Chapter Eleven:

The piezoelectric effect is a phenomenon where you compress an object which is quartz, or which contains quartz, thus creating an electric charge on its surface.

That charge can be used like any electric charge. The more quartz, the better the compression, the bigger the charge.

The problem is how to maintain the compression. If you just used something mechanical, then you have to power it, and then you put more energy into the process than you can withdraw from it. The process is for naught if it doesn’t produce more energy than it draws.

Any planet is constantly in motion, that motion requires energy, and it releases energy, which is in and of itself wasted. Positioning a quartz source at the correct position on a moving planet, theoretically, would maintain compression on the quartz and begin the process, converting the waste energy to an electric charge.

But where to put the quartz and, of course, how to shape it? Logic dictates that the quartz should be a square box in order to maximize the pressure to its sides, but then how to position the box? If it lays flat on the ground then one side is wasted or over compressed, and either way that will ruin the effect. Compression which isn’t even will bias the results and make it difficult to use the energy.

As an experiment, Reglan took a tiny piece of quartz and attached a transmitter to it, then took a tiny fliver used for a probe and tuned it to the transmitted energy. The transmitter was similar to the power source that Maglen used when she travelled down the particle stream to this planet. He then simply shook the quartz and the transmitter.

It didn’t work. He tried again with a bigger piece of quartz, cut in a square, and it still didn’t work.

He made a rod of quartz and he strapped it to his forearm, between his ulna and his radius, where his pulse would thump against it.

The fliver took off and, with a remote control, he could drive it anywhere within 10 feet of him. That’s as far as the transmitter could reach with this power source. It didn’t matter how hard he shook his arm, it was the regularity of his pulse that did the trick. Oddly, he couldn’t feel the charge against his skin.

He attached the quartz rod to a pump motor they were using to move water from the lake to their new edifice. He could fly the fliver all over the compound. In principle, this would work.

They couldn’t do it on Syriahs because there wasn’t enough quartz there. Here, it was plentiful. Here, they could use it like they’d used solar power on Syriahs, with her three suns.

Kharen watched him fly the fliver. “What we need,” she said, “is the world’s pump motor.”

Reglan laughed, and then he considered.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s exactly what we need.”

While Efrain Zane was their leader, an unelected council of named persons had formed in order to review what he wanted and to implement it. On Syriahs, the Government was little different – an impenetrable bureaucracy that had formed over centuries which existed mostly to perpetuate itself and drive the status quo. People were most successful who learned to live outside of it. You drove on its roads, you lived in its cities, you consumed its products, and you went about your life.

They lived too closely together here for that. A single leader was more efficient, but no one of them wanted to live in a dictatorship and, of course, he couldn’t implement his plans without their cooperation.

What Reglan needed would require all of them to support him, if he could convince them.

“This plan seems awfully … grand,” Hames commented.

In their new edifice, in the level made for persons ‘of name,’ they’d built a conference room for them to speak to each other in private, and this was their first time using it. A graphic representation of what Reglan wanted to do shown against one wall.

It was a pyramid nearly 300 feet high. Four-sided, built entirely of stone, it sat on a huge pump, which would draw water from a nearby river and push it out to a series of channels and, eventually, back into the river. Within the pyramid were three chambers and tunnels within that connected them.

“We want something grand,” Reglan said. “We will get so many uses from this – it will be a monument to An and this new world, and our future colonization efforts.”

“But… this?” Livven said.

Efrain was silent, studying the plans.

“We fill the one chamber with zinc oxide,” Reglan said, “the other with hydrochloric acid. We bleed the one into the other and begin a chemical reaction with will burn for decades. It begins a pressure-process which will drive the pump beneath the pyramid, and move water through an irrigation system which will feed fields what will accommodate thousands.

“We reprocess the heat energy as a plasma and we create a new particle beam, which we aim back toward Syriahs – we create a new road to our home world where our people can come here at will. Once we’ve overcome the mass problems with faster-than-light speed, we can begin a new stage of colonization here.

“And finally,” he said, “we use this quartz-based technology to power a series of obelisks to transmit energy, and we refit our flivers to process it. We broadcast free power all over this planet and we settle where we will.”

“And your grandchildren will be old before it’s done,” Efrain said, finally. “We have limited resources in terms of personnel, Reglan Viniker. We aren’t done with this grand project, and now you want to start another?”

“Actually, we have more resources than you would think,” Kharen said.

Efrain Zane scowled at the upstart female. In general, it was accepted that she would be a Viniker. Until then, she was a common.

The image changed, and showed one of the hominids that were native to this world.

“What?” Rebert Thine almost gasped.

“From what we can tell,” she said, “this species evolved from a combination of some of the others on the other side of the planet, then moved out of the lower continent to the upper about 100,000 years ago. Planetary scans show where they were held at bay by a less evolved species which was more adaptable to the coming ice age, and then this hominid began to die out.”

“So it’s inferior,” Hames asserted.

“No, just not well adapted to the extreme cold,” Kharen said. “It’s somewhat intelligent, it’s a tool user. It breeds relatively easily and, if we don’t do anything for it, it’s going to starve in the lower continent, where it’s not getting enough water to survive.”

On the other side of the planet, as the ice caps slowly receded from the upper continents, severe draught had wiped out nearly all life along the equator. To the south there were species which were too violent for this species to handle, and to the north this less sophisticated hominid was thriving and impenetrable.

Many members of the crew were studying the local flora and fauna – it was fascinating. With multiple continents on one planet, especially one coming out of an ice age like what had happened here, less sophisticated species were holding sway. On Syriahs the large mammals gave way to the rise of people, who found them to be easy targets, simple to avoid and to wipe out where necessary. When they were gone, herds of smaller animals became manageable, domesticated herds and smaller predators became more prevalent as they preyed upon them, in opposition to the people as they became more sophisticated.

“What do you want to do with them?” Livven asked Kharen. The two women actually spoke infrequently. The House of Esteve was apparently more accepting.

“We breed them,” she said. “We domesticate them, like any animal, and we use them to build this pyramid.”

Roo Amrain sighed. “Highly inefficient,” he said.

“I agree,” Hames added, leaning back in his chair.

Livven looked more intrigued.

“The time needed to teach them what we need of them would be excessive,” Livven said, but her face showed that she was considering.

“And do you want to bring them here?” Efrain asked. “We breed enough of them to be of value, and then one day they turn on us. These aren’t canines or bovines or equines – these are hominids. They think. They reason – and they might decide that they like what we have, much as they can understand it –“

“In that, I agree,” Reglan interrupted him. He looked cross at the rudeness.

“We bring a few here to train,” he continued, “but we take them back and use them to train the others, and keep two oceans between us. We can build – we should build the power plant on the lower continent, where these beings live. It produces enough to feed them – they thrive. We manage them as a herd and, when there’s wide-scale work to do, we use them.”

That brought some thought.

“We will have projects running for hundreds of years,” Efrain Zane admitted.

“And we won’t have enough people to do it for another hundred,” Hames added.

“With an unsophisticated work force, that would be easier,” Livven admitted. “But we’d need to maintain strict control, breed them to believe that they can never challenge us.”

Kharen smiled. “Exactly what we’ve been thinking.”

A transport fliver crossed the ocean to a continent on the other side, which extended from the equator well down to the south of the planet, almost to its frozen south pole.

There, they found starving bands of this more sophisticated hominid, no group of more than twenty, roaming the continent, fighting for food, trying to collect enough water to survive. Trapping them was a simple matter – they offered the beings food and drugged it. They piled the sleeping hominids into their fliver, discarded the simple, infested skins they wore and disinfected them, and brought them back to the compound.

Reglan went with them. The smell that wafted off of these beings was shocking. They practically lived in their own filth, deriving simple buildings out of sticks, clay and dung. They’d mastered fire and they kept wooden weapons both to hunt with and to fight each other with. Even Reglan couldn’t help thinking that, without this interference, this species would have disappeared from the planet in another thousand years.

“I’m not going all of the way back across the ocean in a closed fliver with that,” one of the crewmen he’d conscripted to help him complained.

He agreed. They took the beings to the ocean and used the salt water to wash them clean. The cool water tended to rouse them, and they had to be sedated again. They’d taken ten – three males, four females and three sub-adults, one of them male.

They weren’t formed that much differently from Sariyans – the sex organs were identical. They were smaller, maybe half the size of a Sariyan – but strong for their size. Their skin was dusky where Sariyans were fair, and they had uniformly brown hair and eyes. When Sariyans’ teeth were even, those of these beings were more like an animal’s, with pronounced canines.

Now that they had a fresher smell, they were piled naked back into the fliver and carted back to the compound. There, a sub-compound had been built for them a mile from the main one. They had food and toilet facilities and running water, and a space for training with volunteers who would do it, led by Kharen.

They were waking as the sun went down. They spent the night assailing the walls of their new abode, screaming and chattering in what had to be their native language. They ate the food that was left for them, using their hands naturally and not looking for utensils. The meat came with bones and they gnawed them.

Efrain and Reglan watched them on the video which they’d set up as a part of the sub-compound. At Efrain’s insistence, they could all be gassed if they threatened to escape. Crewmen acted as guards and caried batons which could deliver a severe shock if necessary.

“You want to educate these?” Efrain asked Reglan.

Reglan nodded. “The original canines bit their handlers,” he said. “They don’t do it now.”

Efrain sighed.

The following morning Reglan was making Maglen ready for her last take-off and Kharen and her team of crewmen were addressing the hominids.

In their sub-compound, they’d crowded into a corner with the males in front, then the sub-adult male, and then females pressed against the wall. They shouted and gnashed their teeth and tried to look dangerous to their captors.

When Kharen tried to bring them food, they rushed her. Crewmen had to protect her with their batons and the hominids retreated with burn marks and screaming, but no food. Kharen withdrew the food but left them access to their water, and waited for the noon-day meal, when she tried again.

Hungry, they didn’t rush her, and they took the food. They didn’t understand the toilet facilities but relieved themselves in a corner opposite where they were congregating. After eating, they took turns sleeping and guarding the small group.

“We should separate them,” one crewman, Khalid, advised. He was from the southern continent and had been working with Kharen for years. She suspected that he’d wanted to pair with her until he saw her ambitions, and he’d chosen another. Now they were good friends.

His skin was as dusky as the hominids, and his hair was black, his eyes brown. He seemed to have an affinity for these creatures, a sympathy for their situation. On Syriahs, the northern continent had conquered the southern, and many of them still clung to a belief that it wasn’t fair.

“We don’t know how they’ll react,” Kharen argued. “They might be codependent and need each other to survive. Do you want to bury these and have to go get more?”

“We’ll probably bury them anyway,” he said. He watched one of the males stroke the hair of a sleeping female, and then the cheek of one of the sub-adults. A family unit – just like their own people.

“The first attempt is almost never a success,” he asserted.

Kharen shook her head. She wasn’t a cold scientist. Some of them could infect canines with diseases or work an equine to death, but not her. She felt for the other being’s suffering, inferior or not.

“I want to make these work,” she insisted. “We’ve got to give them a reason to want to learn, to work for us.”

“If we could translate their language,” Khalid began.

“No,” they heard from behind them, and turned to see Efrain Zane.

“No,” he said again, after they acknowledged him, “you make them learn your language, abandon their ways for yours.”

On a level, that made sense, Kharen admitted to herself.

“They’re a family,” he said. “Take the children, make them earn the children back.”

“We don’t know how to care for their children,” Kharen insisted.

“Good,” he said. “Don’t. When they see the children suffer, they’ll be more willing to comply.”

To Kharen, that seemed really horrible. She looked sideways at Khalid and couldn’t help thinking that he felt the same.

“Do it,” Zane said, and then left. Clearly he had other things to do.

When he left, the two exchanged a glance.

“Sedate them again?” Khalid asked. Kharen shrugged.

“Lord Zane has spoken,” she said.

She re-entered the sub-compound, and the hominids leapt up awake and ready to fight. They wouldn’t be hungry, but then a starving people would eat when they could. They put drugged food in front of them and the hominids collected it.

Sure enough, they ate it, and soon were all asleep again.

They moved more building materials in and quickly created a cell for the sub-adults, and another for the females. The males they left out – they were the protectors, Khalid reasoned, so they would be the first to be broken. Then the others would follow suit.

The compound was made of stone, but they fashioned glass panels too thick to break and used that to let the males see into the cell. They could see their charges, but not access them.

It was assembled by the time the males awoke, and then they realized what had happened.

The males attacked the glass, then the walls, then raged throughout the sub compound. They beat the one entrance to the sub-compound, which they’d seen the people enter through, and then fell back from it.

Kharen entered with two crewmen and their batons, and the hominids chattered and pointed at the sub-adults and the females. They beat the ground with their fists, and then pointed at the others again.

She pointed at the ground, and at the males. The males tilted their heads. The others, now awake, watched through the glass in their cages.

Kharen pointed at the ground, and then stood back. One of the makes approached and, his face betraying his fear and lack of trust, stood in the place where she had pointed. She smiled and clapped her hands. Without turning her back to the males, she walked to the cell where the women were held, and slapped its side, then pointed to the other males and to the spot.

The other two males ran to the spot.

Good.

Now that they were there, she pointed to the ground. The males looked at each other, then at the spot.

She snapped her fingers and pointed to the spot on the ground in front of them.

One of the males leaned forward and started to dig there. She stamped her foot and they jumped.

She pointed at the spot again, and bent her knees. The males looked at each other.

The first male went to the spot, and bent his knees as she had.

She bent her knees more, and he seemed to see what she wanted. For him to kneel.

He screamed and the three of them rushed her. The crewmen beat the males with their batons and they all retreated.

They waited for the noon meal.

The days went on. In a few, Maglen rose up into the sky for the last time, to trace back its path to where Syriahs once was, to divert a meteor shower no less than seven light-years long and make it undershoot where this solar system was going.

Kharen watched it rise into the sky and disappear into the clouds. She hoped it would make it at least a light-year, or else there would be meteors – the remains of asteroids and space debris – raining down here.

Already the fourth planet, which they called ‘Ta,’ was feeling the effects of the debris field. A few large asteroids had hit the belt, pushed a few larger elements out of orbit and they’d been drawn into Ta’s gravitational pull.

The results had been devastating. Asteroids that were mostly iron crushed down into the planet and filled the atmosphere with dust and shrapnel. Already the inhabitants were doomed.

One stray was on its way here but it was expected to miss them. Efrain was looking at it in hopes of being able to harvest it for its iron content.

In the sub-compound, things went on the same.

Kharen entered the enclosure where the males roamed. They’d given up trying to free the females and the sub-adults. Even at night, when they thought their guards weren’t looking, they’d given up trying to break the glass, to scale the walls, to tunnel out of the enclosure.

They took the food, they wouldn’t bend the knee. The women were starving and they were about to lose one of the female sub-adults.

An animal would have consumed its own feces, but these did not. Kharen granted the females and the sub-adults a water source, and they were using it to assuage the pain of hunger, but they weren’t given enough where that would be effective.

She’d consulted with other crewmen, especially the ones in charge of raising their new animals. In the incubators that they’d moved to the edifice, which they’d named ‘Punku.’ They all seemed to agree – reward and punish. Break the spirit of the captives, or they’d simply cooperate until they saw their first chance to escape.

Most believed that the first group would die. Kharen refused to believe it.

The next day, they still wouldn’t bend their knees. She drugged their food, and she went into the cage with the sub-adults. She removed them and moved them to another compound where the males couldn’t see them.

The younger ones might respond to some kindness, she reasoned. Most of the other crewmen told her that she was being foolish, but Regnal supported her and had the adjunct to the compound built for her.

She fed the sub-adults and she cleaned them again. She dressed them in simple dressings – one-piece smocks made of a tough synthetic – and gave them cots to sleep in. The sub-adults didn’t fight like the males, not even the male among them. In their culture, she assumed that raiding for younglings might be part of their culture.

What little they knew of these beings was that they were hunter-gatherers. Where they lived the game was sparce because the water was sparce, and collecting rain water and storing it took up a lot of their time. There was a river that flowed up from the north to dump into a salt-water sea which separated the upper and the lower continent close to the equator, but stronger tribes controlled its banks, and even they were the prey of the animals that drank there.

On Syriahs, there were no felines. Felines were difficult to raise and to domesticate, and they weren’t useful for much. Here, felines ranged in size from tiny cats where roamed their garbage dumps and ranged their fields for the rodents that their seeds attracted, to mighty beasts ten times the weight of a man with long incisors passing their jaws and mighty claws that could tear the hull off of a fliver. When they’d raided north for bison to eat, they’d encountered these and the felines, more lion than cat, had attacked with impunity, fearless of the Sariyans. They’d killed two and brought their bodies back to study.

Their meat was foul. The internal organs weren’t surprising. When they returned, they found cubs belonging to the pair they’d killed, but there were impossible to domesticate and had to be put down.

Oddly, the sub-adults were willing to eat as much of it as they would be allowed, and the males as well. The males howled with anger when they realized that the sub-adults were missing, but they still wouldn’t bend the knee.

In a few more days, one of the females was about to go the way of the sub-adult before Kharen rescued them, and still the males wouldn’t bend.

“Let me try something,” Khalid suggested.

They went in for the normal feeding. The males ate, and Khalid entered, and went to compartment where the females were contained. The males watched him but didn’t attack him – they knew they couldn’t overcome the batons.

Khalid opened the lock on the door to the compartment. The males’ heads rose. Khalid opened the door and the males stopped eating, paying strict attention.

He closed the door behind him, armed only with a baton. The females hadn’t eaten in a week and had little energy to attack him.

He approached the strongest of the three females, and he shocked her with the baton.

The female screamed, and he shocked her again.

The males threw themselves at the glass that separated them from the females, but they couldn’t break it. They howled and they pounded ineffectively.

Khalid raised the baton again, as if he were going to strike the female. The males paused. The females wept and cringed, too weak to fight him.

When the males didn’t attack, he reached into his blue sash and he withdrew three pieces of meat. He threw one to each of the females. All three ate.

The males watched. He reached into his sash, and he pulled out three more pieces.

He motioned to them to bend their knees.

The one whom they considered the alpha, a bigger one with shaggy hair and a beard down past his collar bones, hesitated.

Khalid shocked the female. She screamed again.

He showed them the meat, and he made the motion for them to bend their knees.

The alpha male fell to his knees. The other two did the same. Khalid fed the three females again. He motioned to the other crewman, who brought more of the meat to him. He threw a good-sized piece to all three.

He left the compound. When all of them had gone, the males got up off of their knees and waited by the glass to the females’ compartment.

Kharen was impressed. Either the males hadn’t fully understood the consequences, or they weren’t willing to see their females abused. One way or another, breaking their spirit had begun.