The Fall of the Infinite Empire

Chapter 8

The view was so breathtaking that Myra almost forgot her anger. The Rakatan guards had pulled her from her family and taken her to the shuttle. Once the doors closed she knew no way to open them. The guards who had taken her left her in the shuttle bay and made their way to the cockpit, its door closing behind them. Their absence convinced Myra that there was no way out, for if escape had been possible she would have been watched. And then the shuttle began to rise. This surprised Myra of course because she did not know she was in a shuttle. She knew that the Rakatans came from the stars and could fly through the air and into space, but she had no idea what that looked like, not from the ground and certainly not from inside one of the ships.

The shuttle bay had seats along the walls that were tipped slightly backwards, and windows set above them on each side at what would have been, for Rakatans, eye level of those sitting opposite the windows. When the shuttle first began to rise Myra was taken by surprise and stumbled for a moment, before quickly sitting down. She saw the tops of the buildings moving through the windows and, frustrated that she could not see more while sitting, decided to turn around in her seat, on her knees so she could through the windows behind her. What she saw she would remember all her life.

At that point the city was already well below her. She could make out Rakatans moving on the ground and could see the temple of the Star Map in the distance. And then everything seemed to shoot past her. For the first time in her life Myra got a good look at her world. Beyond the city limits she saw the vast expanse of shimmering glass deserts, broken up only by the large rocky outcroppings. One of those, Myra figured, contained the caves in which she had spent her entire life. In them still lived, she hoped, some of her extended family, those who had stayed behind with the great tribe when she and those closest to her had broken away. Or perhaps the Rakatans had caught them too. This thought took her mind away from the scene before her, as she thought about where her more immediate family was, in particular Tytus and her children. They had been separated that afternoon, shortly after she returned to them from her experience with the Star Map.

Myra had tried to tell Tytus what she had seen there but he did not understand. He thought at first the Star Map was a cage in which a Rakatan who knew about maps was made to live. When she explained that the Rakatan was dead, that he had been dead for generations, then he thought it had been a grave. He asked whether they had buried the maps with him. She had given up trying to explain. But she had told him they were being taken to the Rakatan home world. She told them they would be separated, but that they would arrive at the same place as she did eventually. She had still not been ready when the guards came.

She had left with nothing but the clothes she wore, which were, of course, the only durable items she possessed in the world. There was her frayed robe, ripped in several places on the day of their capture. The caves could be cold places and so her people would always wear robes. She had been told that far to the north there were those of her people who wore robes covering their whole bodies. She supposed that it was colder in the north, and that this was the explanation. And there were her boots. They were her mother's boots, given to her when her mother died. Cloth was something they could make in the caves, but it was a difficult process. It required a different kind of moss than the kind they ate, and it required lots of it. Every generation would weave new clothes for the generation to follow, but the material for footwear was far harder to create, and so something as valuable as boots would not be thrown away.

As the guards led her away she turned to say, "I love you!" to her children, and hoped they heard her before the doors closed. Zhed-Hai had not been precise about how long they would be separated, and she was not even sure she trusted him that they were coming. She had spent most of the time since she had returned staring at her children, who had slept most of the day, still exhausted from their ordeal. If this was the last time she saw them then she wanted to remember their faces. She could not remember so many of the people she had grown up with, family or friends. The anxiety that one day that might happen with her children had absorbed her since she had heard they would be separated. She did not share this fear with her children of course, or even with Tytus. What would be the purpose? No doubt the same thought had occurred to him and reinforcing it would only strengthen his own fears. What good would the fear do him? They would be separated, no matter what they did. Myra had no doubts about the outcome if they resisted, and she had tried, on the trip back from the temple, to convince Zhed-Hai to let her stay with her family. He had given her no reasons, just assured her that he had them. And of course letting her children know was out of the question. Either that day was their last one together or they were not. And whether it was or wasn't, spending this last day in fear and sadness helped no one. So Myra sat with her fear, and did not inflict it on others.

The ascent from the planet's surface had chased away the weariness she shared with her children, but it did not erase the fear. The view of her world falling away below her filled her with awe, but it was the faces of her children she thought about most. Even as the atmosphere fell away behind them and she saw, for the first time, the heavens laid out before her, she kept pulling her mind back to the question. Why did Zhed-Hai want her to travel without her family? What purpose was served by her arriving on Lehon sooner? If he had a reason that she understood then she could make herself believe that her family would follow. But if he had such a reason, why hide it?

The shuttle ride was too brief and the view too thrilling for her to make any kind of progress figuring out what was going on. Myra realized that she had never had any conception of how large her planet was. Of course she had never given the question much thought. Her world had been the caves. What had mattered was how large they were. The wider world belonged to the Rakatans, so what use was imagining it or puzzling over it? But as she looked now upon her world retreating from her, it occurred to her how little of it she and her children had ever seen. They took this from us, she thought, they took from us our home. They made it theirs, burned it down, and then didn't even let us see the ashes.

As the stars came into view through her window, Myra's mind quieted somewhat. The stars of which she had caught glimpses throughout her life were joined by uncountably many brothers and sisters. Had any of her people ever seen this? Then she remembered the story that Zhed-Hai had told her, that her people had once ventured out into the stars themselves. So her people had seen such things, right before they drew the attention of the invaders. While she regretted the decision that brought the Rakatans to them, she could understand, while gazing on the galactic vista, the motivation which drove it.

Suddenly, her view of the stars was cut off. They were in a ship she had not seen coming, being blocked from looking out the front of the cockpit by the door between herself and the guards. The hangar into which the ship came to a stop was brightly lit and just large enough for the shuttle to sit in. As Myra exited through the ramp-door which began to lower as soon as the shuttle touched down, she realized she did not hear the guards exiting as well. She walked around the shuttle, walking towards the cockpit. Through the window she could see the guards still in their seats. One of them looked up at her, curling its lip in disgust. Shortly after the guard, or pilot Myra supposed, looked back towards the control panel the engines of the shuttle restarted and it began to lift off the hangar floor. Myra stepped quickly back towards the wall as the shuttle moved in reverse towards the hangar exit. As the rear of the shuttle reached the exit a large door, as wide as the hangar itself came down swiftly in front of the shuttle. And then Myra was alone.

She had not been alone since they had been taken in the caves. Before that it had been days since she had been alone on account of the preparation needed to move their camp within the cave system. As much as she loved her children Myra had always enjoyed her times alone, partly because of how infrequent they were. It was usually not a good idea to go out into the caves alone. If you fell, if you became stuck, or if you injured yourself in some way, there would be no one to help you, no one who even knew where you were. Still, whenever supplies had run low, it became important for more foraging parties to go out, and Myra had always volunteered to go out alone. She had been alone when she found the water around which they had built their new life. She had hunted alone and gathered alone from time to time. When alone Myra's mind could wander as it would, or focus tightly on her intention. Away from the noise and the distractions, Myra felt most herself. But that time spent alone was rare, for every day had its tasks, and those tasks were almost always at the camp.

And so for a moment Myra simply stood still in that odd place. The floor, ceiling and walls were all a light gray, with rings of light wrapping around the entire room. It was bright, but silent. It was a silence deeper than the caves. For always in the caves there was the sound of water dripping, of the rats scurrying, of the pebbles falling, of your feet on the rocks. All Myra could hear at the moment was her own breathing and her own heartbeat, because nothing else was alive in this place. In a way, Myra reasoned, she was more alone at this moment than she had ever been. This was a dead place. The city had been dead in its own way. The buildings unnaturally precise in their dimensions, their interiors showing no signs of people living there. This is what the Rakatans did, they made dead places. Dead places to carry them between worlds, dead places in which to work on those worlds, and, in the case of her world, a dead place to show the galaxy.

And then suddenly, she was not alone. A door opened at the wall of the hangar opposite the great door to space. There stood the one-eyed Rakatan, the one who had killed her cousin. He held a spear in one hand and with the other he beckoned her to come to him. Myra considered him for a moment before obeying. These spears were peculiar. They seemed to change shape, at least at their tops. Usually they ended in simple points, but she had been sure that she had seen the tip of the spear widen out into a blade when this very same Rakatan had slashed at her cousin. The boy had pushed the guard back when it had forced Tytus' parents to their knees. The response had come swiftly, and Myra was sure that the spear had changed shape. She had been trying to keep track of all the things the aliens could do that her own people could not. They could read your mind, they could move things by force of will alone, they could capture minds in stone.

The thought of the Star Map sent a shudder through Myra. She could not think of her experience in the temple without horror. Horror not just at the existence to which Tato-Heen had been condemned, but at the Rakatans more generally. If that was the only way travel between the stars could be made to work, then why not just stay home? Was their world so desolate a place, that they could not bear to stay there? Or was their greed and aggression so great that they would subject their own people to such a fate just for the chance to subjugate others?

The one eyed Rakatan was growing more insistent, waving his free hand with greater force. Myra walked towards him, slower perhaps than she might otherwise. This beast had killed one of her family, and while she had to admit that she was under its power, she did not have to give any more than the minimum level of effort complying with its demands. After all it, or he she supposed, wasn't the one really in charge anyway. What could he do? If she did not obey as swiftly as he liked, would he kill her? No. The Old Man, Zhed-Hai reminded herself, would punish him for that. The brutality the Rakatans meted out so casually suggested that the punishment would be a cruel death. Would he hurt her? Perhaps. But let him. Myra could accept the pain. She would not accept living in fear of this creature.

Myra and the guard entered the elevator from which he had emerged. This confused Myra for a moment. The research facility on Tatooine was a single story, or at least Myra had only seen one floor. The Star Map temple had ramps and steps. When the door of the elevator closed behind her she reminder herself that they had no reason to kill her. Zhed-Hai said they were going to his home world. When the door opened again Myra had to be prodded to leave the elevator by the guard's motioning her to do so.

She walked out into space. Or so it seemed at first. The solid deck under her feet prevented panic, but as she looked forward she saw nothing but stars. As she stepped forward she looked down, just to check that the deck really was there, and for a few steps it was. After a few steps, however, it seemed that the ship ended and space began. But there, well past where the deck seemed to stop stood Zhed-Hai, dressed plainly, with his hands behind his back. For a moment Myra thought of their magic, until, looking down again, she realized the deck didn't stop in a few steps. Rather, after a few steps she could just see through the deck. While looking at where the deck should be it seemed as though she was looking through water, the light bending almost imperceptibly.

"Join me Myra." It was a whisper in her mind, but one that left her no doubt as to its source. Would this invisible floor hold her as it held him? Of course it would, came the voice in her head that belonged to her. They don't need such trickery to kill you. So Myra stepped out onto the floor she could not see, with only the smallest moment of hesitation. And it was as she walked towards Zhed-Hai beneath and above the stars, that she lost her fear and anger for a moment. Only by looking backwards could you tell you were in a ship at all, at least without looking hard for the signs. As she approached Zhed-Hai from behind she could tell where the invisible walls were. It was glass she realized. Those little shards that you could see through if they were clean, if you put them together you could make something like this. The walls you could see through. It was the same stuff that made the windows of the ship she had just been on, and of the vehicle they had put her family in to take them to the city. It was just much, much larger. The ceiling curved above her both to her left and right and ahead of her. The glass portion of the ship was a half-ovoid poking out of the metallic rear section.

"It is good to be reminded of what wonders surround us, and it is only through eyes like yours that they can be seen," said Zhed-Hai soflty.

"Is this something our masters from the stars brought us?" Myra's question came with a perceptible dose of bitterness in her voice.

"Glass? My child your people knew how to make glass thousands of years before we ever found your world. It is no great accomplishment, but is, as you remind me, wondrous nonetheless. A sad reminder too of how far your people have fallen, that you have forgotten how to make glass," Zhed-Hai mused.

"We did not fall. We were pushed down," came Myra's answer.

"Yes you were." Zhed-Hai apparently did not wish to be baited. Left with little to say Myra looked out at the stars again.

"We will be turning soon, in preparation to depart. You should look out the left side. You will see your world, your Tatooine," Zhed-Hai said, pointing a scaly claw towards what was, at that point, still just stars. Within a few seconds, however, the stars began to slide, and the planet came into view. The combination of yellow and brown, with a few wispy white clouds above them did not make for an inspiring sight on its own. But it was a world, a whole world there below her. She thought of her youngest, Corus, and the joy that would fill her small heart when she saw this same sight.

"Your family will not get this view unfortunately," Zhed-Hai said, as though her most intimate thoughts were being said to him just because she could not stop him from hearing them. It was pointless to demand that he stop, Myra realized, as she could not tell he was doing it at all unless he, as he had just done, said something to give it away.

"Why won't she see it?" Myra asked.

"The ship they will travel in is not built to give one such impressive views. It is a cargo ship and sadly, all they will see is walls," Zhed-Hai answered.

Myra pictured her family alone and scared in some tiny little room and felt a flicker of rage, which she extinguished quickly. He wants to have a chat, she thought, and it was best to give him what he wanted.

"Why doesn't their ship have…this?" Myra asked, gesturing at the glass walls.

"Because it is only my ship that does. In all the Infinite Empire mine is the only ship so constructed. While glass itself is no technological marvel this glass does have some marvelous qualities. It can withstand the heat of entering a planet's atmosphere, it can take a hit from an asteroid and even blaster shots if the gun isn't too large. It is an expensive proposition to create enough of it to serve as half a ship, and there is, in all the Empire, none but me willing to pay the cost. A shame I think. I enjoy the vistas it opens up for me, and in this case, it gives you this last moment looking upon your world." Zhed-Hai had given his explanation with a tone of amusement, and it had not changed as he shared the news that she was leaving her world for good.

"Last moment?" Now Myra had difficulty keeping her feelings out of her voice.

"Yes, the last moment. You are going to Lehon and you are not coming back here." Zhed-Hai took no notice of her emotions.

"So I will spend the rest of my life on your world? You are never sending us back?" Myra's volume rose with her anger.

"Well as for your leaving Lehon, that is a conversation for another time. But no, I am never sending you back to this desolate place. I told you what my people have planned for it. It is barely livable now. It would be wasteful if you returned." Silence followed this answer, as Myra realized the prospect of never returning to Tatooine did not trouble her nearly as much as the fact that the decision was being made for her. The possibility of leaving her world had never occurred to her, but she was fairly sure if she knew it was a possibility that she would have dreamed of going. But her wishes were irrelevant in this. As she watched the stars move beneath her feet she realized that for all that she had been brought on majestic ship to behold its awe-inspiring sights, she was still just something for Zhed-Hai to use. She did not know what use he had in mind for her, but beyond that she felt certain that she did not matter to him, and neither did her family.

"Why can they not come with us?" Myra asked.

"Your family?" Zhed-Hai asked. At Myra's nod he continued, "Well there is only so much room on my ship. Its whole purpose is to be a comfortable place to reflect and think, and that would be compromised by bringing your whole family on. And there is much to think about on our trip to Lehon."

"Then why bring me?" Myra demanded.

"There are things you should know Myra, before we get to Lehon. There are also things you must do once there that will be easier without your family with you. Bringing you with me will give you a good deal of time to do them," Zhed-Hai explained.

Myra's first thought was 'What things must I know? What must I do?' but they were pushed out of her mind by a more insistent, though slightly tardier, question. "How long will it take them to catch up to us?"

"It will take weeks. They do not travel as we do. Remember I told you that we now had computers which could take the place of Star Maps, but that they were slower. Our visit to the Star Map meant that I could plot us a direct course to Lehon, which I have done. But the captain of the freighter that carries your family, along with all the rest of your kind that I have gathered recently, he prefers not to use the Star Maps. Or perhaps he lacks the ability to use them. Either way it is a common enough thing. He will make many smaller jumps, not the one big jump that we will take." Zhed-Hai always spoke of these matters as though they were common knowledge between them, as though all Myra needed was a reminder.

"Jumps?" Myra's face showed her confusion, as well as frustration. It seemed to her his relaxed tone was somehow mocking.

"Ah yes, well, you see Myra, the path from here to…anywhere that matters really, is not a straight one. If we traveled along every point in space between us and Lehon we would never get there. It would take years and years, even with our advanced ships, to make it to the nearest system. And Lehon is very much not the nearest system. So instead of travelling all the points between here and there…" At this several small silvery objects floated out of pockets that Myra had not even realized were to be found in Zhed-Hai's plain golden tunic. They separated as they floated, splitting in half, and in half again, and again, and so on until there were few dozen miniscule silver droplets hanging in a line in the air. Zhed-Hai moved one hand above one end of the line and the other hand above the opposite end, and then brought his left hand to the right by tracing the line formed by the floating droplets. "We instead jump over them, as it were. We enter something called hyperspace, and in hyperspace you reach one end of the line, without travelling the points in between." As he said this the droplets merged once again, until only the two droplets on the opposite ends were left. He then moved one of his hands from the first droplet to the second. "But hyperspace is a tricky thing. It is both outside normal space but significantly impacted by it. Should the lines you are jumping contain, for example, a star, its gravity would still have its effect on the ship in hyperspace, and that effect would be quite terrible indeed. That is why the path that was preserved in Tato-Heen's mind, or what was left of it, is so important. It takes us from here to there in one jump. Without it you must rely on the extrapolations and predictions of computers, and those extrapolations and prediction are, while not quite certain, close enough to certain to work, but only over short distances. The freighter on to which your family will be loaded later today will need to make dozens of jumps to get to Lehon. And along the way they will have to stop for fuel."

"Fuel?"

"Ah yes, well these machines, this ship, the speeder we rode on to the Temple, they all work by the use of fuel, substances which give them their power to move. It is an inelegant thing, especially compared to the Gift, but it is necessary. It takes a great deal of fuel to get into hyperspace. Once there not much is needed to move through it. That is why, despite the fact that we will travel not much shorter a distance than your family, we will not need to stop to refuel, and they will. More than once I expect. And they will need to pick up food and water, and clear the waste that accumulates on a large ship like that. They will be perfectly safe, but they will be slow. But that will be nothing to regret, for it will give us an opportunity to speak, and for you to grow."

"And what is this thing we need to talk about?" She was to go weeks without her family, without her children, so that this little tyrant had a chance to talk at her. Not to her. To him she was a child, to be told things.

"Slavery," he said softly.

Myra's jaw clenched. "I know all about it. I stand in no need of instruction."

"You think you know about slavery, what it is to be a slave, but you do not. You have never been a slave. You have been intermittently hunted. But even after being caught you did not become a slave."

Myra's disbelieving look prompted Zhed-Hai to continue, "Have I put you to work? Have I made use of you for my own ends? Or have I shown you secrets, taught you things no other of your kind knows?"

"To not be a slave is to be free. I does not seem to me I am free," Myra shot back.

Zhed-Hai shook his head, and Myra worried for a moment that there might be a limit to how much impertinence he would accept. But he simply argued back, "That is a childish notion. There are things we must do. All of us. For each of us different things perhaps, but for every one of us, everyone in the world capable of thinking at all about what they shall do, there are things they must do. There are choices to be made in how to do them. One can even choose to make of one's life a failure and refuse to do them, but that does not change that they must be done. You are free to choose your path, but not to choose which one is right, which one is needed. That is not slavery Myra, that is just being alive."

Myra had neither anything to say in response to this, nor any desire for Zhed-Hai to know that and so she simply looked at him, waiting for him to say whatever it is he wanted to say to her.

Zhed-Hai seemed to want his words to sink in and so stared back at Myra as she stared at him. After a few moments he began again, "You have not known slavery Myra, but your people have. Long ago your people lived far better than they do now, but their lives were ours to command. Your rebellion brought you devastation, but in a way it brought freedom too. In your caves you lived free of us. And though, like you, I have never been a slave, just like your people the Rakatans were once enslaved. And like your people we rose up, and the cost was terrible. Our masters you see, were far more powerful than yours."

"Was your world left barely inhabitable? Were you left to scrounge for food in caves? Was that the price of your freedom?" Myra successfully restrained her rage, but only with effort. Free were they? Living on the run, eating moss and rats? What was it exactly that he thought was comparable to that?

"No, for we were more successful in our rebellion than you were in yours. That and our masters operated at a far greater distance. For we were the slaves of slaves. When we threw off the yoke, it was in the hands of their servants, and by the time our masters knew what we had done, we had our world already. And so began the War, and it is this war that you must understand if you are to understand my people, and why we have done what we have done, to your world and to all the other worlds we have enslaved. To all the peoples of the empire."

"What is there to understand? You are stronger than us, so you took from us what you wanted. We are weaker, so we tried to survive." Myra said bitterly.

"We are stronger, but have you ever wondered why we wanted your world? What the point of the occupation was?" Had Myra ever been to school she would have recognized Zhed-Hai's tone as that of the teacher, guiding the student through their lessons.

"You wanted plunder, you wanted our minerals, our food…" Myra trailed off as she realized how wrong her guesses sounded. It struck her as odd that no one had ever told her why the Rakatans had come to her world, and even more odd that she had never asked. What always mattered in the stories was that their coming was the fault of the pride and ambition of the leaders of her people in days gone by; the gods had punished them for the temerity of trying to conquer the stars. The Rakatans were a divine instrument, and instruments don't need motives. Myra had never felt sure about such stories. They didn't seem true to her, but they were the only story on offer and so gained in plausibility as a result.

"No. It's not that we don't do that sometimes. There are worlds on which we have found truly unique substances. The substance used to heal your son comes from one such world, a world covered in water. But your world has nothing of interest to us, except one thing. You." Zhed-Hai replied.

"You had to wait a long time for me then." Myra found Zhed-Hai's refusal to come out and say what he meant annoying.

Zhed-Hai found her humor delightful it seemed. He made an odd little noise, which Myra sensed was the Rakatan version of laughter, before continuing, "Your people were the prize. Everywhere we go it is life forms, especially sentient life forms, that we are interested in. We have droids, and you have seen some of them, but it is quite difficult to program them to understand you. They have difficulty with complex tasks and most of them can only do a few jobs. Then there is the security. The Gift gives us access to minds, but droids don't have minds. They have programs that imitate minds. And so we can never be sure when a droid's program has been corrupted, never know when they have ceased to be servants and started to be threats. And so we search the stars, for beings we can understand, that we can train, that we can use for our purposes. The purpose of our coming was to enslave you. Your people have been taken from your world for generations, sent this way and that across the stars. They could be found on every world in the empire once, and even now there are descendants of your people on many worlds, though in some cases they would be difficult to recognize."

Myra looked down at the stars beneath her feet for a time. The thought that all her people's suffering was just to make life easier for these beasts, so they could find more reliable servants, was sickening. It also struck her as false, at least partly. She had an image in her head of Rakatans lounging about while her people cleaned and cooked and waited on them, and the picture was, she was suddenly sure, wrong. She looked up at Zhed-Hai and opened her mouth to speak, when she was interrupted by the stars exploding.

That was how it seemed at first. It seemed as though every star in the sky suddenly burst. But then she realized they hadn't burst they were just lengthening, or perhaps stretching out from points into lines. A moment later it seemed as though all the lines created by the stars had merged to form a white tunnel spinning around the ship.

"This is hyperspace Myra." Zhed-Hai told her.

It took Myra a moment to recall the topic of their conversation. The jump into hyperspace had unnerved her. Her body had tensed as though they were falling, but rather than feeling as though she was falling down it had felt for a moment like she was falling in every direction at once. She looked all around the curved glass walls and felt incredibly small and weak. But her mind called her back to the question at hand. What did they want her people for? Not to live in luxury and leisure. Nothing about the Rakatans spoke to a restfulness or idleness. Every Rakatan she had seen had a task. In the almost empty city she had been taken to, she had seen guards, healers and, other than Zhed-Hai and his ridiculous looking servant, that was all. No one lounging around being fed whatever it is one ate when one had everything.

She pulled her eyes away from the spectacle all around her to look at Zhed-Hai and ask the simple question, "Why did you need us?"

Zhed-Hai nodded slightly and said, "In recent years your people have become relatively rare, due to the effects of your failed rebellion. Many of your characteristic functions in the empire have been given over to other species. We use slaves for many purposes. To make our clothes, to grow our food, to build our homes, to operate our households, to reshape the worlds we find, to build our great monuments. These things Rakatans do not do, because Rakatans do only one thing. War. Everything we do is directed towards the war. Most of us are warriors. Those that are not warriors support the war in some other direct way. The slaves that free our people up to fight, they must be acquired and managed, and some of the lowest and weakest of our people do that. Weapons must be devised and created. New worlds that might get us stronger slaves, or new materials useful in the fight, they must be found. Everything about the world you are going to is defined by the war. Every Rakatan is shaped by the demands of war. This you must understand."

"But who are you fighting?"

"The Gods Myra. We are fighting the Gods."