January 16th, 1442
Bergen, Norway
"We've had to triage, Henrik. No way around it."
The younger Yngling snorted.
"After 400 years of meeting the enemy? I'm surprised there's enough left of the plan to discard."
"A point, yes. Especially considering that the screwups began right at the start, and with <a href="http://ynglingasaga.wordpress.com/2008/08/28/there-will-be-war-anja-sigridsdottir/">one of our own,</a> at that."
"Nu, if we have any skill other than war, it's triage. Just by coming here we've discarded a whole millennium of history. So what do you have in mind?"
"The privileges of the Yngling caste, essentially. It's the one thing people here have picked up on of our politics, and they reject it to a man. Even the Ynglings! It might just be possible to create a caste society if the nobles supported it, but they don't. You can't give a man privileges he doesn't want."
"So - you're going to turn Norway into a corrupt
democracy? Actual legal equality?"
Einar shrugged defensively at the outrage in Henrik's voice.
"What can we do? We've already lost that battle. They allow anyone to speak at Ting, and they listen to them, too. If anything they bend over backwards to make sure it's not the rich people who get the final say. We taught them that trick, and they're looking for it now."
"There are other ways of subverting the voice of the people."
"Yes, but they tend to rely on the cooperation of the upper class. There are a lot of people here with the surname 'Yngling', but they aren't the real thing. I saw one the other day - do you realise that there are people here who call themselves 'Ynglings' who are actually
fat?"
"Seriously?"
"The guy must have weighed a hundred kilos! Not muscle, either."
"So why didn't you challenge him?"
"It's illegal to duel, remember?"
"Oh."
They sat silently for a while, contemplating the decay of the Yngling race. At length Henrik asked, "So what are you planning to do, then?"
"Two things. One is external politics. We still intend to rule the world. But - there's no urgency on the point. Democracy or not, this country is still a Great Power, with all the imperatives that come with that. Our ruling classes will seek to extend their power, and run an imperialistic foreign policy, quite without input from us. Which is just as well, really, since they don't listen to us."
"Ok, and the other?"
"We can't be having with fat people who can barely lift a sword walking around and telling people they are Ynglings. It's embarrassing. Ok, everybody has some relatives they don't walk to talk about, but there are limits!"
"Agreed, but what are we going to do? Duelling's illegal, as you noted. And we're a bit outnumbered, anyway."
"We're going to have to be subtle. The locals haven't caught on to eugenics yet; we can slip that past them if we're careful."
Henrik cocked his head, considering. "You're talking about several generations, at least. It's hard to maintain a goal over that length of time. Human minds aren't set up to work on that timescale, they evolved to get the banana before the alpha male notices. We're not long-term thinkers."
"True; but we've got an advantage there: Every twenty-five years one of our comrades arrives, with uptime training in genetics and a general areement with our goals. We all had the same education. We don't have to rely on a bureaucracy to keep our organisation pointed in the same direction a hundred years from now, we've got friends to do it for us."
"That might work. But - even on a scale of several generations, you need death-rate differentials of, say, five or ten percent to accomplish anything. We can't very well go around killing five or ten percent of each successive generation. They don't have computers here, but I think they'd notice."
"Ah, but you're forgetting that this isn't the uptime. No sewers, no soap, no germ theory. We don't have to artificially create ten-percent death rates. All we have to do is selectively slow down the fifty-percent infant mortality they get anyway."
"We only have so much of the pink..."
"Yes, yes. But antibiotics aren't
magic, you know. Knowing it can be done is half the battle; we can figure out how to make the simpler kinds, given a couple of years. The bugs here haven't evolved over 200 years of chemical warfare, they won't sneer at penicillin like the uptime ones. All we need to do is set things up so that only the ones with good genes get proper treatment, their infant mortality drops to maybe 25%, and Nietzsche(*) is your uncle."
Henrik nodded, slowly. "Ok - it sounds workable, maybe, as far as genetics go. There's still the problem of nature and nurture. You can give people good genes, but you can't make 'em exercise. And another thing, how are we going to implement this over the whole Empire? There's only two of us."
"Well, we're going to have to recruit some allies. Which will help with both those problems. That's where the bioweapon release is actually going to be helpful to us, for a change. The damn thing worked exactly as advertised: Mass deaths, mass panic, total disruption of the social order. Including any number of nutso doomsday cults springing up, promising to save the faithful from the Plague. Now most of those are variants on Christianity, and not very useful to us - you can twist words, but really, it is a pretty pacifistic, egalitarian sort of religion when you get down to it, and sooner or later someone will. The point is, though, the main Church is a bit distracted at the moment, nobody will pay any attention to another weird cult. And out in the backwoods, the old gods are still hanging on. It's not a formal religion, by any means; no unified theology - it amounts to a whole bunch of people going to church on Sundays, and spilling some beer on their Thor-statue the rest of the week, and maybe telling stories about the Wild Hunt when a thunderstorm goes by. But it's something to build on. Norway has a
lot of backwoods. We'll set up a temple somewhere, announce that Thor or maybe Frey will heal the worthy, and only the worthy, and put in some appropriate mumbo-jumbo about how people can prove their worthiness. And
our cures will really work! We can work out some formalised doctrines and lithurgies and whatnot, people like their rituals. We'll even make some money off it!"
"And the 'worthiness' shtick will involve exercise, not drinking too much, deadly with a blade - in short, being the sort of man we'd like to call an Yngling and a brother."
"Yep. We can even improve on the original a bit by putting in a brainpower clause. I mean, let's be honest. You and I both knew some people uptime who were the bees' sting as far as duels go, but not by any means the biggest fusion-bombs in the arsenal."
"My brother, for one. There's a guy who should have been culled at birth, if only we'd been breeding for non-assholery."
"Then here's to religion as a means of moral improvement; and Loki take the weakest link."
(*) Obviously Einar is not referring to 'our' Nietzsche, but the Yngling-Prime timeline equivalent; I translate so you'll know what he's talking about. He's not talking OTL English, either, but uptime Yngling-Prime Norse, which is much more Germanic than the OTL version due to the long imperial involvement in Germany. Also note that his Nietzsche is required reading in uptime Norway, his recommendations being official State policy.
Reward: 1000 pop in Eiriksfjord.
