Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

Her equipment cases were strapped beneath the cot where she could get at them if she wanted to.

She edged around and stared at them, despair cold inside her. They are by god sure I’m not going to get back, unless… She uncased the Ridaar, ran through the overt index, then called up the last of the hidden files.

Report: deepfile Ridaar: re: Unntoualar

Code: icy eagle’s child damn you Tamarralda I am not 324sub e minus one one half.

… I’m sure of it now, subject Zed has opened up enough to feed me some songs. It’s the usual thing, they’ve made an accommodation with the new powercenters and they’re not about to endanger their survival to help a transient female of more or less the same species as the invaders who took their world from them. The Unntoualar I’m living with are confused, on the one hand I seem to be here with the blessing of the invaders, on the other they’ve been quick to see the not-so-hidden hostility to me. I’ve been careful to limit my inquiries to their songs and the story tapestries connected with these, with those dozens of thready fingers it’s no wonder they’re marvelous weavers. No color vision, so line and texture dominate; almost but not quite writing; from what I’ve seen so far (which I admit is severely limited) they never did develop a written language, which was another clue since most races with a high psi quotient don’t, concepts are too complex for the forced simplification of the written word. Why am I deepfiling this? Their psi-capacity is the hot spot; whenever I get anywhere near that, Zed, Wye, even crazy Tau start sweating blood. Mike and Sigurd have done wonders with the language, it’s a stinker, Tam, you’d guess it would be since a good half the nuance comes from esp fringes. Duncan lived up to his reputation by producing a crystal set, so the youngsters could record a good portion of those fringes and give us access the Unntoualar and the Styernnese don’t suspect. I hope.

They’re projective telepaths, that’s clear from the songs, one of the few such capable of transferring images into the minds of species alien to them. Physically nonaggressive but not passive. Their aggressions came out in psychic attacks; before the colonists came, they were the dominant species on Styernna, having more or less wiped out all competition. Zed pulled a sneak on the censor, included a song in the first batch he let me flake about the arrival of the colonists and the short depressing settlement war; I haven’t any idea why he did it, there’s no evidence he can read me, maybe a gesture of rebellion, one he understands is probably futile. The Unntoualar tried their standard attack on the invaders, but the full force and flavor of it was blunted by the stolidity of those alien minds. Their single weapon was not only useless but proved to be disastrous for them; their most vicious attacks were perceived as surrealistic and erotic dreams. The last part of the song is one long wail against Fate as the Unntoualar realize this and begin dimly to see what it means for them.

Yesterday he brought in Rho and Nu, alpha males like him, they picked out a new tapestry and started singing, but the song had shit-all to do with the images. It was about what was happening to the Unntoualar now. Since the Final Dispossession, the Oligarchs have hoarded for their own use the most powerful of the PT’s (their name in the song is a complex combination of dream dancer, custodian of race memory, spear of the Unn, verbal shorthand: Stahoho idam kaij), parceling out the lesser PT’s for the entertainment of their favorites. All very secret, of course. The homeworld has rules for handling the natives and Styernna can’t live without help yet; besides they know the ordure that will splatter over them if what they’re doing gets out, plus the fact that half the scavs in the universe will come zooming over to harvest their share. Oh Tam, what they’re doing, it’s a lot worse than forcing a PT to do his thing. They’re torturing the miserable creatures to get more piquant dreams out of them. Sickening.

I didn’t want to hear that, Tam, makes me nervous. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, I thought I’d better get this deepfiled before Zed’s plot (whatever it is) starts fruiting. Question: Is this a setup? Are the Oligarchs using Zed to snooker me into accusations I couldn’t possibly substantiate? Is Zed doing this on his own? Is he working with or for other Unntoualar? What do I do? Well, I’ve got the kernel down, up to you to see there’s heavy pressure put to investigate the Oligarchy and how it’s using the Unntoualar.

Distorted, bleeding, the Unn staggered into the circle, shrieking with voice and mind, ululating interling and Unnspeech, flopping in front of Aslan, accusations foaming out of him, curses on the name of the Oligarch who owned him, tortured him, stole his dreams out of him.

Guards surrounding her taking her away, taking away the Unn, dead Unn, twisted tormented. Dead too late for her. At least she was alone, Duncan and the others were at the base camp two sectors away, oh god, she was alone, Mama was right, she shouldn’t have come.

She stood looking at the palm-sized plate for a long sick moment, then she sighed and canceled the read. If they’d bothered to locate and erase those files, she’d have had a sliver of hope that she could get out of this. They hadn’t. Even the overt record was untouched.

She crawled back on the cot and sat with her legs dangling, the fingers of her right hand moving around and around the old burn scar on her left wrist, a scar she’d gotten when she was nearly four and being punished by her foster mother for something or other, she couldn’t remember what, but it was about two months before Adelaar came for her. When she noticed what she was doing, she stilled her fingers and smiled at the scar, a fierce feral grin. Bolodo doesn’t know you, Mama, nooo indeed, you’ll blow the bastards out of their skins before you’re finished with them. Hmm. Better for my self-esteem if I don’t sit around sucking my thumb waiting for you to show up. Problem is, what do I do and how do I do it?

She pulled her legs up onto the cot, pushed herself along it until she was, sitting with her back against the hold wall, then started thinking about contract labor. Like everyone else, she’d accepted its existence as something morally reprehensible but generally necessary. Blessed be the Contractor for he takes away the ugliness of life. Societies always have those they class as criminals, anything from mass murderers and big time thieves to heretics and skeptics who question the way things are. Your average citizen, he’s more comfortable if he doesn’t have to look at the poor, the handicapped, the mildly crazy and wildly crazy, the drunks and druggers, the different, the dregs. Why not keep your citizens happy, reduce taxes, remove focuses of disturbance-all that in one fine swoop? A way of using what would otherwise be a drag on the economy, a way of protecting the comfortable assumptions of the majority from any sort of challenge. Besides, new colonies need labor they can eject when the job is done so the workers won’t pollute the paradise, heavy worlds need miners whose health they don’t have to worry about, everywhere an infinity of uses for workers who can’t object to miserable conditions and miserly pay. And there you have it, contract labor. A marriage of greed with respectability. Blessed be the Contractor (but don’t let him live in my neighborhood).

On her left a youngish man was stretched out, sleeping. Some time ago his hair had been sprayed into lavender spikes, there was a lavender butterfly tattooed on the bicep next to her; his hands were square and muscular with short, strong, callused fingers. There was a heavy silver ring on his little finger; she couldn’t see much of it, but the design looked familiar. A friend of hers on University had hands like those and a habit of giving rings like that to his students. Sarmaylen. He was exploring an ancient and long neglected form of sculpture, working every kind of stone he could get into his studio, threatening the neighborhood with silicosis from the dust he was raising. She leaned over, tried to see past the collapsed spikes; as far as she could tell, she didn’t know the boy (she smiled, getting old, woman, when you look at a man like that and see a boy), he was young enough to be only a year or two out of school and she wasn’t much into Sarmaylen’s life these days. Snuffling marble dust didn’t appeal to her; besides, she wasn’t really interested in the more exotic varieties of the arts, couldn’t talk to him about them because he snorted with disgust at every word she said. That was one of the reasons Sarmaylen was only an occasional sleeping companion though she found the touch of his callused, work-roughened hands electrifying. She smiled at the memory of them, smoothed her fingers across and across the burn scar. His hands were eloquent, his tongue was not, at least in the public sense, a pleasant change from her other friends and lovers. She was fond of him; if she never saw him again, she’d hurt a lot, but she could no more live with him than she could with her mother. Their casual off again on again relationship seemed to suit him as well as it did her, though she sometimes wondered what he was getting out of it besides the sex, which was something he’d have plenty of without her. She frowned at the boy. A student of Sarmaylen, a sculptor. How did he wind up here? Artists and artisans like him never signed with Contractors. Not voluntarily. Trashed like me, I suppose. Or was he just out and out snatched?