JORL watched nearly everyone he cared for run away from him, vanishing into the rain. He’d known more drama in the last handful of days than he’d seen since he’d first set out to find the unnamed island years before. In hindsight, he might have realized that seeking that place before his time couldn’t possibly lead to anything good, and yet he’d experienced wonders since. In that time, Pizlo had continued to grow and learn and defy every expectation of society. And Dabni had changed his life in so many fundamental ways which, regardless of her motivation, had resulted in him being a better man. And Rina, how could he ever doubt the perfection of having a daughter. All of that had come after his first trip to that unnamed island, and he had to believe that this second visit would eventually yield similar treasure. Not in the current moment, but eventually.
For now, everyone was still reeling from the confrontation and revelations on the dock. Pizlo had fled to seek his own counsel, Dabni had likely retreated in confusion and shame to her bookstore, and Rina had run away home. He understood that everyone needed time and space to process, and that was fair, though he worried about his daughter getting back safely. She was mature for her age, but she was also upset. She would never have allowed him to accompany her, but perhaps.…
He saw the harbormaster’s son hesitantly drawing closer, bringing him a solution. He beckoned Chisulo to his side and hurriedly explained the situation. The young man nodded, beaming with the responsibility Jorl placed in him, and set off in pursuit of Rina. She didn’t have much of a head start and he knew the routes up from the harbor better than anyone. His longer legs would let him catch up and shadow her all the way back, or “accidentally” encounter her and guide her home if she lost her way. Satisfied as he could be at the moment, Jorl took a different route, giving his family their space, and headed to the familiar comforts of his own home.
* * *
INSTEAD of answers to the problems before him, he had more questions. The abstract points and principles he’d discussed with Welv had been made concrete by Abenaki’s proposal. But her premise: that in order for the Fant to flourish they required reintegration with other races had been turned on its head by the accomplishments of the Caudex. Six unknown colonies? Another five million Fant out there in the galaxy? His people were already thriving. Even if the Raccoon’s theories promised still more, did he have the right to threaten the safety and stability of entire worlds?
He sat in the hammock at his desk, a blank sheet before him and a fresh stick of ink bamboo in his trunk. He’d been sitting like that, poised to produce a list of pros and cons as he worked through the contents of a large bowl of salad. He was nearing the bottom of the bowl and still hadn’t written a thing. And then he felt a tug.
He set everything down and pushed himself deeper into the hammock and opened himself to what he assumed was Pizlo reaching out to him. The boy’s name was on his lips when he realized the mental space that formed around him belonged to Klarce.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said.
He smiled. There was much to admire about this councilor of the Caudex, not least of which was her conviction to her ideas and commitment to the survival of all Fant.
“Not at all,” he replied. “In fact, I was just thinking about our conversation. I respect your caution and concern when it comes to the Alliance. No one alive on Barsk has any direct experience of them, only eight-hundred-year-old stories of disenfranchisement and oppression passed down from grandmothers.”
“No one but you, you mean?”
He bowed his head in acknowledgment.
“And you would have me believe that those many grandmother tales are inaccurate, or grown out of proportion over the many years of their retelling?”
“Perhaps, in part. But no, there’s certainly no shortage of truth in them. The real problem is they’ve become monolithic, rather than actual. There are trillions of people in the Alliance, and though they may share similarities, just like the Fant they are individuals. Yes, there are regional biases, planetary biases, racial biases. I served in the Patrol and I experienced all of that firsthand, but there are also sociological and educational variables that can transcend those, bring people closer together, create common cause and shared interests. I’ve seen that working alongside my fellow senators in the Committee of Information.”
“You would tell me that the Caudex is painting with too wide a brush?”
“I’d ask that you consider that as a possibility.”
“And if I tell you that we have? That for us these tales haven’t passed down through so many generations and grown distorted because we have ready access to the original grandmothers who experienced the oppression directly? And yes, when you go back to these victims, Speak to the men and women who were displaced from Marbalarma and Dramblys and the many other worlds where they had lived and worked only to find themselves relocated to the wilds of Barsk—there’s a reason we call our cities the Civilized Wood—you find personal descriptions of the individuals who sent them here. The accounts blurred over the years, I’ll grant you that, but the eyewitnesses, that zero-generation that predates Margda’s, they did not experience the Alliance as faceless, interchangeable figures. They saw them as individuals who actively destroyed their lives, separated kith from kin, stripped away all possessions, and cast them away with no concern as to whether they lived or died so long as the Fant were gone from their own daily experience.”
Jorl frowned at her. “And in response? Margda and her generation—which includes your own founders—preoccupied themselves with survival. They took this planet that the Alliance had neither use nor love for and transformed it into an essential world to every stage of their economy and commerce. They sought niches and methods, drafted the Compact in a demand to have a voice and be heard again.”
“I’ve told you before, the Compact doesn’t guarantee our survival, it only delays the inevitable.”
Jorl shook his head. “You’re missing the larger point. When she helped draft the treaty, Margda knew that it was imperfect. You can see that when you study her life. It’s there in between the lines of her writing. She saw the future and planned for it. And those plans included the Compact to buy us all time.”
“No, you’re making my point for me, Jorl. If Margda relied on her visions to keep us all safe until we reached some critical future point, the Caudex created that future. We’ve spent our time actually doing something. I would say we did so in case she was proved wrong and the Compact failed, but to embrace your explanation I could as easily say we were part of her vision. From that perspective, is it so hard to realize we’re on the same side, sharing a common goal?”
Klarce escorted Jorl from her office and together they strolled along a promenade. Her control of the mindscape was perfect but strange. He knew himself beyond Barsk. The foliage in this city looked familiar yet slightly off, and were Arlo still alive he’d no doubt explain it all away as an effect of a different gravity, a different world. He’d walked on other worlds of the Alliance while in the Patrol, but to see a Fant city that did not exist on Barsk was a wonder all its own and moved him deeply.
He tried to keep any of it from showing on his face.
They arrived at a pavilion and stepped within until coming to a balcony that opened onto the largest chimney he’d ever seen. The degree of detail in this mindspace spoke of actual experience and not simply fanciful imagination. Klarce had stood here in the flesh, felt these breezes, smelled these fragrances.
“Where is this place?” He leaned over the balcony railing. Birds, far larger than any that existed on Barsk, flew past him, gleaming jewels of fruit clutched in their claws.
“This is the newsest of our havens. We call it Wella.”
He didn’t even try to hide the smile that pulled from his lips. “What a coincidence. We have a moon we call by that name.”
“Don’t be droll, Senator. We gave the first of our hidden worlds the name of one of our moons as a security precaution. We were overly cautious as it turned out, but on the off chance that some Alliance senator or Patrol officer intercepted any correspondence, their confusion would be limited to our home system. As we expanded even more, the pattern stuck.”
Jorl refrained from reminding her that he was an Alliance senator as well as a retired officer of the Patrol and instead asked, “I suppose you’ll need to find a new naming scheme now?”
“No doubt, but we’re still pushing a portal to the star system of what will likely meet the requirements to house our seventh colony.”
He waved his trunk in a broad arch. “What sort of requirements applied here?”
“This is the sixth hidden world built and colonized by the Caudex. It’s nestled inside a dead moon in a solar system that the Patrol surveyed and wrote off three and a half centuries ago.”
“But the Alliance knows of this place? They’ve been here?”
“Been and gone. There’s nothing here that can’t be acquired more cheaply elsewhere. So they came and went, pushing their portals from one end of the system’s plane to the other and beyond. It would take the nearest Alliance vessel more than two hundred years to get here. They have no portals in this system. Why would they?”
“But you do?” He reached out with his trunk, snagged some leaves and brought them to his mouth. Again a blend of familiar and strange, but also all part of the illusion Klarce provided.
“When the founders of the Caudex hit upon this plan, to potentially colonize systems where the Alliance would never return, they focused their best minds on the science and engineering of portals. The basics haven’t changed much in several millennia. The Alliance builds them large, to accommodate multiple ships coming through at once. They build them to never close. We didn’t have those constraints. Our portals only remain open when we need to use them. Otherwise, we disassemble both sides so no one can slip through.”
“And you think that keeps you safe?”
“Our enemies don’t know we exist. And if they did, they can’t find us. And supposing they somehow learned where we are, they still couldn’t reach us in time to do us any harm. Once we established each of the hidden worlds, we began pushing new portals of our own outward from each of them. We have sufficient vessels and protected backdoors to allow us to remove the entire population of any of them with a hundred years to spare before even an unmanned attack could reach us.”
Jorl pushed away from the railing, passing Klarce and pacing back into the pavilion. “That’s a strategy of hiding and running away, not safety.”
“And what would you have us do instead, Senator?”
He winced at the scorn she poured into his title. “Invite them in,” he said.
“What?”
“You’ve done an incredible thing here, perfected a technique which would serve the Alliance’s goal, its hunger, to expand to new worlds. Invite them to share in what you’ve created. Bring the other races to each of your new worlds and let them learn to live with us again.”
“Have you heard anything I’ve said? Why would we want to live with them? They’ve shunned us, exiled our ancestors, turned us into monsters in their own folklore. We don’t need them in our lives.”
“You do,” insisted Jorl. “And they need you. Everything the Alliance accomplished prior to moving the Fant to Barsk, the art and science, technology and mathematics, envisioned and developed and perfected over tens of millennia, all of that stems from diversity. When they forced our people onto Barsk, they cut us off from all of that. They stole an entitlement from us.”
Klarce laughed. “And yet look what we’ve done, unhampered by their ‘diversity.’ If anything, we’ve excelled without it.”
“For now. But you’re mistaking stagnation for utopia. Look at history, Klarce. People need to struggle. We need differing opinions. We need argument and disagreement. It’s the way we advance. If you lock all the Fant away in these hidden worlds, how will we grow?”
The balcony vanished without warning, replaced by the walls and furniture of a simple office. Klarce sat across from him on a long couch that faced a work desk.
“I hear you, Jorl. I really do. But what you’re describing is theory, unsupported by any data. You might be right, or then again maybe not. If we take a bite out of that fruit and are wrong, well, we can’t go back and have a whole, unblemished fruit again.”
“Actually, you could,” said Jorl. “Allow just one of these worlds you’ve created to become a mixed world. Integrate it however you like, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
She shook her head. “What you’re talking about is using upwards of a million people, Fant like you and me, as unwitting participants in a social experiment. And even if I thought it was a good idea—and let’s be clear, I do not—how would you keep knowledge of the existence and location of our other Hidden Worlds from non-Fant when your experiment goes horribly wrong?”
“You’re making assumptions again—”
“And you’re being a naïve academician. Let me be frank with you, the Full Council decided to tell you about Ulmazh and the colonies we’ve named for Barsk’s other moons because after some debate it seemed clear that we all agree more than we disagree. You understand that there are forces in the Alliance—not everyone, of course, not even most, but some—who would see our entire race, wiped out. This is not a burden we wish to place on all Fant, and so the Caudex remains a secret on Barsk. Likewise, the knowledge of much of what we do is limited even on those worlds we’ve colonized.”
“Is that why you gave the order to have me killed?”
Klarce stared, speechless a moment, then nodded as she thought it through. “Dabni told you this?”
“She did. But she didn’t know why.”
“You summoned Fisco, and the damn fool mentioned the Caudex. From what we already knew about you, it was obvious you’d try to track that down. So Sind activated a team to disrupt the consolidation of your memories of that conversation, only they failed. As did a second team. We still don’t know how you managed that. But the point was, whether deliberately or accidentally, you’d breached our security and then proved uncontainable. We knew you to be engaged in regular communication with the Alliance senate. And as Margda’s chosen you were already under suspicion. A difficult decision was made, and not lightly.”
“What changed that led you to not only rescind my death sentence but also share your secrets of Ulmazh and six other colonies?”
“Your efficiency and your nature.”
“Excuse me?”
“You went from knowledge of Fisco to locating the Caudex in a matter of days. You didn’t attempt to transmit this information to the Alliance. You didn’t see it as a threat or a danger. You personally went to investigate it, to explain it. You sat down with me—with a degree of antagonism on either side it’s fair to say—and you sought understanding. The Caudex seeks the safety of our people, not conflict. We believe you do as well and that the best way to ensure we would not be at cross purposes—to ensure you would not become a liability—was to show you just how much was at stake and recruit you instead.”
He considered this a while before responding. “So you’re saying you trust me now?”
“Not so completely as that. We have common cause though. We’re not philosophically opposed to the ideas of Fant living side by side with other races, but not if pursuing it brings Alliance scrutiny to Barsk. Find another way, and you’ll have our support.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Return to your books, Jorl. Write your articles. Give seminars. Study the past as is your preference and let others chart the future. Above all, do not threaten our security—”
“Or you’ll have me killed?”
Klarce’s sighed like a character in a play. “You can paint me as the villain if you like, but we seek to preserve our people. Part of who we are is a tradition of isolating and culling aberration. You’re already exceptional, Jorl. Rein in your aberrance, for your own sake.”
“Some would say that aberration is what keeps a society from stagnation,” said Jorl.
“You’re the historian. How often is that the story that survives the passage of time and the rigor of events?”
And with that, the audience ended. The nefshon connection had been severed and he was back in his own office, left to ponder Klarce’s advice regarding the aberrations in his life. Understandably, he reached out for Pizlo.