Visions of Liberty

* * *

Chin was clearly jealous that Hauptmann had scored a spacer, and so he made an excuse to come over to Hauptmann’s house in Takoma Park early the next morning.

Hauptmann and Chin listened spellbound as Plato regaled them with tales of Franklin’s World and its four moons, its salmon-colored orbiting rings, its outcrops of giant crystals towering to the sky, and its neon-bright cascades. No life had been found, which was why, of course, no quarantine was necessary. That lack of native organisms had been a huge disappointment, Plato said; he and his crew were still arguing over what mechanism had caused the oxygen signatures detected in Earth-based spectroscopic scans of Franklin’s World, but whatever had made them wasn’t biological.

“I really am surprised,” said Plato, when they took a break for late-morning coffee. “I expected debriefings and, well, frankly, for the government to have been prepared for our return.”

Hauptmann nodded sympathetically. “Sorry about that. There are a lot of good things about getting rid of government, but one of the downsides, I guess, is the loss of all those little gnomes in cubicles who used to keep track of everything.”

“We do have a lot of scientific data to share,” said Plato.

Chin smiled. “If I were you, I’d hold out for the highest bidder. There’s got to be some company somewhere that thinks it can make a profit off of what you’ve collected.”

Plato tipped his head. “Well, until then, I, um, I’m going to need some of those corporate points you were talking about.”

Hauptmann and Chin each glanced down at their weblinks; it was habit, really, nothing more, but…

But that nasty “unknown” was showing on the displays again, the devices having divined the implied question. Chin looked at Hauptmann. Hauptmann looked at Chin.

“Thafe a problem,” Chin said.

The first evidence of real trouble was on the noon newscast. Plato watched aghast with Chin and Hauptmann as the story was reported. Leo Johnstone, one of the Olduvai’s crew, had attempted to rape a woman over by the New Watergate towers. The security firm she subscribed to had responded to her weblink’s call for help, and Johnstone had been stopped.

“That idiot,” Plato said, shaking his head back and forth, as soon as the report had finished. “That bloody idiot.” He looked first at Chin and then at Hauptmann, and spread his arms. “Of course, there was a lot of pairing- off during our mission, but Johnstone had been alone. He kept saying he couldn’t wait to get back on terra firma. ‘We’ll all get heroes’ welcomes when we return,’ he’d say, ‘and I’ll have as many women as I want.’”

Hauptmann’s eyes went wide. “He really thought that?”

“Oh, yes,” said Plato. “‘We’re astronauts,’ he kept saying. ‘We’ve got the Right Stuff.’”

Hauptmann glanced down; his weblink was dutifully displaying an explanation of the arcane reference. “Oh,” he said.

Plato lifted his eyebrows. “What’s going to happen to Johnstone?”

Chin exhaled noisily. “He’s finished,” he said softly.

“What?” said Plato.

“Finished,” agreed Hauptmann. “See, until now he didn’t have a trustworthiness rating.” Plato’s face conveyed his confusion. “Since the day we were born,” continued Hauptmann, “other people have been commenting about us on the web. ‘Freddie is a bully,’ ‘Jimmy stole my lunch,’ ‘Sally cheated on the test.’”

“But surely no one cares about what you did as a child,” said Plato.

“It goes on your whole life,” said Chin. “People gossip endlessly about other people on the web, and our weblinks”—he held up his right arm so that Plato could see the device—“search and correlate information about anyone we’re dealing with or come physically close to. That’s why we don’t need governments anymore; governments exist to regulate, and, thanks to the trustworthiness ratings, our society is self-regulating.”

“It was inevitable,” said Hauptmann. “From the day the web was born, from the day the first search engine was created. All we needed was smarter search agents, greater bandwidth, and everyone being online.”

“But you spacers,” said Chin, “predate that sort of thing. Oh, you had a crude web, but most of those postings were lost thanks to electromagnetic pulses from the Colombian War. You guys are clean slates. It’s not that you have zero trustworthiness ratings; rather, you’ve got no trustworthiness ratings at all.”

“Except for your man Johnstone,” said Hauptmann, sadly. “If it was on the news,” and he cocked a thumb at the wall monitor, “then it’s on the web, and everyone knows about it. A leper would be more welcome than someone with that kind of talk associated with him.”

“So what should he do?” asked Plato. “What should all of us from the Olduvai do?”

There weren’t a million people on the Mall this time. There weren’t even a hundred thousand. And the mood wasn’t jubilant; rather, a melancholy cloud hung over everyone.

But it was the best answer. Everyone could see that. The Olduvai’s lander had been refurbished, and crews from Earth’s orbiting space stations had visited the mothership, upgrading and refurbishing it, as well.

Captain Plato looked despondent; Johnstone and the several others of the twenty-five who had now publicly contravened acceptable standards of behavior looked embarrassed and contrite.

Hauptmann and Chin had no trouble getting to the front of the crowd this time. They already knew what Plato was going to say, having discussed it with him on the way over. And so they watched the faces in the crowd—still a huge number of people, but seeming positively post-apocalyptic in comparison to the throng of a few days before.

“People of the Earth,” said Plato, addressing his physical and virtual audiences. “We knew we’d come back to a world much changed, an Earth centuries older than the one we’d left behind. We’d hoped—and those of us who pray had prayed—that it would be a better place. And, in many ways, it clearly is.

“We’ll find a new home,” Plato continued. “Of that I’m sure. And we’ll build a new society—one, we hope, that might be as peaceful and efficient as yours. We—all twenty-five of us—have already agreed on one thing that should get us off on the right foot.” He looked at the men and women of his crew, then turned and faced the people of the Free Earth for the last time. “When we find a new world to settle, we won’t be planting any flags in its soil.”

THE SHACKLES OF FREEDOM by Mike Resnick and Tobias S. Buckell

I came to New Pennsylvania because I was looking for a world with no government, no laws, nothing to hinder me from doing what I pleased. The colonists here hadn’t liked the laws back on Earth, so they set up shop, free of all bureaucracy and all regulations.

What I never bargained for was having to live with the consequences of that freedom.

* * *

Mark Suderman was dying on my operating table. His plain blue clothing, stained dark with blood, lay crumpled on the floor. I tried to avoid his brothers’ frightened glances. There was nothing more I could tell them, except to pray.

They couldn’t know it, but he was a dead man before I ever got a chance to examine him. I simply didn’t have the tools to save his life.

I sighed deeply. So much for freedom. This was the twenty-third time I had the freedom to watch a man die that I could have saved.

Hooves clip-clopped in the distance and then echoed their way up the driveway. The rest of the Suderman family had arrived.

“Stay here,” I told the brothers, then walked out through the dining room to my porch. A plank squeaked as I stopped next to the swing. Mr. Suderman, his hat in hand, stared straight up at me from the bottom of my tiny set of bleached stairs.