S. M. Stirling & David Drake - The Chosen

CHARTER ONC

Visager

K2I AJ=. (After the Fall)

3OS YJO. (Year of the Oath)

Commodore Maurice Fair lifted the uniform cap from his head and wiped at the

sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief. He was standing on the liner docks

on the north shore of Oathtaking's superb C-shaped harbor. Behind him were the

broad quiet streets of Old Town, running out from Monument Square behind his

back. There the bronze figures of the Founders stood, raised weapons in their

hands—the cutlasses and flintlocks common three centuries ago. The

Empire-Alliance war had ended an overwhehning Imperial victory. The first

thing the Alliance refugees had done was swear a solemn oath of vengeance

against those who'd broken their ambitions and slaughtered everyone of their

fellows who hadn't fled the mainland.

After three years in the Land of die Chosen as a naval attach^, Farr was

certain of two things: their descendants still meant it, and they'd extended

the future field of attack from the Empire to everyone else on the planet

Visager. Perhaps to the entire universe.

West and south around the bay ran the modern city of Oathtaking, built of

black basalt and gray tufa from the quarries nearby. Rail sidings, shipyards,

steel mills, factories, warehouses, the endless tenement blocks that housed

the Protggg laborers. A cluster of huge buildings marked the commercial

center; six and even eight

2S.M. Stirling 6- David Drake

stories tafl, their girder frames sheathed in granite carved in the severe

columnar style of Chosen architecture. A pall of coal smoke lay over most of

the town below the leafy suburbs on the hill slopes, giving the hot tropical

air a sulfurous taste. A racket of shod hooves sounded on stone-block

pavement, die squeal of iron on iron and a hiss of steam, the hoot of factory

sirens. Ships thronged die docks and harbor, everything from old-fashioned

windjammers in with cargoes of grain from the Empire to modern steel-hulled

steamers of Land or Republic build.

Out in die middle of the harbor a circle of islands finked by causeways marked

the site of an ancient caldera and the modem navy basin. Near it moved the low

hulk-log gray shape of a battlewagon, spewing black smoke from its stacks. His

mind categorized it automatically: Ezerherzoe Grufan, name-ship of her class,

launched last year. Twelve thousand tons displacement, four 250-mm rifles in

twin turrets fore and aft, eight 175mm in four twin-tube wing turrets, eight

155mm in barbette mounts on either side, 200mm main belt, face-hardened alloy

steel Four-stacker with triple expansion engines, eighteen thousand

horsepower, eighteen knots.

Tile biggest, baddest thing on the water, or at least it would be until the

Republic launched its first of the Ifemocmt-class in eighteen months.

Fair shook his head. Enough. You're going home. He raised his eyes.

Snow-capped volcanoes ringed the port city of Oathtak-ing on three sides. They

reared into the ha^ tropical air like perfect cones, their bases overlapping

in a tangle of valleys and folds coated with rain forest like dark-green

velvet. Below the forest were terraced fields; Fair remembered riding among

them. Dusty gravel-surfaced lanes between rows of eucalyptus and flamboyants.

A little cooler than down here on the docks; a little less humid. Certainly

better smelling than the oily waters of die harbor. Pretty, in a way, the

glossy green of the coffee

THE CHOSEN 3

bushes and the orange orchards. He'd gone up there a couple of times, invited

up to the manors of family estates by Chosen navy types eager to get to know

the Republic's naval attache1. Not bad oscos, some of diem; good sailors,

terrible spies, and given to asking questions that revealed much more than

they intended.

Also, tiiat meant he got a travel pass for die Oaditak-ing District. There

were some spots where a good pair of binoculars could get you a glimpse at die

base if you were quick and discreet. Nothing earthshaking, just what was in

port and what was in drydock and what was building on the slipways. Confirming

what Intelligence got out of its contacts among die Protege" workers in die

shipyard. That was how you built up a picture of capabilities, bit by bit.

He'd been here diree years now, he'd done a pretty good job—gotten die specs

on die steam-turbine experiments—and it was time to go home.

For more reasons than one. He dropped his eyes to die man and woman talking

not far away.

What did I ever see in him? Sally Hosten thought.

Her husband—soon to be ex-husband—stood at parade rest, hands clasped behind

his back. Karl Hosten was a tall man even for one of die Chosen,

broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, as trim at durty-five as he had been

twelve years ago when they married. His face was square and so deeply tanned

diat die turquoise-blue eyes glowed like jewels by contrast; his cropped hair

was white-blond. He wore undress uniform: gray shorts and short-sleeved tunic

and gunbelt.

"This parting is not of my will," he said in crisp Chosen-accented Landisch.

"No, it's mine," Sally agreed, in English.

She'd spoken Landisch for a long time, her voice had been a little rusty when

she went to die Santander embassy to see about getting her Republican

citizenship back. She'd met Maurice mere. And she didn't intend to speak

Karl's language again, if she could help it.

4S.M. Stirling 6- David Drake

"Will you not reconsider?" he said.

Twelve years together had made it easy for her to read the emotions behind a

Chosen mask-face. The sorrow she sensed put a bubble of anger at the back of

her mouth, hard and bitter.

"Will you give John back his children?" she said.

A brief glance aside showed that her son John wasn't nearby anymore. Where . .

. twenty feet or so, bending over a cargo net with another boy of about the

same twelve years. Jeffrey Fair, Maurice's son.

Karl Hosten stiffened and ran a hand over his stubbled scalp. "The law is the

law; genetic defects must be—"

"A clubfoOt is not a genetic defect!" Sally said with quiet deadliness. "It's

a result of carriage during pregnanc/*—a spear of guilt stabbed her—"which can

be, was, corrected surgically. And you didn't even tell me you were having him

sterilized in the delivery room. I didn't find out until he was eleven years

old!"

"Would you have been happier if you knew? Would he?"

"How happy would he be when he found out he couldn't be Chosen?"

Karl swallowed and looked very slightly away. He is my son too, he didn't say.

Aloud: "There are many fine careers open to Probationers-Emeritus. Johan is an

intelligent boy. The University—"

"As a Washout" Sally said, using the cruel slang term for those jvho failed

the exacting Trial of Life at eighteen after being born to or selected for the

training system. It was far better than Prote'ge' status, anything was, but in

die Land of the Chosen . . .

"We've had this conversation too many times," she said.

Karl sighed. "Correct. Let us get this over with."

She looked around. "John!"

John Hosten felt prickly, as if his own skin were too tij^ht and belonged to

somebody else. Everyone had been

THE CHOSEN 5

too quiet in the steamcar, after they picked him up at the school. He'd

already said good-bye to his friends— he didn't have many—and packed. Vulf,

his dog, was already on board the ship.

/ don't ttxtnt to listen to them fight, he thought, and began drifting away

from his mother and father.

That put him near another boy about his own age. Johns eyes slid back to him,

curiosity driving his misery away a little. The stranger was skinny and tall,

red-haired and freckled. His hair was oddly cut, short at the sides and floppy

on top, combed—a foreigner's style, different from both the Chosen crop and

the bowl-cut of a Proti. He wore a thin fabric pullover printed in bizarre

colorful patterns, baggy shorts, laced shoes with rubber soles, and a

ridiculous looking billed cap.

"Hi," he said, holding out a hand. Then: "Ah, guddag."

"I speak English," John said, shaking with the brief hard clamp of tne Land.

English and Imperial were compulsory subjects at school, and he'd practiced

with his mother.

The other boy flexed his fingers. "Better'n I speak Landisch," he said,

grinning. "I'm Jeffrey Fair. Tliat's my dad over there."

He nodded towards a tall slender man in a white uniform who was standing a

careful twenty meters from the Hosten party. John recognized the uniform from

familiarization lectures and slides: Republic of Santan-der Navy, officer's

lightweight summer garrison version. It must be Captain Farr, the officer Mom

had been seeing at the consulate about the citizenship stuff.

7 wish stie'd tell me the truth. I'm not a little kid or an idiot, he thought.

That wasn't the only reason she was talking to Maurice Farr so much. "John

Hosten, Probationer-hereditary," he replied aloud.

A Probationer-hereditary was born to the Chosen and automatically entitled to

the training and the Test of Life; only a few children of Protege's were

adopted into the course. Then he flushed. He wasn't going to be a

S.M. Stirling 6- David Drake

Probationer long, and he could never have passed the Test, not the genetic

portions. Not with his foot. He couldn't be anything but a Washout,

second-class citizen.

"You don't have to worry about all that crap any more," Jeffrey said

cheerfully, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the liner Pride of Bosson.

"We're all going back to civilization."

The Bag that fluttered from her signal mast had a blue triangle in the left

field with fifteen white stars, and two broad stripes of red and white to the

right. The Republic of Santander's banner.

John opened his mouth in automatic reflex to defend die Land, then closed it

again. He was going to Santan-der himself. To live.

"Y#, we're going," he said. They both looked over towards their parents. "Your

mother?"

"She died when I was a baby," Jeffrey said.

There was a crash behind them. The boys turned, both relieved at the

distraction. One of the steam cranes on the Bosson's deck had slipped a gear

while unloading a final cargo net on the dock. The Protege" foreman of the

docker gang went white under his tan—he'd be held responsible—and turned to

yell insults and complaints up at the liner's deck, shaking his fist. Then he

turned and whipped his lead-weighted truncheon across the side of one docker's

head. There was a sound like a melon dropping on pavement; the dockers face

seemed to distort like a rubber mask. He fell to the cracked uneven pavement

with a limp finality, as if someone had cut all his tendons.

"Shit," Jeffrey whispered.

The foreman made an angry gesture with his baton, and two of the dockers took

their injured fellow by the arms and dragged him off towards a warehouse. His

head was rolled back, eyes disappeared in the whites, bubbles of blood

whistling out of his nose. The foreman turned back to the ship and called up

to the seamen on the railing, calling for an officer. They looked back

THE CHOSEN 7

at him for a moment, then one silently turned away and walked towards the

nearest hatch . . . slowly.

The gang instantly squatted on their heels when the foreman's attention went

elsewhere. A few lit up stubs of cigarette; John could smell the musky scent

of hemp mingled with the tobacco. A few smirked at the foreman's back, but

most were expressionless in a different way from Chosen, their faces blank and

doughy under sweat and stubble. They were wearing cotton overalls with broad

arrows on them, labor-camp inmates' clothing.

"Hey, that crate's busted," Jeffrey said.

John looked. One wood-and-iron box about three meters on a side had sprung

along its top. The stencils on the side read Museum of History and Nature/

Copernik. He felt a stir of curiosity. Copernik was capital of the Land, and

die Museum was more than a storehouse; it was the primary research center of

die most advanced nation on Visager. He'd had daydreams of working there

himself, of finally figuring out some of the mysterious artifacts of the

Ancestors, the star-spanning colonizers from Earth. The Federation had fallen

over a thousand years ago—it was 1221 A.F. right now—and nobody could

understand the enigmatic constructs of ceramic and unknown metals. Not even

now, despite the way technology had been advancing in the past hundred years.

They were as incomprehensible as a steam engine or a dirigible would be to one

of the arctic savages.

"What's inside?" he said eagerly.

"C'mon, let's take a look."

The laborers ignored them; John was in a Probationer's school uniform, and

Jeffrey was an obvious foreigner— an upper-class boy could go where he

pleased, and the Fourth Bureau would be lethally interested if they heard of

Prot6g6s talking to an auzlander. Even in the camps, there was always

someplace worse. The foreman was still trading cusswords with the liner's

petty officer.

John grabbed at the heavy Abaca hemp of the net and climbed; it was easy,

compared to the obstacle courses

S.M. Stirling 6- David Drake

at school. Jeffrey followed in an awkward scramble, all elbows and knees.

"It's just a rock," he said in disappointment, peering through the sprung

panels.

"No, it's a meteorite," John said.

The lumpy rock was about a meter across, suspended in an elastic cradle in the

center of the crate. It hadn't taken any damage when the net dropped—unlike a

keg of brandy, which they could smell leaking—but then, from die slagged and

pitted appearance, it had survived an incandescent journey through the

atmosphere. John was surprised that it was being sent to the museum;

meteorites were common. You saw dozens in the sky, any night. There must be

something unusual about this one, maybe its chemical composition. He reached

through and touched it.

"Sort of cold," he said. Not quite icy, but not natural, either. "Feel it."

Jeffrey stretched a long thin arm through the crack. "Yeah, like—"

The universe vanished.

Sally looked over her shoulder. Where was John? Then she saw him, scrambling

over the cargo net with another boy. With Maurices son. She opened her mouth

to call them back, then closed it. It's important that they get along. Maurice

hadn't made a formal proposal yet, but . . . She turned back.

Karl had his witnesses to either side: his legal children, Heinrich and Gerta,

adopted in the fashion of the Chosen. Heinrich was the son of a friend who'd

died in an expedition to the Far West Islands; they were dangerous, and the

seas between, with their abundant and vicious native life, even more so. The

other had been born to Protege" laborers on the Hosten estates and christened

Gitana. Karl had sponsored her; she was a bright active youngster and her

parents were John's nurse and attendant valet/bodyguard, respectively.

THE CHOSEN

9

Maria and Angelo stood at a respectful distance; their daughter ignored them.

Ex-daughter; no Chosen were as strict as those Chosen from Prote'ge' ranks.

She was Gerta Hosten now, not Gitana Pesalozi,

A Chosen attorney exchanged papers with the plump little Santander consul,

then turned to Sarah.

"Sarah Hosten, ne'e Kingman, do you hereby irrevocably renounce connubial ties

with Karl Hosten, Chosen of the Land?"

"I do."

"Karl Hosten, do you acknowledge this renunciation?"

"I do."

"Do you also acknowledge Sarah Hosten as bearing full parental rights to John

Hosten, issue of this union?"

"Excepting that John Hosten may continue to claim my name if he wishes, I do."

Karl swallowed, but his face might have been carved from the basalt of the

volcanoes.

"Heinrich Hosten, Gerta Hosten, Probationers-adoptee of the line of Hosten, do

you witness?"

"We do."

"All parties will now sign, fingerprint and list their geburtsnumero on this

document."

Sally complied, although unlike anyone born in the Land of the Chosen she

didn't have a birth-number tattooed on her right shoulderblade and memorized

like her name. The ink from the fingerprinting stained her handkerchief as she

wiped her hands.

The consul stepped forward. "Sarah Jennings Kingman, as representative of the

Republic of Santander, I hereby officially certify that your lapsed

citizenship in the Republic is fully restored with all rights and duties

appertaining thereunto; and that your son John Hosten as issue of your body is

accordingly entitled to Santander citizenship also. . . . Where is the boy?"

The universe vanished. John found himself in a ... place. It seemed to be the

inside of a perfectly reflective

10

S.M. Stirling 6- David Drake

sphere, like being inside a bubble made of mirror glass. He tried to scream.

Nothing happened. That was when he realized that he had no throat, and no

mouth. No body.

No body no body nobodynobody—

The hysteria damped down suddenly, as if he'd been slipped a tranquilizer.

Then he became conscious of weight, breath, himself. For a moment he wanted to

weep with relief.

"Excuse me," a voice said behind him.

He turned, and the mirrored sphere had vanished. Instead he saw a room. The

furnishings were familiar, and wrong. A fireplace, rugs, deep armchairs,

books, table, decanters, but none of them quite as he remembered. A man was

standing by a table, in uniform, but none he knew: baggy maroon pants, a blue

swallowtail jacket, a belt with a saber; a pistol was thrown on the table

beside the glasses. He was dark, darker than a tan could be, with short very

black hair and gray eyes. A tall man, standing like a soldier.

"Where . . . what. . ." John began.

"Attention!" die man said.

"Sir!" John barked, bracing. Six years of Probationer schooling had made that

a reflex.

"At ease, son," the dark man said, and smiled. "Just helping you get a grip on

yourself. First, don't worry. This is real"—he gestured around at the

room—"but it isn't physical. You're still touching the meteorite in the crate.

Virtually no time is passing in die . . . the outside world. When we've

finished talking, you'll be back on the dock and none the worse for wear."

"Am I crazy?" John blurted.

"No. You've just had something very strange happen." The smile grew wry.

"Pretty much the same thing happened to me, lad. A long time ago, when I

wasn't all that much older than you are now. Sit."

John sank gingerly into one of the chairs. It was comfortable, old leather

that sighed under his weight. He

THE CHOSEN

11

sat with his feet on the floor and his hands on the arms of the chair.

"My names Raj Whitehall, by the way. And this"— he waved a hand at the

room—"is Center. A computer."

Despite the terror that boiled somewhere at the back of his mind, John shaped

a silent whistle. "A computer? Like the Ancestors had, the Federation? I've

read a lot about them, sir."

Raj Whitehall chuckled. "Well, that's a good start. My people thought they

were angels. Yes, Center's a holdover from the First Federation. Military

computer, Command and Control type. Don't ask me any of the details. Where I

was brought up, experts understood steam engines, a little. Look there."

John turned his head to look at the mirrored surface. Instead, he was staring

out into a landscape. It wasn't a picture; there was depth and texture to it.

Subtly different from anything he'd ever seen, the moons in the faded blue sky

were the wrong size and number, the sunlight was a different shade. It cast

black shadows across eroded gullies in cream-white silt. Out of the badlands

came a column of men in uniforms like Raj's. They were riding, but not on

horses. On dogs, giant dogs five feet high at the shoulder. They looked a lot

like Vulf, except their legs were thicker in proportion, John whistled again,

this time aloud.

The column of men went by, and a clumsy-looking field gun pulled by six more

of the giant dogs. Then Raj Whitehall pulled up his ... well, his giant hound.

A woman rode beside him, not in uniform. Her face was dusty and streaked with

sweat, and beautiful. Slanted green eyes glowed out of it.

The vision faded, back to the absolutely perfect mirror. John looked back to

Raj. "Where was that?" he said. Then, slowly: "When was that?"

Raj nodded, leaning his hips back against the table and crossing his arms.

"That was Bellevue, the planet where I was born. About a hundred and fifty

years ago."

12

S.M. Stirling if David Drake

"You're ... a ghost?"

"A ghost in a machine. A recording that thinks it's a man. It's a convincing

illusion, even to me."

John sat silently for what felt like a minute. "Why are you talking to me?"

"Good lad," Raj said. John felt an obscure jolt of pride at the praise. Raj

went on. "Now, listen carefully. You know how the Federation collapsed?"

John nodded. Visager had preserved the records; he'd seen them in school.

Expansion from Earth, then rivalries and civil war. Civil war that continued

until the Tanaki Nets were destroyed and interstellar travel cut off, and then

on Visager itself until civilization was thoroughly sjnashed. After that a

long process of rebirth, slow and painful.

"That happened all over the human-settled galaxy. On Bellevue, the collapse

was even worse than here. Center was left in the rubble underneath the

planetary governor's mansion. Center waited a long, long time for die time to

be right. More than a thousand years; then it found me. Bellevue's problem was

internal division. We were set to slag ourselves down again, this time right

back to stone hatchets, all the more surely because we were doing it with

rifles and not nukes. I was a soldier, an officer. With Center's help—and some

very brave men—I reunited the planet. Bellevue's the capital of the Second

Federation, now."

"You want me to unite Visager?" John felt his mouth drop open. "Me?" His voice

broke embarrassingly, the way it had taken to doing lately, and he flushed.

Raj shook his head. "Not exactly. More to prevent it being unified, at least

by the wrong people." He leaned forward slightly. "Tell me honestly, John.

What do you think of the Chosen?"

John opened his mouth, then closed it. Memories flickered through his mind;

ending with the blank, caved-in faces of the dockers as the unconscious man

was carried away.

THE CHOSEN

13

"Honestly, sir—not much. Mom doesn't, either. I tried talking to Dad about it

once, but..." He shrugged and looked away.

Raj nodded. "Center can foresee things. Not the future always, but what will

probably happen, and how probable it is. Don't ask me to explain it—I've had

three lifetimes, and I still can't understand it. But I know it works."

maintenance of your personality matrix is incompatible with the modifications

necessary to comprehend stochastic analysis.

John started and put his hands to his ears. The voice had come from everywhere

and nowhere. It felt heavy, somehow, as if the words held a greater freight of

meaning than any he'd ever heard. The sound of them in his head had been

entirely flat and even, but there were undertones that resonated like a

guitar's strings after the player's fingers left them. The voice felt . . .

sad.

"Center means that if I was changed that much, I wouldn't be me," Raj said.

John hosten, the ancient, impersonal voice said, in the absence of exterior

intervention, there is a 51% probability ±6%, that the chosen wifl establish

complete dominance of visager within 34 years. observe.

John looked toward the mirrored wall.

An endless line of men in tattered green uniforms marched past a machine-gun

nest manned by Land troops, Prote'ge' infantry, and a Chosen officer. Two

plain-clothes police agents stood by, in long leather coats and wide-brimmed

hats, heavy pistols in their hands. Every now and then they would flick their

hands, and the soldiers would drag a man out of the line of prisoners, force

him down to his knees. The Fourth Bureau men would step up and put the muzzles

of their guns to the back of the kneeling man s head . . .

conquest of the empire, Center said, observe:

A montage followed: cities burning, with their names

14

S.M. Stirling b David Drake

and locations somehow in his mind. Ships crowded with slave laborers arriving

in Oathtaking and Pillars and Dorst A group of Chosen engineers talking over

papers and plans, while a line of laborers that stretched beyond sight worked

on a railway embankment.

consolidation, further expansion.

A burning warship sank, in an ocean littered with oily guttering flames,

wreckage, bodies, and men who still tried to move. Hundreds of them were

sucked backwards and down as the ship upended and sank like a lead pencil

dropped into a pool, its huge bronze propellers still whirling as it took the

final plunge. Through the smoke came a line of battlewagons, with the

black-and-eold banner of the Chosen at their masts. Their main batteries were

scorched and blistered with heavy firing, but silent; their secondary guns and

quick-firers stabbed out into the waters.

destruction of santander.

Even without Centers information, he recognized the next scene. It was

Republic Hall in Santander City. The ^reat red-granite dome was shattered; a

man in the black frock coat and tall hat of Republican formality stood before

a Chosen general and handed over the Constitution of the Republic in its

glass-cased box. The general threw it down and ground the heel of his boot

into it while the troops behind him cheered.

consequences.

A shabby tenement street in a Chosen city. Figures clustered about the steps,

talking, falling silent as a strange-looking steamcar bristling with weapons

hummed by.

"But those are Chosen," John exclaimed.

Raj spoke: "What do carnivores do when they've finished off the game?"

metaphorical but correct, Center's passionless non-voice said, once

consolidation is complete, die chosen lines would fall out with each other,

the planet cannot support so large a lading class In

THE CHOSEN

15

conditions of intense competition, not indefinitely; and the social system

resulting from conquest and slavery cannot be rationally adjusted to maximize

productivity, internal reorganization would lead to the creation of a noble

caste and the exclusion of most chosen lines.

Armies clashed, armed with strange, powerful weapons. Machines swarmed through

the air, ran in sleek low-slung deadliness over the earth. Men died, Prote'ge'

soldiers, civilians.

the new nobility would fight among themselves, first with protege armies,

rivalry would build.

A long sleek shape dropped on a pillar of white fire into a desert landscape.

Landing legs extended, and a hatchway opened.

technological progress would continue to an interplanetary-transport level,

then fossilize, none of the contending factions on visager could afford to

divert sufficient resources to reestablish stardr-ive.

A huge city, buildings reaching for the sun. It took a moment for John to

recognize it as Oathtaking, and then only by the shape of the circular harbor

and the volcanoes that ringed it. Suddenly one of the gant towers vanished in

an eye-searing flash.

one party among the nobility attempts to use the fallen chosen lines against

die other, instead they rise against the nobility planet-wide, attempting to

restore the old system, the proteges revolt, maximum entropy results.

S. M. Stirling & David Drake - The Chosen

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