Matriarch’s Journal: 3rd Workday of the 2nd Month of Starscape, 3616
Once again, I find myself writing to you in your absence. At least this time I know where you are, and have the comfort that it’s a relatively safe place – as safe as an unknown place can be, I suppose.
I wish that we didn’t have to do this. However, as time passes, I become more certain that you were right. Today, I took breakfast with Lord Danak. He’s looking younger every day, thanks to you. He’s almost the same age now as when Evan first knew him.
It’s becoming obvious who the immortals are, and people are really starting to resent it. I asked Marty if the same thing was happening with the Twist, but he said it wasn’t. “The ones that aren’t immortal generally decay before they’ve had time to formulate resentment,” he said.
Danak wanted to talk about the name of the colony. “Market research has shown that referring to the project as ‘Draco’ is intimidating. We need a name which sounds more hopeful and enticing.” His suggestion was that we call the colony Shambhala. I thought it was pretentious past belief, and I told him so.
“More pretentious than Eden?” he said. “Besides, Crandon ran a focus group. He found that the average person responds 52% more positively to Shambhala than Draco. We also considered Shangri-La, but Driscoll rejected it for a number of reasons, including triteness and associations with shady massage parlors.”
“Did you bother to check the Volparnian history vids?” I grabbed my datapad and looked it up. “As I expected, completely wrong. They say that Shambhala was a medicinal hot springs resort founded by a Doctor Stanley. Why do I even bother with that education plan?”
“Well, that’s not a bad connotation, even if it’s incorrect. Besides, we don’t need to worry about recruiting colonists on Volparnu. We were hoping for an even mix of ethnicities, but the vast majority of applicants are Volparnians. They’re used to tough conditions and eager for the chance at a better world. On the other hand, we’ve had a very disappointing response from Sideria. There’s still an enormous waiting list of Siderians who want to emigrate to Dolparessa.”
They were taking the safe bet. Could I blame them? That’s when I got the brilliant idea of opening the colony up to Taseans. Danak was hesitant, but I reminded him that we promised them full citizenship. “I’m just stealing the idea from the 4th Matriarch – remember how she originally sold Dumati to the Taseans in an attempt to dilute Volparnian culture?”
“It has pros and cons,” he said. “As the 4th Matriarch recognized, Tasea’s culture is primarily IndWorld, outside of the sexual politics of the Domha’vei, but bearing fewer repugnant qualities than Earth. Because the Volparnians would have no reason to resent Taseans, it’s possible for them to exert a moderating influence on Volparnian culture. On the other hand, Dumati is still a very sore issue with Taseans. They were cheated on the deal, and they weren’t in a good position to start with. Recruit a lot of them, and if the colony fails, we’ll be likely to have a revolt on our hands.”
I assured him that the colony wasn’t going to fail, and that we’d chosen a gorgeous planet, almost as nice as Dolparessa.
“But can the Cu’endhari seedlings work the same transformation there as they did on Dolparessa? We’re banking on avoiding the vast expense of Terraforming.”
“If they can’t, we’ll have to start fresh with someplace less hospitable,” I told him. “I really can’t countenance destroying an alien ecosystem.”
“Hmph,” he snorted. “By now, I would have thought I’d educated you in real politics. A complete restart would be a fiscal catastrophe. Yet you’re still acting like some tree-hugging ecologist.”
“Spoken like a Siderian,” I said. “My relationship with trees is a little more intimate than that.”
“There aren’t many trees on Sideria,” he said. “Mostly palms in the dome-gardens.”
“The Cu’endhari don’t consider palms to be proper trees because they don’t have branches. However, palms do fit the definition of tree, but that definition is broad and unscientific. As a scientist, I’d have to agree that a nau’gsh is much closer to the concept of tree than a palm.”
Danak was quick to get back to practical matters. He asked how long it would take the seedlings to transform the colonial planet into something capable of supporting two ecosystems. I waffled on that one. I didn’t want to tell him that we didn’t really know. When Sider’s exploration team left Dolparessa, it was an alien world; when colonists returned four-hundred years later, they found that the squirrel trees had modified the environment. What I did tell Danak is that since we would have an Ashtree at Shambhala, and much better access to nul-energy than Dolparessa, we thought we could hasten the process.
He wasn’t happy when he found out I intended to join you there, once your tree was established. He said it wasn’t safe!
“It is perfectly safe,” I said. “It’s a lot safer than walking through the dodgier sections of Dalgherdia.”
“I’d prefer that you didn’t go,” he objected. “For the sake of political stability, the Domha’vei requires one of its rulers to remain here.”
“The Domha’vei is provincial in its isolationism,” I told him. “IndWorld rulers visit other systems all the time. Other than my studies on Earth, I’ve never gone anywhere; no official visits, not even to Tasea. It will be advantageous from a public relations point-of-view for the Matriarch to participate in the ground-breaking of the colony.”
“We aren’t talking about a diplomatic mission to Arthvea,” Danak said. “We’re talking about another galaxy.”
I told him I’m an autocrat. I get to do as I please.
“In theory. You know as well as I do that in practice, an autocrat who makes too many wrong moves is a dead autocrat. And as we’ve seen, the longer you plan to last, the more careful you have to be. There’s no ‘Après moi, le déluge.’ There’s only lying in the bed you’ve made for yourself.”
I thanked him for his remarkable summation of historical platitudes. Before he could continue to nag me, I called for Heyan. Breakfast seemed awfully late.
He came in a minute later, clearly flustered. He apologized profusely, saying that the kitchen staff was distracted by some loose printed pamphlets found by one of the custodians when he took the trash down to the recompositor on the plebe level.
Political pamphlets? Now that was quaint.
Danak grabbed them out of Heyan’s hand and told me they were nothing to worry about. Of course, that was precisely when I started to worry. I demanded to see them.
The title “Earth: Now for Salvation” was imposed over an image of the planet. Underneath in fine print, it continued, “The godless government of Earth collapses. Those who believe in nothing shall become nothing. It is the duty of those who accept the light of Fennt to purify the souls of Terrans for acceptance into heaven.”
“Fenntians,” Danak explained. “It’s an IndWorld sect. It’s not a legal religion in the Domha’vei, but we never bother to prosecute it. They don’t do anything heretical, like cybridization. In fact, they hate technology. They’re anti-materialists. Waiting for judgment and all that. Their only problem is that we don’t recognize their prophet as a legitimate object of worship. So basically, we just ignore them.”
Anti-technology? The pamphlets were made of paper – wood pulp paper. Now that was provocative. Well, I couldn’t care less whether the light of Fennt descends into the sewage system of Earth. But I flipped it open to the second page, and then I saw what everyone was upset about.
“The Devil Walks Among Us,” read the lettering above an image of a hissing serpent. “Ancient texts forecast the evils which have come to pass in our time.”
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat. (Gen 3:3-6)
I have sent this (to you) because you inquire about the reality of the Archons. Their chief is blind; because of his power and his ignorance and his arrogance he said, with his power, “It is I who am God; there is none apart from me.” (The Hypostasis of the Archons)
The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not. (2 Corinthians 4)
For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many. (Mark 5: 8-9)
I lost it. I threw a fritter out the window, and it nearly hit some poor slob in the atrium. Seriously, I could’ve killed him, especially without you around to fix it. A fritter thrown from that height is no laughing matter. I grabbed a fistful of diamonds out of the dresser and told Heyan to give them to the man with my apologies.
The thing that really pissed me off is that those aren’t even Fenntian holy books. Also, they were quoting completely out of context. The Gnostic text actually contradicts the others. Gnostics believed that eating the apple was a good thing and the serpent was a messenger of wisdom. In fact, their evil demiurge is the same god lauded in the other ones. I told that to Danak, interspaced with a bunch of cheerful expletives.
“You know a lot about it,” he said.
“I had a Skarsian education. Also, the other girls my age hated me, so I spent a lot of time in the Matriarch’s library. There was a time when I was interested in stuff like this. I went through a rebellious phase where I rejected Archonism as materialist nonsense.”
“I remember,” Danak replied. “You refused to go to church.”
“Oh, that. That wasn’t because I was rejecting Archonism. That was because I was sneaking off to meet Daniel.”
The pamphlet went on to improvise. “Those who have eaten of the apple are damned. They can never return to the source of light in their eternal corruption. The devil which calls itself the god of this universe promises them immortality of the flesh because their spirits are rotten. The children of Fennt must purify the worlds in preparation for the end of days.”
First of all, that sounds like a veiled threat. Second, I can only imagine the reaction of the Cantor and the Convocation to the anti-nau’gsh rhetoric. Even though they banished you, I still can’t afford to ignore Cu’endhari politics.
Danak tried to tell me it wasn’t worth worrying about. “No one in the Domha’vei takes it seriously,” he said. “We’ve had all of Earth’s religions from the beginning, Christianity and Judaism included, and none of them ever attacked Archonism.”
Of course, the fact that everyone knew Archonism was a political expediency probably had something to do with it. Or it was, until you became God. And then I started to think about something Battlequeen Escharton had said about Lord Emson. He resigned from the High Council the day Driscoll promised everyone immortality. He took his whole family back to Skarsia and retired from politics. They were Christians. They really did fear that physical immortality was going to cheat them out of the afterlife.
I didn’t mention that to Danak. He would’ve dismissed it as childish superstition. He’s a pragmatist. But I had to wonder. If there is an afterlife, immortals will never find it.
Of course, a lot of people who take those kind of religions seriously are really just afraid of dying. For them, the kind of immortality the Cu’enashti can provide will do just fine. But some might be drawn to the mystery. They believe that something grand and glorious awaits them, some enlightenment, some revelation. Or maybe they feel called by love. Who am I to mock that?
The only thing that bothers me about every heaven I’ve ever encountered is how static they are. An eternal paradise of eternal bliss. You reach the apex and stay there.
How dull.
I do believe that something grand and glorious awaits me. It’s my destiny, and to get there, I have to evolve. Above all, I do believe in love.
I believe in you, Ash.