Adzel accuses van Rijn of prioritizing profit over the safety of planetary populations. Van Rijn has several lines of defense. First:
"'...I don't make no money if my whole society goes down guggle-guggle to the bottom.'" (p. 519)
How many powerful people need to realize that now?
Second:
"'...I got a conscience.'" (ibid.)
To van Rijn, "conscience" means answering to God eventually but I can assure him that conscience works even without theism.
Thirdly, he honestly believes that he is better equipped to deal with the current threat than anyone else. Thus, keeping quiet at an early stage is not (just) a matter of trying to monopolize Satan.
2 comments:
There's no time to refer things to ponderous bureaucracies far away -- as on Earth before rapid communications, the "man on the spot" has to decide.
Incidentally this is how Britain conquered India. It took at least 8 months for a letter to get from the East India Company's HQ in London to Calcutta and back, often longer.
The Company hated anything expensive, and wars are; they also disrupt trade in the short term, and the board of directors hated that too.
But the local officials could usually commit the Company to any war they thought necessary or desirable, and by the time the news got back around the Cape of Good Hope it was too late to cavil -- the directors knew that it would be -another- 4-6 months before their reply got to India.
If the man on the spot carried it off, London had to paste a smile on its face and go along.
This happened as late as the 1840's, when Sir Charles Napier, who'd been told under no circumstances to invade the province of Scinde (what's now southern Pakistan), when ahead and did it anyway and annexed the place.
He was rumored to have sent a one-word message back home: Peccavi. Which means "I have sinned" in Latin -- a multilingual pun; "I have Scinde".
Napier was also the man who replied to a petition complaining about the British suppressing suttee (widow-burning) with:
This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
While I agree with your comments about "ponderous bureaucracies" and how the Board of Directors of the East India Company usually had little choice but to ratify what their men on the spot did in India, I don't think this quite applies to the problem Old Nick faced. At the time of the Satan affair, Technic civilization was not united, comprising it seems, hundreds, maybe even thousands of sovereign entities, human and human, the powerful and those not so powerful. There was no one who could really project force over a couple of hundred parsecs. That would have to wait another two centuries, when the chaos of the Time of Troubles following the collapse of the Polesotechnic League brought home the urgent need for an interstellar state unifying a sufficiently large region of space to defend Earth and Technic civilization. And that was what the Terran Empire provided after it arose.
If something like the Empire had existed in Old Nick's time, the Shenn would never have dared doing what we see them attempting in SATAN'S WORLD.
Ad astra! Sean
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