14
Rudi bit off a piece of a chocolate-peanut snack bar, chewed moodily for a while, then downed a swig of reconstituted fruit juice and looked at the others around the table in the Juggernaut’s central compartment. He was disgruntled over what he saw as too ready a surrender to bluster. “I mean, seriously, what could they do at the end of it all?” he asked, singling out Kieran with his gaze. “Drag us all outside and shoot us? Surely overt violence against an undefended minority wouldn’t be tolerated. Things can’t work that way.”
“Is that how it works anywhere, Rudi?” Kieran asked from where he was lounging by the forward doorway into the driver’s cabin. He shook his head. “People looking to start trouble don’t immediately resort to armed force. They provoke and escalate until it becomes appropriate. Situations like that get ugly and distressing for everyone involved. We all want to avoid that.”
“I thought that people here were supposed to have a way of acting together when something threatens their common interest,” Rudi said.
“The common interest could be best served by respecting first claims,” Trevany reminded him. “Don’t assume that everyone would be sympathetic to our position. Creating a fuss might not be the way to go.”
Rudi looked indignant. “But . . . but we’re talking crass commercialism versus knowledge that could be invaluable. I mean, what’s there to argue with? You’ve only—”
Trevany cut him off with a shake of his head. “Most people wouldn’t see it that way. They’re interested in what relates to them. Rights of use do. Academic claims to privilege don’t.”
“I’m not asking for privileges,” Rudi insisted. “Just some recognition of fundamental values.”
“But that’s how they’d see it.”
Juanita, who had been following, commented, “The system here is based on tenacious defense of—how would you put it?—things you know are yours.”
“Property ownership rights,” Trevany supplied.
“Yes. That doesn’t mean just being allowed to hold a technical title to something, that someone else can grant or take away. It means you possess a monopoly on deciding how the property gets used, sold, exchanged, or whatever.” She shrugged. “That’s what Zorken is doing. And if pushed to decide, Mars would probably side with their right to do it.”
Rudi made a face and waved a hand. “Yes, but can’t this kind of thing be worked out by reasonable compromise? It’s the using of coercion that I’m objecting to.” The others stared at him, then looked at Kieran to take it.
“When you talk about monopoly, you’re implying an ability at the bottom of it all to enforce it,” he said. “When a dispute arises that agreeable compromise can’t settle, and arbitration fails, then people will resort to fighting it out until some view or other is able to prevail.” He nodded at Juanita to endorse the point she had made. “In other words, until monopoly privileges are reasserted. And territory is the most fundamental property right of all, from the space occupied by your body, through the wider domains of personal living space, homes, towns, nations. . . . Exercising a monopoly on territory means securing it from rival claims. That means being able to bring sufficient force to bear to defend it.”
“All right, I take your point,” Rudi said. “But at the same time, I think you’re making mine. You own your house and the belongings in it because nobody else has an equal right to walk in and camp down with impunity, yes? But what gives you that right is the recognition of your monopoly under one system of law which exercises the force. Shared ownership of territory—or jurisdiction by competing defensive agencies, which amounts to the same thing—isn’t a workable arrangement. Stable households exist when there’s one head that the others are prepared to acknowledge. Otherwise the community fights or fragments. And the same happens with larger territories too. When national group marriages break down, the solutions are division of living space, divorce, or murder in the form of migration, revolution, or war until territorial monopolies of some kind stabilize. But that isn’t what you’ve got here.”
“You’re right,” Kieran agreed. “It hasn’t happened yet on Mars. Too much room; too few people. But when the boundaries start running up against each other, then it’ll all start to shake itself out.”