A New Panama

It took less than an hour to assemble the house. The final screws and braces were tightened and the foreman re-checked the floors and walls with her level before declaring the structure sound. Then the team cheered, the owner of the new abode presented the customary bottle, and everyone, watchers and workers alike, went to the gathering hall to eat and celebrate. Everyone, that is, but the owner and a stranger who stayed in place as the community dispersed, like a beach pebble stranded by the waves.

The owner looked at him, but said nothing at first. She sat on her porch, idly handling a narrow piece of fretwork that had become detached during the unlading of the deconstructed house from the shipping container. She looked tired. She’d had a long journey.

‘Hey, Daveed,’ she said finally. ‘Thanks for waiting. Everything got delayed, but I wanted to be here for the house-raising.’

‘Hi Liberty. Love the neochattel design. So, have you read over my proposal?’ The staccato string of words was smoothly spoken, as if the sound of courtesy could gloss over the fact of his fierce and abrupt efficiency.

Liberty slung the fragment of fretwork behind her, dusted her hands together, and stood up. ‘I have. Let’s go to the library.’

The library, like the main hall, was a permanent stone building. It reared up amid a small stand of young trees like a small, square tower, and the air inside was cooled and controlled. Liberty led Daveed to a small side room with seven chairs around a long, cantilevered table affixed to the wall. A thick buff envelope sat on the table like a drab centrepiece. The address was handwritten in uneven ink – not printed, not mere font masquerading as calligraphy. Liberty Brathwaite,  Caribbean  Communities Inc  ,

Barbados V149, Costa Rica  The corner of the envelope shone with the subtle gleam

of a 3D embossing, the words Nereus Mining and Construction underlined with a long trident.

Daveed glanced at it, then looked at Liberty in concern as he sat across from her with the envelope between them. ‘Not signed?’

‘Not yet,’ she said, with neither welcome nor warning in her voice. ‘I wanted to see you face-to-face and hear you speak.’

He looked out of the window at the compound. Cool green curtained the view, bright sun beyond made jewels of the wood and stone buildings arranged in careful, non-linear, familiar order. ‘You’ve done well,’ he said, so quietly that she barely heard him. ‘There’s no reason for you to take on a risk like this.’

She folded her hands and regarded him patiently. ’We already know that, so where is the but?’

He smiled. ‘But I think you’re the only people who can. We’ve all lived through radical change. Asteroid mining companies in space habitats flooding the market with cheap minerals. The beginning of the end of oil-based economies and politics. Add to that the banking collapse, financial reform, and the telesatellite wars. Nation states disappearing beneath the ocean. Epidemics. Disasters. But your microstates have survived, adapted, and invented an entirely new kind of community and citizenship.

Model villages built up into a model state without boundaries, achieving a new independence. That’s unusual, and admirable.’

She shrugged off the compliments. ’Give us space, sun and support, and we’ll flourish.’

‘And that’s exactly what I’m offering you.’

‘It’s not the what, it’s the where,’ she countered.

‘You’ve made a life and living in every part of the globe. What’s one step further?

Don’t your people have a saying, “home is a state of mind, and not of place’?”

She laughed at his boldness. ‘I suppose we do, but even these scattered settlements dream of their old homelands. We live far apart, but our roots grow deep and broad and intertwined. We’re always in touch with the centre and each other, and that’s home. Can you at least give us that?’

He hesitated and said nothing.

‘Another thing. I doubt you’re doing this just because you admire us. What do you benefit from this? Would we really have the habitats all to ourselves? Wouldn’t you be tempted to allow a billionaire or two, or try a little space tourism to keep the money flowing? Because if that’s the case, it sounds to me like you’re scouting for cruise ship staff, not colonists.’

She placed her left hand on the envelope and pushed it toward him. ‘I think we’ve had enough centuries of being other people’s servants, don’t you?’

‘Wait, let me–‘

‘I’m sorry you came all this way to be disappointed.’

He bowed his head in surrender, took up the envelope, and quietly left.

The hall was crowded with residents and guests, some physically present, some virtually. Three dining tables each carried a long screen of translucent glass that danced and flickered with the images of well-wishers from other communities around the globe. Liberty settled herself at a table with a plate of the usual finger foods and a small cup of strong drink, and started catching up with family, friends and colleagues in the hall and onscreen.

It was considered rude to virtually drop by another community’s hall unless you’d been told the time of an event and given some sort of hint to show up, but access was ungated and not everyone followed the unwritten social rules. When the frowning, uninvited face of Senator G. Francis Jones appeared in front of her, Liberty took the opportunity to ignore him and focus on her plate.

‘I thought you were going to sign it.’

Liberty glanced up from her food and eyed her professional nemesis with calm indifference. ‘Oh, are you speaking to me?’

‘Don’t be childish,’ he snapped. ‘And don’t expect me to apologise for voting against you and this entire foolish project.’

‘I’m not expecting you to apologise any more than I expect you to accept that the Senate gave me the authority to decide. But I should have expected you would immediately assume the worst.’

He looked past her as her voice grew louder, conscious of the stares they were attracting. ‘Lower your voice. Smile. Don’t let them see us arguing.’

‘Why not? Everyone knows I don’t like you. Let them watch, let them talk.’

‘Why did you say no? I thought you were a big fan of getting the Communities into space.’

‘I am. But on our terms, G. Always on our terms and to our benefit.’

He drew back a little. Surprised approval leaked past the argumentative mask before he caught himself and controlled his features.

‘I am a negotiator,’ Liberty stated. ‘I never grab the first offer on the table. Trust me, there will be others.’

He began to lecture her. ’Remember, Barbados is watching. We should be consolidating what we have, not abandoning our roots.’

Liberty shook her head in disbelief. ‘You’re thinking this is abandonment? I’m thinking about remittances that’ll make Panama, UK and USA look like pocket change. I’m thinking about safety and security like nothing anyone has ever promised us, far less delivered. This could be the dawn of our empire. I wish you had an imagination.’

‘I wish you had common sense,’ he sneered in return. Then he vanished, having peevishly cut the link.

Liberty steupsed and drank off the rest of her drink.

The second offer came five weeks later, and the representative didn’t even show up in person, choosing instead to videoconference their pitch. Liberty treated the bid with the condescension it deserved – ten minutes of blank-faced listening, thirty seconds

of noncommittal acknowledgement and farewell, and two lines of formulaic refusal sent four days after. Three months later she saw two more hopefuls, both far more persuasive and present, and the month after that brought a deluge of ten proposals.

Word began to spread within the mining industry and then beyond until the open secret was no secret but an explosion of media confetti – bright, flimsy, and hard to grasp.

Barbados demanded a report, and Liberty obeyed. She sailed the short distance from isthmus to island on her Community’s own charter, docked at the floating port amid solar seaplanes and hydrofoils, and took the airship shuttle to the higher ground of New Parliament Hill.

Liberty scrutinised the landscape as the airship passed over. Twenty years of unpredictable tectonic activity had sanctified the new coastal plain as an untouched region of shifting sands and steady mangroves. The occasional modern ruin showed where the optimistic had built too soon. Then came the true ruins, the decayed spine of the hotels of the Platinum Coast, tsunami-ravaged then stranded far inland on the crest of a new terrace as the Caribbean Plate dipped and shrugged and rose again.

For Liberty they were a monument to the death of tourism, the rise of expatriate citizenry, and the establishment of the global Caribbean Communities. They were also a reminder: many eggs required many baskets for survival.

Later, as she stood in the Senate Chamber and delivered her report, she tried to convey that truth in her concluding remarks.

‘Some day in the future the new land will settle and we will reclaim and rebuild the old nation, but for now, you camp here on this territory as a formality to keep our vote in the United Nations. You govern less than ten thousand rather than hundreds of thousands and the House of Assembly is nothing but a handful of village council members.’

The President scowled, and a disapproving murmur rose from the benches. Liberty raised her voice. ‘I do not mean to be discourteous, but these are the facts.

Diaspora saved us before and it will save us again.’

Still frowning, the President countered, ‘But your own report suggests that no-one has been able to offer us a suitable situation. Why continue to entertain this idea?’

‘The right offer will come in time,’ Liberty said. ‘Let the early adopters go forward and make the necessary mistakes. We’ll watch and learn and be better prepared when we’re ready to make our move.’

Debate continued for another hour, but at last the Senate agreed to follow her advice. Then, in typical Senate fashion, they decided that the growing importance of the colonisation project had overridden her original mandate, and appointed a six-person steering committee to ‘ensure that the interests of the Government of Barbados were adequately represented’.

Liberty thanked the Senate with a strained smile. At least they’d had the sense not to put G. Francis Jones on the committee. From the expression on his face, he was happy to be left out and certain that the project would fail in time.

The walls and floor started to shudder and flex. Liberty knew that the new Parliament Buildings had been constructed according to the highest standards of earthquake engineering, but she couldn’t help looking around in alarm. The Senators calmly began to gather their belongings and the President banged her gavel.

‘Session is adjourned for today. Feels like a strong one. Please exit the Chamber with care and get home safely.’

What came next was unexpected to many, but certainly not to those who had been paying attention. Within a month of Liberty’s visit to Barbados, the dominoes began to fall. Three mining companies scaled back operations and closed bases. The media

buzzed again, this time with both urgency and substance, when two mining companies finally declared bankruptcy outright. The steering committee was baffled, and Liberty had to explain things to them using short sentences.

‘Efficient production but bad planning. They could have worked together to control pricing, but they created a glut on Earth and there isn’t enough demand offplanet.

That’s one of the reasons they’re so eager to encourage space colonies or tourism or whatever. They need more consumers.’

‘Does this work in our favour?’ the Chair of the steering committee asked bluntly. ‘Maybe,’ Liberty replied cautiously. ‘They need us more than we need them, but desperation can make corporations lie. The last thing we want is to be stuck in a broken-down habitat. We still have to be careful.’

A simple transformation elongated the small meeting room in the library. The wall at the far end of the table where Liberty had rejected the Nereus envelope was now a screen, and the plain wooden table in Costa Rica blended into a darker, more richly polished version in Barbados. There sat the members of the committee, three on either side, making notes, talking quietly, and waiting for the real meeting to begin. At first Liberty thought she could see their table vibrating just a little, but she blinked once and it steadied. How strange that she could be peaceful with the concept of living in space but get nervy at a mere glimpse of her native land!

The door buzzed in warning, shaking Liberty from her musings, and opened to admit a tall woman with long black hair and light brown skin. She could have been taken for a local in several different countries, but when she spoke her greetings her accent was flat, neutral, international-American.

‘Welcome, Esperanza,’ Liberty replied, waving her to the chair at the head of the table, opposite the screen and in full-face view of the steering committee. ’We’ve had a look at your proposal, and we’re very curious. Can you tell us more about your organisation? There’s not a lot of information about you in the public domain.’

‘We were majority shareholders in a couple of mining enterprises, but our real work is designing specialised modules for life support in extreme environments. I’d be surprised if you’d heard of us. We don’t have a corporate name as such.’

‘No corporate name? Then what is Diné,’one of the committee asked.

‘That’s the name of our people.’ Esperanza turned to Liberty. ‘But you know about that already, with your Communities.’

Liberty tapped her tablet. ‘Your proposal offers bespoke habitats – not just repurposed mining bases or fast-build space hotels, but new, permanent habitats tailor-made to our specifications. What’s the catch?’

She smiled brightly. ‘We’ll all be guinea pigs.’ ‘What?’ said the Chair dryly.

‘We’re conducting research. We’ve been doing this for a while with mini-biospheres in the desert.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not a life for everyone. Small, isolated groups need the right balance of cooperation and distance, or they implode. You’ve been perfecting small-community life for generations. That gives you an advantage. This won’t be like a space lab or mining base with a two-year tour of duty. Our habitats must be home.’