Alien Skies, page 10
part #3 of Wakanreo Series
“Is that the only reason?”
“That and Inchauro Perduay.”
Jared nodded. “You’re right to worry about him. He borders on the lunatic, if you want my opinion. Certainly trying to shoot me with that lethal Wakanrean pea shooter wasn’t the act of a sane man. However, we’re keeping tabs on Citizen Perduay. He’s nowhere near Yiangliun, by the way. He’s not even on this continent.”
“Where is he, then?”
Jared cocked his head again. “I don’t think I want to tell you. You got a little of that wild gleam in your eye when you mentioned his name. I wouldn’t want to have to take drastic measures again.”
“Do you still carry a stun gun with you everywhere?”
Jared nodded. “And don’t go getting any ideas just because you spent some time in Security on New Iberia.”
“So you’ve looked at my file?”
Jared chuckled. “Of course I have. What’s the good of being a Planetary Commander if you can’t have a look in someone’s file when you’re interested?” He smiled impishly. “How was boot camp the second time?”
“Not much better than the first.”
“That must be the first time in your life you took longer to do something than it took most of the rest of the group.”
Kamuhi considered. “Maybe not the first. It took me a while to learn to jump rope.”
“Why did you have to go through it again? Boot camp, I mean, not jumping rope.”
Kamuhi folded his arms across his chest. “Doesn’t it say in my file?”
Jared nodded. “It says you were still questioning orders. I want to know why it took you so long to figure out how to take an order.”
Kamuhi had thought it over already. “It was because I saw boot camp as an obstacle to get over—something to endure. I hadn’t realized I’d actually have to make myself change. Sometime in the middle of the second session, it dawned on me that they were prepared to make me do it over and over again until I got the idea. Once I grasped that fact, it was easier.”
“On the other hand, you did Officer Prep in record time,” Jared said. “Did you like it better?’
“It was all right. Better than boot camp, anyway, except for the last part.”
Jared laughed again. “Who did your Ordeal?”
“My what?”
“Your Ordeal—the grilling in the empty basement room where you have to account for every minute of your life including the time you stole candy when you were six, plus any impure thoughts you might have had since then.”
“Is that what it’s called? It was the same admiral who did my swearing in, which surprised me.”
Jared sat up and put his feet down. “It was Admiral Marochh?”
Kamuhi nodded. “Yes, it was. You seemed pretty friendly with him back then. Do you know him personally?”
Jared laughed out loud. “Know him! I served under Marochh shu Sstad for over five years. He was the Planetary Commander here on Wakanreo when I was a Liaison Officer in Wisuta.” He whistled. “Wow. You should be flattered. Marochh is a vice admiral now, and he’s based two sectors away from your OPI station. Even in highest priority transport, it must have taken him two days to get there to do the Ordeal.”
“It’s hard to feel flattered by being wrung out and hung up to dry,” Kamuhi said dryly.
“Yes,” Jared agreed. “But you could just as easily have been hung up to dry by the training officer. Most people are.” He leaned back in his chair again. “What’s that wily old Shuratanian up to?” he added speculatively. “I know you think I’m devious, Hailoaka, but believe me, if they had a contest in deviousness, I wouldn’t be worthy to hold his coat.” Jared put his feet back on his desk. “I wonder if he sent you here to reward me?”
“What?”
“For planting the seed that sprouted as your enlistment,” Jared explained.
“You make me sound like a Christmas present.”
Jared smiled. “Maybe, but you’re a present I didn’t ask for; I said yes when they offered you, but I hadn’t requested you or anything.”
Kamuhi mentally reviewed the time he had spent alone in the room with Admiral Marochh and his experience in ThreeCon so far. “I think it’s more likely that he expects me to learn something from you.”
Jared nodded. “It does sound more like the old bugger. You’ll go far in ThreeCon, kid. I can tell already.”
“You’re being a nyesh again.”
“You’re not the first one to tell me, kid. Speaking of which, have you contacted your in-laws yet?”
Kamuhi shook his head. “No, I thought I’d leave that to Yulayan.” He said nothing of the relief he had felt when he had received Yulayan’s message that she was coming.
Jared shook his head. “Not good. I checked, and she left Terra in a hurry. Since Kuaron hasn’t mentioned her to me lately, I’m pretty sure she didn’t contact them before she left. I’ll call Kuaron if you don’t want to do it.”
“Does it matter?”
“It’ll matter to Kuaron. And he’s my glynunshahai, so I have an obligation to tell him.”
“You really take that seriously, don’t you, Harlengin—the glynunshah rite and everything?”
Jared pulled up his shirt sleeve to reveal a long scar down one forearm. A second, smaller scar crossed it. The marks were old but still distinct. Jared studied them for a moment and then he pushed his sleeve down again. “Some day, when I’ve had too much to drink, I’ll tell you just how Kuaron and I made glynunshah. Meanwhile keep in mind that the man stepped between me and Perduay when that idiot was trying to kill me. Besides which, he’s your wife’s father and it looks like his father is dying.”
“What?” Kamuhi said. “I thought Juzao Sadoc was in good health?”
“He’s getting older—maybe not that old for a Wakanrean, but they don’t live forever. Besides, I think he’s just kind of worn himself out. He seems to have lost the ability to fight off sickness.
“Ordinarily, Wakanreans are a disgustingly healthy lot. I don’t think Kuaron’s been sick the whole time I’ve known him. And unlike Terrans, it’s not because of medical advances—it’s their own immune systems that keep them healthy. But once they get to a certain age—or sometimes just a certain point in their lives, like when a shahgunrahai dies—it’s as if they’ve outlived their immune systems. They get every little chill and fever that comes along and sooner or later one of them does them in.”
Kamuhi nodded agreement. Hopefully Yulayan would arrive before the old Wakanrean passed away. And certainly, Yulayan’s parents should know she was on her way home. She hadn’t mentioned contacting them in her message. “All right. I’ll call Kuaron and Dina.”
“See that you do,” Jared said. “Meanwhile, you can sit back and listen. I don’t care if you’ve spent time here already and your wife is Wakanrean, you still get the standard lecture on the planet.”
Kamuhi said nothing; he just leaned back and put his feet up on a hassock. Jared’s office was furnished very like the main room in a Wakanrean home except that seating was offered in different sizes; some was scaled to Wakanreans, some to Terrans and Milorans, and a few chairs were short enough for Shuratanians. Kamuhi had selected a Wakanrean-sized chair because he had always found them more suited to his size. One of the things he liked about being on Wakanreo was that, instead of being taller than everyone around him, he became average height, or even a little short.
“Well,” began Jared, “let’s look back to First Contact. I know Yulayan’s mother is walking proof that there was isolated contact before that, but we’ll ignore that for now. About a century ago, the Third Confederation of Planets stumbled across this solar system. By monitoring communications channels it was determined that Wakanreo had a planetary government, had eliminated war, and had attempted space travel. In other words, they were technically ready for First Contact.
“I’m sure all this is common knowledge, at least so far,” Jared went on. “But not many people know that ThreeCon was reluctant to go proceed. Any idea why?”
Kamuhi thought about it. “Cultural differences?”
Jared chuckled. “What a wishy-washy term. No, I wouldn’t call it a cultural difference exactly. The Wakanreans had a unique set of circumstances. They had been a very aggressive people. Their history, up until a few centuries before First Contact, was very warlike. And individual Wakanreans tend to get angry very quickly when they’re threatened. They call this reaction jiewa.” Jared paused. “Ever see anyone jiewa, Hailoaka?”
Kamuhi shook his head wordlessly.
“Well I have, several times. You would have, too if I had let you go with us the day that we went looking for Yulayan. It’s scary. It’s even scarier when you know and like the person. Kuaron is a civilized, cultured man until something makes him feel his family is in danger. Then he turns into someone else entirely.
“Anyway, into this mixture of violence and aggression, was born a woman named Paruian. Do you know much about her?”
“Not that much. I was more concerned with the present than the past when I was here before.”
“Paruian was an amazing person. She was born in a rural area several hundred kilometers south of Wisuta. As a child, she lost her mother to plague and her father went a little crazy after that. Then she herself became shahgunrahai at a very young age with a less than admirable man, a sort of war lord for the area. Paruian refused to concede that the petty, violent wars used to settle disputes at that time were necessary. Her idea was that before you asked another person to die for your cause, you owed it to them to attempt every reasonable means to achieve your goals. She used her position with her shahgunrahai to encourage him to make peace with their neighbors. Through sheer force of will and the power of her own personality, she convinced him that she was right.
“Once her children were grown, Paruian went out into the countryside urging other Wakanrean war lords—and war ladies, to be accurate—to exercise greater self-control and to settle land disputes through negotiation and compromise rather than fighting. She converted many people to her way of thinking. The Disciples of Paruian kept up her mission after her death, and they were the ones who kept her memory alive. Almost all Wakanreans credit Paruian with making possible the advancement of Wakanrean civilization. Some of them think she saved their race from self-destruction. That’s why she’s revered—even worshiped—and her descendants, the parundai, are accorded so much respect.
“What Paruian did was to jump Wakanreo forward several centuries. Wakanreans learned about controlling organized group violence well before they learned to control individual violence. Even Paruian never thought it would be possible to control jiewa. The strange thing about Wakanreo as it existed at the time of First Contact was that individuals were so much more aggressive than groups. Two centuries after Paruian died, a Wakanrean city dammed the river that ran through it, cutting off water to another city downstream; they solved the problem with talks, compromise, and a treaty. At that same time, if a Wakanrean citizen had cut down his neighbor’s picha tree, there could easily have been a fight to the death.”
Kamuhi interrupted, “But didn’t they see that the two were very much the same thing?”
Jared shook his head. “Not really. Wakanreans have always had jiewa as a justification. It is a recognized physiological response to danger and they just shrug their shoulders and say ‘that’s the way we are.’
“So,” continued Jared, “here they were, this planet of violent individuals living without war. Unlike Terra, they had no such thing as true racial groups. Wakanreans come in a variety of colors, but shahgunrah recognized no difference; after technology increased travel, coloration didn’t stay consistent with geography. They made great strides in technology in a relatively short time. They certainly unified the planet sooner after industrialization than most other planets—Terra, for instance. They also found that they had an almost instinctual understanding of chemistry. No one knows why. It’s even been hypothesized that it’s related to their superior sense of smell, but Wakanreo has always produced great chemists. When the Terran corporate conglomerates saw what this newly discovered planet was doing with industrial chemistry and biochemistry, they lobbied hard to have First Contact right away.
“Anyway,” Jared said, “In spite of the fact that the ThreeCon assessment team felt Wakanreo wasn’t ready for it, Terra pushed for and got First Contact. In light of that, it was incredibly ironic that it was a Terran on the First Contact team who first set off false shahgunrah in a Wakanrean. It almost brought the whole enterprise to a crashing halt. The Wakanreans were horrified and very angry. In trying to come up with an analogy to Terran history, imagine if the first aliens to come in contact with Terrans had been rapists or child molesters. We would have wanted nothing more to do with them. That’s the way the Wakanreans felt, even though they knew intellectually that it wasn’t deliberate. They realized that the Terrans had no idea that physical contact with them could have that effect on Wakanreans. That didn’t stop them from wanting the Terrans to go away. To them, shahgunrah was a sacred event that was being defiled by the Terrans. The Wakanrean government had never even allowed research on how shahgunrah works. But the Wakanreans weren’t allowed to have their way. ThreeCon stayed and the Terrans stayed, although they worked out a compromise that included a no-touching rule. Still, it took forty years from First Contact before the Wakanreans voted to join ThreeCon as auxiliary members.”
Jared stopped and poured himself a glass of water. “So,” he said, “now we come to twenty-some years ago. A young woman from a Terran colony world, seemingly of pure Terran ancestry, comes to Wakanreo to work. She’s a good enough chemist to get a work permit and a job offer at Quafray, one of the biggest Wakanrean chemical companies. She’s here less than a week when she meets a Wakanrean man at a party at the Terran embassy. He happens to be a parundai, a descendent of Paruian, and he happens to be renowned as a singer, a qatraharai. Add to that, his father is the current Planetary Administrator, and you couldn’t have asked for a more conspicuous person. What happens when these two people meet across a crowded room? Incredibly enough, true shahgunrah, reciprocated by the Terran woman as well as being felt by the Wakanrean man.
“The news caused a sensation. Mind you, nothing ever appeared in any official news reports. No one would publicly discuss a parundai’s private life. But within a week, I doubt if there was a soul on Wakanreo who didn’t know what had happened. Juzao Sadoc had to be convinced that it was real shahgunrah, but once he believed it, he pushed his family—and a lot of other people—into accepting the relationship.
“Meanwhile, the Terran embassy got very busy hatching a plan to use this event to further their own ends. Wakanreo was still resisting the Terran presence on their planet. To fight this resistance, Terra wanted to find out how they could absolutely control shahgunrah. In spite of an agreement not to, Terra secretly plotted to do research on Wakanrean physiology, trying to solve the secret of what sets off shahgunrah. However, there was a young, idealistic Liaison Officer at ThreeCon Headquarters in Wisuta. Since he was friends with the qatraharai, he warned the couple of Terra’s attempts.”
Kamuhi interrupted again. “Is this part of the standard lecture on Wakanreo?”
Jared shook his head. “Not this part. I’m giving you the deluxe treatment. As I was saying, this young Liaison Officer tried to help. He’s still not convinced he didn’t set Wakanrean progress back at least a decade in the process, but at least he was well intentioned. The end result was that the mixed Wakanrean-Terran couple were left alone, but eventually, the Terrans did discover a way to prevent false shahgunrah.
“In the meantime, the presence of a Terran woman as the shahgunrahai of a noted qatraharai, a parundai at that, helped to drive a wedge into the wall between Terrans and Wakanreans. I don’t know if your mother-in-law ever realized how much she helped, just by being who and what she was. When she had twin children, it helped even further because now there were two half-Terran parundai.”
Jared took another drink of water. “Stop me if I bore you,” he said. “So the two little parundai grew up. And the Terran population all took their precautionary injections and there was no more false shahgunrah. Everything was going along swimmingly when some executives from a Wakanrean manufacturing cartel decided that they shouldn’t have to compete with so many exports from other ThreeCon worlds. They looked around for something to use against ThreeCon, and they found the qatorglynai, the fanatics who wanted to keep Wakanreo for the Wakanreans.
“These qatorglynai were neither popular nor well organized, but they were vocal. When the cartel gave them funds to support their cause, their leaders could afford to quit their jobs and become full-time agitators. They could make inflammatory signs and offer free booze to anyone who would march with them. The qatorglynai became a force to be reckoned with very quickly. Among other things, they rioted. And then one of them happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and he met one of the twin parundai.”
“This is where I came in,” said Kamuhi. “You don’t have to go on.”
Jared nodded. “I’ll skip the next bit, then. But after all was said and done and the little parundai was no longer shahgunrahai with the qatorglynai, we discovered that it wasn’t as easy to get rid of the other qatorglynai as we had thought. They had had a taste of power and they liked it. So now, we have an underground group that’s working against ThreeCon. They’re very much underground because Perduay’s attack on me totally backfired. When Kuaron saved my life, he also took the wind out of the qatorglynai sails. Very few people were willing to be publicly associated with a group that had almost assassinated a parundai.”
Kamuhi couldn’t hold back a question. “What about when the news about Yulayan ending shahgunrah became more widely know?”
