George returned shortly, and Fortis gave him a digest of the conversation.
George closed his eyes, hugging himself, dropping his chin against his chest. After a few moments, he opened his eyes, moved his hands together and clasped them in front of his face, resting his nose on the tips of his fingers, his chin on his thumbs. Finally, dropping his hands, he spoke. “I don’t know which is more disturbing — that he would be lying to you on purpose, or actually believe any part of what he said.”
George paced back and forth across the room slowly. “Given his actions, it seems most probable he believes it. It’s hard to act with such desperation for a lie. This means I was right to warn the runner of that little visit. I wager our ranger friend will attempt flying to the pole right away. I can’t warn Bradley, because the messenger birds can’t get there any faster than a skilled human on a glider. We’ll have to trust God on this one.”
George sat down on his bedroll, leaned back and gazed at the dark ceiling. There was a feeble lantern for each of them standing on the floor, standard lighting on Misty anywhere glow patches weren’t feasible. Fortis sank down onto his own, but crossed his legs and leaned forward on his elbows. The muscles in his back and legs complained but he hardly noticed.
“Perhaps I can untangle this for you.” He sighed, then began. “Our founders back on Terra made a covenant. We still have it today, as a fundamental part of our laws. Not so much for what it says directly, but what it conveys. The covenant recognized not everyone would be able to embrace mysticism or faith in God. But it assumes those are essential to discerning how we should live. It becomes necessary to vest someone with power to keep things together under faith and mysticism, and to provide certain unalterable principles. People who, for whatever reason, lack faith and insight must have something they can cling to in order to remain among us. We do our best to teach the higher meaning, but we back it up by laws which no man can mistake.
“Throughout human history, every system breaks down, sooner or later. What we do here is preserve the context in which law is most likely to succeed, that it will work as well as it can. That context is this our enforced primitive culture and lifestyle you see. We make it a matter of religion first, then culture, but finally it has to be enforced.
“We accepted the peculiar qualities of Misty as God’s way of saying He supported that commitment by bring us to a place where it is easier to enforce. A very significant part of that commitment is, aside from our tweaking the gene pool of flora and fauna through entirely natural means of selective breeding, should the entire population of Misty disappear, future visitors would have little idea who or what was here. It would be virtually unspoiled. That’s our commitment to letting God recycle this planet for the next inhabitants, should He so choose. We are committed to consciously maximizing His freedom to act in our lives, and in the lives of others.
“Those of us who study that covenant, and commit ourselves to keep it alive have already committed ourselves to die sacrificially. But not just individually, we are willing to lose the entire planet at God’s behest. Yes, we presume to make that decision for everyone here, because that’s what brought us here, and what has made everything we have, and is only reason we have for continuing to exist. There is nothing we can do with our hands worth saving, if we do not portray that sacrificial love which took God’s Son to the Cross.”
George rose to his feet again. “We have had those chemical explosive weapons. The ammunition for them does not store well on Misty. For the high cost of getting them, we ended up with useless weapons requiring constant resupply at very high expense, because every shipment degraded within a few months. Gauss weapons, at least, continue to work. Again, the cost is exceedingly high, and we reserved their use to rangers, simply because anywhere they go, numerical advantage will never be theirs. That’s the nature of their role. That we could have a captain spout such nonsense shows his training is broken in the area of law.”
Fortis interjected, “Or that someone has seduced them to another way of thinking.”
“Yes. But there is almost nothing we can do about that. All humanity is broken, damaged in some way. Those of us who are granted higher faculties realize we are trapped between two worlds. There can be only one reason for struggling here to keep things together — it’s still a useful tool for pointing to that higher plane of existence. If we discover any part of this stops working, we discard it immediately. Things have changed since our landing on this planet. Some parts of our charter have been loosened, and other things added or tightened. The mechanism cannot be eternal, but the higher purpose is never anything less. We fix what we can and trust God for the rest.”
Fortis shifted to relieve the tense muscles. “So in the end, our ranger captain is left to figure it out for himself. You could easily have killed him back there in the forest.”
George smiled. “I told the boys to miss, and they shot well. The man’s perceptions are his own worst enemy, his own prison. Tell me, what would happen if he boarded your space craft before it left?”
Fortis didn’t hesitate. “Without evidence someone in authority approved his use of the ship, he’d be a stowaway. He’d be arrested by men and women using energy weapons, immobilized in a stasis field. Very humane and painless, but unfailingly effective.”
George tilted his head to one side. “So it is here, but we lack the energy weapons and stasis fields. We are very reluctant to execute. We would rather give folks a chance to negotiate terms of peaceful coexistence. We really don’t even try to muzzle heretics, just make sure their lies are countered by truth. No one has the right to attempt reshaping the mind of another adult. All we can do is demand terms of sufferance.”
“So your northern hemisphere is somehow a prison?” Fortis recalled the ranger’s comments.
“It serves. There are precious few resources to harvest. We take our rejects there, give them just enough basic survival equipment. We don’t know how it happened, but most of the islands look like cut pieces of higher ground. Precious few trees, none with the enhanced properties of selective breeding, and nothing big enough to make a raft. They can fish, catch birds, eat insects and vegetation, and the weather pattern is the same as on the rest of the planet. They’ll spend almost every waking hour just trying to stay alive, even without much in the way of predators. They get a sealed water filter rig which makes just about enough to drink for daily use, and it will stop working if they try to open it. They are left alone on their own island. They could swim to another if they want, but they might have to fight sea predators.
“As for escaping across the desert? Not a chance. On the northern shores of the equatorial continents there is almost no land at all where you can live. The dry plateaus rise almost straight up from the sea, and climbing is very challenging. The few places that isn’t the case, we tend to avoid leaving our prisoners near them. The one fact the ranger got correct was how much water it would take to get anywhere. We are talking hundreds of kilometers from the nearest human habitation.
“When their time is up, they know where they have to be for the relief ship to rescue them. It keeps the rangers assigned there pretty busy, and we rotate them through there frequently.”
Fortis asked, “Do most of the exiles make it back after their sentence?”
“Most of them, yes. It’s easy enough to die there, but few are exiled for more than three months. That’s about all it takes for them to either negotiate with themselves to rejoin society or confirm their rejection.”
“And if they confirm?”
“Everyone lives under probation, and the next mistake could easily be their last. Would it surprise you to know most of those caught searching the woods for us were on probation? Probation is always served with a distant clan, and all of these were brought here from somewhere else. They were slaves, as it were, not citizens. As you know, the idea behind probation is to earn your way back into society. We don’t permit abuse of slaves, but their lives are not easy, and there is no pretense. They knew the risks.”
Fortis thought for a moment. “I suppose our doubles will be recalled, now? The trick didn’t fool our ranger.”
“No,” George shook his head. “He may have been working independently, but was not working alone. Someone told him where to find you. He took the risk of flying over this place and found you outside on balcony. We can even say God allowed that to happen, and controls much of what goes no here. We don’t fight His hand. We simply do the best we can within the limits of imperatives we perceive from Him. No, we’ll let the charade play itself out as planned to maintain consistency for whomever is watching, including God, but certainly for a number of people lacking omniscience.”
Fingers buried in his blond hair, Fortis clasped the sides of his head. “I think I could use a good course in your religion.”
