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Doing a scenario for Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's SF story, Footfall.

The ones known as the Predecessors ruled the Alpha Centauri system of suns some three million years ago, but although their technology reached great heights, they never managed to create a unified planetary government or a certain racial tendency towards paranoia. Through runaway global warming, disastrous misapplied planetary engineering (several competing programs didn’t help) and brutal warfare over dwindling resources the Predecessors managed to wreck their planetary ecology to the point where an advanced civilization really wasn’t maintainable any longer.

Some managed to get away into space with shaky hopes of creating a self-sustaining society off-world. Earth and the Australopithecines narrowly avoided colonization, the Predecessor travelers deciding it would be unsafe to pitch their tent so near to their own solar system while other factions still survived in space habitats back home. Before the final implosion of technological civilization on planet and the departure of the last spaceships an effort was made to make things easier for any future civilization that emerged from the wreckage: rectangular stone blocks some 30X30X15 feet, with pictorial step-by-step guides to science and technology carved meters deep into them with energy weapons, so the entire block would have to erode away before the message would be lost. Blocks carrying simpler information, such as how to make the wheel or fire, were placed in easily accessed places, while stuff their theoretical descendants would need later, such as atomic power, were placed in hard to reach areas such as mountain tops, barren wastelands, polar deserts, etc.

As it turned out, those Predecessors who survived the collapse ended up dying off as a result of major climate change and new diseases, and the difficulties of learning to become hunter-gatherers on the fly, so the stones ended up benefitting another species entirely. The Predecessors had already tampered with their genetics, to make them a more useful and intelligent beast of burden…

On Earth, history diverged after 1984. Mikhail Gorbachev never took the top spot in the USSR, and the Soviet Union under intelligent hardliners managed to keep economic collapse at bay until 1995, in the meantime retaking the lead in space from the US. Russia and the US both established bases on the Moon, but the Soviets had the only real permanent orbiting space station, and had responded to the US “Star Wars” program by putting an awful load of suspicious crap in orbit (when the US complained about their “aggressive” postures, the Soviets just said “you started it.” By 1995, the Soviets had a clearly superior presence in space from orbit to the Moon. The US tried to compensate for the Soviets new orbiting ion beam weapons and other fun toys with a major push in commercial space development, building the first orbiting solar power satellite array, a square mile of solar power panels able to send 1000 megawatts of power back to earth (cooking birds daily) by 1996.

The European Community , now Union, moved towards neutrality. US forces were tied down in Honduras fighting rebels based in Nicaragua (tit for tat for the Contras) and after an ill-fated intervention, occupying Lebanon. The Soviets continued to support third world rebellion and started building a canal to refill the Aral. Whether the Soviets could have managed to keep all the plates spinning much beyond 1995 remains unknown, since at that time Earth was attacked by aliens from the Alpha Centauri system.

The Fith’p (racial name, individuals named Fi’) resemble small (around 1000-1600 pounds each), tuskless, short-eared elephants with broad, paddle-shaped tails, clawed feet, and trunks which branch and branch again, giving them eight “finger-equivalents” to grasp and manipulate things with, albeit more clumsily than human hands. Their eyes have grey pupils and black or dark brown irises. Natives of a hot, humid climate and with a smaller ratio of surface area to volume than humans, they do not lose heat easily and normally do not wear more than a decorated harness and a cloth over the genital area, with pouches to carry things behind their heads. Unlike Earth elephants, they are omnivorous, although vegetarian fare predominates and they eat much of their food uncooked.

They love their mudrooms, and the carpeting in their ships oozes water to keep their feet moist. If they are in mud or water, it is considered a friendly greeting to spray someone with your trunk. (They only have one set of nostrils, at the first branching of the trunks).

Like many terrestrial animals, they have mating cycles, although they are rather better at controlling themselves during breeding season than a certain race of dumb lizards you may have heard of. They mate for life, and while males usually hold the top positions in their society, their wives generally have a very strong influence over them: female rationality is considered necessary to rein in more impulsive males, and the lack of sexual dimorphism means that females cannot be easily pushed around. Rape (which could only happen in breeding season anyway) is so rare there isn’t even a specific word for it. Females keep otherwise unstable males from going rogue or overly dedicated males from dangerous folly in pursuit of what they see as the good of the herd. Marriage is generally for influence and connections: marrying due to passion is considered foolish.

The Fith’p are a herd species, with all that implies. They cannot exist in isolation any more than termites can: a Fith’p on its own, cut off from any other member of its herd, will go insane sooner rather than later, and will join up with any other herd – even one of non-Fith’p – to avoid that fate. Normally they move in groups of six or more, and for a Fith’p to go places unaccompanied is usually either a sign something is seriously wrong or an indication that they’re going to make sweet, sweet love with their mate.

Their society is hierarchical, and obedience to the herd leaders is a close to instinctive thing: however, somewhat paradoxically, Fith’p do not deify individuals the way humans do. The Herdmaster leads the herd, but is also subordinate to it: although a Herdmaster has dictatorial power, he (usually a he) is expected to have a personal advisor who will challenge his decisions, and to listen to the advice and views of other high-ranked Fi’. Rebellion against a Herdmaster is rare, but if the mass get the idea that the Herdmaster has, so to speak, lost the mandate of heaven by endangering the herd as a whole, it can be swift and violent. Murder in Fith’p society is rare, and when it does happen, it usually indicates a sudden change in top leadership is about to take place.

One of the most important rituals in Fith’p society is the act of surrender, in which a Fi’ lies on their back and their conqueror places their foot on their chest. This is an act of submission on the instinctive level, and after a Fi’ has so submitted they will find it very psychologically difficult to rebel again. It is used almost always in warfare: to ensure the loyalty of another Fi’ of high but lesser rank from your own herd by making them turn belly up is considered a shocking breach of trust and terribly Bad Form.

It is used in war because Fith’p wars are generally about the assimilation of one herd to another. Fith’p tend to be paranoid about other herds and will conquer and assimilate them if they can: Fith’p herd instinct and the instinct towards submission to a conqueror means that this is easier for Fith’p than for human nations. They tend to aim for unconditional surrender, since anything else would allow for the continued existence of a separate herd. A Fi’ which has submitted to the foot on the belly will rarely if ever rebel afterwards: they have been psychologically shackled to some extent. The conquered herd will be essentially slaves to the victorious herd, with the next generation born becoming members with full privileges and rights. Yesterday’s enemy is today’s slave and tomorrow’s citizen. In a way, the Fith’p win all their wars: after all, the only herds which exist are winning ones.

Assimilation is also helped by the fact that the Fith’p have had a common language across most of their planet for a long time, derived from early efforts at making sense of the Predecessor language from their pictographs, and nowadays considered by most linguists to be phonetically almost completely wrong. Their voices are sibilant, and have been described by humans as “a leaking balloon talking”, although they can manage human speech fairly well.

The Fith’p are not, by human standards, a particularly imaginative race. They have myths and legends, but they do not see the point of fiction, stories which are known to be not true, as entertainment. (They do appreciate a nice exciting documentary). Their society is mostly secular nowadays: they used to worship the Precursors as gods, and even fought wars over points of doctrine (in one of them, the actual appearance of the Precursors seems to have been lost due to the destruction of certain “demonic” artifacts) but nowadays generally think of the Precursors as admirable and holy ancestors, but unlikely to perform any miracles on their behalf, although the old priesthood maintains their position as historians and protectors and interpreters of the message stones. The Cycle of Life remains a holy thing to them, and that they return to the soil and fertilize new growth is to the Fith’p a fine thing – so much so that they tend to mix in their dead with the compost.

They also tend to not be very creative thinkers – but with the stone carvings of the Predecessors guiding their technological progress for tens of thousands of years, they have never had to be.

Until they came to our solar system, the Fith'p expected other civilized life forms would be herd animals, as well. A paranoid people, and also a people capable of embarrassment, the Predecessors explained what they had done wrong, but didn’t really explain why, and didn’t really try to describe what they had been like. This led perhaps to the Fith’p making some unwarranted assumptions about intelligent life in general, for lack of other examples.

They are in some ways more _rational_ than humans: Fith’p see no point in dying in the last ditch, and will surrender when they see their situation as hopeless. After all, the enemy is not planning to eat them, kill them, or rape them. Fith’p wars often open with demonstrations of strength and ruthlessness (shock and awe, baby) to convince the other side of their superior power and the necessity of surrender: negotiations before relative positions have been established is a bit pointless, especially since there are to be no terms save surrender.

If an enemy breaks their surrender, it means one of two things: if an individual does, it is sick, insane. If multiple enemies defy the surrender of their leaders, it indicates a mass revolt, and massive collective punishment is the normal reaction. Such things are rare when dealing with conquered Fith’p populations.
Human beings, on the other hand…

The Thuktun Flishithy arrived in the solar system after a 70 year trip by modified ramjet (collect interstellar hydrogen with magnetic fields for fuel). It carried in cold sleep the former leadership of one of the two remaining dominant powers on the Fith’p homeworld. To prevent a planet-killing war with nuclear weaponry and bioweapons, it had been agreed to merge the herds, with the leadership of one side leaving the Centauri system to establish a new state elsewhere (and the other side’s leadership financing the building of a ship to take them). Earth had been observed by automated probes passing through Earth’s solar system in the mid-19th century, so it was known to be a habitable world: the probes had also taken pictures of what appeared to be large cities and detected what appeared to be early signs of industrial pollution in the air, so the Thuktun Flishithycame armed for bear, the three-quarter mile long ship carrying with it some 64 aircraft-carrier sized fusion-drive propelled fighters, massively powerful laser weapons, loads of missiles and anti-missiles, and computer-driven kinetic weapons (AKA “rods from God” to the Star Wars program enthusiast), etc. Arriving in the solar system near the end of the 1970s, after a brief change in leadership with hardly any violence needed (those in suspended animation woke to find that the children and grandchildren of their subordinates no longer considered 70 years out of touch former Herdmasters to be credible leaders), the Fith’p took up orbit around Saturn, to study the earth closely from a distance and make preparations.

Things did not go well. Total command of space after quickly annihilating US and Soviet space defenses, and unobstructed bombardment of highways, rails, dams, shipping, non-nuclear power plants (the Fith’p did not want to render their new planet radioactive) and anything looking like a military base with unguided kinetics (Rocks From Space) failed to bring about human offers of surrender: it seemed humans were unable to grasp the essentials of the situation. After the Americans cooperated with the Soviets in reducing a large chunk of their own nation to radioactive heck to drive an advance landing force back into space, it became necessary to make a more definitive demonstration.

The Foot, formerly a largish chunk of space rock and valuable volatiles, now reduced to its rocky bare bones, was propelled Earthward, landing in the Indian ocean with millions of megatons of force. [1]The colossal waves destroyed coastal cities and lowlands all around the Indian Ocean, and smaller waves bouncing off the coasts of Antarctica drowned low-lying settlements as far away as Brazil. Close to 100 million people died. However, this was only the start of the dying.

The enormous amount of boiled ocean and bits of sea floor thrown into the atmosphere meant many months of rain and cold and dark: any harvests waiting to come in were spoiled, a dreadful winter was followed by a cold wet spring and a summer hardly worthy of the name: it would be more than a year before the weather began to return to normal.

In the process, some four hundred million people, mostly in the poorer and more vulnerable parts of the globe, would die of famine and the diseases associated with being nearly starved to death.

This was Footfall.

The Fith’p then went on to invade southern Africa as a relatively “soft” target: Africa would serve as a base from which to subjugate the rest of the world, which would either surrender or starve in the cold as their control of space allowed them to continue to interdict shipping, rails, roads, etc. and cut their enemy’s territories into smaller isolated areas, with the threat of another Footfall always over their heads. The Fith’p learned the concept of a negotiated surrender, and the business of puppet rulers and allowing humans to operate under their own laws where they did not contradict Fith’p priorities. They expanded as far north as the Congo, and things seemed to be going well… it was a bit of a surprise, really, when a nuclear Orion ship armed to the teeth took off from US territory: the Predecessor cubes hadn’t mentioned such a thing was possible. (Hadn’t mentioned nuclear bomb-powered gamma ray lasers, either: the Predecessors had examined both ideas and considered them not worth the investment.)

************************************************** **

Ten years after Footfall, nine years and some since the Michael intercepted the Thuktun Flishithy in space and forced a surrender in the face of mutual annihilation, the US now has a quarter of a million Fith’p slaves. The word isn’t used, but the Fith’p do not have full citizenship rights, such as being able to protect their intellectual property, decide where they will live or where they will work, and various other things. In many ways they are permanent prisoners of war, and the reconstructed Supreme Court had to come up with a special legal status for them. The Fith’p themselves are fairly accepting of this, since slave status is normal for new Fith’p that have joined a herd by conquest, and their children will be US citizens.

It hasn’t been accepted by a lot of US civil libertarians, who find the situation distinctly immoral, although they face an uphill battle in getting things changed, given the deep hostility of many Americans towards the Fith’p. Over 250,000 Americans died from Fith’p attacks or in the nuclear bombardment which drove them out of Kansas and Nebraska, many more suffered long-term radiation damage, and while the US managed to avoid famine on any real scale, before the Fith’p surrendered and the nation could actually turn its full remaining industrial and scientific capital on feeding the population, most of the country’s population faced shortages, hunger, or at least really boring eating, not to mention cold, lack of water, etc. The exact number of “surplus deaths” from normally avoidable disease, lack of vital medicines, abnormal physical stress, etc. has never been exactly calculated.

(Of course, compared to say, Indians or Indonesians, what Americans feel is rather mild. India and other Indian Ocean Rim nations continue to call for the extradition of the entire former Fith’p leadership for trial (and execution) and don’t find much sympathy with the US saying it would be seen by “their” Fith’p as a betrayal).

The US is currently carrying out a major industrial and military buildup in space through the medium of the Fith’p, with solar power satellites and space-based factories and asteroid bases multiplying. Eventually the plan is to gain independence from Fith’p made-hardware, but US construction of D-T fusion drive spaceships has been slowed by engineering difficulties: Fith’p tech is not that much in advance of terrestrial state of the art, but there are still materials and engineering issues requiring the creation of entirely new industries to supply parts and so on. Still, growth is back on track, with the massive Keynsian stimulus of rebuilding war damage (the US finally getting a real motivation to modernize its infrastructure) now being supplemented by the growth of new high-tech industries, cheap power from space, and space construction. The US may not be able yet to build Deuterium-Tritium drive ships quite on the level of the Fith’p (and the Fith’p ships they own are being supplemented only slowly by new Fith’p built ones – it will be another six years before their losses from the war are fully made up), but two new Orion-type ships bristling with Fith’p knock off weapons have been built on a just-in-case basis, and two-thirds of the Fith’p fighter ships have been rebuilt for human pilots. (The original Orion, the Michael, was towed back to Earth by the Thuktun Flishithy, and remains in orbit as a combination museum and training base: having built in a hurry, the complexities of landing it again were not given much priority).

The Thuktun Flishithy now has more humans – heavily armed ones – on board than Fith’p, the majority of which now live on earth, mostly in “gated communities” near industrial centers and research facilities, under guard by human troops mostly to protect them from bitter victims of the war, and serving to some extent as hostages to those who work in space. At least the mud baths are prime quality. The US government and various “friends of the Fith’p”, many of them in the science fiction community, continues with a TV and increasingly internet (less developed than OTL 2005 due to different priorities) based charm offensive to get people to accept the Fith’p as new Americans, with a fair degree of success – among people who didn’t live in the invasion zone, anyway.

Many Fith’p stuck on Earth want to go into space: it is after all where all non-Sleepers were born and lived their lives, and they are dubious about planets. (Even before the war, there were those who felt that colonizing the solar systems moons, asteroids, etc. would be a better deal than trying to domesticate a bunch of ugly alien groundlings). But the US is reluctant to have too many Fith’p buzzing around the solar system without close human monitoring: American officials may accept the absolute nature of the Fith’p surrender on an intellectual level, but they have trouble feeling it on a gut level.

New technologies, aside from new weapons and propulsion systems, include high-temperature superconductors, a wide variety of new synthetics and new material sciences, working fusion power reactors, at least a two decade jump in computer hardware (the Fith’p are not the most imaginative programmers), very sophisticated closed-cycle ecosystems science, and genetic engineering tech well in advance of OTL 2015 state of art – not enough to, say, give you a pair of working gills, but enough to develop a rich variety of deadly germs and crop-destroying fungi, or on the positive side create rice able to tolerate temperatures ten to twenty Fahrenheit cooler. There is also hibernation tech, but researchers have been slow to start human testing, given that seventy years of cold sleep tends to be hard on the Fith’p body, does nasty things to their skin, and tended to kill those already elderly.

For the 70 year trip the Fith’p brought along not only elaborate hydroponic farms, but a whole mini-ecosystem, including a variety of decorative and food animals as well as plants, including their odd birds with their neck-canards and upturned-tip wings and trees with leaves like sails or giant banners. A number of these have been successfully bred for zoological parks, and two species of insect-equivalents have prospered enough after escaping captivity to become a pest in certain areas.

US politics has been stormy since the invasion. President Coffey failed to get much credit for winning the war, having been fairly invisible for security reasons during the building of the Michael, and was persistently haunted by a rumor that he had nearly given away the store to the aliens and had to be overridden by Admiral Carrell. The President vehemently denied this, but the Admiral’s refusal to give a simple yes or no (“The President is my commander-in-chief and as such his authority overrides my own”) fueled the fire, as did President Coffey’s vehement effort to destroy Admiral Carrell’s career without ever giving an adequate answer why: it was probably not surprising he lost the post-war election to a Republican champ of huge military budgets and US supremacy.

The next eight years saw the US lay down the law to the rest of the world: with the Soviets crippled by a civil war as well as Fith’p bombardment, and the US having absolute dominance of the high frontier thanks to the fact that the Fith’p and all their hardware were now under American orders, the rest of the world had largely to suck it up. The Soviet civil war, which rapidly moved to a conclusion once the Fith’p no longer interdicted movement of troops and equipment, ended in a military victory, with a largely neutered Communist Party kept around as a figleaf to avoid the appearance of a pure junta: the KGB was thoroughly purged and replaced by a new military-dominated organization. However, recovery of the various SSRs which had broken off (or simply drifted away while the Fith’p destroyed the capability for internal movement) was nixed by the US, save for here solidly Russian-majority Kazakhstan, loyal Belarus, and never-lost eastern Ukraine. This was not pleasing, but with the Soviet nuclear arsenal largely depleted and the US/Fith’p union being able to shoot down 99% of anything they shot off (and obliterate Russian cities at will) there wasn’t much they could do. The US has also made it clear they will not stand for re-militarization of space by anyone but themselves, and have shot down a couple new Soviet “weather satellites” to underline the point.

Regime change came to Cuba and Nicaragua, and US predominance in areas from Europe to the Pacific was reaffirmed. However, US predominance proved to have its limits: bombardment from space didn’t help keep third-world governments, and many non-third world, from collapsing from famine and climate disaster and tidal destruction and radical movements from taking control in the wreckage: struggling to feed itself in the Year Without a Summer, the US had little surplus to help out, and sending large numbers of troops abroad to occupy large, chaotic countries was neither popular with an American public wanting to return to normality nor with a military struggling to restore order at home and committed in sizable numbers in central American, the Caribbean, and for a while in much of Mexico. So, ironically, in spite of US “global dominance”, there are at least as many Marxist nations in 2005 as there were before the Fith’p arrived.

Canada got _really_ cold for a while after Footfall, and the country much north of the US border was largely depopulated for a while: the Yukon essentially lacked anything resembling a government for two years. There has been considerable mutual aid between Canada and the northern US states, leading to something of an Era of Good Feeling in spite of the US administration’s clear tendencies to think of Canada as the US’s hat. Canada has, for its size and GNP, been a major contributor of aid to the many countries devastated in the year after Footfall.

Europe, as the third major global industrial center, was also heavily targeted by the Fith’p, and suffered harshly from the global weather change, although technological and industrial capacity helped moderate the effects, as in the US, with lots of greenhouses, trees processed for nutrients, etc. Unfortunately there was a bit of a “our people first” attitude in the more developed north, and the Mediterranean countries were hit harder by famine: the fairly recently democratized and still poor countries of Greece and Portugal suffered leftist rebellions as things spiraled downhill, while the Right returned to power in a Spain descending into chaos. Catalonia broke off, and the Basques tried to. In Italy, the south suffered worse than the north, but it was the north, with its powerful Communist party and large industrial population, where the revolution actually succeeded. The eastern Communist regimes collapsed like dominoes, usually replaced by nationalist coalitions, although the Bulgarian Party remained in control until 1999. The European Union however survived, and has revived economically and politically. European gratitude to the US for defeating the Fith’p is still strong, but has cooled a bit due to the US’s very limited sharing of new technology and insistence on indefinite continuation of basing rights in spite of the crippled nature of the Soviets. Eurocommunists haven’t done very well lately, given the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, and the rather bad new examples: the Italian regime is mellowing, but Greece has been unpleasant from the start and sheer survival considerations have driven the Portuguese to wackiness. (The rumors about the US arming the Spanish dictatorship in secret are in fact quite true).

The Middle East is a mess, as usual: there has been an Arab Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter again. The religious extremists have taken over in Algeria, the Military in Egypt (which was very lucky the Fith’p ran some mortality projections before deciding whether to smash the Aswan dam or not), while Saddam Hussein (who here avoided the Kuwait woopsie) is still in power and a US ally against an Iran that mass death has only made more radical. Saudi Arabia, which suffered a combined disaster of destroyed oil fields and shipping facilities, mass famine due to weather change and collapse of infrastructure combined with a cutoff of exports, and Islamicist rebellion, has broken into pieces. Morocco is … not doing too badly, actually.

In Africa, new communist regimes have arisen and others collapsed, the bits of Somalia are the middle ages with AK-47s, and warlord regimes are only now going out of fashion. South Africa went a bit oddly, with some rebellious Fith’p holding on and refusing to join in the surrender, until driven out by US command of space and lavish arming of rebels, who then turned their guns on local rivals: the interaction between the African national congress, the Zulu, the Boers and other whites which had collaborated, and the Boers and other whites which had joined the rebellion, was…messy, leading to the very odd anti-Communist Boer remnant/Zulu alliance, the left-wing-but-not-hardline-Marxist cape-SW Africa union, and the thoroughly nasty People’s Republic of Azania (De Clerk never came to power here, and Mandela died in his cell: Apartheid just kept tightening the screws). Much of east Africa remains a crumbling blanket of dried mud and salt blowing in the wind and covering flattened cities and millions of corpses, a few straggling dirt roads and improvised railroads reaching improvised harbors built with the aid of the US, Europe, Canada, and various international aid organizations.

Turkmenistan’s leader is as impressively crazy as his gold-statue building OTL equivalent: he has maintained Marxism since it fits the nature of his regime better than mere authoritarianism.

China was hit hard by the Fith’p attack, famine as bad or worse than Mao’s little effort, chaos, etc. but the Party never lost control of the Chinese heartland to the extent where the US could recognize, say, a “free republic of Canton” (although some regional revolts led hawks to call for this), and lost only peripheral bits. The move towards a capitalist economy was interrupted for some years, but the leadership eventually swallowed their bile and moved back towards a role as supplier of cheap crap to the US and other states. The economy is once again growing fast, although influence in the US economy is substantially less than OTL 2005.

The Indian subcontinent. Oy. At times it’s useful to believe in reincarnation.

Japan did better than OTL, economically speaking, in the early 90s, and the massive investment in rebuilding post-Fith’p surrender has prevented a descent into recession as OTL. The frankly bungling incompetence of the ruling party’s efforts to deal with the Fith’p attacks and the post-Footfall weather (several million Japanese died of hunger, cold, and disease) has led to the rise of a right-wing splinter faction, which now is the biggest party in the Diet and holds the Prime Minister spot. There is an angry air of Never Again, and a great deal of resentment to the military presence of a triumphal US and tendency to act as if the Japan That Can Say No is once again the US’s Lil’ Asian Sidekick. Japan is (cautiously) funding a major research program in high-power laser weapons and other missile interceptor tech – for self-defense purposes only, of course, and those rumors about secret tech exchanges with the Soviets are of course mere Korean propaganda.

Australia and New Zealand are to some extent US dependencies, and are happy for any help with reconstructing their economies. New Zealand is slowly rebuilding its sheep flocks, most of its sheep having been eaten during the hard times after Footfall, while the current Australian government insists that the Perth Reconstruction Project doesn’t conceal a massively corrupt deal between said government and a conglomerate of US corporations. Indonesia has (mostly) pulled itself together: the US is not quite sure whether to support or deny the current dictatorship in its ambitions to regain its lost territories. The enlarged Papuan state is supported by Australia (which has never really like the Indonesians that much) and its government is lobbying the US hard for protection. The Republic of Sulawesi is probably too unknown to Americans to have much of a chance.

The US has recently seen the Presidency return to the Democrats, partly due to a split in the Republicans between those who felt that the country needed continued rebuilding and investment and those who felt things were fine now and it was time to get back to smaller non-military budgets and cutting taxes on the rich. The new President is hoping to patch up US relations with the Soviets and other states somewhat put out by the former administrations “we rule, you drool” attitude, and to brings some of the US’s closer allies into a partnership to develop space, which has already led to accusations of him planning to give away the US’s technological advantage. The President however feels that US technological superiority, derived from Fith’p tech, can only be temporary whatever the US does: once other nations know what is possible, they will duplicate it in time, and US total dominance will only be maintainable if the US is willing to drop asteroids of its own on its competitors heads. He has bigger plans: he wants to start humanity on the way to the stars. The Fith’p dropped the ramjet that had brought them from the Centauri system when they braked into the solar system, and it is now lost in deep space: they had done this not merely because it would be a huge fuel expense to brake its mass as well (it was), but also so they could keep the tech secret as a bargaining chip. There is no more bargaining, all Fith’p tech secrets belong to the USA, but building a new ramjet will be a massive, more-than-manhattan-project scale projects, even without the expenses of building a starship able to keep its crew alive across decades of space travel. The first human starship should not be a US project, but a global one, and should represent all of humanity.

************************************************** **

Light years away, the Fith’p homeworld spins. A warmer, wetter world than Earth – closer to its sun – it is also a one nation world. After the unification of the great powers which had built the Thuktun Flishithy, the few remaining small independents were soon rounded up. The global society is peaceable, lawful, and quite oppressive – the Herdmasters have the Predecessor blocks which said what went wrong last time, and they have no intention of letting that happen. The world must remain unified, resources must be self-sustaining, reproduction regulated for zero population growth. Cities are massive and dense to spare wilderness and farmland – the Fith’p don’t mind so much, they like crowds. The ecosystem is somewhat thin on diversity and heavy in weed species – the legacy of the Predecessor era, in which many gaps were left which three million years of evolutionary radiation have not yet filled. In spite of many calls for large-scale space colonization, off-planet settlements remain small and heavily automated: they exist for resource extraction and production of necessary goods, not for those desirous of large families. Any space colony that grows too large might become a focus of rebellion and the creation of a new, separate herd. This is not to be allowed. The Fith’p people must be preserved, and the planet kept safe from attack from outside.

The leadership is worried. There are few Predecessor stone monoliths left. Once antimatter creation and manipulation and the more sophisticated forms of cybernetics and near-AI systems are mastered, there will be no new technology: the Fith’p are now approaching the final technological level of the Predecessors. A largely hidden search project is under way, hunting for more advanced technology described on stones placed on distant Moons and asteroids, but it has proven futile so far. What will happen to Fith’p science once the Predecessors no longer have any knowledge to give?

And then there is the other solar system. Some decades ago the first radio signals, the loud calls of the terrestrial military’s most powerful radar, were detected. Apparently the other solar system was further advanced than early inspection had indicated. Would the Traveler Herd achieve victory, or would they be defeated and forced into an alien herd? And if the aliens could do that – what was to prevent them from duplicating the Thuktun Flishithy and returning to conquer the home world? In the century since its departure, Fith’p technology had progressed, but not at any great speed. And while joining an alien herd might have its advantages, and traditionally going belly up to the stronger was simply a fact of life – could the aliens be, well, alien? Lacking the traditions of the Predecessors, would they have the wisdom to preserve the world? Or might they destroy it? Slower than light probes have been dispatched: they will pass close enough to the Solar system to pick up the feeble messages of radio and television, but not so close that they will be detected as they fly by. The first signals will arrive in a decade or so.

The Predecessors did not die out, not entirely. Some survived in space. And after three million years, they have undergone evolutionary radiation.
Some of their descendants are no longer sapient. Others are extinct. Some have evolved to the point where they have moved to other dimensions more convenient for the shopping and such. And a few still hang around, in the spaces between. They on occasion look in on their accidental heirs. Not long ago, they gave some hunter-gatherer upright apes a little tweak, and quite recently a little prod to the descendants of those apes when they started wondering if the planets moved when angels weren’t pushing them.

After all, if their accidental heirs reached Earth and the most advanced weapon they encountered was the pointy stick, what would they learn?

[1] I diverge from the text here in that the 4,000 megatons the Americans estimate is nowhere near enough to cause the sort of damage the book describes: to wash India “clear of life to the foot of the Himalayas” would require many millions of megatons of force, a full-blown dinosaur killer that would collapse the climate temporarily so badly that advanced human society could not survive at all and rain fiery chunks of planetary crust down again all over the planet. So I’m going for a bit of a compromise.

Description
Doing a scenario for Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's SF story, Footfall.

The ones known as the Predecessors ruled the Alpha Centauri system of suns some three million years ago, but although their technology reached great heights, they never managed to create a unified planetary government or a certain racial tendency towards paranoia. Through runaway global warming, disastrous misapplied planetary engineering (several competing programs didn’t help) and brutal warfare over dwindling resources the Predecessors managed to wreck their planetary ecology to the point where an advanced civilization really wasn’t maintainable any longer.

Some managed to get away into space with shaky hopes of creating a self-sustaining society off-world. Earth and the Australopithecines narrowly avoided colonization, the Predecessor travelers deciding it would be unsafe to pitch their tent so near to their own solar system while other factions still survived in space habitats back home. Before the final implosion of technological civilization on planet and the departure of the last spaceships an effort was made to make things easier for any future civilization that emerged from the wreckage: rectangular stone blocks some 30X30X15 feet, with pictorial step-by-step guides to science and technology carved meters deep into them with energy weapons, so the entire block would have to erode away before the message would be lost. Blocks carrying simpler information, such as how to make the wheel or fire, were placed in easily accessed places, while stuff their theoretical descendants would need later, such as atomic power, were placed in hard to reach areas such as mountain tops, barren wastelands, polar deserts, etc.

As it turned out, those Predecessors who survived the collapse ended up dying off as a result of major climate change and new diseases, and the difficulties of learning to become hunter-gatherers on the fly, so the stones ended up benefitting another species entirely. The Predecessors had already tampered with their genetics, to make them a more useful and intelligent beast of burden…

On Earth, history diverged after 1984. Mikhail Gorbachev never took the top spot in the USSR, and the Soviet Union under intelligent hardliners managed to keep economic collapse at bay until 1995, in the meantime retaking the lead in space from the US. Russia and the US both established bases on the Moon, but the Soviets had the only real permanent orbiting space station, and had responded to the US “Star Wars” program by putting an awful load of suspicious crap in orbit (when the US complained about their “aggressive” postures, the Soviets just said “you started it.” By 1995, the Soviets had a clearly superior presence in space from orbit to the Moon. The US tried to compensate for the Soviets new orbiting ion beam weapons and other fun toys with a major push in commercial space development, building the first orbiting solar power satellite array, a square mile of solar power panels able to send 1000 megawatts of power back to earth (cooking birds daily) by 1996.

The European Community , now Union, moved towards neutrality. US forces were tied down in Honduras fighting rebels based in Nicaragua (tit for tat for the Contras) and after an ill-fated intervention, occupying Lebanon. The Soviets continued to support third world rebellion and started building a canal to refill the Aral. Whether the Soviets could have managed to keep all the plates spinning much beyond 1995 remains unknown, since at that time Earth was attacked by aliens from the Alpha Centauri system.

The Fith’p (racial name, individuals named Fi’) resemble small (around 1000-1600 pounds each), tuskless, short-eared elephants with broad, paddle-shaped tails, clawed feet, and trunks which branch and branch again, giving them eight “finger-equivalents” to grasp and manipulate things with, albeit more clumsily than human hands. Their eyes have grey pupils and black or dark brown irises. Natives of a hot, humid climate and with a smaller ratio of surface area to volume than humans, they do not lose heat easily and normally do not wear more than a decorated harness and a cloth over the genital area, with pouches to carry things behind their heads. Unlike Earth elephants, they are omnivorous, although vegetarian fare predominates and they eat much of their food uncooked.

They love their mudrooms, and the carpeting in their ships oozes water to keep their feet moist. If they are in mud or water, it is considered a friendly greeting to spray someone with your trunk. (They only have one set of nostrils, at the first branching of the trunks).

Like many terrestrial animals, they have mating cycles, although they are rather better at controlling themselves during breeding season than a certain race of dumb lizards you may have heard of. They mate for life, and while males usually hold the top positions in their society, their wives generally have a very strong influence over them: female rationality is considered necessary to rein in more impulsive males, and the lack of sexual dimorphism means that females cannot be easily pushed around. Rape (which could only happen in breeding season anyway) is so rare there isn’t even a specific word for it. Females keep otherwise unstable males from going rogue or overly dedicated males from dangerous folly in pursuit of what they see as the good of the herd. Marriage is generally for influence and connections: marrying due to passion is considered foolish.

The Fith’p are a herd species, with all that implies. They cannot exist in isolation any more than termites can: a Fith’p on its own, cut off from any other member of its herd, will go insane sooner rather than later, and will join up with any other herd – even one of non-Fith’p – to avoid that fate. Normally they move in groups of six or more, and for a Fith’p to go places unaccompanied is usually either a sign something is seriously wrong or an indication that they’re going to make sweet, sweet love with their mate.

Their society is hierarchical, and obedience to the herd leaders is a close to instinctive thing: however, somewhat paradoxically, Fith’p do not deify individuals the way humans do. The Herdmaster leads the herd, but is also subordinate to it: although a Herdmaster has dictatorial power, he (usually a he) is expected to have a personal advisor who will challenge his decisions, and to listen to the advice and views of other high-ranked Fi’. Rebellion against a Herdmaster is rare, but if the mass get the idea that the Herdmaster has, so to speak, lost the mandate of heaven by endangering the herd as a whole, it can be swift and violent. Murder in Fith’p society is rare, and when it does happen, it usually indicates a sudden change in top leadership is about to take place.

One of the most important rituals in Fith’p society is the act of surrender, in which a Fi’ lies on their back and their conqueror places their foot on their chest. This is an act of submission on the instinctive level, and after a Fi’ has so submitted they will find it very psychologically difficult to rebel again. It is used almost always in warfare: to ensure the loyalty of another Fi’ of high but lesser rank from your own herd by making them turn belly up is considered a shocking breach of trust and terribly Bad Form.

It is used in war because Fith’p wars are generally about the assimilation of one herd to another. Fith’p tend to be paranoid about other herds and will conquer and assimilate them if they can: Fith’p herd instinct and the instinct towards submission to a conqueror means that this is easier for Fith’p than for human nations. They tend to aim for unconditional surrender, since anything else would allow for the continued existence of a separate herd. A Fi’ which has submitted to the foot on the belly will rarely if ever rebel afterwards: they have been psychologically shackled to some extent. The conquered herd will be essentially slaves to the victorious herd, with the next generation born becoming members with full privileges and rights. Yesterday’s enemy is today’s slave and tomorrow’s citizen. In a way, the Fith’p win all their wars: after all, the only herds which exist are winning ones.

Assimilation is also helped by the fact that the Fith’p have had a common language across most of their planet for a long time, derived from early efforts at making sense of the Predecessor language from their pictographs, and nowadays considered by most linguists to be phonetically almost completely wrong. Their voices are sibilant, and have been described by humans as “a leaking balloon talking”, although they can manage human speech fairly well.

The Fith’p are not, by human standards, a particularly imaginative race. They have myths and legends, but they do not see the point of fiction, stories which are known to be not true, as entertainment. (They do appreciate a nice exciting documentary). Their society is mostly secular nowadays: they used to worship the Precursors as gods, and even fought wars over points of doctrine (in one of them, the actual appearance of the Precursors seems to have been lost due to the destruction of certain “demonic” artifacts) but nowadays generally think of the Precursors as admirable and holy ancestors, but unlikely to perform any miracles on their behalf, although the old priesthood maintains their position as historians and protectors and interpreters of the message stones. The Cycle of Life remains a holy thing to them, and that they return to the soil and fertilize new growth is to the Fith’p a fine thing – so much so that they tend to mix in their dead with the compost.

They also tend to not be very creative thinkers – but with the stone carvings of the Predecessors guiding their technological progress for tens of thousands of years, they have never had to be.

Until they came to our solar system, the Fith'p expected other civilized life forms would be herd animals, as well. A paranoid people, and also a people capable of embarrassment, the Predecessors explained what they had done wrong, but didn’t really explain why, and didn’t really try to describe what they had been like. This led perhaps to the Fith’p making some unwarranted assumptions about intelligent life in general, for lack of other examples.

They are in some ways more _rational_ than humans: Fith’p see no point in dying in the last ditch, and will surrender when they see their situation as hopeless. After all, the enemy is not planning to eat them, kill them, or rape them. Fith’p wars often open with demonstrations of strength and ruthlessness (shock and awe, baby) to convince the other side of their superior power and the necessity of surrender: negotiations before relative positions have been established is a bit pointless, especially since there are to be no terms save surrender.

If an enemy breaks their surrender, it means one of two things: if an individual does, it is sick, insane. If multiple enemies defy the surrender of their leaders, it indicates a mass revolt, and massive collective punishment is the normal reaction. Such things are rare when dealing with conquered Fith’p populations.
Human beings, on the other hand…

The Thuktun Flishithy arrived in the solar system after a 70 year trip by modified ramjet (collect interstellar hydrogen with magnetic fields for fuel). It carried in cold sleep the former leadership of one of the two remaining dominant powers on the Fith’p homeworld. To prevent a planet-killing war with nuclear weaponry and bioweapons, it had been agreed to merge the herds, with the leadership of one side leaving the Centauri system to establish a new state elsewhere (and the other side’s leadership financing the building of a ship to take them). Earth had been observed by automated probes passing through Earth’s solar system in the mid-19th century, so it was known to be a habitable world: the probes had also taken pictures of what appeared to be large cities and detected what appeared to be early signs of industrial pollution in the air, so the Thuktun Flishithycame armed for bear, the three-quarter mile long ship carrying with it some 64 aircraft-carrier sized fusion-drive propelled fighters, massively powerful laser weapons, loads of missiles and anti-missiles, and computer-driven kinetic weapons (AKA “rods from God” to the Star Wars program enthusiast), etc. Arriving in the solar system near the end of the 1970s, after a brief change in leadership with hardly any violence needed (those in suspended animation woke to find that the children and grandchildren of their subordinates no longer considered 70 years out of touch former Herdmasters to be credible leaders), the Fith’p took up orbit around Saturn, to study the earth closely from a distance and make preparations.

Things did not go well. Total command of space after quickly annihilating US and Soviet space defenses, and unobstructed bombardment of highways, rails, dams, shipping, non-nuclear power plants (the Fith’p did not want to render their new planet radioactive) and anything looking like a military base with unguided kinetics (Rocks From Space) failed to bring about human offers of surrender: it seemed humans were unable to grasp the essentials of the situation. After the Americans cooperated with the Soviets in reducing a large chunk of their own nation to radioactive heck to drive an advance landing force back into space, it became necessary to make a more definitive demonstration.

The Foot, formerly a largish chunk of space rock and valuable volatiles, now reduced to its rocky bare bones, was propelled Earthward, landing in the Indian ocean with millions of megatons of force. [1]The colossal waves destroyed coastal cities and lowlands all around the Indian Ocean, and smaller waves bouncing off the coasts of Antarctica drowned low-lying settlements as far away as Brazil. Close to 100 million people died. However, this was only the start of the dying.

The enormous amount of boiled ocean and bits of sea floor thrown into the atmosphere meant many months of rain and cold and dark: any harvests waiting to come in were spoiled, a dreadful winter was followed by a cold wet spring and a summer hardly worthy of the name: it would be more than a year before the weather began to return to normal.

In the process, some four hundred million people, mostly in the poorer and more vulnerable parts of the globe, would die of famine and the diseases associated with being nearly starved to death.

This was Footfall.

The Fith’p then went on to invade southern Africa as a relatively “soft” target: Africa would serve as a base from which to subjugate the rest of the world, which would either surrender or starve in the cold as their control of space allowed them to continue to interdict shipping, rails, roads, etc. and cut their enemy’s territories into smaller isolated areas, with the threat of another Footfall always over their heads. The Fith’p learned the concept of a negotiated surrender, and the business of puppet rulers and allowing humans to operate under their own laws where they did not contradict Fith’p priorities. They expanded as far north as the Congo, and things seemed to be going well… it was a bit of a surprise, really, when a nuclear Orion ship armed to the teeth took off from US territory: the Predecessor cubes hadn’t mentioned such a thing was possible. (Hadn’t mentioned nuclear bomb-powered gamma ray lasers, either: the Predecessors had examined both ideas and considered them not worth the investment.)

************************************************** **

Ten years after Footfall, nine years and some since the Michael intercepted the Thuktun Flishithy in space and forced a surrender in the face of mutual annihilation, the US now has a quarter of a million Fith’p slaves. The word isn’t used, but the Fith’p do not have full citizenship rights, such as being able to protect their intellectual property, decide where they will live or where they will work, and various other things. In many ways they are permanent prisoners of war, and the reconstructed Supreme Court had to come up with a special legal status for them. The Fith’p themselves are fairly accepting of this, since slave status is normal for new Fith’p that have joined a herd by conquest, and their children will be US citizens.

It hasn’t been accepted by a lot of US civil libertarians, who find the situation distinctly immoral, although they face an uphill battle in getting things changed, given the deep hostility of many Americans towards the Fith’p. Over 250,000 Americans died from Fith’p attacks or in the nuclear bombardment which drove them out of Kansas and Nebraska, many more suffered long-term radiation damage, and while the US managed to avoid famine on any real scale, before the Fith’p surrendered and the nation could actually turn its full remaining industrial and scientific capital on feeding the population, most of the country’s population faced shortages, hunger, or at least really boring eating, not to mention cold, lack of water, etc. The exact number of “surplus deaths” from normally avoidable disease, lack of vital medicines, abnormal physical stress, etc. has never been exactly calculated.

(Of course, compared to say, Indians or Indonesians, what Americans feel is rather mild. India and other Indian Ocean Rim nations continue to call for the extradition of the entire former Fith’p leadership for trial (and execution) and don’t find much sympathy with the US saying it would be seen by “their” Fith’p as a betrayal).

The US is currently carrying out a major industrial and military buildup in space through the medium of the Fith’p, with solar power satellites and space-based factories and asteroid bases multiplying. Eventually the plan is to gain independence from Fith’p made-hardware, but US construction of D-T fusion drive spaceships has been slowed by engineering difficulties: Fith’p tech is not that much in advance of terrestrial state of the art, but there are still materials and engineering issues requiring the creation of entirely new industries to supply parts and so on. Still, growth is back on track, with the massive Keynsian stimulus of rebuilding war damage (the US finally getting a real motivation to modernize its infrastructure) now being supplemented by the growth of new high-tech industries, cheap power from space, and space construction. The US may not be able yet to build Deuterium-Tritium drive ships quite on the level of the Fith’p (and the Fith’p ships they own are being supplemented only slowly by new Fith’p built ones – it will be another six years before their losses from the war are fully made up), but two new Orion-type ships bristling with Fith’p knock off weapons have been built on a just-in-case basis, and two-thirds of the Fith’p fighter ships have been rebuilt for human pilots. (The original Orion, the Michael, was towed back to Earth by the Thuktun Flishithy, and remains in orbit as a combination museum and training base: having built in a hurry, the complexities of landing it again were not given much priority).

The Thuktun Flishithy now has more humans – heavily armed ones – on board than Fith’p, the majority of which now live on earth, mostly in “gated communities” near industrial centers and research facilities, under guard by human troops mostly to protect them from bitter victims of the war, and serving to some extent as hostages to those who work in space. At least the mud baths are prime quality. The US government and various “friends of the Fith’p”, many of them in the science fiction community, continues with a TV and increasingly internet (less developed than OTL 2005 due to different priorities) based charm offensive to get people to accept the Fith’p as new Americans, with a fair degree of success – among people who didn’t live in the invasion zone, anyway.

Many Fith’p stuck on Earth want to go into space: it is after all where all non-Sleepers were born and lived their lives, and they are dubious about planets. (Even before the war, there were those who felt that colonizing the solar systems moons, asteroids, etc. would be a better deal than trying to domesticate a bunch of ugly alien groundlings). But the US is reluctant to have too many Fith’p buzzing around the solar system without close human monitoring: American officials may accept the absolute nature of the Fith’p surrender on an intellectual level, but they have trouble feeling it on a gut level.

New technologies, aside from new weapons and propulsion systems, include high-temperature superconductors, a wide variety of new synthetics and new material sciences, working fusion power reactors, at least a two decade jump in computer hardware (the Fith’p are not the most imaginative programmers), very sophisticated closed-cycle ecosystems science, and genetic engineering tech well in advance of OTL 2015 state of art – not enough to, say, give you a pair of working gills, but enough to develop a rich variety of deadly germs and crop-destroying fungi, or on the positive side create rice able to tolerate temperatures ten to twenty Fahrenheit cooler. There is also hibernation tech, but researchers have been slow to start human testing, given that seventy years of cold sleep tends to be hard on the Fith’p body, does nasty things to their skin, and tended to kill those already elderly.

For the 70 year trip the Fith’p brought along not only elaborate hydroponic farms, but a whole mini-ecosystem, including a variety of decorative and food animals as well as plants, including their odd birds with their neck-canards and upturned-tip wings and trees with leaves like sails or giant banners. A number of these have been successfully bred for zoological parks, and two species of insect-equivalents have prospered enough after escaping captivity to become a pest in certain areas.

US politics has been stormy since the invasion. President Coffey failed to get much credit for winning the war, having been fairly invisible for security reasons during the building of the Michael, and was persistently haunted by a rumor that he had nearly given away the store to the aliens and had to be overridden by Admiral Carrell. The President vehemently denied this, but the Admiral’s refusal to give a simple yes or no (“The President is my commander-in-chief and as such his authority overrides my own”) fueled the fire, as did President Coffey’s vehement effort to destroy Admiral Carrell’s career without ever giving an adequate answer why: it was probably not surprising he lost the post-war election to a Republican champ of huge military budgets and US supremacy.

The next eight years saw the US lay down the law to the rest of the world: with the Soviets crippled by a civil war as well as Fith’p bombardment, and the US having absolute dominance of the high frontier thanks to the fact that the Fith’p and all their hardware were now under American orders, the rest of the world had largely to suck it up. The Soviet civil war, which rapidly moved to a conclusion once the Fith’p no longer interdicted movement of troops and equipment, ended in a military victory, with a largely neutered Communist Party kept around as a figleaf to avoid the appearance of a pure junta: the KGB was thoroughly purged and replaced by a new military-dominated organization. However, recovery of the various SSRs which had broken off (or simply drifted away while the Fith’p destroyed the capability for internal movement) was nixed by the US, save for here solidly Russian-majority Kazakhstan, loyal Belarus, and never-lost eastern Ukraine. This was not pleasing, but with the Soviet nuclear arsenal largely depleted and the US/Fith’p union being able to shoot down 99% of anything they shot off (and obliterate Russian cities at will) there wasn’t much they could do. The US has also made it clear they will not stand for re-militarization of space by anyone but themselves, and have shot down a couple new Soviet “weather satellites” to underline the point.

Regime change came to Cuba and Nicaragua, and US predominance in areas from Europe to the Pacific was reaffirmed. However, US predominance proved to have its limits: bombardment from space didn’t help keep third-world governments, and many non-third world, from collapsing from famine and climate disaster and tidal destruction and radical movements from taking control in the wreckage: struggling to feed itself in the Year Without a Summer, the US had little surplus to help out, and sending large numbers of troops abroad to occupy large, chaotic countries was neither popular with an American public wanting to return to normality nor with a military struggling to restore order at home and committed in sizable numbers in central American, the Caribbean, and for a while in much of Mexico. So, ironically, in spite of US “global dominance”, there are at least as many Marxist nations in 2005 as there were before the Fith’p arrived.

Canada got _really_ cold for a while after Footfall, and the country much north of the US border was largely depopulated for a while: the Yukon essentially lacked anything resembling a government for two years. There has been considerable mutual aid between Canada and the northern US states, leading to something of an Era of Good Feeling in spite of the US administration’s clear tendencies to think of Canada as the US’s hat. Canada has, for its size and GNP, been a major contributor of aid to the many countries devastated in the year after Footfall.

Europe, as the third major global industrial center, was also heavily targeted by the Fith’p, and suffered harshly from the global weather change, although technological and industrial capacity helped moderate the effects, as in the US, with lots of greenhouses, trees processed for nutrients, etc. Unfortunately there was a bit of a “our people first” attitude in the more developed north, and the Mediterranean countries were hit harder by famine: the fairly recently democratized and still poor countries of Greece and Portugal suffered leftist rebellions as things spiraled downhill, while the Right returned to power in a Spain descending into chaos. Catalonia broke off, and the Basques tried to. In Italy, the south suffered worse than the north, but it was the north, with its powerful Communist party and large industrial population, where the revolution actually succeeded. The eastern Communist regimes collapsed like dominoes, usually replaced by nationalist coalitions, although the Bulgarian Party remained in control until 1999. The European Union however survived, and has revived economically and politically. European gratitude to the US for defeating the Fith’p is still strong, but has cooled a bit due to the US’s very limited sharing of new technology and insistence on indefinite continuation of basing rights in spite of the crippled nature of the Soviets. Eurocommunists haven’t done very well lately, given the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, and the rather bad new examples: the Italian regime is mellowing, but Greece has been unpleasant from the start and sheer survival considerations have driven the Portuguese to wackiness. (The rumors about the US arming the Spanish dictatorship in secret are in fact quite true).

The Middle East is a mess, as usual: there has been an Arab Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter again. The religious extremists have taken over in Algeria, the Military in Egypt (which was very lucky the Fith’p ran some mortality projections before deciding whether to smash the Aswan dam or not), while Saddam Hussein (who here avoided the Kuwait woopsie) is still in power and a US ally against an Iran that mass death has only made more radical. Saudi Arabia, which suffered a combined disaster of destroyed oil fields and shipping facilities, mass famine due to weather change and collapse of infrastructure combined with a cutoff of exports, and Islamicist rebellion, has broken into pieces. Morocco is … not doing too badly, actually.

In Africa, new communist regimes have arisen and others collapsed, the bits of Somalia are the middle ages with AK-47s, and warlord regimes are only now going out of fashion. South Africa went a bit oddly, with some rebellious Fith’p holding on and refusing to join in the surrender, until driven out by US command of space and lavish arming of rebels, who then turned their guns on local rivals: the interaction between the African national congress, the Zulu, the Boers and other whites which had collaborated, and the Boers and other whites which had joined the rebellion, was…messy, leading to the very odd anti-Communist Boer remnant/Zulu alliance, the left-wing-but-not-hardline-Marxist cape-SW Africa union, and the thoroughly nasty People’s Republic of Azania (De Clerk never came to power here, and Mandela died in his cell: Apartheid just kept tightening the screws). Much of east Africa remains a crumbling blanket of dried mud and salt blowing in the wind and covering flattened cities and millions of corpses, a few straggling dirt roads and improvised railroads reaching improvised harbors built with the aid of the US, Europe, Canada, and various international aid organizations.

Turkmenistan’s leader is as impressively crazy as his gold-statue building OTL equivalent: he has maintained Marxism since it fits the nature of his regime better than mere authoritarianism.

China was hit hard by the Fith’p attack, famine as bad or worse than Mao’s little effort, chaos, etc. but the Party never lost control of the Chinese heartland to the extent where the US could recognize, say, a “free republic of Canton” (although some regional revolts led hawks to call for this), and lost only peripheral bits. The move towards a capitalist economy was interrupted for some years, but the leadership eventually swallowed their bile and moved back towards a role as supplier of cheap crap to the US and other states. The economy is once again growing fast, although influence in the US economy is substantially less than OTL 2005.

The Indian subcontinent. Oy. At times it’s useful to believe in reincarnation.

Japan did better than OTL, economically speaking, in the early 90s, and the massive investment in rebuilding post-Fith’p surrender has prevented a descent into recession as OTL. The frankly bungling incompetence of the ruling party’s efforts to deal with the Fith’p attacks and the post-Footfall weather (several million Japanese died of hunger, cold, and disease) has led to the rise of a right-wing splinter faction, which now is the biggest party in the Diet and holds the Prime Minister spot. There is an angry air of Never Again, and a great deal of resentment to the military presence of a triumphal US and tendency to act as if the Japan That Can Say No is once again the US’s Lil’ Asian Sidekick. Japan is (cautiously) funding a major research program in high-power laser weapons and other missile interceptor tech – for self-defense purposes only, of course, and those rumors about secret tech exchanges with the Soviets are of course mere Korean propaganda.

Australia and New Zealand are to some extent US dependencies, and are happy for any help with reconstructing their economies. New Zealand is slowly rebuilding its sheep flocks, most of its sheep having been eaten during the hard times after Footfall, while the current Australian government insists that the Perth Reconstruction Project doesn’t conceal a massively corrupt deal between said government and a conglomerate of US corporations. Indonesia has (mostly) pulled itself together: the US is not quite sure whether to support or deny the current dictatorship in its ambitions to regain its lost territories. The enlarged Papuan state is supported by Australia (which has never really like the Indonesians that much) and its government is lobbying the US hard for protection. The Republic of Sulawesi is probably too unknown to Americans to have much of a chance.

The US has recently seen the Presidency return to the Democrats, partly due to a split in the Republicans between those who felt that the country needed continued rebuilding and investment and those who felt things were fine now and it was time to get back to smaller non-military budgets and cutting taxes on the rich. The new President is hoping to patch up US relations with the Soviets and other states somewhat put out by the former administrations “we rule, you drool” attitude, and to brings some of the US’s closer allies into a partnership to develop space, which has already led to accusations of him planning to give away the US’s technological advantage. The President however feels that US technological superiority, derived from Fith’p tech, can only be temporary whatever the US does: once other nations know what is possible, they will duplicate it in time, and US total dominance will only be maintainable if the US is willing to drop asteroids of its own on its competitors heads. He has bigger plans: he wants to start humanity on the way to the stars. The Fith’p dropped the ramjet that had brought them from the Centauri system when they braked into the solar system, and it is now lost in deep space: they had done this not merely because it would be a huge fuel expense to brake its mass as well (it was), but also so they could keep the tech secret as a bargaining chip. There is no more bargaining, all Fith’p tech secrets belong to the USA, but building a new ramjet will be a massive, more-than-manhattan-project scale projects, even without the expenses of building a starship able to keep its crew alive across decades of space travel. The first human starship should not be a US project, but a global one, and should represent all of humanity.

************************************************** **

Light years away, the Fith’p homeworld spins. A warmer, wetter world than Earth – closer to its sun – it is also a one nation world. After the unification of the great powers which had built the Thuktun Flishithy, the few remaining small independents were soon rounded up. The global society is peaceable, lawful, and quite oppressive – the Herdmasters have the Predecessor blocks which said what went wrong last time, and they have no intention of letting that happen. The world must remain unified, resources must be self-sustaining, reproduction regulated for zero population growth. Cities are massive and dense to spare wilderness and farmland – the Fith’p don’t mind so much, they like crowds. The ecosystem is somewhat thin on diversity and heavy in weed species – the legacy of the Predecessor era, in which many gaps were left which three million years of evolutionary radiation have not yet filled. In spite of many calls for large-scale space colonization, off-planet settlements remain small and heavily automated: they exist for resource extraction and production of necessary goods, not for those desirous of large families. Any space colony that grows too large might become a focus of rebellion and the creation of a new, separate herd. This is not to be allowed. The Fith’p people must be preserved, and the planet kept safe from attack from outside.

The leadership is worried. There are few Predecessor stone monoliths left. Once antimatter creation and manipulation and the more sophisticated forms of cybernetics and near-AI systems are mastered, there will be no new technology: the Fith’p are now approaching the final technological level of the Predecessors. A largely hidden search project is under way, hunting for more advanced technology described on stones placed on distant Moons and asteroids, but it has proven futile so far. What will happen to Fith’p science once the Predecessors no longer have any knowledge to give?

And then there is the other solar system. Some decades ago the first radio signals, the loud calls of the terrestrial military’s most powerful radar, were detected. Apparently the other solar system was further advanced than early inspection had indicated. Would the Traveler Herd achieve victory, or would they be defeated and forced into an alien herd? And if the aliens could do that – what was to prevent them from duplicating the Thuktun Flishithy and returning to conquer the home world? In the century since its departure, Fith’p technology had progressed, but not at any great speed. And while joining an alien herd might have its advantages, and traditionally going belly up to the stronger was simply a fact of life – could the aliens be, well, alien? Lacking the traditions of the Predecessors, would they have the wisdom to preserve the world? Or might they destroy it? Slower than light probes have been dispatched: they will pass close enough to the Solar system to pick up the feeble messages of radio and television, but not so close that they will be detected as they fly by. The first signals will arrive in a decade or so.

The Predecessors did not die out, not entirely. Some survived in space. And after three million years, they have undergone evolutionary radiation.
Some of their descendants are no longer sapient. Others are extinct. Some have evolved to the point where they have moved to other dimensions more convenient for the shopping and such. And a few still hang around, in the spaces between. They on occasion look in on their accidental heirs. Not long ago, they gave some hunter-gatherer upright apes a little tweak, and quite recently a little prod to the descendants of those apes when they started wondering if the planets moved when angels weren’t pushing them.

After all, if their accidental heirs reached Earth and the most advanced weapon they encountered was the pointy stick, what would they learn?

[1] I diverge from the text here in that the 4,000 megatons the Americans estimate is nowhere near enough to cause the sort of damage the book describes: to wash India “clear of life to the foot of the Himalayas” would require many millions of megatons of force, a full-blown dinosaur killer that would collapse the climate temporarily so badly that advanced human society could not survive at all and rain fiery chunks of planetary crust down again all over the planet. So I’m going for a bit of a compromise.