Limbo System

by Rick Cook

  Still, the Council President thought, there was one truth in all that muck. When it fell, the aliens’ drive had to fall into the right hands. It could not be allowed in the hands of 246.

  246 was a perpetual thorn in his side. An outlaw colony ruled by a madman. Who was outrageous and grew bolder with each passing cycle. An upstart. A rebel with only the most tenuous claim on his own lineage. Well, one day he would go too far and lose the Mandate of Heaven. His own people would deal with him then.

  In the meantime, however, he had to be reckoned with.

  The root of the trouble was that nearly a hundred cycles ago 246 had been led by a genuine lunatic.

  246 had been one of the powers of the system, a first founding, a Great Branch of the One Tree of the parent lineage. It had dependencies and a web of mutual obligations that spread across the entire system and its voice echoed in the Council.

  That a colony should fall from such an exalted state was part of the Natural Order of Heaven. But the way 246 had fallen was strange and inglorious in the extreme.

  The leadership of the 246 lineage had fallen to one of great personal force and pronounced cultish leanings. For sake of a quasi-religious ideal he had attempted to turn an entire planet into a colony.

  That such a thing was unheard of and clearly against the Order of Heaven mattered not at all to him and very little to his people. He determined that to honor his mad gods a planet should be made over into a place where people could live unaided. Even more incredibly, his people, rather than withdrawing his Mandate, went along with him.

  For two lifetimes the people of 246 labored at their great work. Resources enough to build twenty colonies or to launch expeditions to two other stars were poured into 246’s dream.

  Enormous mass drivers were built in the Jovian systems and huge chunks of water ice were hurled onto the surface of the planet. Settlements were established at the bottom of the planet’s gravity well, under pressure structures more massive than those surrounding a colony. Construction started on a vast system of mirrors to focus additional sunlight on the planet. Cultures were bred to transform and stabilize the planet’s atmosphere when it was finally generated.

  And always the leader drove his people on with the vision of the paradise they would have on the surface of the planet. A place to stand and defy Heaven itself.

  It was madness, of course. It was contrary to the collected wisdom of tens of thousands of cycles and thousands of Foundings. But the leader was mad and he infected his people with his madness. Under the incredulous eyes of the other colonies, 246 pushed ahead with its project. In the process it beggared itself and its future.

  First 246 spent its available capital. Then it called in its accumulated rights and obligations with other colonies. Then, as the huge unproductive works dragged on for cycle after cycle, it mortgaged its future and placed itself under heavy obligations to other colonies to get the resources to feed its leader’s obsession.

  Finally, inevitably, it all collapsed. The project was too great and the available resources were not enough. The old leader had spiraled slowly down into madness and senility. For a while his successor had attempted to carry on the project until he too was overwhelmed. In the end he lost the Mandate of Heaven and 246 emerged embittered and impoverished.

  For perhaps another lifetime 246 alternated between periods of weak leadership and direct control of the Council as one or another of its obligations became overdue.

  During these recurrent periods of chaos and foreign rule, the present leader had risen out of obscurity to take control of the Inner Grove. In the process he had swept away the old lineage leaders and changed the social structure of 246 forever.

  There was a shred of legality for the leader’s position, the Council President admitted. Leadership of a lineage was a matter of limited election. Although the choice was normally made by the Elders of the Inner Grove, their authority rested on their claim to represent the entire lineage. It was theoretically possible for the lineage as a whole to instruct the elders as to who was an acceptable candidate. But in all the long recorded history of the race there were only a few times when that had been done and never before in this system.

  But for the Council President, whose lineage was a Great Branch stretching back through Elders of the Inner Grove for three Foundings, Derfuhrer was an insolent upstart.

  As a politician, Derfuhrer’s constant stream of complaints about how 246 had been stripped of its rightful position and his constant demands were more than annoying, they were dangerous.

  Dangerous, but manageable. The Council President had even briefly allied with 246 to help tame the conservatives. Now he must be checked before he could expand his insolence even further.

  Meanwhile, there were other alliances to consider and other demands to balance as each colony attempted to use its resources and obligations to take advantage of this new situation.

  There are too many resonances, the Council President thought. Too many competing influences. The orbit is perturbed and its future path is beyond prediction.

  And now this new thing, this shipload of strange creatures with their fantastic drive. What new perturbation would they bring with them, the Council President wondered. What price would they extract for their secret?

  Andrew Aubrey stared into the Colonist’s eyes and tried to avoid looking at the great beak in front of them. This being is just as civilized as you are, he told himself sternly.

  “Uh, you are one of the leaders of a colony?”

  “I am,” Derfuhrer told him. Aubrey had asked to talk to one of the leaders and since Derfuhrer and the Council President were the only ones willing to spend time personally on screen with the humans, he ended up with Derfuhrer.

  “I am interested in the way your society works.”

  “It works very well,” Derfuhrer told him. “All join together harmoniously for the greater good.” He saw no point in mentioning the machinations of the illegitimate usurpers who made up the Colonial Council.

  “How long has it been like this?”

  “Thousands of cycles.”

  “And you have been at peace all this time?” Aubrey asked, his excitement growing.

  “We have always lived in harmony. It is the Way of Heaven.”

  “But no war?”

  Derfuhrer hesitated. What was this strange being asking him now? “Explain please.”

  It took a long time for the translation to come back.

  “War. Open hostility between lineages. Killing and destruction of colonies.”

  Instinctively, Derfuhrer flinched. Open hostilities! Were these creatures truly mad?

  “We do not do that,” he said at last.

  “How . . . how long?”

  Again the alien shrug gesture. “I do not know. Never in this system.”

  “But when you have disputes, how do you settle them?”

  “We talk. We trade. We strike balances. There are many ways.”

  “Fantastic,” Dr. Andrew Aubrey breathed. No war! These people had no war. This was a race at peace for thousands of years.

  There was an undercurrent of excitement running through the entire ship when the Ship’s Council met again. In the packed auditorium where the Council met, the air was almost electric.

  All the seats had been taken long before the meeting was scheduled to begin and from engineering to the bridge nearly every screen on the Maxwell was tuned in on it. Most of the Council members were early as well. They whispered back and forth as they waited, sometimes gathering in huddles of two and three. At either end of the table sat the invited guests, Captain Jenkins, Ludenemeyer, Sharon Dolan, Father Simon and the others who had technical knowledge to offer.

  At precisely the appointed hour Andrew Aubrey strode onto the stage, polished, trim and smooth as always, to rap the meeting to order.

  “Since this is a special meeting of the Ship’s Council, we will dispense with the regular business and go straight to the heart of the matter. As you al
l know, we have to discuss trading information with the Colonists. Before we try to make policy, however, I think we need to understand what the advanced civilization of the Colonists has to offer.” He turned to Pete Carlotti. “Dr. Carlotti, I believe you have been talking to them about astronomical data.”

  “Well, under the circumstances the aliens are unwilling to discuss theories,” Carlotti said. “But they have given us some notion of the scope of their observational astronomy. Gentlemen, ladies, the only word I can find for it is ‘breathtaking.’

  “These people have astronomical records going back literally thousands of years. They include observations made from an area which must be hundreds of light-years across. It is an unbelievable treasure trove in both scientific and practical terms.

  “I’m sure the scientific benefits are obvious to all of you. I will simply add to that with the aliens’ knowledge we could extend the range of our starships manyfold. I was shown samples of the data and from those samples I would estimate we would be able to navigate safely out to nearly a thousand light-years in at least some directions. The implications are stunning.”

  “And what do they want in return?” DeLorenzo asked.

  “Our own astronomical data, of course. And the details of our star drive.”

  DeLorenzo muttered something in Spanish.

  “I think we had best leave that until we have heard all the reports,” Aubrey said. “Dr. Dolan, I believe you had something?”

  “There is even more than astronomical knowledge here,” Sharon said, almost breathless with excitement. “Dr. Aubrey mentioned how far ahead the Colonists are,” Dolan said. “There is another area where they are ahead of us. Space engineering. We don’t know how to build anything like those colonies.”

  “They are enormous,” Carlotti agreed.

  Sharon shook her head. “Size is the least of it. The impressive thing is that they are completely self-supporting and have been for thousands of years.” She looked up and down the table excitedly and her face fell at the lack of reaction.

  “Let me summarize,” she said more dryly. “We supply about ninety-five percent of the needs of our space colonies from space resources. The rest represents material that has to be transported from Earth at enormous cost.

  “This isn’t just a matter of making some things on Earth and not in space. There are a number of things that have to come from Earth because we cannot produce them in space. The classic example is that every so often we have to replace the seed stocks and cultures for our farms.

  “These people don’t. They supply all their needs from space and they have been doing it effectively forever. Not only that, but they are much more efficient at managing their life-support systems. The implications of that alone are huge. Our colonies are limited because we have to have a fairly large amount of room for each colonist, far more than we really need to support him or her. All that extra air, space and biomass make an environmental flywheel effect. That makes it easier to manage the environment on the colonies, but it also makes our colonies very inefficient. These people have much finer control over their ecologies so they don’t need that flywheel. That fact alone makes their colonies much more productive than ours.

  “The signs are everywhere. Their ships, their propulsion systems, the construction of their colonies. All of them far, far ahead of us and all perfectly adapted by thousands of years of life in space.

  “If we can learn their technology we have the chance to leap millennia in just a few years. Our space populations can explode. We can even start exporting food from space back to Earth!”

  That caused a stir, Sharon noted with satisfaction as she sat back down.

  “I have a report I’d like to add,” Aubrey said, standing up. “We have heard about the Colonists’ scientific knowledge,” he nodded to Carlotti, “and about the practical skills they could teach us,” a nod to Sharon Dolan. “But there is something even more significant here.”

  He paused dramatically. “The Colonists do not have war.”

  “Huh? Are you sure?”

  “I said war is totally unknown in their culture. They were horrified at the thought of violent conflict.”

  “But surely they must have some disagreements,” Carlotti said.

  “Of course, but they have perfected a system of handling them without resorting to violence.” He looked down the table. “Over thousands of years the Colonists have evolved a nearly perfect Sixth Wave society. They have moved beyond the age of Industrial Scarcity and Information-Age conflict into a post-Information-Age culture built on conflict resolution.

  “Think about it,” Aubrey went on. “In the first place what do they have to fight over? The natural resources of the system are plentifully distributed and free for the taking. The Colonists haven’t begun to bump against their resource limits and since they control their populations carefully, it is doubtful they ever will.”

  Jenkins thought about resource distribution and the energy cost of reaching them from various points in the habitable belt, but he kept silent.

  “Beyond that, they have had to learn to live together. Those habitats are fragile. In the event of open hostilities it is all too probable that both parties would be destroyed. They have lived with that for thousands of years and they have learned to adapt to it.”

  “Humans have had millions of years and we still haven’t learned how,” DeLorenzo put in skeptically.

  Aubrey looked annoyed. “We have not lived in structures in space which could be easily damaged by missiles or even rocks. No, they are far, far ahead of us in the techniques of conflict resolution.

  “If we can apply their lessons to our own society we can advance centuries in a single generation.

  “Earlier someone said the potential here is enormous. It is more than that, it is nearly inconceivable in human terms. There has never been an event anywhere in human history fraught with such great potential for constructive human change!”

  “Human change into what?” DeLorenzo snapped.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Since you’re harping on the Colonists’ long history, let me give you a quote from our own history: ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts.’ We are sitting ducks for these people.”

  “Just because we were fortunate enough to come across something they did not . . .” Aubrey began.

  “Exactly. We’re damn lucky we’ve got one bargaining chip.”

  DeLorenzo let out his breath in a gust of exasperation and ran his hand through his hair.

  “Look, I said this in the beginning. The thing to do is to cut and run. Earth wants to negotiate with these people? Fine, let Earth send out a team of negotiators—and the armed force necessary to back them up.”

  He looked up and down the group. “We aren’t authorized to conduct negotiations. We aren’t equipped to conduct negotiations. And we sure as hell are in no condition to defend ourselves if the negotiations go sour.”

  “We are not conducting negotiations,” Aubrey said.

  “No? What do you call it then? Earth has exactly one advantage in dealing with these aliens and that is the FTL drive. The only thing we can do here is blow that advantage by giving it away to them. It’s too damn dangerous for us to stick around.”

  There was a muttering from the crowd.

  “Captain,” Aubrey asked, “do you think it is too dangerous to stay?”

  “Not if we keep the drive hot,” Jenkins said. DeLorenzo scowled at him. “But that’s not the same as saying we’re going to tell them how the drive works.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said we are not going to discuss the drive with them, Doctor. We do not have the authority.”

  “You’re agreeing with Major DeLorenzo?” Aubrey said incredulously.

  “Only to the extent that we are not empowered to give the Colonists the principles of the drive.” Again the audience muttered and Jenkins realized he had driven a wedge between himself and most of the people on the ship.
>
  “Very well, Captain,” Aubrey said at last. “We all know you have the power to enforce that decision—at least while we are here.”

  “Doctor,” Captain Jenkins replied, “my only concern is while we are here.”

  The ship was still buzzing at dinner that evening. Characteristically, Billy Toyoda didn’t even notice. He barely noticed what was on his tray as he talked shop with one of the other computer crew.

  “That’s heavy sand the Owlies have got,” Toyoda said for perhaps the sixth time since they had sat down. “There are some smart Owlie computer architects out there.”

  Neither of them saw Andrew Aubrey come up behind them and stop short when he heard what Toyoda was saying.

  “I really don’t think it is appropriate to call them ‘Owlies’,” Aubrey admonished. “It sounds derogatory.”

  Billy turned to look up at the scientist. “So who cares? They never hear what we call them anymore than we hear what they call us. They probably call us something worse.”

  “Calling them names promotes prejudice,” Aubrey said.

  “That’s what everyone calls them.”

  “The proper term is ‘Colonists.’ I’d appreciate it if you’d use it in the future.” He walked away from the table.

  “You know that guy crottles my greeps,” Billy said as Aubrey moved out of earshot.

  “Why?”

  “He’s a control freak. He wants to run everyone and everything he comes in contact with.”

  “That’s a funny thing to say about Mr. Consensual Management himself.”

  Toyoda nodded. “That’s the other thing. That he’s not even honest about it.”

  To the great relief of nearly everyone on the ship, including Jenkins, the Colonists were willing to continue talking even once they understood the secret of the drive was not up for trade. However, they had their own conditions.

  “It would be best if we avoided contamination,” the Council President explained. “So we wish to limit physical contact between us.”