Fire Time (13 page)
It is a planet better suited to Naqsans. Early in the course of their spaceflight, they founded a few settlements upon it, which grew and had offspring. They call the world Tsheyakka [a set of hawks and gargles, dubbed from a recording]. Humans bestowed the name Mundomar, after they got interested.
For they
could
survive here, if they were prepared to make herculean efforts. Less torrid and humid than elsewhere, the arctic zone was not altogether unsuitable. Water-loving Naqsans had shunned those parts. They saw no reason not to admit colonists from Earth, for a substantial price on the real estate.
[View penetrates clouds, sweeps across jungles, boggy plains, rank growth afloat in oceans. At times it closes up on a particular spot, e.g., one of the modest Naqsan communities. There great seal-like bodies slop and wallow about in the manner natural for them, which many humans find disgusting. The view proceeds northward, finally settling on a bushy plateau. A Terrestrial spaceship lands, a model six decades outmoded: for this is a section from the archives, proud capture of a historic moment.]
Who would come? True, Earth is overloaded with man. True, planets where he can live are rare, and most of those have autochthons. True, what unclaimed globes he had found and settled were, even then, ultra-cautious about what further immigrants they accepted. But who would be so desperate as to seek out Mundomar … or so hopeful?
Those who had no other choice except endless despair.
A long human lifetime has passed since the prophetic voice of Charles Barton–
(Sequence of views; dialogue and BG commentary summarized.
(Drab, sleazy, crowded, the Welfare districts of typical megalopolitan regions, where they huddle for whom technological civilization can find no use. Idleness; boredom; frustration; sense of personal worthlessness; drugs in bottles, in pills, in shots, in sprays; 3V screens for everbody, joyhouses or brain stimulators for those who can scrabble together the money; gang fights among the young, criminal empires among the adult, and the honest majority walking in dread – but the police are the enemy, aren’t they? Citizen’s allowance, social workers, educational channels, sorry, you don’t qualify, sorry, you do qualify but we have no opening; yet sometimes at night an opening appears, on the roof of a housing unit tall enough to block off part of the city glare and let a few stars shine through.
(The Backworld, whose folk can stay alive after a fashion if they get steady outside help, but no more than alive. Technology is not magic; it cannot operate on resources which no longer exist. Peasants in Dry Africa seek shelter beneath an elevated aqueduct insufficient to keep their farms from blowing away, red upon the wind. At night the streets of Indian cities are paved with sleeping people. A pelagic community off the Greenland coast supports itself by sending boys out to nearly exhausted fisheries at the age of twelve. Nobody starves in the Backworld, as nobody does in Welfare. But aid is a mere stopgap, and still taxpayers feel drained.
(All the old panaceas have failed. Education? You can’t educate a person – a person of perfectly normal intelligence – into special abilities he wasn’t born with; and the demand for routineers is low and falling. Birth control? You can’t ask entire peoples to make themselves extinct. Redistribution of wealth? The conservation laws hold as true in economics as in physics. Return to a simple
and natural existence? A precondition is the death of 90 percent of the human race.
(But the stars remain. And given an ideal, the capital necessary to make a new beginning will somehow come forth. If a man has no other capital, there are his two hands.)
(Archive sequences of the pioneers on Mundomar, toil, pain, grief, but always that hope which refuses to surrender, that vision which makes sullen Welfare loafers and worn-out Backworld beasts of burden into men and women. Their children grow up afraid of nothing in this cosmos.
(Their children, their children, their children. And as the colony waxes, as it puts seedlings across the whole north of the planet, material wealth burgeons; and likewise do the contributions from Earth, for clearly this mad dream is going to work; and immigrants pour down out of the skies.
(Upon tamed lands, the cities rise clangorous. Nature is harnessed and transformed.)
OLAYA
Friction with the Naqsans began when human enterprises crossed ill-defined borders. Disputes were usually settled by negotiation. But the social structure of the Naqsan colonies was such that individuals among them bore any losses, uncompensated. It also permitted aggrieved parties to combine privately and seek satisfaction. This is quite legal and proper in that culture, that species. However, humans have different, incompatible institutions – or, may I say, instincts? They retaliated against what to them was banditry. …
Tension heightened. … Incidents multiplied. … The Governor General appealed for Peace Authority help. … The Naqsan League made clear that it would not abandonits habitants on Tsheyakka. …
Meanwhile industrial, ecological, and climatological projects in the human sectors increasingly affected the
environment further south, adversely from a Naqsan viewpoint. The nonhuman dwellers moved slowly toward a decision to act in unison.
The nonaggression pact between the two mother planets satisfied nobody on the colonial world. Both groups felt endangered. Both had widespread popular support at home; but Earth especially was at that time in a pacifistic mood. …
Fighting erupted, and soon spread far and wide over Mundomar. The humans showed totally unexpected strength. In numbers they were inferior, in equipment equal to their enemies; in leadership, discipline, élan, devotion, they were incomparably more powerful.
[Scenes of combat. It is limited to the planet, and to chemical weapons plus occasional tactical nukes.
[A flag rises above Government House in Barton; and from a balcony thereon a man in battle dress reads aloud a document to a cheering throng and to the universe.]
PROVISIONAL PRESIDENT SIGURDSSON
–These events have made it tragically sure that we can look to none but ourselves for our rights, our security, our very survival. …
We therefore solemnly found and proclaim the sovereign Republic of Eleutheria. …
OLAYA
–Promptly after the cease-fire, Earth recognized the new state, but did not invite it to join the Federation. That may have been from fear of a rebuff by the colonists, who felt forsaken in their hour of need. Or it may have been the result of secret negotiations with Naqsa. The League diplomats may well have said that a
fait accompli
could be accepted, if not given legal sanction. After all, Naqsa never had claimed the entirety of Mundomar: an oversight, though an easy one for Naqsans to make. What they could
not tolerate would be the direct presence of Terrestrial authority in a region they considered stolen.
We do not know if this was the bargain. The record has never been shown us. We only know that the northern fourth of Mundomar was now the independent Republic of Eleutheria, eager for more immigration and more investment from Earth; that Earth recognized it as a legitimate country but Naqsa did not; that the Naqsans in the tropics of that planet felt more embittered and menaced than ever before.
Soon afterward, Earth’s attention was diverted by a fresh crisis elsewhere. The Final Society of Alerion occupied the colony world New Europe. This appeared to be a far more determined and formidable opponent than Naqsa. Sentiment in favor of compromise or thinly disguised surrender ran high in the Federation, leading to a series of domestic conflicts with those who advocated firmness. In the end, as we all know, the resistance party prevailed. A short, sharp space war made Alerion yield every important point at issue.
Since then, Earth’s temper has changed. The fact that during the war New Europe followed Eleutheria’s example and broke away, doesn’t seem to have affected the confidence in human destiny which most people today assert. We disavow imperialism, we admit its absurdity on an interstellar scale – but every poll taken for the past generation has found a majority saying that our species must never again allow itself to be domineered by an alien.
Our
species?
Or our Federation? There is a difference.
(Scenes: The vigorous growth of Eleutheria, in population, industry, and territory; the ill effects on the Naqsan communities and their hinterlands; the next confrontation exploding into the next undeclared war, when the humans overrun the continent of G’yaaru, expel nonhumans, and fortify it.)
PRESIDENT GUPTA
–Our children shall not live in fear. The land mass of Sigurdssonia is vital to our security, therefore to the preservation of peace throughout this globe. We will settle it with our citizens. …
(Joy tumultuous in Shanghai Welfare. Gigantic on a wallscreen, the image of a politician pledges solidarity with the gallant Eleutherians. He is himself wealthy, but he needs these votes.)
OLAYA
–replay my interview of last year with Admiral Alessandro Vitelli, Chief of Staff of the Peace Control Authority. …
VITELLI
–no doubt about it. None whatsoever. The Naqsan League is behind these latest moves. And I don’t mean they’re supplying arms and training to the Tsheyakkans. That’s no secret, same as we’re frankly assisting the Eleutherians. No, I mean that behind the scenes the League is encouraging revanchism. You wouldn’t get the sort of talk you hear on Mundomar otherwise. Naqsans don’t go in for reckless demagoguery the way many humans do. They tend to keep quiet until they’re ready to state facts and take action. Let’s not hide behind wishfulness. The Tsheyakkans – through them, all the Naqsans – want more than to regain Sigurdssonia. They want to drive humans completely off that planet.
OLAYA
Do you think Earth should allow this to happen, Admiral?
VITELLI
Please. My service doesn’t make or advocate policy, it executes the will of Parliament. … Speaking as an individual, I do feel a human presence in that part of space is essential to the balance of power. …
OLAYA
–speech by His Excellency Tollog-a-Ektrush, Ambassador General of the League of Naqsa to the World Federation, just before he was recalled. …
[A blubbery-looking mass, bilious yellow spotted green and wetly shining in its nudity, short fluke-footed legs, membranes up to the knobbly elbows, head suggestive of a catfish, fills the screen. The hologram does not convey the odor, but audio brings the mushy voice, irritatingly hard for human ears to follow, into millions of rooms.]
TOLLOG
–historic w’riendshiw wetween ouw two weowles. True, we hawe owwen ween commercial riwals, wut is that not healt’hy, not stimulating? Ewerywody gains wy trade: more imwortantly, wy the inswiration uw ideas, arts, wilosowwies. t’houghts, dreams. I wish wery much to make you know, humans, how we uw Naqsa admire you, how gratewul we are wor all we hawe learned w’rom you and the many owwortunities your enter’rises hawe created wor ewery
sentient race, how we wish wor a w’rotherhood uw the swirit. And yet, hawe you not learned somet’hing w’rom us, hawe we not made you some return? What can either weowle gain w’rom war, and what can they not lose?
Yes, we do suwwort our kin on Tsheyakka against naked conquest. I cannot weliewe that Eart’h, Eart’h that we lowe, will really condone, let alone assist, the deswoliation and wereawement uw harmless weings in their homes. …
Eart’h has an owligation to those it has imwowerished? Eart’h is morally wound to see they win to a decent liwe and a land uw their own where they can grow as they will? No doubt. No doubt. They hawe ween long denied. Wut why at our exwense? It was newwer
us
who denied them!…
OLAYA
The third outbreak of large-scale hostilities on Mundomar precipitated a crisis which did not seem to be resolvable. After their initial successes, the Eleutherians could make little further progress, and the Tsheyakkans showed nodisposition to accept defeat once more. Peacemaking commissions from outside were in effect ignored, not very politely, by both factions. The fear became great that one or the other would acquire major weapons, or might already have them, and would introduce them into the stalemated struggle which was bleeding everyone empty. …
(Scenes: Parades, demonstrations, chanting crowds around all Earth, crying for the rescue of Eleutheria.
(Terrestrial and Napsan naval units ordered to that sector. Reports of lethal incidents. Views of broken ships, dead crews, hospitalized live casualties in their agony: many of them prisoners, treated as well as alien physicians are able while they await exchange.
(Summary of diplomatic efforts that failed.
(The Parliamentary session that commits Earth to the survival of Eleutheria.
(More incidents. The ambassador of the League delivers his crucial note.
(The Parliamentary session that tells the Navy to fight.)
CHAIRMAN AL-GHAZI
–No, of course, we don’t plan an attack on Naqsa itself, unless Earth is attacked, which I hardly expect. That
would
be an act of war. Worse, it would be morally monstrous and, may I add, militarily idiotic, in view of planetary defense capabilities. No, to the extent that we remain in control of events, this will be an operation on Mundomar and in space, for the sole purpose of inducing our opponents to agree to a fair peace. …
OLAYA
The vote was by no means unanimous. Spokesmen for several countries argued against our involvement, and continue to argue for our withdrawal. A minority of private individuals and organizations urges the same.
(Rain in an almost empty street. A few sad pickets before an Admiralty office. Their signs carry slogans like BRING BACK BROTHERHOOD and HAVE NAQSANS NO RIGHTS? Occasional passersby in vehicles pause to heckle.)
OLAYA
–special guest, Gunnar Heim, former Minister of Space and Naval Affairs for New Europe. Three decades ago on Earth, as everyone will remember, Captain Heim took a lonely lead
in calling for resistance to Aleriona aggression, and eventually initiated action on behalf of France which caused the entire Federation to move. Later he was in the forefront of declaring and consolidating the status of New Europe as a sovereign planet, and was a major figure in its government for years before he returned to private life, though never to obscurity. Here on a visit, Captain Heim has graciously consented to appear …
