by Kali Altsoba
Purity
The party of gray men is a narrow not a broad church. Few are asked to wear the colorless uniform, and even fewer are accepted when they try. Even so, compared to the utterly inbred Broderbund, SAC is ecumenical. It’s also carnivorous. Its officers circle like patient, insatiable Great Whites around the barking seals of the High Court. Most lethal among them are calculating Nagoyans like Takeshi Watanabe, who watch and wait for any slip. But all that was before. All that was controllable. All that was the old Special Action Commando. Before Takeshi began his ascent inside Sakura-kai, into the innermost circle of The Admitted and Pyotr’s trust.
SAC is crucible of a terrible social revolution, champion of a pseudoscientific “biopolitical” theory birthed in the faculty lounge at Pusan Technical University on Daegu years before Takeshi arrived there as a young student. PTU’s geneticists were an orthodox bunch, its political theorists fawning mediocrities of the kind one expects in an autocracy. But then they mated their worst ideas, proclaiming discovery of an ur genome with which to “rewrite and cleanse genetic coding” to make a perfect host biosphere, that would allow them to make the elect social and moral and political order that is predestined for the Imperium.
Travelling in conference papers and in student backpacks, the awful theory soon escaped the campus to slip into the city. There it became a populist blend of old Imperium mysticism and truly bad science, a genetist rather than genetic movement that spoke to rising demands for reform of the caste system. It whipped into the worlds, becoming wildly popular in a few years. It even oozed into cracks in the edifice of insincere elites. They thought they could use it to contain social reform demands surging from below. They could not have been more wrong.
Purity couldn’t be ignored or dismissed as a campus cult after it penetrated SAC, drawing in younger officers who founded the secret Sakura-kai. It seeped into Old Families with wannabe rebels posing at the dinner table to piss off mom and dad. Then a feckless dilettante, Tennō Karl Joseph himself, flirted with the pernicious doctrine over Queen Mary’s contemptuous objections. It’s what got him killed by the jealous Broderbund, and in a way, it got Mary killed by her own son twenty years later. For after the Red Dowager wiped out most of the cowled order in her widow rage, Purity grew ever more influential in elite circles. With the death of the Dowager by poison, it became the stuff of high politics and policy. Then, with his life directly threatened by SAC in private, Pyotr fully bent the knee.
***
Purists claim they adhere to science, but superstitious mysticism is closer to the mark. That’s why they’re mortal enemies of the Broderbund: no two ideas can occupy the same spiritual space at the same time. If they attempt to do so, one must be annihilated by the other. It’s natural law. But one is a science theory and the other is religious, you protest? Nah, trust me. They’re two sides of a coin.
Purists proclaim that AI terraformer experimentation with alien genes and new gene combinations, even basic medical and cosmetic genetic manipulation, was sinful innovation. They say that trying to improve on ur Creation denies God’s natural perfection. The worst, apocalyptic fanatics are ultimately committed to cleansing the Thousand Worlds by war, to killing vast numbers of ‘impures’ in the way of perfect science and perfected politics. They say that it’s necessary to clear the path for a Purity revival, to reorder the genome with replantings from our recovered genetic innocence. And that means they must have Amasia.
Yeah, I know. We’ve heard it before, right? Well, you should know by now that bad ideas never really die. They get recycled, too, along with all our other garbage. In the meantime, while we wait for them to bubble back to the surface in a toxic stew or fall back on our heads as acidic rain, there are gyres of really bad ideas floating out there in oceans of black space that we hardly notice, all around the Thousand Worlds. We’re all distracted by the importance of daily life. Who has time to worry about abstractions? Hell, there’s a mercury ball game tonight!
While most don’t call for multiple genocides, they murkily agree that Purity must contain ‘impure’ billions, to prevent their impurities continuing into history. They’ll leave whatever ‘contain’ means to their leaders. What they want above all is to return their children and homeworlds “to a condition of Purity.” Whatever the fuck that means any given Tuesday. However far fanatics are prepared to go toward a radical ‘solution’ to your imperfections, and all of mine, Purists agree that Humanity is irredeemably split into the pure and impure, higher and lower, fit and unfit, worthy and worthless, useful and useless eaters. None question on which side of the genetic canyon they reside. Not if they’re Grünen. Works out somehow that most Pure found a way to survive inside the Old Imperium, while us farfolk went to gene Hell. Who woulda thought it, eh? The Imperium is chock to the brim with concentrated Purity! Virtue on tap, so to speak. Real convenient coincidence. And about as factually solid as one of those gyre floaters.
Before Pyotr launched Orion into war, the arguments were all about how to proceed, not whether. With Pyotr on the Jade Throne in place of the Dowager Regent, the policy debate was won by leaders who advocated for war to capture the genome basin of Amasia, to “speed the critical work of purification.” They met with Pyotr and made their pitch, and a threat, five years before he arranged the Bad Camberg incident that was mere preliminary to the Krevan War, itself only the prelude and foreplay to the immense Fourth Orion War. That was also the day Pyotr met Takeshi Watanabe, a young major and member of the Purity delegation ostensibly from Pusan Technical University, but really representing a secret cabal of radical officers concentrated in Sakura-kai. Their bond was instant, though wary. Each knew the other was a thorough cynic, pretending to believe. Each knew they had to go along in public, or the sincere men of Purity would kill them and proceed anyway. Each bided their time, and took names.
Skepticism about Purity’s influence predominated among intel analysts in the Calmar Union, and even among more cautious Neutrals. For who could believe such a bad idea might take hold of one of Orion’s great peoples in the middle of the Shōwa Era, the Age of Enlightenment? The “best thinking” and nearly all intelligence assessments outside Grün home systems rejected the charge that Purity was truly millenarian, apocalyptic and genocidal. Even the best informed farfolk, who read the final intentions of Purity correctly, grossly underestimated its chance to ever take power. Complacency was laced through a cotton candy view of the threat coming out of Pusan and the Imperium. Meanwhile, Purity under Pyotr branched out beyond its original genetist and intellectual political base. It willy-nilly mixed and matched ancient ethnic myths, folk images and byways with apocalyptic genetist visions of the end of life in squalid impurity.
It’s brand new and thrilling, and as ancient as Old Earth cave paintings. It’s primal in its attractiveness to the powerful, and alluring in its oversimplified explanations of their misery to the miserable. It has evolved into a dynamic new religion, a syncretic faith as well as mass ideology. It’s far more dangerous than naked cynicism practiced by generations of Oetkert-Shaka dynasts. Whenever tyrants speak of eternal glory, it’s wise to hide your children. But when children speak of glory for themselves, beware your own offspring and hide yourselves from them. Faith trumps even vanity. Sincere, zealous children are always far more dangerous to peace than any tyrant. And the Children of Purity are sincere.
***
What do they want? First, to recover the ur text of the cradle world’s master genome. Then to deploy rediscovered secrets of DNA to reverse a “terrifying miscegenation of the human species” that Purity adherents believe marks the coming of the Kali Age, which they would avert by waging a war that must bring it about. They would reverse the greatest achievements of expansive terraforming, and colonization and genetic building that heralded the dawn of the Thousand Worlds more than 1,800 years ago. The period Purists call the “Nightmare.”
They don’t mean by that all the terrible, massively destructive interplanetary fights that the
Historia Humana records as the Binary Wars, the Triplet Wars, and the Foundation Wars, all of which look to us like practice compared to what we know came later. They don’t mean chaotic destruction of inhabited worlds that have never recovered, during the empire forming period. They don’t mean five bloodsoaked centuries of chronic frontier wars when Daura, the Imperium, and the Calmar Union shaped and defined their relations in the First, Second, and Third Orion Wars, back when a hundred small Neutrals still lay between them and tried to stay out of the great fights, but couldn’t.
No, none of that. Not that at all. They mean before all that, in the time of AI terraforming and genetic seeding, of intermingled expansion and settlement of all those brave new worlds. They think that’s what later led to a thousand years of migration, to the time of what they call “barbarian penetrations” and the rest of Orion calls the counter invasions of Grün homeworlds by armed farfolk who were forced to defend themselves by aggressions of Karl Ferdinand in the Foundation War. Then by his Oetkert-Shaka successors, who started and waged the First, Second, and Third Orion Wars. A thousand years of war of aggression and empire expansion disguised as crusade, as jihad for the Black Faith. And it all ended in stalemate after stalemate, in balance and rebalance and yet more war.
Purists decry the blunting of the Imperium’s march toward inevitable mastery over the Thousand Worlds. The great retrenchment that lasts ‘till today, a time of farfolk containment of Grün loins and reach and ambition. And worse, what they despise as “genetic mixing” that followed the end of expansion, when billions of “impures” dislocated by war poured into Imperium worlds, confusing the social order of “natural castes and classes.” They want to reverse those inflows of farfolk offworlders brought to their homeworlds as prisoners of war or as captive slaves, who then willfully “diluted our native gene stock.”
Purists detest “uncontrolled, polluted breeding.” The movement’s ideologues see genetic mixing with farfolk interlopers as the baleful legacy of the Imperium’s aborted mission. They sneer at fables of civic glory and expanded power that the traditional elites boast about in official histories taught to children and the gullible. They have no truck with supremacy claims of old elites, those with the best estates and most numerous dāsa slaves, and smoothest career tracks to military command or government sinecure or social prominence. They despise High Castes, reject social claims of founder elites with oil black skin recalling the infamously cruel bride of Karl Ferdinand I, the First Empress, Nandi Shaka.
They reject the claim to military supremacy of those with the copper tones of latecomers from Nagoya, Yokohama, and Kagoshima. They can barely tolerate blends of pink and copper, brown and black of the vast majority of lower orders, thinking it all debasement. They have no preferred shade, but think that there must be one hidden somewhere in the ur genome of the past. Above all, Purists detest jade eyed Oetkerts. They regard the ruling dynasty almost as usurpers, genetic as well as political, in an unbroken but illicit lineage from Karl Ferdinand I to Pyotr Shaka III. Do nothing dynasts who failed to deliver Amasia.
Now that we’re inside the Kali Age of chaos and destruction, Purity will use the war to ‘cleanse’ the homeworlds and all conquered farfolk worlds. Only the sterilizing fires of war will provide the pyrophyte replanting that delivers all Orion to the Pure. Only in war will the “Elect of the Origin Gene Pool” be revealed and achieve rightful dominance, ascending via redeath toward the Final Golden Age in a new Satya Yuga. They have already begun the purges and bloodlettings.
No one noticed because the Dowager inadvertently gave them cover with her genocide order. They started with the cowls of the Black Faith, which few outside the Imperium will miss. Purity revealed its potential for mass death when the gray men seized on Queen Mary’s outrage to eliminate a rival far beyond politics. SAC made sure the Broderbund’s mystic theories were dispatched along with 90% of cowls in a nova of bloodshed. The “Red Purge and Expropriation” unsettled all internal religious balance, sent ripples of change through the traditional faithful, shook the hundred billion who adhered to the Black Faith and were bewildered by such wild discrediting, slaughter, and then exile of their priesthood.
Purity won’t stop there. It picked up too many converts attracted to its growing power, as it graduated from heresy to become the new orthodoxy. Its leaders will put an end to a joyous cacophony of divers peoples and hundreds of silly, harmless religions that distract and populate Orion. They will eliminate all deluded local holy men, end all the noisy spiritual arguments, ban ancient festivals and roust and burn out folk traditions, break the relics of local saints and end all pilgrimages. SAC and Sakura-kai will reshape Purity into a replacement faith for all the old religions. They’re already halfway home. Purity’s leaders sit atop a militant, and now militarized, biopolitical movement. They head an ideology of genetist belief devoted to holy war led by their puppet, Pyotr Shaka. They look backward to a different ‘ur moment’ than the dead Brethren believed. Back not to false prophecy hidden in the stars and misread in dead scrolls, but to an equally imaginary time of genetic serenity in the origin system. A false, pure order inside all the chaos.
Genetist theory is for Purity a DNA Rosetta stone which will disentangle all the “polluted languages of falsely directed evolution.” Acolytes proclaim: “My strength will be as the strength of ten, when my genes are pure.” They’ll reverse AI terrabot error and innovation, return species and genomes and biospheres to a time before founding of the first extra Sol colonies. They’ll control the genetic destiny of all Orion. They’ll weed and plough again, till and reseed. Evolution will be guided, not blind. They’ll advance over mass graves to brilliant heights of cleansed utopia in the cause of a pseudo theory built from bunk, bile and cynicism by ambitious leaders who hold their followers in contempt. What’s old is new, as another generation of young is deceived into violence as the necessary herald of moral reform. As before and evermore, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
***
In propaganda made for 2nd and 3rd Class citizens, and lower castes and even outcastes, Purity doctrine reduces to a simple slogan and article of faith: ‘Peoples of the same fathers must share the same worlds.’ It was Takeshi who suggested that Pyotr announce public support for the idea, before starting the Krevan War. Pyotr accepted the slogan as useful, but doesn’t buy into it. He rejects biopolitical ideology even as he elevates SAC to the summit of influence at Court, and accepts to serve in secret as nominal commandant of Sakura-kai.
One night, while deep in his cups, he repeats the slogan to Takeshi, who smiles to hear his cynical words filter back to him this way, in that place. General Curia older men and hastier men in Sakura-kai all think they have a man deep inside the Tennō’s mind, influencing him as they direct. Each faction thinks that it controls Takeshi Watanabe. They could not be more fatally wrong.
Pyotr is sitting in his usual, dirty blue ermine robe, snorting little puffs of spiced snuff that spill carelessly down his sleeve. He hasn’t moved in a while, so there’s a sizeable collection of scented dust resting in an aromatic heap in his lap. He speaks the street slogan in a conspiratorial whisper, then adds out loud. “If we retake the Lost Children and seize Amasia for Purity, tears of war will irrigate my people’s daily bread for eons to come.”
“You can’t and don’t mean it!”
“No more than you did when you fed the words to the Sakura-kai.”
Takeshi is impressed by Pyotr’s deviousness, but doesn’t show it. “You know that Purity is one of the worst ideas in history, tying yet again for supremacy over all. You’re riding atop the tiger’s back, trying to figure a way to dismount.”
“As are you.”
“We understand each other, majesty.”
“Yet, one must admit that Purity is an idea that’s moving worlds, attracting billions. Rather than get in its way, I shall ride its bucking stripes to heights my mother never dreamed to go, as Queen or as the Red Dowager.”
‘A better
trick would be to harness the beast. But that seems beyond your abilities.’ Pyotr is easily the most contrived, convoluted and cynical man Takeshi has ever known. Besides himself, of course. It’s why they make excellent partners in crime. Takeshi shares Purity’s disdain for encrusted elites. ‘Lucky sperm’ he calls High Caste males in his private thoughts, ‘whatever the hue of their skin.’ But he has even more contempt for the fanatic scientism and ideological drive of Purist fanatics, even though he’s still riding the upward movement of Purity to power as a rising star inside the secretive Sakura-kai.
“That’s pure politics,” he tells Pyotr in private, when first asked if he adheres to the new faith. “I have no Pure beliefs. I serve you as the rightful and righteous Tennō.” Pyotr is far too easy to flatter, although he always objects to it. Takeshi did it more often, back then. He’s more sparing and subtle with praise these days. He revels in the fact that he’s his own, self made man. A refugee boy who ran from Fates yet by his talent found his way to the Jade Court and the inner circle of power, without a patron or privileged youth. ‘Even Pyotr sits where he is by chance, from a drunk father’s thrust and grunt and squirt. He swam but a little way, a lucky sperm, simply the first to reach his mother’s pulsing egg. Pahhh!’
Takeshi is a true bastard, child of a low born mother and an unknown father. He’s not High Caste like many Nagoyans who are prominent in the Imperium’s military and social elites, and have been almost since the Foundation War by the Jade Eye. More recently, the sons of Nagoya targeted the General Curia of the Special Action Commandos for the same reason, as it emerged as a rising political power base they could use. They ascended to command until they now stand right behind Pyotr, seated on a radicalizing Jade Throne. They’re still standing there, whispering quotidian urgings to war. They dominate the officer corps of SAC and Rikugun. There are fewer in the Kaigun, but they have influence in the navy, too.
