Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“As knowledge advances further, more complex technology emerges and machines begin to take over the business of production. Cities expand as agriculture becomes more efficient. As factories become more sophisticated, ownership of machines becomes increasingly important, gradually displacing the authority invested in ownership of land. Your culture has not yet escaped this phase, which therefore seems to you to be a culmination of history, but if you were not distracted by petty squabbles over the ownership of the gaiaformable planets in the vicinity of your home star you would understand that you have not yet refined your social relations to their logical end-point. Are you following me?”

He’s already told me that Tetron children had no difficulty grasping it all, so I certainly wasn’t going to admit that I couldn’t. “Yes,” I said.

“If you only had the imagination to see it,” he went on, relentlessly, “you would see that your present system of social relationships is already being transformed. Just as the land-based economy gave way to the machine-based economy, so the machine-based economy will give way to a service-based economy. As feudal servitude was replaced by capitalistic servitude, so the latter will be replaced by the purest form of servitude: a network of obligations independent of the models of agricultural or factory production, generalized throughout society. Had humans not acquired frame force technology so abruptly, your economy of mechanical production would not have received the sudden boost associated with starship production. Had humans not made contact with other humanoid species, your mastery of nuclear annihilation technology would have developed more gradually, and you would have been forced to apply its energy to the reclamation of your own ecosphere, obliterating the traditional authority invested in the control of land and machinery in the interests of ecocatastrophic avoidance. You would have had no alternative but to reconstitute your economy as a pattern of service obligations. The transformation is still inevitable, although you might delay it for a century or two if you insist on fighting more wars in order to preserve your barbaric and antiquated socioeconomic system. Do you see what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said, valiantly. “You mean that power is, in essence, the ability to get other people to do things for you. Like brute force, property and money are just different ways of implementing that power, and only seem to be symbolizing things like land and manufactured goods. What property and money really symbolize is labour, and the only thing a man really has to sell is himself. But there’s an important difference between entering into contracts for the exchange of services as free individuals, and people actually— or effectively— owning one another.”

“It is a false distinction,” 69-Aquila assured me. “No one is a free individual, able to exist outside his society. Our needs are complex, our desires illimitable save by social constraint. In order to have the means of existence, we must sell ourselves entirely—and if we incur debts beyond the value we have put on ourselves, we must find ways to pay them. If we cannot compensate our fellows for the violence we do to them, what recourse do they have but to retaliate in kind? You, apparently, see no fault in that—but you live alongside thousands of other humanoid species, many of whom are wiser than you.”

“Not that much wiser,” I told him. “We had similar theories to yours back in the home system—it’s just that we didn’t drum them into our children quite so ruthlessly.”

He laughed again. “You are the warmakers,” he pointed out. “You are the ones with the punitive criminal justice system. I agree that everything I have said is obvious, even to you—but you are too blind to understand the significance of what you see. And I win again.”

He laid down his cards. He was right, of course. He had won again.

“As a matter of interest,” I said to 69-Aquila, as I dealt another hand, “has anyone ever escaped from this lock-up?”

“No,” he replied, with brutal honesty—but he liked the sound of his own voice and the pretensions of his own wisdom far too much to content himself with monosyllables. “You should not feel so badly about your inability to understand the logic of humanoid society and galactic civilization, Mr. Rousseau,” he went on. “After all, humans are newcomers to the scene, hurled on to the stage without adequate preparation. You have had no opportunity to study the histories of other worlds and other species, and to induce empirical generalizations therefrom. You are bound to be confused, because you are out of your depth. Your species should not have gone to war against the Salamandrans, and you, Mr. Rousseau, should not have come to Asgard. I understand the temptation, but solving the mystery of Asgard is something that humans, vormyr, Zabarans, Sleaths, and the like are not intellectually equipped to do. The Tetrax will discover the answer, when we have amassed sufficient data.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not the only one who doesn’t think so.”

“Clearly not, if you really are innocent of the crime for which you have been convicted,” he observed. “Whoever intends to buy your services obviously believes that they are worth purchasing at a very high price. Fortunately, you are living in a civilized society. Your new employer will be forced to respect the limitations of the law in his use of your… talents.”

“Merde, ” I said—although I had to say it in French, so it was just so much empty noise to him. “Your effective jurisdiction ends at the airlock. Once we’re out in the cold, anything goes. You might think you’re living in a civilized society, but the Tetrax only run the administration and the legal system. People like Amara Guur run the underworld: vormyr, Spirellans, and every other kind of barbarian you can put a name to.”

I was too harsh; I should have taken more notice of the fact that he’d conceded the possibility that I really might have been framed. His hesitation before referring to my “talents” hadn’t been intended as a sly insult. He really was wondering what I had that might prompt Amara Guur—or anyone else—to take so much trouble to obtain total control of me.

“You know,” I said, to calm the atmosphere a little, “there’s one thing I’ve never understood about you Tetrax. Why do you have code numbers instead of first names?”

Usually, you have to be wary of asking aliens questions like that, in case they take offence. Fortunately the Tetrax don’t seem to go in for taking mortal offence at personal questions, and 69-Aquila seemed enthusiastic to educate me while I was at his mercy.

“Humankind is not the only race whose members resent being numbered,” he told me. “Such refusals seem to be based in a fear of losing one’s individuality, a reluctance to think of oneself as a more-or-less insignificant unit in a much greater whole. We Tetrax do not require such illusions, and our guiding anxiety is precisely the opposite. We treasure our connectedness, our membership of a nested series of larger wholes. We bear our numbers proudly, because they remind us that we are not mere isolated irrelevancies, divorced from the context that gives our thoughts and actions meaning. As a species, humans are stuck in the last phase of a degenerate capitalism; as individuals, you are stuck in the last phase of a degenerate existential isolation. Wiser species have moved on.”

“So one of us is crazy,” I said, “and you think it’s not you. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”

“I would be forced to worry if you began to agree with me,” 69-Aquila said calmly. “I believe that I win again.”