Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  After reestablishing contact with CRI, Stavros had unburdened himself of the complicated fiction he’d invented to explain the “temporary” absence of all his colleagues, and went right to work, first to do the necessary fiddling to hide all record of his inquiry, from the Orbiter crew as well as from the landing party, when and if the comlink was fixed. Then he set CRI to search her files for all existing regulatory legislation that covered the operations of corporations exploiting extraterrestrial natural resources, with specific reference to mining companies.

  It was soon clear that Megan had been right. A statutory scheme did exist, whereby the World Federal government claimed jurisdiction over the actions of corporations operating within the settled zone.

  The stated intention of this body of law was both to protect a legally staked claim, and to provide for circumstances where private claim rights might be overridden by a regulatory agency. However, specific determination of such circumstances rested with the agency involved. Stavros found reference to protection of preexisting populations or unique natural wonders, but the language seemed, to his linguist’s ear, to be intentionally vague. Asking for a history of past cases, he discovered that removal of a population to a reservation or even off-planet entirely, had often come under the World Court’s definition of protection.

  “The law would seem to lay responsibility for compliance on the corporate entity,” CRI had pointed out. “And there is an admitted difficulty of enforcement over such great distances.”

  “And if they don’t comply? Could WorldFed put the squeeze on them back home?”

  CRI took a moment to review her files. “This has been done in one or two cases of blatant infraction or complaints by rival corporations. In cases where regulatory infractions are alleged by private individuals, such individuals must file an action with the World Court. In emergencies, where the allegations can be substantiated, injunctive relief may be sought.”

  This lawyer pal of Meg’s better be a genius, he had thought glumly.

  “What constitutes ‘substantiated’?”

  “That is obviously for the Court to decide.”

  And then, operating out of some mysterious prime directive, CRI had begun to tell him horror stories.

  Cautionary tales was a more accurate description. The data bank’s supply seemed bottomless. Tales of extortion, blackmail, bribery, mayhem and murder murmured in his ears, all acts of vengeance called down by CONPLEX and her fellow mega-corporations on the heads of those who thought to defy the mega-corporate will. Stavros wondered if this admonitory device was CRI’s own invention or was somehow imbedded in her programming, to steer a user away from ill-considered action. Either way, he cursed the computer’s designers, who had seen fit to program such stubbornness into a machine.

  Two cycles of lost sleep later, he was able nearly to filter the recitation out of his consciousness altogether. CRI chattered on nonetheless, assuming, in her machine way, his rapt attention. Stavros had turned off the audio several times already, then back on again, made anxious by the silence. Should the com to the Lander be relinked, he needed to know it immediately, faster than CRI might think to tell him on screen.

  At the sink, he dried his face on a sweat-stained shirt and raked back his damp hair. He considered taking the time to hack at it with the clippers from his tool kit, but he liked the thought of letting it grow until he could tie it back as the Sawls so often did with their dangling curls, as Ghirra did, so that with his slight, elegant body and diffident stoop, he resembled an eighteenth-century dandy, lacking only a frock coat and lace.

  Stavros left his hair alone. Turning from the sink, he tuned one ear in on CRI’s recitation. He judged the current tale to be in a wind-up phase.

  Will she start all over again once she runs out?

  The thought appalled him. He paced toward the narrow entry arch, feeling caged. Liphar was stretched on his bedroll in front of the doorway, fast asleep. Stavros stared at him, considering escape, then slouched back to the terminal. He bent reflexively to check the time elapsed on his power cells, noted the oil level in his lamp, and resettled himself on the bench with a ragged sigh. He glanced at the screen, readying his notes.

  While CRI lectured him on the folly of his ways, she was also searching the legal files for precedent that might help Stavros build a case. The message sent to the, lawyer could not be an inarticulate call for help. Such a person needed to be wooed, to be convinced that the case had merit. Most of the cases that CRI dredged up were further indication of how sporadic the enforcement of existing regulations was.

  But occasionally, there was something hopeful for Stavros to add to his notes, inscribed in tiny space-saving letters in a small sketchbook he had liberated from the ship’s stores.

  At the back of the same sketchbook, during the few breaks he allowed himself to do anything but eat or sleep, he recorded his recreational thinking. He worked on recalling the words that Kav Daven had spoken to him in the private language of the PriestGuild, during the time of his “miracle.” He told himself he was building a vocabulary for the more complex ancestral tongue, with its hints of a technological bias. But in truth, his search was for answers to the mystery of the Ritual Master himself, for clues to what the old priest expected of him. The events of the Leave-taking had become dreamlike in his mind. The grimy task he now performed was far from his vision then, of himself as a hero of the people, raising the shining banner of the PriestGuild.

  A new entry appeared at the bottom of the terminal’s screen. Stavros reached for his pen. Halloran vs. Microdyne, 2067, he wrote, then waited, his pen poised, while CRI’s other more vocal self nudged at his flagging concentration.

  “… remains in prison, WorldPen 435 at Lima, serving three consecutive life sentences.” CRI paused. The speaker hissed softly, and as he had during each and every pause over the last two cycles, Stavros prayed that she had come to the end of her supply.

  “New York Times. Thursday, December 10, 2059: The disappearance of Gabrielle Roget has been…”

  “CRI, I’ll shut you off again,” he growled wearily. For reasons he was unable to comprehend without resorting to hopeless anthropomorphism, CRI did respond briefly to threats of being cut off. He failed to see how such an imperative could have been printed into mere circuitry, or for what reason, but he smiled bitter thanks into the blissful if temporary silence and bent to his note-taking.

  “… under investigation by the Department of Commerce, following allegations by several witnesses that…”

  “CRI!!”

  On his blanket by the door, Liphar stirred, shifted and went back to sleep.

  CRI replied, “Yes, Mr. Ibiá?”

  “This will do no good, CRI, worse torture though it may be than any that CONPLEX could dream up to put me through.”

  “Mr. Ibiá, Captain Newman up here is very disturbed to have remained out of contact with the Landing Party for so long.”

  “I’m part of the landing party. You’re in contact with me now.”

  “Mr. Ibiá, if you would allow me to patch you through to Captain Newman, I am certain he would be able to put all of your worries concerning the fate of the inhabitants of 2-PT 6 Fiix to rest in no time.”

  Stavros rested his forehead on his pen hand. “CRI, I think you know better than that. Just who do you think pays Captain Newman’s salary? Now why don’t you try approaching this as a challenging puzzle you’d love to help me solve? Have you no curiosity for the mysteries of legal linguistics, for the intricacies of the argument?” He blotted his damp upper lip against his equally damp arm and tried blunt honesty. “CRI, please understand. The price of development here is just too high.”

  “Mr. Ibiá, it is my duty to inform you that…”

  Stavros reached and cut her off.

  He sat in the silence for a while, feeling the heat like an unbreathable thickening of the air. The smell of his own body sickened him. He wondered where Edan was, prowling the tunnels in search of food or just ou
tside the door, waiting to spring if he should so much as stir from Riding.

  “Lifa!” He barked suddenly, and swiveled from the bench to shake the young Sawl awake. “Lifa, come on, get up! We’re going to the Baths, and I’ll fight like Lagri herself if Edan tries to stop me!”

  12

  Megan envied the illusion of precision Susannah’s list provided, but she was unable to work that way. She attempted lists on occasion, hoping that her habits had progressed, but her lists all too quickly evolved into mammoth run-on sentences whose clauses were not easily dismembered into discrete items placeable one above the other behind a neat column of numbers. She also denied herself the geometric comforts of the assorted graphs and charts employed by her younger colleagues, who held that anthropology could be pursued through statistical analysis like any other hard science.

  Intuitive connections were Megan’s method. Often before she had gathered what others would consider “adequate” data, the structure of a culture became visible to her. She visualized the process as an old-time photograph swimming up out of the ripples of the developing fluid, at the same time admitting that her imagery was as old-fashioned as her methodology.

  But by the time you’re forty-seven, you work the way you work, she mused defensively as she swished through the dark meadow grasses in Ghirra’s wake. And so far, the way I work has worked for me.

  “That’s why I was feeling so frustrated,” she exclaimed to Susannah, her arms spread wide to provide the emphasis her lowered voice could not. The overbearing magnificence of the night sky had the two women whispering as if in a place of worship. The light of the Cluster was, as Ghirra had promised, enough to see by, but only just. Enough to keep from stumbling into holes or bumping into a neighbor or his wagon.

  “Like Tay, you know?” Megan continued. “Lots of data, no connections.”

  “And now? The only connection I’ve come up with is a bunch of items on the same piece of paper.”

  Megan’s head bobbed, somewhere between a shrug and a nod. “Well, now, here and there. Bit by bit.” She kept her eyes on the steadying image of Ghirra’s back. Walking in the half-dark was awkward. The ground was either deceptively close or too far away, and the stiff, sharp grasses snatched at the blousy fabric of the Sawl pants she had taken to wearing, stubbornly enough to break her step.

  Susannah paced alongside patiently. “Meg, I sense you working yourself up to theoretical levels.”

  Megan blotted her brow on her bare forearm. The coming of darkness had only barely lessened the heat, a fact which made the Sawls clearly apprehensive. “Well, I was thinking about survival.”

  “That’s been on all our minds lately, I suspect.”

  “But you know, we take survival too much for granted with respect to developing cultures. I mean, the pursuit of survival. We say: they work so hard to survive, or: they must do thus and such in order to survive, as if the pursuit of survival were merely one more obstacle to the real business of culture, which is to get on with expansion and development.”

  “Isn’t it?” asked Susannah.

  Watching Ghirra ahead, Megan wondered how much of their conversation he could hear, or more important, understand.

  “Usually we think of it as Emil does, that civilization only moves forward. But it could be considered a cultural bias to assume that expansion and development are civilization’s only valid goal.”

  “If not expansion, then at least evolution, yes? Change?”

  Megan chuckled. “Spoken from the bias of a biologist. I wonder if man’s horror of stasis is a race memory of eons of evolve-or-get-eaten…”

  “I think I shall keep my mouth shut until I hear this theory.”

  “Not a theory. Not yet. But change is part of it, as a matter of fact.” Megan paused to glance around as if checking classroom attendance. “Sometimes I find those connections I’m looking for in the patterns of change in a society, as reflected in their history or their myth or their artifacts over a period of time. But here, I sense a pattern of no change.

  “Look at it. If the histories have any relation to fact, we have a cycle of devastations, repeating itself for thousands of years, that more or less regularly decimates the world population. So it’s built up to a certain point of development and then, wham, back to where you started. The net result is no change. Stasis.”

  “Therefore, the very idea of progress, as we understand the word, has never entered the Sawls’ vocabulary. For instance, do you ever hear the FoodGuilders talk about developing a faster seed?”

  Susannah’s incredulous expression passed unnoticed in the dim light. “A faster seed? How much faster do you want?”

  “Well, then, how about a way to grow more food indoors, or improved farming methods so they could increase the acreage under tillage?”

  “There’s not much of that kind of thinking,” Susannah admitted. “But then, they’ve got their hands full just getting what they do have to grow.”

  “There! You just made the excuse. You’re assuming they’d do more if they could. Okay, how about this: would you care to hazard a guess at how long it’s been since the Engineers’ Guild built a new winch?”

  Susannah laughed. “No, but I’ll bet you can tell me to the minute.”

  “I asked. It’s been the equivalent of two hundred years, if I understand their calendar right. And though they made a few improvements at the time, the new one was mostly an exact copy of one that had been in use for the previous three hundred and fifty-odd years. I have this through Ghirra from Aguidran, who thinks it would speed up the loading at caravan times if Engineers built another winch, but she hasn’t been able to talk them into it. Another one, mind you, not a better one!”

  Self-consciously, Megan dropped her voice. “The point is, the Sawls perfect, but they do not advance. Expansion and development are not part of their cultural imperative. Why is the population contained in such regularly spaced settlements? Why do we go to Ogo Dul to trade rather than to conquer? Not because the Sawls are so peaceable, as I used to think until I heard them arguing like banshees among themselves. It’s because they don’t even exhibit that most basic of developmental urges, to expand territorially. They divided the available resources up amongst themselves long ago and are content to keep it that way.”

  “Meg, it’s all they can do to hold on to what they have. There’s a big enough war going on over their heads, without their starting new ones.”

  “Again, you make the old excuse. But that’s fine, because it brings us back to the issue of survival.” Megan slowed to let the Master Healer move ahead, out of earshot. But somehow the space between them remained the same.

  He’s listening, she decided. But I’d bet he’s always listening.

  She continued more quietly. “It would be logical of course to suggest that the Sawls have stagnated due to the harshness of the climate and the lack of metallic resources, that their growth is stunted by the extremities of their world.”

  She felt a soft, insistent nudge against her shoulder blade, and stepped out of the path of the lead hjalk of the wagon behind her. She saw Ghirra also move slightly aside, but was too involved in airing her thought out loud to stop the process.

  “What if we turn our thinking end for end, and suggest that the stasis is not a result but a goal? A necessity. That the Sawls have survived because they have not changed.”

  “Blasphemy,” accused Susannah wryly.

  “I know. Anti-evolutionary claptrap, right? But hear me out.” She tossed Susannah a sly grin. “Jews understand these things, you see. Sometimes just laying low is the better part of valor.

  “Here’s another little detail: how about the Sawls obsessive record keeping? Beyond the usual religious books, the priests’ First Books of the Goddesses, and their Second Books of purported history, there are all the guild ledgers, the reams of lore and records and instruction going back for hundreds of generations. There are the endless weather rolls, and the stories carved on every available sur
face, plus the whole oral tradition, the songs and chants, not to mention the family records and genealogies.”

  “And the Birth Records, and the crop inventories and the animal breeding charts,” Susannah added.

  “This represents a high degree of literacy and literary consciousness for such a technically backward culture. Well, for a while, in the Middle Ages and later, the Jewish people were doing just what these folks are doing: keeping the records, observing the old ways… and waiting.”

  Megan’s tone made this last word the solid core of her thesis.

  “Waiting,” Susannah repeated. “What for?”

  “For an end to persecution,” replied Megan with unusual gentleness. “Like the Jews. For an end to the wars. The Sawls are waiting for peace.”

  “Meg, the entire galaxy is waiting for peace.”

  Megan shook her head stubbornly. “No. Everyone else, it’s within the power of the participants to end the wars if they really want to. Not so here. The Sawls are victims of a war they cannot participate in, beyond offering their prayers of support to the goddess who seems to be weakest at the time. And remember what Ghirra said: they can’t even hope for a victory to put an end to the struggle, because a victory of one side is supposedly what brings on a Devastation.

  “They’re lost in a cycle of hopelessness. The myth is quite specific on that count. Stavros found no ambiguities in his translation of that section of the Tale of Origins. The Sisters have been blinded by the Darkness and they will not see clearly again until the Darkness ends.”

  “And they fall into each other’s arms,” remarked Susannah.

  Megan frowned at her. “More or less. Anyway, the Arrah will end. Why are you being so snide?”

  Susannah ducked her head. “Sorry. It just smacked a bit of the Second Coming or something… do I detect a Judeo-Christian messianic bias here?”