Although he had already spotted Rau Le Creuset sortieing in a rather odd-looking CGUE, it would still take some time for the two sides to close to combat range. So Luther, inside the Time Observer, wasn't in a hurry. He even had time to make a few sarcastic remarks to himself.
"This is pretty good, actually. I don't have to worry about being seen as helping evil by taking the side of the Principality of Zeon;
I don't have to go sink into the quagmire of the Earth Federation, crawling with useless allies, and become an accomplice in suppressing the space citizens' rebellion;
and my adoptive father Deikun's spirit might even be glad to see his Newtype theory spread on a global scale, right?"
Luther was muttering to himself in the Time Observer's cockpit, with no one else around. But A-Qiu, who was QB in disguise, clearly wasn't "someone else"—and wasn't even human—so she had been able to listen in and now rebutted his remarks.
"But from your memories, the Cosmic Era isn't any better than the Universal Century, is it?
"If anything, over in the UC, both sides are still human. The real class conflict is merely concealed beneath the regional divide between Earth and space;
"but over here in the CE, the conflict between Naturals and Coordinators has already escalated to the level of a racial, even species-based, clash;
"if you really had to say, wouldn't the CE be an even worse quagmire?"
Luther couldn't refute A-Qiu's assessment, which she had drawn from his memories.
But unlike the rational A-Qiu, Luther was human, and his way of thinking was more flexible.
"That's true, but it depends on the angle you look at it from.
"Compared to the CE, the UC's conflict might seem to be on a lower level, but it affects the entire economic structure.
"After all, the upper echelons of the Earth Federation, who control the capital despite making up less than one percent of the population, use a fairly feudal order to keep less than twenty percent of the Earth Sphere's total population—the people of Earth—as second-class citizens, while excluding the remaining eighty percent, the people of space, as commoners.
"This thoroughly developed system, so distinctly flavored by its creators' national circumstances, means that at least twenty percent of the population—that is, at least 2.5 billion people—would have to be reorganized or physically wiped out before society could move in a new direction, whether for better or worse.
"Meanwhile, in the CE, never mind that the heart of the conflict is actually the same old class struggle, just dressed up;
"more importantly, although deliberate manipulation by certain people has indeed escalated the conflict to the level of racial or even species-based strife, the number of people actually on the front lines is small.
"Besides, the smaller side, the Coordinators, has enormous difficulty reproducing naturally, and they aren't completely reproductively isolated from Naturals. In the long run, can they really exist independently as a new species—or even just a new race?
"Even if you look at it from the worst possible angle, compared with nearly ten billion Naturals, there are only a few tens of millions of Coordinators. If you used Gihren Zabi's way of handling things, this problem would be very easy to solve, wouldn't it?"
Luther had given a broad analysis of the similarities and differences between the core conflicts that caused the wars in the UC and CE, as well as the fundamental problem with Coordinators as one side of the CE conflict. This fundamental issue—that Coordinators could not yet exist independently—was essentially the core reason behind the Clyne Faction's position on Plant: "promote negotiations through combat."
At the end of his analysis, Luther had also mentioned a solution he couldn't even bring himself to laugh at—one that was, in essence, the solution advocated by Blue Cosmos in the original timeline.
Naturally, A-Qiu, who knew Luther well, realized he was only being sarcastic. She simply waited quietly for him to continue.
"Besides, if we consider whether productivity has reached a bottleneck—a key factor in whether peaceful reform can happen—the CE is in a much better position than the UC.
"After all, humanity in the UC has more or less completed the development of space within the limits of its productive capacity. The Earth Federation's leaders, who hold the reins of power, have already sent every 'burden' they could get rid of to space colonies, leaving no growth at all to fuel peaceful reform.
"By contrast, as we discussed when considering where to go, space development in the CE has only just begun. Coordinators could return to their original role as pioneers in space development, then bring about gradual reform by expanding the economic pie. In fact, most Coordinators aren't opposed to this path.
"In other words, even if they simply copied the UC's 'homework' all over again, the CE could keep going for at least another fifty years. And compared with the Earth Federation, whose name and setup are more 'federal,' the Earth Alliance is much more 'confederate.' Maybe internal conflicts among the three major powers could even sustain another fifty years of cold war before a hot war broke out—and perhaps they'd find a new source of productivity growth by then.
"So the reason the CE has reached this point is that, apart from deliberate attempts to drive a wedge between the two sides, the leaders on both sides simply misjudged each other's resolve, and their game of chicken got out of hand.
"So if there's a suitable off-ramp, and no one keeps fanning the flames, there's still room for both sides to reach an agreement through compromise and negotiation.
"As for the differences in ability between Coordinators and Naturals, which on the surface make them the core of the conflict, they're really no greater than the difference between a genius and an ordinary person.
"After all, the CE's ability to create Coordinators only represents a tentative step from zero to one in Genetic Ascension. It would take the ability to reliably mass-produce Kira Yamato without causing reproductive difficulties to count as truly mastering even the most basic level of 'genetic tailoring.' And I'm not even holding them to the standard of 'designed evolution.'
"So the reason Naturals have been so easily stirred up is that someone deliberately repackaged the existing class conflict as a racial or even species-based conflict to profit from it.
"Do you believe that if we offered free surgery to turn people's descendants into Coordinators, many people's opposition to Coordinators would change overnight? The more actively they oppose them now, the more strongly they'll support them then."
With the UC as an example, Luther's analysis of the CE seemed quite sound.
And his final point—that people didn't oppose Coordinators so much as they opposed being unable to become Coordinators themselves, or to have their descendants become Coordinators—was an even shrewder reading of human nature. A-Qiu had only analyzed human nature through statistical data, but that was precisely why her reasoning was so humanlike, and why Luther's argument was impossible to refute.
Watching Rau Le Creuset's CGUE draw close to Funnel firing range, Luther summed things up.
"Besides, thanks to your efforts, A-Qiu, we now have a position that's even more neutral and detached than Orb's proclaimed neutrality;
"and from other Gundam universes, we've already found a sound solution that lets us make perfect use of this detached, neutral position;
"now all we need to do is stir things up, act as an outside force to break the central situation that's been deliberately pushed into a vicious cycle, and ultimately eliminate the handful of schemers who brought things to this point.
"Whether it's the military-industrial complex that's committed every evil imaginable for profit, wrapped its tentacles around the entire Earth Alliance, and raised vicious dogs to do its bidding;
"or the fanatic who'll take the stage after the people in the spotlight have fought each other to exhaustion, and who, just because his own feelings have gone unfulfilled, believes everyone should simply accept their fate;
"or the man right in front of us, who, because of his own tragic past, magnifies all the evil in humanity and vows to drag the entire human race down with him—a madman and a clown, like the kind you'd find in a Batman story.
"Now, taste the new power from beyond this world, a power that brings new possibilities!
"Go, Funnels!"
Before you continue