War World Discovery
Page 7
Each sought his own path for a few moments; Farrow was devoted to Costanza, and though many Harmonies found some of the Deacon’s interpretations—unsettling—still, he was regarded as a voice of vision.
For himself, Costanza fretted constantly over the Harmonies; they needed so much care and tending to protect them. They were babes in the woods, and they did not understand that those woods were full of peril. The Harmony of existence was a song of many movements, many parts, and though all, by definition, harmonized, not all were pleasant to hear. And despite the order’s belief in harmonizing one’s self to circumstances and events, Costanza knew that every great orchestration needed conductors.
His own song was thus sometimes a lonely one. But he was grateful that he and Farrow had been caretakers of this garden where such seeds of Harmony had been sown.
“Let the blood of those who lie here nourish the seeds of the Song thus begun, and let such fruits flourish and in measures everlasting.”
…flourish, and multiply…
From Crofton’s Encyclopedia of Contemporary History and Social Issues (1st Edition)
BUREAU OF CORRECTIONS
The Bureau of Corrections was one of the first administrative bureaus created by the CoDominium Council in the late-1990s. The Bureau operates as a supranational police force responsible for removing troublesome and repeat criminals off Earth and housing them either in the Sol System or on the outer worlds. It performs a critical function for the CoDominium super powers, serving as a pressure valve for both the US and USSR, whose many overcrowded prisons are filled with violent and habitual offenders. Most of these hardcore prisoners are not only threats to civil peace but extremely expensive to jail and maintain on Earth.
The Bureau’s presence on Earth is limited to two major collection depots (Lompoc Prison in the US and Vladimirsky Central, aka Prison No. 2, in the USSR) for criminal transportees. BuCorrect has been restricted to the maintenance and overseeing of these two criminal detention depots and those offices necessary to transport prisoners to near-Earth orbit. The Bureau of Corrections maintains in-system prisons at Luna Base, Ceres Base and is rumored to have a top-secret, secure facility on one of Saturn’s moons.
It wasn’t until habitable planets were discovered outside the Sol System that it was decided to maintain out-of-system prisons. The primary of these is Fulson’s World, a frigid and desolate outpost, which at the current time is the major CoDominium prison world. Tanith is also becoming an important depository for Earth’s criminal element.
The Bureau of Correction’s authority was increased in the early 2000s to include dangerous political prisoners. This has more than doubled the number of prisoners the Bureau of Corrections has had to warehouse and transport, putting a strain both on their limited staff and budget.
A new development in the transport of criminals has been the shipping of prisoners to newly settled colony worlds in an attempt to save scarce funds due to recent budgetary restrictions. The Bureau of Corrections does not have its own fleet and thus must “borrow” troop transport ships from the Fleet, rent passenger liners from private firms or farm the prisoners out to private concerns. Many of the young colony worlds, Kennicott and Hadley come to mind, do not have the resource base or police resources to deal with the sudden arrival of thousands of hardened criminals. This practice has been roundly condemned in the Grand Senate by colonial governors, the Humanity League and the Prisoners’ Rehabilitation Council.
Another recent development has been to send prisoners on empty mining transports on their way to pick up payloads from the outer worlds. The newly discovered world of Comstock provides a good example of this phenomenon, where there’s not a big enough, or wealthy enough, population base to profitably ship trade items and necessities. Prisoners have been reported arriving on Comstock aboard Anaconda Mining transports. The living conditions aboard these spacecraft are reputed to be inhumane and overcrowded. It’s not uncommon for 5 to 10% of the transportees to die before reaching their destination.
BuCorrect claims that most of these shipboard “deaths” are due to turf fights and revenge killings among the prisoners. This practice has been criticized as inhumane by the Humanity League, who claim that not only are these ships overcrowded, but the artificial foodstuffs provided the transportees is clearly substandard and “fit only for livestock, not human beings.”
There have also been reports that on some of the wealthier planets large landowners and mining companies have been paying unscrupulous and corrupt BuCorrect officers to ship them criminal colonists who are then “charged” a large indenture fee for shipment, which they then have to work off, leaving them slaves in all but name. There have also been numerous complaints about female prisoners who have been auctioned off to colonists as “wives” or to brothels without pay and minimal benefits. Officials who follow-up on these charges are often “disappeared” or are murdered off-world.
While there is substantial truth to these complaints, there is little chance for a remedy as long as the Bureau of Corrections has to stay within current budgetary constraints. This state of affairs will continue until the CoDominium Council makes a supreme effort to clean-up corruption within the Bureau and the Grand Senate allocates enough funds to hire responsible and dedicated personnel.
The recent creation of the Bureau of ReLocation to deal with troublesome minorities, subversives and malcontents has added to the Bureau of Corrections difficulties, causing a loss of over a third of the Bureau of Corrections’ budget. The “logic” being that the new Bureau of ReLocation will be handling many of the political prisoners and minorities that BuCorrect had to deal with. However, due to increasing criminal activity and new nationalistic uprisings worldwide, it is doubtful there will be any lowering of the number of bodies that the Bureau has to place and warehouse. Since they were under-funded before this cut, this leaves the Bureau without the staff or the funds to properly ship and care for the hundreds of thousands of dangerous prisoners that pass through the Department’s aegis on a yearly basis.
Unless conditions on Earth change dramatically, ongoing social disorder and corruption on Earth will cause the CoDominium’s Bureau of Corrections to continue forcibly transporting prisoners from Earth to off-world colonies by any and all available means whether the prisoners are welcome or unwelcome.
— 4 —
IN CONCERT
E R Stewart
I
2038 A.D., Haven
They say Charles Castell knelt and kissed the ground when he arrived on Haven, but I know better because I’m the oaf who tripped him. My name’s Kev Malcolm, and at sixteen standard years of age, I stood beside our leader in the open side hatch, half proud to be one of the reverend’s acolytes, half scared to death I’d do something clumsy.
Sure enough, as the freighter’s shuttle was winched against the dock, I somehow got my foot in the wrong place.
Castell smiled, I remember that. His gaze scanned the horizon of Haven, his world, his church’s place of salvation. “Eden,” he whispered. I looked up at his face so serious and serene, with its strong nose and jutting chin. Just looking at him got me giddy. Power was ours, I knew, because we were blessed. We knew the key-note of the Cosmos, and we Harmonized fully, our bodies and souls as one with the All.
Fishy freshwater breezes entered the hatch now, wafting away some of the stench of the transport.
The last leg of our journey had been accomplished in a freighter, with us as piggyback cargo. At nine hundred souls, we were too few to justify, or to afford, hiring an entire transport, which can carry, they say, up to fifteen thousand people. I’d hate to imagine such crowding, and turned my attention back to my immediate surroundings.
We heard sounds of water lapping, a lone bird or something calling out in harsh joy, and the murmur at our backs of the nine hundred Chosen, each eager for a first glimpse of the new, the promised, land. With darkness behind us, we stood in the hatch in orange light, squinting.
I studie
d Reverend Castell’s eyes, seeking a clue. Did he see his destiny as he absorbed the first sights of his hard-won, costly last chance? Did he smell on the chilly air a cornucopia of plenty, or the stench of decay? Were any of his senses of this world, or all?
Someone said our First Prayer, “Be still as the silence/At the heart of the note/As it swells to fill the song,” as if intoning a hymn, and Reverend Castell broke his pose to step forward. The shuttle bumped the dock.
The next thing I knew, a look of surprise crossed his face and he sprawled forward onto the dirt levee on which the dock was built.
So it was that my first step onto our new home was a leap of consternation and mortification. “Reverend,” I said, along with three other acolytes kneeling to help him rise. Knowing it had been my foot which had caused this undignified advent upon Haven, I blushed and tried to stammer an apology.
His electric gray eyes sparked a gaze toward me. That old familiar tingle of, what? Awe? Terror? It held me, that feeling, and my mouth fumbled into silence as he said, “We must all embrace our home, this Haven.” And he gestured for us to lie down, too.
Word passed back in a chain of whispers as near to silence as the circumstance allowed, and the next few Chosen jumped down from the ship and fell prostrate for a few seconds. It was the inauguration of Reverend Castell’s ritual of return, which he used at the termination of every journey thereafter.
Of course the ship’s crew jeered and shouted catcalls. Our church had hired their transport ship and a crew, but we hadn’t even made a bid for their support or loyalty. “Clumsy lot,” one tough said. Another spat at us repeatedly. To them, we were rag-tag fanatics off on some wild goose hegira, a doomed group of dupes led by a megalomaniac with a simplistic Christ complex.
I’d heard all that and more, during our purgatorial months of motion between Earth and Haven, and not all of it muttered or whispered, either. We bore their assaults upon our dignity with stoic silence, some of us not even bothering to wipe the spittle from our faces or hair.
Some of us may have wondered of what use a tiny act of cleanliness might be to a group as filthy as we, after fourteen months in the transport vessel, washing with gritty dry soap and handheld ionizers, perfumed only by the food-pastes smeared or spilled. Odors were among the least of our burdens, anyway. Old bruises from tests of our pacifism, administered by the ship’s brutal crew bored between duties, kept some of us moving stiffly.
Also, at least one of our women was probably pregnant from a rape I’d unknowingly witnessed one sleep-period, when, in utter silence, the blanketed bunk-pallet next to mine had erupted into thrashing. Only when the crewman rose up from his victim had I realized what had occurred, and my shame and fury were such that I barely spoke for a week as I sought harmony with the event.
Now I shivered as I watched the others jump down from the hatch.
One of the men in a rowboat, still holding the rope by which the shuttle had been winched to shore after splashdown, called out lewd suggestions to our women and girls. I saw at least one of our men grow somber. His eyes grew hard and his mouth set sternly, for one of the prettiest women was his daughter, but none of us broke the peace as we sought to harmonize with the strains of Haven.
I stood with Reverend Castell to one side as he supervised both the advent of his flock upon Haven and the unloading of our supplies. “Each of us must do our part,” he said once, bending to lift a parcel that a contemptuous crewmember had dropped. Smiling, Reverend Castell carried it to the stack of goods growing on the splintery bare-plank wharf, a reminder of Kennicott’s presence. Although our supplies had all fit into the same shuttle that had brought us down from the orbiting transport vessel, they were sufficient to keep us going for as many as three years, even if Haven granted us nothing.
A shudder rippled through me as I avoided thinking past those three years. I bent to lift a sack of seeds, but a brother acolyte stopped me. “Let our beasts of burden do the heavy work,” he said, gesturing at the laboring, infidel crewmembers.
Glancing at the joker, Reverend Castell said, “Take that man’s place, and give him a rest.” He pointed to a particularly loudmouthed space-faring lout, who had berated us worse with every bag and crate he carried.
Keeping my gaze on the hem of my robe, I balanced my conflicting humors and thought I understood the reverend’s actions. “An aspect of respect is the ability to know another’s lot in life,” now made more sense to me. It was no longer just a tenet from the Writings.
A crane and several hoists helped complete our unloading, but it was past first, or Byers’ dusk by the time we finished. By then we acolytes had done as much as anyone else, and the freighter’s crew was largely loafing or drinking in the one-room, rickety shebeen the wharf’s ratty skeleton crew had slapped together a few yards from shore.
Faces showed fatigue, but a few showed more. Some openly grumbled, others gaped at the bleak landscape surrounding them as if trapped, and all of us shivered in our robes. My own hood I kept up, but many seemed to enjoy having their ears turn blue. Rubbing the tip of my nose helped, but only for a few seconds.
Aside from the cold was the air itself, which seemed somehow hard to breathe, unsatisfying to the lungs. A ringing in my ears and a dizziness assailed me, too, but I ignored such trifles in my earnest desire to be worthy of the reverend’s respect and trust. Being an acolyte to such a man is no small thing, and no small things can be allowed to interfere.
As the Shangri-La Valley was turned away from Byers’ Star for a time, Cat’s Eye peered down in quarter phase, its horizontal pupil balefully dark as the rest cast dim light over us. Jagged mountains tore at the bottom of the sky in menacing silhouette, while the lake itself glittered phosphorescent blue-green flashes and orange Eyeshine. I think I saw Hecate, or Ayesha, or Brynhild, one of Haven’s companion moons, but it may have been something else, or nothing outside my overloaded mind.
“Our balbriggans don’t suffice, Reverend Castell said to me, having noticed my shivers. His use of Gaelic words meant he was in a mood, I knew. “We must layer.” He tapped the satchel I carried for him and I put it on the ground. He knelt and tugged out another robe as plain and pocketless as the one he wore. “Pass the word,” he said, a grimace of meaning on his face.
Sibilance behind us was the only hint that the Chosen had heard and obeyed. It struck me that some of us had been waiting only for an example, because no sooner was the Reverend Castell layered in the rough cotton cloth, than many of the Chosen were pulling on their second or third garments. Surely they’d had them out ahead of time.
Such thoughts are best not voiced, however, so I donned my second robe and bowed my head, awaiting further commands. Patience is the lot of followers, who, if they know well their place and abilities, can be of far greater use than any number of discordant individuals howling on their own behalf, for in harmony is strength. So we teach.
“I must speak with the captain of our blessed transport vessel,” Reverend Castell then said to me, as head acolyte. “Stay here and contemplate the start of our great salvation.”
As he walked away I chanted the fugue called “Patience Is the Art of Elegant Timing,” shivering only a little now and worried more about my stomach, which rumbled and growled enough to pain me.
“Sixty-four and three quarters hours,” one of the other acolytes said in a tone of disgust. “That means when Eyeclipse comes, it’ll be only light from the other moons for the next twenty hours or so.” He sarcastically waved his hand in front of his face, as if blind in the dimness of Cat’s Eye. “No suntans here, eh? It’s windtan or nothing, unless the frostbite gets you.”
None laughed and the jester fell silent.
Haven’s night interested me. Reportedly it would never get fully dark, but I thought I’d rather wait and see for myself, experience it. Those CoDo maps lists and descriptions of habitable worlds tend to change after settlement, I knew. They changed especially drastically with the marginal worlds, like Haven.
With a shrug, I went back to concentrating on my empty belly, and how best to ignore it, or at least nullify its demands. My eyes kept seeing, however, and my ears kept hearing and curiosity flared in me like lashes of plasma from a furious star.
My senses tempted me into the new world, so I studied it a little. The orangered tinge of Eyelight allowed sight, but with a diminished sharpness of image, as if details had been carefully erased to allow the world a greater freedom of generality. That idea shuddered through me as I wondered what this place might show us if, or when, it decided to get specific with us.
My heart thumped and thudded. My limbs felt alternatively heavy and light, never normal. My eyes watered and I blinked away the tears. Cold seeped inward, confident of final victory on this bleak soulscape.
After the ennui, the torture, the oppression of the transport ship, however, that cold ground in the dim light beside our small hillock of stacked supplies was at the very least an edge of paradise to us, and few complained aloud. Mothers sang to children, while fathers hummed along. Children chattered and laughed, playing timeless games. Bodies shifted weight and the chill air cleaned us of one another’s scents even as a few hardy souls visited the lake’s edge for baths of an icier kind.
It was a moment of peace, and I was astute enough to savor it, even in my hunger, or perhaps because of it. Hunger imparts a meditative calm at times. At any rate, our peace was short-lived.