by Greg Curtis
The problem was that even though it had been two hundred years earlier, the religious conflicts were well remembered. When many of the faiths had started preaching violence and hatred. They had been used as justification for terrorism and war. And while as the Edenites told him, the real reasons were hatred, poverty and oppression, religion had taken the blame for the evil.
The only exception to the nightmare had been Christianity, though even they had eventually formed some nasty terrorist groups and sects. In part they told him, that was because the teachings of Jesus had specifically forbidden violence. ‘Though shalt not kill’ and ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, had become their watchwords. Messages that were preached from every pulpit. But partly it was also because Christianity had undergone some enormous changes, and had lost much of its voice with the people. Even had they preached violence they couldn’t have achieved the same effect as they might have centuries before.
Regardless, Christianity, along with every other major religion, had been punished by the authorities. Its practice had been largely restricted and even driven underground. Schools taught that religion - all of it - was illogical and ran against the orderly running of society. It was both disloyal and dangerous. Despite that, by the early twenty third century when the Interstellar Community had become known and humans were making their first forays back into space, Christianity had begun its resurgence. Not as a political power base; just as a belief. People were returning to the church, and its followers were once more multiplying worldwide.
By the year 2227, Christians numbered a full tenth of the entire world’s population, and while they didn’t aim to be a political force, they had become one regardless. In that year, a new crisis had beset the world, an economic one as the World Bank had unexpectedly collapsed. It was difficult to maintain an economy when your most important trading partners had no such thing as money. It was worse when those same partners were also your expected future. Disorder and chaos had surely been peeking over the horizon. But the church had rescued them, pointing out strongly that what goes around comes around. The Lord had preached peace, and they needed to remember that even when things seemed dark. Money was irrelevant.
That year had been both a bad one for the world as they went through the painful ructions of change, and finally gave away capitalism as a bad idea, and a great one as they discovered peace and community. As a reward, and Daryl suspected, partly to ease tensions between the church and state, the newly found world of C144, had been granted to the church to establish a new colony, and New Eden was founded.
Life on their new world had been hard in some ways. The ships of the day could not carry much in the way of heavy equipment, and most of what they did carry was the machinery needed to build other machinery. But the world was also generous and kind. Its weather was a perfect balance of warmth and coolness, the rain a pleasure, and the soil rich and excellent for the growing of Earthly plants. The world’s own life had barely progressed beyond the evolution of worms and basic plants, thus Earthly plants quickly gained a foothold and then took over control of the ecosystem.
In a few short years an alien planet had been terra-formed into a new Earth. It quickly became an agricultural world, and soon was transporting back food to Earth, while accepting machined goods in return. By 2235 they’d also established trade routes with the two other colonies, Hope and Foothold. Both of them, while also viable worlds in their own right, were settled because of their extensive mineral deposits. The terra-forming work on both was far from complete, and likely to be another fifty years away from turning them into Earth like worlds. Earth also appreciated the extra food, and the transports returned from them loaded with ore and minerals.
The following year, the fifth coloniser vessel arrived and the population hit ten thousand. The first continent was already turning into a giant farm, and two others were being transformed into wild life preserves for species on the edge of extinction at home. The New Edenites formed their first embassy, more a house in which the aliens from some of the nearer planets could stay if they chose to visit. There was little of any value to them on New Eden but some chose to visit from time to time, mainly as a courtesy.
They also had their first permanent diplomatic posting arrive, an ambassador from the world of Kaiwha, only sixteen light years away. Merely a junior diplomat, he was nevertheless welcomed and given a house of his own. It was the neighbourly thing to do. They were known far and wide even then for their peaceful ways, and had been welcomed early into the Community. They didn’t actually have warships, choosing instead to rely on the Force for their protection.
The Kaiwhare were a species only a little further along than the humans themselves. They had been welcomed into the Community less than twenty standard years earlier, and it was hoped that in another five or ten years when the Earth was finally accepted, the Kaiware would be able to grant them some of their wisdom. It was a position the diplomat seemed to look forward to.
In 2237 a record number of births pushed the population to just over eleven thousand, and they opened their first university. Mainly agricultural and medical courses were on offer to students who wanted to stay instead of returning to Earth for their education, but it was considered a major step for the fledgling colony, and they had declared a public holiday. They also formalised their political system having democratically elected a mayor and council, and laid down plans for the formation of a second town, three hundred klicks further inland.
There they hoped to get the wheat fields truly bursting, and start work on the great forests. Fast growing pines had been planted on some of the other continents, and in another ten years or so, they would be ready for harvest. But on their first continent, they wanted to plant other more exciting trees. Maples and cedars. Mighty oaks and giant redwoods. Trees that were threatened if not almost extinct on Earth.
The colony also gained its first transport ship that year. A sturdy little freighter called the Prosperity. It was to transport their wares directly, limiting their reliance on Earth Fleet vessels. In time they hoped to turn it into a small fleet of traders. The prosperity’s first load to Earth brought back with it some of their most precious cargos yet. Two advanced model weather satellites, and an automated factory that could produce agricultural equipment as fast as they needed it.
2238 was a difficult year for the colony. An unexpected change in the weather patterns brought cooler temperatures and more rain. Yields of their staples were down, wheat, corn, sugarcane and most fruit. But other crops took up the slack, most notably the watermelons and rice. Changes in harvest patterns had to be made and most of the colonists spent long backbreaking days in the fields while they waited for new machinery to arrive. But by the middle of the year the Prosperity had brought a second factory with it, and soon the machines it turned out by the scores were taking the manual labour out of their farming.
Three more diplomats arrived from the Interstellar Community, preparing for the day then thought to be only five short years away when the Earth would join them. They brought with them a Force research vessel that would be based there while it carried out surveys of the nearer worlds. The ambassadors he learned had all been killed in the attack, something Daryl hadn’t known about. He wondered if his people had been told. An attack not just on their own citizens, which was terrible enough, but also on ambassadors from the Community. It was a miracle it hadn’t developed into an all out war.
Then came 2239. A year from which the colony had expected great things. A second freighter was on order, and crop yields were expected to rise once more as the weather patterns had shifted back to their normal cycle. A small deposit of iridium, platinum and gold had been discovered under the central plateau and its mountain range, and from it they hoped to have the beginnings of a fledgling antigrav manufacture facility in perhaps another ten years. But while such deposits were valuable, they didn’t really constitute much of a reason for war, unless there were much greater concentrations on
the world. Daryl decided to ask the Force if they had ever carried out a more detailed geological survey of the world. And if so whether extensive mineral deposits had been found, and who had rights to the world now. That at least could be a motive.
By the middle of the year the second freighter, Endeavour had arrived and begun work. The crop yields were higher than expected, and a sixth coloniser was being readied back on Earth. Two thousand more colonists would be arriving in another six months and preparations were already under way to receive them. New houses were being built, another school was also under construction, and extensions were being made to the colony’s hospital and fledgling university. Everything seemed to be perfect.
Then one fine day in a month they had called June, five days before the holiday they had declared as Founders’ Day, their world came falling apart. Actually it was in the evening, and in the dark of night the fear and chaos couldn’t have been greater.
As the first cataclysmic detonations had begun, no one had had any idea of what was happening. At first they had thought it was a series of earthquakes and had hidden in their houses while they tried to understand how a world so stable could suddenly turn so violent. But earthquakes didn’t come with supersonic shock waves a few minutes or half an hour after the blast. Shock waves that had destroyed the town’s main buildings as though they were made of tissue paper. Nor did they come with large doses of gamma radiation.
As blast after blast had come upon them from all sides and the people found themselves with nowhere to hide, they had individually realised that the caves a couple of miles to the north of the town were their best, and only hope. One by one, and in small family groups they had started running for them. But not many had made them.
The shock waves when they came were so powerful and so fast that even a running man would not have time to throw himself to the ground before they hit. One second there was a distant wall of dust towering on the dark horizon, the next they were being hurled through the air. Even one lying down might not survive as pieces of trees, and dirt and rocks, came at them like missiles. In fact the only reason any of them had survived was because the early blasts were hundreds of klicks off target. The shock waves were weakened by the distance.
In time, maybe half the town had made the caves. Not all had thought of them in their fear and panic, and many many more had been killed trying to get to them. Those that had made it were in terrible condition. The injuries were severe and many knew they would die with or without medical help. But worse was yet to come.
The ships could only fire one plasma bomb every half hour or so, though the colonists had no idea of that. They probably weren’t even aware they were being bombed. They thought for a while that the worst was over as the first series of blasts had ended. They were so wrong. The second and third waves had come too quickly, and many who had ventured too far from the caves to survey the scene and even help the fallen were killed. And some of these waves were far closer to the target.
The closest one they later learned was a mere one hundred and fifty klicks from their town, and the shock wave was worse than a thousand hurricanes as it levelled everything around them. Anyone still outside was killed instantly, and even many of those within the caves died as they discovered a new threat; rock collapse. From the end of the third wave of bombings, they were entombed in a rock coffin, most badly injured and all suffering from radiation poisoning as the gamma radiation simply raced through the rock as though it wasn’t there.
Those deeper down in the caves, received some shelter from the radiation, but traded that for the dangers of being cut off further from the surface by more cave ins. It wasn’t an easy choice as to where and how you wanted to die.
The Elders told him at great length of their time in that rock tomb, as wave after wave of blasts shook them and they held their families, and watched them die one by one. It must have been hell. There was anger and hatred in their voices, and Daryl could understand that. He could even feel it too for those who had done such an evil thing. But there was more pain, as they relived their nightmares. Sorrow for those they had lost, and a world that had been destroyed, for New Eden would not be habitable for at least another century.
Perhaps even worse than the death and dying, and the waiting to die, was that while they lay trapped there, they'd still had no idea what had happened. A few of them had reported seeing fire trails high in the atmosphere as they’d been arriving, though not many had taken the time to look up as they ran, and for a while they wondered if some stray meteor storm had crossed their planet’s path. But the system had no meteors and they had no other explanation. And with no understanding of what had happened, they had no way of knowing if and when it might return.
It had taken days and weeks for them to be dug out. Though to them it had seemed far longer, as they watched their loved ones die, and tended as best they could to their wounds and smelled the air turn sour. They had of course, no real hope of survival, as they had no understanding that anybody outside could have survived to dig them out. They never considered the Interstellar Community as their allies in their pain, and so when they were dug out one by one, it came as a shock to see them there with cutters, rescuing them.
But it was while they were on the sick bays of the hundreds of ships that had eventually arrived to care for them, that they had learned the truth. It was then of course that the hatred had begun. First the disbelief, as they couldn’t understand why anyone, let alone the Earth would want to harm them, and later the rage as they watched the records of the attack and knew it was so.
For many of them that hatred was a palpable thing, and they had begged the Force to attack the Earth and its murderous people. But many of them, in fact nearly all of them still had family on Earth, and they also understood that they couldn’t harm one without the other. Besides, violence, was something that their beliefs did not permit.
Later had come the pain and the grief, as the survivors had finally learned to bury their anger, though not too deep, and mourn their dead and missing. The few pastors who had survived carried out services in the hospital ships, trying to help them cope with the unthinkable, but most of them were not much better off they themselves. Besides, it was hard to forgive when they didn’t even know why. Why would anybody have done such a thing? It became harder still when they heard of the lies the Earth Government had told their people.
It was a long slow healing process, and not just for their battered and broken bodies. For their souls. Many did not truly make it past that hatred. Some of them went mad, and others turned inward and hid themselves away. Those who had lost children were often simply too hurt to ever forgive. But over the years most had found some form of peace.
They could not forgive nor forget, but in time and with a lot of patience and prayer, they learned to suppress their suffering and get on with their lives. Especially when the new children arrived. For some couples, some children and even some pregnant mothers had survived. The children were of course a miracle, as they always were, and they brought hope and some belief in a future.
Early on the Force had decided not to tell the Earth of the survivors, fearing that they might believe the job was not done, and try again. After all, they had no understanding of why the attack had been carried out in the first place. The survivors, when they could think about such things, agreed with their view. For over the years they had come to the view that it was their religion that was the reason for their attack. Surely there could be nothing else? And many of their families back on Earth were just as religious. If the authorities ever realised that some had survived the attack they might use their families as levers to continue their assault on them.
In time, the children that had survived grew up and had families of their own. More children who had no personal memory of the tragedy, but who had to find new lives in the Community because of it. Many of them had found that they needed a future, and from the beginning the Force was an attractive proposition. Not only could it offer a wid
e variety of career paths for them, but it was also the vehicle of their people’s deliverance from hell, and they owed it their very existence. It was only natural that so many of them should choose to join it.
In their tenth year on Haven, the Elders and their pastors finally came to an understanding of their future and they swore a pact with their Lord. They could see how their hatred was twisting their lives, and knew something had to be done. Not for them. They knew it was probably too late for them. The nightmares had taken hold in their very souls. But they had to save their children from the evil that was their hatred.
They took an oath that day to bury their hatred so far and so deep that their children would never see it. Never be contaminated by it. Perhaps it wasn’t a perfect option, and Daryl knew it hadn’t worked entirely. How could it, after such a monstrous act had been done to them? Many of their descendants were still angry, pact or no pact. But it was a noble gesture, and it too humbled him. He wondered if in their shoes he could have done the same, and knew he would be a lucky man if he never had to find out.