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All quiet in the western sub-sector
Uncountable are the nights I have been talking about it. Drunk
and sentimental in rowdy bars with tears
rolling down my cheeks or sober and serious in whispers during
the long hours of watch. It makes kind
of part and parcel of being a guardsman. Talking about your home
that is. It almost takes the form of a
competition in which you have to convince the others that your
homes summers are the greenest, seas
the bluest, smells the sweetest or girls the prettiest. I have
seen scarred old veterans that otherwise are
tough as Kilean leather start fistfights over whose homes sunset
is the most beautiful. Truth be told
though, I never liked mine that much. Why else would I be here?
I grew up on New Tarus. It was so
named by the first settlers who apparently came from a place
called Tarus. Either they had poor
imagination or they just liked their old planet so much that
they wanted a second one. Our history books
never went into any details of what kind of place the original
Tarus was like or why the colonizers left it.
In fact, our history books did not went into much detai l on
anything. New Tarus was a farming planet
and the curriculum of our schools was adjusted accordingly. The
defining moment in our history was a
visit by a group of imperial administrators who made a thorough
evaluation of how the planet best
could serve the Imperium and finally proclaimed, to the eternal
gratefulness of its inhabitants, that it
henceforth would be a grade one agricultural planet; a bread
basket for the Imperium. The walls of our
official buildings have during the following millennia been
covered by numerous interpretations of this
happy occasion. I especially remember a mural in the chapel of
my village in which a smiling man (naked
for some reason) stretches an armful of different cereals to a
group of men in imperial robes. They all
look very serious and they carry all kinds of advanced measuring
instruments. Actually there has not
been much more after that event for neither historians to write
about nor artists to paint on New Tarus.
We have farmed and thats it. My history lessons mainly consisted
of repeating the names and accession
dates of the more than a hundred planetary governors that have
ruled since then. I dont remember asingle one. What I do still
recall is the list of conditions that made the imperial
administrators come to
their conclusion. Endlessly repeated under the threat of harsh
punishment if you forgot a single item, it
constituted the essence of what we were supposed to know about
our home planet: The inclination of
its axis, the distance to the sun, the land/ocean ratio, the
mean elevation of the landmass over the sea,
rainfall and humidity rates, mean temperatures, length and
variation of seasons, mineral composition of
the top soil, microbiological fauna, - well that is what I
remember for now.
By Imperial decree I was to be the only child in my family. A
grade one agricultural planet must keep its
population within strict limits. Any more than what is needed to
operate the vast machines that plow,
sow and harvest its endless fields is a liability. I was born in
the end of a period during which a series of
lax planetary governors had let the population grow
uncontrolled. Consequently there was an increasing
number of idle people with stomachs to fill but without
contributing to the planets productivity. A
diminishing yearly output led to a call from the Adeptus
Administratum for an investigation to be carried
out by the local Adeptus Arbites which in turn soon found out
the reasons for the incongruity. The
aftermath was a series of trials which ended in a number of
public executions of planetary officials and
of course of the governor himself. I was too young to remember
it but in the light of how eventless life
in general is on New Tarus it must have caused quite the
commotion. There was a pictogramme in our
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history book of the governor kneeling in the middle of the main
square of Kornukopia, our capital. A
small stage had been constructed so as to allow the huge throng
a better view of the spectacle. In the
background you see the pillars of the counsel hall and a long
row of gallows in which more than a
hundred bodies already hang. Towering over the kneeling governor
stands an arbitrator in full Imperial
ornament and the executioners sword raised over his head to
deliver justice. The text below explained
that the blow fell just a second after the picto was taken. A
new governor was appointed and his
immediate response to the population issue was to prohibit any
more than one child per family.
I grew up in a farm in the village of Urst. Forget about the
images you may have of intimate communities
consisting of small clusters of houses which is what usually
comes to ones mind when the word village
is mentioned. A village on New Tarus was an administrative term
used for a certain number of
households dispersed over an immense area in which centre a
group of official buildings was the only
reminder that these households were part of a greater unit.
Among these buildings was a chapel which
was the only place where I during my early childhood saw human
beings other than my parents. Then of
course when I got older it was the village school. At the best
of times still only half full due to the harsh
methods of population control I there met the first people that
I would call friends. The images fromthis period that most
frequently come to my mind are the vistas from the window of the
family vehicle.
The travel between our farm and the village centre took several
hours and when I started school these
travels became a daily routine. The journey went through a flat
monotone landscape of cultivated fields.
Once in a while the straight line of the horizon was disturbed
by one or several silos. The flatness of the
landscape made it hard to estimate distances and it took many
years before I understood that the silos I
saw were not small tiny structures but actually several hundred
meters tall. Roads, pipelines and
electricity cables never had to avoid obstacles but ran
completely straight through the landscape,
disappearing into nothingness where the skies met the ground. I
once knew a guardsman that had been
studying in an art school but had joined the forces due to a
broken heart. He showed me the principles
of central perspective by drawing a number of straight lines
that all met in the centre of the picture. Iimmediately thought
about my home. The fields varied in color depending on which crop
that was
grown and on what time of year it was. Seasons where hardly
existing due to the absence of angle of the
planetary axis, making an endless variety of cycles of sowing
and harvesting of different crops possible.
Every year new directives from the agricultural counsel were
issued in order to preserve nutrients in the
topsoil and to maximize output. It changed the color schemes of
the landscape but never the monotony.
During these lonely hours of travel, as the preprogrammed
vehicle kept is course on the straight road,
my mind wandered and I dreamt of distant places and different
times. I think it was then I decided, even
if only subconsciously, that I had to get away from that
place.
One episode during my childhood sticks with me, probably because
it was the only event that wasdiverging from the dull everyday
life. I was nine and our closest neighbor decided to change the
rout of
some of his irrigation canals. While digging, he suddenly noted
bones and chunks of rusty metal in the
shovel of his caterpillar. The whole thing of course sounded
terribly exciting for a kid of my age and as
soon as my father mentioned it I started pester him and did not
stop until he brought me with him to
have a look. In the heaps of moist reddish soil that the
caterpillar had scoped up I finally got to see with
my own eyes several bones and craniums and also rusty lumps of
metal that at least in a kids
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imagination once could have been bolters. I immediately started
to fantasize about heroic battles of the
kind I back then only knew from transmits on the pictoscreen.
What if they actually had taken place
right here at my neighbors field and what I saw were remnants of
the fallen and their weapons? On my
fathers advice our neighbor alerted the authorities that some
time later came to investigate. However,
to my great disappointment they conducted their activities
inside a huge white tent erected over the
site. After several months of excavations they held a meeting in
the village chapel where they explained
that what was found was nothing but the bones of a mammalian
species living on the planet before its
adaptation to farming. The metal pieces were just old farming
equipment. During the same meeting it
was also proclaimed that a great statue of the emperor was to be
constructed on the excavation site.
My neighbor was told that he should consider this a great honor
but he didnt seem to appreciate this
honor very much. During late nights after many glasses of rye
wine I could hear him complain to my dad
about the loss of output that he suffered due to that statue. In
the end it never was constructed
anyway. After cementing the whole field the governors
construction team left with promises to return
at a later stage but they never did. Our neighbor sent many
letters where he suggested some kind of
compensation but they remained unanswered. I had a hard time
letting go of my fantasy of great battles
and I once said to my father that I did not believe what the
governmental representatives had said
about extinct animals. The rough back of his hand taught me not
to air such doubts again. As I grew up I
became convinced that my youth and my imagination had carried me
away and that what I had seen in
the soil actually was remnants of some extinct animal and old
farming equipment. Maybe it was. Or
maybe great battles have been fought on the soil of my home
planet involving space marines and all
kinds of foul alien beasts. Or maybe the decision to transform
New Tarus into the shapeless almost
uninhabited place it is now was not so enthusiastically greeted
by its inhabitants as the Imperial annals
suggest. But I digress. I wanted to tell you about my home
planet so that you would have at least some
images to accompany the first part of my story which deals with
my recruitment. Oh, and by the way, I
am Marcus. Trooper Wayne Marcus.
