Contact across the Solar System

"Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend"

While Orthon, Kalna, and Ilmuth were touring Europe, one of the Earther travelers became the subject of a strange controversy in South Africa. After returning from her travels, Joanne Mabandla liked to show off the jewelry that she got from her SSC hosts -- jewelry with gemstones made in the factories of SSC cities all over the Solar System. The anti-espionagers targeted her as a Marie Antoinette who flaunted great wealth amid poverty, despite her insistence that the jewels were not super expensive in the worlds. They rather obviously weren't, as was evident from what Earth people could see of the SSC, but that did not matter to the anti-espionagers. Joanne went out of sight for a while because of it, and she consulted with SSC people and Watchers and fellow travelers about what to do next.

Then someone leaked some e-mails and assorted documents from a major diamond company's server computers. In them, some of the company's executives and strategists discussed the "threat" of SSC diamonds and various strategies to counter it.

One strategist noted that the company had long been successful at keeping competing miners and synthetic-diamond producers from being a big threat by threatening to flood the market with the company's diamonds. This would keep them from getting much return on their investments. "But the Solar System Community seems immune to such economic pressures," he noted. "They have been producing synthetic diamonds long before they contacted us."

They then considered various strategies, like shaming the SSC in some way. But after a lot of argument, they failed to come up with any good way of shaming the SSC. As one of the strategists explained, the SSC people were totally unapologetic about being unwilling to transfer their more advanced technology, and they showed no shame about their spying on us and impersonating us. Even reading our minds did not give them any shame, that strategist noted.

They settled on a branding one, "Earth Diamonds for Earth People", and they proposed to elaborate that SSC diamonds are as unnatural as other synthetic diamonds, and that extraterrestrial diamonds were inappropriate for Earth people to wear.

However, some of the memos mentioned that some of the company's executives had donated to anti-espionager groups, though they had tried to keep it well-hidden. They did not want the company too closely associated with the anti-espionagers, especially the lunatic fringe of them. When the memos were leaked, some Watchers traced down the chain of finances and verified that that was indeed the case. "So that company went the way of the tobacco companies and the oil companies, financing lots of misleading advocacy."

Joanne felt somewhat better, and she gradually returned to public view. and she even recorded herself singing a cover of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend", with many of the words changed to be about the SSC worlds. She also made a music video of herself dancing in a Marilyn Monroe pink dress with her hair dyed pink, and seemingly plucking diamonds from some rather impressionistic paintings of SSC people and SSC building interiors and SSC city scenes. She put them in a navy-blue satin-ish pouch on a belt that was over her dress in front, and toward the end, she fingered them and then scooped them out and threw them around, laughing as she did so.

Though some critics panned her performance as having more enthusiasm than vocal talent, and some critics kvetched about its lack of "authenticity". Joanne was worried about how to respond, but her Earth and SSC friends urged her to be assertive. "I wanted a dress that's a match for my dancing," she said about her dress having shoulder straps instead of being strapless like the original. One critic even kvetched about her shoes. "Spray paint is nice. I can make my shoes any color I want to," she said about that.

But many Watchers and others thought that she was a great black Marilyn Monroe. "She's what Marilyn Monroe ought to have been," pointing out how assertive she acted as she danced and picked up those diamonds. But she was perplexed about how to do the skirt-blown-up part of the Marilyn-Monroe mythos. After a lot of thinking and discussion, she got an idea. She found a small portable fan, and she aimed it upward. She then put on a white dress much like what Marilyn Monroe wore in her movie "Some Like It Hot." When the fan blew up the skirt part of her dress, she kicked it over then kicked it a few more times, saying "You bad fan! You bad fan! I'm not going to let you mess up my dress!" Then she staggered around drunk with uncontrollable laughter.

Her fans loved it, and she would sometimes do it in public appearances. Her Marilyn Monroe act almost overshadowed her painting, though she didn't complain very much.

Though the diamond lobby was thoroughly humiliated, the SSC was not so diplomatically successful elsewhere. In particular, about China, the SSC wanted to recognize both mainland China's government and Taiwan's government as the governments of their respective territories. But neither one liked this "two-China" policy. Both of them insisted on a "one-China policy", with each one being recognized as the ruler of both territories. The Contact Committee members could only shake their heads at such childishness. Chinese traveler Zhiling Zhao did not say much, other than to support mainland China and to sound like an anti-espionager about how selfish and stingy the SSC is.

Contact Committee members also visited other nations, and as the visits progressed, other SSC people joined them.
Among these nations was Russia, and the Adamski Gang visited the Tunguska crash site. Ilmuth spoke there of her long interest in the fate of the Kinden Tarupa and how she had come to pay her respects to the people of that destroyed ship. She and some other SSC people even posed at Ground Zero with the Aurora overhead at the Kinden Tarupa's final position, tilt and all.
They also visited the remains of the Titanic, visiting that sunken ship in some modified scoutcraft.