“I specialize in the analysis of historical trends.”
“This is an isolated outpost. Is it possible that it’s left from some war?”
“Anything is possible, but the design of the buildings and the openness of the plan would suggest that this was not a warlike culture—or that they were so successful that they were unchallenged. I would opt for the former, based upon our own history of warlike expansion, because we’ve seen no other evidence of this culture. Then, Danann may have been their greatest expansion and simply abandoned.” I shrugged. “The possibilities remain numerous, far more than would be the case were this an abandoned human settlement.”
“You don’t think that’s possible?”
“Given the designs, the sizes of doors, the lowness of the ceilings, and the extensive patterned similarities in structures, the probabilities that this is an alien, nonhuman world approach unity, in my opinion. Moreover, it shows no vestiges of the kind of warlike history that a human settlement would.”
“You’ve suggested several times that humans are warlike. Do you think that for us war is an inevitable historical trend?”
I’d considered the question before, but I would rather have avoided replying in simplistic terms, and any other response would have been hedged by so many conditions that a nonhistorian—even some historians known as over-simplifiers—would not have considered it an answer. “I’d be reluctant to term war a trend, or to say that any trend might be inevitable.”
“I’ve read that there has never been a time in recorded history where some nations or worlds were not actively at war.”
“True enough,” added Lieutenant Chang. “From what I’ve seen. Someone’s always fighting. We’re just headed on an expedition, and someone’s attacked us.”
Tepper glanced at the lieutenant, who apparently ignored the look, yet closed her mouth. Then the major looked to me. “What do you think causes wars, Professor? You’ve obviously studied the matter, academically and perhaps otherwise.”
While I wished she had not offered that last phrase, I quickly offered my usual gambit line for the subject. “When peace fails is when war becomes inevitable.”
“That’s absurd,” replied the linguist. “You could say the same thing in reverse.”
“No. Try it, and you will discover that it is not a proposition whose inverse is equally true. When war fails, there is total destruction., or exhaustion, but never peace, except for the terms imposed by the winner, and that is not peace in the true sense of the word, because peace implies an equality—at least a reciprocity that offers a promise of future equality. Peace is a situation where societal conflicts are resolved through nonmilitary accommodations. When those conflicts cannot be so resolved, war becomes inevitable.” I paused.
“Aren’t you really offering the argument that less sophisticated cultures or societies resort to war when they cannot compete in nonmilitary terms?” Major Tepper’s tone was bantering.
“That has occurred. War has also occurred when societies more advanced in technology or commercial activities have been rebuffed by cultures who do not wish to accept what they regard as values or customs or other societal aspects of dubious value. What many analysts ignore is that information and technology possess values on two separate levels—those of symbolism and those of effective application. Exceedingly or even moderately advanced technology does not always ensure a triumph by its possessor. Such victories are assured only when the effectiveness of application exceeds that of lesser technology. Great military leaders have understood both the practical and symbolic value of technology that appeared strikingly advanced. From the days when all humanity was confined to Old Earth, various military forces have undertaken preemptive strikes to preclude the development, deployment, and application of advanced technology. In some cases, the preemption was merely to prevent a polity from using the technology as a symbol of power. In other cases, the technology would have posed a terrible threat to the polity making the preemptive strike…”
“You think that the attack on the Magellan was that kind of attack?” asked Neison.
“It couldn’t have been anything other than preemptive, but whether preemptive for symbolic reasons or out of fear that the Danannian technology might provide a greater edge to the Comity remains to be seen. At that point in time, we had learned nothing.” We still haven’t learned that much. I turned to the lieutenant again. “What do you think?”
“Even the Sunnis don’t send billion-credit warships if they aren’t worried.” She shrugged. “You know more than I do, Professor, but it seems to me that you have to be open-minded to learn new things, or learn about different cultures. Sunnis haven’t shown that much open-mindedness in a long time. Maybe never. So I’d guess they just want to keep the Comity from learning more. Might be true of the Covenanters, too.”
“Inflexibility, either general or selective, is, as you have pointed out, a hallmark of societies dominated by religious ideologies,” I replied. The lieutenant, for all her terseness of expression, had outlined the argument far better than most politicians could… or would. The Special Deputy Minister had avoided that aspect of the subject altogether, and that action was one of many that classified him as a political prop. “You doubtless have noticed some relation between beliefs and effectiveness.”
The lieutenant inclined her head, as if to assess whether my observation required a response. After an interval too brief to be a pause, except for someone such as she was, in a profession requiring instant decisions, she answered. “The more simple the beliefs, the more quickly people act. Most times, simple beliefs are wrong.”
“It’s a simple thing to believe in good and evil, or right and wrong,” protested Neison. “Is that wrong?”
“Depends on how you define good or evil,” the lieutenant replied.
“How would you define it?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t want to try.” She gave a short laugh. “One of those things that everyone wants to be simple and easy. It isn’t.”
“The Danannians seemed to be very simple, from the reports,” suggested Major Tepper. “No furnishings, rooms and structures of similar size, designs similar throughout…”
“That indicates an incredibly complex society and individuals.” I wasn’t certain she was serious. Once human societies developed any technology at all, they displayed a tremendous range of differences in physical attributes, from housing to clothing, from commercial structures to transportation—everything. The more a society strove to minimize—in a workable fashion—the physical gaps between the richest and poorest, the least able and the most able, the more complex that society had to become. Human societies have never successfully narrowed those gaps, and serious efforts to do so have effectively destroyed both governments and societies. That alone suggested some very fundamental differences between the long-departed aliens and us. “Or vast differences between us and them, not only in terms of physiology but in terms of basic perceptions of the universe.”
“That assumes a great deal, Professor,” said Neison dryly.
“It does indeed.” I smiled politely. “But when you analyze beyond the superficial, just about every decision and judgment we make assumes far more than we ever acknowledge.” I had already said far too much on far too little concrete information.
A faint smile crossed the lieutenant’s lips. After a moment, she pushed back her chair. “If you will excuse me…”
“Of course.” Unlike me, she was on call all the time.
After Lieutenant Chang left, Major Tepper looked at me. She said nothing, and since she had voiced nothing, I merely offered a smile and took a long sip of the formulated and too-cool bergamot tea that lacked the true essence of tea in some indefinable fashion.