by Kali Altsoba
With most men she doesn’t need to. They’re seduced with their first look at her. So she smiles with real respect at the back of the broad-shouldered, blue-clad and fast-departing general, crisp uniform fabric shimmering in sodden heat and a brilliant overhead sun of Argos.
‘He knew all along. My coquettish flirting and schoolgirl vulgarities didn’t fool him a bit. Or that line about not being allowed into the bio labs. He’s an interesting man, I’ll give him that. Perhaps even dangerous. I must learn more about him. I’ll have to get around that ensign though. She’s young but she watches everyone, notices everything, and forgives nothing.’
Chan Wèi finds that’s often the way with other beautiful women, even women in general. They see through her act right away, see things distracted men seldom do. Men find it hard to get past her first and powerful physical impression, their quickening pulse and involuntary uprush of blood to a rising groin. Too often, it’s also their last and only impression of her. Not so LeClerc.
She waits patiently as he leaves the helo pad. Then she takes off her bright red shoes and walks briskly and barefoot to the Off-limits white door laboratory. Submission to a security retina and DNA scan, and in seconds she’s inside the perimeter of her ultra secure bioweapons lab.
She unbuttons a too-tight red blouse, frees her breasts from captivity by a red matching uplift bra, drops a ridiculously short black skirt to the floor around her ankles and steps out of it, strips off small black undergarments and walks naked into a hermetically sealed bio-scrubber.
When she emerges on the other side her rich black hair is tied back, off the trim shoulders of a pale blue bio-hazard suit. She wears it like a gown. Not even so unfeminine and shapeless and functional a get-up hides the natural sensuality of the remarkably beautiful woman inside.
Three more scans and bio-checks later and Dr. Chan Wèi is back in her lab looking to weaponize a recently recovered exo-virus. She thinks she can adapt its reproductive cycle to attack human DNA, which it has never known or encountered in the six billion years of its alien existence. That’s the stage one goal. Stage two will be to direct it to target and degrade specific gene clusters. One vial on her desk is labeled Ordensstaat. A second is marked Oetkert.
All of her research is off-budget. None of it is entirely legal. She’s still a long way from any breakthrough that will help Briand and her co-conspirators in the War Hawks faction. But the research has real promise for her career and Argos Labs, which she owns as well as runs.
She’s no mere mercenary in a lab coat, however. She believes in what she does, which makes her vastly more dangerous in her determined pursuit of genocide. She truly believes she may find in the exo-virus a righteous means to win and thus to end the Fourth Orion War that all War Hawks know is coming soon. Hundreds of billions of lives depend on her success or failure.
It’s just not clear yet whose lives, or on which side.
Data search: Youthspan,
Result: robusto, Final Age.
Historia Humana, Volume X, Part VI (c)
Enhanced longevity swelled population to unsustainable levels, in turn helping drive the Second Age of Exploration past the new moon colonies of the Jovian and Saturnine systems of the host star Sol. More people agreed to trade personal sterilization for space on ark-ships for their children’s genes or their own zygotes, or left Sol system altogether. But not enough.
It was never a serious prospect in any case, the marginal idea of exporting our surplus population to habitable extra-Sol worlds. Nanobots called back to say more and more worlds were ready for settlement, that the Ark ship gene-bank experiment had worked. Light sailors left, then GDM ships left. But two hundred billion, all living longer than any time in history, huddled on Old Earth and the other Sol worlds in increasing misery and crowding and anger.
Death was always a major force for human equality, smoothing inequities of inherited talent over generations. Now, life threatened the old balance. Wealth gaps widened as the more talented or luckier or stronger accumulated far more goods over extended lives while billions of weak, disadvantaged or just luckless folk lived much longer lives in the same old poverty, and now inside coercive states and conformist societies. Some ultra wealthy during this period tried to escape by building secret crypts, ingesting suspend solution timed to last centuries, and thus becoming ‘sleepers.’ They planned to outwit the crisis and the crowds by outwaiting the social chaos that drove both. Inexorably, the hidden, refrigerated dens were found by roving mobs and desecrated and ruined. Sleepers were pulled out, left to rot in public as a warning to other rich.
Amongst the poor, but also many affluent bored, suspensor abuse became widespread. Called ‘robusto’ in street form in the barrios and slums and ‘youthy’ in gated towers, a year’s dose of suspensor was ingested all at once. This led to an intense rush followed by several weeks of an elevated sense of living with extraordinary vigor and vitality. Also too quickly, unguardedly and often extremely violently. User eyes turned white-on-white and were highly photosensitive. After five or more years of regular abuse sudden death resulted. Users were, and are, known as ‘flame-outs.’ Their choice was admired or condemned in sync with the rise and fall of economic cycles, before those were finally smoothed flat enough to be unnoticeable by the vast majority.
Crippling cost rises dominated health care, housing, food production and distribution. Most expensive, however, and ultimately fatal, was social investment in entertainment venues required to service and subdue expanding populations where almost everyone lived to evermore advanced ages in stultifying boredom. It was this so-called ‘social life crisis’ that finally led to a system-wide economic, political, and then a more fundamental cultural crash. All public order fell apart as anarchy slipped the leash that only barely holds it back even in the best of times.
Egalitarian and libertarian norms dissolved under the acid of disorder. Coerced, radical population-control followed. State enforcement of compulsory abortion and sterilization aimed at negative-ZPG was always unfairly applied, though no longer on racial or ethnic lines as in the past. Instead the lists drawn up, and even more ZPG policies in daily practice, responded to religious and class power bases and biases. The old mainline faiths all spoke of the sanctity of life, cradle to grave. They lost credibility under the enormous pressures of the population crisis, dissolving remarkably quickly and even spontaneously. Later, their last fanatic elements were driven underground by popular pressure and demand. The philosophical questions remained.
The most unpopular ZPG policy was a universal ban on organ bioprinting that everyone knew was evaded by the political class and the super wealthy, as well as by exempted ZPG police and other ruling cadres and protected professions. Varying by Sol world, additional disparities reflected the power and interest of locally dominant social groups or ethnicities. Natural death by organ failure or abuse skyrocketed, but still not enough people agreed to die. Ultimately, even the handful of surviving democratic cultures agreed to force state-assisted euthanasia on every citizen reaching a legally sanctioned ‘Final Age.’ These edicts were met by violent and mass resistance. The ‘life crisis’ of Sol system ushered in several major revolutions and three civil wars: on Luna, Mars, and Ganymede. It thereby exacerbated a system-wide economic downturn. A series of interconnected ‘Long Wars’ also reduced populations, less by casualties in battle than by spreading what had been defeated diseases, and by mass slaughter in The Genocides.
What finally eased tensions and restored a natural, though now much extended, cycle of birth and death was a new understanding of problems attending longer life-span, not just for societies but for individuals. A mass movement gathered leading to a consensus solution to the ‘problem of immortality,’ as social philosophers called new issues surrounding suspensor use that might extend individual longevity past 200 or more years. The critical shift was a profound social-psychological brake spontaneously applied to acceptable lifespan. It was, some scientists concluded later, almost as
if Humanity experienced a collective biological or herd response to an epidemic or famine. Most people simply refused the technical capabilities to extend their lives by two or three centuries. Instead, they voluntarily stopped taking low-dose suspensor and other long-age treatments around 130, and died naturally or by gentle suicide within 20 or 30 years.
For extended life did not mean endless youth or joy. One might stretch Youthspan but the many travails and ailments of ageing arrived over time nonetheless. Creative and active persons still enjoyed longer lives, as they always had. Yet, biological, emotional and economic stresses were experienced even inside slow-decomposing communities of ‘artistes,’ just as they were by everybody else. Psychologists demonstrated that it was only the ineluctable narcissism of many creative people that made them less likely to notice or act upon isolation. For the same reason, sociopaths and psychopaths also aged well, raising deep social problems of a different type...
Murder
A rising magma of hate has erupted from beneath the Grün Imperium. It flows already across half the United Planets in an unstoppable molten conquest. But there’s a second chamber, larger and far deeper, an immense pool of pent up rage that not even those like Juan Castro, with eyes and ears open, fully understand as they pick up the first harmonic tremors of magma swells.
Dauran worlds sit atop a vast vault of fear and despair that’s hidden from farfolk, who are forbidden to even approach the frontiers. It’s domed by Jahandar’s mad terror system, encrusted with his brooding grudges, watched over by his killer ‘Black Robes.’ It’s about to erupt with irresistible destructiveness, bursting out and over Orion like pyroclastic flow spewing from a supervolcano. A cubic melt of terror and war is coming that will leave no hope or space to run anywhere, as air is poisoned by the Tyrant’s lusts and worlds are consumed by indefensible heat.
Jahandar is sick of peace, and vastly more dangerous than mercurial Pyotr. His bile is up, thick and viscous, dark yellow in his narrow throat. It chokes him in his stretched infirmity with bitter envies and old hatreds, provoked by fear of his own coming darkness and end of days. So he calls his Shishi and General Staff to Astrana, capital city of the Dauran Commons on Nalchik.
They’re a strange mix, these most powerful men in the Dauran Commons. Far from the most urbane or educated, or cultured or civilized. Everyone in the room committed some terrible crime in order to stand here. Every one is a cold stone killer who would cut down their mothers without hesitation to save themselves. Three did exactly that. A fourth, that perfectly-dressed and strikingly handsome younger admiral over there on the left, sacrificed his own child. He sent her to a prison moon to prove his loyalty to the Tyrant. She was his only child and he doted on her. Which is precisely why Jahandar insisted on the test. It saved the admiral from a Shishi laser axe, though he wonders what he’ll have to do next time. A fifth gave up his wife. And so on.
With few exceptions, they’re vulgar men who indulge all the cardinal sins. Vast greed for estates and stolen treasures they hoard in sixth and seventh or eight mansions and country homes they never even visit. Lust for kliba or a harem of mistresses, but most of all for power over their homeworlds and as many Dauran souls as they can dominate. Envy of each other, that boils into murder plots and setting subtle traps to cause a rival to stumble before Jahandar, their only and final judge. Gluttony in the midst of Dauran privation and widespread hunger, especially marked in porcine General Mikva Royko, DRA Chief of Staff. Wrath toward maids, cooks, drivers, or any lesser folk in their way. Sloth born of the stagnation of Dauran life and disincentive to any originality. Above all, pride in their high titles and elite social status and trophy wives. Always the most deadly and dangerous sin, their pride constantly threatens to bring them to a bloody fall, if ever Jahandar turns his gaze to notice that they venerate themselves instead of him.
They gather around him in silence as he stands brooding over an immense starmap deep inside the chambers of the vast Caesarium Selo on Nalchik. He renamed it “People’s House of the Revolution,” but the name just won’t stick. Daurans still call it Caesarium Selo, or “Caesar’s Village.” He’s lived in the old palace since he took it from the last whimpering Party leaders he dragged off in chains to a Drapchi prison moon, condemned for murdering the Imperial Family then bloodily executed live on the memex. Yes, it was his idea to kill the royals. Yes he and two sleek killers did the butchering of two dozen children and grandchildren. But it was Party leader names and signatures that were so eagerly scratched to parchment death orders, and Party leaders who then moved into the Caesarium Selo while its inlaid floors were still slick with blood.
‘They made it so easy to blame and kill them all. I had more trouble with the boy gangs back on Sachi.’
The great tyrant shifts his once stocky, heavy frame in front of the starmap to relieve a sharp pain running up his good leg, which has spent a lifetime bearing more weight due to the preempted shortness of its gimpy partner. He’s much thinner and more bony than a few decades ago, when he was still in his prime. A shock of thick, salt-and-pepper mustache carpets his upper lip, drooping over yellowed teeth to meet his lower lip like heavy theater drapes before the ballet begins. Above it is an astonishingly pockmarked nose and also holed, yet clean-shaven, cheeks. The deep pockmarks are filled in with silicone powder, giving a gray pallor to his skin.
It would be easy to mistake him for a mad hermit. Or maybe a lost monk who wandered too far from his eyrie in the Blue Mountains on Sachi, demented and wizened, stooped and frail and filthy beneath a wool akhalukhi. For after he made effaced Soso into “Jahandar the Dread” he wore only and always the one-piece robe of the Tikbuli scholar-monks. His plain, colorless akhalukhi falls from a collarless neck to the ground, sweeping the floor below his uneven ankles as he limps. Dauran mothers tell naughty boys and misbehaving girls that underneath the white shapeless cloth Jahandar the Tyrant stands naked on cloven hooves, and that he’ll come for them at night. The last bit is closer to the truth than a Dauran parent can admit to a frightened child. For that’s always the time his Shishi come, with a hard bang! bang! bang! on the cottage door.
His hair is thin, dirty, wispy, uncombed and utterly white, except for three dirty-yellow streaks where he pulls at it constantly, leaving oils from his foods and unwashed hands smeared in long dirty tangles. His fingernails are uncut and unclean. He hasn’t groomed them in 15 years. On his right hand, which he uses more, they’re jagged and broken. On the left they jut and curl out beyond his finger ends in corrupt short scimitars, to end in shatters of jaundiced tips and split tongues of enamel and caked-in dirt. He jabs and scissors at the starmap as he asks questions of his generals, pointing here and there with hard yellow claws on his left hand that cut the air like crooked knives. They hop to answer, to grovel and serve. Especially those who plot against him.
His feet are the true horror. He never wears shoes, for a last modicum of shame stops him from showing gnarled feet to any shoemaker for a fitting. Even cobblers must worship Jahandar, and how could they if they ever saw what poor quality Dauran suspensor did to the special horror he calls feet? So he pulls soft linen stockings over them and up his mismatched legs, one thin and deformed, the other painful and overly muscled. The stockings hide what lies below. Nails black starting at the quick that turn to streaky yellow as they curl under scabby soles, then harden like calcified fetuses to fill the central hollows of each foot. They tangle like fossilized snake balls, then reemerge, stretching under his heels to form calcium flats that klack klack on marble tiles as he shuffle-walks room to room.
Or as now, sliding along the long map table, stabbing at stars. It’s not quite the sound of cloven hooves that peasant mothers conjure to scare disobedient children, but it’s unnatural and unsettling to hear. It’s why the old devil stories are whispered in the villages.
Selo palace is his home and prison, his prize and his burden. It’s also crown jewel of the Dauran prison system, as it was for centuries. Adapted imperial tortur
e cells layer over oubliettes with deep piles of bones inside, forgotten skeletons of 1,500 years of tyranny that preceded his own. His first condemned were tied standing upright in a new Kaiadas he made atop the old, left alone in the abysmal cave with only dungeon rats and their own sobbing for company. The silent dead stood for years, until leg and arm bones dried out and gave way and the rest tumbled to join the pile below. No one has been down those ancient tunnels for decades. Or so Jahandar thinks.
He’s forgotten about the oubliettes, where slow killing was too kind for him. His later victims didn’t waste away in lunatic isolation and pitch darkness standing on meters of bone in a Plutarch Pit. They died bloody, hot and hard, by his hand or his Black Robes, terrible hooded men of the Shërbimi Informativ Shteteror, of SHISH, the State Intelligence Service. They kill families on his whim or order, leaving children gutted in new apothetes. It’s the law Jahandar made after the Grim Revolution, his infamous “Guilty Blood” edict of revolutionary justice. If one family member sins against him then all must die. No mercy. No exceptions. Children too.
Jahandar has decided to make war. But against which of the other Great Powers? In the dank torture chamber of his mind he echoes the ancient threat of enfeebled Lear, a tale he learned in boyhood but misremembers in his mental decay, through heavy veils of long decades passed. He leans toward the huge holo starmap and mutters unaware, “I shall do such things! What they are yet I know not, but I shall be the terror of all the worlds!” His admirals and generals stand stiff to attention, afraid to glance at one another lest Jahandar see and judge them in an instant.