II
My name is Ethan Moreau. I was on board a privately owned satellite functioning as living quarters for a very wealthy acquaintance of mine named Claudio Garza Ortiz. The satellite could support more people, but Ortiz preferred relying on robots to maintain his ships, docked in the satellite, prepare food, and perform other menial tasks. As far as my relation to the man, it has been classified in many different ways. The most frequently used term, I think, would be cohort, but the negative connotations that carries are undesirable. The most accurate term is confidant.
It was eight in the morning and Claudio was still not getting ready for the trip he himself had planned. Still in the music chamber, he was playing the organ. He had been working on a variation of Bach’s “Little” Fugue in G Minor BWV 578, and was near perfecting it. He’d started by transposing the whole score down an octave, added staccatos, and changed around the rhythm in subtly intricate ways, moving legatos and the like. Then, to finish it off, he wrote in a different tempo marking to emphasize the new playing style. Really, there were no singularly large alterations, but the many new small features served to give the fugue a more mathematical sound. There was also an intangible brooding and ominous element to it. I tried to express the opinion that altering a work as he did showed disrespect for the composer. He responded by explaining that the fact that he took the time to improve the piece actually showed respect for the music.
When I entered the room to remind him of the time, he turned around and beamed at me. “Is it not beautiful?”
“I’ve already told you what I think of it. But to the point: you were going to visit Dr. Philbrooke.”
“Oh, yes, there’s been a change to the plan. Events are progressing a little faster than expected, and he assures me that the project is satisfactorily complete. Time has become more valuable than perfection. I do have a conference with Premier Kobayashi soon, but that’ll just be via hologram. Also, you will be a new friend of ours. I didn’t tell him the payment, but if he is up to the jobs we assign him, we’ll give him a quarter of a million a year. That’s what he’d hope to make as a smuggler, but better, since there’s less uncertainty.”
“He’s a smuggler? I don’t think anyone with the skills necessary to be smuggler could be worth so much to us.” Ortiz frequently employed such people, but they were no more than pawns, and one does not pay a pawn much.
“No, John’s not a smuggler, (that’s his name, by they way, John Michelson) but it’s what he’d become if I didn’t offer him another option, and it’s what he was during the Plontian war. You’ll find out about him on the way to his first mission.”
“Our assignment for him, then?”
“He’s going to help convince Kobayashi to do us a favor.”
Premier Kobayashi was the executive of an independent planet. The planet called itself a republic, but it was mostly a dictatorship. And its government didn’t like the UGC. The modesty of their military, which wasn’t all that poor given their limited resources, kept them from joining the few small rebellions that had been starting throughout the galaxy. Essentially, they allowed themselves to be intimidated. In addition to this, they were in perpetual conflict with their nearest neighbor, the Inopsians, another independent planet. The Inopsians had joined the UGC. The “conflict” didn’t amount to much more than petty squabbling and a few small-time naval battles here and there, but Premier Kobayashi felt that maintaining this antagonism (it had been somewhat a tradition for the past century) would be too difficult if he was also sending some of his forces on raids against the UGC.
Claudio walked over to a computer console, interacted with it a bit, and then summoned me over. “This is all the information you or Michelson will need.” He invited me to access a physical drive. This would transfer selected files to a device to be plugged into it, which would then relay them to my internal computer.
The originally Feraustan technology had become mainstream throughout the galaxy, and anyone with an internal computer also had one of these devices unique to them. Most of the time, it was unnecessary, since the computer could be accessed via thought alone, but for more secure files, this device was necessary.
Claudio went on explaining. “There’s the summary of Philbrooke’s work for us, and an estimation of Inopsian security. You’ll see that that includes the precise location of President Colville’s retreat. The Inopsian intelligence people think that that’s secret. He’ll be arriving there in under thirty six standard hours, and so will Michelson.”
“How trustworthy is your new recruit?” I asked. Ortiz was no fool, and an excellent judge of people. If he trusted the man, it was because he had good reason to.
“Trustworthy enough. You’ll learn all about him when you talk to him. We’re leaving in a couple hours. I’ll have to be careful, of course, but I don’t think we’ve much to worry about from him.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but Claudio knew a lot more about this particular matter than he was telling me.
Later
On the way to the Inopsian system, Ortiz invited our recruit to give me a first impression of himself.
“Well, I can’t go wrong with honest, eh?” he smiled, addressing me. “I’ll be honest then; ten years ago, I sure didn’t think I’d be fighting for rebels against some sort of ‘Unified Galactic Confederacy,’ as they’re calling it. And especially not one founded by the Feraustans. Not that I particularly like them. In fact, I suppose, considering what I was doing back then, I should have expected such a thing. But I’d always wanted to get out of the whole thing. That was impossible, though…” He trailed off.
At this, Ortiz jumped in. “Oh, no, we’re not rebels. Surely you realized during our interview.”
Michelson seemed puzzled. “What? Well from what I can tell, you’re anarchists anyway, though you probably go by some euphemism that means the same thing. I mean, chaos certainly seems your goal.”
“In part you are correct, but you still misunderstand our purposes,” Ortiz explained. “The euphemism we choose, as you put it, is ‘opportunists’. We do what is to our advantage. And you see, because of the sort of things I’ve gotten myself into, chaos is to our advantage. I use ‘I’ and ‘we’ interchangeably here because Ethan is effectively my henchman.”
Henchman? This was worse than cohort! “Confidant,” I corrected him.
Ortiz chuckled. “It’s like you said, John. Euphemisms. Some of us use them more than others.” He continued with his previous train of thought. “So, anyway, we’re more than terrorists. That is what you really meant, isn’t it? Yes, I thought so. Well, you see, how one acts is determined by one’s situation. When outnumbered as we are, chaos must be the goal. If we were the majority party, we would strive for order. The real goal is simply the continuance of our lifestyles. Survival of the fittest, you know? We are doing what we can to be the fittest. And of course, chaos is necessary for that. The term usually carries a negative connotation, but chaos is liberty. You see, with chaos, all the particles or people or units or whatever are doing whatever regardless of the others. That’s what we want. We want to be able to do what we wish, regardless of everyone else. With order, all the units are doing the same thing, or what they’re doing is at least determined by the actions of the other units. There’s some sort of rationality behind it all. Thus we call it order. If we could determine what everyone else did, I suppose that’d be just fine, but until now, it’s just been the two of us. Now, you’re the third to be initiated into the group, because we need someone more active in the field. You’re going to become Ethan’s militant counterpart, conducting clandestine operations, while he does the same thing, but off the battlefield and unarmed, giving the right people the type of nudge necessary to get them to do as we wish. Sometimes he’ll pass a few thousand credits to a pirate without a word; sometimes he’ll spend a few hours drinking tea with a prime minister, with no more persuasion than his own verbal rhetoric. That’s his function, and you’ll quickly learn yours. So, when you look at it that way, there really is a measure of order to it all, isn’t there? Well, causality anyway. We can’t escape reality. True chaos is unattainable, so we may as well use what order there is inherent in things to our advantage.”
“But why is it you must do what you do? Why is it necessary for the continuation of your lifestyles?” John asked.
“You could put it this way,” Claudio mused. “Existence is a vicious cycle. One wishes to do as one wishes to do, and to do as one wishes, one needs the freedom to do it. We’re protecting our own freedom, because that’s what we wish to do.”
“Perhaps your existence is a vicious cycle, Claudio,” I scoffed, “but what of someone with more humble desires? Perhaps one’s simple wish is to be a content middle class worker. It takes no more freedom to do that than is readily given by almost any modern nation.”
“Hah! To limit one’s desires in such a way is to deny oneself freedom. It is like saying, ‘I do not want my government to oppress me, so instead, I will oppress myself.’ The freedom provided by the governments of today is the freedom to do exactly as they demand and only as they allow. And what more is a government? Nothing! A government is a set of rules. Protection? Of course it protects its supporters; to protect them is to protect itself. But they are likewise limited. Citizens are no more than subjects. And the subjects are hardly more than obsequious fools. They would rather protect their worthlessness than allow themselves to become something. Existence like that is not worth protecting in the first place. And likewise for what they call ‘probity’. People oppress themselves so their government doesn’t have to do it for them. It’s slave morality!”
Such debates were common between Ortiz and me. I really had nothing against him. For my part, I threw my lot in with him for personal gain, so I was really subscribing to his philosophy more than anything else. I was sure, though, that all this would be to Michelson’s benefit, so that he’d know what he was getting into, and who he was dealing with.
John, who had been silent for a while, asked now, “I understand all you’ve said, so I understand how silly a question this is, but what exactly would you say your occupation is? How do you sustain yourself? You must at least have some sort of income.”
“Oh, that’s not too silly a question. Rather logical really. I am quite wealthy, actually, and I make money by investing in those who need the money bad enough to accept sharp interest rates. But of course I’m not a mere loan shark either. I’ll take money however I can get it. For a while, I employed mercenaries, and then sold them out to those needing them, as a middle man taking a chunk out of the deal. And as you might guess, I’m not really a citizen of any nation. I have a few citizenships under well constructed aliases for practical purposes, but little more than that. When I’m not somewhere else, I live on a large space station half a galactic radius over, or under, depending on your perspective, the middle of the galaxy, to be approximate. It’s well out of the way of everything else, and I can be unnoticed there. I own a good number of ships, including a couple warships, which I rent out to various parties. They’ve all got tracking devices, manual override devices, and even self destruct devices in them, should I wish to do any of that. I don’t tell that to the people I rent them to, but it keeps them safe. I even keep a large supply of nerve agent in some of them, so I can remotely kill the whole crew if it becomes necessary. You shouldn’t wonder why I support such parties, because it’s really quite obvious, but if you do, it’s more or less in keeping with the vicious cycle I mentioned earlier. I have no affiliation with any real nation, so the best way for me to maintain my lifestyle is to support those like me. All of them, pirates, smugglers, or whatever all support chaos. And of course, it’s not uncommon for me to find myself supporting (with monetary gain of my own) two opposing parties, but then, it’s still all going toward our mutual goal of chaos.”
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