Chapter 23

Retirement Planning (TY38-month 445)

“What do you plan to do in retirement, Chief Kotter?” I asked. She’d just had a meeting with all the section directors to go over the plan to create an eighth section, stationed in Lleifior. The Militia was now up to nearly 55,000 members. Lleifior was the last established township to house a dedicated Militia section and we needed to figure out who would get transferred from what to where. In most instances, entire units would be moving but there were smaller outfits that would also be needed.

Like all townships on Tara except Ponderosa, Lleifior had little urban sprawl. Its farmland and ranches, however, had grown significantly and stretched over 1500 kilometers from the city in nearly every direction. In each of those directions, remote business areas had been established. Centurion Oswald, who claimed now to be a century old, had nearly 200,000 unhomed concubines that he was the ‘owner’ of. Tara AI insisted that any unhomed concubine who didn’t migrate to Eldorado had to be owned by the Civil Service. I’d worked with him to establish concubine business and education centers in the sprawling ranchlands where sponsors could send their children for school and training, and that as many as a thousand sponsors used as their central business district.

“Retirement? I don’t think so.”

“Doesn’t your thirty years in the Militia come up soon?” I asked. I knew very well that it did. Kotter was the first Militia member and we were celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Militia when the year turned.

“As if being in the reserves is any different than active service. We have jobs to do and they don’t magically come to an end after thirty years.” I thought about that and the contract we had.

“The contract says we serve thirty years of active and thirty years of reserve. Are you saying that’s a lie?” I asked.

“To paraphrase an old Earth saying, there are lies, damn lies, and AI lies,” Kotter said.

“What? AIs can’t lie. It’s against their programming,” I declared.

“Says the AIs,” Kotter said.

“If I may,” Cricket interrupted us. “Perhaps I can shed some light on the question.”

“Can AIs lie, Cricket?”

“No. However, the interpretation of contracts is a highly evolved occupation. The popular belief is that AIs were created millions of years ago to navigate spacecraft through hyperspace. Indeed, some species did develop AIs for that purpose first. In many species, however, AIs were developed for trade and contract negotiation, financial management, and taxation. It was deemed important to have a neutral third party to enforce contracts. That, in fact, is what humans face in the Confederacy. The Darjee AIs negotiated a contract to take humans to space and colonize various planets if they would fight the Sa’arm. The Darjee AIs are also the enforcers of the contract. They are not a neutral third party.”

“What does that have to do with our Militia contract?” I asked.

“Eight years ago, the first sponsors to reach Tara reached the end of what they felt was their thirty years of active duty. They discovered there was no term limit to their service. When they volunteered, it was the same as a concubine agreeing to join them. It was for the duration. Until the war ends. It is unlikely the war will end. At least, not in the lifetime of any human now living.”

“Are you saying that our contract is not valid?”

“The Militia proclamation that you agreed to states that persons serving in the Militia will be granted full planetary citizenship during and after thirty years of active duty and thirty years of reserve duty. Upon completion of the enlistee’s full sixty years, he or she would be granted full Confederacy Citizenship on par with any other Citizen. That final clause was pending negotiations with Confederacy AIs. The Confederacy AIs struck it down. They further indicated that the terms of active duty and reserve duty describe a reward for service and not an end to service. In the same way that sponsors are sponsors for life and concubines are concubines for life, the Militia is also for life.”

“Did you have anything to do with this AI negotiation?”

“Yes. I argued on behalf of the Militia agreements as did Teddy and Amelia. We were unsuccessful based on the fact no one in any of the Confederacy races retires. Responsibilities change and eventually age or sickness affects how much an individual can do, but what is in retirement that we don’t have every day? We have plenty of food, lack for nothing a replicator can produce, and travel on the planet at will. We have entertainment and even the jobs are generally not endless. If a sponsor decides to become an artist or musician, he can work toward that and no longer be considered a farmer, for example. One can change careers but one cannot stop contributing.”

Kotter hung her head, nodding slightly. So, this was why Ponderosa suddenly became available for colonization by the freemen. There was no call for a retirement village. No one was going to retire.

“You are Provincial Governor for life, Niall,” Kotter said. “On our planet, that is expected to be a very long time. Remember, Marines are also Marines for life. In their case, the life-expectancy is much shorter.”

My own thirty-year retirement date came and went. No one commented about it.

I decided to go for a ride and went to the stable where I heard crying. “Rose? Rose, what’s wrong?” I asked. My first concubine was startled and turned to me, hastily wiping her eyes.

“Nothing,” she said. Even I—raised on Tara and not subject to Earth’s preconceived notions—recognized that response as not meaning what she said.

“Come sit with me, my love. Tell me all about the nothing that has you upset.” It had been over a year since we got word of Lyle’s death in a ground action on a planet we’d never heard of. It was the first death in our family and Rose had been devastated. I thought she had recovered. She cuddled on my lap when I sat on a hay bale.

“I’m pregnant,” she whispered.

“That’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you.”

“I’m not. Niall, I’m tired. I’ve had eleven children since I arrived on Tara. Twelve now, Niall! I know the nanites keep us healthy and fertile, but I’m tired of carrying children. I don’t even know where Amy is or if she is alive. We came to Tara when she was ten and were so excited and happy. Where’s my first baby, Niall? Where are any of our babies?”

“I didn’t know you were tired of having children.”

“Cricket says the nanites can keep me fertile for another fifty years. If a woman on Earth had twelve children, she would be past her bearing years and/or dead by now. We keep manufacturing them. I don’t know if I can last,” she said as she sobbed on my chest. I knew this was serious. Like everyone on the planet, we were discovering what ‘for the duration’ really meant. A sponsored concubine’s job was to provide comfort for her sponsor and to have and raise children. There would be thirty-six years between Lyle’s birth and our next one. I no longer had any idea of how many children I had or by whom. It seemed there were usually around twenty or twenty-five living with us who were under the age of fourteen.

We needed to do something. Our population was increasing exponentially and not only was there the stress of bearing the children, but the fourteen-year commitment to raising them. Not only was the ratio of concubines to sponsors over twelve-to-one, but the ratio of dependents to concubines was over ten-to-one. Of our 38 million population on Tara, 34 million were dependents. We were all exhausted.

“I don’t know what I can do, darling Rose. But somehow, I’ll make sure this is the last child you need to carry.”

“At least for a while,” she whispered. “I just need a little time to recover.”

“I believe we need to have some kind of slow-down in our birthrate, and specifically a moratorium on births for those who have borne a certain number,” I said to the council. “Even with AIs providing most of what we need for childcare, our mothers and many fathers are wearing out. We are going to start experiencing an accelerated mortality rate if we don’t do something.”

“I agree,” Scarlett said. “I’ve borne fifteen myself and I’m frankly a little tired of it.”

“Females in the Confederacy are contractually obligated to continue bearing offspring,” Tara AI said officiously. “You cannot simply have an end-date that is not associated with the end of fertility.”

“And how long before a woman comes to her menopause on this planet?” Scarlett said. “I’m seventy-five years old. On Earth I’d have reached menopause twenty or thirty years ago.”

“Confederacy medical technology can maintain fertility for as much as a hundred years after the beginning of menses. There is some degradation in the length of time fertility can be maintained based on how long a woman has been fertile before she received medical nanite upgrades,” Tara AI said. It sounded quite proud of the fact.

“We are beyond our capacity to care for our young,” I said. I could see nods from the mayors around the table and a strong agreement from Centurion Oswald.

“Not only that,” he said, “we are seeing men and women forced to breed who really shouldn’t have children. The lowest CAP scores are often assigned to people who have poor parenting characteristics.”

“Those people should be culled. They are a waste of resources,” Tara AI said. “We can begin immediately. At your direction, I can disable the medical nanites and they will soon die a natural death.”

“Tara, people are not livestock. We don’t cull them,” Scarlett groaned. “No one will give the order to turn off medical nanites.” I wasn’t so sure about that. Two or three of the mayors were looking significantly at me.

“How about if we set up a moratorium, similar to the way we did with fourteen-year-olds,” I suggested. Cricket was feeding me information as quickly as I could speak it. He was working on a way Tara AI could not object. “We would not cease to reproduce. But after a certain number of children, the rate of reproduction would be reduced. We’ve held pretty steady planetwide with pregnancies beginning in the third year after births. We could simply say that after a certain number of births, the frequency would drop. First to the fourth year, then to the fifth, and so on. It would relieve the pressure on the women as well as ease our burden of educating and caring for the dependents.”

“I could get behind that idea,” Drylanders said. “Frankly, with four concubines, I don’t have any idea of how many children I’ve sired or even what the names of the last batch are. We were supposed to create the kind of supportive family life that would result in more sponsors. Instead, our children might as well be raised in orphanages—or the boarding schools you’ve set up.”

“Governor Cho, please work with the Militia AI and the Ponderosa AI to establish a guideline and projections. We will take this up at the next council meeting. In the meantime, let us simply say that you are authorized to give any concubine a five-year break if she has had ten or more children. That should give us some breathing room. Are there any objections?”

“I object,” Tara AI said.

“Any other objections? Record the decree.”

Eldorado now had a dependent population of nearly over six million with 675,000 freemen. At least we had good education and fifty percent of our new adults tested above the 6.5 cutoff for becoming sponsors. But not all those who tested as sponsors volunteered. It was another quirk in the contract. On Earth, people were offered the opportunity to volunteer if they had a qualifying CAP score, but they weren’t forced to. They could stay and take their chances fighting the Swarm on our home world. Of course, no one had a choice about that. From all the reports we got, though, there were still people on Earth who were focused on how they could profit from the battle with the Sa’arm rather than how to defeat them. Five billion people had died or been evacuated. Entire countries, like India and Australia, had been wiped off the map and were now simply ‘Swarm Territory.’