A rebel

We had provisions enough to last a few days. We were boarded by a
clumsy deep-space galleon of some Galactic Conquistadores, needing
a fix of murder. The night of dark space was more loving than any
rising star. I was a young man, stupid and in awe of the multiverse.
Everything was so fresh, so surprising, so venturesome, so interesting.
After being captured, my consolation was that I formed ideas about
evil and wealth, and these will tell you everything you need to know
about what it means to be involved in imperial politics. But our ideal,
the revolutionary man, does not aspire to be a leader in a perished search.

The story goes also that within echo-memory, in my early days as a “Caelum
nostrum” sailor, I fought bravely. Those who have read any account of my
buccaneering this side of the Sulaco federation, will know that the
prevailing tone of those stories is far from calm, and that a vast gulf
was formed in my chest where once my heart might have been. Autres
gentilhommes! In a caustic tone my guilt hangs over my head, still.
All of what you think is made possible by class-conventions and settled
modes of thinking. When captured, we sailed past the Azuera belt,
a wild chaos of sharp asteroids and stony moons which were cut about
the time of the Carrero Blanco rule, and now, many years afterwards,
the ecological destruction of that part of the galaxy lingers on.

The Conquistadores had particle revolvers at their belts. They had started
to chop their way through strange gaseous self-energy coasts by the stars.
Ominous shadows lay in the sunken rocks and galactic particle tempests
seemed to assemble in the distance. On the quantumeous shores, the Sulaco
federation had found an artistic mine. They were digging for a bit of Anglo-Saxon
spirit, which would have allowed them to hang on their Conquistador dream.

But this is the idlest of dreams; for already then I understood perfectly well
that imperialists are just buccaneers in disguise, with an added touch
of Scalping philosophy, the latest stage of multiversal Capital worship,
which was taking shape across galaxies as ethnic cleansing of the Ute,
and many other outer frontier tribes.

A long becalmed photonic gale made us unable to move at all, and our galleon
would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on gravitons would exploit
the curvature of space-time and sail on. As a young man looking ahead in anger
I understood perfectly, if scornfully, the fate of rebels such as we were.