"What happens to us if we don't find an approved sponsor?"
"You'll be considered runaways."
That meant death, the labor camps, or auction.
"0 Lord Kamye," I said, and took Esdardon Aya's arm, because a curtain of dark had fallen across my eyes.
We had walked some way along the street.
When I could see again I saw the street, the high houses of the City, the shining lights I had thought were mine.
"I have some friends," said the Hainishman, walking on with me, "who are planning a trip to the Kingdom of Bambur."
After a while I said, "What would I do there?"
"A ship to Yeowe leaves from there."
"To Yeowe," I said.
"So I hear," he said, as if we were talking about a streetcar line- "In a few years, I expect Voe Deo will begin offering rides to Yeowe. Exporting intracta-bles, troublemakers, members of the Hame. But that will involve recognising Yeowe as a nation state, which they haven't brought themselves to do yet.
They are, however, permitting some semilegitimate trade arrangements by their client states. ... A couple of years ago, the King of Bambur bought one of the old Corporation ships, a genuine old Colony Trader. The King thought he'd like to visit the moons of Werel. But he found the moons boring. So he rented the ship to a consortium of scholars from
•vfss 244 •A-s
A Woman's Liberation
the University of Bambur and businessmen from his 'capital. Some manufacturers in Bambur cany on a little trade with Yeowe in it, and some scientists at the university make scientific expeditions in it at the same time. Of course each trip is very expensive, so they carry as many scientists as they can whenever they go."
I heard all this not hearing it, yet understanding it.
"So far," he said, "they've gotten away with it."
He always sounded quiet, a little amused, yet not superior-
"Does The Community know about this ship?"
I asked.
"Some members do, I believe. And people in the Hame. But it's very dangerous to know about. If Voe Deo were to find out that a client state was exporting valuable property ... In fact, we believe they may have some suspicions. So this is a decision that can't be made lightly. It is both dangerous and irrevocable. Because of that danger, I hesitated to speak of it to you. I hesitated so long that you must make it very quickly. In fact, tonight, Rakam."
I looked from the lights of the City up to the sky they hid. "I'll go," I said. I thought of Walsu.
"Good," he said. At the next corner he changed
the direction we had been walking, away from my house, towards the Embassy of the Ekumen.
I never wondered why he did this for me. He was a secret man, a man of secret power, but he always spoke truth, and I think he followed his own heart when he could.
As we entered the Embassy grounds, a great park softly illuminated in the winter night by ground-lights, I stopped. "My books," I said. He looked his
3-* FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS question. "I wanted to take my books to Yeowe," I said. Now my voice shook with a rush of tears, as if everything I was leaving came down to that one thing. "They need books on Yeowe, I think," I said. After a moment he said, "I'll have them sent on our next ship. I wish I could put you on that ship," he added in a lower voice. "But of course the Ekumen can't give free rides to runaway slaves. ..." I turned and took his hand and laid my forehead against it for a moment, the only time in my life I ever did that of my own free will. He was startled. "Come, come," he said, and hurried me along. The Embassy hired Werelian guards, mostly veots, men of the old warrior caste. One of them, a grave, courteous, very silent man, went with me on the flyer to Bambur, the island kingdom east of the Great Continent. He had all the papers I needed. From the flyer port he took me to the Royal Space Observatory, which the King had built for his spaceship. There without delay I was taken to the ship, which stood in its great scaffolding ready to depart. I imagine that they had made comfortable apartments up front for the King when he went to see the moons. The body of the ship, which had belonged to the Agricultural Plantation Corporation, still consisted of great compartments for the produce of the Colony. It would be bringing back gram from Yeowe in four of the cargo bays that now held farm machinery made in Bambur. The fifth compartment held assets. The cargo bay had no seats. They had laid felt pads on the floor, and we lay down and were strapped to stanchions, as cargo would have been. •sffSi 246 sfsi A Woman's Liberation i.; A A t it There were about fifty "scientists." I was the last to come aboard and be strapped in. The crew were hasty and nervous and spoke only the language of Bambur. I could not understand the instructions we were given. I needed very badly to relieve my bladder, but they had shouted "No time, no time!" So I lay in torment while they closed the great doors of the bay, which made me think of the doors of Shomeke compound. Around me people called out to one another in their language. A baby screamed. I knew that language. Then the great noise began, beneath us. Slowly I felt my body pressed down on the floor, as if a huge soft foot were stepping on me, till my shoulder blades felt as if they were cutting into the mat, and my tongue pressed back into my throat as if to choke me, and with a sharp stab of pain and hot relief my bladder released its urine. Then we began to be weightless — to float in our bonds. Up was down and down was up, either was both or neither. I heard-people all around me calling out again, saying one another's names, saying what must be, "Are you all right? Yes, I'm all right." The baby had never ceased its fierce, piercing yells. I began to feel at my restraints, for I saw the woman next to me sitting up and rubbing her arms and chest where the straps had held her- But a great blurry voice came bellowing over the loudspeaker, giving orders in the language of Bambur and then in Voe Dean: "Do not unfasten the straps! Do not attempt to move about! The ship is under attack! The situation is extremely dangerous!" So I lay floating in my little mist of urine, listening to the strangers around me talk, understanding nothing. I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless 'rt»s> 247 a-*"® FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died. The ship moved strangely, shuddering, seeming to turn. Several people were sick. The air filled with the smell and tiny droplets of vomit. I freed my hands enough to draw the scarf I was wearing up over my face as a filter, tucking the ends under my head to hold it. Inside the scarf I could no longer see the huge vault of the cargo bay stretching above or below me, making me feel I was about to fly or fall into it. It smelled of myself, which was comforting. It was the scarf I often wore when I dressed up to give a talk, fine gauze, pale red with a silver thread woven in at intervals. When I bought it at a City market, paying my own earned money for it, I had thought of my mother's red scarf, given her by Lady Tazeu. 1 thought she would have liked this one, though it was not as bright. Now I lay and looked into the pale red dimness it made of the vault, starred with the lights at the hatches, and thought of my mother, Yowa. She had probably been killed that morning in the compound. Perhaps she had been carried to another estate as a use-woman, but Anas had never found any trace of her. I thought of the way she had of carrying her head a little to the side, deferent yet alert, gracious. Her eyes had been full and bright, "eyes that hold the seven moons," as the song says. I thought then; But I will never see the moons again. At that I felt so strange that to comfort myself and distract my mind I began to sing under my breath, there alone in my tent of red gauze warm with my own breath. I sang the freedom songs we s-vs 248 A-s A Woman's Liberation sang in the Hame, and then I sang the love songs Lady Tazeu had taught me. Finally I sang "0, 0, Yeowe," softly at first, then a little louder. I heard a voice somewhere out in that soft red mist world join in with me, a man's voice, then a woman's. Assets from Voe Deo all know that song. We sang it together. A Bambur man's voice picked it up and put words in his own language to it, and others joined in singing it. Then the singing died away. The baby's crying was weak now. The air was very foul. We learned many hours later, when at last clean air entered the vents and we were told we could release our bonds, that a ship of the Voe Dean Space Defense Fleet had intercepted the freighter's course just above the atmosphere and ordered it to stop. The captain chose to ignore the signal. The warship had fired, and though nothing hit the freighter the blast had damaged the controls. The freighter had gone on, and had seen and heard nothing more of the warship. We were now about eleven days from Yeowe. The warship, or a group of them, might be in wait for us near Yeowe. The reason they gave for ordering the freighter to halt was "suspected contraband merchandise." That fleet of warships had been built centuries ago to protect Werel from the attacks they expected from the Alien Empire, which is what they then called the Ekumen. They were so frightened by that imagined threat that they put all their energy into the technology of space flight; and the colonisation of Yeowe was a result. After four hundred years without any threat of attack, Voe Deo had finally let the Ekumen send envoys and ambassadors. They had used the Defense Fleet to transport troops and fw> 249 T*® FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS weapons during the War of Liberation. Now they were using them the way estate owners used hunting dogs and hunting cats, to hunt down runaway slaves. I found the two other Voe Deans in the cargo bay, and we moved our "bedstraps" together so we could talk. Both of them had been brought to Bambur by the Hame, who had paid their fare. It had not occurred to me that there was a fare to be paid. I knew who had paid mine. "Can't fly a spaceship on love," the woman said. She was a strange person. She really was a scientist. Highly trained in chemistry by the company that rented her, she had persuaded the Hame to send her to Yeowe because she was sure her skills would be needed and in demand. She had been making higher wages than many gareots did, but she expected to do still better on Yeowe. "I'm going to be rich/' she said. The man, only a boy, a mill hand in a northern city, had simply run away and had the luck to meet people who could save him from death or the labor camps. He was sixteen, ignorant, noisy, rebellious. sweet-natured. He became a general favorite, like a puppy. I was in demand because I knew the history of Yeowe and through a man who knew both our languages I could tell the Bamburs something about where they were going — the centuries of Corporation slavery, Nadami, the War, the Liberation. Some of them were rentspeople from the cities, others were a group of estate slaves bought at auction by the Hame with false money and under a false name and hurried onto this flight, knowing very little of where they were going. It was, -»a 250 »c*-a> A Woman's Liberation that trick that had drawn Voe Deo's attention to this flight. Yoke, the mill boy, speculated endlessly about how the Yeowans would welcome us. He had a story, half a joke, half a dream, about the bands playing and the speeches and the big dinner they would have for us. The dinner grew more and more elaborate as the days went on. They were long, hungry days, floating in the featureless great space of the cargo bay, marked only by the alternation every twelve hours of brighter and dimmer lighting and the issuing of two meals during the "day," food and water in tubes you squeezed into your mouth. 1 did not think much about what might happen. I was between happenings. If the warships found us, we would probably die. If we got to Yeowe, it would be a new life. Now we were floating. 4. Yeowe The ship came down safe at the Port of Yeowe. They unloaded the crates of machinery first, then the other cargo. We came out staggering and holding on to one another, not able to stand up to the great pull of this new world drawing us down to its center, blinded by the light of the sun that we were closer to than we had ever been. "Over here! Over here!" a man shouted. I was grateful to hear my language, but the Bamburs looked apprehensive. Over here — in here — strip — wait — All we heard when we were first on the Free World was orders. We had to be decontaminated, which was FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS painful and exhausting. We had to be examined by doctors- Anything we had brought with us had to be decontaminated and examined and listed. That did not take long for me. I had brought the clothes 1 wore and had worn for two weeks now. I was glad to get decontaminated. Finally we were told to stand in line in one of the big empty cargo sheds. The sign over the doors still read APCY — Agricultural Plantation Corporation of Yeowe. One by one we were processed for entry. The man who processed me was short, white, middle-aged, with spectacles, like any clerk asset in the City, but I looked at him with reverence. He was the first Yeowan I had spoken to. He asked me questions from a form and wrote down my answers. "Can you read?" — "Yes." — "Skills?" — I stammered a moment and said. "Teaching — I can teach reading and history." He never looked up at me. I was glad to be patient. After all, the Yeowans had not asked us to come. We were admitted only because they knew if they sent us back, we would die horribly in a public execution. We were a profitable cargo to Bambur, but to Yeowe we were a problem. But many of us had skills they must need, and I was glad they asked us about them. When we had all been processed, we were separated into two groups: men and women. Yoke hugged me and went off to the men's side laughing and waving. I stood with the women. We watched all the men led off to the shuttle that went to the Old Capital. Now my patience failed and my hope darkened. I prayed, "Lord Kamye, not here, not here too!" Fear made me angry. When a man came giving us orders again, come on, this way, I went up to him sy-s 252 aAS1 A Woman's Liberation and said, "Who are you? Where are we going? We are free women!" He was a big fellow with a round, white face and bluish eyes- He looked down at me, huffy at first, then smiling. "Yes, Little Sister, you're free," he said. "But we've all got to work, don't we? You ladies are going south. They need people on the rice plantations. You do a little work, make a little money, look around a little, all right? If you don't like it down there, come on back. We can always use more pretty little ladies round here." I had never heard the Yeowan country accent, a singing, blurry softening, with long, clear vowels. I had never heard asset women called ladies. No one had ever called me Little Sister. He did not mean the word "use" as I took it, surely. He meant well. I was bewildered and said no more. But the chemist, Tualtak, said, "Listen, I'm no field hand, I'm a trained scientist —" "Oh, you're all scientists, ".the Yeowan said with his big smile. "Come on now, ladies!" He strode ahead, and we followed. Tualtak kept talking. He smiled and paid no heed. We were taken to a train car waiting on a siding. The huge, bright sun was setting. All the sky was orange and pink, full of light. Long shadows ran black along the ground. The warm air was dusty and sweet-smelling. While we stood waiting to climb up into the car I stooped and picked up a little reddish stone from the ground. It was round, with a tiny stripe of white clear through it. It was a piece of Yeowe. I held Yeowe in my hand. That little stone, too, I still have. Our car was shunted along to the main yards Ae 253 a FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS and hooked onto a train. When the train started we were served dinner, soup from great kettles wheeled through the car, bowls of sweet, heavy marsh rice, pini fruit — a luxury on Werel, here a commonplace. We ate and ate. I watched the last light die away from the long, rolling hills that the train was passing through. The stars came out. No moons. Never again. But I saw Werel rising in the east. It was a great blue-green star, looking as Yeowe looks from Werel. But you would never see Yeowe rising after sunset. Yeowe followed the sun. I'm alive and I'm here, I thought. I'm following the sun. I let the rest go, and fell asleep to the swaying of the train. We were taken off the train on the second day at a town on the great river Yot. Our group of twenty-three was separated there, and ten of us were taken by oxcart to a village, Hagayot. It had been an APCY compound, growing marsh rice to feed the Colony slaves. Now it was a cooperative village, growing marsh rice to feed the Free People. We were enrolled as members of the cooperative. We lived share and share alike with the villagers until payout, when we could pay them back what we owed the cooperative. It was a reasonable way to handle immigrants without money who did not know the language or who had no skills. But I did not understand why they had ignored our skills. Why had they sent the men from Bambur plantations, field hands, into the city, not here? Why only women? I did not understand why, in a village of free people, there was a men's side and a women's side, with a ditch between them. zfs 254 s*A' A Woman's Liberation I did not understand why, as I soon discovered, the men made all the decisions and gave all the orders. But, it being so, I did understand that they were afraid of us Werelian women, who were not used to taking orders from our equals. And I understood that I must take orders and not even look as if I thought of questioning them. The men of Hagayot Village watched us with fierce suspicion and a whip as ready as any Boss's. "Maybe you told men what to do back over there," the foreman told us the first morning in the fields. "Well, that's back over there-That's not here. Here we free people work together. You think you're Bosswomen. There aren't any Bosswomen here." There were grandmothers on the women's side, but they were not the powers our grandmothers had been. Here, where for the first century there had been no slave women at all, the men had had to make their own life, set up their own powers. When women slaves at last were sent into those slave-kingdoms of men, there was no power for them at all. They had no voice. Not till they got away to the cities did they ever have a voice on Yeowe. I learned silence. But it was not as bad for me and Tualtak as for our eight Bambur companions. We were the first immigrants any of these villagers had ever seen. They knew only one language. They thought the Bambur women were witches because they did not talk "like human beings." They whipped them for talking to each other in their own language. I will confess that in my first year on the Free World my heart was as tow as it had been at Zeskra. I hated standing all day in the shallow water of the *a*s 255 At-® FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS rice paddies. Our feet were always sodden and swollen and full of tiny burrowing worms we had to pick out every night. But it was needed work and not too hard for a healthy woman. It was not the work that bore me down. Hagayot was not a tribal village, not as conservative as some of the old villages I learned about later. Girls here were not ritually raped, and a woman was safe on the women's side. She "jumped the ditch" only with a man she chose. But if a woman went anywhere alone, or even got separated from the other women working in the paddies, she was supposed to be "asking for it," and any man thought it his right to force himself on her. I made good friends among the village women and the Bamburs. They were no more ignorant than I had been a few years before and some were wiser than I would ever be. There was no possibility of having a friend among men who thought themselves our owners. I could not see how life here would ever change. My heart was very low, nights, when I lay among the sleeping women and children in our hut and thought. Is this what Walsu died for? In my second year there, I resolved to do what I could to keep above the misery that threatened me. One of the Bambur women, meek and slow of understanding, whipped and beaten by both women and men for speaking her language, had drowned in one of the great rice paddies. She had lain down there in the warm shallow water not much deeper than her ankles, and had drowned. I feared that yielding, that water of despair. I made up my mind to use my skill, to teach the village women and children to read. sissi 256 A-s* A Woman's Liberation I wrote out some little primers on rice cloth and made a game of it for the little children, first. Some of the older girls and women were curious. Some of them knew that people in the towns and cities could read. They saw it as a mystery, a witchcraft that gave the city people their great power. I did not deny this. For the women, I first wrote down verses and passages of the Arkamye, all I could remember, so that they could have it and not have to wait for one of the men who called themselves "priests" to recite it. They were proud of learning to read these verses. Then I had my friend Seugi tell me a story, her own recollection of meeting a wild hunting cat in the marshes as a child. I wrote it down. entitling it "The Marsh Lion, by Aro Seugi," and read it aloud to the author and a circle of girls and women. They marveled and laughed. Seugi wept, touching the writing that held her voice. foremen and honorary sons. all the hierarchy and government of the village, were suspicious and not pleased by my teaching, yet did not want to forbid me. The government of Yotebber Region had sent word that they were establishing country schools where village children were to be sent for half the year. The village men knew that their sons would be advantaged if they could already read and write when they went there. The Chosen Son, a big, mild, pale man, blind in one eye from a war wound, came to me at last. He wore his coat of office, a tight, long coat such as Werelian owners had worn three hundred years ago. He told me that 1 should not teach girls to read, only boys. TW> 257 i-"® FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS I told him I would teach all the children who wanted to learn or none of them. "Girls do not want to learn this," he said. "They do. Fourteen girls have asked to be in my class- Eight boys. Do you say girls do not need religious training, Chosen Son?" This gave him pause. "They should learn the life of the Merciful Lady," he said. "I will write the Life of Tual for them." I said at once. He walked away, saving his dignity. I had little pleasure in my victory, such as it was. At least I went on teaching. Tualtak was always at me to run away, run away to the city downriver. She had grown very thin, for she could not digest the heavy food. She hated the work and the people. "It's all right for you, you were a plantation pup, a dusty, but I never was, my mother was a rentswoman, we lived in fine rooms on Haba Street, I was the brightest trainee they ever had in the laboratory," and on and on, over and over, living in the world she had lost. Sometimes I listened to her talk about running away. 1 tried to remember the maps of Yeowe in my lost books. 1 remembered the great river, the Yot, running from far inland three thousand kilos to the South Sea. But where were we on its vast length, how far from Yotebber City on its delta? Between Hagayot and the city might be a hundred villages like this one. "Have you been raped?" I asked Tualtak. She took offense. "I'm a rentswoman, not a use-woman," she snapped. I said, "I was a use-woman for two years. If I was raped again, I would kill the man or kill myself. I i-xs. 258 a® A Woman's Liberation think two Werelian women walking alone here would be raped. I can't do it, Tualtak." "It can't all be like this place!" she cried, so desperate that I felt my own throat close up with tears. "Maybe when they open the schools — there will be people from the cities then —" It was all I had to offer her, or myself, as hope. "Maybe if the harvest's good this year, if we can get our money, we can get on the train. .. ." That indeed was our best hope. The problem was to get our money from the chief and his cohorts. They kept the cooperative's income in a stone hut which they called the Bank of Hagayot, and only they ever saw the money. Each individual had an account, and they kept tally faithfully, the old Banker Headman scratching your account out in the dirt if you asked for it. But women and children could not withdraw money from their account. All we could get was a kind of scrip, clay pieces marked by the Banker Headman, good to buy things from one another, things people in the village made, clothes, sandals, tools, bead necklaces, rice beer. Our real money was safe, we were told, in the bank. I thought of that old lame bondsman at Shomeke, jigging and singing, "Money in the bank, Lord! Money in the bank!" Before we ever came, the women had resented this system. Now there were nine more women resenting it. One night I asked my friend Seugi, whose hair was as white as her skin, "Seugi, do you know what happened at a place called Nadami?" "Yes," she said. "The women opened the door. All the women rose up and then the men rose up a«> 259 -o-a FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS against the Bosses- But they needed weapons. And a woman ran in the night and stole the key from the owner's box and opened the door of the strong place where the Bosses kept their guns and bullets, and she held it open with the strength of her body, so that the slaves could arm themselves- And they killed the Corporations and made that place. Nadami, free." "Even on Werel they tell that story," I said. "Even there women tell about Nadami, where the women began the Liberation. Men tell it too. Do men here tell it? Do they know it?- Seugi and the other women nodded. "If a woman freed the men of Nadami," I said, "maybe the women of Hagayot can free their money." Seugi laughed. She called out to a group of grandmothers, "Listen to Rakam! Listen to this!" After plenty of talk for days and weeks, it ended in a delegation of women, thirty of us. We crossed the ditch bridge onto the men's side and ceremoniously asked to see the chief. Our principal bargaining counter was shame. Seugi and other village women did the speaking, for they knew how far they could shame the men without goading them into anger and retaliation. Listening to them, I heard dignity speak to dignity, pride speak to pride. For the first time since I came to Yeowe I felt I was one of these people, that this pride and dignity were mine. Nothing happens fast in a village. But by the next harvest, the women of Hagayot could draw their own earned share out of the bank in cash. "Now for the vote," I said to Seugi, for there was As 260 a A Woman's Liberation no secret ballot in the village. When there was a regional election, even in the worldwide Ratification of the Constitution, the chiefs polled the men and filled out the ballots. They did not even poll the women. They wrote in the votes they wanted cast-But I did not stay to help bring about that change at Hagayot. Tualtak was really ill and halfcrazy with her longing to get out of the marshes, to the city. And I too longed for that. So we took our wages, and Seugi and other women drove us in an oxcart on the causeway across the marshes to the freight station. There we raised the flag that signaled the next train to stop for passengers. It came along in a few hours, a long train of boxcars loaded with marsh rice. heading for the mills of Yotebber City. We rode in the crew car with the train crew and a few other passengers, village men. I had a big knife in my belt, but none of the men showed us any disrespect. Away from their compounds they were timid and shy. I sat up in my bunk in that car watching the great, wild, plumy marshes whirl by, and the villages on the banks of the wide river, and wished the train would go on forever. But Tualtak lay in the bunk below me. coughing and fretful. When we got to Yotebber City she was so weak 1 knew I had to get her to a doctor. A man from the train crew was kind, telling us how to get to the hospital on the public cars. As we rattled through the hot, crowded city streets in the crowded car, I was still happy. I could not help it. At the hospital they demanded our citizen's registration papers. I had never heard of such papers. Later I found 3-ttfs 261 a"-® FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS that ours had been given to the chiefs at Hagayot, who had kept them, as they kept all "their" women's papers. At the time, all I could do was stare and say, "I don't know anything about registration papers." I heard one of the women at the desk say to the other, "Lord, how dusty can you get?" I knew what we looked like. I knew we looked dirty and low. I knew I seemed ignorant and stupid. But when I heard that word "dusty" my pride and dignity woke up again. I put my hand into my pack and brought out my freedom paper, that old paper with Erod's writing on it, all crumpled and folded, all dusty. "This is my Citizen's Registration paper," I said in a loud voice, making those women Jump and turn. "My mother's blood and my grandmother's blood is on it- My friend here is sick. She needs a doctor. Now bring us to a doctor!" A thin little woman came forward from the corridor. "Come on this way," she said. One of the deskwomen started to protest. This little woman give her a look. We followed her to an examination room. "I'm Dr. Yeron," she said, then corrected herself. "I'm serving as a nurse," she said. "But I am a doctor. And you — you come from the Old World? from Werel? Sit down there, now, child, take off your shirt. How long have you been here?" Within a quarter of an hour she had diagnosed Tualtak and got her a bed in a ward for rest and observation, found out our histories, and sent me off with a note to a friend of hers who would help me find a place to live and a job. VMS 262 3T»s> A Woman's Liberation "Teaching!" Dr. Yeron said. "A teacher! Oh, woman, you are rain to the dry land!" Indeed the first school I talked to wanted to hire me at once, to teach anything I wanted. Because I come of a capitalist people, I went to other schools to see if I could make more money at them. But I came back to the first one. I liked the people there. Before the War of Liberation, the cities of Yeowe, which were cities of Corporation-owned assets who rented their own freedom, had had their own schools and hospitals and many kinds of training programs. There was even a University for assets in the Old Capital. The Corporations, of course, had controlled all the information that came to such institutions, and watched and censored all teaching and writing, keeping everything aimed towards the maximization of their profits. But within that narrow frame the assets had been free to use the information they had as they pleased, and city Yeowans had valued education deeply. During the long war, thirty years, all that system of gathering and teaching knowledge had broken down. A whole generation grew up learning nothing but fighting and hiding, famine and disease. The head of my school said to me, "Our children grew up illiterate, ignorant. Is it any wonder the plantation chiefs just took over where the Corporation Bosses left off? Who was to stop them?" passion that only education would lead to freedom. They were still fighting the War of Liberation. Yotebber City was a big, poor, sunny, sprawling city with wide streets, low buildings, and huge old shady trees. The traffic was mostly afoot, with cycles .-*® 263 3A-s1 FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS tinging and public cars clanging along among the slow crowds. There were miles of shacks and shanties down in the old floodplain of the river behind the levees, where the soil was rich for gardening. The center of the city was on a low rise, the mills and train yards spreading out from it. Downtown it looked like the City of Voe Deo, only older and poorer and gentler. Instead of big stores for owners, people bought and sold everything from stalls in open markets. The air was soft here in the south, a warm, soft sea air full of mist and sunlight. I stayed happy. I have by the grace of the ford a mind that can leave misfortune behind, and I was happy in Yotebber City, Tualtak recovered her health and found a good job as a chemist in a factory. I saw her seldom, as our friendship had been a matter of necessity, not choice. Whenever 1 saw her she talked about Haba Street and her laboratory on Werel and complained about her work and the people here. Dr. Yeron did not forget me. She wrote a note and told me to come visit her, which I did. Presently, when I was settled, she asked me to come with her to a meeting of an educational society. This, I found, was a group of democrats, mostly teachers, who sought to work against the autocratic power of the tribal and regional chiefs under the new Constitution, and to counteract what they called the slave mind, the rigid, misogynistic hierarchy that I had encountered in Hagayot. My experience was useful to them, for they were all city people who had met the slave mind only when they found themselves governed by it. The women of the group were the angriest. They had lost the most at cat® 264 a*a. A Woman's Liberation Liberation and now had less to lose. In general the men were gradualists, the women ready for revolution. As a Werelian, ignorant of politics on Yeowe, I listened and did not talk- It was hard for me not to talk. I am a talker, and sometimes I had plenty to say. But I held my tongue and heard them. They were people worth hearing. Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd. Though the Chief, the President of Yotebber Region, elected by a manipulated ballot, might not understand our countermanipulations of the school curriculum, he did not waste much energy trying to control the schools, merely sending his inspectors to meddle with our classes and censor our books. But what he saw as important was the fact that, just as the Corporations had, he controlled the net. The news, the information programs, the puppets of the neareals, all danced to his strings. Against that, what harm could a lot of teachers do? Parents .who had no schooling had children who entered the net to hear and see and feel what the Chief wanted them to know; that freedom is obedience to leaders, that virtue is violence, that manhood is domination. Against the enactment of such truths in daily life and in the heightened sensational experience of the neareals, what good were words? "Literacy is irrelevant," one of our group said sorrowfully. "The chiefs have jumped right over our heads into the postliterate information technology." I brooded over that, hating her fancy words, irrelevant, postliterate, because I was afraid she was right. To the next meeting of our group, to my sur-a-s' 265 ""-® FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS prise, an Alien came: the Sub-Envoy of the Ekumen. He was supposed to be a great feather in our Chiefs cap, sent down from the Old Capital apparently to support the Chief's stand against the World Party, which was still strong down here and still clamoring that Yeowe should keep out all foreigners. I had heard vaguely that such a person was here, but I had not expected to meet him at a gathering of subversive schoolteachers. He was a short man, red-brown, with white corners to his eyes, but handsome if one could ignore that. He sat in the seat in front of me. He sat perfectly still, as if accustomed to sitting still, and listened without speaking, as if accustomed to listening. At the end of the meeting he turned around and his queer eyes looked straight at me. "Radosse Rakam?" he said. I nodded, dumb. "I'm Yehedarhed Havzhiva," he said. "1 have some books for you from old music." I stared. I said, "Books?" "From old music," he said again. "Esdardon Aya, on Werel." "My books?" I said. He smiled. He had a broad, quick smile. "Oh, where?" I cried. "They're at my house. We can get them tonight, if you like. I have a car." There was something ironic and light in how he said that, as if he was a man who did not expect to have a car, though he might enjoy it. Dr. Yeron came over, "So you found her," she said to the Sub-Envoy. He looked at her with such a bright face that I thought, these two are lovers. 33Aa 266 A-s A Woman's Liberation Though she was much older than he, there was nothing unlikely in the thought. Dr. Yeron was a magnetic woman. It was odd to me to think it, though, for my mind was not given to speculating about people's sexual affairs. That was no interest of mine. He put his hand on her arm as they talked, and I saw with peculiar intensity how gentle his touch was, almost hesitant, yet trustful. That is love, I thought. Yet they parted, I saw, without that look of private understanding that lovers often give each other. He and I rode in his government electric car, his two silent bodyguards, policewomen, sitting in the front seat. We spoke of Esdardon Aya, whose name, he explained to me, meant Old Music-1 told him how Esdardon Aya had saved my life by sending me here. He listened in a way that made it easy to talk to him. 1 said, "I was sick to leave my books, and I've thought about them, missing them, as if they were my family. But 1 think maybe I'm a fool to feel that way." "Why a fool?" he asked. He had a foreign accent, but he had the Yeowan lilt already, and his voice was beautiful, low and warm. I tried to explain everything at once: "Well, they mean so much to me because I was illiterate when I came to the City, and it was the books that gave me freedom, gave me the world — the worlds — But now, here, I see how the net, the holos, the neareals mean so much more to people, giving them the present time. Maybe it's just clinging to the past to cling to books. Yeowans have to go towards the future. And we'll never change people's minds jim with words." ,ets, s*-s 267 a»® FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS He listened intently, as he had done at the meeting, and then answered slowly, "But words are an essential way of thinking. And books keep the words true.... I didn't read till I was an adult, either." "You didn't?" "I knew how, but I didn't. I lived in a village. It's cities that have to have books," he said, quite decisively, as if he had thought about this matter. "If they don't, we keep on starting over every generation. It's a waste. You have to save the words." When we got to his house, up at the top end of the old part of town, there were four crates of books in the entrance hall. "These aren't all mine!" I said. "Old Music said they were yours," Mr. Yehedarhed said, with his quick smile and a quick glance at me. You can tell where an Alien is looking much better than you can tell with us. With us, except for the few people with bluish eyes, you have to be close enough to see the dark pupil move in the dark eye. "I haven't got anywhere to put so many," I said, amazed, realising how that strange man. Old Music, had helped me to freedom yet again. "At your school, maybe? The school library?" It was a good idea, but I thought at once of the Chief's inspectors pawing through them, perhaps confiscating them. When I spoke of that, the SubEnvoy said, "What if I present them as a gift from the Embassy? I think that might embarrass the inspectors." "Oh," I said, and burst out, "Why are you so kind? You, and he — Are you Hainish too?" "Yes," he said, not answering my other question. "I was. I hope to be Yeowan." a*-s 268 -a-® A Woman's Liberation He asked me to sit down and drink a little glass of wine with him before his guard drove me home. He was easy and friendly, but a quiet man. I saw he had been hurt. There were scars on his face and a gap in his hair where he had had a head injury. He asked me what my books were, and I said, "History." At that he smiled, slowly this time. He said nothing, but he raised his glass to me. I raised mine, imitating him, and we drank. Next day he had the books delivered to our school. When we opened and shelved them, we realised we had a great treasure. "There's nothing like this at the University," said one of the teachers, who had studied there for a year. There were histories and anthropologies of Werel and of the worlds of the Ekumen, works of philosophy and politics by Werelians and by people of other worlds, there were compendiums of literature, poetry and stories, encyclopedias, books of science, atlases, dictionaries. In a comer of one of the crates were my own few books, my own treasure, even that first little crude History of Yeowe, Printed at Yeowe University in the Year One of Liberty. Most of my books I left in the school library, but I took that one and a few others home for love, for comfort- 1 had found another love and comfort not long since, A child at school had brought me a present, a spotted When I tried to pass it on to another teacher they all laughed at me. "You're elected, Rakami" they said. So unwillingly I took the little being home, afraid of its frailty and delicacy and near to feeling a disgust for it. Women in the beza at Zeskra had had pets, a 269 -A-f FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS spotted cats and foxdogs, spoiled little animals fed better than we were. I had been called by the name of a pet animal once. I alarmed the kitten taking it out of its basket, and it bit my thumb to the bone. It was tiny and frail but it had teeth. I began to have some respect for it. That night I put it to sleep in its basket, but it climbed up on my bed and sat on my face until I let it under the covers- There it slept perfectly still all night. In the morning it woke me by dancing on me, chasing dust motes in a sunbeam. It made me laugh, waking, which is a pleasant thing. I felt that I had never laughed very much, and wanted to. The kitten was all black, its spots showing only in certain lights, black on black. I called it Owner. I found it pleasant to come home evenings to be greeted by my little Owner. Now for the next half year we were planning the great demonstration of women. There were many meetings, at some of which I met the Sub-Envoy again, so that I began to look for him. I liked to watch him listen to our arguments. There were those who argued that the demonstration must not be limited to the wrongs and rights of women, for equality must be for all. Others argued that it should not depend in any way on the support of foreigners, but should be a purely Yeowan movement. Mr. Yehedarhed listened to them, but I got angry. "I'm a foreigner," I said. "Does that make me no use to you? That's owner talk — as if you were better than other people!" And Dr. Yeron said, "I will believe equality is for all when I see it written in the Constitution of Yeowe." For our Constitution, ratified by a world vote during the time I was at 270 A Woman's Liberation Hagayot, spoke of citizens only as men. That is finally what the demonstration became, a demand that the Constitution be amended to include women as citizens, provide for the secret ballot, and guarantee the right to free speech, freedom of the press and of assembly, and free education for all children. I lay down on the train tracks along with seventy thousand women, that hot day. I sang with them. I heard what that sounds like, so many women singing together, what a big, deep sound it makes. I had begun to speak in public again when we were gathering women for the great demonstration. It was a gift I had, and we made use of it. Sometimes gang boys or ignorant men would come to heckle and threaten me, shouting, "Bosswoman, Owner-woman, black cunt, go back where you came from!" Once when they were yelling that, go back, go back, I leaned into the microphone and said, "I can't go back. We used to sing a song on the plantation where I was a slave," and I sang it, 0, 0, Ye-o-we, Nobody never comes back. The singing made them be still for a moment. They heard it, that awful grief, that yearning. After the great demonstration the unrest never died down, but there were times that the energy flagged, the Movement didn't move, as Dr. Yeron said. During one of those times I went to her and proposed that we set up a printing house and publish books. This had been a dream of mine, growing from that day in Hagayot when Seugi had touched her words and wept. A, 271 .A FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS "Talk goes by," I said, "and all the words and images in the net go by, and anybody can change them. But books are there. They last. They are the body of history, Mr. Yehedarhed says." "Inspectors," said Dr. Yeron. "Until we get the free press amendment, the chiefs aren't going to let anybody print anything they didn't dictate themselves." I did not want to give up the idea. I knew that in Yotebber Region we could not publish anything political, but I argued that we might print stories and poems by women of the region. Others thought it a waste of time. We discussed it back and forth for a long time. Mr. Yehedarhed came back from a trip to the Embassy, up north in the Old Capital. He listened to our discussions, but said nothing, which disappointed me. 1 had thought that he might support my project. One day I was walking home from school to my apartment, which was in a big, old, noisy house not far from the levee. I liked the place because my windows opened into the branches of trees, and through the trees I saw the river, four miles wide here, easing along among sandbars and reedbeds and willow isles in the dry season, brimming up the levees in the wet season when the rainstorms scudded across it. That day as I came near the house, Mr. Yehedarhed appeared, with two sour-faced policewomen close behind him as usual. He greeted me and asked if we might talk. I was confused and did not know what to do but to invite him up to my room. His guards waited in the lobby. I had fust the one big room on the third floor. I sat on the bed and a 272 As A Woman's Liberation the Sub-Envoy sat in the chair. Owner went round and round his legs, saying roo? roo? I had observed that the Sub-Envoy took pleasure in disappointing the expectations of the Chief and his cohorts, who were all for pomp and fleets of cars and elaborate badges and uniforms. He and his policewomen went all over the city, all over Yotebber, in his government car or on foot- People liked him for it. They knew, as I knew now, that he had been assaulted and beaten and left for dead by a World Party gang his first day here, when he went out afoot alone. The city people liked his courage and the way he talked with everybody, anywhere. They had adopted him. We in the Liberation Movement thought of him as "our Envoy," but he was theirs, and the Chief's too- The Chief may have hated his popularity, but he profited from it. "You want to start a publishing house," he said, stroking Owner, who fell over with his paws in the air. "Dr. Yeron says there's no use until we get the Amendments." "There's one press on Yeowe not directly controlled by the government," Mr. Yehedarhed said, stroking Owner's belly- "Look out, he'll bite," I said. "Where is that?" "At the University. I see," Mr. Yehedarhed said, looking at his thumb. I apologized. He asked me if I was certain that Owner was male. I said I had been told so, but never had thought to look. "My impression is that your Owner is a lady," Mr. Yehedarhed said, in such a way that I began to laugh helplessly. He laughed along with me, sucked the blood off his thumb, and went on. "The University never As 273 a FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS amounted to much. It was a Corporation ploy — let the assets pretend they're going to college. During the last years of the War it was closed down. Since Liberation Day it's reopened and crawled along with no one taking much notice of it. The faculty are mostly old. They came back to it after the War. The National Government gives it a subsidy because it sounds well to have a University of Yeowe, but they don't pay it any attention, because it has no prestige. And because many of them are unenlightened men." He said this without scorn, descriptively. "It does have a printing house." "I know," 1 said. I reached out for my old book and showed it to him. He looked through it for a few minutes. His face was curiously tender as he did so. I could not help watching him. It was like watching a woman with a baby, a constant, changing play of attention and response. "Full of propaganda and errors and hope," he said at last, and his voice too was tender. "Well, I think this could be improved upon. Don't you? All that's needed is an editor. And some authors." "Inspectors." I warned, imitating Dr. Yeron. "Academic freedom is an easy issue for the Ekumen to have some influence upon," he said, "because we invite people to attend the Ekumenical Schools on Hain and Ve. We certainly want to invite graduates of the University of Yeowe. But of course, if their education is severely defective because of the lack of books, of information ..." I said, "Mr. Yehedarhed, are you supposed to subvert government policies?" The question broke out of me unawares. A Woman's Liberation He did not laugh. He paused for quite a long time before he answered. "I don't know," he said. "So far the Ambassador has backed me- We may both get reprimanded. Or fired. What I'd like to do . .." His strange eyes were right on me again. He looked down at the book he still held. "What I'd like is to become a Yeowan citizen," he said. "But my usefulness to Yeowe, and to the Liberation Movement, is my position with the Ekumen. So I'll go on using that, or misusing it, till they tell me to stop." When he left I had to think about what he had asked me to do. That was to go to the University as a teacher of history, and once there to volunteer for the editorship of the press. That all seemed so preposterous, for a woman of my background and my little learning, that I thought I must be misunderstanding him. When he convinced me that I had understood him, I thought he must have very badly misunderstood who ( was and what I was capable of. After we had talked about that for a little while, he left, evidently feeling that he was making me uncomfortable, and perhaps feeling uncomfortable himself, though in fact we laughed a good deal and I did not feel uncomfortable, only a tittle as if I were crazy. I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. 1 found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine. But what I thought about was him, Yehedarhed Havzhiva. I kept seeing him sitting there in my old chair, stooping down to stroke Owner. Sucking blood off his thumb. Laughing. *A»s 275 s9.s FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS Looking at me with his white-cornered eyes. I saw his red-brown face and red-brown hands, the color of pottery. His quiet voice was in my mind. I picked up the kitten, half-grown now, and looked at its hinder end. There was no sign of any male parts. The little black silky body squirmed in my hands. I thought of him saying, "Your Owner is a lady," and I wanted to laugh again, and to cry. I stroked the kitten and set her down, and she sat sedately beside me, washing her shoulder. "Oh poor little lady," I said. I don't know who I meant. The kitten, or Lady Tazeu, or myself. He had said to take my time thinking about his proposal, all the time I wanted. But I had not really thought about it at all when, the next day but one, there he was, on foot, waiting for me as I came out of the school. "Would you like to walk on the levee?" he said. I looked around. "There they are," he said, indicating his coldeyed bodyguards. "Everywhere I am, they are, three to five meters away. Walking with me is dull, but safe. My virtue is guaranteed." We walked down through the streets to the levee and up onto it in the long early evening light, warm and pink-gold, smelling of river and mud and reeds. The two women with guns walked along just about four meters behind us. "If you do go to the University," he said after a long silence, "I'll be there constantly." " 1 haven't yet —" I stammered. "If you stay here, I'll be here constantly," he said. "That is/ if it's all right with you." I said nothing. He looked at me without turning S-MS' 276 A*-s A Woman's Liberation his head. I said without intending to, "I like it that I can see where you're looking." "I like it that I can't see where you're looking," he said, looking directly at me. We walked on. A heron rose up out of a reed islet and its great wings beat over the water, away. We were walking south, downriver. All the western sky was full of light as the sun went down behind the city in smoke and haze. "Rakam, I would like to know where you came from, what your life on Werel was," he said very softly I drew a long breath. "It's all gone," I said. "Past." "We are our past. Though not only that. I want to know you. Forgive me. 1 want very much to know you." After a while I said, " 1 want to tell you. But it's so bad. It's so ugly. Here, now, it's beautiful. I don't want to lose it." "Whatever you tell me I will hold valuable," he said, in his quiet voice that went to my heart. So I told him what I could about Shomeke compound, and then hurried on through the rest of my story. Sometimes he asked a question. Mostly he listened. At some time in my telling he had taken my arm, I scarcely noticing at the time. When he let me go, thinking some movement I made meant I wanted to be released, I missed that light touch. His hand was cool. I could feel it on my forearm after it was gone. "Mr. Yehedarhed," said a voice behind us: one of the bodyguards. The sun was down, the sky flushed with gold and red. "Better head back?" a?-® 277 -A-s> FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS "Yes," he said, "thanks." As we turned I took his arm. I felt him catch his breath. I had not desired a man or a woman — this is the truth — since Shomeke. I had loved people, and I had touched them with love, but never with desire, My gate was locked. Now it was open. Now I was so weak that at the touch of his hand I could scarcely walk on. I said, "It's a good thing walking with you is so safe." I hardly knew what 1 meant. I was thirty years old but 1 was like a young girl. I had never been that girl. He said nothing. We walked along in silence between the river and the city in a glory of failing light. "Will you come home with me, Rakam?" he said. Now I said nothing. "They don't come in with us," he said, very low, in my ear, so that I felt his breath. "Don't make me laugh!" I said, and began crying. I wept all the way back along the levee. I sobbed and thought the sobs were ceasing and then sobbed again. I cried for all my sorrows, all my shames. I cried because they were with me now and always would be. I cried because the gate was open and I could go through at last, go into the country on the other side, but I was afraid to. When we got into the car, up near my school, he took me in his arms and simply held me, silent. The two women in the front seat never looked round. We went into his house, which 1 had seen once sAs 278 a A Woman's Liberation before, an old mansion of some owner of the Corporation days. He thanked the guards and shut the door. "Dinner," he said. "The cook's out-1 meant to take you to a restaurant. I forgot." He led me to the kitchen, where we found cold rice and salad and wine- After we ate he looked at me across the kitchen table and looked down again. His hesitance made me hold still and say nothing. After a long time he said, "Oh, Rakam! will you let me make love to you?" "I want to make love to you," I said, "I never did. I never made love to anyone." He got up smiling and took my hand. We went upstairs together, passing what had been the entrance to the men's side of the house. "I live in the beza," he said, "in the harem. I live on the woman's side. I like the view." We came to his room. There he stood still, looking at me, then looked away. I was so frightened, so bewildered, I thought I could not go to him or touch him. I made myself go to him. I raised my hand and touched his face, the scars by his eye and on his mouth, and put my arms around him. Then I could hold him to me, closer and closer. Some time in that night as we lay drowsing entangled I said, "Did you sleep with Dr. Yeron?" I felt Havzhiva laugh, a slow, soft laugh in his belly, which was against my belly. "No," he said. "No one on Yeowe but you. And you, no one on Yeowe but me. We were virgins, Yeowan virgins. .. . Rakam, araha...." He rested his head in the hollow of my shoulder and said something else in a foreign language and fell asleep. He slept deeply, silently. Later that year I came up north to the University, a? 279 Ao FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS where I was taken on the faculty as a teacher of history. By their standards at that time, I was competent. I have worked there ever since, teaching and as editor of the press. As he had said he would be, Havzhiva was there constantly, or almost. The Amendments to the Constitution were voted, by secret ballot, mostly, in the Yeowan Year of Liberty 18. Of the events that led to this, and what has followed, you may read in the new three-volume History of Yeowe from the University Press- I have told theAstory 1 was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free. •a 280 Notes on Werel and Yeowe cAA) 1. Pronunciation of Names and Words GATAYAN, vowels have the usual "European values": a as in father (ah) e as in hey (ay) or let (eh) i as in machine (ee) or it (in) o as in go (o) or off (oh) u as in ruby (oo) In Voe Dean the accent is normally on the next-to-last syllable. Thus: Arkamye — ar-KAHM-yeh Bambur — BAHM-boor Boeba — bo-AY-bah Dosse — DOHS-seh Erod — EH-rod a® 281 •=-•£' FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS gareot — gah-RAY-ot Gatay — gah-TAH-ee gede — GHEH-deh Geu — GAY-oo Hame — HAH-meh Hagayot — hah-GAH-yot Hayawa — hah-YAH-wah Kamye — KAHM-yeh Keo — KAY-o makil — MAH-kihl Nadami — nah-DAH-mee Noeha — no-AY-hah Ramayo — rah-MAH-yo rega — RAY-gah Rewe — REH-weh San Ubattat — sahn-oo-BAHT-taht Seugi — say-00-ghee Shomeke — sho-MEH-keh Suhame — soo-HAH-meh Tazeu — tah-ZAY-oo Teyeo — teh-YAY-o Tikuli — tee-KOO-lee Toebawe — to-eh-BAH-weh Tual — too-AHL or TWAHL veot — VAY-ot Voe Deo — vo-eh-DAY-o Walsu — WAHL-soo Werel — WEH-rehl Yeowe — yay-0-way Yeron — YEH-rohn Yoke — YO-keh Yotebber — yo-TEHB-ber Yowa — YO-wah As 282 Notes on Werel and Yeowe Names formed with the name of the deities Kamye (Kam) and Tual tend to keep a stress on that element, thus: Abberkam — AHB-ber-KAHM Batikam — BAH-tih-KAHM Rakam — RAH-KAHM Sezi-Tual — SAY-zih-TWAHL Tualtak — TWAHL-tahk HAINISH (The extremely long lineage-names common among the Hainish are cut down for daily use; thus Mattin-yehedarhed-dyura-ga-muruskets becomes Yehedarhed.) araha — ah-RAH-ha Ekumen (from an Ancient Terran word) — EK-yoo-men Esdardon Aya — ez-DAR-don-AH-ya Havzhiva — HAHV-zhi-vah lyan lyan — ee-YAHN-ee-YAHN Kathhad — KAHTH-hahd Mezhe — MEH-zheh Stse — STSEH (like the capitalized letters in English "beST SEt'A Tiu — TYOO Ve — VEH Yehedarhed — yeh-heh-DAR-hed 2. The Planets Werel and Yeowe From A Handbook of the Known Worlds, printed in Darranda, Ham, Hainish Cycle 93, Local Year 5467. a® 283 -.-*•» FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS Ecumenical Year 2102 is counted as Present when historical dates are given as years Before Present (BP). The Werel-Yeowe solar system consists of 16 planets orbiting a yellow-white star (RK-tamo-5544-34). Life developed on the third, fourth, and fifth planets. The fifth, called Rakuli in Voe Dean, has only invertebrate life-forms tolerant of arid cold, and has not been exploited or colonised. The third and fourth planets, Yeowe and Werel, are well within the Hainish Norm of atmosphere, gravity, climate, etc. Werel was colonised by Hain late in the Expansion, within the last million years. It appears that there was no native fauna to displace, as all animal life-forms found on Werel, as well as some flora, are of Hainish derivation-Yeowe had no animal life until Werel colonised it 365 years BP. Werel Natural History The fourth planet out from its sun, Werel has seven small moons. Its current climate is cool tem- perate, severely cold at the poles. Its flora is largely indigenous, its fauna entirely of Hainish origin, modified deliberately to obtain cobiosis with the native plants, and further modified through genetic drift and adaptation. Human adaptations include a cyanotic skin coloration (from black to pale, with a bluish cast) and eyes without visible whites, both oao 284 3a® Notes on Werel and Yeowe evidently adjustments to elements in the solar radiation spectrum. Voe Deo: Recent History: 4000-3500 years BP, aggressive, progressive black-skinned people from south of the equator on the single great continent (the region that is now the nation of Voe Deo) invaded and dominated the lighter-skinned peoples of the north. These conquerors instituted a master-slave society based on skin color. Voe Deo is the largest, most numerous, wealthiest nation on the planet; all other nations in both hemispheres are dependencies, client states, or eco- nomically dependent on Voe Deo. Voe Dean economics have been based on capitalism and slavery for at least 3000 years. Voe Dean hegemony permits the general description of Werel as if it were all one society- As the society is in rapid change, however, this account will be put in the past tense. Social Classes under Slavery Class: master (owner or gareot) and slave (asset). Your class was your mother's class, without exception. Skin color ranges from blue-black through bluish or greyish beige to an almost depigmented white. (Only albinism affects hair and eyes, which are dark). Ideally and in the abstract, class was skin color: owners black, assets white- Actually, many owners were black, most were dark; some assets were black, most beige, some white. OWNERS were called men, women, children. The unqualified word owner meant either the CTO 285 "a® FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS class as a whole or an individual/family owning two or more slaves. The owner of one slave or no slaves was a staff-less owner or gareot. The veot was a member of an hereditary warrior caste of owners; the ranks were rega, zadyo, oga. Veot men almost invariably joined the Army; most veot families were landed proprietors; most were owners, some gareots. Owner women formed a subclass or inferior caste. An owner woman was legally the property of a man (father, uncle, brother, husband, son, or guardian). Most observers hold that the gender division of Werelian society was as profound and essential as the master/slave division, but less visible, as it cut across it, owner women being considered socially superior to assets of both sexes. Since women were property, they could not own property, including human property. They could, however, manage property. ASSETS were called bondsmen, bondswomen, pups or young. Pejorative terms: slaves, dusties, chalks, whites. Luls were work-slaves, owned by a person or a family. All slaves on Werel were luls, except makils and asset-soldiers. Makils were sold to and owned by the Entertainment Corporation. Asset-soldiers were sold to and owned by the Army. "Cutfrees" or eunuchs were male slaves castrated (more or less voluntarily, depending on age, etc.) to gain status and privilege. Werelian histories describe a number of cutfrees who rose to great power in var- ®*ri® 286 s-*a Notes on Werel and Yeowe ious governments; many held posts of influence throughout the bureaucracy. The Bosses of the bondswomen's side of the compound were invariably cutfrees. Manumission was extremely rare up until the last century, restricted to a few famous historical/ legendary cases of slaves whose supernal loyalty and virtue induced their masters to give them freedom. About the time the War of Liberation began on Yeowe, the practice of manumission became more frequent on Werel, led by the owner group The Community, which advocated the abolition of slavery. A manumitted asset ranked legally, though seldom socially, as a gareot. In Voe Deo at the time of the Liberation the proportion of assets to owners was 7:1. (About half these owners were gareots, owners of one or no assets.) In poorer countries the proportion dropped lower or reversed; in the Equatorial States the proportion of assets to owners was 1:5. In Werel as a whole, the proportion was estimated to be about three assets to one owner. The House and the Compound Historically and in the country, on the estates, farms, and plantations, the assets lived in a fenced or walled compound with a single gate. The compound was divided in halves by a ditch running parallel to the gate wall. Thegateside was the men's quarters, the inside was the women's. Children lived on the inside, until boys reaching working age (8 to 10) were sent over to the longhouse. Women lived in huts, mothers and daughters, sisters or friends usually sharing a hut, two to four women with their children. The •a.s 287 •a-s' FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS men and boys lived in gateside barracks called long-houses. Kitchen gardens were maintained by the old people and small children who did not go out to work; the old people generally cooked for the working people. The grandmothers ruled the compound. Cutfrees (eunuchs) lived in separate houses built against the outside wall, with a surveillance station on the wall; they served as Compound Bosses, intermediaries between the grandmothers and the Work Bosses (members of the owner family, or hired gareots, in charge of the working assets). Work Bosses lived in houses outside the compound. The owning family and their owner-class dependents occupied the House. The term House included any number of outbuildings, the Work Bosses' quarters, and animal barns, but specifically meant the family's large house. In conventional Houses the men's side (azade) and the women's side (beza) were strictly divided. The degree of restriction on the women reflected the wealth, power, and social pretension of the family. Gareot women might have considerable freedom of movement and occupation, but women of wealthy or distinguished family were kept indoors or in the walled gardens, never going out without numerous male escorts. A number of female assets lived on the women's side as domestics and for use of the male owners. Some Houses kept male domestics, usually boys or old men; some kept cutfrees as servants. In factories, mills, mines, etc., the compound system was maintained with some modifications. Where there was division of labor, alt-male compounds were controlled entirely by hired gareots; in all-female compounds the grandmothers were •s-w 288 ssAs Notes on Werel and Yeowe allowed to keep order as in country compounds. Men rented to the all-male compounds had a life expectancy of about 28 years. During the shortage of assets caused by the slave trade to Yeowe in the early years of the Colony, some owners formed cooperative breeding compounds, where bondswomen were kept and bred annually, doing light work; some of these "breeders" bore a baby annually for twenty or more years. Rentspeople: On Werel, all assets were individually owned. (The Corporations of Yeowe changed this practice; the Corporations owned the slaves, who had no private masters.) In Werelian cities, assets traditionally lived in their owners' households as domestics. During the last millennium it became increasingly common for owners of superfluous assets to rent them to businesses and factories as skilled or unskilled labor. The owners or shareholders of a company bought and owned individual assets individually; the company rented the assets, controlled their use, and shared the profits. An owner could live on the rental of two skilled assets. Thus rentsmen and rentswomen became the largest group of assets in all cities and many towns. Rentspeople lived in "union compounds" — apartment houses supervised by hired gareot Bosses. They were required to keep curfew and check in and out. (Note the difference between Werelian rentspeo-ple, rented out by their owner, and the far more autonomous Yeowan freedpeople, slaves who paid their owner a tithe or tax on freely chosen work, called "freedom rental." One of the early objectives of the Hame, the Voe Dean underground asset lib- a 289 a FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS eration group, was to institute "freedom rental" on Werel.) Most union compounds and all city households were gender-divided into azade and beza, but some private owners and some companies allowed their assets or rentspeople to live as couples, though not to marry. Their owners could separate them for any reason at any time. The mother's owner owned the children of any such asset couple. In the conventional compound, heterosexual access was controlled by the owners, the Bosses, and the grandmothers. People who "jumped the ditch" did so at their peril. The owner myth-ideal was of total separation of male and female assets, with the Bosses managing selective breeding, chosen stud asset males servicing the females at optimal intervals to produce the desired number of young. Female assets were mainly concerned, on exploitive farms, to avoid undesired breeding and yearly pregnancy. In the hands of benevolent owners, the grandmothers and cutfrees often could protect girls and women from rape, and even allow some affectional pairing. But bonding was discouraged both by the owners and the grandmothers; and no form of slave marriage was admitted by law or custom on Werel. Religions The worship of Tual, a Kwan Yin-like maternal deity of peace and forgiveness, was the state religion of Voe Deo. Philosophically, Tual is seen as the most important incarnation of Ama the Increate or Creator Spirit. Historically, she is an amalgam of many local and nature deities, and locally often refragments into multiplicity. Nationally, enforcement of the national •rAa 290 A-f Notes on Werel and Yeowe religion tended to accompany Voe Dean hegemony in other countries, although the religion is not inherently a proselytising or aggressive one. Tualite priests can and do hold high office in the government. Class: Tualite images and worship were maintained by the owners in all slave compounds, both on Werel and Yeowe. Tualism was the owners' religion. The assets' practice of it was enforced, and while including aspects of Tualite myth and worship in their rituals, most assets were Kamyites. By considering Kamye as "the Bondsman" and a lesser aspect of Ama, the Tualite priesthood included and tolerated Kamyite practice (which had no official clergy) among slaves and soldiers (most veots were Kamyites). The Arkamye or Life of Kamye the Swordsman (Kamye is also the Herdsman, a beastmaster deity, and the Bondsman, having been long in service to Lord Nightfall): a warrior epic, adopted about 3,000 years ago by the assets, pretty much worldwide, as the sourcebook of their own religion. It cultivates such warrior/slave virtues as obedience, courage, patience, and selflessness, as well as spiritual independence, a stoical indifference to the things of this world, and a passionate mysticism: reality is to be won only by letting the seeming-real go. Assets and veots include Tual in their worship as an incarnation of Kamye, himself an incarnation of Ama the Increate. The "stages of life" and "going into silence" are among the mystical ideas and practices shared by Kamyites and Tualites. The First Envoy (EY 1724) was met with extreme suspicion. After a closely guarded deputa- a-.® 291 -i-® FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS tion was allowed to land from the ship Hugum, alliance was rejected. Aliens were forbidden to enter the solar system by the Government of Voe Deo and its allies. Werel, led by Voe Deo, then entered on a rapid, competitive development of space technology and intensification of all techno-industrial development- For many decades, Voe Dean government, industry, and military were driven by a paranoid expectation of the armed return of conquering Aliens. It was this development that led within only thirteen years to the colonisation of Yeowe. During the next three centuries the Ekumen made contact at intervals with Werel. An exchange of information was initiated at the insistence of the University of Bambur, joined by a consortium of universities and research institutions. Finally, after over three hundred years, the Ekumen was permitted to send a few Observers. During the War of Liberation on Yeowe, the Ekumen was invited to send Ambassadors to Voe Deo and Bambur, and later Envoys to Gatay, the Forty States, and other nations. For some time nonobservance of the Arms Convention kept Werel from joining the Ekumen, despite pressure from Voe Deo on the other states, which insisted on retaining their weaponry. After the abrogation of the Arms Convention, Werel joined the Ekumen, 359 years after first contact and 14 years after the end of the War of Liberation. As a property of the Corporations, having no government of its own, Yeowe Colony was considered by its Werelian owners to be ineligible for Ekumenical membership. The Ekumen continued to question the right of the Four Corporations to ownership of the planet and its people. During the last Notes on Werel and Yeowe years of the War of Liberation, the Freedom Party invited Ekumenical observers to Yeowe, and the establishment of a regular Envoy there coincided with the end of the War. The Ekumen helped Yeowe negotiate an end to the economic control of the planet by the Corporations and the Government of Voe Deo. The World Party nearly succeeded in driving the Aliens as well as the Werelians off the planet, but when that movement collapsed, the Ekumen supported the Provisional Government until elections could be held. Yeowe joined the Ekumen in Year of Liberation 11, three years before Werel did. Yeowe Natural History The third planet out from its sun, Yeowe has a warm-moderate climate with little seasonal variation. Bacterial life is ancient and of normally vast complexity and adaptive variety. A number of microscopic marine Yeowan species are defined as animals; otherwise, the native biota of the planet were plants. On land there was a great variety of complex species, photosynthetic or saprophytic. Most were sessile, with some "creepers," colonial or individual plants capable of slow movement. Trees were the principal large life-form. South Continent was almost entirely tropical jungle/temperate rain forest from the coastlines up to timberline in the Polar Range and to the taiga of the Antarctic Circle. Great Continent, forested in the extreme north and south, was a steppe and savannah landscape at the higher central altitudes, with immense areas of bog, marsh, •sAs 293 a.s FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS and sea marsh on the coastal plains. In the absence of pollinating animals, the plants had many devices to use wind and rain to cross-fertilise and propagate: explosive seeds, winged seeds, seednets that catch the wind and float for hundreds of miles, waterproof spores, "burrowing" seeds, "swimming" seeds, and plants with mobile vanes, cilia, etc. The seas, which are warm and relatively shallow, and the vast sea marshes nourish a huge variety of sessile and floating plants, on the order of plank- ton, algaes, seaweeds, coral-type and sponge-type plants forming permanent constructions (mostly of silicon), and unique plants such as the "sailers" and the "mirrorweed." Vast connected "lily mats" were harvested by the Corporations so efficiently as to render the species extinct within thirty years. Heedless introduction of Werelian plant and animal species killed off or crowded out about 3/5 of the native species, aided by industrial pollution and war. The owners brought in deer, hunting dogs, hunting cats, and greathorses for their hunts. The deer thrived and destroyed a great deal of native habitat. Most introduced animal species failed in the long run. Werelian animal survivors other than humankind on Yeowe include: birds (domestic fowl brought in as game or as poultry; songbirds were released, and a few species adapted and survived) foxdogs and spotted cats (pets) cattle (domestic; many wild in abandoned districts) deer (wild, called fendeer, adapted to the marsh regions) hunting cats (feral, rare, in marshlands) s-s.® 294 s»a> Notes on Werel and Yeowe The introduction of some fish species in the rivers was disastrous to the native plant life, and what fish survived were destroyed by poison. All attempts to introduce ocean fish failed. Horses were slaughtered during the War of Liberation, as symbolic possessions of the owners; none remain. The Colony: The Settlement Early Werelian rockets reached Yeowe 365 years BP. Exploration, mapping, and prospecting were eagerly pursued. The Yeowe Mines Corporation, owned principally by Voe Dean investors, was given sole right to prospecting. Within twenty-five years, larger and more efficient ships made mining profitable, and the YMC began regular shipments of slaves to Yeowe and ores and minerals to Werel. The next major company established was the Second Planet Forest Woods Corporation, cutting and shipping Yeowan timber to Werel, where industrial and population expansion had reduced forests drastically. Exploitation of the oceans became a major industry by the end of the first century, the Yeowan Shippers Corporation harvesting the lily mats with immense profit. Having used up that resource, the YSC turned to the exploitation and processing of other sea species, especially the oil-rich bladder-weed. During the Colony's first century, the Agricultural Plantation Company of Yeowe began systematic culture of introduced grains and fruits and of native species such as the oe-reed and the pini fruit. The warm, equable climate of most of Yeowe and the ,-rtea 295 A-s FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS absence of insect and animal pests (maintained by scrupulous quarantine regulations) permitted an enormous expansion of agriculture. The individual enterprises of these four Corporations and the regions where they operated, whether in mining, forestry, mariculture, or agriculture, were catted "Plantations." The four great Corporations maintained absolute control over their respective products, though there were over the decades many battles (legal and physical) over conflicting rights to the exploitation of an area. No rival company was able to break the Corporations' monopoly, which had the full, active support — military, political, and scientific — of the Government of Voe Deo, a major beneficiary of Corporation profits. The principal investment of capital in the Corporations was always from the government and capitalists of Voe Deo. A powerful country at the time of the Settlement, after three centuries of the Colony Voe Deo was by far the richest country on Werel, dominating and controlling all the others. Its control over the Corporations on Yeowe, however, was nominal. It negotiated with them as with sovereign powers. Population and Slavery For the first century only male slaves were exported to Yeowe Colony by the Corporations, whose monopoly on slave shipment, via the Interplanet Cartel, was complete. In the first century, a high proportion of these slaves were from the poorer nations of Werel; later, as slave-breeding for the Yeowan market became profitable, more of them were sent from Bambur, the Forty States, and Voe Deo. af»@ 296 •s'"® Notes on Werel and Yeowe During this period, the population grew to about 40,000 of the owner class (80% male) and about 800,000 slaves (all male). There were several experimental "Emigration Towns," settlements of gareots (owner-class people without slaves), mostly mitts and service communities. These settlements were first tolerated, then abolished, by the Corporations, who induced the Werelian governments to limit emigration to Corporation personnel. The gareot settlers were shipped back to Werel and the services they had set up were staffed by slaves. The "middle class" of townsfolk and tradespeople on Yeowe thus came to be composed of semiindependent slaves (freedpeo-ple) rather than gareots and rentspeople as on Werel. Prices on bondsmen kept going up, as the Mining and Agricultural Corporations in particular squandered slave life (a mine slave during the first century was expected to have a "worklife" of five years). Individual owners increasingly often smuggled in female slaves as sexual and domestic servants. The Corporations, under these pressures, changed their rule and permitted the importation of bondswomen (238 BP). At first bondswomen, considered as breeding stock, were restricted to the compounds on the plantations. As their usefulness for all kinds of work became evident, these restrictions were eased by the owners on most plantations. Slave women, however, had to fit into the century-old social system of slave men, which they entered as inferiors, slaves' slaves. On Werel. all assets were personally owned, A-e" 297 a-s FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS except the makils (bought from their owners by the Entertainment Corporation), and asset-soldiers (bought from their owners by the government). On Yeowe, all slaves were Corporation-owned, bought by the Corporation from their Werelian owners. No slave on Yeowe could be privately owned. No slave on Yeowe could be freed. Even those brought in as personal servants, such as maids of plantation owners' wives, had their ownership transferred to the Corporation that owned the plantation. Though manumission was not allowed, as the slave population increased very rapidly, causing a surplus on many plantations, the status of freedper-son became increasingly common. Freedpeople found work for hire or independently and "rented freedom," paying one or more Corporations monthly or annually whatever fee (usually about 50%) was levied on them as a tax on their independent work. Most freedpeople worked as sharecroppers, shopkeepers, or mill hands, and in service industries; during the Colony's third century a professional class of freedpeople became well established in the cities, By the end of the third century, when the population growth had slowed somewhat, the total population of Yeowe was about 450 million; the proportion of owners to slaves was less than one to one hundred. About half the slave population were freedpeople. (The population 20 years after Liberation was again 450 million, all free.) On the plantations, the original all-male social structure set the pattern of slave society. Work gangs early developed into social groups (called gangs), and gangs into tribes, each with a hierarchy of power: a-*® 298 A-s Notes on Werel and Yeowe Tribesmen under a slave Headman or Chief, under the Boss, under the owner, under the Corporation. Bonding, competition, rivalry, homosexual privileges, and adoptive lineages became institutionalised and often elaborately codified. The only safety for a slave was membership in a tribe and strict adherence to its rules. Slaves sold away from their plantation had to serve as slaves' slaves, often for years, before they were accepted into membership of the local tribe. As women slaves were brought in, most of them became tribal, as well as Corporate, property. The Corporations encouraged this. It was to their advantage to have slave women controlled by the tribes, as the tribes were controlled by the Corporations. Opposition and insurrection, never able to organise widely, were always crushed with the instant and brutal finality of infinitely superior armaments. Headmen and chiefs colluded with the Bosses, who, working in the-interest of owners and Corporations, exploited the rivalries between tribes and the power struggles within them, while maintaining an absolute embargo on "ideology," by which they meant education, information of any kind from outside the local plantation. (On most plantations, well into the second century, literacy was a crime. A slave caught reading was blinded by dropping acid in the eyes or scraping the eyes from the sockets. A slave caught using a radio or network outlet was deafened by white-hot picks thrust through the eardrums. The "Fit Punishment Lists" of the Corporations and plantations were long, detailed, and explicit.) In the second century, as slave population shot As 299 'a> FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS up to the point of surplus on most plantations, a gradual trickle of both men and women towards the "shop-strips" run by freedpeople grew to a steady stream. Over the decades, the "shop-strips" grew into towns and the towns into cities entirely populated by freedpeople. Although doomsayers among the owners began to point to the ever-increasing size and independence of the "Assetvilles" and "Whiteytowns" and "Dustyburgs" as a looming threat, the Corporations considered the cities safely under control. No large buildings were allowed, no defensive structures of any kind; possession of a firearm was punished by disembowelment; no slave was allowed to operate any flying vehicle; the Corporations kept tight guard on raw materials and industrial processes that could provide weaponry of any kind to the slaves or freedpeople. "Ideology," education, did exist in the cities. Late in the second century of the Colony, the Corporations, while censoring, filtering, and altering information, formally gave permission for freedpeo-ple's children and some tribal children to be schooled up to age 14. They allowed slave communities to set up schools, and sold them books and other materials. In the third century the Corporations instituted and maintained an information and entertainment network for the cities. Educated workers were becoming valuable- The limitations of the tribes had become increasingly evident. Rigidly conservative, most tribal chiefs and Bosses were unable or unwilling to change any practices in any way, at a time when the abuse of the planet's resources called for radical changes in meth- a-O 300 vA-s Notes on Werel and Yeowe ods and objectives. It was clear that profit on Yeowe would increasingly come not from strip-mining. clear-cutting, and monoculture, but from refined industry, modem plants staffed by skilled workers capable of learning new techniques and following unfamiliar orders. On Werel, a capitalist slave society, work was done by people. Slave labor, whether simple brawn-work or highly skilled, was hand labor, aided by an elegant but ancillary machine technology: "The trained asset is the finest machine, and the cheapest." Production, even of very high-technology items, was essentially traditional craft of very high quality. Neither speed nor great volume was particularly valued. On Yeowe, late in the third century of the Colony, as raw material exports failed, slave labor was used in a new way. The assembly line was developed, with the conscious purpose not only of speeding and cheapening production, but also of keeping the worker ignorant of the work process as a whole. The Second Planet Corporation, dropping the words Forest Woods from its name, led the new manufacture. The SPC quickly surpassed the old giants. Mines and Agriculture, reaping huge profits from the sale of mass-produced finished goods to the poorer nations of Werel. By the time of the Uprising, more than half the freedworkers of Yeowe were owned by or rented to the Second Planet Corporation. There was far more social unrest in the mills and mill towns than on the tribal plantations. Corporation executives ascribed it to the increase in the number of "uncontrolled" freedpersons, and many advocated closing the schools, destruction of TW 301 SW FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS the cities, and reinstitution of sealed compounds for all slaves. The Corporations' city militia (gareots hired and brought from Werel, plus a police force of unarmed freedmen) increased to a considerable standing army, its gareot members heavily armed. Much of the unrest in the cities and attempts at protest centered on mills that used the assembly line. Workers who, feeling themselves part of an intelligible process, would tolerate very harsh conditions, found meaningless work intolerable, even though working conditions were in some ways improved. The Liberation began, however, not in the cities, but in the compounds of the plantations. The Uprising and the Liberation The Uprising had its origin in organisations of tribal women in plantations of Great Continent, joining together to prevent ritual rape of girl-children and to demand tribal laws against sexual enslavement of bondswomen by bondsmen, gang rape, and the beating and murder of women, for none of which was there any penalty. dren of both sexes, then by demanding proportional voice in the all-male tribal councils. Their organisations, called Woman Clubs, spread across both continents throughout the third century of the Colony. The Clubs spirited so many girls and women off the plantations into the cities that the chiefs' and Bosses' complaints began to be heard by the Corporations. Local tribesman and Bosses were encouraged to "go into the cities and get their women back." sws 302 a-*.® Notes on Werel and Yeowe These incursions, often led by plantation police and aided by the Corporation city militia, were often carried out with extreme brutality. City freed-people, unused to the kind of violence normal on the plantations, reacted with outrage. City bondsmen were drawn to defend and fight with the women. In 61 BP, in Eyu Province, in the town of Soyeso, the slaves' successful resistance to a police raid from Nadami Plantation (APC) escalated into an attack on the plantation itself. The police barracks were stormed and burned. Some of the chiefs of Nadami joined the uprising, opening their compounds to the rebels. Others joined in the defense of their owners in the Plantation House. A slave woman unlocked the doors of the plantation armory to the insurrection — the first time in the history of Yeowe Colony that any large group of slaves had access to powerful weapons. A massacre of owners followed, but it was partially restrained: most of the children of the Plantation House, and twenty women and men, were spared and put on a train to the capital. No adult slave who had fought against the uprising was spared. From Nadami the Uprising spread, by way of guns and ammunition, to three neighboring plantations. All the tribes joined, defeating Corporation forces in the quick, fierce Battle of Nadami- Slaves and freedpeople from neighboring provinces poured into Eyu. The chiefs, the grandmothers of the compounds, and the leaders of the insurrection met at Nadami and declared Eyu Province a free state. Within ten days, Corporation bombing raids and land troops had smashed the insurrection. aA 303 -Af- FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS Captured rebels were tortured and executed. Particular revenge was taken on the town of Soyeso; all the people left there, mostly children and the old, were herded into the town squares and trucks and tread-wheeled ore-carriers ran over and over them. This was called "paving with dust." The Corporations' victory had been quick and easy, but it was followed by a new insurrection at a different plantation, the murder of an owner's family here, a strike of city freedworkers there, all over the world. The unrest did not cease. Many attacks on plantation armories and militia barracks were successful; the insurrectionists now had weapons, and learned how to make bombs and mines. Hit-and-run warfare in the jungles and the great marshes gave the guerrillas' advantage to the rebels. It became clear that the Corporations needed more armaments and more manpower. They imported mercenary soldiers from the poorer nations of Werel. Not all of these were loyal or effective troops. The Corporations soon persuaded the government of Voe Deo to safeguard its national interest by investing troops in the defense of the Owners of Yeowe. At first the commitment was reluctant, but 23 years after Nadami, Voe Deo decided to put down the unrest once and for all, sending 45,000 troops, all veots (members of the hereditary warrior caste) or owner-volunteers. Seven years later, at the end of the war, 300,000 soldiers from Werel had been killed on Yeowe, most of them from Voe Deo, and most of them veots. The Corporations began to take their people off Yeowe several years before the end of the war, and during the final year of fighting there were almost a-*-® 304 T*-S Notes on Werel and Yeowe no civilian owners left on the planet. Throughout the thirty years of the War of Liberation, some tribes and many individual slaves sided with the Corporations, which promised them safety and rewards and furnished them with weapons. Even during the Liberation there were battles between rival tribes. After the Corporations and the army pulled out, tribal wars smouldered and flared up all over Great Continent. No central government was able to establish itself until Abberkam's World Party, defeating the Freedom Party in many local elections, seemed to be on the point of setting up the first World Council elections. In Year 2 of Liberation the World Party collapsed abruptly under accusation of corruption. The Envoys of the Ekumen (invited to Yeowe by the Freedom Party during the final year of the war) supported the Freedom Party in activating their constitution and setting up elections. The First Election (Year 3 of the Liberation), managed by the Freedom Party, established the new Constitution on rather shaky ground; women were not allowed to vote, many tribal votes were cast by the chiefs alone, and some of the hierarchic tribal structures were retained and legalised. There were several more fierce tribal wars and years of unrest and protest while the society of free Yeowe constructed itself. Yeowe joined the Ekumen in Year II of the Liberation, 19 BP, and the First Ambassador was sent in that year. Major amendments to the Yeowan Constitution, assuring all people over 18 the vote by secret ballot and guaranteeing equal rights, were voted by free general election in Year 18 of the Liberation. 305 0 Yeowe A h. ISaa A \- -Q__A A_A_______A -/kf A-AA-A 0 « « « « . . 1 0, 0, Ye-o-we, No-bo-dy ne-ver come back ATTENTION: ORGANIZATIONS AND CORPORATIONS Most HarperPaperbacks are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, or hind-raising. For information, please call or write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Telephone: (212) 207-7528. Fax: (212» 207-7222.
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Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги