by Kali Altsoba
Tales of his boyhood were washed away by Shishi sent to kill everyone on Sachi who knew about any minor error he made as gang leader, or as a student, then as a young Party man. They chanted fundamentalist Black Robe rites as they chopped, then proclaimed Soso’s “law of oblivion.” That meant all who knew the victims were required to remember to forget. Then all their names and pasts were erased from public records, forever. Police and gangs in Dambatta were purged near extinction. Half the city vanished, scrubbed by fear even from private memory.
Taking the first steps on a causeway to a full cult of personality, the Dauran Antiquarian Academy announced “discovery of lost texts of Sachi prophecy.” They foretold the life of a local boy destined to lead Daurans in conquest of the known galaxy, “The Jahandar.” That’s what the holy texts call the prophesied boy and man of destiny. It meant “Possessor of All the Worlds.”
Cultism dominated the JarNeb for two years, building to a sincere frenzy among the young and hopeless and the hopelessly young. On a morning like any other but forever different, hundreds of billions awoke to learn that Soso was proclaimed and proven to be “The Jahandar,” the foretold and foredestined ruler who will lead them and all Orion out of darkness into the Satya Yuga, a golden Age of Enlightened Peace and Prosperity. Soso-Jahandar then emerged like a god, proclaimed from the pinnacle tower of the sacred Caesarium Selo to billions of bowed servants and bent slaves. Bathed in spiced oils and scented with myrrh, he was raised over them with arms spread wide like a pagan deity. He still smelled more of the mortuary than a Temple.
Worlds wondered at, and feared, his words. “Whatever has Glory, Brilliance, and Power is a fraction of My Splendor. Everything you are Emanates from Me. The fool dares to meet My Gaze without Devotions. Prostrate before Me, worship Me as Benefactor and Master. Give to Me all Love and all Loyalty. You are the many Dead Souls of these Lost Worlds. I am the one, true, Living Soul. I am The Jahandar, Possessor of All the Worlds. I am Prophet and Messiah of the Satya Yuga. I am Culmination of the Word and Light of all the Worlds. Know Me and Fear Me.”
Whoever questioned the revelation, whoever doubted the prophesy or queried in any way Soso-Jahandar’s right to absolute rule over the Dauran multitudes, to rule more godlike and with more power over them than any Dauran emperor dared, disappeared into the oblivion system of prison moons run by his fearsome Shishi. Or into the grave. So the dark faith spread, conversion was by terror but it was conversion nonetheless. As decades passed, fewer Daurans remembered anything else, knew anything else, believed anything else. Jahandar became the Resplendent All.
When the scholars were done with lying and his cult was in place, sincerely believed by billions, Jahandar had them chopped into fertilizer. They’re not missed. They, too, were blotted from all records as if they never were, joining erased ranks of non-persons.
So, too, vanished the monks from Dambatta and Old Ritual teachers in Tikbuli, men who taught Soso more than he admitted or dared allow known. He had them killed one by one then in batches, and all family that his sniffing Black Robes found. He dissolved names and lives from memory of the living and the dead, until no one was left who dared remember the real Soso.
Then he replaced the vanished scholars with dullards, gray men of no talent or initiative or real faith. He promoted only sycophants to the Antiquarian Academy and High Church and broadcast on the JarNeb their mockery of all Dauran tradition and the old faiths and doctrines.
Jahandar forbids use of his old name. It’s a capital crime ever to speak it. No one may say it or look for the prophet’s origins. For tens of billions across Daura, “Soso” is decreed a haram word. To speak it is blasphemy, and there’s only one punishment for that. The same punishment that’s meted for every crime against the will and power and dignity of Jahandar. All know that Black Robes wait to ride out on his every whim and that Death waits only on his word.
Yet in his wandering mind, in dungeons of recalled slights and insults, in a graying dotage and long malignant decline, he’s still the cruel and brutal boy Soso. He coos the old name to himself whenever he’s alone, or forgets he’s not. Perhaps he’s remembering his old babu as he pulls hard on strands of dirty yellow, streaking his thin white wisps of hair until his scalp bleeds.
Soso the student thrilled to tragedies and dark histories, soaking up ancient tales of sordid murder, blood-soaked vengeance, and wanton hate and war. He never read the bard’s comedies, however, during his aborted year of study in Tikbuli Temple Seminary. So Jahandar the Dread, the old man who inherits the boy inside, doesn’t know that a portrait was penned millennia ago that fits him better than the praise songs he orders written or the monkish akhalukhi he affects. It would tear his stunted spirit apart, rip his hollowed-out soul, to learn of its existence in every database across all Orion, wherever the text is venerated and read still. For he is it and it is him:
Deformed, crooked, old and sere,
ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere;
vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind;
stigmatical in making, worse in mind.’
Jahandar views all life as a zero sum struggle and believes there’s nothing to follow. Anything he gains must come here and now and at the cost and loss of another. He wins every battle he fights and it’s still not enough.
There’s more. He’s dying. He must see all the Thousand Worlds tremble in fear of him first, and there’s only one way to do that. Jahandar is going to war. His fearsome outer deity will be affirmed while inwardly he coos comfort to his folded younger self, like a sulky, wounded, self-pitying teen: ‘You should’ve knifed me first. I’m strong. I’m right. I am Soso!’’
Out loud he bellows to his generals waiting at the starmap, like an old bull in last heat. “I am strong! I am the Jahandar! I have for too long ignored the stars. Now I shall take them all!”
Jahandar will explode into Orion like a sudden quasar, sending polar jets of incandescent will streaming out to scour and sear and burn the Thousand Worlds. Daura is on the move at last.
Starmap
Jahandar leans in to the starmap, tremulous above a redwood table in an enormous room deep inside the Caesarium Selo. The table is unique, carved from a single Toruń tree over 1,000 years old. It was a gift to the Dauran emperors from the people of the United Planets, delivered with great pomp and ceremony five years after the Third Orion War ended almost 300 years ago, when Krevo and Daura fought side-by-side. There’s a space where an engraved marble plaque was inlaid, thanking the Dauran people for their sacrifice, honoring their Emperor’s guarantee of all Neutrals in the Peace of Orion. Soso ripped out and smashed the plaque decades ago.
The starmap shows inhabited and claimed systems of the Thousand Worlds, not the many hundreds of millions of stars in the Orion spiral arm. It mimics the redwood’s dimensions, rising out of a grown-diamond rim circumnavigating the table at 100 meters per long side, curving 35 meters at either end. That’s still less than the height and diameter of the granddaddy tree from which it was carved. Polished daily by three dumb-bots, it’s the most absurd piece of furniture in Orion. Krevans knew that when they made it, in flattery of the imperial ego of historic Daura.
On the other hand, the oversized table and holo star chart that rises shimmering above it befits the immensity of the room, whose far wall is so distant it’s visible only as a dark haze. The chamber is preposterously wide and tall, over a klic long and half as wide and high, the largest room in an enormous complex of interconnected palaces, the Caesarium Selo. Daurans still call it by that old name, “Caesar’s Village.” It’s a social and cultural tic. An anti-revolutionary irony expressing longing for a past that few loved at the time. It was for fifteen centuries the largest room in Orion. Until the Dowager Empress died and Pyotr encased his own expanding vanity in a vast hall in a new Waldstätte Palast, carefully building his 10% larger than Jahandar’s.
This was once the Caesarium Ballroom. The playroom of dead emperors and empresses, centerpiece of th
e palace complex solitary Jahandar took as his manor house. The whole was the Imperial Family residence for fifteen centuries, center of high culture and Dauran elite ambition.
Before the Grim Revolution the grand ballroom enchanted 10,000 a night with high state music and gaily colored twirls of dancers. Bejeweled ladies swirled across inlaid tiles in gorgeous green or blue or silver gowns made of rare silks and other fine thread imported from the textile cities scattered over the lower Grün systems. Handsome young lieutenants clicked silver-studded boot heels in invitation to the dance, undressing with their eyes laughing ingénues eager to lose their heads in love and red virginity in an officer’s bed.
Colored lasers synced to each pair of dancers, carving unique cones of light above masques of soon-to-be lovers, framing iridescent whispers of pending coitus and, for a fortunate few, perhaps a more lasting love. Now the huge vault’s black ceiling looms darkly overhead, like the roof of a tomb. High, wood-lined walls are but dimly lit. Stained oak and maple grains soak up white, blue, and yellow light glimmering from thousands of imitation suns in a glowing holo dome projection above the red wood where pharaoh lurks.
Jahandar spends most of his waking hours in the gargantuan starmap room, brooding like Midas, counting up his worlds and numbering his slaves. He calls it “My Study.” It started as a joke more than half a century back, one of the last he ever tried. No one is sure if he’s still joking when he says it. He isn’t.
For nine decades he has ruled alone and unchallenged from this empty room in an emptier palace, as absolute tyrant governing the largest polity in the Thousand Worlds. Only he has looked upon the emperors’ famed starmap in all that time, brooding on its display of worlds and populations and resources captive to his will, and at other stars beyond his grasp and control.
In all its shimmer, in its glimmering histories of a thousand worlds filled with stories told and untold, he sees only dominance. Not a web of lives and worlds, arts and effort, suffering and survival, life and fate, war and peace. He sees none of that. He can only destroy, never build. Demolish, never raise up. Crush, never create. And more these late days than before, he sees and mulls in the great holo map of the Thousand Worlds only the galling outer limits of his power.
A year ago he brought his top military advisors in to see the starmap for the first time. They’re here again today, standing in a tense semi-circle around the pock-marked cripple, close but not too close; distant, but not so far away that he’ll notice. As always in these twilight days of his vitality, Jahandar wears a seamless akhalukhi that falls straight from his gobbly neck down past his uneven ankles, flowing onto the cold marble to hide his hideous feet. Beneath the robe is a wizened old man’s body so frail it hardly supports the light and loose silk.
Yes, silk. For this is not at true akhalukhi woven of coarse wool to mortify the flesh. It’s fine spun silk, only affecting the look of harsh Sachi sackcloth. The shift to light silk that rests easier on his desiccated skin is but one of many and growing concessions he makes to advancing age and infirmity, though he’ll admit to none and would kill anyone foolish enough to suggest he has changed in any way. Other changes he doesn’t even recognize include fading lusts for spiced foods and disinterest in the nubile, drugged kliba his guards always ensured awaited every night in a dead emperor’s bed. ‘I’m in my prime! I am Soso. I am The Jahandar!’
Despite ruling the far-flung peoples of the Dauran Commons for the best part of nine decades, Jahandar is a mystery to them still. Many tens of billions live in abject servitude just as they did under the old emperors, but now also in fear of a demented Tyrant’s smallest whim. For any who resist his iron will are hauled off to do forced work in the Drapchi archipelago on one of dozens of drear prison moons run by his Shishi. And the moons host only a fraction of his slaves.
Others are conscripted into his armies, which for decades have served as an even vaster reservoir of unpaid labor working on huge state projects for the glory of Daura, meaning him. For the last ten years they’ve been secretly building out immense stocks of armaments and huge war fleets, unaware of what they’re doing. Always, the Dauran homeworlds are hounded by his “night dogs,” ghastly Shishi bound to his vision and autarchy. They head out on murder rides on hover-bikes and glide-sleds. They kill with sachis and precise sadism, without pity or remorse.
Jahandar even tries to pour himself into spiritual life, dimly recognizing a vacuum he doesn’t really understand but is compelled to fill. He immerses billions in a cynical cult of his own omnipresent personality in which even he doesn’t believe. At least, not at first. Endless repetition of praise tales corrupt his own sense of reality, as does quailing by lickspittle ministers who act in his presence more like table servants than the men of huge wealth and power they are on their homeworlds. Lately, he can’t distinguish between the myth he made and his real self.
One reason is in the night sky whenever he looks up. Seventy years ago he braked the rotation of a small moon in close orbit around Nalchik, until it was tidally locked. Camps were built on the airless surface and slave laborers shipped in from the Drapchi prisons. They polished dark maria lighter and flattened rims so that craters didn’t remind onlookers of his plague-pitted flesh. Hollows were filled with regolith and debris, including dead workers not worth moving. On the polished surface pharaoh carved a graven image, a fantastic continent-sized geoglyph of his own face covering 9/10ths of the lunar facing. It’s lit up by geostationary lasers so that the image of Jahandar the Dread, and dreadful, looms always. Godlike over the lives of all below.
All border systems are locked-down. All star ports open to internal trade only. Offworld travel is severely restricted even in systems many bohrs distant from the long frontiers of Daura. Jahandar understands that if immigration is the sincerest form of flattery, emigration is the surest critique. So he sealed all the border worlds even tighter than under the hermit emperors. Few escaped Daura to become refugees in “western systems,” as all farfolk and forbidden stars are called, whether Calmari or Imperium or Neutral. Only a handful made it past frontier patrols that shot-on-sight any private ship spotted at a Lagrange point. Today, there are no private ships left. Those not impounded are in disrepair after a second century of economic stagnation and decline.
Not even drones come to Nalchik anymore, as they first did after he expelled the farfolk ambassadors, arriving to protest the tens of thousands of chopped bodies in “Little Daura” slums spread over the western systems. Never once was a drone or answering message or ambassador sent back. Daura’s stars all went silent inside what some Kars wit dubbed a new “Dread Zone.”
Anyone who fled Daura in Jahandar’s first years knows that all family members left behind were surely killed by some cruel Shishi in bloody and public retribution. Exiles lived in foreboding that the long reach of his vengeance and assassins might find them in a squalid Little Daura, one of hundreds of refugee slum pits barely tolerated on non-Dauran frontier worlds.
In fact they’re safe at last. He won’t let his assassins leave his control or space for fear they’ll also flee, and fly to his enemies. Betray him to “foreign shits,” as he calls all farfolk. Fifty years ago he cut the last links, recalling his Shishi and assassin-spies from the Neutrals, the Imperium and Calmar Union. Then he had the killers killed, for they’d been beyond Daura and knew his lies.
Daurans reside outside the vital currents of Orion, cut-off from knowledge of the rest of Humanity. Denied a present or future beyond Jahandar, they must also live in a past only he defines. They bow like stone-age islanders in primitive veneration and fear of an emperor-god, posing also as a prophet and foretold liberator of all Orion. They dwell in a far-off and forgotten country bound by backwardness where everything is done differently, and worse than before or anywhere else in Orion. “Stagnation” does not begin to describe the moral, economic, cultural and military state of the Dauran Commons. But it’s a vast star empire, and polities of its size and complexity can go right on declining
for a very long time. For centuries. Even for millennia.
Jahandar is unknown to the teeming billions of non-Daurans spread over the Orion spur. For nine decades he has totally cut off Daura even from minimal diplomatic contact, deepening a historic isolation of its systems from the rest of Humanity. In that at least he built on a cultural foundation. An urge to radical autarky is deeply embedded in Dauran culture, dating to the start of the Second Age of Exploration when dissident settlers on eight GDM-ships (Idaho, Kashi, Liaotung, Novgorod, Odessa, Rio, Shanghai and Vatsa) landed on what later became the core Dauran founder worlds. After a few early reports, all eight closed themselves to outside contact. Under Jahandar, the old tendency of Daurans to limit farfolk movement and knowledge became radical state policy, enforced by his terror police and border guards. History is paranoia in Daura.
Secret police block all outside hyperspace broadcasts, control the always pitiably limited Dauran memexes, forbid external trade or travel on pain of death. With one exception. Jahandar has always allowed a single ‘Green Ship’ from the Imperium Court at Kestino to dock at the L1 of Nalchik’s moon for one week each year. Imperium pilots gaze up in amazement at the lunar visage overhead, and down in disgust at a dark and gloomy world where beyond the capital of Astrana the night side is hardly broken by any ground lights. It’s worse on other Dauran worlds.