Under the Eye of God (36 page)

As a result, only a small percentage of males ever achieve the opportunity to mate. The horrendous competition, even for an unlicensed Vampire female, exhausts the skills of most males. Among the aristocracy, the grueling rivalry for mating rights produces unspeakable savagery.

Naturally, Phaestoric society rules itself along matriarchal lines, with the most power held by the oldest and most fecund female. When disputes between age and fertility occasionally occur, the power almost always goes to the female who has given birth to the most offspring—because she has the largest army.

Phaestor young do not bond emotionally with either parent; instead, they bond chemically to the carriers of specific genetically-linked pheromones. This produces in every individual a remarkable loyalty to the members of its own blood line—a loyalty that
cannot
break by any means short of massive chemical confusion. Additionally, this chemical bonding automatically extends to every other individual that carries a related genetic mix; the closer the mix, the stronger the connection. A Phaestor child defines his identity through the linkage to his siblings and to his maternal parent. Ultimately, the Phaestor young become the foot soldiers in the undeclared wars of their mothers, grandmothers, and greater ancestors.

A Vampire may have allies, it will never have friends. The family scent controls every Vampire motive, outweighing every other possibility before it has a chance. As a species, the Vampires have no gods but themselves, they
cannot
. They have no higher vision, no purpose other than their own all-consuming hunger.

²¹
The position of Prince-Consort not only carries great status and power, it also comes with its own set of unique dangers. Breeding females often change their tastes abruptly.

Should a Lady become tired of her Consort, he could die in sudden and mysterious circumstances. Should another suitor seek the Lady's favor, almost a certainty to happen, again the Prince-Consort could have an unfortunate and unexplainable accident.

Nevertheless, the competition to win a Lady's favor goes on and on and on. The explanation for this lies beyond the simple power of the pheromones: every male Vampire believes that he has the personal authority to escape the law of averages.

²²
Vampires have the ability to see well into the infrared and ultraviolet. They perceive colors beyond the range of normal human or animal vision, and find the radiation-blasted surface of Thoska-Roole a dazzling panorama of light and shade. Several Vampire poets have even composed thousand-stanza cycles about the indescribable beauty of the Thoska-Roole aurora. Unfortunately, most of the more dramatic colors of the planet's aurora remain invisible to lesser creatures.

²³
Predators appear instinctively to avoid intense gravity wells. A predator will not feed directly on a star, but will take as much nourishment as it can from a close approach.

²⁴
At that point in time, the evocation of artificial singularities, although theoretically possible, remained only a tantalizing, but unachieved goal. Subsequent to this, and due to a massive research effort, the technology became not only practical but widespread in application.

²⁵
Pronounced Eee-bah-ka.

²⁶
A bastard subspecies of Vampire, the ghouls have the single worst reputation in the Regency. Not even their clients speak well of them. Most observers consider ghouls a significant genetic mistake, and most Phaestor Nobles publicly agree with this perception. Nevertheless, the ghouls have demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for a variety of unsavory tasks that the Phaestor prefer not to handle themselves and remain unwilling to trust to license-holders and clients. For instance, ghouls make wonderful attorneys.

The gene-designers who had originally created the Phaestor Vampires had also attempted to create an even nastier, species by crossing the Phaestor with several members of the order of rodentia. Only one of the hybrid species proved immediately viable, the mix of Vampire with Rat. Not wanting to see either their genetic purity or their reputations damaged, the young but growing population of Vampires quickly moved to suppress all further research into their specific genetic heritage, except for that which they directly controlled themselves. Later, for reasons of their own, the Phaestor recreated the species, now called ghouls.

At the specific request of the publisher, the author will not include a description of the mating habits of ghouls.

²⁷
The Vampires had their own reasons for staying on Thoska-Roole—possibly because their control of all interstellar transport had also given them control of the planet's mines, its banks, and ultimately of its economy. This gave them both a lever and a place to stand. From here, they could apply pressure to the economies of many other worlds. And just as possibly, they may have enjoyed the bleak and desolate spaces of the planet.

²⁸
The office of Arbiter carries only honorary importance, the legal equivalent of a Poet Laureate. The Arbiter speaks for justice, impartially and as a detached observer. He may act as a friend to any court in the land. In past times, the Arbiters served as the consciences of their worlds.

²⁹
Vampires have an intense dislike of any kind of disability. They perceive it as weakness.

³⁰
An ancient philosophical discipline, alleged to have its roots on Earth, the legendary birthworld of humanity.

³¹
Dragons in particular like the flavor of mayzel-fish, but then Dragons have no sense of taste. Ask any Vampire about Dragon aesthetics.

³²
The source of this enmity lies some seventeen standard years prior to this narrative, at which time an “unfortunate incident” took place in the small agricultural community, Kilpatrick's Folly, on the rocky planet Morpaline. A troop of Regency Dragons sought revenge for an inadvertent insult to one of their number.

The insult itself did not develop out of any action of any member of the local community, but instead occurred when a visiting traveller, known only as Mr. Costello, who identified his profession as “hero”, accidentally espoused a philosophical position somewhat at odds with the Dragons' perception of personal integrity. Unfortunately, the Dragon's response grew severely out of hand. They slipped into a killing rage and ran amok through the settlement, killing one hundred and seventeen of the hundred and eighty-three inhabitants.

The Regency Prefect of Morpaline, a member of the Lee clone-family, summarily ordered the entire troop of Dragons dishonorably executed. This judgment triggered a violent three-year campaign of assassination and terror by the Moktar Dragons directed against any and all members of the Lee family throughout the worlds of the Regency. At no time would either the Lees or the Dragons accept arbitration or reconcilement. As a result, the blood-war has never officially ended—the Dragons have simply run out of Lee clones to kill.

³³
The Regency did not freely license female embryos, and of those who survived to breeding age, few remained on the planet. Thoska-Roole maintained its reputation as a good place to leave quickly.

³⁴
Fececious: full of feces.

³⁵
Genetically male, but bioformed to function as a female.

Several centuries previous to this narrative, the Regency had begun a deliberate policy of adjusting the availability of breeding licenses to restrict the ratio of female births in various sentient species. While this admittedly heavy-handed method of social engineering did have the desired effect of limiting the growth potential of any race that might grow in sufficient numbers to challenge the Phaestor aristocracy, it also produced widespread “mating psychoses” and “bonding frustration” among the many young unpartnered males of the affected races—particularly humans. The Regency responded by licensing the development of “synthetic females” for mating and bonding, but not for breeding. By the time of these events, the implementation of these policies had become so widespread that human males on the most rigidly controlled Phaestor worlds had never even seen a real female of their own species; gender-females remained the only experience of human femininity available to them.

³⁶
Because of the distances and the speeds involved, no interstellar authority has ever succeeded in imposing a uniform code of conduct where the participants have not already embraced it willingly.

Other than the technocratic feudalism of the Regency, which does not function as a uniform authority in any case, but only according to the goals, desires, and whims of its individual Lords and their Ladies, the only significant effort to define a uniform standard of conduct and authority in the Palethetic Cluster comes from the Spacers' Guild.

Ideally, the government of every planet or moon that hosts interstellar travel—every authority that operates a legitimately recognized StarPort—has also signed the Minimum Basic Agreement of the Interstellar Operations Guild, committing itself to a standard of behavior that all space-faring vessels can depend on. Without the IOG seal of approval, a StarPort cannot operate. No Guild member would allow his ship to land or receive goods at an outlaw facility.

The Guild handles the collection of all taxes for the representative worlds, disciplinary matters of its own members as well as ground-based employees, and arbitrates all disputes over contracts and breaches thereof. The Regency could not function without the approval and cooperation of the Guild.

On most worlds, IOG officials also run most of the ancillary operations of the StarPort, taking an additional percentage off the top to cover the operating expenses of the local Guild offices. In reflection of this fact, IOG installations usually tower over all the other installations at most StarPorts. Nevertheless, on some worlds, IOG authority remains tenuous.

On Thoska-Roole, for example, the IOG held onto its venue only by strategically applying bribes and kickbacks to the ruling Vampire authorities. The Phaestor had long had their eyes on the wealth of the Guild and had begun looking for ways to appropriate first the Guild's operations, and ultimately, the source of its continued wealth. Instead, what she found left her so appalled that she made an irrevocable decision, one on a level with the famous brinewood betrayal that had eventually toppled a government.

³⁷
Owed To A Dragon
, by the poet Aristol.

³⁸
Article Two of the Regency Charter strictly forbids the use of sentient creatures as prey animals. This prohibition serves as one of the most fundamental tenets of the Regency authority.

³⁹
Because of Thoska-Roole's elliptical orbit, it suffers extremes of both heat and cold. During winter, for instance, much of the atmosphere freezes, and those inhabitants who remain during the six month freeze must stay in the pressurized and heated habitats of the winter-caves. During the peak months of summer, when the planet passes through the outermost fringes of the red star's corona, the oppressive heat also drives the population deep underground. As a result, most of the long-term residents have grown to regard the surface of the world with a mixture of distrust and fascination. Horror and mystery prowl the surface, watched by the
Eye of God
. Security lives only deep under the covering rock. So profoundly do the planet's inhabitants feel this revulsion of the empty sky that many of them refuse to venture to the surface even during the long safe months of passage between the extremes.

⁴⁰
Sawyer referred, of course, to the rumors that the original genetic designers of the Phaestor had modelled their creations on wasps, spiders, and other carnivorous insects.

⁴¹
The TimeBinder's dream state bears little relation to the Phaestor dream state. Where the TimeBinder communes with the shared identities of every individual who has previously worn the same headband, the Vampire communes only with his or her own hallucinogenic center. Wisdom drives the TimeBinder, but only hunger drives the Vampire.

9781939529565

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