Some Andersonian action:
"Positioned, the artillery cut loose. Guns roared, rockets wooshed, explosives detonated in racket, smoke, and flinders. Slowly the Old Keep crumbled. At last from the wreckage stepped a Merseian waving a white flag." (p. 274)
What a welcome sight! A Merseian with a white flag! He is one of us, an oxygen-breather, even though he has been duped into merc-ing for the hydrogen-breathing Baburites. But they in turn were duped by oxygen-breathing human beings of the Seven In Space. Van Rijn can do business even with the Baburites who are well-informed enough to send their messengers directly to him. But he must ask the Hermetian government to broker the deal:
"'The Commonwealth government can never recognize the independents as rightful agents, no more than it could ever really recognize the League. Hemel! Something besides another government having the right to decide things? Might get folks at home wondering if they do need politicians and bureaucrats on top of themselves.'" (pp. 278-279)
Very occasionally, Poul Anderson gives us a glance behind the scenery:
8 comments:
Wealth is relative.
You and I have wealth greater than kings a few generations ago but we're not wealthy in the sense they were.
It's not a matter of how much you have, but how much you have relative to others. That's what being wealthy IS; having much more than others.
As the saying goes, there's too much and too little but no such thing as "enough".
That's because wealth is a subdivision of "power" in general.
And power is not only relative, it's a positional good and a zero-sum game.
Humans aren't necessarily genetically predisposed to seek wealth as such; but they -are- predisposed to seek power.
And the power of the rods and the axe -- power to punish and to kill -- is ur-power, real power, the one of which all others are mere derivative shadows.
So governments and bureaucrats are necessary. That's where van Rijn was wrong; private-enterprise violence is an extremely bad thing, a route back to the "state of nature", in which the commonest way for an adult human to die is to be killed by other humans, which until the invention of the State was the universal state of affairs.
The Old Adam is always waiting. Let up the constraint, the pressure, and he emerges and rams a spear into your throat or bashes in your head. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
A powerful epitaph for mankind.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: as sympathetic as I am to Old Nick's libertarian views, it's you I have to agree with. However many fools, bunglers, and idiots we get in any gov't, we need the politicians and bureaucrats (and a military which obeys them), to keep that Old Adam down for as long as possible.
Paul:And seeing a Merseian waving a white flag in defeat was a pleasant change from their never ending aggressiveness in Dominic Flandry's time. And I would argue that Benoni Strang had been manipulating the Seven in Space.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Yes, if anyone, Strang was the evil genius of this period.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Exactly! His folly and fanaticism helped to wreck the Polesotechnic League. It would have been better for Technic civilization if he had died in an air car accident two decades or more before MIRKHEIM.
Ad astra! Sean
Someone once defined a fanatic as someone who's doing what God would do if only God knew the real facts of the case.
More seriously, a fanatic is an obsessive -- someone who puts one thing ahead of everything else.
Eg., Strang is utterly obsessed with social problems on Hermes, and is willing to wreck entire worlds to get what he wants there.
It's not so much that he wants evil, or has an evil end in mind, as that he's prepared to do any amount of evil to get what he wants, and isn't prepared to admit that he -can't- get what he wants under any circumstances.
Sean,
I think that it would have been better if Strang had stayed on Hermes and led the Liberation Front.
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: I agree. Strang was obsessively fanatical about relatively TRIVIAL problems on Hermes.
Paul: I disagree. I have zero use for the so called Liberation Front. Too much like Strang.
Ad astra! Sean
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