A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire
Hashiyo-Hashiyo 208
At some point, Gregory—or Sterlitz or whoever he was—physically vanished from Chandrasekhar's life, though his influence was still certainly present. He'd been promoted and shuffled deeper into the leadership, closer to the Admiralty on Terra, and his involvement in secret operations meant that it became more important he remain out of the public eye. Even if Chandrasekhar had wanted to, he couldn't have found him. More and more Chandrasekhar answered to the civilian authorities, a position he agreed to in principal, and only objected to the fact that the particular civilian authority he answered to was a controlling freak who severely failed to understand that, regardless of his rank, Chandrasekhar was a glorified bobble-head who possessed no real power by design.
In this regard, he missed Gregory. Gregory wouldn't have been so stupidly impractical. Gregory would not have fallen for such a basic deception, wherein the tired, aging, weak-willed Chandrasekhar convinced his new superior that he did not hate her. She was one of the deputies of the Inspector-General of the Navy, one of a dozen such positions in the Naval Ministry. She was a round, outgoing, take-charge woman who completely and fundamentally believed in the dogma of corporate training sessions wherein people like herself traveled to resorts, participated in training courses, drank abundantly and believed themselves to be on the one true path to mastery of the universe. It was the new religion, except it wasn't new: corporate retreats were older than space travel.
Sometime after Lady Kalin departed, Chandrasekhar was left increasingly to his own devices—really, the only good part of his position, aside from the not starving (which he owed singularly to his benevolent patrons, the Clan-Clans)—with the exception of the occasional high-level civil briefings he was obligated to attend to. What the briefings were about was usually not revealed to him, which honestly he was grateful for. What he was less pleased with was being the Deputy Inspector-General's personal stooge. He wasn't sure if she was simply unaccustomed to having unquestioned power over someone else as a part of her job, or if he simply had the resolve of a wet noodle. He definitely disliked her, from the moment they met, and his dislike was repeatedly justified. Was she really a horrible to him personally? Was he simply so narrow-minded he couldn't adjust his thinking to the right corporate mindset? Either could be possible, though only one of answers was approved by corporate retreats throughout the universe.
There was an escape: in his time observing the Lady Ayesha, the beautifully cold, iceberg-like wife of Lord Dawid, she'd taught him something (once one stop learning, one was truly doomed)—nothing in the universe was permanent. Her Ladyship had an undeniable way of breaking things down to the most elemental components, and revealing them all as temporal. One merely need apply it to one's circumstances: for example, the Deputy Inspector-General could, eventually, be promote or demoted from her office, severing her connection to Chandrasekhar. Even if she wasn't, by design, the role of briefing official/weak-willed toady, was temporary. Eventually, someone else would take the position from him, someone better. Chandrasekhar might go back to being a useless Bohemian, and given just how much he hated the Deputy Inspector-General, it was hard to look at even that without a smile.
Nothing lasted forever. In the end of the day, Chandrasekhar was coming to the end of the road. He could feel it in his bones, an undeniable reality. Life had taken its toll. The Naval Manual he was authoring might be the last thing he ever did—for better or worse, so far, it was hardly impressive even for a first draft. He might not be allowed, or even able, to finish it. It was written for Admiralty, who did not intend to publicly promote it to civilian authorities, which he was fine with.
To Chandrasekhar it felt like as life in the Empire was changing bit-by-bit, his life was beginning to harden and become static. The naval briefings did not substantially change, which for all his displeasure, might have been the best he could hope for: there was definitely a sense things could get worse.
One, in particular, did stand out: the informal naval summit between Ctarl-Ctarl and Terran offers in the DMZ. Some civilians had to be invited as well, of course. Something was going on that was, for the time, none of his business (he'd only be made aware of the real meaning of the summit in the future). Chandrasekhar had made his report to the Deputy-Inspector General, going over some particularly complex, nuanced aspects of how the Ctarl-Ctarl economy was transforming in peacetime: the sort of subject Chandrasekhar could prattle on about for an hour, but the Deputy didn't have time for. She wanted the essentials—what those were wasn't really clear to him. He also took her calls, humiliating perhaps on face value, but not something that particularly bothered him (even if he was no good at that either). Far worse was when Chandrasekhar was compelled to ask her a question to something, apparently, he was supposed to know. A favorite line of hers was "You tell me?" paired with an expectant face.
Though she was rather heavyset, she wasn't lazy—far from it, she was an energetic workaholic of sorts. She also expected Chandrasekhar to know everything at all times, apparently her definition of his position. After stuttering out an answer, she'd release him. He would nearly have one of his anxiety attacks, which always lurked in the background when he worked with her. He was lucky—on the occasion of the conference about the DMZ, she wasn't upset at him, but at the other Deputy Inspector-Generals, of which there were at least two dozen that Chandrasekhar knew of. She had a hand in managing expenses which, besides paying Chandrasekhar's meager salary, was used to send her ilk on rather pointless (in his opinion) corporate retreats. That particular day, she was a victim of the own corporate culture she worshipped: another official had gone on a multi-planet "information gathering" tour of the DMZ and charged the Naval Ministry's funds—after they'd expressly been told they couldn't do that. Unlike in the Space Forces, in corporate culture it was better to ask forgiveness than permission. Chandrasekhar was just relieved that for once, it wasn't his fault, whatever was wrong, and was able to slink away after nodding repeatedly and pretending he had even a faint interest in this misappropriation of funds. He hovered about in the main hall of the Ctarl-Ctarl space station that hosted the summit.
"Did you ever get the feeling that 'you tell me?' is f-ing moron dialect for, 'How dare you f-ing ask me a question, you peon, I'm the one who asks me questions, and how dare you not know exactly what I'm thinking at all times?'"
This question was posed by a familiar voice in both Ctarl-Ctarl and English. Chandrasekhar turned to see an older woman in a military greatcoat with short, straight grey hair and faded, cloudy eyes.
"Grand Admiral Soban-Soban? What are you doing here?"
The grand admiral grinned back at him. She looked much older than he remembered, in a dark greatcoat and a little hunched over. Apparently, the peace hadn't been very kind to her, at least in that respect, and she'd lost some of that physical imposingness. Her features had lost much of their strong harshness, though she was thinner and sharper in her face. Her eyes were particularly cloudy now, though she still possessed some vision, at least enough for her slow, deliberate movements. He noted that she must have been nearly seventy, old for a Ctarl-Ctarl, and certainly the oldest woman he'd ever met in the Imperial military.
Lady Rihanna kept grinning at him, as though she couldn't care less what others thought, patting him on the back. She was still stronger than him. "I see you're still with us, in spite of it all."
"Yes I am, Lady Grand-Admiral."
She was much friendlier than he would have expected and the two actually engaged about some small talk: Chandrasekhar's time living with the Clan-Clans, Lady Rihanna's informal retirement from the navy and her plan to formally retire in the coming year. The popularity of her memoirs, which had finally been completed and published. Chandrasekhar had only read a little of them, to Lady Rihanna's disappointment, and she relayed a story of their first meeting: how the grand admiral had been speaking to a civilian journalist, whom they'd immediately given some medals and pretended was an officer when Yamaguchi and Chandrasekhar arrived. Chandrasekhar laughed at the story, which pleased Lady Rihanna. He hadn't expected to see her again, and above all, not for her to be this friendly.
Chandrasekhar avoided talking about his actual work—not for reasons of confidentiality, but because the portions he hated far surpassed those he didn't in importance and profile. Her vision might be failing, but Soban-Soban picked up on his smoldering resentment. She liked it, and told him so, filling in the gaps of what he didn't share.
"Though I have to say, if I were you, I would have put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger the first time I had to deal with that person," she explained quietly.
You have no idea where I've gone with that. "I think that's a bit…extreme, even in these circumstances."
Soban-Soban gave an inappropriately loud laugh. "Oh, right, I forget, you Terrans have convinced yourselves that everyone around you—your children, your parents, your family, your lovers, your God, your employers—have some claim to ownership over your own mortality." She gave him a familiar, dangerous smile, hunching over. "Let me tell you a secret truth, Chandrasekhar. There are only two parties in the universe with a claim to your life: yourself and the State. And the State's purview is strictly over the mortal realm. Ergo, you are the only relevant party on the matter of self-obliteration."
She threw her head back and laughed again. "That one is free."
Lady Rihanna's nihilistic outlook on life was certainly not common among Ctarl-Ctarl, but nonetheless, Chandrasekhar actually appreciated her suggestions—not for their bleak content, but the mind who had made them. Monzo was still in a vegetative state, though there had been word of him being treated with cybernetics. Novikov was dead. Yamaguchi was still under house arrest. Time had left them behind. Like him, Soban-Soban was tired. Even her reputation couldn't fool people otherwise anymore. She'd spent a half-century as an officer fighting against pirates, the Space Forces, mercenaries, Outlaws, and everyone else. But since the end of the war, she'd been removed from active duty, a necessity in the mighty Ctarl-Ctarl navy that couldn't afford to have elderly among its active-duty admirals. She was no good as a staff officer, and had passed up the position of War Minister in the last cabinet shuffle. She accepted that it was the end of her time as a commanding officer. What she didn't like, understandably, where the inane "strategy development sessions" she was sent on, which sounded a good deal like corporate retreats to Chandrasekhar from her description of them. If she couldn't be on a ship, she wanted to be left alone in her office until she was finally booted from the Imperial Navy, was that so much to ask? Chandrasekhar immediately sympathized, of course.
Lady Rihanna was not the sort of person one simply became friends with, unlike Lord Dawid. But Chandrasekhar stayed in contact with her, primarily to infrequently discuss the few internal Ctarl-Ctarl matters that he was actually privy too. They wouldn't meet again until well after her formal retirement, when Emperor Anton had his unfortunate accident…
Grand Admiral Soban-Soban was also involved in the Social Revolution, in her own way. She was a conservative, unsurprising given her age, and thus, wary of change. But she also considered it inevitable, for good or bad, and applied her nihilist world view to it. She had a number of sons—no daughters—who were all in the navy, except for one who'd been elected a junior member of the Assembly of the Empire. She had some particular fears about how things were working out, in particular, that the next generation of young officers—Lady Aisha, Lady Kalin, and their peers—might lack the aggression and heroism their parents had. The war, she admitted privately, was a stupid waste of time and resources in practical terms. Its lone accomplishment was demonstrating the utter superiority of the Ctarl-Ctarl military over its only real rivals, the Space Forces. In the process, it had broken its rival's back, and become the war to end all wars. Soban-Soban considered this a bad thing: political conflicts and differences of opinion would always exist, but from here onwards, they'd be solved clandestinely, and with methods she considered below the dignity of the parties involved. Next, the Empire had missed what should have been its greatest objective: to utterly wipe out the Pirate Guilds and Outlaws, once and for all, in Terran space. The one unquestionably ethical goal of the war had been ignored for reasons of practicality and cost. Mariana IV and her chiefs of staff had gotten it backwards: they should have crippled pirate forces for a thousand years, and left the Terran military intact to fight another day. She didn't buy Chandrasekhar's suggestion—that the leaders of the Terran Empires had done as much damage to the military, in the long run, as the Ctarl-Ctarl had—for a second. It was either her pride, or her firm belief that "…even Terrans couldn't be that stupid, no offense intended."
It contributed to another problem: the degrading of the quality of the Ctarl-Ctarl fighting trooper. Bloodlust was more the exception than the rule. Sailors now thought about their next leave for port more their next battle. Young officers were being subtly undermined by their older XO's, with the demand for greater equality in civil society translating into military life. Pirate hunts were not a replacement for actual war. It might take ten years or a hundred, but these problems would catch up with the Empire's military eventually. The Social Revolution was inevitable, she felt, but it was going to cause a host of insidious issues that everyone seemed to be ignoring. Chandrasekhar gave her opinions considerable weight: most military personnel, he notice, considered the revolution not to be polite conversation, and didn't care to be candid. They took the usual Ctarl-Ctarl approach: they didn't lie, they simply refused to talk about it.
Not every change of the Social Revolution was broad and all-encompassing though. As he saw, quite a few were more specific. One came to mind: even in his forties, Chandrasekhar still noticed that, among the elderly, there was an overwhelming tendency towards yelling (even a dignified woman like Lady Rihanna occasionally lapsed into it). It reached across cultural groups and even across species: at a certain advanced age, people were no longer obligated to maintain the volume of their voices within a certain spectrum. It wasn't a loss of hearing either; that could only explain part of the cases. It simply seemed as, while a person middle-aged or younger who resorted to loud shouting as the conversational norm was accepted rude or even suffering from some sort of condition, the same behavior was perfectly acceptable for someone just a decade older.
This was a problem in Ctarl-Ctarl society, probably amplified by their hearing. One could upset or disturb a Ctarl-Ctarl by shouting in their ears: their sensitivity of hearing was far advanced of their legendary ability to tolerant pain and discomfort. Nonetheless, in a quiet office workplace or home, it was not uncommon to find an elder Ctarl-Ctarl screaming and shouting in everyday conversation, not from anger as one might expect, but just because it was normal.
A movement rose up, literally translated it was called 'the Elderly Shout Too Much Movement'. Its goal, sure enough, was to overcome the deference paid to seniority, at least when it came to rude behavior. It was not the first "Good behavior" political movement among the Ctarl-Ctarl. Ultimately, it had no glorious successes or upsets in parliament, but it did make the loud elderly—who, just like Terrans, saw their shouting in people's ears early in the morning as charming and friendly—wary of "unfriendly" students who wore the yellow armbands.
Another movement came about: the promotion of "Victim Protection Laws." This was an area most Terrans would say the Ctarl-Ctarl lagged far behind. Startling, they did not have any comprehensive laws against domestic violence. There was a statistical argument that they weren't necessary: outside of the military, the Ctarl-Ctarl toleration for violent altercations was higher than that of Terrans. Slapping someone wasn't a crime typically among Terrans—for the same reason that punching someone wasn't a crime among Ctarl-Ctarl (slapping was pretty rare, in general). The domestic violence laws that were implemented distinctly from the general laws on criminal violence were not based on gender, but rather, size: the variation in size among an age group of Ctarl-Ctarl was smaller than that of Terrans, and the law put the burden of guilt on the bigger party rather than the smaller one. Maybe victim's rights advocates (who generally served children and the elderly, since they tended to be smaller than adults) considered this a coup. Chandrasekhar wasn't sure what to make of it, since being slapped by a Ctarl-Ctarl might kill him at this age, but he was still taller than many Ctarl-Ctarl. On the other hand, the Empire had a whole plethora of laws defining behavior between the species. He thought for certain it was just a matter of time before the Empire threw down the gauntlet and flat-out forbade marriage between the two (though maybe not children, ironically, since they were so good at assimilating them back into the population).
Then again, it wasn't so surprising. The Ctarl-Ctarl sense of youthful invincibility that caused them to lag behind in domestic violence laws hadn't stopped their legal system from drafting the most comprehensive children protection laws in the universe. In this regards, they were far ahead of Terrans. Corporal punishment horrified the Ctarl-Ctarl, maybe because they were so strong, and that Terrans used it to discipline their children horrified them. Terrans living in the Empire were forced to raise their children the same way the Ctarl-Ctarl, with yelling rather than spankings and beatings, since the same laws applied to them. Maybe this was just part of the Empire's goal to slowly mold Terran culture into something that offended its sensibilities less? In a few centuries, would the only clear distinction between Terrans and Ctarl-Ctarl living in the Empire be their ears and hair?
These were the sort of political acts you saw in everyday life. Not all were lofty politics like the FTA—the proposed Free Trade Agreements with the other interstellar realms, particularly the Terran states. They were slowly pushed through new sessions of parliament, discreetly when possible, publicly when not, with the intention of boosting lagging sectors of the economy that were either affected by the slowdown production of peacetime, or the ongoing economic depression with their Terran trade partners. The primary goal, however, was paying off the debt: the Empire, and even His Imperial Majesty, repeatedly emphasized the need to pay off both domestic loans (bonds bought by the citizenry) and pre-war loans to Terran interests (which the treaty had stipulated were legitimate). The final totals were fairly large, on the order of almost a quadrillion wong.
There were a lot of things Lord Dawid didn't understand—but one thing he did have some mastery over was trade law. The Ctarl-Ctarl, he explained to Chandrasekhar with uncharacteristic pride, did not play "money games" because they did not have the Terran obsession with profitmaking.
"Well, that seems flawed. You're saying people don't care about money?"
"Of course not, old sport. People everywhere care about resource scarcity, it's the human condition. What I'm talking about is profitmaking."
There was a distinction: in the universe according to Dawid Clan-Clan, the Ctarl-Ctarl knew money existed to be spent, and paid their debts. Terrans, on the other hand, amassed money, only spent it if they had to (if theft were not an option, which is usually was, hence the phenomenon of piracy and Outlawism), and always craved more. The more they had, the more they needed, it was no different than a chemical addiction. Chandrasekhar had a hard time arguing with that, though he felt as though he should, if only because he was a human who had been through the looking glass.
Furthermore, Ctarl-Ctarl worked for their money. Terrans made their money work for them. That was the goal. Chandrasekhar couldn't even hope to argue with that logic, since he'd spent forty years of his life listening to nicely-dressed men in suits tell his parents, and then him, "You need to make your money work for you." Even the Ctarl-Ctarl nobility felt this way, in the sense that they worked at being nobles.
The end result was the state of bilateral trade relations between the Ctarl-Ctarl and Terrans. As he'd learned in research for his writing, the whole Empire consisted of three (or four, depending on semantics) ancient economic networks integrated forcefully into a common market. The central government had a tendency to set the cost of trade through tariffs or promotions, though it was reactive rather than proactive as a general rule. Food had to be cheap. Luxuries should be expensive. If there was an upsurge in sales of luxury space yachts, it had better stay a secret, because the state would find out and appropriate that money to build a new naval drydock or a research hospital or a natural history museum somewhere. Nor did things tend to remain secret for long.
Interstellar trade was a different story. The Ctarl-Ctarl liked a good war; trade wars weren't the same thing, but they were a cheap, effective way of making a policy point when another war with Terrankind was no longer a realistic option. No sooner than the peace after the fall of Liberty Bell, did the Ctarl-Ctarl completely readdress trade relations. The old way of doing things was that the Ctarl-Ctarl sold Terrans large amounts of raw materials, like uranium, petroleum, copper and iron, along with unprocessed foodstuffs, and Terrans sold large quantities of cheap, refined goods, like clothing, furniture, office supplies and computer chips, to them in return.
Goods from Terran worlds were too popular, any hint of a trade deficit had to be rid of. The new government set about doing this. It was the perfect time as well, since the war had previously cut off trade completely. Anton's new government was very subtle about it: they started from a serious issue, the theft and sale of decommissioned Ctarl-Ctarl weaponry, which was in high demand through Terran space, from the Empire, and simply spun it out from there.
"Of course, old sport, this has its own problems: the Terran empires can only keep paying us war reparations if they remain financially solvent. And to do that, they need income."
"Income from trade with the Empire?"
"Exactly, old sport. It's a vicious cycle."
Some people would call that a virtuous cycle. But he didn't really understand trade law. The powers that be in Terran space were almost as upset about "draconian" Ctarl-Ctarl protectionism (a new word for him) as they'd been during the war itself. They warned it would lead to a trade war, except that it wouldn't: Dawid explained that, especially for the reconstruction efforts, the U.S.S.A., Tenpa Empire and Einhorn Reich were particularly dependent on Ctarl-Ctarl fuel and raw materials, and taxing them didn't make them less attractive, it just made reconstruction more expensive. Meanwhile, the Ctarl-Ctarl weren't really suffering from the rising price of dating video games or children's sun dresses, and there was the possibility they could produce their own viable alternatives. Yet another war where we are hopelessly outmatched. How exactly did we become a galactic power again?
The Terran Empires paid their reparations to the Ctarl-Ctarl, which were immediately put towards paying off the debt. Priority was made to paying off foreign debt, which meant a lot of that money flowed back to Terrans. The real purpose was to get a firm grip on trade, which was accomplished.
Those economic shenanigans did not particularly effect Chandrasekhar, who was far removed from his family's wealth (if it still existed), and life continued on. He wrote the occasional message for his son, but in actuality, he received and responded to more letters from Lady Kalin more often from her flight school. The two men didn't seen eye-to-eye on the issue of Yoko—Chandrasekhar's son was still living with her, which seemed to suggest they were serious, even if he denied it personally. Over the months he had pieced together that Yoko wasn't merely an Acid-B Guild pirate, but some sort of Tao-practicing superhuman—so, at least as long as she was in love with Shekhar, the young man would always have someone protecting him. On the other hand, if the situation turned…
More problems he had no control over. The universe marched onwards. The Crystal Queen ruled from her throne on Io. PARA●SOL occasionally appeared as a blurb in the news. The Ctarl-Ctarl military remained the most powerful force in the universe. The Terran birthrate was still abysmally low, and more and more of those births came from people in "migratory professions" like couriers and laborers in space rather than on rural or urbanized worlds. Piracy continued to become more and more problematic, as did Outlaws. Some of them, like the famed Ron MacDougal, demonstrated just how blurred the line was between the various groups, as he ran guns in the DMZ and successfully evaded multiple Ctarl-Ctarl investigatory taskforces (apparently proof of Lady Rihanna's warnings). The situation was worsened that, while the cultural changes in the Empire had not really caused introversion or an isolationist position, the Ctarl-Ctarl was just as morally and politically inflexible towards pirates as in the past. A particular incident demonstrated this: there were vague rumors that a member of the Anten 7, Pirate Lord Hazanko's elite in the 108 Stars, wanted to defect. The rumors were so cloudy and concealed that even Hazanko himself could not identify whom in his inner circle to punish, but had they been true, it would have been an unprecedented coup. The problem was that the only force that could match, and overcome, the might of Hazanko's retaliatory fury was the Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial Navy. The defection, or associated punishment, never happened because the government on Home immediately squashed the rumor. Another missed opportunity.