Free Happiness: A Planet by Sam Smith

Because, again, here in Space we come to accept the roundness of our environment as the natural order. On that cultivated planet though, in both the buildings and the growing plants surrounding them, straight lines intersected straight lines at apparent random.
    The Spokesman’s farm was in North Eight’s constituency. The Senate Member for North Eight was that day visiting the Spokesman. His small planetary ship was parked beside the Spokesman’s on the apron. Planetary ships are called planes. When the two Senate Members became aware of the descending space ship they ran out through the dust to greet it.
    Seeing the two men flapping towards them over the apron Alger asked Drin,
    “You had your jabs?”
    “Before I left college. You?”
    “Years ago though,” Alger nodded to the rising ochre dust, “Look at all that dirt.” He rubbed worriedly at his upper arm, “Dammit I hope they’re still working.”
    Alger’s anxious nervousness amused Drin. His own nervousness took the aspect of high excitement. He was still young enough to be thrilled by the new, no matter how unsavoury.
    The ship’s engines stopped, the interface locked in. The planet’s machines would now be updated by the police ship, the police ship by the planet.
     
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    As the unfolding of these events depends on what is known when and where, here is a suitable point to digress in order to briefly explain, simply if possible, for the benefit of those of you who may have never paused to consider how our communication system works, its extremely complicated process.
    Because of the distances travelled at the speeds travelled, what is known when and where depends on the passage of ships, because all ships, whether privately or publicly owned, carry information. Every freighter that plugs in at every station and at every planet puts information in, takes it out. In light of that information the station’s, or the planet’s, machines amend itineraries, check loads, pass on supply requests, send messages by various other ships to various other stations.
    Say a trader on XE2 needs more slippers. He informs XE2’s machines, which inform the next freighter. That freighter takes the request to the next station. Its machines know what ships are due for XE2. So it works out a route to take a message by a variety of ships to intercept the next freighter bound for XE2, which will also be calling somewhere en route where it will be capable of picking up a load of slippers. Once the slippers are collected from the supplier the request is noted as fulfilled. Thus any delayed requests, received via other ships and stations, are ignored. But only when the slippers are delivered to XE2 is a message sent out from XE2 cancelling the original request.
    At least two freighters a day call at most large stations, so at least twice daily their machine memories are updated, twice daily letters are delivered. Of course police information carried on any ship will be covered by a police tag, Service information by a Service tag, and personal messages by their own confidential tag, for personal or business use only and not for public dissemination. The system looks after itself. Until something goes missing; and then people have to get involved.
    One of the early side effects of this communication system, incidentally, was Space Time. Imagine the confusion that ensued from faster than light travel coupled with different places using not only different clocks but different calendars for different years. The budding communication system had to incorporate into its every calculation the differences in local time, a plethora of different freighter datums, and it consequently became overweighted with extraneous information. Hence the introduction of Space Time. Now, in Space, if it is five minutes to noon in one galaxy, it is exactly the same time of the same day in all the other galaxies. Not so, however, on the inhabited planets in those galaxies. Hence the