"Perasmon can't be serious," Rez declared. "Not at a time like this. It has to be a bluff. Not the kind that I'd say was very smart. Even being able to conceive something like that should be enough to disqualify him from office. Maybe it's because nobody's quite sure yet what the right way is to deal with our kind of system. But it can't be for real."
Urgran scowled and leaned across the table to top up his glass.
Kles stayed out of it, occupying himself by ladling out another bowl of the stew, which was still hot. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly toward his uncle and indicated the pot. Urgran shook his head. "Not for me… Thanks."
Kles didn't follow the politics that the adult world seemed to spend half its time talking about these days. Giants and buried cities, life in the fringe regions, and finding out about animals was more interesting. He didn't understand why they couldn't all get along the way the archeologists and geologists got along with the Iskois.
Minerva had two major populated land areas, called Cerios and Lambia, each straddling the equatorial belt between oceans that became ice-locked in the north and south alternately with the winters. It hadn't always been that way. Long ago, when the ice caps had been much smaller, the oceans had connected all around the planet. The civilization of the Giants had extended into regions that were now covered by permanent ice sheets, which was why so little of it had been found. There were probably the remains of whole cities and who knew what else still waiting to be discovered. The mix of gases in the atmosphere, along with a thin crust that permitted a high flow of heat from the interior, had kept Minerva significantly warmer than it would otherwise have been at its distance from the Sun, for as long as reliable records of the past could be reconstructed. But in recent centuries that had been changing. Towns that had once flourished lay abandoned to the snow, and former farmlands turned into frozen deserts as year by year the advancing ice sheets pushed the populations centers relentlessly back to the equatorial belt.
Earlier peoples, aware of the trend and under no illusions as to the fate that it portended, had resigned themselves to accepting that, like all things and every individual, their world would eventually come to an end and nothing they could do was going to change it. Amassing vast fortunes or striving to gain fame and prestige for themselves in the future was all pretty pointless, since there wasn't going to be one. They applied themselves instead to the arts of civil and harmonious living, the enjoyment of culture, catering to the needs of the young, the sick, the elderly, and the unfortunate, generally pooling what they had to make the experience of life as comfortable as possible for all while the time lasted. Some said that it should never have changed, that people had never been better than in those days. Trying to fend off the natural end to the spell that had been allotted to a world was like propping up a wilting flower that had lived out its days, and in the end just as futile. Didn't the skies show that new flowers were forever budding? The Lunarian word for universe meant "never-ending garden."
Then learning and experiment led to the emergence of science, engineering, new technologies, and the harnessing of revolutionary forms of energy. Machines opened up regions of vast untapped resources beneath the ice, and when the dream of artificial flight became a reality, followed rapidly by the development of regular air travel, the notion took root, inspired by the legend of the Giants, of moving the Lunarian civilization to Earth, closer to the Sun. This became the racial quest.
Most of the various tribes, clans, nations and so forth that made up the population were ruled by some form of the hereditary monarch or popular chieftain that Lunarians had traditionally turned to for ordering their affairs. As the goal of survival by migration became the common enterprise, the pattern of previous history led them to merge and combine their efforts until, apart from a few fringe communities, the map had consolidated into the two major groupings of Cerios and Lambia.
Kles and Laisha were Cerians. Why such things should matter much was a mystery as far as he was concerned, but as the pace of life quickened with the coming of the new technologies, and change seemed to become the rule for everything, Cerios had replaced its royal house with a president heading a congress of representatives that the people appointed. Some kind of theory that most Cerians apparently supported said that this would lead to a decentralized system of research and production in which many different groups competing with each other would produce better results faster. The Lambians, on the other hand, believed this could only result in chaos, duplication, and ruinous waste, and the old, proven methods of central direction and coordination were the only way of achieving any coherent program; in any case, this wasn't a time to be tearing down what had been shown to work and replacing it by something unknown that might not. So Lambia still had a king, with the people being represented by a limited parliament.
The two powers had coexisted in this way since Kles's father's time with neither demonstrating anything that was obviously superior. The advocates on both sides emphasized their own successes and the other's failures, while the critics of both said that ability and knowledge were what counted, not theories on how they should be motivated-as if the present circumstances required any additional motivation, anyway.
The more ominous development that Urg, Jud, and Rez were talking about was fairly recent. Taking the traditional Lunarian view that resources belonged to all, the Lambian king, Perasmon, had accused the Cerians of squandering a future that belonged to the Lambians as much as to themselves. If the Cerians were not going to safeguard it responsibly, Perasmon said, then the Lambians had the right to take charge of it themselves, forcibly if necessary. He was setting aside a sector of Lambian industry to develop appropriate equipment for a contingency force to be armed and trained accordingly. Now it sounded as if President Harzin was saying that Cerios had no choice but to follow suit.
Kles was still too numbed by the implications to even want to think about it. Kings, presidents, all other the kinds of leaders who had headed communities… were there to serve people, to organize ways to help them live better. It was why people had always listened to them and trusted them. But this talk now was about designing and making things to kill people. Not just hunting weapons, or the kind that sheriffs and town marshals and sometimes companies of volunteers needed for stopping criminals or dealing with the bandit gangs that appeared in outlying areas from time to time, but for threatening ordinary people who hadn't done anything.
Long ago, there had been barbaric tribes and even upstart nations that tried to live by violence and preying upon their neighbors. But they had never lasted long among a vaster majority once the majority was driven to take action, and civilized ways had spread to become universal to the point where most Lunarians were probably incapable of conceiving anything else. To hear a king talking now about organizing to violently attack another nation was like the thought of being ruled by bandits. Perasmon said he had no choice. Kles didn't know what choices kings did or didn't have, but it seemed unbelievable that the whole adult world with all its complexities and resourcefulness couldn't come up with some other way of resolving the problem. He had seen the corpses of animals felled by bullets and spears, and once, when he was younger, the charred remains of two occupants of a car that had gone off a cliff. His mind conjured up a picture of something like that happening to Laisha-not from an accident or one of the misfortunes that life brought sometimes, but inflicted deliberately by someone, with a device that others had designed and made for the purpose. The thought was so horrifying that Kles felt unable to finish his stew.