Contact across the Solar System

Back Home Again

A few days later, the ship arrived at the Earth, after doing a flyby of the Moon. The travelers had been in space for around a year, and they were now coming back. The SSC people dropped each one off in their home nation, complete with all the loot that they brought back -- a lot of souvenirs and knickknacks and the like, including each one's optical disk. Some of them needed an extra scoutcraft for what they brought home.

After dropping the last of them off, the ship then went on another world tour, and then headed off.

The twelve travelers got a hero's welcome in their home countries and elsewhere. "To the edge of the Solar System and back," went one news story about the travelers, even though there are lots of Solar-System objects far beyond Eris. Mostly planetoids and comets, however.

Their nations' politicians liked it also, and some of them also liked the discs that the travelers brought back. But some people continued to grumble that the SSC could be doing more for the people of the Earth. A lot more, like bringing peace to the Middle East. Orthon responded to such requests

"We might consider it if leaders of the various factions invite us to get involved. But so far, they have not done so. In fact, some people in some of the factions have claimed that we are helping their opponents, a claim that we find almost impossibly silly."

The Saudi civil war continued to rage. The Emirate of Ahsa was now reconciled with the Saudi rump state, but they could not defeat the Republic of Qatif. But the Saudi state held on to the Ghawar oil field, successfully defending it against Qatif. The Emirate of Jawf also made moves toward reconciliation, but it then suffered a military coup that was widely rumored to be backed by Iraq and Syria. So it was now the Republic of Jawf. The Islamic Republic of Hejaz showed little interest in reconciling with the Saudi state, and it continued to keep Mecca and Medina open for the numerous Muslim pilgrims who continued to visit them. Rumors of Israel supporting Hejaz continued, however, and Hejaz's leaders also showed themselves suspiciously welcoming to Iran's leaders.

The war spread to the other Gulf states. Kuwait suffered a coup, while Bahrain had a civil war. A would-be coup in Qatar was rather ruthlessly suppressed, and the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen also had some unrest.

But the Saudi state was getting some of its oil out through Oman, and Qatif though the Persian Gulf with Iran's protection, so those two nations were getting some money to finance their duel. Likewise, Hejaz was being supported by religious tourism -- Muslims were still doing their pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina, despite the risk of terrorist attacks.

Other nations were also involved. Iran's involvement was very evident, and Turkey was also somewhat involved. Iraq's and Syria's involvement were very low-key, since they were recovering from their recent civil wars, and Jordan tried to stay neutral. Israel's support of Hejaz was an open secret, despite Israel's attempts to keep observers away from Eilat. That provoked a lot of protests from Egypt and Jordan, but they could not do much about it. But Israel couldn't do anything about Russian and Chinese spy satellites, either.

The United States did not do much more than send aid to the Saudi rump state, because it had gotten burned out of fighting wars in the Middle East and nearby. This was despite certain Americans loudly yelling that the US has to protect "freedom" in the Middle East. Fortunately, US politicians preferred to work with the likes of Europe and Russia and China and India to keep the Saudi civil war from becoming World War III, though they were often at loggerheads about how to settle it.

Large numbers of Saudis fled the fighting, some of them trying to get into neighboring countries. Like some Middle Eastern wars not long before, this produced a massive humanitarian crisis, with refugees stuck in squalid refugee camps in whichever places would accept them -- and there were not many such places. It was often hard to get aid to many of them, with all the fighting going on.

Much of the Saudi royal family had an easier time fleeing, because of their money. But even that did not make them very welcome in some places, because those places' politicians did not want to import the Saudi strife. Many of these royal refugees seemed to blame everybody but themselves for their country's ruin, naming a variety of culprits. Rival royal-family factions and members. Israel. Iran. Turkey. The United States. The European Union. Russia. China. India. And, of course, the SSC. Some of them even had the conspiracy theory that the SSC provoked the war in order to make Earth people dependent on its energy technology.

Some Saudi refugees even developed the conspiracy theory that it was some war against Islam, because Islam's two holy cities were within Saudi Arabia. But much of the fighting was where the ex-Saudi oil fields are, in the east. So it was rather obviously a war over oil wells though it also had Sunnis vs. Shias.

This provoked chuckles in the Contact Committee and elsewhere in the worlds. "Why would any of us care about their stupid squabbles?" some SSC people said. The Contact Committee composed a response:

"Various people have claimed that we are somehow involved in the Saudi civil war. We are supposedly helping some of the factions, or somehow getting them to fight each other. Those claims are almost too silly to be worth responding to."

"To the leaders of the Saudi factions, we ask that you reconsider your war and make peace with other. Look at what your war has done. It has caused lots of death and destruction and it has caused large numbers of people to flee from their homes. Even if you make peace with each other, it may be hard to restore your nation to its former state, what you had grown up with."

"You had done economic warfare on your fellow oil producers, deliberately selling your oil at prices too low for them to match, even though it hurt your nation's main source of income. It succeeded for a while, but you are now paying a heavy price for that."

"You were right to recognize that your oil would not last forever, and you were right to prepare for a future after oil. But your war has helped push other nations into that future, and you will likely have deprived yourself of much of your income."

Some of the Contact Committee proposed also talking about how the nation's royal family had become top-heavy and how it was keeping itself in power by supporting a superstrict sect of Islam, but Orthon and some others didn't want to go that far.

"Saudi Arabia's internal politics was rather obscure, and I don't think that we should get into that unless we have something solid to point to," said Orthon. "What is visible from outside is bad enough, I think."

Orthon also conceded that this appeal would not be very successful, but he hoped to show which side he was on.

It was not very successful. A Hejaz leader huffed that the SSC people don't know what they are talking about, and a Qatif leader objected that the people of Qatif had to fight against the oppression that the Saudi royal family had inflicted on them. A spokesman for the rump kingdom dismissed it as yet more SSC preachiness. Several royal refugees tended to agree with this or that of those opinions, while a prince who had ended up in Switzerland stated "I have to say that I agree with the Solar System people. Our civil war has given us nothing but misery. For all our faults, our nation was a bastion of stability in a strife-torn region. But then this had to happen." He continued with detailing the regime's backwardness and failures. "But I have good news: my wife is learning how to drive."

While that civil war continued, Earth scientists and engineers were gradually figuring out how to manufacture what the SSC's disks described, even if they tended to agree with that Russian scientist's good news and bad news. Even with their difficult manufacturing, it was evident that the SSC technologies could create a revolution in materials manufacture. A revolution that could enable further applications of renewable energy, like synfuels. Thus making possible a complete liberation from fossil fuels, and an end to what had financed Saudi Arabia for so long.