Chapter 4
This is another motto of the Shine, etched in gold above major corporate centres.
Happily for Clonus Tererens’ ambition, if not hís common sense, there was a lot about Ko-mdo to overcome.
It had liquid water at the poles and enough carbon dioxide to feed habitation dome scrubbers, but the gravity was light, the magnetic shield was weak and the soil largely toxic to human life.
But Clonus um-Bagret Tererens had a vision, and a belief in the inherent power of human ingenuity and strength of human labour.
So long as we work, and work hard, without complaint, hé said, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
And so it was, although later scholars questioned whether it ever in fact needed to be.
Clonus died before hé could see hís vision of a humanity elevated by labour come to fruition, so it was hís successor, Aemilis Nona Wells, who put down the first oxygen revolt.
Her swiftness and brutality was to become something of a theme in USV policies, and in the aftermath, certain ideas were codified into law, including the principle that every individual was only worth the sum of their labour.
Slackers, scroungers, those who didn’t pull their weight – the frontier of space was too hard, too cruel for the rest to carry these, and if their number included those injured or old, well, that was just a harsh reality.
The duty of every individual in the Shine was to ensure that they were working at the peak of their individual capacity; if everyone did that equally, there would be a perfect society where no one would have to worry about looking after anyone else at all.
By the time Quincitus Keto led the breakout from Ko-mdo to conquer the worlds of Bi-mdo and Gera-sa, the army hé led was almost unrecognisable from the original colonists who had come to Ko-mdo nearly three centuries ago.
Breeding programmes had over-filled the cramped arcologies with too many unemployed teenagers, their limbs frail and thin in the weak gravity, gene-blasting radiation and meagre rations of Ko-mdo.
But the peoples of the United Social Venture were not ones to lie down and die, and so with hís ragged ships hammered together by blood and will, with hís suicide troops and desperate force of arms, Quincitus Keto led the people of the USV out into the galaxy and to fresh new worlds, seizing by indomitable strength that which weaker peoples were too frail to defend.
Thus the USV proved once and for all not merely that it was a force to be reckoned with, but that it was ideologically right.
That hardy survivors, willing to work themselves to the bone, could with sheer guts and strength overcome any obstacle.
Even an obstacle as absurd as trying to eke out a life in the dust devils of Ko-mdo, miserably failing in the attempt and then conquering nearby, far gentler systems when you eventually realised the scale of your generational, mind-boggling mistake.
A few millennia later, the Slow came to Tu-mdo.
Half the planet saw the Slow’s message, and though the Marketing Standards Agency raced to scrub all mention of it, even they couldn’t keep down conversation about the end of the world.
Venture Management initially tried to shrug off the Slow’s message, claim it was a conspiracy, an insentient AI sent by the Accord to sow chaos and so on.
Alas, the binary star system LK-08091881 – more generally known as Lhonoja – was only seventy-nine light years away, a mere jaunt in galactic terms, and every astronomer in the southern hemisphere, from advanced observatories to teenagers with a telescope, could turn their gaze upon the heavens and say but oh goodness, oh my, oh yes.
There are two stars spinning towards each other, exactly as the Slow said, and if we look back through the historical data it would appear that they are on a collision course and actually the maths is fairly elementary now we bother to think about it…
The Ventures wiped the historical data.
This caused further outcry – it was too late, too much, the world could see the truth of it.
So they tried a different approach. Yes, Lhonoja was going to collapse in on itself, but no, it wasn’t a problem.
Not a problem at all. The nearest planet to the blast – Cha-mdo – all that needed was a magnetic shield built in high orbit, a fairly simple bit of engineering, and it would be fine.
And the rest of the Shine? It was far too far from the supernova to actually experience any harm.
There’d be some nice dancing lights in the sky for a few days and maybe a couple of thunderstorms, and then it would pass, and where the light of Lhonoja had shone, now it would not.
Nothing to worry about.
Nothing to worry about at all.
This time, when the astronomers protested, the astronomers disappeared.
Then the physicists objected, and they disappeared as well.
Then the philosophers, the mathematicians, the planetary biologists, the engineers, even a few political scientists – they vanished, and kept on vanishing, until no one was really left to object.
And that might have been the end of it, except that in Heom, one of the physicists they disappeared was Sarifi “Famed” im-Yyahwa, and she had Shine.
A middling commnet personality, she went to the right parties, talked to the right people, hosted spectacular occasions when spectacle was required but knew also how to invite the correct manager to a quiet dinner at an appropriate place.
She conformed enough to be accepted, but was mischievous enough in her opinions to stand out, and thus, one careful smile and polite “how fascinating – tell me about you” at a time, she had risen, and people envied her.
There is no Shine greater than being envied.
We are the United Social Venture, she said.
We are pioneers, resilient, hardy.
So why are we so afraid of the truth?
The Marketing Standards Agency initially let her broadcast, because she wasn’t advocating any especially radical change.
“Just asking questions” was her motto. But the more she talked, the more people listened, not least as there didn’t seem anyone else worthwhile to tune into, and the more people listened, the more she clearly felt she had something to say.
“But why are we pretending this isn’t an extinction-level event?” she demanded one day. “Why are we so scared?”
The first time she was arrested, she paid her way back onto the streets within three hours, marching before the cameras with the scars of her imprisonment bare across her shoulders, declaring: “This time it’s actually the end of the world!”
Her broadcasts evolved. “The Executorium isn’t willing to confront the scale of the danger facing us, because to do so means confronting the weaknesses in our Ventures! Maybe it’s time to admit that the system doesn’t work, and that to face up to what is coming, we need fundamental change!”
This time when the Shine arrested her, there was rioting outside the prison, and she was busted out before security could intervene.
Now she broadcast from underground, and her broadcasts were electric.
“Corruption! Exploitation! Inertia! Stagnation! This is what our Venture has become and they” – everyone loves a polemic “they”; it leaves so much to the imagination – “they don’t want you to know it!”
It is unclear whether Sarifi actually believed a word she said – perhaps it was just another power play, another bold move to accumulate more Shine by making herself relevant, the kind of firebrand who guaranteed views without ever actually taking anything seriously.
Perhaps she understood that it was only her Shine that kept her safe, and her Shine was built on outrage, noise and attention.
It is not especially easy to attach new ideas to something as big as the very literal “end of the world” and its expected arrival in one hundred and seventy-nine years, no matter how charismatically you may express it.
But people can channel big fears into more immediate concerns.
They were hungry. Saw their debts grow, not diminish.
Went sick rather than pay for medicine. Laboured mightily to get more Shine, and yet never seemed to rise.
Had been promised hope. Saw only stagnation.
Paid their profits in corruption and tasted poison in the water they fed to their children at night.
Such a loose conflagration of sparks, each burning by themselves, was not quite enough to start a fire. And yet they simmered.
The last time Sarifi was arrested, there was no public announcement, no legal declaration. She simply vanished without a trace.
Usually that would have been enough, but times had been hard in Heom, and the Executorium clearly misjudged how people would interpret absence.
Petitions became protests, protests became marching through the streets, became unauthorised acts of disobedience, the downing of tools.
Became night-time clashes with Venture security, hacks and hijacks of commnet airwaves, mass arrests that only made the shouting louder.
By the time Special Operations were sent in, the protests were not even about the inevitable destruction of the planet; they were about working conditions and stagnant salaries, about elders left to die because they had not paid enough of their debts to live, about children as young as nine put into the debtor’s collar because they had been judged without potential and sold onto whichever Venture cared to pay a pittance for their labour.
Nor were the protests confined to Glastya Row, or even to Heom.
The Slow’s message had awoken something across the Shine, a sense of expectations unfulfilled, promises broken.
We were supposed to look after ourselves so that no one had to look after each other; yet how did looking out for just ourselves solve this?