A Planet for Rent

Somewhere, Tomorrow…

Once, Earth was brimming with futurologists.

Once, when Contact was just a nightmare to be found in the books of a few pessimistic science fiction writers…

Back then, futurologists seemed to have a monopoly on optimism. It wasn’t a fact that any point in the past was always better. The future would always be brighter, more human, richer, more ecological, more…

Or, otherwise, it would simply not be.

The most pessimistic of these latter-day augurs only went so far as to imagine the possibility that Homo sapiens, with their nuclear weapons (or their biological weapons, or their waste—there were several apocalypses to choose from), would destroy their civilization and their race. And maybe the planet as a whole, while they were at it, but how many actors care what happens on stage after they exit the scene?

In any case, the decision about the future depended entirely on man. The choices seemed very limited: either rational development at a dizzying pace, or suicide.

But the xenoids showed up, and apparently they didn’t know about futurology and didn’t care. At least, not human futurology.

Following the xenoids’ Ultimatum, the augurs lost their monopoly on the future. So did the rest of the human race.

All that Homo sapiens had left was the present, like a bone thrown to a dog to gnaw on after its master has gorged on all the meat.

No more “predictions of the world fifty years from now.” Or ten years… or even tomorrow.

Every morning, every human wakes up in fear and hope, to discover, to his dismay but also relief, that he is still there. It was no nightmare. The xenoids exist, and they’re the masters. And nobody knows what they’ll decide tomorrow.

Social workers, Body Spares, erasing the memories of humans who travel off Earth, the Auyar huborgs taking the place of fallible humans in Planetary Security, mass-produced mestizos, Earth’s history and ecology sold wholesale…

Nobody could have imagined it before.

Nobody knows what will come next.

Even the descendants of those pessimistic science fiction writers have stopped imagining and writing, overwhelmed by the dizzying madness of reality.

But just as a man condemned to death knows that no pardon will come, everybody knows that this situation is just a strange interregnum, that it can’t last long.

And everybody is scared; if it’s hard now, what will it be like later?

Better the frying pan you know than the fire you don’t…

Some visionaries try desperately to find a way out.

Earth discovering some new form of superultralight propulsion and abandoning the solar system and the galaxy, getting far away from the xenoid vultures who gnaw our livers every night, only for us to have them grow back the next day.

Earth discovering the ultimate weapon and threatening the galaxy with annihilation if they don’t let us emerge from underdevelopment once and for all.

Earth discovering the ultimate drug to stop death and aging, and giving it to the galaxy in exchange for being allowed to have our own, self-determined future.

But the scientist-serfs toiling away in their laboratory-slave barracks know all too well that science won’t be the solution. No matter what gets invented, there aren’t enough resources to deploy it on a large enough scale to compete with the xenoids.

Others speak of human dignity and propose mass suicide for Earth. Better not to be than to be slaves.

But psychologists know all too well that life and the instinct for self-preservation are too strong. Much stronger than pride and despair… The entire Earth will not become a new Numantia or a new Sagunto. Better slaves of the xenoid Romans than dead…

Others, even more divorced from reality, dream of the galactic act of altruism that will at some future date give this terrestrial colony its freedom to develop. As England so graciously did for India at the end of World War II.

They forget that Queen Elizabeth II only sent her last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to give the subcontinent its independence when she could no longer control it. When neither the Englishmen nor their sepoys could continue to lord over millions of people.

So long as the xenoid Englishmen and their Planetary Tourism Agency sepoys continue to control Earth, there will be no independence. Nobody gives away the goose that lays the golden eggs until he’s forced to.

Some put their faith in time, which can wear away stone, so that decadence may capture the exhausted old xenoid races and make their empire fall, much as Rome collapsed.

Historians disagree: no empire falls on its own, if it has no shrieking barbarians hammering on the doors of its city walls. Spartacus’ rebellion was heroic, but it failed…

Others believe in even more illogical and unlikely things. In the Second Coming of Christ (or of Muhammad, or of Buddha, or of Joseph Smith…) as a Lion, not a Lamb, to drive out the demonic non-human races from the world of His children.

Or that God, or Something Cosmic and Indefinable called (for lack of a better name) “homeostatic justice,” will inevitably punish the xenoids’ wickedness and highhandedness with stellar cataclysms and devastating plagues, compared with which the magenta illness of Colossa will seem like a minor rash.

But even the most orthodox believers are starting to believe that God, if He does exist, might not be on the humans’ side…

Other trust that a mighty and overpowering race will appear from beyond the galaxy, enslaving all the Milky Way and putting the masters and servants of today at the same level…

Many sects hold and secret ideas and theories and indulge in endless debates about the possible futures of Earth and the galaxy. Nobody lifts a finger to bring about the futures they say they believe in.

Of course, it’s not all talk and no action…

The famously irredentist Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation does act. Though their motto, “It matters not if a hundred humans die, so long as one single xenoid dies or leaves,” seemingly ignores the fact that there are many more xenoids than there are humans, their bombs and attacks at least annoy the planet’s extraterrestrial masters.

The bad part is that the Union, like many pre-Contact terrorist organizations, has nothing resembling a liberation strategy. Just tactics, and not very brilliant ones at that. Nearly a hundred humans do die for every xenoid… Planetary Security is much more efficient.

They have no plan for taking the power now held by the Planetary Tourism Agency, nor would they know how to keep it… Following the ideas of Bakunin and Nechayev, they just keep trying over and over again to jab their bee stings into the monstrous oppressor’s tough hide. And, like bees, they often die trying. And the monster scratches at the stings, smiles, and keeps on going.

The Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation has even been accused many times of playing into the xenoids’ hands, serving only as an outlet for human aggression and frustration. Draining to death the forces that should be organizing to struggle for life…

The unidentified leaders of the Union haven’t even gone to the trouble of refuting these charges.

Many think they wouldn’t be able to…

Life goes on, the years go by, the present seems like it will last forever and always be the same in spite of all the changes that give the impression that Earth is moving into the future.

Ordinary humans, the famous “moral majority,” are tired of impossible futures even before they get here.

The question remains: What fate awaits a race that has lost faith in the future, idolizes the past, and puts up with the present?

It seems the futurologists were wrong, and in reality, for Earth, everything before Contact was better.

Homo sapiens, forever trapped in a present that doesn’t belong to them and they don’t determine, can only aspire to one thing: that the hypothetical and frightful future will never arrive. That the present will last forever.

Fearing that, as things stand, any change can only be for the worse…