Confederation -- 35

Chapter 35

I figured that what I'd been calling "Our Space," the rough area occupied by the Sunnys, the Sim-tigers, and humans, would require some governing force. That was the point of what Liz was now calling the ISC. I wasn't too concerned about the form of organization that either of the two other species chose. The Sunnys had a lot of experience organizing themselves over several planets, and there weren't that many Sim-tigers. They were widely dispersed on their planet, and Kasm had assured me that they no longer fought as they'd done in the past. Their groups always cooperated in the allocation of hunting territory. If they could just bring that attitude into space, we'd have no problem with them.

It was the human tendency towards infighting that had me worried. If space travel became widespread, we would have groups setting up their own empires, pirates, space Vikings, colonies of hippies, Amazons, militant feminists, and who knows what else. Total chaos wouldn't work into my plans smoothly.

Likewise, humans, now faced with aliens for the first time, needed to come together and act with a unified front. I suspected that our species is, unfortunately, too diverse to unify completely. One man's meat is another man's poison, so to speak. A political organization that works for some people won't work for all. It never has in recorded history. Trying to impose an organization on the discontented ones by force would lead to the same, sad set of errors we've always made. There would be wars, people would be killed, and humanity, as a whole, would be vulnerable.

During the voyage, I discussed the problem with Liz. We came to the not very astute conclusion that what worked in space should also work on the planet. In short, if we could form a confederation with the other species, we should be able to form one on Earth.

That way, the individual groups making up the confederation could have their own form of rule within their own territory. I didn't care about that, as long as they allowed people to emigrate if they didn't like the local rules. Eventually, the best set of rules should end up with the most citizens as long as people were free to choose.

While we humans currently only held our home planet, I figured we'd extend our reach as quickly as the Sunnys could provide FTL ships to us.

I didn't like my name, "Our Space," so I sort of redefined the term 'Oikumene.'

The word is usually used in science fiction to refer to the human-inhabited worlds of the galaxy. As such, it seemed a little ostentatious to me. We only held one world, but if I included our allies – well, that was a different story. Together, we held eight worlds if you didn't count those of the Pugs or Pug-bears, and I wasn't minded about counting them. However, Oikumene seemed to be the way to describe our joint space, and I decided to use it.

If humans were going to expand into space, we'd need to organize quickly, or we'd end up suffering the consequences in terms of interplanetary strife later. I couldn't see how that would benefit us.

Now, as to Earth, Jake's Eastern-slope group and our small community were loosely allied. If we could somehow either get rid of the Motherland group or make peace with them, that would bring over half of the old United States back together.

Several kingdoms and other groups were scattered off in the mountains to our north and west, and I thought they'd probably fall into line with the confederacy idea pretty quickly. I didn't know anything about Europe, Asia, or – well, I didn't know anything about the entire rest of the world. Still, I was prepared to use space power to enforce peaceful organization. The one thing I didn't want was a group like the Motherland Army terrorizing and stealing resources. If they were peaceful, that would be all right. If not, we'd see what it took to pacify them.

I looked in the mirror when I had this thought and wondered, "Am I going to turn into what I want to stop other people from being?" I didn't want to rule the world, though. I just wanted to give people the opportunity to live peacefully and prosperously. I hoped my organizational idea would lead to that.

Then another concept came to me. Our planetary system needed its own force. The ISC could serve for the three species, but we needed an Earth-space Protection Force to handle our own problems. I didn't want humans to feel antagonistic about the other species if the ISC had to intercede in human space affairs. Plus, we would shortly need someone to ensure that there was some standard of decent behavior in our own solar system. As I mentioned, I didn't want pirates or whatever.

That might work, though. Each species could have its own space force under the auspices of the ISC. That would keep the ISC small in size, and it could mainly serve as a coordinating organization, only pulling everyone together in the event of a significant emergency.

I told Liz about my ideas, and she commented, "So, now we've got two organizations in space. We need one on Earth. It could be a confederation like you say, and its role could be kind of like the ISC or maybe the old UN."

I was not too fond of the UN reference. That was a deeply flawed organization from its inception. The basic idea was well-intentioned, but it had quickly become corrupt. The general democratic structure ensured that. Democracies are always subject to distortion caused by self-interest.

No, we needed a robust coordinating organization on Earth, and it needed to be independent. How could I find a man who was saintly enough to run it and not be corrupted by power? Then it hit me, the Earth-space Protection Force – I'd taken to calling it the ESPF by now – would be responsible for planetary coordination of the various political entities. Maybe that would provide a little control over corruption.

After considerable thought, I got discouraged. I was pretty sure that whatever I could think up wouldn't be good enough to prevent ill-intentioned people from finding ways to screw it up. However, it didn't seem like I could do any better, so I decided that this would just have to work. If the ESPF started causing trouble on Earth, the ISC could step in and straighten things out. It wasn't perfect, but there were enough layers that I thought it could be self-correcting.

I hoped that the influence of the two alien species would also have the effect of overruling the human tendency towards self-interest. The Sunnys, especially, were altruistic in outlook and were likely to mediate disputes fairly. At least that was my hope.