“All of Planetary Security?” The human high official was terrified and started sweating for the third time. His olive skin had gone almost ashen. “But… That’s impossible. They are only biomechanisms… with flexible programming, of course…. but they’ll have to get orders from someone, be supervised, after all… And your tourists won’t want to be cared for by biomechanical replicas of humans, no matter how perfect they are.”
“They’ll never find out,” the Auyar shrugged. “Our huborgs can be more human than humans. Be everything a xenoid tourist expects from a police force officer, even one belonging to a primitive lower race. But don’t worry, Kharman. We’ll only replace your street patrol personnel. The higher officials will still be humans, of course. Though also supervised by our technicians. They will work together, for… technical reasons. Huborgs can be very delicate sometimes.”
“Ah,” was all that Colonel Kharman said, beaten.
“It will not be so terrible,” Murfal consoled him patronizingly. “And there are still many details in our huborgs’ programming that must be perfected. For now we will begin only here, in your district, as a pilot project. It may take a couple of years or longer before the system can be instituted all over Earth. And you cannot deny that we will be saving your planet quite a bit in the matter of salaries. Thanks to which, for example, your own salary could… double.”
Kharman smiled unenthusiastically and stood up. “Well, Murfal, Your Excellency… if everything has been said, I will be going.”
“Wait. I want to ask a favor of you,” the xenoid stopped him. “I am curious about something. Do you have any holoimages of this Sergeant Romualdo? I would like to see his face. He is a clever man, it cannot be denied. He was judicious enough not to lay all his cards on the table until they had gone inside the Body Spares depository. He knew that no electronic equipment could record his words in there…”
“Yes, but he wasn’t counting on your huborg prototype’s photographic memory,” Kharman fawningly reminded him. “He couldn’t have known. It precisely reproduced every word that Romualdo uttered.” The fingers of the former Dayak colonel from Planetary Security flew across a keyboard, and a holoimage materialized between him and Murfal. “Look. This is Sergeant Romualdo.”
The Auyar contemplated the man’s features. A leathery face with the melancholy of a man who’s seen it all and no longer has faith in anything. The face of a man who knows that if he doesn’t take care of the dirty work, somebody else will do it, though no better than he would. Who doesn’t enjoy it… Who’s just doing a painful duty.
“Enough. Turn it off,” Murfal sighed, seeming more human than ever. “Colonel… Could I ask you for another favor?”
“As you wish, Murfal, Your Excellency,” said Kharman, servile but uncomfortable.
“Destroy that recording. I want the secret to remain between you and me. Do not let Internal Affairs take any sort of steps against this Romualdo,” the xenoid said absently. “If possible, have him retire now. With full honors and a double pension. And I will pay for it, if the paperwork is too complicated. Can you do it?”
“Of course, Your Excellency,” Kharman replied, completely dumbfounded. “But… why?”
“Why have I decided to pardon him?” The Auyar stood up with a clumsy gesture. “Because I enjoyed listening to him. Because I like his images: the one of the anemone and the little fish; the one of the child, the organ grinder, and the monkey… And especially the one of the suicidal lemmings. Because, in the final analysis, if Planetary Security is the most venal organization on this terribly corrupt planet, it is not his fault. He said it himself: he never did anything other than follow the rules of the game. The good Sergeant Romualdo did not even invent them. We did. And he had no way of knowing that those rules had begun to change… right now. Goodnight, Colonel Kharman.”
“Goodnight, Murfal, Your Excellency,” said the former Dayak.
The Auyar halted again on the threshold. “One last minor detail… Do you think it would be very difficult to arrange a visit to that… Baracuyá del Jiquí? Now that I am on Earth already, I would very much like to see it. If what the sergeant said is true, it must be an interesting place. Perhaps I will be lucky. Human settlements as… primitive as that are growing rare, according to what I have read in the tourist guide…”
The Majority Shareholder
As soon as they realize that the power actually controlling Earth is the Planetary Tourism Agency, xenoid financiers and investors ask their human hosts why one person isn’t in charge of the whole mechanism instead of the cumbersome Board of Shareholders, where nearly two hundred humans argue endlessly among themselves before reaching any agreement.
Upset by the delays that this decision-making process inevitably entails, the xenoids insist every so often that the body should name a single Majority Shareholder with plenary power. One individual, backed by his peers’ vote of confidence, who has full authority and responsibility to conclude deals with all non-human investors, discuss budgets and agreements directly, and so forth.
They base this proposal on the fact that the system of representative democracy, which humans always champion, is inevitably more agile than participatory democracy. Though they recognize that it is also less just, to be sure…
The more than two hundred shareholders on the Board always listen with respect to these proposals while glancing at each other with almost imperceptible smiles.
Of course a representative system would save time.
But saving time isn’t the key thing here; trust is.
None of them has enough trust in any of the others to think that, were one of them to become the Major Shareholder, he would defend the interests of all in an equitable way… rather than putting his own interests first.
That is the only reason the Planetary Tourism Agency has no Majority Shareholder or anything remotely similar. When the xenoid financiers who call so vociferously for creating the position think it over, they are actually glad that things continue as they do. Some of them even go so far in their change of heart that they speak of “excessive concentration of power”—and propose expanding the two hundred shareholders to four hundred or a thousand.
Earth divided by two hundred is perfectly controllable.
Earth unified under the will of a single man who has the confidence of all the others would be a different matter entirely.
That is why the most important Xenoid Emergency Plan of all, more important even than their general offensive against the infamous Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation, is their Karolides Project.
Karolides was a charismatic Greek statesman who came close to unifying the Balkan peninsula in the twentieth century. If he had succeeded, Germany might never have propelled Europe into World War I. But he was assassinated, the Balkans broke up—and ever since, whenever people talk about political fragmentation, the term they most commonly use is “Balkanization.”
In the unlikely yet conceivable case that a new Karolides should arise among the shareholders of the Planetary Tourism Agency… everyone knows what fate the true masters of the planet have in store for him. And how quickly it would fall.
Politics is implacable.
Divide and rule.
Aptitude Assessment
“Let’s get started… Identify yourself. Please state your full name.”
You might call me an accidental scientist. Despite what they call my “exceptional qualities,” I could have died and the world would never have found out if it hadn’t been for that lucky incident.