Of Kings, Queens and Colonies by Johnny Worthen

Author:Johnny Worthen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf and fantasy fiction; scifi; gothic fantasy; science fiction; flame tree press; speculative fiction; hard science fiction; fantasy; Dune; Game of Thrones
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2021-10-14T07:55:21+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Their immediate profit becomes our longterm problem – pollution. As usual, our ‘leader’ class is tragically shortsighted, for poison and pestilence have no favorites and can’t be forever contained. What then of our masters when they destroy us and this world? Where can they flee?

Anarchist Pamphlet, 2215 London, England,

Reprinted 935 NE, Enskari

15, Ninth-Month 937 NE – Vildeby, Enskari

Sir Nolan Brett pulled his collar up more to protect his clothes from the staining rain than himself from the cold autumn storm. He worked his way through the morning crowds of Vildeby’s bustling streets, taking his time on his way to Government House. He wore a coat far beneath his station that allowed him to blend with the commoners doing business. He could pass for a well-to-do tradesman or maybe a revered manservant. His clothes spoke of a commoner with status instead of a noble in the slums.

Vildeby was in storm. Soot-summoned lightning flashed the sky and blew black muddy raindrops down like fleeing insects. He worked his way casually past the storefronts, pushing through crowds of hagglers and shoppers, sure to keep his step purposeful to defy eager shopsmen vying for his attention.

He was without bodyguard. His contingent of trusted men were elsewhere. They were not as good as he at blending in for all their lowborn grace, and he didn’t like the attention they always brought him despite themselves. He might not be recognized for who he was, but the pickpockets and cutthroats of the city gutters would sense a man of standing when they realized he was trailed by armed protectors.

“Where’s the sharing?” A man pushed a handbill into Nolan’s hands and then one into the woman’s behind him.

Nolan looked at the paper.

It proclaimed in four block headlines along each of its four sides, The rich are richer and the poor are poorer. How’s this different from slavery? What good are these people doing? This is how Old Earth was ruined.

In the middle of the page was a cartoon. It showed a rickety staircase balancing on a sagging planet. On the topmost step was a wild drunken orgy of bejeweled gentry. To their patriotic credit, Zabel was pictured with a stern disapproving scowl, but was doing nothing to stop the others, who threw riches into a fire, soiled their clothes, took their neighbors’ wives and spilled poison in buckets on the steps below.

Holding the noble tier aloft over their heads were a pack of caricatured merchants, fat and greedy, stealing money from one another in a ring of comical pickpocketing. Many of them were trying to climb the stairs to the upper step, but as part of a dance, the nobles above stepped on their fingers in turns.

Holding up the merchants were glorified peasants and factory workers, coughing and struggling with wise eyes and weak bodies, their bones visible under their skin. They shoveled and toiled and their wealth was sucked away by a vacuum that pulled not a few of them into it as well and showered gold and blood upon the upper steps.

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