Society, a Construct of Hook, Crook, and Flail

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Dear Readers,

  Societies are very interesting things when you get down to it.  They have ordered laws in most if not all cases, and generally some linguistic and cultural commonalities that make them work as a cohesive mass.  When those things break down, they become collections of people who disagree.

  Your Western society, in Europe and the US, works well as a society.  People participate in it because it has a tradition for getting results.  You go to the post office and you trust that the postal workers will not open your mail and rob you.  You call the police, and you expect that they will come for the bad guys and not for you.  You go to a hospital, and you...well, that's a matter for another time.  The upshot is that your society works because it has a tradition for working, because the symbols of its power resonate with people and they respond to that.  It's not so, in say, Soviet breakaway republics scattered across Eastern Europe.

  The great societies have all had these traditional symbols of power and their ordered nature.  Police wear blue.  Strong governments use are represented with an Eagle.  Laws are kept because your parents kept them.  There are criminals, yes, but criminals are dealt with.  They perturb society, they do not subsume or consume it.

  Below you will find two vignettes, one based on a time stream where the great Egyptian Empire, a personal favorite of mine, stayed together for a much longer time than in your time stream.  Its tradition for order was legendary, to the point where its people relished the opportunity to engage in slave labor for their god-king Pharaohs.

  The second vignette is a chip off of that time stream, wherein the tradition has been broken by the loss of symbols of power.  It's been hard for me to figure out if these are divergent time streams, or if one follows the other.  Perhaps a reader can help me in my work, after the jump.

  Always,

   Dr. John Skylar
   Chairman
   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople

The hum surrounded Ankhenhaten 72 while his father gazed through the aircraft window.

A-71 said to his son, "Below, son, see the great city they build for you, here in Manhattan.  Manhattan--I thought it funny that we kept the natives' name."  He grinned with a wideness that the commoners could not manage.  Above his shirtless, muscled body, that face still bore hints of Nefertiti, so many thousands of years before.  Even A-72 could see it.

A-72 dashed to the window, his ten year old legs spry to see the people's tribute.

A-71 put his arm around his son's shoulders, and spoke with his same warm, buttered voice.  It felt like the sun in Cairo, "Now you know that you are a god.  The buildings spell your name, my son.  You carry the exact blood of our forefathers, and it sets you apart.  Unlike them, you are perfect."

The Pharaoh stepped away from his son.  A-72 turned away from the window to watch his father.  A-71 picked up the symbols of power from the aircraft table.  The crook and flail fit into his hands like new extremities, and he brought the Rite of Leadership onto the screen.  The manifestation, created by A-71's priests, showed the Pharaoh all of his urgent business.

A-72 read the notes on the Rite's giant world map.  "Riot in Khartoum," or "Last David Clone Rebels in Jerusalem." Little things that did not really need his father.  Pointless things.  A-72 wanted his father to come back to the window.

Instead, A-71 waved the flail over Khartoum, and the Rite knew what he wanted.  Instantly, beseeched by the god-king, the priests there would release food from the granaries and appease the people.  The riots would end.  A-72 wondered why his father did not use the crook.  He always liked it when his father used the crook.  It felt like such power, to command men in that way.

A-71 turned to Jerusalem.  The flail twitched in his hand, but then his nostrils flared and he nearly threw the crook at the screen.  A-72 jumped a little at his father's rage, but he still saw the crook have its effect.  It compelled the garrisons at Ashkelon and Tyre to get their aircraft ready.  In minutes, Jerusalem would be rubble once more.

A-71 whirled back to face his son, "It saddens me to do that, son.  But this is the last David clone.  I do not want to take any more chances."

#

Ahote fitted the second to last block into the wall and stepped back to look at his work.  He felt his stomach rumble, and looked to his left and right to see the other laborers.  Somehow, they all stopped as well.  He knew they all felt hungry.  The storm on the Muhheakantuck River delayed their latest food shipment from the Pharaoh.  He could not even feed the workers who built his city.  The workers who swallowed his religion instead.

Ahote took a look at the final stone block, and then at the task master.  He looked again at the wall, and his heart pounded in his chest.  The last work he did on the wall was twenty seconds before.  Soon, the taskmaster would notice.  He would notice them all, with their stopped work.  Ahote saw that some of the others had turned back to their tasks.  They did what they were supposed to do.  They did not need to be told.

But Ahote's stomach still rumbled like the thunder of a thousand refugee feet.  He missed the stories of the ancient nations, before the Pharaohs.  If a man could hunt in the woods, he could eat.  Ahote yearned to hunt in the woods.

Next to him, Sala spoke in her low voice, "Ahote, you must start working again.  It will be called a rebellion.  They will kill us.  You are supposed to work."

"Not eating will kill me, Sala."  He did not want to blow her off.  In fact, he wanted to do quite the opposite.  But as his eye burned a hole into the stone block, he could not bring himself to lift it to the wall.

He feared the crook, of course, and knew of its power.  Where the old gods were things of stories, the Pharaohs truly exerted their power.  The crook could make him die.  It could make them all die.  His heart pounded faster within his chest.  Ahote's fists clenched, but at the same time, his bladder wanted to unclench.

Then, the taskmaster yelled, "Mason!  Get back to your work!" and lashed his whip.

It stung into Ahote's shoulder with all its teeth.  Despite the blood, he knew that the taskmaster could do far worse.

Something shifted in his guts, and he lunged for the final block.  He lifted it in his hands, to the height where it should go in the wall.  Instead, he sent it straight at the taskmaster's head, and he watched the stone sail through the air.  It connected before the large slavedriver could jump out of the way, and the man's skull cracked with such force that Ahote could hear it.  He fell from the building's scaffold.

In the tender, stunned second before the workers joined his rebellion and all hell broke loose, Ahote had an encouraging thought: If the flail could fail to fill his stomach, perhaps the crook could fail to punish him.

Somewhere in a garrison nearby, hungry soldiers ignored their call to arms.