I wanted to get in a post in the actual weekend, and I actually had two options for the Space Guys. One had stuff happening, the other was a backstory dump that does develop a few characters who are supposed to be important. Guess which one this is. As usual, a table of contents is at the end...
The trek to Uranus went on. Training with the equipment improved morale. There were further unexpected effects. Jax and Dr. Cahill began appearing together again, and acted more like real friends than lovers. Vasily emerged after a long self-imposed exile, often in the company of Sandra. Jackie simply stayed on his own, talking freely with men and women alike. A very few times, he kept company with Anastasia in her husband’s absence. That subsided, however, after the third time Jason saw Moxon watching her.
He also spent more time with the higher officers. Alek conversed regularly with or leastways at Mehmet, who was often with Tanya. Jason considered whether the two were having an affair, but his suspicions faded after the one time he did see Mehmet leave her quarters, following a half-heard argument that clearly ended in him being thrown out. He also grew more acquainted with the Americans Smith and Yates, officially their Ethnic Relations and Morale officers, evidently good friends. A time came when Jason, Alek and Jax joined them at the captain’s table. Smith brought out a map of the United States, divided into 54 states and 7 Trade And Commerce Authority zones. Jason pondered the largest of them, which ran from Louisiana to Montana. Its center of operations was Baton Rouge.
“So, here’s my home town,
Philadelphia, PA,” Smith said. He pointed to a spot in the Upper Atlantic Trade
Zone. He tapped another spot in a corridor that tapered down to a swath of
coast east of Louisiana, in the east of a blocky state in the middle. “And this
is where my counterpart is from, Franklin, Tennessee. We both represent the
United States Office of Ethnic Relations. Our mission since the War has been to
identify and integrate non-Anglo citizens.”
By then, Donald and Anastasia had wandered in. “Yeah,” Donald said. “In case you think that sounds nice, they started as a wing of the Draft Board. It was all because there were people trying to get in to the all-moreno units.”
Jason nodded,
disregarding Donald as usual. “So, what, were your folks on opposite sides of
the Civil War?”
“Uh-uh,” Yates said. “I came from east Tennessee, where there isn’t enough flat land for the plantations. People say we were never really in the South, but we’re further south than Virginia. It was one of the places the Rebs couldn’t control. One of my ancestors fought on the Union side. My own family organized for Integration. I went door to door taking donations.”
The captain spoke up then. “It is like Thuringia,” he said, either wistful or sad. “We are at the meeting of West, East and South, of every part and no part. We were not many or powerful, yet even the Reich knew better than to tell us our business.”
After a moment of
silence, he regathered himself. “I am given to understand that there have been
discussions among the crew about the history of the Americas,” he said.
“Officers Smith and Yates have provided a list of films that might better
address any questions. We were interested in getting a Martian’s opinion.”
Jason looked at Jax. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
A monitor was set up. The first few videos were a propaganda reels featuring either Tweel the Martian a costumed character named Captain Patriot. Jason had seen others, but these were the first that was in color. The reels with Captain were always idealistic, always ending with the vindication of non-Anglo war heroes and gallant workers misunderstood by society. Those with Tweel were sadder and more mature, as the ostrich creature talked openly about prejudice, persecution, enslavement and worse, grimly illustrated from history. Then they got to a reel with the Captain that was different. This time, it was a young veteran and his bride and groom arrested at the altar by a doddering yet devious Race Registrar. He presented an affidavit that one of her great-grandfathers’ great-grandfathers, supposedly unknown, had in fact been an enslaved African. On those grounds, he held that they not only could not marry, but had committed a knowing felony by listing her race as “white”.
The ensuing drama was longer and more elaborate than usual. The couple admitted that they knew of rumors of that a distant ancestor of the bride had had an affair with a freed Creole, but insisted that while none denied it might be true, he had died years before the birth of her only son. However, the record of the Creole’s death could not be found. The Captain went in search of a duplicate in Federal records, suspecting an intrigue by the bride’s distant family. Meanwhile, two friendly morenos debated a movement to repeal laws against intermarriage, which they emphasized was led by Anglos who had been denied marriages to each other over minute or entirely speculated degrees of mixed ancestry. Of course, the Captain captured a lackey sent to destroy the records that proved the bride’s story. He arrived in the court room with proof that the Registrar was part of a plot against her, and a Reich sympathizer to boot. The judge prepared to marry the couple as the villain was led away, until the Captain gave his own objection. He called on the young man’s father, who confessed that he had hidden proof that his own grandfather was moreno.
“It’s a good propo,” Donald mused. “It couldn’t have happened that way, of course. All the penalties were down to fines and misdemeanors by the end of the War. And they couldn’t mess with church marriages. And if Anglos just put their race as colored, the States had to go along with it or wait 18 months for a review by the Draft admin. By then, people were putting anything they wanted, just to scraw with the Registrars.”
“It wasn’t that simple,” Jax said. “The States hadn’t all repealed felony penalties, they just couldn’t enforce them while the Draft was active. All the Fed cared about was giving the Selective Service branch time to create a standard for their own Registry. They actually stopped suits that could have overturned the laws. It hurt a lot of people.”
Yates showed them another reel, evidently for the Office’s own staff. It led into a case of an Anglo caught trying to hide the body of an Anglita child in a field on commune land. “Jill helped her mother with a book on the trial,” Jax said. “The girl was really half-Mexican. They had been looking for the guy a while. The Fed was close to getting involved. He probably thought leaving a body on commune land would convince them they were looking for a moreno.”
The
trial followed. With utmost delicacy and fairness, the petitioner for the
commune presented the case to moreno jury and an Anglo judge, in a court in
Baton Rouge.The man was found guilty of abduction leading to death. The jury
foreman earnestly requested that he be committed as unsound in mind. The judge
instead sentenced him to hang. “He didn’t have the authority to do that,” Jax
said. “It would have gone to Federal review, anyway.
“Authority, Hell,” Donald said. “I read someone had to tell him the State had outlawed hanging 20 years earlier.”
“It was all a misunderstanding. Really,” Yates said. “The Office sent a statement explaining the facts to every news paper in the country. There were editors who printed it that still had the headline that blacks had sent a white man to his death.”
“They
said what they wanted to believe,” Jax said. The reel already showed what
followed. It froze on a shot from above of flames that seemed to stretch
without limit from east to west.
“And
that was it?” Jason said, baffled. “That was what they needed an Intervention
for?”
“Sometimes,
the forest just wants to burn,” Donald said.
Jason
started at Moxon’s words, which he had never admitted overhearing. Fortunately,
Jax spoke first. “Wait,” he said. “Where did you hear that?”
“I don’t know,” the engineer said. “I guess it’s supposed to be an Indian saying, or something.”
Jason
saw one record left, with the markings of restricted material. Yates
reluctantly agreed to play it. “It was a propaganda film from a faction called
the Nordicist Party,” he said. “We placed their materials on a Restricted list
just before the Intervention.”
“I want to see it,” Jason said. At a nod from the captain, Yates put on the disc.
It was an animated film, little more than still images that showed in sequence as the dialogue and narration played. Its vignettes were on a Biblical vein that meant little to Jason, with the evident intent of an allegory for the sophisticated. Even he recognized it from the start as an escalating chain of heretical deviations. It started with the Creator making men from baked mud, each colored according to the clay from which they came. Some were a deep, burnt brown. Some were glazed white. Some were brick red. Then the creator tried to mix another race from remnants of half-baked clay. The result was small and malformed dwarfs of ugly yellow that crumbled in the Maker’s hands. It was decreed that the men should be scattered on the Earth so that they would not mingle.
Then came the central story, of a chief named Adam who called himself made by God’s own hands. He had two wives, one brown and one snow white with golden hair. The first was named Eve, the other Lilith. Some said that the latter was not a woman, but a goddess, angel or demon who had defied heaven to consort with a mortal man. It happened that Eve had born two sons, Abel and Seth, one brown and the other tan like olive, where Lilith bore a son and a daughter, Cain and Aclima, each as white as herself. Cain guarded his sister from any man, some said out of love, others out of a lust that Adam declared could not be fulfilled. A time came when Adam declared that Aclima should be given to Abel. When Cain tried to hide her, Abel abducted her. Cain struck down Abel in vengeance, only to find his sister already with child. Fearing a war between his sons, Adam called on Heaven to send a curse, that all should know by Cain’s white skin that he was mighty and terrible as Death, and so flee him or serve at his feet. Cain called down his own curse, that his sons would ever after do as they willed with the daughters of Abel, but any son of Abel who but touched a daughter of Cain would be made a eunuch in their house.
Finally, there was a tale of Babel, founded by the descendants of Seth in the land south of Eden. Their king Nimrod was nearly white. He decreed that he would make his Tower, a great ziggurat to ascend to Heaven and meet the gods or God that made Heaven and Earth. To secure workers for his great monument, he married a dark queen from beyond the western sea. But the slaves and servants she brought with him could not or would not learn the speech of his overseers, nor would they obey the clearest direction. Soon, they ran riot, looting the city and seizing women who would not be willing consorts with them. When the queen bore a son of pure black skin, the king knew he himself was made a cuckold. He took her to the platform atop the Tower and hurled her down with his own hands. But the bricks were already weathered and crumbling, and the earth beneath was sand. As the queen tumbled down, she called a curse that split the ground. The ziggurat collapsed, crushing the king and queen and their followers together.
“What the Hell?” Jason
said at the end. “I mean, really, what the Hell? Who believed this? Did anyone
believe any of it?”
That was when Anastasia
spoke up. “You can tell them what they teach us,” she said.
“That’s… different,”
Jason said with a frown.
Alek looked at him, her expression halfway between empathy and amusement. “You never talk about religion, even to me,” she said. “What do they teach the farmboys?”
“Well, it’s only for the families that don’t have their own church,” Jason said. “People like Jax’s folks and Jill’s know about it, but we don’t preach at each other. So, anyway, they teach us prayers to the old gods, like Mars and Venus and Jupiter. It’s not to worship them or say we believe in them, but to honor what they stood for and everything they gave us.”
He crossed his arms with a scowl. There was a silence. It broke when Alek started laughing. “Sorry, sorry, it is not how it looks,” she said. “It is just, when we are alone, he calls me Venus. Sometime, he has me call him Vulcan!” She covered her mouth as she continued to giggle. Jason managed a smile. The captain himself did the same, quite kindly.
Jason finally looked to
the captain. “You came from Deutschland,” he said. “What do they really say
about what happened there?”
“I don’t suppose we could understand,” he said. “One thing you must understand, we do not speak the names of the Leaders or of their deeds, if we can avoid it. Why should we, when even the historian cannot say who gave the last commands? In Thuringia, we look at them differently than others. Even now, there are men and women who will say what it was like to see them come. It was from the south that they came, Austrians, Catholics, alehouse trash, faugh!”
He looked down at the map, a frown on his face. “We did not understand them, we could not,” he said. “The elders say they laughed at them. Why not? They said that Germany had forgotten how to be German. Perhaps it was true, in Munich or Berlin, but not in Erfurt! And who were they, to tell us or anyone else how to be German again? It is a proverb now, if it was not then, a Bavarian is to a Thuringian what a frog is to a fish!” He thumped his chest. “We were the living heart of Deutschland. Our ways were as they had always been. We were happy, we were free, we minded our business and let others mind their own!”
He shook his head. “But the old ones will confess that they knew even then, the men of the Reich were evil, and if they were not consumed by their own evil, it would be by a greater evil they drew on themselves and many more. We thought that if we minded our business as we always had, we need only wait for their end. But that came from the south, too. The old men say the hills shook long before they could be seen or heard, a thousand tanks and a million men who had seen and suffered the worst the Reich could do.”
Again, it was Anastasia who spoke. “Our leaders were against it, even the ones we do not talk about,” she said. “The commanders said we could still break out of Poland. The Englishman only said that Munich was to the Reich what Leningrad was to the Party.”
She turned to Jason. “What do you think, Farmboy?” she said. “Do you want more history? Here it is. People are terrible. They always have been, they probably always will be. Just be glad we’re out here.”
She turned to leave. As
Donald rose to follow, he turned back to Jason. “I’m just glad,” he said, “I
already married a Russian.”
That made Anastasia
freeze in her tracks. “Russian?” she said. It was a hiss like a snake. “We have
been married almost a year, and you think I am Russian?” She ran out, and Jason
and Jax ran after her.
By the time they got to
her cabin, she had already locked Donald out.
Table of contents
Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!
Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!
Part 12: The inevitable geography lesson!
Part 15: The bad guy backstory!
Part 17: The alternate history!
Part 18: The weapons exposition!
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