Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra

by Stephen Lawhead

  “How are we going to take a load of putrefying eels into the desert? They’ll rot before we get two days from here.”

  Pizzle rolled his eyes in exasperation. “We dry them. On rocks. In the sun. It’s easy. And we’ll have food all across the desert. Water, too.”

  “This is just one big jamboree to you, isn’t it, Pizzle?” sniped Treet.

  “Starving appeals to you?” Crocker mocked. “Let’s get started.”

  They discussed several techniques for catching the eels, including making rods and line from the tent poles and braided thread, and rigging up makeshift harpoons. Neither possibility, nor any of the others they considered and discarded just as quickly, suggested success. So they sat stymied until Treet said, “Actually Pizzle didn’t catch that eel as much as that eel caught Pizzle.”

  “What do you mean? I caught it.”

  “If I remember correctly, you fell into the hole and it grabbed you. When you came rocketing out of the water, I saw that thing attached to your chest. You were flapping your arms around trying to get rid of it.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Crocker turned an appraising eye on Pizzle.

  “Hold it! What are you guys thinking? You can’t be serious. I’m not—hey, wait a minute …”

  “Food all the way across the desert, Pizzy,” said Treet.

  “You’re crazy!”

  “It’s easy,” said Crocker. “We used to do it all the time when we were little kids—slip down along the river bank and find a hole and reach inside. A good grappler could catch some pretty big old catfish.”

  “You’re both crazy!” Pizzle edged away. “I won’t do it.”

  “It’s the only way. Besides, it was your idea. You should get the glory.”

  “It’s only right,” agreed Treet. “We could tie something around you to hold on to so you wouldn’t drown or anything; you have nothing to worry about. We’ll be there right beside you.”

  Within ten minutes, Pizzle’s protests notwithstanding, they were wading out into the river together, Treet and Crocker holding opposite ends of a piece of tent cording which had been secured around Pizzle’s waist. “Look, there’s nothing to worry about,” offered Treet. “They don’t have teeth. From what you said, they just sort of suck onto you and there you go. We’ll pull you up if you get into trouble—so don’t get yourself in a nervous tizzy.”

  “You’ll be fine,” assured Crocker. “In fact, after the second or third time, you’ll start to enjoy yourself.”

  “If I live through this,” muttered Pizzle darkly. “I’m going to get a good lawyer and sue both of you into debtor’s prison. There must be laws against using a person for fish bait.”

  “You won’t sue us,” predicted Crocker, “you’ll thank us.”

  They found the hole Pizzle had dropped into the day before, and several more near it, one of which was big enough to admit a man. With murder in his close-set eyes, Pizzle took a deep breath and dropped in. Treet and Crocker held the ends of the cord and counted, figuring they would give Pizzle twenty seconds to accomplish his task.

  He was back in ten. The hole was empty. And so was the next. After several more attempts, they moved on a little further downstream and came to a place where more holes dotted the river bottom. Here their luck changed. The second hole Pizzle tried contained an eel abut the size of the one he’d caught the day before. This one attached itself to his back and when they pulled Pizzle up, Treet grabbed it and flipped it onto the bank.

  The rest of the holes in the area were empty. “We won’t find any more eels here,” said Treet after the fourth try. “These critters have territories. I think all the holes in a given area belong to one eel. If we want to catch another one we’ll have to go further downstream.”

  “The water gets deeper,” observed Crocker.

  “We’ll stick to the shore.” Treet looked at the eel expiring on the bank. “This is going to take a lot longer that we thought. I think we ought to streamline this process. You two could catch them, and I’ll gut them and get them drying out.”

  “Good idea. We’ll get a regular little production line going.” Crocker and Pizzle headed off downstream, and Treet—using a tool from the skimmer kit—made quick work of the eel and carried it back to camp. The two women were waiting when he got back. He gave them the eel, explained their plan, and repeated what Pizzle had told him about how to dry the meat on rocks in the sun. “We’ll be back later on this afternoon,” he told them.

  By the time Treet reached the place where Pizzle and Crocker had been, he found another eel on the bank—this one half again as big as the other two they’d caught. The two “fishermen” were already working their way further downstream; he could see their torsos swaying above the water as they searched for holes in the riverbed.

  The day stretched out into a rhythm of walking and working and waiting and walking again—a rhythm Treet found enjoyable. The eerie silence of the place was modified by the plap and gurgle of the river as it moved quietly along. With the sun on his back and the company of his thoughts, Treet went about his task happily, enjoying the solitude and serenity of the day.

  By late afternoon they had worked far downstream. The sun dipped near the horizon, signaling the end of a good day’s work. Treet lost count of the number of eels they had caught. He decided, however, that it was enough for one day and was gutting the last eel before hurrying ahead to call Crocker and Pizzle back when he heard the whine of a skimmer behind him.

  Yarden, her dark hair streaming, piloted the skimmer expertly over the ruffled riverbank toward him. He stood and waited for her. “Call it a day,” she said. “Talazac taxi service has come to fetch you home.”

  “Thanks. Pizzle and Crocker are somewhere up ahead. Why don’t you go get them and I’ll finish up here. We can pick up our catch on the way back.”

  “You’ve caught enough to last three months. I counted twenty-eight, and I may have missed a few.” She gave him a smile and a wave and glided away. Within minutes she was back with two tired fishermen in damp clothes. She had found them a little way downriver lying on the bank drying out before heading back. Treet squeezed onto the crowded vehicle and they worked their way homeward, stopping at intervals to pick up their catch.

  They arrived back in camp as the sun faded behind the hills, washing the westward sky a pale eggshell white as the east darkened to indigo. Calin had a fire going and an eel on the spit as they climbed down and unloaded the toppling stack of flayed eels. Treet noticed that the tents had been moved and that beneath each one was a thick bed of bunched grass. “We’ve been busy all day, too,” said Yarden proudly. “We made grass mattresses.”

  “My dear lady,” said Crocker, “each and every one of my brittle, aching bones thanks you. If I weren’t so hungry, I’d crawl in right now and go to sleep.”

  As they ate around the fire, Treet noticed that everyone’s spirits were markedly improved. They all talked and joked and smiled at one another. Even Calin joined in shyly from time to time. Something important had happened to them that day; a milestone of some sort had been passed. Treet worked it over in his head and decided that the buoyant feeling was due to the fact that day was the first time they had worked together as a group toward a common goal of survival. Today they had become a team.

  When all had eaten, they lay back as the blue flames flickered. “Well,” said Treet, “I guess I’m the entertainment for this evening. Are you sure you all want to hear a story?”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Treet began like this:

  “After the scuffle on the landing platform, I woke up by myself in a room—fuzzy-headed, naked, and sore. I put on the clothes I found in my cell and waited. I was brought food, which I ate, and I slept. Two or three days went by and I was taken to meet the Supreme Director of Empyrion, a cagey old cuss named Sirin Rohee.

  “Three of his advisers showed up and asked me questions. I answered. We talked a little, and he sent me back. It was a day or two later, I think, when I remembered
who I was, where I was, and who had come with me. The drug wore off, I guess—or maybe they didn’t give me such a heavy dose. When Rohee sent for me again, we met alone. I told him I remembered, and told him what I remembered. For some reason—I still don’t know why—he took pity on me and gave me quarters of my own. He provided Calin to be my guide and allowed me the run of the place, although I’m fairly certain I was watched constantly nevertheless.

  “I toured each Hage of Empyrion—at least those areas open to inspection. There are places within Hage where outsiders are not allowed, and we of course stayed out.

  “After about a week of this touring, I asked Rohee if I could see the Archives. He debated about it for the better part of a day and decided to allow me. I think he had some private plan in mind for me, or hoped I would discover something useful for him, or maybe he was just curious—I don’t know.

  “Calin and I, along with the obligatory priest, went to the Archives and looked around. The place was full of old machines, parts, and junk, and it was my impression at the time that the place had not been visited in many years, generations perhaps. Anyway, we didn’t find what we were looking for—at least not at first. Then, as I was getting ready to leave, I noticed Calin had disappeared and went looking for her. I found her in a hidden room under the Archives—a room full of historical data on the colony which had been hidden and sealed about seven hundred years ago. That’s an educated guess.

  “On leaving the Archives, we were contacted—waylaid, actually—by some people who said they had information about my friends. These turned out to be Tvrdy’s people, and they reunited us all. Things heated up, and we moved to the Archives to make good our escape. We fled the colony and have been making our way across some of the most desolate country I’ve ever seen.

  “And,” Treet summed up, “here we are.”

  Into the silence that followed Treet’s account, Pizzle bleated. “That’s it? That’s what we’ve been waiting breathless all day to hear?”

  Crocker made a move to join the protest, but Treet raised his hand for silence. “Not so fast. Those are just the bare facts. I wanted to construct the skeleton first; now I’ll hang some observations on the bones.”

  He paused, gathered his thoughts, then said, “Empyrion is not the colony Cynetics established. Rather, it was, but is no longer. It has changed, evolved. As near as I can figure, we are seeing the colony nearly three thousand years after its foundation …”

  “Three thousand years!” gasped Crocker. “Impossible.”

  “I knew it was old,” said Pizzle, “but I never dreamed—”

  “According to Belthausen’s theories, it’s possible,” said Treet. “Someone who knows a whole lot more about these things than I do is going to have to figure it out, but… Well, let’s just say we’re dealing with a culture which has had a good long term of isolated development. Empyrion has evolved into an extremely stratified, regimented, organized, and highly repressive society.”

  “There are eight Hages, each with its own societal function. They’re organized around necessities: food, that’s Hyrgo; Bolbe, clothing; Saecaraz handles energy; Nilokerus takes care of security, health care, social services; Tanais is structural engineering, construction, housing, that sort of thing; Rumon is communication and what you might call production, traffic, and quality control—anything that has to do with movement of goods and services through the colony; Chryse is fine arts and entertainment; Jamuna is waste recycling.”

  “Don’t I know it,” remarked Pizzle.

  “A Hage is more than a vocational guild, although it is that. It’s also home, family, city, and state.”

  “It’s a caste system,” said Yarden.

  “Yes,” agreed Treet. “There are strong elements of caste in the mix. It isn’t hard to guess how this caste system came about: survival. A colony arrives with all the basic components necessary for establishing a viable society. If something happened to cut the colony off from its source of supply, it would quickly organize itself into skill areas vital to survival.

  “Whenever you have rigid occupational stratification—some jobs are essential, waste recycling for instance, though hardly the most prestigious or attractive, so these low-status tasks must be assigned—an enforced hierarchy soon develops. In order to preserve its place in the hierarchy, occupational protectionism takes over. If I am a genetics technician, which is near the top of Hyrgo Hage, and I want to stay secure in my position, I guard my professional knowledge and expertise jealously. Over time, it becomes nearly impossible for anyone not born into the caste to develop the knowledge and skills.

  “Just as there is a hierarchy within Hages, there is a hierarchy of Hages within the colony as well, with intense competition for control of leadership. The top man of each Hage is the Director, who serves on a sort of Board of Directors called the Threl, with the Supreme Director acting as Chairman of the Board.”

  “They retained the old corporation structure,” observed Pizzle.

  “Yes, but how these people come to power, I don’t know. They’re not elected, that’s for sure. I suspect the reins of power are handed down in much the same way as early trading companies or political parties handed down power: through hand-picked successors chosen by dint of their loyalty and adherence to the party line, then groomed for the job. Factors such as birth or qualification would have little to do with the choice. Once in power, it would be nearly impossible to get someone out of leadership since the whole structure of the system is designed to maintain the status quo.

  “As time passes, the whole society slowly becomes ever more firmly entrenched in preserving the caste code that allowed its development. Any person or group threatening the code is seen as an enemy of the state. In the early years, malcontents would have jeopardized survival and would have been dealt with harshly. All energies had to be channeled into supporting the common good, and any deviation could have been disastrous.

  “By the time survival became less of an issue, the system was firmly established and functioning autonomously. It became self-protecting. Physical survival was transmuted into ideological survival.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” Crocker broke in.

  “Think of it like this: the system was set up to reach only one goal—the physical survival of the colony. It reached that goal. Then what?”

  “Apparently the leaders of Empyrion colony failed to appreciate their position, and instead of redirecting the colony on to higher, more universally fulfilling goals, they merely abstracted the old goal. Physical survival became political survival. Instead of threats from the outside, they became concerned about threats from the inside. The system equated opposition with danger, ideological purity with safety, loyalty with consensus agreement. In essence, the system emerged as an entity in its own right and claimed primacy over the interests of individual citizens. The leadership saw to it that the system continued serving itself, devoting as much energy to its own survival as it had previously devoted to the survival of its citizens.”

  “Those evil people,” said Yarden softly.

  “Evil? I don’t know,” replied Treet. “It was probably easier to go with the flow than dismantle the entire apparatus of colony government and redirect the energy of the citizenry to higher ideals.”

  “It could have been done. Societies have always done it,” Yarden pointed out. “What monstrous selfishness.”

  “I suppose it could have been done, but remember they were cut off, isolated. The wormhole closed or shifted or whatever wormholes do. And anyway, the leadership had effectively silenced any opposition, so there was no real challenge to their authority or values.”

  “What about the Fieri?” asked Pizzle. “I thought they were the hated opposition.”

  “I was getting to that,” said Treet. “The documents I’ve seen indicate that long ago—a few hundred years after foundation— something catastrophic happened. I have not read the specific documents to find out what it was, but it was a severe shock to
the colony—maybe a natural disaster of some sort. They came through the crisis, but in the following years there were disputes over how to reorganize and rehabilitate the colony.

  “At one point, I believe, the colony actually split into three factions. There was a Purge, and the smaller faction was eliminated or consolidated. Sometime later one of the factions, the Fieri, left the colony or was forced out.

  “You would have thought that would be the end of it, but their leaving signaled the beginning of about three hundred years of political upheaval. The power structure of the colony was gutted by the pullout of the Fieri; there were bloody coups and countercoups and eventually a revolt by the citizens, followed by a second Purge, which ended in the establishment of the Threl.”

  “When did all this happen?” asked Pizzle. He leaned forward, chin in hands, listening with rapt attention.

  “About fifteen hundred years ago, by my reckoning. The Second Purge began what colony historians call the Third Age—a period characterized by continual, fanatical harassment of the Fieri.”

  “But why?” asked Yarden. “I thought the Fieri left. What reason could the colony have for persecuting them?”

  “I don’t know the details. My guess is that at first the Fieri were simply a convenient target—a scapegoat. The colony was in trouble. Among other things, it was rapidly losing its technology; things were beginning to run down and nobody knew how to fix them. The Threl chose to point to the Fieri as the source of all their ills. Persecuting them diverted attention away from the colony’s real problems, which the Threl were no doubt struggling to contain.

  “But even after that, when the Fieri were no longer a threat— if they really ever were—the Threl did not give up. Over the years the hatred, so useful before, became an obsession. Fanaticism grew up. They simply could not let it go. I think the Threl were jealous of the Fieri for having the courage to leave, to follow their own destiny. Since there was no other way to punish the Fieri, the Threl plotted to hound them into oblivion.”