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The first shuttle had barely left when the language decoding system was able to do some crude translation of 'O' talk into English. Another system had already cataloged all the various shows we had recorded. Newscasts, of course, were the most profitable for understanding the current situation on the planet. Through it we learned about their structure of government, which appeared to be a form of independent democracies that were linked to one-another via a planet wide sovereign constitution akin to the structure that now governed our ship.
The planet itself appeared to be a high tech world of fast moving trains, air transportation, immensely huge cities that were often integrated into a single gigantic building in order to escape the effects of the weather. The weather, as far as we could see, was constantly wet and dark. Large indoors agricultural complexes supplied all the foodstuffs. Power was derived from nuclear fusion. Mahesh was delighted about that. He understood the concept, but had never seen it implemented.
Hardly a day had gone by when Jill jumped off her seat and announced yet another great discovery about "their way of life" that bordered on the miraculous. None-the-less, when all available information was analyzed, we were surprised to learn that the 'O' people were no more advanced in technological development that we had been on Earth.
"The only difference is," said Jill in one of her reports from the Mission Control Committee, "that the 'O' people have utilized every available technology they have created to increase the productivity of their society, which became greatly enriched thereby. In other words, these people had actually used the technologies they developed to enrich their common life and culture," said Jill. "She said that their technologies were by and large the same technologies that we on Earth had thrown away for a long time until our economies collapsed under the weight of this insanity that became self-imposed poverty. The point is, these 'O' people had done nothing unique that we couldn't have done, that we had actually prevented ourselves from doing."
Olaf added in his usual dry and coarse voice. "The difference between them and humanity lies in their mental technology that allows their physical technological wonders to become useful to the fullest possible extent." Olaf gave many lectures on these and related subjects.
Politically, too, the 'O' society appeared like a great puzzle to people when judged against earthly standards. There appeared to be a central government all right, but one that had no authority over anyone except in a limited scope that pertained to specific areas of business concerned with providing planet wide-services.
Natalia and I could understand their planetary government perfectly, from our own experience with the captain that made us look more deeply into universal principles. If we hadn't grown up that way over the past few years, pondering our own constitution and living by it, the 'O' people's well functioning world of independent democracies, which were as numerous as grains of sand on a sea shore, would have been incomprehensible to us. There was no interference accepted, by law, between those sovereign democracy, regardless of their size or power, so it seemed. What magic made the thing work? We were puzzled until someone mentioned our own historic "Treaty of Westphalia" from 1648, which had been trashed by Napoleon at the desire of the empire that had controlled him.
Jill suggested that the 'O' people had probably come to the same point where we mankind stood in 1648 and had simply carried on, always protecting and cherishing what they had created. Many people on board now gained a dawning awareness why this process hadn't worked on Earth so that we had allowed ourselves to trash this treasure almost as soon as it had been created. Natalia pointed out during one of the lectures that the same system certainly hadn't worked too well for us on the ship under the rule of the captain until she and I had discovered the imperative of the principles that superseded the authority the captain had wrongly assumed. She suggested that the 'O' people might have simply followed the same thought processes and had been building on it.
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Stories about
Love
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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