The Caravan, Pt 3

“Do you know the story of the Hero Arendt?”
The Magister did not look up. The question was not worth answering. Everyone knew the story of The Hero. He had been taken as a child to become a scribe to the Emperor, a life spent in figures and in constant worship of The Hero that he may rise to become a God.
“He delivered us from the yolk of Earth, you know. They came from the Earth without faces, and ordered us to build more and more solar arrays and grow more and more food. But Arendt knew that without our food and without our solar power, they couldn’t come any more.”
“By the time they found him, hidden deep in the cathedral at Archimedes, it was already too late. He had taken the satellites and turned them, and bathed the surface of the earth in radiation and microwaves. They say that all at once, the lights went out. The seas began to boil and dark clouds blotted out the sun. They say the darkness overwhelmed them. All their crops died, and the air began to choke them. Billions of people died, unable to escape the choking air. The Hero cast them into a dark age from which they may never escape.”
At this the magister looked up. A slip of the tongue, a small heresy almost undetectable. Surely it was a mistake.
“Will never escape, madam.” He corrected.
She did not respond, lost in thought. It was improper to think on the topic, but at one time Arendt had been a boy. Records show he studied at the university at Copernicus, under corporate tutorship. There was rumor that he had been able to journey to the surface of the earth – they thought him clever and loyal, and he was to be given a small kingdom. And in gratitude, he built for them a way to capture the energy of the sun, and do with it as he willed. He willed it to burn the earth. Nobody knows why.
How different life would be, if he had simply taken their riches. His family would probably own half of the lunar face by now. They would all still be out in the fields, swinging scythes under the watchful eyes of soldiers from distant lands. And now she looked at her life.
The emperor had taken everything. She had a year, maybe, before the local vice lords would grow tired of her new taxes and would burn down buildings until the Emperor replaced her. Her family would be cast down, and she would be executed before the lot of them. It was a clever trap, from which there was no clever escape.
But perhaps the emperor assumed she did not know how to claw her way out – or perhaps it had been so long since someone tried that he had forgotten what it looked like. The pistol in her lap had always felt so heavy before, but sitting in her lap obscured by the folds of her dress it was simply an extension of her hand.