2013-01-01. The Barbarian Invasion.
[speaker-mute]
Revolt of the Rebel Angels: The Future of The Multiverse – Book 2; Chapter 4 ~by Timothy Wyllie
Book 2, Chapter 4
[/speaker-mute]
[speaker]
Learning From Mosquitos, Multiple Personalities, and Angelic Memory
I’d chosen to leave Earth for a while because I was disgusted with the horrors Prince Caligastia had visited upon your world. Now I was on Zandana, a planet I’d previously believed to have solved their issues of war and belligerence, only to find myself once more embroiled in their conflict. Since I’d been in Prince Zanda’s presence during the discussions regarding the imminent invasion it appeared as though I was involved in spite of myself. Both Zanda and Janda-Chi were well aware I was present and I’m sure they’d witnessed my horrified reaction to Unava’s complaisance. And, frankly, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The Council wouldn’t have lasted long on Caligastia’s Earth!
After the Council of Elders–all whom had appeared to me to be unduly influenced by Unava’s condescending dismissal of the pending barbarian invasion completed their business and left the Temple Garden, I wasn’t altogether surprised to feel the slight pressure of Prince Janda-Chi signaling me telepathically me to remain there. It was Prince Janda who seemed to be the only one with any practical sense. “As you must understand, we have a problem. You can see what we’re dealing with?” I didn’t need to agree. I could feel the despair in his emotional body. “We haven’t had a war in more than two thousand years. We’ve no weapons; we’ve forgotten how to fight. And you saw how most of them think.
They don’t believe it’s possible they think they’re above all that.” There was nothing I could say. Granted there had never been any major wars in Van’s territories, but there was always some small conflict going on over land or women. Human beings on Earth seemed to me to be naturally belligerent. I didn’t believe, from what I’d seen of the Zandana natives, that they were quite as liable to erupt into anger and violence. They were cunning, of course, and clearly great businessmen and traders but, for example, in whole city of Zandan I’d never seen any military or police activity. If the Zandanans were now living safe and secure lives, it seemed to me they’d lost the ability to even imagine they could ever lose it all. “They freeze the dangers out of their minds. They’re in a state of chronic denial.
I’m afraid there’s no one who knows what to do.” Janda-Chi had picked up on my thoughts. “Absolutely no one. Good people, of course, but not fighting men. And no time to train them even if we could.” There was a long silence as both Princes considered their options. Their problem lay once again in the degree of intervention they should permit themselves. In spite of the greater levels of freedom allowed them by the Lucifer Manifesto, they still appreciated the wisdom of keeping their distance from mortals. Once mortals have got it in their minds to act independently, there isn’t much an angel, a watcher, or a Planetary Prince, can do about it. We have to find other, more subtle, means of communicating and you can see from the unfortunate demise of almost all of your prophets that this approach also has its drawbacks.
Now it was Prince Zanda in my mind. “You. You know all about fighting, don’t you?” It was no question. “We know what’s been happening on Earth you’re affiliated with Prince Caligastia, yes? You’ve seen more horror than we can imagine you must know about fighting.” I was on the spot. What could I say? Watchers don’t fight, never have. Zanda again: “It’s not as though the barbarians have particularly advanced weapons. We’ve tried to make sure of that. But spears and yes, knives, swords.” One of the midwayers who’d stayed behind was quietly signaling Prince Zanda.
I could tell he was one of their espionage agents tasked with keeping an eye on the two rogue islands. No doubt his reports had been dismissed as overwrought with the same casual dismissal as I’d seen in the previous meeting. I could tell from the emotional tone of the signal that the midwayer was still carrying his resentment. “Yes, yes I remember what you said,” Zanda told the midwayer, “but I doubt if they’ve been able to do very much with it.” The Prince turned towards me again. “Well! Got any ideas?” The full absurdity of the situation hit me. Here were two Planetary Princes asking me, a mere watcher, if I have any ideas! Well, alright, let’s see. “Your womenfolk?”
I asked, an idea blossoming in my mind that I needed to keep shielded from the others while I spoke. “They’re known for their beauty, aren’t they?” “We’ve maintained the aristocratic bloodlines, of course, at least here, in the city less so in the provinces. And who knows what they’ve done on the outer islands. Complete genetic mess, I’ve no doubt.” “Prince Prince!” I interrupted Zanda rather more abruptly than I’d intended. I was getting overexcited as this idea was forming itself.
An original idea? Not, really. An obvious one? So obvious I’d never heard it done before. “All our women are beauties!” This was Janda-Chi with more than seemly enthusiasm. “Well, my Princes, don’t you see?” I could feel they were unaccustomed to be addressed so directly and it forced me to realize how tempered I’d become on the forge of Caligastia’s violent nature. “Beauties, you say! There might be a way.” Now they were really listening. How was I going to put this politely?
I’d already been mildly telepathically reproved by Janda-Chi for being more direct than they’re apparently comfortable with, so this needed to be handled delicately. “So, no mating for love, correct? Not among the aristocrats not if you’re trying to keep the bloodlines intact, right?” I was hoping they’d have the idea before I had to image it. I still had my shields up. No? Nothing. Well, here goes. What’s the worst that could happen?! “I know from my previous visits that the women here how shall I put it? They consider themselves free, yes? They’re not tied down by tradition they think of their bodies as their own ?” “Many of our finest technicians and scientists are female and the artists, of course they’re almost all women.”
Was Janda-Chi an old fool? He just wasn’t getting it. Then, I realized as non-sexual beings, neither of the Princes would be likely to grasp what I was suggesting. “No, I mean free. They’re not owned by any man. Isn’t that was they say? It’s what I’ve heard.” “Oh! Yes. They’re very proud of that. The women choose who they want to be with who they want to make their babies with. Is that what you mean?” Was Janda-Chi starting to get it? I allowed a long pause before replying. “You can’t fight, right? But you can love!” Still not a hint of comprehension. “So, don’t fight them when they arrive in their boats. Use your women. Send them down to greet the boats.
Hang flowers around the barbarians neck. Invite them into your homes. Celebrate their arrival. Encourage your women to seduce them.” Both were looking horrified by this time. Horrified, but quite silent. “Don’t you see. It’s what your people do best. Swamp the barbarians in luxury. Love them, feed them, sleep with them. Make them thoroughly at home and if the women have to hold their noses, remind them there are worse things they could be suffering.” Janda-Chi’s emotional body was starting to warm up. “Then, when you have them thoroughly tamed, you can decide between you all, what you want to do with them.
The invaders won’t want to leave, you know that. They won’t be used to being treated so well.” “If they don’t leave, no one back where they came from will know what has happened to them. They’ll think we defeated their fleet somehow.” Janda-Chi was starting to understand the tactic. “Will the women agree to this?” I asked, more tentatively. “They’re going to love the idea!” Prince Zanda appeared to have woken up. “Besides, what’s the choice?” “And the menfolk?” I knew how jealous and territorial mortal men can be with their women. “They’re going to have to deal with it. I think it’ll work, though. They’re pretty free with their own desires. I doubt if they could stop their women doing what they wanted to do anyway!” Zanda said with what looked to me to be a knowing smirk.
I could see he was starting to appreciate the idea. “This could work, you know.” Janda-Chi tuned in with growing enthusiasm. “We can certainly stop anyone from going back and the midwayers can throw up sufficient astral confusion to baffle their spies.” I saw the midwayer bowing his head in agreement. Unlike on Earth, far more of them had followed Prince Zanda than the few midwayers who’d stuck with the rebel staff on the outer islands.
They’d be no match for the powerful astral cloaking capacity of a large number of midwayers operating in concert. “Then, when they’re all settled and they feel fat and safe, we can chose who to keep and who to kill. That’ll please the women!” The smirk was back on Zanda’s face. Then, I recalled something I’d casually overheard on my second visit, as I was passing through one of the finer houses on the outskirts of the city.
Three finely dressed and elegant women of the Zandan elite were sitting around discussing the efficacy of various different natural poisons. Amid much laughter I overheard one of them claiming to have poisoned at least five people with a tincture of one of the more common plants that grew in the mountains. “And it’s absolutely undetectable,” one of them was confiding to the youngest of the three. “If there was anyone around to do the detecting” from the third, to some knowing laughter. “Looks just like a heart attack, too. Very quick and neat no mess to clean up and they don’t know what’s hit ‘em.”
There was a terrible coldness in her delivery which, following the laughter, shocked me even more, despite my unhappy acquaintance with the ways of conspirators. But, women? Naive as it might sound, I was yet more horrified that these were three beautiful, well-bred, and highly educated, Zandan women who were talking about efficient ways of killing people with such casual indifference. It was something of an eye-opener for me at the time. Up to that point I was largely unfamiliar with the nature of the female intelligence on Zandana. The speaker was cooly dictating the recipe for optimum dosage to the younger woman when I chose to leave in disgust. But it left an impression on me that might well have provided the fertile ground for my idea. My idea! I liked the sound of that. We watchers aren’t known for our ideas. I could only conjecture that I was starting to think more like a mortal.
I’d no need to say anything more. The Princes were clearly excited. They called Unava and the Council back into the Temple Garden and I stayed well in the background while they briefed the assembled company on what they had come up with. I appreciated they’d no wish to admit it was me, an off-worlder–and a watcher to boot who gave them their idea. After some initial concerned expressions on some of the Elders’ faces, Janda-Chi finished speaking with a triumphant flourish. “If the women agree, and I think they will, everyone will come out of this invasion with what they want. Everyone.”
A short silence was broken by some nervous laughter, followed then by a chortling which quickly turned into full-hearted guffaws. It could work. It really could work. Frankly, I was nervous, or as nervous as a simple watcher can get. My idea that the citizens of Zandan might wage love, not war, in the face of the expected barbarian invasion, had been avidly taken up and claimed by the two Princes, with Janda-Chi enthusiastically handling the details. Regardless, the strangeness of the whole situation and my surprise as to where such a thought might have come from, all contrived to make me feel responsible for what might happen. If it was going to be a success, it would create some turbulence in the Zandanans’ personal relationships, but all would be essentially fine.
Prince Zanda will herald the strategy as his and I can disappear back into the dimensional woodwork. If it fails for some unpredictable reason, I’ve no doubt the blame will be placed on me, the untrustworthy off-worlder. Just another rebel angel with her strange ideas. It turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the women of the city greeted the strategy far more positively than most of their menfolk.
“Trouble is, I don’t know what the wife is looking forward to most: bedding the men or killing them afterwards!” “What if she ends up liking him more than me?” “I don’t want her making any little barbarian bastards oh no I’d drown the little buggers, whatever she says!” “Me? I’ll be happy to get the old lady off my hands for a while!” I overheard a number of remarks such as these as I slipped through the fashionable men-only clubs in Zandan City’s business quadrant. But, within a few days, what little opposition there’d been among the men faded away as the harsh reality of the alternative dawned in their somnolent minds.
Janda-Chi had sent envoys out on the silver monorails to all the towns and villages in the outlying regions of the vast southern continent. Since it was acknowledged as a delicate matter, even for the more sexually liberated Zandanans, the Prince had suggested a more personal representation in a series of town-hall meetings all over the islands would be most effective. Knowing there’d be more resistance to the tactic in the conservative provinces, he insisted that it remained strictly voluntary on behalf of the women. Knowing mortal psychology as well as he did, Janda-Chi required his envoys to remain in the towns to ensure no antipathy was stirred up between those who offered up their bodies for the continuing purity of the Motherland, and those who chose not to volunteer.
Most of Zandana’s mortal population of reasoning age quickly realized that any invasion would have to be first directed at the city to have any hope of success. The island continent was far too large and isolated from the other islands by a wide and dangerously stormy ocean to make resupply a real challenge for the barbarian military. First, they would have to cut off the head–which meant taking out the city as soon as they’d landed. That much was obvious. They might have put aside fighting for a couple of millennia, but they were no fools.
They were quite capable of thinking through a simple military strategy. This fact, and the provincial women’s natural reticence, meant somewhat fewer volunteers came forward than what seemed to me to be an unbecoming eagerness on the part of the more sophisticated city women. But in their case I’m more inclined to believe it was the prospect of practicing their arcane poisoning arts on one of the opposite sex, and being admired for all the personal sacrifices involved in accomplishing it. For some of the mature, yet still comely women, among Zandana’s genetic elites, the opportunity was seen as almost too good to be true.
I heard many of them express how interminably bored they were getting with the limited genetic pool available to them. Besides, some of the wiser among the female Elders had recently been pointing out that the tradition of preserving their bloodlines had started to deplete the life-force in many of the ruling families. They strongly advised the fertile women to carefully choose, as far as they were able, the most physically well-developed of the invading men and mate with them, and to be prepared to poison the father of their child when the time for killing came around. Since natural birth-control had long been practiced by the women of Zandana, there was no fear of an unwanted pregnancy.
The Zandanan mortal female was somewhat more biologically advanced than females on Earth. Even at the time I’m describing, some fifty thousand Earth years ago, they were capable of controlling their own biology. Like terrestrial dolphins, sexually mature Zandana females were able to retain male sperm in their bodies for many months following insemination. This allowed them to give birth at propitious times–while astrology had long been dismissed by Zandan’s foremost scientists, it still maintained its vitality among the women–as well as the ability to consciously dispatch any male gamete, should it consider consummating its zygotic drive.
It was this singular female ability which allowed the Zandanans to maintain a balanced population growth on the southern continent without having to deal with the massive contradictions I see currently bedeviling your world. I’m told the optimum population for an Earth-size planet of approximately the same land mass and biosphere is between five hundred million and a billion. As I write in 2010, the population on Earth is close to reaching seven billion, clearly a massive aberration of the natural order of planetary affairs.
By allowing unfettered procreation on the one hand; and by lauding the Industrial Revolution and the medical advances which had led to the belief that technology has permitted the modern world to transcend the Malthusian checks which have traditionally limit population growth, humans have exploded across the planet in less than a hundred years. That this is a delusion should be obvious to anyone living on Earth in the 21st century. The hyperexponential population growth in most developing countries, the diminishing supplies of natural materials, famines, changing climatic conditions, air and water pollution, these are but a few of the signs of an oncoming Malthusian crisis.
I’ve come to believe it was the ability of the Zandanan women to monitor and control their biological processes which allowed them to accept their mission with such equanimity. Whatever was to happen, they were confident they would be in charge of any potential progeny. I heard that one of Zanda’s midwayers just returned from an espionage mission to report the barbarian fleet was delayed by a storm which had separated the boats and sunk one with all hands. They were apparently regrouping in the ley of the closest island and were said to be unlikely to set sail again until the weather changed.
A Council for Recreational Survival, quickly dubbed the Love Council by the more scabrous of the city’s news outlets, had been put together in one of Prince Janda-Chi’s retreat centers up in the mountains. From here the strategy would be directed. Regular surveillance by Zanda’s midwayers observing from subspace would supply the necessary information as to where to move the women to greet the boats. The citizens made good use of the delay. Believing they had the weather on their side and there wouldn’t be an invasion until the change of season, advisory workshops to help council the women were set up in all the main towns.
Each volunteer was given an older woman as a mentor who would be on hand to deal with any emotional issues which might spring up in the course of her seductive activities. The brief respite also allowed the mentors to familiarize themselves with the volunteers’ families; their parents, children, and their menfolk particularly the menfolk! They were all aware it was the men who might prove to be the major impediment to the “Make Love, Not War” strategy. All the women volunteers were required to get the agreement of those close to them, but in some of the mens’ cases, a prior agreement could quickly wither in the face of their wives, or lovers, willing seduction of their barbarian enemies.
It was the mentors’ function not only to support and encourage the women, but to make sure the men were kept in line by a constant reminder of how terrible any alternative would be for everybody not just for them. Rather than hide away all their valuables, all households were encouraged to show off their wealth. The official buildings all received a face-lift and the public monuments, which had been recently falling into some disrepair, were smartened up and repainted. Shops were told to display their most resplendent goods luxury was to abound.
Food must be seen to be plentiful and everybody not directly involved with the invasion were encouraged to go about their daily business as normal. Children would continue to go to school. Life should go on much as usual, with the citizens appearing to affect a complete lack of concern at the approach of the barbarian hordes. Such were the directives being issued from Janda-Chi’s Love Council while the citizens of Zandan busily prepared for the invasion. I heard many a last-minute assurance from a nubile maiden to her lover, as I drifted through their dwellings, and even more from young wives hoping their specious denials will mask their enthusiasm for some sexual novelty.
Naturally those women in advanced stages of pregnancy were excused from participating, but all those in the first and second trimester were free to volunteer as one of the back-teams of women. Since it still wasn’t known how many barbarians would make it to their shores, Janda-Chi thought it sensible to cover a worst-case situation in which all boats known to be in the fleet arrive intact. The southern continent possessed no military craft and since they had no interest in the other islands, they’d never had the motive for developing oceangoing ships.
The many small fishing boats that tended to hug the coast and work the fertile fishing fields in the estuaries of the many rivers tumbling down from the mountains, were told to continue their normal routine, but to stay well out of the way of the invasion fleet. And, in the case of any encounter which might be precipitated by fog or an inconvenient storm, they were told to show absolutely no sign of any aggressive behavior. Neither of these strictures needed any excessive persuasion to gain the fishermen’s’ approval.
I am a Watcher Angel and my name is Georgia.
