After showers in the entryway to rinse off the sticky salt, and a bandage on Boro’s little bite, they pointed the Manessa Kwi toward their next destination.
“Back in your kingdom, I had the blessing of my superiors to let the ship be seen — and attacked — by the local people to help with your training. Here we will follow the more usual practice of observing a culture as discretely as we can. Manessa can become almost completely invisible by adjusting hull color to match the sky. Occasionally someone will see us, but not really know what they are looking at, and we will soon be gone. Kibi, you are in command.”
Kibi’s city spread out in a shallow river valley near the sea, on the east side of a continent, not far from the equator. As they approached over the water, a brown haze choked the air, filling the entire valley.
“Looks like there was a forest fire,” Sata remarked.
“There are no forests nearby,” Ilika informed them from the steward’s station. “Switching to internal air.”
“Let’s start at three thousand meters just to get a look at the place,” Kibi said from the command chair.
“Down to thrusters one,” Mati requested. “I might need a high-resolution topographic.”
“Thrusters
one,”
Boro
confirmed.
Rini touched two symbols on his console. “High-rez on channel four.”
“How’s this?” Mati asked, slowing the ship directly over the city.
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 107
Rini provided several down-angle views and everyone stared in amazement. Shabby wooden buildings teetered three or four stories high, and people clogged narrow winding streets everywhere. Smoke billowed from countless chimneys to darken the air. Nowhere could the crew of the Manessa Kwi see any wide avenues, any plazas or squares, or any section of the city that might be better off.
“Yuck!” Kibi blurted out from the command chair. “We aren’t doing any shopping here!”
Ilika
smiled.
“Give us a short tour, Mati,” Kibi began, “just above the rooftops. You’re taking care of camouflage, Ilika?”
“Manessa takes care of it automatically, unless we override,” he assured.
The pilot lowered the ship and began to follow whatever street or drainage ditch caught her eye. Sometimes she had trouble telling the two apart. They repeatedly observed food taken by theft, if possible, open combat if necessary.
Dogs fought over scraps, or attacked children. Balconies and flat roofs contained more people, sometimes just sitting or lying side by side, sometimes fighting, occasionally being intimate without caring who might be watching. Smoldering piles of trash in every street added to the smoke.
“I have some interesting notes about this city from Manessa’s memory,”
Ilika announced. “There is no slavery here — these are all free people able to come and go as they please. Also, these people have such a high regard for
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 108
human life that there is no war, and no killing, even of criminals. For the same reason, no one is allowed to use any method to avoid pregnancy.”
Several troubled faces glanced at the captain, then turned back to their display screens.
Mati frowned deeply. “I’m sorry, but this is the most horrid place I can imagine. I’d rather be dead than live here.”
“Actually,” Ilika began, “in this culture you wouldn’t be allowed to die.
They keep everyone alive as long as possible, even if they are in pain and begging to die.”
“That’s not freedom!” Boro asserted. “I’d rather be a slave in our kingdom than a free person here.”
Rini didn’t have anything to add, but wore a sour expression as they continued to gaze at the dense urban scene below that contained nothing of color or beauty.
Kibi sighed. “Let’s look at the rest of the valley. Maybe the farmers are better off.”
Mati steered the ship westward and increased the altitude slightly.
“The river!” Sata yelled, pointing at her display. “It looks like . . . a sewer.
Black goo . . . dead animals floating by . . . dead people . . . I feel sick.”
Ilika grabbed a bowl from the galley, just in case she meant it.
Farmland came into view, but every field was ringed by little huts and campsites. Farmers with shovels and sticks tried to fend off the starving people, with little success.
“This can’t last,” Rini said, shaking his head. “They can’t even grow food.”
“It doesn’t last,” Ilika confirmed. “According to Manessa’s records, the population collapses about every hundred years. If people won’t control their reproduction, or limit their population through war, then the natural ecosystem will do it for them. Famine and disease sweep through the land and only a few survive. Then the cycle begins again.”
“What is this crap about a high regard for human life?” Boro challenged.
“These people aren’t living, they’re dying!”
Ilika nodded. “I agree. It’s one of those simple ideas that leads to its opposite when it’s used thoughtlessly.”
“You mean . . . by trying to keep everyone alive,” Mati began, still slowly
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 109
moving the ship through the river valley, “they’ve accomplished nothing but disease and death?”
“Exactly. Observers come here often because it’s such a clear-cut example of self-defeating social values.”
“From Nebador?” Rini wondered aloud.
“Yes, and even farther away.”
“This makes me remember what we were trying to do at Cattle Town,” Kibi shared. “I’m not sure I’ll be so interested in helping people solve their problems next time.”
The captain smiled slightly. “Helping people is a lot trickier than it sounds, as we learned at Cattle Town.”
“I’ve seen enough here,” Kibi announced. “Anyone else want to stay longer?”
No one made a sound.
“Flight objective, captain?” Kibi asked without turning around.
“Find us a place to hover with a nice view. Our next task requires some briefing.”
Deep Learning Notes
This chapter gives an excellent example of the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Only intelligence is needed to place a high value on human life.
Wisdom is required to realize that such a value cannot be taken to extremes, or implemented on all levels of society, without serious problems.
One problem was discussed by the crew. If any creature will not limit its reproduction by choice, or thin its population through conflict, then nature will do the job instead with famine and disease. There are no other options.
All ecosystems are limited, even for a species, like us, who can go everywhere on the planet. Infinite growth is not possible in a finite ecosystem. We humans of planet Earth have not yet come to terms with this reality.
But problems arise long before famine and disease limit a population. Since
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 110
all living creatures need roughly the same things to live (land, water, air, sunshine, etc.), any effort to maximize the population of one species will minimize the populations of all others. Although we might be able to live on a diet of just a few plants, would we want a world with nothing but people and a few food plants (say, wheat and soy beans)? Other animals and non-food plants would not be allowed because they would take up space, or eat food, that could be used for more people. (Don’t worry, it’s not possible because such a simple ecosystem would be completely unstable.) It is natural to place a higher value on your own species than another, and a higher value on a relative (by blood or marriage) than on a stranger. If we have the choice of saving a fellow human or a horse, we usually choose the human. If the choice is between brother and shopkeeper, brother usually wins. But this only works on the individual level. When we implement this idea on a societal level, such as by allowing the destruction of a forest so more houses can be built, we shrink the carrying capacity of the planet a little, and at the same time we raise our population a little.
Another problem, which we saw in the discussion about Kibi’s city, is that a population never arrives gracefully at the carrying capacity of its environment, and stays there without going over. Instead, it “overshoots” the carrying capacity because all of the possible corrections (birth control, war, famine, disease) take time to get going. Having jumped up well over the environment’s carrying capacity, the population will then “crash” quickly due to famine and disease, down to a fraction of the numbers that could have lived in the environment.
But also, in the process of overshooting, the environment is usually damaged, resulting in a lower carrying capacity than before. A human population, for example, that tries to recover from famine and disease, only to discover that the farmland is eroded and the water is polluted, will not be able to recover as quickly, nor reach the same population numbers (or quality of life) it had before.
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 111
Perhaps this is the ultimate test. We are a species with enough intelligence to
“subdue the Earth.” Will we find the wisdom to not destroy it?
