by Mike Resnick
For seventy-eight days Cobart fought futilely against the media boycott. Then, in desperation, he set up a governmental department to publish its own newstapes and newspapers. ASOC countered through its distributional channels. They couldn't legally forbid their outlets to handle the Administration tapes and paper; but they pointed out that their ships, which delivered literally thousands of other tapes and papers each day, were in a sad state of repair, and it was possible that some deliveries might be late.... The retailers balanced the profits from selling two government publications against the loss of every other publication they handled, and reached the only financially sane decision. Cobart was denied outlets for his tapes and papers.
The Administration's next step was, through private channels, to take out advertisements in the media proclaiming support of the government. ASOC neither accepted nor refused the ads, but simply returned the payments with no explanation.
A minor attack was launched on Aldebaran X, ASOC's headquarters. ASOC appealed to the Oligarchy for assistance without ever naming the enemy, and Cobart withdrew his forces before the Navy arrived on the scene.
Finally Cobart tried to nationalize ASOC. Bomin immediately went to the Oligarchic Council, showed them the agreement, argued his case passionately and forcefully, and got the Council to rule that Cobart's action was illegal.
Soon numerous polls began appearing in the media, polls expressing voter choices for the next election. They were widely publicized, with one exception: Cobart was not listed as a candidate for reelection, and his name, where written in, invalidated the sample ballot. Within a year the Administration was reeling; within two it was crumbling; and by election day it was totally dead. Cobart did indeed run for reelection, but even though his name appeared at the top of the ballot, as befitted the incumbent, he drew only four percent of the vote. His party, which had previously exercised a hairbreadth control of the system's legislature, retained less than a fifth of its seats. Only the briefest mention of Gile Cobart could be found in the history books, and he died a defeated, broken, and
forgotten man at the age of sixty-three.
Of course the next Coordinator, who until three years before had been the head of ASOC's video division, signed no agreements, mended the system's political fences with the Oligarchy, had Jorg Bomin assassinated within three months, nationalized the media, and went on to enjoy a reign undreamed of by Gile Cobart even during the halcyon days of his Administration. 13: THE ARTISTS
...In a way, the artists can be considered the revolutionaries of the middle Oligarchic period. Literature had just begun to reflect the fact that Man was dominant in the galaxy, and the classics of the previous few centuries had shown him overcoming, in various ways, the many threats posed to his primacy. Now it was the artists who began to buck the government line by finding beauty in alien forms and outrage in alien living conditions, and by showing tolerance of alien ways. They were, in a very real sense, the conscience of Man—and a very lonely conscience at that, distrusted by their own kind and frequently ignored or misunderstood by the very beings they wished to aid. Certainly the foremost writer of the period was Fillard Niis (5427-5510 G.E.), whose immortal cry of outraged conscience,The Steel Boot, sold more than six billion copies and was undoubtedly the most widely read book in human history up to that time... —Man: Twelve Millennia of Achievement ...Of Niis himself, very little is known other than the fact that he was considered to be the greatest author of his time, both in that peculiarly human literary form known as fiction and in the more traditional fields of documentary writing and philosophical essay. Even today, copies ofThe Steel Boot still exist. What little we know of Niis and of the book's origins are contained in the transcript of an interview made in 5502 G.E. some three decades after the book's first publication... —Origin and History of the Sentient Races, Vol. 8 THORRIN: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another edition of “Retrospect.” I am your host, Lornath H. Thorrin, and my guest this week is Fillard Niis, the author who achieved literary immortality during his own lifetime with the publication ofThe Steel Boot. Mr. Niis, for those of you who have been living in some other universe for the past three decades, is the author of nine best-selling novels plus literally hundreds of essays. He ran for the legislature on Earth in 5466, was elected by a narrow margin, and then resigned after claiming that wide-scale corruption made it impossible for him to function efficiently in that capacity. He then moved to the Deluros system, where in 5472 he wrote a book that dwarfed all his other achievements:The Steel Boot. It sold more than a billion copies during its first four years of existence, and is fast approaching the six billion mark, making it the bestselling book in the history of the galaxy. Looking back, what do you suppose accounted for the book's initial success? NIIS: To be honest, Lornath, I wasn't exactly an unknown writer at the time, and as I recall the book was given a pretty large publicity budget, which certainly didn't hurt matters any. However, I think the prime reason was that the book touched the conscience of the human race, a conscience that had been dormant for too long a time. For the past few centuries Man had been concerned only with clawing his way to the top of the galactic heap, to asserting his dominance over the other intelligent races. WhenThe Steel Boot was published, it was time to look around and examine the carnage we'd left in our wake.
THORRIN: As everyone knows, the book concerns the despicable treatment that the various alien races suffered at our hands during our periods of galactic expansion. But not many people know exactly what it was that triggered the writing of the book. Would you care to tell us? NIIS: Certainly. I had just put the finishing touches onA Handful of Dust —which, incidentally, was the last novel I ever wrote—-and felt the need to get away from Deluros, to totally free my mind from my work. I decided to take a vacation to Pollux IV, which was being heralded as one of the better new
resort colonies. Once there, I checked in at the fanciest hotel I could find and spent the next few days
just soaking up sunlight and alcohol. One night, after I had been there a week or so, I decided to take a walk around the city. I was never much for conducted tours, so I just set out on my own. I never had much sense of direction, and I was soon totally lost. I wandered into the alien quarter of the city and suddenly, within sight of the towering peak of my hotel, I found myself surrounded by almost unimaginable squalor and poverty. The living conditions were absolutely shocking. There were corpses littering the street, and garbage was piled up in front of all the dwellings. The water was so foul I could smell it from two hundred meters away. To my untrained eye, I felt that many of the Polluxans were in dire need of medical attention.
When I finally got back to the hotel I found our ambassador-in-residence and complained to her of the outrageous conditions I had seen. In fact, I literally begged her to send a medical team to the alien quarter—after all, the Polluxans were oxygen-breathing humanoids, and I felt that even nonspecialized human medics might be able to alleviate their suffering to some degree. The ambassador replied that the Polluxans were happy the way they were and that it wasn't our business to interfere with them. Her comments were that the Polluxans couldn't ingest pure water, but instead required the numerous minerals that were found in the foul-smelling stuff that came from their lakes. She also stated that, far from neglecting their dead, they were simply unemotional and irreligious, and that the bodies would be carted off and incinerated by the next morning. And she also opined that, since the alien quarter was centuries old, they obviously felt no inclination to repair it or institute a program of sanitation and hygiene—and since Man was a virtual newcomer to the planet, we had no right to impose our values on the native inhabitants.
Her answers made a great deal of sense, but I decided to look into the problem a little further anyway. I discovered that she was correct about the corpses, but that everything else was either a deliberate lie or a gross misinterpretation of the situation. For example, the Polluxans do indeed require certain minerals that are not to be f
ound in pure H2O—but the water they were drinking contained not only the requisite minerals but massive amounts of industrial waste, enough to increase their death rate by three hundred percent. As for the sanitary conditions, they had been placed in what amounted to a reservation, and were not allowed to leave it, even to dump their waste and garbage on an empty plain beyond the city. The only time it got removed was when the stench became so great that it reached the resort area and annoyed the guests. It was then thatThe Steel Boot began to take shape in my mind. I spent the next year touring a number of planets we had recently assimilated into the Oligarchy, and found conditions deplorable on a great majority of them. Frequently we didn't even know we had harmed the aliens in any way, but that didn't alter the facts. We used populated alien worlds to dump deadly radioactive wastes, to test new weapons of war, to experiment with various ecological systems and mutations. We even had some sentient chlorine and methane breathers in our multi-environmental zoos. Everywhere I looked, Man had ground the dignity and self-respect of intelligent alien races into the dirt. Usually there was no malice intended but occasionally such actions were a result of a carefully thought-out and programmed policy. For example, during the years 5300 through 5500 we signed 10,478 treaties with alien races. Do you know how many we broke? THORRIN: No.
NIIS: All but sixty!
THORRIN: As the author of the best-selling book of all time, what effect did the success of the book have on you personally?
NIIS: First of all, it made me and the next few generations of my family incredibly wealthy. And, to be
honest, I'd have to say that it's secured a place in literary history for me. But it also had some deleterious
effects as well. For one thing, no book, no matter how potent or timely, sells as well asThe Steel Boot without an intense publicity campaign. Spending promotional money was just a small part of the procedure. For almost three years after its publication I was forced by contract to tour the worlds, of the Oligarchy, making personal appearances, being interviewed on video shows, pushing both the book and the ideas behind the book to as many people as I could reach. It was financially successful, but physically and artistically debilitating. I wanted to get back to work, to keep hammering at my theme, but I simply couldn't find the time.
THORON: But wasn't there a rash of similar books published shortly after the success ofThe Steel Boot became manifest?
NIIS: There were, but they never had much effect, and in fact they were so one-sided and passionate in their approach that they almost turned the whole subject of mistreatment of aliens into the private property of an elite cult. Perhaps I'm being less than generous, but I honestly feel that these books and authors lessened the potency of the arguments and the poignancy of the aliens’ plight. THORRIN: In other words, none of them could push a noun up against a verb as beautifully or as effectively as you could. And, lacking your literary skill, they failed where you succeeded. We won't be letting any secrets out of the bag by noting that no other book on the subject sold more than nine million copies.
NIIS: Still, it wasn't from a lack of sincerity. You might view it as a legal case: even the most sincere barrister will hurt his client's cause if he argues with insufficient skill. Nonetheless, they reached a number of readers that probably hadn't seen or boughtThe Steel Boot, so I've no objections to their jumping on the bandwagon, as it were.
THORRIN: Now, in retrospect, have you noticed any change in our policy toward the other races since the publication of your book?
NIIS: Not a hell of a lot, to be blunt about it. THORRIN: Why do you suppose that is?
NIIS: I don't know. Maybe the wrong people read my book. When we began to realize just how well it was selling, I really had hopes. I was naturally pleased from a professional point of view, but I had also entertained the thought that perhaps I had struck a responsive chord among the readership, had confronted them with the truth of our treatment of nonhuman beings and elicited from them the desire to make some amends. As it turned out, that wasn't the case. THORRIN: But what about those billions of readers? Are you saying that you don't feel the book had any effect on them at all?
NIIS: For all practical purposes, that is precisely what I am saying. I think the huge majority of them read the book, felt a very justifiable racial guilt, and having thus undergone a painless mini-catharsis, ambled off to bed and forgot the whole thing. THORRIN: Obviously this feeling is nothing new. What was your reaction when you first decided that the book, though admittedly a best-seller, was not the dawn of a new era of racial harmony? NIIS: There was no single day that I looked around me and said: Hey, what's the matter with
everybody? The Oligarchy didn't act, but hell, since when do governments act because of books? I
founded a group to aid the aliens, and I know that literally hundreds of similar groups were initiated during the first rush ofThe Steel Boot's popularity. Some of them raised quite a lot of money, and began work on some pretty comprehensive plans. The depressing thing was that seven years later, my own group was the only one still in existence, and our income, which was derived solely from contributions, had dropped from forty million credits the first year to a mere sixty thousand credits the seventh. It was as if everybody had donated just enough time or money to clear his conscience and pay his dues, so to speak, and then, having done so, immediately forgot about the problem. The pity of it is that the problem is still with us, and it's not getting any better. THORRIN: What of the aliens themselves? I hate to sound melodramatic, but are there any insurrections or revolutions being plotted these days? NIIS: Against the Oligarchy? You must be kidding! How do you fight an attitude that spans a million worlds, or a Navy that could demolish half the galaxy in two years’ time? How do you fight an economic system that, through no fault or desire of your own, is all that stands between you and even greater squalor than already exists?
THORRIN: Then what's to become of them? NIIS: I don't know. I hope this creeping paternalism will begin creeping back the way it came, though I doubt that it will. In the meantime, they'll simply have to put up with things as they are, and as they threaten to become.
THORRIN: I'm sorry, but I just can't imagine their not getting up on their haunches one of these days and screaming “Death to the tyrants!” or some such thing. Didn'tthey read your book too? NIIS: Some of them did. Most couldn't understand it. THORRIN: Surely your publisher could have translated it— NIIS: I didn't say they couldn't read it; I said they couldn't understand it. You have to remember: They're aliens, with all that the word implies. Their hopes, dreams, goals, life-styles, their very thought processes arealien to our understanding. I had hoped my book would make this clear: that in some cases we had gone out of our way to subjugate them, but in most instances they thought and reacted on such different levels that there was never any conflict. We just moved in, did as we wanted, and they simply permitted—or, as was more often the case, ignored—us. THORRIN: It must be very frustrating to be the messiah of a people who want no salvation. NIIS: I've never set myself up as a messiah. As for the alien races’ wanting salvation, some of them—such as the Canphorites—very actively desire it; and who is to say that the others don't?The Steel Boot was about Man's inhumanity to his fellow beings, not their reaction to it. In other words, I'm
saying that we can be moral or immoral without reference to an alien's acceptance or rejection of his condition, merely because of our actions themselves. THORRIN: And yet, despite the book's fabulous success, your pleas have been rejected by one side and ignored by the other.
NIIS: True. My only hope, the only hope Men have ever had, from the first cavemen who couldn't handle fire to the last author who can't mobilize moral outrage, is for the next generation. Maybe the great
awakening will come tomorrow.
THORRIN: I'm sure we'd all like to think so. NIIS: So would I. But...
THORRIN: Yes?
NIIS: I won't say that tomorrow never comes, but I suspect that it's going to arrive too late to do anyone
much good.
14: THE BIOCHEMISTS
...Sometime around 5600 G.E. the life sciences, and especially biochemistry, seem to have taken a wrong turning, this in spite of the fabulous Project that had captured the imagination of men for centuries. Gains were made in numerous related fields, but... —Man: Twelve Millennia of Achievement ...It was in the field of biochemistry its sister sciences that Man came close to achieving a masterwork, sharing his results with the other races of the galaxy. Millennia-old problems in the artificial production of cellular life were solved with sober single-mindedness, and parthenogenesis allowed literally billions of females of all species to have the offspring that a cruel Nature forbade them to bear. Indeed, if Man was an inspiration anywhere during the years of the Oligarchy, it was in the biochemical sciences .... —Origin and History of the Sentient Races, Vol. 8 It sure didn't look like a superman.
“Failure Number 1,098,” said Rojers, turning away from the incubator with a grunt of disgust. “Shall we destroy it, sir?” asked one of the lab assistants. “Might as well,” said Rojers. “A maximum intelligence capacity of a ten-year-old, and a body that'll never get out of a wheelchair. Yes, give it six cc's of the lethal solution, injected directly into the heart ... whereverthat may be.”
