by Lindsay Peet
CHAPTER TEN
Our route across the continent was to be a big circle. We wouldn’t go to every community, just the ones the P. U. wanted us to see and be seen in. Still, after ten days we’d be as far away from Solip City as we were going to get, and would be beginning the return part of the loop. I asked Zeno how near we’d be getting to Caliuga City (I called it that to tweak him).
“We won’t be going to Caliuga Town, Jaf.” We were on first-name basis in private, now. Very strange acting buddy-buddy with your torturer, especially when you think his fondest dream is to torture you some more. But, his hands held my strings, and the stick, and whatever carrot there was. I had to tread delicately, literally and figuratively.
“I understand that, and that’s not what I asked. How near will we get? This could be big for you and your bosses, whoever they are.”
“Aspe Iapmo, Pex-al-Pex, and Sirah Rekaburb have each stated that your party rode south to the ranch that the P. U. was renting. Had you ridden twice as far in the same direction, you would have come to Chugtallis. They, too, haven’t joined the P. U., but we believe that they’re on the verge of changing their minds, so we’ll be heading there in a few days. We’re counting on you two to do your best.”
“Count on our help, Zeno,” I said to set him at ease. “Our ship is out that way, near Caliuga City. Any chance of going by and retrieving a few odds and ends?”
“What sort of ‘odds and ends’?”
“Oh, you know, personal effects we didn’t want to carry along, check some things on the ship, make an appraisal of any repairs she might need – you know. It might be nice to have a functioning ship that can leave Caliuga, once we know where we are.”
“And secretly check your location and retrieve hidden weapons. I know about your desire to leave, and am not unsympathetic. In truth, the Ambassador foresaw this request, and told me to allow it, as long as only one of you goes, and I accompany him.
“The ambassador dislikes surprises, you see.”
Myself, I look on surprises as the leavening in my daily bread, but I understand some like flatbreads. I didn’t want to debate that now. “Zeno, I thought that only Caliuga City had not joined the Planetary Union. Now you say that Chugtallis hasn’t, also. What’s up with that?”
“We may have gotten a little ahead of ourselves in our announcements. Chugtallis will join, as will Caliuga Burg, too, we are certain.”
“Uh huh. Any other premature announcements, Zeno? Places where reality hasn’t caught up to your ideal universe?”
He smiled enigmatically.
Our first stop was Paluta, where Zeno’s alma mater the SCU was sited. Keeping in mind that their tradition started with only the few resource materials which the various castaways had come with, including massive data banks on every shipboard computer, the SCU faculty had forged already quite a hierarchy. The history and sociology departments were having a grand old time, collecting and molding stories and traditions into themes that supported the primacy of the P. U. and its research arm, the SCU. Criticism for literature, music and the other arts was only beginning to craft the criteria for critical evaluation of the few works they had available, and I sensed some real hostility among the faculty there as various camps and schools quarreled about how to take apart what artists had put together.
Medicine and the other hard sciences were off to promising starts, very impressive in fact considering their humble origins. While at the SCU some of my confusion was removed. You see, Caliuga’s year was longer than a standard year; likewise, her day was longer than a standard day. Now, human experience on other planets had shown how we adjust to these sorts of things – the pace at which we mature is controlled both by standard time units, and also by environmental factors, especially seasons. Some ancient Earth cultures referred to people’s ages in terms of winters, or summers; turns out they were onto something. So, although Sirah was thirteen going on nineteen, in a way she was about halfway in between, and just very precocious for her age. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, and then dismissed the whole speculation as useless. The deeds were done, and then some.
But – after maturing, the Caliugans kept aging, because they hadn’t yet developed or brought along the youth-prolonging procedures the Empire had. I was thirty-five and had already received treatments; in another fifty years I would end up looking like a Caliugan of thirty-two. So, all the people I had thought were about a hundred, based on my experience off Caliuga, were actually about half that age. If you’re confused, so was I, as this was the first time I’d been anywhere that didn’t use youth-prolonging procedures. For awhile I was hyper-aware of how much younger Caliugans were than they seemed to look, but after awhile I stopped thinking about it, and just saw them as people.
Except, personally speaking, since I’d had the treatments, and Sirah and Aspe and Pex hadn’t, they would likely be dead before I reached middle age. This made their beauty and vitality poignant, as each time I looked upon them it was like seeing the approach of autumn (or winter, in Pex’s case). I left this behind in time, too – I found worrying about how they were using up their allotted spans distressing, even though theirs was the more natural path. Still, every time I saw a voluptuous young thing on campus I flashed-forward to her with sunken cheeks, sagging breasts and flabby buttocks. I hoped they’d catch up to the Empire soon. Such loveliness ought to live as long as possible.
Zeno and the SCU were proudest of the Planetary Union Justice Center. Again, Caliuga’s isolation allowed or forced them to start pretty much from scratch, except for basic shared ideas of justice from the Empire. The Justice Center went further though, trying to ensure fairness and equality for the citijects of Caliuga through an elaborate and ever-evolving system of taxes, subsidies, benefits, and regulations. They kept having problems because people kept misinterpreting the rules, and exploiting loopholes, so more rules with stiffer penalties were always being drawn up and debated. The training for judges also emphasized trying to create fairness and equality, if necessary at the expense of the law, so there was a fair amount of improvisation, and in only a couple of decades they’d reached a point where it looked to me like anybody could be convicted of something, and nobody was definitively guilty of anything.
Fortunately, if the citiject had access to the appropriate official, an arrangement could be worked out to lessen or eliminate penalties, so the system also allowed for mercy. I could see why they thought it was almost ideal, and needed just a little more tweaking to be perfected.
Wanliet poured oil on troubled waters wherever they roiled, and I poured sand into any gears I saw, but more discreetly. It was much like tap-tapping at keystones in archways of shared myths, but this was only a side issue for me. I believed that in chaos was our best chance to escape, or to take charge, but I was feeling so lost that it felt like my sabotage was more of an opportunistic hobby at that point than any kind of well-planned campaign . Wanliet and I both realized that we would at some point become disposable to the Solip City crowd, and with this bunch ‘disposable’ was the same as ‘disposed’. We worked the yin and the yang of it, proving our indispensability to the powerful while trying to undermine them.
It developed that the routine for the trip was, after a partial day travelling W and I and Zeno would meet the bigwigs, and that night would be a banquet. After that we’d sleep in their most comfortable rooms , and the next day they would slobber all over us as they showed us the highlights of their mini-metropolis. The Inspector General would praise the settlers, and his adjutant would sneak off and ask questions – that’s all. We’d have a second banquet, sleep like princes again, and then the next day it was off to the next stop.
The adjutant to the Inspector General never slept alone; I was grateful that zoocaine hadn’t yet spread through the boonies, as the constant variety was stimulating enough. I got the feeling that bedding a different girl every night might wear thin after awhile, but until it did I was willing to keep testing my theory. W kept to himself nig
hts, I had no idea what he was up to in that strange brain, but he played along and was the very image of a modern Inspector General.
And so it went for the next ten days, as next we toured Cyron, a startup manufacturing center run founded where early water-wheel power had been upgraded to hydroelectric a generation back, and now they had a diverse manufacturing base, having supplied much of the infrastructural elements for Solip City. Newly powerful capitalists formed close ties to Paluta and Solip City, entrenching themselves.
Here I perceived an administrative pattern that turned out to hold elsewhere. The citijects weren’t so keen to join the P.U., but the leaders were. Often a mayor would gain the additional title, pay and power, of District Administrator when his community joined the P. U. Afterward, even if he were no longer mayor, he was still the D. A., and he or she looked forward to maybe rising in the P. U. organization, meanwhile recruiting others to be aides, secretaries, vice-counsels and such. I had to admire the system, the power of self-interest reined in to serve the P. U. in perpetuity.
After Cyron we were off to Doyoga, a spiritual center, a truly lovely place with mountains, trees, flowers, rivers with fat fish and sleek furry things which ate from your hand and flying feathered warblers, which they called birds, and I saw no reason to argue. We spent an extra day there because Wanliet got sick from something he ate, I guess, and the only doctors there were faith-healers.
Another odd thing happened at Doyoga. It kind of made sense, being a spiritual capital of Caliuga, that I’d first hear about a re-awakening, but it was the ‘when’ that bothered me the most. A lovely young thing, Aeiouwyz I think was her name (that’s how it sounded), walked with me to my quarters one evening. Once inside we started to undress, and then she said, “I wonder what the Gurjoo would say about this?”
Now, I’d never heard of the Gurjoo, but I figured he or she couldn’t very well be against love, and the efforts we go through to continue the propagation of the species, right? And I said as much to Aeiouwyz. “Gurjoo wants us to spiritualize our love, to transmute base carnality to noble affection,” she came back. Then, gently and slowly, I gave her a taste of noble affection – well, no, really it was more base carnality, but she liked it anyway – and everything went just fine after that. Even better, in truth, as it turned out she knew her way to my carnal base, and then some. This was the first I’d heard of the Gurjoo, but hardly the last.
Back to our travelogue -- while each individual settlement had its root in a single ship’s crew and passengers, over the years there had been migration between settlements. Just because somebody was born, or settled in, Doyoga didn’t mean he or she couldn’t move to Solip City. The characters of the settlements were reinforced by emigration and immigration, as people’s personalities and those of their communities settled out so everybody ended up where they belonged.
While I’m at it, let me mention the scenery. By Empire standards, the towns and villages were rough, but you could see the people cared and were working to the future. The lands around them were uniformly striking. It’s funny, but one of the things people love in their scenery is no people, not even evidence of people, and Caliugan scenery still had that in abundance. Unspoiled forests and rivers and mountains, down south, and even near Solip City the land, while harsh and stony, had a barren purity to it.
Allow me to elaborate on the geography some more – where our ship had landed was on a plateau just to the east of a range which ran north-south to a peninsula. South, and not far west of that peninsula range was Caliuga City, between a second range and the sea. That strip of flat land, roughly fifty kilometers wide, was pretty wet and fairly temperate. Somewhat over a day’s ride south of Caliuga in that same strip was Chugtallis, which we’d visit after Zembla. West northwest of Chugtallis, across the mountains, Zembla was our next destination, and north-northwest of there was Solip City. Doyoga, Dysnical and Paluta ran in a crescent to the west and then north from Zembla, its northern tip at Solip City.
Zembla made no sense to me. The guy in charge was a poet who called himself Botkin, or maybe not, but it was really run by a Charles Veraxi –or, maybe it wasn’t. When I tried to understand how it worked I just got confused, but if I rolled along with the chaos it was quite nice, really. In some ways it was worse than any slum back in the Empire, but the people had energy and seemed happy, and Zembla was growing and building and falling apart all the time, burning with a pale fire.
“Rumors of religious fervor, or fever, I heard,” Wanliet muttered. “Back up north, Solip City/Caliuga way, enemies are swearing they love one another and will work together to make Caliuga better. Kind of like the spiel I’ve been giving every other night, but they seem to mean it.”
Took me aback, both because of the subject, and because it was the most he’d volunteered in days. “Funny. I heard something about a Gurjoo fellow in Doyoga – almost cost me a girl. Hey, Wanliet, remember back before everything fell apart, before Jedub got popped and flipped us I had the idea that we might be able to salvage things by changing our secular authority to a religious one? You know, start up a new cult, coming as an outsider to ‘show the way’ kind of stuff. Damned if it doesn’t look like somebody’s moved in on that action, too. Can’t catch a break.” I complained.
“Occulted by a cult, occluded and clueless. Mayhaps a mix of hex and sex and tricks.” He was sounding more himself already. But what was going on with this cult? Who or what was the Gurjoo? Could we use it somehow, take over the cult, use it for our own purposes?
Or maybe it wasn’t the cult that was blocking me. There was no question but that I’d gotten even lazier for awhile. I’ve heard stories of young men like me struggling for months, years, with some great physics or math problem, focusing day and night on its solution. Personally, I can’t see how they did it – being a young man is such a ride, your body’s crying out, constantly reminding you of all the wonderful things there are to do, fighting and loving and making and doing, all the while whispering to you that you’ll live forever. So, forgive me, please, when I succumb to the enticements of young lovelies for a night or two, after eating and drinking more than I should. I’m not the first, nor the last, hardly the best nor the least.