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Corruption

Page 38

by Adam Vine


  If only they knew the Prophet was a son of their own world, and was himself a refugee when he fled to Home…

  (“Leech,” Queen Rat interrupted me again. She’d polished off another two glasses of wine while I was reading. The bottle was empty. She got up to get a fresh one. “Though long have I yearned to know my enemy in such intimate detail, how does any of this prove…”

  “Just wait. I’m about to get to the good part,” I said. I continued reading.)

  War is the one area where I have found the Yesaedans to be like us. One would think that on such a peaceful, prosperous world, war would have been eradicated long ago. And this is true, except in the case of the Shadashim…

  (“Leech…” Queen Rat slurred, one eyelid already drooping. My plan was working.

  “Your Highness, you’re going to want to hear this,” I said.)

  The Shadashim are the creatures indigenous to this world. They are a sentient species resembling colossal armored insects with translucent shells, who live both on land and underwater, though they seem to prefer tropical beachfronts. Their diet consists of fish, roots, and large fruit, and they cook their prey the way humans do, using targeted spears of flame. Mother Sea has given them the ability to shoot fire from their mandibles. Underwater, these flames turn into boiling spears that can cook entire schools of fish from a dozen yards away. The Shadashim are truly miracles of nature.

  The Yesaedans, like our tribe from Home, did not seed from this soil. They came here many aeons ago on ships that carried them across the Sea of the Gods. The Shadashim, on the other hand, were here millennia before the arrival of humans, though they keep no written records. It is said their memory is genetic, and thus, eternal. The Yesaedans call them ‘crabs’ for short, but I think this is meant to slander them as unintelligent. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Shadashim are peaceful and do not use technology as we know it, but they are beings of enormous intelligence. I hope someday the Yesaedans realize this, even if it is at their own peril.

  (“The Lice…? What else does it say about them?” Queen Rat said.)

  The Yesaedans conquered the Shadashim ages ago, in a long and brutal war that was mostly one-sided. Today, most Shadashim work for the Yesaedans as servants, manual laborers, or as city peacekeepers, doing the types of dangerous, mundane jobs the Yesaedans don’t want to do. The Yesaedans rarely do any kind of work that doesn’t involve sitting in front of screens. Yesaedans have weak, strangely proportioned physical bodies, and the ones who don’t only exercise at special places called wellness centers.

  “Wellness center.” I’ve never heard anything that sounded more dystopian.

  But the Shadashim don’t seem to mind doing the actual work that keeps Yesaedan society running, because this arrangement yields them twelve hot meals a day, and comfortable beachfront slums to live in.

  Back on Home, we would have called such an arrangement “slavery.” The Yesaedans have a different word for it. They call it “The Diversity in Labor Initiative,” though to me, that too sounds abhorrently dishonest.

  Most of the Shadashim willingly accept their bonds, but there are still some who resist. I understand there has always been an underground faction of them who did not accept Yesaedan rule, though it is small. No less than three nativist rebellions have been violently put down since I arrived on this world. Of course, these short, brutal massacres – one could hardly call them battles - are far away and scarcely reported on. When the Yesaedan news media does mention them, it is similar to when our own urban poets used to cry the royal affairs back on the busy street corners of Ito. They scrub their words to the point of bleaching, but a discerning person can always read between the lines.

  Though Yesaeda may be paradise for Yesaedans, and perhaps someday it may be for us who crossed the stars from Home, too, the motto here seems to be, “Paradise is a place for some, but not all.”

  (“He was a fish out of water who admired bigger fish out of water,” Queen Rat chuckled into her wine glass. I ignored the comment, but before I could go back to reading, she added, “All cheap shots aside, I am curious to see how someone so invested in the ideal of social justice, who was so against inequality and political falsity, could go on to build a place like the Amber City.”

  I paused, holding my place on the page with my finger. “It says here that he found religion, though not in the way you would imagine,” I said.

  Queen Rat slouched back in her chair. “I’m all ears.”)

  My own placement proved to be disappointing. They have asked me to join the Order of the Brothers and Sisters of Cultural Anthropo-Moral Preservation, on account of my disability.

  (“His arm,” Queen Rat said.

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry. Continue.”)

  Apparently, on this world, I am unfit for any kind of physical work – not because I am actually unfit, but because of their labor laws – despite the fact that they have the ability to replace my lame arm with a new one made of silver and glass. I am told something called the Integration Affairs Committee fears it would cause a public backlash for me to receive such an extremely expensive surgery while tens of thousands of Yesaedans are still on the waiting list.

  So they want me to be a church librarian. Me, last scion of the Sturgeon House and heir to Stag Horn Castle, a librarian - even though I have never professed belief in their god, and remain loyal to the Five Mothers of Home, at least in the privacy of my heart. Indeed, the coup in Ito at the hands of our own monotheistic clergy, and the five-year civil war it started, were the events directly leading to the cataclysmic flood that caused us to flee Home on Gadov’s ship.

  One might say that my opinion of organized religion is somewhat dim.

  Yet some Yesaedans, however few, still attend regular services, despite being mostly godless in their day-to-day-lives. My duties will be more akin to that of a museum curator than a monk, my sole purpose to safeguard some otherwise forgotten aspect of their culture. Ringing bells, sweeping floors, creating interesting displays in the main hall, kicking horny teenagers out of the catacombs, that sort of thing.

  What would the Prophet say, if it was he being forced to work for the office of a false and dying faith? I haven’t seen him in months. He’s too busy traveling and preaching, trying to grow his movement. But I think he would say that there is a lesson I can glean from all this.

  Back on Home, I was heir to Stag Horn Castle and all of its attendant lands, but I never would’ve truly ruled there. If I had stayed and taken my father’s seat, my advisors would’ve made the important decisions for me, and I would’ve spent my days hawking and hunting in the Spider Web Forest, drinking with my fellow lords in their keeps along the Eagle’s Nest Trail and growing older one day at a time, until I was a withering relic incapable of changing or impacting the world around me.

  Here, I have no bow, no arrows or hawks. But I have power. It may only be over this one tiny corner of a dusty, ancient church, but it is power just the same.

  I will do my duty. I will wear the lilac robes and give comfort to those few people who come to listen to the God-Word in this mausoleum of belief. I will clean and polish and make this time-wracked ruin as beautiful as the Old Quarter that surrounds it, will make its colorful entanglement of spires shine once more. They will call me brother, though the color of my skin, hair, and eyes, my strange accent and my disability will forever mark me as one not of their own, but of the tribe who came across the stars from Home. I will spend my afternoons and nights studying these confounded mountains of old books, until I have mastered all their strange systems of mathematics and science. I will lose all connection to Home, my former friends who came with me on Gadov’s ship…

  All except for the Prophet, whose body I carried through the torrential downpour up the thousand steps of the Animus Tower. Perhaps one day, together, we will change this broken, artificial world.

  THE BURROW

  THE FIRE gave a final lick and paled to ember. Sitting up, Queen Rat
said with a drunken slur, “Almost makes you feel sorry for him, doesn’t it? I never knew the wretched bastard was an immigrant. A spoiled rich kid immigrant, but still, it’s a harder lot in life than I would’ve guessed. Sorry, I should say political asylum seeker. I know not making that distinction can cause certain people’s undergarments to bunch up and cause discomfort to their genitalia.”

  “My undergarments don’t bunch easily,” I said.

  “I’ll bet they don’t.” The queen gazed at my crotch long enough to make me uncomfortable, burped, and rolled her glass through thumb and forefinger, fruitlessly trying to shake up any last drops lingering at the bottom. “So, our Dear Leader started his life as an invalid. He left his home, lost his friends and family, and came to this world under what sounds like rather uncomfortable conditions. His only friend was a religious fanatic, and his job was studying old books and sweeping dusty floors. That all sounds pretty awful to me. But, what the hell do I know? I never saw his personal battles, his triumphs, his unhappiness, or his loneliness. I only suffered the lasting effects of their reimbursement to society.”

  Queen Rat took the Glass Book from my hands. “May I?” she said. She smirked as her fingertips trailed down the page. “His name was Jun, Son of Sen, Heir of the Something House… what did you say his family name was? I know I heard it, I just can’t remember, and I don’t know what this word means. Some symbol that looks like a fish.”

  “It’s sturgeon. I thought you couldn’t read Old Ithic,” I said.

  “Jun, Son of Sen, Heir of the Sturgeon House,” Queen Rat said, the name filtering through her teeth like a taste of something vile. She repeated the word several times with increasing distaste. “And, I can read a little, though certainly not as well as you can. I mean, as well as Len could.”

  The queen returned the book to me, still open to the page where she’d found the name of the Crippled King. “Why don’t you skip ahead a bit, past all the mundane details of our Beloved Sovereign’s boyhood? His moral formation – his bildungsroman, if you will - while interesting in terms of knowing one’s enemy, so far has not disclosed any information that could give us a strategic advantage,” Queen Rat said.

  “You’re in luck. Here, the account jumps ahead five years.”

  Queen Rat leaned forward with exaggerated interest, knocking her wine glass off the table. It broke on the flagstones with a crash. The queen dismissed the shattered vessel with a shrug and a sigh. “And what was the reason for this five-year gap?”

  “The war,” I said.

  “And which war would that be?”

  “The Great Passage. The war your legends say the Wanderer came here to end.”

  Queen Rat chewed a fingernail. “Of course the Crippled King says he lived through the Great Passage. That would only strengthen his claim that he is the Wanderer Returned.”

  “Why don’t you have another drink before we go on? You might need it,” I said.

  “I’ll have two,” Queen Rat said.

  “I think it’s better if I paraphrase this part,” I said.

  “Paraphrase away.” The queen poured herself another glass while I went on.

  “Remember what you told me in the Salt Church, that the War of the Great Passage happened because the people grew too complacent, and could no longer reproduce? Well, according to this, it’s more complicated than that.”

  “Go on,” Queen Rat said.

  “Yesaeda isn’t a normal world. It’s what’s called a rogue planet. Do you know what I mean by that?”

  Queen Rat shook her head no.

  “Most worlds are tethered to their parent star by gravity, the same force that caused your glass of wine to fall toward the ground when you knocked it over just now.”

  “I know what gravity is, Leech.”

  “No doubt. Anyway, some worlds don’t have a parent star. These are called rogue planets: worlds ripped free from the star that gave them birth, usually by some cataclysmic event. These planets are doomed to fall through the darkness of space, without sunlight or warmth, forever, or until another star catches them in its gravitational field. You still follow me?”

  “Few people in the Burrow have ever actually seen the stars,” Queen Rat said. “I never have, myself. I was tutored in rudimentary astronomy when I was in school, so I know what you mean by stars and gravity, though I admit this phenomenon of rogue planets is new to me. Still, I’m not a moron.”

  “My understanding of it isn’t much better,” I said. “But, according to Jun the Acolyte, your Crippled King, the people of Yesaeda left their parent star and became a rogue world on purpose.”

  Queen Rat glared skeptically over the rim of her cup. “What?”

  I flipped the pages of the book to the chapter on the stellar gateways. “According to Jun’s diary, the people who settled this world thousands of years ago - your ancestors - were the richest human civilization to ever exist. They wanted to create a world that was not merely a physical paradise, but a social and political one, as well, free of any corruptive outside influence.”

  Queen Rat hummed.

  I flipped forward a few pages to find the reference I wanted. “Apparently, they wanted to escape something called the Paradigm, which I assume was some kind of large, galactic federal government.”

  “Fascinating,” Queen Rat said. “In our language, the connotation for that word is highly negative. You would only use it for systems that are inherently tyrannical. We call the Amber City a paradigm, for example. It’s also what edgy children say when they don’t want to go to church,” Queen Rat said.

  “Moving on.”

  “Please.”

  “In order to build their perfect society, the Yesaedans came to this world, which back then was a land of beauty and plenty. They conquered the peaceful, sentient natives, and immediately began constructing the most expensive project in the history of the human race... a string of gates scattered all across the galaxy that would allow this planet to jump from star to star without needing to be anchored to a single one.

  “Jun the Acolyte didn’t write down exactly how long the gates took to be completed. They were built thousands of years before he arrived here as a refugee. What he does say, however, is that the Yesaedans used seed-worlds to build the gates – worlds they terraformed, and then implanted with people.

  “The Yesaedans engineered the societies of their seed-worlds to be heavily feudalistic, never allowing them to move beyond their respective dark ages. They mostly did this through religion, but they also had elite military units who would lead purging parties to the surfaces of these worlds to assassinate rebels and thought leaders any time talk of revolution started to foment.”

  “Their perfect world was built with slave labor,” Queen Rat said. “Of course it was.”

  “It gets worse,” I said. “What Jun the Acolyte realized while he was writing this account was that the grimy, medieval world where he and the other refugees had come from, the world they called Home, was a Yesaedan seed-world. Not only that, but the planet-wide flood that had destroyed Home and caused Jun’s tribe to flee was caused by the Yesaedans’ own negligence at keeping the planetary systems running. As you can probably guess, Jun started to resent the Yesaedans for the suffering they’d caused him and his people. And the more he learned, the more that hatred festered.”

  “Oh, wonderful. I love a good tale of bloody revenge,” Queen Rat said.

  “Do you want another refill?” I said.

  The queen shook her head no. “I’m good for now.”

  “When the gates were completed, the Yesaedans somehow found a way to detach from their parent star and fall out of its orbit. I don’t know how they did it, and neither did Jun. He had some ideas, but my math is too low to understand the equations. The important thing is the reason.

  “The Yesaedans cut this entire planet free from the gravity of its parent star so it could fall into the first gate. The first gate aligned with the second, and the second with the third, and so on,
forming an infinite ring around the galactic center. Their daytime was the periods when Yesaeda was outside of a gate, falling next to the light of a star. Night was when the planet was passing through the gates.

  “Once this chain of gate jumping started, it was supposed to be unbreakable. The Yesaedans were too blinded by their newfound power to realize there was a flaw. In making their planet invisible, they had become like gods. Instead of being influenced by the Paradigm, the Yesaedans suddenly controlled it. No single army or coalition of worlds could touch them. And for a while, they enjoyed their secret paradise as any of us would, happy and carefree.

  “Of course, it didn’t last. People started getting sick. An unknown, incurable disease started spreading through the Yesaedan population.”

  “The Blight…” Queen Rat said.

  “Exactly.” I nodded. “You already know that one in four children were born infected. Those numbers haven’t changed to this day. The mildest case will leave a person sterile. The worst prevents the body from forming the right pigments in the skin, hair, and eyes, causes the brain to lose the ability to dream, so that you don’t rest, even when you sleep fifteen or twenty hours a day. Eventually, your body just gives up, and you die of exhaustion. Boys are more likely to be affected than girls. Most don’t survive past early childhood. Those who do are forever changed. In Jun’s society, they became social pariahs or holy men, living secluded lives far away from the rest of society.”

  “The great judgment of our times. And theirs, apparently,” Queen Rat said.

  I nodded. “The doctors never learned where it came from. Some thought the cause was genetic, a mutation caused by some unknown side effect of the gate jumps. Others thought it was a virus engineered by the Shadashim, their revenge for the genocide and enslavement against them.

 

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