Free Scarcity (Special Forces: FJ One Book 1) by Adam Vance Page A

Which, mind you, I will certainly make sure goes into the arkship resource pile. When it’s empty.”
    The whole flying saucer thing is clearly deliberate. Wherever they go, I bet they present as what’s least shocking to the native population. Remember the Aztecs? Cortez was thought to be the “white skinned god from the east.” A happy accident for him, but it does make a great strategy.
    “Well, it’s truly fantastic stuff.”
    The Jungian Archetype, you mean. Something to soothe the subconscious. Well, it’s working.
    “Do you know the story behind this bottle? It’s really quite fascinating. This is the ‘Constantine’ decanter. There were only four of them made. It took 17 craftsmen over 50 hours to complete the job. They destroyed forty decanters for imperfections before they were happy with the final product.”
    People are tired, Dieter. They’re tired of struggling, knowing that for most of them, life will never get better. They’re tired of starting over on new worlds and having to behave when they get there. Maybe we made a mistake, encouraging a completely secular culture. Maybe there is a “god gene,” and people will always look for a god or a savior, and our Visitors can just…step into the vacuum.
    The Captain nodded. “Amazing. It never ceases to astonish me, you know? Reading about those times. People back then were still appalled by stories of Roman orgies, and yet they didn’t bat an eyelash when they heard about a man who spent nearly a million bucks on a bottle of booze.”
    I have to admit. “I Want to Believe.” It would be so nice to stop fighting… So let me play angel’s advocate – what if they’re The Culture, from the old Iain M. Banks books? The post scarcity civilization, peaceful, rational, who’ve really come just to uplift us?
    “Their definition of what was ‘normal’ in that department just kept expanding, it had to, to accommodate the ever-more-unreal reality of it all. That a man could spend so much wealth on a single object. That a whole school of philosophy existed to justify his decision.”
    Then they surely won’t mind if we make provisions for the opposite case. Speaking of philosophy, I want to know theirs, if they have any religion. Let’s see if we can’t get our guest to discuss it.
    “Well, they paid the price after Collapse. That’s how bad it had to get, for all the world’s Ents to finally rise up and take down their Sarumans.”
    That would be revealing, wouldn’t it. I’m assuming you’re thinking about the Campbell quote?
    She nodded. They were both intimate with Joseph Campbell’s work, and after so many years of working together, he could read her intent from inference. In “The Power of Myth,” he noted that some cultures had mythologies of war and some had mythologies of peace.
    But those whose mythologies were peaceful “have not been the people generally who have survived in what Darwin termed the universal struggle for existence. Rather…it has been the nations, tribes and peoples bred to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to their descendants.”
    HM waved her free hand, dismissing the foolishness of people in the past who should have known better. “On the bright side, at least our Visitors found us after we’d come to our senses, and not before. I wonder if they’d have been so helpful to a world run by Sarumans.”
    Also, I need you to take the pulse of popular opinion here in Berlin. Do a walkabout, see what people are thinking. We know the mob mentality from Social, but I want you to use the personal touch. See what people say when the world isn’t watching.
    “If the world was still run by Sarumans, there wouldn’t be much of a world left, would there?”
    Will do. I could use a good cup of ersatzkaffee.
    “No. And no reason to visit, other than to collect some of leftover humans as zoological samples, I suppose.”
    That’s a contradiction in terms. But if