The Parliament of Dreams
2243 - 2253
“The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.”
Sister Miriam Godwinson,
A Blessed Struggle
In the 2243 elections, the first under the new republican constitution, Solidarity rode a wave of enthusiasm. The once insurgent party won 341 seats in the new Dáil, as well as commanding majorities in the sector legislatures for Gaia’s Landing and Resplendent Oak. In Gaian’s Landing, Núantolunn Glina won a narrow victory for re-election primarily by highlighting her working relationship with Aoife Deaca. Resplendent Oak governor Lus Utur had been appointed to her position by Deidre Skye, but she pragmatically joined Solidarity and adopted their platform as her own.
With the wind at her back, Lady Deaca turned her attention to foreign affairs. In her first term of office, Deaca made three diplomatic advances that would define Republican politics in the years to come.
At the dawn of this new republic, a scientific breakthrough revolutionized Gaian understanding of the galaxy. On February 29, 2242, the science ship
Federov nearly escaped an encounter with what was initially thought to be hostile vessels from an unknown empire. Further examination of the
Federov data revealed something more remarkable: a species of voidborne Tuath Dé, known popularly as the “space amoebae”. These beasts were fiercely territorial, even predatory, but they were nonetheless alive.
Gaian biologists had not imagined the possibility of life existing in the hard vacuum of space, and many questions remained about how such life came to evolve. One thing was immediately apparent, however: if there were predators, then there was also prey. From the Zakharov, Ellái Vana proposed the existence of both carnivores (like the space amoeba) and ‘herbivores’, which would absorb the electromagnetic energy from stars. Whatever the reality, a massive Tuath Dé species could not exist except part of a larger, interstellar ecosystem. The galaxy was alive as surely as Planet was.
Over the next four decades, Gaian scientists would go on to identify countless other voidborne species ranging from microbes that inhabited stellar dust to vast ‘herbivores’ like the tiyanki, also known as the ‘space whales.’ Some Tuath Dé, like the Void Clouds and the Crystalline Entities, challenged human conceptions of the very definition of life, prompting a revision of fundamental biological principles. The tiyanki were of particular note. These space whales were born and reared in the upper atmosphere of gas giants, only to delve into the void of space as young adults. In vast internal chambers, the juvenile tiyanki carried with them the atmosphere of their birthplaces, a relative oasis for life in the vacuum of space. A mature tiyanki might collect microbes and airborne organisms from dozens of systems throughout its, rendering each creature the home to unique ecosystems.
“We call the tiyanki ‘space whales’, and in a sense, that is what they are: charismatic megafauna in an incomparably vast ecosystem that operates on geologic timescales,” wrote Ellái Vana.
“In another sense, however, they are oases in a cosmic desert, or hydrothermal vents in a cosmic ocean. The internal ecology of each is as unique as our footprints. Were we be swallowed by a space whale like Pinnocchio in the ancient tales, we would be witness to an utterly unique drama as complex as Planet itself.”
While much remained unknown about this new discovery in the early 2240, Lady Aoife Deaca and her ministers were clear on how to respond. The Republic was founded on Gaian principles and thus would defend the thriving ecosystem of the galaxy by sacred charge. On January 9, 2244, now-Foreign Minister Lior Boda promulgated what became known as the Boda Doctrine: the Gaian Republic would defend the integrity of this galactic ecosystem with military force. May the gods protect any empire that stood in their way.
The second diplomatic advance began as a Bouan initiative. The Bouan Trade Commission had harbored growing concerns about Gaian instability during the 2230s and 2240s, fearing that internal chaos might lead to an isolationist or reactionary faction and leave the Bouans open to attack from their more powerful Ngasiran neighbors. The new democratic constitution struck many Bouan observers as a recipe for further chaos and subversion by demagogues.
The sitting head of state, Chairman Mahloukrouzj, was an old and wily merchant prince. He had spent most of his eighty-nine years cultivating a reformist faction within the Bouan elite and scheming against his great rival, Chirioul, of the conservative faction. He had a louche reputation among the other Bouan princes, but he cared deeply about the safety of his people and thus was driven to his great diplomatic masterwork.
The Bouans approached Minister Boda and Lady Deaca with a proposal: let the Gaians and the Bouans agree to form a federation, with a common governance structure that would bind them both and a federation fleet that each would contribute to. From a Bouan perspective, building the federation would deepen ties between the two powers such that a future Gaian reactionary would find it difficult to untangle them. The federation fleet was, implicitly, an answer to internal Gaian fears about the power of their own fleet: the commander of the federation navy could serve as a counterweight to the Gaian navy in an emergency.
Aoife Deaca and her top aides greeted the proposal with enthusiasm. Lady Deaca had promulgated the Boda Doctrine but she was personally reluctant to engage in military adventurism. This was partially a matter of temperament and partially a matter of political expediency. The Void Pact coup was launched by anonymous junior officers, but what if the next one were led by a charismatic war heroine? This new federation would allow the Gaians to follow the Boda Doctrine by other means, by serving as the core of a powerful diplomatic bloc that could protect the galactic ecosystem through treaties and interstellar law. Provided, that is, that the federation followed Gaian prerogatives.
The founding treaty for the United Sapient Nations was signed on March 8, 2244, by Lady Aoife Deaca of the Gaian Republic, Chairman Mahloukrouzj of the Bouan Trade Commission, and Hallowed Comptroller Goli den Fum of the Ngodoan Holy Enterprise. Minister Boda had negotiated for the inclusion of the Ngodoans--and hypothetical future vassal states--as separate entities with their own votes, and in exchange conceded that Mahloukrouzj serve as founding president for the next ten years.
The Gaian Foreign Ministry publicly hailed the creation of a groundbreaking inter-species compact, unprecedented in the history of all three species. In a speech at the Gaian Fleet Academy later that year, Lady Deaca declared that the Gaian Republic was happy to sit at the table with representatives of all nations and species under the principles of equality and sorority. Internally, however, it became the policy of the Deaca government to establish a Gaian suzerainty over the United Sapient Nations “by any peaceful means necessary.”
Signing the United Sapient Nations treaty was the high point of Goli den Fum’s reign as Hallowed Comptroller, and by then the writing was already on the wall. Den Fum’s reign as Hallowed Comptroller had been buoyed by a booming economy, powered primarily by industries related to the new interstellar drive, including alloy production and construction of ships for civilian and military use. Investment money was ever available for the space industry, creating a dangerous financial bubble. In the fall of 2042, the bankruptcy of a politically-connected aerospace firm burst the bubble, leading to a stock market panic and soon economic depression. With den Fum in desperate need of an economic bailout, the Gaians finally had enough leverage to change the terms of the relationship
Ngodoans had been migrating from Beta Coeli II since the hyperlane drive had come to their system, crammed into the holds of rickety civilian ships piloted by suspect captains during the long journey to Vale of Winds. There many would find work in the farms and alloy foundries and surreptitiously wire money back to families on the homeworld through shady Gaian middlewomen. After the crash, den Fum realized that credits from Vale of Winds were a vital source of outside cash. Gaian envoy Lior Boda arranged a normalization of relations in exchange for an expansive migration treaty.
The nascent Gaian Republic had few restrictions on citizenship. Indeed, leading up to the 2243 election local Solidarity and Green party leaders competed to declare Ngodoans citizens and register them to vote. A young Ngodoan scholar, Goli tal Oth, was named as a deputy minister in the Solidarity planetary government. Most Ngodoans on Vale of Winds were conscious that they had more freedom as Gaian citizens than they would have back home. In thousands of private messages home from Vale of Winds to Beta Coeli II, the seeds of discontent were nurtured.
By 2247, den Fum faced serious unrest back home. Riots were endemic, prompted by democratic activists, by outrages committed by den Fum’s secret police, or simple hunger. Early crackdowns by the Hallowed Comptroller’s private security forces prompted an angry Lady Deaca to threaten den Fum with complete economic isolation. As the situation at home degraded, it became clear that his regime’s days were numbered. With den Fum getting desperate, Lior Boda was again dispatched to resolve the situation.
Den Fum, backed into a corner, agreed to a plebiscite on the question of Beta Coeli integration into the Gaian Republic. In exchange, den Fum and a collection of cronies would be offered a peaceful exile in Bouan space. Held the following year, the plebiscite revealed that a strong majority of Ngodoans had come to see Gaian citizenship as a guarantor of stability and prosperity. A young priestess, Kiy up Khnu, was elected as planetary governor under the auspices of the Green party.
(Kiy up Khnu and Goli tal Oth were lifelong correspondents. Both were ambitious Ngodoan politicians in a largely human republic, and both would be elected as sector governor at a young age. The secular, leftist tal Oth and the passionately religious up Khnu were rivals as much as friends, and their collected letters provide a crucial look in the political debates well into the Second Republic period.)
The Ngodoans had experienced three decades of turmoil and conflict, from the world war at the dawn of the 23rd century, through first contact with the Gaians, the great pagan revival of the 2220s, and the violent reign of Goli den Fum. After the peaceful integration in 2248, most Ngodoans longed for stability and found it in pagan revivalist practice, which were soon ‘cleansed’ of den Fum’s idiosyncratic innovations. Aoife Deaca was broadly popular in Beta Coeli II, but otherwise the population voted for Núantolunn Glina’s Green party in overwhelming numbers. This had the unexpected result of granting the Greens a stable majority in the Dáil for decades to come, a political reality that Deaca would need to reckon with.