Family Challenge

My family was subjected to the hardest test anyone could design or imagine for a family, and we passed with flying colours. As a family we left the Green Line walking, starving and deadly thirsty. We found civilization and earned a place in it, also, always, as family: in a different world, in a different Universe, with alien values, practices and institutions. No harder test for family ties can be created.

“There is nothing wrong in self-preservation”. If you must kill for that, you should kill for that. No matter if you are in the majority or in the minority, or what kind of tales your History teachers and professors fed your mind with. I wanted to start this by saying something good_ something I do like_ about my adoptive world, civilization and State City, and this was that. The more I hear people arrived from Earth more recently talk about my home planet, happier I feel for not have had to see my children growing up there.
About the things I dislike here, they are I suppose the same things most Earthlings have difficulty to swallow. Not talking here about the local’s inclination for use far too much spice, that you get used to easily enough.
Cannibalism is hard to accept as just another part of the world. Most cities in this planet do not allow it entirely, but the conviction of their prohibition is less than what you would expect from any civilized folk. In any case, I got ill luck in this particular, because the city where I am a citizen happens to be one of those nations where eat human flesh is legal. There are some limitations in place, that make me thing about the situation with cannabis in my home country by the time I lived up there, but they do have restaurants where is possible to choose slaves and see them killed and prepared to be eaten. Most of those are people how are not humans, other talking species, since the taboo against eat them is less serious. However, if you look carefully you will find some places where human children are in the menu (slave boys, mostly: since slave-girls have a higher economic value on average).
Well, is easily to not look in the direction of Cannibalism, if you choose to ignore it. Places where intelligent (they say ‘talking’) meal is served are the exception not the norm, and most places where you can eat some intelligent creature (they say ‘being’) only serve species that are not humanoid and who are fairly distant from human aspect. Besides, most families will eat home most days any way. The options for meat that both look and behave like proper food are neither more expensive nor hard to find. On the contrary, they are the standard everyday meal even for most local fans of cannibalism.
Slavery is impossible to ignore, and unlike cannibalism it isn’t a local taste. All human cities in Sharitarn, and most non-human cities as far as I know, have legal slavery. Sexual slavery is always the bulk of it, and human females are always to one picked for “natural slaves”. On the other hand, even if slave women are ubiquitous I have not heard about any human city where free women do not exist. So there is that.
Cannibalism, slavery, female submission, caste system, total absence of human rights, strange religions, endless state of almost war between neighbour nations, no legal restriction against dangerous drugs, dangerous monsters and extreme climatic events that make life uncertain even in the cities and transform any travel beyond walls in a Russian Roulette, the ridiculous “Exclusion Law” that forces all nations to stay locked in a sort of Bronze Age with a few twists, and the dammed “Duels” that force all free men to carry a sword all the time and risk themselves in fights to death far too often. Those are the first reasons that came to my mind for why met the Vortex would not be my choice if I had the chance to refuse it and remain on Earth. Of course, no one has that chance. That is why they call us ii, or “involuntary immigrants” here.
My name is Helen. I was born in the year 1960, in United States of America. In a very small town so close to the geographic centre of my country that if it started boiling like a soup many generations would see the light and die from old age before the excessive heat start bothering us in the summers. My father was a Math teacher, my mother did some work in translation but was mostly a mother of seven, dedicated mother and wife.
We where not overly religious folk, but frequented the church most weeks. What is more than I ever managed to get my family to agree to do.
There is a protocol to tell that sort of thing here, I understand. One first tell the place of birth, date, then the date when the Vortex happened, followed by a brief description of the place where the Vortex left us, them the day when we got killed and transformed into an undead, what kind of undead we are and how “life” unfolded from that point on. Perhaps is not exactly that, but more or less, in general lines. Some other day I do that, in this occasion I would ratter change the subject back to life in Sharitarn, and how it contrasts whit what I considered normal living on Earth.
Only reason why I decided to give you that information about my age and origin was to avoid any noise that could came from the differences between “my” planet Earth and yours. So much things have changed in a relatively brief period of time that perhaps my home planet now isn’t much less distant from the Earth I left that this Universe.
Overstatement I admit, hyperbole. No “Global Govern” matriarch or over the top welfare-state policy could make Earth near as strange as a place where there are no singing birds flying between the trees.
My family was subjected to the hardest test anyone could design or imagine for a family, and we passed. We where in the car: my husband, our one and a half years old daughter, and my son still too small to be casually noticed inside my belly. The Vortex caught us in our way to a summer trip, and deposited us in a Green Line in what then was the Main Continent of Sharitarn. We survived the fall, and the burning of our vehicle instants later. As a family we left the Green Line walking, starving and deadly thirsty. We found civilization and earned a place in it, also, always, as family: in a different world, in a different Universe, with alien values, practices and institutions. No harder test for family ties can be created.
I mentioned some aspects of Sharitarne society that many Earthling iis complain about. Worse than all of them to me is the way children are raised here.
They say “children are children” and allow them to play free most the time, running through the city in bands that are veritable packs of wild beasts. Every so often a child dies in those plays, because they play with no adult supervision and are pretty harsh with each other. They few sad about those deaths, the Sharitarnes, but do nothing to prevent them. From their perspective is better for some children to die than would be to make all children softer and weaker, repressing their violent impulses and freedom of exploration.
If was not for my husband back them I would not have had worries about the matter, or at least I would never have means to do anything about my worries. Because women how came from other nations without make a protector are immediately slaved, and slaves have no saying in any matter. Dario got his citizenship fast enough, thanks to courage and good luck, and he protected me from the hot iron used to brand slaves around here. As a free women who was “free companion” of a citizen I got citizenship three years later, long before I feel that I wanted to enter a caste by Admission Test. Admission Test or not I was a free women, with children, and therefore had saying in how to raise and educate my children.
“How much saying” varies from caste to caste, and according to contract of free companionship. In practice there was less conflict between Dario and me about what to do with the children than between our desires and reality. Especially during the first years my husband had to dedicate so much energy in stay alive and earn a position in our caste that domestic matters felt almost entirely on me.
Parents have power of life and death over their children here. Literally. You CAN kill your on children any time you want and no legal authority will say anything about, even mention the matter in negative colours is considered rude. Unless you are a Peasant, I understand Peasant communities do take care of their children and the parents are the ones who have little saying in the matter. We where not Peasants, however, so no one did nothing to stop me when I decided that I would raise my pups as if we were still living in America. Or as close to that as circumstances allowed.
For a couple of years we had just one slave-girl in the house, and pretended that she was free. We even paid her some money, that she could not touch because slaves are forbidden to touch money, but we would give it to her after she was legally freed. Before that could happen she conspired with thieves to have me and my daughter kidnaped and sold into slavery. Hopping to earn for herself a place as First Slave of some Thieves Caste man.
Dario got me back two days later, only minutes before I was branded into slavery. Took us another half year to find Ingrid, and another two to rescue her, and by the time we succeeded in that she had learned the dialect of some wild folk. My plans of raise my family in Earthling values was lost.
My husband had started using slave-girls for his sexual satisfaction, as they openly do here. I was not angry, perhaps a bit sad, but mostly I felt relieved. Because this master/slave interaction is pivotal for deal with slave-girls, and by this point I strongly wanted Dario’s intervention in that aspect. We would have slave-girls in our house, because in this low levels of technology that’s a necessity, and I understood that the only way for the women of the house to be safe among those slave-girl was to have the fear of God planted in the hearts and souls of those slave-girls by our men.
Once more, I am exaggerating. You will find women here, free women, who are more than capable to terrify their slave-girls. Without effort and even with some personal satisfaction. I was not such a woman. Dario, was not a man that I would have imagined capable of brake a woman’s will and keep her at his feel, submitted by fear and docile to the fault.
He would probably never have done that, and would likely prefer to die instead. Wasn’t for the fact that we needed that from him. He had to put the slave-girl in line, and keep their heads down, so we could remain free women.
In the middle of all that, somehow, my son’s education escaped my attention. Sharitarn is “a world of men” in stronger sense than Earth ever was, and so I knew that my son was not under much risk of end up as a slave. Unless our city falls in war under the strength of some foreigner invader. Even them he would be more likely killed than slaved.
I was pregnant more two times, and the last children died sick before the second birthday. Three children of mine reached adulthood and citizenship. One boy and two girls. My son was the first to die, in his mid-thirties. My younger daughter the next, two decades later.
By this time I was old, and sad and perhaps a little bit bitter. Dario was older than me, and he suggested that we should stop caring for our children and grandchildren and stop looking at the future. Was time to close our bills, and do anything we still wanted to do before the natural decadence of old age deprive us from the chance. “What you want to do, still?” he asked me. “What I want to do before I die, you mean? Live forever”.
“You can’t do that before you die. After you die, is actually possible”. Dario was Mage Caste, he had the contacts and the knowledge to plan something like that and get it done.
“Would you leave me alone, in this vicious world?”
“I am sorry love, to keep going an endless existence as undead is not for me. I think it could be your think, however. There is a risk of end up slaved by the necromancer who makes the ritual, because the ritual of creation makes easy to slave those you create. If you want, I can perform the ritual, and find some necromancer mages to provide the purity of Xar needed to give you a decent enough potential as undead. You would be able to exist indefinitely, and with no risk of your creator use the bond against you since I will be dead and gone in one decade or less.”
I rejected the notion. Changed my mind eventually, thinking about how good would be to see the new generations of our family grow and develop.
Must admit, I lost track of most my descendance less than half century later. When I realised that Chelav was no longer a good place to be undead and moved. Got myself a temporary residence in Mimbao, the Undead City. Which eventually was upgraded to citizenship.
The difference between Chelav and Mimbao is about the same that existed between my home town and New York. If you only count the living residing in the island of Mimbao and do not look the endless layers of caves used as home and sanctuary by the older undeads that still exist on Sharitarn. Some of who are older than our home planet, if Scholars and Mages can be trusted.
Needless to say: die changes a person. It gives you a different perspective about life, suffering, right and wrong. Not to mention a completely new pallet of emotional responses.
Death, time, and experience did not erased my original feelings about children and how they should be protected. I gave up the notion that I could apply my ideas here without destroy most the children by making them unable to endure the world where they must enter as adults one day. The cost is too high to be paid. Nevertheless, is a shame that things cannot be different.
Sad as it is, “children are children”. They must be! There is nothing wrong in self-preservation, and to protect your children is right and necessary. In Sharitarn, however, one cannot protect children against other children. Least not most the time.