Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (110 page)

*We are
standing off of Two a few million kilometers. Here are our
possibilities.*

The holovid
screen lit with stars strewn around with symbols beside them as to
distance and type.

[ That one?
]

"Looks good to
me!"

*It has radio,
I think. We'll have to get closer.*

They were soon
above the only likely lifebearing planet in the system. The radio
was coming from a gas giant and was caused by the same effect many
of them showed when they were big enough to supply much core heat
to the atmosphere. The huge storms caused enormous eddy currents of
ionized gases. A swirling ion storm, in short. A swirling ion storm
is like any charged coil. It emits radio and magnetic waves.

They recorded
the system, then Maita put another star chart on the screen.

"That one?"

[ Looks good to
me! ]

*We go!*

The excitement
was back!

Efete Stagnation

They approached
the star system from "north" of the star so they could view the
planets and take readings. There were eleven planets and the star
was a bit hot, but the fourth and fifth worlds were in the "life
zone" for that type of primary.

[ Spectroscopic
analysis shows chlorophyll so we have highly developed plants at a
minimum. The carbon cycles seem advanced. ]

*There's carbon
dioxide and a great enough percentage of free oxygen to indicate a
very large plant coverage and animal balance on both the worlds.
The outer one is cooling somewhat while number four is in a very
good range. Both planets should be comfortable. There should be
ample life here and quite advanced.*

"So let's go in
for a closer look. Orbit and send floaters down if there isn't
evidence of a more developed civilization."

Maita had, as
usual, already sent the floaters so they waited several hours for
the sensors' return. Z and Thing played a few fast games of three
dimensional chess, which Thing almost always won. It used to win in
four to six moves, but Z was improved enough that the average was
twelve moves now. One game went to twenty seven moves. Z won on
rare occasions by playing without logic.

Maita finally
announced the floaters were back and that information was going on
the holovid screen.

[ I'll be
damned! ]

"Probably.
What's up?"

*Number five.
Highly developed civilization.*

"Without
cities? No trains or planes or ships? No clouds of pollution? No
dying seas? And you call them developed? Come on!"

[ It seems that
way sometimes. I wonder why there are so few of them? How do they
control the population? ]

"Where are
they? It all looks like virgin territory to me. It's really a
pretty place though. Everything seems fairly well in order."

[ I would tend
to say a bit too much order. Where do they get the energy, Maita?
]

*They use core
thermal generation for energy and have great amounts of it in use,
all underground. Those hills in the scanner are apparently
dwellings. Food's grown in underground areas, I would say. That
leaves the surface undisturbed. The floater scan detected two
separate craft that seem much like the skimmers we use on the
vacation worlds, floating on a cushion of air downdrafted through
spinning vanes. They have a kind of power sphere that's quite
effective. Science is advanced.*

[ Advanced
enough to where these may be remnants of that once mighty empire? I
would be inclined to believe they are very much aware of
extra-planetary life so we can land here. There's certainly no
danger from contact to these! ]

"Let's do. Have
you checked with Library about this sort of lifestyle?"

*There were any
number of theoretical worlds that.... I can crossreference the
coordinates. If I translate the coordinates of this star into the
math of the beacon and figure drift backward for some quarter
million years I get.... Shall we go to Library? We can come back,
land and know more about their far past than they do.*

"This may make
a projection station we can work directly from Library. Move the
coordinates for various worlds ahead in time to the present, check
the worlds and see what's changed."

[ I vote to go
to Library, too. There's a lot of the data we can check there in
person we couldn't study through the fastcom links. We have to
learn what questions to ask. ]

They were on
library four hours later. Thing rode Z's shoulder into the enormous
underground building where they greeted the robots who maintained
the place in perfect repair, went to the automatic selector desk
and checked the listings for the symbols Maita supplied. Thing's
floater hovered overhead so it could talk and so that Maita could
know everything happening and could converse itself. There were
nine ships from various empire worlds on the pad complex Maita
used. Library was popular.

[ Mmm. D twenty
four. That's down the fourth isle and back a few cases before the
first cross-aisle on the right. ]

They found the
symbol for D24. Z moved to stand on the symbol set into the floor
and said, "Maitan, please."

They had programmed Maitan
et al
into the computers several years ago so
they could read and hear the histories in a language they could
understand. While the scene played through Maita recorded the
native language and the full history of the world directly from the
computers.

The way Library
worked in this building was that these seeming mirrors were holovid
screens, each representing a world that was inhabited at the time
Library was built. The races in the present Maitan Empire were
added, but the closing of Library when the Kropfth Empire abandoned
it until Maita and the crew reopened it left a lapse of a full
quarter million years in the interim. When anyone stood on the
inlaid symbol in front of a screen and spoke a one-word order for
language, a lifelike being from that world was shown, introduced
beings of any other types from the world and spoke the general
history of the world. Z had been recorded as representative of
Earth, Thing was representative of Menta. Each world now had a
"mirror" and symbol.

The screen
showed a world very different from the one they had seen a few
hours ago so Maita checked the listing.

*The fifth
planet was uninhabited by a native race when this was recorded.
These people are from the fourth. I think maybe they will prove to
be the ones there now. There was a colony.*

A rather
strange-looking mammalian being along with a female and small child
were slowly turning in the screen. They stopped to look out at Z
and Thing – or very slightly to their right.

"I am called
Khahrth, and this is my mate, Lueth, and my young son, Hehrth," the
figure said. "We are from the world Flincheen, fifth planet outward
from the star Echienne. We have a colony on the fourth planet,
Glisp.

"I am mammalian
and am of slightly less than half my lifespan in age. My mate is
slightly younger than am I, which is customary in our society. It
is customary for a pairing to have one child, though twins,
triplets and quadruplets sometimes result from the pairing. This
custom is relatively new and came about because we overpopulated
our world, which leads to many problems, though I am informed this
is by no means an unusual situation.

"The government
on Flincheen is headed by a single individual elected by the elites
every ten years. The Seconds and Thirds do not own land, therefore
do not vote. The Seconds are generally shopkeepers and farmers,
running the estates of the elites. The Thirds are of low
intelligence and are generally servants or do menial tasks for the
government. It is the responsibility of the government to see no
one is without sufficient food, shelter and medical attention.

"The
specialties of the Flincheen in the empire is as military officers
of the highest quality and as general administrators. We also
supply some numbers of police from the Seconds and maintenance
personnel from the Thirds.

"Flincheen
produces all of our own foodstuffs and, now that we have the
colony, all of our own ores for industry. That industry remains
insystem here. We export people, not merchandise.

"My mate will
exhibit some art forms and will sing and play the klarmench for
you."

Z waved for the
machine to fast-forward after a few seconds of a tinny sounding
instrument until it was past the art exhibition phase.

"We enjoy
watching various physical contests and train many of the Thirds,
the better physical specimens, for those manner of entertainments.
A particularly expert Third can rise above his birth station and
his children become Seconds, infusing new and stronger genes into
the higher classes.

"Our
architecture is..."

Z stepped back
and the screen shut off.

*It seems more
was said by what wasn't said than was said by what was said.*

[ You sound
like Z. I take it we now know what kind of culture they had back
then. They were slavers, which seems to have been accepted by the
empire. It used the Thirds, who were the slaves. Flincheen's
contribution to the empire was to produce slaves for them. No
wonder the thing died! It's inherent in the system. It can't
survive cultural crisis. Sociomath shows clearly that such a system
holds only until the decadence of the elite classes have rendered
them helpless in cases of societal stress, then the slaves will
take over and recycle the same system, the society will fail and
regress. They will outgrow that form and evolve. ]

"I suppose
we're going to find exactly how far slavery can be taken when we
land on Glisp. I think we're going to be very outraged about a
thing or two there!"

*Surely, they
outgrew that kind of government hundreds of centuries ago! As Thing
said, such a system can't be viable longterm!*

[ Only if they
made machines to be the slaves. I know what Z's saying. A good deal
about that society is pretty clear now. I doubt the empire condoned
slavery, but it probably didn't try too hard to regulate such
things in its member worlds. Perhaps that's why the empire is no
more. It allows corruptions that erode the ability to retain a
dynamic. ]

"Let's go back
to see. I won't mind being wrong one little bit! This could be very
interesting and I hope they really have made machines to be their
slaves."

[ It's likely.
They have all the energy they could want and you don't have to feed
machines and you don't have to house and medicate machines. Simple
economics would tend to dictate going to a machine-society base.
Just think! A very few people and thousands of machines! This will
be linear psychology study gone to the limit! My sociomath formulae
will certainly be advanced tremendously I'm sure. ]

*I still don't
see how you figure it. I don't disagree, either. The society
certainly doesn't exhibit any particular drive if it isn't even in
space. That's withdrawal to the extreme. They certainly have the
science and resources to head their own empire. I agree they have
lost any semblance of a societal dynamic.*

"We're figuring
dynamics from the organic standpoint, Maita. That character who
made the recording was hedonistic, proud and steeped in the things
a society can produce that have no real worth. He already thought
of his fellow beings as being less than himself, was willing to
supply those of his own race to other cultures for slave labor or
worse.... You can bet the 'physical contests' were brutal and
deadly. That was his entertainment. The set of the minds of that
kind of being will be so deeply ingrained now that nothing could
possibly change it. They simply will be unable to see any viewpoint
but their own."

[ Remember the
Kroon, Maita? The religious thing? The total inability of some of
those people to see truth no matter how obvious? Remember how blind
a person can be who simply refuses to see or hear a thing he
doesn't want to see or hear? Add constant strong lifelong
conditioning along those same lines and you have what these will
have become. They won't see anything they don't want to see.
Nothing exists if their religion says it doesn't and they are now
their own religion. ]

"Khomeini
Baptists."

*What was that
reference, Z?*

"I just now
thought of something that was happening in my own neighborhood when
I was abducted from Earth. There was a state in another part of the
world from the USA that was ruled by a turkey named Khomeini. He
ran the state strictly along the lines of his religion. To the last
letter. Anything else was unthinkable. As you can guess, the state
was constantly at war with everyone else in the world. 'Death to
the infidels' and all that crap.

"There was a
religion called the Baptists at the same time. They were in the US.
A group of them broke away and started a movement to infiltrate the
government of the US. They wanted to take over and to run the
country along the lines of their own religion as they perceived it.
The Baptist Bible was to be the law because God said it was to be
that way. Other people would argue that to try to run a state along
such strict lines was ridiculous. We even had a constitution that
guaranteed it wouldn't happen BECAUSE the framers of the document
knew such a thing couldn't work.

"These people
argued that it would work, it had simply never been tried.

"There was a
movement called the Calvinist Movement that was partially like
that. They couldn't even see the atrocities of that partial form of
what they wanted. We argued that not only had such a thing been
tried, there was exactly the same sort of thing happening at the
time. They could read about the results of the religious control in
every newspaper or watch it on TV. It was Iran and Khomeini.