Stars of Charon (Legacy of the Thar'esh Book 1) (3 page)

Chapter 5.

“Vengeance,
violence, and victories are archaic abstractions. We have the words for these
things because they were prevalent in our distant past. They are the actions of
the unenlightened, those whose lives are just a brief flame in the fire. Such
things are fleeting, like a name written upon still water, they will ripple and
curl, but soon they will become shapeless and slip into memory.”

“But
what of the stories you’ve told me?” my voice asked. “Of how Tinaeas first
crossed the tundra and settled the lowland valleys. Those were victories, and
there was violence, when they fought off the packs of kargs in the night.”

“Ah,
Eli.” my teacher responded. “How many kargs did they fend off on the sixth
night?”

“When
you tell it there are eight, but when Jonar used to tell it there were
sixteen.”

“My
point exactly,” my teacher nodded. “Memories of words are fleeting, the number
of kargs changes in the telling, as do the number of days they traveled between
rains. Such tales are stories that have lost their truths. They are fun to tell
around the campfire, but the real story was lost the day that Tinaeas died
alone on Canter’s hill, and his Charon slipped away unmet. All we can do is
guess what truly happened.

“The
truth of his victories is brief and fleeting without the truth of his life that
was never remembered. Do not hold tight to stories of adventure, and do not
hold onto anger when you are wronged. For vengeance and violence are fleeting
and weak.”

On Lee’s
orders, Chen began the synthetic therapy the next morning. There were
injections and sonar treatment sessions that shifted around my entrails. It
wasn’t painful, but it was uncomfortable. As Chen explained it, they were using
synthetic stem cells to build new organs to take over for my own organs which
Chen referred to as “ornamental.”

After two
weeks my artificial liver began to function. Chen was excited when it seemed to
rouse the rest of my systems. Within three days I was a fully functional,
eating and defecating human being.

“Well now
Elicio, it seems we fixed you up right,” Chen was rightfully proud of his
success.

“Thank
you Chen,” as I spoke I put my hand on his shoulder and smiled. It was a
gesture I had seen him make several times when conferring with other patients.

He smiled
broadly, “Well, off to work with you! It was a pleasure having you here for the
last few months. They are saying we have 190 days until winter sets in, so
we’ll need to make sure that we’re ready.  Lee said he’d send someone down to
set you-ah, there she is. Ju-lin! Over here.”

Ju-lin
was young and pretty with long brown hair and a small mouth. She looked
familiar. I thought she had been another patient at some point; I’d seen dozens
of people coming in and out of the hospital with scrapes, bruises, and broken
bones.

“I see
you found some clothes,” she said with an unceremonial nod. “Good. The green
jumpsuit’s an improvement over the whole naked covered in mud and leaves
thing.”

I flushed
red with embarrassment. Of course, that’s where I knew her. The smaller one of
Lee’s companions who had found me in the woods.

“Still
haven't learned to talk, eh?” She rolled her eyes and gestured for me to follow
her.

She
didn’t wait, and was halfway across the room before I caught up to her.

“Chen
says you understand Common well enough,” she continued as soon as I got within
earshot. “So first, let me say, welcome to the Downs, as we have taken to
calling it. Not the best name. But it’s a name, and every place needs a name.”

As she
spoke we stepped out through the hospital doors into the sunlight. Ju-lin
absently pulled a pair of dark sunglasses from her jacket and slipped them over
her eyes. I squinted and shaded my eyes as I struggled to adjust to the light
and look around. What had been a pile of storage crates unloaded from the
colony ship a few weeks before had exploded into a small city. I turned behind
me to look at the hospital, it was one of a dozen prefabricated buildings in
the Downs. From my time with the Slate I had learned that most colonies landed
with a dozen or so basic prefabricated structures, including a hospital,
several sleeping barracks, a hydroponic greenhouse, cafeteria, a number of
utility support structures to handle waste, water purification, and a 3D
printing facility to create any tools the colony may need.

“Keep up
Berry,” Ju-lin called over her shoulder without looking.

I decided
to ignore the nickname and again jogged ahead to catch up.

“So, old
man McCullough’s first rule of the colony: work. His second rule: work. And his
third rule, any guesses?”

“Work?”

“See there,
you can talk,” she nodded to the left and we turned between two large
buildings, barracked by the look of them. On the north wall there was a large
lean-to shelter where a small group was working on assembling some large
equipment.

“What’s
that?” I gestured toward the group of mechanics.

“You
don’t know a hover-skiff?” for the first time, she turned and studied my face,
her eyes hidden behind my reflection in her glasses. After a brief moment she
turned forward again and kept talking. “It is a high-load hovercraft with some
fancy gear attached, a crane, basic mineral processing, that sort of thing. It
can chew up raw stone and shit out concrete. We have four for the colony, this
one broke down. The other three are working up the river on the dam.”

“You’re
damming the river?” I asked. “Why?”

This time
she stopped and turned to face me. She was shorter than me, her head coming up
roughly to my nose. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but a stray strand
was flitting lightly across her forehead in the breeze, she curled her lip
upward and sent a brief puff of breath to blow it to the side. She exuded an
anxious energy that made me feel both exhilarated and unnerved.

“You
really
don’t know anything do you?” She held out her arm, palm up, making a grand sweeping
gesture at the colony and land around us. “This place may look all great and
shiny, nice trees, fertile land, birds in the sky, berries to eat, but it’s not
natural. More importantly, most of what you see doesn’t
belong
here.”

“You
mean—” I stammered, her abruptness caught me off guard. “You don’t belong on
this world?”

“Belong
on this world? You
are
dense.” She rolled her eyes. “No, what I mean is
that this world was probably a useless hunk of stone before MineWorks came
along and terraformed it. The terraforming process may seed a world for life,
but it doesn’t do it
intelligently
. Look around, see that forest of
pines? It’s in the heart of the delta. That’s wrong. Do you get it?”

I didn’t,
and said so.

She
sighed dramatically.

“Next
spring, inland snow will melt up in the mountains. The river will rise and this
valley to flood. Now, tell me, if this was a natural world, how in the name of
the Sower would there be a stand of trees right there?”

“I’m not
sure I follow.”

“Look,”
she was losing her patience. “If this were a natural world, then this valley
would look completely different. There would be a field of thick grasses there.
Every year, the river would flood, and every year, new grasses would grow. But
instead, this world was terraformed. Terraforming may ‘plants the seeds of
life’ across the world, but it does it stupidly. Most of what is on this world
won’t survive the winter. There are tropical trees planted in the tundra, there
is warm-water algae in lakes that freeze solid.”

I began
to understand what she meant. All I could manage was a nod as I recalled the
blue-green grasses and the world as it used to be. She was more right than she
knew.

“This may
be the new Garden of Eden, but without our help, and without our hard work, the
garden will wither and die, taking us with it,” she turned back forward and
started walking again, satisfied that she had gotten my attention. “You don’t
talk much do you?”

I didn’t answer.

“So we
work,” she continued. “We’re using the large hover-skiffs to build a dam
upstream so that we can control the flooding of the river. We’ll also use the
dam as a power source. There are three other colonies like this one. One of
them is Ridgecrest. We’re working with them and pooling our resources with
Bodford, their Governor, to build the dam. The hydroelectric will provide more
than enough power to keep both colonies humming-as long as we get it built
before the wet season comes and washes us all out to sea.”

“I’d like
to see that.” Hydroelectric dams, hovers, concrete: I was making a mental list
of all of the things I would look up on the Slate next time I had the
opportunity.

She threw
me a startled look.

“I mean
the dam.”

“I bet
you would,” she smiled wickedly as we approached a broad stretch of land on the
edge of the colony. “Especially after you’re done today. Here we are. The
Governor wants you on plow duty. We need to get some fruits and vegetables
planted. Tomatoes and peas. You can see there that the surveyor has already
marked out the lanes, it’s up to you to get the field plowed for planting.”

I looked
around, there was a sharp-bladed plow blade lying in the grass nearby. On one
end were two handles, the other had hitches to connect it to a beast of burden,
or perhaps a small hovercraft of some kind.

“Well?”
She looked at the plow and then back at me, impatiently. “What are you waiting
for? The bio group hasn’t finished bringing the livestock out of cryo yet. So
we won’t have any oxen to help pull the big plows until next spring, and we
need to get the seeds in the ground soon if we’re going to have anything to eat
when the stocks of freeze dried rations start getting low.”

“Isn’t
there a machine or something?” I looked out; the survey marks on the field
seemed to stretch out forever.

“Machine?
Yes there are. But none to spare, not until we get the dam built. The Governor
wants us all to minimize our power use. Besides, as he’ll tell you, ‘the human
machine is the only machine that you can count on’.”

She
turned to leave.

“Ju-lin,”
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure why I had spoken.

“Elicio.”
She turned and looked at me. Her voice was tinged with mockery. Her eyes were
brown with specks of yellow mixed in. After several breaths she continued. “You
do know that it’s customary to say something after calling someone’s name?”

“Th-thanks.”

“For
what? Assigning you to hard labor?” Her demeanor softened further. “Look,
you’re not the only one that is stuck here without understanding why. Believe
me, the last place I want to be is a land-locked flowerpot on the edge of
civilized space. Hell, the Collective traders don’t even come out this far, and
they go
everywhere
. But it doesn’t seem like either of us have a
choice.”

“Not even
you? I thought you were in charge?”

“In
charge? Me? Ha-” she threw her hands up. “That’s rich. No, I’m only here
because I had no choice. I’m 17, which means that even though I passed my
secondary course tests early, I need my parent’s permission to enlist in the
fleet. My mother’s dead, and my father decided to drag me and my brother out
here to the ass-end of space to make sure that we can’t have a life of our
own.”

“Your
father?”

“Ju-lin
McCulloch
,
at your service,” she raised her hand as if to tip an imaginary hat and turned
to leave without another word.

I stared
dumbly as she walked away. I was startled to realize that her absence made me
feel particularly alo
ne. I picked up the
hand-plow and began to work.

Chapter
6.

“A tired body houses a
contented mind,” the memory of my voice echoed in my mind
as I repeated the mantra. I was using a plane to mold the length of the log. I
worked the edge of a knot, layer by layer I shaved through the deep rings of
the tree until the knot was ground down and the section of the log was smooth.
The muscles in my arms burned as the sun was setting.

“A
tired body builds a contented mind,” I repeated again as I looked up the length
of the log. I still had a third of the way to go. It would be a long night. I
was tempted to speed up and not take as much care, but then I remembered what
had happened before. There had been imperfections in my plane, I had crossed
the grains. The log was imperfect, and had to be burned. So I had been sent to
do it again, and do it right.

“A
tired body builds a contented mind,” I continued to carve, slowly, and evenly.

I spent
several weeks plowing, tilling, planting, and weeding the field. Through the
work, I let my fear, confusion, and anger melt out through the sweat of my
brow. There was something ancient, familiar, and calming about working the
land. Most days I worked alone. Everyone in the colony had a job to do. The
engineering crews were busy building the dam and installing power, electric,
and sewage lines: all of the basic components of civilization. Other teams were
busy at work following the plans that Lee had laid out for the city. The core
of the Downs was the prefabricated buildings: the workshops, the cafeteria, and
barracks. Though, aside from the dam, Lee’s second priority was to build
houses. Three construction teams were working daily to build the simple three
bedroom wooden-log homes.

Workers
cleared the stand of misplaced trees that Ju-Lin had pointed out, and used the
lumber to build new homes.  The cleared land would be used to grow wheat. It
was an efficient operation, well planned, and well executed. Lee was a man of
vision and direction, and the colonists were all former miners and did not seem
to be strangers to hard work.  At night I returned to the men’s barracks with
the bachelors as the families moved into the newly built houses.

And so I
worked day after day, and used my Slate to learn about my new humanity each
night. I learned about the long history of wars on Earth, about the Great
Expansion and the founding of the great Earthborn Society which now claimed
three dozen star systems, and the Earthborn Protectorate Fleet that stood guard
to keep it safe. In studying history, I found that leadership was a f
ickle thing. Many times, the people best suited for
leadership were the ones who wanted it least. The people who were clever and
creative avoided responsibility and authority, while the
brutish and
strong craved power.

Weeks
passed, and I didn’t see Ju-lin again after she left me in the field, and the
mid-level work-team bosses, whom I dealt and lived with, tended to be the more
brutish sort. They would take authority where they could. The bosses and
foreman would order others around and take extra rations, using the power they
could obtain to get as much as they could. But Lee was different. I found that,
though the colonists would complain about him, they would never contradict his
direction. Where some men worked to gain and hold authority over others, Lee
simply held it.

In the
evenings I spent my time listening to the other colonists talk and studying the
Slate. I found that nearly all of the colonists were from Lagrange VI, a small
mining world owned and operated by the MineWorks Corporation. The whole planet
was devoted to chemical processing and mineral refining. In order to meet the
ever-increasing demand for processed minerals and precious metals, MineWorks
had steadily increased production at the refinery since it was first colonized
over a hundred years ago. The refining was so intense that the outdoor air on
the world had become toxic. When the conditions got bad enough that the
colonists started to get sick, MineWorks ignored their complaints. Not long
after that two young children died, and the colonists banded together and
threatened to take their story to the media if MineWorks didn’t relocate the
four small mining communities on Lagrange VI.

At first,
their cries were ignored, but when there were more deaths, the colonists began
to complain louder and more often. And then there were rumors around the
NewsNets that MineWorks had been engaging in illegal trade with the pirates and
smugglers operating outside the law of the Earthborn Protectorate. Unable to
handle the growing surge of bad coverage, MineWorks folded to the colonists’
demands to keep them quiet.

It took
two years for MineWorks to locate a suitable planet that was far enough from
existing shipping lanes and system traffic so that the colonist’s story
wouldn’t spread.  Eventually, everyone from Lagrange VI was settled onto
Eridani III. It was a planet that required minimal terraforming that was
located in a remote series of star systems known as the Nymphs on the edge of
the Protectorate territory, far from the heavily-traveled frontier worlds
between the Protectorate and the Domari Collective. Eridani was close enough
that MineWorks could monitor the colony, but far enough to keep the colonists
out of the public eye.

The
colonists were a tight-knit community. On Lagrange VI, they had all supported
the refineries in one way or another; most were mechanics or industrial
workers. They were not particularly well educated, but all were hardworking. On
Lagrange VI, the colonists had grown their own food using hydroponic pods and
lived all of their lives within an isolated series of buildings and tunnels in
the shadow of the huge refinery facilities. There were a lot of things they
were not used to: wide open spaces, clean blue skies, and strangers.

I was
surprised to learn that t I wasn’t the only stranger in their midst. The
McCulloughs were also outsiders. Colonists regularly complained about Lee, but
they did so without malice or anger, more like how a child complains about
their parents or a teacher. He was a man of vision and purpose. From the moment
they stepped out of the colony ship, he had assumed command easily and
efficiently. Overwhelmed by the clean new world and the hard work ahead of
them, they didn’t have time to question him.

By the
time they had gained their footing on the new world, Lee had already helped
them to build and establish a growing and thriving community. Daily the ranks
in the barracks grew smaller as new houses were finished and more families were
able to settle into their new homes. Lee knew how to get tangible results, and
it won him the colonist’s respect, if not their love.

Though
they quickly learned to accept Lee’s direction, the men in the barracks still
complained when the lights went out. But their complaints were mixed with a
sense of shared pride. Lee may be a pain in the ass, but he was
their
pain in the ass. His success was their success. Though the colonists learned to
accept Lee as one of their own, the colonists weren’t quite as accepting of
Ju-Lin, or her brother, Marin.

Lee had
tasked Ju-Lin with leading the team to install the power infrastructure from
the new dam to the Downs. Ju-Lin led her team of 15 at a breakneck pace,
pushing them to regularly work over 10 hours per day knee-deep in the mud.
Though she worked harder than anyone else, she did so with contempt. She made
it clear every day that “being in the ass-end of space on some nameless rock
with a two thousand refugee grease monkeys” wasn’t her idea of a good time.

Marin had
been the third person with Lee and Ju-Lin when they had first found me huddled
under the bush. He was a few years older than Ju-Lin, and recently graduated
with a post-secondary degree from an academy on one of the central Protectorate
worlds.

He was a
brisk young man, always purposeful and direct. While most of the colonists,
including myself, wore light and comfortable jumpsuits and were always covered
in mud, grease, or worse, Marin always wore crisp black pants and jacket. Lee
had put him in charge of compliance. He monitored all of the work crews to make
sure they were on schedule and following the colony development plans, but
Marin took it a step further.

“Fancies
himself a
s the Marshal of the Downs!” The voice
belonged to a man named Jager who worked as foreman for one of the building
crews. I was lying silently on my bunk, listening. “He came down this afternoon
with his Slate and surveyor’s scope, checked our sightlines, an
d told us
we had to move the foundation because we were off by six inches. Six damned
inches. He didn’t bother to ask why we had moved it, or he would have found out
about the boulder just under the surface. But bastard just assumed we couldn’t
read the plans.”

“Well,
Jag, to be fair, I’m still not convinced that you can read at all,” the second
voice was another tech they called Boils. His arms, neck and face were scarred
from a chemical leak that had occurred in his youth.

Several
of the men chuckled as they lay back in their bunks listening.

“Well,
not all of us can get by with our looks like you can!” Jager retorted with a
friendly jibe. “It’s too bad MineWorks decided to put us out here, maybe if
they would have landed us in some Domari commune you could have found a willing
Olsterian female to take in that ugly mug of yours—”

The men
laughed again.

I didn’t.

Nearly
every night Jager, Boils, and a few others would talk into the late hours,
exchanging insults and telling stories that most likely never happened. Though
I tried, I couldn’t quite see what was funny in the back and forth. Although
Boils didn’t seem offended when they made fun of his looks and laughed harder
than anyone, I just couldn’t manage to feel a part of their conversations.
Jager had mentioned the Domari though, that was a new one.

I pulled
up my Slate and typed in “The Domari”. 

Domari / The Domari
Collective:

The Domari Collective
is a society comprised of humanoids originating on four discrete worlds. The
Collective was founded in the namesake Domari system, a solar system containing
twin habitable worlds that traveled in similar orbits: Hoken and Laster. The
Lasterian natives (similar to Earthborn humans, though with particular grooming
styles and thick hair on their forehead that reaches down to the tip of their
nose) first developed manned spaceflight in the Earth-year 1302, and set off to
explore the nearby planet of Hoken. They were stunned to find that Hoken was
already inhabited with an intelligent (though pre-industrial) race of
humanoids. Genetic testing determined that the two peoples shared a common
genome, though they had evolved separately for millions of years. This gave
rise to the theory of Panspermia, the now pervasive school of thought that the
human genetic seed had been scattered across the universe by an unknown force
and left to evolve separately on different worlds (See Article on Origin
Debates: Random Dispersion, or Sown Seeds?).

The Lasterian’s
recognized the Hoken people as cousins. The two worlds began trading,
intermarrying (interbreeding), and mingling their two societies over the last
millennia to the point where the two races have become culturally
indistinguishable. As time and science progressed over the next few centuries,
the Domari Collective developed the first known gravitational flux drive, and
began traveling between star systems by exploiting the randomly occurring
static gravitational anomalies that connect neighboring star systems (see Flux
Points). Over the following centuries, the Domari encountered and integrated
two additional pre-space flight humanoid races into the Collective: the natives
of the Noona and Olster systems.

Though
physically similar to Earthborn humans, evolution (and 400+ years of
interbreeding between the human subspecies within the Collective) has resulted
in a number of physical differences between humanoid variants. For example, due
to
stronger-than-Earth-normal
gravitational field on the planet Olster, many who carry Olsterian heritage are
notably shorter, squatter, and physically stronger than Earthborn humans.
Natives of Noona (See Noonan) evolved in subterranean complexes and have pale
and sometimes nearly translucent skin and are extremely sensitive to bright
light. Noonan often wear long cloaks to protect themselves from bright lights
on space stations and other worlds.

Researcher’s note:
Members within the Collective prefer to identify themselves by their home
planet rather than specific humanoid subspecies. This emphasis on identity
relative to community, rather than socioeconomic class or racial/species
affiliation, is a stark difference to the Earthborn, who have a long and
violent history of racial conflict.

First Contact
between the Earthborn and Collective:

In 2167, the Earthborn
developed their first gravitational flux drive. Over the next 85 years, the
Earthborn charted 15 star systems, and expanded with permanent settlements
(orbital and terrestrial) on six solar systems, including two successfully
terraformed worlds. On 11.9.2252, an Earthborn prospector was scanning a
mineral belt in Tau Ceti when a large, unidentified vessel approached,
signaling the prospector in an unknown language.