Well, the good news was that dealing with the U.N. was a lot easier than dealing with kudzu. All you had to do to get rid of government was say no. Simple. Direct. Say no, show the bureaucrats the nearest ship out, and get on with your life. Your life, your money, your future. Yours. No one to say who could and could not build on the planets, no endless rounds of licensing for ships and shipping, no one to hedge or ban scientific research that frightened them, no one to ever again supervise bloodbaths like the U.S. Disarmament.
Ben had had no blaze-of-light revelation. He’d started reading because he almost couldn’t help himself. Fuller and Fuller’s ideas were all anybody talked about. He had to find out for himself whether they would work or not.
The answer shocked and scared him. It could work. The free flow of information was the key, just as Fuller said. The U.N. had been, in some ways, a necessary stage to eliminate the barriers imposed by nation states and national currency. But now that it had nothing external to fight against, it had turned around, like all powerful governments had throughout history, and started to feed on its own, and people put up with it because they couldn’t see any way past it.
Bradbury and its people could show them. Bradbury could push the U.N. out the door and thrive. When they did, the rest of the worlds would see that it could be done, and done safely and quickly. It would start with Mars, out on the frontier, but it would spread all the way back down to Mother Earth herself.
It should have worked, but they moved too fast. Fuller got bad advice, or maybe he just got overconfident, but they overestimated the number of their followers in Bradbury. Too many people just stood around and did nothing. Too many other people actively tried to undermine the revolution and were judged dangerous to the implementation of the new system. Transporting all the dissenters back to Earth turned out to be a bigger problem than had been anticipated. During the process of transportation, someone got sloppy and didn’t run safety checks on all the ships that carried the dissenters away.
Then there were the ones who misunderstood what was happening and decided to take charge in their own way before the security systems could be established. Revenge had overwhelmed the fragile court corporations.
None of that changed the basic principles. Fuller’s ideas still held. But twenty years had passed and no one else had found the time or the place to put them into practice.
Until now.
Ben stared at the clouds displayed on his view screen. They billowed and boiled, filling the world outside. Even after so long, they could still be awe inspiring.
When he’d first stood inside the Discovery, his thoughts had tumbled over each other, almost too fast for him to follow. Awe, fear, wonder, humility, and then, slowly, almost shamefully, came the idea that he might be able to use this great thing that had happened. This might be the catalyst for the shift in thinking that would be needed to finish what Ted Fuller had started.
The more he thought, the more he saw and uncovered on his own, the more certain he became. This was it. It just had to be managed, that was all. Not suppressed, not lied about, just managed. Everything could be made to work out for the best for all the worlds, including Venus, if they just moved carefully.
Well? He tapped his fingers restlessly against his thigh. If you’re going to do it, do it. If not, put your file away and go get dressed up for the yewners.
Ben leaned forward and jacked the case into the table. He set up a quick search code, attached his best encryption to it, and dropped it into the queue for the next com burst to Earth. Then he got up to shave and change for the reception.
One of the features of the stream that few people bothered to take notice of was that if you constructed your packet correctly, you did not actually have to store your information anywhere. So many different, completely untended machines were constantly receiving and rerouting data that it was possible to keep a packet bouncing between them. Ben had several packets that had been flying from relay to relay for twenty years now. He’d lost three to badly timed hardware upgrades that he’d failed to get wind of, but other than that, his most secret information bounced happily around the solar system, untraceable, not only because of its encryptions, but because it seldom landed anywhere long enough for any one machine to make a complete record of its contents.
The disadvantage of this was that it took awhile to find the packet, once you did go looking for it.
Ben returned to his case, clean shaven and dressed in tunic and trousers of a suitably conservative blue-gray. A matching cap with black beading covered his head. He checked the screen display.
Success.
His searcher had recovered the packet in one of the repeater relays between Earth and the Moon and had rerouted it back to Venus. Ben accessed his four-tier decryption key and added the password.