The Rise of the Empire

by John Jackson Miller

  “Only certain Tarkin males,” his mother said.

  “So Nomma never had to go?” he asked, referring to their diminutive, heavily jowled near-human servant.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Why not? Are Tarkins different from Nomma’s family?”

  “Who serves whom?” his father responded with force. “Have you ever placed a meal in front of Nomma?”

  “I would.”

  His mother’s expression hardened. “Not in this house.”

  “What you learn on the Carrion will one day allow you to show Nomma how to be content with his station,” his father went on.

  Wilhuff struggled with the word station. “To be happy about serving us, you mean.”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  Still on unsure ground, Wilhuff fell silent for an even longer moment. “Will you be taking me there—to the Carrion?” he asked finally.

  His father narrowed his eyes when he smiled. “Not me. Someone else will come for you when the time is right.”

  A more delicate, impressionable child might have lived in fear of that day, but to Wilhuff the threat of sudden change, the abrupt undermining of his effortless life, and the need to forge his own future eventually became a promise: a parable, an adventure on which he yearned to embark, made real in his imagination long before it actually came to be.

  The day arrived shortly after his eleventh birthday; Wilhuff was, by then, a shipshape kid burning with desire for bigger things, already something of a dreamer, an actor, an exaggerator. He was seated with his parents for the evening meal. The litany of harsh reminders was about to commence when three men looking as if they had just crawled out from beneath a mine collapse barged through the front door and into dining room. Tracking mud across the polished stone floors, they began to stuff the pockets of their ragged longcoats with food snatched from the dinner table. When Wilhuff looked to his suddenly silent parents, his mother only said, “They’ve come for you.”

  But if his parents and the three intruders thought they had taken him by surprise, he had one of his own in store for them. “First I need to get my gear,” he said, hurrying up the curving stairway as expressions of puzzlement began to form on the faces of the uninvited guests.

  The looks were still in place when he returned a moment later, dressed in cargo pants and a multipocketed vest he had stitched together in secret over many weeks. Dangling from his neck was a pair of macrobinoculars that had been a birthday gift. His gear, his outfit, his uniform for when it would be needed.

  Scanning Tarkin from head to toe, the tallest and grimiest of the three launched a short laugh that shook the anteroom chandelier. Then he stepped forward to take the boy by shoulders that would remain bony and narrow throughout his life, shaking him as he said: “That’s a beauty, it is. A uniform fit for a future hero. And you know what? It’ll look even better with blood on it.”

  His father stepped forward to say: “Wilhuff, meet my father’s brother, your grand-uncle Jova.”

  Jova grinned down at him, showing even teeth, whiter than Wilhuff would have expected considering his uncle’s dirt-streaked face.

  “Time to go,” Jova announced.

  So: whisked from his home without a reassuring embrace from either parent, the two of them standing instead in each other’s arms, expressions of sad resolve on their faces. This was something he needed to experience. And through the gate into Eriadu’s pitch-black pall, safe for the moment within the uniform, exhilaration stifling the hunger he was already feeling. Whisked not only from the manicured grounds but also from the city itself in an aged airspeeder, on a shaky flight across the finger-shaped bay and up into the hills beyond to follow the meandering Orrineswa River to a region he had never known to exist on his homeworld, one that seemed more the stuff of holodramas and escapist literature: an untamed expanse of flat-topped mesas separated by surging boulder-strewn rivers, and in the far distance volcanic mountains that were perhaps still active. Even more shocking was Jova’s explanation that while vast areas of Eriadu were much like this one, everything the boy’s wide blue eyes could take in from horizon to horizon was family land—Tarkin land, procured twenty generations earlier and never allowed to fall into the hands of developers, miners, or anyone with designs on the region. A protected place and more: a natural monument, a reminder of what the planet could devolve into should sentient beings lose their grip and surrender their superiority to nature, to savagery. For young Wilhuff, a place of initiation; and central to it all, the Carrion Plateau.

  A rickety speeder listing to one side because of a faulty repulsorlift carried them up onto the tabletop summit: Wilhuff, Jova, two other headclothed elders, and a pair of elderly Rodians who worked as guides, caretakers, trackers, all six of them perched atop the ailing machine and Wilhuff’s five keepers carrying long-barreled slugthrowers. His hunger partially staved by dried meat almost too tough to swallow, Wilhuff was beginning to have serious misgivings, though he refused to let them be known. This was a much darker and more dangerous place than the one his imagination had conjured. Fixed on masking his unease and on seeing an actual animal in the wild, he sat with the macrobinoculars glued to his eyes as the speeder navigated immense stretches of grassland and forest, passing thick-boled ten-thousand-year-old trees with skinny, near-leafless limbs; monolithic ruins and cliffside petrogylphs ten times older; and shallow seasonal lakes dotted with flamboyant birds.

  At length that first twilight he spotted something: a stately quadruped two meters tall, striped in black and white and crowned with graceful, curving horns. My first animal in the wild. The others spied it, as well, without the aid of magnifying lenses, and Jova brought the speeder to a jarring halt. But not, as it happened, to gaze on the beauty of the beast. In unison, the antique rifles came up and half a dozen shots rang out. Through the glasses, Wilhuff watched the majestic creature leap up, then fall heavily onto its side. And a moment later they were all hurrying through the sharp grass in an effort to reach their kill before other predators or scavengers could arrive—and also to get to it while it was still warm.

  Wilhuff asked himself what the creature had done to deserve such a fate. If it, too, had come to the Carrion to learn the meaning of survival, it had failed miserably.

  The Rodians rolled the animal onto its back, and from a sheath strapped to his thigh Jova drew a well-used vibroblade.

  “Cut straight up from between the legs to the thoat,” he said, handing Wilhuff the knife. “And take care not to make a mess of the innards.”

  Fortifying himself—worried as much about fainting as about disappointing his elders—Wilhuff plunged the point of the weapon through the creature’s fur and flesh and tasked the vibroblade to cut. Hot maroon blood spurted, striking him full in the face. The Rodians seemed almost gleeful as it dripped from the tip of his nose to his chin and down the front of his pristine vest, saturating the seams and pockets he had stitched with such care.

  “Good cut,” Jova said when the carcass had parted, the smell of the beast’s entrails nearly overwhelming Wilhuff. “Now, you reach deep in there”—he indicated a place in the torso—“and follow the rear curve of the breathing muscle until your hands find the liver. Then you pull it out. Go on: Do it. Do it, I said!”

  In went his hesitant, shaking hands, maneuvering through squishy bulbous organs until they found a heavy lump rich with blood. He had to yank several times before the liver broke free of its fibrous net of blood vessels and ligaments, and he nearly fell backward when it did. Then Jova took the slippery, uncooperative thing into his callused hands and began tearing chunks from it.

  “This one’s for you,” his uncle said, placing the largest of the pieces in the palm of Wilhuff’s already bloodied hand. He motioned with his chin: “Go ahead now. Down it goes.”

  Once more Wilhuff focused on living up to expectations, and when he had gotten past his revulsion and devoured the chunk, his uncles and the Rodians celebrated his act with a short song in a la
nguage Wilhuff didn’t understand; celebrated Wilhuff’s first step, the opening stage in an initiation that wouldn’t conclude until years later at the Carrion Spike.

  —

  While Eriadu didn’t have indigenous creatures as large as the rancor or as unusual as the sarlacc, it did boast ferocious felines, carnivorous crustaceans, and a species of veermok far more fierce and cunning than others in its primate family. For the next month Wilhuff did little more than follow in the tracks of his elders, observing predators of many varieties killing and devouring one another, and learning how to keep himself from being similarly devoured. There was no denying that witnessing death up close was a far more visceral experience than watching such events transpire in holodramas viewed in the airy tranquillity of his bedroom. Still, he struggled to understand just what he was supposed to be taking away from the close encounters. Could daily brushes with death transform a simply ordinary person into one who was larger than life? Even if that was possible, how could that transformation have an impact on the lives of Nomma and others like him? He might have been able to puzzle out the answers were he less preoccupied day to day with being set upon and eaten by the beasts they stalked.

  Gradually the routine changed from merely observing kills to stealing them. Frequently the Rodians would use their vibro-lances to drive killer beasts back from their quarries and hold them at bay while Wilhuff rushed in to complete the theft. Other times it would be Wilhuff’s turn to wield a vibro-lance, and someone else who would make the grab.

  “We’re teaching them how to behave in the presence of their betters,” Jova said. “The ones who learn, profit from the laws we lay down; the rest die.” He wanted to make certain Wilhuff understood. “Never try to live decently, boy—not unless you’re willing to open your life to tragedy and sadness. Live like a beast, and no event, no matter how harrowing, will ever be able to move you.”

  When his uncle decided that Wilhuff had experienced enough stealing, it came time to do the actual hunting. And so Jova and the others began to teach him tactical methods for taking advantage of the wind or the angle of the light. They taught him how to defend against attacks by groups of beasts by confounding them with unexpected moves. They taught him to kill by concentrating all his power on one point. All the while the vest became more bloodied and tattered, until ultimately it was useless except as a rag, and he was on his own, without a uniform or costume to hide within.

  The routine of tracking, hunting, killing, and cooking over fire continued as the land surrendered the last of its moisture to the blinding sky. His feet turned raw and his sunburned skin blistered, his mind given over to memorizing the names of the Carrion’s every tree, animal, and insect—all of them serving one purpose or another. Late one evening the speeder’s powerful forward lamps illuminated a rodent as it leapt from the saw grass, and with a carefully aimed collision Jova sent it flying. Wilhuff was instructed to use his vibroblade to excise a scent gland buried where the animal’s thin, hairless tail met its plump body. From that gland the Rodians prepared a musky gel that they then used in their hunts for more of the same rodents. Similarly, they prepared stimulant concoctions from residue drained from the stomach of long-necked ruminants or the droppings of felines that had ingested certain plants. Wilhuff grew accustomed to eating every part of an animal and to drinking blood on its own or mixed with mind-altering plants gathered during treks across the plateau.

  Over time he became so inured to the sight, smell, and taste of blood that even his dreams ran red with it. He kept waiting for the adventure to conclude at some log-walled shelter stocked with prepared food and soft beds, but the days grew only more harrowing, and at night half-starved scavengers would circle and howl at the edge of a meager cook fire, their eyes glowing furiously in the dark, waiting for a chance to rush in and steal back what food they could.

  The tight-knit band of humans and Rodians didn’t always succeed at remaining at the top of the food chain. Jova’s cousin Zellit was killed during a nighttime raid by a gang of reptiles whose saliva contained a powerful poison. By midseason Wilhuff knew real hunger for the first time, and came close to dying of an illness that caused him to shake so violently he thought his bones would break.

  Sometimes even the smallest of the plateau’s creatures would catch them unprepared and get the better of them. One night, when they had been too exhausted to set up a perimeter of motion detectors, he dreamed that something was feasting on his lower lip, and what his numb fingers found there was a venomous septoid, its pincers anchored in his soft flesh. Waking with a start, he hurried through the open flap of the self-deploying tent only to land in a stream of the segmented critters, which were all over him in a moment, hungry to find purchase wherever they could. By then his pained cries had woken the others, who themselves became targets, and shortly all of them were all hopping around in the dark, yanking septoids from themselves or plucking them off one another. When at last they had retreated to safety, it became clear that the assailants comprised only a narrow tributary of the insect river; the principal torrent had gone up and over the tent to where the Rodians had stored pieces of the beasts the group had slaughtered and dressed earlier in the day—all of it now devoured to the bone.

  But regardless of whether they had won or lost the day, Wilhuff would be treated to tales of his ancestors’ exploits: the lore of the early Tarkins.

  “All of Eriadu was similar to the Carrion before humans arrived from the Core to tame it,” Jova told him. “Every day, on their own, as pioneers and settlers, they waged battles with the beasts that ruled the planet. But our ancestors’ eventual triumph only altered the balance, not the reality. For all that sentients have achieved with weapons and machines, life remains an ongoing battle for survival, with the strong or the smart at the top of the heap, and the rest kept in check by firepower and laws.”

  Jova explained that the Tarkin family had produced a succession of mentors and guides through the many generations. What made him unique was his decision to make the Carrion his home following his initiation in young adulthood. That was how he came to have tutored Wilhuff’s father, and why he might even live long enough to tutor Wilhuff’s son, should he have one.

  They spent the remainder of the dry season on the plateau, leaving only when the rains came to that part of Eriadu. Wilhuff was a different person when the speeder carried them down from the mesa and back into civilization. Jova had no need to lecture him on what technology had allowed his ancestors to achieve in the planet’s handful of cities, since it was evident everywhere Wilhuff looked.

  But Jova had something to add.

  “Triumphing over nature means better lives for sentients, but dominance is sustained only by bringing order to chaos and establishing law where none exists. On Eriadu, the goal was always to rid the planet of any creature that hadn’t grown to fear us, so that we could rule supreme. Up the well, outside Eriadu’s envelope, the goal is the same, but with a different caliber of predators. When you’re old enough to be taken there, you’re going to find yourself faced with prey who are every bit as quick thinking, well armed, and determined to succeed as you are. And unless you’ve taken the lessons of the Carrion to heart, only the stars themselves will bear witness to your cold airless death, and they will remain unmoved.”

  Returned to his comfortable bedroom, Wilhuff wrestled with what he had been put through, the experiences on the plateau infiltrating his sleep as vivid dreams and night terrors. But only for a short time. Little by little, the experiences began to shape him, and would become the stuff of his true education. Each of the next five summers would find him on the Carrion, and each season his education would widen, right up until the day he had to endure his final test at the Spike.

  But that was a different story altogether.

  TARKIN WAITED UNTIL the Carrion Spike was in hyperspace to announce an impromptu inspection of the officers and enlisted ratings who were accompanying him to Coruscant. In the starship’s austere main cabin, furnis
hed only with a round conference table and chairs for half a dozen, eighteen of his crew were standing smartly in two rows, arms at their sides, shoulders squared, chins held high. Each wore a uniform similar to his, though the tunics were slightly longer and the trousers slimmer and more threadbare than those the fabricator had produced for him. The officers wore brimmed caps studded with identity disks, and displayed code cylinders in their appropriate pockets.

  Hands clasped behind his back and looking stylish in his new garments, Tarkin had reached the last crewmember in the second row—a midshipman—when he stopped to peer down at the instep of the junior officer’s left boot, where a smudge of what looked like grease or some other viscous substance had left a large circular stain.

  “Ensign, what is that?” he asked, pointing.

  The young man lowered bloodshot eyes to follow Tarkin’s forefinger to the spot. “That, sir? Must have spilled some hair product I was applying in preparation for the inspection.” His gaze was unsteady when he looked up at Tarkin. “Permission to wipe it off, sir?”

  “Denied,” Tarkin said. “To begin with, it’s obviously a stain, Ensign, not some blemish you can simply rub out.” He paused to scan the midshipman from head to toe. “Remove your cap.” The youth’s brown hair was regulation length, but it did indeed have the stiff look that hair gel might have imparted.

  “Attempting to train it, are you?”

  The midshipmen stood stiffly, eyes front. “Exactly, sir. It can be unruly.”

  “No doubt. But that blot on your boot is not hair product.”

  “Sir?”

  “One can tell simply by the way it congealed that it is lubricant—lubricant of a type used almost exclusively in the repulsor generator of our T-Forty-Four landspeeders.” Tarkin’s eyes narrowed as he focused on the stain. “I see, too, that the lubricant is impregnated with grit, which I suspect came from outside Sentinel’s auxiliary dome, almost certainly from where the landing platform is undergoing renovation.”