Labyrinth of Night by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online Page B

of extraterrestrial artifacts. The closest applicable document, ‘The Protocol for the Sending of Communications to Extraterrestrial Intelligence’, which had been drafted by SETI scientists in the late 1980s and proposed to the Outer Space Affairs Division of the United Nations, did not cover the remote contingency of someone actually finding alien artifacts, and most legal scholars agreed that terrestrial maritime law did not apply to the salvage of non-terrestrial objects. Thus, there was no practicable legal recourse: the City seemed to be up for grabs, but by whose hands?
    To make matters more complicated, American Politics had taken one of its periodic swings to the right, particularly in regard to American-Russian relations. Having dragged itself from the verge of complete social and economic collapse during the early 1990s, the Commonwealth of Independent States had entered the free-market system with a vengeance in the early 21st century. Now strongly allied to the European Common Market countries, the CIS had become a strong world competitor in export machinery, agriculture, and cybernetics. As well, the newly-privatized Glavkosmos had become particularly innovative in space industry, with many of its spin-offs directly affecting the CIS’s revitalized industrial base. Although the United States had long since ceased to be the Commonwealth’s military and political rival, America found herself rivaled in the global marketplace by the CIS, in everything from wheat exports and popular films (the remake of Battleship Potemkin had taken the Oscar in 2028 and the action film Six from Siberia was breaking worldwide box-office records) to consumer cybernetics and automobiles, as demonstrated by the success of the new Zil 3000 solarcar.
    Many pundits were already pronouncing the 21st century as the Russian Century, a slogan which didn’t sit well with those who had assumed that the new millennium would be a continuation of the American Century. The discovery of the City threatened to upset the pre-existent balance even further; if the alien necropolis yielded any important technological discoveries, then the unspoken conventional wisdom was that the nation which made those discoveries would be the primary beneficiary. The CIS was desperate to solidify its new foothold in the world marketplace and saw the City as a possible means to a greater end…and the United States, its principal economic rival, was equally desperate to make sure that the CIS didn’t grab that leading edge.
    It now seemed to many Americans still suspicious of Russian motives as if the CIS was about to swipe a major scientific discovery from the hands of the United States. The Cooties and the City became a sore point for the man in the street. A national boycott of Russian products was begun by the Republican Party, and the archaic-sounding ‘Mars Is Not Red’ bumper-sticker began appearing on cars across the country.
    The nationalistic backlash reached its peak in November, 2028, when the ultra-conservative George White was elected President. During his first State of the Union address to Congress, White alluded directly to the emerging American-Russian disagreement over the salvage rights to Cydonia artifacts (even though, as his critics pointed out, none had yet been discovered within the City). Referring to an ‘American manifest destiny in space,’ President White also made the highly dubious claim that the City belonged to the United States because it had first been spotted by an American space probe in 1976.
    The Russian leadership in Minsk was furious with White’s rhetoric. President Andrei Nasanov, a Labor Party protectionist who took the traditional view that Russian space efforts constituted manifest destiny for his own country, struck back with an even more ludicrous claim that, because the old USSR had accomplished the first landing of a space probe on Mars in 1971, the red planet was rightfully Russian territory. All mention of