Paradise is found at the end of the southern spiral. Don’t ask me how astronomers decided which arm of the spiral is north and which south. It was done years before I was born or it occurred to people how many habitable systems there are in a single galaxy. Several hundred years ago, in fact: long before our resident lunatics began arguing about who owns what.
Of course, back then the idea of simply shifting an uninhabitable planet into an orbit that made it habitable was still new and no one really had their heads around the physics, which are quite simple.
Writing to his cousin, a prince called Archimedes once boasted he could move whole worlds given the right tools. He was correct, just a few thousand years too early. Like most of my barroom facts, I have my old lieutenant to thank for that particular gem.
Below me a planet turns slowly, a ghostly white sphere with a sickly-looking sun in the far distance. I’m watching it through the window of a troop carrier that has been converted to a convict ship. This mostly seems to involve taking out all the walls and removing anything that might create an air of comfort.
We’re sitting in a long metal hold on metal benches. And the filters on the windows look like they gave up screening light for radioactive particles years ago.
“Paradise?”
The woman next to me nods.
I seem cursed by officers who pride themselves on having a sense of humor. As the convict ship gets closer, I can see a great expanse of cloud stretching from both poles and meeting in the middle. We are too high still for the sight of towns or cities.
Turning to the woman, I ask the obvious question. “Storms?”
She shakes her head. “Sheet ice,” she says. “Miles of it.”
“ Shithead, ” I say.
A dozen exiles turn to glare at me.
“Not you,” I tell the woman. “The general.”
“Which general?” asks a man.
And the woman shakes her head in warning.
“Jaxx,” I say. “General Indigo Fucking Jaxx.”
A hush falls along the row, and I realize that others have been listening in. “Know him personally, do you?” asks a man several seats along. He has one of those ratlike smiles you find on the faces of pimps just before they try to hand you the wrong change.
I flick him a scowl, and he’s the one who looks away. When I check again, his face is red and he’s chewing his bottom lip. I’ve made an enemy and we haven’t even landed.
“What’s the wildlife here?” I ask.
The rat-faced man laughs, nastily. “Wildlife?” he says. “This is Paradise, final destination for everybody on this ship.” He laughs again, then stares down at his feet, and I realize he’s doing his best not to cry.
“Well,” he adds, moments later. “Final destination for anyone traveling in the cheap seats.”
“It’s an ice planet,” the woman tells me. “Everything has to be freighted across. In the early days that included oxygen. Now they crack it from the ice. Use the spare hydrogen for fuel…And there are rumors that the dead end up as source material for the protein slabs.”
A man swears.
And she shrugs. “Just telling you what I’ve heard.”
The woman is old enough to be my sister. A good fifteen years older than me, with a tired face and bitter eyes and a flatness to her voice that speaks of someone on the edge of despair. She could even be my sister, with her belief in facts to keep life at bay, but her upscale accent betrays her. She shares it with the pretty-boy lieutenant who died in that attack on the fort.
“You’re not a common criminal,” I say.
She looks at me, almost amused despite her surroundings.
“Are you?” she asks.
Several of the others smile, and for a moment the atmosphere lightens.
“We’re exiles,” she adds. “Paradise is an exile planet. No one here is a common criminal.”
A thought occurs to her. How could I not know this?
“And you?” she asks. Several people seem to be waiting on my answer.
“Oh, I’m common enough,” I tell them. “And a criminal.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“Wrong place, wrong time…”
“Which means what?” demands a man across the aisle. He’s been friendly enough until now.
“I survived a massacre,” I say, my words matter-of-fact. “A tribe of ferox attacked us and slaughtered everybody but me. I don’t really know why…”
“Except you do.”
It’s uncanny. The woman even nags like my sister.
“I was lashed to a whipping post,” I tell her. “Naked, with most of my back laid open. I guess the ferox figured the legion were my enemies, too.”
“You are in the legion?”
I nod. “Yes,” I say. “Fifteen years.”
She turns away. “The legion killed her parents,” says the blond man who sits beside her.
“Mine, too,” I tell him.
The woman turns back. So I answer her question before she has time to ask it. “I’m twelve, homeless, without a family. A lieutenant offers me food, clothes, and somewhere to sleep. All I have to do in return is-”
“Kill people,” says the woman.
We make the rest of our descent in silence.
As I glance around, I can tell that the others are wondering what kind of monster they have in their midst. This creature, with his metal arm and ragged clothes, a scar on his face, and a wrist so thick that the shackle bites into flesh.
In my turn I wonder how long it will take each of them to turn into somebody else. The convicts down there might have begun as exiles, polite and well spoken. But circumstances change everybody, circumstances and hunger and poverty and necessity…
You can put a dozen fancy words to that most basic of needs.
“Welcome to Paradise,” announces the rat-faced man when our ship finally reaches the surface and guards begin to walk up the line, undoing shackles as they go. “That includes you.” He smiles sourly in my direction.
I don’t answer or look away or do anything that might draw attention to myself. I just watch, as one of the guards punches the man in the mouth, half drags him from his seat, and slams him back again so hard that when his skull hits the wall behind him, everyone in the hold hears the sound of bone on metal.
Opening her mouth to scream, the woman next to me halts when I put my hand across her mouth and hold it there, receiving a nod of grudging respect from one of the guards.
Speak only when you are spoken to. None of this lot has the faintest clue.
“Keep quiet,” I say.
Very slowly, she lifts my hand from her mouth, and though she wipes her lips with the back of her own hand and looks like she’s about to be sick, she does what I suggest and stays silent.
“And you,” I tell her friend.
They stay close to me after that. My monstrousness, my knowledge of how this world works has become an asset. Typical liberals, I tell myself. Even Rat Face trails along behind us, blood trickling from his broken mouth. Whatever he’s carrying wrapped in a cloth is kept close to his chest.
“If you can eat that,” I say, “eat it. And if not, and it’s small enough, then swallow it while you still have time.”
Narrow eyes watch me.
“Stuffing it up your arse isn’t enough,” I tell him. “They’re going to search us. And if we get lucky it’ll be limited to a cavity search.”
“And if you get unlucky?” asks the woman, her voice acid.
“A fuck-off body scan. Maybe random surgery, to make the point. Anything you’ve got hidden under chest muscles or sewn into your guts will get found.”
It’s obvious from her expression that she didn’t know you could hide objects beneath layers of muscle or inside the upper gut. They’re amateurs. My personal opinion is that no one should attempt to start a revolution unless they’ve got some chance of success. This lot, forget it.
“Line up.”
We do, and I notice most of the others doing whatever the woman does. And since she follows my example, I find myself leading a row of puppets whose ham-fisted movements reflect my own.
Having made us strip, the guards stand us by our clothes while we wait to be cavity-searched. It’s done in the open, with sexes mixed to ensure the maximum humiliation and make sure the prisoners realize their place.
There are sixteen of us in our group. Twelve men and four women. The men are younger than the women, mostly my age or a little less. One of the women is our age, the rest a good fifteen years older. This has to say something about revolutionaries.
“It says women die more willingly,” a voice beside me announces.
I turn to find the woman from the ship.
“Given how they’re treated after capture,” she says, “it’s a sensible choice…” She smiles at my shock. “I read people’s faces. It’s one of the things I do.”
“And you?” I ask, wondering how to phrase my question.
“Was I raped? Did OctoV let a group of his little fuckwit teenagers practice their torture routines on me?” She shakes her head. “I was bailed almost before I was arrested. My family refused to let me go anywhere without guards. They hired the best lawyers money could buy…”
“And the judges still found you guilty.”
“Oh no.” She smiles, sourly. “I was found innocent. But I got jailed just the same.”
She’s the first to be cavity-searched, in front of one friend and fourteen strangers. And she takes it because she has no option. Something is already hardening behind her eyes. I’m second, her friend third. It looks like a hierarchy is being established.
A thin man is standing naked in the middle of jeering guards. At an order from their corporal he squats until his buttocks almost touch the cold tiles, and then thrusts his arse into the air and kisses the ground as ordered. Fingers force their way inside him and he screams. When they let him climb to his feet he’s crying.
“It’s barbaric,” says the woman.
“Intentionally.”
She stares at me, crossly. As if to say, I realize that.
“I’m Sven.”
“The mercenary.”
“The ex-legion-sergeant…”
For a moment she’s about to argue. And then she shrugs. “You’re right,” she tells me. “This isn’t the place for semantics.”
The question must show in my eyes.
“What words really mean.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Debro Wildeside.”
“Sven,” I repeat.
“What’s your second name?”
I stare at her. It’s a good question. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have one.
“Do you know the story of Sven Tveskoeg?”
We weren’t keen on stories in my family. So I shake my head, wondering what this has to do with me. This woman is odd. Mind you, looking around the holding pen, where a good half of us are scrabbling back into our clothes and the rest stand naked awaiting their turn, I realize that we’re all a little odd.
Ungainly, occasionally ugly. We’re almost normal in how odd we are.
“He was a king,” Debro says when she sees she’s got my attention back. “In the old days.”
“Which planet?”
Most of the known galaxy is ruled by the United Free. Our dear leader holds much of the rest, or so we’re told. The Enlightened and the Uplifted reckon they hold more, but repeating that is treason. The only worlds that still have kings are the worthless ones. Princes of rubble and rock, my sister used to call them. She had firm opinions on those people, which didn’t stop one of them hiring a legion for six months and reducing three planets in our system to cinder.
“Which planet?” says Debro. “The original…”
“Farlight?”
She sighs. “Earth,” she says, fastening her top.
I don’t mean to laugh. “Earth’s a myth,” I tell her. “Fairy tales.” I know nothing, and even I know that.
She shakes her head. “It was real. A lot more real than most of the crap that passes for history these days…”
“Debro.” The word is a warning.
“You know it’s true.”
“I’m Anton,” says her friend. He’s been dressing with his back to her. Unless she was the one who had her back to him.
We shake.
“My ex-husband,” she says, almost fondly.
In his rags he looks like a stick insect wrapped in cheap plastic. Since he doesn’t seem the type to dress like that, someone has obviously stolen his real clothes farther up the line.
“You were condemned as well?”
The glance he gives Debro is strange. It’s as if he is asking her permission for something. “We have a daughter,” he says. “Under the age of majority. You know the law.”
Obviously enough, I don’t.
“She’s legally still bound to her mother. Since her mother is here Aptitude should also be here…” He hesitates. “My family made overtures to OctoV. The emperor agreed to let me take her place. For old times’ sake.”
Anton talks of OctoV as if he’s just another man.
“You’ve met him?”
“My father and his grandfather were friends.”
It explains why Debro is still alive. Although, I realize, it could equally well explain why she was dead had that been the case. “Who is looking after your girl?”
Again that glance.
“My cousin,” says Debro finally. “Thomassi was the only one who offered.”
A story is obviously hidden in the looks they give each other and under the silence Debro lets hang at the end of her words.
“You’ve quarreled with the others?”
“Hardly,” Anton says. “My mother would have offered. As would my brother. They were too afraid to upset the senator…”
Who has to be the cousin, I guess. Anything else Anton might say is lost as the last of the new prisoners climbs up from her squat, head held high despite the tears in her eyes. She’s the youngest of the women, and the guards have saved her until last. As she passes the corporal, she mutters something.
It’s a bad mistake.
A baton to her gut, an upsweep between her legs, and she’s on the floor again, rolling from side to side in her own piss.
“You,” the corporal says. “Pick up her clothes.”
Anton does as he’s ordered.
“And you,” I’m told. “Take her with you.”
I come to attention. “Yes, sir.”
His response is a sour smile. “Strip,” he orders.
It seems best to do it without question.
“Turn around.”
Waiting for the blow, I wait some more, but the man is reexamining the scars on my back.
“A sjambok?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m surprised you lived.”
“Yes, sir. Me, too.”
“Dress,” he tells me. Walking over to the girl, he hooks his boot under her rib cage and rolls her over, scowling at the mess. “And take your garbage with you.”