The Voiceless
By Emily Nelms
The Oligarchs were getting settled into the small meeting hall in Landing, the uncreative name of the town near where the first spaceship carrying humans had landed on Recounton. Landing was the town created by the first colonists.
I had never been there before. Although people from all of the original families lived in Landing, Oligarchs were the only people who visited this town. The Oligarchs only came when there was something going on that affected the whole planet and required the family to come to a decision on what to do.
"Jenny, this is my great uncle, Peter Oligarch," my husband, Emir, said.
I stopped looking around the relatively small room and directed my attention to the elderly man Emir was introducing me to. I had never seen the man before, despite the fact that he was the most powerful man on the planet.
"Nice to meet you, Jenny…." Peter Oligarch said, trailing off to indicate that he wanted a last name.
"Oligarch," I said.
"Jennifer Democracy Oligarch," Emir added quickly. "She was a member of the Democracy family."
The eldest Oligarch held out his hand, and I shook it.
"Nice to meet you, Jenny Democracy." Peter nodded quickly before moving along to address other family members.
"Why didn't you answer his question?" Emir asked quietly.
"I did answer his question," I said. "He wanted to know what my last name was and I told him."
"You knew what he meant," Emir said, but I knew that he would drop the subject immediately.
My maiden name only would have mattered to this family: the Oligarchs. The family that claimed that its first ancestor on Recounton had been the captain of the ship that had brought humans to our small planet. The family that lorded over our entire population based on this claim, despite the fact that enough time had passed for virtually everyone on the planet to have been related to every member of the original crew. The family that supplied every town on Recounton with water: the real source of the family's power.
I had to remind myself that I was now technically a member of this family.
"We should sit down," Emir said, leading me to a seat in the back row of the room. He sat down next to me and started speaking to some people sitting near the two of us.
I was more curious about what was happening around the room than the conversation my husband was engaged in. All of the people who had affected my life for twenty years surrounded me. These were the people who, two years before I graduated, had decided that all children should attend an extra year of school. Their votes had declared it illegal for people in one town to supply any goods to people in another town.
Each of the original families had one task. Sometimes a town would reach the point where there were too many people in each family. It only takes a certain number of people to perform each task. When a town reached this point, half of the people in each family would leave and form a new town. It was a sad occurrence, which occurred about every five generations, but it was necessary in order for Recounton's economic system to keep working correctly.
Not that the system always worked well. My family's task in each town was to build modes of transportation and do repair work on these vehicles. The Oligarch's decision to stop inter-town commerce hurt my family because we could no long take business from nearby towns where demand for transportation was great. Democracies in towns where demand for transportation was low were beginning to hurt financially. No Democracies were benefiting from the new law, which had been passed a year and a half prior to this meeting. The families that had more demand for transportation than they could meet were forced to tell some people that they would just have to wait for service.
Most of my immediate family's business came from different
towns that had too many requests for vehicles for the Democracies in that town
to provide vehicles fast enough. Now my
family was forced to rely upon vehicles in our town,
"Are you OK?"
I turned to see that a young woman had taken the seat next to me. She smiled a little, encouragingly.
"I'm fine," I said.
"You're new, aren't you?" she asked, although it was obvious that she already knew the answer.
"Yes, I got married last month."
She laughed a little under her breath. "I can always spot the newlyweds. They're the people who look very pissed off before the meeting even begins."
I laughed, too. "Are you… I mean, did you marry into this family, too?"
She nodded and motioned for me to keep my voice down. "Yes. Five years ago. I usually just stay at home when these meetings are called, but I heard that this meeting is going to be more important than most."
"You stay home? When you could be here where the decisions are made?" I asked quietly.
"Only people who are born an Oligarch can vote on the decisions," she said.
"I know that."
"So what difference does it make if I'm here or not?"
"Well… you're here now, so it must make some difference," I said.
She smiled. "I'm here because I'm curious about the current situation." She leaned a little closer. "I'm here because this could be the end of this family's reign over us."
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. I didn't have any time to question her because Peter Oligarch was in the front of the room trying to call the meeting into order.
The room quieted rather quickly. Recounton was not lacking in communicational devices, and most families always knew what events concerning their families were happening. The Oligarchs probably had very little new news to tell each other tonight.
"It has been nice seeing all of us here, together, again," Peter began.
Peter Oligarch had no official title. Everyone on Recounton just knew that the oldest member of the Oligarch family led these meetings. Peter's opinion meant very much to the Oligarchs, and the Oligarchs often voted how Peter wished.
"As most of you know, only one spaceship carrying humans had ever landed on Recounton," Peter began.
The room muttered, acknowledging that they knew this to be true.
"Until yesterday afternoon," Peter added.
There was a very brief silence. As people realized what Peter had said, the room grew loud as the Oligarchs started asking each other questions about what ship had landed on Recounton yesterday without anyone noticing.
The woman sitting next to me leaned over, laughing a little. "Told you that this meeting would be different."
I looked over at her. "How did you know?" I asked. I was still shocked by what Peter had just revealed.
The woman didn't answer. Peter was pounding a gavel on a table in the front of the room. The room quieted down much more slowly than it had a minute earlier, but eventually it was silent enough for Peter to explain what was happening.
"We usually do not speak with people on Earth's other colonies. Most of the colonies agreed hundreds of years ago that it would be best if we kept communication to a minimum. We thought that isolation would be the best way to avoid conflict. Colonies usually exchange information about what is happening on their planets every five or ten years, just in case there is a big issue that is coming up.
"Because we get information from the different colonies so infrequently, we never really know if rapid change is occurring on another colony. We learn about natural disasters and revolutions after the fact."
"But natural disasters and revolutions don't affect us," someone in the crowd interrupted.
Peter nodded. "You're right. The natural disasters and the revolutions do not directly affect us. Usually. Until yesterday."
There was a pause. No one spoke. We all waited for the rest of his information.
"As we speak, there are a large group of people from Sariyah about five hundred miles from here, about fifteen miles from our outmost town called Proximity. Sariyah is one of our nearest neighbors. It takes about a year to get there. The planet was never really suited for inhabitation. There is a very thin atmosphere, and the planet is very cold. However, the people made do with this planet for almost as long as humans have been here, on Recounton."
That had been five-hundred years, I thought. Five hundred years of not much air and sunshine?
Peter interrupted my thoughts. "The people were barely conscious of the volcanic activity on Sariyah. It had never really proven to be a problem for them. Most of the activity occurred on the other side of the planet. When activity began increasing nearer to them, the people started paying more attention. We received some reports of their concerns about fifty years ago."
"Why didn't we hear about it?" an older person in the group asked.
"It didn't really matter," Peter said, shrugging. "We have volcanoes. Most planets do. Humans have never inhabited a planet where this was truly a problem."
"Until now?" someone in the room asked sarcastically.
Peter nodded solemnly. "To make a long story short, the volcanoes' ash was spreading quickly through their atmosphere. It was getting more and more difficult to use solar energy and clean the air. The people of Sariyah took a year to prepare to leave their planet. They split into twenty groups and each group went to a different colony. This group is one of the first groups to reach its destination."
Peter paused again. Perhaps he wanted us to figure out the point of this meeting by ourselves. No one seemed willing to do so, so Peter was forced to continue addressing his relatives.
"There are twenty thousand people. They want to stay," Peter said quickly.
"Twenty thousand? On one ship?" I said without thinking.
"Of course not. They took several ships. Only one ship has landed. The rest are waiting for permission to join their fellow colonists," Peter answered.
Emir looked over at me strangely, but I was too preoccupied to care that he cared that I had spoken at the meeting. I knew, while there were no rules saying that I could not speak, that spouses of Oligarchs were expected to stay silent during the business part of the meeting.
There was another awkward silence.
"So… we need to decide whether or not they can stay," Peter said.
"What will they do if we say they can't stay?" a man near the front of the room said.
"Go back out into space and find some other planet to live on," another man responded coldly.
"Do they have enough supplies to get to another planet?" Emir asked.
"No," Peter responded. "These people came here hoping that we would accept them. If we don't…. Well, I don't know what they'll do."
"Why didn't they call before just dropping in?" said the man who had suggested that these people find a different planet to live on.
Peter looked at him and then looked down. "They tried," he said quickly.
"They tried?" the man asked.
"It's Recounton's policy not to take any messages from any colony unless it is one of the prearranged times to exchange information," Peter said.
"So if we ever need help, we should time it correctly so that it happens during one of these prearranged times to exchange information?" I asked.
Emir put his hand on my knee. I looked at him and he shook his head very slightly. I frowned at him.
"Isolation has worked very well for us for hundreds of years. Sariyah has practiced the same policy for centuries as well. This is all beside the point. The point is that twenty thousand people want to join our colony, and we need to decide whether or not to allow this," Peter said.
"Can't these people just go to the other side of the planet? We're not using it," a woman on the left side of the room suggested.
"These people have no knowledge of how to live on this planet. Their supplies do not mesh with our environment. We have plenty of air, but less oxygen than their planet did. Their machines are calibrated completely wrong," Peter said.
"I'm afraid I don't see what this discussion is even for. There are people at our front door, so to speak, with no place else to go. How could we turn them away?" another woman asked.
"These people will not fit in with our system," Peter said. "Every family has a role in this society. Everyone has a job. We would essentially be taking in twenty thousand unemployed people. This planet has never had an unemployed person. Our system cannot handle it."
"It can for a few months. We can supply more than we have been. If we spread these twenty thousand people out between all of our towns, taught them how to do our tasks—"
The crowd cut off the man speaking with sounds of objection. Teaching people outside of your family the family trade was not done on Recounton. If other people could provide the service or product that your family provided, then your family was no longer needed. It was something that every family on the planet feared.
The objections slowly died away and were replaced with a silence. Everyone was beginning to see the difficulty of coming up with any solution that would work. We could not support twenty thousand people who were not contributing to the society. On the other hand, our society was so based upon the family, we could hardly allow people who were not a member of the families to work.
"What if we just give them what they need to live on the other side of Recounton?" a young man near us asked. "We'll give them all our secrets, but we'll send them far enough away that it won't matter."
The room voiced objections to this idea as well.
The woman next to me leaned over again, laughing a little under her breath. "Have you ever seen a group of leaders watch their power crumble around their feet?"
I looked over at her. "What do you mean?"
"Think about it," she whispered. "How many families would object to losing their monopolies on their trade? How many families here really could offer the Sariyahans anything that they don't already know? How many of these family trades were really secret when this society began?"
I thought about it. The truth was that most families would object to losing their monopolies. However, the woman had made a good point. Most families probably wouldn't be able to offer anything that the twenty thousand new people really needed. For example, my family, the Democracies, could tell them how to make the vehicles that we knew how to make, but obviously a group of people who could move their whole colony to different planets had some grasp on the concept of transportation. They doubtlessly had knowledge on other matters, such as medicine, communications, and solar power. What these twenty thousand people desperately needed from us was our information that was specific to this planet: how to get food, water and air out of our unique environment. Only three out of fifty families on Recounton were directly threatened by these Sariyahans. Unfortunately, these three families had the most power. They had almost all of the power. The Oligarchs, who supplied water, had the official power. The Polities and the Tyrannies, who supplied food and extra supplies of oxygen respectively, had the ears of the Oligarchs. Almost everyone else in Recounton was voiceless.
I looked at the woman again, this time with understanding. She raised her eyebrows. We both turned our attention back to what was happening in the room.
"There is no way to incorporate these people into our way of life," a man was saying. "We should turn them away. Perhaps… Urleid is more suited to accept twenty thousand refugees."
"They can't make it there. This has been established already," a woman said.
"Then they can't make it!" the man retorted.
"If we turn them away, they'll lose hope. They won't just give up. They'll attack us!" the woman said, getting angry. "We've got to accept them. That's all there is to it."
"But how do we accept them? They have to contribute. We can't tell them our secrets. There's no good solution," Peter said.
"What if we supply them with what they need but keep them separate from us. They can stay where they landed. They can create their own towns. We'll supply them with water and whatever else they need," a man said.
"For free?" Emir asked.
"Of course not for free. They can pay us back in whatever they can. Surely they have some things they don't need from us—"
"I can't believe this," I said to myself.
"What can they provide that we don't already have a family providing?" Emir asked.
Peter shrugged. "Perhaps they have some new things we could use. Perhaps they have things we already have, but they would give us other trading options."
"You mean… let these people offer us things that other families are already offering?" a woman in the middle of the room said.
Again, muttering could be heard in the room, but obviously fewer people were voicing their dislike for this idea. Upon quickly scanning the room, I found it clear who these dissenters were: spouses of Oligarchs. We were thinking more about our real families than the family we had all married into, most of us probably because our parents wished for us to marry "up."
"So we could trade with these twenty thousand people for anything they could offer us. No family will tell these people their family secrets. That should make everyone happy. The people from Sariyah will be free to trade with anyone they want. Obviously there are certain families who they will certainly trade with. These people will need food, water and extra oxygen to breathe at night," Peter said.
I was furious. The Oligarchs were clearly putting their own good ahead of the good of Recounton. Not that this was anything new, but normally the family's decisions' impacts were smaller than what could result from what was now being discussed.
"That will make most of the families on this planet very unhappy—"
"There's no other solution. We can't turn these people away because there's no place else for them to go. Julia was right. If we told them they couldn't stay on our planet, then the Sariyahans would attack us. This planet cannot handle a surface war. And we can't send them halfway around the world because they wouldn't be able to survive, and then we're facing war again. This is the only way that we can incorporate these people into our society without our society crumbling," Peter said.
The more Peter spoke, the angrier I was becoming. I willed myself to stand up and say something. I wished that the woman next to me, who clearly was as angry as I was, would tell these people that this policy was not right. Many families would suffer if the Sariyahans could offer the richest families on Recounton the only thing that those families provided. My thoughts leapt to my own family. What if the Sariyahans could provide better transportation than the Democracies could? The richer families were the Democracies' best customers. It would be devastating to us if people could get transportation from another source. I wondered how many other families could be affected in the same way. But I didn't say anything.
"And when the other families begin to learn that this policy could take business away from them?"
"We still make the water. The Polities still make the food. The Tyrannies still provide the air. What are people going to do?" a man very near me said while smirking.
I looked over at the woman on my right. Her face was frozen into a look I assumed she meant to appear to be apathetic. Her anger was still very visible.
"I thought that this was the end of this family's rule. It's only making their rule stronger," I whispered.
She looked at me and nodded. "Yes."
"But you said—"
"I failed to think of this solution," she whispered quickly. "But it won't work for long. When enough families become desperate enough because of this policy… then perhaps this family will meet its end."
"Why don't you tell them that?" I asked her. "Why don't you tell them that you believe that this policy will not allow them to keep their power in the long run?"
"Why don't you?"
There was a sense of excitement among the Oligarchs now. The family lived for power, and they sensed that more power was within their grasp. They would have the same control over twenty thousand other people that they had over the rest of the planet. The Sariyahans would soon face the same problem that most of the Recountons had for hundreds of years. The new colonists would hate the system. Water would prevent them from changing anything. And they would hate the Oligarchs… including me… for taking advantage of them. They would hate themselves for letting the system continue.
"Are there any other ideas?" Peter was asking.
No one said anything.
Why wasn't I saying anything?
"Because it doesn't matter what you say," the woman next to me said, so softly that I could barely hear her. I looked at her quickly. It was unclear whether she had been speaking to herself or had known what I was thinking and had answered my unspoken question.
"Then let's vote. Who supports the policy of extending our trade to the Sariyahans and making it illegal for any family to share information with these new people?" Peter asked.
Most people in the room stood up and said "Aye." I looked over at my husband. 'Tell him!' I told myself. The family would listen to Emir. He was a member of the Oligarchs. A true member. He could tell them that this policy would not work. He could tell them that everyone would end up hurting because of this decision. True, most of the other families would hurt first, but eventually this decision would bring down the political situation that had remained almost the same on Recounton since people first landed near this very meeting hall.
Emir looked at me carefully for a few seconds. He could tell that I wanted to say something.
But I couldn't. Because it wouldn't matter. Even to my own husband, I had no voice.
He slowly stood up and said "Aye" as well. After about thirty seconds, every person who had been born into the Oligarch family was standing.
"I hereby proclaim that the Sariyahans will be allowed to live on Recounton. They will form their settlements fifty miles from the town nearest to where their ship landed. The Sariyahans will be permitted to trade freely with the Recountons and vice versa. However, no family is to reveal their family trade secrets to anyone, whether they are from Recounton or Sariyah. This will be effective immediately upon the landing of the next ship to enter our atmosphere. And, as always, this meeting is entirely confidential."
Peter ended the meeting and everyone started preparing to leave the meeting hall and go home. The people who lived in outlying towns left almost immediately. They had a three-hour drive ahead of them. The Oligarchs who lived closer to Recounton lingered to exchange gossip and congratulate each other on dealing with an extreme problem rather quickly.
Fortunately, Emir and I lived about two-and-a-half hours away and left the meeting hall within fifteen minutes of the end of the meeting. We got into the car that my father had built for Emir. He started the engine and began driving home.
After about half-an-hour of an awkward silence, Emir finally broke. "So… your first Meeting. What did you think?"
I didn't respond at first. After a couple of minutes, I said, "It was interesting."
He smiled.
"I don't think I'll go again," I said.
"What? But the Meetings are where all of the decisions are made. You don't want to be there to watch history in progress?"
I sighed. How long had it been since I had asked the same question of the woman who was sitting beside me at the meeting? An hour at the most?
"Are you OK?" Emir asked when it became clear that I didn't intend to answer his question.
I thought about it. I had been OK before the Meeting. Nothing had changed. I had the same voice that I had always had: no voice at all.
And I hated myself for not using it.