A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire
13 Terran Standard Years Ago
Author's Note: The second half of this chapter includes much more imaginary and purely theoretical socio-economic speculation than is usual for this story. Hopefully not enough to be boring.
In the wake of his encounter with PARA•SOL, Alan Chandrasekhar relented to his family's pleading: he saw a psychiatrist. While he was finally seeing someone about his mental health, the entirety of Terran military might in the universe began the process of collapsing into ashes. Fortunately, it wasn't his fault.
It was curious how psychiatry predated space travel, Alan was certain, and yet still its employment still carried some social stigma. Then again, it somehow seemed less unfortunate: Alan still had acquaintances outside the Space Forces, and of those, the ones who had to pay for their own healthcare laughed at the notion of "preventative medicine", calling it "preventative poverty". They were, unfortunately, correct as far as their bank statements were concerned. Psychiatric treatment was even more expensive. The entirety of Alan's healthcare came from Space Forces hospitals, and had it not, he doubt he'd be willing to pay the cost for something like a broken arm or a twisted ankle.
After all, without your health, you had nothing. But health was entirely dependent on money (as 200-year-old pirates and oligarchs could attest), as were many other considerations in living. Ergo, without money, there was no happiness. Another unfortunate truth he couldn't argue with.
The counseling wasn't covered by the Space Forces, so Alan's wealthy mother footed the bill and he was in no place to object. The last, and only, act of youthful rebellion in his entire lifetime was to enlist in the Space Forces, and look where hat had got him. He met his doctor, a motherly-looking Silgrian to his surprise, who must have had a very good understanding of the Terran condition.
"So, what would you like me to help you with?"
Alan wasn't sure where to begin. He wasn't that inclined to admit he'd tried to kill himself, nor confess that every time he closed his eyes, he'd eventually see the humanoid pile of scabs, tubes and misery leaking all over a glass wall.
"I'm not what you'd call a happy person."
"I can see that. Do you know why?" she asked, twisting her head like a ostrich.
"Isn't that why I've come here, why you're being paid?"
"Well, what would you say is causing it?"
Again, Alan didn't feel like he could give the obvious answer. Instead, he tried to relate to her vague, censored versions of the stories of his failures, how he felt he'd been betrayed by the institutions in the universe he was supposed to trust, how every day, all he saw were signs that everything and everyone was on the wrong path, and he felt insane because he seemed to be the only one who cared. That the whole universe that they knew, the Great Guilds, the Terran Empires, even Old Earth, had nearly all fallen to a powerful threat that they were all apparently oblivious to.
"The Ctarl-Ctarl Empire?"
"No, far worse: human shortsightedness."
The Silgrian turned her head again, practically all the way around. She had a stern, motherly-voice, that almost managed to conceal the cold harshness of an academic behind it. "You feel you're a victim of things beyond your control?"
"Of course, everyone feels that way! Is everyone else miserable too?" he countered.
"Perhaps you feel, more personally, that you've been betrayed by those you trusted, your social betters."
"Maybe I do." That didn't explain how he felt about pirates, who Alan had spent almost 20 years thinking were the scum of the universe.
The doctor seemed to sense this too. "Perhaps you're just coming to grips with the notion that authority is imperfect." She turned her head again. "You haven't said much about your childhood, before you reached maturity. Were you rebellious as a child?"
He shook his head: quite the opposite, really. Alan only remembered being an entirely obedient child, and his parents confirmed the fact. Except for on one occasion, he'd never disobeyed his parents. Sure, there were things that upset him as a child, he was only human. He'd huff and shout and complain, but he never disobeyed. Instead, he'd run to his room, cry into his bed sheets, and capitulate. He used that specific word, 'capitulate'. It felt very well-suited.
"A pretty typical middle-child," he said, finishing.
The doctor didn't answer immediately. Apparently, she hadn't expected that answer. "It seems...perhaps your current emotional state is owed to your suppression of youthful rebellion. Even as an adult, you obeyed the same figures of authority, the same system. Take your marriage."
"What about it?"
"Do you regret it? And please answer truthfully."
The truth was he did, he regretted it immensely. He wasn't sure he loved his son the way a father was supposed to, but he did know one thing: he couldn't imagine a universe where Trang Shekhar Hieu didn't exist. That was the beginning and the end of it. He hadn't given his son life, he'd just deprived him of a potential father who wasn't a nervous wreck of a divorcee with a shaking arm. He kept that to himself.
"You've come to see your life not as a chain of events, but as a chain of regrets, one after the other. And that the system of life has turned its back on you."
"I suppose that's possible."
"But you're not content to play the victim, most people aren't."
"Are you sure of that?" he asked incredulously.
She nodded her begin head. "Oh, yes, in my experience, most aren't. I think that your recent experiences have begun to galvanize your mind along military lines: friends and enemies. Your friends helped you. But your superiors, the system, have frustrated you at every turn. So you reject the system, and that part of yourself."
He shook his head. "That can't be, I don't reject the system."
"Are you sure?"
"Organized, social society, one bound by rules and laws, is literally the only thing saving the Terran species," he told her, sitting up on the couch. "I've seen enough of the universe to see the alternative: it is short, brutish and painful. It's unfortunate that the alternative to unfair law-abiding civil society is an outlaw life, but calling it an alternative is being overly generous. You'll trade the social contract, the pursuit of justice and equality, for the freedom to be irresponsible, to be trapped in childhood for a short, violent life."
"So then what? Why not be an outlaw?"
"I reject that, a needless pursuit of glory and adventure. I no longer need my ego self-inflated by my own perceived greatness. Another ribbon bar, another medal, another citation for bravery. It's like those outlaws, always obsessing after what they don't have yet, and when they get it, it becomes a race for who can discard it fastest. I no longer need the un-attained, but instead, should look inwards at myself and my role in the universe. Instead of being so desperate to constantly change it. Let younger men chase their dreams endlessly. I'll stay with the universe they've left behind, and won't miss them in turn."
He didn't see the psychiatrist much after that. It was, after all, useless if he didn't want to help himself. Alan surmised he might be better off taking the money his mother paid and drank, smoke and injected it instead. He kept up a tough face like a good sailor, he thought. Better than the last time he'd returned to his family as a dejected loser. He couldn't keep doing this, eventually, he'd start to resent his family along with the rest of the universe.
She was right about the mood swings she warned him about. Some days he'd be all about, anxiously roaming the estate, agitated at everything around him. He considered trying to find out something, anything, about Raquel Tsukino, but still lived in fear of the company. Other days, he'd be too melancholy to bother getting up. But Alan Chandrasekhar was hardly the only one with problems.
About three months after the end of the war, very shortly after he was released by PARA•SOL, something very strange happened, something Alan couldn't fully comprehend at first. The Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy—that is, the civilized universe according to all—suffered a financial collapse, the worst in the Towards Star Era. It was the first economic depression in history to simultaneously impact the four dominant species in the Orion Arm: the Terrans, the Ctarl-Ctarl, the Corbanites and the Silgrians. Starting from the outside in, even Alan realized that the universe's economic system, whatever it was (who could actually understand how it worked?) had collapsed in on itself. Almost twenty years later, when Alan visited Ban Guild space returning from the Empire, he could still see the effects.
Alan was a not a social scientist. He was the beneficiary of an excellent education, perhaps not a very good military education given his career thus far, but an excellent one nonetheless. He was not the sort of person who should label an entire epoch on his own. First and foremost, though, he was a (failed) naval officer, even if he wished he wasn't. Not everything was seen as negative or bad: according to the Outlaws, this was a golden age of freedom and opportunity. The Ctarl-Ctarl, during the collapse, ultimately underwent a cultural revolution that changed their society forever. But the Depression, without a doubt, was the single most damaging thing that had happened to the Space Forces since its founding. So bad was it, the battered remains of the Space Forces following their catastrophic defeat, if transported in time, probably would have crushed the contemporary Space Forces of their day in a fight.
There were a thousand different causes. Less understood was how those led to the problem. A man working in an accounting office on Heifong, whom Alan saw regularly every time he visited his old office, explained it when the two were chatting and the conversation turned to Alan's son. The man was much younger than Alan, about the age when his son was born, but was not married and had no children. Alan was curious why; the young man was fairly handsome, very well educated, in good health, came from a bourgeois family, and had an unflinching work ethic. He possessed the sort of character Alan, and any father, could hope to pass onto their son by example. But when Alan carefully asked if he planned to have a family, the man shook his head.
"No, that won't be possible."
"Really?"
"Not at all. If I'm lucky, I may be able to afford having a family in twenty years. By then, I'll be far too old to get married, much less start a family."
The man said this with such a matter-of-fact conviction that it shocked Alan, who asked him to elaborate: the man worked two jobs, part-time, as an office assistant and a media clerk. His wages for both jobs were the same: 16 Wong an hour, one Wong over the minimum wage on Heifong. At first, Alan thought this was higher than the minimum wage when he'd first joined the Space Forces (at a much higher salary, of course), but the clerk quickly explained he was wrong, which Alan later confirmed through his own research.
Fifty years ago, the minimum hourly wage in the U.S.S.A., the highest in Terran space, was 6 Wong an hour. Adjusting for inflation, that would be more almost 30 Wong Today! Furthermore, in all the states, the minimum wage was supposed to increase in real value against inflation in relations to the increase in worker productivity! According to the math, today's minimum wage would be close to 60 Wong! Instead, it's just over a forth of that. Think of the rise in the cost of living! The practical minimum wage has been quartered while never decreasing!
"So you won't have children?"
"I doubt it. I wouldn't want to force a young woman to put up with a husband twenty years her senior, just because I can finally afford a family. It's for the best."
"And what will you do when you get old?"
He thought about it. "Well, I'm in good health. Don't smoke, don't drink, no drugs. No cybernetics either. In sixty years, I'll be a lot healthier than my grandparents were at the same age."
"No, I mean, who will take care of you if something goes wrong?"
"Oh, in that case, I'll probably just die. Have you seen medical costs nowadays?"
Alan stared at him, shocked, while the other just shrugged.
"When it's your time, it's your time. I can't very well bankrupt myself having children on the off chance they'll be available to care for some future geriatric, when I could die in a year from expensive cancer. That's not fair for anyone."
"No, I...suppose not." It stunned him: he'd seen officers brave enough to stare down Ctarl-Ctarl torpedoes, conduct landings through mine-filled space, who'd suffered breakdowns when they found out that radiation exposure from a damaged reactor on their ship had removed, or even just severely reduced, their chances at procreating with their officers' wives. Suicide was not unheard of. Said wives usually left them, whatever the case was. But here was an intelligent young man who, when confronted by a reality only the most ridiculously delusional optimist (or capitalist) could deny, made the conscious decision not to procreate.
The clerk, Alan realized, was the vanguard of a demographic shift: young people, particularly young men (who were still traditionally the breadwinners in all of Terran space) but also young women, were doing something none of their parents even considered: they looked at their pocketbooks and elected, freely, not to have children. As far as Alan knew, this had never happened in Terran history, and certainly not since the development of FTL travel. The poor frequently had more children than the wealthy, for their own gain or loss. But the clerk had seen the writing on the wall. And to the horror of the Space Forces, he wasn't alone.
The powers-that-be, overwhelmingly of the generation before or earlier, dismissed this as they always did. "Kids these days don't know how good they got it!" they said, conveniently ignoring that these kids had fought and died in the Space Forces while they were sitting around pointing at charts or being evacuated with their governments-in-exile, all for the honor of substandard wages. "They'll get over it, they always do."
Alan was less convinced. Every single major war since the sub-ether drive was developed was followed by a 'baby boom', attributed to the return of young people to their homeworlds to start families, as well as the adjustment to a civilian economy and a decline in mortality rates. The Space Forces counted on it: more than ever, they were desperate for a population surge that would, in time, allow them to replenish their ranks. The total manpower, including reservists, of the Space Forces was calculated to have been reduced by a third due to the war. Even more so than deaths, desertion and discarding of contracts had taken their toll.
Now wages were cutting population growth overall by a huge amount. The same Space Forces desperate for young people had, in secret, lobbied aggressively against raising the minimum wage: how else with the Space Forces remain a bastion for the impoverished and desperate? They had shot themselves in the foot by their policies finally. In time, so were the national governments themselves. As expected immediately after the crisis began, raising wages was out of the question, especially in the U.S.S.A. and the Pyotr Empire. Corporate leaders promised that, as the economy was precariously inching over the cliff, any raising of the minimum wage would be tantamount to murdering the jobs market. If anything, wage restrictions needed to be lessened, the euphemistic way of requesting the minimum wage either be lowered or abolished. Those who wanted to start families didn't work for a living, that was what loans were for, and interest rates were low. A child of the bourgeoisie, Alan even believed their arguments, at least for a time.
Other measures were needed. Many worlds in the U.S.S.A., to the astonishment of the universe, banned contraceptives. New Jerusalem, and the influential Christian Primitivist church there, was the first. Surely this would work! Except it didn't. The black market for birth control skyrocketed: before long, the Ctarl-Ctarl were sending freighters full of their own birth control pills to sell, which worked chemically on Terrans but caused nausea while simultaneously increasing appetite in their species, leading to weight gain, into the U.S.S.A., apparently going against their own tradition of legalist behavior. Those who didn't have access to the market simply stopped having sex: not only did the birth rate plummet, so did the marriage rate. The health of women and men degraded. Entire portions of the economy vanished, while others, like digital entertainment and publishing, did quite well. A hundred thousand years of philosophy was refuted in a single stroke (or many, as the case might be). In the Tenpa and Pyotr Empires, where birth control remained easily available, birth rates were hardly better.
This was a disaster in the making. While the economy lurched and crumbled, and so many businessmen in Liberty Bell hanged themselves that people started blacking out the windows in corporate offices, the Space Forces panicked and tried to prepare for the future, and the next war: the Admiralty created the Potempkin Edict, which the Naval Minister delivered to the Terran federal legislature. It called for a limited draft, not unlike that in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire, to make up for plummeting recruitment levels to be followed by a shortage of young people.
To Alan's surprised, the great nations agreed to it. That should have been the first warning that something was horribly wrong.
The Einhorn Reichskanzler explained it very clearly. "We agree with the Space Forces, mobilization is necessary to ensure our security. However, it's impossible to implement unless we give priority to homefront defense. You can hardly expect us to press-gang millions of young men into the navy just to send them half-way across the galaxy."
These harmless-sounding words destroyed the Space Forces. Over the next twenty years, the Potempkin Edict led to a restructuring of the Space Forces that barely resembled its original design. Its operational strength was reduced to half. Four fleets were completed disbanded. When they weren't scuttled, sold or stolen, ships by the thousands became parts of completely-unrelated and unorganized planetary defense forces. The inevitable gaps in coverage were filled by corporate fleets, like Angel Links. Piracy tripled in the first five years. The frontier worlds became self-contained sanctuaries that, from time to time, vanished amid pirate raids. Hazanko and his ilk got more powerful. The whole galaxy grew a little darker, and in time, as the other species began to rebuild and recover, Terrans did not.
Shortly after the start of the Depression became official, he visited a world to, of all things, assist a number of Ctarl-Ctarl nuns who were traveling across the planet, feeding and clothing victims of poverty. They went around in their black-and-white habits, ears hidden, praying rhythmically and working the soup lunches. They were joined by the locals, of course.
One nun beamed at him after a local, suffering from poverty as well, "Have you ever noticed that those with the least always give those most? We're so blessed to have them."
Alan stared at her. The compassionate voice of a much younger man, naturally, reflected that this was a beautiful sentiment. But the much older man that he was couldn't help but think was a useless, even harmful sentiment that was. What kind of moron is hoping the poor keep giving? They are barely surviving, and now we want to force one more demand on them? Why not this obliterate them and be done with it, if we're going to operate like that? It was a scary, ugly thought, and it took all of his self-control to keep it from exploding all over the young nun's face. It was thanks to nuns like her, he thought, that it was fine that the social contract had just slit its own throat. There would always be young, smiling nuns from another species to take care of things.
According to the Outlaws, it was a Golden Age. Of course, Outlaws didn't collect census data, governments did. And Outlaws following the data learned that they, as a group, were not doing any better than the destitute. They overwhelmingly died young (their combat mortality rate was three times that of sailors in the Space Forces in the last war!), and were poor (within ten years, more than ninety percent of Outlaw wealth ended up concentrated in under ten percent of individuals). Of the people who remained Outlaws for more than five years, half became pirates or joined the Pirate Guilds themselves.
But was not an Age of Evil. There were no horrific acts of genocide, none that were common knowledge anyway. PARA•SOL and its ilk were, it seemed, limited in their reach. There were no Ctarl-Ctarl firing nuclear weapons at themselves, there were no Terrans exterminating each other over religious differences. But between them, the Pirate Guilds probably killed at least a half billion people over the next twenty years, throughout guild space. It was not an Age of Evil, but it was an Age of Savagery. Where smuggling drugs, weapons, dragonite, or even legal cargo without paying duties, became a glamorous way of sticking it to The Man, right before corporate stooges in The Man's employ revealed you owed them more than your ship was worth in spaceport fees and ammunition costs. Or better-armed stooges blew you to pieces with rail guns or pirates captured you cargo and enslaved you. Some Golden Age.
The galaxy that Alan's son Shekar came of age in was a dimming, more dilapidated place. It stood in stark contrast with Dawid Klan Klan's daughter, Aisha, born almost a decade afterwards. By then, the social revolution in the Empire had run its course mostly, as had the shared effects of the Depression. Military spending had lessened, and the crash had taken its course on the nobility, which, combined with multiple war losses, was reduced by almost a third. For those who remained, though, it was a time of peace, prosperity, and excitement. In time, even a tremor-suffering relic like Alan was put back to work, the Space Forces were that desperate. Eventually he would return to the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire again, on orders from the Space Forces. And when Alan first met Aisha, still a little girl, it was plainly apparent the good it had done for her to be born in her place in the sun.