For thousands of years there was no peace among us. One family made war upon another, and one town marched against the next, and country against country, and then empires clashed with empires, so that it seemed certain that in time we would turn all the Earth to rubble and ash.
But that did not happen, O Master of the Ansaar. That is perhaps our greatest achievement: that our harsh and irascible nature might have led us to destroy ourselves, and we did not do it, though we had the capability. We did not do it.
You should know, Lord of All, that by the time of my birth the division of the Earth into nations was only a memory, and the populace of the Earth was no greater than the world could sustain; and we had made a green park out of our planet, with fresh, clear air and pure blue seas, and all people lived in harmony and hope.
And then the Ansaar came.
We knew a little by then of the Empire. Not much, for we had chosen not to venture among the stars. It would have been in our power to do it, had we wanted to. But we did not want to.
Those earlier Earthfolk who built nations out of towns and empires out of nations probably looked to the stars as well, and said, “Someday we will rule those also!” But by the time our race knew how to build ships to travel among the stars, we no longer saw reason to do it. We were content to remain on our own small world.
You are probably thinking, O Omniscience, that that is a profound flaw in us; and perhaps you are right. But we were happy enough as we were. Our days of striving were behind us, and it satisfied us to live as we lived, in a balanced, harmonious way.
We knew of the Empire because we could by then detect the messages that pass among the stars, though we didn’t understand them; we knew the sky was full of worlds, and we suspected that many of those worlds were under the rule of one dominant race. But we believed that the Empire wanted no part of us.
Of course, we were wrong. The Empire knows no bounds and the spirit of the Ansaar knows no peace; and your people will never rest until your power reaches from one wall of the universe to the other.
The day of the conquest—the Annexation, I should say; I know I should call it that—I will never forget. It was in the time of your father of blessed memory, His Departed Majesty Senpat XIV, may he taste the joys of Paradise forever! It was just two or three years since my breasts had grown. These are breasts, Majesty, these swellings here: if I had a child, they would give milk, for—perhaps you know this?—we humans are mammals. The coming of breasts marks the end of girlhood and the beginning of womanhood for us.
For me the Annexation began at midday in the brightest time of summer, at a time when my life was tranquil and happy, and the future seemed to unfold with limitless promise.
I lived then with my mother, my father, my brother Vann, my sister Theyl, in a house like a golden dome in a village of a thousand people close to the river. To the east were low round hills like green humps; to the west the land tilted as though a giant’s hand had lifted it, and mountains of black stone rose to the sky. There once was a great city on our side of the river, back when the Earth had been crowded and noisy; but the city was long gone, and only its traces remained, a gray line of foundations in the grass.
It was a peaceful place and we hoped it would never change. But nothing in the universe is exempt from change, Great One.
Do you know what an Annexation is like? Let me tell you, O great and omnipotent lord.
First there is the Darkness. Then, the Sound. And then, the Splitting of the Sky. And at last the Voice, announcing to the conquered ones the fate that has befallen them.
The Darkness is total—sudden night at midday. Our power sources were orbital satellites whose great wings gathered the sun’s energy and sent it to us in laser-steered bundles. In a single moment the Ansaar invaders interrupted the output of every one of our power satellites. The weapon called the Vax did that. It was as if all the satellites in their orbits had been wrapped in blankets of a material impervious to light. Every electrical device on our planet ceased to function. The Darkness had come to us.
I was in the garden. How could I know that the lights were out all over the world and that all our machines, including our weapons of defense, were inoperative? But in the garden there was Darkness. The sun itself had been blotted out. The sky became a black sheet, so black that it was painful to look at. Your Vax had thrown some world-encompassing screen of opaque force, some gigantic barrier, across the sky. It is the great Ansaar weapon, the thing that lets you rule the galaxy: you interpose your might between a planet and its sun, and choke off all light and warmth and energy in a single moment. Who could withstand such a calamity?
I stood staring at the darkened sky and I thought at first I had been struck blind. I held my hand up and could not even see my fingers, not even very faintly, like the shadow of a shadow. I touched my fingers to my eyelids and saw colors, the dancing islands of blue and gold and green that I always saw when I pressed my eyes; but when I opened my eyes again I saw nothing. The world in all its brightness and beauty and wonder was gone.
Yet I was not afraid, not yet. For it all had been so sudden, and so total, that I could not yet take it in.
Next came the Sound, and the Sound was like nothing anyone had ever heard before, a low droning wail, coming from a point near the horizon, that gradually rose in intensity until a dreadful earsplitting screaming was coming down on us, the siren of our doom, a frightful discordant deafening screeching that would not stop, a noise that fell upon us with an almost tangible force.
Now at last I was frightened. This seemed to me to be the end of the world. I fell to my knees and covered my ears. As I think you know already, O Master of All, I am not one easily frightened; and yet I was plunged into an abyss of fear by your Darkness and your Sound. I thought I would never come forth from it.
We were conquered already. But we did not know that yet.
As the Sound grew and grew in strength I saw long belts of light appear, rippling across that curtain of midnight darkness—brilliant horizontal bands of green and yellow and violet and crimson, quivering shimmers of potent brightness that stretched completely across the sky from east to west and vanished beyond the curve of the world’s rim. They were like chains encircling a giant’s waist. Staring at them in wonder and fright, I felt a sense of strain, for I sensed their tense pulsations, as though the giant were breathing in and out, gathering his force, making ready to throw those dazzling shackles off.
The Splitting of the Sky was starting to occur.
The bands of light danced in and out, the green one bending until it seemed to touch the ground and the violet one retracting like a drawn bow, curving far away into the heavens, and the crimson and yellow ones doing the same; then they reversed, snapping inward where they had been out, and out where they were in. And the Sound assailed us with ever more horrendous power. This continued for—five minutes, perhaps? Ten? I became aware, gradually, that the motion of the bands was tearing apart the dense black sheet that lay like a curtain behind them. As they eddied and rippled to and fro, the blackness was strained and stretched to the sundering point.
Then it ripped and the stars came shining through. Thousands, millions, the heavens ablaze with points of light, cold and dazzling, like the reflections of a billion fires in a dark lake.
Then I saw that those myriad lights were moving, moving as stars never move, rapidly growing larger and larger: the ships of the invaders is what they were. The Sound died away, finally. A ghastly stillness took its place, a stillness so total that it was like a roaring in my ears.
And at last came the Voice.
It spoke from the sky, a calm clear deep voice heard everywhere on Earth at once. First in Universal Imperial, of which, naturally, we could not understand a syllable; then again in our own language:
“We bring you the greetings of His Imperial Majesty Senpat XIV, the High Ansaar, the Supreme Omniscience. He instructs us to inform you that you have been gathered this day into the beneficence of the Empire. Thencefort
h we of the Empire will shield you from harm, will share with you the greatness of our accomplishments, will guide you toward the attainment of civilization.
“Have no fear. You are in no danger. We come only to offer you the advantages of the Imperial way of life. A new era begins for you this day, people of Earth: an era of security and happiness and prosperity under the benevolent friendship of His Imperial Majesty, the Lord of All, Senpat XIV, may he thrive and prosper.”
And so we joined your Empire.
I assumed—we all assumed—that our leaders must already be recovering from the first shock, that defensive measures long held ready were going into action, that everywhere on Earth at this moment the old warlike soul of mankind was awakening from its long slumber and we would begin to take steps to rid ourselves of the unwanted benevolence that the intruders from space were offering us.
But no—no—
Our energy sources remained inoperative. Nothing moved; nothing worked. There was no government, no army, only the two billion baffled citizens of Earth, facing an incomprehensible enemy.
The truth of that landed upon us like a falling mountain. Our souls were numbed; our spirits were crushed. Which is the Ansaar way of conquest: show in the first moments of conquest that resistance is unthinkable, and thus make resistance impossible.
Already the ships of Ansaar were landing in every province of the world, and the Voice of the Imperial Procurator could be heard again everywhere, announcing to us the new order of things.
We were thenceforth under the administration of the Territorial Government of the West Quadrant of the Empire. We would pay taxes to the Territorial Government and would receive the full benefit of membership in the galactic sphere of mutual prosperity that was the Empire. Those with special skills that might be of use to the Empire would be invited to make them available; for the rest, life would go on as it always had, but now an Imperial presence would reside on Earth to insure perpetual peace.
The rioting, the panic, began even before the Voice had finished explaining the changes that had come to our world.
We showed our lack of interest in the benefits of membership in your sphere of mutual prosperity by letting a civilization that had been ten thousand years in the making topple into chaos in a single day.
Once the Voice had stopped speaking I ran for the phone and to call my father at the hospital. Silence came from the speaker grille, the terrible silence of the darkness between the stars.
“Call my mother, then,” I told it.
Nothing happened; and it was then that I realized that all communications lines must be dead.
The midday darkness was thinning, now. I saw vague shapes through it, like the shadows of a shadow. Fires blazed in the village. I heard far-off sounds—shouts, cries—
It was the beginning of the Craziness—the Time of Fire.
Demons we had put behind us, monsters and nightmare beings of our bloody past, burst free again now. Our placid society—two billion people neatly spread out across a green planet, quiet villages with tidy homes and pleasing gardens and gentle, law-abiding citizens—went berserk. Nothing mattered except the need to find food, weapons, a secure hiding place. Neighbor turned against neighbor, friend against friend. The world became a jungle again.
Yes, Majesty, I see your smile. Maulas, you are thinking. What else could be expected? Mere primitives, with a pitiful ten-thousand-year veneer of civilization—of course they’d turn into savages again the moment things went wrong for them!
Of course!
You are right: we behaved shamefully. But let me put the question to you, Lord of the Ansaar: What if a Darkness were to settle over Haraar, and a Sound were to rend your sky, and starships appeared overhead, and a Voice said that the Ansaar Empire has fallen, that your domain was now a minor province of a far greater empire from another universe, that you have been conquered by a people to whom the mighty Ansaar were no more significant than insects? What would happen, O Emperor of All? The slaves in your palace—eunuchs, concubines, all the lesser and greater wives—would they gather around you and protect you, O Supreme Omniscience? Or would they not fall upon you and tear you into a thousand pieces and run through the palace like beasts?
I mean no disrespect, O Emperor of All. But think of how it would be if a race greater even than yours came without warning and kicked your Empire to pieces the way a boy kicks an insect nest apart—casually, indifferently?
How I managed to live through the first days after the Annexation—the days we called the Craziness, and which now are called by us the Time of Fire—I can hardly say. Thousands died, maybe hundreds of thousands. It was a war of everyone against everyone.
The only rule of law that existed was that of the Ansaar, and in the early days we saw very little of the Ansaar. Sometimes we heard their Voice, but they themselves were all but invisible.
Our government dropped leaflets from the sky urging us to join in a resistance movement; but nothing came of that. At least I was in the safety of my home. I locked the doors and waited, hardly daring to sleep, for my parents or my brother or sister to return.
They never did. I never saw my mother and father again, or my sister. My father, I learned, had died when a mob broke into his hospital looking for medical supplies. My mother was “annexed” herself by the Ansaar, and taken to one of the new depositories where humans with scientific or technical skills were held.
As for my brother and my sister—
My brother Vann, because he pretended to the Ansaar that he was already a trained healer, was taken to the same center as my mother. But soon he was transferred to another Empire world. It would be years before I found him again, and then—but that is another story, Sire, and a very painful one.
Since my sister Theyl was learning to be a scryer, she was, I suppose, annexed and taken to one of the depositories also, or perhaps she was killed during the Time of Fire. But I like to think that she is alive somewhere in this vast Empire.
As for me, I survived. Somehow.
When the food ran out I gathered berries and seeds like any savage. I crept down to the river and filled pots and jars with water. If I had seen small wild animals, I would have tried to kill them by throwing rocks; but wild animals are not common on Earth.
The Darkness was over. The Ansaar once again let the sun shine by day and the moon and stars at night. I would have preferred the Darkness, I think. I would have felt safer moving about in total blackness. Whenever I was outside of the house and spied one of my neighbors I ran desperately and hid in the bushes, like an animal in fear, and crouched there until it seemed safe to come out.
But gradually the Craziness ebbed, and we became accustomed to our new lives. We began to trust each other again and to come together like the civilized beings we once had been.
“The cities have all been destroyed, and their people evacuated into the countryside,” I learned from Harron Devoll, the woman who lived just across the stream from me. “And all the government officials are dead.” A great weight of loss and sadness descended on me when I heard that.
I heard also that you Ansaar were emptying Earth’s museums, taking our treasures to your own main planet; that you were doing something to the oceans and rivers to make Earth’s water more agreeable to you; that we would be sent to work in mines on distant worlds; that Ansaar soldiers were raping Earth women.
Was any of it true? Who could say?
But life went on. We formed little groups to raise crops and share such packaged foods as remained to us. We rebuilt much of the village center that rioters had burned the first day. But electrical service still was not restored, nor the communications nets reopened. We had been plunged back into a harsh medieval existence in a single moment.
In the third month of the Annexation three Ansaar came to us in a bronze-colored teardrop-shaped vehicle. They halted in the center of the village and made a tour of inspection, peering at our town hall, at the broken windows of our empty shops, at us.
Forgive me, Greatness. They had taken our world in a moment: and surely beings who could do that must be of titanic stature and grandeur. We wanted them to be tall and splendid, with shining eyes and heroic frames. But they were squat, they were coarse, they were ugly. They moved not with the grand swagger of overlords but in the slouching way of those doing a routine job, ordinary troops patrolling an ordinary little conquered planet.
I see you smiling again, Excellency. I know what you are thinking. Such airs this maula puts on! She dares complain that the soldiers of the Ansaar weren’t grand and awesome enough for her! But I want to speak only the truth. That is how we felt.
“We could kill them,” someone suggested. “Only three of them, and so many of us—”
“Perhaps we really could kill these three,” someone else answered. “And then others will come and burn the village down to the ground, and burn us with it.” And so we did nothing.
The three Ansaar settled in our town hall and made us come before them one by one. I could not stop staring, they seemed so strange to me, so repellent. Yes, Majesty, repellent. Yet though I was appalled by them I felt great curiosity too: who are these people who have crossed half the sky to take our world away from us, and why did they want to do it? They had a machine that turned what I said into words they could understand, and what they said into good clear Earth words. They said to me, “What special skill do you have, Laylah Walis?”
“I know how to learn. That is my skill.”
And as I said it I swore that I would discover for myself all that could be known about our conquerors.
Three days afterward there came a heavy knock at my door, and I heard an Ansaar voice. I was frightened, of course. I was alone. I remembered what I had been told about the Ansaar finding the women of Earth desirable.
But I feared refusing to open the door, so I let him in. He was one of the three from the town hall. I recognized him by a great welt of a birthmark across his face, like a cap worn low on his forehead. He was very short and very wide through the shoulders, and his greenish skin had a pebbled texture.
The New Space Opera Page 47