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Alexander’s Sword

ER Stewart

Haven, 2074 A.D.

WILLIAM GARNER CASTELL, known as Wilgar among the Harmonies of Haven in the early CoDominium years, smiled, revealing white teeth that contrasted his bronzed skin and bright black eyes.

Tiger teeth, I thought. Fit to clamp on for good.

We mingled at the inaugural of our new Haven Administrator, Governor Thompson Erhenfeld Bronson Jr., son of the late Governor, Thomas Erhenfeld Bronson, dead in his sleep of what many whispered were hidden causes linked to his son’s ambition.

I pegged Thompson as just the type to plunge a dagger into the ear of a sleeping patriarch.

Wilgar moved among the VIPs at ease, gracefully using just enough of his considerable charisma to charm each mover and shaker he met. Yet I could see the hard glint in his gaze, the tension in how he shook hands; he knew the Harmony leadership, in his person, had been invited not to participate in CoDominium consolidation of Haven, its power parades and governance dances, but rather to learn its limited place and how to keep to it.

I kept an eye on things, meaning everything with sharp points, serrated edges, and barrels that spat metal hurlants. As Wilgar’s gallowglass, it was my job to keep him from the fatal ambitions of others. Wilgar hid his own ambitions well behind that glowing smile. He was astute and well-informed and understood that all war is deception, as Sun Tzu taught. Wilgar was also as pissed off as a muskylope with a Haven dust tiger clamped to its ass, so he was motivated.

Having been leader of the Harmonies since his father, Charles Castell, had been hanged and martyred when Wilgar was thirteen, he had watched the Harmony sect colonize this far-flung, undervalued planet only to be bumped aside and marginalized first by waves of unwanted, disharmonic settlers, then by the CoDominium’s Marines. And CoDo presence brought concurrent political and business aspirations, such as Kennicott mining and other destructive discords that calculated no profit margin in tolerating Harmony land-ownership or freedom.

* * *

Earlier, in our semi-underground enclave outside Castell City walls, I’d watched the frustration come to a boil in our leader.

“They seek to marginalize us so they can gradually eliminate the Harmony presence on Haven,” Wilgar had said, pacing the narrow confines of his father’s erstwhile chamber. “It’s taken only a generation to move us from the founders of this place, at the center of it all, to cowering fringers kept at the margins.” He slammed a fist onto the torso-sized rope knot his father had so obsessively tied on the altar at the back of the room. “Soon, they’ll expunge us.”

“Some of the outlying farmsteads are empty,” one of the Deacons said, his face as regretful as a funeral director met with genuine loss for the first time in a life of feigning. “Rumor is, they’ve fled to the mountains.”

“Cowards,” Wilgar shouted. He again struck the knot; I’d caught him several times pummeling it and railing at the ragged thing, as if it were his father, who had been hanged, and transformed into legend when he burst into flames and vanished from the gibbet that fateful night.

Wilgar sighed. “Monasteries only scatter our chorus, weaken our song. We lose the melody and…” He trailed off as if he now lacked even the heart for Harmony metaphor. “There must be a better way.”

I watched and waited through various suggestions from Deacons and Beadles. As the protectors of the faithful, Deaks and Beads could deploy deflective, defensive violence and be forgiven. No full Harmony could, being pacifists, which I tended to spell ‘passive fists’ in my mental journal. Having trained them for years, I knew they did a conscientious job, but I also understood their limitations. Their goal, after all, was to earn their way into the silence at the heart of the song and become complete Harmonies. Once there, they were useless to the likes of me, who prowled the perimeter on guard against the endless challenge, hostility and attack Haven offered.

They had sung their parts, finally. I ushered them out so Wilgar could meditate. I knew that probably meant another boxing match with his dead father, who had left him such a mess to deal with. Haven born, Wilgar had known more about the realities of this world than his father could have conceived, including the secrets in the book his father had hidden at the core of the huge knot he’d worked on in his last years.

I’d seen that book, although I’ve not been privileged to read much from it. It is a leather journal, handwritten by Garner “Bill” Castell himself, the founder of the Harmony sect. It was remarkably candid about such matters as political theater, appearance versus reality and keeping the flock in line. It was, in fact, quite a cynical little primer on Machiavellian strategy and tactics, jotted down in earthy language by an Earther who had been kicked around enough to know street smarts could often prevail over other kinds. He knew faith was not enough, too. He had a Fitzgerald quotation on the front cover that read, “Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat.” He had added, “So make ’em lose first.”

It was an admirable tome, one that had served Wilgar remarkably well in the past dozen years.

* * *

He had met me as one of his Irregulars, a band of ragtag kids neglected, abandoned, or unwanted who banded together to run with the smartest, fastest, and best-looking Harmony we’d ever seen. His ideas were always fun and frequently risky, and we prospered under his devilish tutelage. He even made us into a force to be reckoned with, which we found out when three shuttles full of CoDo Marines were due to come take over our little world.

It had been my idea to use waterlogged logs to create obstacles for the CoDominium shuttles to collide with in Havenhold Lake when the first contingents of Marines splashed down. We destroyed two of the three shuttles and struck a solid blow against tyranny but it had only worked once; they patrolled the lake’s perimeter and swept the splashdown lanes now with fanatical devotion. That once sufficed, though, to teach the arrogant interlopers that their fake uprising, used as an excuse to garrison Haven, might just turn real on them after all.

Since that night Wilgar had me study and hone myself both educationally and physically. My mother was one of Cambiston Doxie’s best earners and she accepted books from Earth as pay for extra attentions. She taught me to read. My mother is now long used up; she died of some untreated Earth rot caught from some Marine, and Cambiston Doxie’s is now Dockside Doxie’s with a whole new Doxie and a whole new and bigger building, but we Irregulars maintain contacts there.

Best place to learn things is in a bordello, bar, restaurant, or taxi. Anywhere conspirators relax and especially if they can get drunk there. This is straight from Castell’s knotty book.

* * *

Once I’d shooed everyone else out, I turned to Wilgar and said, “Do I have to wait for you to beat up your father some more, or can we talk?”

He glared at me. I stepped back involuntarily, even though I knew he would never hurt me, such was the force he commanded through his gaze.

“More than a decade and still nothing,” he said. “Haven is lost to us.”

I smiled. “Or we are lost to Haven?”

“How do you mean?”

I could see the hunger for a new idea, any idea, in his face, his stance. He was ready to pounce.

“Which breaks first, a stiff branch or a flexible one?”

“How much further can we bend before our spine snaps? How much more can they demand of us? They’ve subsidized our farms, they say; it means they now take seventy percent of what we grow to feed their damned Marines and the riffraff they protect. They’ve helped us irrigate, meaning we must depend on them for water now. They take all our fuel from the dung pits and steal our minerals outright from the mines—”

“Our? All this prideful boasting of ownership.” Deliberately speaking in the half-mincing way a Harmony sermon might be delivered by one of the older Deacons, I sought to irritate him into thinking it through. Then I dropped the sneer and said, “You own what they let you. They have the superior force. You need to stop whining. Adapt or die; hell, if this lousy planet doesn’t teach you that, you’re stupider than that rope you’re always humping.”

“How dare you!”

Oh, how he glared, but I interrupted him: “How dare you, almighty leader. Ever see what an ocean does to a cliff? Doesn’t matter how sturdy the rocks, it wears it down into sand. Better to be a shore that changes as the sea demands. Better to remain whole by joining the larger forces.”

“Joining? Are you seriously advising me to join the CoDominium or one of its corporate masters? To dissolve our rocky cliff and float as grains of separate sand in a sea of—” His face grew as red as a clownfruit.

I counted three beats, then said, “I’m saying we should become mostly invisible. Like an iceberg. Most of us unseen, with the part that shows small and harmless-looking.”

He opened his mouth to shout some more, but then his fists, clenched the whole time, relaxed. He opened his hands and clasped them behind his back. His pacing slowed and his head lowered along with his brows. The red in his face faded. “Hmm.”

“We give them the Harmony Compound as our distraction, with you as our leader. Our numbers stay outwardly small, and we are careful to keep to ourselves and offer no trouble to anyone. We seek only to observe city and state council meetings, for example. Or ask for a vote now and then, just to stay legitimate. But we do not push for land grants or any of those other things that get the greedy bastards so excited.”

He paused, blew out a candle, then relit it, a nervous gesture. “How…” He paced a bit more and changed his question. “What do we do?”

“We train a new kind of Harmony. We train the top ten percent, say, of our best Deacons and Beadles to blend with the general populace. No more Harmony ceremonial robes, no more setting ourselves apart; not for that new contingent. Instead, they learn to maintain their Harmony faith in strict privacy, in their own minds, and show it to no one.”

“To what end, all this secrecy?”

“All this silence at the heart of the song, you mean. What end? To seed an abiding sympathy for the Harmony ideals, and for the Harmonies, among the controllers of Haven, by training our people to move upward in society. They will carry the secret flame, and work covertly to sway things, when possible, to our cause. They will soften the harsher blows against us, and provide a willing ear to hear our grievances, and so on.”

“A sixth column,” he said. “Campbell-Heinlein.”

“Or the C Street Dominionists of old Earth,” I suggested. “They seized control of the strongest nation on the planet by stealth and patience.”

“Yes, and money, the help of corporations.”

“True, but they converted as many billionaires to their cause as it took, if you’ll recall.”

He nodded, having read the same books I had read, having studied the same histories. “Not celebrities, but the ultra-rich…” he muttered.

He stopped pacing and looked me in the eye.

I was struck by the force of his personality.

“Yet I will have to stay here,” he said, “visible, leading the Harmonies they will be able to see.”

“Yes, and that is perfect, because you draw such attention. You are a beacon rather than a deacon. You’ll attract and blind and dazzle them.”

“A lighthouse of Alexandria.”

“A sword of light, to cut that damned Gordian knot your father left us. Alexander’s Sword, sheathed. For now.”

He glanced at the thing on the altar and turned back to me smiling. “You may have hit on something.”

At least, I thought, it isn’t that damned rope father of yours. I was sure his fists would be bloody when I got around to telling him about my next logical step in developing my iceberg approach; assassination.

* * *

Now, moving among the self-appointed elite of Haven, Wilgar’s tension had him prowling with the feline intensity of a big cat scenting blood. He was tall, with bronze skin courtesy of some mestizo in his heritage, I guessed. He had dark hair and darker eyes that flashed when he smiled, and his teeth were perfect and kept spotlessly clean, unusual on Haven. He kept his posture straight, as his father had taught him, and reflected what others gave off, a talent honed over the years to a politician’s dream sheen.

Watching him work the room made me wonder if our covert efforts would be necessary. Perhaps he could simply charm them all into according the Harmonies a permanent and honored place among Haven’s leaders.

And maybe the mote in God’s Eye would one day heal itself, I mused, thinking of our troubled sky.

Slithering women whose nudity was enhanced by jewels, sheer and gauzy costumes, and intricate coifs stalked the room or clung to this or that fat power broker’s arm, laughing at the right times, feeding insatiable egos and generally plying the trade my mother had excelled at on a rather lower, rather less gaudy level. Exotic foods tempted; goblets, and flutes and flagons of wine sparkled, while artificial lighting brightened Haven’s dull orange daylight into a golden glow. Finery prevailed from clothing through accessories. Officers in braided uniforms sported swords engraved and bejeweled and likely blooded. Furniture was all Earthish, both heavy and intricately carved. Seats were lushly cushioned, whether on chairs and benches or the rich gluttons who sat upon them. A kind of heady joy filled the room, that of self-congratulation and boastful ostentation. We eat it all, their preening proclaimed.

This single gathering, I thought, costs more than all the Harmonies earn in several years. This made me smile and I nearly laughed aloud at how socialist and ridiculous I sounded. Might made light of such considerations as fairness or equitable distribution of wealth. What nonsense, to contemplate a world where everyone had enough and no one bullied anyone else. That didn’t even happen in families. Garner Bill had known.

Haven made such notions sickeningly stupid to entertain, with its obvious hostility toward any kind of life, fair or foul. Haven gave only grudgingly what one fought to the death for. Haven wanted us all dead and gave not an instant’s concern to how high or low one’s birth might have been. To Haven, all birth was obscene.

Worse, Haveners have absorbed all that, and more. To them, a zero-sum game is molecular and basic, born and bred to the bone. They know others must lose for them to win, and if they shed tears or wasted effort commiserating over having to kill to live, they would be next on the chopping block. Haveners knew all this.

Hobbes had it only timidly right if he was describing Haven when he wrote, “…continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Of course, he wrote that on the paradise of Earth, so he must have found camping a particularly distasteful experience. Even worse, he was arguing that we need politics to escape such a situation; was he not paying any attention at all to politicians or the effect they have on others? He mistook the cause as the solution. It was downright Harmonic.

Still, Wilgar, Haven born though he was, did more for others than anyone I ever knew. That was the power of the Harmony song. It brought people together and blended their voices into a greater whole. Our chorus could prevail.

Be still as the silence at the heart of every note, they say; this means to listen. Listening lets you finally hear what music there is around you, and that gives you a chance to join in. All I was advocating was that Wilgar listen, and join in, to the song Haven now sang around him. It was different from his father’s time, and different by far from the Founder’s days.

Surely he saw that Haven’s instrumentality ruled in a way fit to make Hobbes proud. “Any abuses of power by authority are to be accepted as the price of peace,” he wrote. “There is no doctrine of separation of powers.”

Blend in, in other words. Take what comes and harmonize with it. We could become the church in the state.

Hobbes wrote, “The sovereign must control civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers.” So give the powers that be the illusion of control over the Harmony sect. That will satisfy their lust for control over ecclesiastical powers, and set us free, unobserved, gradually and steadily to spread our influence unnoticed among them.

Even as I slipped unremarked among the VIPs, following Wilgar, alert to anything that might threaten his bodily well-being; I began to sense something amiss, perhaps dangerous.

It was as Wilgar bent to accept a kiss on the cheek from one of the fat rich corporate leaders’ slender, young and perfumed wife or concubine that I glimpsed an unsheathed dagger. Unsettled, I moved to stand between it and Wilgar, noting the knife was clenched in the fist of an angry-looking younger man wearing the blue and gold tunic of the CoDo Marines.

When he screamed and lunged, I shoved Wilgar one direction hard enough to knock him down, then dived the other way.

My dive happened to be onto a table laden with food, all of it crashing to the ground as fine china and crystal shattered, men and women bellowed and blundered like cattle, and chaos exploded around us.

I kept my gaze locked on the knife and watched it come up in a short arc, powered by well-developed biceps, into the belly of a startled banker type, who delicately bit off the tip of one of his own fingers as the knife plunged deep and tore upward.

I imagined the canapé and fingertip the man had just compulsively swallowed meeting the knife’s tip halfway down as his guts split.

Scrambling, I shoved through confused people to Wilgar, whom I hefted to unsteady feet. “Come on, we should be gone,” I told him.

“Wait.” He resisted me, and reached for a woman whose neck was either bleeding or splattered by another’s blood. She looked placid, as if drugged.

“Who is she?” I asked, wanting to punch Wilgar for so dangerous an impulse.

“Mya—” he began, but just then someone’s fist connected with his stomach and he doubled over and staggered away from me, into a small crowd fist-fighting over, as far as I could tell, the right to stand on a particularly greasy section of floor.

Gunshots slammed the room into startled, and muffled, silence, and several armed guards waded in. All I have described can have taken no more than a few seconds, but already I was berating myself as a piss-poor bodyguard, having let my charge be swallowed from my sight by a crowd of half-drunken effete rich brawlers.

“Over here,” Wilgar’s voice said into my ear as he grabbed my arm and hauled me behind a large ice carving of a nude woman doing an impossible dance with a creature of the sea of some kind I did not recognize. Wilgar later called it a dolphin, a kind of Earth whale, apparently, smarter than man but not quite as violent.

How Wilgar had gotten behind me, I did not know, but he was giddy now, his blood running high. I was relieved it was not running out of him.

“What’s going on, do you know?” I asked.

“Stolen wife or something,” he said, shrugging. “Jealousy. Now’s our chance.”

I followed him without asking anything further as we made our way swiftly out of the room past a group of CD Marines just now darting in to see what the commotion portended. They seemed eager to get to the fight before it petered out, even though others of their kind had already restored the bulk of what passed for order. They also shot us glances of contempt, probably thinking us peaceful Harmony types cowardly.

We ran along a hall and dodged first left, up a small spiral staircase, then right, along another hall, this one far shorter, lower of ceiling, and darker. I caught the feeling of being behind the scenes. We reached an unmarked door and Wilgar, without hesitation, opened it and dashed inside.

Following, I found an office strewn with lakegrass paper, scrolls protruding from a wall that reminded me of a Tri-V image of a wine cellar I’d seen once, and all manner of books. “Start looking for schematics, plans, maps, anything like that,” he said, digging into a pile of papers on a desk.

We rummaged for several minutes until the sound of voices reached us. We both froze.

People ran by the office, shouting angrily.

We agreed via glance our time was up. Taking what we’d found, we stuffed a pouch hanging by the door, which I then shouldered. Peering, then slipping out the door, we retraced our steps, only to find the party was, remarkably, still convened, with people milling, chatting, eating, and drinking as if nothing had happened.

“Oh there you are,” a woman said, buttonholing Wilgar, while I snatched a glass of what I thought was Harmony honey wine. Turned out to be a fiery mead, delicious but with lip-numbing properties that lasted a good half hour; deliciously above my credit line.

And that was how we accidentally acquired the plans and blueprints and sewer schematics and so on that have served us so well of late.

* * *

Training our selected few and scouting for more recruits of a quality and quantity to convene a second and subsequent class kept us busy during the next months. It reminded me of how we had chosen Irregulars in our childhood. Turns out we’d learned a lot by mimicry of those old Doyle stories.

* * *

“How does this sound?” I asked one afternoon as Wilgar and I sat in his father’s chamber doing paperwork. “We can call them Ice Bergs, with ice an acronym for Invisible, Covert and Exceptional.”

“The kids, you mean?”

It had occurred to us that children should be trained into this, from the start, in order to indoctrinate a new generation of unseen Harmonies.

“Yes, the kids.”

“So what’s a berg?”

I sighed. I had not gotten that far yet. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s silly anyway.”

“No, no. It’s not, really. The ice acronym is fine for kids, they’d like that. Hell, I know some adults who’d eat it up. People love being part of a secret organization.”

“Yes, so they can brag.”

“Exactly.”

“So putting a name to it is a bad idea.”

“Probably, but kids would respond. Maybe that can be the outer layer, from which we recruit the real ones.”

“Ah, esoteric approach.”

He smiled at me and returned to his list of potential positions where we might be able to place or recruit someone sympathetic to our cause.

He looked up after a few seconds. “Important, Considerate, Energetic. There’s your outer meaning. Then, when you recruit the few who get to know the next part, tell them the real meaning, the one you came up with. Lead them through layers of revelation.”

“Testing for trustworthiness along the way, yes.”

“That way we can cull without letting on.”

Without having to kill, I thought. Waiting for Wilgar to realize our new tack led inevitably to being forced to assassinate certain key enemies and opponents was nerve-wracking, but I still worried springing it on him would cause him to reject it outright. If the Harmonies were to survive long term, that could not be allowed to happen. Blood had to be spilled, if discreetly and selectively.

The CoDominium’s coup was proving that left and right.

* * *

In an old book—moldy from its journey from Earth under the deck plates of a cargo vessel hauling industrial parts we could not yet make on Haven—I found a story about a religious group who bought a ranch, then systematically seeded members into local elections until they controlled the city council, at which time they voted to change the town’s name and begin building a city. They were well underway when they ran afoul of state land use laws, and a mass vote of locals managed to take back the town.

What, I thought, if they had taken over and done nothing too showy? What if they had bided their time and consolidated their hold, until a big move became unnecessary? No one might ever have realized. Invisible is the way, I thought, smiling and tossing the book into a fire. Fire cleanses all evidence, they say.

* * *

“To be understood clearly is always a blessing, and always a rarity.” Wilgar stood tall, his voice projecting effortlessly to the crowd in the paddock. An icy wind flapped robes and tousled hair in surly rushes. He seemed naturally to speak between gusts, as if he knew they were coming, or as if they waited for him to cease speaking. Perhaps each gust carried his bursts of words to farther ears, ears muffled in muskylope wool yet still burning from the cold, ringing from the low air pressure, ears often missing chunks from frostbite or battle.

Such a harsh place, Haven, and his words so like seeds that somehow flourished; I have thought long and hard about this and have reached no profound conclusion. He was simply inexplicable at times.

Other times he was as crass and needy as any other man. “We need to be understood clearly, like a man needing a woman to ease the tension in his loins. Like a woman needing a man to fill her ache. Like an empty belly needing filling with any nourishment. Like an ice sword through a bloodthirsty heart.”

We’d argued over that sequence. I found it crass and needy, as I’ve stated. He found it blunt and effective. “Speak to them on their body level,” he told me, “and their minds follow.”

“And their spirits?”

He glanced at me askance. “Oh, those,” he said, smiling. “Those are inconsequential in a silent coup.”

How I hoped he was right about that.

* * *

His paddock speech eased them toward anger, then banked their fired up emotions with talk of home and hearth. He had them on an Archimedes pump, screwing them higher only to dump them into another channel. My gaze flicked across faces rapt and hands clasped. I saw no weapons raised against him, and all hearts raised by him and for him.

That damned charisma.

“In their vast palaces,” Wilgar said, raising his face to project his voice across the paddock crammed with milling acolytes eager to join us.

In realistic terms, these were orphans and outcasts of various sorts hoping for a better break from the Harmonies than they got from any other organized group on Haven. I watched them, alert for trouble.

“In their vast palaces, they sleep in small rooms even as we do, for warmth, even as we do, and their large impressive ballrooms and dining halls, where glittering parties are held costing more than we can earn in many lifetimes—” He swept his hands up, slapped his palms together, than spread his arms to indicate our surroundings, the entire Shangri-La Valley, all of the outdoors. “Are their decadent places as vast, as impressive as all this?”

Striding to the edge of the small stage, made of a few boards tacked to storage crates pilfered from lakeside docks, Wilgar shook his head and kept his arms wide. “They exclude us from their world of insular wealth yet they never see that we inherit far more, far better, in our journey far from Earth’s oppression. We inherit freedom to make of this world what we will, what we see, what we can. And we do not shirk from such labors, but celebrate our privilege to walk freely everywhere on Haven, our birthright, our legacy and our home.”

Cheers rose like a mushroom cloud.

Wilgar cheered with them, pumping his fists and rousing the crowd even further toward open rebellion.

I stood in front of the stage, on ground level, eyeing potential threats and quailing from the inner precipice he’d led them to. If they boiled over and fell into mob violence, the Governor would send Marines to crush us where we stood.

We would be smoldering slag before we would have a chance to scream a denial.

As the crowd began settling into a murmur, Wilgar raised his hands once more and shouted, “Yes!”

“Yes,” the crowd replied.

“Seek not the false promises of wealth and comfort those debauched liars offer,” he called, prompting more “Yeses” from the crowd. “Join us instead, and Haven shall be ours.”

“Yes,” the crowd cried, swept up in whatever vague vision he had managed by the witchery of his words to plant in their hungry and cold-dullened minds. I could only hope no one rushed up and stabbed him, or threw a lucky rock against his thinning hair or wrinkled face.

So young, yet he looked so old.

He looked, I thought, increasingly like his father.

* * *

And in rounding, and rousing, the remaining Harmonies, we created a visible conclave to hold the CoDo’s attention. I knew some of those in the crowd were spies—some of the faces were too well fed, some of the eyes glittered with sharpness instead of glamour. This pleased me, as long as none of them took a pot-shot at Wilgar or set off a bomb in the middle of the paddock. We needed a spectacle on Harmony terms, and in Harmony scale. Our gathering was rag-tag, impoverished, and humble. They could count, and feel contempt, all they wished. We were not a visible threat to CoDominium control. They could rest secure in their brutal power. For now.

Even as he spoke to the convened Harmonies, representing most of those not yet in the mountains hiding, our swords of ice fanned out to infiltrate, infect, and inhabit. We knew of three city council members so far, and a wandering trader. We knew of an advisor to the CoDo Marines who worked as a kind of scout—more Judas goat really—as they cleared the far canyons of homesteaders. They wanted us controlled and that meant leaving no one unaccounted for inside the Shangri-La Valley.

Reports we received in Harmony code told us some of those homesteaders had managed to stay hidden in underground enclaves and even, in one instance, in caverns under a glacier. Hard numbers were scarce but Wilgar felt we had a growing army of invisibles. He longed to live until they revealed themselves as being a secret, silent majority in charge of everything.

My own readings of history made me expect more a truce, as the old Earth Vatican had achieved for a few thousand years. If we could do as well it would fulfill my hopes and exceed our expectations. At that time, though, I would have accepted a Mormon style success; they took Utah and influenced national politics in old Earth’s America. That was remarkable considering some of the parallels between the origins of our sects.

Utah’s salt flats, deserts, and mountains were as nothing contrasted to Haven’s arid highlands, thin air and jagged mountains, I knew. Still, we were doing all right.

If only Wilgar did not jump the gun, or get too ambitious.

* * *

“We have to kill Thomason Erhenfeld,” Wilgar said, punching his father’s knot again for emphasis. “If we don’t, he’ll corral us, brand us, and butcher us for political meat.”

His colorful speech might have amused me on some other topic. On this one, I could not smile. “Try to kill the Governor, he’ll come after us. We’re the only ones who’d—”

“Factions,” he said. “You’ve been to those meetings. You know there are any number of blades drawn under the table.”

“It’s Haven,” I said. “It would be stranger if that weren’t the case, but you know we’re the threat.”

“Harmless Harmonies? You’ve heard the taunts. Little kids spit on us and laugh.”

“Spoilt rich snots, sure. They treat any perceived underdog that way, they’re raised to be coddled cowards.” I paced now, back and forth, as he stood by the knot occasionally smacking a fist into the rope. Did he want to shatter Garner “Bill” Castell’s hold over us, I wondered. Or free it?

I could not understand why he both wanted to overreach, and aim so low at the same time, other than revenge for his father. Eherenfeld Bronson Junior’s father had killed Wilgar’s. Martyred him, frankly. Half the charisma Wilgar wielded came from that last burst of flame that consumed his father so shockingly as he dangled from the gibbet, hanged as a criminal. “I’m not going to help you hang like your father did.”

“I’m already a traitor and revolutionary.” He said this calmly, then smiled.

I saw the humor in his eyes. “Planning to burst into flames?”

“I was thinking more of exploding and taking everyone with me,” he said. “No, I’m no martyr. Dying isn’t my goal. I know you think it’s revenge, too, like that old Earthish war you keep talking about, and those Americalic precedents.”

“Presidents,” I said. “American Presidents.”

“That family who got rich canning beans?”

“They had oil and many other interests too.”

He laughed. “Oh, well, diversity’s good. Here I am with all my eggs in one basket.”

“You’re forgetting about Alexander’s Sword.”

“I’m referring to my little ice men.”

“They’re everywhere, and nowhere. Scattered, yet in unison. They’re—”

“Save the slogans and mantras for the recruits.”

My fists clenched. How I wanted to show him what that huge knot of ropes he tied my stomach into so often felt like.

He saw my flare of anger and said, “Go ahead. Beat me bloody. I deserve it.”

“No. You’d enjoy it too much.”

“Only afterwards, yes. Yes, I would.” He laughed again, a more bitter sound this time. “So there’s a touch of martyr in me, after all. Your job is to keep me safe, even from myself. I don’t envy you that duty, but I love you for doing it so well. So dedicatedly.”

“Save your love for the recruits,” I said, leaving him to his brooding, his Hitlerian bunker plans, his futility.

In my own office a runner waited, just catching his breath. He was maybe fifteen Haven years of age and as scrawny as a clownfruit tendril. “Report,” I told him.

He ducked his head, summoning the message verbatim.

I wrote it down and dismissed him, then opened the books necessary to decipher the code and find out what new urgent hell awaited us.

When I saw the message I could neither stand nor breathe for a moment. “You son of a bitch,” I whispered, when my spell of being shocked had passed. “You sneaky underhanded son of an effing bitch.”

* * *

That evening, Erhenfeld Bronson luxuriated in his Roman style baths with three concubines culled from the Steppes tribes, each younger and more virginal than the next. Having deflowered them over the course of a long soak, complete with pauses for much gluttony as roast yak, sweets, and wine imported from Earth, he felt greatly refreshed, if tired. He was also, be it admitted, slightly let down that one of the silly bitches had managed somehow to drown in the throes of her underwater servicing, but the way she’d tightened around his throbbing member had been exceptionally sweet, and had him wondering if perhaps he might make a habit of drowning them, if that’s the effect one could reliably expect.

He wandered in a silk robe through the harem slapping and punching a few deserving wenches but not enough to excite him again, then decided a good day sufficed. “I shall to bed,” he announced, skipping the verb as only the best in Haven society had the right to. After all, it was understood that the high and mighty simply acted and had no need of verbs or other such low descriptive crutches.

Slouching through the halls, he paused now and again for more wine, poured by the trio of servants who trailed him constantly with food, drink, and pleasure items such as a hollow dildo with a chamber full of headland wasps that buzzed delightfully when shaken. He liked that they died to give him pleasure.

Bronson reached his bedroom and dismissed his trio of attendants. He told his chamberlain to keep the fires blazing as he slept, lest a chill descend and spoil some remarkably sybaritic dream no lower mortal could possibly grasp, were he ever teasingly to relate it. They’d only be envious, he thought, poor nothings.

Climbing the three steps up onto the massive bed, where long ago, so long it seemed forever to him, his father, poor fool, had died from the hot lead he himself had so carefully poured through the funnel into the sleeping man’s right ear. That a head could hold so much molten lead remained a marvel although, truth to tell, the old man had thrashed a bit as the heat struck his senses, and some of the dull silver stuff had gone spurting out his nose and mouth as his palate and nasal passages melted. Messy old raptor, Erhenfeld thought. Smelly, too. Especially as the lead ate into him.

Had it dissolved one of his father’s sick dreams? he wondered.

He laid his heavy head into the many silk pillows propped to hold his bulky shoulders up as he slept. His fat, overwhelming his diaphragm, made it difficult for him to breathe if he lay flat on his back. Not that Haven’s air was rich and sweet like that of Earth, which he’d visited as a boy. Oh, so like being drunk was breathing on Earth, he remembered. How pleasant to dream of being there again, lording it over those pathetic wiggly things they call people.

His chamberlain, a thin fellow, descendant of a Steppes tribe, Turkic or Polsky perhaps, worked his way around the six fireplaces, stoking each and bringing the warm flow of air, using ducts and vents, onto the bed, which was partly enclosed by silk drapes of many colors, embroidered with erotic scenes.

Erhenfeld watched the fellow, whose name he could never recall despite the man having worked for him for two or three Haven years, or more perhaps, who knew? He watched him bend and stoke, adjust vents, and fiddle with the matches professionally.

When the chamberlain reached the final fireplace, which stood behind the bed, Erhenfeld considered saying something vaguely complimentary to the man. He opened his mouth to do so but a yawn interrupted him, and after that, well, the effort was simply too much. He closed his eyes, slobbering already.

His first snore was cut short by the rope tightening around his neck. Startled, and already panicked for air, he tried to sit up but found himself pinned by a noose tightening even as his legs kicked, his arms flailed.

His face got very red, then his vision, too, but through the crimson haze he saw his chamberlain, whatever his name was, come around the bed from behind to stand over him. The chamberlain said something about ice, but strangely then poured a scoop of coals glowing red and yellow from the fire directly onto Erhenfeld’s crotch. The bed clothes, sheets, and soon the drapery too caught flame and burned with greed for the scant oxygen Haven’s air offered. Still, it burned.

The Haven Administrator, Governor Thompson Erhenfeld Bronson, son of the late Consul, Thomas Erhenfeld Bronson, died trying so hard to scream that his lungs burst, but they soon melted as the fire fed off them, too, eager to stay alive in Haven’s harshness.

* * *

The announcement spread like a Haven ice storm.

Haven Administrator, Governor Thompson Erhenfeld Bronson, who had hanged Wilgar’s father, who had burst into flame as he hanged from the noose, died of strangulation and fire in his bed, which he’d inherited when his own father had died mysteriously of, most said, patricide.

A chamberlain, whose daughter had drowned in a mishap in the governor’s private baths, and who had been assigned to the governor’s bedroom for overnight duties, was missing and being sought.

Anyone caught harboring this fugitive would be considered guilty of accessory to murder. This, under the new CoDominium occupation laws, would earn the accessory’s entire family, as well as circle of known associates, possible death sentences.

Anyone knowing anything was strongly urged to come forward.

* * *

“You stupid son of a bitch, you called for this without consulting with me,” I said, my anger cold now, controlled and all the more dangerous.

He stood in the kitchen sipping warm needle tea, his woolen robes puffed out as if he’d stuffed them with smugness. “You really expect me to consult you on all my decisions?”

This said so blithely I wondered for a moment if he remembered anything we’d lived through in our lives.

He smiled and said, “Sit, get some tea. It’s good, the needles are fresh from the foothills.”

Meaning a courier had brought news I had not yet heard. This was getting better by the moment, meaning much worse than I’d dared worry about. “Wilgar, talk to me. Tell me what you’re trying to do, other than destroy us?”

“I’ve voiced my displeasure.”

He had not even bothered saying ‘our’, I noticed. “So you’re becoming the monster you’re fighting, is that it?”

“Stuff your philosophy back down your throat and listen. My decision was based on many things, too many to discuss with anyone. My connections were seamless.”

“This time. Maybe. That remains to be seen. You realize the CoDo may not care if it can prove a case against us. It can lie and achieve the same end, ridding itself of us.”

“It can try.” He smiled and sipped more tea.

I accepted a cup from one of the women, wrapping my cold fingers around it. My robes were not as lined, it seemed. “We’re making a huge mistake trying to fight them on their terms,” I said. “Patience is called for, the long game.”

“We’re cutting what you so often call our Gordian Knot.”

I saw in his eyes a gleam of, was it glee? Hysteria? Madness?

“We’re cutting to the heart of it all, to direct power. These corrupt scum must learn that we can touch them any time we wish, anywhere, in any way, up to and including death. We are all around them, and we outnumber them.”

“And one of their bombs can vaporize all of us at one go,” I said, but he wasn’t listening, perhaps not even to himself. He was speechifying.

I sipped needle tea and let him go. It mattered not what he said. What he did was my worry. He was endangering not only himself but every Harmony, or Harmonite, as the CoDo insisted on labeling us. Probably a cognate of sodomite, I thought. That was their style, crass and low.

Now I, Kev Malcolm, Wilgar’s lifelong friend and chosen gallowglass, was watching our spiritual leader tempted by the power of secrecy away from Harmony principles, ideals I defended by never fully embracing them. By doing so he was threatening not only all our lives—the CoDo was not above a pogrom—but all that Harmony stood for.

“You need to come back from the edge,” I said, sipping more tea.

My words did not even interrupt the flow of his words.

I sighed.

How like a hopeless love for an unattainable woman, I thought, my relationship to Harmony ideals. Having decided they were not only good, but worth dying for in defending them, I stood apart, unacknowledged, and guarded their best interests, hoping to keep them safe and ensure that they flourished. And now, their husband, my best friend, a man of vision, strength, and integrity, was planning and doing things that practically ensured a rough road ahead for my beloved. His actions might also spell doom for the Harmony ideals I had stewarded so long by protecting their embodiment, in him, in Wilgar, whose role was to husband them into an ever better future.

“This can’t end well,” I muttered, and of course he ignored me, perhaps did not even hear me. And as he droned on, a thought struck me: This can’t end well if let be.

I frowned and tasted blood, having bitten my lower lip.

* * *

Haven, we’d called it. A refuge. A place to be free from oppression and free to live our own ideals. We had colonized Haven and made it viable for settlers. This made it valuable, and in swooped the corporate vultures. We were easy meat, they thought. We pacifists with our passive fists would not fight back even if we could.

We are born, live for a time, and die. All else is games, according to the Quartermain Codicil. It’s attached to Garner Bill’s hand-scrawled book of thoughts; he says he cited it from an old movie about a wilderness paradise ruined by greed. Why he called it what he did, I do not know. Perhaps it was only a quarter of the main truth.

In any case, our new wilderness, harsh, hostile, and barren, is now a gem lusted after by CoDominium greed. Kennicott and Dover want minerals, corporate and political forces want a power stage, outcasts want elbow room, criminals want a free-for-all: everyone wants something. My detestation of what the original colonists must have left on Earth is overwhelming at times. Yet I grant, too, the good things mentioned in our slender scripture. There is good even in suffering, if you can last long enough to sift it out.

Seeing what was coming, I started making us protective vests, using what materials lay at hand. I scrounged every time we sallied forth or did a dark mission. I kept my eyes open when roaming the streets in town or creeping through dark halls to break into locked rooms for this or that piece of leverage against the forces aligned against us. It was surprising, what I found discarded or lying exposed and unsecured.

Making the vests was a kind of meditation for me. Finding the right way to puncture and stitch thick muskylope hide, layering in padding and making pockets for plates and other inserts, figuring out force deflectors, and reading about ancient Chinese paper armor; it all kept me busy.

I made vests first for Wilgar and myself, then, skipping other hierarchy types, began making them for the Deaks and Beads. Deacons being where the Harmony religion would ride should we be, as I feared, scattered, while I supplied the Beadles because, as our newest members, they were exposed to most of the rougher elements. To be frank, these two groups fought most of the physical battles for Harmony, for us. They guarded our space, allowing those further along in the Song to remain Harmonic. These defenders of our finest Singers needed my protective padding. Many had fallen wounded or dead and could use any advantage possible.

My vests could stop knives and slow most bullets at least enough to let the wearer keep scrambling. As I got better at making them I replaced Wilgar’s vest, then mine.

* * *

“You seriously want me to wear this?” he said, upon receiving the second vest. He hefted it and flexed it, showing it to be heavy and stiff. “This is why wooden underwear doesn’t work.”

I tapped the vest. “It works better than the first one.”

“Hampers me. Look, I’d put it on if we were facing an all-out attack but, hell, I’d look scared in it, otherwise. My job is to project confidence, Kev.”

I paced in his office and scowled. He never called me by my name unless he was feeling all paternal and patronizing.

“Okay, fine. Stash it here and use it when the blitz comes.” Saying that, I ducked through the doorway and left him to his grandiose wool-gathering, ignoring his plaintive, “When? You mean if…”

Some of us, I thought, were at least taking steps to keep the Harmonies together and viable. Others of us, damn him, were addicted to denial, lofty assurance, and narcissistic, arrogant certainty. Damn him.

* * *

Wilgar sat behind his desk when Kev walked out. He put the ridiculous vest aside, thought for a moment, then wrote, in his bold, flourish-dense script:

Are there never hopes anymore? Is there no Haven Spring to grow us green? Is all joy forbidden to us Harmonies now? A crushing darkness of heart subsumes even us, the Singers of the Song, as we bend our knees to bow and offer up our lives to hardship in exchange for a chance at salvation, redemption, and joy. Life is meaningless without even a glimmer of light from within, and this darkness oppresses, and crushes us, as it muffles our Song. Our Harmony.

Having read it over, he nodded, folded it, and placed it in a pocket of his inner tunic.

A chunk of ceiling woke me by falling onto my face. Swatting, I sat up in the gloom. My fire’s embers glowed under a coating of ash. No flames leapt.

“What?” Achenne asked, stirring beside me.

I listened, and a thud shook the room. Coals in the fire shifted, settled, and sent sparks upward. They glittered briefly. A sifting of dust fell on us.

Pivoting, I slid my legs out from under the muskylope hide cover and as I leaned to put on my pants and boots was jolted to the ground by a more violent thud from above. More chunks of ceiling clattered down.

“Is it a cave-in?” Achenne asked.

On the cold floor I got my trousers and boots on, stood, and said, “It’s an attack. They finally decided to hit us hard.”

“What should I do?”

“Go now, take anyone you find and get out, scatter. Head for the mountains; we’ve gone over the routes.”

“I want you with me.”

I gazed at her silhouette, wished the light were brighter so I could see her more clearly, and shook my head. “I have to be with Wilgar right now. I’ll follow when I can.”

My wife’s last words to me comprised a sob I could not understand, except that I knew she meant we’d never see each other again. It seemed a likely prophecy.

* * *

Wilgar, awake as always, pounded the map on his desk and glared at the Deacon reporting to him. “This means nothing,” Wilgar shouted. “This is a child’s scribbling.” He picked up the map and tore it apart, throwing the pieces at the Deak, who blinked but otherwise stood stoic.

My entry was ignored, so I said, “Deacon, report to me.”

He turned and said, “Sir, there are forces massing to our east, northeast, and southeast. Arial bombardment has already begun. Estimated half an hour before troops reach us.”

“The skirmish lines?”

Another thud, closer, made rock dust fall on us. He shook his head. “Unknown, sir.” His eyes shined with unshed tears. Fear and regret showed on his face, along with a fierce will to keep fighting. His gaze never left mine.

I liked him, even though I did not know his name. “Thank you, Deacon. Return to your post and tell them to scatter, hide, and keep the Song going.”

“Sir.” He strode past me and gave me a relieved look. He did not acknowledge Wilgar, who sat now chewing on a piece of rope as long as his forearm. His brows met in a frown of concentration. I’d seen him chew the rope before. It usually came before one of his crazier announcements.

A grinding vibration rattled my teeth; what were they doing up there on the surface?

Going to Wilgar, I touched his shoulder and kept my hand there. It was as much to keep him seated as to comfort him. I did not want him surging to his feet to shriek into my face.

The thumps and vibrations from overhead continued. They seemed fewer and further between now. It was like thunder receding. “You know what we have to do,” I said.

“I.” He chewed. “I know they lied.”

“Treaties are made to control others.”

“They’re made to be broken, yes, by the stronger signatory.”

He used words like that to step me back. He forgot that I’d read more than he had of the old forbidden Earth books. His use of arcane words did not unsettle me. I said, “We are stronger by our lack of resistance. Can you punch a cloud? Can you grasp smoke? Can you stab or slash the air, the water?”

“Does not a single note often ruin the harmony?” he shot back, glaring up at me as the rope thunked to his desk. It lay glistening and leaking spit. He surged to his feet despite my hand. Looking me in the eye, he smiled, then turned away and began pacing.

I wanted to throw the desk at him. “Sir, we have to scatter, so our people can sur—”

“You want me to tell them to run?”

“You’d tell them to stay and die? You’d tell them to break every rule we have and fight?”

He blinked.

Pressing whatever instant’s advantage I had before it wafted away on his mental breezes, I said, “We must harmonize wider, with all of Haven. Our pacifism demands it. We must spread now like seeds of song bursting from a performance to improve the minds behind every ear they touch.” The metaphor, strained to begin with, left bile on the back of my tongue as I broke its spine, but I had to reach him on a level he grasped.

He blinked again. “Yes,” he said. “Dandelions.”

Faint screams entered his room, fell silent, and left us wondering if we had heard them.

I had no idea what a dandy lion was but, encouraged by the “Yes,” said, “You need to tell them now, before the troops get here. We cannot let them catch us underground.”

My mind filled with dreads. They would use gas on us. Smoke alone would suffice, if they plugged our vents. Already an acrid pall and faint haze was developing, from the vents inadvertently plugged by the bombing.

Without escape tunnels, bunkers became traps, then graves.

“Wilgar, I’m your friend.”

“You are.”

“I’m here to help you get out of here.”

“We are here to help the Harmonies.”

“That’s right. You need to lead them. We need to guide them in their Song.”

“So they Harmonize?” He said this as if questioning it. He shook his head and his eyes cleared. His posture changed; he stood straighter, looked stronger. His chin shifted forward.

He looked at me. “What’s going on?”

It was the old Wilgar, wily and sharp. Relieved, I told him troops were moments away. Our people needed to hear him give the blessing to scatter, hide, and preserve our teachings. They needed him to lead a group out, and send other groups to other refuge, if they could find any.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Diaspora.”

I knew spores from studying molds and figured that was as good a way of looking at it as any other. With a confident nod, I started for the doorway.

“You’re not wearing your vest,” he said, taking his from the floor beside his desk. He put it on.

I had forgotten the vests. “I didn’t have time,” I told him.

“None of us do, in the end,” he said, coming with me as I led the way into a dark tunnel beginning to fill with smoke.

* * *

Wilgar surprised me by veering toward the main tunnels. He barked commands and shouted encouragement, helping at times to hurry people along, blocking exits to change the flow of our exodus when he felt it necessary. “We cannot clump,” he warned. “Scatter, stay in small but separate groups until we rally.”

Captain staying with the ship, getting everyone else safely off the sinking vessel, I thought. I helped him direct traffic and advise refugees where to go, how to get there, when to rally, what signals to use, and ways to communicate.

Some of our people would go to ground in the disharmony of the city by staying with family members who were not of the faith, or setting up as immigrants from the plains, hiding their Harmony amidst the noise of the crowd. Others would flee to the mountains, found settlements, and find survival as possible in a wilderness harsher than any Earth desert.

We told many to keep their hearth fires burning as they abandoned the enclave, hoping heat signatures would confuse any sensors the enemy might deploy against us.

I kept thinking about Wilgar’s vest. It became a question of when, not whether.

He told me to check a tunnel as he checked another. “Meet here in three minutes,” he said.

As if we had synchronized time pieces.

I checked the tunnel and an adjoining tunnel, finding no one. No one answered my calls. Back at the rendezvous junction I found Wilgar swatting a young boy’s bottom as he hastened him along. “Hurry,” Wilgar said. “Go.”

The boy broke into a run, being small enough to move through the tunnels without crouching.

I reported my tunnel clear. “Was he hiding?”

“Said he was left behind.”

“So where’s he running? To whom?” As an Irregular, I knew what being abandoned and forced out on one’s own meant.

Wilgar shrugged. “Said he’s joining a friend.”

I would have said the same thing when I was a feral orphan. How many orphans had our enclave harbored?

Where would they all go now?

Back to scavenging. Back to prostitution. Back to hardscrabble hand-to-mouth survival, for the lucky. Others would be killed, or die and society would step over them on the way to buy more treats for their pets.

How I hated the CoDominium and their Marines and callousness and culture war and brutality and apathy and conformity and death-cult intolerance of us. As if we posed a threat. As if pacifism had to be eradicated for them to feel safe. What they did to my friends, how many of my friends had died because of their policy of total control, kept a cold rage lodged in every breath I took. All I did opposed them.

All I did amounted to shouting at bombs.

We came up near the rear of the surface camp.

Craters pocked the ground around us. Fires burst from holes in the ground where bombs had punched through. Tunnel collapses made wormy ditches that twisted among rubbled structures. Shattered bricks lay everywhere. Blood covered everything. Parts of people and whole corpses lay together. We heard CoDo troops clearing the camp from the front. We had moments.

“You’re crying,” Wilgar told me, standing and dashing toward one of the gates. A clot of people milled there, trying to push through a gap where the wall had collapsed. The gate itself was a smoldering tangle of wood and wire.

I followed, remembering to zig and zag.

Wilgar climbed onto a heap of bricks, then onto the top of the wall. He stood tall and spread his arms. “Harmonies, take the song to every quarter of our world. Carry the seed of song to the plains, the valleys, and the mountains. Be with the silence at the heart of the song, and sing so that Harmony is kept as our legacy always.”

At the base of the wall gazing up at him, I saw a man shouting his truths to a world in chaos, to people in panic. He waved his arms and shouted as if daring a CoDo marksman to pick him off. That thought sent a slab of terror through me.

He is still wearing the vest, I thought.

I did not know how many people saw him at that moment. I did not know how many had paused in their flight from death and attack to glance back at their leader. I did not know how many could even hear him, in the crackle of flame, the rumble of collapsing tunnels, and the pop and sizzle of weapons being discharged. I did not know anything.

My hand went to a pocket and took out a device I had rigged. It was an activator. I opened it, exposing a button.

As my tears blurred my sight I pressed the button with a thumb, then threw the damned thing aside.

Above me, above us all, Wilgar’s vest exploded with blue-white brilliance, sending sparks trailing smoke and chunks trailing blood. His clothes and hair caught fire.

Somehow, his arms remained raised until he toppled off the wall. He fell out of the camp.

I stood abandoned.

“There,” a rough male voice shouted.

“Magnesium flares,” someone growled. “They got a signal off.”

Hands grabbed my arms. A rifle butt slammed into my spine, between my shoulder blades. I was shoved to the ground.

Orange brown soil viewed so close to my eyes looked like terrain. I imagined a world within a world and waited for the bullet or energy beam to slam or sizzle me into harmony’s silence. Nothing moved. I thought I heard a child laugh in the middle distance.

“He’s one of them,” a voice said.

I was hauled to my feet, bound, and a canvas sack covered my head. I staggered and fell many times as I was pushed along on unsteady legs over tortured ground.

Had anyone seen Wilgar repeat his father’s miracle?

Had anyone who had seen it cared?

* * *

A military tribunal found Kev Malcolm guilty of conspiracy to commit treason, plotting to assassinate a CoDominium official, and various acts of terror, sabotage, and crime. He maintained silence throughout the trial and refused to say where William Garner Castell could be found.

He was sentenced to death by firing squad.

The sentence was carried out against the courthouse wall, in the courtyard named after the Bronson family in honor of its service to Haven’s elite. Just before the shots silenced him, he shouted, “Everywhere.”

* * *

In the ruins of the Harmony enclave, a huge knot of rope was found in William Garner Castell’s quarters. When it was cut open, it revealed a hollow inside. The soldiers in the room at the time shrugged and called it proof of craziness, folly, or some weird Earth artifact no one knew about.

It was burned along with all property left behind by the fleeing Harmonies, who disappeared into an uncertain future to be played out on Haven’s harsh whim.