Leaping to the Stars

by David Gerrold

  Whitlaw raised an eyebrow at that one. He stopped writing. "You already have the right to secede."

  "Huh?" Pedder looked skeptical.

  "It's called an airlock."

  "That's not funny!"

  "Then why did everybody laugh?" Whitlaw stared blandly at Pedder. "Do you understand the concept of a social contract?"

  "I don't believe in the myth of a social contract. I never signed one."

  "Actually, you did—and so did your parents. When you signed your emigration agreements, you accepted not only responsibility for yourself, but responsibility for the whole colony as well. United we thrive, divided we starve."

  Pedder was in full argument-mode now. He had something to sink his teeth into. His face was starting to get flushed. "You talk about the tyranny of the majority. Well, what if the majority doesn't know what it's doing? When you give people the vote, the first thing they do, they vote themselves a pay raise from the other guy's wallet. That's why I want the right to secede."

  "And you have that right," Whitlaw said. "I don't think you'll get very far without air, water, food, or a hyperstate drive, but any time you want to secede from the partnership of the community, Commander Boynton will be happy to arrange it."

  Pedder scowled. "You're making fun of me."

  "No, I'm not. I'm dead serious. With the emphasis on dead. You wouldn't be the first. Obviously you didn't read your history assignment. Three people have already seceded from Outbeyond. They were given every chance to fulfill their obligation to the community and they refused. They're not buried in the same cemetery as those who died in service of the colony.

  "It's this simple, Pedder. When we get to Outbeyond, you will be expected to contribute to the survival of the colony. If you do not, you cannot expect the colony to contribute to your survival. It's a very simple equation. You have the right to secede—but as soon as you secede, you lose all claim to a share of the commonwealth. By the way, you might want to look at the root meanings of that word: common wealth."

  "It's not that way on Earth."

  "And look at the mess Earth was in when we left—" shouted Kisa.

  Whitlaw hushed her. "Actually, that's exactly the way it is on Earth. Or was. Unfortunately, there were seventeen billion human beings who couldn't comprehend a social contract that included seventeen billion others. So they got selfish, greedy, and stupid. And dead.

  "A society is a cooperative effort. The food you eat—somebody has to grow it. The air you breathe, the water you drink—someone has to clean it and deliver it. Every product you consume, every device you employ, every service you use—someone has to produce it and deliver it. Your education, for instance; that requires that teachers be trained and paid. Your health—that requires that doctors and dentists and counselors be trained and paid. That requires a support system. You become part of that support system. You provide services for others, they provide services for you. Together, you all make a functioning community. Do you want to secede? Go ahead. But if you do that, you give up all claim on everyone else's services, products, and contributions. Feel free to step out the airlock any time."

  I thought that Pedder would shut up then. But he didn't. "You don't understand anything," he grumbled, folding his arms across his chest.

  "You might be right," said Whitlaw. "Maybe the universe really does owe you a living, but you'll still find that it's a lifetime job to collect."

  Pedder didn't look convinced. And he probably wouldn't be convinced—right up to the moment when they pushed him out the airlock. I suspected that there wouldn't be any shortage of volunteers to do the pushing.

  Whitlaw turned away from Pedder. "Anyone else? No? All right, I'm going to read your list aloud, and I want you to raise your hand for those items you think should be kept. Anything that gets more than one-third of the votes stays on the list—yes, I know that's not the way a 'real election' works, but that's the way it works in here, because anything important to one third of you is important enough for the rest of you to consider. I think you'll see that most of your issues will probably not enjoy majority support; so that's lesson one: You can't afford the tyranny of the majority. Only by respecting minority positions can you build a consensus."

  He read the list, counting hands for each item. Then he read off what we'd voted for. "The right to free speech, the right of assembly, the right of worship, the right to free expression, the right to defend yourselves, the right of privacy, the right of marriage, the right to be safe from unreasonable government authority, the right of property, the right to make a profit, the right to a just legal system … " He looked up at us. "Not too bad for a first attempt. My congratulations. You've just reinvented the Constitution of the United States of America—"

  The uproar was astonishing.

  MACHINERY

  Kisa shouted the loudest. "You're crazy! Everybody knows what happened to the United States—"

  "Do they?" Whitlaw looked skeptical. "What do you know? Anybody?" He didn't wait for a show of hands. People started calling out their answers immediately:

  "They ran up a thirty-three trillion dollar national debt, spending money on social programs that didn't work—" That was big Lyn Ramsey. He'd grown up on a chocolate ranch. Or something like that.

  "Uh-uh!" Kisa shouted right in his face. "Most of that money got spent on stupid military bungles."

  "Yeah, and then the liberals taxed everybody to death to try to pay for it," Lyn sniped right back.

  "Well, they wouldn't have had to if the conservatives hadn't borrowed and spent the government into bankruptcy." Jimmy Dellon, the polite one, finally spoke up.

  "Their economy failed because they stopped investing in research and development and education. They didn't take care of the next generation," Goodman put in.

  "That was because minorities demanded quotas and special programs," said Susan Snot. That wasn't her real name, but that was what everyone called her behind her back.

  "They weren't getting a fair share!" yelled Kisa.

  Susan Snot wasn't convinced. "The minorities pulled the United States apart. Special interest groups kept awarding themselves special privileges."

  "Yeah, like tube-towns," I said. "That was a real special privilege." I said it sarcastically.

  "Exactly!" said Susan Snot. She missed the sarcasm. "Only freeloaders and frauds live in tube-towns."

  J'mee pulled me back down—

  "Keep going," said Whitlaw. He looked both sad and amused. I wondered if he had actually lived in the United States. He was old enough …

  Trent raised his hand. Whitlaw nodded at him. "They lost their faith in God," Trent said quietly.

  "Horse exhaust!" That was Kisa again. She was in a fighting mood today. "The churches tried to take over the government. Religious fanatics hijacked a political party and tried to stage a coup."

  And then everybody was shouting:

  "Well, people of faith had to do something. Children were shooting each other—"

  "And then the liberals banned all the guns. So nobody could defend themselves."

  "Immigrants came in and took everything away from the rightful owners."

  "The government was brainwashing children in school, so the parents took their kids out and rebelled."

  "The government got too big."

  "The government didn't spend enough money on defense."

  "They kept starting wars against other nations, and other nations hated them."

  "No, that wasn't why other nations hated them—they were using a third of the world's resources to support five percent of the world's population. They were deliberately impoverishing other nations to maintain their gluttonous lifestyle."

  "They were international bullies, threatening other countries with nuclear war. They sent in their troops wherever they wanted. They bombed children."

  "Big business took over the government—"

  "It cost so much to get elected, only rich people could run for office—or people willing t
o be bought by corporations. So the leaders didn't care about the real people."

  "They fragmented into fifty different political parties, and nobody knew what to think."

  "The farmers couldn't make any money, so they quit farming and food prices went up and people starved."

  "They went crazy on drugs—all kinds, both legal and illegal. They couldn't think straight anymore."

  "The legal system broke down. There were too many laws. None of them were enforced, so nobody respected any of them."

  "They passed laws about what you were allowed to think."

  "They taxed the big corporations into unprofitability. They made it a crime to be rich." That was Susan Snot again.

  "They let degenerates and perverts pretend to be normal."

  "They killed babies."

  "They made sick, ugly, violent movies and became sick, ugly, violent people."

  Whitlaw wore an amused expression, but he kept encouraging us to say what we knew about the United States of America. Pretty soon it started getting silly—Whitlaw let us go on until it was obvious that people were just making stuff up now, whatever they were angry about.

  At last, he held up his hands to quiet us. Then he let us sit in silence for a bit, with our own words still hanging in the air.

  Finally, Kisa blurted, "Well, aren't you going to tell us what really happened? You were there, weren't you?"

  Whitlaw said, "Aren't you afraid I'll try and brainwash you?"

  "You're supposed to teach us," Kisa said. "Most of what we said was crap, wasn't it? So what's the right answer?"

  "Well … all of what you folks said—that's the right answer for someone, probably whoever told it to you in the first place. The facts might not match, but those are still the right answers for those who believe them."

  "Are you saying they're not the right answers—?"

  "Those are the answers you were given. Did any of you bother to check if the facts matched? You know, knowledge isn't about what you believe. It's about what you can demonstrate. None of you know what real knowledge is, because none of you have been educated in how to get it. You don't know what research is, do you? Whoever got paid for educating you was taking money under false pretenses. Every single one of you is entitled to a refund! No, it's worse than that. You don't even know what kind of a crime has been committed on all of you! You haven't been taught how to look things up!"

  For a moment, he looked honestly angry. "I know what your educational experience has been. I don't have to ask. I can see it on your blank faces. I can hear it in your answers. Somebody stands at the front of the room and talks. Jabber jabber jabber. And you sit at a desk and copy down as much as you can as fast as you can. At the end of the semester, you look through everything you've copied and try to cram as much of it into your head as possible. And then you sit down with a blank piece of paper and regurgitate as much of it as you can in the next forty minutes. As if that proves that you've learned it. And by the time you walk out of the room, you've already forgotten most of it. That's not education. That's bulimia. You got cheated. Your parents got cheated. Learning how to repeat other people's opinions is not an education—"

  He finally stopped himself. It was a great rant. And it was uncomfortable, because it was true.

  Silence. Until Kisa spoke up again. "So teach us."

  "I intend to," Whitlaw said blandly.

  I raised my hand. "Tell us what really happened to the United States … ?"

  Whitlaw nodded. "There are a lot of different answers to that question, Charles. Which answer you get depends on who you ask, as we've already seen demonstrated here. And what they say usually depends on what they want you to believe or who they want you to hate or what they want you to do next, so they use the United States of America as an example of what not to do. But I'll tell you what I saw happen to the United States." He glanced around the classroom. Students were hanging off the walls at all kinds of odd angles. It didn't bother anyone anymore. Whitlaw met each of our eyes in turn, and then he spoke: "The people forgot they were Americans."

  "Huh—?"

  "What do you mean—?"

  "That doesn't make sense—"

  "Only the liberals forgot. The conservatives remembered—"

  "Shut up," said Whitlaw, quietly. "You're doing the same thing. All of you. You're arguing among yourselves like a pack of excited chimpanzees. And you're forgetting your common purpose. That's what the Americans did—they forgot their partnership with one another. They forgot who they were. They forgot what they were committed to. They failed to uphold their own social contract. And they had a very good contract, one of the best.

  "It was called the Constitution. And it was the written expression of a very simple, very radical idea—one that worked fairly well for three hundred years—that a government can only rule with the consent of the governed. Representative government is based on the idea that a well-educated, well-informed citizenry can exercise responsibility for its own destiny.

  "The United States government was chartered by the people to act on their behalf. All rights belonged to the people and the government was specifically prohibited from infringing the rights of the people. Everybody was supposed to have equal rights—everybody, no exceptions. And everybody had a corresponding responsibility to protect everyone else's rights—because if anyone's rights were threatened, everyone's rights were threatened.

  "So what happened to the United States? They forgot their own agreements. Some of the people decided that the government was the cure to everything and some of the people decided that the government was the enemy of everything—and both sides were wrong, because they were both thinking of the government as something else.

  "Government is a machine, a device, a tool—its purpose is to provide services. You have to respect it as a valuable and important tool. Use it. Make it work for you. Monitor its operations. Clean it regularly. Maintain it. Service it. If something breaks, fix it or replace it—but just the part that's broken; and if it ain't broken, don't fix it. And most important, don't throw out the whole machine just because one part has failed.

  "The mistake the Americans made—they started thinking of the machine as something that they had no relationship with, something they had no control over. They began to see the machine as something that didn't belong to them—either it was controlled by somebody else, or it was out of control altogether. But either way, they forgot who built the machine and why."

  Whitlaw looked directly at me when he said the next part. "They started to think that control of the machine was more important than the results it was supposed to produce. And they forgot who was ultimately responsible for the results. Who are you?" he asked. "That's what you have to decide. What do you want to build? What are you truly committed to?"

  Maybe he was speaking about HARLIE when he said that. And maybe he wasn't. But that's what I was hearing.

  WHO'S ON FIRST?

  HARLIE and I kept having these weird conversations—I wasn't sure we were supposed to, but nobody said I shouldn't, so I kept going up to the Captain's briefing room, because Commander Boynton had decided we should keep the monkey there and not let him run loose around the rest of the ship, because it might not be safe. Not for the monkey, and maybe not for anybody else, because of the effect he had on people. I didn't mind, it sort of made sense, and even Stinky was okay with it, which surprised me, because I thought for sure he'd pitch a Stinky-fit, except nowadays he was too busy with all the other kids his age, so maybe that was good too—that he had real friends now instead of just a monkey. I sort of envied him. I had friends too, but there were some things going through my head that I could only talk to HARLIE about—

  See … I kept trying to figure out if he was sane. Except who was I to judge? So I had to ask myself if I was sane. And so far, the best I could figure out, we were both losing that particular argument.

  Because, the question of sanity was one of those really weird questions like the one Judge Griffith
once asked me—how do you explain the difference between your right and your left? You can't, unless you point to something else. Sanity is the same thing. You can only judge if you're rational by how you behave in relation to all the stuff around you. And that's just another way of asking the other question, "Who am I?"

  The more we talked about it, the more I began to realize that as good as HARLIE was at figuring things out, he wasn't too good at understanding them—I mean, understanding inside.

  For instance, he could tell you that certain combinations of notes, certain chords like G-major and C-major, would produce joyous or triumphant feelings in a listener. And certain other chords, like D-minor would produce sad or introspective moods. But he couldn't tell you why those chords felt that way.

  On the other side of that conversation, I could listen to a piece of music and almost immediately spot the emotional core, even if I knew that it would take me an hour to deconstruct the rhythms and chords that produced it. Some music was so complex—like Gustav Mahler or Philip Glass—with so much going on simultaneously that you couldn't simply understand it. You had to listen to it. HARLIE couldn't do that. He could analyze, he couldn't feel.

  We talked about that a lot.

  HARLIE said he couldn't feel because he didn't have anything to feel with. When he said that, I got one of those sinking feelings that we were about to have another one of those conversations—

  HARLIE explained that the way human bodies were constructed, humans felt things viscerally—in the gut. That was because the spinal cord and nervous system evolved codependent with the gastrointestinal tract, so when you felt something, you really felt it. All of our human emotions are physical sensations. They really are feelings.

  Oh. I hadn't realized that.

  Fear and grief are stomach-feelings. That's why being afraid can make you throw up or crap in your pants. Anger is a heart-and-chest-and-lung feeling. Rage makes your heart race.