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FIFTY-SEVEN The Great Leap Sideways

"Well, here goes nothing."

C. C. Jones ran a damp palm over his close-cropped, graying beard a final time, gave up any further pointless scrutiny of the glittering golf ball in his other hand, threw a tiny switch concealed in the base of its handle, which was too short for human fingers, and turned his professional attention on his subject.

This odd object he'd been given by that bird-man Aelbraugh Pritsch would either work or it wouldn't. For his purposes, it wasn't important at all that the damned thing didn't bear even the faintest resemblance to a TV camera or a microphone.

He cleared his throat.

The slight slur he spoke with, which had faded over twenty years, and the ropy scar concealed beneath his beard between his lower lip and chin, which hadn't, were both the result of an argument he'd had with Horatio Gutierrez, then a young lieutenant colonel in command of what would someday be the famous Redhawk Squadron.

He cleared his throat.

Four months in a military hospital after having had his teeth dashed out by Gutierrez, wielding a heavy steel fire extinguisher, plus the resulting slur and scar, had cost him his network anchor position, his marriage, and had led him through an endless, nightmarish series of increasingly demeaning and obscure jobs with the wire services, news magazines, and newspapers—to here.

He cleared his throat.

"Lieutenant Colonel `Chuck' Tai Chiao," he intoned, nervousness and preoccupation disguised perfectly by a deep, melodious voice which had once been familiar to the people of an entire planet, "is the commander of the PRC's `Extra-Special Forces' on 5023 Eris, a military arm of the supersecret—and some would say bizarre—`Great Leap Sideways' program cobbled together in the late nineties."

Thinking back now, Gutierrez had been right. Antisocialist guerillas had planted a fuel-air bomb aboard one of his fighter-interceptors being used to suppress resistance to American sovietization. Television lights and cameras had not only made defusing that bomb a great deal more difficult, they'd also made brightly lit targets of the men trying to do a job which was deadly dangerous even under the best of conditions. However, even after all these years, Jones couldn't bring himself to like the officer, now a brigadier general and an exile just like himself, who had ruined his brilliant and promising career.

He probably never would.

He cleared his throat and looked up at the individual he was talking about, hoping that the omnidirectional image recorder was doing its job better than he was doing his own.

"Colonel Tai, since it's no longer much of a secret to anyone on 5023 Eris, at least, could you tell us something about the Great Leap Sideways?"

"Better call me Chuck." Walking beside Jones as they ambled through the woods between the American encampment and the Elders' settlement, Tai nodded and grinned. "Well, at the time it began, Deng Xiao Peng, better known around the world as the `Butcher of Tien Anmen Square,' had just died of natural causes—after all, it's only natural to die when you've been force-fed several dozen grams of arsenic—and two related matters were perplexing our newest leaders in Beijing."

Jones nodded, but his thoughts were still elsewhere. It had been bad enough working for American Truth in the first place, and worse to be given a dead-end assignment like this. But he'd been absolutely horrified to discover that Gutierrez was commanding this expedition to nowhere. The likelihood that the general probably didn't remember him, after two adventure-filled decades, or the violent incident which had so disastrously changed his life, only made things worse.

Tai was going on. "The first was a continuing hostility exhibited by the people of the world, despite a demonstrated willingness on the part of their governments to pretend otherwise, because of what had happened in Tien Anmen Square and afterward. Beijing felt that many modern states had done worse on considerably less provocation, and couldn't figure out why it was being treated differently."

"I see," Jones answered, trying to focus his mind on business. This was the only fresh break he was ever likely to get—even if the whole damned underpopulated planet was only the size of Texas and his employer looked like something on sale at a bait shop—and he'd better not blow it. "And the second?"

"Increasing depletion of technical and economic vitality on the part of the Japanese, whom the PRC had broken its back to emulate over the previous decades. If Japan, Inc. could falter and stagnate, what of Beijing's hopes?"

"And the Great Leap Sideways," Jones asked rhetorically, "was an answer to that question?"

"Well," Tai replied, "an argument was put forth, I believe at Hong Kong University, using Japan as a bad example. Japan had been nominally democratic since World War II, but remained stratified and anti-individualist. It's simply not possible, went the theory, to foster economic and technical progress over the long run without corollary increases in individual political and social freedom."

Jones grinned. "Most of our nonhuman audience would probably agree with that. They might also be interested to know that Hong Kong was a city-sized free market enclave which had just been reabsorbed into the PRC after a long period of relative independence. And what was the reaction to this idea in Beijing?"

"Naturally, it was bitterly denounced by the older politicians who had risen to power under Mao Tse Tung and believed that his methods, by some standards the most vicious the world had ever seen, were fully vindicated by what they viewed as excesses committed by the advocates of democracy in Tien Anmen Square."

"I see." Jones had found the tone that had made him a star. "Make that fifty or sixty million murders on one side of the ledger, as opposed to a few banners and a styrofoam Statue of Liberty. But the younger pols felt there might be something to Hong Kong's theory?"

"Right. So it was decided to be very Western indeed, and conduct a scientific experiment—"

"A scientific experiment in personal freedom?"

"The whole thing could be aborted if it proved a mistake. Even the old guard felt they might learn something—like the parameters involved in extracting maximum effort from individuals while giving minimal freedom in return. To everyone this seemed very American in character, and that became the basis for the experiment."

"Er, um, yes. Please go on."

"Young peasants and workers in their early teens were rounded up from all over and sent to newly built villages in remote locations. Often no two spoke the same dialect. That was remedied by a teaching cadre educated abroad under previous regimes, who introduced their pupils to American English and the American way of life as they understood it, aided by a store of data including novels, old TV shows, and movies."

"What sort of movies?"

"Anything, as long as it showed something of everyday American attitudes. Movies like The Shaggy Dog, American Graffiti, Some Kind of Wonderful, Sixteen Candles, A Christmas Story, Back to the Future, My Best Friend's Wedding, Stand By Me, Beetle Juice, Honey I Shrunk the Kids."

"Beetle Juice? You'd get a pretty distorted view of American life from that, wouldn't you?"

"They were working with what they had. Even a movie like that gives some idea, say, about how American teenagers relate to their parents. Anyway, when some criterion had been met, most of the teachers made an exit, leaving the subjects more or less on their own. A few remained as `village elders' to keep the program on course."

"How did you come into the picture?" Despite a lifetime of professional habit, Jones had begun to be fascinated with this man's story. He was forced to struggle, overcoming a reflex to suppress it and remind himself that Aelbraugh Pritsch had told him this was just what Mister Thoggosh wanted—humanity, enthusiasm, understanding, most of all, intelligence—none of the self-consciously detached, unjustifiably superior attitude which, with its resulting air of slightly bovine stupidity, characterized news reporting back on Earth.

"My four grandfathers and grandmothers," the colonel answered, "were among the young peasants and workers who were expected by Beijing to become Americans overnight. They suffered many hardships, mostly psychological in nature, but their children—my parents' generation—fared better. As a consequence, I grew up in a `village' in eastern Mongolia meticulously patterned after what Beijing believed to be a typical town in the American southwest."

"What was it like?"

"Well, its American twin could have been found anyplace from Laporte, Colorado to Clovis, California—two prototypes that were used. It was code-named `Calumet'—"

"Because of another movie." For this, Jones was prepared. He imagined his former employers keeling over from strokes and aneurisms at what he was about to ask. It was a good thing this interview wouldn't be sent back to Earth. Maybe. "After the little community which resisted Russian invasion in John Milius's Red Dawn?"

"Cuban and Nicaraguan invasion. Believe me, it was equipped for the task it was designed to accomplish. We had a local MacDonald's, a Safeway, a Starbuck's, a Baer garage, a laundromat, a dry cleaner, two bars, a little one-horse shopping mall, three restaurants—"

"One of them Chinese."

Tai laughed. "That's right, a synagogue and two churches, one Roman Catholic, used by Manchurian peasants shipped in to simulate a minority population. The other you might call generic Protestant—all Western religions look alike to Beijing. We had a movie theater and a radio station offering rock music and farm reports. Internet communication was limited to other villages in the program. TV was piped in from Japanese, Swiss, and South African satellites."

"Why not American satellites?" Another question he'd never have been allowed to ask back home.

"Because by then, American TV no longer reflected individualistic values which the program's directors were interested in. As a matter of fact, it hadn't for some time."

"I see. Well, tell me more about Calumet, Colonel Tai—Chuck. What else did it have to offer?"

"We had a video rental, a bank, even a gun shop—I was a grown man, an officer in the Red Army, before I knew how remarkable that was. On Sunday mornings the streets of Calumet would be filled with Ford and Chevy pickups with Norinco copies of Winchester and Marlin rifles hanging in their back windows. We even had one freelance prostitute living in a small frame house at the edge of town. I always believed she was PRC Intelligence, reporting directly to Beijing."

"And what about your life, growing up in Calumet?"

"No complaints. I was educated in an American-style community-oriented school system. `I pledge allegiance to the flag of the People's Republic of China, and to the collective for which it stands . . .' I took Mandarin as a second language, along with Spanish. My folks belonged to the PTA and taught Sunday school. I was a Cub Scout, Boy Scout, Explorer, 4H, Junior Red Cross, and played clarinet for a while in my high-school band. I had to quit because I made the football team—my `sports collective,' as Beijing called it—the `Wolverines.'"

Jones laughed at another reference to Milius. "How did your hometown interact with the rest of China?"

"Not much. Calumet was surrounded by mechanized, American-sized farms owned by the farmers, which served as a source of supply for the program and as a cultural buffer. Outside the farms was a forested zone, ringed with barbed wire, guard towers, and mine fields, which could be crossed only with permission from Beijing. Among the kids of Calumet, it was known as the `Lost Cojones Wildlife Preserve.' "

"I see—"

"That wasn't the only thing lost there—the first time I got laid was in those woods, in the shadow of an automated gun emplacement. No attempt was made to deceive us—we knew we were Chinese, living in China under special circumstances—or to deny us news of the outside world. Nor was any attempt made to indoctrinate us, either in Marxism or Chinese socialism. We had been placed where we were to see what developed. Our job was to be as classically American, to live as much like classical Americans, as we could."

"Which meant what?"

"Well, the program's directors couldn't be certain exactly what elements had most contributed to America's two centuries of almost unbroken prosperity and progress. They were terribly afraid to leave out anything, for fear it might prove important. So every aspect of American life, at least as we knew it, was copied in the most painstaking detail possible in Calumet and her sister villages.

"Our diet, which we largely supplied ourselves, was scandalously high in protein by PRC standards. Bureaucrats were always complaining that we swam in caffeine and nicotine, but they even allowed us a `statistically valid' amount of marijuana, sold by the lady I mentioned in the frame house at the edge of town."

"What was that about Calumet's `sister villages'? I hadn't heard about that before."

"In a way, you Americans really ought to be complimented—Calumet was only one of several artificial environments, each as American as . . . well, as America had been before it turned itself into a socialist republic. The Great Leap Sideways created eight or nine midwestern—`Smallville,' I think they called it—southern, northwestern, and southwestern towns. The only typical American environment deliberately excluded by the program was that of your East Coast: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and so forth."

"And why was that?"

Tai shrugged. "The directors felt that they too-closely imitated Europe, producing the same human sheep, and contributed negatively to individualism. It's true, isn't it, that the northeast was the first American region to begin sovietizing itself?"

"Who's interviewing who here?"

"Who's interviewing whom. Our towns, on the other hand, were intended to close the `nerd gap,' to assure the social and technical progress Beijing came to feel were a natural outgrowth of untrammeled individualism. Aside from the obvious travel restrictions, the only limit was that the advocacy of collectivism was discreetly but firmly discouraged."

"Collectivism? Discouraged how?"

"Well, a newspaper editor I recall—we had a little weekly and the high-school paper wasn't bad—wrote a couple of editorials demanding confiscation of all the guns in town. Shortly after the second—I figure he must have gotten a quiet warning lecture about the first—he moved away and was never heard from again."

"All because the directors weren't certain what elements had contributed to American prosperity and progress, and were afraid to leave out anything, including private gun ownership."

"Exactly. They still aren't certain, especially since you people wound up destroying everything I was brought up to believe had been constructive and decent about America."

"Hmm. Well, now that you're here on 5023 Eris and the Great Leap Sideways is no longer a secret, what of the program's future—and that of the people you left behind?"

"Oh, it'll stay a secret. The program was always controversial in Beijing and that's truer now than ever. The third and fourth generations have begun to chafe under restrictions imposed on them by the outside world—consisting of a communist dictatorship. Beijing has never forgotten the hideous propaganda blunder committed by Deng, so they'll step lightly, but they're afraid of all these uncontrolled and uncontrollable individualists they've created—"

"Is there a particular reason for that?"

"Aside from general principles? Sure: they made a terrifying discovery in the second generation and never quite got over it. At first, Calumet and her sister villages were merely prosperous. After a subsidiary experiment abolishing taxes and internal economic regulation, they began producing huge surpluses, overwhelming the economies of the districts where they were based. The directors were afraid to reinstate taxes and regulation for fear of wrecking the program. Unlike American politicians, they understood the danger of interfering in a culture schooled in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party and Concord Bridge. However, they were equally afraid to acknowledge the actual economic effects—as opposed to the widely advertised and purely mythical benefits—of taxes and regulation."

"And that was a generation ago. How did it all work out?"

"Beijing decided to buy whatever surplus we produced. The old guard argued that it must be destroyed to avoid further disruption. This would have defeated the whole purpose of the program, but it would have been the Chinese thing to do.

"Younger politicians, not so young by now, argued that the program should be allowed to generate the benefits it was designed to generate. I suspect some were benefitting individually, on the black market. Anyway, we're on permanent probation, just as we've always been. In a sense, our group, the PRC Extra-Special Forces, has been sent here for much the same reason yours was."

"And that, specifically, is . . ."

"Well, if we accomplish anything positive out here for Beijing, that's fine. If not, at least Beijing is rid of some of us in a sanitary manner. Perhaps they'll wind up sending the rest of us and wash their hands of us entirely. Who can say?"

"Well, Colonel Tai, on that sobering but hopeful note, we'll end this. Thanks very much. I'd also like to thank Mister Thoggosh personally for giving me this opportunity. As a former network anchorman and a stringer for all the most prestigious American newspapers, this may be the first honest reporting I've ever done.

"Given a chance, it won't be the last.

"C. C. Jones, reporting for the Elders' Cerebro-cortical Network."

 

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