The White Lily Blog

You read parts One through Four below. Here’s Five. The Church will be out there in the future. Get used to it.

Everybody in the room had the same debit card since the pre-flight check. Nobody knew exactly how it would work, but everybody was now on the government payroll, at least temporarily. But not exactly. They had done something new there. Or really old, Al wasn’t sure which. They had organized the colony as an old-fashioned cooperative, and eventually the profits would be distributed among them all, as full owners.  And earth’s investment, administered by all the world’s governments, paid back. It wasn’t socialist, it wasn’t capitalist. And it was a big risk. But cooperatives had been done, and overlooked, from early times right up to the twenty first century. And there it was, the cooperative concept, when they needed some new economic vehicle. So the workers wrote their mission statement and their rules of operation (“One man one vote”), bought out NASA with government money, and began to transform the whole debate, from the bottom up. 

As investments went in this day and age, it was an incredibly good one. There’d be no foreseeable drastic social welfare problems, because everyone had a paycheck, there would be no unemployment on the colony, not in the near future, at least. Everybody worked, how not?  They had a whole miniature world to set up. The opposite, probably, a labor shortage, which can be serious, too. 

The first job, along with subsistence, was to provide solar energy to earth via microwaves, and until then everybody got paid just enough to maintain a minimum standard of living. There were very many perks, though! Women got paid time off to raise kids and had opportunities to stay trained in their specialties, for extra pay. Fathers got bonus pay.  Above that, you could get extra through participation in any profitable project you could swing, even using the company resources in development. You got pizza going on the colony, made the connections for somebody with wheat and somebody with yeast and tomato sauce, you got the pizza franchise. 

Up to a point, anyway.  Something they were starting on earth, too. There was a big tax on chains over four franchises. Earth was getting serious about promoting broader ownership of business however way they could. The “Free Market” fake econo-religion had finally fizzled, along with communism. Now earth was searching for a third way, some way to save capitalism from itself. Keep it off the third rail. Some way to keep it young. 

Like take the space colony. How would it work? Who would finance it, who would own the profits? The government? The same big businesses whose concentrated political and economic power was already poisoning the well? That question had finally forced them out of the box.  Anyway, there simply was no company big enough to swing it, and besides, the possibility for revolt was just too great and made those old sub-prime loans look mighty safe indeed, compared. The distance made it, like say the American colonies once were, just about inevitable. What company could risk it? So why not skip the struggle part and let the colony own itself right from the start? 

The arguments that preceded these unprecedented economic decisions were surprisingly short, once Earth’s predicament became clear: conservation alone is not the answer, not enough, got to get some form of alternative energy AND stop the demographic winter and start reproducing, or die, economically first, physically shortly thereafter, by the millions. That the earth was finite was beside the question. To try to go backwards economically, to step it down to a less energy-dependent civilization also meant the deaths of millions. And it was stupid. Then their eyes turned again to the stars, the dream they had abandoned just about the time the world had given up having babies. And hope returned. With some surprising results. 

Thus the cooperative idea happened. Totally new. Not socialism, not imperialism. It sounded good to Al. He was psyched in spite of himself, to be a part of it. His pay was more than fair, and he would be building stock. Management was difficult, but people could manage themselves in spite of their tendency to be douche bags, given the right conditions. At least Earth had quit ducking the question, what conditions are those? Why actually does socialism fail? Why actually does capitalism turn imperialist? 

And the whole new game, new ownership, new opportunities for new capital, and that’s not even mentioning the positive effect on production getting free of gravity caused, once they got used to it and realized how it could be managed, changed the  rules that had been operating on Earth ever since the end of the twentieth century.  Some effects were purely economic, some were social, and surprising for sure! 

One example. Turns out the old, discredited biblical command Go forth and multiply was actually a thoughtful economic strategy!  Except women had stopped buying into it, without some major repositioning of social policy. Surprisingly, they wanted support for traditional marriage, monogamous and life-long, as before. Feminists had found it the most pro-woman, after all, in the end. Somehow in the negotiations with the company women representatives found the courage to say so, and also to demand, off-world, an end to no-fault divorce, and an end to polygamy –the Muslim feminists among them, a sprinkling in their modest clothing, spoke up, reticent at first and then you couldn’t make them shut up. Naturally.  But they all wanted also on-going support for their professional careers, which they planned to resume when their families could manage it. They wanted women’s sports, and increased investment in labor saving household devices, but they wanted to keep cooking, not go to some central cafeteria, and they wanted subsidized daycare, but also the right to stay home. They wanted, as in the early days of feminism, to put porn back in the closet on the colony, no more of it everywhere you turn, shutting women out, making them playthings, making sex a game instead of a life.   

In short, women wanted it all, and in an expanding economy such as could be predicted when humans finally got off-world, their particular product, which was well-nurtured human beings, would be so much in demand that, in a precedent-setting agreement in off-world free enterprise, they got it: everything, motherhood and career and family and r-e-s-p-e-c-t. 

Earth’s big stake-holders, long commited to all policies that reduced conception and birth, wavered for a few months, fighting the temptation.  But their Holy Grail was right there, it was within reach: unlimited solar energy, unimaginable off-world mineral and chemical resources, gravity-free production.  Everything they ever wanted. Nothing so simple as a woman wanting to get paid and be respected for birthing high quality future workers (not to mention human beings)would stand in the way of it. 

So give them their bread and their roses! Let them be mothers and workers too, let them be anything they liked as long as they gave us human capital! Because one little tiny meteor, like Amun, had six trillion US dollars worth of platinum, and once we’re out there, without the expense of lifting into orbit, mining it became feasible. Not that different from mining in the Arctic, say. Very, very difficult, that’s all. That’s not even considering the iron, the nickel, cobalt. And surely somewhere, gold. Oh the possibilities! So give women what they want, and let’s go! 

But that was all theoretical. Had been theoretical. Actually it was still theoretical, but they were just going ahead and doing it. Jumping into the unknown, economy-wise. ‘Cause if they didn’t, they were screwed. Simple economics. Al looked at the card that would take the place of money for he and his fellow NASA owners, and thought how fragile the basics really were. Making the colony work all depended on just s few behaviors, and they had always been, for human beings, the ones under pressure. Showing up. Telling the truth. Not raping. Being a good parent.  Fair prices and a fair day’s work.  Remembering to reproduce, making that particular big sacrifice. “Yeah, yeah, but it’s less labor, and no ice,” Al maintained, late, to the bartender’s back. 

Basics, whether a martini up should cost more or less. Whether you should give women what they wanted. Who should own the company store.

More than a few things about the set up on the colony worried Al, of course, besides the economics. It was so fragile, literally, the skin just a couple of inches thick. But he understood how all that worked, the metal parts, the electrical parts. It was the human being part, the civilizations they built. They would have to build one there, in that huge emptiness. They were just as capable of smashing everything as making it work. Why do we smash things sometimes, and sometimes not? Who are we? 

It occurred to Al that he had just thought of himself as simply human, not as black, and that maybe it could be like that finally, in space. All of us united as a species, out there, looking for other species with awe and dread. What did this mean for him personally? Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot. He’d been black for a long time. It meant good things and bad. It meant things he could say and things he could never put into words, things deep inside him. He thought again of the pills hidden in his pocket.