Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  He and Pyotr saw it in each other’s eyes the first time they shared a searching look across the reddish, Toruń teak conference table. The exact thought occurred to both men simultaneously: ‘Why you damned cynic! You don’t believe a word of this rubbish, either! That makes you a player. Let’s connect.’

  “I have already given your Pusan faction large funds for field research.”

  “And we are grateful, highness, for your wisdom even more than your coins.”

  “Leave the flattery aside. Cut to the quick. What do you really want from me?”

  “You must wrest Amasia away from the impure!”

  “You want war with the Calmar Union? Are you mad?”

  Back then, until that day, Pyotr had thought only about starting a very little war with the United Planets of Krevo. His ambition was tied to his fear, learned from his mother, of social and political imbalance inside the Empire.

  “Amasia is repository of the most comprehensive transfer of uncorrupted cradle genes to any colony world. We must have it to establish Purity. You must have it, majesty. It will be the peak achievement of both your great Houses, of the chosen Oetkert and blessed Shaka lines.”

  “I ask again, are you a madman?”

  “Do this thing, and all future history will venerate your name!”

  “History doesn’t interest me. I prefer to keep my head on my shoulders.”

  “Would you care if the movement, which is the future, despised your majesty instead?”

  “Watch your tongue, little man. Or I’ll have it out of your mouth.”

  “It’s time to be frank, majesty. You might have my tongue, but can you silence all those who will speak for the truth of Purity after I’m hoisted silent and impaled on your execution pole?”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No majesty. It’s far more dangerous. It’s a fact.”

  Pyotr knew the balding little biopolitics professor was right. He backed down, for the moment. “Proceed, but take care how you speak to your rightful ruler.”

  “Purity has billions of believers. It has followers in the highest positions of power. It wants you to be its leader. We know that you have pledged yourself to the great movement before the people, but real leadership that retains our support requires much more. We must have Amasia.”

  “So it is a threat, not from future history but from your queer faith and politics.”

  To be absolutely sure, Pyotr looked Takeshi in the eye. That’s where he saw the stark truth that these men of Purity, together with SAC’s General Curia would move against him. They would organize to overthrow him and much worse, if he did not yield and make their war. Takeshi gave Pyotr a little conspirator’s smile in just one corner of his mouth that said better than words: ‘Yes, they will kill you, for they are sincere.’ They understood each other from that moment forward.

  The little Pusan professor makes a second threat. He’s openly disrespectful, knowing that he has Pyotr cornered. “There is another Oetkert who is of age, who could sit upon the Jade Throne.”

  ‘There are two, in fact. And I have both under locks. Yet, I do fear this threat to the Jade Throne, for they understand that to make a coup you must present the multitude of sheep with a different wolf to rule them. Sheep being sheep, will always bow. But they need a wolf to worship.’

  “I see that you misunderstand me. We are of one Pure mind and one iron will. Yet I will need time. Plans for war need planting, then careful cultivation.”

  “How long?”

  “War with one of the Neutrals is one thing, with the United Planets, or the Helvetics or Threes. War with the vast empire of the Blues? I will need five years to prepare my military for that dangerous undertaking. At least five years.” He doesn’t tell these provincial fanatics, or the smug looking SAC High Council, that he has been rearming in secret for 15 years, since his mother the Dowager’s odd and sudden demise. He still hopes to avoid their war, while preparing for his own.

  “Done. You will have our support in all other things you do in the meantime.”

  “I expect nothing less from all my subjects, at all times.” It’s a feeble effort to reassert prerogative, coming on low heels of his submission. Everyone knows it.

  “Of course, majesty.”

  “I want something more in return.”

  “Anything, majesty.”

  “I want your Nagoyan. That young major sitting there like the cock-of-the-walk. He’ll be liaison between us on this issue. I will speak to no one else and no one else will speak for me.”

  “He is pretty, is he not?”

  “You really do not care to keep your tongue between your teeth, do you?”

  “It’s done, majesty. Young master Watanabe is your man henceforth.”

  Takeshi showed nothing on his stone face to any SAC officer in the room, or Purity delegate. Only Pyotr recognized a slight hint of a superior smirk playing at the corners of his perfect mouth as he stood, tucked down his tight tunic, and walked across the room to stand behind Pyotr, at his right hand side.

  ***

  Purity wants Amasia for its complete genome, for its original and unaltered bioseeding that the movement can capture, reproduce, then replant across Orion. They say that Amasia hosts “a unique clarity of pure genetic lineages.” They say that too many worlds have been corrupted by AIs playing with destiny, sometimes splicing in primitive alien DNA. Others were ecologically poisoned beyond redemption, including during the post colonization era on Old Earth. Certainly, on all its AI deformed and terraformed children. For the ideologues of the Purity Movement, Amasia is the key to Humanity’s future, to destiny, and their own biopolitical power to reshape all Orion.

  It’s a truly stupid idea, of course. Really fucking stupid! But then truly stupid ideas have formed the central core of many human faiths and ideologies. Rank and provable falsity was never a barrier to influence, maybe even the reverse. The stupider a fundamental idea is, the more likely it is to obtain a mass following and real political power. Like an inverse law of stupidity, or something. Lots of really stupid ideas provoked big or little wars over the history of the Thousand Worlds.

  Like the idea that some god declared a specific piece of shitty dirt or a barren desert or a damned rock “sacred.” Or set cold, holy worlds aside for billions of years. Paradise after paradise kept in godly cold storage until his people showed up out of the celestial vacuum, and presto! It’s a real popular one. Gotta be two or three hundred patches of precious dirt and sacred soil and holy worlds scattered over Orion. Ask an Old Ritualist about how the gods sent them on GDM colony ships to claim New Edens, just sitting there waiting for them to show up!

  Or ask one of the Ritter der Broderbund about his holy predestination. Yeah, I agree. Since the Brethren truly believe that they're the Chosen of God and that he wants them to keep their own clone mothers in perpetual slavery, and they still got to control the Jade Throne for close to 1,500 years, until the Dowager, I think it’s safe to say we’re a pretty dumb species. If those bastards are the ‘Elect of God’ it’s time to hold a new election and vote their besotted god out of office.

  The gods show up in a lot of these dumb ideas, don’t they? How about the one where “the gods are on my side” when I fight you in a war? People wore that one on their chests while they raped helpless women and burned down stone castles, or chanted it as their scimitars came down on innocent necks. Hell, they wore it on their belt buckles while they murdered millions! Shot and gassed and burned them! Did you know that? Well it’s true! Gott Mit Uns. The gods are on my side in war? Where the hell did that come from?!

  Though come to think of it, I’ve heard people invoke a deity over their holiday weather or a parking spot dispute, or say the gods are rooting for their homeworld team in some damn mercury ball game! Did you see the last All Orion Cup Final? Yes, I know it’s not really “All Orion” if the Daurans aren’t part of it. Get over that, will you? They relegated themselves a hundred years ago! My point is, the goal
ie for Aral was praying before the game. Must’ve worked, too. Aral beat Kars, three-nil. My team? Didn’t make the quarter finals. Bunch of fucking loser atheists!

  Or how about the idea that Calmaris really like, that they must liberate the hell out of worlds that resist modern enlightenment, that men and women “must be forced to be free”? Good one, eh? Yes, I think so too. Makes even secular types feel all warm and holy inside. There’s another good one that says we must share everything equally, because none of us are more talented or deserving than anyone else. Nice idea, right? Ok, let’s pass laws that say we’re all the same and we will be. What, you think you’re better? You think you work harder than lots of folks you know? I shouldn’t take your extra stuff and give it away? Arrest that subversive! Make him confess to secret meritocratism! Shoot the arrogant bastard!

  Then there’s the classic howler… What? No, not a Howler! I didn’t mean a Three! Are you trying to be funny or are you just being rude? I mean the really, howlingly dumb idea that the only way to have high culture is to underwrite it with slavery, so that a talented, elite few will have sufficient leisure to think and make useless … err, sorry, wonderful things like high art and poetry. Ulysses would recognize that one! So would all the Pharaohs and Caesars and Incas and Sultans and Tsars. So do Oetkerts and Dauran Emperors and the Broderbund. That one has been around forever, in one guise or another.

  So, let’s not assume that just because Purity has its head up its own ass looking for its tonsils that it can’t be truly and sincerely believed by millions, let’s make that billions. OK? Besides, sincere belief is always a terrible danger to peace. Sincere people, really sincere people, usually end up one of two ways: burned at the stake or burning other people at the stake. I’ll take hypocrisy over sincerity seven days a week and twice on Sundays! Old Belief calendar, that is.

  Let’s remember, too, that at least half of Daura’s hundreds of billions think Jahandar is some kind of demigod, or at the least, a prophet. Jahandar for heaven’s sake! Jahandar a god! A prophet! Of what, Death? There’s just no telling who we aphids will choose to worship and follow this year or next. Or who we’ll sacrifice at an Aztec temple or enslave for pharaoh or burn as a witch.

  Fear.

  Hate.

  Stupidity.

  Sincerity.

  It’s a witch’s cauldron of motives for war. But what’s the difference in the end why the other son-of-a-bitch is pointing a warm and humming maser at your head? If you’ve got a gun in your hand, stop thinking about why he hates you and shoot him in the head before he shoots you! Being first or fastest in war counts a lot more under the indifferent stars than being right. You can always thank your gods later, if you win the quick draw.

  Data search: terraforming

  Result: Amasia, Lemuria

  Historia Humana, Volume III, Part IV (f)

  Amasia has moderate to heavy gravity, at 1.35 Old Earth Standard, orbiting in the temperate zone of the average, Type-M star Chara II. Its signature feature is, as schoolchildren everywhere know, the supercontinent Lemuria, curiously named for an imagined OE continental configuration deep in the genome ur-past. Lemuria occupies 46.2% of all surface area and, as the only major landmass, is surrounded by a vast salt water ocean that turns into ice sheets at either pole. The salty waters that wash against the western seaboard are called by locals the Panthalassa, while the same world girdling ocean that surges onto the eastern coast is known as the Thalassa Sea. Offworld mappers simply call all of it the Okeanos.

  Like all terraformed worlds, Lemuria’s deep soils and the great Okeanos were seeded by AI nanobots that traveled centuries ahead of the first settlers. What is unusual is that every ecosystem and subsystem brought to the stars during the Second Age of Exploration is on Amasia. Life was freed, and rioted across its land surface and into the Okeanos. The ‘nanny bots’ were so acutely successful in seeding Amasia they pyramided the original creation, reforming nearly intact the whole chain of life on land and in the seas as it evolved on Old Earth. No other world is as close to original universal seeding, not even Old Earth. On Amasia as nowhere else, the AI bot colony project of the Second Age achieved its highest scientific and even artful masterpiece.

  Fourteen thousand klics east of the Thalassa shore is a deep ocean rift valley, the Ganiki Chasma, that breaks up Okeanos’ cobalt uniformity. The great chasm is balanced on the other side of the world by submerged caldera rows of several thousand tectonic volcanoes. Only a few hundred black cones break the surface to form small island chains up-and-down the ridge line. They are uninhabited except for rare island species carefully isolated by the AI nanny bots, including a recreated Galápagos Isles, a replica Rapa Nui without the statues but restored palms and subtropical broadleaf forests, and a Nova Tristan da Cunha archipelago.

  The nanny bots floated huge plankton blankets over pods of sea grazers and sleepless, cruising denizens of the immense Okeanos, seeding huge colonies of marine plants down to the edge of permanent darkness. Far below that, they made riotous forests of clutching, lightless life: tube worms, blind giant shrimp, pressure flattened spider crabs, whole ecosystems feeding off sheets of carpet bacteria nourished by active sea vents far from Lemuria’s coasts. They clustered high pressure fish and blind crawlers in immense underwater metropoli. Sunken skylines of hidden cities made of tens of thousands of black or white smokers over 30 stories high are surrounded by still more, splintering rift valleys. These cracks reach out from the Ganiki Chasma in webs of life that support vast savannas of tube worms far exceeding in range and biomass anything seen on the origin world or elsewhere in Orion. Save perhaps in the deeps of Oceanus or Amphitrite.

  Manatees swim in warm coastal mangroves, while whale pods and sharks and great schools of tuna plough the vast, living ocean. Whole universities of cod, sardines, and anchovies fill up the surface zone, hunted by the usual predators and along rocky coasts by barking cities of seals and walrus. In the epipelagic or photic zone, lantern and flashlight fish briefly light the darkness to eat and mate, swimming under enormous pressures and in silent lethality along with cookie cutter sharks, bristle mouths, anglerfish, viperfish, and many species of eelpout.

  On Lemuria itself, the nanny bots laid layers of differential bacteria in sheets ten klics deep. They underlie warm wet soils and clays and sparser, specialized colonies inside achingly dry caves and salt deposits. Still more life slime grows green or blue or red in bubbly black and scummy pools where hot acid rock meets cool, surface water. More rare growth fills up geyser mouths erupting in splotches of color in the deep deserts, oases of harsh chemistry extruding life into gray surface sands to color them living red and blue.

  Arctic and mountain zones are carpeted with mosses, short and tall grasses, and endless trees in coniferous and deciduous forests with no equal in Orion. Five major river systems, with a hundred tributaries and ten thousand creeks and brackish runs, turn green with algaes, then ever larger water plants. They flash silver with pike and perch or piranha, while black bass and rainbow trout jump for fireflies in southern freshwater lakes. Coastal runs turn pink with salmon, white with carp, black with catfish. Crayfish and water bugs thrive in reedy shoals and bays, and hundreds of species of frogs have lily pads to sit on and to munch, as well as reeds and bulrushes to hide in and swift-and-silent water snakes to fear.

  On the plains, savanna grasses are trampled by mammoth herds and serengeti elephants, along with water buffalo and humped zebu with heavy dewlaps, and gazelles and gnus. Lions and loping hyena and jackals hunt or scavenge the weak of the vast herds, according to their nature. Alligators and supercrocs lie in wait in hot rivers and in the water holes. In some forest, nanny bots seeded primates, mastodons and arbor elephants and stealthy panthers. In others, deer, moose and elk, along with timber wolves and black bears. On the tundra, they dropped in white bears and great kodiaks to patrol frozen polar edges and keep the seals in check, and white fox and arctic hares and bright summer flowers. They released pigeons and peacocks, spar
rows, midges and gnats, a thousand kind of snakes, mongooses, spiders, bees and wasps, and fleas and flies. They set up two separate amazons on opposite sides of the broad equator, and two discrete, widely distant arctic ecosystems under the flashing pastels of the polar auroras.

  They impregnated deserts with night rodents and vipers, set jackals and cacti on top, and nested beetles and shrews below. They planted rich alpine forests to climb the mountainsides, and tiny mosses and flowers that barely hold to the rock basins of high altitude meadows. They sent elephant grasses rolling in vast tsunamis over tens of millions of square klics of steppe, and other wild grasslands to feed the huge grazing herds. They made a marsupial niche on an inland ‘island’ set apart from all the rest of Lemuria by broad, slow niles on either side of the arid zone. This rare sanctuary teems with quoll, bandicoot, eucalyptus, koala, leaping roos and joeys, with dozens of species of tree possums, with platypus and screaming devils and restored thylacines.