Not a single drop of water to be found. The desiccating winds shift sand in a global sea of dunes. Human life, such as can survive, is brutish and short. This is the planet of Iraqqis, not to be confused with the other one called
Iraqqis exists under the iron boot of its dictator, the obese and treacherous Saddam Harkonnen. His palaces flow with fountains and pools of the water stolen from his people, sequestered for sole use of his ruling Bath-ist Party in its bizarre cleansing rituals. His sons and regents, the fork-tongued Uday and the one they call Beast Qusay, walk unimpeded through his domain, seeking who they shall tear and devour.
Saddam’s world was not always a rich one. There was a day when its people were aimless wanderers, trudging the sands between secret cisterns hidden deep within the rock. They lived solitary lives; rarely would two clans meet one another amidst the dunes. On these occasions the stronger clan would beat the weaker to death with crude digging implements, in order to rape their women and steal their goats, or vice versa. Nobody cared. It was expected of them.
But one day a nameless Iraqqi was out in the desert shooting at some food, when up from the ground came a’bubblin’ crude … the story is legend. That first discoverer was quickly beaten to death by his envious clan, which was in turn beaten, robbed, and enslaved by the notorious Clan Humungous, which was immediately set upon by other clans. Eventually, using a hodgepodge of decommissioned and discarded military equipment, clan Harkonnen crushed all other opposition to emerge as what the United Nations terms “a stable and universally acknowledged planetary government.”
The U.N. figures prominently now in the affairs of Iraqqis. U.N. Space Command starships patrol its orbit and regulate all visitors. One concern is paramount: the crude must flow.
Industrial worlds traveled by the gasoline automobile would grind to a halt without Iraqqi crude. Those with electric cars that depend on oil-fired power grids or hydrogen vehicles that require diesel-driven electrolysis plants have the same concern. The crude must flow.
Thus the lynchpin of the Iraqqis economy: the U.N.’s Oil for Food, Weapons, Torture Devices and Digging Implements Plan. In this way the wealth of the industrialized sphere trickles down into the desert world. And the crude flows.
Such dramatic change has, of necessity, spawned cultural strife. Not so much on Iraqqis as on the industrial worlds themselves. In the past a tourist airship would veer miles out of its way to observe local color in the form of a clan-feud with beatings and rapes carried out by shovel-wielding men in aboriginal garb. But give those same men the resources to live in brownstones with polo shirts and Toyotas and their antics become horrid atrocities to be whispered of in angst, achieving the hallowed status of Things a Civilized People Cannot Abide.
Industrial powers have tried every measure to make Harkonnen’s people behave as befits their new lifestyle, but to no avail. Even cluster-bombing proved not only ineffective but detrimental when some clans fired gleefully back in a mistaken belief that offworlders had finally “come around” to the proper Iraqqi way of life.
Thus the thin blue line of U.N. starships that circles the waterless globe, a permanent fixture. Serious disruptions such as the bombing campaigns of O’Samwan Bin’Fartin are discouraged with lethal prejudice. Garden-variety scoundrels like the tax-evading rightwing Free Men of the deep desert are ignored or left to local Harkonnen strongmen. And the crude flows.
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