Entry 41. The governor

Silas Fredersen was not a bad man. But he will not be remembered as a good man.

Appointed governor of Sirius 4 in S4Y 132, he had the unenviable task of implementing increasingly unreasonable Earthian policies over an increasingly restless populace. He was a true believer, but only to a point.

It made perfect sense to him, for example, that the people of Sirius 4 had a perpetual debt to Earth for the investments made more than a century earlier – the interstellar flights, the establishment of bases, the construction of the oxygen-nitrogen generators. He had no problem collecting our taxes and transferring them to unseen and, to us, irrelevant bureaucrats 8.6 light years away.

But he always admitted he felt uncomfortable that he was the leader of Sirius 4 not because we wanted him but because one of those unseen and irrelevant bureaucrats selected him to rule over us.

That instinct is one big reason why I say he was not a bad man; he understood the need of free men and women to rule themselves.

That instinct is what made him able to sustain negotiations for Sirius 4 independence for three full years, even as it became increasingly obvious that his Earthian masters were not going to let us be any more independent than they were willing to dictate.

“Silas always made us feel like he believed in our ultimate goal, to let Sirians determine the future of Sirius 4,” Sen. Badiah Sinclair told me as we watched the ship carry Fredersen and the last of his security forces fly away on that fateful day in S4Y 138. “I think that’s what kept us at the table.”

History later showed that Fredersen convinced Earth not to let the Simmons incident escalate into full-blown revolution, instead retreating back to the homeworld and allowing us to feel our oats as an independent planet for a couple of years. That was how long it took for Earth to decide it couldn’t live without our tax payments after all, and they sent Joshua True to collect our freedom.

Without Fredersen’s reluctance to make Jim Simmons just the first of many martyrs for the cause, the bloody phase of our story would have come much sooner. And perhaps we would have lost that war. Perhaps we needed to taste a couple of years of freedom  to fully appreciate its flavor.

So for all of those reasons, I believe Silas Fredersen was not a bad man. In some ways he was even heroic. But he also was responsible for running a government where a bureaucrat felt justified murdering a landowner for defending his right to erect a pole building 10 centimeters closer to his property line than the law allowed.

Therefore, we won’t ever remember him as a good man, either.

Entry 42