War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  “You made the decisions you had to make,” KaiDin says. “As we all do.”

  “It was still a heavy day for both of us,” VinDu says.

  KaiDin raises the goblet in her right hand. She takes a long sip. “We are what we are, VinDu.”

  VinDu had emphasized KaiDin’s special personality when he instructed the arrest posse. “You’ll be armed with painless, short duration anesthetic loads,” he had told the four proteges he had recruited for the posse. “You should fire at the first sign KaiDin is attempting to resist. Do not hesitate. Do not think you can predict her reactions. You are dealing with someone who is significantly different from us.”

  KaiDin’s personality structure was a response to a long-term problem. In the last hundred years there had been a drift in the genetic and post-natal cultivation of the Overseer class. Their drive to fulfill their duties had weakened and their tendency to seek comfort and safety had increased. KaiDin had been the first product of a cautious attempt to reverse the trend. She was a throwback to a long-gone era—a time when the first Overseers had turned Anmei into the capital of a polity that had transformed five hundred asteroids into thriving cities.

  VinDu knew he was moving very fast, with very little preparation. He had confirmed that KaiDin was plotting insurrection just three hours before she would present him with his best opportunity to take her into custody. If he waited any longer, she would notice her senior concubine was missing—and realize she had probably been betrayed.

  VinDu split up the posse and had them follow different routes when they walked to the Garden of a Thousand Fountains. In the Gallery of Eternal Sunlight, he bestowed smiles and friendly nods on the tourists who realized they were actually looking at a current member of the Eleven Cultivated Overseers. In the Grove of Tranquility he picked two of the more obscure trails.

  The authors of a thousand guides all agreed that Anmei was one of the loveliest cities in the asteroid belt. Visit Anmei if you possibly can, the guides all asserted. You may have to spend decades on the waiting list but you won’t be disappointed when your turn comes.

  To VinDu, the city was touchable, visible proof that KaiDin was threatening one of the glowing achievements of the human species. Anmei was rich and beautiful because it was the home of a form of governance that had now survived three standard centuries. It was the capital of an empire in which three billion people lived under the benign rule of men and women who had been endowed with all the qualities a governing class should possess. “This is obviously a grave moment in the history of our polity,” VinDu had told the four proteges. “This will be the first time an Overseer has invoked his emergency powers inside the capital itself. But this is also the first time an Overseer has decided she could force a decision on the rest of us. I am not taking action because I disagree with KaiDin’s views on Revelation. I am invoking my emergency powers because KaiDin is attacking the orderly, agreed-upon procedures that form the foundation of our government.”

  KaiDin was lying in a public recliner when the four proteges lined up in front of her and drew their weapons. VinDu stood to one side with his richest official vestment draped across his shoulders. Water splashed around him. Birds flashed through the greenery. KaiDin visited the Garden of a Thousand Fountains twice every tenday, on the third and eighth days. She always entered the garden near the beginning of the thirteenth hour. She always came alone.

  “This is a formal arrest,” VinDu said. “I have assembled undeniable evidence that you are plotting insurrection. I have filed notice I am invoking my emergency powers.”

  He raised his voice and addressed the loudspeakers and cameras installed in the landscape. “I am placing Overseer KaiDin under arrest because she is conspiring to force Revelation on the combine. She has armed most of her proteges. She plans to take several Overseers prisoner and force them to vote for Revelation.”

  KaiDin rolled out of the recliner and positioned herself behind it. Thirty years ago, during his first term as an Overseer, VinDu had been the senior who had introduced KaiDin to the subtler aspects of sexual pleasure. He hadn’t touched her since, but the trim balance of her body could still provoke the feelings she had stimulated the first time he noticed she had become a young woman.

  A pair of agonized shrieks panicked the birds. Two proteges crumpled to the ground. Their backs arched in pain. The other two swung to the right and screamed before they could raise their weapons.

  VinDu’s head snapped around. Three figures were standing on a balcony that looked down on the garden.

  The four proteges were sobbing as they writhed across the stubby yellow vines that carpeted this part of the garden. Two had started drooling.

  KaiDin slipped a copper tube out of her jacket. She pointed it at VinDu’s chest and he spread his arms to show her he had come to the garden without weapons.

  Fire spread through his nervous system. A scream ravaged his throat. His fingers started clawing at the vines before his head touched the ground.

  “We aren’t playing, VinDu,” KaiDin said. “This is the most serious issue the Overseers have ever confronted. We’re prepared to inflict pains that are several times worse than the sensations you’re feeling now.”

  The pain started ebbing after a few minutes. VinDu rose to his knees and discovered his four proteges were still stretched on the vines. He forced himself erect and fed his communications implant four subvocalized random syllables. A hooded face appeared in front of him.

  “Launch,” VinDu said.

  “I have an order to launch. Please verify.”

  “I repeat—launch.”

  “I have initiated launch procedure. Shall I let it proceed?”

  “Proceed.”

  “Launch is proceeding.”

  The four proteges were recovering their self-control. VinDu trotted toward an exit and they fell in around him.

  “Don’t blame yourselves,” VinDu said. “It wasn’t your fault. I should have realized she would have herself shadowed now that she’s committed to revolt. Please stay with me now.”

  His voice sounded mild and even—the gentle speech pattern of a thoroughly rational personality. He had trained himself to talk that way and he was pleased to see he could maintain it when he was trying to control severe emotional stress.

  “We have completed launch,” the hooded face said. “All four missiles are enroute.”

  “Complete personnel dispersal. Be prepared to initiate abort.”

  “Understood. Abort sequence loaded.”

  The face vanished. VinDu ran through an exit and turned into a corridor that was lined with polished gold. He gave his communications implant another order and KaiDin’s secretary answered the call.

  “This is an Overseer to Overseer universal-override priority message. Please advise Overseer KaiDin I have just launched a cluster of armed missiles at the Emissary. Tell her the entire Emissary complex will be destroyed if I have reason to think her conspiracy is succeeding.”

  He terminated the call without waiting for an answer. The corridor opened into a golden hemisphere and he veered around a reflecting pool and picked up the pace.

  His next call transmitted a flurry of orders to the proteges he had left in his apartments. His senior adviser was ordered to distribute the arms stashed in the special-situations vault. Armed posses were to be dispatched to the apartments of four Overseers: ElGari, OgaRuto, MinFi, and HangLan. The posses were enjoined to keep all four out of KaiDin’s custody. They should assume their careers depended on their success.

  The four posses had been committed by the time VinDu reached his apartments. The fifty proteges who were left had taken up the positions dictated by his security program. His favorite concubine met him at the door and stayed with him as he hurried through his corridors and galleries.

  He stopped by the Pool of Seven Grasses and inhaled the aroma of freshly mowed stalks—a sensation he had always found soothing. “You can consider this my crisis center,” he told his proteges.


  Rugged, unfinished stone rimmed the pool. Eight species of grass grew in the beds that surrounded it. A fur lined recliner rolled down a walk and stopped beside him. The back of the recliner settled into his preferred position. His hand closed around the goblet that had been placed in the drink receptacle.

  A situation report appeared in front of him. Five Overseers had already announced they were voting for Revelation. Two had obviously been coerced. One had left a message for VinDu.

  “I am voting for Revelation to avoid conflict,” Overseer JenPol had said. “KaiDin has now proved she is just as turbulent as I feared she would be. I have decided we should save our colleagues the pain she is obviously willing to inflict on them.”

  VinDu tipped back his head and let the cold, creamy liquid soothe his throat. His left hand stroked the silky arm of the recliner.

  VinDu had thought of JenPol when he had voted to elevate KaiDin to the Eleven. JenPol, he had believed, was a good example of the drift KaiDin was supposed to correct. Now he knew he had been right. Three hundred years ago, no Overseer would have yielded to KaiDin merely because she wanted to save her colleagues a little pain.

  The answer to the whole problem of government, Tai-Park had believed, lay in the personality of the rulers. Now that we have acquired the ability to shape the human personality, he had argued, we must use it to shape human society. Most of VinDu’s childhood memories involved programmed experiences that had been managed by the teams that directed his cultivation. His personality was the product of a controlled, continuously monitored process that had started with his genes and continued through the first years of post-adolescence. First we control the seed, then we control the soil.

  Tai-Park had agreed with all the philosophers and theorists who believed the ideal rulers should possess intelligence, empathy, and other morally desirable traits. But he had also concluded they needed something more dependable at the center of their personality structure. The government of the TaiPark Combine, he had decided, would be placed in the hands of some of the most narcissistic personalities the human species had ever generated. The Overseers and their proteges were all men and women who valued their personal self-image above every other human need—and their self-image was firmly wedded to their picture of themselves as people who placed the general welfare above their own desires. Without their mania for pleasure, they would have been the kind of robotic puritans who had governed mankind’s more cheerless experiments in social organization.

  The situation report switched to a map that advised VinDu his three posses were all approaching their destinations. Two of the Overseers they were supposed to defend were already under attack. ElGari and MinFi had both retreated to high-security areas in their apartments. OgaRuto had initiated her security program but KaiDin was apparently leaving her alone.

  I will vote against Revelation if I am left free, OgaRuto had assured him. I would have voted against it under any circumstances. But KaiDin’s treachery has reinforced my resolve.

  KaiDin’s image popped into visibility beside the situation report. “I’ve received your message, VinDu. Am I really expected to believe an Overseer of the TaiPark Combine is willing to commit the greatest act of vandalism in the history of our species?”

  “The missiles can be aborted, Overseer. I’ll reroute them as soon as you call off your attacks on your colleagues and release your prisoners—when we can once again debate this issue the way we’re supposed to. And hold it to an honest vote.”

  “And come to the same conclusion we’ve come to every decade for a hundred and sixty years.”

  “We have an agreed-upon decision-making procedure—a procedure we have followed for over one and a half centuries. We will initiate Revelation when eight of the current members of the Eleven Cultivated Overseers freely vote for it. If you don’t feel that’s satisfactory, you have the same power as the rest of us—you can campaign for a change in the procedure.”

  A map that covered a third of the asteroid belt floated over KaiDin’s head. KaiDin had flouted the map in most of the communications she had imposed on the Overseers during the last year. White dots represented the cities of the TaiPark Combine. Red circles surrounded the five cities the Toremata Union had annexed in the last ten years. Winking lights marked the current position of known Toremata probes. KaiDin had pressed home the same message every time she had argued for immediate Revelation: The Toremata probes can discover the Emissary complex at any time.

  VinDu had responded with a statement in which he stood in front of a collage that depicted the turbulence that had plagued mankind during the last fifteen decades: the six wars currently raging on Earth . . . the destruction of the Northern Habitat on Mercury, with the loss of a billion lives . . . the great scar that now dominated a third of Earth’s moon . . . the revolutions and tribal wars that had erupted in the cities humans had created in the asteroids.

  Our power over human genetics and human psychology has given us three hundred years of peaceful expansion in our own combine, VinDu had argued. In the rest of the Solar System, it has given us assassins, flawless soldiers, and physical and mental variations that offer us new reasons to hate each other. Can anyone truly believe the human species can absorb a stream of information that may include messages from civilizations that are millennia ahead of us? The Toremata Mediators may be more aggressive than us, but they are still people who have confronted the realities of governance. If they do happen to stumble on our secret, they aren’t going to be any more eager to disrupt human society than we are.

  “Have you really thought this through, VinDu? Have you decided what you’ll do if I succeed before your missiles arrive? And the Emissary broadcasts its initial announcement to mankind? Are you going to destroy the Emissary complex anyway? After the entire population of the Solar System knows it’s our link to a civilization that may cover most of our galaxy?”

  VinDu only hesitated for a second but it was long enough. KaiDin noted the lapse and acknowledged it with a smile.

  “You’re the first Overseer in three hundred years who’s tried to use violence to force a decision on the Overseers,” VinDu said. “Every Overseer in our history has understood that our entire polity would be threatened with destruction if we began to make war on each other.”

  “You have just launched missiles that will destroy a treasure we have been preserving for over one and a half centuries. And yet you still think you can lie on your recliner and claim I am endangering our polity.”

  KaiDin waved her hand. Her image vanished and VinDu’s communication system immediately advised him he had a call from Overseer MinFi.

  “Accepted,” VinDu said.

  The woman who took KaiDin’s place was serving her third term as an Overseer. VinDu had been one of MinFi’s favorite aides when she had been serving her first term. She had worked him hard but her courteous, matter-of-fact leadership style had made him feel she deserved any effort she demanded. He had always felt her tutelage was the main reason he had been selected as an Overseer five years before he had expected it.

  “KaiDin says you have launched missiles at the Emissary complex. She says you claim you’ll destroy it if she forces a yes vote. Is that true?”

  “I’ve given her a choice. She can continue fighting and lose the Emissary. Or she can stop this madness and save it.”

  “You had those missiles ready to launch . . . ”

  “I learned she might be planning an insurrection several days ago. I didn’t try to arrest her until I was certain. But I felt I should establish a contingency plan.”

  MinFi nodded. VinDu didn’t have to tell her he had turned to his supporters outside the capital. All the Overseers had powerbases in the rest of the combine. It was one of the things the Overseers took into account when they met each year and picked a successor for the Overseer whose term had come to an end.

  “She isn’t going to back down, VinDu. She’s willing to take risks you and I wouldn’t even contemplate.”

&nbs
p; “Then the missiles will destroy the Emissary and she’ll have created all this chaos for nothing. I think the issue is clear, Overseer. KaiDin won’t be the last Overseer to start an insurrection if we let her impose her will on us. If I have to destroy the Emissary to keep her from setting a precedent that could undermine our entire political system—then I’m willing to destroy the Emissary.”

  “I haven’t altered my views on Revelation,” MinFi said. “I want you to understand that. We are still in agreement. We’d be better off if we’d never discovered that thing. We’ll be lucky if we still have a civilization left once we let people start prowling through its databanks. But I can’t stand by and let it be destroyed, either. You’ve created a difficult choice, VinDu. I’ve advised KaiDin I’m voting for Revelation. I’ve notified the Overseers who haven’t registered their votes yet and urged them to join me.”

  “You’re going to let her have her way merely because she’s willing to be nastier than the rest of us? You’re willing to let her threaten the stability of a polity that has given billions of people one of the best governed societies in history just to save you and your proteges a little pain?”

  “I’m advising you your missile threat can only lead to a disaster. We will vote in favor of Revelation, the Emissary will make its promised broadcast to the entire Solar System, and every human being now alive will know the TaiPark Combine destroyed our first link to galactic civilization. Do you really think you will be serving the long term interest of our constituency, Overseer?”

  VinDu’s face hardened. “I have already heard from OgaRuto. She has promised me she will hold out. KaiDin’s actions have only aroused her anger. If you’re truly interested in the survival of the Emissary complex, Overseer, you should be lining up votes against Revelation.”

  The Emissary complex occupied an asteroid only six hundred meters long. The molecular devices in the warheads of VinDu’s missiles would penetrate the surface of the asteroid and deconstruct anything buried beneath it.