On Earth, many of your tribes have called themselves simply “the People”. Similarly, most races call their planet Home or World—in my native language, as adapted to Anglic-speaking tongues, the name is Bleevit.
I was not raised to be an Emperor. My parents, distinguished members of Lizard Clan (as your sociologists translate the Bleevit name), raised me to be a hotelier in a long line of hoteliers. But a band of Rebel fighters—may the God of Fire roast their hearts into charcoal!—brought the War of the Northern Rebellion into our family and meshed my karma with that of Earthlings.
Unrest had begun well before I was born. A single Government ruled all Bleevit’s nine continents, as it had for more than three hundred of our years. The Rebellion began when four provincial Governors in the Northern Continent declared the Government corrupt, incompetent, and no longer in the Gods’ Favor. The fighting lasted a decade, and in my youth one group of Rebels dragged our family into the maelstrom.
It was not our choice! Our family, every Elder and Cousin, had always stood solidly behind the Government. Hotels were the family business and we cared nothing for “Freedom!” “Tyranny!” and “Revolution!”—the exciting political slogans that are at the heart of a rebellion, any rebellion. We did not care whether the Rebellion was as noble as an uprising against oppression or as mundane as a grab for local control of the best source of building stone on Bleevit. We cared about what was good for our business. And what was good for our business was a stable Government that made people feel secure. Our hotels gained when happy people felt good about traveling.
At the height of the fighting, one of the Rebel groups was forced out of its provincial capital and retreated to a resort town on a peninsula called the Uzbak, where our flagship hotel was located. They commandeered the Majestic and all their communiqués called it their Headquarters of National Liberation. Ah, those fatal words! When a week later Loyalist troops drove them out, they seized our hotel as Rebel property. They kept on my Eldest Maternal Uncle, his family, and their staff as managers and employees at modest wages, but they made officer quarters of it so we got diddly in rent.
It was futile to argue the unjustness of that seizure then. The fighting was intense, the outcome uncertain, and the Government desperate for resources. But three years later, when the armies of the Rebel provinces had started fighting among themselves and the central Government seemed certain to win by default, we filed suit for the return of our hotel and monetary compensation for the Government-confiscated profits. The plaintiffs were the hotel owners of record—my Mother, my Elder Brother, and I; her Eldest Brother, who was my Eldest Maternal Uncle; and his Third Daughter, then my Fifth-Eldest Female Maternal First Cousin. (I am always amused at how many syllables, nay words, such simple relationships require in your Anglic.)
Another three years later, with no sign that our case would ever come to final judgment, the Government offered us a strange settlement, shaped by the strange circumstance of the times: A fully equipped starship—where “fully equipped” included a thousand Prisoners of War as passengers!
With the war near ended (every year, the end was “right across the creek”), the Government needed to dispose of a lot of former enemies now under its control. The two Governors who had survived the war, along with a handful of other civilian leaders and army officers, had already been executed for war crimes. The dullest few thousand Rebels were being sent to reeducation camps of one sort or another; efficient Bleevit reeducation would make them a pool of docile employees who would be no further trouble to the Government. The more intelligent, enterprising, and discontented tens of thousands were offered—or ordered to take—berths to become colonists on distant worlds. The Government’s proffer to us was a way of killing two lizards with a single rock: If we accepted, it would settle not only the lawsuit but also a significant fraction of the prisoner problem.
My Elder Brother, most of our younger Cousins, and I loved the proposal. A whole starship in exchange for control of a 300-room hotel now in need of serious redecoration and remodeling! We could do anything and everything with a starship! But my Ancestors, Aunts and Uncles, and older Cousins all laughed at the proposal. My Paternal Grandfather said to me, “We are hoteliers, not star explorers. This land is our land. And don’t be fooled, Seventh Grandson, this Government negotiator is offering us a solution to his problem, not a solution to our problem.”
Ah, but Elder Brother and I were young. We had stars in our eyes, almost literally, and we were so naive! When the two of us met with the negotiator and decried the reluctance of our Elders, he said, “I can sweeten this offer, but only if you take it now! I’ll give you a bigger starship, fully equipped, and with not 1,000 but 3,000 prisoners. These are the most intractable Rebels, so I can get the Reconstruction Board to classify them as extralegals, with whom you can do anything you want—sell them, eat them, throw them out in space—it doesn’t matter, as long as they’re taken away from here.”
We were not small fools … Elder Brother and I negotiated carefully and very well over what else “fully equipped” meant, and what the monetary penalties would be if what we got was substandard. But we were big fools … that evening we said “Yes”.
Our Elders disowned us, of course. At the time, Brother and I were totally surprised by that reaction because we were very proud of the deal we’d negotiated. In retrospect, I’m surprised they didn’t behead us as well. Except it wouldn’t have made any difference. Since the two of us constituted more than 15% of a group of closely related plaintiffs, and the court deemed the agreement of benefit to us all, our acceptance would have held even with us dead.
Part of our agreement was that the ship would leave within nine months, barely over half a year, with Brother and me as joint Captains, which left us with a thousand and one details to be taken care of in what we rapidly came to see as too short a time.
The first and foremost detail was how to guard the ship. We would need about a thousand on-ship marines. When the hotel was confiscated, Elder Brother had joined the Government military, where he rose meteorically to Battalion Commander. A year before we made our deal, as the peace geared up, his unit was demobilized. We planned on finding about 250 of its former members, and hoped it would be nearer the whole 555, who would agree to join us as the core of our marines. It was a good plan, But as with many good plans, it didn’t come to fruition quite as we expected.
We weren’t too far off on what Elder Brother’s men felt and wanted to do. But alas, we hadn’t taken their women into account! Almost to a woman, they said “No!”, and they said it as loudly and clearly as our Elders had! In the end, only one man in ten would join us. We had to search outside Elder Brother’s former unit to fill the marine ranks.
The marine problem was a minor setback that we could overcome. But then came a major setback.
The editors of the largest planetary newsfeed were dead set against the Government’s Starship Scheme. For those who wanted more conciliatory ways of handling the defeated Rebels, the fact that our POWs were extralegals made Elder Brother and me the most powerful symbol of Reconstruction blunders. “Colonialists!” “Slave masters!” “Death merchants!” were some of the milder things shouted at us by harsh editorials, by day and nighttime messages, and by a few of our neighbors when we walked down the street. The full support of the Government, the speeches and letters of gratitude from the Ministries of Interior and Economy, the polls showing majority support of the Scheme as an innovative solution to a difficult problem, had no effect on the vocal minority.
We were already disowned by our family, and we shrugged off this merely verbal onslaught as nothing in comparison. But one day someone added a bomb to their threatening epithets and Brother ended up in the hospital, literally in pieces.
This, as you can imagine, nearly stopped us. For days his life hung in the balance, and it would be years before he recovered entirely. But as Elder Brother recovered, we talked and kept working on the details of our plan as therapy to cope with our enormous dread—dread that he would not be fully healed, physically and mentally; dread that the bitterness our plan had sown between us and our family could not be healed; dread that the violence done to him showed that, won war or not, Bleevit society was far from healed. We were both happiest when we talked about the new worlds we could explore and the good we would bring to all those who came with us, prisoners and crew alike. Four weeks after the bombing, I dropped a metaphorical bombshell at a press conference: “Lizard Clan’s Youngest Retired Battalion Commander, my Elder Brother, will come with us.”
“What about his medical care shipboard?” asked the Eldest Reporter.
“We’d already planned for state-of-the art medical equipment. All that’s changed is that Assistant Chief Surgeon at Aurochs Hospital, Bovine Clan’s Twelfth Living Surgeon-Physician, who has been Elder Brother’s primary caregiver, will be aboard as Co-Captain’s Personal Physician.”
A strange thing had happened during the month that the project was in limbo. Up until the bombing it looked as if getting good people to join us was going to be the most difficult part of the project, with the marine problem just the first to surface in a series of personnel problems. We had been seriously afraid of having a crew salted with dregs and cutthroats ready to turn on us, their officers, at the least provocation. I was reminded of that fear when I watched your Treasure Island with human schoolchildren a few years ago.
But after the bombing, a steadily growing stream of people expressed interest. At first Elder Brother and I supposed that its coverage and the preceding newsfeed attacks had proved that “No publicity is bad publicity”. But that was only part of it. As I interviewed people, I realized another factor was swelling interest in our project: There were a lot of unhappy winners in our society.
Reconstruction was uncovering whole new fields of discontent. Those who’d won the war disagreed on many things. As Personal Physician said to Elder Brother and me, “This hospital is being run by asses. It always was, but during the War we all had to work together, so they’d listen and compromise. Now that the War’s over, they don’t listen. Any complaint they don’t want to hear is ‘antisocial agitation’ or ‘neo-Rebel propaganda’.
“And I’m tired of it.”
She was not alone. We filled the ranks of our marines and professionals with some really topflight people, so good I was seriously worried that either the Government or its politician and newsfeed opposition would accuse us of inflicting brain drain on Bleevit. But whether it was drowned in the invective of “Neo-slavers!” and (my favorite) “Suicidal murderers!” or evaded by our low-key personnel announcements, I never saw that complaint.
By and large, the Government came through as promised. And while we waited for launch, the prisoners had formed their own security details—a desirable development, according to Ship’s Psychological Officer. Fresh Embarkation against Strident Hostility was outfitted, crewed, and launched on schedule, with two hundred professionals and crew, a thousand marines, a hold filled with three thousand prisoners, and a wide assortment of tools and weapons.
All we needed now was a new world to explore and exploit.