Autarchy

By Grant Winston

Autarchy is a cross-genre work of soft science fiction and political fiction. The setting is a planetary-lunar nation state in the Laniakea Supercluster, formed by the planet Curmis, and its two orbiting moons, Ghelinis and Vorbishte. The three together form the Democratic Triumvirate, a free and open society that has been sinking into cultural despair, leading it into a crisis with an authoritarian dictator whose goal is to replace the democracy with an autarchy.
The novel is told in the narrative of a young man, Hempstead Patrick, through his letters, as he describes the efforts of his heroic journalist sister, Boudicca, with additional comments from Hempstead's criminal defense advokat. The novel chronicles how democracy can tragically slip away easier than we care to think, even now, even here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543964554

Book preview

Autarchy

Preface to the Reader:

What follows are the letters of a condemned man I knew and last saw nearly six months ago after he was led away to his jail cell to await execution. His name is Hempstead Patrick. I was his criminal defense advokat. During the time of his show trial he would write the letters on paper I would bring to his cell, sometimes dashing off two in a day, and occasionally on my device while sitting in the High Court room. There was, as you will come to understand from reading what follows, little for us to do in preparation for his trial. He would commend the letters to my possession and I would smuggle them out with me after each visit, past the besotted dullards wearing prison uniforms. He entrusted the letters to me with the promise that I would see to their publication once I was safely away from the dead Democratic Triumvirate. I fulfill that promise here, along with my added narration of background to you, the reader, that I have been able to include based on my own personal observations when I was on Curmis, my own research, and from contemporaneous information provided to me by my courageous contacts who are still on that forsaken planet and its two moons, or living, as I am, as a refugee. Some of those contacts are still alive, some are now dead of mysterious causes or have been disappeared, or executed, in the first momentum following the election of President Colander. A few such as myself were fortunate to escape the rapidly closing vise grip of the new regime. My additions to Hemp’s letters are accurate and true, true in the classical sense of that word, a sense which had become disused, no longer understood or credited by hardly anyone alive at the time and where these events occurred. My words are italicized throughout. Knowing Hemp as I did, I believe he would approve my contributions as additional supporting context to his personal story, as well as my preface and postscript as a final narration he was, for reasons you will read, unable to write himself.

As I just mentioned, I am no longer on Curmis or either of its two offspring moons, and never again shall be. I fled for my own life shortly after Colander assumed the presidency, as from that point on advokats, especially those for the accused and dissenters, or civil rights in general, had become objects of persecution along with all the other people who were, or who were merely suspected of being, supporters of a free and open society, one with a rational humane and tolerant view of humankind, one dedicated to free thought, and hospitable to science, which is to say all resisters of the regime. I now reside safely on a planet or moon I choose not to name.

Hempstead is, or was, a remarkable person; intelligent, affable, and possessed of a wisdom beyond his years, albeit yet in the process of outgrowing a youthful naivete. I first tried to defend Hemp, and then tried every legal delaying tactic in the book and invented a few new ones to prolong Hemp’s life once I became aware it was forfeit, and in doing so gave him another couple of months or so of life which he used to write his story. But in doing so I fear I bought time for my client by exposing procedural loopholes in the legal processes that the dictatorship promptly closed. If Hemp were tried on the same charges today, he would have lived, perhaps, three days from arrest to execution. But I knew the verdict and sentence of death were preordained soon after the nascent dictatorship decided to have Hemp arrested. His execution, barbaric in its particulars, was scheduled to begin within hours after I last saw him, and to certainly occur relatively soon thereafter. Only its exact location no one would ever know with any certainty. But dead he is, most certainly. He was 24-years-old when we shook hands in the courtroom, a moment before he turned and walked away from me for the last time. I am quite sure he will be 24-years-old forevermore.

Theodoric Eonizon, former advokat, D.T.

Hempstead’s

First Letter

Despair was the mother of the people’s desperation, and once they became desperate the people’s critical thinking stopped. And many of the people of my home moon Ghelinis were hurting and no one was helping them, not even hearing them it seemed. Years of disappointment had eroded hope, and the people despaired, and became desperate, and individual after individual, voter after voter, totaling in the thousands, and then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and millions, first became demoralized and disaffected, and then turned against all those in the National and Provincial Assemblies, and the presidents, who had done nothing to help them, and then they turned to him, the outsider, who had never been a part of any body politic, and who convinced them that only he could hear and had the strength to help. No one, no political party that should have helped, that had promised to help, had helped. So the millions thought: Why not he? The others had done nothing for anyone besides the relative few who had placed them into office, and continuing to do nothing more than doing nothing came to be expected from those in office. And when the strong man came along the people of Ghelinis began to suppose that perhaps he would, perhaps he could. And the people fell in line behind him.

But my older sister Boudicca, she was killed in all of this, was not fooled by him for a minute. She told me early on, Hemp, if this man and his small group of followers ever gain power it will be too late. They will stop at nothing. Boudie made sense, she always did, and not only because she was my big sister by 12 years. But practically everyone on Ghelinis, and millions of others on our planet Curmis and sister moon Vorbishte as well, minus the few thousand of the uber wealthy, were hurting, and had heard years of promises from the two powerful political parties.

The Triumvirate Revivalist Party, the TRP, we knew had to lie and legislatively undermine a democracy if they hoped to win elections, because the majority of the people in our Democratic Triumvirate stubbornly held to the notion that in a land where there was enough for everyone no one should have nothing, that no one should die from not having enough coin to live, and that was a notion the TRP detested. Poverty was a choice, was the TRP conclusion, or at any rate a condition beyond the responsibility of government to alleviate. But the TRP majority had been effective with their demagoguery and distractions. Once empowered, the TRP passed into law measures they gave nice-sounding names, but measures that would nonetheless bring about ends that would hurt the very people they said would be helped, but did not intend to help, which included almost everyone.

While some knew the TRP legislation were lies, even nonsense on their face, promises made to us from the other, more racially and gender diverse group, the Popular Uplift Party, were promises of the opposite kind, and promises that we had hoped and hoped year following year were given in all sincerity, election after election. But the PUP, effete even in victory, never really fought as hard as they could to make their promises come true. Members of that party who promised to help the rest of us who were not wealthy were afraid of themselves, we found out. They were afraid to fight for their own promises because they were afraid of their own promises. Pups lived in abject fear of losing votes, any votes, from the roles of eligible voters who still bothered to vote. And so, like a child who gives herself nightmares from telling ghost stories to her little friends, or a little boy who after bragging about how he can jump all the way across the creek, thinks of some reason to excuse himself from even making the attempt, the PUP quailed and slunk away from any meaningful encounter in the political arena.

And that’s where it lay when he came on the scene. The Pups would run from their promises, make excuses for losing without even fighting, while the Treps continued in power and all wealth concentrated in the hands of the few. The Treps holding the power would never ease our plight, and the Pups’ platform that could help us would never be implemented even with Pups in power.

There was where hope ended and despair began. Poor people grew by the tens of thousands every year, their ranks being increased by former members of the middle class who had slid into poverty. Those in poverty had slid into food insecurity, malnutrition and near starvation, and the dwindling numbers of people who were still above water, including my family, were just hanging on for another day. And people became desperate. People needed someone who would fight for them, someone outside of the TRP and PUP, for none among them would ever care or really try. Voting on Ghelinis, where my family lived, declined to around one third of all those eligible. Morale had sunk into an abyss where truth did not exist; where all we heard with our own ears and saw with our own eyes could be a lie, and anything seemed possible.

Then he came along. They killed Boudicca. And now they’re going to kill me.

Nota Bene

A little background concerning Hempstead Patrick’s home, Ghelinis, might allow you, dear reader, a deeper appreciation of the peculiar conditions and forces that combined to mark the deliberate end of his, his sister’s, thousands more, and the Democratic Triumvirate’s life. There will be other passages in Hemp’s letters that are naturally less explicit being written by a young man circumstanced as Hemp was, and while I have not changed or omitted a single word of Hemp’s, I have occasionally given description of his actions and added to his spoken words as I experienced and heard them first hand, or from sources whose reliability I consider beyond question, and offered explanatory notes as a reader’s aide.

Ghelinis is one of the two moons orbiting the planet Curmis, the other moon being Vorbishte. All three bodies are inhabited by indigenous life forms and humans who are descended from the first pioneers and early immigrants, and the three together are, or were until recently, the members of the nation-state named the Democratic Triumvirate, which orbits its host star, ZR7177, in a small galaxy of the Laniakea Supercluster.

Ghelinis and Vorbishte are horseshoe co-orbital moons, sharing their orbits around planet Curmis. I’m ignorant of why the astrophysicists use the term horseshoe. I think I remember hearing from someone that horse is some kind of extinct life form from another planet, perhaps old Earth, but I can’t say for sure. I think people who lived contemporaneously with these horses thought they were noble or elegant, which might explain why the horses were given shoes to wear. I don’t know if horses were adorned with other articles of clothing. Howsoever that may have been, I do know basically what horseshoe co-orbitals do. Ghelinis and Vorbishte hold their orbits at the same mean distance from Curmis. For the past four years Vorbishte’s orbit was slightly closer than Ghelinis’s to Curmis, giving it a shorter orbital period. That being so, for the past four years, Vorbishte, which has been trailing behind Ghelinis, has been slowly catching up to Ghelinis. They were so close at the time of the events chronicled by Hemp that their masses were exerting gravitational pull on each other, and thereby exchanging angular momentum. The pull from Vorbishte on Ghelinis had reduced Ghelinis’s orbital velocity, causing it to fall toward Curmis in its orbit, while the gravitational pull exerted by Ghelinis on Vorbishte, had been causing Vorbishte to speed up, and therefore move farther away from Curmis. Now, they have traded places and it is Ghelinis on the shorter, inside track, meaning in four more years Ghelinis will have overtaken Vorbishte, and they will repeat this minuet in reverse, swapping their orbital positions again. They trade places every four years while gracefully avoiding collision. And it is no coincidence that the two moons reached each other to trade places at the same time as the DT presidential and assembly campaigns and elections were in full swing. That was by design. The DT elected a president by four-year terms to coincide with the moons’ close dance so that it would be faster and more economical for the campaigns to travel to both moons on the same trip, as opposed to wasting time on travel that would be required to visit first one moon and then the other 180 degrees on the other side of Curmis.

But Curmis and Vorbishte are wealthy. Curmis has prodigious amounts of metals valued throughout the neighboring stellar region for their civil and military uses, including space travel. On Curmis can also be found abundant deposits of gold, silver, diamonds, and other precious, and semi-precious stones, particularly in its southern regions. It is with the wealth of Curmis and Vorbishte that the Democratic Triumvirate has erected the base of its economic success which thrives on interplanetary trade. The DT had not until recently even tended to isolationism, and had allowed and even promoted some moderate amount of international commerce with other planets and moons. Its present-day choices are much different.

Ghelinis, the most densely populated of the troika, on the other hand is breathtakingly beautiful, but mostly poor. It has some limited fresh water and rainfall, one sizable amount of arable land near a broad, verdant delta that can be cultivated if one can overcome the challenges of its poor nutrients. But most of life’s necessities on Ghelinis must be imported from Curmis.

Ghelinis has rugged mountain ranges that are the tallest by far of any in the Democratic Triumvirate, known as the Brittle Spike Mountains. Deposits of a highly reflective type of quartz, some bismuth, and multi-hued kalobis jasper lie on the surface of the mountains and in its substrata. The surface deposits catch the starlight perpetually shining on the Ghelinisan mountains from ZR7177 and reflect it in iridescent hues of oranges, yellows, reds, and browns. This beautiful little moon can also claim the second-largest fresh water lake in the triumvirate; Lake Nicazos which is fed by the innumerable middling rivers pouring down from the higher elevations thence to just below the foothills and gently emptying into the lake, and the lake in turn empties the water on its way across the delta where the inhabitants grow some small measure of the food consumed on Ghelinis.

Ghelinis, in contrast to the other two members of the DT, has no deposits of precious metals or stones; no platinum, no gold, etc., nothing to recommend itself to the interplanetary markets, except its natural beauty. There is a public university on the moon, and, until recently, an extensive tourism and hospitality industry. There are also a few, small military installations, including one orbital sub-command. But there are no high paying jobs, and the millions of humans who stay on Ghelinis eke out a modest living from the menial employment opportunities, or scavenge the land for materials to craft little trinkets to peddle to tourists outside of the resorts or the moon’s provincial capitol, the Hall of Iridescence. Or, they can try to survive as a crop worker in the delta, which is the most unattractive option among all the unattractive options. Unemployment and poverty are high, and highest by far among all three members of the DT.

Ghelinis also has the additional demerit of a native bacterium known as a Corynebacterium lassitudinum that lives in the soil and has a pathogenic effect in humans. C. lassitudinum produces a disease, commonly called the languor. It is nearly impossible to eradicate once introduced into the unprotected body. The bacterium is carried into humans when its ground habitat is disturbed, usually by farming, and becomes airborne. Humans then inhale the bacterium and contract the disease. Within a day or two, sometimes within hours, the victim lies in bed, lethargic, passive, unable to move more than to turn in bed or go to the bathroom with assistance. Mostly the victim sleeps in a nearly constant stupor, waking occasionally to take nourishment. The languor itself is not fatal but in its advanced stages can lead to complications resulting in death.

Efforts to completely eradicate the bacterium have proven less than satisfactory. The bacterium can adapt rapidly and it can be only partially controlled or managed by careful efforts not to stir up the ground, especially on windy days, which becomes impracticable during planting and harvest times. Prevention can be had by the use of an individual air filter worn over the mouth and nose for breathing outdoors. Most buildings, other than the hovels inhabited by the agricultural workers, are equipped with central filtration systems, obviating need of the individual breathing filter while indoors.

There is, I must add, a species native to Ghelinis that evolved a natural, genetic immunity to the bacterium, the oltioyoqli beast. It is a six-legged animal, about the size of an average adult Vorbishte warragin. The oltioyoqli beast has a layer of green scales on its upper back and neck and a row of short, pointy protuberances running up and down the middle of those. The oltioyoqli beast was envied for its immunity to C. lassitudinum, and so modern science stepped in. The scientists found what was in the beast’s genomic make-up that provided the immunity, and through advanced gene editing technology were able to successfully transfer that small portion of the genome into humans, giving them immunity to C. lassitudinum as well. There were two procedures for doing this; editing of somatic cells which would give the human, but not it’s offspring, the genetic immunity to C. lassitudinum, and germline editing of a human couple’s embryos, which would immunize the children born of the embryos and their offspring too. In many instances the humans would opt for both treatments and enjoy the success of immunity from the languor for themselves and their descendants.

Forgive me, I must qualify my use of the word successful, for while the transgenic humans were indeed immune to the bacterium, in several cases the transgenics grew a few of their own oltioyoqli-like scales and spikes on their own back’s upper