Bad Tolz, Germany, 31 January 2005
Schultz is too clean, thought Krueger. In an exercise in mud crawling intended for little higher purpose than to accustom the boys to getting dirty—well, that and simple toughening to overcome their civilized sensibilities, the boy remained too clean.
Krueger bent over and picked up a clod of half-frozen mud. This he smeared into Schultz's face snarling, "You little pussy. You smelly little fur-hole filled with nothing. You are nothing so good as a Jew-bitch camp whore. At least she would have known her job."
Turning from Dieter to the rest of the platoon, standing in ranks, Krueger shouted, "The earth is your friend. Use it. Huddle up to it as if to your mother's tit. Embrace it like the little sluts you used to waste your time with. Dig into it. Do not be like this ever-so-prissy little schoolboy, Schultz, afraid to get yourselves dirty. You can wash dirt away. Your own blood is a tougher stain. Dismissed."
Without another glance Krueger turned away from his charges and walked to the NCO barracks, briskly and erect.
The platoon gathered about Schultz, standing there with his face dripping filth. No one said a word; they just stared. Schultz himself quivered with anger. By what right, by what right did this man who looked no older than did Dieter himself, treat him like dirt? And not merely today, but everyday, so it seemed to Schultz, Krueger—his platoon trainer, had some new heap of abuse for him.
One of the boys, Rudi Harz, put a calming hand on Dieter's shoulder. "Mein Freund, my friend . . . Krueger is an asshole, a Nazi asshole to boot. But he is also a Nazi asshole who knows. And he sees something useful in you. Bear with it."
Around the two the others nodded somberly.
Schultz, grateful for the touch and the concern, cocked his head and shrugged, adding his own nod. Harz was a good comrade. So were they all.
"But that asshole, Krueger?" said Dieter, quietly. "He is a bad man, whatever he may know."
"Yes," agreed Harz. "He is the worst. If I hear even one more tale of his rapes in the old concentration camps I will vomit. Even so, use him for what he is good for: which may include how to keep ourselves alive."
Silent, Schultz again nodded. Then to the rest he said, "Shall we march back then? Not crawl or amble? March back singing?"
Amid a general assent, and a wink from Harz in Schultz's direction, the boys formed into four ranks. "You march us back, Dieter . . . that's right, Dieter . . . show that bastard Krueger that he can't break us up."
Silently agreeing and taking a place on the left side of the platoon, Schultz gave the command, "Vorwaaaats . . . Marsch!"
Up in the front rank, Harz began the song, "Vorwärts! Vorwärts! Schmettern die hellen fanfaren . . ."21
At a distance, still walking away, Krueger smiled to himself and felt an enormous inner glee. He muttered, happily, "The old ways still work."
Over the Rhein River, 13 February 2005
The steep banks of the river spoke to the Indowy with a voice hoary with age. He remembered; he remembered.
"We have been to your planet before, long, long ago," Rinteel said, seemingly to the chancellor. "It is a story of sadness."
"Really?" asked the chancellor. "Sad, how?"
"The same way all blighted hopes are sad," answered the Indowy, distantly.
Off, too, in the distance, Rinteel saw a rocky hill. His mouth began to mime words in his own tongue. The chancellor had no clue what the words meant, yet something in the cadence touched a chord.
"What is that you are saying?" the chancellor asked.
The Indowy took a few moments, inexpressibly sad and weary moments, to answer. "It is a song of my people, an ancient song. It tells of an attempt at liberty from our oppressors, of an ancient stronghold, of trying to forge a weapon to defend those who might have become, in time, our deliverers."
The Indowy sighed and pointed from the helicopter window. "It tells the blood-drenched tale of that rock over there."
His interest piqued, the chancellor gave orders to the pilot, ignoring the scowls of his security detail. The helicopter veered sharply to the right. In the setting sun the rocky hill gleamed golden and beautiful.
The helicopter touched down flawlessly, despite the heavy crosswind atop the hill. The Indowy, seemingly in a trance, spirit walking, dismounted first. He was followed by the chancellor and his guards.
The helicopter had landed a scant three hundred meters from the summit. Over the steep and rocky ground the Indowy advanced, his chanting growing louder with each step. The Chancellor thought he could almost recognize some of the words: "Fafneen . . . Mineem . . . Albletoon . . . Anothungeen . . . Nibleen . . . Fostvol."
At last the Indowy, and the others, stood before a sheer rock wall. "It was my clan, mine and mine alone, which made this attempt. We paid for it, heavily."
"What attempt?" asked one of the BND guards.
Rinteel half ignored the question. Instead, speaking distantly, he said, "We wanted to make a holy order, a group of warrior heroes, to man the defenses we would build here. We had thought that under the protection of Anothungeen, an insuperable defense for your planet, your people might grow to mightiness. We could not defend you. Yet we sought to give you the means to defend yourselves."
The humans of the group, swaying on the wind-swept slope, faced the unmarred cliff with boredom writ large upon their faces. And then the Indowy reached out a palm and uttered a phrase in a nonhuman tongue. A portion of the rock face disappeared, exposing a rough, archlike entrance. The humans, including the chancellor, gaped. Still in his half trance, Rinteel entered; in enclosed spaces the Indowy people were much less fearful than were the sons of Adam.
From just past the arch Rinteel said, "This place was chosen because it was on the fringe of your then dominant civilization. Here we could, so we thought, develop the systems, Anothungeen and Fafneen, in peace. From here also we could, so we thought, distribute it secretly throughout your then-dominant civilization, the one you humans call 'Roman.'"
The Indowy's chin sank upon his breast.
The chancellor looked over and past the Indowy to cast his gaze upon a scene of ancient slaughter. Skull-less cadavers, dried and brittle, of humans and Indowy both, met his sight. The chancellor's mind turned back to little piles of gnawed bones in a place called "Fredericksburg." "Mein Gott," he said.
"Only one of us, Albletoon, escaped the slaughter," Rinteel translated as he recited. "A human mercenary, traitor to his race, led the assault. Siegfried, cursed be his name, betrayed the People. For greed . . . and the promised mate . . . he sold them out . . . and so fell the cause of liberty. The traitor Mineem led them through, foiled the gate, and compromised the safeguards. For foul gold, and fame, our hero Siegfried sold his soul."
So deep was the Indowy into his trance that the chancellor feared for him. He reached out a hand almost comradely.
Rinteel shrugged off the comforting grip.
"Let me make sure I understand," the chancellor said. "Your people knew of us, and tried to save us, centuries ago?"
"More than centuries, millennia."
"But you failed? It didn't work?"
"No," answered Rinteel, with a sigh both sad and painful. "We forgot—it had been so long since we had known war. Only weapons of your own forging could save you. The Elves will sabotage anything we might give you. So, no, Herr Kanzler, no, it won't work. It didn't work."
Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany,
15 February 2005
"Well, that didn't work," sighed Mueller.
"Back to the drawing board," agreed Prael, disgust dripping with every syllable.
The object of that disgust, an enormous steel cylinder leaking heavy red hydraulic fluid as if from a ruptured heart, stood shattered within its testing cradle. The cylinder, intended to be one of ten that would absorb the recoil of the Tiger III's twelve-inch gun, had proven deficient . . . and that in the most catastrophic way possible. Indeed, so catastrophic had the failure been that at least one of the testing crew within Prael's vision was leaking red fluid nearly as rapidly as the cylinder. Instantaneous decapitation will do that.
Mueller, emerging from the test shelter, itself a metal bunker, looked at the body and shook his head wearily. "I did want a railgun. Continuous acceleration. Greater—much greater—ammunition storage . . ."
The Israeli, Benjamin, interrupting, asked of Prael, "At what point did the metal give way?"
Instead of answering directly, the German handed the Jew a printout.
"I see," said Benjamin. "Hmmm. Could we reduce the charge . . . no, I guess not, not and achieve the kind of velocity we must have . . ." The Israeli had, in an earlier day, riding his Merkava against his national enemy, punched out more than one Arab-manned, Russian- or Ukrainian-built, tank.
"Nor can we reduce the weight of the projectile and still achieve the penetration we must have," finished Mueller.
"GalTech," offered Nielsen.
"The chancellor, acting on the advice of the BND, has decreed not," answered Henschel. "For what it's worth, I think he is most likely right in that. The Galactics have their own agenda. That agenda might or might not include the presence of humanity after the war."
Scratching an ear absentmindedly, Benjamin observed, "When David went out to fight Goliath, King Saul offered the boy the use of Saul's own armor and weapons. The boy refused, claiming that he would do better with his own weapon than with others the use and feel of which were unfamiliar to him. David was right. Your chancellor is right. Our prime minister agrees. This must be a human weapon, something the Galactics cannot interfere with."
"Isn't there some way we can strengthen the recoil cylinders by making them simply bigger?" asked Mueller, pushing his pet railgun to the side for the nonce.
"No," said Prael, rubbing his face briskly with a frustrated hand. "We've looked into that. We can reduce the cylinders to eight and make them somewhat larger and stronger. And then the breech of the gun hits the back of the turret. Scheisse! We tried to cut it too fine."
Though they had not been present for the test, the resounding crash from the destruction of the recoil cylinder had sent a shock wave through the entire plant, drawing Schlüssel and Breitenbach at a run. They entered the test chamber, took one look at the cylinder, another at the corpse, and crossed themselves like the good Catholics they were. Schlüssel, perhaps not so good a Catholic as Breitenbach, said, "Fuck!" immediately after.
What had happened was so obvious that neither Prael nor the others felt the need to explain to the two newcomers.
"Oh, well," said Schlüssel. "There's some good news. Breitenbach, here, has gotten something very interesting from the Americans. Tell them, Stephan."
In his left hand Breitenbach carried a small black box, attached to and trailing a harness. "Better I should show them, nicht wahr, Reinhard?"
Schlüssel sighed, resignedly. Impetuous boy! "Oh, yes. By all means show them, since you must."
Without another word, Breitenbach turned on his heel and left the area. When he reappeared some minutes later, standing on a steel walkway seventy feet above the factory floor, the harness was around his body. Schlüssel directed the others' attention upward with a nonchalant finger.
With a boyish cry, and to the wide-eyed amazement of all of the others but Schlüssel, Breitenbach hurled himself over the railing guarding the walkway. He fell, faster and faster, shrieking with a boy's mindless joy. So fast fell he that the eyes had difficulty following. Henschel's eyes didn't follow at all as he had closed them against the seemingly inevitable impact.
The impact never came. Eighteen to twenty feet above the plant floor, Breitenbach's body began to slow. The rate of descent continued to slow. By the time Breitenbach had reached the floor, he was able to settle onto his feet as gently as a falling feather.
"What the hell caused that?" demanded Mueller.
Schlüssel shrugged. "The mathematics are beyond me, frankly. Had she not written them down, the American girl who discovered the principle would likely have found them beyond herself as well. Long story there, so I am told.
"But look at it this way: that black plastic device on Stephan's harness takes the energy of falling, saves it, and then twists it sideways to turn it into an energy of slowing. We believe we can use this in the suspension system for the tank—without a major redesign being required, by the way—and reduce the robustness of the shock absorbers to save perhaps fifteen or twenty tons of weight. To say nothing of reducing the maintenance required."
Mueller's eyes, which had never narrowed to normal after Breitenbach's plunge, grew wider still. Prael's eyes began to dance in his head, unable to focus on anyone or anything. Henschel and Benjamin exchanged thoughtful glances.
Heads swiveled slowly as all eyes turned to the ruin of the recoil cylinder. A new light gleamed in those eyes.
Paris, France, 15 February 2005
Isabelle's husband entered her kitchen wordlessly, a paper clutched in one hand.
She did not see the paper, initially. She saw instead a much-loved face gone ashen.
"What is wrong?" she asked.
He didn't answer, but just thrust the paper at her.
With a trembling hand she took the proffered form letter and read it through quickly. Uncomprehending, she shook her head in negation. "They can't do this to you, to us. You did your time in the army as a boy. They have no right."
The husband quoted from the scrap of paper he had already read fifty times, "In accordance with our time-honored heritage and traditions, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for the defense of the Republic."
"But you are a doctor, not a killer," Isabelle objected.
"Killers get hurt," answered the husband. "Then they need doctors. I report the day after tomorrow."
She stood there for a long moment, stunned, unable to speak further.
Bad Tolz, Germany, 17 February 2005
Quietly, a long and snaking column of armed men marched up the forest trail in the dead of night. In the darkness, only the eyes gleamed, and occasionally the teeth. The faces were darkened by burnt cork and grease paint . . . and a fair amount of simple dirt. Frozen dirt and gravel below crunched softly under the soldiers' boots.
The boys, as Brasche thought of them, had done well so far with their basic training. Marksmanship was of an acceptable order, though Brasche had serious reservations that any amount of normal training would be adequate to teach anyone to shoot well when there was an enemy shooting back. He had served on the Russian Front, after all.
But "well" is a relative term, he thought, too. And we have a few tricks, ourselves, that just may help. Brasche smiled with wicked anticipation at what awaited the boys ahead.
The boys' ostensible mission was to counterattack to retake a section of field entrenchments lost to a notional Posleen attack. In fact, as Brasche and a few others running the exercise knew, the techniques of the counterattack through the trenches were purely secondary. The objective of the exercise was to frighten the boys half out of their wits so that once they recovered those wits would be harder to frighten.
Brasche heard static breaking over the radio at his side. He answered with his name.
"Oberst Kiel here, Brasche. My men are in position."
"Excellent, Herr Oberst." Brasche glanced quickly at the rear entrance to the trench system just as the first of the new troops began his descent into it. "The party should be beginning right about . . . now."
As if they were timed to a clock, as indeed they were, the first mortar shells crashed down onto the objective area. Through the actinic glow of the splashing shells Brasche saw, faintly, the outlines of half a dozen or so of Kiel's men. Themselves immune to any weapon the new boys had to bring to bear—as well as from the mortar shells, the armored mobile infantry were there to add spice, frightfulness really, to the exercise. Their holographic projectors were ideal for portraying a Posleen enemy, even a mass of them. But best of all . . .
"Lieber Gott im Himmel!" Brasche heard a boy—young Dieter Schultz, so he thought—exclaim over the radio. "They are fucking shooting at us. For real!"
"Indeed they are, Kinder." Brasche recognized Krueger's voice in the radio. "With weapons much like the ones the invaders will have. Now what have you been taught about what to do when someone is shooting at you?" asked Krueger, with a tone of scorn.
The radio went silent immediately. Still, so Brasche was pleased to note, rifle fire began to flash out from the trenches, to strike the holographic projections or even, occasionally the armored combat suits. Where a bullet was sensed to have passed or hit, or a shell or grenade to have exploded, an Artificial Intelligence Device—or AID, eliminated one or more of the Posleen targets. Meanwhile, from above the ground and the trenches, the Armored Combat Suits themselves flashed fire generally in the young boys' direction. The ACS were aiming to frighten, however, rather than to kill or wound, carefully keeping their point of aim away from the boys' heads and bodies.
Young Schultz's voice again crackled over the radio to be answered by a regular Bundeswehr tank commander on loan to the training brigade for the exercise.
Over the sound of rifle fire, high explosives, and the sound barrier cracking of the ACS's grav-guns, Brasche detected the throaty diesel roar of a Leopard II tank in full charge.
Good boy, young Schultz, thought Brasche. Not everyone would have remembered that they were not in the fight alone.
The tank was suddenly lit in Brasche's view by its own flame as its main gun spewed forth a storm of flechettes onto the objective area. . . .
Brasche and his wingman advanced alone into the storm of steel. Ahead, artillery pounded at such of the Russian positions as could be positively identified or confidently guessed at. There was never enough of it though.
They had been warned that the defenses were incredible. But nothing had prepared Brasche or the men who had begun the battle under his command for the reality of Kursk. Nothing short of a tour through hell could have even approached the reality.
Of the men under his command to begin, a single platoon of Panzer IVs and a platoon of infantry in support, all that remained were a brace of tanks. The infantry was but a memory.
And Ivan's PAKs, his antitank guns, were everywhere. Brasche shuddered at the memory of a fight between his medium panzers and no less than a dozen Russian guns, dug in, camouflaged and firing under a unified command. That fight alone had cost him two panzers. The screams of one crew, burning alive, still rang in the tank commander's ears.
In Brasche's headphones he heard the commander of his wing tank exclaim, "Achtung! Achtung! Panzer Abwehr Kanonen zum—"22 and the panicky voice cut off.
But the direction was not needed. Standing in the tank commander's hatch, Brasche himself could see smoke and fire belching from the ground to his right. Eyes straining to make out the precise location of his enemy, he could not see, but he could feel, the half dozen solid shot that tore through the air at himself and his wing man.
Both tanks frantically tried to pivot themselves to place their more strongly armored glacis in the direction of the fire, as their turrets swung round even faster to engage the enemy.
A race against time it seemed. And then Brasche realized there must have been a reason for those guns to have opened fire when they did. He turned around just in time to see more fire coming from behind.
Then the world went black for Hans Brasche, Fifth SS Panzer Division (Wiking).
The Leopard fired again, clearing Hans' reminiscences from his mind. Never mind, though. Back at Kursk, more than six decades prior, the second battery of guns had opened up, gutting both his tank and his wingman's. Hans had lost consciousness. He never knew how it had come to pass that he escaped the tank. In his memory he imagined a mindless crawling thing, fleeing the fire like an animal fleeing a combusting forest. Of his trip back to Germany, to his convalescence, his memory had been reduced to a sense of little beyond pain, sometimes dim, sometimes agonizing.
The memory of the pain made him shudder, still.
Brasche pushed the memories aside, finally and completely. The open ramp into the trench system awaited. Hans walked forward and descended.
Down in the trenches Dieter Schultz, age eighteen, shuddered with pain from a tank-fired flechette that had grazed one arm, ripping an inch-long jagged tear across his skin. Blood poured out, staining his Kampfanzug, his battledress. The blood showed a dullish red in the tracers' gleam.
Beside Schultz another of the boys, Harz, looked down in uncomprehending fright. "Dieter, you're bleeding."
"Never mind that," insisted Schultz, clamping a hand to his wound to stop the trickling blood. "Run down the trench to Third Squad. Get them to move to the right and engage . . . to take some of the fire off of us here."
"Zu Befehl, Dieter,"23 answered Harz, half mockingly and yet half serious.
Krueger, meanwhile, crouched silently nearby, watching Schultz's actions with an eagle eye. He caught a bare glimpse of Brasche, easing himself down the trench, and stood to a head-bent attention.
"Herr Major?" asked Krueger.
"Nothing, Sergeant," answered Brasche. "Just observing."
Dieter, obsessed with his wound but more so with his mission, did not notice Brasche standing nearby. Still, Hans noted the quiet boy, growing into his potential, there in the cold and muddy trench.
The boy shouted to the others around him. "Stand by." Then he spoke a few short words into the radio, "Five rounds, antipersonnel." Brasche and Krueger ducked low once again. And only just in time, too, as the distant tank began firing rapidly, deluging the surface above with flechettes. All told there were precisely five major blasts and five minor as the flechette rounds burst to spill their deadly cargo.
Without more than half a second's hesitation after that fifth minor explosion, Schultz shouted another command and the boys, following his example, stuck their heads and their rifles above the trench lip, adding their precision fire to the holograms and ACS remaining.
Very good, thought Brasche.
Paris, France, 17 February 2005
The house was plunged in an early morning sadness. The mother and one little son cried openly. The elder boy, nearing thirteen now, struggled to keep his face clear. Last night his father had made him promise to be the man of the house, a promise asked for solemnly . . . and as solemnly made.
"I will write every day, ma cherie . . . ma belle femme," promised the husband, stroking the sobbing Isabelle's hair softly. "And I should be able to take leave at sometime."
Isabelle pressed her wet face into his shoulder. Her encircling arms held him tightly. There were no words she could bring herself to say.
Last night had been bad. They had fought as they rarely fought. She had struggled to get her husband to desert, to flee to some place past the army's reach. He had steadfastly refused, claiming—truthfully insofar as he knew—that no place on Earth would be safe from the army, not now with the entire planet rearming to the teeth.
In the end, seeing that he would not, it had been she who had relented. In fear for her future and in remembrance of more youthful, happier times, she had dragged her husband to their large wooden bed and made love to him with a dazzling skill and enthusiasm that left him breathless.
"That is to remind you," Isabelle had said, "to remind you of what you have here and to make you want to come back."
Still half out of breath, he had answered, "After that awesome performance, my love . . . and at my age . . . I should be better to stay away in order to safeguard my life."
Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany, 21 June 2005
Mühlenkampf was . . . well, there was no other word: he was awed.
Gleaming above him, for the beast had not yet had its coat of paint, stood the Tiger III. Below, at ground level—though the ground was meters-thick concrete—the tracks were caked with the mud, so Mühlenkampf noted with interest.
"She works," he announced with a quiver in his voice, drawing the correct conclusion from the caked mud.
Proudly, Mueller, Schlüssel, Prael and the others stood a bit taller. "She works, Herr General. This is prototype number one. There are a few bugs yet. But she moves. She shoots. She can take a punch on her great armored nose and punch right back."
"And," added Prael who had designed and nearly hand built her electronic suite, "Tiger III is the best human designed and built training vehicle in history, with virtual-reality simulators to allow a full gamut of gunner and driver training without ever leaving the Kaserne."
"We will have to take her out anyway," answered the general. "Otherwise you will never know what might still be wrong. When can I have one? Or, better still, many of them?"
"This one is yours now," answered Mueller. "We are, indeed, hoping your field tests will help work out any remaining problems."
But Mueller spoke to Mühlenkampf's back. Already the veteran was fumbling with his new, inconvenient, and sometimes damnable cellular phone.
"Brasche? Get to Munich. Now!"
Sennelager, Germany, 28 June 2005
Basic training was long over now. The thin, emaciated skeleton of a Korps was beginning to grow and fill out here at this training base on the north German plain where the boys had been relocated for unit training.
Though Basic was over, the days were still as long and the nights sometimes longer. And yet the boys reveled in the name "soldier." On the route marches that took them through the nearby towns the boys marched with pride and a spring in their steps.
That the girls turned out to watch, more often than not, didn't hurt matters any.
Yet the nights and days remained long. Soldiers were killed in training and their places taken by new faces. The old German army had thought that one percent killed in basic training was not merely an acceptable, but a desirable figure. The new-old German Army did as well, this portion of it, at least.
That rarely happened in the regular Bundeswehr. There, the few Wehrmacht veterans scattered about were impotent to change things from the politically correct, multiculturally sensitive stew the politicians had made of the German army.
Only in the 47th Panzer Korps, called by political friend and foe alike, "the SS Korps," were there enough men who knew the old ways—knew them, and more importantly, were willing to tell the politicians and social theorists to "go fuck yourselves" over them—to meld their new charges into what Germany, what Europe, what humanity, needed.
And so the boys marched with pride and a spring, knowing that, perhaps alone among their people's defenders they could and would do the job at hand.
Was it this that the girls of the towns had seen? Was it that they had seen one group of defenders whom they could be sure would never leave them defenseless until death stopped them?
The boys didn't know.
"I just know I get laid a lot more than I used to," laughed the irrepressible Harz, just before something attracted his attention.
It began as a low rumble in the air. Soon, the boys were hustling out of their tents in fear of an earthquake.
"What the fuck is it?" asked Harz of Schultz.
Dieter just shook his head, equally uncomprehending.
"Over there!" shouted another of the boys. "It's a tank. Nothing much."
Schultz looked and saw an iron beast cresting a hill. Yes, just another tank. Nothing special. They worked with tanks all the time. And then, as the tank drew closer and the rumbling stronger, his eyes made out a tiny something, projecting from the top of the turret.
"Lieber Gott im Himmel!"24
From atop the Tiger III, as if on parade . . . as if on parade before a universe he personally owned, Hans Brasche, late of 5th SS Panzer Division (Wiking), tossed a crisp salute at his future tank crews.
As was fitting for a junior Kessentai, Ro'moloristen took an obscure position towards the back of the oddly designed, auditoriumlike, assembly room. The floor, to the extent an Aldenata-based ship could be said to have permanent floors, swept upward as it swept back, allowing the young Kessentai a full view of the assembling God Kings and the central raised dais against the far wall.
While himself relegated to the rear by his junior position, the young God King's betters—elders, in any case—took more prominent positions towards the front. Centered at the very front, right against the cleared semicircular area that had been left around the raised dais, stood Athenalras, arms crossed before the massive equine chest in the posture of supplication and serenity.
The thousands of other God Kings present in the auditorium likewise matched Athenalras' pious posture as an elderly Posleen, a Kenstain—Bin'ar'rastemon—a once prominent Kessentai who had given up the Path to become a very special form of Kessenalt. No mere castellaine was Bin'ar'rastemon, no mere steward for another God King. Once the toll of years and wounds had begun to tell, he had turned his clan and its assets over to his senior eson'antai, or son, only keeping control of sufficient to support himself in a modest style as he entered the Way of Remembrance.
Something between historians and chaplains, the Kessenalt of the Way of Remembrance served to maintain and remind the People of their history, their values, their beliefs . . . and the very nasty way of the world unwittingly inflicted upon them by the Aldenata and their one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter, philosophy.
Clad in ceremonial harness of pure heavy metal, Bin'ar'rastemon—old and with the Posleen equivalent of arthritis creaking every joint—ambled up the steps of the dais, ancient scrolls tucked into his harness.
Though Kenstain normally received little respect as a class, except perhaps from the God Kings they served directly, the followers of the Way of Remembrance were widely and highly valued. As Bin'ar'rastemon centered himself upon the dais, he ceremonially greeted the assembled God Kings, who ceremoniously answered, "Tell us, Rememberer, of the ways of the past, that we might know the ways of the future."
Bin'ar'rastemon unrolled a scroll formally, placing it upon a frail-seeming podium. On this he placed a hand. Yet he was a Rememberer, still in full possession of his mind, however much his body may have aged. In any case, he needed no scroll for this tale.
"From the Book of the Knowers," he began . . .