Bound In Behind It

A REPLY FROM MARS, 2724 UCSD To: Commander Hedda Ravndal, instructor in staff method on the officer-track syllabus, Solar Command From: Sildron Drey, Mars. No commission; no post. Standing: A private letter, copied into the syllabus file by its recipient at the writer's request. Valid for its author and for nobody else.

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Commander Ravndal,

You ask whether On the Cost of Speed should still be taught. You have asked someone with no standing to answer, and I take it you know that, since the syllabus board sits two floors above your office and I resigned my commission three years ago. So I will answer as what I am, a civilian on Mars who wrote the paper twenty-six years ago, and you may weigh the answer accordingly.

I will do it the way I was trained to, because I have no other way. The question first, then what I know, then a recommendation, and the decision left where it belongs.

The paper

You have it in front of you. I have not opened my copy in four years and do not need to. It argues that a command structure which cannot be hurried is a design property and not a defect; that the Coherence Wars were fought by institutions which could move faster than they could think; and that a review which takes a season is a season in which nobody is made to decide anything while frightened. The historical part is sound. I would not change a footnote of it.

It attaches conditions. Three, in the section everyone skipped. That the delay be visible to those bearing it. That it be reviewable by someone other than the body imposing it. That there be a route by which the person waiting could reach a rank with the authority to shorten the wait. I was proud of those conditions. They are the reason the paper is longer than the argument.

The post

I held the Directorate of Operations from 2711 to the spring of 2720. I will not write about the spring. It is not what you asked, and it is not yours. The nine years are.

I will give you the figures, because they are the ones you already have. Eleven months to form the committee that Eden's fold-route anomaly report required. Fourteen months from the committee to a preliminary report, which classified the habitat's position as monitoring-recommended. Six years from the preliminary report to the follow-up findings. In 2715 I signed the liability classification on the Patience First expedition, unauthorised and therefore outside the Command's obligation to the crew's next of kin, and I signed it because it was correct, and it was. I drafted the terms of reference for Eden's monitoring officer, and twice asked in writing that the post be given authority to act without a further committee. Both requests were answered that the change required committee review. Both answers were correct.

I want to be exact here, because I know how this will be read in a classroom. I am not saying that any of those delays was wrong. I examined each of them at the time and I have examined them since, and every one was lawful, procedurally correct and defensible, and the terms in which it was defensible were my paper's. Not a paraphrase of my paper. The paper. There was no day in nine years on which I could have taken a position against a delay without arguing against a document with my name on it. Nobody asked me to. I did not.

That is what I have to give your students, and it is not what the clip gives them. The clip gives them a general who said a hard thing aloud. What I have is a director who said nothing aloud for nine years and was correct the whole time, by a standard she had written herself, which nobody outside her Command had ever been asked to approve.

The conditions

I had thought the conditions were the paper. This is how I learned that they were not.

I gave nine days of testimony to the Consolidation Hearing in 2719. My directorate's response-time figures were the backbone of its finding, and I supplied them without contest, because they were ours and they were right. In the eleventh week the chair put the pattern of those figures to General Krast and asked her to answer it directly, and she did.

She said my paper. She said it in one sentence, without any of the conditions, and the room heard it as the whole of the argument — which it was. The conditions had never been doing any work. I had written them for myself.

I will put that in staff language, since that is the register your students are examined in. A condition that only the conditioned body can test is not a condition. It is a preference, held by the body about itself, and it is honoured for exactly as long as the body finds it convenient, which in our case was nine years and happened to coincide with my tenure. Visible to whom? Reviewable by whom? A route to what rank? Every answer my paper gave was a rank inside Solar Command. I had written three sentences that said we will be good, with footnotes, and then I spent nine years being good, and the tables you have in front of you are what good produced.

In 2722 the Accords negotiators wrote to me about the jurisdiction limits the Defence Command was objecting to, and I answered them in writing and supported the limits. My reasons are in the negotiators' file and need not be here; the paper's own three conditions, read against those limits, make the case without my help.

Recommendation

Do not withdraw it. A syllabus that drops a paper because its author's Command fell teaches students that arguments are retired by events. They are not, and this one was not. The argument was not refuted. It was tested, over nine years, by the only people in a position to test it, and they were its authors.

Teach it as written. Then bind in behind it, as an appendix with no commentary, the directorate's response-time tables for 2711 to 2719, as I supplied them to the hearing; they are in the hearing record and you have access to it. Put no note between the paper and the tables. Your students are trained to ask what a document is for, and the tables answer that question for the paper, in the paper's own units.

Whether to do it is yours. I have no standing to decide it, and I find I do not want any. If you bind them in, tell me. If you do not, tell me that. I will not write again about it either way.

With respect, and with thanks for asking the question rather than deciding it,

Sildron Drey Mars, 2724 UCSD

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Archivist's note (S., Survey Archive): The syllabus file holds the paper, the tables and this letter, in that order. Commander Ravndal bound the tables in as the letter asked, and placed the letter after them rather than before, so that a reader meets the writer's reasons last; the record does not say whether Drey was asked about the placing. The paper stayed on the officer-track syllabus, with the tables behind it, for the remaining years it was taught. Of Commander Ravndal the record holds her name, her post and this one act, and the Archive has not asked for more. Drey's own file records that the acquaintance continued; this file does not.

See also: Sildron Drey, Maren Solveig Krast, Military Space Command, Eden Space Habitat, The Outer Stations Consolidation Hearing, Unauthorised, Therefore (S00E02C01), The Volunteered Word (S00E02C02), What They Were Forbidden to Become (S00E03C01), Jehu Among the Comparanda.