Buca stopped in front of a hologram of New Paris. Before it was a half-melted piece of metal that, according to the sign, had come from the actual Eiffel Tower.
She had never been there. There were so many places on Earth that she might never get to now…
It didn’t matter that New Paris was just a plastometal reconstruction of the old, authentic city, which had been leveled by a nuclear blast in the days following Contact. Like all terrestrials, Buca felt great pride in the Earth’s past glory.
In Greece and Rome and the Aztecs and the Incas and Genghis Khan and the Mongols and the pyramids and the Great Wall of China and the Indian rajahs and the Japanese samurais and Timbuktu and New York.
The present was grodos and all the other xenoids.
Selshaliman also stopped in front of the hologram of New Paris. Hadn’t he ever been there? It was ironic. Whatever the Earth was today, it was all due to them… and their money. And they didn’t take advantage of it.
“Welcome to Earth, the most picturesque planet in the galaxy. Hospitality is our middle name! We’re only here to make you feel better than you feel at home.” Laughing, Buca recited one of the omnipresent slogans of the Planetary Tourism Agency.
Then her lips twisted into a bitter smile and she looked at Selshaliman with barely concealed hatred.
There was also the other past.
The one described in elementary school interactive texts. One of the few things the Planetary Tourism Agency handed out free to every inhabitant on the planet.
A relatively recent past. When people were already traveling to the cosmos in primitive ships, but many of them still refused to believe in xenoids. When Earth had different countries and lots of tongues instead of the one unified Planetary language. Cattle, crops, fish, and game in abundance, but also plenty of hungry people. When civilization was always on the verge of collapse. Because of nuclear war, pollution, the demographic explosion, or all of it together.
But Contact happened.
The minds of the galaxy had been keeping an eye on humans for thousands of years. Without interfering. Waiting until they were mature enough to be adopted by the great galactic family. But when the total destruction of Earth seemed inevitable, they broke their own rules and jumped in to stop it. Their huge ships landed in Paris, in Rome, in Tokyo, in New York. Their desire to help and their resources seemed endless…
Terrestrial leaders, jealously protective of their power in the presence of vastly superior minds and technologies, deemed this altruistic intervention an invasion. And their reaction was violent. Arguing that offense was the best defense, they sounded the trumpets and shouldered arms.
Nuclear arms.
The surprise attack caused a few atomic explosions, like the one that wiped out Old Paris. But there was no nuclear war. The xenoids prevented the rest of the missiles from going off, and then they revealed their full might. When they deployed the geophysical weapon, Africa disappeared beneath the waves. They gave one week’s warning, but the obsession with secrecy among the governments and the disbelief of the masses were the real reasons for the deplorable disaster. More than eighty million humans perished in a matter of hours. When it would have been so easy to evacuate them…
After that horrendous incident, the extraterrestrials delivered their famous Ultimatum: since the terrestrials were incapable of intelligent self-government or of using their natural resources rationally, from that moment on they would cease to be an independent culture. And so they entered the status of a Galactic Protectorate.
To reestablish the damaged ecological balance, the planet’s new masters instituted draconian measures: Zero use of fossil or nuclear fuel. Dismantling the great industrial and scientific centers. Zero demographic growth.
There were global protests, which were put down efficiently and bloodlessly. Total deaths: not even a quarter of a million.
Less than a century later, Earth was once again the natural paradise that had seen the birth of man. With practically all its non-green surface turned into a giant museum, tourism was the major (and almost the only) source of income for the planet and all its inhabitants. Tourism, controlled by the nearly omnipotent Planetary Tourism Agency, with huge investments of extraterrestrial capital and deep concern for the future of Homo sapiens. A brilliant future awaited human beings, under the benevolent tutelage of the galactic community, into which they would be accepted one not very distant day, with the rights of full membership…
At least, that was the official version.
Buca, like everybody else, knew that the truth was something else entirely.
If it were up to the xenoids, humans would never be a race with equal rights.
Xenoid altruism wasn’t what had motivated Contact. And it wasn’t the hope of saving humanity that had made them interfere, cutting off any possibility of the planet’s independent development at the root.
Jowe had explained the real motives to her. He knew something about Galactic Economics—one of the subjects most strictly forbidden by Planetary Security. You could study it in the secret cells of the clandestine Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation. No wonder they were persecuted. Or that he had been condemned to Body Spares just for suspicion of having links to them. Though, most likely, the Yakuza had played some part in the affair…
Jowe used to say that the whole galaxy was engulfed in a cruel war. Like all wars, it had offensives and counter-attacks, diversionary movements and tactical retreats. But this was commercial warfare: for new technologies, for markets, for clients, for cheap labor.
Mankind had been a loser in that conflict from the get-go. And as such, it was condemned to be a client, never a rival, not even potentially. Earth barely produced enough food, clothing, and medicine to satisfy a quarter of its own population. And what it manufactured was of such low quality that it couldn’t compete with the worst, cheapest products of xenoid technocracies. There was little use for earthly products except as folklore and tourist trinkets.
For commercial expediency, they turned the Earth into a souvenir-world—another of Jowe’s phrases, Buca recalled.
Right… Because, no matter what the ads said, Earth was no paradise. Getting by was a day-to-day struggle. For every person like her who lucked out, thousands more were left by the wayside. Magnificent people, many of them. Like Yleka. Like Jowe.
Buca was almost sure that the real reason Jowe was arrested and sentenced had nothing to do with the Xenophobe Union, but something else much more petty. Until they caught him, Jowe was a freelance “protector.” And one of the best; he raked it in. The protection racket was theoretically illegal, but it could be even more profitable than being a social worker. Riskier, too; if a freelancer got sloppy about paying off the Mafia, the Triads, or the Yakuza every month, tough luck. If Jowe gave her a half-price discount just two months after he started protecting her, only because he’d fallen in love with her beautiful eyes, maybe he’d been naïve enough to do the same for others. Too dangerous. Organized crime didn’t like it when other people gave away their money. The arm of the Yakuza was as long as Planetary Security’s… and they were tougher when punishing time came around.
Her conscience was clean. The truth of it was that she hadn’t tricked Jowe. He had set his own trap. The overly idealistic kid believed that sex, cuddles, and sweet talk meant she loved him, too… She didn’t force him to do it. He was just trying to do her a favor, relieve her debts. And since you weren’t supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth…