Bokhara in the land of Transoxiana
The windows of this room can be thrown open effectively removing the entire east facing wall. Beyond the narrow porch is a long sweep of grassland which descends to the distant ocean and to the north-east is a rocky headland which, at the right time of year, is shadowed by the long midnight twilight.
Now is that time of year and I can see the glow of a sun which has set but never gets far enough below the horizon not to throw up some light. It is glorious, it is beautiful, and it reminds me so much of my home on earth.
That is why I came here and that is why I will remain here, even though I know that the Loman will one day find us. Earth is lost to us but I will have the midnight twilight of this world as compensation.
It has been a very long time since I saw the twilight of earth.
Soldat was his name. Probably still is. A Loman trader who ran the same runs as me. We carried goods, information, and people. As far as I am aware we stayed pretty much on the side of the law; well such laws as existed beyond the core systems. We were the matrix which held these early explorations of the galaxy together because without any sort of radio communication information had to travel the old way.
Some days our tough little ships were like post office vehicles from the previous century, filled to the roofs with letters.
Soldat was his name but the universe knows him as Besak now, or rather The Besak, some sort of war leader. I still find it hard to reconcile the quiet man I once traded with as the monster who now devours worlds and seems intent on running the entire human race down and exterminating it.
The odd thing about this journal (I suppose I could call it) is that, in the normal run of things the events leading up to humanity’s war with the Loman would be part of a retrievable history. But things are far from normal and there simply is no history to refer back to now. If any human being is reading this then I have no choice other than to provide some background.
In 2130 I was still making the Capella – Aldebaran – Zosma loop weekly and Soldat made much the same run in reverse but with an extra pick up of passengers from Denebola. There were thousands of us making enough money to stay fat and always business of some sort or another. Only the Loman and humans were represented among these star traders in any great numbers although there were smaller groups.
There was plenty to go round and precious little need for any aggression between folks.
As for where the Loman originated they never offered that information and, when asked, simply ignored it.
I liked Soldat which must seem odd now but, unlike just about every human I ever met, he wasn’t constantly tapping me for money, time, or even interest. When we passed, in deep space, he would flash his lights and flip on the generally useless radio set. He spoke a little English and I picked up a working knowledge of whatever the hell they called their language.
He sought me out just before everything went wrong. I had a little house on earth with a lovely view of hills which shadowed the midnight twilight on that world. He sought me out there. It was July 2131 and the twilight glow was bright in the night sky. Those hills were vague but somehow still beautiful in the night-time.
He was wearing a uniform. Soldat, despite his name’s similarity to Soldier, never wore a uniform. I commented on it being smart and he shrugged. He had barely sat down before speaking.
“Friend Calvin, a storm is coming and your people are in great danger.”
Dramatic I thought then, and a bit over the top. We had only been in interstellar space for a few decades but somehow we had become less fearful of the universe at large. When my parents were children they had been afraid of things like climate change, over-population, famine, disease. Out among the stars we could see that resources and space itself were limitless.
I guess we became complacent but, as I have already said, there was plenty to go round and no need at all to fight over it.
Which, I now discovered, sitting with my friend Soldat, was not how the Loman saw things. He told me about his people’s shock at finding another space faring species venturing out into the unknown just as they were making their own first faltering steps.
He told me how they had watched until the time was right. Until the time was now. He answered my questions and he parried my objections, and then he stood up.
“My friend. You must leave now and get away from anywhere my people might ever be interested in. Right now. You know where the main trade routes are. Stay away from them. Find a comfortable, remote bolt hole and stay there.”
And he left.
My last words to him that last night in my old home were, “What is the uniform?”
“I have a part to play in what is to come. My friend, I hope I never see you again.”
I took him partially at his word in that I left earth that day but I did not throw the accelerators forward and just head out beyond the trade areas. I parked up, contacted the few people on earth I had any dealings with, advising them to keep their eyes open, and then, with the moon huge on my starboard side, I watched the Loman fleet arrive and inflict a hammering I knew the world could never recover from.
He had timed his visit perfectly knowing that, while I might be able to spread the warning around a few friends and family, I had no chance at all of giving anyone in any measure of power a proper warning of what was coming.
The earth burned behind me as I took off up and out of the solar system, determined to warn someone, somewhere.
I flew for months and found the same thing on every earth-settled world. Sirius, Procyon, Arcturus, Pollux, and a dozen others. At worst the worlds were smoking wastelands, at best Loman structures were being quickly built on the ruins of human habitations which had hardly been there long enough to warrant the titles of town or city.
Landing was something I only did when the ship needed some vital piece of maintenance and only when I had made absolutely sure that facilities had survived and there were neither Loman nor human survivors. If there was one thing I dreaded almost as much as the Loman it was the thought of desperate humans overwhelming my little ship.
Do I feel guilty about these feelings? Certainly, but I have had many years of watching the ocean in the distance, the stars in the night sky and the twilight of summer. I have come to understand that things often just happen and we have to just let ourselves be blown along, curled up and protecting ourselves in any way possible.
I spent far longer exploring the ruins of humanity than I should have but it took a long time for the utter truth in Soldat’s last words to finally get its hooks into me. I knew the extent of human activity and I knew the extent of Loman activity, so I knew exactly where to run to; anywhere but those two great spaces.
And yet I struggled with the idea of abandoning the places of humanity forever. Whoever you are who is reading this I just ask you to put yourself in my shoes. Where do you go when everything is gone? And how long do you remain in the ruins of your life before you realise that you are indeed going to have to abandon them forever?
Our history is filled with exile and escape. It is strange that we never seem to learn from it. Of course that was when we had a history. I eventually understood that it was time to go and even then I held back. The ship’s calendar showed that a new year had begun; perhaps that was what started my change of mind and heart. I really don’t know but by then I had acquired an instinct for where the Loman were operating and where they were spread thinly.
In what now seems like a twisted game of cat and mouse I spent a long time quietly weaving through these areas of relative safety. In the thick of it I would have been caught immediately but in these corridors of relative peace my ship did not look too different from Loman traders.
I held off on that final departure and made my way somewhere, anywhere that might provide a justification for staying at “home” for another day, another day, another day. And one day I found the Castor System and the radio bubble around it still crackling with the sounds of human activity. Crackling with the sounds of human preparations for war.
With still a germ of concern I finally made land fall and gave up the dubious security of speed, mobility, and artificial gravity. Castor was in chaos and no one I spoke with could believe that I had effectively crept between oncoming Loman fleets and overtaken them by several days.
I had not been coming through fields of relative safety. I had managed to creep through and out of no-man’s land and right into a coming war.
A tall, attractive woman in her sixties interviewed me and the first thing I noticed was that humanity had started wearing uniforms again. After a generation of reasonably effective self-regulation, and government only in extremis, we were right back to where we have been in the last century. There wasn’t even a declaration on her uniform of us all as human beings, nor was there any statement that we had all once lived on a world called earth. No, the badge on her shoulder (in rather rough stitching) was clear that this lady was an operative of the Castor System.
And not just a uniform but even a rank. Lieutenant, pronounced leftenant just like back in my old country on earth. Was that a pang of memory when she introduced herself, that lieutenant, from a place which had not existed in any meaningful sense since we had taken to the stars?
And had ceased to exist at all after Soldat’s visit.
Lieutenant Cara Bradley.
“Do I call you Cara?”
“No, you call me Lieutenant.” I toyed with the idea of jokingly using the alternative pronunciation but thought better of it. Leftenant it was.
She was not unkind, just sceptical about my journey and initially wary of me. One thing that had never occurred to me was that I might be mistaken for a Loman. But of course there are no obvious differences between the two peoples.
She asked about me and I told her what I could remember. Earth seemed like a dream and I struggled with my early years there but some gentle prodding and some good coffee started a trickle of memories which became a bit of a torrent.
British, from when such adjectives even meant anything, born in Scotland in 2090. An only child of two ordinary Scots folks who took to space when I was three years old. I remember coming back to a small house every few months before being whisked back into the big black. A happy childhood marred only by legally mandated periods of formal education when I was subjected to psychotic school mates and a few even more psychotic teachers. A friend once recounted meeting a former maths teacher in the street and it was plain that the man had had to be lobotomised.
And yet I got an education and I continued to value education in general. Mum took too much radiation from the early, unregulated star flights and passed away when I was twelve. Safety was one of the in-extremis situations where old style government proved a rare but necessary return to the old ways.
Dad lasted two years after that, going through the motions of living until he could follow her. The stars had begun to break up the over-regulated nations of earth and I took full advantage of this. I grabbed the family jewels, the family space ship, and took off.
And that’s pretty much it. Business was good in space. You probably won’t get rich given the sheer amount of competition but the limitless demand for transport of goods, people, information meant that there would always be paying work.
And the unexpected simplicity of star ships meant that overheads were negligible.
“So that’s me, lieutenant. A small trader in a big galaxy.”
She had smiled.
“Or a wandering orphan.”
I shrugged, smiled as sweetly as I know how, and she released me with a request that, should her people need it, I would answer my phone. The sheer delight of being back in next to immediate communication meant that my reply was only ever going to be in the positive.
It was from her that I found out that Soldat was now known as the Besak. And that a terrifying mythology was forming around him. Not the plucking stars from the sky sort of mythology. No; the leaving no survivors sort of mythology. The corpses on spikes sort of mythology.
The I can do it so I will sort of mythology.
I told her that didn’t sound like my friend. She replied that monsters are seldom monsters to those who love them. A lot of her comments sounded like she had heard them in movies, and not necessarily good movies. But she was kind enough in her way and I would probably never have heard about Soldat’s transformation without her.
The Castor System was not quiet for long and the war came to this world on a warm evening when I was visiting an old friend in hospital. In truth this world was uncomfortably hot and I had no idea what season we might be in. I hoped it wasn’t winter because summer would then be a pretty close reflection of hell.
The lieutenant had contacted me to let me know that an old friend was asking after me. My arrival in the Castor System was the focus of a very brief flurry of interest and Kelvin had spotted me on the rather basic TV provision. On the night of the attack I visited him and we spent hours talking about nothing in particular. It was a blessed relief from everything being vital and intensely important.
Kelvin and I had, as far as I can recall, first spoken when we discovered how similar our names were. It is a poor reason for making a life-long friend but I suspect most people hook up with their best friend for some pretty unspectacular reasons. We were not best friends but we knew one another from as long ago as earth and, in the present climate, that was a long time ago.
He was very ill. I don’t want to write details of what was wrong but it was not the sort of thing you get better from. I am sadder about that now, all these years later, because I don’t think I really understood how rapidly everything was coming apart. His imminent demise and the imminent demise of the human race just felt like something discussed theoretically. The Castor System, the lieutenant, and Kelvin were real. I could touch them, I could speak with them, I could move among them. The idea of them not being there just felt wrong, unreasonable.
Mum and dad were gone but somehow that could be explained away. Kelvin going too just seemed … unreasonable.
He had reached safe ground just a few weeks before me but he had picked up information about this Besak.
“One of us, Calvin. Just another trader until someone put this damned idea into his head.”
He reached out his hand and I took it. Not something tough, practical trading types usually do but he had something to say and, weak as he was, he needed some sort of emphasis.
“You knew him. I knew him. But this thing that he has become just believes in something and he believes in it so hard that there is nothing we can do to turn him back. It’s too late for me but do yourself a favour. Run, and keep running, and take as many of these people who will run with you and get away to somewhere they aren’t interested in.”
His grip eased but I tightened mine and he squeezed back a little, pleased that I had not let go.
“Any ideas where we could go?” I asked.
“Get out of the Local Bubble. If you analyse their movements they are sticking to systems inside the Bubble.”
I remember smiling, even as I squeezed his hand again.
“Outside of anything, Kelvin, is a lot of space. Anything more specific?”
And he smiled as indulgently as a dying man can.
“Try Betelgeuse. At least everyone knows where it is.”
How do you argue with a dying man, but now I see his point. Over and over, between 2070 and 2100, we found habitable planets in almost all the systems we visited. UV a bit high in places, temperature a bit low, local fauna a bit too like hungry dinosaurs but none of these things insurmountable.
And Betelgeuse did give me this lovely home in this lovely place. For a time.
The attack came on the last night I visited Kelvin and I watched from the roof of the hospital as the Castor System’s young but impressive capital city was systematically taken apart with three exceptions; the spaceport, the government centre, and the hospital.
The first two I can understand. Why destroy a perfectly good landing ground? Why wreck central records? But the hospital seemed like such an easy target. Hundreds of helpless sick and injured.
I left Kelvin and walked out into corridors lit only by emergency battery lights. A few staff scurried around in a few places but the overwhelming sense I got was of abandonment. Weak sounds of crying were everywhere. Louder cries suggested bigger problems, and a few terrified screams simply cut through the air and echoed down stairwells.
And on level three, as I tried to find the final staircase down to the ground I found Soldat, the Besak, standing benignly at the foot of a bed which was surrounded by monitors and drug delivery equipment. He turned and looked at me and seemed as genuinely surprised to see me as I was to see him.
I kept a distance but felt no real threat. Hell, we were friends.
“I once lived in a remote town,” I said, far more calmly than I felt. “But I would come home to the city regularly and a friend from the city once commented that I kept bumping into people I knew far more often than she did, even though she lived in the city.”
Soldat held his hands out a little in a gesture which conveyed the word “And?” far more eloquently than the words themselves.
“Well, I thought about this for a long time and then realised that most of the people I kept meeting were from the town I lived in and they were clearly just frequenting the same places in the city that I did. Far from being an odd coincidence it would have actually been odd if we hadn’t bumped into one another from time to time.”
Soldat nodded. “Whereas the people who lived in the city were more numerous and less likely to visit the same places than people who came from the outside.”
My turn to nod.
“And where else were we both going to end up than humanity’s last system?”
He turned back to the bed in a gesture that said I was not a threat but which also included a swift adjustment of the pistol on his right hip. I walked slowly forward and joined him.
The patient on the bed was never leaving that bed. I knew this and I was no medic.
Soldat tapped the records folder hanging at the foot of the bed.
“Violent unprovoked assault. I think your people call it a sucker punch. Human against human. No reason, no motive, no sense but pretty much what we know about your kind.”
I said nothing.
“We struggled to decide what to do when humanity joined us among the stars. War was discussed but wars really only benefit warriors and exploitative business people. So we nudged you away from the places that were clearly ours, showed you equally lucrative alternatives, and shared a few worlds. Just good business. And all the while we watched, carefully, to see if you had actually changed. If you had become peaceful and cooperative.”
“And hadn’t we?” I asked, my eyes fixed on the poor, soon to be gone man in the bed in front of me.
“Hard work has a way of keeping people’s minds away from mischief and there is no question that settling planets and keeping communications going is hard work. As a people you have done well. You certainly achieved as much as us in a shorter time.”
“I seem to recall that the Loman provided a lot of help.”
He put his hands on the end of the bed and let his weight shift forward.
“Not as much as you might think. Your ships were overly complex. We helped you make them more serviceable. No, friend Calvin, earth has done quite well.”
“And yet we now find ourselves at war.”
He stood up again, and again adjusted the weapon at his hip. I felt no sense of threat but it was plain he was reminding me it was there.
“I and others come to places like this to see how humanity really is. We have been creeping around your hospitals, your rehabilitation homes, your orphanages for a long time now just watching, just hoping that the hard work would keep the mischief at bay.”
That was the moment that I felt a cold shaft of danger enter the conversation. I needed to say something. I just knew that somehow this was a last chance to head off whatever was coming out of his mouth next.
My effort failed but I want it recorded that I tried.
“We help one another in these places,” I said, angry with myself that my voice wavered. “Some of the finest examples of human behaviour happen in hospitals. Soldat, surely this is where you see us at our best.”
He had turned and was now facing me, his face shadowed by the dim battery lighting behind him. It was like looking into a pit.
“This facility was knocked out of action four hours ago. The few staff are still remaining at their posts but I have already killed an intruder on the top floor who was preparing to assault a bed bound patient. On other worlds we have found children’s facilities infiltrated by those who would hurt them, even as others are making futile efforts at planetary defence. We routinely intercept fleeing spacecraft filled with money and goods but noticeably devoid of fellow human beings.”
He took a step forward but I did not back away. What would have been the point?
“Humanity has not changed. It has just been distracted for a few decades. You are still the same warlike, exploitative, cruel vermin you ever were. You had your chance, friend Calvin, and you all blew it. We even slowed the pace of the war, gave you all chinks in our armour to escape through, opportunities to show some magnificence in the face of defeat.
And you blew it.”
What did I have to counter this accusation? Nothing other than the suggestion that his people had to have been just as bad. But in truth I had never so much as seen the Loman short-changing anyone. They had a clear sense that things are done properly or they are best not done at all.
And I had seen what he was talking about. Even a few years ago there was a camaraderie in the human worlds, a real sense that we were all out on the frontier, all slogging away at the coal face, all in it together. But as things got more settled the cheating had begun. Bundles of cash, settlement of deals, were now counted, something I never recall doing in my early days. Townships were employing peace keepers, something we had all contributed to in the past. These new earths among the stars were indeed starting to look a lot like old earth.
“So the actions of a few assholes are to condemn humanity to oblivion?”
It was feeble but it was all I had.
“It infects you all, Calvin. You end up enduring it, then tolerating it, and then ignoring it. You start looking inward, happy for your own home, ship, shack to be safe while the worlds get ever more crime ridden and corrupt. Your own goodness eventually becomes enough for you, and that personal goodness is why I warned you. Left to your own devices, Calvin, and away from the baleful influence of humanity I am sure you can remain a good man. I do hope so because wherever you go I will eventually come watching.”
“And judging?”
He did not even pause.
“Yes. I suppose that’s was this is, judgement. Your people have not lived up to our standards. You have been found wanting and put even more simply, if you had not been so wicked then I would not be standing here in front of you saying these things. Now go. I will comfort this man as he dies and then I will investigate the character I saw snooping around the paediatric unit.”
I did not run. I did not panic. I just made my way to where my ship was parked, in an industrial facility far enough out into the countryside to have been missed by the attackers. Either that or Soldat had told them to leave it be.
And then I flew, still watchful for Loman activity, still playing cat and mouse with an enemy that was very probably letting me through and away.
And over the course of weeks I found my way slowly to Betelgeuse. And every centimetre of that journey I had a nagging sense that something Soldat had said was familiar. But in the absence of access to a computer system I had no way to dig deeper.
In any case I had bigger problems than the possibility that Soldat was in the habit of quoting from human sources.
Betelgeuse certainly had worlds that I could live on but actually getting settled was something I had never done before and it did turn out to be a drawn-out nightmare. On the up-side I wasn’t there alone for long. For all Soldat’s disdain for humanity many of us found one another and, contrary to his low expectations of us, we survived, thrived even.
But something had changed in us and I wonder now how many of us had Soldat or someone like him in their lives. Because we are suspicious of one another in a way we were not before. Sure there was always a caution in dealing with individuals and groups but this is something else, something the Loman have put into us. Or rather it is an understanding we should perhaps have always had that there is something in humanity which should be feared, should be carefully watched, and should never be trusted.
The things he described that night in the hospital have haunted me. I knew things like that happened but, like everyone else, and probably to maintain my sanity, I put them to the side. I never associated them with myself but he challenged me to see that this wickedness was something in humanity, not just in individuals. The terrible acts are not just events, they are part of the whole matrix of human existence, even the pitiful fragment that lives on here.
I have been happy here but not a day has passed, in all these years, when Soldat’s bleak view of the human heart has not cast clouds over even the finest of days. Perhaps that happiness tinged with discontent and worry is the best any of us can hope for.
A woman, Mrs Beacham, came from the small township by the sea a few days ago. Her insistence on that ancient married title is about the least eccentric thing in that strange collection of huts, shacks and attempts at proper houses. She was carrying a bag of books which had been brought by a new arrival.
“Has he been out there all this time?” I asked in genuine shock.
She nodded and made a spinning motion with her finger at her right temple.
“Pretty mad but perhaps some company will help.”
I studied the insane collection of leggings, skirts, pullovers and jackets that festooned her sturdy but by no means huge frame. She looked like a walking car-boot sale and I felt a measure of doubt about her or the townsfolk’s ability to bring normality to anyone.
But she was nice and she brought things up the long slope from time to time.
“Where is he staying?”
“In the town hall. We don’t use it for much so he can get used to being around people in his own time.”
I kept my thoughts to myself about the whole township thing but invited Mrs Beacham into the shack, sat her down, and poured her a generous glass of the wine I make from the plants closer to the mountains. The planet is generously supplied with just about anything someone might need but I have never bothered to name anything. Nor for that matter, as far as I am aware, has anyone in the township.
Half a glass in and she visibly relaxed, opened her bag and lifted out the books. Mostly paperbacks from not long before the war but one was a thicker, A Chronology of World History. I recall smiling as I turned the volume around in my hand. I have always liked this sort of thing but feel that dealing with over fifty thousand years of history in six or seven hundred pages is just a bit ambitious.
“What do you think he would trade for this?”
Mrs Beacham drained her glass and held it out with a friendly wiggle of the fingers. I topped her up and she quietly sighed her thanks.
“A couple of bottles of this would probably do it. I doubt he’s had more than recycled water for years.”
I dropped the volume onto my desk and lifted two bottles from a basket behind my chair. The vegetation close to the mountains is very generous.
“Deal.” And I filled a glass for myself and joined Mrs Beacham in a drink and a chat.
It was later, as I flicked through the book, that I remembered that odd comment Soldat had made in the hospital all those years ago. What was it?
“You have been found wanting and put even more simply, if you had not been so wicked then I would not be standing here in front of you saying these things.”
And there it was from around the year 1218. The words of Genghis Khan addressing the defeated people of Bokhara in the land of Transoxiana.
“O people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
Not the same certainly and perhaps there is a universal sense of being the righteous hand of wrath but I have had many years on this world to think things over and I am now not so sure about the Loman.
So I sit here at my desk and I think things.
How can we and the Loman be so physically similar?
How did we bump into one another so soon after discovering that star travel is so simple that a High School student can rig up an engine and drive field?
And finally how did Soldat know so much about us? When he spoke with me in that hospital ward he was not referring to recent human activities. He was describing life on earth from before we took to the stars. The crime, the abuse, the fear, the discrimination, the selfishness, the greed, and above all else the cruelty.
The Loman knew us before we ever left earth, which leaves me with only a couple of directions to take these long ponderings. Either the Loman have been watching us for a long time which I now doubt since we have seen that they could easily have wiped us out before we ever left earth. Or the Loman are humans who somehow got away from earth sometime before the rest of humanity.
As time passes and as I get older I favour the Loman as humans version. If nothing else it explains their less slick spacecraft. Robust and functional but without all the electronic gadgets we had crammed our lives with in the late 21st century.
I have spent a long time trying to recall the interior of Soldat’s ship and from those memories I am prepared to theorise that the Loman left earth sometime in the late 20th century but before the explosion in computer technology which marked the last decade of that century and the first three decades of the 21st century. Sometime between 1960 and 1990.
I am guessing but I have little else to do these days. There is one more thing, though, and it has been affecting my peace of mind and my sleep for a while now. If the Loman are us, and if Soldat was right in what he said about humanity that night, then he was deluding himself if he thought he was better than us.
The Loman may have found their way to the stars before the rest of humanity made it to the moon, and they may have created some sort of utopia among those stars, but we are what we are and there is a darkness in the human soul which defies reason and healing.
I have that Chronology of World History open in front of me just now and there is a commentary on Genghis Khan’s words to the defeated citizens of Bokhara in the land of Transoxiana.
“That the Khan was great we cannot doubt if only for his profound influence on human history. In the context of his defeat of the Bokharans however we are seeing cynical politics at its worst. Wrapped up in an indignant statement on human wickedness and divine justice is a simple act of theft on a grand scale coupled with a callous side order of victim blaming.”
I look out of my home and down the long slope to that beautiful sea with the canopy of stars above it. In the summer the midnight twilight shadows the great headland. I have more than I need but I have seldom had a fully happy day. Soldat is out there and some day he or someone like him will find us and I am too old and too tired to even face them, far less fight them.
I am scared of that meeting but I am as scared of what it means if the Loman are indeed as human as I am. Soldat was right about me at least. There is an incurable darkness in me and I have to conclude that it exists in Mrs Beacham as well and in that poor madman sleeping in the town hall.
I could just about accept being judged by Soldat the Loman, the righteous warrior. I could weep, though, at the thought of one day being judged by Soldat the human being.
As dark, misguided, corrupt and cruel as those he one day chose to judge.
My remaining days will be forever clouded by the knowledge of what I am and what everyone else either is or might be.
End
The windows of this room can be thrown open effectively removing the entire east facing wall. Beyond the narrow porch is a long sweep of grassland which descends to the distant ocean and to the north-east is a rocky headland which, at the right time of year, is shadowed by the long midnight twilight.
Now is that time of year and I can see the glow of a sun which has set but never gets far enough below the horizon not to throw up some light. It is glorious, it is beautiful, and it reminds me so much of my home on earth.
That is why I came here and that is why I will remain here, even though I know that the Loman will one day find us. Earth is lost to us but I will have the midnight twilight of this world as compensation.
It has been a very long time since I saw the twilight of earth.
Soldat was his name. Probably still is. A Loman trader who ran the same runs as me. We carried goods, information, and people. As far as I am aware we stayed pretty much on the side of the law; well such laws as existed beyond the core systems. We were the matrix which held these early explorations of the galaxy together because without any sort of radio communication information had to travel the old way.
Some days our tough little ships were like post office vehicles from the previous century, filled to the roofs with letters.
Soldat was his name but the universe knows him as Besak now, or rather The Besak, some sort of war leader. I still find it hard to reconcile the quiet man I once traded with as the monster who now devours worlds and seems intent on running the entire human race down and exterminating it.
The odd thing about this journal (I suppose I could call it) is that, in the normal run of things the events leading up to humanity’s war with the Loman would be part of a retrievable history. But things are far from normal and there simply is no history to refer back to now. If any human being is reading this then I have no choice other than to provide some background.
In 2130 I was still making the Capella – Aldebaran – Zosma loop weekly and Soldat made much the same run in reverse but with an extra pick up of passengers from Denebola. There were thousands of us making enough money to stay fat and always business of some sort or another. Only the Loman and humans were represented among these star traders in any great numbers although there were smaller groups.
There was plenty to go round and precious little need for any aggression between folks.
As for where the Loman originated they never offered that information and, when asked, simply ignored it.
I liked Soldat which must seem odd now but, unlike just about every human I ever met, he wasn’t constantly tapping me for money, time, or even interest. When we passed, in deep space, he would flash his lights and flip on the generally useless radio set. He spoke a little English and I picked up a working knowledge of whatever the hell they called their language.
He sought me out just before everything went wrong. I had a little house on earth with a lovely view of hills which shadowed the midnight twilight on that world. He sought me out there. It was July 2131 and the twilight glow was bright in the night sky. Those hills were vague but somehow still beautiful in the night-time.
He was wearing a uniform. Soldat, despite his name’s similarity to Soldier, never wore a uniform. I commented on it being smart and he shrugged. He had barely sat down before speaking.
“Friend Calvin, a storm is coming and your people are in great danger.”
Dramatic I thought then, and a bit over the top. We had only been in interstellar space for a few decades but somehow we had become less fearful of the universe at large. When my parents were children they had been afraid of things like climate change, over-population, famine, disease. Out among the stars we could see that resources and space itself were limitless.
I guess we became complacent but, as I have already said, there was plenty to go round and no need at all to fight over it.
Which, I now discovered, sitting with my friend Soldat, was not how the Loman saw things. He told me about his people’s shock at finding another space faring species venturing out into the unknown just as they were making their own first faltering steps.
He told me how they had watched until the time was right. Until the time was now. He answered my questions and he parried my objections, and then he stood up.
“My friend. You must leave now and get away from anywhere my people might ever be interested in. Right now. You know where the main trade routes are. Stay away from them. Find a comfortable, remote bolt hole and stay there.”
And he left.
My last words to him that last night in my old home were, “What is the uniform?”
“I have a part to play in what is to come. My friend, I hope I never see you again.”
I took him partially at his word in that I left earth that day but I did not throw the accelerators forward and just head out beyond the trade areas. I parked up, contacted the few people on earth I had any dealings with, advising them to keep their eyes open, and then, with the moon huge on my starboard side, I watched the Loman fleet arrive and inflict a hammering I knew the world could never recover from.
He had timed his visit perfectly knowing that, while I might be able to spread the warning around a few friends and family, I had no chance at all of giving anyone in any measure of power a proper warning of what was coming.
The earth burned behind me as I took off up and out of the solar system, determined to warn someone, somewhere.
I flew for months and found the same thing on every earth-settled world. Sirius, Procyon, Arcturus, Pollux, and a dozen others. At worst the worlds were smoking wastelands, at best Loman structures were being quickly built on the ruins of human habitations which had hardly been there long enough to warrant the titles of town or city.
Landing was something I only did when the ship needed some vital piece of maintenance and only when I had made absolutely sure that facilities had survived and there were neither Loman nor human survivors. If there was one thing I dreaded almost as much as the Loman it was the thought of desperate humans overwhelming my little ship.
Do I feel guilty about these feelings? Certainly, but I have had many years of watching the ocean in the distance, the stars in the night sky and the twilight of summer. I have come to understand that things often just happen and we have to just let ourselves be blown along, curled up and protecting ourselves in any way possible.
I spent far longer exploring the ruins of humanity than I should have but it took a long time for the utter truth in Soldat’s last words to finally get its hooks into me. I knew the extent of human activity and I knew the extent of Loman activity, so I knew exactly where to run to; anywhere but those two great spaces.
And yet I struggled with the idea of abandoning the places of humanity forever. Whoever you are who is reading this I just ask you to put yourself in my shoes. Where do you go when everything is gone? And how long do you remain in the ruins of your life before you realise that you are indeed going to have to abandon them forever?
Our history is filled with exile and escape. It is strange that we never seem to learn from it. Of course that was when we had a history. I eventually understood that it was time to go and even then I held back. The ship’s calendar showed that a new year had begun; perhaps that was what started my change of mind and heart. I really don’t know but by then I had acquired an instinct for where the Loman were operating and where they were spread thinly.
In what now seems like a twisted game of cat and mouse I spent a long time quietly weaving through these areas of relative safety. In the thick of it I would have been caught immediately but in these corridors of relative peace my ship did not look too different from Loman traders.
I held off on that final departure and made my way somewhere, anywhere that might provide a justification for staying at “home” for another day, another day, another day. And one day I found the Castor System and the radio bubble around it still crackling with the sounds of human activity. Crackling with the sounds of human preparations for war.
With still a germ of concern I finally made land fall and gave up the dubious security of speed, mobility, and artificial gravity. Castor was in chaos and no one I spoke with could believe that I had effectively crept between oncoming Loman fleets and overtaken them by several days.
I had not been coming through fields of relative safety. I had managed to creep through and out of no-man’s land and right into a coming war.
A tall, attractive woman in her sixties interviewed me and the first thing I noticed was that humanity had started wearing uniforms again. After a generation of reasonably effective self-regulation, and government only in extremis, we were right back to where we have been in the last century. There wasn’t even a declaration on her uniform of us all as human beings, nor was there any statement that we had all once lived on a world called earth. No, the badge on her shoulder (in rather rough stitching) was clear that this lady was an operative of the Castor System.
And not just a uniform but even a rank. Lieutenant, pronounced leftenant just like back in my old country on earth. Was that a pang of memory when she introduced herself, that lieutenant, from a place which had not existed in any meaningful sense since we had taken to the stars?
And had ceased to exist at all after Soldat’s visit.
Lieutenant Cara Bradley.
“Do I call you Cara?”
“No, you call me Lieutenant.” I toyed with the idea of jokingly using the alternative pronunciation but thought better of it. Leftenant it was.
She was not unkind, just sceptical about my journey and initially wary of me. One thing that had never occurred to me was that I might be mistaken for a Loman. But of course there are no obvious differences between the two peoples.
She asked about me and I told her what I could remember. Earth seemed like a dream and I struggled with my early years there but some gentle prodding and some good coffee started a trickle of memories which became a bit of a torrent.
British, from when such adjectives even meant anything, born in Scotland in 2090. An only child of two ordinary Scots folks who took to space when I was three years old. I remember coming back to a small house every few months before being whisked back into the big black. A happy childhood marred only by legally mandated periods of formal education when I was subjected to psychotic school mates and a few even more psychotic teachers. A friend once recounted meeting a former maths teacher in the street and it was plain that the man had had to be lobotomised.
And yet I got an education and I continued to value education in general. Mum took too much radiation from the early, unregulated star flights and passed away when I was twelve. Safety was one of the in-extremis situations where old style government proved a rare but necessary return to the old ways.
Dad lasted two years after that, going through the motions of living until he could follow her. The stars had begun to break up the over-regulated nations of earth and I took full advantage of this. I grabbed the family jewels, the family space ship, and took off.
And that’s pretty much it. Business was good in space. You probably won’t get rich given the sheer amount of competition but the limitless demand for transport of goods, people, information meant that there would always be paying work.
And the unexpected simplicity of star ships meant that overheads were negligible.
“So that’s me, lieutenant. A small trader in a big galaxy.”
She had smiled.
“Or a wandering orphan.”
I shrugged, smiled as sweetly as I know how, and she released me with a request that, should her people need it, I would answer my phone. The sheer delight of being back in next to immediate communication meant that my reply was only ever going to be in the positive.
It was from her that I found out that Soldat was now known as the Besak. And that a terrifying mythology was forming around him. Not the plucking stars from the sky sort of mythology. No; the leaving no survivors sort of mythology. The corpses on spikes sort of mythology.
The I can do it so I will sort of mythology.
I told her that didn’t sound like my friend. She replied that monsters are seldom monsters to those who love them. A lot of her comments sounded like she had heard them in movies, and not necessarily good movies. But she was kind enough in her way and I would probably never have heard about Soldat’s transformation without her.
The Castor System was not quiet for long and the war came to this world on a warm evening when I was visiting an old friend in hospital. In truth this world was uncomfortably hot and I had no idea what season we might be in. I hoped it wasn’t winter because summer would then be a pretty close reflection of hell.
The lieutenant had contacted me to let me know that an old friend was asking after me. My arrival in the Castor System was the focus of a very brief flurry of interest and Kelvin had spotted me on the rather basic TV provision. On the night of the attack I visited him and we spent hours talking about nothing in particular. It was a blessed relief from everything being vital and intensely important.
Kelvin and I had, as far as I can recall, first spoken when we discovered how similar our names were. It is a poor reason for making a life-long friend but I suspect most people hook up with their best friend for some pretty unspectacular reasons. We were not best friends but we knew one another from as long ago as earth and, in the present climate, that was a long time ago.
He was very ill. I don’t want to write details of what was wrong but it was not the sort of thing you get better from. I am sadder about that now, all these years later, because I don’t think I really understood how rapidly everything was coming apart. His imminent demise and the imminent demise of the human race just felt like something discussed theoretically. The Castor System, the lieutenant, and Kelvin were real. I could touch them, I could speak with them, I could move among them. The idea of them not being there just felt wrong, unreasonable.
Mum and dad were gone but somehow that could be explained away. Kelvin going too just seemed … unreasonable.
He had reached safe ground just a few weeks before me but he had picked up information about this Besak.
“One of us, Calvin. Just another trader until someone put this damned idea into his head.”
He reached out his hand and I took it. Not something tough, practical trading types usually do but he had something to say and, weak as he was, he needed some sort of emphasis.
“You knew him. I knew him. But this thing that he has become just believes in something and he believes in it so hard that there is nothing we can do to turn him back. It’s too late for me but do yourself a favour. Run, and keep running, and take as many of these people who will run with you and get away to somewhere they aren’t interested in.”
His grip eased but I tightened mine and he squeezed back a little, pleased that I had not let go.
“Any ideas where we could go?” I asked.
“Get out of the Local Bubble. If you analyse their movements they are sticking to systems inside the Bubble.”
I remember smiling, even as I squeezed his hand again.
“Outside of anything, Kelvin, is a lot of space. Anything more specific?”
And he smiled as indulgently as a dying man can.
“Try Betelgeuse. At least everyone knows where it is.”
How do you argue with a dying man, but now I see his point. Over and over, between 2070 and 2100, we found habitable planets in almost all the systems we visited. UV a bit high in places, temperature a bit low, local fauna a bit too like hungry dinosaurs but none of these things insurmountable.
And Betelgeuse did give me this lovely home in this lovely place. For a time.
The attack came on the last night I visited Kelvin and I watched from the roof of the hospital as the Castor System’s young but impressive capital city was systematically taken apart with three exceptions; the spaceport, the government centre, and the hospital.
The first two I can understand. Why destroy a perfectly good landing ground? Why wreck central records? But the hospital seemed like such an easy target. Hundreds of helpless sick and injured.
I left Kelvin and walked out into corridors lit only by emergency battery lights. A few staff scurried around in a few places but the overwhelming sense I got was of abandonment. Weak sounds of crying were everywhere. Louder cries suggested bigger problems, and a few terrified screams simply cut through the air and echoed down stairwells.
And on level three, as I tried to find the final staircase down to the ground I found Soldat, the Besak, standing benignly at the foot of a bed which was surrounded by monitors and drug delivery equipment. He turned and looked at me and seemed as genuinely surprised to see me as I was to see him.
I kept a distance but felt no real threat. Hell, we were friends.
“I once lived in a remote town,” I said, far more calmly than I felt. “But I would come home to the city regularly and a friend from the city once commented that I kept bumping into people I knew far more often than she did, even though she lived in the city.”
Soldat held his hands out a little in a gesture which conveyed the word “And?” far more eloquently than the words themselves.
“Well, I thought about this for a long time and then realised that most of the people I kept meeting were from the town I lived in and they were clearly just frequenting the same places in the city that I did. Far from being an odd coincidence it would have actually been odd if we hadn’t bumped into one another from time to time.”
Soldat nodded. “Whereas the people who lived in the city were more numerous and less likely to visit the same places than people who came from the outside.”
My turn to nod.
“And where else were we both going to end up than humanity’s last system?”
He turned back to the bed in a gesture that said I was not a threat but which also included a swift adjustment of the pistol on his right hip. I walked slowly forward and joined him.
The patient on the bed was never leaving that bed. I knew this and I was no medic.
Soldat tapped the records folder hanging at the foot of the bed.
“Violent unprovoked assault. I think your people call it a sucker punch. Human against human. No reason, no motive, no sense but pretty much what we know about your kind.”
I said nothing.
“We struggled to decide what to do when humanity joined us among the stars. War was discussed but wars really only benefit warriors and exploitative business people. So we nudged you away from the places that were clearly ours, showed you equally lucrative alternatives, and shared a few worlds. Just good business. And all the while we watched, carefully, to see if you had actually changed. If you had become peaceful and cooperative.”
“And hadn’t we?” I asked, my eyes fixed on the poor, soon to be gone man in the bed in front of me.
“Hard work has a way of keeping people’s minds away from mischief and there is no question that settling planets and keeping communications going is hard work. As a people you have done well. You certainly achieved as much as us in a shorter time.”
“I seem to recall that the Loman provided a lot of help.”
He put his hands on the end of the bed and let his weight shift forward.
“Not as much as you might think. Your ships were overly complex. We helped you make them more serviceable. No, friend Calvin, earth has done quite well.”
“And yet we now find ourselves at war.”
He stood up again, and again adjusted the weapon at his hip. I felt no sense of threat but it was plain he was reminding me it was there.
“I and others come to places like this to see how humanity really is. We have been creeping around your hospitals, your rehabilitation homes, your orphanages for a long time now just watching, just hoping that the hard work would keep the mischief at bay.”
That was the moment that I felt a cold shaft of danger enter the conversation. I needed to say something. I just knew that somehow this was a last chance to head off whatever was coming out of his mouth next.
My effort failed but I want it recorded that I tried.
“We help one another in these places,” I said, angry with myself that my voice wavered. “Some of the finest examples of human behaviour happen in hospitals. Soldat, surely this is where you see us at our best.”
He had turned and was now facing me, his face shadowed by the dim battery lighting behind him. It was like looking into a pit.
“This facility was knocked out of action four hours ago. The few staff are still remaining at their posts but I have already killed an intruder on the top floor who was preparing to assault a bed bound patient. On other worlds we have found children’s facilities infiltrated by those who would hurt them, even as others are making futile efforts at planetary defence. We routinely intercept fleeing spacecraft filled with money and goods but noticeably devoid of fellow human beings.”
He took a step forward but I did not back away. What would have been the point?
“Humanity has not changed. It has just been distracted for a few decades. You are still the same warlike, exploitative, cruel vermin you ever were. You had your chance, friend Calvin, and you all blew it. We even slowed the pace of the war, gave you all chinks in our armour to escape through, opportunities to show some magnificence in the face of defeat.
And you blew it.”
What did I have to counter this accusation? Nothing other than the suggestion that his people had to have been just as bad. But in truth I had never so much as seen the Loman short-changing anyone. They had a clear sense that things are done properly or they are best not done at all.
And I had seen what he was talking about. Even a few years ago there was a camaraderie in the human worlds, a real sense that we were all out on the frontier, all slogging away at the coal face, all in it together. But as things got more settled the cheating had begun. Bundles of cash, settlement of deals, were now counted, something I never recall doing in my early days. Townships were employing peace keepers, something we had all contributed to in the past. These new earths among the stars were indeed starting to look a lot like old earth.
“So the actions of a few assholes are to condemn humanity to oblivion?”
It was feeble but it was all I had.
“It infects you all, Calvin. You end up enduring it, then tolerating it, and then ignoring it. You start looking inward, happy for your own home, ship, shack to be safe while the worlds get ever more crime ridden and corrupt. Your own goodness eventually becomes enough for you, and that personal goodness is why I warned you. Left to your own devices, Calvin, and away from the baleful influence of humanity I am sure you can remain a good man. I do hope so because wherever you go I will eventually come watching.”
“And judging?”
He did not even pause.
“Yes. I suppose that’s was this is, judgement. Your people have not lived up to our standards. You have been found wanting and put even more simply, if you had not been so wicked then I would not be standing here in front of you saying these things. Now go. I will comfort this man as he dies and then I will investigate the character I saw snooping around the paediatric unit.”
I did not run. I did not panic. I just made my way to where my ship was parked, in an industrial facility far enough out into the countryside to have been missed by the attackers. Either that or Soldat had told them to leave it be.
And then I flew, still watchful for Loman activity, still playing cat and mouse with an enemy that was very probably letting me through and away.
And over the course of weeks I found my way slowly to Betelgeuse. And every centimetre of that journey I had a nagging sense that something Soldat had said was familiar. But in the absence of access to a computer system I had no way to dig deeper.
In any case I had bigger problems than the possibility that Soldat was in the habit of quoting from human sources.
Betelgeuse certainly had worlds that I could live on but actually getting settled was something I had never done before and it did turn out to be a drawn-out nightmare. On the up-side I wasn’t there alone for long. For all Soldat’s disdain for humanity many of us found one another and, contrary to his low expectations of us, we survived, thrived even.
But something had changed in us and I wonder now how many of us had Soldat or someone like him in their lives. Because we are suspicious of one another in a way we were not before. Sure there was always a caution in dealing with individuals and groups but this is something else, something the Loman have put into us. Or rather it is an understanding we should perhaps have always had that there is something in humanity which should be feared, should be carefully watched, and should never be trusted.
The things he described that night in the hospital have haunted me. I knew things like that happened but, like everyone else, and probably to maintain my sanity, I put them to the side. I never associated them with myself but he challenged me to see that this wickedness was something in humanity, not just in individuals. The terrible acts are not just events, they are part of the whole matrix of human existence, even the pitiful fragment that lives on here.
I have been happy here but not a day has passed, in all these years, when Soldat’s bleak view of the human heart has not cast clouds over even the finest of days. Perhaps that happiness tinged with discontent and worry is the best any of us can hope for.
A woman, Mrs Beacham, came from the small township by the sea a few days ago. Her insistence on that ancient married title is about the least eccentric thing in that strange collection of huts, shacks and attempts at proper houses. She was carrying a bag of books which had been brought by a new arrival.
“Has he been out there all this time?” I asked in genuine shock.
She nodded and made a spinning motion with her finger at her right temple.
“Pretty mad but perhaps some company will help.”
I studied the insane collection of leggings, skirts, pullovers and jackets that festooned her sturdy but by no means huge frame. She looked like a walking car-boot sale and I felt a measure of doubt about her or the townsfolk’s ability to bring normality to anyone.
But she was nice and she brought things up the long slope from time to time.
“Where is he staying?”
“In the town hall. We don’t use it for much so he can get used to being around people in his own time.”
I kept my thoughts to myself about the whole township thing but invited Mrs Beacham into the shack, sat her down, and poured her a generous glass of the wine I make from the plants closer to the mountains. The planet is generously supplied with just about anything someone might need but I have never bothered to name anything. Nor for that matter, as far as I am aware, has anyone in the township.
Half a glass in and she visibly relaxed, opened her bag and lifted out the books. Mostly paperbacks from not long before the war but one was a thicker, A Chronology of World History. I recall smiling as I turned the volume around in my hand. I have always liked this sort of thing but feel that dealing with over fifty thousand years of history in six or seven hundred pages is just a bit ambitious.
“What do you think he would trade for this?”
Mrs Beacham drained her glass and held it out with a friendly wiggle of the fingers. I topped her up and she quietly sighed her thanks.
“A couple of bottles of this would probably do it. I doubt he’s had more than recycled water for years.”
I dropped the volume onto my desk and lifted two bottles from a basket behind my chair. The vegetation close to the mountains is very generous.
“Deal.” And I filled a glass for myself and joined Mrs Beacham in a drink and a chat.
It was later, as I flicked through the book, that I remembered that odd comment Soldat had made in the hospital all those years ago. What was it?
“You have been found wanting and put even more simply, if you had not been so wicked then I would not be standing here in front of you saying these things.”
And there it was from around the year 1218. The words of Genghis Khan addressing the defeated people of Bokhara in the land of Transoxiana.
“O people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
Not the same certainly and perhaps there is a universal sense of being the righteous hand of wrath but I have had many years on this world to think things over and I am now not so sure about the Loman.
So I sit here at my desk and I think things.
How can we and the Loman be so physically similar?
How did we bump into one another so soon after discovering that star travel is so simple that a High School student can rig up an engine and drive field?
And finally how did Soldat know so much about us? When he spoke with me in that hospital ward he was not referring to recent human activities. He was describing life on earth from before we took to the stars. The crime, the abuse, the fear, the discrimination, the selfishness, the greed, and above all else the cruelty.
The Loman knew us before we ever left earth, which leaves me with only a couple of directions to take these long ponderings. Either the Loman have been watching us for a long time which I now doubt since we have seen that they could easily have wiped us out before we ever left earth. Or the Loman are humans who somehow got away from earth sometime before the rest of humanity.
As time passes and as I get older I favour the Loman as humans version. If nothing else it explains their less slick spacecraft. Robust and functional but without all the electronic gadgets we had crammed our lives with in the late 21st century.
I have spent a long time trying to recall the interior of Soldat’s ship and from those memories I am prepared to theorise that the Loman left earth sometime in the late 20th century but before the explosion in computer technology which marked the last decade of that century and the first three decades of the 21st century. Sometime between 1960 and 1990.
I am guessing but I have little else to do these days. There is one more thing, though, and it has been affecting my peace of mind and my sleep for a while now. If the Loman are us, and if Soldat was right in what he said about humanity that night, then he was deluding himself if he thought he was better than us.
The Loman may have found their way to the stars before the rest of humanity made it to the moon, and they may have created some sort of utopia among those stars, but we are what we are and there is a darkness in the human soul which defies reason and healing.
I have that Chronology of World History open in front of me just now and there is a commentary on Genghis Khan’s words to the defeated citizens of Bokhara in the land of Transoxiana.
“That the Khan was great we cannot doubt if only for his profound influence on human history. In the context of his defeat of the Bokharans however we are seeing cynical politics at its worst. Wrapped up in an indignant statement on human wickedness and divine justice is a simple act of theft on a grand scale coupled with a callous side order of victim blaming.”
I look out of my home and down the long slope to that beautiful sea with the canopy of stars above it. In the summer the midnight twilight shadows the great headland. I have more than I need but I have seldom had a fully happy day. Soldat is out there and some day he or someone like him will find us and I am too old and too tired to even face them, far less fight them.
I am scared of that meeting but I am as scared of what it means if the Loman are indeed as human as I am. Soldat was right about me at least. There is an incurable darkness in me and I have to conclude that it exists in Mrs Beacham as well and in that poor madman sleeping in the town hall.
I could just about accept being judged by Soldat the Loman, the righteous warrior. I could weep, though, at the thought of one day being judged by Soldat the human being.
As dark, misguided, corrupt and cruel as those he one day chose to judge.
My remaining days will be forever clouded by the knowledge of what I am and what everyone else either is or might be.
End