Appalachian Overthrow

by E. E. Knight

  Having expressed sympathy for the man, I’m now free to describe him as I knew him for that tiresome seven months. Of all the humans I’ve known well, he was remarkable in that he exhibited fewer virtues than any other individual I’ve met.

  We have a saying among our people, which I’ll translate, taking some liberty with the phraseology:

  When missing one, may just mean fun;

  Take two away, adds spice they say;

  When lacking three, thy purse keep to thee;

  Four or more, show him the door.

  In other words, those missing one virtue will probably be more companionable, for who can spend much time in the companionship of a saint without growing bored? Those without two will be fascinating to know, but I’d recommend not becoming too close to them. Those who show no signs of three virtues, never trust with money, and you’re better off entirely avoiding those missing four or more.

  The Golden One virtues share some similarities with human ones. For those interested, I will list them; the rest should skip ahead a page or two. In short, these virtues are empathy, truth, justness, reason, courage, fortitude, industry, salubrity, and generosity.

  Empathy—This virtue is usually called the first, because it is what separates the Golden One from the salbal.* Being able to put oneself upon the path of another, understand pain and desire to mitigate it, even knowing nothing of what challenges came behind and what obstacles stand before, is the bright shining line between sentience and bestiality. Unlike all the other virtues, its place is specifically listed in the Rhapsodies as the one that makes civilization possible. Empathy is a good place to start on one’s ascent, for it takes no money or skill—we each have all the tools in our minds and hearts already to practice this virtue.

  Truth—This virtue is at the heart of all others. While young, we’re often taught that one must always tell the truth. But that comes at the end of the path of this virtue, not the beginning. One must be able to look at oneself, others, and the world with clear eyes. Once one has trained himself to see the truth, then he can begin to attempt to speak it. The final step on the Ascent to Truth is teaching others how to see and speak it.

  Justness—Those who have gained some knowledge of truth, reason, and empathy may use it to pursue an ascent in justice. Without the three preceding virtues, justice would be nothing but chance-of-the-moment emotion.

  Reason—The Ascent to Reason is more challenging than it appears, at least for our kind. In the Golden One definition, the first step of the ascent is control of temper. We can be subject to blind furies when the animal brain reawakens in response to what may or may not be a threat. The smell of blood, for example—I know many men who are indifferent or barely aware of the odor, but it sets a Golden One on edge, ready for what your behaviorists call “fight-or-flight.” Humans seldom appreciate how quickly this can turn even the best Golden One dangerous. Under certain stimulus, our response is as quick as a leg-kick to a tap on the patella for a human. Reason must intercede, and quickly, or a tragedy may happen.

  Courage—Too many of my kind consider only the physical side of courage to matter. Of course, when the Reapers are shrieking on the other side of the door, it takes physical courage to kick it open and throw in the gasoline bomb. For those who’ve seen much battle in the fight against the Kur, they know there is also an ethical component to courage. A general must be able to order his men to die and be able to move on to the next decision, letting go of his own failure if necessary, as long as he learned by it.

  Fortitude—Life does not favor us all equally. A good deal of chance determines one’s fate. I have seen enough of life and battle to have a soldier’s realism about happy endings and just outcomes. The practice of the Virtue of Fortitude in adversity means keeping your other virtues even when it seems fate itself fights against you. Nothing inspires admiration more than seeing an impoverished man carefully scrubbing the stains out of his one shirt with a toothbrush and a bit of soap, or an exhausted charwoman taking a laboratory skills class.

  Salubrity—This is another collection of good habits, a very big barn that holds many different species of animal. It can mean personal hygiene, appropriate dress, physical fitness, attention to care of one’s teeth and hair, and proper grooming of the feet. Even getting enough sleep in an environment conducive to restoration and repose is part of Salubrity. While I have been filthy and tired many, many times in my life, I restore myself at the first reasonable opportunity. Appearance is deceptive, true, and the cleanliness of one’s hair reveals nothing about the quality of the thoughts passing beneath, but I have found more often than not that how one presents oneself is self-fulfilling. It aids one’s ascent like a mountaineer’s stick or can hasten a descent as well. Present yourself to the world as what you wish to be, whatever you are. I have been long among men and for much of that time those I met thought of our kind as bloodthirsty savages. By keeping my hair trimmed, my teeth and nails polished, my dress neat and orderly, my speech minimal, brief, and to the point, I was able to begin changing a lifetime’s prejudice and ignorance in a matter of moments. English is difficult, but, with practice, you can learn to speak better than most of the people you meet.

  Industry—This is a virtue that can mean both quality and quantity of your work. Part of this is how your work affects others: a Golden One who keeps an estate that supports nine families will benefit from extra respect for making it possible for others to honestly earn their bread and trade their butter. Industry can also mean accumulating the necessary skills to take your role in family and society.

  Generosity—This is the final virtue. Full exercise of this virtue’s path is possible only if the others are practiced and a few perfected. Generosity can mean hospitality to friends and visitors, the practice of charity, spending time and skill in helping others, acting as an example and mentor to the next generation. It is the virtue that gives the most satisfaction of all of them. A day spent in practicing generosity is a day you will look back on with pride.

  These are in my own order, though there are Golden One philosophies that place them in different groupings of thirds. There are the “at all times” virtues; the “daily” group; and finally the “endeavor” group, which includes those that rise to prominence above the others when carrying out a great duty to yourself or others. Sometimes, sadly, it is necessary to lie or become a coward to survive. I do not believe in self-immolation to keep to a philosophical principle. Some human philosophers have researched our Rhapsodies and drawn their own conclusions, recasting them as mind, body, and spirit. If it makes their life better and allows them to avoid or ease an ache, I certainly do not object.

  I apologize to anyone whom I’ve offended with this digression. I’ve no wish to proselytize. The Golden One Rhapsodies have found some human adherents and followers among those who work closely with us. To my mind, this is a positive sign for our future. I’m impressed with the human Judeo-Christian ethical system and have done my best to read a little of its major contributors. I see nothing in the Rhapsodies that prevents harmony between our strains of sentience beyond a few home-planet death rituals that humans may find distasteful.

  • • •

  The less said about the rest of my introduction to the palace, the better. It turned out that the vet mostly worked with horses, and the “kennels” housed a mix of dogs and Gray Ones who rotated between landscaping work, family farm duties, and nearby road maintenance, depending on the season. The vet had to look me up in a Xenoguide to determine normal blood pressure and heartbeat. His issue was badly out-of-date, and it had some bordering-on-laughable illustrations. It seemed not many Golden Ones made it to the other side of the Appalachians.

  They installed me behind the White Palace in the kennels—you could call it a barn or stable, divided into dog runs, chicken coops, and a few stalls for horses. In the white-painted basement, which still smelled faintly of pigs, there was some aged milking machinery along with a few partitions about the size of a mechani
c’s bay where the other Xenos slept and recreated.

  The Gray Ones of the White Palace loved their work and their life. There were three of them, just enough to set up a small tribal hierarchy of a chief and two followers. They were all well into maturity, so the burning need to prove themselves and court females had faded into comradeship of long standing. They had easy labor and superb food and a comfortable dwelling—they were probably the happiest residents of the White Palace.

  When I first saw them, I had thought I might be able to impress myself on them enough to take over the role of chief, as escape would be easier in a small group. Perhaps if I had worked with them every day, we would have jelled, but my schedule and theirs differed. They always worked with daylight; my schedule was irregular and required frequent overnights.

  They did give me some training, mostly on special rules of the road for the Coal Country, signal flare notations, and a few military hand signals.

  The most interesting of the road rules was the practice of following the firemen on calls. When a group of firemen in one of their vehicles had their whirling, blinking signal lights on, armed men of the Kurian Order in vehicles were to drop everything and follow behind and offer assistance, unless they were waved off by one of the firemen. I thought this a very strange rule until I learned the real role of the Coal Country firemen.

  As for the signal flares, it was a useful way of communicating in the mountains for divided parties with no radio. They were visible in all but the heaviest weather and loud enough to attract attention for miles. I learned the signals for “objective sighted” and “assistance required” and “return to base.” Any of the paramilitary commanders in the field had a corporal or two trailing him with a box of signal flares and a special small mortar for firing them.

  They must not have expected much of me tactically, for I only learned the hand signals for “Wait here” and “Follow me,” although it is true that a good deal of military activity can be said to boil down to one or the other. But then, if the Coal Country was employing three perfectly healthy Gray Ones shifting bales of straw, spreading gravel, pulling up scrub brush, and painting fencing, they must not have been experienced with just how effective they could be as scouts, snipers, and trackers.

  They didn’t have a uniform that fit me. The best they could manage was a cap.

  Much of the lower level of the White Palace was filled with workshops. There was an electronics shop, a machinist-cum-locksmith, a gunsmith, a cobbler’s area for shoes and boots, and a corner filled with tools for working leather. One of the larger working rooms was devoted just to reclaiming and recycling clothing and material.

  While my fur serves to keep me warm and dry, I have found through long years of association with humans that being dressed in a manner similar to them turns our interactions into sentient-to-sentient, rather than those of a man interacting with a dancing bear. Also, I’m less likely to get a bullet fired into me by an overzealous hunter.

  I found some cargo netting and fashioned a long tunic undershirt out of it, so my fur would have some airflow around it. I closed it with carabiner clips, one of the handiest things to have on you in the wilderness. It never hurts to have some netting handy, either, when you need to make a bag or shelter.

  Next I fixed a knee-length kilt, using a woolen blanket. I found a discarded set of chaps and took one to fashion into a girdle when I had more time to work with it. I rooted through a huge old bureau filled with tiny drawers and found some studs, spring-closed hook-and-eye loops such as you find on a dog leash, and tough thread for the leather. There were many beautiful pieces of furnishings tucked down here showing the craft that went into each drawer pull and beveled edge, still gorgeous despite the battering of heavy use. Upstairs the Maynes family preferred clean, utilitarian lines and the atrocity of enamel paints over wood grain.

  Gloves that fit would be out of the question, but an old leather doctor’s bag had some wonderful lined leather that could be used for improvising a fingerless set, and I could put a protective iron band across the knuckles. A little extra heft and protection to a blow never hurt.

  I wear hats and helmets only in extremes, preferring to give my ears full play to sweep my surroundings (I’m often asked whether the rotations and angles are deliberate. They aren’t, unless I’m concentrating on listening to a specific noise).

  I have found through long experience that truck tires make excellent footwear once properly fitted to a moccasin—another project for idle hours.

  • • •

  A land shapes (if not makes) its people, Hok-Tkrah* tells us.

  The people of the Coal Country lived in a manner as timeless as their hills, at times as secretive as their forests.

  The Coal Country people believed in some sense of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence sense. I heard the phrase “You can’t do this to me” several times during my years there. There was a sense that as long as you stayed out of trouble, you were safe. In some of the more remote areas, they perhaps even felt free to start trouble with the knowledge that the Order would not spend the resources to hunt them down.

  I have spent time in Kurian Zones where everyone acted, and often looked, like a convict with a noose around his neck waiting for the trapdoor to be pulled. In the Coal Country, the people walked with something of the swagger I recognized from the freeholds west of the Mississippi.

  For example, once while waiting for Maynes to return from some grotty room above a bar with one of his press-gang victims of the day, I watched two women walking arm in arm along the sidewalk back from the market, lightly laden. A pair of firemen coming in the other direction made room for the ladies. Both very pointedly spat on the sidewalk in front of the firemen. They were good-sized, burly men. An insult such as that could have been met with violence; it would have in New Orleans (in Atlanta at the very least they would have been arrested and had their friends and family investigated).

  Minor vandalism sometimes hampered, or just irritated, the firemen, troopers, and Maynes security forces. Tires would be flattened or punctured; locks would be disabled. The New Universal Church rarely had such difficulties; either the locals believed they were an innocuous part of the regime—they might have felt differently had they known that the Church kept more detailed records of the individuals in a community than the security services—or they saw the churchmen as being of some benefit to the community.

  Of course, in the Coal Country, the Kurian Order ruled with a lighter hand. Which leads to a chicken-or-the-egg argument over whether the obstinacy and, at times, violence of the people forced the Order to tread lightly, or the easy treatment by the rules gave the average person a little more courage in asserting himself.

  From what I have been able to learn, the people of Virginia, home to so many political philosophers of the United States’ founding, were much like those in every other Kurian Zone.

  I suppose I should outline the larger situation in the eastern half of North America in the 2070s. Living memory is brief, after all, and I suspect I do not have many years left as I recompile this diary.

  The most powerful faction of the Kurian Order in Eastern North America was the Georgia Control. It had a skilled and creative populace, a professional technocratic class acting as intermediaries between the Kurian overlords and the populace, and an ecclesiastical hierarchy that was constantly nudged to improve its social role. They had an arms industry unmatched in North America, and one of the best equipped military forces in the world at the time.* The broad seacoast allowed trade. There were even flights out of the old Atlanta airport to South America, Europe, and Africa for the desultory trade and diplomacy the Kurians practiced when the mood struck.

  Its strength was also its weakness: so much of its power flowed through channels of long use that it had become calcified and cirrhotic, lacking the ability to imagine consequences that could threaten its position.

  On paper, the Northwest Ordnance looked powerful, stretching from Pennsylvan
ia to the borders of friendly Chicago, with trade coming in from the Great Lakes and the New England patchwork of principalities, but it was actually a rather ramshackle construct, a poor imitation of the Georgia Control.

  The eastern seaboard had a similar network of Kurian fiefdoms, but without even the appearance of a unified political structure, only the Church and a few able administrators kept the jealous and grasping Kurians from executing their endless vendettas and feuds in a manner that was too harmful to the populace. I never made it to the formerly great metropolis-states of Boston or New York or Philadelphia, but I am told that the humans there showed an amazing resilience, with little neighborhoods getting on with their lives and ignoring the Kurians as best as they could. From what I heard from those who’d grown up there and left for the green of the Coal Country mountains, your loyalty toward those of your neighborhood was absolute, with outsiders picked out and turned over so the rest of the neighborhood remained untroubled. In that region there was a very lucrative trade in “substitutions”—dealers in warm bodies who would trade one aura for another if a family had the money to redeem a member picked up by the Order for a minor offense. West Virginia, like much of the Appalachian Trail, was hunting ground for those who supplied the substitutions.

  In this environment, the oddities of the east were Kentucky and the Coal Country. Kentucky was ranching country for the fleshy legworms that provided ample, if unappetizing, protein that was ground up, flavored, and packaged into any number of premade meals (WHAM! being the most famous, still available for those who’ve developed a taste for its rather chewy blend of protein and fiber), and the Coal Country made energy. Of the two, the Kentucky legworm clans were the more independent; the nature of their herds meant they had a certain amount of independence, as they had to follow their voracious beasts, chewing up sod at one long end and depositing a rich mixture of fertilized, aerated soil at the other.