The second solution was ultimately far more effective and completely noninvasive, although it remains a strictly regional answer to the challenge. It was discovered in 2110 that the organism sought out its hosts through a very keen sensitivity to infrared emissions, but only along a very narrow set of wavelengths. It was also determined that they avoided slightly more energetic emissions as being “too hot”: their version of pulling back a hand from a hot stove top.
The answer: emitter towers that project pulses of higher wavelength infrared. The exposure is decisively subclinical for humans, but works as a repellent for the unicellular organisms, which demonstrate a capacity for limited airborne motility. In order to maximize the area covered by these emissions, and to minimize their effect upon the colonists and their equipment, the emitters are mounted in towers that were originally planned to serve other purposes: short range power beaming, wireless communication, ground control and guidance for shuttles and landers, and even tether/refuel sites for VTOL and tilt-rotor vehicles. Consequently, the settled regions of Epsilon Indi 2 D, but particularly the environs of SinJin, are marked by tall, multipurpose towers scattered throughout the community and at its peripheries.
TODAY
Despite a burgeoning population in excess of 100,000, the worlds of Epsilon Indi are still most notable for the marginal exploration and almost cursory mapping that has been carried out upon them. In large part, this is because of the plenitude of satellites in the system, and the strong advantages in human suitability offered by Epsilon Indi 2 D, Tigua. The other worlds which support life—the even more alien biosphere of Kitts, and the marginal “brown world” satellite of Loupe—have only been sparsely settled. No other satellites boast permanent habitation, despite the fact that there are 19 others with diameters of at least 1000 kilometers. Mining and other resource exploitation initiatives are in early stages, simply because so much of what was required for initial use and commerce was found right on the surface of Tigua.
Visitors to Epsilon Indi may find themselves perplexed by the seemingly unrelated, and even peculiar, names of its many planets and moons, but there is in fact a common origin—one that persons familiar with the Caribbean detect immediately. One of the cartographic experts with the original pathbuilder mission in 2107 remarked that, like the West Indies on Earth, Epsilon Indi had plenty of possible ports of call. The two parallels—“Indies” and Indi, and the many islands or moons—stuck, and proved itself all the more appropriate with the passage of time. Unlike most stellar systems, where the duration and distance of most interworld journeys involve many days and tens or hundreds of millions of kilometers, movement between the worlds of the Indis is often quite rapid. Almost no journey between the worlds of a single gas giant will ever involve a distance of more than 15 million kilometers, and it is usually much, much less, since transits are timed to coincide with the closest possible orbital approaches, and can often make use of gravity-assisted or “slingshot” trajectories.
Recently, because of this and because so many of the moons of the system boast at least some volatiles (usually in the form of frozen water or carbon dioxide), the media has seen fit to characterize a few isolated cases of brigandry and barratry as the first indicators of a trend toward yet a third historical similarity between the “Indies” and the “Indis”: piracy. While it is true that the satellite systems of the three sequential gas giants are ideal for the operation—and concealment—of small craft, there seems to be little opportunity for ship-to-ship intercept and seizure. As most military authorities point out, effecting rendezvous between spacecraft—particularly in order to conduct boarding actions and cargo capture—is almost impossible to compel by force. As one European Union official put it, “It is difficult enough to dock with another craft that is trying—very hard—to join itself to yours. To effect rendezvous with an actively uncooperative, or even hostile, hull is so unfeasible as to be ludicrous.” Nonetheless, traveler’s warnings are in effect system-wide regarding the charter of small craft for private excursions. Individuals without compelling commercial or research needs must expect that they will be denied permits for such excursions.
With the majority of the moons of the three gas giants named after the islands of the Caribbean, the gas giants themselves are named for the grouping of those islands. The innermost—Antilles—is named for the Greater Antilles; Leeward, the second gas giant and home to the habitable worlds in the system, is short for Leeward Islands; and the outmost, Windward, borrows its name from the Windward Islands. The asteroid belt one orbit further out from Windward was to be named Roque, after the de la Roque Shoals, but the itinerant prospectors of that region reduced the name to Roka, then Rock, and ultimately Rock-Show, instead of Roque Shoals. They like to claim that their name is not only far less pompous, but far more descriptive.
Travelers to Epsilon Indi are advised to send accommodation requests at least three months in advance of their travel. It is unlikely that a reply will be received before you depart, but the ratio of room inventory to demand ensures that this advance warning will secure dirtside housing. Food prices tend to be high, as is the case on all worlds that are not cleared for local comestibles agriculture. Travelers should be aware that national or even bloc currency will frequently be rejected by both small and large businesses in the system. The economic currency unit (or “ecu,” “uni,” or “credit”) is the medium of exchange for all transactions.
The high volume of persons bound for Epsilon Indi should not discourage individuals who wish to travel to the system for a visit. Most persons who choose Epsilon Indi as a port of call are not stopping there, but usually taking a break before heading further down to the other habitable worlds of the Big Green Main, particularly the two high-compatibility planets, Delta Pavonis III, and Zeta Tucanae II. As the “Doorway to the Big Green Main,” Epsilon Indi is a collection and departure spot for various long-contract colonial personnel, Earth-bound cargos, and outbound equipment and supplies for the further colonies. Consequently, although it is second only to Junction (Lacaille 8760) as a multi-destination hub, it has far fewer permanent inhabitants than one might suspect, and facilities are not overtaxed, but expanding to keep abreast of increases in demand.
IINS SPECIAL FEATURE
The Blocs: A Historical Primer
from an address given by Prof. Christiana De Parto,
Ogilvie Chair of World History, University of Ottawa,
at Johns Hopkins’ 238th Commencement Exercises (2114)
ONE: AN INTRODUCTION TO BLOC POLITICS
College students who have grown up in our modern, bloc-dominated political environment spend a great deal of time studying history that relates to nation-states as dominant. Then, when their academic focus shifts to a consideration of current events, it often seems to them as if that older political world simply vanished, that it instantaneously and effortlessly transformed itself into the world we know today. Much of what underlies this impression is the short-shrift given to the political forces which prompted the amalgamation of separate states into blocs in the first place. Because that evolution was slow, irregular, and often frustratingly subtle, it is as difficult to teach as it is to understand. But understanding our present world depends upon our understanding how it arose from that relatively recent pre-bloc past.
By the end of the twentieth century, it had become quite obvious that any nation striving to achieve a monopolar hegemony was embarking upon a course certain to arouse the ire of its global peers. In short, the long-standing, and internationally ubiquitous, desire to achieve imperial dominance was beginning to work its way out of the collective political psyche. This was not due to an upsurge in altruism or enlightened reconsideration of the dead-ends of the realpolitik that had driven statesmen as diverse as Metternich and Bismarck. Rather, it was a practical and overdue acknowledgement of the limits of national power and influence in a world that was increasingly transnational in its commerce, communications, and consciousness. In short, the change t
o bloc politics did not arise out of a finer moral sense, but from sobering assessments of the sheer unsustainability of empire in the modern world. It comes as no surprise, then, that the last two nations to move away from such aspirations were the last two which could still reasonably entertain hopes of achieving them: the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China.
For the most part, the United States’ movement toward true imperial ambitions was so short-lived and occasioned by such singular causal variables that, in hindsight, many have labeled it an aberration. Articulating its brief dalliance with a one-superpower or “unipolar” world in documents such as PNAC, the US actively demonstrated these ambitions by engaging in wars ostensibly validated by the need to effect “regime change” in hostile states. However, the underlying imperial impulse did not reflect the true, abiding will of the people, but was rather enabled by the harnessing of their distressed reactions to a variety of terrorist attacks and other aversive events.
Although nominally still an isolationist culture as it entered the twenty-first century, it must also be remembered that the United States had shown fitful and irregular impulses toward imperial ambitions in the past: the Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish-American War, the Baruch Proposal. Consequently, although its last dalliance with the notion of global hegemony is not a wholly unique aberration, it was ultimately atypical of the nation’s traditions and self-image, and as such, might best be considered a spasm of uncertainty as it confronted an extraordinary historical crossroads.
In the case of China, however, a more fixed hegemonic reflex persisted well into the twenty-first century, and has not entirely been extinguished even now in the twenty-second. The variables that explain this enduring imperial impulse are diverse, but two emerge as predominant.
Firstly, it must be acknowledged that, while China is the world’s oldest polity, it was the youngest superpower of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by Russian and American might, further overshadowed by the even greater accumulation of power and influence those centers of political gravity gathered around themselves in the contending organizations known as NATO and the Warsaw Pact, China remained an unwieldy, imbalanced giant until the last decade of the twentieth century. Wracked by internal difficulties that ran the gamut from famine to family sizes to ferocious cultural upheavals, the People’s Republic of China did not come into its own until the Cold War polarization disintegrated. With the bidirectional global power monopoly finally broken after half a century, newly industrialized China began to accrue some of that power for itself.
The primary reason for this late entry into the first ranks of the global powers is also the second factor which has arguably continued to fuel its visions of hegemony: its status as a victim of sustained Western imperialism. Spending centuries unable to present—let alone maintain—a unified political identity in its relations with the rest of the world, China was a prime exploitation zone for the West. Shamed in its political and military impotence, China’s embarrassment and bitterness must be understood in the context of its culture, which was still intact and had been preserved across four (or some would argue five) millennia. From the perspective of Chinese nationalists, her own leaders and merchants had repeatedly prostituted the world’s most august civilization for the coin and favor of recently civilized barbarians.
It must certainly be acknowledged that if many Western imperialists were racially dismissive of the Chinese, many Chinese secretly (and sometimes overtly) returned the dubious favor of pronounced bigotry. And it cannot be denied that China’s self-portrayal as a much-wronged country handily overlooked its own analogous sins. A quick survey of the nations that are China’s neighbors will reveal that they do not associate the Emperors of the Middle Kingdom with anything less than hegemonic acquisitiveness and colonial rapine.
However, the axiom has it that perception is reality. Accordingly, the architects of the People’s Republic of China stoked this two-stroke reciprocating engine of cultural resentment and national fear to generate enough power for rapid industrialization and expansion. As the gulf of time widened between the present day and the last epoch in which it had known true national shame, the ardor with which the Chinese embraced the rhetoric and values of hegemony diminished. However, the dividing line between China’s protectionist Traditionalists and transglobal Transformists can still be traced to this fundamental quandary: whether China can safely embrace the rest of the world or whether it needs to defend its cultural identity behind high, separatist walls.
Alliance or Bloc?
As suggested in the preceding section, the national instinct for amassing power did not diminish, let alone disappear. It simply reconfigured itself into the concept of joint expression, projection, and cost-sharing.
How this differs from simple alliance is a point of enduring contention among scholars, but this much may be asserted: there is no crisp boundary separating the two. The difference between highly cooperative alliances and loosely integrated blocs is one of degree, not absolute distinction.
Similarly, there is no one moment in history where one can definitively assert that the need for collectives larger than the nation-state first arose, but several global trends prompted a corresponding increase toward bloc politics:
a strong decline in the profitability and desirability of overt imperialism;
the need to share the increased expense of “paradigm-shifting” strategic technology initiatives;
transglobal interconnection as an increasing component of the dominant youth culture.
The decrease in the profitability of direct imperialistic control was fundamentally recognized and embraced at the end of the First World War. It is a matter of some interest that the European powers—winners and losers both—all took steps to disentangle themselves from direct colonial involvement at that time. Much control passed to nationally-select corporations. Much more went to semi-autonomous indigenous governments. The nineteenth-century formula known as the New Imperialism (colonies as sources of raw materials, cheap labor, and also, exclusive markets) was clearly nonfunctional, now representing a net loss to the once-proud colonizers.
However, the endeavor for empire became not only undesirable but completely insupportable in the aftermath of World War II. The new trend toward transnationalism was not merely an artifact of expedited information exchange between continents. It reflected a growing appreciation of the growing costs of what might be called “transformative technological endeavors.” As all the superpowers experienced in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly in their races to build nuclear weapons and to get to the moon, epic achievements entailed epic costs. And as the Russians learned in trying to keep pace with America’s high-tech Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), those epics could contribute to economic self-destruction.
Significantly, joint projects—in defense, in space, in high-energy physics—began to point toward the only reasonable way forward: shared costs, shared tasks, shared gains. In many ways, these partnerships paved the way for the economic coordination that made possible the fiscal integration that is the touchstone of today’s blocs.
Undergirding these highly quantifiable phenomena is a more nebulous, but arguably supremely powerful variable for which there can be no finite metric: the changed outlook of each successive generation. From worldwide cinemas to today’s global chic of virtual dating across continental lines from the comfort of one’s own simstation, the last century and a half has seen the qualitative significance of distance shrink, even though its physical quantities have remained unaltered. A thousand miles is still a thousand miles, but how much does that matter when you can go on a virtual date with someone from the other side of the world?
In short, one of the most powerful drivers behind the maintenance of national boundaries was the coherence of national identity. But the coherence of such an identity was largely reinforced by immutable physical barriers that impeded or prevented contact with persons from other nations and cultures. As
electronic interconnection eroded those barriers, the coherence, or at least the implicit militance, of national identity began weakening.
There were, of course, many who proclaimed that this was the end of the nation-state in toto, and that we were soon to live in a post-historical, post-political, post-racial, even post-cultural age. But this prediction, like so many others uttered when its devotees are caught up in the ebullient throes of a rising phenomenon, overreached considerably. As almost three decades have shown us, language shapes not only thought, but also expectations and concept of self—all of which play powerful roles in determining long-term compatibility. So although there is increasing marriage across cultural lines, the majority of lasting unions are still forged within the boundaries of extant cultural affinities.
A similar “affinity function” is evident in bloc politics, as well. Four of today’s five blocs shared similar cultural roots, and more than one critic has observed that the degree of understanding—or lack thereof—observed between individuals of any two blocs often microcosmically reprises the degree of (mis)understanding between the blocs’ own leaders.
TWO: PRECURSORS OF BLOC POLITICS
As mentioned before, the blocs did not emerge, wholly formed and independent, from the earlier expanses of nation-state politics. However, it could be reasonably maintained that they rose as quickly and surely as they did (comparatively speaking) because of precursor dragon’s-teeth sown by the superpowers themselves.
Fire with Fire, Second Edition Page 53
