“I hearken and obey,” Dejerine responded. While they stowed their material, he added seriously: “Miss Conway, you are kind to show me around like this. I am grateful. However, is your main hope not to enlist my feelings on behalf of the natives?”
“Sure. What else?”
“Well… will you give my side a similar attention? I know you see us as destructive intruders. Will you believe that we may have reasons—over and above our orders—for being here?”
She let him stand a second before she said, “I’ll listen to you, yes.”
“Good.” He smiled. “As a matter of fact, I would like to start by collecting an audience, everybody in Primavera if possible, and showing a tape I have along. It is not official propaganda—it’s rather critical—but that’s important too.” He paused. “You see, I wish for you to believe that I am not a fanatic.”
Jill snapped laughter. “I’ve got to watch your show to prove I’m not?” His mobile features registered hurt, and she felt more contrite than was entirely reasonable. “No offense,” she said. “We’ll be glad to watch.”
EIGHT
Excerpts from 3V; simultaneous English.
OLAYA: Good evening. This is Luis Enrique Olaya Gonzales, welcoming you again to “Universe of Discourse.” Our program tonight is special in both length and, we trust, importance.
Exactly six months ago, the Parliament of the World Federation passed a measure requiring the Peace Control Authority to take “appropriate forceful counteraction” against “agencies, vessels, installations, personnel, and instrumentalities” of the Naqsan League in order to “terminate the emergency and ensure a just settlement of matters in dispute.” In plain language, Earth declared war on Naqsa. Officialdom carefully avoids any such phrase—and has better reasons than hypocrisy; some words bring on irrevocable commitments with unforeseeable consequences. Nevertheless, that resolution of Parliament turned a series of accidental clashes into systematic military operations. The powers no longer confine themselves to protest, propaganda, pressures political and economic, increasingly desperate diplomacy; the decision is now to be made through force. War it is, war the people call it, and likewise will we tonight.
We are going to examine this war, its background causes, its past and present and possible future course, its tangled issues. We shall try to be fair…
(View of a planet in space, terrestroid though heavily clouded. Pan in.)
OLAYA (voice BG): About a hundred and fifty light-years from Sol, a globe where men can live unaided spins close around its dull orange sun. They cannot live there very well—or could not. For them, most of it is hot, wet, tormented by violent weather, vast wildernesses of rain forest, swamp, eroded mountains. The native life can nourish a man for a short while at best; and much is deadly poisonous…
It is a planet better suited to Naqsans. Early in the course of their spaceflight, they founded a few settlements upon it, which grew and had offspring. They called the world Tsheyakka [a set of hawks and gargles, dubbed from a recording]. Humans bestowed the name Mundomar, after they got interested.
For they could survive here, if they were prepared to make herculean efforts. Less torrid and humid than elsewhere, the arctic zone was not altogether unsuitable. Water-loving Naqsans had shunned those parts. They saw no reason not to admit colonists from Earth, for a substantial price on the real estate.
[View penetrates clouds, sweeps across jungles, boggy plains, rank growth afloat in oceans. At times it closes up on a particular spot, e.g., one of the modest Naqsan communities. There great seal-like bodies slop and wallow about in the manner natural for them, which many humans find disgusting. The view proceeds northward, finally settling on a brushy plateau. A Terrestrial spaceship lands, a model six decades outmoded: for this is a section from the archives, proud capture of a historic moment.]
Who would come? True, Earth is overloaded with man. True, planets where he can live are rare, and most of those have autochthons. True, what unclaimed globes he had found and settled were, even then, ultracautious about what further immigrants they accepted. But who would be so desperate as to seek out Mundomar… or so hopeful?
Those who had no other choice except endless despair. A long human lifetime has passed since the prophetic voice of Charles Barton—
(Sequence of views; dialogue and BG commentary summarized.
(Drab, sleazy, crowded, the Welfare districts of typical megalopolitan regions, where they huddle for whom technological civilization can find no use. Idleness; boredom; frustration; sense of personal worthlessness; drugs in bottles, in pills, in shots, in sprays; 3V screens for everybody, joyhouses or brain simulators for those who can scrabble together the money; gang fights among the young, criminal empires among the adult, and the honest majority walking in dread—but the police are the enemy, aren’t they? Citizen’s allowance, social workers, educational channels, sorry, you don’t qualify, sorry, you do qualify but we have no opening; yet sometimes at night an opening appears, on the roof of a housing unit tall enough to block off part of the city glare and let a few stars shine through.
(The Backworld, whose folk can stay alive after a fashion if they get steady outside help, but no more than alive. Technology is not magic; it cannot operate on resources which no longer exist. Peasants in Dry Africa seek shelter beneath an elevated aqueduct insufficient to keep their farms from blowing away, red upon the wind. At night the streets of Indian cities are paved with sleeping people. A pelagic community off the Greenland coast supports itself by sending boys out to nearly exhausted fisheries at the age of twelve. Nobody starves in the Backworld, as nobody does in Welfare. But aid is a mere stopgap, and still taxpayers feel drained.
(All the old panaceas have failed. Education? You can’t educate a person—a person of perfectly normal intelligence—into special abilities he wasn’t born with; and the demand for routineers is low and falling. Birth control? You can’t ask entire peoples to make themselves extinct. Redistribution of wealth? The conservation laws hold as true in economics as in physics. Return to a simple and natural existence? A precondition is the death of 90 per cent of the human race.
(But the stars remain. And given an ideal, the capital necessary to make a new beginning will somehow come forth. If a man has no other capital, there are his two hands.)
(Archive sequences of the pioneers on Mundomar, toil, pain, grief, but always that hope which refuses to surrender, that vision which makes sullen Welfare loafers and worn-out Backworld beasts of burden into men and women. Their children grow up afraid of nothing in this cosmos.
(Their children, their children, their children. And as the colony waxes, as it puts seedlings across the whole north of the planet, material wealth burgeons; and likewise do the contributions from Earth, for clearly this mad dream is going to work; and immigrants pour down out of the skies.
(Upon tamed lands, the cities rise clangorous. Nature is harnessed and transformed.)
OLAYA: Friction with the Naqsans began when human enterprises crossed ill-defined borders. Disputes were usually settled by negotiation. But the social structure of the Naqsan colonies was such that individuals among them bore any losses, uncompensated. It also permitted aggrieved parties to combine privately and seek satisfaction. This is quite legal and proper in that culture, that species. However, humans have different, incompatible institutions—or, may I say, instincts? They retaliated against what to them was banditry…
Tension heightened… Incidents multiplied… The Governor General appealed for Peace Authority help… The Naqsan League made clear that it would not abandon its habitants on Tsheyakka…