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Authors: Jr. L. E. Modesitt

BOOK: Adiamante
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THE CONSTRUCT
M
utual individual respect and self-respect must be maintained, since the greater the mutual respect between individuals and the respect for the role of each individual within society, the more stable the society.
Because society is based on trust, trust cannot be withheld on unfounded suspicion.
Threats are a form of mistrust; so are unprovoked violence, use of physical force, and manipulation of another. Failure to be trustworthy requires removal from society.
Attempts to redefine principles into written rules of conduct reflect mistrust and are doomed to failure.
Direct statements of individual desires are not forms of mistrust, but no individual or group of individuals is bound or required to fulfill another's desire.
Society may agree upon mutually restrictive and/or coercive measures, but only so long as such measures have commensurate impacts upon those who develop and impose such measures.
T
he previous day's clouds had lifted, and as I landed and air-taxied the flitter to the base of the Deseret locial, a glance to the east showed that the warmer breeze out of the southwest was strong enough at the higher altitudes to lift plumes of snow off the eastern peaks.
After shutting down the turbines and flight systems, I'd barely lifted the thin case containing the copy of
The Paradigms of Power
and a general recent history of Old Earth off the second seat of the flitter when Kemra waved from beneath the nose of the cyb lander, a boosted hydrocarb monster that had to gulp kilolitres of fuel on every hop.
After sealing my comparatively minuscule flitter, I linked with Crucelle and Keiko and walked toward the cyb craft. I wore a winter jacket, not the black cloak. The ruins would be cold.
“Any reports to you from Elanstan?”
“Kappa's up; Delta's a mess.” Keiko's words were quick and crisp, as efficient as she always was. I'd have bet she was wearing black again.
“The cybs are using solar arrays to charge what seem to be firin cells,” Crucelle reported, each word precise. “They are pulse-mapping most of the locials, and they did a survey flight over the earth side of the moon. They spent a lot of time in the equatorial belt.”
“They target anything there?” I asked, trying to recall if we had any sealed installations or depots there, although I thought most were in higher lunar latitudes.
“They covered the whole surface,” he answered ironically.
“That Commander Gorum was here already, asking for hydrocarb fuel to their specs, suggesting that it would be a nice gesture since they were transporting you to Cherkrik,” added Keiko.
“Hydrocarb fuel won't hurt, if we can refine any in that volume,” offered Crucelle.
“What he wants has the same specs as what the Coordinator's flitter—or anyone's—uses. The volumes are something else again.”
I shrugged as I walked, keeping my mouth shut and answering on the netlink. “See if you can work it out, Keiko.”
“What's the point of all this?” asked darkangel Arielle, slipping into the net like a sudden storm.
“Stalling them until they see the error of their ways,” I answered. “Or until we're ready to convince them.”
“They're thinking the same way, with all the power recharging and troop drops.” The darkangel offered a snort. “They want to force the error of our ways down our throats with supercharged particle beams or de-energizers.”
“You have a better idea?” I asked Arielle.
“You're the Coordinator.”
That meant she didn't.
“Crucelle? Make sure that the old hardening systems are operational.”
“Great suggestion for our morale, mighty Coordinator,” offered Keiko.
“Coordinators have to be honest.”
“Don't be quite so honest with the subcommander. They're still playing your memories,” assessed Keiko, accurately … but painfully. Then, I suspected one of the reasons she was my assistant was because the precise—but caring—Crucelle was looking out for my welfare.
“Don't I know it,” I admitted, my eyes focusing on the sandy-haired cyb waiting ahead by the lander ramp, clad in a midweight green wind jacket that would not be heavy enough for our destination.
“Remember that,” added Crucelle, not quite able to hide his concern.
I downlinked and smiled at Kemra, ignoring the junior officer standing slightly behind her. “It's a much better day today.”
“Yes. Our observers say it's clear over the ruins as well.”
“But cold.”
“The way you're dressed means I'll need a heavier jacket.”
“Probably.” I extracted the thin folder from my case. “I remembered your interest in the
Paradigms.
There's also a relatively recent, and mercifully brief, history of Old Earth since The Flight.”
“Thank you.” She took the folder, but did not open it, and turned to the officer behind her.”Are we ready, Kessek?”
“Yes, Subcommander.”
She motioned to the olive-black ramp, and we walked up it into the main cabin, where rows of empty acceleration couches filled the dim space. The lander could have easily carried two hundred marcybs, loaded like livestock
or cordwood, which was about the way the cybs regarded them.
“We'll go forward.” Kemra did not look at me.
Forward of the bulkhead and through a heavy hatch was a smaller compartment, containing a mere half dozen almost luxurious couches, three against the fuselage on each side. In the middle was an open space, but the lines in the deck gave the impression of a large extendable table of some sort.
“Take any seat.”
I sat in the left forward couch-seat. Unusually supple, it was covered with a black synthetic leather. Kemra sat in the forward couch on the right side.
Behind us, the ramp whined up and into place. Then Kessek closed the hatch separating the troop compartment from the officers' space, and without looking at either of us, marched forward into the cockpit, closing a second hatch with a dull thud.
Deciding to take the risk, I let my net-enhanced senses probe the lander as Kessek began his checklist for lift-off. Fuselage—enhanced metalite-boron-composite. Propulsion—fan-ram-scram screamers, with magboost. The magfield boost surprised me a bit. The delta wings contained antimatter pellet launchers, although I couldn't sense any pellets. That wasn't surprising, given their weight. Also concealed in the wings were two pair of heavy-duty, high velocity slugthrowers, with plenty of ammunition—the nasty osmiridian-depleted uranium tipped stuff. The guns were just for emergencies, since the lander's real military purpose was destruction of wide areas of landscape, presumably inhabited areas rather than hardened military targets.
Lovely people, the cybs.
A thin whine grew into a larger whine, and the lander began to move. I tapped the locial control frequency and got Kessek's transmission.
“Deseret locial, this is lander one. Ready to taxi for departure.”
“Lander one. You're cleared to the north end of radial two zero zero.”
After a moment, another transmission—net-to-net—followed. “
Gibson,
lander one lifting for the ruins with the subcommander and the demi Coordinator. Interrogative instructions.”
“That's negative, lander one. Follow observation plan.”
“Stet.”
The lander kept rolling northward.
“What do you think?” asked Kemra, the slightest gleam in her eye.
“It's a rather impressive way to transport two individuals.”
“We'd like to impress you,” she answered.
“I gathered that.” Mere size and brute firepower weren't that impressive in demonstrating technological prowess or sophistication, but they were successful in suggesting what the cybs had in mind for Old Earth.
Kemra fell silent as the lander began to accelerate, the whine of the fan turbines turning into more of a thundering rush as the lightly laden lander angled into the sky, almost as steeply as a magdrive shuttle. Before long Kessek reconfigured the engines into scramset, and the external sound bled back into a dull rumble.
The blank oblong on the bulkhead in front of Kemra shimmered, then began to display a panorama of the terrain in front of and below the lander; the white-covered mountains and darker valleys northeast of Parwon.
Kemra glanced at the view for a moment, then opened the folder and read the sheet that held the
Paradigms.
Finally, she looked at me. “That's it?”
“I didn't say it was complicated. Principles usually aren't.” I offered a smile. “In the beginning, the implementation
was nastier than a pack of vorpals. Sometimes, it's still a problem.”
“In what way?” She closed the folder and brushed back a lock of short sandy hair, an unfamiliar gesture.
“The whole issue of power. Some people won't accept society's values except at the focus of a weapons laser. Others never will. If we overuse force, then no one will accept the society. If we don't use it, we have no society.”
“Nice generalizations. What about some specifics? Cases?”
“You sound like a true rat-comp.”
She raised both eyebrows.
“Rationalist comprehender. The facts, please, nothing but the facts.” I shook my head, trying to ignore the distractions of the lander's noisy net and the rumbling of the engines. “At first, children were the biggest problem. How do you deal with them? They're innocents, relatively. Wayneclint's successor, Terese, decided to finesse the issue. She gathered a Consensus on a replacement birth policy and enforced it with reversible female sterilization after two children.”
“Rather chauvinistic. How could she enforce that?”
“Easily enough. Anyone who didn't comply lost their children, got forcibly sterilized, and dumped on one of the swept islands. That's where we still put malcontents.”
“That's barbaric.”
“Let's see,” I answered. “It's civilized to let a society overbreed and destroy the ecology, raise interpersonal tensions to the point that violence is endemic, and stretch resources to the point that all too many children are ill-fed, uneducated, diseased, and without any hope of ever reaching their potential? Or would you prefer millions of abortions? That happened, you know, before the chaos. But it's barbaric to require people to limit their offspring?”
“What if a child dies or something?”
“Reversible sterilization,” I repeated. “How do you handle the problem? By expansion? Or by market forces?”
“Market forces?”
“Economics—only those who can afford children can have them … or some variant.”
“Cybs are rational enough that we don't need such brutal measures.”
I nodded. Simple enough. If a cyb couldn't access the net, and use it proficiently, then access to partners was nil. Likewise, a common net meant everyone knew everything—which was a different form of consensus, power socially imposed. Plus, the cybs had never had to deal with a large population of draffs, and that made matters easier.
“How do you know what I'm talking about?” Kemra asked.
So I told her what I'd been thinking, and her mouth opened and then closed. “I never said that.”
“It's basically true, isn't it?”
“You make it sound so … compulsive.”
I forced a laugh. “Your society has survived. That means you have to follow most of the
Paradigms of Power.
You may have a different morality and a different way to apply power, but it's the same in the end. Survival means acceptance of a desired moral structure and the use of some sort of force to maintain it against any small minority that would undermine it.” I shrugged.
“What about large minorities?”
“If you won't or can't enforce or adapt the morality to reduce discontent, you'll have some form of civil war, societal breakup, revolution, or all three.”
“I'd like to think about that.” She looked toward the screen before and above her.
Self-delusion about the applicability of the Paradigms is also an all-too-human trait. We all like to think that we aren't slaves to belief and that we aren't governed by power, or fear of power, but most of us aren't that altruistic,
especially deep-down. Shared morality is a way to survive, and it's hard to overcome our basic genetic hardware. Some never do.
Instead of resuming the conversation, Kemra opened the folder again and began to read the history I'd provided. That might not prove any more palatable to her than my observations on the cyb society I'd never even seen.
Before long, the desolate ground appearing in the screen indicated our approach to the ruins.
Kessek was smooth. I had to hand him that, the way he greased that big lander right onto the Cherkrik locial's strip, even in what seemed to be a stiff crosswind.
The front hatch slid open, and Kessek called back, “I'm lowering the ramp, Subcommander. Do you have any idea how long you'll be?”
Kemra looked at me.
“If you want an in-depth look, it'll take a minimum of two hours, and maybe four.”
“At least three hours, Kessek,” she answered.
“You can close up and come with us,” I offered. “Or relax in the locial tower. There's a small café there—no charge to visitors.”
“You can have the ruins,” the pilot answered.
Kemra opened a small locker on the bulkhead before her and withdrew a belt and a handgun. “I assume you don't mind. You had mentioned the ruins are wild.” She crossed to another locker and extracted a heavy jacket that was slightly too large for her. After stripping off her lighter jacket to reveal a set of informal greens and donning the greenish-brown heavier jacket, she transferred a pair of gloves from her wind jacket to the new one.

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