Many months before, we’d discussed what we would do at this point: Cut bait or ride out the storm?
Frankly, I’d expected strong support for quitting; we had the cream of what things-for-things trading could bring us. But I was wrong. By then much of the crew had had a chance to visit one or two places in the Colonies, and we’d all been in virties of Earth. The favorite one, endlessly copied among us, set you down naked on an endless stretch of white nanorocks between beautiful blue liquid and lush green vegetation supporting bright-colored patterns … a sun beaming overhead in the blue punctuated by fluffy white blobs … a light breeze caressing your hide as it ripples the ocean, sways the jungle, and sails the clouds along (to use words we didn’t then have adequate equivalents for) … the warmth of the sand, the cool of the surf … and then a sunset … and stars in a black that is somehow warm … ahh…
As Second Assistant Cook put it at that meeting, “Nine billion people live on that planet. It has to have a lot right on it.”
“But the only way we can justify staying,” said Elder Co-Captain, my Brother, “is by building starships here to take hundreds of thousands of Earthlings to different star systems.”
The vote had shown more than 80 percent of the crew wanted to stay and make that happen! Wow! And the option gained support afterward.
So we’d done pre-planning to take advantage of the upcoming crisis, and as it erupted and developed we entered the actual factors into our software. The key to quickly ending the chaos turned out to be getting the Old Mars tribe, those who had liked living on Mars for decades previous, to come out solidly against the radical Earth Firsters, making possible fruitful action to end the chaos and violence. We expected our early pull-out to galvanize the Old Martians into making that choice.
Our best sociotech couldn’t calm the underlying chaos, but properly used it could help minimize the violence, even stop it once the Martian community decided decisively that was what it wanted. As my experience with Agent Inchausti, the corrupt police officer, had clearly demonstrated, misuse was likely—and most likely if opinion about the proper end state of affairs was divided. Agent Inchausti was corrupt because just about the same number of people wanted the smuggling to continue as wanted the smuggling to end. We did not want to support another Agent Inchausti, so we would not get involved until the Old Mars tribe decisively made a choice and tipped the balance.
Things went as we hoped. Half a season after we pulled the crew off Mars, with the increasing violence threatening to blossom into civil war, a delegation heavy with Old Martians flew up to our hospitality ship in orbit around Mars and we planned how to wage peace.
It was a straightforward adaptation of Bleevit management technique: If you’re going to change plans quickly you must know what the plans are. The radical Earth Firsters were coming to Mars to take part in various ship way–spawned projects. Part of the Bleevit technique is knowing your people as well as your project. Using ship ways the right way, it wasn’t hard to identify the bad apples to Martian authorities.
After calm was restored, our crew rejoined the Martian community to spread ship ways and other ship technology even further and faster than before, but now in close coordination with the Mars government in areas of process, key policies, and personnel. That is now recognized as the key step in my transformation from Captain of the Fresh Embarkation against Strident Hostility to Imperial power. The title and trappings were almost a joke at first; after Elder Brother died, a few journaloggers proclaimed me sole Emperor of Earth and Protector of Her Colonies in Outer Space. Then for the launch of Mars’s first ship intended for interstellar colonizing (ship way–built, of course), The Empress of Mars, our Chief Publicity Specialist had the crown and scepter constructed and a purple cloak to complement my hide, lined with artificial ermine. When I didn’t wear the same getup to launch the Jumbo Vole starship on Earth, over a billion Earthers complained I had dissed them!
Gradually, generations of journaloggers, and their readers, have made the name into a sort of reality.
* * *
As Earthlings around the Solar System took more and more advantage of what we Bleevits had to offer, the cycle we had observed on Mars—from change to uncertainty to stress to unrest to chaos—was repeated in most of your other Colonies and finally on Earth. Each time, we helped, and ended up coordinating closely, very closely, with the government. But we could do so only when a government and enough of its people had tired of tolerating community-damaging violence that was caused by resistance to rapid technology assimilation.
It was several years before Earth invited us in to teach, and years more before it called on us to stem the resultant chaos.
As in many other things, Titan Colony is an exception. I’m still a little surprised that Titan Colony is as obstinately independent as it is—they have learned from us, and we protect them, but they have never had occasion to let my crew coordinate fully with their government. Sociohistorical analysis says the reasons they’ve never had serious unrest from the introduction of ship ways is that they were already long accustomed to rapidly assimilating novel technology.
The star colonizing project could begin in earnest only after Earth invited us in, but it soon exploded toward the present pace, when we build, populate, and launch ten colony ships a year! Incredible! And that figure is likely to grow to fifty within twenty years. Who would have imagined the Solar System as a major center for colonization?
So how did a strange-smelling and stranger-looking alien become Emperor of Earth and Protector of the Solar System? It happened because I and the rest of my crew offered a way for the Solar System to become a better place for ourselves and humans alike—a much better place.
I’ve come a long way from my destiny to be a hotelier on Bleevit, but in truth I think I’m still in the same business, the business of making a person’s stay in my lodgings a wonderful experience. The lodgings I manage have just … grown a bit.