by Ed Hurst
Fortis placed the fingers of one hand on his chin, resting the elbow in the other hand. He hoped he looked a lot more relaxed than he felt. “I suppose you would recruit men like the twins as part of your larger ranger force.”
“Yes. We can surely afford to field a couple of new regiments. Of course, it would require a central command to run it, but this planet has more than enough wealth to support at least that many. We just need an independent force so the sheikhs will quit hindering our efforts to protect the planet. They keep finding unimportant errands for us, like they don’t have enough slaves running around already.”
Fortis was pretty sure this was not entirely accurate, but let it pass. “I suppose you have something you’d like me to do.”
“Of course. Just take me back with you. I’m sure your ship has room, no?”
Fortis juggled the risks, but decided honesty was the best answer. “There is room. However, the ship is going to leave without me, so there would be plenty of room for you.”
“What?” The man stared hard at Fortis.
“I estimate within twelve or thirteen days, Elder Bradley will reach the ship with a device which will instruct it to leave immediately without me. I can’t imagine you’ll get there fast enough to do any good.”
The man froze, staring. Then he jerked upright at the sound of a door handle rattling. With a quickness that left Fortis staring, the man jumped back up onto the roof and disappeared over the peak. A few seconds later, something like a kite rose almost invisible in the night air. With its dark fabric, Fortis barely made out the shape, as it filled with air, then drifted away.
George’s face peeked around the door. “I’m going to bed...” He stepped out hurriedly. “Are you unwell? What has made you so pale?”
“Our fake hunter came to visit.” Fortis still stared off into the dark over the peak of the roof. “I didn’t know the kites could be used as gliders.”
George looked, too. “It’s extremely risky. Only a very few can afford the time to master them. Most who try as a hobby end up dead or maimed. It began as a way to gain elevation for human eyes with the rangers, especially search and rescue. That’s from a static line which provides some safety. Free flight is vastly different. The winds aloft are very unstable compared to what we experience with sails and windmills. A skilled wind-rider must face into the wind, rise to altitude, and as soon as it starts bucking and before the glider breaks up they must glide downward a ways, then repeat the process. It’s exhausting, so just a few kilometers are about the limit for most.”
They stepped inside the little room. George continued, “Did you have a nice conversation with our ranger?”
Fortis looked just a little sheepish. “I told him the ship was leaving when Elder Bradley got to it.”
George smiled. “I suppose now is as good a time as any for him to learn that. If he were able to muster the incredible endurance, he just might fly there that fast with his glider kite, but the winds won’t give him much of a lift down near the pole. He would have to approach in a very wide circle, making at least a couple of loops around the polar island. So it’s not likely any man could get there, and Bradley would surely try to kill him before he landed. He’s a much better archer than I.”
George stepped into the hall and called someone as he walked, then thumped down the stairs. Fortis stayed in the room, staring out the window at the eternally starless sky of Misty. He could hear George talking to whoever answered his call. The ranger captain might easily escape, but there was little he could do now. Perhaps this would shut down all their plans? He hoped so.
Chapter 24: Prisons of the Soul
George returned shortly, and Fortis gave him a digest of the conversation.
George closed his eyes, hugging himself, dropping his chin against his chest. After a few moments, he opened his eyes, moved his hands together and clasped them in front of his face, resting his nose on the tips of his fingers, his chin on his thumbs. Finally, dropping his hands, he spoke. “I don’t know which is more disturbing – that he would be lying to you on purpose, or actually believe any part of what he said.”
George paced back and forth across the room slowly. “Given his actions, it seems most probable he believes it. It’s hard to act with such desperation for a lie. This means I was right to warn the runner of that little visit. I wager our ranger friend will attempt flying to the pole right away. I can’t warn Bradley, because the messenger birds can’t get there any faster than a skilled human on a glider. We’ll have to trust God on this one.”
George sat down on his bedroll, leaned back and gazed at the dark ceiling. There was a feeble lantern for each of them standing on the floor, standard lighting on Misty anywhere glow patches weren’t feasible. Fortis sank down onto his own bed, but crossed his legs and leaned forward on his elbows. The muscles in his back and legs complained but he hardly noticed.
“Perhaps I can untangle this for you.” He sighed, and then began. “Our founders back on Terra made a covenant. We still have it today, as a fundamental part of our laws. Not so much for what it says directly, but what it conveys. The covenant recognized not everyone would be able to embrace mysticism or faith in God. But it assumes those are essential to discerning how we should live. It becomes necessary to vest someone with power to keep things together under faith and mysticism, and to provide certain unalterable principles. People who, for whatever reason, lack faith and insight must have something they can cling to in order to remain among us. We do our best to teach the higher meaning, but we back it up by laws which no man can mistake.
“Throughout human history, every system breaks down, sooner or later. What we do here is preserve the context in which law is most likely to succeed, that it will work as well as it can. That context is this: our enforced primitive culture and lifestyle you see. We make it a matter of religion first, then culture, but finally it has to be enforced.
“We accepted the peculiar qualities of Misty as God’s way of saying He supported that commitment by bringing us to a place where it is easier to enforce. A very significant part of that commitment is, aside from our tweaking the gene pool of flora and fauna through entirely natural means of selective breeding, should the entire population of Misty disappear, future visitors would have little idea who or what was here. It would be virtually unspoiled. That’s our commitment to letting God recycle this planet for the next inhabitants, should He so choose. We are committed to consciously maximizing His freedom to act in our lives, and in the lives of others.
“Those of us who study that covenant, and commit ourselves to keep it alive have already committed ourselves to die sacrificially. But not just individually, we are willing to lose the entire planet at God’s behest. Yes, we presume to make that decision for everyone here, because that’s what brought us here, and what has made everything we are and have, and is only reason we have for continuing to exist. There is nothing we can do with our hands worth saving, if we do not portray that sacrificial love which took God’s Son to the Cross.”
George rose to his feet again. “We have had those chemical explosive weapons. The ammunition for them does not store well on Misty. For the high cost of getting them, we ended up with useless weapons requiring constant re-supply at very high expense, because every shipment degraded within a few months. Gauss weapons, at least, continue to work. Again, the cost is exceedingly high, and we reserved their use to rangers, simply because anywhere they go, numerical advantage will never be theirs. That’s the nature of their role. That we could have a captain spout such nonsense shows his training is broken in the area of law.”
Fortis interjected, “Or that someone has seduced them to another way of thinking.”
“Yes. But there is almost nothing we can do about that. All humanity is broken, damaged in some way. Those of us who are granted higher faculties realize we are trapped between two worlds. There can be only one reason for struggling here to keep things together – it’s still a useful tool for pointing
to that higher plane of existence. If we discover any part of this stops working, we discard it immediately. Things have changed since our landing on this planet. Some parts of our charter have been loosened and other things added or tightened. The mechanism cannot be eternal, but the higher purpose is never anything less. We fix what we can and trust God for the rest.”
Fortis shifted to relieve the tense muscles. “So in the end, our ranger captain is left to figure it out for himself. You could easily have killed him back there in the forest.”
George smiled. “I told the boys to miss, and they shot well. The man’s perceptions are his own worst enemy, his own prison. Tell me, what would happen if he boarded your space craft before it left?”
Fortis didn’t hesitate. “Without evidence someone in authority approved his use of the ship, he’d be a stowaway. He’d be arrested by men and women using energy weapons, immobilized in a stasis field. Very humane and painless, but unfailingly effective.”
George tilted his head to one side. “So it would be here, but we lack the energy weapons and stasis fields. We are very reluctant to execute. We would rather give folks a chance to negotiate terms of peaceful coexistence. We really don’t even try to muzzle heretics, just make sure their lies are countered by truth. No one has the right to attempt reshaping the mind of another adult. All we can do is demand terms of sufferance.”
“So your northern hemisphere is somehow a prison?” Fortis recalled the ranger’s comments.
“It serves. There are precious few resources there to harvest. We take our rejects there and give them just enough basic survival equipment. We don’t know how it happened, but most of the islands look like cut pieces of higher ground. Precious few trees, none with the enhanced properties of selective breeding, and nothing big enough to make a raft. They can fish, catch birds, eat insects and vegetation, and the weather pattern is the same as on the rest of the planet. They’ll spend almost every waking hour just trying to stay alive, even without much in the way of predators. They get a sealed water filter rig which makes just about enough to drink for daily use, and it will stop working if they try to open it. They are left alone on their own island. They could swim to another if they want, but they might have to fight sea predators.
“As for escaping across the desert? Not a chance. On the northern shores of the equatorial continents there is almost no land at all where you can live. The dry plateaus rise almost straight up from the sea, and climbing is very challenging. The few places where that isn’t the case, we tend to avoid leaving our prisoners near them. The one fact the ranger got correct was how much water it would take to get anywhere. We are talking hundreds of kilometers from the nearest human habitation.
“When their time is up, they know where they have to be for the relief ship to rescue them. It keeps the rangers assigned there pretty busy, and we rotate our troops through there frequently.”
Fortis asked, “Do most of the exiles make it back after their sentence?”
“Most of them, yes. It’s easy enough to die there, but few are exiled for more than three months. That’s about all it takes for them to either negotiate with themselves to rejoin society or confirm their rejection.”
“And if they confirm?”
“Everyone lives under probation, and the next mistake could easily be their last. Would it surprise you to know most of those caught searching the woods for us were on probation? Probation is always served with a distant clan, and all of these were brought here from somewhere else. They were slaves, in a sense, not citizens. As you know, the idea behind probation is to earn your way back into society. We don’t permit abuse of slaves, but their lives are not easy, and there is no pretense. They knew the risks.”
Fortis thought for a moment. “I suppose our doubles will be recalled, now? The trick didn’t fool our ranger.”
“No,” George shook his head. “He may have been working independently, but was not working alone. Someone told him where to find you. He took the risk of flying over this place and found you outside on balcony. We can even say God allowed that to happen, and controls much of what goes on here. We don’t fight His hand. We simply do the best we can within the limits of imperatives we perceive from Him. No, we’ll let the charade play itself out as planned to maintain consistency for whomever is watching, including God, but certainly for a number of people lacking omniscience.”
Fingers buried in his blond hair, Fortis clasped the sides of his head. “I think I could use a good course in your religion.”
Chapter 25: Second Career
The greatest struggle for Fortis was not the symbolism of Misty’s dominant religion. The spiritual logic was not out of reach. What he struggled with was the sudden slow pace of life. The sea journey was a jolting experience intellectually, so his mind was busy enough. The first week of travel on Johnston Island brought a more physical brand of adventure. The month of religion instruction was actually rather mundane in itself, though the sudden insights were constant. But the waiting for news of how things transpired with the ranger and Elder Bradley was a nagging worry the whole time.
George had other business to attend to, and Fortis made new friends on the college faculty, as they devoted time tutoring him one on one. So he was caught off guard when, after almost a month, George turned up at his door just before dawn. “Looks like the ranger didn’t make it. Fisherman found his kite off the coast south of here,” he announced.
Fortis invited him inside. George was about as bubbly as Fortis was anxious to hear the story. “We were shocked by one thing. The wreckage included a hot air bag – almost completely enclosed and aerodynamic; worked like a balloon. It was just enough to enhance the rate of climb for the kite. The fabric was flameproof and our boy had several small ceramic canisters of hydrogen and a tiny burner mounted in the bag. Best we can tell he would fire up the balloon when he couldn’t get a lift from the winds and could vent the bag at glide altitude to get forward travel.”
“But you don’t use hydrogen much for heat, do you?”
“We’ve been able to extract it for quite some time, but we don’t have the means for condensing it to liquid. Refrigeration requires too much power. Some limited compression storage is possible, but it’s very inefficient. Most production facilities are bunkers. A cluster of windmills running non-metallic dynamos will be clustered together right near the machinery to prevent the need for metal wire. We use the ceramic hotplate technology to warm stuff. If we need more heat, we have separate windmills pull water from a well, and some of that electrical power operates some ancient water fracturing equipment we imported. We pull the gases off and inject them back into an oven. The fracturing units operate pretty much on demand. They include a mechanical compressor with a small chamber.
“We have tried, but could never make hydrogen economically feasible for shipping. Mostly we use it in melting glass and firing ceramics. What he had would have cost almost as much as two ships and the resources to operate them for the same trip, so why would anyone bother?” George shook his head in wonder. “Somebody was pouring extravagant resources into his mission. Too bad. We found his remains still attached to the harness.”
Fortis thought for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling at least one of the clans involved has a factory?”
“So we believe,” George affirmed. “My own clan is one of them.”
Fortis took a moment to absorb that. Meanwhile, George produced something from under his cloak. He shook out a dark red robe, just like the ones worn by the professors in the academy. However, this one had no patches of yellow and purple, but a thin stripe of each down both shoulders. “Put this one, Fortis, and let’s take a walk.”
“So I’m a professor, now?” Fortis was trying to catch on to the complicated symbolism of the garments he had seen so far on Misty. “What do the stripes mean? I haven’t seen anything like that before.” Fortis wrapped the robe about himself.
George led him down the hall. “You aren’t a citizen of Johnston,
but a free employee. There are precious few of those anywhere on the planet.”
“So tell me why the Harbor Master wore black, with leggings,” Fortis asked as they descended the stairs.
They exited the wooden door at the bottom which led into the hard packed street. “Judicial authority. He exercises the Council’s power, separate from the sheikh. That, while he technically remains a vassal of the sheikh. I suppose you would call it an extension of the Law of the Sea, which is often echoed in space travel, no?”
Fortis nodded. “Yes. A Port Master has similar authority, typically used to handle unruly hands or passengers who escaped a captain’s execution outright when the ship lands. It’s part of the treaty system for space travel.”
George grinned. “Same here; I was Acting Port Master when you arrived.”
Fortis was almost bursting. “And I suppose we have no idea whether that ship of mine is gone, yet?”
George pretended the question was an unimportant distraction. “Of course,” he said, watching something down the street. “Bradley is a good man. He promptly sent a message bird as soon as the dust settled. Bird arrived an hour ago.” Then he grinned broadly.
Fortis sighed deeply. “And for all we know, another spaceship has returned by now with some other mission.”
“You would know better than I. News on Misty travels very slowly, as you know.” Again, there was that broad mocking grin.
Fortis went on. “And Acting Port Master Bradley will greet them faithfully according to Council’s wishes. But I doubt any of the visitors are so anxious to travel in the fashion we do here on Misty, only to confirm what I reported. Should I suppose Elder Bradley had any sample trade goods or something?”
They rounded a turn sloping down toward the forest. Cocking his head to one side, George thought about it. “Most likely he did. His specialty is business management, so I have no doubt he quickly seized upon the opportunity. He’s a mystic, but finds business negotiations a major form of entertainment. I’d wager he raided Francis’ closet for a selection of goodies before he left.”
