Lal remembered visiting museums before the mission to Alpha Centauri, gazing into the eyes of aging paintings and trying to imagine the painter.
He thought he had that awareness since a very young age: the powerful knowledge of history, in the almost overwhelming sense that legions of the dead had loved and lived before you. The workers who hauled stones up the pyramids lived lives like his, lived human lives like Mughal Emperors or Carthaginian elephant tamers or any other profession you could care to name.
The people of the past were humans deserving of dignity – even if oft denied such – the people of the present were, and those of the future were. Rights and privileges and inherent value… their journey over to Alpha Centauri had made all those things seem negotiable if the strife and chaos of Earth at launch hadn't already. What was man worth compared to the high ambitions of the other factions?
Was he a tool for the advancement of science? The bearer of a soul with infinite value, even if he didn't realize it? Was he an instrument of capital?
A man (or woman) was a person just like him. As far as Lal knew, they experienced the world the same way, felt the same emotions, lived and loved just as he did. Perhaps some argument could be made that no man could truly claim to know another's experience – did Lal's perception of red differ from Miriam's or Deidre's, even if they applied the same label to it? – but on some deep level, he knew.
The numbers on his screen represented people just like him. People with less power, certainly, but people who wanted to keep on living, people who believed in a future for man defined by democratic principles and inalienable rights. Not that their value came from that belief. Their value came from their humanity. But perhaps they were a bit more valuable to him because they had placed themselves in his care.
Perhaps that only made it worse. He couldn't claim to know how Santiago or Yang thought, or how the burden of leadership weighed on their shoulders, but he wondered if not having to live up to the expectations of the UN (which lived on, perhaps, in Lal's leadership, but in a meager form, as his wife lived on in a single cell) made leadership simpler for them.
Article 55 of the UN Charter called for the promotion of higher standards of living and economic development and the creation of solutions for societal and health-related problems. Morgan and Zakharov would agree with that part, at least, and might even agree that certain rights and freedoms could intermesh with those desires to make a better society. Morgan would stress the free in 'free market', Zakharov would stress the free in 'free research', and both of those things would swiftly overshadow such paltry things as equal rights and self-determination of peoples.
Miriam was not by any measure blameless, and she was perhaps a bit too much of a Luddite, but sometimes Lal thought everyone could use a bit of her faction's hesitation regarding technology. Perhaps some developments polluted the soul, but they demonstrably caused changes in man. They raced to create new ways of destroying themselves so they might win hegemony over Planet, without questioning the end goal.
What would happen when one part sat sovereign over Planet? Well, each would begin to put their own preferred paradise into practice. Easy. Except… what of those who disagreed? Lal attracted UN loyalists, and children were raised in the creche to respect each other, in a similar way to the University's creches encouraging curiosity and the Spartans allowing rough play as they encouraged fitness. Those beliefs would not simply leave a person, and they were liable to persist through generations unless children were divorced from parents almost entirely…
Would Miriam's zealots lie down under the boot of the Antichrist? Could Deidre's followers resort to eco-terrorism? How would you solve that? Well, he could imagine how the others might try. They all remembered the last days of Earth – which had the character of the end of days to them, even if there was no reason to assume everyone died the minute the colonists left – where terror was an uncontrollable problem, where discontent seethed anywhere people gathered.
Their tools for stopping unrest were more terrible than any an earthly despot could have imagined, and yet they faced the age-old problem of empire. The terror that garrisons or military police inflicted on the colonies would seep into the metropole, the violence almost fated to turn even on good, proper citizens. Imperialism weakened the dignity of the empire's subjects as surely as it destroyed the dignity of the conquered.
(You couldn't put the genie back in the bottle, especially if you thought the bottle an illogical weakness of a childlike, superstitious age.)
He knew this because he knew history. Imperial excess in Rome or Franco's forces descending on the Spanish metropole, the jackboot slamming down and down on human faces until you'd think nothing could survive. Maybe the human spirit was indomitable. Maybe they just needed a better jackboot.
He supposed the struggle had never really changed, they were just in an era where they couldn't assume the affluence and security that brought rights to the forefront. For all their technological advancement, they backslid as a society. They trotted out the rank relics of centuries long past: authoritarianism, zealotry, militarism, nationalism, even eugenics if rumors about Santiago's cloning experiments proved true.
He knew that sort of thought was its own poison, though. He tried to remind himself of that as he worked out the cold equations, as he decided who lived and died, which units made strategic withdrawals and which died to cover retreats. A human life… was not something to be spent easily. Perhaps in an earlier day he'd say no life was to be spent at all, but Planet was harsh. People died, and then they were fed into the vats.
(Those great vats, dark sludge obliterating the flesh so others might live. He wondered if any of Miriam's followers struggled to see glorious resurrection in that churning, or if a comparison to Christ was more apt. In some way, those vats were historical, even if they were a harsh necessity of Planet. The people of the past gave themselves for the future. What that future was exactly… varied. The martyrs of the French Revolution and the counter-revolutionaries of the Vendee died the same.)
For what little it was worth, they weren't lacking for purpose. No one was. Whatever faction you were in, you believed in some future. Maybe they had to just to make all the bleeding worth something.
Planet was a crucible that heated mankind, making it malleable and fluid. Impurities bubbled up, and enterprising craftsmen worked to remove them. What polluting aspects of man's infancy on Earth would be left behind, and which would be kept? What mold would mankind be poured into? Would they be alloyed with the strange materials – the strange thoughts, the strange mind – of Planet, taking an alien shape for alien purpose?
Or perhaps that was a callous metaphor, for mankind was composed of men, not metal. You simply couldn't hammer mankind into the shape you wanted, you couldn't reform thousands of minds to all act the exact same way.
That was his hope, at least.