Within the compass of the eye

WITHIN THE COMPASS OF THE EYE

Our ancestors arrived here during the Ninth Expansion, in the Twenty-Seventh Century of Human Space. Since then the Tenth and Eleventh Expansions have twice emptied the planet and the system. The ebbtide of humanity breaks empires, and each time those who remain rise like the phoenix to rebuild their cultures.

Here on the Great Quay of Saramaka I stand, with my back to the shore and my face to the open sea. From the ocean comes our wealth, to the waves our people flow. Each tide outgoing takes with it another few thousand colonial futures, going out to those parts of the map where our colour rules the earth and our armies hold sway. Ours is an heir-archical society, where arrogance is so ingrained that it passes almost without comment. It makes strangers of our cousins across the sea, whom we treat with unjust disdain even though we are but separated from them by two or three generations. Be that so, we have the unfortunate habit of treating them, when they arrive, partly as a combination between children and servants. We do ourselves a great and lasting disservice by treating them so, for their descendents will be the heirs of our empire; and resentful memories are longest.

Wherever I turn, our flag flies. Were I to be transported about this entire world of Hiragam, onto every continent, I would find some outpost where I could spy in the crowd some faces from my native land. Our touch is everywhere, and no part of the world is completely foreign to us; even beneath the earth, for all Hiragam has become a graveyard for our people. Our laws, our mores, our ethics and our ethos are in common usage wherever we travel. Whatever coast our ships sail along, whatever ports we enter and wherever our feet tread, our language has been either adopted or adapted. Even in the remotest part of the globe, among the general gabble of some barbaric tongue some discernable jewel of understandable speech leaps out to touch the ear—a word of our language which has leaked into theirs by contact or more slowly, by diffusion.

Our fleets of vessels traverse the wide ocean, bringing from faraway shores the produce and treasures of our colonies. Here to the streets of this mightiest of emporiums they travel, and here the merchants grow rich and fat on their great profits. From these docks go the production of our factories, back to the colonial markets for consumption by the sons and daughters of the settlers. From time to time there is heard a clamour for the establishment of an industrial infrastructure in this colony or that. We turn a deaf ear to the pleas, for it would not do to have overseas competition for either our finished goods or our markets. So they produce food for our hungry industrial working class, and feed us with raw materials from their mines and forests. They rely on us for almost everything else, as is proper.

In turn, we feed them with our people. Not the best of our race, of course. In a society such as ours, where the divisions of class are so acute, rebellion is an ever-present monster that threatens the stability of the existing system. The plain fact is this—we manage to keep a lid on revolt and social violence at home most of the time due to this constant, deliberately engineered hemorrhaging of this country’s poorest and most dangerous blood to each new colony. The most impoverished, and therefore the ones with the greatest cause for disaffection, are the ones chosen for this great exodus.

The criminal and working classes perceive the advantages enjoyed by their betters, and are discontented. The hoi polloi who exist as the great base of society’s pyramid, they who have so little to lose and therefore, no respect for authority of any kind—-they are the lifeblood, the million heads, of the revolutionary hydra. These two unhappy classes, the dispossessed and the barely-possessed, are natural allies in any potential outbreak of mischief or violence. It therefore behoves us to remove this constantly-threatening thorn which has the ability to so poison our flesh.

It is this need to assuage the anger of the underclass by offering them the lure of greener, emptier fields that drives the urge for colonial expansion. In the new country, they can become their own masters instead of our servants—or at least, that is the convenient lie we feed them. The reality is that they remain as much our servants overseas as they do at home, as I have explained already. For in supplying the home country with goods that have received the minimum of processing while in the colony, are they not fulfilling our needs? By producing large amounts of food which cannot be grown at home for lack of space, are they not feeding the people and assuaging their hunger, raising the standard of living for the poor to the extent that their anger is somewhat appeased, and the threat of imminent ferocity thereby somewhat abated?

In this great work of preventing disharmony from becoming open rage, we are assisted by the mutual efforts of those two social cohorts who have the most to lose from the actions of their angry underlings. They are namely the upper working class and the lower middle class. These two social groups abut one another, and therefore are natural allies against anyone beneath them while being concurrently—as one would more naturally assume—great rivals. The upper levels of the working class fear the eagerness of those with whom they compete most directly; the lower working class. For their part the lower middle class, fearing the social pressure of the working class, co-operates in ridding society of its lowest orders in order to remove the ever-imminent threat of upward motivation that is the wish of the lowest people.

We have another great army of allies in our war against the spectre of violent uprising; the priests. True, the great mass of the people have but little interest in religion, but all the same we try to instill in them the righteous fear of the eternal powers, and some faint appreciation of the awesome power of God. To an outsider it may appear that we are displaying altruism; but there is a far more important reason for this work. The main point of any of the great religions can be summed up in a five-word epigram; ‘be satisfied with your lot’. Be not so eager to look for rewards in this lifetime, for you will be granted rewards in heaven.

Particularly if you have had a hard life, I might add. The cynic might say that a hard existence (and the harder the better) is its own reward. We of the upper classes would take issue with that. A life which is full of excessive hardship will lead a person to desperation and violence because they see no other options. We prefer to think of religion as a sort of safety-valve for the head of pressure that builds up behind the dams of social restriction which this society creates. We know full well that the promise of eventual reward in heaven is an amazingly effective palliative for the disasters and disappointments imposed by life in the world.

We have done very well in the century or so since we began creating colonies. Indeed we have done magnificently. Within the compass of the eye there is hardly a place on the world’s surface that has not been touched by our presence. The disparate societies of the globe have to a great degree been incorporated and ultimately assimilated by our empire. If history has any lessons for us though, it is that nothing lasts permanently. In the ultimate, the further we spread ourselves in extent the safer we are from the forces of historical inevitability.

The tide that presently bears us in its flood will fall at last; the time will come when this present day is looked back upon wistfully as a golden age. How many Golden Ages have there been though, throughout history? Certainly the wave crest we are riding at the moment will one day become a trough. Looking forward a century or two into the future though, after the next Expansion, our descendents will be riding another crest of hope, a new wave of chance.