Christopher Nuttall - A Learning Experience

He smiled. His father had always gone on and on about the value of gold, but Steve knew that gold’s value depended upon having someone willing and able to purchase it. Gold would work, he suspected, if it were sold down on Earth, but if the bottom dropped out of the market there would be a colossal economic disaster.

“I was thinking a kind of Lunar Credit,” Rochester said. “We could pin it to the dollar, for now, but we don’t want something that is pegged by forces outside our control. That almost fucked Greece.”

Steve nodded. If nothing else, the economic troubles in Greece meant that the country had plenty of young men and women willing to emigrate to find work. He was sure that, once the public announcement was made, hundreds of thousands of them would apply to join the growing colony. The only difficulty would be training programs and those were just a matter of time. As the colony expanded, experienced men could start training inexperienced men, who would then train newcomers in turn.

And, as they set up more homes below the lunar surface, there would be room for people who didn’t want to live on Earth, but couldn’t work on the moon.

“I’ll work on that, along with a constitution,” he said. “Have you had any major trouble just yet?”

Rochester scowled. “One idiot with more initiative than common sense built himself a still and nearly poisoned a couple of workers with bootleg alcohol,” he said. “I clobbered him, then put the idiot on punishment duty for a couple of weeks. But we will probably face something more serious later on, as we keep expanding. We need some kind of law, sir, rather than just my fists.”

He waved a cyborg arm under Steve’s nose. “That could be very dangerous in the future.”

“It will be done,” Steve said. “Somehow.”

He shook his head. He’d seen more than a few attempts to rewrite the constitution or devise a completely new one, but they were either simplistic or excessively detailed, full of ifs , buts and exceptions . There were people who wanted to restrict the franchise to those who had served a term in the military and people who thought that only those who paid tax should vote. Both ideas sounded reasonable, but they had flaws that would become disastrous if the system suffered a serious breakdown.

And most of the other ideas boiled down to I should get a vote. Here is the list of people who shouldn’t get a vote .

“Good luck,” Rochester said. He paused. “For the moment, we’re largely operating under Queen’s Regulations, with some exceptions for off-duty hours. But that will have to be clarified soon.”

Steve nodded, tiredly.

“Markus Wilhelm was talking about moving his factories up here, as soon as we have cleared space for them,” Rochester continued. “I imagine that other corporations will want to follow suit, particularly if our regulations are nowhere near as tight as the States. But that will cause problems too. What happens if we don’t over-regulate and we have an industrial accident?”

“All right, all right,” Steve said. He held up his hands in mock surrender. “You’ve made your point. I’ll speak to the alien, then go back to the ship and start working on a constitution. And then Kevin and Mongo can read through it and decide what they think of it. How long did it take the Founding Fathers to draft the constitution?”

“Around one hundred days, but it depends on just what you use as the starting point,” Rochester said. “Just try and keep the lawyers out of it. We don’t want a monstrosity like the European Constitution.”

Steve nodded. The Constitutional Convention had included lawyers — or at least people trained in the law — but they’d also been statesmen. He wouldn’t have trusted any modern-day lawyer to draw up a Constitution to govern a kids playground, let alone an actual country. Hell, perhaps they should have a law banning lawyers from government altogether…

“We’ll make it happen,” he said. Had Washington and Franklin felt so tired, even as their work came to fruition? “Somehow, it will happen.”

Cn!lss had fallen in love with the human laptop as soon as it had been gifted to him by one of the humans charged with watching him. It was clunky, compared to some of the computers he’d seen when he’d been trying to study Galactic technology, but it was also remarkably simple. He’d read through countless files on humanity, researched aspects that puzzled him… and discovered that humans seemed to like nude photographs of themselves. When he’d asked, his guards had muttered something about human sexuality and changed the subject.

The more he studied humanity, the more impressed he became. Humans were… odd, both a technological race and yet a divided race. Almost every Galactic power had unified their homeworlds before reaching out into space or shortly afterwards, when they discovered that they weren’t alone in the galaxy. Even the Hordes had an overarching structure, although it was more symbolic than real. No Horde would happily accept the domination of another Horde indefinitely.

But humanity… they’d come so far, despite so many different attitudes and cultures. Human religion was a strange mixture, utterly beyond his comprehension, while human government perplexed him. There were societies that reminded him of the Hordes — and yet they were technological — while there were others he simply couldn’t understand. What sort of ruling family ruled indefinitely? What sort of society operated by giving everyone, strong and weak, a vote? Half the time, he would read one website and then discover that the next website contradicted it. If he believed all he read, the human race was in a permanent state of civil war.

He looked up when the door opened, revealing the human commander. Cn!lss pulled himself to his feet, then slipped into the Posture of Respect. Maybe the humans didn’t really expect him to prostrate himself, but there was no point in taking chances. He hadn’t seen any of the humans beheaded by their superiors, yet even the most brutish Horde Commander tried to keep such discipline away from Galactic eyes. After all, they might disapprove and suggest trade sanctions on the Hordes.

“Greetings,” the human said. As always, it was hard to read emotion on the alien face. They simply didn’t have anything like the Horde’s range of expressions. “Two more of your ships have been captured.”

Cn!lss wasn’t sure how he felt about two more ships falling into human hands. On one claw, two more Horde Commanders had been humiliated — and he hated his superiors with a passion he couldn’t have hoped to convey to his human captors. But on the other claw, it suggested that the humans were steadily growing more and more powerful… and, combined with their technological inventiveness, would soon be in a position to leave their star system and wage war on the Hordes. Would his entire people be exterminated?

“Good,” he said, finally. At least it didn’t seem as if the humans would commit genocide against the Hordes. “Did you take prisoners?”

“Most of the crews,” the human said. “Do you wish to speak with them?”

“No,” Cn!lss said, hastily. “They would reject me as a traitor.”

“I expected as much,” the human said. “Our sociologists will wish to discuss them with you later.”

“I have nothing to add,” Cn!lss warned.

“We will see,” the human said. “And there is a second issue we would like to raise with you.”

Cn!lss waited, expectantly.

“We will be sending a trade mission to the nearest settled star,” the human said. “What do you think we could offer them?”

Cn!lss considered it. The nearest settled star to Earth, as far as he knew, was a multiracial colony on the end of a dangling chain of gravity points. There was almost no form of overall government, merely dozens of small settlements on the planet’s surface and asteroid belts. Indeed, it was commonly believed that, sooner or later, one of the larger galactic powers would eventually swallow it up. But, for the moment, its political insignificance was incredibly useful to the shadier sides of galactic society.