THERE was no more time to make arrangements. Eternal had put down anchor. The Cancrioth waited, thirsty and sinking, in the bay beside Iritain. And in Iritain Baru’s parents waited, too.
They set out late in the morning, Governor Heingyl’s procession guarded by her own armsmen and by a party of Maroyad’s marines: the armsmen glared at them across the withers of the carriage team, resenting this sign of official distrust, even after the ballroom attempt on Ri’s life. Barhu would have left them all behind, but these armsmen were Ri’s family. And that left Barhu prodding, again, at thoughts of her parents. Was she ready to see them again? She’d expected more time to prepare … more results to show them, as justification for the choices she’d made … would she need to lie? Could she lie to her mother? Would Pinion hate Barhu already? Would she hate Solit, for letting Barhu go to the Iriad school?
She was so wrapped up in her worries that she lost her seat in the Governor’s carriage. Ake and Ude Sentiamut invited themselves along and stole Barhu’s place. She did not get a chance to speak to her would-be wife at all until they stopped for water.
“Heia, did you know that the Stakhieczi value salt a thousand times more than gold? Pan any river in the mountains and you’ll find gold. Salt, though, salt preserves food for the winter. That’s why their word for salary comes from their word for salt.”
“I know,” Heia said, with wary curiosity.
“Did you know that they make the finest steel in the world? As hard, as flexible, and as beautiful as Tain Hu.” This made Heia laugh. “Legend says they can tease a pound of steel from two pounds of raw soil. I heard in Aurdwynn that the secret ingredient is the mountain wind itself.”
She cocked her hip to support the barrel she was filling. “Is this your idea of courtship?”
It was. “Did you know that in Oriati Mbo they have a lot of salt and spices, and not nearly enough steel?”
I made Faham treat me roughly. His cover on the Llosydanes kept him doing real farm work, pulling stone and working plow. He was magnificently strong. He had sure hands and thick arms and a heart that made him what the maids in the Governor’s House used to call zisuczi: like steel. Afterward I lay against his broad chest and listened to him breathe in the dark. He ran a finger down my cheekbone. “Old Maia women are supposed to have hairy lips and bad tempers.”
“I pluck the hairs. And I do have an awful temper.”
“You should smoke more.”
“I can’t smoke away my problems, Fa.”
“The world is a dream.” He kissed me behind the ear. “It might as well be a pleasant one.”
I shivered at the warmth of his lips. He and I both knew that the dream would not be pleasant for long. A choice would have to be made.
I did not know if I could give Barhu everything she wanted. I was not certain at all. She had come from a trading village on a trading island. She had been raised by a man who used commerce and influence as his weapons. She had never been merely common.
There was so much she didn’t understand.
In the morning we waited in the small front room of our house in the Annalila fortress yard, borrowed from a retired rocketry mate. Stewards served coffee in glass pots, with prisms of Souswardi sugar and shaved fruit on ice. I wondered where they got the ice from, and how long they could keep it from melting.
Shao Lune arrived with a thick roll of sheepskin palimpsest under her arm. “Your Excellences. So pleased to see you here.”
“Show us,” I snapped.
Shao Lune hung her diagram with a pair of clothespins. A deck plan of Eternal, annotated with details of dimensions, materials, assessment of fire hazard. The ship’s cannon-powder magazines a splotch of dangerous red, forward of amidships and directly below the cargo hoists.
Faham Execarne gave a grudging nod. “I believe these plans are genuine.”
“How can you tell?” I asked him. I was in agreement: forgers always gave it away in the linework. But I was curious what tells he looked for.
“All the stupid shit in the design. If she’d forged this, she would’ve made the plans make sense. Real ships have history.”
I waved to Shao Lune. “Please proceed.”
“Your Excellences.” Shao Lune beckoned her companion forward. “Upon my request, Commander Falway has prepared a plan for a compartment-by-compartment seizure of Eternal. The plan calls for a primarily lethal approach, using gas, smoke, and flooding as the main force components. We’ll take prisoners from the wounded and subdued. The action will begin with divers from Sterilizer, to secure lines on Eternal’s hull and prepare an approach for the boats—”
“This is all, of course,” I said, “strictly a contingency plan, in the event that the negotiations do not meet my requirements. Not to be enacted without express authorization.”
“Yes, Jurispotence.” Shao Lune nodded with quiet, professional competence.
THE crater of Isla Cauteria’s peak still smoldered; Barhu wondered if Taranoke’s old gods of stone and fire lived here now. Certainly there was other life in plenty. On the carriage ride she tallied wild goats, feral pigs, stiltbirds, nene-ducks, geckos swarming over hot stones, night herons, frigatebirds above, finches and sparrows and pheasants, rock doves (pigeons, in nice scenery), hawks and gyrfalcons like the sorts that allegedly perched on the heads of gyraffes. Young ohia and koa trees boulevarded the road, shadowing tall blue ginger, cup vines, and everblooming lantana. Iscend climbed up onto the carriage roof with refreshments, then lay beside Barhu and inquired after various birds.
“Iscend,” Barhu asked her. “Whatever I do as an agent of the Emperor is in service of the Republic, correct?”
“Within reasonable limits, I should think,” Iscend said, so cheerfully that Barhu almost thought she was being teased.
“What would those limits be?”
“The general improvement of the Republic’s condition. The suppression of disease and disorder. The pursuit of an Incrastic future of ordered breeding, sterile homes, equal yet specialized races and sexes. And a complete understanding of the natural world, so that all its forces and peculiarities may be accounted for in the Republic’s policies.”
Barhu considered the economy of the clouds in the sky. What currency did clouds use? How did they pay for their own existence, so as to grow fat and thunderous? What difficulties and expenses made them dwindle away?
“What if Incrasticism were itself disproven?” she asked. “What if Incrastic thought were outstripped by some foreign alternative? Say, for example, that a foreign mathematics were to make some discovery beyond Incrastic knowledge.”
“Incrasticism is a self-improving tool. It is flexible and amenable to change.”
“Could it ever change so that it was amenable to me?”
“You mean, could it become accepting of the tribadist?” Iscend was looking right at her now, not even blinking: a signal of openness, but also of wariness. “That would depend on the origin of the taboo. Some argue it existed before Incrasticism, in the days of the Verse-hammer and their wars against the shaheen kings. Others say it was a reaction to the decadence of the Fourth Dynasty. A taboo supported, of course, by the most rigorous scientific investigation.”
“Science like Torrindic heredity.” Behaviors enter the hereditary particles, to be passed down to offspring. “What if that heredity were wrong?”
“You’re suggesting that my very existence is based on a lie!” But Iscend was smiling like a barracuda.
“You’re teasing me,” Barhu said, in wonder.
Iscend adopted an Urun accent. “I could not possibly do so.”
“Now you’re imitating Ulyu Xe!”
Somehow she made herself looser, an interior uncoiling, relaxing into the motions of the carriage, like she was full of water. “I can be her. I can be anyone you need me to be.”
Barhu scoffed. “Don’t be silly.”
The Clarified woman’s face narrowed. Her shoulders tightened, her breath came through her nose, and she glared at Barhu with serpentine intensity. “I can, though.”
“Oh, don’t be her,” Barhu groaned.
Iscend’s eyes flattened into indifference. Her muscles tensed, relaxed again, so she lay on the carriage roof like a sprawled panther. Her hands were loose fists. The red of her lips suggested a mouthful of blood.
Barhu recognized the imitation, and shuddered.
“Interesting reaction,” Iscend said, coyly.
SUNSET caught them just five miles from Aratene, on the mountainside above the the Rubiyya valley. Governor Heingyl called for a halt, to spare the horses from a risky descent in the dark. As soon as the tents were pitched she launched a blackberry-picking expedition “in the name of Aurdwynn’s ranger tradition.” Ake Sentiamut walked with her, the two women speaking intently in Iolynic, exchanging small energetic gestures.
“Like they’re cooking together,” Barhu said, bewildered. “Look at their hands! Chopping, gathering, mixing…”
“Concerned, my lady?” Iscend asked. “Should I eavesdrop?”
“No, no.” It was just hard to give up control.
Barhu climbed a tree, trying to spy Eternal’s masts in the cove to the northwest. There was nothing to see in the falling dark, so she turned to voyeuristic observation of the camp. Was Haradel Heia flirting with her handmaidens? Or was that just how Aurdwynni ladies associated in high company? The compliments, the laughter, the delighted exchanges of food and favor?
Somewhere on her blind side a branch snapped like a pistol shot: she leapt in surprise, and looked.
A stag stood below her, dying.
It had the velvet antlers of spring growth, flush with blood and water. They had been crushed and now they bled down its face. Another wound on its breast yielded dark arterial red. One of Heia’s handmaidens saw the stag and shrieked. The Stag Duchess herself stood aghast, hands black with raspberry juice. Not with all the repertory in Falcrest could you have invented a better image of her father’s ghost.
The stag screamed like a maimed man, exactly like the man Ude Sentiamut had mercy-killed by the Fuller’s Road. One of the armsmen wailed and tore at his jerkin. “It’s calling to her! It’s saying her name!”
Haradel Heia covered her mouth. Blackberry juice stained her cheeks.
Something in the tall grass behind the stag made a sound like a bird chirp. It grew, not birdlike, to a growl. A red catamount rose up from its crouch in the treeline and leapt onto the stag’s haunches. The stag warbled, tried to buck it off. The cat climbed, grabbing bloody paw-holds with its claws, trying for the throat and the killing bite.
But the catamount couldn’t open its jaws. It could only nuzzle the stag’s throat. A rusty trap dangled from its back leg. If it were human it would have sobbed in desperation.
The thing had lockjaw.
A cold premonition of danger on her blind side. Barhu glanced over, saw the Stakhi armsman who’d shouted in horror. He was crying. Torn between love of the old duke’s daughter, and anguish at the old duke’s ghost screaming and bleeding under the claws of a catamount, the symbol of Tain Hu, the woman who had killed him.
You could not ask for a clearer omen. Old Heingyl’s ghost was begging for revenge as the spirit of Tain Hu tore at him.
Barhu leapt down from the tree and did the only thing she could do. She found a longbow and a quiver and went to kill the maimed things. Iscend met her with a glass bottle from the medical bag. “This will help.” The label read:
POISON LETHAL POISON: RAPID CONCENTRATED KRATOM OPIATE ALCOHOL SOLUTION WITH ACONITE SUPPLEMENT: FOR LARGE ANIMAL DEFENSE IN BAITS OR BOLTS.
LOT ONE OF SEVEN WINTER AR 130.
HOMEOPATHY IS A FRAUD: DO NOT ATTEMPT.
It even had a little brush, for application. Their poisons, Hu, are as useful as their roads. Barhu plunged the brush into the bottle, turned it to get a good coat, nodded when Iscend said “Be very careful,” and painted a ring of poison—not on the arrowhead itself, where the target’s skin could wipe it away, but on the shaft behind the head.
She nocked the arrow and drew.
In winter memory, Tain Hu touched Baru’s elbow, drew her spine a little straighter, pressed at the curve of her back. She whispered,
“Shoot.”
Barhu sighed and shot the stag. It groaned and fell. Then the catamount: draw, aim, sigh, shoot.
Heingyl Ri ordered the mournful armsman back to Annalila Fortress at once, clearly worried about what he might do in his agony. Then she ordered her house to help burn the corpses.
It was the fire that betrayed Barhu’s camp to the people hunting her. But she did not know that yet.
“WHAT a terrible omen.” Haradel Heia, Governor of Aurdwynn, shuddered and shifted closer to the fire. “My father’s sign. Tain Hu’s sign. They aren’t at peace.…”
“It wasn’t Tain Hu,” Barhu assured her. “Tain Hu rests well.”
“Dangerous to speak for the dead,” Heia murmured.
“She trusted me to speak for her.” Barhu poked the fire with the catamount’s thighbone. She and Iscend had slaughtered the cat, curious about its anatomy. It had made a bloody mess of Barhu’s traveling clothes, and she had stripped down to linens, a loose tunic, and a cloak. Crouched at the fireside now, she was curious to see Heia noticing her legs.
Iscend hadn’t washed. In place of her calisthenics she was silently, viciously fighting Heia’s armsmen, winning sometimes, losing sometimes, a bloodsmeared specter on Barhu’s blind side. The men were ginger with her until she threw them, or hit them in the throat.
“You really married her,” Heia said, guardedly.
“I did. I think. Are you married, if you choose a consort? Maybe we were only betrothed. But I could argue that I was acclaimed Queen, and had the power to execute the marriage. Certainly,” she even managed to wink like Tain Hu, “the marriage was consummated.”
Her firelight flush. “And now you want to marry me?”
“I want to pass to you the claim to the Mansion Uczenith, so you can bring it as dowry to the Necessary King.”
“I feel quite self-conscious.” Heia plucked at her square neckline. “I’ve never, ah, thought of another woman as—it’s quite—you’re so much taller than me!”
Barhu laughed. “So?”
“I’ve always been shorter than my suitors. It made me nervous, knowing they could hurt me. But it’s not the same with a woman. You’re taller, but it doesn’t trouble me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Women always felt safer to me.”
“That must be a nice way to live,” Barhu muttered, quite against her resolution to be charming.
“How so?”
“Women have never been safe for me, Your Grace.”
“Really? In my experience people don’t notice tribadists.”
Barhu stared at her. “I feel like an actuary most days. Putting a risk on every glance.”
“Tain Hu made it seem like she just reached out and plucked women like grapes. No one gave her much trouble because … well, because Yawa protected her, of course, but also”—Heia giggled, actually giggled at this thing that had terrified Barhu all her life—“it was as if people didn’t understand what she was doing.”
“Didn’t understand…?” What was there to not understand?
“They really didn’t imagine that women could—you know! There were always women who married women, even among the Stakhi. Women did it to unite households. But the Stakhi didn’t consider women as … capable of conjugation with each other.”
“Or they did, and the Masquerade erased the evidence of that belief.”
“Perhaps,” Heia conceded.
“Your husband certainly understood women were ‘capable of conjugation.’ Did he ever go ahead and report me?”
“No,” Heia said, into the fire.
“Why?”
“Bel had reasons. Something that happened to a boy in school with him. It’s not my story to tell.”
Barhu was startled by the idea of an actual Falcresti schoolboy, and a man at that, suffering under Incrastic hygiene. Heia saw her expression: “I know. It caused some uproar. The way it doesn’t, when it’s done to people like us.”
“Incrastic hygiene scours harsh,” Barhu murmured.
“And yet,” Haradel Heia sighed, “for the first time in its entire history, enough of Treatymont’s babies survive childhood for the city to grow without immigration.”
“I think that’s a false dichotomy.”
“Your pardon?”
“I don’t think our choice is simply between accepting Incrastic hygiene in its entirety, or going back to the days before modern sewers and soap.”
“Aren’t the theories which justify the hygiene also the theories which gave us inoculations and handwashing?”
“Do you think the sewers and the roads justify the rest of what they do?”
Heia clasped her hands and thought.
And of course Barhu fell in love with her. Just for an instant. She saw a tiny duchess with sharp eyes and an ocean of blood on her hands, staring into the fire, considering the possible futures she might engineer. Of course, in that moment, she loved her.
“I don’t know,” Heia said. “My father served the Masquerade because he took a vow. I’ve never thought of their presence as … something that could be changed.”
“It might be.” Barhu leaned forward, hands on her bare knees. “If you make the right choices.”
“I won’t leave Bel, you realize,” Heia said, quietly. “I just … I’m sorry. I can’t imagine making my life with a woman.”
“The Necessary King is a man. You could make a life with him.”
Heia leaned forward into the firelight. Behind her, Iscend shook an armsman’s hand with her blood-caked own, and walked off into the forest to bathe.
“You know that if Bel dies I’ll blame you? You and Yawa? No matter how subtle and accidental it seems.”
Barhu growled in frustration and prodded the fire with her bone. “I’ve made no plans to kill him. But I can’t let Aurdwynn be lost because of one man.”
“Well,” Ri said, firmly, “I won’t break his heart.”
“Fuck,” Barhu muttered.
“No, but thank you.”
“You’re not funny.”
“You do think I’m funny,” Heia said, smiling. The firelight was painfully flattering. “I can tell.”
“I need to take a piss,” Barhu lied.
She got up and went out to the dark.
“OH, please,” Barhu groaned. “Don’t pretend you weren’t waiting for me.”
“I don’t mean to be alluring,” Iscend said, placidly. “I was washing, and wanted to think.”
She floated in the stream, side-on to the current, moored to the north bank with one finger and to the south bank with one foot. She had to arch a little to keep her backfloat. The effect was immensely, unwantedly flattering.
“Stop,” Barhu begged her. She had never had the slightest trouble separating incidental nudity from sexuality: what was it about these Falcresti women that denied her that clarity? “Please, please, don’t play this ridiculous role. You were trained to read people! You know I don’t want this.”
It was not that Barhu didn’t want sex (she was not yet twenty-five, for Himu’s sake, she deserved to wander) but that the incredible discomfort of Iscend’s conditioning made Barhu sick at the thought. She kicked a rotten stump in frustration. It spilled over and a centipede of prodigious size scuttled away. She yelped.
Iscend frowned up at her. “You interest me. Your responses are strange. In the Metademe, we find people are enticed and aroused by the naked body. But you’re not from a society where desire must be coded and hidden. You don’t react the same way.”
“I don’t like to mix sex and business.”
“A taboo I don’t share.”
“Why not?” Barhu challenged her. “Doesn’t it bother you when everything women do is read as sexual provocation? Doesn’t it frustrate you when your professional encounters are taken as invitations?”
“Sex is a useful tool in espionage. It makes people talk. It can draw them into error, which can be leveraged. Sex is one of the basic elements of blackmail, and blackmail is one of the One Trade’s nine methods for running an agent.”
“I don’t like it,” Barhu said, stubbornly.
“Tell me, are you familiar with the archetype of the seductress?” Leaves pasted themselves across her upstream flank, glued by pressure to her skin. “The woman who uses sex as an instrument of politics, and manipulates her partners through their desire.”
“How couldn’t I be,” Barhu said bitterly, having read plenty of books about Falcresti spies on Taranoke.
Iscend let herself swing sideways, like a rudder in the current, and kept her place by gripping the stones. Her arms corded with the effort. Leaves plumed away downstream. Various factions inside Barhu begged her to leap in the water and do something, anything, drown herself if necessary, just stop looking, it was unbearable.
“In my review of popular literature,” Iscend said, “I discovered that the seductress usually appears as a villain. She generally succeeds in the seduction of other characters. This provides the reader with a kind of secondhand sexual encounter. But she always fails in the ultimate attainment of her goals.”
The stream parted over her, around her graceful neck, down the smooth grid of her abdomen and the muscles in her thighs. The whole world caressing her existence. Barhu hated her mind for thinking this way; she was genuinely fascinated by Iscend’s thoughts.
Iscend continued. “Generally a writer strives for characters the reader finds credible, wouldn’t you say? Yet savvy readers must instantly discredit seductresses as an antagonist or threat. Why, then, does the archetype still recur, when it must have been robbed of all effect?”
Barhu thought of Duchess Nayauru, who had very nearly wedded her way to control of Aurdwynn. She’d also been a patron of engineering and a cunning politician. But Barhu had for too long thought of her merely in terms of her liaisons.
“Punishment, I suppose. Negative reinforcement.”
“Exactly. The seductress establishes the manipulation of sexual access as a social threat, and her failure discourages the behavior as ineffective. The titillation of the sex act rewards the reader for their contempt. They will be at once aroused by the seductress and satisfied by her downfall.”
Barhu sat down on the streambank. “It’s rather like managing different currencies in one economy, isn’t it? The seductress enters her desirability into the economy as a commodity. But the law forbids her from exchanging it for other currencies. Such as political influence, or money. She is punished for the attempt: whether by those who fear the power she would gain, or those who fear the negative consequences it would have for other women.”
Iscend giggled. “What a silly way to put it.”
“You’re very good at pretending to giggle, you know that?”
“Thank you,” Iscend said, rewarding Barhu with a sly look. “The interesting question, I think, is why this seductress is always a woman.”
“A very anti-mannist sentiment.” Barhu frowned. “Why is it called anti-mannism, anyway? Why not womanism?”
“There was a woman’s movement, early after the revolution. They demanded the vote, a law requiring gender-blind legislation, hysteric self-determination, and so forth. Iro Mave was involved—”
“Who?”
“Lapetiare’s tactician. She was of Oriati ancestry, which is rarely touched on in popular histories. She caused a schism in the movement over issues of race. Afterward, ‘womanism’ was seen as a word too closely tied to racial affairs, particularly the rights of Oriati women. Anti-mannism, a movement against the preeminence of men in society, became more socially accepted.”
Barhu made a note to read more about Iro Mave. “Why do you think the seductress is always a woman?”
Iscend twisted to duck her face underwater. Barhu, relaxing into the conversation, found herself still idly admiring Iscend’s body. Iscend seemed to welcome Barhu’s eyes—but did Iscend welcome it? Or had she been conditioned to make herself seem welcoming to Barhu’s eyes, so that the choice was not actually hers at all?
“I suppose it lies in the difference between men and women,” Iscend said. “It is as apparent in birds as in human beings. Males make displays to illustrate their value, and females choose the males whose value they like best. A seductress invites the display.”
“Why shouldn’t it be the other way? The women advertise and the men choose? Aren’t women more…” Barhu struggled to imagine how a man might look at a woman. “Contoured?” she tried, desperately. “Featured? Interesting? In Treatymont, most of the dancers and prostitutes were women, and they certainly made displays.…”
“That is only a side effect of desperation; their sexual availability is valuable because normally a woman is hard to obtain. Incrasticism says that it’s this way because women must spend more effort having a child. We can’t afford to choose inferior males as our mates. That’s why men fall to promiscuity, but women fall to perversion. The man’s desire for many children is deranged into the desire for many mates. The woman’s desire for a particularly good mate is deranged into the desire for a particular perversion.”
“But that can’t be right,” Barhu protested.
“Why not?”
Because of greatfamilies like Ulyu Xe’s, or Barhu’s own, where women did not adhere to one man. “It’s just what you said—each child is a huge investment! A woman can’t afford to have all her children with one father, because then the babies would all die to the same diseases, they would all have the same strengths and flaws. And if all her men think they might be the father of a child, then they all help care for the baby. This is why it’s good luck for the wife to be with all her husbands on the marriage night.”
“But the truth of biology is that a child has only a single father.”
“If biology explained everything about parents and love, would there be adoption? Would anyone raise stepchildren as their own? Yet they do, Iscend, you can’t deny it!”
“Perhaps so,” Iscend conceded. “But you’re an accountant, aren’t you, not a eugenicist? How could you possibly challenge the Incrastic account of heredity with your knowledge?”
“I bet you I can,” Barhu said, with that offhand confidence that Hu had always used to drive her mad.
“Oh?” Iscend raised her head from the water. “What will you stake in the bet?”
But Barhu, already racing ahead into thought, entirely missed the flirtation.
ACCOUNT for the existence of the tribadist, the sodomite, and the doubly-taboo omnamorous, using only economics. Can it be done?
Imagine a man and a woman (or anyone with a womb, man or laman or any other sort, but, for brevity’s sake, a woman).
Imagine that each person, man or woman, has a hundred coins to spend on childbearing. The man can spend as little as one coin and walk away: one drop of seed to make the child. The woman must at minimum expend nine months of coin to get the child to term, and then, assuming she does not forecast poor finances and leave the child to die of exposure (a practice that had happened nearly everywhere in the world), spend even more coins to raise the child to adulthood.
So the man wants to spend only one coin and the woman must spend nearly her whole fortune. Why, therefore, don’t the men all fuck and run? Why are babies not raised by mothers alone?
Because babies are so expensive that they need two parents’ investment to keep them alive. Especially if conditions are harsh. So it is important, as a mother, to draw investment from others. A husband is one way to get that investment. Incrasticism says those without husbands will not see their children survive, so they will not pass their behavior down. Incrasticism says this is why women are suited to forethought, planning, conspiracy, and entrapment: because their biology favors such traits in securing husbands and building futures for their children.
But why would a woman spend a hundred coins on the same man’s children over and over again? There is incentive to hedge and diversify, and to confuse the paternity of a child, even to the mother herself. That would give women as powerful an incentive to fuck around as men. It could explain the Tu Maia greathouses and the families of Taranoke, where many men and women might marry each other.
But all of this still required a mother and a father. It did not explain people like Barhu.
What if it was impossible for the mother to get support from the father? What if you lived in a society like the bastè ana, where husbands left after one night? Or like the Stakhieczi, where all the husbands might go to war?
You could get investment from one of your sisters instead. Say she loves only women. Say she has no children and never spends her coins. She is fierce and fast, she goes out hunting and she brings back her kill to share with you. Or she is soft and gentle and she knows how to cook safe food and how to treat a baby’s maladies while you sleep. But let us imagine her as a huntress, because huntresses are attractive. A sister who loves women, childless, but devoted to the survival of her sisters’ children.…
But that didn’t make any sense at all. It was impossible.
If a woman took only women as lovers and had no children, then the huntress behavior would never be passed down into the hereditary particles. Perhaps if she fucked her sisters, and taught them the behavior to go into their children … but the thought of incest disgusted Barhu. Second cousin Lao, fine, Barhu would admit to certain adolescent longings. But never a sister.
So there was no way for these huntresses to have children who were like them.
Only—the world was full of women who loved women—
So where did they come from? Why was the behavior not extinguished?
“Where do I come from?” Barhu asked, aloud.
“DO you concede the bet?”
“No,” Barhu snapped, “but I’m stuck.”
“There is,” Iscend said, conspiratorially, “a certain heretical idea among the Clarified.”
“What is it?”
“We breed plants for our heredity experiments. They grow quickly and they do not, ah, complain if radically modified. In the course of our breeding we have found … certain stubborn failures of Torrindic heredity.” Iscend shuddered, a full-body wriggle of disgust, and grimaced for a moment. Then she relaxed: she had found some way to rationalize this to her conditioning.
“The things we do to plants, like pruning off all the leaves on one side, do not seem to be inherited and passed down. The orthodox account says that plants lack the flesh memory of a living being. Since they have no behavior, of course they cannot inherit it. But we know that plants can learn; we have taught plants to grow toward certain sounds or colors. If plants can learn, why is this learning never inherited?”
“Tell me,” Barhu said, to give her that push of approval. Tell me everything, Iscend.
“We have a model … a toy model, a thought play … which explains the patterns of inheritance we see in plants. In our pretend world, our alternative account of heredity, everyone is born with a set of particular fixed traits, called, ah—”
“Coins.”
“Coins, then. The coins determine how they behave. But the coins are not themselves altered by behavior. Your life is set by the coins you’re born with.”
“That’s quite grim,” Barhu said, delightedly. “So there might be coins for anger, or greed, or brilliance, or so forth.”
“Exactly. This sheds interesting light on the problem of the isoamorous.” Iscend caught a mosquito from the air and twisted to wash the smear from her hand. “If the coin for isoamorous behavior is not created by isoamorous behavior, it must have some other function.”
Barhu sighed. “But, again, those with the coin can’t pass it down. It should vanish.”
“Not,” Iscend suggested, “if it can be passed down through sisters.”
“What do you mean?”
“Perhaps the coin can land heads-up or numbers-up. Perhaps those who receive it heads-up are isoamorous, and those who who receive it numbers-up have isoamorous siblings. The numbers-up carriers would have children. The heads-up women would not have children of their own, but they would help their sisters. Perhaps these sibling teams end up with more surviving children than siblings who are all competing to raise their own.”
“Yes!” Barhu paced right into the shallows. “That fits! The huntresses don’t have to have any children, but they still help their sisters pass the coin down. It’s as if the extra surviving offspring their sisters have are their own children, in a way!”
She threw a huge rock into the stream, purely out of euphoria, the desire to hear a splash as solidity displaced uncertainty. Caldera gods boil her, if this was anything but fantasy, it would be a tremendous weapon.
She had never needed a scientific rationale to believe that she and all the people like her deserved to live with dignity and without fear. But if she could prove in scientific terms that the whole ideology which rationalized their punishment was wrong … why, between this and Kimbune’s mighty mathematical proof, there was a chance to destroy a bulwark of Falcrest’s power without spending a single note or killing a single person!
“A study of pedigrees might substantiate the theory,” Iscend suggested. “Perhaps the Cancrioth has kept track of their breeding for an entire millennium. Perhaps they would be able to demonstrate whether heredity obeys Torrindic predictions, or an … alternative model. And the figures do support the resilience of isoamorous behavior.”
“What figures?”
“Despite all attempts at eugenic, behavioral, and somatic intervention, undercover hygiene delegates report that one in four people still engage in some isoamorous behavior. Why does the behavior recur so often even when we discourage it so strongly? Why has it not become extinct?”
Barhu imagined herself before the Faculties, presenting her research. A Proof of the Necessity of My Existence.…
“Baru,” Iscend said, “what’s been done to me can never be undone. Do you understand that?”
Barhu started out of her reverie. Iscend had crawled up beside her on the bank and propped herself on her elbow. She was sleek and strong and far too close.
“You’ve already started to undo it,” Barhu protested. “I’ve heard you—” It would probably shame Iscend if Barhu, a cryptarch, directly addressed her use of her own command word. “I approve of what you’ve done this journey. I like the way you’ve altered yourself.”
Iscend lay on her side, almost exactly Barhu’s height, watching her with an intensity which seemed to twist her perfect face. “You approve, you disapprove. But still it’s not my approval. The terms in the equations have changed, but I’m still bound by their outputs. My whole life I’ve been conditioned to feel wonderful when I serve the Republic. That will never stop.”
She swallowed. “Right now, you are the Republic, Agonist. You are the closest I can come to seeing my whole purpose in a single woman.”
Oh no, oh, please stop. “The conditioning will fade. Or you’ll learn how to alter it.”
“I know how to alter it,” Iscend said.
“How?”
“Like this. Gaios. Kiss her.”
Barhu squeaked into Iscend’s mouth. She made a half-hearted effort to escape, but in that flash of cold and heat there was such suggestion of delights to come—it was like trying to turn down a tremendous investment from a dubious donor: the money might be tainted but it would still spend so well—
“Wait,” she spluttered, “wait, no! Stop! Stop!”
“Am I too forward?” Iscend withdrew at once, though not far.
“You’re not too forward. But we have to stop. I don’t want us to do this.”
“Because you think I’m not in command of myself? I know exactly what motivates me. I had every part of me laid out in a design. Can you say that?”
“But you didn’t lay out the design!”
“I know exactly two ways to feel good, Baru. One is to obey the conditioning instilled in me by the Metademe. The other”—she lay her hands on Barhu’s, all that neuromassage training pent up, waiting to be used—“the other, and, please, draw away if you want me to stop, but the other way I know … it is the way all bodies know. The Metademe couldn’t take it from me. I learned it in the function tests. Something I wasn’t supposed to feel, something not part of the protocol. When I slid the flag needles into the small of my back, into my pelvis, into my thighs … it made me hot, Baru. It was the first time I ever came. I didn’t make a sound. But I knew it was something they couldn’t take out of me, no matter how they conditioned me … I want to feel that. I want you to make me feel good for being near you. I want to feel good in a way they didn’t plan for me. I want that.”
Barhu was so absurdly turned on by this, the idea of unpinning Clarified conditioning with sheer force of lust, that she almost, almost gave in. Her hands were free, free to pull away, to make the right choice, but the way Iscend moved guided them.…
The moonlight glittered on the passing stream. Patterns each as complex and temporary and fascinating as people themselves. And yet the stream ran on, down to the sea, the direction unchanged.
Nothing within the water could escape its context. Not this choice. Not any other.
“Please.” Iscend pushed against Barhu’s hand. She was damp from the stream, and cool, except for this warmth. “Please let me have this.”
Barhu knew she had to stop. She knew, absolutely, that if she let this happen she would hate herself for the rest of her life.
It was just so tempting to wait a moment longer.…
“Baru!” someone shouted. “Baru-u-u!”
No voice in the world could have pulled her off Iscend so quickly.
“Mother?” Barhu gasped. “Ma?”
TAIN Shir walks the deck of RNS Scylpetaire between the forlorn and the furious and the damned. A killer among killers but she alone is free.
She is unmastered. They are masterless. The difference is everything.
She has not seen Scylpetaire since the day the frigate left Sulane’s company to find Baru Cormorant’s parents. She hunted it across half the Ashen Sea. Left Kyprananoke aboard the last ship to escape, the merchant Ngaio Ngaonic’s trader. He recited old Scyphu prayers as the wave chased them, subsiding into the deeps around Kyprananoke, until it was no more than a ripple beneath the keel.
When they made port at Yama and settled into quarantine, Shir leapt overboard, swam between the anchor lines of the crab traps, came ashore like a seal in the dark. She bartered news of Kyprananoke for passage to Taranoke on a Masquerade postal clipper. But Scylpetaire was not at Taranoke. Baru’s parents had already fled.
Scylpetaire has failed Juris Ormsment.
And now their traitor-admiral is dead.
Shir tracked Scylpetaire here to Imaranoke, a speck of an islet north of Taranoke. The name is favorable, though the place is not; Shir suspects it was named so by ancient Maia voyagers in order to draw rival families away from fertile Taranoke itself. The mutineers came here to hide from Sixth Fleet Sousward and the inevitable order for their arrest.
They still had hope. Reunion with Ormsment. Vengeance against Baru.
Shir took all that from them.
“She deserved better,” Captain Iscanine mutters. “Shot dead by her own comrades … you say Asmee Nullsin turned on her? That prince bastard.”
Shir does not care about this question. Ormsment is dead and the circumstances of that death are as immaterial to her future as the position her parents chose to conceive her.
“You’re afraid they’ll mutiny.” She watches the gray-haired crew scrub the deck. The sun sits directly above the mainmast and does not move. Qualmstones scrape. The waves rush and suck at the hull.
“Of course I’m afraid,” Iscanine mutters. She’s maintained her uniform in perfect order, though the red wool is soggy in the tropical heat and the pins on her collar are dull from overpolish. “They’ve already done it once. If we can’t go home, if we’ll never have pardons, if Baru’s beyond our reach … if I have to tell them we’ve failed…”
She shakes her shunt-scarred head. She was a water-swollen child, and the Metademe barred her from childbearing before she was even out of the crib. She has never known any meaning but the navy. Now those invisible shrouds of support are cut away. She staggers free.
A delicate time, Shir thinks. A time of second birth, with all its blood and all its screaming.
“I will take command,” Shir says.
“What?”
“The Province Admiral is dead. I will take command. You will be ship’s captain, and I will be your admiral, like she was. And we will continue her mission.”
“How? How can we do right by her?” Iscanine is begging now, though she would not admit it.
They’ve come to the bow, the railing that overlooks the sprit and the dolphinstriker. Iscanine begins to turn but Shir crowds her against the rail. “Baru has a second father.”
“She was adopted?”
“No,” Shir says. “Pinion had two husbands.”
“At once?”
“Yes.”
Iscanine, who has no husbands, makes a salacious eyebrow waggle. “Lucky bitch.”
Shir is not interested in the predilections of Falcrest’s women, unless they involve her. “The second father’s name is Salm.”
She imprisoned him and so it is right, in the way of talion, the law of an eye for an eye, that she should set him free. Only then will she in turn be free to conduct the duty she promised Baru. To watch over her. To await the day when Baru at last betrays Tain Hu’s faith.
And on that day, Tain Shir will kill her and cut out her heart and prepare it on open coals.
Baru may yet avoid the fall. It may be that the Brain has already persuaded Baru, as she once persuaded Shir, to turn away from the path of lies and control. It may be that Baru already carries Falcrest’s death in her arteries.
And that would be good.
Empire planted that killing tree on Kyprananoke, where the rebels dashed children dead against the trunk.
The only answer to empire is to move the tree.
It is not justice. But there is no such thing as justice. Only the measureless and asymbolic truth. Who prospers. Who suffers. Who lives in glory. Who dies in chains.
“Make your ship ready to sail,” she commands Captain Iscanine. “We have works to begin.”