Ascending - James Alan Gardner [43]
The Shaddill offered Lajoolie’s ancestors a choice: to abide by the League’s law (in which case the Divians would be granted the means to venture into the galaxy at large) or to reject the law (in which case they would be killed if they tried to leave home).
In the abstract, this sounds like an easy decision—few persons would openly say, “I must decline the chance to see the galaxy; I prefer the option of slaughtering whomever I choose.” But in concrete terms, the situation was more controversial…because the Divians would be required to leave all lethal weapons on their homeworld, thus traveling to the stars unarmed. The Shaddill claimed that consciously equipping yourself with the means to kill other beings was direct evidence you were not sentient; those who refused to lay down their guns were not “civilized” enough to join the League.
(At this point, I asked Lajoolie what was wrong with carrying, say, a shiny silver ax, if one only intended to use it on bad people who truly deserved what they got? But she told me the League did not view it that way…and the League did not engage in debate, they simply executed those who did not Play Along. That is the problem with aliens—their heads are so full of alien thought processes, they will not see reason.)
So each Divian of those long-ago days had to make a decision: either to hold on to his or her weapons and stay home, or to lay down arms and go to the stars. The Shaddill promised that those who chose disarmament would be granted pleasant tracts of land in another star system, on a planet specially prepared to mimic the Divian homeworld. The Shaddill also offered excellent enticements as “Welcome to the League” gifts: breeding seeds for Zarett spaceships, making it possible to fly from one star to another; a chemical called YouthBoost that helped people live twice their normal lifespan, without growing weak or shriveled; and new tricks of gene-splicing that allowed the Divians to engineer their offspring into specialized forms—huge muscular women, for example, or talkative little men whose skin automatically turned dark to block out radiation.
Despite these incentives, many Divians were not eager to accept the Shaddill offer. They did not trust aliens who said, “We will take you someplace nice, except you must leave behind all means to resist us.” Indeed, the only ones who embraced the deal were wild optimists or people with nothing to lose—those trapped in terrible poverty or under murderous regimes, not to mention persons afflicted with fatal illnesses who threw themselves at the mercy of the Shaddill’s superior medical technology. Oddly enough, Lajoolie told me, there were many many people enduring precisely such desperate conditions: living in fear of war, facing death by famine, or growing sick from poisons in the air, water, and soil.
Anyone wanting to escape simply had to call upon the Shaddill. A few soft words would do…and even if there were killers breaking down your door or you were locked in a hideous torture chamber, you would be teleported instantly to the safety of a Shaddill carrier ship. In some regions of the Divian homeworld, this possibility of escape only increased the local brutality, as ruling authorities attempted to purge Unwanted Elements by scaring them into flight. Terrifying people into leaving the solar system was virtually as good as killing them…
…except that a few years later, many of those people came back. Looking healthy and prosperous. Flying wonderful Zaretts. Showing off gene-spliced babies who were more beautiful and intelligent than anyone who stayed behind, not to mention that these children were expected to live hundreds of years without suffering the infirmities of age.
That is when a number of stay-at-homes said, “Holy shit indeed!”
For one thing, most who had stayed on the Divian home-world were suffering difficult times. Their planet had lost a goodly percentage of its underclass—the poor who worked