Ecce and Old Earth

Ecce and Old Earth

During the darkest, quietest hours between midnight and dawn, four patrol flyers departed Araminta Station, armed with such weaponry as the armory was able to provide. At high speed they darted around the curve of the world; across Deucas, over the Western Ocean, then slanted down so as to approach Ecce at low altitude. Up the Vertes River they flew, barely skimming the surface of the water, the better to evade whatever detectors might be operating on the summit of Mount Shattorak.

Where Glawen had landed the Skyrie, the raiding party veered away from the river to fly low over the swamp and up the slope of the volcano, and so arrived at the summit.

Twenty minutes later the operation was over. The communications shed had been destroyed, along with a gun emplacement. The hanger sheltered seven flyers, including the two most recently captured from Araminta Station. The base personnel offered no resistance.

But the leaders, having had warning of the raid, had departed hours before. . . .

Ecce and Old Earth

Copywrite 1991 by Jack Vance

PRECURSORY

I. THE PURPLE ROSE SYSTEM

(Excerpted from: THE WORLDS OF MAN, 48th edition.)

Halfway along the Perseid Arm near the edge of the Gaen Reach, a capricious swirl of galactic gravitation has caught up ten thousand stars and sent them streaming off at a veer, with a curl and a flourish at the tip. This strand of stars is Mircea’s Wisp.

To the side of the curl, at seeming risk of wandering away into the void, is the Purple Rose System, comprising three stars: Lorca, Sing, and Syrene. Lorca, a white dwarf and Sing, a red giant, orbit close around each other: a portly pink-faced old gentleman waltzing with a dainty little maiden dressed in white. Syrene, a yellow-white star of ordinary size and luminosity, circles the gallivanting pair at a discrete distance.

Syrene controls three planets, including Cadwal, an Earth-like world seven thousand miles in diameter, with close to Earth-normal gravity.

(A list and analysis of physical indices is here omitted.)

II. THE NATURALIST SOCIETY

Cadwal was first explored by the locator R. J. Neirmann, a member of the Naturalist Society of Earth. His report prompted the Society to dispatch an official expedition to Cadwal, which, upon its return to Earth, recommended that Cadwal be protected as a conservancy, or nature preserve, secure forever from human settlement and commercial exploitation.

To this end, the Society registered the world in its own name, and after securing the Certificate of Registration found itself in sole and perpetual tenancy of Cadwal Planet with no further formalities other than periodic renewals of the certificate; a task devolving upon the secretary of the Society.

The Society issued an immediate decree of conservancy: the Great Charter to which were attached the Regulations of Conservancy: the basic political instrument of Cadwal. Charter, By-laws and Certificates were stored in the Society’s archival vaults, and an administrative staff dispatched to Cadwal.

III. THE WORLD CADWAL

The landscapes of Cadwal were endlessly various spectacular and almost always – to human perceptions – pleasant, or inspiring, or awesome, or idyllically beautiful Tourists who made the rounds of the wilderness always left Cadwal with regret and many returned again and again.

The flora and fauna were approximately as diverse as those of Old Earth, which is to say that they challenged generations of research biologists and taxonomists with profusion of their species. Many of the larger beasts were savage; others exhibited aspects of intelligence and what seemed to be an aesthetic capability. Certain varieties of andrils used a spoken language which, try as they might, linguists were unable to interpret.

The three continents of Cadwal were Ecce, Deucas and Throy. They were separated by expanses of empty ocean, unbroken by islands or smaller masses of land, with a few trifling exceptions.

Ecce, long and narrow lay along the equator a flat tract of swamp and jungle, netted by sluggish rivers. Ecce palpitated with heat, stench, color and ravenous vitality. Ferocious creatures everywhere preyed upon one another, and made the land unsuitable for human settlement; the Naturalist had attempted not even a wilderness lodge on Ecce. Three objects alone broke the flat landscape: one dormant and a pair of active volcanoes.

The early explorers gave Ecce little serious attention; no more did the later scholars, and Ecce, after the first flurry of biological and topographical surveys, remained for the most part a land abandoned and unknown.

Deucas, five times as large as Ecce, occupied most of the North Temperate Zone on the opposite side of the planet, with Cape Journal, the continents southernmost extremity at the end of a long narrow peninsula which trust a thousand miles below the equator. The fauna of Deucas, neither as grotesque nor as monstrous as that of Ecce, was yet, in many cases, savage and formidable, and included several non-intelligent species. The flora tended to resemble that of old Earth, to such effect that the early agronomists were able to introduce useful terrestrial species at Araminta Station: bamboo, coconut palms, wine-grapes and fruit trees without fear of an ecological disaster (1).

Throy, to the south of Deucas and about equal in area to Ecce, extended from the polar ice well into the South Temperate Zone. The terrain of Throy was the most dramatic of Cadwal. Crags leaned over chasms; dark forests roared in the wind.

Three small islands, all ancient sea-volcanoes, were located off the east coast of Deucas. These were Lutwen Atoll, Thurben Island and Ocean Island. Elsewhere the oceans spread open and empty around the globe.

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1) The biological techniques for introducing nest species into alien surroundings without danger to the host environment had long been perfected.

IV. ARAMINTA STATION

An enclave of a hundred square miles had been established on the east coast of Deucas, halfway between Cape Journal to the south and Marmion Head to the north. Here was Araminta station, the agency which monitored the conservancy and enforced the terms of the Charter. Six bureaus performed the necessary work:

Bureaus

A: Records and statistics.

B: Patrols and surveys: Police and security services.

C: Taxonomy, cartography, natural sciences.

D: Domestic services.

E: Fiscal affairs: exports and imports

F: Visitors accommodations.

The original six superintendents were Deamus Wook, Shirry Clattuc, Saul Diffin, Claude Offaw, Marvell Veder, and Condit Laverty. Each was allowed a staff not to exceed forty persons which they all recruited from family and guild kinships, and which brought to the early administration a cohesion which otherwise might have been lacking After many centuries, much had changed but much remained the same. The Charter prevailed as law of the land, though certain factions were intent upon modifying its terms. Others – notably the Yips of Lutwen Atoll – paid no heed whatever to the Charter. At Araminta station, the original rude encampment had become a settlement dominated by six palatial edifices, where lived the descendants of the Wooks, Offaws, Clattucs, Diffins, Veders and Lavertys.

As time passed, each House developed a distinctive personality, which its residents shared, so that the wise Wooks differed from the flippant Diffins, as did the cautious Offaws from the reckless Clattucs.

The station early acquired a hotel to house its visitors; also an airport, a hospital, schools and a theater: the ‘Orpheum'. When subsidies from society headquarters on Old Earth dwindled and presently stopped altogether, the need for foreign exchange became urgent. Vineyards planted at the back of the enclave began to produce fine wines for export, and tourists were encouraged to visit any or all of the wilderness lodges, which were established at special sites and managed so as to avoid interaction with the environment.

Over the centuries, certain problems became acute. How so many enterprises could be staffed by a complement of only two hundred and forty persons? Elasticity was necessarily the answer. First, collaterals (2) were allowed to accept middle-status positions at the station.

By a loose reading of the Charter, children, retired persons, domestic servants and 'temporary labor not in permanent residence' were exempted from the forty-person limit. The term 'temporary labor' was extended to include farm labor, hotel staff, airport mechanics – indeed, workers of every description, and the Conservator looked the other way so long as the work-force was allowed no permanent residence.

A source of plentiful, cheap and docile labor had always been needed at Araminta Station. What could be more convenient than the folk who inhabited Lutwen Atoll, three hundred miles to the northeast? These were the Yips, descendants of runaway servants, fugitives, illegal immigrants, petty criminals and others, who at first furtively, then brazenly, had taken up residence on Lutwen Atoll.

The Yips fulfilled a need, and so were allowed at Araminta Station on six-month work permits. So much the Conservationists grudgingly allowed, but refused to yield an iota more.

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2) Collateral: only forty Wooks, Offaws, Clattucs, Diffins, Veders and Lavertys could be reckoned Cadwal Agents’. The excess became ‘collaterals’ (co-Wooks, co-Lavertys, co-Clattucs, etcetera), and upon their twenty-first birthday were required to leave the house of their birth and seek their fortune elsewhere. The occasion was fraught always with heartbreak, sometimes fury and, not infrequently, suicide. The situation was criticized as ‘brutal’ and 'heart-less,' especially among the LPFers of Stroma, but no remedy or better method could be devised within the intent of the Charter which defined Araminta Station as an administrative agency and a business-place, not a residential settlement.

V. THE CONSERVATOR AND THE NATURALIST OF STROMA

At Riverview House, a mile south of the agency, lived the Conservator, the Executive Superintendent of Araminta Station. By the terms of the Charter, he was an active member of the Naturalist Society, a native of Stroma, the small Naturalist settlement on Throy. With the waning of the Society to little more than a memory, the directive necessarily had been interpreted loosely and – at least for this purpose, where no realistic alternative offered itself – all Naturalists resident at Stroma were considered equivalent to members of the Society.

A faction dedicated to 'advanced' ideology, calling itself the 'LPF, Peace and Freedom Party', began to champion the cause of the Yips whose condition they declared to be intolerable and a blot on the collective conscience. The situation could be relieved only by allowing the Yips to settle on the Deucas mainland. Another faction, the ‘Chartists,' acknowledged the problem, but proposed a solution not in violation of the Charter: namely, transferring the entire Yip population off-world. Unrealistic declared the LPFers, and ever more categorically criticized the Charter. They declared the Conservancy an archaic idea, non-humanist and out of step with 'advanced' thinking. The Charter, so they asserted, was in desperate need of revision, if only that the plight of the Yips might be ameliorated.

The Chartists, in refutal, insisted that both Charter and Conservancy were immutable. They voiced a sardonic suspicion that much of LPF fervor was hypocritical and self-serving; that the LPFers wanted to allow Yip settlement of the Marmaton Foreshore in order to set a precedent which would permit a few deserving Naturalists – no doubt defined as the most vigorous and ardent LPF activists – to establish estates for themselves out of the beautiful Deucas countryside, where they would employ Yips for servants and farmhands and live like lords. The charge provoked the LPFers to such violent spasms of outrage that cynical Chartists asserted that the vehemence of their protests only underscored their covert ambitions.

At Araminta Station, ‘advanced’ ideology was not taken seriously. The Yip problem was recognized, as real and immediate, but the LPF solution had to be rejected, since any official concessions would formalize the Yip presence on Cadwal, when all efforts should be exerted in the opposite direction, i.e. transfer of the entire Yip population to a world where their presence would be useful and desirable.

This conviction was reinforced when Eustace Chilke, the station airport manager, discovered that the Yips had long been systematically stealing from the airport warehouse. Their booty was primarily spare parts for the station flyers, which in due course could be assembled into whole flyers at Yipton. They also took tools, weapons, ammunition and energy packs, apparently with the connivance of one Namour co-Clattuc, Agency Commissioner of Temporary Labor, and in this connection Namour and Chilke came to blows. The two fought an epic battle. Namour, a Clattuc, fought with typical Clattuc flair and courage; Chilke fought a methodical backroom style: essentially a technique of backing the opponent up against a wall and pummeling him until he fell to the floor, exactly as Namour eventually found himself doing.