Chapter Four: Choosing the path to Empire

By Year Twenty, the nature of the trading we were doing was changing dramatically. You Solar System people started thinking beyond the "trading trinkets and beads" mindset, so the cooperation between us was getting much more interesting. We moved into the "you've got the technique and we have the manpower" stage. What started this transition was the realization by your people that we could change plans on a dime and not lose a penny in the process -- or so it seemed to you. You were simply amazed at how fast we could marshal resources. We would plan a mine, and in two weeks it was operational. Your -- jaws dropped -- and you said, "That should have taken five years to develop!" After a few years of watching this, some of your people said to us, quite seriously, "Teach us how to do that."

It wasn't something we had given any previous thought to. What you were asking us to do was become teachers instead of traders. And you were asking for that very seriously. It was this envy of our techniques, not our trinkets, that was the first step in my becoming Emperor.

Even with all the technique and technology we had on the ship, teaching is very labor-intensive. To teach, we would have to unload our colonists (what we now called all of our ship's members) and spread them widely through the Solar System. And to learn our techniques was going to take making huge changes in how humans did things.

As you well know, there were a lot of humans who were very nervous about the idea of spreading ship colonists around the Solar System. "This is colonization!" they shouted and screamed at demonstrations. But it wasn't my colonists or the ship who were paying the police who dragged those demonstrators away. It was "the winners" -- those people who had begun embracing the technologies and teachings we offered.

Mankind benefited enormously from what we brought. You may recall that the average age of Solar System people increased by a full two years between Year Fifteen and Year Seventeen alone. People lived longer and they were more comfortable while they lived. Those who learned "ship ways" -- as they came to be called -- benefited even more: they learned how to communicate quickly, how to think more precisely, and how to coordinate among themselves more closely. But all this change "spooked" a lot of people. Those who didn't deal much with our offerings were particularly spooked by people who learned ship ways. According to those who didn't like them, ship way people were distant, cold and "off in the ozone" -- which meant, I think, that they had different values.

In Year Twenty Five the resistance to our techniques grew sharply, and it became violent. At first some ship way people on Earth were harassed. This was to be expected: Earth was a bastion for those who saw danger in the new ways. For that reason we had kept colonists away from Earth. There were a thousand spread widely throughout The Belt -- the inhabited places beyond Mars -- and 200 were allowed to go to Mars, but we felt it was too provocative to send any colonists to Earth. Demonstrations on Earth were newsworthy, but nothing more. What was crisis making was when the demonstrations became large on Mars.

When the Mars demonstrations got ugly, too, the Earth Firsters became the lightning rod, the symbol for the troubles. When some ship way people were kidnapped on Mars, the ship way faction blamed it on terrorists being lead by Earth-based Earth Firsters. They called for a crackdown on Earth-Mars travelers to weed out "agitators."

You may recall that Year Twenty Four was the first time there were millions of people coming from Earth to do temporary work on Mars, and then returning to Earth. Some of our new HX technology had spawned the development of "space buses" which could make the Earth-Mars passage in a week, and without forcing passengers to pay a king's ransom to do so. A year later -- this was one of the first ship way projects that used ship management and manufacturing techniques -- Earth people were taking advantage of space buses to fill temporary jobs on Mars. We saw that there would be trouble when a million dirt-poor Earth people mixed with Old Mars wealth, Nouveaux Riche ship way people, and 200, or so, ship colonists, but we also saw that there would be huge benefits.

The crackdown organized by the Mars government was unilateral, and it didn't work on many levels. It's hard to imagine now how many ways people were upset by it. And because many people got upset, the violence got worse. Three days after the crackdown began to be enforced, we pulled our colonists out. We pulled out because we could foresee how much discontent was coming, and the last thing we needed was a killed or kidnapped colonist. My brother's experience made me a true believer that violence could get out of hand.

We could foresee that pulling out the colonists would bring hardship on the ship way people of Mars. We didn't like that, but we pulled out because the violence and demonstrations were symptoms of an oncoming time of deep chaos. The technologies and methods we were introducing to the Solar System community were bringing benefits, but they were also bringing uncertainty, and that uncertainty was stressing the various communities of the Solar System. There were a lot of people who wanted to "turn back the clock"... I think that is your expression for it. At that moment, Mars was becoming a focal point for stress relief.

Our pulling out was taken by the Earth First sympathizers as a sign of weakness on our part -- we wanted to avoid that, but we couldn't, and it brought a lot of pain to the ship way people. Rather than celebrating their victory with peace, the radical Earth Firsters brought even more violence against ship way people.

What we needed to have happen... what kept us away even though it was causing pain to those who supported us... was we needed people on Mars to take sides on this issue. The various people and various communities of Mars needed to decide which side of this controversy they were on: Were they on the "Aliens, Go Home!" side, or the "Aliens, Give Us More Gifts!" side?

Thanks to some of the planning technology we have on the ship, we saw this crisis coming about six months before it did. Our planning technology could tell us that a big crisis with potential for a lot of violence was coming, and when, but it could not tell us what events would trigger it, how it would resolve, or who would take what side on the issues.

Even earlier, a year before the crisis, we could see big trouble was coming. We had a "grand meeting" on the ship. The agenda was: do we cut bait soon, or weather this upcoming storm? Frankly, I was expecting the crew to vote for cut bait. We had been trading with the Solar System for ten years now, and we had certainly cherry picked the best that "trinkets and beads" trading was going to bring us. We were being offered the "become teachers" opportunity, and I didn't think the crew would want to take it up. But I was wrong. Much of the crew had had a chance to visit one or two places in the outer Solar System, and all had seen the videos of the inner system.

As one of the crew members put it at that meeting, "Nine billion people live on that planet. It has to have a lot right on it."

I think it was the videos of the tropical beaches that really fired the crew's feelings on this. You may not realize it, but having a stretch of white sandy rock, bordered by blue waving liquid on one side, and lush greenery on the other... with a solid blue sky over head... and clouds, but just a few... so you can stand on the beach... naked... and see both sun and stars... ahh... there's just nothing like it on any world our people know of!

"Staying is a big project." I said, "The only way we can justify it is if we are going to build star ships here. Star ships like ours. Star ships that will take hundreds of thousands of those Earth people to different star systems, as we have done."

The vote was taken, and 80 percent of the crew wanted to stay and make that happen! Wow!

So, we planned for how to take advantage of the upcoming crisis...