K. Pasternak
Role: Nootician (scientist of Consciousness) who becomes the 73rd Empiral Marquis, Arbiter of the 319 Human Orbs. Third and final major Packet of The First Wanderer. Affiliation: Galactic Human Empire — eventually its ruler. Era: ~2641 A.L. (far-future; ~2190 years after the Timeline’s founding of the Empire).
Summary
A very tall man — built to his father’s genetic specification. Wears a toga that cycles through hues of blue. Speaks Mandala. Has had seven marriages (four-person marriages are standard in his era). Has been in love once, and was heartbroken. Has a private fascination with early Aerth history — which is how The First Wanderer picks him.
At first appearance he is one of four academics auditioning for research funding from the then-reigning Marquis: alongside a temporal physicist, a wiremind engineer, and a hypergeometrist. The First Wanderer enters him mid-meeting and offers a deal: political power in exchange for a Nootics research programme aimed at finding out what the wanderer is. Pasternak accepts within seconds.
With the wanderer’s help he rises in three weeks from respected-but-misunderstood academic to the Marquis’s “foremost scientific adviser,” then — on the old Marquis’s death three days after adopting him as his son — becomes the 73rd Empiral Marquis, Arbiter of the 319 Human Orbs. He is a sociopath who has always wanted power above all else.
Pasternak’s beneath-the-surface nature: on the surface longs for clarity, underneath self-congratulates, and beneath that the will to dominate. The wanderer knew from first inspection that Pasternak fancied himself as one day becoming the Marquis of the Human Empire.
In office, he destroys trade agreements, plunders religious sites, runs military spending to an all-time high, and when two core worlds propose seceding via congressional vote he has their armies incarcerate millions in labour camps and kill those who won’t work “with bullets and gamma blasts.” The wanderer reasons that “political systems are self-correcting” and continues the work. Evie does not reason that way.
Dies in the primer chamber of the wanderer’s ithrium-shielded 5-Churten collider, sealed in by Evie. His last words to the wanderer: “Will we dream?” The wanderer’s reply: “Sure we will. Sleep tight.”
Appearances
- Ch. 03 — For Every Dove a Bullet: Third and final major packet. Dies in the beam chamber.
Related
- The First Wanderer — his tenant and accomplice.
- Evie — his executioner.
- Galactic Human Empire — the polity he ruled.
- Nootics, Nooticle, Ithrium, Churten, The Fifth Science
- Mentalic Ontology — the metaphysic whose proof he was chasing.
Open questions
- Does Pasternak’s historical legacy survive the double death? The public knows him as the 73rd Marquis, not as the man killed in a research accident. Is the collider-chamber death ever reported truthfully?
- What happens to the collider? Completed, primed to 4.3 churtens, then abandoned. Does another marquis finish the experiment Pasternak started?