The Revolt of Suetemorp
To read the classics, to know history, to care about the past, is an invitation to disaster, for one must always face the terrible conundrum that history is made by those who do not study the past, and one is obliged to see the course of history roll onwards, in blithe disregard for all of one's pretensions to understand it and to change what had come.
Suetemorp was an odd man to be selected to lead the Jirakirai exploration project. He got it due to being ingratiated with the clan's leader, Urkrian, a distantly related - as far as that term could be applied to the Suesdyians, with their asexual reproduction, but his biological line had been closely associated with the clan leadership since time immemorial. He had undergone his naval training of course, and he had passed with flying colors, and nobody questioned his competence. But there But at the same time everything knew there was something off about him: his romantic obsession with the past, his study of the ancient languages, his obsession with the fragments of texts that survived from old Nires, from before it was destroyed, telling of life there. He had kept himself apart from the infighting and drawn knives that characterized politics among the Suesdyians, he had always been quiet, devoted to duty, but seemingly unambitious, frugal in his material life - and contemptuous of the age he lived in. And contemptuous of most of the people around him, although he tended to hide it well enough that only a few really understand the deep seated contempt with which he held them all.
But he had gotten the exploration project, calling in all of the favors that he had gotten and never requested a single return on for all of those years, showing that he understood the way the game was played despite his long abstention from it, despite the puzzlement of all that he knew about why he was so obsessed with the exploration program. And when the exploration ship had set off, his motives had seemed equally unclear: his reports were precise and clear, but lacked any emotion or hint of feeling, and he seemed like a robot, as his ship traveled across the stars, identifying asteroid belts for development, where colonization ships would travel eventually, following with loyalty and dedication ever initiative insisted upon by the Jirakirai clan.
It all seemed like such a non-descript, such an uninteresting, such a... boring story. But shadows lurked beneath the surface.
Another transition as the vessel transited out of hyperspace, like the... scores? hundreds? It was hard to remember now - of times that it had happened before. The excitement of the first few times, the first steps of the Suesdyians - and more importantly, the Jirakiraians - into the stars - had long since worn off. They had scoured dozens of light years of space, and here was the newest planet to explore.
The sensory information flooded in, and Suetemorp read the screen panels as the information flowed through, his hooded and sunken eyes peering at the data. The asteroid belt in this system was a poor one, they could already tell that, without any of the resources which would make effective colonization useful. It would be another wasted system, with nothing but a few gas giants, some rocky balls of stone grilled and baked by the sun, and a thoroughly uninteresting marble of blue and green.
His eyes lingered over the planetary information, as the buzz of the bridge washed over him, then he stood up, bringing the ship's intercorm mike closer. The crew stayed at their terminals, working still - eager to complete this project, eager to be onwards.
"Gentlemen, I have the pleasure to inform you that this will be our last stop. We have found our home at last, and our voyage shall continue no further. Now, all officers, report to the inner command bridge."
The steady tapping of claws and the sound of work halted, and the silence of the vacuum of space fell over the bridge as his words hammered out, and then a bubbling roar of voices clambered for attention
"Last st-"
"What d-"
"This is-"
"Imp-"
"Mad-"
"I said," he shouted, "OFFICERS TO THE INNER COMMAND BRIDGE." His voice cracked like a whip, and the silence fell again. One by one, the officers rose from their posts, and walked to the door to the inner bridge, looking at him warily as they passed. When they had all gone through the door, he followed them.
"What is the meaning of this, Captain?" His chief mate, Natin, drew himself up in bulk, frowning at his superior.
Suetemorp walked to the center of the room, and keyed a button on a holo project. A green-blue planetary holoprojection sprung up into the air.
"Natin, do your recognize this world?"
Natin looked puzzled, his eyes scrunching up, his teeth grinding in confusion. "The world we just saw?"
"No, that is this one." Suetemorp manipulated a holo control, and another planet sprung into the air next to the former, as the first shrunk in size to be only slightly larger than the newcomer. "Can you tell the difference between the two?"
The officers peered closely at the worlds. The patterns were different, the size slightly off, but it was hardly different.
Natin shook his head. "No, but what does this world of mud mean to us? What has addled you so deeply?"
Suetemorp gazed several seconds longer into the holo projection. Without turning around, he began to speak.
"Do you have any idea how many years it has been since our ancestors lost our own world and became one with the heavens? Only a few of our people have ever cared about such questions, so I don't blame you if you don't know. It has been some 23,453 ears since then. Tens of thousands of years where we have slowly, achingly, clawed our way back up to be truly Suesdyians, to be truly the masters of our own destiny. Our bodies have changed, have atrophied, our eyes shrunk - but deep inside you you remember. The Epic of the Dailli still speaks about it, still speaks about what it was like to live on a world where the earth was underfoot, where the was wind in the skies, to feel gravity, to be one with something else than a machine. Do you know the agony that one lives, to know of what might have been, the torture that rips through he who examines the past, and knows that a different road might have been traveled?"
He turned around. "It has been too long since the Suesdyians have walked earthly soil. At last, more than a score of millennia onwards, we have the possibility to do just that. The time has come to cease with the sterile colonization of asteroids, with the charting of mineral resources - to embark on something great. To embark on the renaissance of our species, to rediscover our destiny."
They stared at him. Seconds passed, with the aching silence having over the room, as the seconds transformed themselves into minutes, as the glow of the hologram cast its strange blueish green over them, their pasty furless skin turned to a sickly hue in the strange light.
The spectrometer officer, Sunaru, spoke first. "You are proposing," he said, the words coming out of his mouth, choked, "to colonize this planet?"
Suetemorp blinked his eyes in affirmation.
"You must truly be mad", said Sunaru. "Whatever gave you such a ridiculous notion."
"You have heard that already. I have been planning this for a long time. Nires does not know where we are - the reports which we have sent back have all had their location doctored by me. They think that we are many lightyears to the galactic north, and that we have had a very poor run of luck indeed concerning the resources that we have discovered."
The communications officer, Aiag, looked ashen, an expression of horror creeping over his face.
The sensory officer, Sueoc, jumped up. "This is all the more proof that you have been driven insane by these long years of travel across the heavens, that you must be relieved of your command, and returned to the Clan for punishment for dereliction of duty."
A few eyes blinked in support.
"Gentlemen, I can assure you that I am absolutely in command of my senses. Why do you think that I moved the stars themselves in order to become the commander of this expedition? In order to prepare for this moment. If you wish to admit that you have been under the command of a lunatic for this entire voyage, then do so, it is no concern of mine. What matters is that you listen. You stand, all of you, on the threshold of glory, of grandeur, of the immortality of your name. You may choose now to follow me, to establish upon this world a colony of the Suesdyians, to end this long and unnatural separation between our people and the air, the waves, and the soil, or you may go ignominiously into the long night of space, to never be remembered, to sail in the void between the stars to nothingness. Which is it to be?
Beady eyes stared back at him.
"Captain," said the engineering officer Supetal. "Even if your ideas had merit - and I for one, can hardly be convinced - you know as well as us that there is not the slightest possibility of us being able to support the gravity of this world. Initial spectrometer reports seem to indicate that it has an atmospheric mixture which would support us, but we have no idea of its food supplies nor of the biological life found upon it. This idea of yours is insane, and we have not the slightest idea of whether it will work out not.
Once again, blinking of enthusiasm.
Suetemorp moved his head up and down in humor. "You have always been a clever one Supetal. None of us would be here today if it wasn't for your actions off of XG-23, when you saved our engine when the fire started. Our bodies have changed certainly - changed in these thousands of years in space - but we have traveled the heavens for decades. Nires was destroyed in a day, certainly, but the Confederation was not built in one. I have prepared a colonization plan for this planet, in between my oft-remarked open excessive reading of the classics" - his head bobbed up and down with laughter - "and once you agree with my course of action I will give it to you. We will need time to settle this world, to acclimate to gravity on its moon, for our gene splicers to modify the bodies of our children for its life, for robotic exploration to traverse the planet. But it is, I can assure you possible.
Once more the eyes stared back at him. Then the life support officer, Noirepyh, piped up. "And what if we under no circumstances desire to take part in this scheme?"
"Then you will be free to leave, as soon as your memories of this have been wiped, and to return to Nires, with a suitable tale of the mad captain Suetemorp. The rest of us will remain here, and carve out a tale of grandeur the likes of which no clan has ever known, which shall illustrate a story of greatness in the heavens that shall last until the stars burn out."
In the end, after a long period of debate, conversation, and discussion, almost all of them agreed that they would stay, that they would begin the long project of the captain to colonize this world. Only a few held out, desired to return home - but even they had to stay for years longer, while the industrial effort proceeded to prepare the basis for the colonization of the planet, and when they time came, even they no longer felt the urge to return, to go back to Nires. They too had thrown their lot in with captain Suetemorp, with his dream to settle the world that they had named Dailli.
Nothing was ever heard on Nires from Captain Suetemorp nor his ship ever again.
Suetemorp was an odd man to be selected to lead the Jirakirai exploration project. He got it due to being ingratiated with the clan's leader, Urkrian, a distantly related - as far as that term could be applied to the Suesdyians, with their asexual reproduction, but his biological line had been closely associated with the clan leadership since time immemorial. He had undergone his naval training of course, and he had passed with flying colors, and nobody questioned his competence. But there But at the same time everything knew there was something off about him: his romantic obsession with the past, his study of the ancient languages, his obsession with the fragments of texts that survived from old Nires, from before it was destroyed, telling of life there. He had kept himself apart from the infighting and drawn knives that characterized politics among the Suesdyians, he had always been quiet, devoted to duty, but seemingly unambitious, frugal in his material life - and contemptuous of the age he lived in. And contemptuous of most of the people around him, although he tended to hide it well enough that only a few really understand the deep seated contempt with which he held them all.
But he had gotten the exploration project, calling in all of the favors that he had gotten and never requested a single return on for all of those years, showing that he understood the way the game was played despite his long abstention from it, despite the puzzlement of all that he knew about why he was so obsessed with the exploration program. And when the exploration ship had set off, his motives had seemed equally unclear: his reports were precise and clear, but lacked any emotion or hint of feeling, and he seemed like a robot, as his ship traveled across the stars, identifying asteroid belts for development, where colonization ships would travel eventually, following with loyalty and dedication ever initiative insisted upon by the Jirakirai clan.
It all seemed like such a non-descript, such an uninteresting, such a... boring story. But shadows lurked beneath the surface.
Another transition as the vessel transited out of hyperspace, like the... scores? hundreds? It was hard to remember now - of times that it had happened before. The excitement of the first few times, the first steps of the Suesdyians - and more importantly, the Jirakiraians - into the stars - had long since worn off. They had scoured dozens of light years of space, and here was the newest planet to explore.
The sensory information flooded in, and Suetemorp read the screen panels as the information flowed through, his hooded and sunken eyes peering at the data. The asteroid belt in this system was a poor one, they could already tell that, without any of the resources which would make effective colonization useful. It would be another wasted system, with nothing but a few gas giants, some rocky balls of stone grilled and baked by the sun, and a thoroughly uninteresting marble of blue and green.
His eyes lingered over the planetary information, as the buzz of the bridge washed over him, then he stood up, bringing the ship's intercorm mike closer. The crew stayed at their terminals, working still - eager to complete this project, eager to be onwards.
"Gentlemen, I have the pleasure to inform you that this will be our last stop. We have found our home at last, and our voyage shall continue no further. Now, all officers, report to the inner command bridge."
The steady tapping of claws and the sound of work halted, and the silence of the vacuum of space fell over the bridge as his words hammered out, and then a bubbling roar of voices clambered for attention
"Last st-"
"What d-"
"This is-"
"Imp-"
"Mad-"
"I said," he shouted, "OFFICERS TO THE INNER COMMAND BRIDGE." His voice cracked like a whip, and the silence fell again. One by one, the officers rose from their posts, and walked to the door to the inner bridge, looking at him warily as they passed. When they had all gone through the door, he followed them.
"What is the meaning of this, Captain?" His chief mate, Natin, drew himself up in bulk, frowning at his superior.
Suetemorp walked to the center of the room, and keyed a button on a holo project. A green-blue planetary holoprojection sprung up into the air.
"Natin, do your recognize this world?"
Natin looked puzzled, his eyes scrunching up, his teeth grinding in confusion. "The world we just saw?"
"No, that is this one." Suetemorp manipulated a holo control, and another planet sprung into the air next to the former, as the first shrunk in size to be only slightly larger than the newcomer. "Can you tell the difference between the two?"
The officers peered closely at the worlds. The patterns were different, the size slightly off, but it was hardly different.
Natin shook his head. "No, but what does this world of mud mean to us? What has addled you so deeply?"
Suetemorp gazed several seconds longer into the holo projection. Without turning around, he began to speak.
"Do you have any idea how many years it has been since our ancestors lost our own world and became one with the heavens? Only a few of our people have ever cared about such questions, so I don't blame you if you don't know. It has been some 23,453 ears since then. Tens of thousands of years where we have slowly, achingly, clawed our way back up to be truly Suesdyians, to be truly the masters of our own destiny. Our bodies have changed, have atrophied, our eyes shrunk - but deep inside you you remember. The Epic of the Dailli still speaks about it, still speaks about what it was like to live on a world where the earth was underfoot, where the was wind in the skies, to feel gravity, to be one with something else than a machine. Do you know the agony that one lives, to know of what might have been, the torture that rips through he who examines the past, and knows that a different road might have been traveled?"
He turned around. "It has been too long since the Suesdyians have walked earthly soil. At last, more than a score of millennia onwards, we have the possibility to do just that. The time has come to cease with the sterile colonization of asteroids, with the charting of mineral resources - to embark on something great. To embark on the renaissance of our species, to rediscover our destiny."
They stared at him. Seconds passed, with the aching silence having over the room, as the seconds transformed themselves into minutes, as the glow of the hologram cast its strange blueish green over them, their pasty furless skin turned to a sickly hue in the strange light.
The spectrometer officer, Sunaru, spoke first. "You are proposing," he said, the words coming out of his mouth, choked, "to colonize this planet?"
Suetemorp blinked his eyes in affirmation.
"You must truly be mad", said Sunaru. "Whatever gave you such a ridiculous notion."
"You have heard that already. I have been planning this for a long time. Nires does not know where we are - the reports which we have sent back have all had their location doctored by me. They think that we are many lightyears to the galactic north, and that we have had a very poor run of luck indeed concerning the resources that we have discovered."
The communications officer, Aiag, looked ashen, an expression of horror creeping over his face.
The sensory officer, Sueoc, jumped up. "This is all the more proof that you have been driven insane by these long years of travel across the heavens, that you must be relieved of your command, and returned to the Clan for punishment for dereliction of duty."
A few eyes blinked in support.
"Gentlemen, I can assure you that I am absolutely in command of my senses. Why do you think that I moved the stars themselves in order to become the commander of this expedition? In order to prepare for this moment. If you wish to admit that you have been under the command of a lunatic for this entire voyage, then do so, it is no concern of mine. What matters is that you listen. You stand, all of you, on the threshold of glory, of grandeur, of the immortality of your name. You may choose now to follow me, to establish upon this world a colony of the Suesdyians, to end this long and unnatural separation between our people and the air, the waves, and the soil, or you may go ignominiously into the long night of space, to never be remembered, to sail in the void between the stars to nothingness. Which is it to be?
Beady eyes stared back at him.
"Captain," said the engineering officer Supetal. "Even if your ideas had merit - and I for one, can hardly be convinced - you know as well as us that there is not the slightest possibility of us being able to support the gravity of this world. Initial spectrometer reports seem to indicate that it has an atmospheric mixture which would support us, but we have no idea of its food supplies nor of the biological life found upon it. This idea of yours is insane, and we have not the slightest idea of whether it will work out not.
Once again, blinking of enthusiasm.
Suetemorp moved his head up and down in humor. "You have always been a clever one Supetal. None of us would be here today if it wasn't for your actions off of XG-23, when you saved our engine when the fire started. Our bodies have changed certainly - changed in these thousands of years in space - but we have traveled the heavens for decades. Nires was destroyed in a day, certainly, but the Confederation was not built in one. I have prepared a colonization plan for this planet, in between my oft-remarked open excessive reading of the classics" - his head bobbed up and down with laughter - "and once you agree with my course of action I will give it to you. We will need time to settle this world, to acclimate to gravity on its moon, for our gene splicers to modify the bodies of our children for its life, for robotic exploration to traverse the planet. But it is, I can assure you possible.
Once more the eyes stared back at him. Then the life support officer, Noirepyh, piped up. "And what if we under no circumstances desire to take part in this scheme?"
"Then you will be free to leave, as soon as your memories of this have been wiped, and to return to Nires, with a suitable tale of the mad captain Suetemorp. The rest of us will remain here, and carve out a tale of grandeur the likes of which no clan has ever known, which shall illustrate a story of greatness in the heavens that shall last until the stars burn out."
In the end, after a long period of debate, conversation, and discussion, almost all of them agreed that they would stay, that they would begin the long project of the captain to colonize this world. Only a few held out, desired to return home - but even they had to stay for years longer, while the industrial effort proceeded to prepare the basis for the colonization of the planet, and when they time came, even they no longer felt the urge to return, to go back to Nires. They too had thrown their lot in with captain Suetemorp, with his dream to settle the world that they had named Dailli.
Nothing was ever heard on Nires from Captain Suetemorp nor his ship ever again.
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