There is remarkably little known about the early life of Ghale Thusif. We know that he was born sometime late in 11212 to a mining family. From the few and brief references he made to his early life on Pearl that are known to us, it appears that both of his parents were luminium miners. His mother died of disease when he was still very young and his father died under mysterious circumstances in 11228 when Thusif was 15. For the historian, it is regrettable that that is the entirety of the information we have regarding Thusif’s early years.
Some speculation is possible though, and while the words that follow should all be taken with a heavy degree of skepticism, they are the best we have. With that necessary caveat though, the typical life of the child of a Pearlian mining family would have looked as follows.
In order to promote reproduction, the mining companies ensured that essential services were provided for newborn babies and children. Food, water, and a basic shelter were provided for them and their families until the children turned 15. In return for this “service” of the mining companies, the families would sign an agreement that the parents would not be allowed to quit until the contract was completed (although they could still be fired) and their child would agree to work in the mines starting the day they turned 15 for the next decade. Parents would be allowed to have children that they were otherwise unable to afford on their mining wages, they would even be ensured food and shelter when those commodities may otherwise be scarce, and in return would just have to sign away a decade of their child’s life. The companies, in return for their supply of valuable goods, would be repaid for it by the children with a bit of interest. It was the perfect contract.
It’s unclear how many miners actually took the companies up on this offer. Historians broadly agree that miners were unhappy with their lives and wanted to give their children better than they had been given themselves. This may seem to suggest that the contracts were broadly unpopular and rarely used, and some historians agree, suggesting that while evidence does point to the mining companies not struggling to find employees that is more likely due to immigration and outlier families than a broad adoption of the contract system. There are contrasting views though, as some historians claim that the miners may have accepted the decade of work in the hopes that at the end of it, the more stable upbringing of their child would result in them being able to escape the mines. The historical community is too divided to concretely answer that question, it may well have been a bit of both.
If the idea that the miners hoped their children would be able to have a better life after a decade in the mines was true though, those miners were greatly mistaken. From one analysis of the lives of the children who went through this program:
“Nearly all of the children at Averinian Engineering [a major Pearlian mining firm] stayed after their 10 year contract period was up, with the remaining company records showing a retention rate of approximately 94%. The reasons for staying aren’t stated in the records, but other searches find that of the children that stayed, 67% were in debt to the company suggesting financial and legal barriers to leaving had accrued in their contract period. There were other reasons that the children would stay though, as searches also found that in the contract period 83% of the children got married, 56% had children of their own, and 43% had at least one parent survive until the end of the period. All of this suggests significant social pressures to stay working for the mines.”
While we cannot be certain that Thusif was raised under a contract system, it seems likely, especially considering that all available evidence shows that he started working in the mines at 15. He was not destined to stay there.
At 17 years old, Thusif became the union representative for his mining group. While young, this wasn’t a particularly rare feat. The United Pearlian Mining Union (UPMU) represented miners from all companies on the planet and was both immensely powerful and immensely corrupt. The representatives were the lowest level of the union and often young – many of the older miners had grown disenchanted with the UPMU. Additionally, the young representatives helped keep the union alive, as outstanding representatives (who didn’t rock the boat too much) were often promoted and could wind up eventually leading the union. Had events not intervened, that very well could have been the path Thusif took in life.
The role of the UPMU in Pearlian life is difficult to describe. In some senses, it was totally subordinated to the mining companies. There hadn’t been a strike in centuries or even a particularly intense session of contract negotiation. The upper level union bureaucrats lived in houses that would make any one of the miners they represented envious, they frequently befriended and vacationed with the CEOs of the very companies they were supposed to be organized against, and they were apparently powerless to prevent workplace mismanagement. This, certainly, was the opinion of the majority of miners who were the members of the UPMU.
It was not the opinion of many of the most active members of the union though, including the representatives and the middle level bureaucrats who didn’t have nearly the same level of luxury that higher level ones did, and it’s worth understanding why because it’s an attitude that Ghale Thusif may have (and as I’ll argue later, did) have himself.
For the more enthusiastic members of the UPMU, the role of the union was not the traditional ideas of labor struggle and certainly not of class struggle – it was to serve as an arm of Pearlian society working with the mining corporations rather than against them. They were to represent the concerns and grumblings of the workers to the companies so that they could be acted upon before anything got out of hand. They were to inform the companies of when a new policy had gone too far and was driving the workforce more than they could handle. They seriously considered themselves advocates of the working miners, they just believed that because of the unique depth of Pearl’s luminium deposits, their union could not afford to rash actions in the way that others could. Strikes could be dangerous, the work stoppages resulting in magma breaches that could kill thousands of miners. Any significant action could result in an extreme loss of profitability to the firms, and in turn a massive job loss for the miners. The inaction on the part of the UPMU was not considered to be a flaw, it was one of the main benefits of their way of doing things.
Is all this true? Did the UPMU actually succeed in preventing unrest? As with most things on Pearl, it’s hard to say. There certainly is some evidence that some part of this strategy was working. The last recorded miners’ strike on Pearl is in 10603, over 600 years before the birth of Thusif. On other luminium rich planets, major strikes appear to have happened roughly twice a century. Even on planets that had similarly conciliary unions there is typically at least one major wildcat strike a century, whereas on Pearl there simply isn’t any evidence that that occurred. It’s much harder to adjudicate their claims to being a hotline from the miners directly to the mining companies that were actually able to address their concerns, but it seems clear from the total lack of strikes – including wildcat ones – that the UPMU was doing something right.
It was through this organization that Thusif gained his first political experience, albeit an experience less explicitly political than most traditional politicians get. Through the battles within the UPMU bureaucracy, Thusif learned the art of argument, compromise, and maneuvering. Unfortunately, we have direct records of absolutely none of this. Such a critical period in Thusif’s development is totally lost to us, leaving us solely with the fully formed Thusif that left Pearl for the Vaird at the start of the Revolution. We know at some point he rose above the rank of union representative into the middle rungs of the UPMU bureaucrats. Presumably this was after his 10 year contract period was up (assuming he was under contract) and presumably this required a fair amount of politicking, although none of that is recorded anywhere.
Except for one source. There is one source about the pre-Revolution life of Thusif that is available to the historian: ✶. It is difficult to imagine a source with more issues, a source less reliable, and yet a source more necessary to attempt to find the truth in than ✶ if one wishes to understand Thusif’s early life.
✶ was a miner on Pearl roughly a decade younger than Thusif who left Pearl to join a esotericist sect on Lynnys. It was a UPMU representative for three years, reporting directly to Thusif. That is all that can be stated for certain about ✶’s relationship with our subject. ✶ would go on to make a lot of claims about Thusif once he rose to prominence, many receiving galactic attention, but it’s necessary to go through ✶’s biography first before those claims can be properly addressed.
Similarly to Thusif (arguably even more so, due to being a much more minor figure), nothing is known about ✶’s early life. We have mining company records indicating that it was a union representative reporting to Thusif, but that’s it for its time on Pearl. Apparently when it was around 23, ✶ found its way into a esotericist sect that called itself the Starchildren. It left Pearl to join these Starchildren, changing its name in the process. The Starchildren have disappeared these days and were never a very large organization, only having members in the tens of thousands, but they played an outsized impact on the politics of Lynnys (which partially explains how ✶’s claims would get such attention during the Revolution, although more on that in a later chapter). In essence, they believed that they could transcend humanity and become stars themselves, which they viewed as living, unknowable creatures that had ascended from an alien race. In this understanding, stars were seen to be the next evolution of humanity (although “evolution” doesn’t quite explain their beliefs. Evolution typically implies a multigenerational process, whereas the Starchildren believed they would be able to become stars themselves). Any attempt to interfere with the perfection of the stars or to disrupt their stellar nature would be like interfering with perfection itself. These beliefs led them to be extremely hostile to much science out of fears that all science would eventually realize their beliefs and in its materialistic nature attempt to harness the perfection of the stars for less than perfect uses. Consequently, this rejection of science led them to reject a powerful central state which functions as the main driver and supporter of science. It should be no surprise then to say that the Starchildren would be incredibly hostile to Ghale Thusif and it is therefore necessary to take any account of the man from one of their members with significant skepticism – and that only touches on the inherent bias of such a group, let alone whether the member of such an organization have credibility to begin with.
There were three principle claims made by ✶, each of which must be dealt with in turn.
First, that Thusif was a negligent union representative that did not represent the interests of those who reported to him. On the face of it, this initial claim does not seem entirely implausible. As described above, these are the thoughts that many miners had on the UPMU, it is not entirely unreasonable for a miner that reported to Thusif would have similar thoughts on him specifically. Even if this may have been ✶’s true opinion of the man though, that does not mean it was true or that it was everyone’s opinion. As we can see from his later actions, it is clear that Thusif must have already had some experience taking criticisms and defusing tense situations prior to the Revolution. His ability to appeal to all sides and find some common ground is what made him so important and it seems absurd to imagine that he had that ability innately, without practice. Additionally, the fact that he was one of those elected to represent Pearl in the first place indicates that at least some people must have valued him, even if all did not share in that assessment.
Second, that Thusif had disparaged esoteric beliefs and those who held them. This claim is more difficult to answer and it is arguably the one that had the most greatest impact on the course of events, undermining Thusif’s ability to mediate the Velvet Chamber Debates. Beside ✶’s claim, there’s absolutely no evidence to prove it (unless one reads Thusif’s mediation between the esotericists and the cataphatics as biased in favor of the cataphatics, although I will argue later that it was not). Thusif made no known statements insulting any esoteric beliefs or even indicating that he did not hold any himself. Certainly, he never insulted anyone who held those beliefs. Obviously, it is possible he held them and did not share them. He was a shrewd enough of a politician that it’s not impossible to suggest, but in that case it seems unreasonable to suppose he would have allowed his personal biases to impact the way he governed. Had he held those beliefs as strongly as some have argued, there is no reason he would not have simply joined the cataphatics himself instead of acting as a mediator.
Third, that Thusif had a child out of wedlock with ✶ that he refused to raise with it. This is undoubtedly the most explosive claim made by ✶. It’s also the hardest to prove. At least nominally because of the Starchildren’s rejection of science, ✶ refused to allow its child to be given a paternity test, even though Thusif agreed to do so. Due to Thusif’s careful nature, the author finds this claim unlikely. Ultimately though, it is up to the reader to decide how much stock to put in it. With ✶ refusing to allow a paternity test (and the child dying sadly in the Revolutionary Wars), the historian is left with attempting to guess from photographs whether Thusif even could have been the child’s father. It is a fool’s errand, best left to the conspiracists.
That is the sum of what we know about Ghale Thusif’s first 35 years alive. A union man he was and a union man he probably would have stayed, slowly moving up the ranks of the UPMU until plateauing at some point. He probably would have married, had kids raised in a better life than his own, and passed away peacefully in his bed surrounded by his loved ones. That was not to be. Unbeknownst to him, over the past several decades a crisis had been sweeping the Empire. And unbeknownst to everyone, the greatest Revolution in history was just around the corner.