Ahaja Bucherei

The Vilani and Rule of Man colonies in the Deneb Sector suffered particularly severe population loss and technological regression during the millennium and a half of the Long Night. For, few of them possessed self-sufficient high-tech industrial infrastructures, and the Deneb Sector was the most astrographically isolated of all the former territories of the Second Imperium. Even before the collapse, it had been largely isolated from the rest of the Imperium by the Great Rift, and was accessible only by way of a few sparsely-populated links through the narrow funnel of the Corridor sector. Ultimately, after the foundation of the Third Imperium the Deneb Sector would be the very last region to be re-contacted. At that time it was discovered that only a handful of the Deneb colonies had been able to retain jump technology, and that most of them had lost if for good by -1300.

One such colony was Prinkipo, a terran-prime world located near the spinward border of the Gulf Subsector / Deneb Sector. Colonized just 134 years before Twilight, Prinkipo rapidly regressed after the collapse of interstellar society, stabilizing only around TL-3. However, the planet’s bountiful environment allowed steady population expansion which helped Prinkipo to regain TL-6 within a millennium. By -450 Imperial, Prinkipo had achieved TL-10, and was ready to resume interstellar travel, but had no naturally occurring deposits of lanthanum from which to fashion the critical jump discharge coils.

At this point in Prinkipo’s history, the planet was ruled by a repressive oligarchy. In -420, a group of revolutionaries tried to overthrow the regime, but their poorly-planned uprising was swiftly and brutally crushed. However, the surviving revolutionaries became folk heroes to the oppressed common people of Prinkipo, and the oligarchs feared that executing them would merely create a host of martyrs for their cause. Accordingly, the remaining revolutionary leaders were permanently exiled to penal colony on Dru’mhilla, one of Prinkipo’s moons. After several years in exile, the revolutionaries managed to seize control of one of several jump-capable interstellar exploration vessels that had been constructed using lanthanum painstakingly recovered from the millennia-old wreckage of pre-Long Night starships that had been found drifting in the system. Just how the revolutionaries managed to accomplish this remains unclear. One theory holds that they were assisted by a faction among the oligarchs that was anxious to be rid of them. Another suggests that a key role was played by several psionics within the revolutionaries’ ranks.

Before jumping out of the system on their stolen ship, the revolutionaries transmitted a proclamation back to Prinkipo that has since become known as the Dru’mhilla Manifesto. The Manifesto, which was largely the work of Ahaja Bucherei (Hah-Jah Boo-Kerry), a noted political scientist and philosopher, presented an impassioned defense of the natural rights of sophonts to freedom and self-rule. The popular rebellion that finally overthrew the oligarchs seven decades later enshrined the document as the central pillar of Prinkipo’s new constitution. Over the centuries, the Dru’mhilla Manifesto, whose text has been preserved in full, has come to be considered one of the most eloquent declarations of sentient rights ever produced.

In 611, the renowned novelist Mornal Bruton took this incident as the inspiration for Shambhala – her magnum opus. The book’s plot borrows heavily from an ancient Solomani novel entitled Lost Horizon – a work with which Bucherei is known to have been familiar (there survives a reference to an article on political theory, penned by Bucherei, whose title alludes to Lost Horizon). Drawing upon Lost Horizon’s central theme, Bruton depicts her hero – miscast as the leader of the revolutionaries – as being driven by a mighty vision to create a remote sanctuary in which all of Humaniti’s greatest artistic, intellectual, and technological treasures would be collected and preserved, hidden away from the chaos and corruption of the outside universe. Shambhala is considered one of the great classics of Imperial literature, and has long been standard reading for students in practically every reputable university in the Imperium. The story has been filmed on innumerable occasions, and was even adapted for the live stage in 836.

Due to the popularity of Shambhala, Ahaja Bucherei is among the best-known historical figures in the Imperium. Indeed, over the centuries he has become something of a romantic cult figure, and like many others of that sort, a considerable body of legend and myth has grown up around his image. It has been common practice for sensationalist authors and the tabloid press to claim that Bucherei is still alive, thanks to anagathics, and hidden away on some remote world where he and his followers have built a utopian society founded upon unimaginably advanced psionic powers (including the ability to ‘cloak’ their planet -- inevitably named 'Shambhala' -- from discovery). These claims are ‘substantiated’ by rumors about individuals who have supposedly encountered agents clandestinely collecting artistic, intellectual and technological treasures on Bucherei’s behalf, spacefarers who chanced upon his fastness, and clusters of unexplained ship disappearances in six different regions of space.

These sensational theories have recently been given a boost by Professor Kethrin Virbek’s The Bucherei Conundrum (University of Deneb, 1101). The book is based upon an exceptionally thorough study of all the available historical sources relating to Bucherei and his fellow exiles, including several new fragmentary documents discovered in the Prinkipan secret police archives in 1094. Virbek proceeds to explode many of the myths surrounding Bucherei, while confirming that the Dru’mhilla exiles did indeed flee Prinkipo with the aim of creating a utopian society on some isolated world far beyond the boundaries of the old Second Imperium. He also asserts that the Prikipan secret police archives strongly imply that at least some of the exiles were psionics. Virbek’s findings became the subject of intense and bitter debate within the halls of academe, but were eagerly seized upon by certain elements in the popular media as proof of their earlier claims. Indeed, despite the cautious tone of Virbek’s work, some sensationalist authors were encouraged to develop even more wildly extravagant theories concerning Bucherei. Several even speculated that the Drumhilla exiles were responsible for founding the Zhodani Consulate (completely ignoring the realities of the timeline).

Nevertheless, it is generally believed that the exiles did indeed plan to leave the territory of the former Second Imperium, but there is no way of knowing in what direction, though Rimward and Spinward would have offered the shortest routes to uncharted space. Much depends upon whether one interprets the somewhat contradictory evidence to mean that the exiles’ ship had J-2 or J-3 capability. Most serious scholars scoff at the notion that the exiles founded a colony that survives down to the present day, and believe that all of the exiles died either in a ship-board mishap or a failed colonization attempt – and are confident that archaeological evidence of this will eventually be found.

However, a large segment of the Imperial population continues to find the myth of Bucherei and his psionic utopia irresistible, and new books are continuously being published on the topic. Many of these posit the Sagittarian Subsector / Reft Sector as Bucherei’s destination – which is utterly impossible given the exiles’ maximum J-3 jump range. However, the mythmakers are inexorably drawn to the Sagittarian Subsector by its extreme remoteness and the aura of mystery created by the fact that its only solar system, R'bak, is a Red Zone that is off-limits to all visitors. For, one of the most widely accepted rumors about Bucherei is that the Imperial authorities have long since discovered his hiding place, but have kept it hidden by classifying the system as a Red Zone and releasing false USP data.

Most projections of the exiles’ likely course point to six more practical destinations: the Vestus and Usher Subsectors / Reft Sector, the Pax Rulin and Egyrn Subsectors / Trojan Reach Sector, and the Glisten and District 268 Subsectors / Spinward Marches Sector. Popular speculations focus upon Red Zones in these and adjoining subsectors as possible sites for Bucherei’s hidden utopia, while one sensationalist author suggests that the famous desert markings on Wardn (Spinward Marches 1726) are somehow connected with him.

Yet, despite all of the scholarship, speculation and myth surrounding Ahaja Bucherei, no real evidence of the ultimate fate of the Dru’mhilla exiles has ever been found.