humans have uninhabitable areas - but I’ve never seen this much of a planet reduced to a mental
blind spot, by unspoken agreement of the bulk of a population. Which only served to make me
more curious.
I was considering going back to the ship, just to regroup, find another angle, when I decided
I’d do much better to get a snoot full of bishka at one of the friendlier canteens. I decided on a
place that had the sign of a horse, freshly painted blue. This, I determined, was an auspicious
place to mine the culture.
I was right. Before too long I had fallen into conversation with the more cheerful of the
drunks, and learned much. I learned that Senel-4 had been colonized three separate times before
a settlement had survived long-term. Asport itself had been rebuilt no fewer than five times.
Building the Great Blue Way had been so costly that a few folk had advocated bending the knee
to the Empire, which had resulted in some truly chaotic political times. There had even been a
dictator of sorts, who had seized power over Asport and a significant number of other settlements
in order to preserve everyone’s independence and freedom. After the whole mess settled down,
he’d stepped down and gone into voluntary exile on Rigel-6. His name was Calabus, and the
drunks in the Blue Horse spoke of him with respect and approval.
“Only killed a few people, really,” said Gaflus, who seemed more on the ball than other
drunks and, I intuited, actually did some kind of work some days.
“Let me guess, he gave them decent burial, too,” I said. But Gaflus shook his head.
“No, he didn’t. That’s kind of what caused him to lose power. He might have taken over the
whole planet, but…” and he trailed off, and suddenly I was aware that the drunks had fallen
silent. I waited a skip or two for them to say anything else but they didn’t. I got a sense that the
Forbidden was impeding our flow, so I just offered to buy another round. They accepted with
enthusiasm.
We kept on like this, drinking occasionally to Lord Calabus’ health, and in the process
discovering that all but one of the drunks had served in his Ranks during the Blue Way Troubles,
as they had become known. The other had fought against him, but also against the Imperialists,
so he was okay, they insisted. Gaflus had even been a sergeant of sorts, though the title was
different. Sorting all of this out between martial-sounding drinking songs took some time. After a
while some of them went off to wherever else they needed to be, and others were arguing about
the regional pony races, so I asked Gaflus an idle question, half-surmising the answer: “So how
did they ever get that Great Blue Way built?”
Gaflus belched. “Calabus did it. He built it with forced labor from among his political
enemies.”
“I can see people not liking that.”
“That wasn’t the problem. People liked that. Good punishment for Imperialists, they
thought.”
“Then what was the problem?”
“When he got the road built all the way to Garonfall, he….”
I drank a little. He drank a little.