Inculcated Reflex and Disaster, Part 1: Shibboleths and HS2 Failure.

It's a curious paradox that, in order to be accepted into any intellectual circle, or any circle which aspires to intellectual status, an individual must learn to suppress original thought. If we can understand this paradox, we can understand how really great disasters happen, supposedly "without warning".

Acceptance into an intellectual circle is dependent on other intellectuals accepting that you are indeed one of them, and this is why the Nobel Laureate Prof. Richard Feynman refused membership of a sort of secret society for gifted people (which seemed to operate in every major college and university in the United States and possibly beyond), because the only point of membership was to assert one's intellectual status, not to make or facilitate any new discovery or insight. Unfortunately, very few of the world's intellectual elite share Feynman's insight; that membership of any self-defining elite can swiftly destroy your worth and usefulness as a person.

Now, the fact that acceptance into the circle is dependent on the other individuals in it, accepting that you are one of them, means, actually, that each one of them is as nervous of his status as you are. Therefore, they can only agree with your views and ideas if their survival instinct tells them that others will agree with you, too. So, although as a new member you are required to pronounce whatever the local shibboleth happens to be, there is also a  super-shibboleth at work, which threatens to expose and disgrace any establish member who accepts your pronunciation of the shibboleth when others don't.

In Britain, the Royal Society is, in theory, a collection of the nation's brightest and best scientists. In practice, like most similar organizations, it is instead a collection of the most influential British scientists. The Royal Society selects and refines its influential membership through a number of shibboleths, the most currently important of which is rejection of any sort of serious British space programme, especially manned, as a threat to "real science" or just an absurdity: something so ridiculous that all credibility is lost merely by suggesting that it is possible, let alone desirable. Something set up by King Charles the Second to oblige his ministers to become forward looking, inquiring and imaginative, has become a mechanism for opposing and covertly sabotaging the "wrong kind" of progress. The Royal Society stands a barrier between Britain and the second half of the Twentieth Century, let alone any part of the Twenty-first, when it ought to be getting its sights set on the Twenty-second Century by now.

The mechanism by which shibboleths disable a person's capacity for original thought is scientifically explicable: our conscious minds and our subconscious minds work in parallel all the time, and the primary task of the subconscious mind is the avoidance of danger. The sub-conscious mind does not analyse and understand things: it reacts to danger. It's definition of danger is harvested from the experiences of the conscious mind, but without the conscious mind usually being aware of what it is programming its subconscious "watchdog" system with. Shellshock is what the subconscious mind does when there is overwhelming danger which the conscious mind cannot evade or even understand, for a period of time. If the conscious mind knows it might die at any minute, and it isn't supplying any precise definition of what the signs are of the situation it must avoid in order to stay alive, the sub-conscious mind demands a reaction to almost everything.

For members of an elite, membership becomes the core of the individual's self-awareness and eventually the sub-conscious assigns any threat to that status the same significance as it would to a threat to life. The sub-conscious promptly does what it is there for, and speeds up the individual's responses to shibboleth-type situations by making the reaction happen before the conscious mind thinks anything through. Anything touching on matters which are perceived as crucial to the elite, is dealt with by developing a set of inculcated reflexes ("Pavlovian" is nearly but not quite the right word) which guide the individual away from the perceived danger as if it were a cliff edge or a fire. The fatal flaw of the human sub-conscious, is that this can condition the individual to ignore or even actively oppose, the very kind of warning to which he should be paying urgent attention: see the housing market-driven banking crash of 2008, or Stalin's refusal to allow Soviet forces to deploy or even make any preparation for Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" in 1941, despite being given two weeks warning and a quite reasonably accurate German order of battle by British Intelligence. The heroic outcome: the Red Army managing to halt and then defeat the German army just outside Moscow only by stupendous effort and massive sacrifice even with the help of the weather, should have been a routine and inexpensive annihilation of German invasion forces in summer while they were still safely hundreds of miles from Moscow. It was a Shibboleth of Stalin and the whole politburo, that the British were untrustworthy. manipulative liars, and that shibboleth killed millions of Russians. British Intelligence handed Stalin a chance to win the war before the Wansee conference, that launched Hitler's "final solution", had even taken place. Nearly all of the genocidal violence which the Jewish population experienced before the Wansee conference, occurred in the lands which Stalin lost control of primarily because he ignored British warnings.

And the cryptographic breakthroughs which allowed British Intelligence to offer that warning in the first place, wouldn't have been possible if the Nazis and German military leadership had not developed an "Enigma shibboleth" which made questioning the security of their encryption protocols seem like an act of disloyalty.

Once the proposed HS2 high-speed railway between London and Birmingham achieved "all party support", which in this case is defined as the leaderships of all three "main" political parties agreeing to support it without consulting their back benchers and membership, the necessity, benefits and inevitable success of HS2 immediately became a shibboleth of the British political elite. Precisely because of the importance of the matter, because the technical risks are significant and the financial risks are absolutely gigantic, the political elite started to ignore or reject anything which made anything of any of the risks or the huge unfairness with which half a million households must be treated in order to push the project through. 

This is the real reason why the Transport Secretary has just invoked what amount to war powers to keep secret a report, submitted to the Cabinet in 2011, which warns of the risks of HS2 failing in financial and political terms. (The risk of a purely technical failure: some part of the project proving technically impossible, has not yet even been considered so far as can be discerned by any document in the public domain.) Patrick McLoughlin claims that he is acting to protect the confidences of those civil servants who prepared the report, though he has no such respect for those who have authored material in support of the project and he publishes their work widely and freely. The truth is, he is acting to protect, not the process by which the report was prepared, but the process by which it was ignored by the political elite, acting on their inculcated reflexes.

One doesn't need to know what the report says to know why it has to be secret: if it raised serious doubts, or issued some grave warning, and ministers (with the support of the opposition leader) had decided to press ahead anyway, based on a reappraisal or some fresh evidence, that would be perfectly respectable and there would be no call for secrecy. The reason for keeping such a report secret for so long can only lie in how that report was dealt with in the decision-making process and not in its content. Perhaps campaigners should amend their freedom of information requests to cover the way the report was considered after being submitted, rather than anything which involves its content or the privacy of those civil servants who compiled it?

Although the blog author does not know of any equivalent report covering technical, rather than financial, risks to the HS2 project, any plan which involves a river diversion near where the A52, important existing railways and the proposed HS2 railway all intersect the river Erewash, must have been subjected to some well-informed scepticism by one or more engineers by now. The apparent silence on this issue suggests that there is another report, so threatening to the HS2 shibboleth, that even its existence has been kept secret. There is, however, a set of outline descriptions of the civil engineering challenges for each bit of track: Please accept the preceding link as acknowledgement of the source of the extract below.

3.5.4
In the vicinity of the station and Toton Yard, the existing Trent Junction to Chesterfield (Erewash Valley) line would be diverted to pass through the proposed new station on the modified existing network, and this line would lie to the east of the high speed alignment along this length. Trains from the high-level lines would also be able to bypass the new station by utilising the new rail flyover that passes over the high speed alignment, and rejoining the Trent Junction to Chesterfield line alongside Sandiacre after passing through Toton Yard.

Toton station to Trowell

3.5.5
North of Toton, the high speed route would reduce from six tracks to four and then two tracks, and it would then pass under the bridge carrying the A52 Brian Clough Way over the current railway (2). The extent of the alteration of the lateral positioning of existing lines, as well as the introduction of HS2, would require that the existing bridge be demolished and replaced. As the A52 could not be closed for the duration required to achieve these works, either a new permanent off-line bridge would be constructed or a temporary off-line diversion and associated temporary structure would be needed.

3.5.6
North of the A52, the River Erewash would require diversion over approximately 100m to avoid conflict with the realigned existing lines.

3.5.7
Further north from the A52, Derby Road crosses the existing lines (3). There is insufficient vertical clearance under this structure to accommodate the new high-speed lines, and the horizontal positions of the high speed and realigned existing lines would conflict with the supports of the existing structure. The structure would therefore have to be demolished and replaced about 2m higher.

3.5.8
North of Derby Road, the route would rise in level, climb out of the Erewash Valley, and swing eastwards to run parallel to the M1, north of Stanton Gate. About 550m north of Derby Road, the route would cross the River Erewash, the Erewash Canal and the realigned existing Erewash rail lines, on a 780m viaduct (4).

The blog author is somewhat inclined to bet that one of the sections of HS2 most likely to halt the entire project for technical reasons, is highlighted above. Note that the A52 has to be permanently realigned merely to allow the river to be moved in order to allow the existing railway to be moved to allow the HS2 line to be built without a low radius bend in it. This is entirely a consequence of ministers setting a specification for a very high track speed of 400 kph, (for prestige reasons and no other), when the need they are supposedly meeting is one of capacity. Even the brief summaries of engineering challenges are so vast in aggregate that he cannot be sure that there are not dozens of other sections like this. Despite the utter indifference of the political elite to any problem besetting a shibboleth project, the civil service is methodical and the blog author expects that they will have commissioned reports and assessments, or will do so shortly. The blog author is also quietly confident that the political elite will ignore these in their own decision-making and suppress news of their existence in order to avoid the political embarrassment of using war powers to prevent their publication.


PS:
The above should also give some clue as to why a degree of privacy is essential to mental health: if a person is concerned (or knows for certain under many regimes) that any thought they might voice, or note down, can be heard, observed or recorded and then used against them in some way, then conscious attempts at self-censorship will turn into a reflex by which the sub conscious mind attempts to keep the conscious mind out of trouble by stopping it from thinking at all. It's not just a question of the harm that may be done by intrusive surveillance by the state: many elite groups and cults require candidates and members to open their whole lives, including their innermost thoughts, up to constant scrutiny and in many cases systematic and relentless criticism. It's almost impossible that such a process will fail to do damage.

Cameron's Gay Marriage Bill and Dystopia

See bottom of article for update.
This article isn't about the rights and wrongs of gay marriage in general: it is about the Bill currently going through Parliament, what it might be intended to achieve, and how the kind of sexual revolution it purports to be part of, fits in with dystopian societies as envisaged by the leading dystopian writers: Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. The author has read B.F. Skinner's "Walden Two" and isn't disposed to deal with it here, as it's too much of  a paean to experimental psychology to offer much insight into anyone's future in the real world. (For example: making the great psychologist's disciples put teacups on strings to avoid spilling any tea.)

The columnist Suzanne Moore has said that the bill offers conformity rather than equality, which may be true in a way, but it's also a reminder that the institution of marriage in general has some very prominent and formidable foes.

A much more insightful quote, which betrays thought rather than reflex, comes from the Labour MP for East Ham, Mr Stephen Timms:

Children are at the heart of marriage... but they are barely mentioned at [all in] the Bill. The Bill aims to open up the benefits of marriage to people excluded from it at the moment but it is doing [that] at the price of taking away a significant part of its meaning.

There have also been some much loved national figures declaring their determination to take advantage of the Bill's provisions at the earliest possible opportunity, and nobody with a heart would, for instance, want to deny Alice Arnold the undoubted joys and privilege of Clare Balding's hand in marriage.

Supporters and many opponents of the bill have used a great many words, Mr Timms who is a critic of the Bill, but not necessarily its ostensible intent, has used very few.  His concise analysis is that the Bill all but ignores the primary purpose of marriage and diminishes its meaning. The latter is probably a reference to the Prime Minister's inexplicable determination that the Bill will be used to remove all legal meaning from the words "husband" and "wife" with their resulting deletion from all kinds of official forms. This aspect isn't recognised or acknowledged by many supporters, either of the Bill itself or gay marriage in general, and it may actually prove a disappointment to many gay couples:

Miss Balding's publicly stated reason for wanting to marry Miss Arnold rather than be satisfied with a civil partnership, is that she dislikes "civil partner" as a term for someone she loves very deeply. If the Bill is passed as drafted, and implemented across all other affected legislation in the manner the Prime Minister has indicated and stubbornly demands, then Miss Arnold will never actually be acknowledged as Miss Balding's "wife" for any official or legal purpose. All spouses will be something very similar to "partners" and that's precisely what Miss Balding dislikes about their current arrangements.

It's an instance of equality being achieved by taking something away from heterosexual couples without actually giving homosexual couples the full deal they yearn for. Careful note should be taken when the authors of the Bill are utterly unmovable on awkward and frustrating details which don't seem at all necessary to their declared purpose. 

If it's inappropriate for one woman to be the wife of another (and how equal is that?) can't we mine the world's richest and most expressive language to adopt a nicer and more elegant word for it and let heterosexual couples remain "wife" and "husband" in the eyes of the law, too? The last thing Miss Balding seems to be asking for is any linguistic camouflage for her loving relationship with Miss Arnold, or for everyone else to have to adopt the ugly terminology imposed upon it.

George Orwell saw that language was not merely a powerful tool, but a deadly weapon in the wrong hands. If gay marriage is to be a positive institution, then the associated language needs to be elegant and expressive of love, rather than giving one's partnership status in a purely bureaucratic way which expresses nothing whatsoever. And yet, this is the part of the Bill upon which the Prime Minister has his heart set and he has made it clear that no compromise or change whatsoever will be accepted. The most negative aspect of the Bill, is something that he strongly desires. That will bear further discussion when we get around to dystopian societies, below.

If the meaning of marriage is being changed, indeed nullified, by the Bill, what of the purpose of marriage? As Mr Timms noted, children are barely mentioned.

 This may be because for a homosexual couple to have children other than through adoption, either a third party has to be involved, or they must have access to a level of technological intervention which has is not yet feasible, but obviously might be, one day.  In theory, the third party might be involved only until a child is conceived or handed over, with the homosexual couple assuming full and sole responsibility for it from that point on. Except that laws, which the government (and indeed, the opposition) have no intention of changing, forbid any such thing, for any straightforward way of achieving this. No male who donates sperm in the United Kingdom to allow a lesbian couple to have a baby, can legally surrender all responsibility for the child, no matter how strenuously the lesbian couple may draft and sign agreements to that end. And an amendment to existing laws, going through the works even as the gay marriage Bill begins its legislative passage, will make it impossible for sperm donors' rights to fatherhood of their donor children, to be signed away or otherwise denied. Not quite a barrier, but perhaps a lifelong annoyance and a pretext for legal action or official intrusion at any time.

For some reason, and equality can't be it, though extreme wealth might be, some male homosexual couples have been able to jointly father children by surrogate mothers (usually or solely outside the United Kingdom so far as the author knows) without apparently sharing any long-term rights or responsibilities with the surrogate mother or egg donor (by no means necessarily the same woman). Presumably, English courts are perceiving  this process as a form of adoption, or perhaps because of the wealth and status of the handful of couples so far involved, not perceiving it accurately at all. Legalities aside, surrogate motherhood is a (very) rich man's sport. Paradoxically and ludicrously, the only way a lesbian couple, married or otherwise, could achieve the same undiluted rights over and responsibility for, their children, would be if they, too, involved a surrogate mother, with neither of the lesbian couples carrying the child, but possibly one donating an egg via IVF, and then effectively adopting the child when the surrogate gave it up.

The passage of the current Bill, will not allow a married lesbian couple to have undiluted and unqualified charge of children which either of the couple carry in their own womb, conceived with the aid of  a sperm donor. Technology might one day allow a technical work-around for the law, but it's not possible yet and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive when it is. As long as the embryo has a detectable biological father, English and Scottish law duly detects him and assigns him rights and responsibilities.

The stumbling blocks for most lesbian and gay couples wishing to raise a family of their own as a married couple, don't lie in the marriage laws at all, but in other pieces of legislation, which Mr Cameron's government has no intention of changing, other than to make them tighter, as with the tweak to the law on sperm donors' rights and responsibilities.

Conversely, adoption by gay couples has been made much easier, thanks to a concerted and single-minded effort by three successive governments, which also had the effect of removing nearly all Christian adoption agencies from the field. Three prime ministers and governments including all three "main" political parties unswervingly followed the same path. Making gay adoption easier at the same time as making it somewhat awkward for gay couples of average wealth to contrive to have their own children, seems to be the subject of a somewhat unlikely political consensus.

So, to sum up what the Bill, and other measures happening separately but concurrently, would appear to do: it materially and detrimentally affects heterosexual married couples far more than is being headlined, and advantages lesbian and gay couples who wish to be married and "normalised" a great deal less than most of them appear to believe. If the purpose of marriage for gay couples is to raise a family, as it has always been for heterosexual couples, then other laws and official attitudes will have to change a lot more than seems likely at the moment, unless the family they are to raise has been taken away from somebody else. On this score, the Bill grants lesbians and gays an illusion of progress and nothing more.

A cynical interpretation would be that the probable outcome is the intended outcome, and that the gay rights lobby is being used as cannon fodder for a disguised attack on the institution of marriage, and by implication the Christian Church. This would be the very opposite of what Mr Cameron claims to be his intent, not that it'd be the first time he or his immediate predecessors have claimed one thing and done the precise opposite. The gay rights lobby, like all cannon-fodder, is unlikely to gain from the experience, but can console itself by blaming and witch-hunting "bigots" and "Christians" for any frustrations and disappointments which are already inherent in what is being proposed.

For any analysis of would-be dystopian regimes, an understanding of "divide and rule" is essential.

The other key quality of the Bill, is that it stirs up trouble out of any possible proportion to the minimal advantages it bestows upon the minority it purports to benefit. Whether there might be a much smaller minority which might benefit much more, is another question.

How all this ties into Dystopia:

First of all, we have to consider how fictional dystopias, as in "Brave New World", "1984" and Zamyatin's "We", as well as real-world dystopias such as North Korea and the former Argentine Junta, see families and marriages as a platform for raising children. In the case of "Brave New World" and "We",  families do not really exist, except that the elite castes in Brave New World retain surnames, often ones with a high reader recognition factor, such as "Rothschild". In "1984" and the real world North Korea, families are seen as essentially disciplinary units, though not in the same way.

In "1984" marriages are tolerated only for couples to have children, and those who fail to produce any are under official pressure to divorce and move apart by a significant geographical distance. In real world North Korea, whole families are routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed for the "crimes" of one individual. This does not happen in "1984", at least as long as the family members follow the rules about denouncing traitors. When Winston Smith, to his surprise, finds himself sharing a holding cell at the Ministry of Love with his super-loyalist neighbour, Parsons, Parsons express pride in the fact that it was his little girl who reported him for muttering "I hate Big Brother" in his sleep. What Parsons is expressing, of course, is relief that his daughter has the ruthless instincts necessary to survive under Party rule. 

In the same scene, two women in the holding cell are probably lesbian lovers, and it's also pretty obvious from the context that this is their crime. 

It is explicit throughout "1984", that marriages are solely for the purpose of producing children for the Party. And the Thought Police officer. O'Brien, who interrogates Smith, claims that the Party is seeking a scientific means of removing all pleasure from the act of procreation. (This puts the Party in line with the traditional ethos of Fettes College, which is that pupils are to lust after everything in life, except sex. Money, power, acquisition of great art, but no sex. If you want to understand our possible future, it does no harm to take note of what's taught at the schools which educate our would-be rulers.) In that kind of context, lesbians have no future at all, and male homosexuals would probably have to be very, very useful to the Party to survive. Which would mean they'd need to be the most ruthless and treacherous beasts around.

In "Brave New World" children are produced entirely on an industrial basis, and entirely to plan. There are no families as such, but elite genetic lines  are recognised and perpetuated. There is an awful lot of sex, especially orgies for the elite, and even the drudges are encouraged to perform, (only with each other), but affectionate relationships are deeply unfashionable for most, out of the question for the elite, and tolerated only for the lowest castes, who are all deliberately mentally handicapped anyway. Clumsy relationships between members of the lowest castes are a source of patronising amusement for those who supervise them. Love is almost universally seen as a weakness. Sexual "freedom" is taken to the extreme where it must surely be oppressive.

In "We", children are again effectively an industrial product, though there's not really a caste system, more a differentiation by a "Number's" area of expertise. Sex is by arrangement and absurdly formalised, but anyone can ask for a ticket to have sex with anyone else and there's no absolute right of refusal: the only leeway is the arrangement of a mutually acceptable appointment. Everyone lives in glass apartments, and blinds can be lowered during sex at specified times, not at any other time, or for any other purpose. When D-503 commits a rape, his female victim is desperate, not to protect herself, but to get D-503 to observe these social rules.

It's worth noting that in his follow-on to "Brave New World", "Brave New World Revisited" (an extended essay rather than another novel) Aldous Huxley states that his dystopia, Orwell's and Zamyatin's,  despite their differences, could all be the same dystopian society at different stages in its evolution.  (With Huxley's own work representing a period between "1984" and "We"). The author would also like to point out that Orwell's pre-war novel "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" whilst not a dystopia in itself, could have sown the seeds for much of the post-war "Ad Man's Dystopian Science Fiction" such as "The Space Merchants". A lot of the subliminal manipulations which preoccupy Huxley in "Brave New World Revisited" are not there in "1984" but are on view in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying". Written a long time before anyone but Orwell had really cottoned on to the marketing industry's tricks.

So, a dystopian regime still fighting for its existence resents both the energy wasted in sex and any affection for anyone but Big Brother, but needs children to raise as cannon-fodder, so a loveless, mechanical but productive  marriage is the ideal.

A dystopian regime facing no external threats, able to produce children industrially to order, but still seeking to refine its control of human society, outlaws marriage or any kind of genuine affection, except for the least mentally able castes. But its citizens at all levels are required to have regular sex and consume recreational drugs, the elite needing to be the most heroically hedonistic of all castes.

In "We", a dystopian regime which has, or at least thinks that it has, conquered all that Earth has to offer, bestows a lot more superficial freedom than the more primitive dystopias, but is still jealous of anyone harbouring affection for anyone but the Benefactor, and to some degree his secret police, the Guardians. (D-503 rather admires, in a not quite sexual way, the one Guardian that he knows personally, and it seems that either the Guardians are designedly attractive, or that society is somehow deeply programmed so that all Numbers tend to admire the Guardians.) So anyone can ask to have sex with anyone else, presumably even including Guardians, but it has to be done in a completely unromantic way, as a way of dealing with a physical urge. Anything deeper, is suspect and dangerous.

In a way, the population of the City in "We" is composed exclusively of the elite caste from "Brave New World", even though "We" was written a generation earlier. Huxley may have been consciously trying to work out how mankind might have gotten from the nineteen thirties to "We", but it's also worth noting that "We" is indeed a society where only the elite have survived and there is no underclass within the City, which is completely independent of the world "beyond the green wall."

So, dystopian regimes are not necessarily "sexually repressive" and may indeed make sexual activity mandatory. It's evident that any celibate citizen of Huxley's world will be swiftly corrected in some way. Anyone who avoids recreational drugs will be dealt with even more swiftly! A polar opposite of the Taliban, but just as oppressive.

It isn't at all hard to see a great deal of Huxley's "Brave New World" in where we are at the moment, but it's quite not so easy to see much of his dystopia in where Cameron's Gay Marriage Bill might take us.

There is a significant echo of Orwell's "1984" in the way that the Bill will strip the emotional and spiritual meaning from heterosexual marriage, making it in effect just a form of partnership to create children.  That was always its purpose, but never its sole meaning. But the purpose, having children, is notably absent from the Bill itself.

"We" a world where only the elite survive, is visible in the way that very wealthy male homosexuals will be free to go to California with an enormous wad of cash and reproduce via surrogates in a manner not available to most others; the somewhat more direct route to reproduction available to lesbians being subject to at least a (recently strengthened) legal deterrent if not yet a ban. In the real world, it is perhaps the deep ecologists, rather than the gay rights lobby, who come closest to actually wanting the world of "We". Because it is they seriously propose eliminating more than 90% of the human population -and totally controlling the reproduction rights of the survivors, along with complete societal control over the raising and education of what few children they are allowed to have.

There are disturbing echoes of classic fictional dystopia in Mr Cameron's Bill and where it seems designed to take us, but the most powerful parallels are with a real world dystopia, which we haven't really discussed in detail yet:

Argentina under the military Junta, and other Falangist states, such as Franco's Spain.

We enter dangerous and heretical waters as far as liberal political thought is involved here, because Margaret Thatcher fought a war against the Junta (no matter how hard her Foreign Secretary and his ministers of state had tried to sell the pass first) and this means that the Junta was a victim of Thatcher and can't have been as bad as the lying Tories make out.

No, they were much worse. But the way in which it was worse still isn't grasped by anyone much outside Argentina, to this day.

There was no widespread racial genocide, the original colonial River Plate Province government having done most of what was necessary in that direction (only 1% of Argentina's population has native American origins, and they dare not use native American names). There was extreme nationalist rhetoric, but it wasn't particularly racial. Economic control was exercised by the traditional Peronist method of having state-controlled (not exactly state-owned) combines in charge of each major industry, though trade unions were banned rather than being state-controlled, as in Peron's day. Economic control was pretty much as it had been under Peron: the real difference lay in the pioneering mechanisms of social control, which Peron hadn't seriously attempted, though General Franco had, in Falangist Spain.

Again, because what Franco did wasn't really understood outside Spain (except for Argentina, of course) what happened has largely gone unnoticed. 

The Argentine military  Junta exercised social control through the adoption of children.

Loyalists, and promising potential loyalists, were given children to adopt. Dissidents with children disappeared and their children were those adopted by loyalists. The fate of the vanished children was used to blackmail friends and relatives of vanished dissidents into silence, though there was never the slightest intent on the Junta's part ever to give the children back.

Those who were considered delinquent rather than dissident, had been at risk of losing their children before the Junta even came to power. This had no doubt given officials some useful practice.

The vanished dissidents were indeed murdered by the thousand, how will be described below, but all were aware before they died that their children had been taken away from their relatives and would be brought up by their opponents, to believe and stand for the opposite of what their natural parents had believed and stood for. If grandparents and other relatives tried to track the children down, or demand their return, they were threatened with death and quite often killed.

 The method of execution was unusual: condemned couples, and they often were couples, who'd been held separately, would find themselves reunited at an airfield, only to be sedated. Some of them do seem to have been forced to sign documents relating to their children before being sedated. More as a way of forcing them to be aware of what was being done, rather than because their permission was being sought. Outer clothing, sometimes most clothing, would be removed. They would be taken to a twin-engined utility aircraft (not usually a large one) with a military doctor and a couple of "cargo hands".

The plane would fly out over the South Atlantic, the doctor would administer an injection; this seems to have been a muscle relaxant to prevent any struggle which would endanger the crew during what happened next. No authority has said the dissidents were unconscious at the last, merely incapacitated. With the dissidents unable to struggle and the aircraft flying at height over a strong ocean current well out at sea, the two cargo handlers would toss the dissidents out of the cargo door, one by one. The fall was from a great enough height to break the bodies on impact with the sea and carry them under. The ocean current having been well chosen, nothing identifiable survived by the time that current would have brought anything back to land. The removal of clothing, and especially shoes, must have played an important role in the elimination of the bodies, because floating shoes and overcoats have sometimes protected feet and other body parts from marine animals and decomposition for many months.

This was a far more expert process than many assume: it was brutal, but the evidence was at least as thoroughly destroyed as in the gas ovens in Nazi concentration camps, and the method did not require any equipment specific to mass killing at all. The aircraft used could have delivered flour or other essentials to remote communities, and sometimes they probably did.

As well as the terror of falling from a great height, and nobody has ever suggested that the dissidents did not know that this is what was in store, nor can anyone say they were unconscious when they fell, they would have known that their children, had they any, were to be brought up by the enemy, to stand for the complete opposite of what they stood for. No Jew died in the holocaust knowing that his children would be raised as Nazis, merely that they were probably dead already. In God's hands, not the Devil's.

Relating the Junta's social control methods to Cameron's Bill:

Legalizing gay marriage in a legislative and bureaucratic climate where, for all but the wealthiest, gay couples will encounter disincentives to build families by any means other than adoption, creates a huge demand for children to adopt. Ministers have already exploited a scandal over the sexual grooming of children in (privatised) local authority children's homes to state that a much higher percentage of children taken into care will be adopted. This means that there is going to be a presumption against returning them to their natural parents in most circumstances.

If all these newly married gay couples are to have the children they yearn for, in the way in which the government is prepared to let them have children, then someone else is going to conceive, bear and lose those children. The recent case in Rotherham, where a foster-couple famously had three children snatched away from them "for being UKIP supporters" was actually more notable for the fact that the children in question had been taken from a Slovak immigrant couple on the most questionable of grounds.

The "necessary" secrecy surrounding all workings of the family courts, has been used to conceal from the British public the fact that there have already been diplomatic protests from the Slovak government about the very high number of Slovak families living in Britain who have had their children taken into care and offered for adoption. The grounds on which any child is taken is, of course, a secret protected by the family courts. But some local authorities are seizing children from certain ethnic groups on an industrial scale, and others, notably in Norfolk and Suffolk, are using the slightest suggestion of a learning difficulty or other minor handicap on the part of the natural parents, as a pretext for taking children away.

Just as the Gay Marriage Bill promises to make about a tenth of the adult population into adoptive parents, the State seems already geared up and tooled up to go out and grab enough children to satisfy that demand. Once that practice is established, we can probably take it as read that protesting, about anything, will make it more likely that your children will be taken. Already seems to be the case, in fact.

General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri Castelli would have been proud of David Cameron.

Update:

 It seems that behind the layers of secrecy associated with the family courts system, the adoption and fostering sector in the UK has been in the process of realignment towards a new goal since circa 2007.

Many of the web posts relating to this have been killed, apparently by court order.

However, there are web discussions taking place outside UK jurisdiction that might give readers a legal starting point. Go to the link and work outwards from there. This author isn't going to give readers any directions or conclusions, because it's not yet clear what's really going on. But it doesn't, so far, seem at all incompatible with his conclusions, above.

Pilgrim Process

This, the author's Dystopia, is published by him at both Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords (in several useful formats). The latter makes it available via a number of affiliate libraries, to include Sony in due course. It is already available via:

Diesel e-books.

Barnes and Noble "Nook"

Kobo


For any reader who does not own a dedicated e-reader device:
Amazon do a downloadable free reader for PCs and Mac, Android etc. that will read their normal "MOBI" format e-books, and Adobe do a very acceptable free "Digital Editions" reader for PCs etc. to read the EPUB (and PDF/A) editions available from Smashwords and most of their affiliates.

Dedication

The work is dedicated to Alan Myers and Sadie Martineau. A very useful website of Alan's work, including his Literary Guide and "Famous People" which are are must for anyone researching literature or culture in North East England, could once be found, but The Alan Myers Website seems to have disappeared, probably because there's nobody paying the subs.

Sadie was not such a public figure and there is currently no website in her memory. Alan's article on Yevgeny Zamyatin is a recommended read for anyone who's finished reading "Pilgrim Process".

The cover illustration is by Laura Hoerster.

The author also has a Smashwords page which will have news of future publications.

The ISBN for the Kindle Direct Publishing edition is 9780957157606

Review.
Pilgrim Process has been reviewed, on Smashwords by Dr Joel Huberman and by Kitty Hundal. 

Update 11/03/2017: Originally written in 1996, this novel predicts a global version, the "Monetary Accounting Unit" or MAU, of what is now being referred to as the "Fedcoin" that is, an electronic currency that's not even paper.

Laura Hoerster

Laura Hoerster is the artist who created the cover image for "Pilgrim Process". She is a graduate illustrator living in Texas, currently working as a conceptual artist and illustrator on her second movie project so far. The author would prefer any downloads of this image that readers intend to circulate or reproduce, to be the titled version on the article for Pilgrim Process. The original is included here so that editors and producers can gain some idea of Laura's capabilities as an illustrator and, if the mission requires it, cartoonist.

More of Laura's work can be found, and commissioned, on this link.

Forest Series: "Protegée"

Protegée, the third of the Forest series of hard Science Fiction novels, shows Eleanian Society dealing with the evil when a small part of the rest of the human race re-invents slavery and the rest of the human race looks the other way. At the same time, Eleanian Society begins to rediscover its own values and direction, becoming once more outward-looking and pioneering, without, of course, jeopardising the world they have built to suit themselves. Interested publishers can contact the author by e-mail.

Protegée is Copyright (c) M.K. Spencer 2007



 Chapter 1,         Sentinels

Amanda reminded herself, not for the first time, that it was because of her promotion that she was stuck out on the periphery of the system in an interceptor, trying to frighten passing traffic into respecting Eleanian jurisdiction. An image floated before her eyes, of a nice, big, white, trans-atmospheric “Swallow.” The vision was flying in honest air, soaring, banking, gliding and rolling down a runway to let its pilot get her body under a shower and into bed, there to lay her face to rest against her lover’s breasts.
    The big and white theme of the daydream continued: June’s body was incredible, deliciously curvy and yet firm and pneumatic. Apart from the obvious delights of a body built like an adventure playground, June was beautiful of face and voice, highly intelligent and, as Director of the University Department of Stellar Science, interested in space and spacecrew. Her one fault was that she wasn’t in the Space Corps and, more specifically, she wasn’t in the interceptor or anywhere else within several billion miles. Amanda returned to unpleasant reality and wriggled out of the minimal sleeping berth at the back of the control cabin.
    Her fellow crewmember was strapped into one of  two acceleration couches, which more-or-less filled the cabin. The other girl, Harriet, was junior in terms of rank and length of service. However, the young sub-lieutenant had served more time on this particular type of craft and duty than Amanda. “I’ll relieve you now if you like, Harry.” “I’m afraid not, Captain; that berth hasn’t got the room and, besides, I’ve been saving up my sexual tension for my next leave. Apparently, my kid sister has been passing my holo round at her school and I have a healthy fan club of sixteen year-olds. I’ve told her that if any of them want to visit the Capital this summer, I’ll put them up in my flat.”
    Amanda sighed. Sub-lieutenants had changed neither their sense of humour nor their tendency to plan their lives around hopeful fantasies since, well, since she’d been the old-fashioned equivalent of one herself. “Unless you’re really into crisp thighs and innocence, young lady, I’d advise you to stick to older women; they have more stamina and, at your age, well: you’re still learning. I expect that you’ve read Susan Appleby’s ‘A Young Lady’s Guide to her Best Friend’s Body?’” “As a matter of fact, I haven’t. Is it a required text?” “It is, if you’re planning team games with schoolgirls.”
    As she strapped in, Amanda reflected that the fan club might very well have gawped at the book themselves; it was part of teenage culture these days, apparently. She decided to keep quiet about the fact that she knew the author: people in the Corps might draw the wrong assumptions about the relationship. “Okay, Lieutenant, let’s go to work. What’s the intelligence about our slot for the next ten hours?”
    “One freighter contact, expected to traverse our sector in four hours time. It isn’t anything scheduled as inbound to our system and there’s no obvious reason why it’s going through our space to get to anywhere else. We see this kind of thing hardly ever, if at all.
    “Passenger Starships not calling at our system sometimes route themselves past it on the way to other colonies, so that they aren’t too far from help at the midpoint of their journey. We’re informed about all of those and all official inbound traffic is cleared long in advance. Casual visits have been the province of wandering Terran military craft up to now, apart from past instances of covert entry by the Sirurians.” Amanda knew far more about that than Harriet probably did, but she let her lieutenant finish telling her about the job.
    “The Terrans don’t intrude as a matter of policy. It’s just that some commanders don’t realize that the rule actually matters here and that we’re capable of enforcing it. I daresay that it’s only that capability of ours that causes the Terrans to publish such a rule in the first place; they’ve developed a depressing tendency towards imperiousness.”
    “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To educate the commanders about the rules and, through them, the Terran Government. Right! This contact, classified as a freighter by whoever tracked it last, has a right of transit, provided that it’s carrying no contraband et cetera. But since it didn’t bother to obtain clearance, or even notify us, we’ll harass it to the limits of our legal rights. We can’t let people sneak past just because they can’t be bothered to get themselves cleared!
    “This also gives us a chance to do a practice interception. As the contact is unregistered, we’ll treat it as potentially dangerous and pretend that it’s a military craft. Programme the combat computer for running analysis; I want to know immediately if it really does start behaving like a military craft, or shows signs of detecting us before we hail it. It might really be hostile; there are supposedly such things as pirates in some systems, though I think that’s a fairy tale myself. There really is such a place as Siruria, however. Just between you and me, I’ve been there and they weren’t friendly.”
    “Where do you want to intercept it from?” “Point two steradians away from dead astern. I don’t want to run over anything that it jettisons and accelerates away from, but I don’t want to overshoot if it evades. Not that we can’t correct and come round faster than they’ll ever believe, but I want them to be overawed by the effortless manner with which we match vectors with one fluid movement. That way, we look impressive without even giving them an inkling of how manoeuvrable we really are. Then, if they fail to slow to sublight speed when transiting our controlled space, we’re in a safe position to launch a faster-than-light attack.”
    Harriet was impressed: it seemed that Amanda had at least done the reading for this job. Few trans-atmospheric pilots, slung out here for deep space command experience, sounded so confident on their first patrol in charge. She set up the vectors to take them to a position where they could approach the contact from Amanda’s preferred aspect, before unstrapping and trying to get a couple of hour’s sleep in the berth which Amanda had vacated.
    When Harriet’s alarm woke her up with an hour to spare before they started serious interception manoeuvres, she realized the full import of Amanda’s aside. If Amanda hadn’t done this before, she had done something other than fly Swallows around. Not that flying those huge things in and out of a turbulent atmosphere wasn’t a skilled occupation; Harriet preferred vacuum herself: there was no windshear there. It was just that Siruria meant an interstellar mission, something that the Space Corps didn’t generally do, except for training or scientific purposes. Her people didn’t have any great reason for going to any of the other colonies: the Terrans carried most of the interstellar trade and the all-female Eleanian society was culturally incompatible with the others.
    Again, Terran diplomats came to them, rather than vice versa, and what little Harriet knew of Siruria led her to believe that nobody sane would ever wish to go there. But Amanda had said that they weren’t friendly. Just possibly, her captain wasn’t here by chance: what if the intruder really was Sirurian?
    Junior officers don’t believe that their superiors ever do anything in a straightforward manner, they come to suspect that everything contains a hidden factor designed either to test or unfairly hazard poor hard-working sub-lieutenants. Harriet strapped herself in and began checking for combat in deadly earnest.
    This far from the system’s primary, the blacked-out interceptor wasn’t visible to the unaided eye. Had there been anything much in the way of light, an observer would have seen a spire-nosed cylinder, some sixty feet long by eighteen in diameter. The control cabin was in the centre, behind the weapons bay and in front of the drives.
    Because of the role of mass, both in the distortion caused by faster-than-light travel and in gravitational sensors, the interceptor wasn’t heavy. Around a fifth of its current mass consisted of offensive and passive decoys and actual missiles. An offensive decoy being one that refuses to be ignored by trying very hard to ram the sensor system which it is trying to distract. The passive decoys were useful primarily when the consequences of an offensive decoy going all the way home couldn’t be tolerated.
    The difference between an offensive decoy and a missile was that the latter was designed for near-zero detectability and carried either a number of independently-manoeuvring kinetic kill projectiles, or an X-ray lasing warhead. In addition to all these, there were a number of faster-than-light drones. These could be used for many purposes, including communication, surveillance, FTL target tracking, FTL attack -and one or two other tricks. Where two objects under FTL drive were concerned, warheads were mostly superfluous.
    The interceptor also carried a couple of fast-tracking multi-purpose lasers. Most of the remaining mass was shielding and the FTL and reaction drives. The electronic warfare and communications suites, despite their sophistication and power, didn’t take up very much room, which left the designers just enough scope for a highly durable and damage-tolerant life-support system.
    The interceptor wasn’t designed for long patrols, nor was it really meant to travel between the stars. It was purely the most cost-effective means of providing cover for the Eleanian star system. It, and many others like it, operated from a number of space stations in various orbits around the system primary. There were also countless robot weapons systems, particularly in areas where the interceptors would have trouble providing an immediate presence.
    These last, however, were only trusted with fire authority during actual hostilities, when any unidentified contact could be engaged. It was a constant preoccupation of Space Corps pilots that nobody in Planetary Defence was ever given sufficient excuse to turn any of this arsenal of automata loose, at least not while they were in the way.

****

As they commenced their interception run, Harriet obtained Amanda’s permission to dispatch the customary pair of drones, one to report what they were planning to do, the other to loiter recording events, returning either to them or to their station, depending on how well things went.
    This being done, Harriet monitored the output of the computers as they searched for signs of the contact. She was just about to draw her captain’s attention to the data, when Amanda made it clear she’d already noticed.
    “Okay, Harry. The contact has passed our jurisdiction marker beacon and it hasn’t slowed to sublight speed for recognition. Curiosity as to why is the only reason we have for not zapping them without further warning. We’ll try to apprehend them, but we won’t be gentle! Programme a drone for FTL drive-field modulation and let’s go after them. Oh, and drop a drone direct to Planetary Defence with a message, but for Eleanor’s sake reiterate the fact that it is going past, not in, and we’re still here dealing with it!”

 Chapter 2,         The Challenge

The freighter first became aware of the pursuit when navigation and guidance computers began to sound alarms and warn of a drive-field incursion. The control room crew enjoyed something like ten seconds of dumb incomprehension before their universe came apart. Instead of the roller-coaster ride of local gravity effects normally experienced when the field brushed some significant mass, there was a shrieking roar ascending into a deafening whistle. The noise seemed to come from everywhere at once as the whole fabric of the freighter -and its crew- was stretched and compressed by pulses emanating from the drive of a small object that elbowed its way into their own field. Feeling like fleas on a loudspeaker cone, the crew weren’t in any position to develop an understanding of what was happening; they just tried to endure.
    The noise suddenly dropped in pitch to a barely audible hum, though it was still overpowering in amplitude. The captain, who’d been resting in his cabin, stared with horror at the way visible vibration patterns ran across the alloy bulkheads and even the flesh of his hands. He could feel, all too easily, that the vibration extended to his whole body, inside and out. He made a tremendous effort to think some coherent thought, but the only idea which would come, was that this was the start of a drive field malfunction that would leave him scattered throughout space and history in the form of residual gravity waves.
    The noise changed again and, suddenly, the crew could hear a woman’s voice all around them. Save for masculine cultural conditioning, her voice was godlike. “Drop your drive-field and attempt no further manoeuvre beyond attitude control. You will find this conversation much less traumatic if you allow us the courtesy of continuing it by microwave link at sublight velocity.”
The captain was already making for the control room when the power system failsafes made up their own minds about the weird load they were carrying, dumping the drive and internal gravity fields -and the lights. The captain grabbed a stanchion and peered through the darkness, searching for a tritium-powered sign. There was one nearby, on an emergency locker, and he gratefully unclipped one of the torches he found inside. The torch felt almost too hot to handle, but it still worked.
    A few emergency lights were on in the control room and, after the terrible noise, it seemed as silent as the grave. As he made his way to the communications panel, the captain’s shattered hearing recovered enough to tell him that the control room crew were breathing. Some were even groaning, but they weren’t doing much else. He wasn’t inclined to spare them much attention: he had other priorities!
    It was imperative to start talking back to whomever it was out there, before they did something even more drastic than they had managed already. Whilst the captain was confident that he could justify his cargo in purely legal -if not moral- terms, to Terran-controlled colonial authorities, he knew quite well that Eleanian mores and legislation differed markedly. First priority, therefore, was avoiding summary destruction, closely followed by a need to get back under way without being boarded and searched. A more distant concern was to avoid having to justify what he was doing to the local authorities in terms of recent Terran legislation, which might be repealed if the Eleanians or some other colonists brought enough diplomatic pressure to bear. There were all too many meddling bureaucrats in the Federal Terran Government who refused to view things in a purely commercial light, and they’d fought a determined rearguard action against legalisation in the first place. He was making too much profit from legalisation to give them fresh ammunition!    His hands automatically went through the routine for establishing a microwave link with a nearby spacecraft. This involved a millimetre-wave radar guiding the communications band beam-shaper onto the craft in question. Once power circuits began to cut back in, he had no trouble getting the system up and running, but there was nothing at all within detection range. He tried using low-gain omnidirectional antennae to broadcast a systems handshaking code, expecting a lag before the obviously-distant whoever it was responded, but there was no appreciable delay at all before the monitor screen displayed a “Channel Opened” message.
    “There’s no need for you to bother locking the beam onto us. We don’t have any trouble hearing you, wherever it’s pointed, and there’s no problem with our transmitters tracking your vessel.” The captain couldn’t detect any trace of irony in the oddly accented (to his ears) woman’s voice, but he didn’t doubt that there was more than just a communications link tracking his ship as it wallowed around at some unknown sublight velocity.
    “I’m sure that we can dispense with the preliminaries. They’d never have let you run an FTL freighter without teaching you about interplanetary law and suchlike, so you know that you passed an Eleanian jurisdiction marker without slowing down to sublight speed to allow identification. Neither do you have any sort of registration with us, or clearance from us. In recent years, we have experienced a hostile penetration of our controlled space and it is general policy to classify craft that behave as you did as hostile. You cannot now be under any illusions that any craft so classified will be allowed to proceed unhindered. Had you not been tracked long before you committed the violation, you would have been destroyed.
    “As it is, we extended you the unusual courtesy of arresting your FTL progress in order to enquire of your sanity and intentions, because we are kind even to the wicked and the ungrateful. This does not mean that we are indulgent. We do require explanations and we will be naming you in a formal protest to the Terran Government, which appears to have granted you a callsign and, we assume, pending prompt confirmation by yourselves, a legal registration.”
    The captain transmitted the registration file quickly and without any trouble, there was a standard function button to do that on every commercial communications console. This didn’t give him much time to think, though it did seem as though he was going to be thoroughly bullied pour encourager les autres. The Eleanian craft, whatever and wherever it was, seemed to be indignant rather than suspicious. Perhaps if he played on the indignation, they would move him on in disgust and content themselves with trying to get the Terran authorities to revoke his registration. He did know that now they’d successfully stopped him -and while he wasn’t sure how, exactly, the laws of physics had facilitated their doing that- they couldn’t legally blast him in cold blood. On the other hand, persistent refusal to obey lawful commands might justify anything and there weren’t any witnesses.
    All around him, the captain could sense the control room crew stirring, either struggling to their stations or staggering off for treatment. He ignored them, sure that none of them would do anything precipitate while he was visibly on the bridge and capable. He was reasonably certain that they would deal with damage-control without being told; they were trained to do so and it ought to be obvious that their first concern should be to get everything vital working!
    He was subjected to a series of questions over the microwave link -noticing in the meantime that his communications computer was making absolutely no progress in trying to obtain a bearing on the transmissions. He found himself sweating profusely as he struggled to answer the questions, which followed no identifiable theme or train of thought. This made it very difficult to concentrate on a line of deception, because the conversation kept changing subject and then returning suddenly to a particular point after his mind had moved on to inventing answers to other questions.
    The interrogation was interrupted when the female voice brusquely told him to expect a series of strong magnetic pulses. These duly came, to the accompaniment of curses from people trying to get sensitive equipment back on line. When the interrogation resumed, the woman’s tone was noticeably more irritated than suspicious and he was questioned in somewhat less excruciating detail about his destination, a mining colony and free economic zone on the non Terra-formable world, “New Basingstoke.”
    “You’ll be accompanied to your destination by an automatic drone, which will deliver a message to the authorities there, explaining that you have committed a gross violation of transit rules. They will be advised that you are probably a criminal in terms of Terran law; you’re certainly one in our eyes. We won’t, however, rely on them to discipline you: we are perfectly aware of just how responsible the administrations of “free economic zones” tend to be. A formal complaint will be in the hands of the Federal Government on Terra by the time you return there. The drone will ensure that you proceed to the stated destination; your safety can’t even be remotely guaranteed if you go anywhere else or attempt to interfere with the drone.” Resistance was useless, but he was welcome to try.
    “If you enter our controlled space again, and we advise you to err on the side of extreme caution in deciding what qualifies as our space, you will be arrested -or quite possibly destroyed.
    “For the sake of your crew’s safety, we won’t detain you while we make further enquiries about you with the Terran authorities, but we might still prefer charges against you through the Terran courts or demand your extradition. You are being allowed to proceed solely because your safety cannot be guaranteed -out here in a recently over-stressed vessel- while decisions are reached about you, and we reserve the right to pursue the matter further.”
    The communications console then received a data file, which turned out to contain the information required to re-orientate the freighter’s navigation system after a total shutdown and memory wipe. There was no further communication, but the captain was certain that he hadn’t been left alone and he was in a hurry to proceed.
    “Damage control! How much did they break?” There was a pause while they worked out who was responsible for giving the report, the capable officers having been too busy with their own departments to notice that the watch officer had been carried off. The captain restrained himself; it wasn’t going to help if he got cross with people who were still half-silly from shock, though the medical orderlies weren’t supposed to remove watch officers from the control room unless a replacement was on hand. The thought came to him that they probably hadn’t known which of the groaning idiots was the watch officer; he’d have to introduce an armband system or something.
    “Nothing very much seems to have actually broken, Boss, but a lot of things went into emergency shutdown and a lot of software and immediate data was wiped.
    “Everything got over-stressed, as the lady said, and a lot of things are going to fail much earlier than they would otherwise have done. The owners are going to have to cough-up for a total teardown inspection, or hire a new crew, because we’re getting off at the next suitable planetfall until it’s done. The external cargo modules dropped their environmental conditioning systems and there are three that aren’t coldstarting themselves or responding to control via the ship’s databus. Somebody will have to go and reset them manually, or rig emergency controls, or the cargo in them is going to be wasted.”
    “Well! The cargo is going to be wasted. We can’t move while someone’s prancing around out there and I’m not wasting the time, or men who could be keeping this ship going from the inside. The cargo isn’t going to know anything about it, as if you care anyway. Dump any module that hasn’t started to restore conditioning by the time we’re ready to move; there’s no point in delivering dead ones.”
    The subordinate, the third officer as it turned out, still had a meaningless objection to raise. “But, Boss, external cargo modules aren’t as well insulated as the ship, which is why you wanted to take a short cut through here. The cargo will be wasted anyway if the conditioning doesn’t start in the next few minutes, let alone by the time we’re ready to go.”
“There you are, then. Dump those three modules, now! Then do something useful towards getting us going and keeping the ship in one piece.”
    The third officer shrugged and turned to arm the jettison systems for three of the twenty-five cargo modules. He didn’t seem at all put out at being told to dump them; he’d probably just been getting the captain to publicly take the initiative about dumping part of the cargo. Only a couple of the crew paused at the three muffled thuds; it was only someone else’s money, plus a little bit of their bonus, which they’d gladly swap for safety and a rest.

Chapter 9,         Revival

Kemala had been made to go to sleep by the people who bought her contract, in a strange room that always felt as if it were moving. Sometimes there was a feeling like falling out of a tree, only this went on for ages and she cringed in anticipation of a fearful bump when the room hit the ground, which it never did. As she drifted off, uncomfortably, due to a drug that made her feel as if she was trapped in mud, she tried to remember who she was and where she’d come from, before everything in her life became horrible and frightening. All she could remember was a name; perhaps it was her own.
    Paralysed but still conscious, she felt herself being put in a bag. She had no clothes on, but that was just one of the things that happened to her now: nobody cared if she was embarrassed, or even if she was hurt or hungry. The world she knew zipped away, leaving her in blackness, which grew cold before she ceased to feel anything at all. Before her thoughts faded away altogether, she wondered why the people had bought her contract, just to kill her in this way? She knew that she was dying, because she’d never gone to sleep like this before! She seemed almost to wake for a while; there was pain and cold but no thoughts, then there was merciful oblivion.
    When she found herself waking up again, her first reaction was one of dismay and outrage, couldn’t they at least leave her dead? She’d wanted to die ever since she’d become the subject of a contract, so her parents could borrow to buy a plot of land for her brothers. It wasn’t just the indignities and ill treatment she’d suffered as a result; it was the betrayal: being traded away by her parents like she was a goose! One of the older girls had made Kemala understand -with difficulty, because she came from a different village and spoke so strangely she’d had to use gestures and graphic noises- that their contracts would be fulfilled in a certain way. This terrified Kemala, because she’d heard dire stories about the circumstances of such things outside the village -and it had been a relief to die first. It was with dread, therefore, that Kemala realized that she was alive again.
    There were voices, but she couldn’t even begin to understand what they said, perhaps they were devils and she was still dead? She was afraid to open her eyes, or move, in case someone noticed her. The voices around her became soft, encouraging, but she still couldn’t understand what they said.
    Kemala was trying not to breath very deeply, lying as still as possible so that nobody would take any notice of her. Even so, her chest hurt with each breath. A hand touched her face, ever so softly, but Kemala’s heart still turned somersaults. The hand stroked her face gently until Kemala fearfully opened her eyes. For a moment horror seized her: the face which confronted her was white like a ghost or demon! It was a woman’s face, though -and Kemala realized that it was the white face of a tourist, not a demon. This didn’t help much; the dire stories that Kemala had heard, involved tourists and the things they came to do, although those were men tourists, of course.
    As her eyes began to focus better, Kemala saw that the tourist woman was dressed a bit like the health workers who visited the clinic in one of the villages near her home. Could she be a doctor? Why would a tourist doctor bother with a girl whose contract had been sold by her parents? Perhaps she was going to examine her to see if she had any diseases; Kemala had heard that tourists preferred girls who’d been checked by doctors.
    The tourist woman raised Kemala up and held a beaker to her lips to drink. As she sipped the nice-tasting liquid -she didn’t know what it was called- she noticed that there was some sort of tube going into her arm and there were pads on her chest with wires coming out of them. She didn’t dare interfere with any of that, so she looked around her.
    She was in a completely different room to the one she’d died in; this one was somehow cleaner and brighter than any room she’d seen before. There was a window opposite the bed Kemala was lying in: she could see tall, white-capped mountains in the distance and, closer at hand, there were hills with some buildings on. There were lots of trees and short green grass between the buildings, but Kemala couldn’t see any fields, except perhaps in the very far distance. It was strange; it wasn’t crowded and dirty like a city, but if there weren’t any rice paddies, sugar-cane plantations, oxen, geese, shacks, mills, dumps, gas wells or refineries, it couldn’t be countryside, either.
    The tourist woman gently removed the tube and pads and, seeing that Kemala was fascinated by the view, lifted her out of the bed and helped her into a funny sort of sarong, before supporting her as she stood at the window. Her legs ached and her head swam, but it seemed that the place outside the window was full of hope for Kemala. She couldn’t say why, but it was so peaceful and clean, with lots of coloured plants just below the window.
When her knees began to wobble, the tourist woman helped her back onto the bed and made her lie down. Kemala assumed a comfortable position for the first time -there seemed to be aches and pains everywhere- and, despite her fears and curiosity, she fell asleep. The nurse carefully covered her and tidied away the equipment.
    The doctors had been certain of the girl’s condition long before she’d been allowed to regain consciousness. When all was well, they’d left her to wake up naturally with just a nurse to watch her, although they were ready to help a few footsteps away. Once she was awake, the nurse’s brief had been to reassure and let her have a nourishing drink before sending her off to sleep again. It was thought best to let reality intrude in gentle stages and allow the bruises and frostbite to heal a bit before the girl spent long periods awake.
    The next time Kemala awoke, it was night outside and the room was lit only by a dim glow near the door. The curtains weren’t drawn and Kemala could see the stars above and behind the mountains. She gasped because there were so many of them, so bright and clear. The sky behind them was black and didn’t glow orange at the horizon -and the stars were so different! They made shapes she’d never seen in the sky before. She lay gazing at them in wonder until the moon moved into her field of view. Her startled exclamation brought the tourist woman into the room in a flood of artificial light.
    The woman was puzzled for a moment; Kemala looked astonished but there was nothing strange in the room. Seeing that the curtains weren’t drawn, the woman switched the light off to see what was outside the window. Kemala realized that the woman couldn’t see anything strange, perhaps the moon had started to look like that since she’d been dead! Suddenly fearful that she’d attracted attention without good enough cause, Kemala started to pretend that nothing had happened, trying to curl up to go to sleep again. She didn’t know if she was allowed to sleep, though, and she shivered with fright.
    The tourist woman sighed sympathetically, switching the light back on and drawing the curtains shut. With encouraging noises and a few gentle strokes of the neck, she persuaded Kemala to uncurl and get up. Opening a door in the wall, she revealed something like the lavatory at the clinic, or the one Kemala had used at the place she and the other girls had been before she’d died. Satisifed that she at least recognised it, the woman helped Kemala to the cubicle and showed her how to work the taps, before closing the cubicle door nearly shut.
Kemala was glad to use the lavatory, she’d been wondering about it for a while. She was terrified of making a mess, because one of the girls who had -through sheer fright- was beaten so badly in front of the others that she’d been taken away and not seen again. She knew she was supposed to wash, because she’d been shown the taps, so she washed her hands and face as carefully as she could.
    When she’d finished, and the woman had shown her that she could use the towels (clean ones, all to herself!) the woman helped her back to the bed, made her sit up and clipped a sort of board across in front of her. Another white-faced woman, dressed the same as the first, came in with a tray, which she set in front of Kemala.
    There were several small dishes of food on the tray, the sort of thing she’d seen visiting officials and traders eat. There was a dish of very fine fluffy white rice with strips of fried spicy chicken, one full of chopped vegetables, another with white things like clouds, a beaker of drink and a dish filled with red fruits dusted with white powder and a little, well, was it cream? There were some sticks on the tray, like the ones some traders she’d once seen, yellow men, used. It was important to yellow men to use the sticks very precisely and they didn’t even touch their lips with the food! She didn’t know how, so she tentatively picked up a spoon and looked at the women to be sure that this really was for her. They smiled kindly and Kemala tasted the first classical oriental cuisine of her life.
    There were no hard bits or specks of millgrit in the rice, which wasn’t in the least bit stodgy or sticky. The strips of chicken weren’t chewy or tough and they had a complicated taste.
    Kemala had been given a bit of chicken occasionally before, when there’d been weddings in the village, although not every wedding party had chicken; most had to make do with fish or dog, some had to have soya curd even for weddings. Girls like Kemala were seldom given any form of salable protein; insects, snails, even frogs, could be had for nothing when the family’s geese could be sold.
    Chickens had to be bought; they died easily in the village for some reason, which surprised nobody because so did children. Soya curd was cheaper than chicken, but it still had to be purchased by the villagers, even though the beans were grown nearby. The soya fields didn’t belong to any of the villagers and thieves could expect little sympathy and some very rough justice if they ever got past the white posts that whistled and hurt.
    Trying the vegetables, Kemala found them to be somehow nicer than she’d imagined vegetables could be. She discovered that it was impractical to use the spoon on the white cloud things, so she carefully laid the spoon on the rice dish and picked one up between thumb and forefinger. Looking to see if the women approved of her eating it that way, she bit a corner of it experimentally. It was crisp and crunchy, but melted in her mouth, leaving a taste a bit like fish. Perhaps it was made from fish, or, could it be? Grasshoppers!
    Kemela ate carefully; she’d never had food like this before and she didn’t want to make herself ill. When she came to the red fruits, she was surprised: they had much more flavour than she expected! She ate them one at a time so as not to spoil things. The drink was very refreshing; it tasted of fresh fruit, though it fizzed with bubbles like the Cola that her brothers sometimes bought. When she’d finished, one of the women gave her a piece of soft paper and mimed for her to wipe her lips, then she took the empty dishes away on the tray.
    The first woman folded the board away and then did a few things to Kemala’s arm with a band, which squeezed it and hissed. She looked into each of Kemala’s eyes using a tube with a light in it and then put something square and black against her forehead for a few moments. When she took the black thing away, she glanced at some glowing red writing that appeared on it and wrote on papers attached to a board hanging at the end of the bed. She indicated for Kemala to lie down, miming the act of snuggling into a comfortable position. Then she touched her arm and Kemala fell asleep again.
    The next time she awoke it was daytime and the weather had changed; clouds left sweeping shadows on the hills and moving shafts of sunlight illuminated grass and trees wet from showery rain.
Rain pattered against the window in large drops for a few minutes; then it was sunny again. As the drips ran down the window and the glass cleared, Kemala noticed how clean it was! She’d been used to raindrops leaving smears and streaks on windows. Often the rain itself came down dirty: sometimes it stung and made dead spots on plants. She couldn’t see the mountains at all today: the clouds kept her field of view so low that she could see no further than the second row of small hills. Concentrating on what was nearer at hand, she noticed four long paths of shiny metal between two fences. There was a row of trees in front of the paths, which was why she hadn’t noticed them before, but sparkling water drops on the metal drew her attention.
    The paths went from one side of her field of view to the other and, as she was watching, something like the Jakarta train went past, only it floated silently above the metal path without any lurching or sparks. Kemala couldn’t see any wheels. The train seemed almost too clean and perfect to be real, but she could clearly see people sitting in it through its windows, which were as magically clean as her own.
    The people weren’t crowded together, they were talking or reading and, in one special part of the train, they even seemed to be eating. Kemala got up, in her funny sarong, and managed to reach the window, leaning against the sill for a better view. Another train went past in the opposite direction, going much more slowly. This train was shorter than the first and it seemed a bit more crowded: people were standing up as it went past, as if there was a stopping place nearby. Nobody seemed to be riding on the outside, though; perhaps everybody could afford a third-class ticket?
  Without any warning, though not frighteningly so, a longer train than either of the other two skimmed past on one of the middle paths. It was going quickly enough to make the grass between the paths swirl as it went past, but after it had gone there was no sign of its passing, just four unobtrusive paths of metal gleaming between the trees.
    Kemala gathered her strength and made for the door in the wall, holding onto a rail which ran round the room for support. It was difficult and she was glad when a tourist woman came into the room and took her arm to help her. It wasn’t the same one who’d helped her before, perhaps she didn’t stay there all the time? When she’d finished and washed, the woman helped her back to bed and went out again.
    She came back with a tray. There was a cup next to a transparent pot full of amber liquid, a bowl of something that looked a bit like goose feed mixed with milk, a little jug with more milk in it, and a plate with two slices of scorched bread; one spread with butter and some sticky clear orange stuff with rinds in, the other spread with butter and something brown. Kemala expected that girls like herself would have to eat things like goose feed most of the time here: it was kind of them to put milk on it, though. She picked up a spoon.
    It didn’t actually taste at all like goose feed. There were all sorts of things in it; something like dried fruit, nuts -and grains and meal. The woman poured some of the milk into the cup and topped it up with the amber liquid from the pot. The liquid was hot and fragrant, Kemala realized with a shock that she was actually being given tea!
  She didn’t understand about the little shaker of sugar the woman offered and, picking the tea up, she sipped it carefully because it was hot and tea was something she hadn’t had all that often before, certainly never with milk in it!
    The brown stuff on the scorched bread tasted salty-savoury -she’d half expected that it might be chocolate- and she found that it was best to eat the scrunchy scorched bread between sips of tea. The orange stuff was sharp but sweet, she found that she liked it a lot. She was allowed to finish the pot of tea, a level of indulgence that amazed her.
    When she’d finished and the woman had taken the tray away, Kemala heard her having a discussion outside the door of the room. The words were unintelligible, but Kemala guessed that they were talking about her. She began to worry again; she knew that a contract meant that she had to work for the person who owned it, to pay back what her parents had borrowed, and this usually went on for ever, or as long as the person who’d been sold, lived. There was always money left to pay back (that was why it was best to sell someone else to the contract people if you needed money) and the things you ate were added to this money. She’d been given expensive food, which she’d never even tasted before, and tea, and yet nobody had made her do any work to begin to pay for it! The only explanation was that she was indeed destined to fulfil her contract in a certain way. Even so, she was surprised by the wonderful food and by the fact that the women didn’t even make her carry her own tray or anything like that.
    As the woman from the night before came into the room, Kemala looked pleadingly at her, wishing that someone would at least tell her what she was going to have to do to pay for all this! The woman put a reassuring hand on Kemala’s shoulder, then she once more did things to her arm, looked at her eyes and used the black thing to produce red writing about Kemala, which she copied onto the papers from the end of the bed. When she’d finished with that, she sat on the edge of the bed and began to read out strange words from a list, pronouncing each word very carefully and looking at Kemala after each one. Kemala stared back blankly until the word “Jakarta” made her wince: the woman was checking where she’d been sold!
    The woman stopped, spoke very softly to Kemala, words she didn’t understand but which sounded friendly and, with a parting touch to Kemala’s worried brow, she left.