by Moshe Ben-Or
How many worlds in today’s Known Space had been terraformed for their commercial real estate value? Tiantiju, of course. Miranda. Berten and Guntag. Maybe a dozen others, in various stages of completion when the nova bombs had gone off.
And the others?
Who had seeded life amid the erupting calderas and marching glaciers of Haven? Who had brought a man-sustaining ecology to the broiling deserts of New Israel? Who had terraformed flare-scarred Volantis and Xing, meteor-poked New Helena and Tienchen, radioactive Dove and toxic Paradise? Who had enabled human survival on tidally-locked Bretogne, on unpredictably-metastable Sparta, on Novaya Zemlya, whose axis of rotation pointed at its primary for half the orbital period on end, on Hadassah, with its massively variable star, and on all the rest? Who had paid to seed life in distant backwaters where no one seeking commercial gain would ever want to go? Who had made it possible to sustain even stone-age people on planets where no rational Golden Age man would have ever considered living even armed with all the marvelous technology of that time? Who had collected, peseta by peseta, the funds necessary for such quixotic projects? Who had spent lifetimes obsessing over what everyone else had called nonsense? Who had been laughed at by all rational men? Who had picketed offices and palaces and gone to prison and forgone their life savings in the name of sending robots out into the sterile depths, to sprinkle worthless dustballs with pond scum and lichen? Why had they done it, those crazed cultists?
And what did the Poly Girls feel, when they looked upon the windows that would decorate their half of the Temple’s nave, the Labors of the Goddess that ran counterpart, pane for pane, to the tireless Labors of the Beast?
Did they not see themselves as they watched Her bind the Beast’s wounds and comfort Him in His pain, take away His vast loneliness and turn His threadbare dwelling into a Home and give precious purpose to His meaningless existence?
Did they not draw their life lessons from Her as She went, thanks to Her Mighty Beast’s tireless efforts, from hunger to plenty, from freezing nakedness to warm clothes, from pitiful cave to comfortable palace?
Did their every glance not drive another nail into the coffin of the poisonous old world as they watched Her, pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, surrounded by ever more children and pregnant in pane, after pane, after pane as She walked upon distant shores and brought Life wherever She went, as She summoned forth greenery under domes amid the airless desolation of the regolith desert, as She blessed Her Mighty Beast for labor and for battle, as She taught Her many children the foundations of all that was Worthwhile and Good?
Did they not feel one with Her as She guided the entire universe, ever so gently, to eternal Civilization, Prosperity and Peace?
Were the poisonous lies of the old world not laid low before their very eyes? She was not enslaved, nor was She demeaned in Her arrangement. She was the fulcrum, She was the linchpin, She was the axis about which all things revolved. She captivated the Beast with Her Mighty Weapons. She controlled Him through Her Sacred Way. Hers was the True Power. Hers was the True Purpose. Hers were the True Pride, the Sacred Labor and the Holy Mission. The Beast toiled for Her.
Dean Weinberger turned from the window, setting aside his teacup. Penny was blushing ever so slightly. He could see it spreading down her throat. Beneath the thin fabric of her blouse, her nipples were stiff as buttons.
She’d taken something, though the professor as he unbuttoned his secretary’s blouse. Some stimulant, to help loosen her inhibitions. Garcia had supplied it, no doubt. Were the fool not such a capable physician, he would have found himself giving vaccinations to nomadic reindeer herders a few kilometers north of the south pole, by now. He still might, if he kept this up. Armagnier’s death should have taught the imbecile that there were no indispensable men on this campus. But there was no fixing stupid.
Before the war, reflected the dean, Penny would never have dared make love to him where others might see. Though many had known, or at least suspected, their relationship had been officially illicit.
He’d never feared losing tenure over it. The very idea had been laughable on its face, whatever the official rules had said. But they might really have expelled her, had the thing become public.
Now it was a different world. But she still acted as if she was sleeping secretly with her decrepit old thesis advisor, down to the guilty looks and the anxious lip-biting and the long, solitary showers. The dean wasn’t sure what bothered her more, the general policies of the new campus, the fact that she no longer had a choice in the matter, or the fact that she hadn’t been the only one for a good eleven months.
Penny’s skirt pooled on the floor. She’d worn nothing underneath.
The blush was everywhere now. Her breath came in short gasps, between questing lips. She’d plucked herself smooth, noted the professor. Trying to imitate her foremost rivals, in all the things that mattered least.
A soft little tap downward on her shoulders, and Penny was looking up at him from her knees. Doctor Weinberger caressed the girl’s hair softly as her hands fumbled to free him.
There was a whisper of feather-light, graceful footfalls on heated tile. Sophie was standing in the living room doorway, glaring daggers at the back of Penny’s head.
He’d promised her tonight, remembered the dean with a twinge of guilt. He shouldn’t have. It was Penny’s turn. But he couldn’t resist. She’d almost gotten her way this afternoon, when she’d come over to the office at lunchtime. If it hadn’t been for Iago Martín’s emergency call...
Now, he was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t.
If she’d decided to take a break from her homework a little later… He wasn’t that vigorous, anymore. His second youth had limits.
“Come, Sophie,” motioned the professor, making his decision. “Come.”
Penny tried to pull back, but her master’s hand was suddenly on the back of her head. Sophie’s robe slipped off her shoulders just as he effortlessly pushed all the way forward, past his prewar lover’s abortive half-gag. Whatever drug she’d taken, thought the dean, it had only made her clumsier than she was already.
He was just plain tired of her, realized Klaus Weinberger. Guilt-ridden, wooden, inhibited. Graceless. All but sexless. Head full of the Zombie’s idiotic notions. An old man’s lover. A frozen relic of the past. She simply didn’t fit him anymore.
Penelope Cruz had no one to blame but herself. She’d led the campaign against Barboza and Vargas. She’d been the one to enlist Jacques Delavre into it. She should have been able to predict how her foolish crusade would end, and what he would do in response. He’d thought that she’d known him for years, but it turned out that she hadn’t known him at all.
Where did Penny get off acting like he was handing the granddaughter of an old comrade over to be eaten by the Zin? Where did she get off fomenting rebellion, when he had explicitly established a precedent?
Marie Vasseur had been a seventeen-kilo tottering shadow with one foot in the grave when the selection team had found her. She’d jumped at loud noises, and wet her bed at night. Her stay on campus didn’t begin with a Second Birthday. She’d gone into the Special Program, the one that started with a two-week stint in the custom ward, next to the campus clinic. She’d needed no breakdown phase.
Barboza had been obvious for years. One needed but follow his wistful glances at any prewar staff picnic. He’d had the man’s psych profile in hand, the real one, not the fake he’d hidden behind for decades, when he’d sent the girl who used to be Marie Vasseur to his evening intro class. He’d known exactly what would happen to Juliana Flores, and exactly what wouldn’t.
That girl was thriving with her new family. She was happy as a clam.
A girl with tabs was a girl with tabs. Those were the rules, and the rules existed for a reason. All of them, including the Accelerated Program age brackets and the Dean’s Exemptions.
The poison tree of the old world had to be pulled up, root and branch and scattered seed, never to arise
again. There was only one way to do that, now. He’d made his choice of deities. What the Zombie called a sin, the Goddess called a sacrament. The rules came now from Her Scripture, not from his. And there would be no going back.
The dean pulled away from his gasping secretary. Penny sobbed as his arm wrapped around Sophie’s slender waist. The girl melted eagerly into his kiss.
Penelope Cruz’s stupid plot had accomplished precisely the opposite of what she’d intended, thought the dictator of Poly as he caressed Sophie’s slim, athletic body. Her rebellion of mutters and whispers had forced the Dean to set a binding example, and turn the dead old world’s most-despised from yesterday’s grudgingly-tolerated into today’s noblest protectors of the most vulnerable.
What, a mere year ago, had been the greatest of taboos, was now de rigeur for the new nobility. The dead old world’s most heinous crime was now the subject of illustrated how-to guides, available in brochure form at the campus clinic, at the registrar and at the Tent of Meeting. When the brochures had first come out, girls like Sophie got copies in class.
The Dean could do no wrong anymore. What he said, went. What he did was the Right Way, to be emulated, not criticized. He could turn black into white, evil into good, night into day, with a single gesture.
All he’d needed to do to silence the whispers against his right-hand men was add two slots to his Personal Staff, and choose from among the yet-unclaimed.
Sisters. Foreigners. A-tabbers. Like Diego Vargas’ favorites, Sophie had barely made the age cutoff. Like almost all of Hesus Barboza’s flock, Leah had an age exemption. She’d missed the lower bracket by a year and eight months.
Only a week had remained to April First when the two new faces had appeared with the Dean at the Sunday Assembly. By the following Friday, almost every remaining girl under thirteen had been preregistered by late-deciding Staff. Not one would stay ownerless, come Pin Day.
He set all the rules. He made them up as he saw fit. At will, from whole cloth. He decided the shape of this planet’s society, for centuries to come. Not even General Palmer had wielded that kind of power. Not even Hernan the Great.
Doctor Weinberger felt himself stiffen massively at the thought. He was rampant as a pagan god. Rampant as the Beast.
He understood now what Barboza and Vargas saw in their girls, thought the absolute ruler of Polytechnic University. Sophie and Leah had taken to the Sacred Way like fish to water, with none of the qualms and inhibitions of the others. They simply hadn’t been taught anything before, one way or another, in their prim and proper upper-crust Imperial schools. They were blank slates.
They loved every moment of it. They craved the pleasure and they relished the attention. They were eager clay for him to mold as he wished. Willing receptacles for the exercise of his unlimited power.
Everything Penny had to force herself to do, the sisters would do eagerly, and unprompted. While Penny sat in her room with her nose in the Zombie’s useless bible, crying over the dead old world, Sophie and Leah had their faces in the Goddess’ Guidebook, dreaming of the future.
Sophie had a countdown calendar hanging next to her dressing mirror. Fifty-three days to her first crack at the medical exam. She’d already picked out names for her baby. The more Penny tried to compete, the more pathetic she seemed in comparison.
Sophie was an electric flame in her master’s arms. He should really let Penny in, considered Klaus Weinberger as he explored his favorite’s eager flesh. It was her rightful turn. She should at least be permitted to share. But Sophie wouldn’t let him break away. And he didn’t really want to.
The world dissolved into animal pleasure. Somewhere far away, at the very edge of his awareness, a sobbing Penny fled the room.
* * *
“This has got to be some kind of record,” thought Moshe Tellman as he floated down the Dalia’s central corridor. Thank God for these modular Shock Corps coldsleep pods, or they would still be in orbit of Haven, trying to get all these people aboard. Even with the Shock Corps pods, it had taken days to load all eight thousand. The chutes and cargo arms had to go slowly. The equipment was modular, reasonably self-contained, and designed with all the usual handling and attachment points, like any other set of standardized containers. But it wasn’t exactly sacks of rice. Shock Corps transports had special gear for this stuff. Even live millipedes didn’t require this level of care in handling. Avi and Shimon damned near had a nervous breakdown dealing with it all. Srulik, down in engineering, would’ve pulled out all his hair, if Rivkeh wasn’t there to calm her poor husband down.
Eight thousand passengers aboard a clipper! Almost a million people, just in this convoy alone. All of Mishpocha Gellerman. Every able-bodied, skilled man and woman they had, plus every child and elder. No one to care for the dependents back on Haven, with the whole mishpocha gone, so they couldn’t be left behind.
He couldn’t even turn on the gravity generators. There wasn’t power enough. The whole damned ship felt like a giant oven. It had to be forty-five degrees in here, even with the radiators out as far as they would go and the pumps whirring so fast, you’d think they were coming out of a day-long firefight. By the time the Dalia got to Sparta, they would probably need new pumps. Srulik was gonna just love that!
This whole war was straight-up meshuggeh. A messed-up, bonkers hell like you wouldn’t believe. All the damned rules were out the window.
The Gellermans were shipyard rats in the Heaven-knows-which generation. The shipyards back home couldn’t rebuild fast enough, so off to Sparta they went.
Didn’t want to, but the Admor told them. Guaranteed payment, and their land back after. Swore to put any usurpers in cherem and go to war against them himself, if it came to that. Call out the mishpachot in arms, like against a foreign invader. Swore an oath upon a Sefer Torah.
So the Gellermans up and went. The whole mishpocha, with the Av at its head. The Settlement of Bretogne, all over again, if not straight-up something out of Parashas Bo.
There were belters all over the place there, too, and belters all over Haven now, despite the prewar Delimitation Agreement, helping to rebuild the shipyards out in the asteroid belts…
It was all just plain nuts. By the time this thing was over, there would be hundreds of millions of people all over the place, who just plain didn’t belong where they were.
And New Helena was full of Imperials from Tienchen. Volantis, too.
Three more days to Sparta. Say, two days to straighten out the pumps, if Srulik didn’t have a nervous breakdown in the middle. And then off to the Serpent Swarm they went. A million Youth Labor Reservists of the Serpent Swarm Corporation were waiting. Destination – Haven. Delimitation Agreement be damned.
Just meshuggeh…
* * *
“What do you think?” writes Reginald Freeman on the piece of smart paper before him.
“60/40, our favor,” replies Eli’s untidy Hebrew scrawl, “The Admor will vote ‘yes’.”
“90/10,” disagrees Robert Bernard’s perfectly-shaped French calligraphy. “My CEO is with us, 100%.”
“Don’t know,” opines Moshe Ben-Ami’s telegraphic scribble. “The Prime Minister wavers. Politics unpleasant. Expenditure great.”
Right, thinks the newly-minted League Admiral of the Fleet. Prime Minister Alon’s concerns are quite obvious and understandable. Every day the Fleet does not undertake some major operation obviously aimed at retaking Timon is another day he has to answer to his people. Upset mothers are writing letters. Under the conditions of wartime censorship, the press is staying silent, but social media seethe.
Israel Alon is a seasoned military man, a former Admiral of the Fleet, scion of a family that has produced no fewer than six prime ministers. He’d commanded a fleet task force at Timon and Luke as one of the primary architects of the Archduchy’s near-evisceration in the Second Omicronian. He’d led the Fleet through the bloody, grinding stalemate of the Third Imperial. He knows that Tenth Fleet is small, that the Roy
al Tròidoese Navy, brave and well-trained force though it may be, is not capable of mounting operations on the required scale at such a remove from home. He knows that the bleach-outs cannot be trusted, regardless of whatever additional “memorandum of understanding” they might have signed on top of extant cease-fire agreements. He knows that with Xing, Miranda and Paradise all in enemy hands, getting additional large forces onto the Tròido-Timon axis is a near-impossible logistical task. He understands full well that irate housewives and social media armchair strategists neither have a clue what they are blabbering about, nor can be permitted to run the war.
But Prime Minister Alon also knows that censorship will cease and there will be an election after this war is over. He knows that, during said election, the opposition will pillory him and his party, rightly or wrongly, over every single needlessly dead Israeli. He knows that, given the slightest excuse or hint of scandal, his people’s press will eviscerate anyone and everyone in the government in the fine Israeli media tradition of chasing after ratings by demonstratively slaughtering sacred cows in the middle of the street. And he knows that, whatever else happens, under no circumstances whatsoever can an Aryan task force be permitted to reach Timon before the Fleet does.
What New Israel’s Prime Minister wants to hear is a General Staff plan to storm Tienchen, seize Lingjao, and link up with the Empire’s ponderous but inexorably advancing armadas for the liberation of Xing. Instead, the General Staff brings him a plan for a year full of raids, probes and stalling tactics, and an eye-popping bill for special operations, the centerpiece of which is a lunatic scheme whose punchline costs nearly as much as a Hector-class battleship, per drop.
“All rise!” commands the bailiff.
“All right,” thinks Duke Reginald as he resets the smart paper to again bring up his presentation notes, “forward into the breach we go.”