I’m not going to say that Badiah Sinclair wasn’t a big improvement over the Gang of Earth. I mean, at least he was one of us.And all that propaganda that came up from Earth calling on us to overthrow Sinclair and restore their boys to power? Did they think we’re nuts? Sure, he turned out to be a tyrant, too, but he was our tyrant, you know?
Ray Kaliber said it was all about the power and who had it. We just figured nobody needed to have it in the first place.
I mean, power to do what? run our lives? decide how we’d take care of our land and property? We figured the best way to handle the people’s business was for each of us to mind our own business.
What’s that? Oh, yeah, I’m getting ahead of myself again.
Sirius 4 was one of the first settlements established after the ImagDrive became practical. You know all about ImagDrives, right?
Oh.
OK. Here’s how it works. I cribbed this from another book about the events of this era, so it’s pretty reliable:
“It goes back to the old days when scientists were trying to develop a way to go faster than the speed of light, seeing as otherwise most of the universe was years and even centuries away.
“They tried for years without success until the historic day when someone in R&D at what is now ImagCorp threw up his or her hands and said. ‘This is nuts. I can’t imagine how we’re going to achieve faster than light speed.’ And the proverbial light bulb went off. Imagination was the key!
“They reasoned out the first tenet of imaginary physics: The power of the imagination is unlimited. Therefore, an engine powered by the imagination theoretically could travel at unlimited speeds. The trick was developing a computer with an imagination to power the engine, but once that was accomplished, the galaxy opened up."
So anyway, Sirius 4 was one of the first settlements established after the ImagDrive became practical. One of the more totalitarian Earth governments — that was most of them by then, so for our purposes here, it doesn’t really matter which one — was in charge.
The main purpose of these Earth governments was to keep the people who ran things rolling in comfort. So they went around collecting what were called taxes in exchange for services people could get cheaper if they did it themselves, but they made it illegal for people to do it for themselves. Yeah, I know it’s kind of hard to explain the concept because we haven’t lived that way for years now.
How did taxes work and why did people put up with it? Believe me, the less said, the better — I’d hate to give somebody ideas. Let’s just say that the higher the tax, the more likely somebody will lift up and say, “You know what? It’s my money. I’m going to keep it.” Kind of like the cookie incident.
But the government did stuff that was a little unpleasant or inconvenient for the average citizen, like wage war and collect the garbage, so people put up with it — as long as the government didn’t get overly pushy about it. Of course, sooner or later all governments get a little too pushy.
So our story picks up that day when things got one-step-over-the-line too much for us.
* * * * *
Ray Kaliber was never a guy to force his way of thinking on anybody, but it was a long time before he could put it all into words. Then he started studying the lives of Mohandes Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and that study brought him back to Henry David Thoreau, and stuff just kind of melted into place from there. Who’d really have thunk that the guy who hauled all of that nonviolent thought together and crystallized it into action would spring out of a world as harsh as Sirius 4? But there you have it.
One of the first things that opened the door in Ray’s mind was reading Thoreau’s account of when he was arrested — that would be July 23, 1846, a couple-three centuries ago now. Old Henry David had not paid his $1 poll tax in six years or so, and the gendarmes finally were sent to lock him up.
Imagine Ray Kaliber’s brain exploding when he first read those words Thoreau wrote: “... as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up ...
“I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar ...
“As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
“Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest ...”
Right then and there, back on Earth in the middle of the 19th century, the wheels were set in motion for what was going to happen 8.6 light years away on independent Sirius. First the wheels had to start turning in Ray Kaliber’s head, and it’s a good thing he loved to read.
You probably don’t need me bugging you with my opinion s all the time. I’m going to slip into omniscient narrator mode, starting here, and just tell you the story of what happened. Some of these conversations later on, I witnessed myself, but most of them are reconstructed from what I’ve learned talking with everybody involved and with Ray himself.
Now, some of this stuff is going to sound a little unbelievable, but that’s the funny thing about real life. Sometimes what really happened is better and crazier than anything you might have wanted to make up.
And here’s the first example of that: The day the ruling government went one step over the line also happened to be the day Ray Kaliber met the love of his life.
* * * * *
The day the government went one step over the line, Raymond Eric Kaliber was outside. The sky over Sirius 4 was a lot more pale and orange than it is now, because the oxygen-nitrogen generators were still only two or three decades into their work — despite what you see in those old movies, you don’t terraform a planet in 90 seconds — but the atmosphere always was more or less condusive to breathing. It just made more sense in those early years to live indoors; that’s why the encampment was mostly enclosed in those days.
As everyone knows nowadays, Dr. Ray Kaliber was a 27-year-old associate professor of political science at the University of Sirius 4. It was the first day of the fall semester and he wanted to show the students how free and casual he liked to run things, so he’d taken the gang outside and planned to teach the class on the beach across the bay from an oxy-nitro generation station.
He had the class list and, as was his habit, he was calling on the students at random rather than follow the list in alphabetical order. So the fourth or fifth pick was from near the end.
“Buffalo Springsteen?”
“Here.” You could tell by his reaction that he was a little surprised to see that the voice belonged to a woman. She had long, semi-curly auburn hair; I’d probably describe her as average cute, but he saw her in a different light. He’d claim years later that Buffalo Springsteen was the most beautiful woman ever to give him the privilege of sharing intimate time — but as for these first few moments when she was still just a student in his class, he would later say he immediately was arrested by her eyes, which kind of flashed brown with golden tinges of some sort. And as you’ve already heard, he didn’t have a problem with the idea of being arrested.
(Oh, and in case you were wondering, she was 23. This was a class for seniors. We’re not exactly talking cradle robbery here.)
“Do you go by Buffy?” the prof inquired, innocently enough, and he could see by that flash in her eyes that it was the wrong question.
“No. I prefer Buffalo,” she said in a tone clearly intended to settle the issue once and for all. There may have been a titter or two among the other students. She didn’t seem to care.
“That’s an interesting name for an attractive woman, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Kaliber said.
“Thank you,” she replied uncomfortably. “Some people think my parents had a sense of humor, but I’m proud of the name just as it is.”
“Oh, come on, Buffy, lighten up,” said a male student nearby — near enough that it wasn’t particularly hard for her to reach out, grab him by the front of the shirt, and draw him so close that the only thing in his field of vision was that auburn-framed, average-cute face twisted into an extremely vicious snarl.
“I really can’t emphasize this strongly enough,” she hissed. “Don’t — call — me — Buffy. I prefer Buffalo!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Ray Kaliber strode over to the two students and pulled on their shoulders to separate them gently. “OK, Ms. Springsteen, you’ve made your point. Let’s have a little more decorum.”
“Jeez, what a psycho,” said the young man, which caused her to lurch in his direction again. Fortunately for him, the professor’s hand was lingering on Buffalo Springsteen’s shoulder just in case, so she was unable to complete the thought.
“I think you’re a little more thin-skinned than you need to be,” Dr. Kaliber said as he resumed his place in the center of the class. “But I will call you Buffalo, when I’m not calling you Ms. Springsteen.”
The rest of that opening roll call is lost to history, being relatively routine. The boy who made fun of Buffalo’s name turned out to be named Carson McGillicudy, so I guess he knew something about lightening up over his parents’ naming decisions.
“Now we had a little incident here a minute ago, and before I get into the syllabus, I’m going to use it as what we educator types like to call a teaching moment,” Kaliber told the class. It was a great day to have class outside; a small breeze tousled his blondish-brownish hair a bit and his easy smile made him an instant favorite among the female members of the class. “Now Buffalo here had a differenc e of opinion with young Mr. McGillicudy, and she chose not to use diplomacy in resolving those differences.”
Here it came. Although he wasn’t yet what you’d call a public figure, the students at the University of Sirius 4, especially the politics majors, were well aware of Dr. Kaliber’s devotion to the concept of nonviolent civil disobedience. So it was kind of cool to get a taste of his whacked-out philosophy on the first day. (Hey, in those days most people thought it was whacked out, so he wouldn’t mind my saying so.)
“I’m going to throw out the proposition that Buffalo Springsteen accomplished nothing by going after poor Carson here physically,” Kaliber said. “No, actually, I’m going to say that she produced exactly the opposite of what she hoped to accomplish. What do you think, McGillicudy?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Kaliber,” Carson replied ruefully. “I don’t think I’m ever going to call her Buffy again.” The class laughed at that, and so did the prof.
“Yes, but here’s the funny thing about that — did she change your mind about whether ‘Buffy’ is an appropriate nickname for someone named Buffalo?”
“No, of course not.”
“You got it,” Kaliber said. “She didn’t change your beliefs — in fact, I believe you used the word ‘psycho.’” Even Buffalo smiled at that. “My point is that violence might force people to change their behavior, but it can’t change their minds. The most brutal regimes in the history of humanity have all faded to dust eventually, because you can’t brutalize an idea out of existence.”
“Hang on a second,” McGillicudy persisted. “A lot of those regimes got overthrown violently. I mean, how else do you get rid of violent oppression if not by violence?”
“Good question. That’s a big chunk of the syllabus, so we’ll get to that in a minute. For now, let me suggest that you recognize the names of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King faster than the names of Nathuram Godse or James Earl Ray. The men who fought for freedom without raising a hand in violence live on in our memories more than the men who killed them.”
“We remember Hitler and Stalin, too,” Buffalo Springsteen interjected.
“True.” Kaliber sighed. “I’m off on a tangent. My point is simply that you can force Carson not to call you by a nickname, but you can’t force him to change his mind. Changing minds is a more complicated process. That’s why so often you’ll find that a violent revolution only results in a new violent regime, sometimes more violent than the old one.”
As if on cue, about a hundred space ships buzzed over the beach just then, each of them emblazoned with the insignia of the government that was in charge of the encampment of Sirius 4.
