Jack Chalker - Downtiming the Night Side

“Well, I have seen the future of the human race. I have seen both futures of the human race. I have seen the Earth sink into a horror of misery and degradation, a humanity enslaved whose very souls are captive from birth to the dictatorial whims of a government elite, its resources depleted, its air fouled almost beyond redemption. The Earth of the future is death. The elite live over three hundred years, on average, in technological comfort. The slaving billions of the future have an average lifespan of less than thirty years—worse than in your own time by far, and live in a wasteland of medieval primitiveness. There’s no power, no unspoiled vegetation, and few animals, except on the elite’s preserves, where even human beings are hunted for sport. I can prove this. I have many pictures of this future Earth, or you could be taken there to a far corner to see for yourself.’’

She sighed. “I believe you. So the shits will inherit the Earth. What else is new?”

“ We are,” he replied softly. “Listen, my ancestors came to the New World and found great civilizations there. We did not try to integrate them into our society—we destroyed theirs. A priest of the Catholic Church burned the entire master royal library of the Mayan people in the Yucatan, and others of the Church and the Spanish state destroyed much of what was left. We destroyed their culture and reduced those proud people to slavery, and we were proud of it. They had a different culture, a different religion, and they looked and dressed wrong by European standards. They were, therefore, not human to my ancestors, but subhumans, intelligent but not ever equals.

“When this old world began to run out of its exploitable resources, the fuels and minerals that made civilization good for everyone, they had to go out to the planets to find more, and find them they did. The trouble was, they were in places Earth humans could not live without expensive and extensive life support. Mars had much value beneath its rusty soil; many of the asteroids and moons of Jupiter and Saturn had even more. To change those places to the type on which humans could live and work easily would take a fortune—and centuries. Earth did not have centuries, and the amounts it needed from its planetary sisters was far too great and too expensive to be economically feasible. The only solution they had to this was to make humans into creatures that could live in such places as easily as men could live on Earth. Not easily—but at least as easily as men lived in the Antarctic cold and the desert wastes of the Sahara. Do you follow me so far?”

She nodded. “I think so. They got a bunch of people and changed them into monsters.”

“Not exactly. There was no shortage of volunteers. Skilled technicians and scientists were lured by the challenge and the romance of it. Workers were drawn from the poor and the dispossessed who saw a chance for becoming something great. It was a new frontier, and it was tamed, in a way, by such a breed. Scientists, romantics, and both losers and criminals—the same mix that colonized the Americas. And like the colonists of the Americas, they were taken for granted, used, and abused by an Earth grown fat and dependent on their labors. Cultures which had no trouble destroying the Mayas or oppressing the American colonists found even less of a moral problem with the Outworlders. They did not look human at all, but in many cases like strange beasts. They gave the Earth what it craved in abundance, and the Earth accepted magnanimously. But they were human here —inside their bodies”— he tapped his chest—“and they found themselves regarded as animals and treated as property.”

“And they’re gettin’ even.”

“Perhaps. Being human, I’m afraid that’s a part of it. But they will not be the new Mayans. Earth was totally dependent on them. When individual employees of a key mining company staged a major strike, they were ruthlessly rounded up and put to death by the Earth authorities. That began a massive revolt that swept through the solar system like a fire. Earth was ill prepared and ignorant of history. The Outworlders were too angry to be afraid, and so, at great cost, they seized control of the most vital thing in the whole system—the transportation network. The supplies stopped, and Earth was strangled. Within weeks things began to break down. Within months they were in a crisis state. Within a year they were reduced to a horrible situation, with mass starvation and the collapse of the energy which was never very cheap and was now very dear. Most humans had taken such things for granted. They didn’t know how to work the land without machines, nor could a non-mechanized civilization feed, clothe, and house its people. Governments by necessity were forced to act brutally and ruthlessly. What was left, in the end, was a terrible, crushing military dictatorship which created a miniature of their old world, in which they alone got the resources and comforts that were left from the masses who slaved for them or died.”

“Seems to me it’d be easier to make a deal.”

“That’s what we thought, but the collapse was so swift and sudden, the military authorities so absolute and doctrinaire, and nations which had hated each other for centuries merged their ruling classes out of common need. They are sixteenth-century Spain faced with a Mayan revolt in which the Mayans have superior arms and position and all the resources. They will not deal with the subhumans, even though they need them, and their own fears and terrors and prejudices see only a domination by inhuman monsters. They see themselves as saving humanity, and will fight to the death for that ideal. And it is a terrible tragedy, for the inhuman monsters they so horribly fear are their own children.”

His face and tone took on a distant look. “See me. Am I not a human being? Yes, I am that—and more. I am the future. I am the way man broke with his follies and his wastefulness and spread to other worlds. I am the path to human survival, for through me humanity will continue to grow, spread, and thrive, to explore and experiment and wonder about the next hill, the next ocean, the next star. And if my skin is white, or black, or yellow, or a chitinous exoskeleton; if I breathe oxygen or methane—I am still a human being. I have seen the currents of air rushing down the great valleys of Mars, and I have stood upon the shores of great sand seas and watched a thousand colors reflect the pale sunlight. While my brothers grovel in the filth of ancient Earth, I have the freedom of the stars and know the wonders of God firsthand.”

She was impressed in spite of her tiredness and confusion, but Doc had been right. She had followed it all, and still had thinking doubts.

“Eric said you would destroy the human race.”

“We can’t destroy it without destroying ourselves. Our fight is for many things, but it is not to destroy. One day, God willing, we will go to the stars and sow our seed, perhaps meet other of God’s creations. We wish to save the people of Earth. Their own rulers wish to destroy what they cannot control, not us. We could have destroyed all life on Earth years ago. We are a rescue mission, a liberation movement, and a vision of man’s future. For my part, I have a more personal motive. I am a priest of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, yet I am denied ever visiting Rome as myself, ever seeing the great dome of St. Peter’s or the wonders of the Sistine Chapel, if, indeed, they still exist in my time. I wish to walk the streets of Campeche on the Gulf Coast of the Yucatan, where my great-grandfather was born and generations of my family before that. I cannot be denied the present or my future, but I am still robbed of my past which is my birthright.”

“Why are you telling me all this? What is your fight to me now?”