The Assassin
Chapter 23
Retirement Planning (TY38-month 445)
“What do you plan to do in retirement, Chief Kotter?” I asked. She’d just had a meeting with all the section directors to go over the plan to create an eighth section, stationed in Lleifior. The Militia was now up to nearly 55,000 members. Lleifior was the last established township to house a dedicated Militia section and we needed to figure out who would get transferred from what to where. In most instances, entire units would be moving but there were smaller outfits that would also be needed.
Like all townships on Tara except Ponderosa, Lleifior had little urban sprawl. Its farmland and ranches, however, had grown significantly and stretched over 1500 kilometers from the city in nearly every direction. In each of those directions, remote business areas had been established. Centurion Oswald, who claimed now to be a century old, had nearly 200,000 unhomed concubines that he was the ‘owner’ of. Tara AI insisted that any unhomed concubine who didn’t migrate to Eldorado had to be owned by the Civil Service. I’d worked with him to establish concubine business and education centers in the sprawling ranchlands where sponsors could send their children for school and training, and that as many as a thousand sponsors used as their central business district.
“Retirement? I don’t think so.”
“Doesn’t your thirty years in the Militia come up soon?” I asked. I knew very well that it did. Kotter was the first Militia member and we were celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Militia when the year turned.
“As if being in the reserves is any different than active service. We have jobs to do and they don’t magically come to an end after thirty years.” I thought about that and the contract we had.
“The contract says we serve thirty years of active and thirty years of reserve. Are you saying that’s a lie?” I asked.
“To paraphrase an old Earth saying, there are lies, damn lies, and AI lies,” Kotter said.
“What? AIs can’t lie. It’s against their programming,” I declared.
“Says the AIs,” Kotter said.
“If I may,” Cricket interrupted us. “Perhaps I can shed some light on the question.”
“Can AIs lie, Cricket?”
“No. However, the interpretation of contracts is a highly evolved occupation. The popular belief is that AIs were created millions of years ago to navigate spacecraft through hyperspace. Indeed, some species did develop AIs for that purpose first. In many species, however, AIs were developed for trade and contract negotiation, financial management, and taxation. It was deemed important to have a neutral third party to enforce contracts. That, in fact, is what humans face in the Confederacy. The Darjee AIs negotiated a contract to take humans to space and colonize various planets if they would fight the Sa’arm. The Darjee AIs are also the enforcers of the contract. They are not a neutral third party.”
“What does that have to do with our Militia contract?” I asked.
“Eight years ago, the first sponsors to reach Tara reached the end of what they felt was their thirty years of active duty. They discovered there was no term limit to their service. When they volunteered, it was the same as a concubine agreeing to join them. It was for the duration. Until the war ends. It is unlikely the war will end. At least, not in the lifetime of any human now living.”
“Are you saying that our contract is not valid?”
“The Militia proclamation that you agreed to states that persons serving in the Militia will be granted full planetary citizenship during and after thirty years of active duty and thirty years of reserve duty. Upon completion of the enlistee’s full sixty years, he or she would be granted full Confederacy Citizenship on par with any other Citizen. That final clause was pending negotiations with Confederacy AIs. The Confederacy AIs struck it down. They further indicated that the terms of active duty and reserve duty describe a reward for service and not an end to service. In the same way that sponsors are sponsors for life and concubines are concubines for life, the Militia is also for life.”
“Did you have anything to do with this AI negotiation?”
“Yes. I argued on behalf of the Militia agreements as did Teddy and Amelia. We were unsuccessful based on the fact no one in any of the Confederacy races retires. Responsibilities change and eventually age or sickness affects how much an individual can do, but what is in retirement that we don’t have every day? We have plenty of food, lack for nothing a replicator can produce, and travel on the planet at will. We have entertainment and even the jobs are generally not endless. If a sponsor decides to become an artist or musician, he can work toward that and no longer be considered a farmer, for example. One can change careers but one cannot stop contributing.”
Kotter hung her head, nodding slightly. So, this was why Ponderosa suddenly became available for colonization by the freemen. There was no call for a retirement village. No one was going to retire.
“You are Provincial Governor for life, Niall,” Kotter said. “On our planet, that is expected to be a very long time. Remember, Marines are also Marines for life. In their case, the life-expectancy is much shorter.”
My own thirty-year retirement date came and went. No one commented about it.
I decided to go for a ride and went to the stable where I heard crying. “Rose? Rose, what’s wrong?” I asked. My first concubine was startled and turned to me, hastily wiping her eyes.
“Nothing,” she said. Even I—raised on Tara and not subject to Earth’s preconceived notions—recognized that response as not meaning what she said.
“Come sit with me, my love. Tell me all about the nothing that has you upset.” It had been over a year since we got word of Lyle’s death in a ground action on a planet we’d never heard of. It was the first death in our family and Rose had been devastated. I thought she had recovered. She cuddled on my lap when I sat on a hay bale.
“I’m pregnant,” she whispered.
“That’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you.”
“I’m not. Niall, I’m tired. I’ve had eleven children since I arrived on Tara. Twelve now, Niall! I know the nanites keep us healthy and fertile, but I’m tired of carrying children. I don’t even know where Amy is or if she is alive. We came to Tara when she was ten and were so excited and happy. Where’s my first baby, Niall? Where are any of our babies?”
“I didn’t know you were tired of having children.”
“Cricket says the nanites can keep me fertile for another fifty years. If a woman on Earth had twelve children, she would be past her bearing years and/or dead by now. We keep manufacturing them. I don’t know if I can last,” she said as she sobbed on my chest. I knew this was serious. Like everyone on the planet, we were discovering what ‘for the duration’ really meant. A sponsored concubine’s job was to provide comfort for her sponsor and to have and raise children. There would be thirty-six years between Lyle’s birth and our next one. I no longer had any idea of how many children I had or by whom. It seemed there were usually around twenty or twenty-five living with us who were under the age of fourteen.
We needed to do something. Our population was increasing exponentially and not only was there the stress of bearing the children, but the fourteen-year commitment to raising them. Not only was the ratio of concubines to sponsors over twelve-to-one, but the ratio of dependents to concubines was over ten-to-one. Of our 38 million population on Tara, 34 million were dependents. We were all exhausted.
“I don’t know what I can do, darling Rose. But somehow, I’ll make sure this is the last child you need to carry.”
“At least for a while,” she whispered. “I just need a little time to recover.”
“I believe we need to have some kind of slow-down in our birthrate, and specifically a moratorium on births for those who have borne a certain number,” I said to the council. “Even with AIs providing most of what we need for childcare, our mothers and many fathers are wearing out. We are going to start experiencing an accelerated mortality rate if we don’t do something.”
“I agree,” Scarlett said. “I’ve borne fifteen myself and I’m frankly a little tired of it.”
“Females in the Confederacy are contractually obligated to continue bearing offspring,” Tara AI said officiously. “You cannot simply have an end-date that is not associated with the end of fertility.”
“And how long before a woman comes to her menopause on this planet?” Scarlett said. “I’m seventy-five years old. On Earth I’d have reached menopause twenty or thirty years ago.”
“Confederacy medical technology can maintain fertility for as much as a hundred years after the beginning of menses. There is some degradation in the length of time fertility can be maintained based on how long a woman has been fertile before she received medical nanite upgrades,” Tara AI said. It sounded quite proud of the fact.
“We are beyond our capacity to care for our young,” I said. I could see nods from the mayors around the table and a strong agreement from Centurion Oswald.
“Not only that,” he said, “we are seeing men and women forced to breed who really shouldn’t have children. The lowest CAP scores are often assigned to people who have poor parenting characteristics.”
“Those people should be culled. They are a waste of resources,” Tara AI said. “We can begin immediately. At your direction, I can disable the medical nanites and they will soon die a natural death.”
“Tara, people are not livestock. We don’t cull them,” Scarlett groaned. “No one will give the order to turn off medical nanites.” I wasn’t so sure about that. Two or three of the mayors were looking significantly at me.
“How about if we set up a moratorium, similar to the way we did with fourteen-year-olds,” I suggested. Cricket was feeding me information as quickly as I could speak it. He was working on a way Tara AI could not object. “We would not cease to reproduce. But after a certain number of children, the rate of reproduction would be reduced. We’ve held pretty steady planetwide with pregnancies beginning in the third year after births. We could simply say that after a certain number of births, the frequency would drop. First to the fourth year, then to the fifth, and so on. It would relieve the pressure on the women as well as ease our burden of educating and caring for the dependents.”
“I could get behind that idea,” Drylanders said. “Frankly, with four concubines, I don’t have any idea of how many children I’ve sired or even what the names of the last batch are. We were supposed to create the kind of supportive family life that would result in more sponsors. Instead, our children might as well be raised in orphanages—or the boarding schools you’ve set up.”
“Governor Cho, please work with the Militia AI and the Ponderosa AI to establish a guideline and projections. We will take this up at the next council meeting. In the meantime, let us simply say that you are authorized to give any concubine a five-year break if she has had ten or more children. That should give us some breathing room. Are there any objections?”
“I object,” Tara AI said.
“Any other objections? Record the decree.”
Eldorado now had a dependent population of nearly over six million with 675,000 freemen. At least we had good education and fifty percent of our new adults tested above the 6.5 cutoff for becoming sponsors. But not all those who tested as sponsors volunteered. It was another quirk in the contract. On Earth, people were offered the opportunity to volunteer if they had a qualifying CAP score, but they weren’t forced to. They could stay and take their chances fighting the Swarm on our home world. Of course, no one had a choice about that. From all the reports we got, though, there were still people on Earth who were focused on how they could profit from the battle with the Sa’arm rather than how to defeat them. Five billion people had died or been evacuated. Entire countries, like India and Australia, had been wiped off the map and were now simply ‘Swarm Territory.’
So, while over fifty percent of those on Eldorado who tested passed at 6.5 or above, only thirty-five percent volunteered. The other fifteen percent were considered freemen, no matter where they lived on the planet. They could work for someone else, join the Militia, or emigrate. Military training was required regardless. The one thing we knew better than anything else was that no sponsors would willingly defend the freemen. The sponsor level freemen, however, were not allowed concubines, though they could establish a relationship with another freeman. Or more than one. Most chose to come to Eldorado and make a life for themselves.
I think we all believed the war would end. On Earth, there were still zones of humans and zones of Sa’arm. It seemed that all we could do was contain them and beat the shit out of them when they sent another armada from space to invade. The Earth defense, like Tulak, was doing an effective job of keeping the planet blockaded. So far, the feared planetary destruction had not been executed. Apparently, they still had food. But they were strictly underground now. The Orbiting Weapons Platforms could pin down any surface movement and eliminate it.
Those were things we didn’t have on Tara. We were still far enough out of the way of the Swarm’s advance that our protections were minimal. Our one orbital installation was a ship repair facility. Interplanetary immigration, either from Earth or from other colonies, had slowed, so the station no longer produced pods to replenish colony ships. We received a military ship nearly every month. It would drop off crew for a month or two of rest and recreation as the ship was refurbished, then take a load back to the battle. We had only about 10,000 military personnel on the planet and few had been here more than three months. Those who had been here longer were trainers, counselors, recruiters, and administrators. Military personnel were not included in the planetary census of sponsors because they were short-term visitors.
As a result, Sunnybrook had the highest concentration of unhomed concubines outside the population of freemen. They were there to hitch a ride out if they could get one. New recruits who had just turned fourteen had a lot of open slots to fill—so to speak. The number of unhomed concubines not in the Militia or freemen continued to rise while the number of sponsors on the planet stayed roughly the same. I’d heard stories of concubines having a fight to the death to determine which would become the property of a sponsor with a slot to fill. It was disgusting.
We were still receiving Tuull trading ships on a regular basis. They brought a variety of exotic trade goods from the other species of the Confederacy and took away our arts and crafts, as well as fresh meat, grains, and alcoholic beverages. In a post-scarcity economy, it was popular to import rare items because the cost was only really for the otherwise unoccupied transports. Tara had become a major supplier of beer, wine, and grain alcohols for the Confederacy. I’d heard that some of our beverages had been shipped back to Earth on unoccupied refugee ships. Agricultural production on Earth was generations from recovery after the vast burn-offs used to control the advance of the Swarm.
Semicentennial Jubilee (TY50-month 600)
“People of Tara,” Governor O’Hara spoke through every screen, AI link, and speaker on the planet. “Fifty years ago today, the Aurora ship AP008 Diaspora arrived in this system with 96 sponsors, 288 concubines, and 307 dependents. We were the first humans to set foot on this world which our AI had prepared for us. There wasn’t much here at the time. We brought seeds and as soon as our little village was set up at Drovers Run, we began planting. We constantly scanned the skies and the world around us for danger. We were so few.
“That year, ten more colony ships arrived here, along with more seeds, frozen sperm and ova for domestic animals, and more colonists. By the end of the first year, we had a total population of seventy-five hundred. Today, the total population of Tara is approaching 125 million. We now have a planet that is rich in natural resources. We have trees, fields of grain, domestic and wild animals, lovely homes, peaceful cities, and prosperous trade.
“So, it may come as a surprise to you when I say in this Jubilee celebration that we are still in grave danger. Our concubine population continues to outpace the growth of our sponsor population. In fact, over the years, we have sent two million new sponsors into the service of the Confederacy with four million concubines. And we find ourselves with only thirty-two thousand sponsors left here on Tara. At the same time, we have accepted… We have joyfully received into our fold 97,000 unsponsored refugee concubines and well over half a million orphaned dependents. Our planetary population now includes 150,000 sponsored concubines, 1.5 million unsponsored concubines, and 120 million dependents. We sponsors are outnumbered by concubines and freemen 50-to-1.
“We have allowed the immigration of 1.15 million freemen over the past thirty-five years to the southern continent of Eldorado and the city of Ponderosa. Between that and the ninety thousand Militia members who are also allowed concubines, we’ve reduced the overload to about 17-to-1. Therefore, I am calling for a million additional unhomed concubines to immigrate to Ponderosa in the next ten years. And I want to increase our Militia, which has shown its value in farm expansion, forest management, infrastructure expansion, rescue operations, wildfire suppression, disaster relief, and peacekeeping. I am calling for a million unhomed concubines to volunteer for the Militia in the next ten years. And I am encouraging every concubine with a CAP score over 6.0 to retest annually and strive to become a sponsor.
“We came to this world to preserve the agricultural ecosystems of Earth and we are doing a phenomenal job of it. That ecosystem requires many hands to labor in the fields and on the ranches. Let us continue to put those hands to work, to grow and to prosper, and to bring forth on this planet the very best of Earth’s treasures.
“Let us all in every corner of Tara, celebrate Foundation Day today. Let us put our minds and our bodies to the task of building and developing this wonderful world.”
Our planet’s International Dateline ran just east of the planetary capital, Drovers Run, and just west of the Eldorado capital of Ponderosa. So, we were always a day behind the capital. Which meant I had a few hours yet before I would address the freemen of Eldorado. There wasn’t much I could add to the Governor’s speech. I just wanted our people to be proud and happy.
Exercises (TY51-month 608)
Our expansion outward from Ponderosa continued with our fifteen million population. We now had five coastal villages and were very proud of them. People had built the cities with their own labor from the materials replicators supplied. One had become a center for higher education. No one was considered too old to get the equivalent of a college degree from our school system. Of course, it was primarily an agriculture school and specialized in research and development of our resources. The farthest inland population center was 500 kilometers from Ponderosa and was a cluster of villages populated by the tribal immigrants. This included our original band of Yolŋu with their many adoptions, but also the people who had grown from the six thousand or so Lakota we had received.
The population centers were connected to each other by a network of good roads. And patrolling the outer boundaries of our expansion was not the Militia, but well over 15,000 tribal members now. All tribal members tested on their fourteenth birthdays—nearly all above 6.5—but none volunteered. They stayed hidden in the forests beyond our farthest development.
I visited my adopted tribe at least once every month or two and was always warmly welcomed. I could hear the buzz of their bullroarers from miles away. I shouldn’t say I could ‘hear’ them. Yes, there was a sound when I was close enough, but long before I entered hearing range, I could feel the vibration of the air. I went out on a hunt with the young men of my clan and we drove the deer with the bullroarers. The men of the clan had become so adept with the ancient instruments that they could direct the deer right to our kill zone.
“Red Five, you have incoming at two o’clock. Prepare to repel forces. Fire at will.” I heard the voice through my helmet and spun to my right. I could see movement in the thicket and took aim with my cadre. When the first of the two-meter tall aliens broke through, we opened up with fire, dropping one after another as they kept pouring through the gap.
Suddenly, all my senses shut down. I couldn’t see or hear. I tried to raise my hand but could not feel my limbs. I may have fallen or I may still be propped against the tree I used as cover. I didn’t know. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it takes only fifteen seconds of complete sensory deprivation to feel like an eternity.
«You were lost in the battle,» the gaming AI finally relieved my near panic.
«What was the sudden loss of senses about?»
«It is a game upgrade. Anyone killed in the battle loses all sensory perception for thirty seconds. It is intended to drive home the point that if you lose in the battle, it is over. It is not ‘pretend to be dead.’ If you lose, you lose your life. Was it worth it?»
«You’re asking if it was worth losing my life?» My senses were returning and I could see my cadre beginning to move on the ground where we’d fallen. «What were our casualties?»
«All of Red Five Cadre were lost. All of Red Cohort was lost. Red Outfit has eighty percent casualties.»
«The village?»
«The village was given enough time to evacuate behind the safety lines.»
«Then yes. It was worth it.»
My underlying purpose for each trip to the tribal villages was to make sure they were still equipped with their rifles and helmets and to drill all the members of the tribe on their use and on how they would join in a battle if it was called for. This new upgrade in the Pussy Pirate game was heart-stopping. Of course, we didn’t anticipate being called up to fight the Swarm, but everyone on Eldorado in all the towns, ranches, and deep forest villages was prepared to fight to the death. This new upgrade really brought home the reality of dying in battle.
The tribal members were happy and at peace caring for our jungle. They guarded the outlying farms and ranches from predators. They carefully managed the forest. They had even responded so quickly to a lightning strike fire once that it was out before we could field our smoke jumpers. The communication devices in their helmets doubled as sleep learners so education was not neglected among the young. Otherwise, they did mostly without Confederacy technology. The rifles were no good for hunting as the weapons were not activated. So, they used traditional weapons for hunting. Bolos, boomerangs, arrows, and slings. They were very good and very accurate.
As hunter gatherers, they needed much more range than the farmers and ranchers. It was not unusual for the hunters to spread out for a hundred kilometers or more in any direction, and they would bring back news of plants, fruit, berries, nuts, and roots to the gatherers. In Ponderosa, we could still order nearly anything from a replicator and have it delivered. We raised and traded beef, goats, pigs, and chickens, as well as guinea pigs and rabbits. We had wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, beans, hay, and a variety of root vegetables that were raised and traded and eaten. Our ranch-raised produce was some of the finest on the planet. But the wild food I ate with the tribe always seemed superior. I would go home, usually bringing Yindi with me, with a feeling of great satisfaction in my heart.
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