Character
"All is well, all is well," Mordane muttered to himself as he secured the last crate against the rear rack of the utility crawler, repeating the line with the stubborn certainty of a prayer whose meaning had long since been forgotten. It came from some holodrama he had watched decades ago during the Empire, though whether it had been a comedy, a romance, or a war story he could no longer recall, and this failure irritated him enough that he found himself repeating the words more often than before, as if persistence alone might recover the memory.
The morning fog still hung over the low fields of Keldoonie, turning the rows of grain silver beneath the rising sun and obscuring the distant hills beyond his property. The harvest had been satisfactory, which was to say it had not failed, and Mordane regarded satisfactory harvests with the same enthusiasm he reserved for satisfactory weather, satisfactory meals, and satisfactory conversations, all of which seemed to make up the entirety of his retirement.
For twenty years he had governed worlds, commanded fleets, and directed ministries whose budgets exceeded the annual output of entire sectors, yet now he spent his mornings inspecting irrigation ditches and arguing with local merchants over fertilizer prices. The absurdity of it had not diminished with time. If anything, familiarity had sharpened it.
A flock of pale-winged marsh birds settled beside one of the drainage ponds, and Mordane watched them with a scowl. Every year they arrived. Every year they damaged the seedlings. Every year the government of Keldoonie assured farmers that a management plan was being developed. It reminded him of countless committee meetings in the Imperial Capital, except that the birds were more productive than most bureaucrats.
The crawler's engine coughed to life beneath him. He climbed into the driver's seat with the ease of a man who remained strong despite his age, his dark hair now threaded heavily with gray but still thick, his frame lean from labor rather than exercise. Retirement had taken many things from him, but softness was not among them.
As the vehicle rolled down the dirt road toward the market town, he passed neighboring farms where families were already beginning their day. Children carried baskets between sheds. Wives shouted instructions from porches. Elderly grandparents sat beneath awnings and supervised tasks they no longer possessed the strength to perform themselves. Mordane observed them with a detached curiosity. They appeared content, and he supposed that was admirable, though he had never understood the appeal.
He had known women, certainly. More women than he could have named without assistance, some beautiful, some clever, some ambitious enough to mistake proximity to power for power itself. Yet he had never married, never produced an heir, and never found himself regretting either omission until retirement deprived him of distractions. There were evenings now when the farmhouse felt large enough to echo.
The market appeared gradually through the thinning fog, first as a collection of rooftops and then as a proper settlement clustered around the river crossing. Farmers, traders, mechanics, and fishermen were already converging from every direction, filling the roads with wagons and crawlers loaded with produce.
Mordane rested one hand on the steering wheel and sighed.
The Empire had collapsed. The ministries were gone. The fleets were scattered. The men who had once feared him were dead, imprisoned, or reduced to arguing politics in provincial taverns. Meanwhile he was transporting vegetables to market on a planet whose government could barely afford road maintenance.
"All is well, all is well," he repeated.
