DUALITY: The World of Lies (39 page)

Gahre stood and staggered. He looked about
dizzily, then turned turned to Indulu as if to speak and saw there
was a young girl beside him dressed like something out of a
storybook. But... he did not address either of them. Instead he
very quickly recast his eyes east to a stretch of astonishing
sights and wonders that held him immediately dumbstruck and
spellbound.

“Take it all in, blessed one. You've surely
earned this.” Indulu's voice barely registered to Gahre’s ears so
marveled were his eyes.

There were.... there were... machines just
hovering in the air high and low above the land. He saw a mirrored
building of many segments and stories, each bursting with greenery.
The floors terraced out like steps and the segments of the building
seemed to be turning and reshaping the entire structure. There were
geometrically perfect cones terraced with crops that stood spiking
up higher than he atop this great wall. Fields and fields of crops
in every configuration, enough food to feed the world! And large
long mechanical arms were running over them, spraying mists that
left rainbows in their wake. There were clusters of buildings
towering up hundreds of stories into the clouds interconnected by a
web of walkways: a shining silver city.

“The mirrored terraces move to make the most
efficient use of Cearulei's light upon the crops,” explained
Indulu. “Those taller buildings yonder are human
settlements.”

But Gahre's eyes had already affixed
themselves upon a singularly awestriking vision far to the south.
There was a red column that rose out of the ground and into clouds,
and then emerged through the top of them and continued to rise into
the clouds above them until it tapered away completely into the
uppermost heights of the sky. Elegantly vehicles were moving up and
down the length of it. It was as something he had imagined from the
old faerie tale of the boy and the beanstalk. He pointed to it, jaw
agape.

The little girl laughed and said something he
could not understand.

“Speak Pangean, child, and only when you're
meant to!” Indulu scolded her then answered Gahre's wonderment.
“That is a space elevator. It is used to transport the foodstuffs
beyond the atmosphere where there is no air and from there export
those goods to other worlds on flying ships.”

“A stairway to heaven?” asked
Gahre.

“Well, no, it's an elevator. You wouldn't want
to take the stairs, trust me. There are four more on that latitude
east over the horizon.”

The girl giggled at this. Gahre turned to
them. “Honored One, I don't even know what to say. It is ordered in
a way entirely unlike my world. There is not one speck of this land
that has not been tamed by these... machines.”

“You are as yet merely peering into this
rabbit hole, but welcome anyway to the Machine World.”

It was then he noticed the little girl was
playing with a slender tablet of some sort. She was staring into
and it was projecting sound out of itself:funny circus-like noises
and whistles and funny voices talking and fighting and singing
songs. Her attire was complex and colorful, made from fabrics that
did not wrinkle and held a bright distinct sheen, and she was
adorned with bracelets that emitted ever changing lights.
Everything about her was so ordered and perfectly in its place, and
he'd never seen a child look that clean. She was just
immaculate.

“Put that away!” Indulu demanded of the girl,
who obeyed at once. She could not have been more than 13. She stood
there, hand on hip, looking Gahre up and down with an impertinent
smirk on her face.

“You're a real Pangean man?” she
asked.

“I am, child.”

“You came across that eco-zone on foot?” she
asked, indicating the western side of the wall.

Gahre did not understand the term “eco-zone”
so Indulu answered for him. “Not only that, Gahre hiked over half
the span of the Pangea, including the desert.”

She shot him a challenging look. “But you
couldn't scale the height of this wall, could you?”

“I... I lost my pickhammer, and without it I
could not further ascend.”

“Pfffff,” she scoffed. “I could climb this
wall, easy. But I wouldn't. I'd just put on a levitation suit and
save myself the trouble.”

Indulu jumped back in. “Gahre, allow me to
introduce you to this little ball of sass, my apprentice,
Meimei.”

“Oh, please uncle!” She hit him not-so-lightly
in the arm.

Gahre asked Indulu in all sincerity something
he had been wondering himself all along. “Your apprentice, Honored
One? I had begun to think that it might be me who filled that
role.”

Indulu looked into him intently. “Then perhaps
you should be aiming higher, son of Danu.”

“This is Arath?” Gahre asked, pointing out
again over the eastern span.

“The westernmost nation of the Arathian
subcontinent is what you see before you, Agrigar, the breadbasket
of the Taiji. It extends many lengths beyond that horizon and
comprises nearly half of the subcontinent. It is, as you can see, a
land entirely devoted to farming. It feeds trillions.”

“Trillions? Taiji?” he asked, not
understanding the how a population could be counted by such a high,
theoretical number, and the context of the word “Taiji” which he
only associated with a symbol of those who followed The Great
Way.

The girl snickered.

Indulu ignored her and continued. “For every
one person on the Pangean side of the wall, there are 30,000 on
this side.” He grabbed the device Meimei had been playing with and
slid his fingers over it. A large bright picture manifested in the
air, showing more silver buildings and flying machines in greater
concentrations, and the image flew through and around them
revealing a cityscape that scraped the sky.

Gahre jumped back at the sight of the magic
vision in fear it. “Sorcery!” he exclaimed.

The girl started to laugh and laugh. She
stepped up to the hovering picture and ran her arm through it.
“It's a computerized display projected through a holograph. It's
called a toody! What, you've never seen one?”

“Meimei!” insisted Indulu. “You know he is
Pangean and has never known the like of our technology. Try to
imagine that if you even can.”

“I know Uncle, but look at him all scared of
it like some kind of caveman! How am I supposed to help but
laugh?”

“Excuse her,” said Indulu “She can be
downright insolent at times. This is a... light picture showing you
the nation states beyond this realm of Agrigar. It is also
generated by machines, electrical thinking machines, called
computers.”

“I see, Honored One. I understand... a little.
This technology is more fantastical than I have ever dreamed. The
child, she is Arathian then? I must be as much an oddity to her as
she is to me.”

“Uncle Indulu is the one who is Arathian!”
Meimei burst in. “I was born here, but my parents and grandparents
are Pangean, like you. So it is my blood, even though Uncle would
probably rather die than ever allow me over this wall. Why, Uncle?
Why are you letting this museum-exhibit-come-to-life cross over to
our side, but I can't go onto his?”

“The wall was not designed to keep Pangeans
like Gahre here out of Arath. The geography does that well enough.
It's here precisely to keep the likes of you from meddling with
their world. So enjoy the glimpse, child, and just be grateful you
got to see that much of it.”

“Hrrmmph! Whatever,” she crossed her arms and
pouted.

“Excuse me, Honored One, you are
Arathian?”

“Yes, my boy. Born and raised here, one of the
fortunate few who get recruited into The Service.... or The Order
as you know it, from this side of the wall. I have a family here, a
wife and two sons, one about your age.”

That was another revelation. The Indulu of the
Pangea was thought to be a celibate priest of the Dharmaists with
no family at all.

“So The Order reaches across both sides of the
world then?”

“Well, it's not that simple. Just like the
Pangea, the Arathian nations have their own governments, but they
are not overseen by The Order as the Pangean nations are. There is
another multinational governing body which presides over them, The
Arathian Council.”

“But it is you who presides over The Order and
the Pangean realms? And there is another ruler for
Arath?”

“Well... there is no 'ruler' per se...” Indulu
seemed flummoxed.

“Uncle, don't confuse him with your silly
modesty,” Meimei interrupted. “Uncle Indulu rules the entire planet
of Occitania, both sides of this wall, and everything Cearulei Azur
shines upon.”

“I wouldn't use the term “rules”, child. It's
fair bit more kaleidoscopic than that. A better phrase might be
“chaos management.””

“Honored One, are you an emperor?”

Indulu laughed. “No. Nor am I the true
sovereign of Occitania. All this worldly power I wield was granted
to me by the One True Master. Gahre, if I might relate to you a
tale? And Meimei child, you'd do well listen to it
also.”

“Please, Honored One.”

“The Taiji... that is name of our star system,
Cearulei and Rubeli in their ancient oppositions. There was a time,
in ages long past, when the Taiji was unified under the providence
of a single government and single leader, The Emperor
Wu.”

Meimei clapped excitedly at the invocation of
the name. “That is my ancestor!” she declared.

Indulu nodded and continued. “That was a
golden age of enlightenment in the Taiji, an age of peace and
prosperity, great works and discoveries, art and literature. But
like all great ages, it came to its end, with his death and the
subsequent rise of the dynasty of Emperor Mandu.”

“Booooo!” hissed Meimei.

Indulu loudly cleared his throat. “My
ancestor. Mandu reigned from the old throne, The Emperor's Stones
that orbit Ignis Rubeli, and favored that star above ours. He
imposed oppressive policies on this world and sought to modernize
the Pangea, which is precious beyond all measure to every Blue. So
we revolted, and a rift formed between the stars. We declared our
independence from the Empire, and we formed our own world
government, the seeds of the ones we have today. Seeing his empire
divided, Mandu sought vengeance and that vengeance turned to war
between the Red and the Blue in the last century of his reign. The
War of Endless Sorrows was the darkest age in our histories. It
went on and on, decade after decade, seemingly without end. Mandu
dictated that the Rubelians procreate more and more so that he
might raise from them an invasion force to overwhelm this planet.
Their populations rapidly swelled to the point that their
homeworld, Calidon, could no longer accommodate the exploding mass
of humanity. So they built Carousels, human habitats in space from
every asteroid and comet they could find in or around the Taiji,
and stuffed them there. Being a far less fertile world than
Occitania, Calidon could no longer produce the agricultural output
to provide for these great masses. They built farms in space, but
to mixed results, with high rates of disease, and generally low
yields -problems that persist to this day.”

“Rubelian food is disgusting.” added Meimei.
“They eat sea slugs raw in vinegar, and weird meats and the tails
and heads of things. They love the taste of mold and yeast! It's
enough to make one vomit.”

“I consume worse, little one, and often,”
Gahre told her. “Just the other day I stewed the entrails of a
possum and ate them with black river fungus.”

“Blechh!” Meimei feigned nausea holding her
stomach and sticking out her tongue.

Indulu went on. “Those days gave birth to men
of renown, an ascending new order of masters. On this world, it was
a man named Kol Kong, born here in the east to a lowly family in
that age of war. He burst from the shackles of his caste by way of
his genius, and rose to prominence in every field he touched. First
he was impressed into the Occitanian Planetary Defense League, now
known as The Service, and trained as an officer of electrical
engineering. The technologies he developed quickly turned the tide
of the war until the homeworld was free from the long cycle of
Rubelian raids and assaults. By then most crop exports had ceased,
contributing to horrific famines in the Carousels. The war between
Red and Blue still lingered on in space, while internal struggles
filled the void of violence on the homeworlds. The deprivation and
discontent of the Rubelians boiled over into a full-fledged
uprising, and the military junta that controlled Occitania by the
war’s end ruled with an iron fist over a caste system of
intolerable disparity. Kol Kong forsook the governing body and
turned his talents to the aid of the resistance while a cyborg by
the name of Valecot Diem led the revolt against Emperor Mandu and
his reign of tyranny on the other side of the Taiji.”

“He is in this time known as Logos,” added
Meimei.

“He is,” agreed Indulu. “Gahre here knows
something of Logos by now. But before he usurped the Rubelian
throne, at the dawning of both stars' rebellions, Diem and Kong
reached out to one another in agreement that they in fact both
fought the same enemy, not a star or any political philosophy, but
that of the will-to-power's use of repression and their insatiable
appetite for dominion over humans. So the rebellions did what the
governing bodies of both stars could not, they allied. Once that
happened, the tides of war favored the new order until it came to
be that the seat of Mandu in the Black Stone was taken by force and
Diem was crowned the new Emperor. Kol Kong, however, was not a
prominent leader. He was one who preferred to rule from the shadows
and give others the light. New democratic governments were formed
and brought together in the Arathian council, with the common
understanding that a unified Occitania was the best defense against
any future incursions by the Reds. Kol Kong had made his name in
war, but he was at heart a humanist, and a devotee of the Great
Way. He negotiated an unpopular program in his dealings with Diem,
but one he was morally compelled to nonetheless.