Dawn (2 page)

It cannot be doubted that this man—who as Emperor Rudolf I of the Galactic Empire had become the first absolute monarch of the political system uniting all humanity—was possessed of extraordinary talents. With the boundless strength of his political leadership and the fortitude of his will, he enforced discipline, improved the efficiency of government, and purged corrupt officials.

This was all according to standards which Rudolf set himself, but the “vulgar, decadent, fallen, and unhealthy” way of life and entertainment vanished, and the rates of crime and juvenile delinquency plummeted in the face of severe—even cruel—judicial activism. In any case, the evil that had enshrouded human society was blown away.

And yet, the “Steel Giant” (as some liked to refer to Rudolf) was still not satisfied. His idealized society was one with a high degree of unity, regulated and managed in an orderly fashion by powerful leaders.

For Rudolf—who relied greatly on himself and had utmost faith in the justice that he himself executed—critics and opponents were nothing but foreign contaminants disrupting the unity and order of society. As a natural consequence, the cruel suppression of opposition forces began.

In Year 9 of the imperial calendar, this created the opportunity for the Genetic Inferiority Elimination Act to be promulgated.

The strong consume the weak! The fittest survive! Excellence is victorious while inferiority is defeated! This is the providence of the universe!

So Rudolf expressed his beliefs to his “subjects.”

Human society is no exception. When the number of aberrations exceeds a critical mass, society loses its vitality and declines into weakness. My ardent desire is for humanity’s everlasting prosperity. Therefore, the elimination of those elements that would weaken humanity as a species is my holy obligation as ruler of humanity.

Specifically, this meant forced sterilization for the physically handicapped, those below the poverty line, and those who “did not excel.” It meant euthanasia for the mentally handicapped. It meant that societal measures for the support of the weak were all but eliminated.

For Rudolf, weakness was the unforgivable sin, and the weaker members of society who “use their weakness as a shield, then demand to be taken care of” were nothing more than objects of his hatred.

When this bill was shown to the people, even the throngs that had thus far worshipped and followed Rudolf blindly were ashamed of themselves, as might be expected. The number of those who could confidently declare themselves to be superior beings was not so great. Everyone was thinking,
Isn’t this a little too high-handed?

Politicians of the all-but-vanished republican faction still hung on in parliament, and they gave voice to the will of the people, lambasting the emperor. To this, the emperor determined to make a decisive counterstrike.

He immediately and permanently dissolved the parliament.

The following year, the imperial Ministry of the Interior created the Bureau for the Maintenance of Public Order, which came to wield fierce power against political crime. Ernst Falstrong, who was Minister of the Interior as well as a close associate of Rudolf’s, ran the bureau himself, arresting, incarcerating, imprisoning, and punishing—not according to law, but according to his own judgment.

Such was the unholy matrimony of authority and violence. These two soon gave birth to the infant known as “state terrorism,” which grew in no time to be a giant that engulfed all of human society.

At that time, a blackly humorous joke was making the rounds: “If you don’t want to be executed, don’t get arrested by the police. Get yourself caught by Public Order instead, because they don’t execute anybody!”

It is a fact that of all those whom the bureau arrested for political and thought crimes, not a single one was ever formally executed. However, those who were shot dead without trial, who died under torture, who were “disappeared” to barren penal asteroids, who were left disabled by lobotomies or massive doses of drugs, who died in prison of “illnesses” or “accidents” … the combined tally of these climbed to four billion. But because this number was only 1.3 percent of the Galactic Empire’s total population of three hundred billion, the bureau was able to spuriously claim, “We have eliminated a handful of dangerous elements for the sake of the absolute majority.”

Of course, that “absolute majority” did not include the four billion who shuddered in fear for their fates or the countless others who swallowed their objections amid the oppressive silence.

Rudolf crushed those who opposed him, and at the same time selected and granted special privileges to certain “people of superior ability,” creating an aristocracy to support the imperial family. But was it a sign of the inferiority of Rudolf’s own knowledge that all of them were white people who bore old Germanic family names?

Based on his strong service record, Falstrong also received the title of count, but on his way home he ran into a terror attack carried out by an underground republican group. In the flash of a neutron bomb, he met a tragic end. Rudolf mourned, and with the execution of twenty thousand suspects, he sought to comfort the soul of one who had served him well.

In the forty-second year of the imperial calendar, Rudolf’s life of eighty-three years came to an end. It was said that his huge frame had been stronger than ever, but psychological distress had cast a heavy burden on his heart.

The emperor did not die in full satisfaction. Of the four children he and his empress Elizabeth had, all were girls, and he was left without a male heir. Late in life, his concubine Magdalena gave birth to a baby boy, but it is said that the child was born an idiot.

Of this episode, the public records of the empire are silent, but we may surmise that the rumors circulating at the time were almost certainly true, because not just Magdalena, but also her parents, her siblings, and even the doctors and nurses who had attended her birth were afterward all put to death.

It must have come as a stinging blow for Rudolf, who had promulgated the Genetic Inferiority Elimination Act and sought the development of a superior form of humanity.

For Rudolf, the gene decided everything, and to prevent the collapse of his belief system, Magdalena had had to die. It simply could not be that Emperor Rudolf had a genetic makeup that produced retardation. The fault had to lie completely with Magdalena.

After the death of Rudolf, the imperial crown of the Galactic Empire came to rest upon the head of Sigismund, eldest son of Rudolf’s eldest daughter, Katharina. And so at the age of twenty-five, with the assistance of his father Joachim, Lord of Neue-Staufen, this young emperor came to rule the galaxy.

With the death of Rudolf I, republican rebellions erupted in every quarter. It was believed that with the loss of Rudolf’s leadership and fierce personality, the empire would soon crumble; however, that kind of thinking was too optimistic. The aristocrats, military leaders, and bureaucrats that Rudolf had been nourishing at his side for the past forty years made up a troika far stronger than the republicans’ hopeful estimation.

These forces were led by Lord Joachim of Neue-Staufen, who was both the emperor’s father and prime minister. Displaying the composed, cool leadership that might be expected of a man chosen by Rudolf as groom for his daughter, Joachim crushed the weaker forces of insurrection as though they were eggshells beneath his heel.

More than five hundred million who had participated in the uprisings were killed, and of their families more than ten billion had their citizenship revoked and were thrown into serfdom. “In the suppression of opposing forces, be unsparing,” said the imperial regulations, and they were followed to the letter.

The forces of republicanism were once again made to endure a long winter.

In the face of such powerful dictators, it was thought that this harsh winter would stretch on forever. After Joachim’s death, Sigismund ruled directly. And after his death, Sigismund was succeeded by his eldest son Richard, who was in turn succeeded by his own eldest, Ottfried. The highest position of authority passed only to the descendants of Rudolf, and it looked as if heredity was the only thing that could determine the transition of power.

However, deep beneath the thick ice, a watery convection current was silently moving.

In IC 164, the republicans of the Altair system—who had been denounced as a rebel clan, reduced to slave status, and set to hard labor—succeeded in escaping, using a spaceship they had constructed themselves.

Their plan was not like the ones that their forebears had been carefully refining for generations. The number of such plans that had been proposed was equal to the number that had ended in failure. The grave markers of republicans had only increased, and in place of elegies, only the cruel laughter of the Bureau for the Maintenance of Public Order resounded among the graveyards. It was a cycle that had repeated itself endlessly. Yet finally, there was success. And from conception to execution, it had only taken three standard months.

It had literally begun as child’s play. A child of two slaves who were mining molybdenum and antimony in the cruel cold of Altair 7 had dodged out of the sight of his overseers and was playing at carving small boats from the ice, which he then floated out onto the water. A young man named Ahle Heinessen had been watching him absently, and this image reverberated in the back of his mind like a divine revelation. Wasn’t this lonely planet, after all, a bottomless storehouse of shipbuilding materials?

On the seventh planet, the overall amount of water was not so great; it abounded more in natural dry ice than in frozen water. Heinessen chose a gargantuan mass of dry ice that was entirely buried in a certain valley. Its dimensions were 122 kilometers in length, forty kilometers in width, and thirty kilometers in height. After hollowing out the center, he made a propulsion area and a living area, and soon it began to look like it could fly. The most difficult part of the plan was the question of how to get materials to actually build a spaceship. It was no good trying to obtain materials illegally, for if the Bureau for the Maintenance of Public Order got wind of it, they would simply arrest and slaughter everyone involved.

However, this world also had natural resources that would not draw the bureau’s attention. In the absolute zero cold of outer space, there was no fear of dry ice sublimating into gas. If they could just isolate the heat that would be generated by the propulsion and living areas, a considerably long-term flight would be possible. During that time, they could search asteroids and uninhabited planets for the materials needed to build an interstellar spaceship. There was no need to keep flying in the same ship in which they had departed.

And so their glittering white spaceship of dry ice was christened the
Ion Fazegas,
named after the boy who had made that toy boat out of ice. Four hundred thousand men and women entered that vessel and escaped from the Altair system. This was the first step on a journey that historians would later dub the Long March of 10,000 Light-Years.

After shaking off the ruthless pursuit of the Galactic Empire’s military, they hid themselves beneath the surface of a nameless planet and there constructed eighty interstellar spacecraft. Then they set out into the inner core of the galaxy. Here the escapees faced an immensity brimming with deadly giant stars, dwarfs, and variables. Here the ill will of the Creator crashed down on their heads time and time again.

In the midst of this journey of hardship, they lost their leader Heinessen to an accident. His dear friend Kim Hua Nguyen took over as leader. By the time this man grew old and his eyesight faded, they at last passed out of the dangerous regions and found their future in a stable cluster of main sequence stars. More than half a century had passed since they had left Altair.

To the stars of their new world they gave the names of the gods of ancient Phoenicia: Baalat, Astarte, Melqart, Hadad, and others. They made their base on the fourth planet from Baalat, to which they gave the name of their fallen leader Heinessen, that his deeds might be forever honored.

The conclusion of the Long March of 10,000 Light-Years occurred in IC 218, but these people—who had escaped the yoke of the dictatorship—chose to abolish the imperial calendar and revive the SE calendar instead. In this, they prided themselves that it was they who were the rightful heirs of the Galactic Federation. Rudolf and his ilk were nothing more than contemptible traitors to democratic rule.

In this manner, the establishment of the Free Planets Alliance was solemnly declared. It took place in SE 527. The first generation of its citizens numbered around 160,000. More than half of their comrades had perished during the Long March.