Nine thousand five hundred years ago (and nine thousand years before our story starts), while the Empire was still fresh and agile, it set its sights on distant stars. Lightspeed technology had finally been perfected, the home system was bursting at its seams, and the Empire was looking to consolidate its rule. Throughout time, there has never been a better way to clamp down on political instability at home than through conquest and colonization, the safety valve of empire. Away go all the restless souls, all the troublemakers, all the sectarians into the wild. And in comes the imperial profits, land, and culture.
There is no doubt that this was the greatest migration in all of history. Ten thousand worlds must have been scouted in this time (we have records of at least 6,000) with a thousand colonies set up. It was as though a thousand seeds had been thrown into the wind. Most of them failed, thrown on a barren rock or molten inferno or glacial cold. A few found tiny niches that they could barely get their roots into – but once they had gotten there, they would cling like nothing else. And an incredibly small amount would land on the most fertile soil ever found. They would become second Earths, growing rapidly over the decades and centuries following settlement. In order to understand Ghale Thusif and why he made the decisions he did, it is first important to start with the story of one of those second Earths, one of the rare ones that has entirely faded from popular memory.
Even by the standards of the time, Pearl was an exceptionally odd planet. The exact circumstances of its settlement are lost to the Early Imperial Dark Age, but local tradition holds that it was founded by an esotericist sect in 4890. Supposedly, it was named after the sect’s belief that even life in the harshest of places could become beautiful. Growth was slow, like any other sect founded colony, for the first couple of centuries. As the center of the Empire shifted away from Earth and toward the cluster of planets around Oxalis after the discovery of luminium there, Pearl began to take on a new role as interplanetary pitstop.
With the Empire finally emerging from the dark age, historians can get a closer glimpse at what was happening (although Pearl’s final fate makes it harder than usual). As Pearl was being transformed by the inexorable force of merchant capital, it set aside the more political implications of its esotericist beliefs. A new government was founded, the colony was integrated more fully into the Empire, and the first of the soon to be legendary Pearlian bazaars were set up. A thousand years later when luminium was discovered on Pearl itself, that sealed the deal. The already large colony was soon swarmed with migrants. Exact estimates are difficult to be sure of, but by 7000 Pearl appears to have had 8 billion residents making it the 10th most populous planet in the Empire.
All of that gives the wrong image of Pearl though, because even while it was more integrated into the Empire than many other colonies and even while it was one of the most populous parts of the Empire and even while on the surface it appears to have had all of the traits of a typical core Imperial planet, it is totally unlike every other. The group of planets that would later be so infamously dubbed the Oxalites did not and would never include Pearl. That is what makes it so unique. Pearl was a highly developed, seemingly highly wealthy planet that on paper should be as closely tied to the Empire as all of the Oxalites – and yet it was totally politically isolated.
Attempting to explain the nuances of Imperial administration is difficult (see Chapter 3), but in order to understand the magnitude of this, it is going to be necessary. In the Galactic Empire, there were four major relationships a planetary government could have with the Vaird (generally speaking at least, as with everything in the Empire there were exceptions). The most integrated were those under direct rule of the Empire. They were ruled by Imperial governors, selected by the Emperor themself. This sort of rule was reserved for the core most planets of the Empire. There is nearly a one-to-one correlation between planets under direct rule and those that would make up the Oxalites. The second type of rule was a shared state. The planet was allowed a government of its own choice, but it shared power with an Imperial ambassador who could propose legislation and unilaterally veto policies. The shared states were a sort of “middle class” within the Empire. They typically weren’t as wealthy as the planets under direct rule, but they also were more than just hubs for resource extraction. They were often centers of manufacturing. By contrast, planets under the third type of rule, known as Imperial dependencies, were mere hubs of resource extraction. They were allowed nearly total freedom in how they governed themselves, with the major exception that the Imperial military was the only major armed force allowed and the Imperium could enforce resource quotas if needed. If the quotas were ever not met, the Empire had the right to enforce a new, more pliant government. This is the relationship Pearl had to the Empire. Even while it was as populous and prosperous as many of the planets under direct rule, Pearl was treated as a simple mining colony – while having numerous orders of magnitude more people than one. The fourth relationship was one of simple tributage, and used almost exclusively for planets both very poor and very distant from the center.
In her history of Pearl, historian Valyra Nanes describes the attitude of the citizens of Pearl to this relationship as “deeply alienating. For a planet as rich and populous as Pearl to be treated on the level as somewhere like Pnumusis or Avara Avis was insulting. This personal affront to the honor of citizens of Pearl was a major reason why it was able to give rise to a figure like the traitor Thusif.” For Oxalite sympathetic historians like Nanes, the sole factor that would make Pearl such a powderkeg during the revolution was this error of administration by the Empire. In truth though, the story is more complex. Nanes was not incorrect to point to this decision to treat Pearl as a dependency as a major factor in this development, but there was an entire other element at play that Nanes missed. Pearl was the single most economically unequal planet in the universe.
For modern readers, it can be difficult to understand exactly how bad the inequality of Pearl was and by extension how stratified Pearl’s society was. Even for readers from highly stratified societies today, there is nothing that comes close to the magnitude that Pearl reached. For reference, of the current members of the Galactic Trade Federation (the largest organization where enough economic data is mandated to allow calculation of planetary inequality levels), Yussifimian has the highest calculated inequality level at 21.3. This means that the highest 10% of Yussifimiani society has over five billion times more wealth than the bottom 10%. Economic historian Jingse Arratsun calculated Pearl’s inequality to be approximately 429.
The absolutely unimaginable levels of inequality in Pearlian society were caused nearly entirely by the peculiar nature of the luminium mines. Unlike most resources, a planet home to luminium is not destined to become a mere extractive outpost like most other valuable resources. Luminium is such a valuable resource and so difficult to transport that it bursts an entire society from itself. The mechanics and electronics factories and the infrastructure to support those factories and the bureaucrats to support the infrastructure – all of it has to be on the planet itself. Normally, all of this economic activity raises the standards of living of everyone on the planet. Other planets rely on the products that luminium is required for, giving the planet greater political power and leverage in intra-Imperial negotiations. Why did this not occur on Pearl?
Pearl’s luminium deposits were unparalleled by any deposit found then or since in how deep in the planet they were. To safely extract the luminium, it was not simply required to dig into the mantle as in normal luminium extraction, but to reach the inner core of the planet. This made the mining process far more expensive and dangerous as specialized machines were needed to protect against the molten liquid outer core. It had taken so long to discover the luminium deposits on Pearl in the first place simply because it was deeper than contemporary science had thought was possible. Even with all of this extra expense and danger though, luminium was so valuable that it was still worth mining. In order to make it profitable enough though, Pearl’s mining companies had to resort to methods usually reserved for dependencies. Miner’s pay was a fraction of what it was on other planets, democracy was limited to those above a certain level of wealth, and the union was de facto controlled by the mining companies themselves. In this way, the top levels of the mining companies and those that benefited from the mining were able to profit nearly as much as on any other luminium rich planet, while the miners (and to a lesser degree, the factory workers as well) were kept in a state of poverty unseen on any other luminium rich planet.
This, then, is why the Empire never put Pearl under direct rule. It wasn’t simply an administrative error or oversight, nor was it an intentional slight in the way the Pearlian elites saw it. It was a recognition of a fact that the Pearlian elites made themselves intentionally blind to – Pearl was given the status of an Imperial dependency because it acted like one. With exactly the same level of brutality, with exactly the same level of exploitation, with exactly the same level of cruelty, Pearl only differed from those dependencies that its leaders hated being compared with so much in that it had a wealthier upper class. Nothing more. It is this very contradiction, the society that is both very wealthy and very poor and the elites that hated being compared to the “brutal” dependencies and yet was one itself, that would form the incubator for the man who would tear it all away.