As both sides became more experienced, our trade grew enormously. Finally! We were getting some decent payoff for our wait!
And the nature of our trade changed dramatically. The Earthlings of that time moved from the “You have things and we have things” stage into the “You have know-how and we have manpower” stage. You were simply amazed at how fast we could marshal resources, at how we could change plans in a 10-yard turning radius without laying nurubber—or so it seemed to you. When we had a mine operational two weeks after we first saw a site, human jaws dropped and you said, “That would have taken us years to develop!” After a lot of similar examples, you Earthlings switched from “Do that for us” to “Teach us how to do that.”
We’d considered being conquistadors instead of traders, but not being teachers. It was this envy of our techniques, not our trinkets, that was the first step in my becoming Emperor.
We had the materials for good Bleevit teaching methods and technology on the ship, and as we went along we improved them with HX-derived ideas, but no matter how you slice it, teaching is very labor-intensive, so we had to unload our crew and spread them widely through the Solar System.
That idea—spreading out but not conquering—first made us somewhat nervous, then made a lot of humans very nervous. “This is Bleevit colonization!” they shouted and screamed at demonstrations. But “This is human progress!” cried the counterdemonstrators recruited—not to say paid—by people who had begun embracing the technologies and teachings we offered and were experiencing the benefits.
All humans benefited enormously when some learned our techniques and made huge changes in how they did things. People lived longer, and they were more comfortable and felt less crowded while they lived.
Those who learned “ship ways”, as they came to be called, benefited even more, communicating more quickly, thinking more precisely, and coordinating more closely with others. But those who didn’t deal much with our offerings were spooked by people who did, saying they became distant, cold, and “off in the ozone”. If they meant that ship-wayers acquired some different values along with different techniques, I suppose those critics were correct.
Resistance to ship ways grew sharply and became violent. Our planning tech had foreseen that teaching ship ways to Earthlings would bring uncertainty and thus increase stress, causing a crisis with high potential violence at about that time, but it couldn’t tell us what events would trigger it or how the stress would resolve.
The first sign of serious trouble was when some of our graduates who returned to Earth were harassed. That wasn’t surprising; Earth was a bastion of social conservatism, and for that reason we’d felt it was too provocative to send any crew there. Instead we’d spread a thousand widely throughout the Colonies, with the largest contingent of about 200 sent to Mars. So if demonstrations on Earth were newsworthy, they were nothing more.
But then large demonstrations erupted on Mars. When they too got ugly, Earth Firsters became the lightning rod, the symbol for the troubles. When some ship-wayers were kidnapped on Mars, it was blamed on terrorists led by Earth-based Earth Firsters. To weed out agitators and facilitators, the ship-wayers who controlled the ruling Forward Mars tribe in the government engineered a crackdown on Earth-Mars travelers.
Keep in mind, now, it was then barely a year since millions of Earthers had begun coming to Mars to do a few weeks or a few months of temporary work, then return to Earth. Some of the technology you Earthlings had traded with us for had spawned the development of space buses that could make the Earth-Mars passage in a week, without forcing passengers to pay a king’s ransom. That was one of the first of your projects to use ship-way management and manufacturing techniques. We saw that there would be difficulties when the Earth-cultured temps mixed with Old Mars wealth, nouveaux riche ship-wayers, and 200 crew from the Embarkation, but we also foresaw huge benefits.
The Mars government response to the violence was a unilateral crackdown that was almost as inefficient as it was ineffective. Ironically, ship ways had not been applied. It was done the old fashioned Earth-culture way, and it got old-fashioned results: Employers were angry that their legally hired workers were excluded, the influential though still small faction of ship-wayers and their sympathizers were angry that many protesters and agitators got through despite the new restrictions, the workers who got through were angry that friends and relatives had been excluded, and fearful that they would be deported before their contracts were up. It was not surprising the violence surrounding the demonstrations got worse.
Three days after the first workers were turned back at the spaceports, Elder Brother and I recalled all our crew members. The last thing we needed was for one to be killed or kidnapped, even though we knew that pulling them out would bring hardship on Mars’s ship-wayers. We now foresaw deep chaos coming on as a lot of people tried to relieve the stress that uncertainty brings by turning back the clock—a highly appropriate metaphor, since even when the apparent time is retarded, the real time flows on unchecked.
Of course the Earth First sympathizers saw the pull-out as a sign of weakness. We hadn’t really expected them to celebrate their victory by declaring peace, and they didn’t. Violence against ship-wayers increased. We regretted that, but it was needful. It forced the Marser tribes to decide if they were on the “Aliens, Go Home!” side, or the “Aliens, Sell Us More!” side.