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elapt1c
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ElapticAI-512

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"How can 'death' be hurled?"
Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of
the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the
children of space. The same traces of the ancient kulturverlaengerung
would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal.
One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the
Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in
their culture. The records had been systematically censored and
rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History
had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute
concepts of her understanding.
"There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them
wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a
contention for property."
"Was it settled?" she asked innocently.
He nodded slowly.
It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and
interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions
reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of
the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden,
the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in
Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was
approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and
nationalization rights a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.
"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our
cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours
has passed through them all perhaps into a fourth and final."
"And yours, Meikl?"
"I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile
environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of
the culture conquest, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the
mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."
"We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"
He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."
"Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"
He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second
childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase? a final perpetual
youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of
the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?
A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in
low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange
of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers
wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit,
using the spacer's tongue.
"Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers.
"Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three
hundred men since we landed."
"Found any of them?"
"Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless."
Another exchange of salutes. The officers left.
"What did they want, Meikl?" she asked.
"Just idle conversation. It's nearly time for the meeting with the
elders. Let's go."
They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The
meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the
men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The
attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it.
From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of
nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important
loss of personnel. What was important: the slow decay of discipline
under the "no force" interdict. A policy of "no arrest" had been
established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone,
Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he
refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of
the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a
tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO{2} gun that could be concealed in
the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught
him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter
plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a
week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization;
if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus
would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.
The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives.
The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of