A Step Farther Out (17 page)

This dictated the class of ship: it must be a cruiser or battlecruiser. Battleships and dreadnaughts wouldn't ever land, and would be cylindrical or spherical to reduce surface area. Our ship was too large to be a destroyer (an expendable ship almost never employed on missions except as part of a flotilla). Cruisers and battlecruisers can be sent on independent missions.

MacArthur,
a General Class Battlecruiser, began to emerge. She can enter atmosphere, but rarely does so, except when long independent assignments force her to seek fuel on her own. She can do this in either of two ways: go to a supply source, or fly into the hydrogen-rich atmosphere of a gas giant and scoop. There were scoops on the model, as it happens.

She has a large pair of doors in her hull, and a spacious compartment inside: obviously a hangar deck for carrying auxiliary craft. Hangar deck is also the only large compartment in her, and therefore would be the normal place of assembly for the crew when she isn't under battle conditions.

The tower on the model looked useless, and was almost ignored, until it occurred to us that on long missions not under acceleration it would be useful to have a high-gravity area. The ship is a bit thin to have much gravity in the "neck" without spinning her far more rapidly than you'd like; but with the tower, the forward area gets normal gravity without excessive spin rates.

And on, and so forth. In the novel,
Lenin
was designed from scratch; and of course we did have to make some modifications in Leif Ericson before she could become INSS
MacArthur;
but it's surprising just how much detail you can work up through having to live with the limits of a model. . .

The Alderson Drive and the Langston Field determine what kinds of interstellar organizations will be possible. There will be alternatives, but they have to fit into the limits these technologies impose.

In THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE we chose Imperial Aristocracy as the main form of human government. We've been praised for this: Dick Brass in a
New York Post
review concludes that we couldn't have chosen anything else, and other critics have applauded us for showing what such a society might be like.

Fortunately there are no Sacred Cows in science fiction. Maybe we should have stuck to incest? Because other critics have been horrified! Do we, they ask, really
believe
in imperial government? and
monarchy?

That depends on what they mean by "believe in." Do we think it's desirable? We don't have to say. Inevitable? Of course not. Do we think it's
possible?
Damn straight.

The political science in MOTE is taken from C. North-cote Parkinson's EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL THOUGHT, Parkinson himself echoes Aristotle.

It is fashionable to view history as a linear progression: things get better, never worse, and of course we'll never go back to the bad old days of (for instance) personal government. Oddly enough, even critics who have complained about the aristocratic pyramid in MOTE—and thus rejected our Empire as absurd—have been heard to complain about "Imperial Presidency" in the USA How many readers would bet long odds against John-John Kennedy becoming President within our lifetimes?

Any
pretended "science" of history is the bunk. That's the problem with Marxism, Yet Marx wrote a reasonable economic view of history up to his time, and some of his principles may be valid.

Military history is another valid way to view the last several thousand years—but no one in his right mind would pretend that a history of battles and strategies is the whole of the human story. You may write history in terms of medical science, in terms of rats, lice, and plagues, in terms of agricultural development, in terms of strong leadership personalities, and each view will hold some truth.

There are many ways to view history, and Aristotle's cycles as brought up to date by Parkinson make one of the better ones. For those who don't accept that proposition, we urge you at least to read Parkinson before making up your minds and closing the door.

The human society in MOTE is colored by technology and historical evolution. In MOTE's future history the United States and the Soviet Union form an alliance and together dominate the world during the last decades of the 20th Century. The alliance doesn't end their rivalry, and doesn't make the rulers or people of either nation love their partners.

The CoDominium Alliance needs a military force. Military people need something or someone they can give loyalty; few men ever risked their lives for a "standard of living" and there's nothing stupider than dying for one's standard of living—unless it's dying for someone else's.

Do the attitudes of contemporary police and soldiers lead us to suppose that "democracy" or "the people" inspire loyalty? The proposition is at least open to question. In the future that leads to MOTE, a Russian Admiral named Lermontov becomes leader of CoDominium forces, and although he is not himself interested in founding a dynasty, he transfers the loyally of the Fleet to leaders who are.

He brings with him the military people at a time of great crisis. Crises have often produced strong loyalties to single leaders: Churchill, Roosevelt, George Washington, John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Crisis, etc. (A year after Kennedy's death Senator Pastore could address a national convention and get standing ovations with the words "There stood John Kennedy, TEN FEET TALL!!!")

Thus develops the Empire.

Look at another trend: personal dictatorship. There are as many people ruled by tyrants as by "democracy" in 1979, and even in the democracies charges of tyranny are not lacking. Dictatorships may not be the wave of the future—but is it unreasonable to suppose they might be?

Dictatorship is often tried in times of severe crisis: energy crisis, population crisis, pollution crisis, agricultural crisis—surely we do not lack for crises? The trouble with dictatorship is that it itself generates a succession crisis when the old man bows out. Portugal seems to be going through such at this moment. Chile, Uganda, Brazil, name your own examples: anyone want to bet that some of these won't turn to a new Caudillo with relief?

How to avoid succession crisis? One traditional method is to turn Bonapartist: give the job to a relative or descendant of the dictator. He may not do the job very well, but after enough crises people are often uninterested in whether the land is governed well. They just want things
settled
so they can get on with everyday life.

Suppose the dictator's son does govern well? A new dynasty is founded, and the trappings of legitimacy are thrust onto the new royal family. To be sure, the title of "King" may be abandoned. Napoleon chose to be "Emperor of the French," Cromwell chose "Lord Protector," and we suppose the US will be ruled by Presidents for a long time—but the nature of the Presidency, and the way one gets the office, may change.

See, for example, Niven's use of "Secretary-General" in the tales of Svetz the time-traveler.

We had a choice in MOTE: to keep the titles as well as the structure of aristocratic empire, or abandon the titles and retain the structure only. We could have abolished "Emperor" in favor of "President," or "Chairperson," or "Leader," or "Admiral," or "Posnitch." The latter, by the way, is the name of a particularly important President honored for all time by having his name adopted as the title for Leader. . .

We might have employed titles other than Duke (originally meant "leader" anyway) and Count (Companion to the king) and Marquis (Count of the frontier marches). Perhaps we should have. But any titles used would have been
translations
of whatever was current in the time of the novel, and the traditional titles had the effect of letting the reader know quickly the approximate status and some of the duties of the characters.

There are hints all through MOTE that the structure of government is not a mere carbon copy of the British Empire or Rome or England in the time of William III. On the other hand there are similarities, which are forced onto the Empire by the technology we assumed.

Imperial government is not inevitable. It is possible.

The alternate proposition is that we of 1979 are so advanced that we will never go back to the bad old days. Yet we can show you essays "proving" exactly that proposition—and written thousands of years ago. There's a flurry of them every few centuries.

We aren't the first people to think we've "gone beyond" personal government, personal loyalties, and a state religion. Maybe we won't be the last.

Anyway, MOTE is supposed to be entertainment, not an essay on the influence of science on social organization. (You're getting
that
here.)

The Empire is what it is largely because of the Alderson Drive and Langston Field. Without the Drive an Empire could not form. Certainly an interstellar Empire would look very different if it had to depend on lightspeed messages to send directives and receive reports. Punitive expeditions would be nearly impossible, hideously expensive, and probably futile: you'd be punishing the grandchildren of a generation that seceded from the Empire, or even a planet that put down the traitors after the message went out.

Even a rescue expedition might never reach a colony in trouble. A coalition of bureaucrats could always collect the funds for such an expedition, sign papers certifying that the ships are on the way, and pocket the money. . . in sixty years someone might realize what had happened, or not.

The Langston Field is crucial to the Empire, too. Naval vessels can survive partial destruction and keep fighting. Ships carry black boxes—plug-in sets of spare parts—and large crews who have little to do unless half of them get killed. That's much like the navies of fifty years ago.

A merchant ship might have a crew of forty. A warship of similar size carries a crew ten times as large. Most have little to do for most of the life of the ship. It's only in battles that the large number of self-programming computers become important.
Then
the outcome of the battle may depend on having the largest and best-trained crew—and there aren't many prizes for second place in battle.

Big crews with little to do demand an organization geared to that kind of activity. Navies have been doing that for a long time, and have evolved a structure that they tenaciously hold on to.

Without the Field as defense against lasers and nuclear weapons, battles would become no more than offensive contests. They'd last microseconds, not hours. Ships would be destroyed or not, but hardly ever wounded. Crews would tend to be small, ships would be different, including something like the present-day aircraft carriers. Thus technology dictates Naval organization.

It dictates politics, too. If you can't get the populace, or a large part of it, under a city-sized Field, then any given planet lies naked to space.

If the Drive allowed ships to sneak up on planets, materializing without warning out of hyperspace, there could be no Empire even with the Field. There'd be no Empire because belonging to an Empire wouldn't protect you. Instead there might be populations of planet-bound serfs ruled at random by successive hordes of space pirates. Upward mobility in society would consist of getting your own ship and turning pirate.

Given Drive and Field, though, Empires are possible. What's more likely? A representative confederacy? It would hardly inspire the loyalty of the military forces, whatever else it might do. (In the War Between the States, the Confederacy's main problem was that the troops were loyal to their own State, not the central government.)

Each stellar system independent? That's reasonable, but is it stable? Surely there might be pressures toward unification of at least parts of interstellar space.

How has unification been achieved in the past? Nearly always by conquest or colonization or both. How have they been held together? Nearly always by loyalty to a leader, an Emperor, or a dynasty, generally buttressed by the trappings of religion and piety. Even Freethinkers of the last century weren't ashamed to profess loyalty to the Widow of Windsor. . .

Government over large areas needs emotional ties. It also needs
stability.
Government by 50%-plus-one hasn't enjoyed particularly stable politics—and it lasts only so long as the 50%-minus-one minority is willing to submit. Is heredity a rational way to choose leaders? It has this in its favor: the leader is known from an early age to be destined to rule, and can be educated to the job. Is that preferable to education based on how to
get
the job? Are elected officials better at governing, or at winning elections?

Well, at least the counter-case can be made. That's all we intended to do. We chose a stage of Empire in which the aristocracy was young and growing and dynamic, rather than static and decadent; when the aristocrats are more concerned with duty than with privilege; and we made no hint that we thought that stage would last forever.

Robert Heinlein once wrote that the best way to give the flavor of the future is to drop in, without warning, some strange detail. He gives as an example, "The door dilated."

We have a number of such details in MOTE. We won't spoil the book by dragging them all out in a row. One of the most obvious we use is the personal computer, which not only does computations, but also puts the owner in contact with any near-by data bank; in effect it will give the answer to any question whose answer is known and that you think to ask.

Thus no idiot block gimmicks in MOTE. Our characters may fail to guess something, or not put information together in the right way, but they won't
forget
anything important. The closest that comes to happening is when Sally Fowler can't quite remember where she filed the tape of a conversation, and she doesn't take long to find it then.

On the other hand, people can be swamped with too much information, and that does happen.

There were many other details, all needed to keep the story moving. A rational kind of space suit, certainly different from the clumsy things used now-. Personal weapons. The crystal used in a banquet aboard
MacArthur:
crystal strong as steel, cut from the windshield of a wrecked First Empire reentry vehicle, indicating the higher technology lost in that particular war. Clothing and fashion; the status of women; myriads of details of everyday life.