The Languages of Pao Author:Jack Vance Divide and conquer galactic scale. Pao, long having evolved its own separate culture after being colonized from Earth, has a single language and a peace loving 'tho stagnant society. Scientists from the neighboring world of Breakness launch a ruthless experiment, jarring Pao into new virility by installing three class-languages: ... more »one for a warrior class, one for technicians, and a third for rulers and paper-shufflers. But they build into the formula certain weaknesses of their own degenerate culture.
The Panarch of Pao is dead and Beran Panasper, his young son and heir to the Pao throne, flees his usurping uncle Bustamonte when his father is killed. To live and avenge his father's death, his refuge is the austere remote bleak planet of Breakness, under one of the planet's ruler-academics, the elderly but immensely powerful Lord Palafox, omnipotent Dominie of Breakness Institute. Palafox and his peers are obsessed with prestige and dominance, augmenting their bodies technologically, and breeding legions of sons upon indentured women brought from scores of worlds. Palafox was the half-mad egoist responsible for the implantation of Breakness's totally alien thought patterns into the mind of Beran.
As years pass at the secret fortress on Breakness, Beran's suspicion grows that the aging Palafox has his own plans for tranquil Pao, and Beran discovers the dreaded truth behind the assassination of his father, and a ruthless experiment on Pao. But though he has been fashioned into a man of Breakness, Beran's heart is of Pao. Returning at last to Pao, Beran finds the planet ravaged by war and upheaval, its placid culture fractured by viral languages designed by Palafox, introduced by Bustamonte. Beran is determined to restore peace, and he brings to his world the seeds of change that will save Pao...or destroy it,but if Bustamonte finds him, he is dead. And should he win back the Panarch's throne, he will inevitably face Palafox, who, if senile, is physically more powerful than ever.
This is the first book publication of Vance's classic. It was previously published in Satellite Magazine.« less