Early on during our time in the HX swarm, we had plundered a Solar System ship and learned to our astonishment that Earth really was almost the classic virgin planet, with a climate in the best parts even more hospitable than that in Bleevit’s good parts, and billions of low-tech people, at least as compared to Bleevits. Though not, as it turned out, with adoring and anatomically compatible females. While none of your female spacers fled screaming from a male Bleevit, or from a female for that matter, their snouts did wrinkle uncontrollably, just as your males’ did, when we shared an atmosphere. Which was just as well; our partners aboard would have objected to fraternization, and our friends been disgusted. But I digress—charmingly, of course, but I digress.
With the Embarkation’s complement reduced by a quarter and our hull only 99.4% stable, we chose your Solar System as the best place to digest our newly-acquired technology and make gravity well–assisted repairs. Moreover, with the hold empty of its former occupants, perhaps we could fill it up with some tradable beings to supplement the HX loot.
In flight we again researched and trained, and aimed our manufacturing from the HX loot towards trade—all making up the routine of space travel. But this time what we would do at our destination was not so clear. The HX are well known and change little with time, though more quickly than the geological intervals that alter uninhabited planets. But inhabited planets are change incarnate. Civilizations rise and fall, and even species may rise and fall when looked at by slower-changing ones. And though the Solar System ship we encountered was lower tech than our own, and the System was close, so that the journey would take under twenty Earth-standard years, ship time, nevertheless their trip to the HX, our stay there, and our journey from it totaled a significant period in a technological civilization.
So we didn’t feel we had a perfect guarantee about what the Earth we visited would be like. We trained both to be traders and to be conquerors.
As we got close, we opened up communication. Well … we tried to open up communication! Earth and this Solar System were so virgin that you people didn’t have Clue One as to how to talk to a starship. For a surprisingly long time there was no response to our signals, then a couple of conflicting responses, then a dozen responses within days of each other, with hundreds following over the next Earth-standard month. At least six claimed to represent the supreme authority for the whole Solar System, which seemed pretty wacky, and others were wackier. We were petitioned as gods. We were reviled and (via return virty) exorcised and banished as devils—by Christians, Animists, Buddhists, and possibly others. We were offered women, land, and gold … friendship … redemption … the secret to 1,000% profits in real estate … just crazy stuff! We made serious plans for what to do if the whole Solar System was infested with some sort of contagious disease causing madness, with contingencies for whether we were vulnerable to it or not.
But with time it became clear that we were simply witnessing a world that had never interacted with a space visitor before, and that Earthling social structure, like Bleevit’s, was essentially tribal—there were lots of organizations that wanted to talk to us.
What we couldn’t figure out was whom to talk seriously with so we could profit from this new star system. Who was really an authority? Who could make serious offers, and follow through on their promises?
Fortunately, from your communications with each other it became entirely clear that we had the biggest guns in the System so it was safe for us to come to a stop here. We didn’t have to constantly worry about getting swatted by something bigger and meaner. So we didn’t invoke Plan B, jetting through at near light-speed toward someplace else.
Nevertheless, though you were low tech, you weren’t particularly stupid. And nine or ten billion of anything is a lot. As some of your people put it, “A man does not fear an ant, unless you bury him neck-deep next to an anthill.” If we messed up, we could still lose big.
Since we couldn’t decide who to talk to, we decided to talk to everybody—everybody who could get to the neutral ground we chose. That had to be somewhere we could meet with various Solar System tribes without either the tribes or us feeling seriously threatened. Earth’s Moon came up as an early candidate, but it had millions of humans, and it might have been hard for some Solar System tribes to get to safely—tribes being tribes as we knew too well from our own Rebellion. We finally announced our intention to set up shop on Hektor, the largest of the Trojan Asteroids, in Jupiter’s L5 point, with a stable orbit and relatively uninhabited.
The choice was a good one in the end. And in the beginning, for that matter. The litter of little nearby asteroids provided us with rock to use for repairs and refitting, to build a reception center for conducting trade negotiations, and to set up a Kwidatch course for our leisure hours. We had plenty of those as we waited. Waiting is something every trader who deals with virgin planets has to learn to do, but no trader likes. Sure, time is money, but giving locals time to work through their feelings towards the strange new outsider is vital. If you move first, you risk not only alarming the natives but also giving them too little time to find the best deal they can offer.
For a long time, hardly anybody landed on Hektor. Of course the miner, his wife, and her other husband, who had been the sole inhabitants, came and went frequently. They were stopped for a while by the military patrols, “for their own safety” as they were told. When we and they patiently complained, they were allowed to return, and soon after started bringing their friends to see our Kwidatch matches. But for what seemed an eternity, your various tribal militaries kept demonstrating and patrolling in Hektor’s vicinity in a fundamentally pitiful show of force. No virgin star system ruled by tribal governments is going to resist showing off its military prowess, even when you know, and they know you know, that you could easily destroy them.
Along with the military displays came squabbling among your various tribes as to who would represent the Solar System. That kept on for another interminable while after the military fly-bys tapered off.
By then, to combat the boredom, a lot of us had started learning freestyle R-ball, tole painting, and other human sports and crafts from your educational vidfeeds, along with intensively surveying your Solar System with the Embarkation’s superior sensor arrays. Trading information to you about valuable resources that you could exploit would help get us beyond the pissing contest stage, as you colorfully name it. (Bleevits call it the vomiting competition; the unpleasant historical background is known to your sociologists.) And at worst we could exploit those resources ourselves.
We started with Jupiter’s L5 bodies, then its other Trojans at L4, and proceeded through your asteroid belt, which none of your militaries laid claim to. We also noticed there were a number of resources extractable from your gas giants, but your people recognized less than a handful, primarily Rubyzin—which as you of course know is not bioactive for Bleevits.
Even before our collected information could have a commercial impact, while the military ships were still falling in and out of orbit around Hektor, our explorations themselves led to one of the few surprises of our Long Boredom. A bizarre request came from Triton Customs Agent Loída Inchausti, a very serious woman who insisted on seeing “the Captain” in person. (By that time Elder Brother was long recovered, but he preferred to leave non-military alien contact to me.)
“I understand that your people have mapped out the location of many mining sites in the Asteroid Belt,” she snapped. “I’d like to know the locations of all those that currently host small mining operations.”
“You don’t know where your own people are?” I asked incredulously.
“Most such sites are legitimate mining operations, but a few are smuggling dens. It’s my job to crack down on smuggling, and if I know the locations where smugglers are hiding their loot, I can put a serious dent in their operations.”
The translation I had for “smuggling” was “moving things into a country illegally”. That confused me, since I knew that while most of the asteroids were “in the Belt”, the Belt government, such as it was, didn’t claim jurisdiction over any of them. Then I realized I was dealing with an intertribal matter. The smugglers were people who did not agree with the laws of Agent Inchausti’s tribe and were using neutral territory to flout them. Elder Brother and I had adopted the wise rule of staying out of intertribal conflicts insofar as possible, so I turned her down. But Agent Inchausti was very insistent, coming back every few months with her request.
When commercial contacts finally began, ending our Long Boredom, she went to a newly established trading partner of ours, apparently one of the tribes she belonged to, and had them include her request among the conditions of a profitable trade deal. At that point of course we acquiesced and listed about fifty sites that seemed to fit her definition of smugglers’ dens.
My curiosity being piqued, I watched what Agent Inchausti did with the information. Her people raided five dens and turned doing so into a great newsfeed show, while leaving the other nine tenths of the list untouched and unspoken about. I found this very curious, until I learned more about corruption, and then it made a sort of sense in the human context. Any Bleevit equivalent would have been public, legal, and efficient, rather than secret, illegal, and very uneconomic.
As you know, many human methods that were formerly slow and uneconomic have been reformed under my benevolent Imperial rule—but all in good time, all in good time!
The Long Boredom was a spooky, uncertain time for us. About halfway through it, as things turned out, I held a meeting of the crew (what we now called all of our ship’s members) that identified three fundamental options:
Cut through the bullshit and conquer something outright; show these people how much time they were wasting.
Cut bait and head for a civilized star system; this place was hopelessly primitive.
Continue waiting; things were bound to get better.
A plurality favored the last, and Elder Brother and I chose it, but more than once we came near switching to the first! Almost immediately after your military ships finally stopped visiting, they were replaced by private parties, in a wacky mix much like that displayed in your responses to our original communications. We were offered the benefits of the Peace and Freedom Party and of the Freedom and Peace Party; of forty-two distinguishable religions and sects (our Priestess listed them all in the theological science paper she wrote); of high colonic irrigation (Bleevits do not have long colons); vegetarianism (we are obligate omnivores); of home fire prevention (there was virtually nothing likely to burn in our ship or our shore-leave shelters); and more.
And at first infrequently, but more and more often as time went on, there were actual serious trade deals, bartering raw and partly processed Solar System materials, including a few luxury foodstuffs—luxurious to us, at least, during the Long Boredom—for manufactures from our ship, mostly using HX technology.