Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

“But in addition to those internal problems, I have a star nation’s interstellar reputation to restore. To be perfectly blunt about it, there isn’t a single star system in the galaxy which has any reason to accept the honesty or integrity of any statement originating in the Republic. The Legislaturalists and the Committee of Public Safety have spent the last hundred and thirty T-years making certain no one did. That’s an even deeper hole to dig our way out of and, to be honest, it damned well ought to be.

“Which is what brings me here today.”

She paused, and Ambart leaned back in his own chair, elbows propped on the armrests while he steepled his fingers under his chin. He regarded her thoughtfully for several seconds.

“Why?” he asked simply.

“Because just as with our own citizens, no other star nation is going to believe what I say ,” she told him levelly. “They’re going to judge me, and my Republic, and the Constitution I’ve sworn to restore, by what I do . And that means I can’t simply do what’s expedient. There’s an ancient phrase from Old Terra: ‘Purer than Caesar’s wife.’ If the Republic means to earn back any sort of interstellar legitimacy, then its actions— my actions, my decisions and policies—have to demonstrate that I’m ‘purer than Caesar’s wife’ when it comes to interstellar relations. I can’t afford ambiguity, can’t afford anything that even looks like a continuation of Legislaturalist or Committee of Public Safety practices and duplicity. Opponents and rivals will twist anything they can to portray my Administration as the same old People’s Republic with no more than a change in labeling. I can’t—I won’t —give them a single extra piece of ammunition if I can avoid it.”

“I see.”

He lowered his hands, clasping them across his abdomen, and smiled faintly.

“Since you’ve been candid enough to bring up your predecessors’ perhaps somewhat less than stellar record of human rights abuses and… acquisitiveness, I suppose I might be candid enough to admit that I’ve acquired a rather better understanding of the interstellar realities than those predecessors would have preferred. Would it shock you to learn that not all of the State Security personnel sent here to keep an eye on us truly were stalwart paragons of the Revolution, immune to… inducements from certain of my own people?”

“Frankly, given the quality of the people who worked for StateSec, I’d be astonished if they had been.” Her voice was desert dry. “In fact, I was more than a little astonished Secretary Theisman managed to get Administrator LePic and his people here before one of those ‘paragons of the Revolution’ sold its location to one of the SS holdouts.”

“I’ve met the Admiral several times now,” Ambart said. “Before I met him, I probably would have shared your amazement. Now, though…”

He shrugged, and Pritchart nodded.

“I agree,” she said. “But that rather brings me to the point of my visit. You see—”

“Please.” Ambart raised one hand, his tone courteous as he interrupted her. “Allow me to speculate upon your purpose for a moment.”

She paused, then nodded and sat back in her own chair.

“As I say, not only were certain StateSec personnel amenable to persuasion, but there’s a certain downside to using political prisoners to kick start a planet’s economy. As a consequence, I’ve managed to educate myself on the realities of the People’s Republic—and, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, on the degree to which you appear to differ from them—rather better than Citizen Pierre or Citizen Saint-Just would have preferred.

“I was completely sincere earlier when I mentioned just a few of the uncountable ways in which the People’s Republic has improved the lives and the happiness of my people here on Sanctuary. If you’ve never lived in a society in which people routinely die of appendicitis, like my own grandfather did, or of diabetes—in which no one even dreams there might be a vaccine against cancer or what I believe they used to call Alzheimer’s—you can’t possibly appreciate the true magnitude of those improvements. So even though it had become apparent to me that the People’s Republic was far from the epitome of interstellar justice it had portrayed itself as, I felt very little resentment. It’s true that the independence of my dynasty was sharply curtailed when we became a Havenite protectorate, but in absolute terms, compared to our pre-protectorate position, we’re as much better off as our poorest subjects.

“My point is that Hereditary President Harris and Chairman Pierre—even Chairman Saint-Just—had a legitimate claim to have enormously improved almost every aspect of life here in Refuge. Not only that, they did it without directly intruding—not excessively, at least—into the personal lives of our people. They were prepared to allow us to retain our own law codes, our own customary usages, so long as we accepted our position as their secret arsenal.”

“And your position as second-class citizens in your own star system,” Pritchart said bitterly. “I’m not unaware of the extraterritoriality demands the People’s Republic has made on your people.” She gestured at the armed bodyguard standing at her own shoulder. “And I’m not unaware of the restrictions placed upon some critical aspects of your educational system. Like the ones which forced you to acquire that understanding of interstellar realities through… unofficial channels, let’s say.”

The shirkahna pursed his lips and cocked his head, rather like a bird considering some interesting tidbit. Then he shrugged.

“True enough,” he conceded. “In fact, a growing number of our intelligentsia have been murmuring quietly about that very point for the last few years. It’s only murmuring, so far at least.” He smiled slightly. “Trust me, my family’s secret police have had several centuries of experience telling the difference between genuine unrest and simple intellectual unruliness. For the vast majority of our people—well over ninety-five percent, I’d estimate—it remains a nonissue, in most ways. As long as the intrusion into our customs remains limited, it should stay that way.

“Yet I was never sure how long the intrusiveness would remain limited. You see, I had gotten at least a glimpse of the truth behind the façade they presented to us. For the moment, our value to them was both enormous and impossible to doubt and their arrangements here seemed to be working very well for them. But what would happen if someday that was no longer true? What would happen on the day my subjects began demanding the sort of self-determination about which our modernized education system has, as you just pointed out, been remarkably silent?”

“Or the day when your subjects began to question just who ought to own everything they’ve built over the last thirty T-years or so,” Pritchart said quietly, and he nodded.

“Or on that day,” he agreed. “Mind you, I can see the argument that none of that building—certainly none of it outside our own atmosphere—could possibly have happened without the People’s Republic’s massive investment of education, technology, and money. It isn’t unreasonable for the people who made its construction possible to be the ones who own it.”

“Your people may feel that way now ,” Pritchart said. “They may even be right to. But ultimately, it wouldn’t exist without all the sweat and effort and human capital Sanctuary’s provided, either. And quite aside from that, your star system’s natural resources were there long before the Peoples’ Republic discovered you or invested a single credit in Refuge. Whatever might be true of the infrastructure that’s been built since, they ought to belong to you, not to outsiders.”