The Probability Broach, chapter 24
In the final chapter of TPB, L. Neil Smith tries to wrap up some loose ends. He seems to recognize, belatedly, that it made his alleged utopia look bad for them to be utterly helpless in the face of an invasion. In an attempt to make up for this, Win narrates that the Continental Congress reconvened after he departed and swung into action after all:
I don’t know why I expected that stubborn congregation to sit on their hands with the world collapsing around their ears. Too used to the U.S. Congress, I guess.
But… they did!
That’s indisputable. The Continental Congress had the threat explained to them in detail. They heard firsthand testimony and video evidence. The villain confessed his entire plan. And in the face of all that proof, they voted to adjourn without taking any action, because doing anything to thwart the bad guys would have violated their rights.
This is a retcon on Smith’s part. In the earlier chapters, he made a big deal about how difficult it was to get Congress to assemble in the first place, because it requires the active participation of at least 90% of the population of North America, and because it meets in an unappealing remote area as an intentional obstacle. It normally meets only once every few decades, if that, and this one took weeks of work by the protagonists to persuade enough influential people to make it happen.
Once they voted to adjourn, that should have been it. Most people would have lost interest and gone home. The idea that Congress could easily be called back into session very shortly afterward flies in the face of what the author tells us about how this society works.
The explosions in Saint Charles and Auraria didn’t really change anything—maybe relaxed the timetable a little—because the Confederacy has decided to strike back. Not against the Hamiltonians, who were never regarded as a significant threat, but against SecPol and the culture that allows such an abomination to exist. And not with Confederate A-bombs or troops, but in the same way that Sequoyah won the Mexican War: with ideas.
There’s a lot of fundraising and enlistment going on in the Confederacy now. We’re preparing to change a world, an entire universe, and drag the United States of America, kicking and screaming, through two centuries of peace and freedom it managed to miss by letting Alexander Hamilton screw things up back in 1789.
Win narrates that the Propertarian Party in his world, as well as a few other politically amenable organizations, are about to receive funding and support from the North American Confederacy. It’s at this point that we find out that this whole story is a manuscript he wrote that’s being sent to them:
You can’t draft anybody or raise war taxes here, but you can ask folks to chip in, and try to explain why it’s important. And you can try to explain to the Propertarian Party why the first copy of this manuscript and an initial seventy-five pounds of 999 fine have suddenly materialized in the middle of their conference table.
This sounds like an anarchist-friendly plan: voluntary and peaceful, changing people’s minds with words and ideas rather than with force. Too bad that under the circumstances, it would have been much too little, too late.
As TPB spent most of its length reminding us, the Hamiltonians from this world and SecPol from Win’s world were prepared to conquer the North American Confederacy with overwhelming force. They were going to drop nuclear bombs to destroy any potential centers of resistance, then march armies through the Probability Broach portal to subjugate the survivors. And they would have succeeded, if not for a last-minute technological deus ex machina combined with Win’s completely accidental meddling.
This isn’t the kind of threat that can be countered with political tracts about the virtues of anarcho-capitalism. The NAC’s peaceful evangelism would have been utterly futile in the face of an organized enemy willing to use violence and terror to get their way.
The “persuade everyone to be an anarchist” plan would only have a chance of succeeding in a tolerant society with free speech—but Smith has insisted all along that Win doesn’t live in that kind of world. He lives in a dystopia where government black helicopters blast unauthorized radio stations, and jackbooted secret police haul people off to reeducation camps or even murder them outright to suppress the slightest whisper of dissent.
Ironically, if you think armed resistance against such an oppressive regime would be a better plan, then it would appear the nonhuman sapients of the NAC are smarter than the humans:
The simians are preparing a small army of volunteers to travel across the Broach. They have a tough job ahead of them, taking their borrowed culture to relatives who have, as yet, no culture at all. I’d love to see the first CIA reports of well-dressed, heavily armed “infrahumans” roaming the African countryside.
Ooloorie haughtily assures me that her own people will have no such difficulties. Cetacean civilization, she claims, was already ancient when H. sapiens was discovering the useful properties of obsidian. I’ve spent a lot of Telecom time with her while I’m recovering, listening to fascinating stories: how porpoises first discovered the forgotten world above the sea; how they decided to observe and protect man until he was fit company for civilized beings; how the finny folk met in a roving, decades-long convention, deciding at last to let the Confederacy join them.
So watch out, tuna fishermen! As I’ve had reason to learn, lasers are nasty weapons.
Smith continues his bizarre insistence that apes and cetaceans didn’t need to be uplifted to intelligence, but that they were intelligent all along—in Win’s world (the “real world”) as well as in the North American Confederacy.
If cetacean civilization is as ancient and as advanced as Smith says, it makes no sense that Win’s world wouldn’t have found out about it. How could it be possible that we’ve been hunting whales or drowning dolphins in fishing nets without suffering retributive attacks from cetacean armies with frickin’ laser beams?
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Other posts in this series: