Emerald
Legion – Chapter 6
“Tell me
of your homeworld, Usil.” –
In which our young Champions share their impressions of their birth-worlds…
*****************************************************
The three
Champions had used their Champion’s Rings to ensconce themselves atop one of
the spot-lights, watching the moopsball play-offs
from a spectacular vantage point that no one else could challenge.
“I just
don’t get it. *Team* sports? Where’s the glory in that?” Rokk muttered, not for the first time.
~Cooperative
exercises are useful, Rokk. You have to admit we worked well when we
coordinated our actions and didn’t all attempt to run rampage against those
gunmen…~
“That’s
different. This isn’t life or death, or
military action. It’s for *fun.* What’s fun about
sharing the glory?”
“I'm beginning
to think I’d never last a second on Braal.”
“Oh, it’s
not that bad, Garth. Yeah, we’re
hyper-competitive, but it brings out the best in people. It gives people something to strive for,
goals and dreams and all that.”
~That’s
easy for a sports-prodigy to say. But it
doesn’t work out for everyone, does it Rokk?~
With a
heavy sigh, Rokk concedes the point. “That’s for sure.”
Garth was
trying to figure out the game again, “This game is stupid! They just run around for like, a few seconds,
and then call time-out to argue about all these stupid rules for another
half-hour.”
“On this
we are agreed.”
~We’re all
colonists, come back to the mother Earth, but we don’t really have anything in
common with these people. Tell us about Braal, Rokk.~
“Not much
to say. It’s just a rock that exports
lots of exotic metals. Just about
everyone is tied to the mining and enrichment consortiums, and we work like
beasts, and then play twice as hard when shift is over. Our SP branch is the second highest paid in
the UP, because we keep them so busy cleaning up after us. The only spectator sport more popular than magno-ball is bare-knuckled bar-brawling…”
“Second-highest
paid?”
~The
detachment to Rimbor is the highest paid, I’ll bet.~
“Yeah. Even we can’t compete with actual
professional troublemakers.”
~Everyone
has magnetic powers, right?~
“Not like
mine, but yeah. When we settled Braal it was an accident.
The third planet was lush and hospitable. Braal, the fourth planet, was a shattered lump of metal and rock that had been
split open by a cometary impact a few million years
before. The molten iron core spewed out
in an enormous fountain that scorched Braal’s smaller
moon, and formed the magnetite ring surrounding the planet today. The planet was all lopsided and broken, and
after some ridiculous number of years, all of the chunks of
iron that had rained back down to the planetary surface degraded into
particles the size of sand. The entire
planet was one giant desert, but the sand dunes were made of tiny chunks of
iron, and when the moons passed overhead, the magnetic fields would sweep
across the deserts and hurl up mile high clouds of charged iron particles that
spent the next million years wearing everything else on the planet into dust.”
“So,
obviously the colony ship wanted the third planet, and got sucked in by the
magnetic forces?”
“Exactly. They had planned for it, but an asteroid
shower damaged the ship and brought them too close to Braal,
and left them unable to escape its’ pull.
The captain realized that she’d drain the ships fuel and burn out the
engines, and still not be able to escape, and then have nothing left to make a
safe landing. So she accelerated towards
the planet and cut the engines to save power.”
“Ballsy move.”
“Yeah. She tore into the atmosphere like a meteor,
and only engaged thrusters when she was nearing impact, slinging the ship along
the surface and letting the atmosphere break their velocity. She went all the way around the planet two
and a half times before the desert sands, attracted to
the charge the hull had picked up during entry, reached up and pulled the ship
from the sky.”
~I don’t
get it. Was it a sand-storm or some sort
of magnetic interference?~
“The
charged iron sands were attracted to the ship as it passed overhead, and the
more of them clung to the hull, the more they slowed the ship down, and weighed
it down… Fortunately, they also ended up
cushioning the ship from the worst of the impact. The captain died, and six other
crewmembers. The passengers in cryo-sleep were heavily shielded, with triple redundancies
and all back-up power reinforcing those sections, and still, 23 of them
couldn’t be revived. At planetfall, two crewmen and 227 passengers were left alive,
on a planet with an unbreathable atmosphere, and
magnetic fields so intense that most of their machinery flat out wouldn’t
work.”
~What a
nightmare!~
“Yeah, the
first year was rough. But the passengers
were all scientists and explorers, resourceful folk who had leapt at the
challenge of colonizing a new world, so far out on the fringe that they knew it
would be years before anyone came to check on their progress. They couldn’t live on the surface, so they
tunneled down, using the airlock tubes to make a passageway down through the
iron sands until they hit rock. Then
they used cutting torches that they’d ripped off of the useless worker-droids
to bore down through the rock and fashion caverns, which they immediately began
to seed with renewable food sources, as they were already running short on
rations. Thoughts of colonizing the
surface were abandoned when the exploration teams were attacked by what turned
out to be unknown forms of electromagnetic life. The head of the team was Resa
Martel, and she was unconscious when they brought her back, her suit having
been overloaded by the energy discharges, and having some sort of epileptic
fit. She recovered quickly, but the
researchers discovered that she had been pregnant, and that the baby seemed to
have retained some sort of magnetic charge.
Because of the high iron content, just about everyone was suffering mild
metal poisoning, but she seemed to get healthier, and months later, gave birth
to Genn Martel, the first Braalian. He was born with bright purple eyes, and a
powerful magnetic field, and the colonists knew that everything had changed…”
“So the
purple eyes, everyone on Braal has those?”, Garth asked.
“Actually
it’s a reaction to all the iron in our systems.
Like me, Genn should have had blue eyes, but
all the iron makes our eyes look purple.
If a Braalian would have green eyes, the red
from the iron would make them brown, and if they were already supposed to be
brown, they would end up looking dark red.
Purple is kind of rare, actually.
Dark red is the most common eye color.”
~I’m
surprised that the colonists so quickly accepted a child that was so different.~
“Ah,
you’re already getting ahead of the story, Imra. And no, they didn’t all welcome the new
child. A few superstitious weirdos,
already stressed out by the living conditions and the shortages and the various
energy disturbances said that the child was possessed by the energy creatures
or something. Anytime something would go
wrong, they would blame it on the birth of Genn, claiming
that he was cursed or something. The
other colonists were forced to move Genn and Resa into secluded rooms and guard them day and night,
after a few fanatics attempted to kill them.
It was nearly a civil war, until two other women gave birth to children
with dark red eyes and similar magnetic anomalies. Neither of these women had ever been to the
surface or encountered an energy creature, and that took some of the fire out
of the movement. The last hold-out, a
true fanatic who had snapped under the stress of the living conditions, ended
up being killed by his own wife after she discovered that she was
pregnant. She wasn’t about to let her
husband kill her ‘demon-baby,’ and killed him with a plasma welder.”
~That’s
horrible!~
“The other
colonists banded together and held a vote.
It was determined that she’d acted in defense of her child, and her
desperate act was actually applauded.
Five years later, she became the first elected leader of Braal. Who would
have thought killing your husband would be the first step to a successful
political career?”
~Only
every woman in the universe, ever?~
“Heh, she’s got you there, Rokk.”
“Anyway,
the shortages remained harsh, and it seemed like they ran on the brink of total
collapse for three generations. During
that time there were constant fears that the rationing system would fail, and
there were constant rumors of a ‘death lottery.’ According to the rumors, anyone who didn’t
perform a vital function would be denied a sustenance ration, to save vital supplies
for those who were necessary to the survival of the colony. It never actually happened, but it had our
people at each others throats for years, and even centuries later, we remain
hyper-competitive, as if we aren’t going to get fed if we don’t break records
and exceed expectations.”
~These
fears only lasted for a few generations, and your people are *still* affected
by them?~
“Yeah, it
doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I guess fears rarely do.” Rokk
conceded,
“Finally,
the colonists encountered an underground sea, and a form of algae that was
subsisting off of geothermal activity and chemical synthesis. It wasn’t much, but it was a carbon source,
and they quickly turned it into a food supply.
The days of rationing were at an end, and the deeper mines had turned up
many forms of radioactive materials that could be used for power sources. Things were looking up, and over the next two
centuries, exploration teams discovered that the electromagnetic life-forms
were vanishing. Every decade there were
less and less encounters, until it seemed that they were completely
extinct. The Spiritualists of the
Crystal Unity claim that for every birth on Braal,
one of the creatures was replaced, and that each Braalian
is a composite creature, both flesh and energy, but most people don’t believe
that. Because of the whole ‘demon-child
/ possession’ incident, Braalians have a strong
dislike of that train of thought, associating it with the crazies. I know that *I* certainly don’t feel
‘possessed’ by any sort of electromagnetic entity…”
~And yet,
I don’t feel ‘possessed’ by the organisms living in my cells, or the ones in my
bloodstream, or the ones in my intestines.
Why would you be aware of a creature that has become an
indistinguishable part of you?~
“I guess
it’s possible. In any event, the worst
of the storms seemed to vanish along with the entities, and over the next few
centuries, the colonists were able to begin building on the surface, and soon
established contact with the United Planets, who had never realized that there
was an thriving subterranean civilization trapped on the world that they had
marked as ‘off-limits’ and a ‘navigation hazard.’ We communicated by laser, until a Coluan scout-craft landed in our main city, completely
unaffected by the magnetic storms, and the diplomat’s *kid* ended up showing us
how to get our antique worker-droids active despite the magnetic
interference. Something that took him a
few hours of pondering, because he was bored, something he called ‘adaptive
heuristic response,’ and it revolutionized our world. Any stubborn insistence that we didn’t need
the UP after all we’d accomplished on our own vanished overnight.”
Rokk
shifted as the night breeze whipped Imra’s cloak into
his face. “Well, that’s it for Braal. You’ve pumped
me for info, now it’s your turn. Tell us
about Titan.”
“Yeah! I heard it’s cold
there.”
~Very. Titan is the oldest Earth colony, but no one
knew that for a long time, because we were hidden from Earth for centuries.~
“But
Titan’s in the Earth system! How could
they miss it?” Garth protested.
~Let’s
start at the beginning. Telepaths have
been native to Earth for millennia, but rarely welcomed. Sometimes burned as witches, or persecuted as
‘demon-children,’ like that first Braalian child, the
only telepaths that survived were the ones who learned to hide their
gifts. By the early 22nd century, there
were enough of us being born, and humanity was so closely connected, that it
became impossible to deny our presence any longer, and some cultures turned
paranoid and began to cull any child that showed signs of the gift. There wasn’t a culture on the planet that
didn’t strictly regulate telepathy, declaring telepathic contact to be ‘mental
trespassing,’ or eavesdropping, coercion, espionage or even rape!~
“That’s
just crazy!”
~Everybody
had secret shames and fears back then, Garth, and would die, or, more likely,
*kill,* to keep those secrets. Telepaths
were the ultimate threat to society-as-it-was, and so we found it increasingly
impossible to live in peace among ‘normal’ humans. The first proposed withdrawal was at a summit
in
“That’s
awesome! How did they know how to fly a
spaceship? Did they have
telepath-astronauts?”
~No, but a
few hours alone with the original pilots, and the telepaths knew everything
they needed to know. They knew that Mars
was not an option. Earth could too
easily retaliate, and yet the ship was not sufficient to leave the system. One telepath had worked as an intelligence
agent for several nations, under various guises, and had learned of an alien
base abandoned under the ice of Titan.
It had been ultra-classified, and he wiped all knowledge of it’s existence not just from the data-records, but from the
very minds of the few who knew of it.
That was the telepath’s goal.
They practiced mind-over-body techniques and entered trances, to reduce
oxygen consumption and eliminate the need for foodstuffs, since the ship didn’t
have supplies adequate for their longer-than-projected voyage, and upon
entering orbit around Titan, they quickly located the base, and shuttled the people
down over the course of several weeks, stripping every usable thing they could
from the colony ship, before programming it to fly to Jupiter and plunge into
the Jovian atmosphere in front of the exploration
satellite orbiting that world. As far as
Earth knew, the stolen colony ship had fallen into Jupiter’s gravity well and
died with all hands.~
~The
colonists spent the next centuries confined to the alien base, lacking the
technical know-how to expand the facility.
It took many generations before the technology was re-invented necessary
to add onto the structure, and by then our people had grown accustomed to the
bleak sterile surroundings, cramped conditions and tasteless protein bricks
assembled from raw elements by automated machine. Making sound, or showing emotion, was
considered rude and disrespectful. We
became a race of pale-faced ghosts, never speaking, eating only tiny bites of
tasteless food and drinking only water.~
”It sounds
as hard as what the Braalian colonists went through,
in it’s own way.” Rokk noted
sympathetically.
~And yet,
it was paradise. I would sit in my tiny
undecorated quarters, gray walls over my gray sleeping mat, close my eyes and
soar through skies of colors I had never seen with my own eyes, surrounded by
living creatures I only knew from the memories past down over a dozen
generations. We live a life of the mind,
and most Titanians are content with that.~
“But not you.” Rokk added.
~No. I had to see these things for myself. I didn’t want to relive someone else’s dreams
of sunsets that I would never see, of flowers and birds and a world with warm
scented breezes where children and run and play in open fields. Mind-pictures weren’t enough. I had to *feel* these things for myself.~
“Is it
everything you’d hoped?” Garth asked, as Rokk had
fallen quiet.
~So much
more. I want to go back to Titan and
shake them and scream in their heads what they are missing. We don’t have to hide anymore. We don’t have to live like that. There is another world out here, of sights
and sounds and scents, and it’s so *real.* Not dreams or psychodramas, actual
flesh and dirt and sound.~
“Wow.”
~But
they’d think I was crazy. They’d ‘calm’
me with soothing platitudes and psychic readjustment, saying that I was ‘overstimulated.’~, although the Ring keeps her warm, Imra wraps her cloak around herself anyway. ~I’m never going back there. It’s all I’ve ever known, but it was never my
home.~
Garth
massaged his shoulder, which had stiffened up from sitting in the same position
for so long before standing up and stretching, “Well, I guess it’s my
turn. But it’s kind of a let-down. Winath was
colonized only 200 years ago, and there really isn’t any big drama. It was a rich, fertile planet, and we moved
in and planted some stuff and now it’s the bread-basket of the galaxy…”
“I’m sure
it’s a *little* more interesting than that, Garth.”
“Winath was old when we found it, really old. It had been crawling with life for millions
of years, but a radiation wave-front from an exploding supernova in the next
system had sterilized most of the living creatures on the planet. It was perfect for colonization. A million years worth of fertile chemically
rich topsoil, oceans teeming with decaying organic matter, an entire dead
ecosystem lying in front of them, and it was all fodder for the new plants and
animals that they introduced. We
measured the topsoil on our farm once, and it went down nine and a half
meters!”
“That’s a
lot of tordek poop...”
“Yup. It was like a graveyard when the colonists
landed, and they just dropped seed and stuff started growing like
wildfire. The planet was just waiting
for new life.”
“And
that’s when they discovered the twin thing?”
“No,
that’s a myth. Stuff grows fast on Winath because the soil is so rich. If you used the right fertilizers and
genetically modified crops, you’d get the same crop yields on Braal. The only
reason the colonists have twins is because we’re gene-modified that way. Our sperm trigger a chemical reaction that
causes a fertilized egg to divide exactly once, and then chemically repel
towards opposite sides of the womb, so that the two fetuses don’t get in
other’s way during development. They
remain connected by something sort of like an umbilical cord, so that if even
one egg implants, the other one is ‘tethered’ and won’t be flushed out, to help
prevent single births. It was intended
to speed up colonization, but it’s become such a way of life that they never
changed it back.”
~Yikes. The colonists *chose* to always bear
twins? That’s quite a commitment…~ Imra thought, her hand brushing over her stomach dubiously.
“Yeah, it
was. There was no way the women were
willing to just bear twins as is, there was almost a riot. So the first generation of genetic
modifications caused their hips to expand slightly, to make child-birth easier
on the body. It’s kind of a galaxy-wide
joke that Winathian women are ‘full-figured.’”
“That must
be the source of the term ‘child-bearing hips.’”
~On behalf
of women everywhere, we prefer ‘Juno-esque.’~ Imra declared defensively.
“Juno-esque it is, not that *you’d* ever need to worry about
that…” Rokk backpedaled diplomatically. “So the farm animals don’t actually have twin
births?”
“Some were
modified in the earlier years, but for the most part, not any longer. It’s just the people. And those stupid space-legends about crops
producing double the yields because of some weird energy field? That would be really nice, but it’s just a
load of crap.”
~What
about your powers? Rokk
and I come from worlds where everyone can manipulate their bio-magnetic field,
or read minds, but Winathians aren’t generally known
for throwing lightning…~
Garth
looked down for a second, but was smiling, maybe a bit too broadly as he
replied. “Winath
isn’t just the breadbasket of the galaxy, it’s also
got the most sophisticated weather-control systems ever constructed, since our
whole planetary economy revolves around crop schedules. Turns out that those big signs at the weather
control sub-station that say, ‘danger, don’t touch’ are actually important…”
“Garth, I
don’t need to be a telepath to know that’s not the whole story.”
“Look, I
don’t want…”
“No, you
look.” Rokk stood up quickly and moved so that he
right in the taller man’s face, “We’re your friends Garth, and that means *if*
you want to talk about something, then we’re here, any time, no matter
what.” Garth’s mouth started to move
again, and Rokk smoothly put his hand over it,
blocking any protest, “And it *also* means that if you *don’t* want to talk
about something, we aren’t going to pry, and it’s none of our sprocking business.”
He removed his hand from Garth’s mouth.
“Got it?”
Garth
looked to Imra, unsure of her reaction, “Imra?”
~Everything
Rokk just said.
Every word.
Applies to me as well. We’re not your parents, Garth, we’re not here
to judge.~
Garth
folded his friends up in his arms, “I love you guys! You guys are the greatest, you know that,
right?”
“Oh, I’ve
known that for years, Garth, but thanks for saying…”
~And we’re
so modest, too!~