by Kali Altsoba
Soso met exiled revolutionaries in the criminal precincts. They talked in whispers of rebellion and purges and violent revenge to follow a seizure of power on Nalchik. They didn’t impress him as serious men, so he stayed neutral in the political struggle building to crisis across the Dauran Empire after the Great Plague and a century of economic stagnation. He sided with revolution only later, once it looked like the fools might win. He never cared about their politics, ever. He just thought appearing to join and support them was good for his criminal businesses.
That’s how he ended up in the Freedom Party, where he discovered whole new talents in himself and fresh ways to influence and control far more people than his gang. He rose rapidly but on the margins, raising funds for Party leaders through robberies, kidnappings and extortion. First on the streets and then in the Party, he found his life’s true calling as a leader of gangsters. He was a poshlusty, in the local Sachi dialect. Vulgar, coarse, without spirituality, a degenerate. The perfect candidate to migrate from a Dead Souls street gang to harvesting Dauran dead souls.
Soso’s defects were twisted by his boyhood and youth far beyond excesses of a normal teenage narcissist. High intelligence and bitter self-loathing added to the odd mix. As he shifted from street thug to Party tough his afflicted personality should have been as obvious as his facial pockmarks. But he hid his hatred for any and all who offended, and did as he was bid by the Party higher-ups. Beneath a flow of credits and his mask, his lethal flaws went undetected.
He was capable of charm, seduction, even inspiring loyalty from lower cadres. His unlikely personality helped him rise inside the revolution, for he hid the stone killer and his glacial ambition when playing host to high Party officials. He liked elaborate dinners where he served the traditional delicacies of the country gentry of Sachi, such as sturgeon in pomegranate sauce or spicy kebabs and delicate aubergines served with walnut jelly. He was moving up by secret murders: the jellies were where he hid tasteless poisons that took out rivals in the Party.
Engorged with ambition and abscessed grudges, he embellished his reputation with Party leaders in a flood of private communications and by daily exhibitions of loyalty and his capacity for hard work. He hid overweening pride by dressing in a plain tunic, maybe also in an oubliette of his mind paying tribute to rejected Old Ritual monks in a backhand and perverted way. “Sachi sackcloth” sophisticated Party leaders called it when they sent him offworld for the first time in his life, to carry out some of the dirtiest jobs they were too elevated or afraid to do themselves.
It was more important that he concealed from Party leaders his truly expansive intellect by employing coyly simple speech. He listened to the jabbering intellectuals more than he talked, learning all about them while revealing nothing to his enemies. He was genuinely vulgar, which made them underestimate his brilliance and ambition. They said they were social as well as political revolutionaries but they were all elitist snobs in their speech, tastes and thought. Soso was clearly not in or of their class.
“Bring me samogon you whoreson, before I chop you,” he shouted at a simple server in a rough backwater inn during one meeting. Others at the table laughed because they didn’t know his reputation. His rough provincial manners and outward modesty cloaked profoundly insecure pride, gutter guile, and a fearful will to power. He had a fathomless cruelty that will kill them all.
Soso’s brutishness was so coarse and ever-present it was finally seen by Party leaders. They acquitted him anyway. They were hard men, too, and the Party needed his ruthlessness. He knew things they didn’t. How to run criminal businesses to fund their cause; how to make enemies disappear without police noticing; how to chop anyone with a hot laser axe who needed it, and do it so savagely and publicly it frightened thousands then millions more into cowering obedience to the Party and its collective leaders. It was the stuff of a true revolutionary: brute and random violence. He was far better at it than any of them. ‘Fools, weaklings, cowards!’
***
Ruthless men without conscience or restraint or judgment, they moved Soso from the outer systems to undercover work on Astrana. Even then the city smelled neglected and too old, full of the odors of decay, of uncollected waste left on dry red brick, of wet street sweepings after bazaars were hosed down at night. In its narrow streets, thin pancakes of unleavened bread were sold from tall stacks teetering in wooden barrows, wheeled by barefoot children calling out prices in shrill and hungry voices. Women pounded cassava and millet laid out on blankets on the ground, then sold it to the poor in scoops from the white and yellow cones. Stacks of raw yams, each the size and color of a large beaver from adjacent swampland, waited for affluent customers. Cheap carpets and trinkets sold as faux artisanal crafts filled in the scene, along with cheaper gold-plated amulets and voodoo dolls, and clouds of incense and superstition. Everywhere, a bottomless desperation.
Soso was there a year in secret when the Grim Revolution arrived with its hat on its head and won through to power. To the great surprise of everyone, Party leaders most of all, the old regime hardly resisted at the end. Dauran emperors and their imperial-religious system expired in a low whimper, surrendering to hard men vastly more dedicated to veneration of absolute power.
Soso made his move. “Members of the Central Committee, my leaders, I recommend that the Party hold a public execution of the Imperial Family.”
“Won’t that stir trouble among the people and Old Ritualists?’
“No, it will suppress it.”
“How?”
“It will prove that we’re capable of reprisal. It will sever the church from the state when royal heads roll. Above all, it will show dull-witted, emperor-loving people that there’s no going back from revolution.”
“Excellent, Soso. See that it’s carried out.”
“I will prepare the documents for your signatures, comrades.”
“Be certain that my name is the first listed. I am Party Chief Officer, after all.”
“I will make sure of it.”
And so murder leading to much more murder was agreed in a moment, sealed with a set of signatures by fools who thought they were in control. Soso used his old Dambatta sachi to behead the emperor and empress, standing amidst ‘chopped’ bodies of their dead children and grandchildren. The memex showed his revolutionary butchery in full. Two killers stood beside him, also holding humming sachi in one hand and a princeling’s or royal granddaughter’s lolling head in the other. The scene was rebroadcast over-and-over to a cowering population across nine hundred and more worlds.
It was exactly the terrifying image and warning Party leaders wanted. It was also their fatal error. They calculated correctly that Daurans were born into centuries of perpetual fear and thus most expected nothing less from them or any other central government on Nalchik. They missed entirely that the images sent out produced terror of Soso far more than of them, and made him the most famous man in the empire in a moment. They made this same mistake before.
Throughout his rise to power, Soso was underestimated by the arrogant revolutionaries and rivals who thought him too crude, too unclever to be a threat to them, to their command of history and radical change, to the great revolution they brought Daurans in a nova of bloody violence. His too rough origins, provincial manners, and vulgar speech fooled them, hid his grotesquerie from their eyes. It was there all the time, hidden inside a man they only saw as a rough tool of their revolutionary demand for systematic mass murder.
Besides, they were busy remaking the Hermit Empire into the “Dauran Commons.” That’s what Party leaders renamed the Dauran Empire, to pretend that it no longer was one. The edicts and slogans that effectively decided who lived and who died followed in swift succession.
“The Party is one with the people.”
“Enemies of the people are enemies of the Party.”
“All enemies of the Party will be shot.”
“Food belongs to the people.”
“Hoarders of the people�
�s food will be shot.”
“All food production and distribution will be controlled by the Party.”
“Never allow eating the Party’s food then smashing its cooking pots.”
“Enemies of the Party are useless mouths. They will get no food.”
“All property belongs to the people.”
“All property belongs to the Party, which is the people.”
“Property is theft. Property is abolished.”
“The people are finally free to think.”
“Only revolutionary thought is acceptable.”
“Cadres! Never allow singing tunes contrary to revolutionary thought.”
“Anyone deviating from Party thought lines will be shot.”
“Long live the Grim Revolution.”
“Death to all enemies of the Grim Revolution.”
“Death to all enemies of the Party, guardian of the Grim Revolution.”
What began in savage butchery of the royal family morphed into systematic butchery of whole classes of elite citizens. Then of rebel cities. Then of rebel worlds. The people’s revolutionary commons ran red with the people’s blood.
With the Revolution in power, Soso slipped easily into appointed office on Nalchik. Once ensconced, he accumulated more power behind the scenes. Again, he was underestimated and hardly noticed. Party leaders were too busy with expropriation, with moving into grand villas and mansions, into country estates of the dispossessed ruling classes.
After food confiscation decrees provoked widespread opposition, another savage blood purge was ordered by Party leaders in the name of the people, a murder binge of “hoarders” that Soso manipulated from behind heavy curtains of bureaucratic gray. Public slaughter of “masters of the old regime” cleared space for rising men like Soso, an ambitious provincial thug more than willing to draw a serrated knife across any throat the Party asked him to cut. And many others it never knew about.
They put Soso in charge of the old Imperial Shishi, which he dutifully purged but then remade not as the Party’s sword and shield but as his own terrible killer police, loyal to him and not to the tone-deaf Grim Revolution. They became his instrument of terror and personal power base. On orders of Party leaders, using state funds he hired tens of thousands of brutes on every Dauran homeworld. He freed them to “chop” millions of class and Party enemies with what they called their “sachis,” stubby laser axes he sold to the Shishi, pocketing the credits while rigging the books. With wealth also stolen from the purged dead, he bought his Shishi killers’ loyalty.
Amidst the wider carnage and corruption of the Grim Revolution, few noticed that too many Party middlemen and loyal cadres were missing or turned up dead. Soso found a backstairs and secretive path to steal their power. He climbed up and over the Party’s ranks and leaders, drenched in Party blood. And they thanked him for it.
He concealed murder in the open, under chopped limbs and slash-throat corpses from the Party’s officially sanctioned massacres. Brutal, pitiless men could not match him in sheer guile and ruthlessness. They didn’t see his terrible crimes because they were so busy committing their own. They missed his truly radical ambition in the blood-spatter he sprayed over all Daura, because they thought they gave him the order. Soso was their man. And in a sense, so he was.
All members of the Party Central Committee embraced Soso’s turn to mass violence, his hounding of declared class enemies into obedience to their own illegitimate and hasty authority, his sheer butchery of any and all with ties to the old regime and overthrown social elites. They applauded his cunning use of the law as a club to beat enemies to death, shrouding mass murder in show trials whose centerpiece was confession followed by cascading denunciations of faked co-conspirators, who confessed and denounced more false enemies in turn, in widening circles of slaughter and servility. They welcomed his terror because they needed to replace with raw fear a social contract they broke past repair. And because they thought he kept their own hands clean.
Mass killing was crucial work Party leaders disdained as beneath their value as vanguard intellectuals and true revolutionaries. Not Soso. He understood that the real levers of power in a bureaucratic empire were all colored gray, not painted in rainbow glories of fancy talk and laws. He put hard, violent men loyal to him personally into key positions in state police and the Shishi, in security and counterintelligence, and lastly in the Party bureaucracy itself. He came to control every Party subsection and all terror police, everywhere. Only then did Soso let fall the masque macabre, drop his act of dumb devotion to the leadership and reveal his true ogre’s face.
***
Never were men so awfully, fatefully wrong. Their great purges and massacres and egos unwittingly prepared the way for the best killer among them to chop his way to power. His tool was assassination, as it was also for them. Only he was quicker to the thought and unflinching in the act. He even got them to condemn and murder each other. Many died without knowing it was Soso who killed them. The lucky ones that is. Then the rest met agony under his pocked stare.
He started by killing the most naïve, those who actually believed in violent revolution as a path to reform. Then he killed the cynics, hard men for whom the motor of social murder was always personal advance, not belief that murdering stalwarts of the ancien régime would clear a way to change for ordinary Daurans. He accused them of revisionism, of corruption and sin, in mass show trials held in courts they set up to try the old Imperial elites. ‘It’s like stealing apples.’
Once he controlled the Black Robes he framed and arrested Party rivals one-by-one. They all proved to be mediocre talents compared to him. They thought they were men of destiny and of history’s chosen hour, that they were truly ruthless and ready to use assassination, murder and incredible violence to effect great social changes. They only saw what real power was, what revolution was, what terror was, what he was, when he ordered them tied to chopping beds far beneath the Caesarium Selo. They all went astonished, and most went meekly, into the scuppers. A few true believers actually found some portion of metaphysical happiness in martyrdom.
“Soso’s a useful idiot,” Party leaders had said, laughing as they downed cantors of dark beer or spiced samogon. Never noticing that in a recess of the gather house or a dim corner of a back street bar where they went to pretend they were true men of the people, a silent police or Black Robe was taking notes. As each deposed rival’s turn to die arrived Soso quoted back their mockeries during long torture sessions. Or had their words read out loud while he stood to one side watching their torments at the hand of a grinning Shishi sadist, slow-drinking clear samogon from Achinsk and blowing smoke rings from coarse Sachi blue tobacco across the torture bed.
Sometimes, he stood over a condemned Party enemy just before he chopped them up himself, with the same stubby laser-axe he reached for that day in Dambatta and always carried ready-to-hand, tucked into his broad black mountaineer’s belt. “Useful idiot, you said. Vulgar pig, you said. You don’t remember? Shishi, read it back!” The hired sadist recited the time and place and fatal words and cutting laughter, or played a quantum-dot vid that can’t be faked or denied. Then Soso lifted his bright blue, humming laser axe and brought it down, over and over, “chopping” the screeching Party man into pieces he later ordered fed to the city’s dogs.
Once he took charge of the Party he controlled the vast demesne of the Dauran Empire. Some 945 billion “dead souls” spread over 287 inhabited systems, the largest polity in Orion. He ruled it as an abattoir masquerading as a revolution, tucked inside an ancient empire of fear and superstition, pretending to be a worthy and progressive civilization. That’s when his last restraint frayed and broke and he unleashed hordes of Black Robes on all the worlds of Daura. They ran amok, provoking massive resistance but also crushing it in a bloodbath like none seen in all the sordid histories of all the Thousand Worlds. Soso became conductor of an unresolved symphony of sadism with no closing movement, a cacophony of cruelty going on ad infin
itum.
In the early years of his tyranny, when there was still some resistance, he liked to deal with captured rebel leaders personally. He paraded them in iron cages along blood-soaked streets of their own ravaged cities, then brought them to Nalchik to stagger down the central avenue of his stolen capital, Astrana, and of course on all the memexes of all his captive worlds. He leered over their tortures and humiliations before granting their cries and pleas for release, allowing in his august mercy that they could be at last chopped up by laser axe. “Chopping” was decreed the official and sole legal method of public execution. But first they must thank his executioners for each probe and cut, then beg him to be allowed to die. Only then did he permit the death chop.
He told frightened scholars to rewrite all the histories, putting him at the center of the Grim Revolution and all Dauran achievement. Alchemists of his past changed the putrid and leaden truths of his life into a golden Indus of myth. They invented oral histories, planted folk memories in a renamed JarNeb, wrote quasi-spiritual paeans to Soso’s nobility and wisdom.
