H Beam Piper & Michael Kurland, page 9
Then, in the year 416, a black smudge was seen to obscure one group of islands. It was not a cloud, and through it the observers were sure they could make out glimpses of orange flame. At first it was supposed that a volcano had broken into activity, but when the smoke cleared, in less than one waking-period, there was no discernable alteration in the shape of the islands. This was the first date which could be fixed in both Hetairan and Thalassan history; it was the day of the burning of the Zabashan fishing-fleet by the ships of Gir-Zashon.
Chapter Ten
However scrupulously the historian may shun value-judgments, the Thalassan Fish Oil War can only be characterized as a senseless and barbarous folly. The Ocean Sea was so vast, and its marine life so prolific, that the whole population of Thalassa might have exploited its resources for all eternity without having occasion for conflict. The war began without legitimate reason or necessity, and it ended in the ruin of every participant. Only the kingdoms and city-states of Dudak remained neutral, carrying on trade with both Gir-Zashon and Thurv, and with the Sabashan-Vashturan-Nimshan-Gvardan allies. The war ended in the year 1950 of the Tissean Era, with the defeat of Gir-Zashonan and Thurv. The whole of Thurv was overrun and conquered by Vashturan and Gvardan armies; several powerful Gir-Zashonan fleets were destroyed in naval battles on the Central Sea; two of the three semi-autonomous states of Gir-Zashon became embroiled in a civil war growing out of mutual accusations of cowardice and treachery. The war itself, begun without formal declaration, ended without formal peace. Everybody was tired of it; even the nominal victors were glad to see its end. The credit for finally halting the war goes to the then Successor of Puzza, and Interpreter of The Books of Tisse, Avaraff XVI, who finally managed to get an agreement from all parties; negotiating with the states of Gir-Zashon and Thurv through one Horv-Had-drov, a Gir-Zashonan general who had been taken prisoner several years before and converted to the Puzzan creed at Tullon. Although the peace obviously saved the Gir-Zashonan states from extinction, there was bitter dissatisfaction within Gir-Zashon. All three of the semi-autonomous governments were overthrown, the people accusing them of having stabbed the armies and fleets of Gir-Zashon in the back. Horv-Haddrov, returning to Karkasha, was dragged from the rostrum while attempting to explain the terms of the peace and lynched with shocking brutality. Other members of the peace party, especially the clergy of Puzzanism, were the victims of savage pogroms. In the century which followed, at least fifty governments were toppled from power in the three states of Gir-Zashon; their political backgrounds ranging from absolute monarchy to total anarchy.
It was at Karkasha, near the mid-mark of this century of disorder, that Dov-Soglov wrote his brief thesis,The Organic State. Dov-Soglov was no superstitious and subliterate Tisse, dictating his random thoughts over a pot of beer to a drinking-crony while he pegged the soles of peasants' sandals. His portraits, admittedly idealized, show a serious and intelligent face, with much darker head down than was usual among the Hoz-Hozgaz race, and the close-set eyes, small ears, and pointed nose of the mountain people of the interior. He was for some time a student in one of the secular universities at Karkasha, and, simultaneously, held some minor clerical post in one of the kaleidoscopically-shifting governments of the period. His studies seem to have been in the field of anatomy and what passed, in his culture, for biology. The state, according to his book, was analogous to a living organism, and obeyed laws parallel to the laws of organic growth and evolution. Each individual was therefore a part of the organism, and could have no function or duty save the service of the organism-as-a-whole. Not nohigher duty than service to the state, but no other duty at all. Individualism was a species of social cancer. As the body is directed by a central nervous system, the state must be directed by a governing elite, to whom the body-cells must give absolute obedience for their own good.
Dov-Soglov lived only eight years after the publication of his book, but in that time he saw it become a subject of hot discussion all over the planet. The hierarchy of Puzzan Tisse'ism and the Zaithuan Congregations outdid one another in denouncing it; the latter because it was revolting to their individualistic principles, and the former because it proposed a rival authoritarianism too much like their own. Absolute monarchs and dictators approved it-with much suspicion and with reservations-and quoted or misquoted from it to support their authority. The workers and peasants, slave and free, hailed it as a promise of equality and fraternity for all. Workers and peasants tend to be out of touch with their own best interests. And adventurers saw in it a ladder to power.
Within twenty years of Dov-Soglov's death, there was a strong, if clandestine, Organicist movement on every continent around the Central Sea. Everywhere its existence was illegal and secret, its advocates slinking among the poor and oppressed with glowing promises of freedom and prosperity for all. There were governments, even formally democratic republics, which adopted parts of Dov-Soglov's political gospel and grasped more and more authority in the name of such meaningless abstractions as the common welfare, or the greatest good for the greatest number. Whenever possible, Organicists managed to infiltrate as many of their supporters as possible into such governments. This even happened in states which looked for spiritual guidance to the Puzzan Creed.
The end of the Fish Oil War had brought peace, but not prosperity to Thalassa. With the exception of the Confederacy of Dudak, which had stayed out of it, every nation around the Central Sea either stood on the crumbling edge of bankruptcy, or had gathered skirt in hand and leapt headlong over it. The introduction of new weapons had forced all of them into rearmament programs far beyond their financial or technological capacities. The fishing fleets were devastated; merchant ships, the red corpuscles of trade, were mostly sunk or burned in port. Blockades and commerce-raiding had forced every continent into a shabby self-sufficiency based on a make-do or do-without philosophy. Everybody was poor, and almost everybody went to bed hungry nine times out of ten. Gir-Zashon was the first to go completely Or-ganicist. Conditions there were worse than on any other continent, with the exception of Thurv, still occupied after a century by Zabashan troops. The last of a long series of progressively weaker governments could no longer suppress the hungry rioters, and collapsed into a shambles of blood and destruction. The Organicists, organized, disciplined, armed with secretly accumulated stores of weapons and ammunition, and reenforced by comrades from overseas, waited until the whole continent was in anarchy and then took over in a series of almost bloodless coups. The bloodshed would come later. Hetairan history had not been without its bloody pages. There had been no national wars, for there were no nations; but as gangs grew larger, conflicts between them approached the ferocity and intensity of wars. There had been the Sugar Valley Massacre; people still talked of the wiping out of the Halzorros and their bandit mercenaries. There had been fights between migratory labor-gangs. There had been the Painted Hills War, between the Vallados and the Grassanos, which ended after the first Timber Lake Conference as a result of the friendship and collaboration between Dwallo Vallado and Lyssa Grassano. This collaboration may have resulted in more than that-it was rumored that Dwallo may have been the father of Lyssa's next child. This was somewhat shocking. Liaisons with wanderers were acceptable, but with that one exception, sex outside of the gang was dis couraged by an ancient, unspoken taboo. After all, the gang had to raise the offspring of any such liaison. The rumor itself was regarded as almost indecent, the only form of indecency existing in any Hetairan language, although the mere act of attempting to trace the paternity of a child was, in itself, regarded as in extremely poor taste. In one way the Trading Combine was a force for peace: gang wars were definitely bad for business. When, however, such clashes could not be averted, they were apt to be far more extensive, sanguinary, and destructive, as inter-gang connections grew. In the Fifth Century there was an oil-war in the Rim Country which lasted for five years; both sides used armored trucks and dropped bombs of blasting-paste from transport planes. The Trading Combine tried to stop it by cutting off credit to the two warring oil-gangs, but this only hurt business even more, and both gangs were able to borrow from independent banking groups. It proved, at least, that the Trading Combine was not the all-powerful monster that so many small gangs had feared.
No gang or combine, however, was ever able to so completely dominate any geographical area as to resemble, even remotely, a national state; and such a thing as government was an idea that never developed. Armed individuals protected themselves. Hetairans of good will were always willing to band together to put down brigandage. Roads were built out of common need, and paid for by the users. Fire protection was supplied by a gang, and paid for like an insurance policy. Police protection could be supplied the same way, if anyone felt the need.
Hetaira was a world of order in the absence of law; if violence between individuals was common, and violence between gangs possible, at least the greater violence that was possible between nations was completely unknown. The individual's rifle or revolver was less of a burden to him than a nation's armies and air-fleets would have been, and far less of a danger to his neighbors. There was very little incentive for an arms-race.
The day after the smoke-smudge was observed on Shining Sister, the newspapers all over the planet carried the story; and for years to come they were filled with the continuing controversy as to just what this signified. There had never, since the establishment of the observatory on Skystabber, been any trace of volcanic activity on Shining Sister. While this proved nothing, it gave support to the view that the smoke was the result of some artificial process caused by intelligent beings. The radio station began beaming signals toward the other planet. They went unanswered for the excellent reason that there was not, on Thalassa, at that time, a single radio to receive them or reply. A closer watch was kept through the big telescope. Occasionally smaller smudges were detected on the open water. Some optimists were of the firm opinion that these were signal-fires, but the prevalent-and correct-opinion was that these were burning ships. One scientists approached absolute truth when he opined that it was probably the sign of a great gang-war in progress. The interest in Shining Sister was powerful and universal, deeply involving the emotions of everybody. For over a thousand years it had been known that she was a duplicate world, formed, along with their own, from the wreckage of a single planet in a great stellar cataclysm. In the Hetairan social organization the family, as such, was non-existant. The only blood relationship commonly recognized was that of mother and child, and between children of the same mother. The binary planetary system they were a part of was, perhaps inevitably, conceived of as-in poetic terms-the two children of a single mother, who gave her life in their birth.
For thousands of years they had looked toward the unmoving globe in the sky, first with wonder, then as a reliable landmark, and finally, when their astronomers established the relationship, with familial love. And now it seemed strongly probable that Shining Sister had children with whom they could communicate.
An attitude of something less-or something more-than logic, perhaps? Though extremely logical, the Hetairan was not exclusively logical. About some things he could be passionately emotional. And so, compelled by the two poles of logic and emotion, the Shining Sister Combine was formed by the scientists of the Rendezvous Combine, and, almost immediately, heavily subscribed by the general public. The six who sat in the ornate-shabby room were variously clad. Yev-Lorov, paring an apple-like fruit with his knife, wore the leather smock of a carpenter, but there was a heavy pistol thrust through the loop in which a carpenter usually carried his square, a powder-flask in one side pocket and a book in the other. Tav-Jarkthov and Olv-Yakkov wore military uniforms, one of cavalry and the other of the Brigade of Naval Infantry; they were playing cards at one end of the table. Thav-Thabov, in the sleeveless jerkin of a merchant's clerk, had one of his pistols apart and was cleaning it. Rav-Razkov, in his student's gown, with an artillery private's carbine slung from his shoulder, was peering at the titles of the books on the shelves across the room. And Zov-Zolkov lounged, seemingly asleep, in the armchair once occupied by the High Courts judge whose private chamber this room had been; except for the tip of one ear, which would twitch occasionally, he was utterly motionless.
The group shared two things in common: they each had a white armband bearing, in black, a cubist humanoid figure, stylized to the point of inhumanity; and they each had the bitter, hate-filled, utterly humorless expression of the complete fanatic.
Cattle! Thav-Thabov said contemptuously. They riot for bread-and they begin by destroying the bakeries!
'And on the farm,' Raz-Razkov quoted, 'there are the cattle, and the herdsmen, and there are those who tell the herdsmen where to drive the cattle, and what to feed them, and which are to be milked, and which bred, and which slaughtered.
You can quote the Citizen-Originator about anything at all, Yev-Lorov admired. Me, I have to carryThe Organic State in my pocket, but you have it all in your head.
If you'd spent five years in prison as I did, Raz-Razkov said, you'd know it all by heart, too. There was a sound outside the door; the faint rattle of a musket-sling, as the sentinel brought his weapon to the ready. Only the apparently somnolent Zov-Zolkov heard it; his hand went to the pistol inside his jacket, and then he relaxed as the door opened and a man in the trousers of a workman, the coat of an infantry captain, and a steel helmet, entered.
Obedience, Citizen First Controller, he greeted Zov-Zolkov. All the gates of the city are in our hands. Citizen-Lieutenant Niv-Hazrov's force controls the warehouse district, and Citizen-Captain Yav-Novrov sends word from the rural districts that the seizure of grain and meat-animals is progressing, and what little resistance he had encountered has been dealt with according to The Words of Instruction. Zov-Zolkov smiled-not a pleasant smile. Excellent, Citizen. Have you notified Citizen Trav-Vasov? Then do so at once; he has his instructions.
Obedient to your will, Citizen First Controller! The messenger turned and went out, closing the door behind him.
The cattle will be lowing to be fed, soon, Zov-Zolkov said. The herdsmen have been told under what conditions to feed them. Citizens, we will now proceed to construct the Organic State. The construction was neither swift nor nice. Peasants and workers who had gulped the doc trines of Dov-Soglov whole, without pausing to savor the taste or texture, which is to say without examining the details or understanding just what their position in the Organic hierarchy was to be, had to be made to understand that they were cattle on the farm of Zov-Zolkov; bone-cells and muscle-cells in the body of the State, of which the Party was the brain and Zov-Zolkov the First Controller. The understanding usually came painfully. There were certain brain-cells, too, which had to be excised when they began disagreeing among themselves. Yav-Lorov was one of these; he was put on trial for contra-organicism, convicted without dissent, and brained with an iron mace. Execution by shooting was a useless expenditure of ammunition, and therefore a criminal waste of the resources of the State. His crime appears to have been disagreement with the Citizen First Controller about agrarian policy, again a matter of conservation of the resources of the State.
The resources of the State were the first concern of all; they had to be husbanded and multiplied. Every one of the humanoid resources-the body-cells, in the Citizen-Originator's metaphor-must perform precisely as much work as possible; they must be asked for no more, and they must deliver not one tap less. They must eat and wear and use what was barely necessary for the work they must do. They must reproduce themselves with the same machine-like efficiency with which they produced food and clothing and tools and weapons. After all, their children would be, in a very real sense, the tools and weapons of the State.
They were shifted from job to job, from place to place, from mate to mate, at the dictates of the First Controller and the Board of Deputy Control and the Board of Planning. They owned nothing, not even themselves. It must be said that Zov-Zolkov and his Deputy-Controllers drove themselves as hard as they drove the body-cells, but that merely made the enslavement of Gir-Zashon complete. In the earlier phases of the Organic State, technological advancement had top priority. Dov-Soglov, when his thinking had not been distorted by too-rigid adherence to anatomical analogies, had been a keen student of political history. He had realized that from the days of the First Sea Empire on Gvarda, the limiting factor upon the growth and survival of every state had been its level of technology, and he had postulated that the state can only grow numerically and geographically to the extent that it has the tools for supplying its subjects, communicating with the edges of its domain, and waging successful war upon its enemies. With this dictum Zov-Zolkov agreed wholeheartedly, not only because it would have been unthinkable for him not to do so, but because, if Dov-Soglov had not said so, he would have thought of it himself.
He established research and development centers; he selected the most intelligent body-cells and trained them to be brain-cells; he collected books on every scientific subject from all around the Central Sea; he imported scientists and technicians from every country on the globe and devised methods to encourage them to work for the State. Steam-turbine engines were improved, and gas-turbine engines designed. Electricity, long a classroom demonstration-toy in other lands, was studied and applied to industry and communication; electric lighting and power and the telephone were developed, and eventually the principles of radio were discovered.
