Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

“They’re not going to tell me about her, are they.”

“Nuh. Or her about you. What you going to do?”

“Snoop. There’s a meeting…” Aslan grinned, suddenly riding high. “Be a hoot if I turned up there and said hi mom. Pass that bottle and let’s celebrate.”

The Ridaar unit had three voice-activated pinears, ilddas in University jargon, inconspicuous-long-distance-data-collectors. Aslan slipped one into the mine chamber the Council used for their private meetings, she got one into Elmas Ofka’s quarters. The third she hesitated over for some time, but she finally decided to keep it reserved for anything that turned up in the feed from the other two.

On the night of the day she planted the ilddas, the night after Gun Peygam, she came back alone after supper and played over what they’d picked up and transmitted to the Ridaar. There wasn’t much from the ear in Elmas Ofka’s quarters, but in the material from the other she found the Dalliss report to the special Council meeting and the discussion afterward. She learned the date and place of the next meeting with the outsiders, she learned about the plan to attack the Warmaster and the role she was meant to play in that. Hostage. The breathing equivalent to a handful of rosepearls. Sold again, she told herself when she heard that. A slave is a slave is a slave.

Time crawled. She felt the feet of every minute walking across her skin, inescapable tickling torment. She taught her history seminar and kept her body easy and her face blank with an effort of will that left her drained. There was an itchiness in her students that she found hard to ignore, they stank of conspiracy. their questions were perfunctory or prods to get her talking on subjects all round the secret that excited them; she could not notice that excitement because she was not supposed to know about the plan to seize the Warmaster.

“How many rebellions have you studied, doctori-yabass?”

“Too many to narrate. I’ve told you about three, if you’ll remember, examples of what can happen. The genocide on Alapacsin III, the Great-Father uprising on Tuufyak, the Placids on Ceeantap. If I have time the next few weeks, I’ll fill some cassettes with what I remember of other violent changes in leadership, show you variations on those three types of outcome.”

“Which do you think we’ll have here, doctori-yabass?”

“Depends on you and how you look at things. Please remember, people are capable of almost anything in the name of good.”

“What’s wrong with that, doctori-yabass?”

“So it’s a game, eh? Whack your teacher, eh? Look to your prophet and learn. Seems to me he said a thing or two about ends and means. At the start, all rebellions are rather much the same. I know, I’ve told you to avoid generalization, it’s lazy thinking, but even that’s not always true. They begin with passion and ideals, fire in the belly, ambition in the brain. You, young Hordar, that’s you I’m talking about. And they begin because there is a need that grows until it explodes one day. There you have the inklins. You here at the Mines, you’re playing touch and run games, you tease the Huvved because you can’t afford to slaughter them. The inklins on their yizzies are playing a deadlier game, they’ve nothing to lose. These feral children are a lit fuse; unless you can damp it, they’ll force the Huvved to destroy everything you’re trying to save.”

“Huvved are crazy, doctori-yabass, are they that crazy? If they destroy us, they destroy themselves.”

“Alapacsin three, read your notes. I have a cassette I want you to see. Some of you may remember the speaker, you can explain to the others later. Make notes if you wish, the segment is quite short.”

I am KalaKallampak, a Mon of the Bahar. I have been here on Tairanna, a slave, for more than twelve years.

The Morz was sitting on his cot, his back against the wall, his heels dug into the thin mattress. As he talked, he was knitting, producing something shapeless, using the rhythmic swings of his hands to subdue the fury that knotted his jaw and set the veins throbbing at his temples. Yet when he spoke, his gravelly voice was mild, almost serene.

In the beginning my servitude weighed lightly on me. I was permitted to spend much time in the open ocean, when I studied the sea life and collected samples part of the day and part of the day I played, enjoying myself in water as fine as any I can remember.

He lowered his hands, bowed head and torso toward the lens.

For which I honor the Hordar who demand such purity. I was content, though not happy; who can be happy forcibly separated from those he loves? But it was endurable. Then the Fehdaz who bought me died and his successor was a fussy nervous little cretin who was distressed at the thought of property so valuable roaming about loose. I was forbidden the open sea and I started to suffer. Day by slow day I grew heavier with anger and physical pain. Until my days were dreary and my nights were worse and sleep was fickle and had to be courted. During those years when salt smell on the wind was all I had of the sea and a brine tub all that kept my body whole, I searched for a way to keep my mind more supple than my misfortunate body. The habit of decades gave me the answer, I am as much a scholar by temperament as I am a technician by training. I began watching gul Brindar; day and night I found ways to see what was happening to the city. I set the things I saw and heard into the many-leveled intricately nuanced watersong of my people, polishing the periods of my mindbook into a poetry of sound and sense, writing into my memory the recent history of Ayla gul Brindar.

Eyes closed, he scratched absently at his wrists, then fumbled at the wool; the veins at his temples pulsed visibly. After a moment he lifted the needles and began knitting again.

For three years I did this, then one day there was a moment when I was loose upon the cliffs of Brindar with no one near enough to stop me. I did not care if I lived or if I died. I jumped and fell a hundred yards into a clash of rocks and weed and incoming tide, survived and swam the three thousand miles to surface here. You ask me to tell you my mindbook. I will do that, though turning the tale into the airgroan of Hordaradda erases all its grace.

The Troubles have their seed in things done long before Bolodo brought me here. I cannot speak of them. This is what I saw myself. Five years ago the treatment of yoss fibers was introduced, a slave like me was given a task and did it and in the doing crumbled what was already cracking. Because yunk wool rotted in the depots waiting for a buyer, many and many a landbound Hordar was pushed off the Raz where his family had been generation on generation, back to the Landing Time. Where could they go? The Marginal Lands would not support them, there were many already claiming those. Young single men took their hunger to Littoral cities that glimmered with promise. Though that promise proved as illusory and fragile as soap bubbles, hungry families followed them. The cities began to bulge with dispossessed grasslanders. They took any work they could get so they could feed themselves and their children, took work from Little Families; living was already precarious for the city poor; those not affiliated with Great Families were as hungry as the grasslanders who were not welcome or well treated.

He was rocking gently back and forth, like the sea rocking back and forth, his eyes were still closed, the needles clicked and clashed, the wood twitched and ran through his fingers.

The Duzzulkerin, what coin they had they were not about to waste on rent; in cities there are always and ever empty buildings. They lived in these until they were driven out, one family, two, ten, wherever there was an empty corner. Their unwilling landlords would call the city wards and evict them, but in a day or so, or a week, more families would come to take their places. And when these moved on, more again would come, until finally the landlords gave up trying to reclaim their property and began charging rent which sometimes they managed to collect.