People of the Sky

Scenario I: Ridgetop Citadels

First we went camping.
We were seen as peripheral peoples anyway.
To some extent, we encouraged the perception of ourselves as misfits,
so our remote encampments would be tolerated.
The governments tended to overlook our isolated settlements,
under the premise that such undesirable itinerants were less of a nuisance
in remote rural localities than on the streets of the cities,
where they might be seen by the important people.
And we were careful to keep nomad encampments of an innocuous sort
as cover for our industrial endeavors, while we produced our first airships.

One way and another, we were able to produce a few efficient airships
without attracting too much official notice.
After that we were mobile, and we moved up to the high ranges.
Our camps had been vulnerable, in the wooded hills which were threaded with roads.
After we had our ships, we didn't need roads, and we moved above the tree line.
There on the harsh, windy heights we lost our concern
about being confronted with trespassing charges.
We could dig, cut rocks and build walls at our pleasure.
Nobody knew we were up there; if they did, they couldn't see us;
if they could, they didn't care we were up there;
if they did, they couldn't get there to tell us about it.
We felt free to build our castles and our factories into the icy rocks.

At this point, we probably could not be stopped.
Our decentralized industry of building airships was established
in scores of mountainous locations on several continents.
These locales were near the altitude ceilings for most helicopters,
in windy places where helicopters didn't work very well.
Helicopters which approached us tended to have accidents.
These heights were hard to approach on foot,
a challenge for experts climbing for sport.
Every time a government developed a serious interest in our activities,
we were gone in overnight evacuation.
Our tunnels and buildings were covered with the rubble of landslides.
An avalanche above the snow line doesn't melt away in the spring,
to reveal the shapes of the rocks under it.
The secrets we were concealing had to do with our technology.
We were not a simple nomadic people.
We didn't want people to worry about us.
We knew how easy it would be for the governments to slander us.

We safely avoided confrontation until our industrial substructure was finished.
At that point, we had a totally self-sufficient economy,
which nowhere intersected with the money economy.
We had restricted access, for no other pilots could fly as we could
among the shrieking turbulent winds of the rocky heights.
We could build airships without hindrance, and harbor them safely.
That was when we first began to show ourselves in the lowlands.

Scenario II: The Social Movement

We built our ships out of sweat and enthusiasm.
They were built with donated labor, from donated materials in donated workshops.
The vast hordes of the disaffected of all nations pitched in spontaneously.
We saw the amazing and unprecedented phenomonon,
that all this far-flung activity was coordinated via the computer network.
All these resources were drawn from the square economy.
The people were instantly persuaded that the marketplace was a dead end,
that their efforts and their wealth would be better placed in creating the new world.
They saw the airlight economy as the wave of the future:
eco-sensitive, recycling, solar powered, hydrogen fueled, self organizing.
They were convinced that too many roads had been built,
too many fences, too many canals, too many dams, too many levees.
Too many forests had been cleared, too many marshes drained.
It was time for humans to begin effective work for the wild,
not to try to kill the wild.

The airlight economy was only made possible by advanced technology.
Not before the turn of the millenium was it possible to see
that advanced materials and advanced techniques made it possible
to organize human endeavor in an environmentally non-exploitive mode.
The avoidance of metals was a deliberate choice, largely a matter of taste.
It was selected as one of the criteria
which would distinguish our industry from the fascists.
Metal goods characterized the smokestacks of exploitive, centralized industry
based on greed and denial, but we meant to build a better life.
It helped that our materials were superior, stronger and lighter.
We used a lot of metals, just not as primary structural elements.
We proved that metals were not the essential basis for technical achievement.

Our most fundamental issue concerned surface transport.
We dared to imagine trucks, trains and tractors becoming obsolete.
We intended from the very start to tear up roadways.
It was difficult at first to present cogent arguments against
devoting so much surface area of the land to crops and pastures.
We knew we could do better on the food issue,
but clear proof was difficult to produce in the prevailing circumstances.
But we could demonstrate immediately, incontrovertibly,
that we didn't need so many roads.
So that was what we did.

The technology of the automobile was about a century old.
It was the fundamental basis of the fascist economy.
It was an easy point to attack, for innovation was suppressed
within that field as a matter of policy.
The conglomerate of the steel, automobile and petroleum industries
made up the core of fascism.
We attacked that economy by producing our airships.
Our advantage was that our way was more efficient,
and could reasonably provide a complete replacement for fascism.
We could get the crops to town without touching the roads.
After we proved that, economic forces starved fascism.

Amazingly quickly, the population shifted their support to our vision of the future.
Money became worthless overnight as consumerism died.
Work for the boss so you can buy a car? Nonsense!
A car was useless when you could ride an airship.
The public lost faith in the market economy.
The physical proof of the revolutionary society was visible in the sky.
We took care to make it very clear that acceptance of our new mode of transport
also entailed giving up the notion of land ownership.
None could stop airships from flying anywhere.
That was a new social axiom.
None could prosecute a claim to the land where airships may alight.
That too became starkly clear.
As soon as society was put on this new footing of aerial mobility,
the concept of land ownershp was doomed.

This social upheaval was substantial.
Inevitably, it was associated with violent events.
But because the airship people stuck together, the world came to know
that violence against an airship or its crew
would only produce a dozen airships in your sky.
The land you sought to defend would no longer be yours
when you and your machinery and your livestock and your buildings
were lifted from it and carried elsewhere.
The new law was that nobody owned the land.
Neither a person nor a family nor a company nor a government owned land.
Humans didn't own land. Life owned the land.
Humans could use the land if they didn't mess it up.
Also if they didn't shoot at airships.
Life was different after the airships arrived.

Scenario III: Aboard the Airships

For most members of the crew, the airship was home.
Loyalty was first to the ship, and then to the other airship people.
There were always children aboard, who had free run of the ship.
They generally preferred to stay with the other kids, though.
That freed the mother's attention for her shipboard work.
Living situations were loosely arranged voluntary associations.
Nesting in couples was socially discouraged, but commonly occurred.
The predominant living arrangement was their unique social slavery,
which is treated in more detail elsewhere.
The salient feature of shipboard life was that the sky people
could choose how they wanted to live, whether they were free or slave.

The big ships were born in the great mountain redoubts of the sky people.
These citadels were carved out of the living rock in steep and rugged regions.
Above the snow line, great inflated canopies raised false ridge lines,
creating vast cavernous areas protected from the chilly winds,
and hidden from surveillance satellites.
These canopies were large enough to shelter many inflated ships.
Unheated to avoid thermal detection, these camoflage canopies
were strong enough to bear great burdens of snow.
They were at ambient pressure, only the geodesic struts pressurized.
Lighting in daylight hours was provided by rerouted diffuse sunlight.
The presence of the canopies was hard to detect visually from outside.

The sky people lived and worked underground.
Extensive networks of tunnels drilled into the mountain
made the fortress concept very real.
There were many such citadels built.
Communications were maintained at all times.
Strategically, the sky people held the high ground.
Socially, this certitude freed them for innovation.
The milieu of the mountain citadels encouraged a vigorous creativity.
This was expressed artistically in some quite stunning achievements
in a rich mixture of computer media.
But it also reached expression in the practical terms of technical invention.
To some degree, this inventiveness had to happen, among the first airship nomads.
But the sky people developed a feverish intensity of ingenuity.
All these innovations were recorded on the internal computer network.
The sky people obviously created for the sheer joy of it.
They were sure that very soon, the world could see their work and wonder.
That was just the way it happened.

Whithertowards?

rev 980303