The Violent Society

by M C Rooney

“A fucking alien,” Dean said contemptuously.

  The priest walked up close to the former Captain Dean and looked at him with pure hatred. “If I had my way, you would have been put to death for heresy,” he said as spittle leapt from his mouth onto Dean’s face. “But the Governor-General does admire your grandfather and your own battle skills and believes that because of your service, you deserve to live out your life on this island.” The priest walked away but then turned around to look again at Dean. “Oh, and don’t worry about your wife,” he said with an evil grin. “A new husband has already been picked out for her. She will breed many more children, as is her duty.”

  Dean felt the pain of grief enter his heart. His wife, Gabby, had been chosen for him, as some marriages were, but over the years, he had fallen in love with her and her with him. She had given him six children, as was required by their religion and the community to ensure their survival and the thought of her being with another man and not seeing her and his children again broke his heart.

  The priest smiled as he saw Dean’s pain. “Are we close enough?” the priest then called out to the ship’s captain.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” the captain called back.

  “Throw them in,” the priest ordered. “The infidels will either drown or die of starvation on that island. It is not mine to decide, but for God and his chosen one, Lord Cykam.”

  “Stay close to Jordan,” Dean ordered Mitchum as he was untied. “He’ll drown for sure if we don’t help him.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mitchum replied.

  Extra guns were trained on Mitchum from the guards. He did have that way about him.

  “You are all sheep,” Marriott cried out, and as he was thrown into the sea, he did a nice pirouette in the air and gave the guards two middle fingers as he crashed into the ocean.

  Jordan was thrown in next, kicking and screaming, and Mitchum, whom the guards had not touched, dived in after him.

  Dean turned and looked at the priest, who was surrounded by guards and sailors.

  “Any last words?” asked the priest sarcastically. “Any words of wisdom from a man who knows better than God?”

  “Yes, Priest,” Dean replied. “The truth is bulletproof,” and he dived in after his friends.

  A number of men in black, green, and yellow robes and jackets stood and watched from the windy island as four men were being thrown off the passing ship.

  “Some more heathens, Your Grace,” a soldier in black named Palin called out with a smile.

  The man in white looked through his spyglass and was disappointed yet again that no red jackets of the engineers could be seen. Those men were only concerned with building things, not mental or spiritual matters or the corruption of the new regime. He then noticed that the last man was someone well known to him.

  “Well, finally some luck,” the exiled priest said keenly. Your life isn’t over yet, Dru, the priest thought to himself. He turned to the soldiers around him. “Please get a rowboat out to them as quickly as you can.”

  At last, the priest thought, as the soldiers followed his orders and began to make their way to the beach, someone with the nous to get them off this island. But were they to go back to the mainland or to Tasmania?

  He needed to meditate on the subject.

  Melbourne, Mainland Australia

  The Governor-General Rezaul Dean, or Rez as he liked to be called by his few close friends, was a man of medium height with an intelligent face, dark brown skin, grey hair—which had previously been jet-black—who was fast approaching the age of sixty-eight. He had been through so much warfare and politics over the years and was so accustomed to high drama that he had trouble relaxing even in his quietest moments. He had begun his career as a lowly foot soldier under the great Captain Adam Dean himself, a man whom he so admired and had indeed considered to be his real father, that he adopted his surname for himself.

  He then slowly climbed through the ranks of the Cykam fanatics over thirty years, mainly because he had a level head as opposed to a crazy head, until he reached the pinnacle of the Governor-General’s office. Sure, he’d had the previous Governor-General assassinated by a well-known assassin, as in fact, the dead man had done to his own predecessor, but he had maintained his position as Governor-General for nearly twenty years now through his own innate skills and some cunning allies.

  He spoke with an almost regular Australian accent, but if you were old enough to remember, you would notice that his accent had a little foreign tinge to it. In other words, you could understand everything he said quite clearly. The Governor-General said Austra-lia instead of Austra-ya. He wasn’t like most of the soldiers, politicians, or religious council members, who spoke purely in a ‘Strine’ accent, which was obtained by using as little mouth movement as possible when talking. He sounded educated and refined, and he was, for he was an Arab Prince after all.

  He looked out the office window and saw the steady flow of traffic driving through the streets. He remembered as a child seeing cars backed up bumper to bumper for miles on end, but the streets of Melbourne were barely filled now, and peak hour traffic didn’t exist. Still, it didn’t stop the greedy local council from asking for permission to charge for parking spots. New cars were finally being produced in his city, and he felt a wave of personal satisfaction at this achievement. The cars that had been used previously were patched-up piles of metal that were up to sixty years of age. Death traps people called them, but the Scavengers of the Awakeners of Melbourne were born survivors, and everything was kept working for as long as possible. But now people seemed to be getting soft, as more and more of the old technology was returning. It was inevitable, but a part of him would be disappointed to see the old ways return fully.

  “So I hear through the grapevine that you would like to charge people a higher interest for their loans.” He turned away from the window as he addressed the greasy-haired man on the Holophone.

  “It would only be a surcharge to cover our banking expenditures, my lord,” the banker replied.

  God, these people made him sick. The Australian Bank of Cykam was the only bank that lent or printed money in Australia. There was no worldwide Central Banks you owed money to like in the old days. A Central Bank where some governments of the day had to ask them to print money so they could pay them back on the interest owed, knowing all too well that the new money they asked for had an interest applied to it as well. This caused a never-ending spiral of debt that could never be paid back, ever. So Rez was determined that the bankers of today were not going to make obscene amounts of money; they were to purely print a currency only for the economic needs of his people.

  “No,” the Governor-General replied firmly, “you already have a low interest rate to cover your wages and expenditures. I have had my people check your finances, and they are balanced very well.”

  “But—” the greasy man tried to protest.

  “No buts, sir,” Rez replied. “I have studied the old days, and there were bankers who were so rich that they made my birth father’s family look poor.” Actually, there were banking clans who were so far above the governments that nobody knew how rich they were at all. “Now, tell your colleagues that if they cannot do their job properly I will find someone who can. Do you understand my meaning, sir?”

  “Yes ... yes, Governor-General,” the greasy man replied nervously and the connection was severed. The banker thought ‘his meaning’ was a threat to kill him, but Rez was only bluffing, for the moment at least. If the banking council were to still defy his rule, he would have to kill them and their whole families as an example. He had ordered the death of a previous head banker and his family, including his children. It made him feel ill to give such an order, but his will needed to be obeyed. He was the ruler of Australia, not some money-loving banker. It was for the greater good of the nation.

  “Have we received any news from the oil tycoons in outback South Australia?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Finance Minister Rochaid replied. “
The shale oil goals have been reached; we have enough oil to last us for the next one hundred years at least.”

  “And the oil tycoons, are they happy?”

  “Of course, my lord,” Rochaid replied. He knew where this was headed.

  “Kill them, then,” the Governor-General replied, “and find me some suitable replacements.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Rochaid replied and left the room to complete an order he had already started to prepare for.

  No bankers and no oil tycoons, Rez thought. If only I could get rid of certain others in this room.

  “Have we heard from the Western Army yet?” the Governor-General said, turning to the next agenda.

  “Reports are coming in from Captain Mahaz Dean, my lord,” Toi Reynolds replied. He was the captain of the Governor-General’s Melbourne Security Forces. He was also smart enough to not call Mahaz Dean the Governor-General’s son. Rez Dean insisted that his many children and grandchildren had to make their way to the top on their own. He didn’t want to pass the hands of power on to his son for his family’s sake; he wanted to pass the power on to someone who earned this position, by killing him at the very least.

  “The resistance led by the various warlords has finally been crushed,” Toi continued. “The engineers are now trying to restore the electricity supply. It will take a while, but I think we can safely say that Western Australia has finally rejoined the Federation.”

  “And the puppet politicians, have they moved in?” Rez Dean asked.

  “Yes, my lord,” Reynolds replied, “with the politicians and the money currency, we should start moving the population back to civilization quite soon.”

  This was good news. The western campaign had taken so long due to the vastness of the state and the stubbornness of its people. Perhaps now he could turn his full attention to the elusive Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory and its capital, Darwin.

  A polite cough was heard from the other side of the room. Rez Dean immediately had to quell the disgust he felt and tried to maintain a pleasant face when he looked at the five white-robed men with their—it had to be said—stupid-looking pointed hats. “Yes, Your Grace?” the Governor-General said. “Do you have anything to add?”

  Imperial Grand Master Eli Iggulden sat across the table from Dean, looking down his nose at him with all his high-ranking religious council members by his side. The hugely obese man Wyndham was to his right; he was a man who loved money and power. To his left was a man called Radcliffe, who loved money with such a passion it was almost romantic. On the far left was Sutchence, who loved power, and like Wyndham, liked to enforce that power on the people through violence, and on the far right was a high priest by the name of Redman; he was an oddity in that he actually cared about the people he represented. He wouldn’t go much higher than where he was. All of them, except Redman, seemed to look down at him, even though Dean commanded at least thirty thousand troops across almost the entire continent. They seemed to think they were better than anybody else because over two hundred thousand of Australia’s citizens followed their idiotic religion, and some of the council, like Sutchence, actually believed that they were indeed God’s chosen ones.

  Holy men! What a joke. Rez knew for a fact that Iggulden had poisoned his own predecessor by arranging a hit from the famous retired assassin known as The Hatchet, who had worked numerous jobs for himself, so it seemed that murder was apparently condoned by this fictional Lord Cykam. Rez would have liked to have simply killed them all, but religion was part of controlling people, and the charade needed to be maintained for the present moment. Perhaps a chance would come for Rez to be rid of them, but he could not see any opportunity on the immediate horizon.

  “I would like to know if any ... unruly elements of the Western Australian state have been ...reeducated,” Iggulden said in his imperial tone.

  “You mean you wish to know if any citizen of any other religious practice has been tortured to recant their beliefs or killed if they didn’t?” the Governor-General replied. Rez Dean was not someone to mince his words. He may have been born in another country, but he had very quickly picked up the Australian habit of ‘cutting the bullshit’ so to speak.

  The Grand Master looked angrily at the Governor-General for a moment, but soon replaced the anger with a sickly smile. Iggulden also knew that the balance between the politician and the religious needed to be maintained for the reunification of this country. The religious may work alongside the army in controlling the population for the moment, but Rez, through his Spymaster, knew that the Grand Master would not be averse to setting up his own Theocracy. Iggulden may be disappointed to learn, as his Spymaster had only recently informed him, that several breakaway sects had already started in countries all over the world where Cykam ruled, especially on the continent of Africa. Rez had laughed at that. All other major religions had taken a century at least to break off into different sects, but Cykam had taken just fifty-seven years to start arguing with each other about what interpretation was to be taken over what this paragraph meant or what that word meant. That was the trouble with writing things down: it can always be misinterpreted, deliberately or not, to mean a number of different things. He knew that Wyndham was now writing the Australian official book of Cykam and that they were all in big arguments as to what to officially sanction in their so-called holy book. Knowing Wyndham as he did, the final product would cost the faithful a pretty penny to buy.

  Actions were always better than the written word, Rez thought. There can be little misinterpretation over an action, unless, of course, if you fully control and cover up the situation by force or deception as governments had often done in the past. What media they had in this day and age was well under control of his regime. Every piece of news had to be approved by a media office he had created. The people didn’t need to know the truth; all they needed to know was that Rez’s regime had their best interests at heart and was determined not to go back to the years of violence and bedlam after Governor-General Fevola had died from a sudden illness.

  “It is not ... torture, as you say.” The Grand Master grimaced with distaste. “It is a necessary action about saving the people’s souls.”

  What? Rez thought, surprised. That was a new one. “I’m sorry,” the Governor-General replied, “but I have never heard of this ‘saving of souls’ in your belief before.” This must be part of Wyndham’s new book, he thought.

  “It is a ... missing chapter in the book of our Lord,” the Grand Master said offhandedly as he waved his hand in the air and the diamond and ruby rings on his fingers flickered in the light. The Grand Master had initially requested that the Governor-General get down on bended knee and kiss the large ruby ring on his left hand in a way of greeting. Rez Dean had politely declined.

  “Really?” the Governor-General replied and tried not to smile. “A missing chapter, you say?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Iggulden replied, looking down that long nose of his.

  “So you can actually control where a person’s thoughts and memories go after they die?”

  Iggulden’s eyes flashed, as he knew that Rez was making fun of him, but the charade needed to be played out.

  “Yes, my lord, we can,” Sutchence replied arrogantly, defending his Grand Master. “Through the power of Lord Cykam and God, which courses through our very being.”

  You can’t believe that, surely, Rez thought. Sutchence and Iggulden looked down their noses with such disdain they could almost be thought of as twins.

  Rez knew what the real reason of the new law was. The information his father had given him had shown him what a joke Cykam was, but the belief said that Cykam had left a new world for his believers. Heaven on Earth, the priests had called this land. So if this was indeed the Promised Land and paradise on Earth, then what were the priests needed for? The power of religion was always based on fear; people needed to be controlled by the threat of an angry, invisible God who would punish you if you did not follow their chosen path. If the
people of Australia were already in paradise, what power would the priests have?

  Rez suddenly felt like he had let a huge opportunity pass him by. If he had realised this earlier, he may have promoted this revelation and also had the chance to stop his citizens paying the church ten percent of their wages. He didn’t know what effect that would have on inflation, but he knew that it would stop the church from becoming the power that it was today. The politicians he had installed in the state government of his home city had not the courage to insist that the church pay any taxes for fear of upsetting the voters, even though the four yearly elections were always rigged to favour the Governor-General’s candidates.

  This was a bad hangover from the old days: billionaires and rich churches not paying their share. He was actually surprised that Iggulden had not set up his own sponsored political party. Perhaps he thought that would be going too far and the Governor-General may finally crack down on him. Or maybe Iggulden knew that the political parties were a joke and the real power came from his office. If he had any brains, he would know this.

  Why people followed such men was a mystery to Rez. Were they so blind they couldn’t see? Or was religion a sort of mass hypnosis for the weak-minded or the fearful? The history lessons provided on the orange disk showed that corruption and sexual depravity, such as pedophilia, was rampant in the churches. These people should not have been followed. These people should have been strung up. And the hierarchy that covered up this evil should have soon followed them. Sure, some of the old era priests did do good things for the communities they represented, but so did the regular folk, and the regular charities were not as filthy rich as the organised religions.

  And what about the women of the Cykam religion? Rez thought with shame. Stay at home, have children, cover yourself up, no positions of high power. One of the priests in Iggulden’s council, the idiot Maz Wyndham, was pushing for the removal of girls from the schools, as he clearly believed they were only good for breeding. This made him feel so angry. His own dear departed wife had been a beautiful, intelligent woman who had guided his career from the start. She should have been the one who was running the country, not him. But, oh no, she was born a woman, so these idiots in their silly hats looked at her as a sub-human. It was so disgraceful, and dare he say it, evil, to treat women in this way, and Rez felt like fifty percent of the human spirit was repressed by these morons.