Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra (45 page)

“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.”

“And succeeded,” said Yarden.

“That's what I thought, too—at first. But the Fieri still exist, though it's been a long time, a thousand years at least, since anyone in the colony has actually seen one. They thought
we
were Fieri, remember. And I doubt Tvrdy and his cohorts would have sent us out if they didn't believe we had a chance of finding them. They're desperate for help, so it wouldn't make sense to send us knowing there was no help to be found.

“That's it in a nutshell. I had planned, of course, to go back and study Empyrion history in detail, but—well, that's as far as I got. Things got too hot, and here we are.” Treet finished and everyone sat silent for a long time, staring into the faint blue flames, watching the ghostly flicker, conjuring up visions of times long past in the Third Age of Empyrion. Without a word Yarden got up and went to her tent; Calin followed immediately.

Crocker yawned and rose. “You sure talk pretty, Treet,” he said and shuffled off. Pizzle and Treet sat together for a time, staring into the dying fire, listening to the sizzle of the solid fuel as it burned away. When the last flame died, Pizzle crept away, leaving Treet alone with his thoughts and the star-dazzled night.

They
stayed another day on the banks of the river to allow the eels caught the day before to continue drying in the sun. They swam a little and napped, resting up for the next leg of their journey. Pizzle fiddled with various ways of securing a water-filled tent to one of the skimmers and toward the end of the day came up with a solution that offered at least the barest possibility of success.

“There's no way to know if it will work until we try it,” he said regarding his handiwork.

“Elegant it ain't,” offered Treet, “but it ought to do the trick.” He studied the limp tent encased in a latticework of cloth strips and cording and strung over the vehicle like a deflated balloon. Pizzle had removed the passenger's seat, creating a trough for the water bag to rest in. “You've done a fine job. By the way, where did you get the cloth?”

“I tore up a spare singleton. The thing is, we won't be able to fill it up as much as I'd hoped, which means we'll run out faster. We won't be able to travel as far. That worries me a little—we don't know how big this desert is.”

“No way to know. We'll just have to do the best we can.”

Pizzle nodded, but the frown that creased his brow did not go away. He fussed and mumbled for several more hours until Crocker came by and ordered him to go swimming and get his mind off the problem for a while.

By evening, everyone was rested and in good spirits, eager to be traveling once more. They ate and discussed the rigors of the desert. Then, after a pause in the talk, Yarden said, “I want to tell my story.”

She described her life with the Chryse in fine detail—their forays into various Hages to perform the plays and mimes, the flash orgies, rehearsing new plays, lolling around the marketplaces on allotment days, and other things she had experienced and observed.

“It sounds like you had it pretty good,” remarked Pizzle. “How did you get your memory back?”

“I became suspicious of Bela, the troupe leader. At first he was kind to me, wanted to make love to me—tried on several occasions. When I cut him off, he changed toward me. He was still solicitous, but I saw an ugliness beneath his bonhomie, a duplicity that I distrusted. I came to feel he was using me in some way.

“In fact, he became quite brazen about giving me the mind drug. I think at first it must have been administered secretly in my food or drink, but later he offered it to me in the form of a little wafer and made me take it myself. I did the first time, but palmed the wafers and threw them away after that.

“I soon discovered that without the drug my memory started coming back. The drug blocked memory somehow, but if the doses were not kept up, the fog barrier thinned. It took some effort, but I was finally able to break through. It got easier after that.

“Unfortunately, I did not have time to regain my memory completely. On the last day I was taken to an Astral Service.” Yarden's voice quavered, and her shoulders shivered with an imaginary chill. “It is still so vivid in my mind … the most horrible experience of my life.” She paused, looked into the campfire.

Treet watched the light shifting over her handsome features. He'd heard the story before—she'd told him a few nights ago when they were alone on the hillside. As Yarden talked, Treet remembered that night, and wondered if they'd ever again be as close as they were those few moments. Strangely, he began to feel sorry for himself, and resentful of the fact that she was telling her story to the others just the way she'd told him.

Their time together that night had been an intimate moment, and now she was letting everyone else in on their shared secrets. It was like kissing and telling. He told himself it was silly to feel that way, but the argument lacked conviction and he succeeded only in stirring up a little guilt to go along with the self-pity. He retreated further into himself, reliving the intimacy of those moments.