The Amish Colony was very similar in outlook, although they had inhabited a much more welcoming world. I wasn’t sure what to make of a sect that had largely abandoned technology in favour of a simpler life, but after a week’s shore leave on the planet — a dreadfully boring experience for spacers used to Luna City — I had decided that they were completely insane. The vast majority of their population worked from day to day on back-breaking labour, trying to pull enough crops from the soil to feed themselves for another year. They spoke of happiness in simplicity, but I saw little of it. I only saw people who didn’t know what they were missing. They could have replaced their horses and carts with cars easily, or even built aircraft or airships, but they seemed content with what they had. It was a deeply boring planet. They, too, had nothing the UN or anyone else wanted.
“Captain,” I asked, one day, “why are we checking in on all these places?”
The Captain shrugged. He’d been happier, if anything, than I was. This far from the Human Sphere, his word was law. “They might become a threat later, or someone with more hostile intentions might use them as a base,” he said. “The Amish won’t have mentioned it to anyone, but fifty years ago a pirate tried to extort food and supplies from them, before a UNPF cruiser chased him away. It’s worthwhile just to keep an eye on him.”
“Yes, sir,” I agreed. I wanted it to last forever, even though I knew better. Back home, the conspiracy I had created would be burrowing into the UNPF’s structure, trying to reach as many starships as possible and prepare to seize control. I had to go back to trigger the takeover, but…I didn’t want to go back. I understood, now, why so many starships had gone renegade over the past hundred years. They couldn’t bear to return to the tarnished world they’d left, where honour was a joke and they were compliant in atrocity after atrocity.
The Wonderland Asteroid Federation was easily the oddest colony — set of colonies — I’d seen. They had moved out to their asteroids — thousands of asteroids circling a dull red star — nearly a hundred years ago and burrowed into the rocks using technology that had been outdated even before humanity had taken the first steps into space. Their technology could keep them alive, but it couldn’t do much else, let alone challenge a starship. If they had crashed on a planet’s surface, they would have been utterly unable to escape, even assuming they survived. They’d lived years under lower gravity than Earth, or almost any other world, apart from the moon. Their bodies had adapted to the low gravity. We took shore leave on one of their resort asteroids and watched a sexual ballet between girls who seemed to fly through air on wings. It was profoundly moving and yet, somehow, very sad. I slipped away early.
It was there that I saw my first Transhuman. The process was officially banned everywhere the UN held sway — and, oddly, Heinlein and most of the other colonies were in full agreement. The process had created a human spliced with animal DNA in hopes of creating a superior form of life. The UN’s files were scarce, but reading between the lines, I suspected that the process didn’t always work perfectly. The Chimps — as they were called in impolite company — might not be fertile, or might grow into immensely retarded adults. The whole process made me sick and I complained to the Captain, who told me to ignore it. The asteroid federation could go to hell in its own way.
It chilled me and the next time I went to the flying ballet, I allowed myself to wonder if the wings were actually part of the girls’ bodies. I even asked one of the girls afterwards and she laughed at me, before removing the wing and offering to allow me to examine her in private. She was so slight that I was terrified that I would break her in half — I was only average on Earth standards, but I was a lot stronger than her — and I was no longer sure that I liked the colony. They did have something the UN wanted — asteroid ore — but with all the stresses being placed on the freighters and transport networks, it would probably be centuries before someone attempted to set up trade links. If the UN was still around, I wondered, what would they make of the colony? Would they all be Chimps by that time?
We also spent months inside the wormholes and I spent the time, apart from training the Ensigns, studying the UN carefully. It wasn’t an easy task. There were so many lies and half-truths in the files that I found it hard to work out what was true and what wasn’t, and the Heinlein files weren’t much of an improvement. They were sound, historically speaking, but there was a ideological bias against the UN running through them. It was hard to know just what was truth…and what was nothing, but a lie.
No one had intended to create the UN, I worked out slowly. I wished I could have discussed it with the Captain, but I didn’t dare. The system had originally been nothing more than a place where humans from different nations could meet and talk in relative safety, although the most powerful nations had always been able to go their own way. As technology advanced and the world grew smaller, the UN had ended up assuming more and more of an oversight role, over everything. I was vastly amused to discover that there had been an environmentalist movement even that far back. They hadn’t known how lucky they had been! The development of the Jump Drive had allowed those who hated the thought of a world government to escape, while leaving Earth in a desperate state. Terrorism and wrecker attacks had the entire population scared to death and willing to support anything to eliminate the terrorists.
The nations could have vetoed laws, but no one had thought to prevent the UN from creating regulations, until it was far too late. The UN hadn’t intended to create a massive bureaucracy itself, but as it was forced to create regulation after regulation, it ended up with a massive support base, demanding pay. It had ended up taking over the power of taxation and securing its position as the master of Earth. It imposed harsh new laws intended to curb pollution, but the bigger corporations had simply paid massive bribes and carried on polluting. The smaller ones had been unable to either pay the bribes or meet the regulations and, eventually, most of them had either collapsed and thrown the employees onto welfare, or emigrated to other stars. I wondered, absently, if that had been deliberate. The UN had known from the start that there was a population problem.
I couldn’t understand that, at first, until I did the maths. If a child costs money to raise, parents will have fewer children, but if the costs are met by someone else — the UN’s welfare department, for example — there is actually an incentive to have more children. This put more pressure on the system, but repelling the legislation would have been politically impossible, forcing them to try to extract more taxes and resources from the colonies. There, in short, was the tragedy of the United Nations. It could neither cure itself nor allow anyone to break free of its grasp. The people who really ran the UN, the beauecrats, were resistant to any change. The colonies were resistant to being robbed to pay for the UN’s mistakes. The civilians…had no control over their lives at all.
“You’re not doing badly with the Ensigns,” the Captain said, one afternoon over tea. I hadn’t realised that he drank tea with his First Lieutenant and Political Officer on a regular basis, but it made sense. The Captain had to be aloof to the remainder of the crew, particularly the Ensigns. “Allen and Geoffrey will make quite competent tactical officers, apparently, and Yianni would make a good engineering officer in the future.”