“No, I didn’t.”
“Technically, I suppose he wasn’t considered a casualty; he certainly wasn’t reported as a casualty. But his boss permitted a half dozen men a foot race in the Martian desert, and one of them didn’t finish because he sprained his ankle. Nothing serious, the man was back to full duty before we made our next landing. But that was luck, you understand?”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“When we settled into orbit around Earth when we got back, I looked down at the globe that’s the mother of us all and realized that it was as much at risk as any member of my crew from the scientific work I’d advanced.
“Until then, all this was theory to me, even the plan for this conference and what I pray comes out of it.
“Mr. Prime Minister, this is for all the marbles. With rational government, governments that a lot of people already enjoy today, we can move forward and do great things as a species. If we let the bigots, the crooks, and above all, the power mad, move into space, we’ll never be safe, just like the Secretary of Defense said so long ago.
“I would hate to have to shoot. But, sir, if I had my finger on the trigger, I would. To enforce Caltech’s patent, to protect a city in the path of a madman breaking the speed limit... and to keep their ilk planet-bound. Without hesitation. And the next morning, sir, I’d wake up and look at myself in the mirror and congratulate myself on a job that had to be done.”
An aide poked her head into the room. “The welcoming ceremony, sir, is due to start in ten minutes.”
The Prime Minister turned to the American President. “After the ceremony we have the first of our working breakfasts. I’d like to toss out the aides and leave it just at the three of us.”
“No problem,” the President agreed.
After the opening hoopla, Stephanie sat down at the breakfast table with the two men. “Prime Minister Campbell,” Stephanie started.
He nodded at the President. “Earlier, Howie and I agreed on ‘Bob’ and ‘Howie’ when we’re by ourselves and being informal. If it’s all the same to you, Stephanie, how would you like to be informally addressed?”
“Steph, sir,” she said at once. She laughed then and gestured at the President. “Until now, I thought I’d ruin everything if I got jocular with Howie.”
“It’s just something you do at this level,” the President said. “Peer-to-peer.”
“You understand that it’s my devout hope that I never sit where either of you is sitting today?”
Howie chuckled. “There are those who’d think you were dissembling. But I remind myself about the admiral who showed up for the launch of the Ad Astra wearing jeans and a t-shirt. You really, really didn’t want to give a speech.”
“Yes, sir.” Stephanie blushed at the last word from her mouth. “It’s going to take me a while to break my speech habits, please bear with me.”
She turned to the Prime Minister. “Bob, I used a great deal of leverage on Howie so I could come and talk to you. If necessary I’m willing to spend time with selected world leaders, one to one, if you think it will help.
“I want to make some points clear; the points I think that absolutely must come from this meeting if what we all hope is to be possible.”
She steepled her fingers. “First and foremost, colonial sovereignty. That’s the big one. We simply must set it up so that the advantages of going with monitored elections, open communications and open political processes are worthwhile. If each colony starts off with a stable political process, it’s going to take a lot to change that.”
“Historically, that’s not been true for colonies,” Bob offered.
“Sir, in the past colonies didn’t require rocket scientists. Now they do. Quite a few of the early colonies in North America failed because of the hostile environment. Space will be a thousand times more deadly. Only the intelligent, the ones who can learn and adapt quickly have much chance of survival.
“That sort of person is, I believe, constitutionally opposed to some bureaucrat back on Earth telling them how to do what they do... whether it be how they should govern themselves or the best way to plow a field.
“We want to provide a reasonable framework that will allow things as varied as the American three branches of government and a bicameral legislature, an English style of parliament, or a monarchy, for that matter, if that’s what they want. But in each case, there has to be private media outlets, unfettered except in the broadest senses by the government. There has to be the loosest of rules about establishing political parties — so long as a party doesn’t espouse the violent overthrow of the government, they have to be permitted. And everyone eighteen and older votes, regardless of gender, education and property. Reasonable residence requirements are okay, a common language requirement is okay... Something like the American Bill of Rights.”
“You’re describing the American government,” Bob told her.
“And not yours?”
“Well... I suppose you’re describing ours, too. But a lot of our emphasis is different from where you Yanks put it. I like the draft constitution; that was very good.”
“Steph wrote it,” Howie told him. “All of it. I told my staff that I’d entertain two comma changes and a correction of a misspelling if they could find one. They couldn’t.”
The Australian PM looked at Stephanie. “Hmmm. What else is important?”
“After government, the next most important thing is who goes into space. It isn’t practical to expect colonists on a shirt-sleeve planet to be conversant with how spaceships work, but they should have a minimal competency test for what they are going to be doing in their new home. OJT as a farmer seems like a really bad idea to me, not when it’s the choice between success and survive versus fail, starve and die.
“The area we have to concentrate on first is the crews of space vessels. As the Fore Trojan rescue pointed out, things can go out of nominal very quickly. The two survivors of that catastrophe were smart, clever people who kept their heads, didn’t panic and were finally rescued.
“If either had panicked, they both would have died. They both had useful skills that kept them alive until they could be taken off their completely busted vehicle. They were so far from Earth, that no possibility of technical or material assistance from the ground was possible. They had, in fact, been rescued before the news of their plight reached Earth. All we could do was listen to what the aloft crews were doing ninety minutes after they’d done it and hope they didn’t make any mistakes. If they had made a mistake, we’d have only known about it after the fact, and likely more people would have been dead.
“So, the number two priority of our proposed Federation of Democracies has to be the establishment of professional competency levels for work in space, creating adequate measures of that competency, and then insuring that those standards are met.”
“And you think that’s nearly as important as the political underpinnings?” Bob said, sounding dubious.
“Yes, Bob. It will also be useful in the short term limiting those governments we don’t want in space. They will naturally resist those standards... and will regret it. Space is like the ocean, only times a thousand. We don’t require certification to swim, but it doesn’t hurt. Most countries require lifeguards, coast guard rescue personnel and the like to meet professional competency standards. It’s simple objective reality: if you don’t insist on it, a lot of people will die from incompetence. In space it will be much, much worse.”
“And after the political framework, and the professional standards, then what, Steph?” Howie asked.
Stephanie turned to Bob and whispered, sotto voce, “This is supposed to be a trick question.” She raised her voice. “Everything else is negotiable. It would be nice if the democratic governments of the planet rose up and said ‘no’ to the UN. The federated democracies should set up a ‘U-WHO’ at once, for instance.”
“You-who?” the PM asked, confused.
“A universal World Health Org
anization. They also need a military arm as soon as possible as well as more mundane record keeping and statistical organizations. A competency review board that develops and administers those competency tests. A membership committee, a monitoring committee... those are really low hanging fruit.
“The single most important item is the sovereignty issue. Off-world planets have to be like democracies on Earth, politically. People set up their own government, and we recognize them if they are within the framework. We’ll need a Federation Council of some sort, where the largest sovereignties are represented. Rules, rules, rules. I’d hate to try to dictate things at that level of detail — because you can be sure no matter what we recommend, in small things the committees that decide these things are going to do as they please.”
She smiled at them. “Colonies aren’t going to be a few dozen or even a few hundred people. Maybe the first couple, but after that, they’ll consist of thousands, then tens of thousands of people who arrive all at once. You can’t run a colony that size, weeks away from Earth, by administrative fiat from home. Nor will that many people be happy being run by executive fiat from someone they have no investment in — not when they can pick up stakes and move a few hundred kilometers and be rid of executive fiats for a couple dozen years.”
Stephanie was sitting, talking with Charlie Rampling over lunch when a messenger arrived. “Admiral, the President would like a few moments of your time.”
“Certainly,” she replied and stood up.
Charlie waved her fork. “Does this mean I can have your steak?”
Stephanie reached out and grabbed her ice tea glass. “Anything but my tea.” The two women exchanged grins and Stephanie followed the messenger, who ushered her through a door guarded by Secret Service and their Australian counterparts.
A minute later, she slid into a vacant seat at the President’s table. There were more vacancies than she would have expected.
“I’d like to get your input on two things, Steph,” the President told her.
“Both of us would,” the PM added. “First, China has lodged an official protest about our seating Taiwan.”
“They are threatening unspecified trade retaliation, if we don’t seat them,” the American Secretary of State interjected. He was new at his job, and wanted to make sure he was heard on every foreign policy issue.
Stephanie laughed. “They have a hundred and fifty billion dollar a year trade surplus with the US, nearly two and a half billion with Australia and another ten billion, each, with Japan and Taiwan. The only trade retaliation that could hurt us meaningfully is to increase that — and they’d have to have a massive price cut to do it. If they raised trade barriers on imports, we’d just retaliate and their two hundred billion dollar a year trade surplus could evaporate in a year. That would ruin their economy. The Chinese, sir, might be able to put the screws to other Chinese, like those in Hong Kong, but as far as the rest of the world, they can’t afford it.”
“They could hurt us in the short run,” the Secretary of State insisted.
“And you could fix it overnight. Slap a dollar a barrel surcharge on oil bound for China going through the Straits of Hormuz. Every time they complain, raise it a dollar.”
“That’s brinkmanship of the worst sort,” he told Stephanie.
“It’s a bluff on their part, sir. The Chinese know they walk a fine line between economic and political liberalism. So far they’ve managed to keep away from political liberalism, even as they’ve opened the floodgates of their economy. Every a month or so, the Chinese string up a couple of bureaucrats living too high on the hog, but the fact is that there are millions of bureaucrats living better than any Chinese Emperor ever did. No one is going to do more than make noise... they would never dream of actually doing anything to rock the boat.”
“That’s three no votes, Fred,” the President told his new Secretary of State.
“But, Steph,” the President continued, “we do have a more serious problem. The idea was that we’d form a committee of the whole and take the areas under discussion, one by one. The French and a bunch of other European nations, plus the Canadians, say it would be more efficient to break out into subcommittees. That we give the subcommittees a few days and let them report back and adopt their work by a vote of the whole.”
“That way it would be much harder to make sure we get what we want,” Bob expanded.
“Harder, but not impossible. You were always going to have to have specialists in each area paying particular attention to their topics. Now, you’ll just have to make sure that the sub-committees are properly monitored by those specialists. Even if a group does something you don’t want, that can be dealt with. Insist on ‘minority reports’ or ‘special appendices,’ whatever we can use to affect the outcome and get our preferred choices on record.
“Then we’ll coordinate with those countries who agree with us and push through what we want.”
“That’s going to require a lot of staff work,” the Secretary of State said dubiously.
“Perhaps it might be better then,” Stephanie said levelly, “if your staff canceled their three planned outings to Bondi Beach, Ayers Rock and Alice Springs this week.”
Stephanie could see a blood vessel in the President’s temple visibly start to pulse.
“I did tell you that this was the most important political negotiation of the last hundred years, did I not?” the President told his Secretary of State, his voice low.
The Secretary of State evidently knew a firestorm when he saw one. “This is just the usual thing we do on such trips, Mr. President,” he replied, trying to sound placating.
Howie turned to his Chief of Staff. “I surely hope no such trips are planned for my staff.”
“No, sir.”
“Be the bad guy. That’s what chiefs of staff are for. Cancel every last extra-curricular trip during the conference. For Christ’s sake! The conference is just five lousy days! They can play tourist afterwards!”
The President leaned close to Bob and the two whispered back and forth for a few minutes.
Bob spoke up. “Digby, you get with Fred. I want your best specialist, two if you have them, assigned to each subcommittee. Australians, I mean. Fred will make sure that at least two Americans are available for each subcommittee. I want someone in each group tasked with taking notes. Those notes are to go to you and Fred for collation at lunch and dinner. A half hour later, synopses will be ready for Howie, Admiral Kinsella and myself. Attached will be the full reports, with the synopsis on top. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t muck this up. Either of you.”
The President looked around. “Is everyone through eating?” There were nods, no shakes of the head. “Good, all of you, except Admiral Kinsella, go find something useful to do. Reading my briefing instructions wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
People trooped out of the room, leaving the three of them.
“I am concerned, Steph,” Bob told her. “About the Chinese. This is really, really tippy-top secret. You understand about those?”
Howie laughed. “Yeah, she sure showed me!”
“Yes, Bob, I do. I understand.”
“Slip up and you’ll get a good man killed. Let’s just say that the top man of the Chinese delegation talks to us. He says that as the head of the delegation he was told to make as many waves as possible, to put up every obstacle possible to prevent us from success. He is, he told us, going to be obdurate.”
Stephanie looked at the PM, then at the President. “You really want me to weigh in on this?”
“That’s why we’re asking. Both state departments say this means the Chinese intend on going to the mat. There’s no telling what they’ll do.”
Stephanie looked at them, and then shook her head. “I think you need to undertake personal reviews of Chinese foreign policy. Probably their domestic policy as well. You are not being served well.”
“What do you mean, Steph?” Bob asked mildl
y.
“You just told me. Now and earlier. The Chinese aren’t going to rock the boat. Their entire culture is about not rocking the boat. They gave up exploration of the oceans because they found there were foreigners out there, for heaven’s sake, and they didn’t want to deal with them. They are the ultimate players of ‘kick the can down the road.’
“Howie, Bob... more than two hundred billion dollars a year flows into Chinese coffers. Every bureaucrat in China spends his waking days, and no little dream time, figuring out how he, personally, can get even a trickle of that Niagara of money.
“Anyone who threatens that ocean of money would be out so fast the body parts would be vaporized from the friction of the flight.
“The problem is that in the last sixty or so years, the West has talked big, but carried a small stick. China knows they can confront you without fear of retaliation, because it’s never happened. Their head delegate wants to be obdurate? Call him in, the two of you, with Howie’s ‘bad guy’ Chief of Staff. Demand his gallery pass be handed over at once. Then, when the COS gets it, he shreds it, right there in front of him. Then you, Bob, tell him he’s persona non grata and is to be on the first flight out of the country. Send him to Bolivia, if you can.”
“Why Bolivia?” Howie asked, curious.
“The Chinese have a big mission there, but the current Bolivian government is friendly with the US. He’ll lose a great deal of face. At the airport you can tell him he can stay if he shuts up and behaves.”
The President and Prime Minister exchanged glances. “Not this man,” the President said finally. “They’ll shoot him. We don’t want that.”
Stephanie sighed exasperatedly. “Like I said before, I think this is important. I assume it’s important to you.” She paused and looked at them, her face sad.
“Okay, you don’t want him hurt. I don’t think that’s a significant consideration, but you have information I don’t.
Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) Page 22
