I was about to turn away when I noticed something familiar about one of the volunteers on New Earth. I watched closely until he turned to face the viewer, then recognition hit me – it was Luke. Of course, I thought, my brother wouldn’t miss an opportunity like this. I noticed that he was wearing a headnet so I worked my way through the comms system and contacted him.
‘Hi Luke, I might have guessed that you’d be here.’
He looked around in surprise, expecting to see me.
‘I’m about ten metres and an entire dimension of existence away from you.’
He understood and nodded. ‘This is going really well. You know I had my doubts about what you were doing, but you have come up trumps this time. For the first time, I really feel that we are achieving something.’
‘Don’t thank me, thank the saurians. You don’t know what altruism is until you get to know these guys. They’re making a major – and I mean planet-wide – effort to make this work.’
He narrowed his eyes in concentration. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me. What’s wrong?’
‘No immediate problem, I’ll let you know if anything develops.’
He nodded doubtfully and turned back to his work. I tried to ignore the Representative’s glare. As we headed back to the airship, I privately contacted Primo. ‘Any word from the Convenor about what she’s doing with the Representative’s request?’
‘Not yet, she’s still stalling. The best argument we have so far is that we have only solved the technical issues with regard to the two-metre size of the hoop within which the slider hole is generated; the solution does not scale easily. And the manufacture of the hoop is absolutely critical, it has to be made in one piece and can’t be disassembled. So by definition we can’t sent one through another, as they’re all the same size; which means they all have to stay on our world, until we have the time to design one small enough to be pushed through. So the Representative has now asked for control of some of our machines, which would mean bringing his own men through to our world to guard and operate them. So far that has been blocked on the grounds that a transfer of populations between our worlds raises fundamental issues of principle which would need careful consideration and negotiation. He’s getting impatient, though.’
‘The best solution would be to find another empty world which they could have.’
‘Don’t we know it: the slider scientists are working flat out to try to locate one. So far they’ve rediscovered most of the lost human worlds, but they all still have significant human populations, albeit only a small fraction of what they used to be and living in rather primitive conditions. ‘
‘Sooner or later, we’re going to have to tell the UN about your warlike relatives and their ambitions. But better make it later, if you can keep stalling. If S2 manages to get access to New Earth, humanity will insist on sending weapons for self-defence and we’ll end up with a planet-wide war on our hands.’
‘Yes.’ Primo’s response was filled with misery. He was finding out the hard way that altruism isn’t necessarily painless.
That evening, as we cruised back over North Africa, I was contacted by the UN Secretary General, who was in a state of considerable agitation.
‘What is going on? This afternoon’s session of the General Assembly has just ended in chaos!’
‘Why?’
‘We were interrupted by a message from a saurian who called himself “the representative of another saurian world”. He warned us to restrict our colonisation of New Earth to central and southern Africa, because his people had laid claim to the rest of the land. He warned of dire consequences if we disobeyed. What is this, some kind of prank?’
‘No prank, sadly. Hang on, I’ll get back to you in a few minutes.’ I quickly contacted the Convenor and my friends and briefly explained what had happened. They were stunned and appalled.
‘The Representative had asked to be shown how to access our communications function to keep in contact with his own people. It was a reasonable request which we could not refuse. It never occurred to us that he would do anything like this.’ The Convenor’s mind showed her distress – and the beginnings of anger. Anger was good, I thought. I decided to emphasise the point.
‘You need to bear in mind that with the S2 Rulers, scheming and duplicity are their normal mode of operation. This will be part of a plan they have worked out to keep you on the defensive, forever reacting to events and giving ground at every stage until they’ve got what they want. New Earth would only be the start. I suspect that they see the existence of multiple worlds as a golden opportunity to extend the scope of their political and military games, using other planets as battlefields – including your own. I hate to disillusion you, but your invitation to S2 was like a flock of chickens inviting a fox into their hen coop.’ I had to send a mental image to illustrate that analogy, but they got the point. There was a long silence.
‘So what do we do?’ The Convenor radiated weariness.
‘What they’re trying to do in getting access to the slider machines is to get the keys, not just to your hen coop but to all of them. If they ever succeed in doing that, there’ll be no stopping them; you’ve lost, permanently. We all have. So the top priority is to prevent any such access, or the leaking of any information about the technology involved which might allow them to develop their own. My fear is that they will use violence or the threat of it to secure such access – it would be normal practice for them. You need to be braced to take tough decisions, to follow your head not your heart.’
‘That is not what we are like.’
‘I know that – and so do they.’
‘What should we do about this message they sent to the UN?’
‘To the Representative? Nothing – ignore it. He will already have some justification prepared, and it will probably throw him off balance a bit if you pretend nothing happened. It’s going to be important to seize the initiative in dealing with your aggressive cousins. But in the meantime I’d better give the Secretary General an edited version of events, stressing your control of the transfer machines. There will inevitably be demands to send troops through to defend the colonists, though. I will resist that; it is probably what the Representative wants, as it would allow him to put pressure on you to permit some of his troops through, in the interests of fair treatment and to establish and defend their claim. In any case, the history of groups of armed men wandering around Africa is not a happy one.’
Back at Laketown, the Representative kept up the pressure by requesting a meeting with the whole Assembly. As usual, a reasonable request which the Convenor felt she could not refuse – but at my urging she fully briefed all of the Assembly members on the situation as I saw it.
This time it was the Representative’s turn to occupy the floor of the Assembly; I stood at the back with my friends. He made a carefully crafted vocal speech – his mind as closed as usual – which I followed via the usual process. He started by drawing attention to the warlike nature of humanity, referring to the demands to send armed forces to New Earth which had been made that very day at the UN. He displayed dramatic images he had unearthed from the S1 archives to demonstrate the appalling irresponsibility of humanity in consistently messing up every planet they had occupied, destroying their own civilisations in the process. Needless to say, my own world’s record featured prominently, featuring views of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He contrasted this with the stable, sustainable settlement of S2, glossing over their constant little wars. He spoke at length about the poor conditions and hard lives the manual workers of S2 suffered – conveniently ignoring the fact that this was a deliberate policy of the Rulers – and stressed their need for living space. He ended with an appeal to species solidarity: he had researched the genealogies of the two worlds carefully and had identified common ancestry between several members of their Council and the Assembly.