by Kali Altsoba
“We bent our best talents in exploration and exploitation of hundreds of colony worlds. The bots worked and waited on the choicest and warmest, newly-greening and foresting them, stocking flora and fauna, receiving the ‘ark ships’ then the GDM and stardrive colonists. They started Humanity on the road to the first of the Shōwa, the first Great Age of Enlightened Peace.”
“It’s 20 centuries since AI-bots left Old Earth for the stars, 18 since the light sailors slept. Three more until the Thousand Worlds first sparkled into life, singly then all together. Before they grew apart again, forgetting the ancient dream of their ancestral world to escape history by ending it. They drew apart into isolation and atrophy, then rejoined in open conflict. We fell back into envy, anger and spite, into plots and murders. The first of three Orion Wars began.”
“Over a millennium has passed since the empires formed. Since they fought, failed, and formed yet again. Since our unoriginal rediscovery of original sin hidden inside the ark ships, to escape and thrive on all the Thousand Worlds, every one becoming a spoiled new Eden. For we brought the serpent with us to our pristine new homes, gave it a nest and renewed opportunity.”
They aren’t sure what he means by all that. It’s only his line about plots and murders and wars that excites them. Except for a few Old Believers from Novaya Bator in the third row from the back, clustering as always against the ridicule of others, with secret crucifixes sewn inside their caps. They catch his allusion to their ancient myths. They nod eagerly at the rare reference to their long-dying yet lingering cult, now returned full-circle from imperial warrior faith to its origins as outlier in a marginal province of a dominant empire that’s only posing as a republic.
“Over 1,000 years ago the First Orion War divided our over-proud worlds, destroying some while elevating others. It raised up chaos and renewed deep superstitions masked as faith, brought pathos and brutal calculation, invasions and genocide, slaughter and slavery and mass exterminations. For we brought the worst scourges with us out into Orion. War’s terrible sounds were heard again under a dome of Mars glowing red with fury. Then we did it again, and again.”
“The three Orion Wars saw mass destruction without real military decision. They led to exhausted pauses, not peace. They dragged on for decades, moving up and down the spiral arm, pulling in faraway worlds and peoples of whom the fighting states knew little and cared less.”
“Battles were lost or won, ten billion names etched in stony honors on cenotaphs in every capital and small town. Then all was forgotten. All the battles in distant systems, carved in Life Temple stones while we sang the same old laments for those left lying dead in farfolk fields.”
“Hard to remember all that? Yes, for it’s been 300 years since the last battle of the Third Orion War echoed silently across our space. Since we made the Perpetual Peace of the Blessed Balance. Since the powers signed the Golden Writs to end the last and greatest of all wars.”
“Three centuries since we met the enemy and learned that he is us, that war lies curled in a rent womb of our vanity, clawing to escape into the worlds to feed its gnawing hunger. Since we did such terrible things that all Orion yearned to live apart, lest the empires touch and we rage into beasts again. So we agreed to abide in heavily-armed mutual isolation and to call it peace.”
“Have we moderns not put an end to war? I know you ask it, even as you sit in uniforms you donned today thinking we’ll only let you play at war, in simulators and then in war games. That we’ll release you back to parents and real lives in a few years, your term of service done.”
“You protest? You say our leaders tell us this. Our noblest minds and all the memexes confirm it. Poets and troubadours celebrate a peace reaching over history’s receding horizon into a fourth century of true progress. We live in a new Shōwa Age of moral and cultural maturity as a species and as civilizations. I know that you believe this. Why not? Too many of our worlds do look shabby and fat and slow, as unready for war as your smug and fat fathers and lazy mothers.”
A few shocked and offended cadets look back angrily at him. More look down, however, embarrassed and ashamed and astonished at what he says. And at the truth of it. The moment’s here to plough into a thick fug of their childish innocence. “You’re young. You’re pretty. You look even prettier in cadet gray. Though none of you are quite so pretty as I am in officer blue.”
They laugh. He cuts them off. “You now embark on uniformed careers in defense of this Union. That’s why you must see things as they are, with more than a child’s eye. You will grow up, today! I shall now tell you harsh truths of our Union and your uniform. Childhood’s over.”
***
“Your parents and bad teachers tell you that Orion’s hates are dormant or gone. That’s a child’s fable. You believe it because you’re still so young you think that you, too, are forever. Yet you do not live in peace. Only in a time of apprehended war. Barbarians and barbarism are eternal, not civility and civilizations. Look around, it’s why we live amidst so very many ruins.”
“Past wars don’t die. They’re not even fully past. We live with atrophied muscles of the last Orion War, forgetting how to make war as old men forget how to make love, yet recalling its fading glories and glancing in envy at our strong sons.” A few cadets smirk, others squirm.
“So we keep armies and navies and industries of death and mayhem at the ready, living with dusty masers locked away and safeties on. Inside a frozen peace of rigid fear and threats, haunted by memories of past folly, of destructive waywardness in our reckless species youth. It will do. It will suffice. Peace has to last. It’s the best we’ve ever done! Stop questioning it!”
“Arguments about history continue long after historians are dead. It’s an inability to shut up even in the grave that drives most to write history in the first place. Yet facts survive even if the scribblers do not. It’s the hard military balance and elite memories of old wars that upholds Orion’s Peace. Nothing else. It’s not kept by milky sentimentalities of your parents or ordinary folk, living closeted lives in the central worlds or hardscrabble ones on some less favored rock.”
“It doesn’t come from ‘platinum parchments’ of the Triple Treaties, the ‘Golden Peace’ that teachers and our own propaganda foist on you as icons of our new age of wisdom. Like an ancient deity’s mountaintop laws inscribed in stone with fire, those old treaties were written to threaten and trick a riotous mob in the valley below. To make it adore a golden pharaoh of law.”
He sees that this attack on their cult foundation myth deeply offends the Old Believers. ‘Good. I must wake them up, too, from the moral slumber of their sins in the outer provinces.’
“It’s only naked power that keeps the peace. Our will and capability to inflict mass death and destruction keeps away the baying dogs of war. But not just ours, also the same ability of our enemies. Peace rests on a threat of future war, on mutual absolute destruction, on a teetering and ever shifting balance of terror. Not on culture or gods or reason or good will or moral progress.”
“There’s no right or wrong in war, no rules or laws to restrain us from our worst selves. In war, all law is silent except for an unwritten lex talionis, the law of tooth and talon, the golden rule of retaliation. The gods are all silent, too, although they’re everywhere in every battle, shouting down to believers to have more faith. There’s no room in war for your pale morality. Shed all such foolish thoughts. There’s no ‘Just War’ as the philosophers say. There’s just war.”
“Armed prophets conquer. Unarmed prophets perish. Disregard the false prophets upheld as experts on interstellar politics, on unknowable unknowns that can never be foreseen or solved by models and theories. Ignore the learned ones who hurl treatises at each other, like monkeys throwing nuts from the treetops. Don’t be distracted from your study and duty by flying nuts in the canopy overhead. Watch instead for the panther stalking you, padding over the jungle floor.”
“Some would ask you to believe that we Calma
ri have no sins undergirding our historical success, unparalleled in all Orion, while they condemn the sins of all the other powers. They say that Calmari reached the summit of empire from our special virtue, not from our ordinary vices.”
The cadets are tense and alert. Castro barges into their silence. “Our sins are great, but not original or ours alone. All of us are sinners in war. And as sinners, all are at war with sin.” The cadets are confused but the Old Believers are happy again, as they always are when words return them to sin. They’re in love with sin. It’s why they cling to the sins of their Old Belief.
“Others say that ours are the gravest of crimes. They overlook the crimes of all powers, inert with guilt for sins by dead generations of fellow Calmaris. They prefer their guilt to girding. They invoke your pity in place of our power. They paralyze you with doubt and excess piety. They want you to wage war with words, not warships. Yes, you should know of our true crimes. But don’t dwell on our past crimes so that you’re not prepared to fight to save today. When war comes you will fight to win, doing whatever is necessary. You will sin in all our names. If you’re not willing or able to commit true, terrible crimes, you shouldn’t fight. Stand up and leave now!”
No one moves. No one rises. ‘Good. We selected them well. They’re young, yet have the brains to keep silent and the good character to stay seated.’
“Very well. You choose to serve. You choose a uniformed path more dangerous every day. Once again, the Thousand Worlds are hostile, sundered and split, as human polities ever were and shall forever be. Amen.” He almost grins as he looks directly to the Old Believers, visibly squirming in the back at his open blasphemy. He does it again: “We shall have war always because our shared vanity is more reliable and eternal than any golden calf or cross.”
“Understand that war is coming toward us. Know that your enemies will do whatever it takes to win. They’ll use any means they have to ruin this Union. Resolve here, in this moment, that you’ll do whatever you must, kill whomever you must, destroy worlds if you must, to save them. After that, if we win? Well, we’ll all just have to find a way to live with what we’ve done.”
***
“Great wars seem to demand great explanations, but most don’t really have any. All it takes to start a war is some fool’s or tyrant’s choosing. The real damage isn’t in the start, it’s in how it goes on, as the pride of entire star nations engages across Orion and the war’s first cause uncaused is all but forgotten. We walk the knife edge between barely understood lessons of wars past and fresh errors waiting to be made by the current or next generation, which doesn’t know real war and may think it would like to try it. That, too, has happened before. Teeter-totter...”
“A fraction of Humanity retains independence inside a clutch of small and well-armed Neutral powers. You were told that their much larger neighbors, led by us in the Calmar Union, agreed to preserve them in place out of deep respect for cultural uniqueness and diversity and inherent human rights and freedoms. So said your primary school teachers. So say our good and democratic memex and government. The great star nations guarantee the smaller powers in neutrality and independence, codified by oath and the glorious text of the Peace of Orion, in burnished platinum letters inlaid into triple solid gold tablets to proclaim their permanence.”
Even the faculty is paying attention. Castro has never spoken to cadets quite like this before. That’s because since last term there’s been real news about Bad Camberg and Pyotr’s invasion of Krevo. ‘Now’s the time to hit them with the harshest truths about why we fight.’
“Tosh! We did it to create frontier buffer zones, to protect our independence with a raw balance of military and economic power, not a ‘blessed balance,’ among the three empires that dominate all of modern Orion: the Grün Imperium, Dauran Commons, and the Calmar Union.”
“Yes, we too are a great empire. Don’t flinch at the word! Only our empire is disguised as a republic, framed as a confederation, masquerading as a democracy. We were built by war and are held together in peace by a threat of force against internal rebels and external foes. Do not doubt this for a moment. Understand it. Accept it. Defend it. This is the way of all worlds.”
“Behind every great empire, including this one, there’s always some great crime. Ours is hidden in plain sight as a story of necessary conquest in pursuit of justice and right. This Union won preeminence not by superiority of our ideas or values or tamed religion, but our superiority in war. We made war better than others, used our terrible violence to take what we wanted in the three Orion Wars. You may overlook or forget that hard fact. Our once-and-future foes do not.”
There are gasps and a few angry murmurs at this extraordinary secular blasphemy against the Calmar Union. Castro ignores these last sputtering outbursts of flailing childhood morality.
“The harsh truth of the Orion Peace is that in order to make it and to keep it several older Neutrals were erased from your star maps, their systems seized and divided among the Big Three as a way to halt the last war. Some of you in this room hail from the worlds this Union took as its share in those partitions. Go back far enough and you will find that all of us come from worlds that were overrun in some long ago war. We merely choose to ignore that inconvenient fact.”
“The treaties called the Peace of Orion left only a handful of small states intact, buffer Neutrals waiting like unripe barley between the millstones of great empires: the United Planets, Helvetic Association, the Three Kingdoms, a few others. Their defenses are weak, their leaders are nervous. For the three empires are again stirring from slumber. Krevo is fighting as we meet here today. All its worlds will fall in time. This is certain. And that they shall not be the last.”
He glances down at the visiting lecturer from Aral, dressed in impeccable KRA oakish weaves with shimmering silver-vein trimmings. His head is down. His kit bag already packed. He’s leaving on the next shuttle departing orange-skied Kars. He’s going to one of the five sanctuary moons, to Harsa, to prepare for arrival of the Aral government-in-exile. For the besieged capital world of the United Planets has finally lost its outer system ice-moons to the invader. Its War Government holds the inner asteroid belt and one LP as civilian ships shuttle as many away as possible. Then Aral itself will be abandoned in an Exodus run by its defeated army and exiled fleet and people.
“Spies and agents of the Imperium are active in unusual numbers and ways. I can say no more than that, except be sure that Pyotr III has agents even here on Kars and on Caspia.” Some cadets quickly glance around the Great Hall, then sheepishly look back to Castro at the podium.
“The Imperium controls southern Orion, and is 700 billion strong. Most there live in some form of servitude to the three high-born castes. Inside Pyotr’s court his generals and his priests are all plotters or agents of outside influences. They tangle and seethe like a ball of rutting serpents, writhing with rattler’s strikes and poison grievances and freshly-hatched conspiracies.”
“Then there’s Purity, a niagara of nonsense. Yet there’s no denying that its adherents grow in number and influence daily, especially among the young. They’re in the billions now, cultists in an amorphous movement without a center or leader or direction. Only a dread purpose: to clear away all heresy and heretics who will not bend the knee in submission to its truth. It’s not clear if Pyotr is a believer or a cynic about Purity’s radical marriage of biopolitical pseudo-science and older Grün supremacy theories. It is clear, however, that Purity is a rising tide of ethnic and religious rage that may yet decide it must go to war with all the rest of Orion.”
“It was opposed by the old Grün elites, traditionalists under the Dowager who upheld continuity at home and the Peace of Orion in the spiral arm. Since her death, even Higher Castes look to Purity and to war as a pressure valve to slow-release social stresses threatening ancient privileges in ways we’ve not seen before. We’re watching to see if they can do it, if brave little Krevo is enough, or whether war will breed more war a
cross Orion. Your careers and even your lives depend on the outcome of this titanic struggle, about which we Calmaris can do nothing. It is not we who shall decide if it is to be war or peace in your lifetimes and on your homeworlds.”
A complete, appalled, gobsmacked silence stills the sea of gray. No mummers or gasps or groans escape to eddy in pockets of the Hall. There’s just hard attention and gut-clenching fear.
Castro pauses to amplify the echoing sounds of silence. Longer than his slow measured breathing requires or narration demands. Longer than his warning threat to their futures warrants. He wants them fully alive to what he says next. His ice-blue eyes narrow and chill, searching the room like a sniper focusing on a head shot a klic away, across undulating waves of prairie grass.
“We know that Pyotr has spoken in High Court about his war with Krevo, saying that he feels reborn and tingles with renewed ambition. We hope he means to confine the war to Krevo. He has not yet spoken of wanting a wider war. Grünen despise us but fear us, the hated Calmar Union. Yet they also know that our armed forces are not what they were or what they should be.” There are knowing nods from many faculty, long worried that the present twin governments on Kars and Caspia have neglected frontier defenses and pursued unqualified appeasement too long.