Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

“If no one else turns up we can trust, I can get the ship back, close enough anyway to put out a mercycall.” Aslan scraped rain off her face. “Something I’d better say. Whatever Tra Yarta thinks, whatever the records say, I can’t do what he wants. I can describe, analyze, compare societies, tease them to bits under the scope of technique, if you want it in the pretentious jargon the man seems to prefer. Manipulate them? Nonsense. I wouldn’t know the first thing about that.” She got up, went a short way up the slope, came back. “What happens when he finds out?”

Parnalee brushed at his hair again. When his hand dropped, he was smiling. “You weren’t listening. That’s my part of the job. You analyze, I put your data to work, Churri adds the frills. That’s what the man said. Not altogether a bad idea. Comes close to my usual practice. Maybe Bolodo told him, maybe he thought it up his little self.”

“He did say you were a propagandist.”

“Event designer. Sounds better.”

“All that talk about dirtying one’s self-esteem?”

“He wanted to hear that, so I gave it to him. Bargaining chip. Ah, all right, a bit more than that. I do not like being coerced.” The last phrase was spoken slowly with an angry emphasis on each word. “I choose where and when I’m going to work, not some tin god on a backwater world.”

Aslan folded her arms across her breasts, rubbed her fingers slowly up and down her biceps. “Um. Maybe I don’t need to say it.” She scowled at him. “Maybe I do. Don’t underestimate the locals, Par. I’ve seen a lot of that places I was working. Travelers come through and just because the locals don’t think the same way or know about the same gadgets, they think they’re stupid. My mother talks like that, I think it’s because she knows it irritates me. She and her friends have been around a lot, it gives them illusions of…” she laughed, tasted ram on her lips, “you said it, tingodishness. According to them the locals haven’t got the brains or the get-up to suck a tit. These Huvved, maybe the Hordar too, they’ve been isolated a long time, but they’re not stupid and I doubt if they’re unsophisticated in the art of the cabal. Tra Yarta wouldn’t be sweating like he is if they were easy to handle. He thinks he’s got us locked, that we can’t make trouble for him whatever we get up to. I hope he’s wrong. But we’d better be damn clever.” She pushed at soggy hair, drew her hand rapidly back and forth across her nostrils. “And I’m catching pneumonia out here, can’t we go in where it’s warm?”

“Right.” Parnalee stood. “I’ve said what I had to say. Aslan, I agree with you on most of that. We won’t fool him if we fake it; we have to do it straight until we’re ready to jump, whether we jump at the ship or into the mountains, otherwise we’re in shit to our eyeballs. I’m going to get out of this one way or another. Don’t either of you screw me up; I’ll twist the neck of the one who tries it.”

Aslan began working.

Reluctantly.

These weren’t her people, she had no responsibility for what happened to them, but…

What Tra Yarta wanted was a profound distortion of her work and she was ill at ease whenever she thought of what Parnalee was going to do with the data she provided, but…

She had to do the analysis, she needed the information, she didn’t trust either Parnalee or Churri, but there was no one else; she drove herself at her preparations with disgust, distrust and a bellyload of fury.

She made abortive gestures at first, feeling about like a blind worm, starting lines of investigation, letting them trickle from her fingers; she wasn’t accustomed to working without a staff to help interview the subjects, collect data samples, do a preliminary sort on them and much of the slog work thereafter. Not having those eager, ambitious students, she had to reshape her habits and find a way to do that work herself.

After a week or so of aimless dipping into the Palace Library, she called herself to order and spent several days working with (and cursing copiously) the computers Tra Yarta had provided, setting up procedures, protocols and questionnaires. Then she began interviewing the Hordar who worked as gardeners, servants, cook, cat-handlers, musicians, poets, entertainers of all kinds, and last of all the few Hordar who made it into the Guard. Every Hordar working inside the Wall. They talked with her because they were ordered to and were very cautious in their answers to her questions, but she expected that and had long experience in setting up a series of questions that would give her much more information than they knew they were providing.

All that took time, more time than usual, because she had no staff, because she had to do all the analysis herself without any of the software she needed on computers not designed for that sort of work, because she was deliberately doing about three times as much interviewing as she needed, because above all she wanted to be very careful about what she actually passed out of her hands. Tra Yarta grew restless, but could not fault her for not working; besides, as she’d guessed from the first, he was a thorough man himself and they were only a minor part of his plans for suppressing dissent and disturbance. She sank her apprehensions and anxieties in a half-willed amnesia and let the work absorb her; she enjoyed everything about her profession, even the dullest part where she was going over and over material, arranging and re-arranging bits of information to discover patterns and unexpressed meanings.

Aslan yawned, recrossed her ankles. “Where’s Churri?”

“Getting drunk somewhere, spinning stories, picking up more recordings. What’ve you got?” Parnalee took the lid off the carafe he’d brought with him, chugged down half the ice water inside. It was an unusually hot day and the house wasn’t equipped with any kind of air conditioning, not even a fan, so Aslan was spending the hottest part of the afternoon outside under shade trees near one of the dozen fountains, stretched out on a lounge chair she brought from a slatted toolshed tucked away behind some flowering shrubs.

“I’ve started getting the history sorted out. See what you can pick up on a couple of prophets; they seem to be important to the Hordar, so you might be able to use them. Pradix and Eftakes. Better be careful, though. I suppose you know how tricky that kind of thing can get for outsiders. Pradix. Hmm. Center to the local religion. He was born some two millennia ago, standard years not local, on a world called Hordaradda which was on the edge of the Huvveddan Empire. By the time he died or was translated or whatever you want to call it, one half of Hordaradda was swearing by him, the other half at him and the Huvved were agin the whole thing. Ended up with the Pradite faction buying a colony transport and lighting out for parts unknown. Shaking the dust off, usual reaction. Like a lot of fanatics, they didn’t know what they were doing, but they were sure they were sharper than any mundane, so they got cheated on the ship, paid hard cash for junk. The transport went blind in the insplit. If you believe in that kind of thing, it was their holy Prophet’s intercession, or maybe it was Luck, anyway, when they tinkered their way back to realspace, there it was, a nice yellow dwarf of a sun with a coolish but comfortable planet waiting for them. No intelligent life as far as I can tell from the look I got at contemporary records, but otherwise a flourishing biota land and sea. They named the sun Horgul and settled on the fourth planet out to breed and argue over the teachings of Pradix. I’ve printed up a few of those, you might be able to do something with them. Eftakes was born here about five hundred years later, I’m not all that sure just what his differences are with Pradix, but the Hordar had a sharpish little war over them and the Eftakites moved down to the south continent. Guneywhiyk. Silly name, isn’t it. North continent’s no better. Kuzeywhiyk. Sounds like a sneeze. Got some of Eftakes’ sayings listed too. Be careful how you use those up here. On Kuzeywhiyk.” She giggled. “I don’t know if Tra Yarta wants you doing anything down south; if so, you’d better have a look at Eftakes and his faction.”