Space Knights- Last on the Line

by Emerson Fortier

  “It must be lonely, running the corporation.” She said.

  “Don’t.” The word came out as a growl.

  “No. I mean, I was just remembering. When we were children. Do you remember? We used to all go chasing lumpy around the pond making bets on where he’d surface. It just got me thinking of all those people in the manor, the way we live now. What’s happened to our so called friends. It’s all so lonely.”

  She was right of course. He watched the children rampaging across the dock and struggled to remember what it was like to look at the people around him without the cynical CEO part of his head wondering what they wanted from him. His memories of playmates and carefree afternoons were as remote to him as the grave. They were buried in the tomb of years and a long ways away, soured by Locana’s presence in every one that once glowed with the happiness of youth’s hope for the future.

  “You never married.” He said abruptly. “I thought all Marain women married when they reached twenty.”

  “Oh I never went in for all that claptrap the Vicar is spouting, about women needing to be mothers and men needing to be fathers and women… you know you need to be mothers.” She said the last in a mocking voice, waggling her finger, and he smiled politely at the intended joke.

  “So what do you do if you’re not being a mother then?” He asked. “I don’t suppose you’re playing the spinster at your age.”

  “I believe it’s impolite to mention a lady’s age.” Willow said austerely. “I help my brother run the dynasty. Mostly the banks. It’s our smallest monopoly, but it’s one which yields the best opportunities. When the Knopf’s transportation industry won the contract that got them a share in the corporation we got a piece of that.”

  He nodded. He hadn’t known that but it made sense. It would be prudent to investigate how many dynasties outside of the Coleburns and Knopfs this woman’s banks had sunk their teeth into.

  “I was brought up that way you know.” She continued. “For leadership. My brother might be the family CEO but that doesn’t mean my father didn’t make opportunities for me. He gave me something to do. Society is just a distraction, pleasant of course.” She smiled at him and leaned into his elbow a bit.

  A child yelled and Willow put a hand on the rail to lean out and watch one of the tooth fish dart beneath the dock’s shadow after one of the small fish hiding in the weeds, creatures Darren called “winkies”. They were imitations of the tooth fish but smaller and with puckered astonished mouths they used to feed on the crud at the bottom of the pond. The children shouted and rocked the dock as they ran to the other side to watch the tooth fish shoot out with its prey wriggling in its tentacles. “Lumpy never was half as exciting.” Willow said, watching the fish.

  “No.” He agreed, but his mind was elsewhere, remembering her brother’s more recent subterfuges. They had an army coming together beyond the mountains and the leadership of that army was becoming a sticky political subject. Edward Avakoff had managed to get several of his own people appointed to high positions in the army beneath Charles nose and the other dynasties were lining up to imitate him. How many of their new army owed money at the Avakoff’s bank he wondered. Had they set up a competitor when they allowed the Avakoffs to influence the flow of wealth to the rest of the colonists? It was a disturbing thought.

  “What about you?” Willow asked, cutting through his reverie. “What do you do now besides make sure the AI’s keep the world running.”

  “An AI can’t run the world.” He said absently. “It wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “I know that, I mean, what’s it like? What’s in your life, if there’s anything, besides the corporation?”

  “I didn’t know you did anything outside of work.” He said to her, smiling at her approach. It was all politics, all the time. This attempt to get close, to know without being known. He’d played the game since he was fourteen. She wouldn’t be able to teach him anything someone else hadn’t tried before.

  “I paint.” She said. That surprised him, he hadn’t expected an answer.

  A foot bug crawled onto the rail in front of him and he distracted himself by blocking its path with his finger. “What do you paint?” He asked, sorry now that she’d answered. He didn’t really want to know about her personal life.

  “Mostly landscapes.” She said looking out at the mountains that bordered the family valley. “Our valley is very high in the range. I can get a good view from both sides of the mountains if I want to. I learned when I was twelve. Now sometimes I go on sabbatical to the pampas or to the Berg range. I’ve been to the tidal continent with your uncle as well, but it wasn’t very interesting, for painting at least. Mostly it’s just one big marsh.” She smiled. “So I’ve told you, now you tell me. Do you do anything to pass the time or do you always brood like this?”

  “Brood.” He said. Somehow, it was all too much. The party, the children, the fish, Willow. He’d hoped they’d bring a little peace but this was not the pond of his childhood, nor the uncomplicated girl he remembered from the days before he fell in love, before family crests meant anything but a family history to be memorized from a book. That was all he saw now, when he looked at her, the A scale and coins, the Avakoff crest. Might as well call it the crest for avarice, and if it painted in its free time it didn’t change what she was doing here. He was like one of the winkies hiding in the reeds while she circled above his walls of silent discontent.

  He flicked the foot bug into the pond. “Come on.” He said. “I need a drink.” This winkie wouldn’t be made into meat so easily.

  “I’d show you my paintings sometime if you’d like.” She said as they were making their way back.

  “I will have to decline you for now.” He replied, with no intention of ever accepting. “Perhaps another time.”

  “Mmm.” She seemed to accept that but a short distance later she added. “You know you could do worse than me.”

  He could also die alone.

  “I’m not Locana.” She said. The comment was like a knife to his chest. She should never have said it. “But I am capable of holding my own in society, and I don’t come with the political problems of some of the other girls you might consider.” She’d lost the soft, lets bond and maybe more if you want to, look as she said the words. In its place was a woman he could imagine telling peasants and sub dynasty leaders that their loans were due and they’d better pay up. “My father has been trying to merge our families since he realized he would have a daughter who wasn’t a total fool. You’d win an ally, at home, as well as amongst the dynasties.” She looked directly at him as she said it in a clear invitation to accept the offer.

  In that moment he hated her from the soles of his feet to the tips of his hair. How dare she, he thought, but the feeling was gone in a flash and he was able to reply in a stiff courteous tone. “Well you’ve certainly convinced my mother.”

  She shrugged and turned back to the path as they walk. They were silent for the rest of the way until they arrived back at the enclosed garden that adjoined the front of the manor. “People will talk you know.” She said again. “Best have an answer ready.”

  “I think I’d rather have a drink.” He wished again that he could be an alcoholic, even just for the day, or as long as it took for the party to end so he could get back to the office. There was work he could be doing.

  Chapter 7: Charles // The Kamele

  “The Kamele’s revolution cannot sustain itself.” Jonathon Quinn was saying. Charles sat in one of the sun rooms along with his father, Bairn and a few others of the old guard corporate figures, sipping at his drink and avoiding his mother as well as every other would be match maker by finding the association of men whose conversation would bore them to tears. “They are parasites, just like the little fellow they left behind to incite their bloody rebellion in the first place. I always told you he ought to be sent to the penal colony when he arrived. Let that kind of thinking take root and we’ll be hearing it from the pulpit, how automation is
the right of every man, and poverty should be made a thing of the past.”

  “Oh I don’t think you have to worry about that anytime soon.” A priest in the small circle said. A father Peltast, old and retired from the parishes along the Mighty river, accepted now as part of the Quinn household as Tanya’s confessor and the estate priest.

  “I should hope not!” His father blustered. He was a large man, thick where his sons were thin but just as tall.

  “Poverty is, after all, one of the virtues extolled by our savior in the Gospels.” Father Peltast continued. “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God, and in another place he tells us that we will always have the poor.”

  “We will always have the poor.” Jonathan echoed. “That’s right. You can’t eradicate them by giving everyone a personal factory to cater to their every whim and fancy. What would settlers do with automation anyhow I ask you? I know what the dynasties would do if we removed the sanctions, but what would a colonist need a universal mech for?”

  “I imagine they would use it to plant their fields and improve their homesteads.” Bairn said. “I know Ryker has petitioned us to have some agricultural models modified for colonial work before. A few of his prospectors have asked about leasing them from us in a bid to improve their community’s standing amongst the colonists.”

  “What do they need automation to do that for?” Jonathan asked. “They’ve been planting enough to live on. Give them automation and they’ll expand their fields, start to grow excess, and then what have we got? People fighting over land they don’t need so they can clog up the courts over profits that do no one any good. We’ve been planting in the pampas for almost three centuries and never seen the need to expand our own productivity there. Until there’s a call for a higher yield there’s no need for it.”

  “It does seem to have worked for the Kamele.” A man to the edge of the group said. He was thin and balding, if still well dressed. His name was Martin Chandler, Jonathon’s retired logistics executive who kept a small villa on the north end of the family valley.

  “The Kamele are unique.” Charles said idly. This was all old talk. They’d been holding the same conversations three years ago when the ambassadors had been making their rounds in society, spreading their views as recorded in the so called Kamele Declaration. Only now there was no one to defend those ideals, and there was considerably stronger resistance as a result of the appearance of a Kamele army on the planet.

  Charles wasn’t sure if the alcohol was finally doing its work or if he was simply more comfortable with the men who’d surrounded him his entire life, but sitting in the armchair, listening to the talk about the Kamele, he found himself relaxing again as he had when Locana first approached him. “Their planets are six of the original evacuation planets. They are old, and their population density has been creeping upwards for centuries. A top down distribution of wealth like we have on Marain works, for a colony world with only a few million people spread across a small percentage of its total land mass. The land still provides ninety percent of an individual’s needs. What isn’t provided is easily obtained by the city managers and settlement prospectors. On a planet like those in the Kamele systems, that simply isn’t the case anymore. Sociologically, allowing automation into the general population might make some sense. Poverty doesn’t mean much on a world that can still feed you, but on heavily populated worlds? I imagine it means death there. Automation would free them from that fear.”

  “So they can go on breeding more starving, beggar, children.” Jonathan said. “Free them from poverty and all they’ll do is breed until they’re poor again. We should have sent those ambassadors to a penal colony the moment they started spreading their damnable heresy.”

  “Send them to the black coast, and after three years you’d have been facing two armies on the continent instead of one.” Chandler said. “The dispossessed are always the first to join a revolution.”

  “But the system could work.” Charles continued gamely as he sipped from his tumbler. The Knopf grass wine was good on first sip but seemed to improve as he drank. “There’s no reason the same distribution which we make amongst the dynasties couldn’t include the entire population of a planet. It would simply be a matter of making everyone on the planet a member of a sub-sub-sub dynasty, entitled to a certain percentage of the company production shares.”

  “It’s a very fine theory.” Chandler said. “But in practice, the Kamele won’t last a century. Look at our own dynasties. It isn’t as though the AI provides for everything. There are still CEOs, and executives and Lord knows there's enough sub dynasties vying for power. Without centralized leadership the whole system would fall apart in moments. The sub dynasties would seize as much as they could and in the end you’d have a dozen different factions vying for control over the manufacturing. The whole planet would be divided down family lines. Can you imagine if everyone on the planet was part of a sub dynasty? You’d have anarchy, wars on every side. The poor would just end up losing everything again to whoever had the strength to take it.”

  “It’s a matter of institution.” Charles replied. “The Kamele are trying to institute their revolution from the bottom up, by overthrowing the people that have ruled them. If that was reversed, the ruling class could use that very program of proliferation as a means of control. We would still command the lease on the automation itself. People could be arranged into key industries, agriculture, mining, manufaction, those sorts, then each individual could be classified into one of those industries and given a share in the production of the automata there. We could even require some education so that they will have ownership of their particular industries. It would turn the entire planet into a living part of the corporation, rather than, as we have now, a minority involved in the major productivity of the planet, and the rest simply eking out a living on the charity of various corporate figures and the bounty of the land. Eventually one or both will dry up, then such a program might be necessary if we want to keep the colonists on Marain from revolutions like the Kamele.”

  “Now you’re talking about human development.” Chandler said. “No no. It’s been done before I tell you. People might go to war for such grand ideas, but they won’t help institute them and maintain them. They want what they can get from such a system, not the picture of harmony you draw. This war is only the Kamele getting drunk on the wealth they found when they plundered their ruling class. Eventually it will dry up as the lower class fails to aggregate what they produce with their shiny new personal automata. Their worlds are going to fall apart, if one of them still has working automation on a large scale by the time this war is done I’ll be amazed. Right now they’re trying to show a strong face, tell everyone that the revolution really has worked, and has to work everywhere, but in reality they already started to collapse as soon as the average person became as powerful as a corporation.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.” Charles said. It didn’t really matter to him. It was all just talk. “It would be interesting to try instituting on Marain though, if it weren’t for the bloody revolution.”

  “I can see that you’re quite sold on the idea.” A Kidawa second cousin had somehow joined their group without Charles noticing. The dark complexion stern above a severely cut suit. “I hope that we won’t have to endure such social experiments at any cost to the rest of the dynasties.” The man said with a smile that was all teeth. A reminder that for all that this was a party, politics was still at play, everywhere.

  Charles swirled his drink and cursed the Kidawa for the reminder. “Not while the war is on.” Charles said. There was an awkward silence for a moment and a few drifted away from their little group.

  “Why does Jesus say that poverty is a virtue?” Irenaeus, the youngest of Charles’ brothers, asked.

  “Oh, well, when you are poor, you are forced to put your trust in God.” Father Peltast said in his thin whispery voice. He shifted his legs to cross one over the other while he shifted hi
s drinking glass to the other hand and composed his thoughts. “It is also a way of imitating Christ. Christ had so little money, even at the height of his ministry, that when he was called upon to pay the tax for entering a city he sent Peter to draw a coin from the mouth of a fish. When the Apostles gathered the first diocese they required every adherent to the Christian ideal to sell everything they owned in order to follow Christ, an obedience, also, to the order which Christ gave to the virtuous merchant. When it was sold they shared out the wealth among one another. One woman was even killed when she failed to give everything that she had made from the sale of her house. I believe her husband died with her.”

  “Oh please, padre, we all know Jesus was a good man” Jonathon Quinn said. “But if you’re asking us to believe he pulled a coin from a fish’s mouth you won’t need us to tell you why we don’t attend your Church every Sunday.”

  “You could attend every day if you wished.” The priest replied, unperturbed by the old Patriarch’s tone. The priest turned his aging gaze from his father to Charles. “You seem quite taken with the ideas which the Kamele have brought with them.” He said.

  Charles shrugged. “It’s an intriguing answer to a problem we have yet to encounter. Possibly not for another couple of centuries.”

  “Hmm.” The priest nodded. “And yet, here we are, on the cusp of a war that will send thousands to their death for the sake of these ideals, theirs and ours, if the rumors about this army of yours are true. .”

  “The army isn’t mine.” Charles swirled his drink again and watched the crystal liquid refract the light. “It belongs to the corporation.”

  “I wonder.” The priest continued. “If the time has not come to speak to these, invaders and ascertain if peace could not be had, at the cost of initiating some of these, ideas, before their problems arose. A small cost, if it meant the lives of your people.”