PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

The best science-fiction ideas are very big ones that have never quite occurred to anyone before, and the writers to whom such ideas come very frequently have second thoughts about them, or third thoughts, or fourth and fifth ones. And so one of the glories of modern-day science fiction has been the extended series in which the writer digs deeper and ever deeper into his original concept, finding new richness with each excavation.

I’m not speaking here of the kind of series that James Blish, long ago, called a template series—in which the writer, having hit on a serviceable idea and an appropriate structure for dramatizing it, goes on profitably replicating idea and format over and over again, sometimes for dozens of stories. This is not necessarily reprehensible—the Sherlock Holmes series, for example, is a template series that has given great pleasure to readers for more than a century, and the fundamental similarity of one story to the next and the unchanging relationship of Holmes to Watson are essential components of the delight to be had. But in the Holmes stories we do not find increasing depth of insight into the problems of crime detection in Victorian England, or into the curious personality of Sherlock Holmes, as the series proceeds. The series extends by self-imitation, not by evolution, as so many slick-magazine series of a later era (Tugboat Annie, Alexander Botts, etc.) did, and the way most television programs do nowadays. Most of the series stories that the Saturday Evening Post ran so copiously fifty and sixty years ago are forgotten today, as are the television shows of the season before last; it is Conan Doyle’s superior ingenuity that keeps the Holmes stories alive despite their underlying formulaic nature.

We have had plenty of formula-series stuff in science fiction, too, from Tom Swift back in 1910 through Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter on Mars novels of the 1920s through the Captain Future epics of a couple of decades later, and on through the kind of highly commercial multi-volume stuff that floods the bookstores today. Some of this is fun, in its way, although a great deal is mere space-filling junk, in which a trivial idea is inflated by means of much huffing and puffing into three (or more) fat volumes that keep the readers contentedly circling around and around the same feeble little concept for hundreds of thousands of words. (We also have the myriad Star Trek and Star Wars novelizations, many of which tell lively and entertaining stories, but which, by predesign and stern publishing decree, do nothing at all to advance the underlying series concept beyond its starting point.)

However, we do have the other sort of series in science fiction, too, the kind that carries the reader through an evolutionary progression of concept and (sometimes) insight into character, and it is out of that kind of series that this book has been constructed.

Anyone with any historical grounding in science fiction can name dozens of such series at the first prod of his memory. E.E. Smith, Ph.D., a pioneer of the form, operated two of them, the Skylark novels of the 1920s and 1930s, and the subsequent Lensman series, vast and ever-expanding epics of the spaceways. In the 1940s and 1950s Robert A. Heinlein linked dozens of stories and novels into one enormous and basically coherent Future History; Poul Anderson offered a similar structure of his own a couple of decades later; A.E. van Vogt wrote two dazzling and bewildering novels about Gilbert Gosseyn and his fellow semanticians of the Null-A crowd. (A third, much less dazzling, followed decades later.) Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the original trilogy and the various later books, looked deep into the Asimovian concept of psychohistory, and, as the series grew, Asimov eventually linked it with his other celebrated many-paneled work, the Positronic Robot series. Henry Kuttner’s memorable Baldy stories, collected as Mutant, were admirable examples of the same thing in shorter form, as of course were Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. The list could continue for many pages, invoking the names of Blish, Simak, Clarke, Herbert, Leiber, Cordwainer Smith, and many another hero of time and space.

Amidst all the content-free trilogies and infinitely expanding media tie-in series of the present era, plenty of splendid books are still being written that form ongoing science-fiction series which actually evolve and penetrate ever more deeply into their conceptual frameworks. What I have done in Far Horizons is to gather together most of today’s foremost practitioners of the evolutionary science-fiction series and ask them to write a short story or novelette that explores some aspect of their famous series that they did not find a way of dealing with in the books themselves.

You will find some well-known writers missing. I would gladly have included a new Foundation story here, or a new snippet of the Heinlein Future History series, or a return visit to Frank Herbert’s Arrakis. Not possible, alas, in this particular continuum. And a couple of the living writers whom I invited told me that they had already said all they wanted to say about subject X or Y and Z, a position I had to applaud, however much I regretted their refusals.

But those who are on hand form as impressive a group of late-twentieth-century science-fiction writers as could possibly be assembled. I’m grateful to them all for having been willing to examine once again the settings and characters and ideas that have given so many readers such great pleasure over the past couple of decades. A great science-fiction concept, as we have learned over and over again in the world of science fiction, is inexhaustible—the infinite always is—and herewith a platoon of our best writers demonstrates that all over again for your enjoyment.

—Robert Silverberg

May, 1998

THE EKUMEN

Ursula K. Le Guin

Rocannon’s World (1966)

Planet of Exile (1966)

City of Illusions (1967)

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

The Dispossessed (1974)

The Word for World is Forest (1976)

Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

Most of my science fiction takes place within one future-historical frame. As this developed haphazardly along with the books and stories, it contains some spectacular inconsistencies, but the general plan is this: The people of a world called Hain colonized the entire Orion Arm of the galaxy over a million years ago. All hominid species so far encountered are descendants of Hainish colonists (often genetically tailored to fit the colony planet or for other reasons).

After this Expansion, the Hainish withdrew to Hain for hundreds of millennia, leaving their far-flung offspring to hack it.

When Earth people began to explore nearby space, using Nearly As Fast As Light (NAFAL) ships and the instantaneous communicator called the ansible, they met up with the Hainish, now reaching out again to find their lost kinfolk. A League of Worlds was formed (see the novels Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions). This expanded and matured into an egalitarian association of worlds and people called the Ekumen, administered from Hain by people called Stabiles, while Mobiles went out to explore unknown worlds, find out about new peoples, and serve as envoys and ambassadors to member worlds.

The Ekumenical novels are: The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, and The Dispossessed. Most of the science-fiction stories in the collections The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose, the last three stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, and all in Four Ways to Forgiveness, are set in the Ekumen.

This last book introduced the planets Werel and Yeowe. On Werel, thirty-five hundred years ago, an aggressive black-skinned people dominated the paler northern races and instituted a slave-based society and economy, with caste established by skin color. First contact by the Ekumen scared the xenophobic Werelians into rapid development of weapons and spaceships, and incidentally into colonizing Yeowe, the planet next inward to their sun, which they exploited with intensive slave labor. Soon after Werel finally admitted diplomats from the Ekumen, a great slave uprising began on Yeowe. After thirty years of war, Yeowe won its freedom from the dominant nation on Werel, Voe Deo. Voe Dean society was destabilized by the Yeowan liberation, as well as by the new perspectives offered by the Ekumen. Within a few years, a widespread slave uprising in Voe Deo pitted owners against assets in a full-scale civil war. This story takes place late in that war.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

OLD MUSIC AND

THE SLAVE WOMEN

by Ursula K. Le Guin

The chief intelligence officer of the Ekumenical Embassy to Werel, a man who on his home world had the name Sohikelwenyanmurkeres Esdan, and who in Voe Deo was known by a nickname, Esdardon Aya or Old Music, was bored. It had taken a civil war and three years to bore him, but he had got to the point where he referred to himself in ansible reports to the Stabiles on Hain as the Embassy’s chief stupidity officer.

He had been able, however, to retain a few clandestine links with friends in the Free City even after the Legitimate Government sealed the Embassy, allowing no one and no information to enter or leave it. In the third summer of the war, he came to the Ambassador with a request. Cut off from reliable communication with the Embassy, Liberation Command had asked him (how? asked the Ambassador; through one of the men who delivered groceries, he explained) if the Embassy would let one or two of its people slip across the lines and talk with them, be seen with them, offer proof that despite propaganda and disinformation, and though the Embassy was stuck in Jit City, its staff had not been co-opted into supporting the Legitimates, but remained neutral and ready to deal with rightful authority on either side.

Jit City? said the Ambassador. Never mind. But how do you get there?

Always the problem with Utopia, Esdan said. Well, I can pass with contact lenses, if nobody’s looking closely. Crossing the Divide is the tricky bit.

Most of the great city was still physically there, the government buildings, factories and warehouses, the university, the tourist attractions: the Great Shrine of Tual, Theater Street, the Old Market with its interesting display rooms and lofty Hall of Auction, disused since the sale and rental of assets had been shifted to the electronic marketplace; the numberless streets, avenues, and boulevards, the dusty parks shaded by purple-flowered beya trees, the miles and miles of shops, sheds, mills, tracks, stations, apartment buildings, houses, compounds, the neighborhoods, the suburbs, and exurbs. Most of it still stood, most of its fifteen million people were still there, but its deep complexity was gone. Connections were broken. Interactions did not take place. A brain after a stroke.

The greatest break was a brutal one, an ax-blow right through the pons, a kilo-wide no-man’s-land of blown-up buildings and blocked streets, wreckage and rubble. East of the Divide was Legitimate territory: downtown, government offices, embassies, banks, communications towers, the university, the great parks and wealthy neighborhoods, the roads out to the armory, barracks, airports, and spaceport. West of the Divide was Free City, Dusty-ville, Liberation territory: factories, union compounds, the rentspeople’s quarters, the old gareot residential neighborhoods, endless miles of little streets petering out into the plains at last. Through both ran the great East-West highways, empty.

The Liberation people smuggled him out of the Embassy and almost across the Divide successfully. He and they had had a lot of practice in the old days getting runaway assets out to Yeowe and freedom. He found it interesting to be the one smuggled instead of one of the smugglers, finding it far more frightening yet less stressful, since he was not responsible, the package not the postman. But somewhere in the connection there had been a bad link.

They made it on foot into the Divide and partway through it and stopped at a little derelict truck sitting on its wheel rims under a gutted apartment house. A driver sat at the wheel behind the cracked, crazed windshield, and grinned at him. His guide gestured him into the back. The truck took off like a hunting cat, following a crazy route, zigzagging through the ruins. They were nearly across the Divide, jolting across a rubbled stretch which might have been a street or a marketplace, when the truck veered, stopped, there were shouts, shots, the van back was flung open and men plunged in at him. Easy, he said, go easy, for they were manhandling him, hauling him, twisting his arm behind his back. They yanked him out of the truck, pulled off his coat and slapped him down searching for weapons, frog-marched him to a car waiting beside the truck. He tried to see if his driver was dead but could not look around before they shoved him into the car.

It was an old government state-coach, dark red, wide, and long, made for parades, for carrying great estate owners to the Council and ambassadors from the spaceport. Its main section could be curtained to separate men from women passengers, and the driver’s compartment was sealed off so the passengers wouldn’t be breathing in what a slave breathed out.

One of the men had kept his arm twisted up his back until he shoved him headfirst into the car, and all he thought as he found himself sitting between two men and facing three others and the car starting up was, I’m getting too old for this.

He held still, letting his fear and pain subside, not ready yet to move even to rub his sharply hurting shoulder, not looking into faces nor too obviously at the streets. Two glances told him they were passing Rei Street, going east, out of the city. He realised then he had been hoping they were taking him back to the Embassy. What a fool.

They had the streets to themselves, except for the startled gaze of people on foot as they flashed by. Now they were on a wide boulevard, going very fast, still going east. Although he was in a very bad situation, he still found it absolutely exhilarating just to be out of the Embassy, out in the air, in the world, and moving, going fast.

Cautiously he raised his hand and massaged his shoulder. As cautiously, he glanced at the men beside him and facing him. All were dark-skinned, two blue-black. Two of the men facing him were young. Fresh, stolid faces. The third was a veot of the third rank, an oga. His face had the quiet inexpressiveness in which his caste was trained. Looking at him, Esdan caught his eye. Each looked away instantly.

Esdan liked veots. He saw them, soldiers as well as slaveholders, as part of the old Voe Deo, members of a doomed species. Businessmen and bureaucrats would survive and thrive in the Liberation and no doubt find soldiers to fight for them, but the military caste would not. Their code of loyalty, honor, and austerity was too like that of their slaves, with whom they shared the worship of Kamye, the Swordsman, the Bondsman. How long would that mysticism of suffering survive the Liberation? Veots were intransigent vestiges of an intolerable order. He trusted them, and had seldom been disappointed in his trust.

The oga was very black, very handsome, like Teyeo, a veot Esdan had particularly liked. He had left Werel long before the war, off to Terra and Hain with his wife, who would be a Mobile of the Ekumen one of these days. In a few centuries. Long after the war was over, long after Esdan was dead. Unless he chose to follow them, went back, went home.

Idle thoughts. During a revolution you don’t choose. You’re carried, a bubble in a cataract, a spark in a bonfire, an unarmed man in a car with seven armed men driving very fast down the broad, blank East Arterial Highway.…They were leaving the city. Heading for the East Provinces. The Legitimate Government of Voe Deo was now reduced to half the capital city and two provinces, in which seven out of eight people were what the eighth person, their owner, called assets.

The two men up in the front compartment were talking, though they couldn’t be heard in the owner compartment. Now the bullet-headed man to Esdan’s right asked a muttered question to the oga facing him, who nodded.

Oga, Esdan said.

The veot’s expressionless eyes met his.

I need to piss.

The man said nothing and looked away. None of them said anything for a while. They were on a bad stretch of the highway, torn up by fighting during the first summer of the Uprising or merely not maintained since. The jolts and shocks were hard on Esdan’s bladder.

Let the fucking white-eyes piss himself, said one of the two young men facing him to the other, who smiled tightly.

Esdan considered possible replies, good-humored, joking, not offensive, not provocative, and kept his mouth shut. They only wanted an excuse, those two. He closed his eyes and tried to relax, to be aware of the pain in his shoulder, the pain in his bladder, merely aware.

The man to his left, whom he could not see clearly, spoke: Driver. Pull off up there. He used a speakerphone. The driver nodded. The car slowed, pulled off the road, jolting horribly. They all got out of the car. Esdan saw that the man to his left was also a veot, of the second rank, a zadyo. One of the young men grabbed Esdan’s arm as he got out, another shoved a gun against his liver. The others all stood on the dusty roadside and pissed variously on the dust, the gravel, the roots of a row of scruffy trees. Esdan managed to get his fly open but his legs were so cramped and shaky he could barely stand, and the young man with the gun had come around and now stood directly in front of him with the gun aimed at his penis. There was a knot of pain somewhere between his bladder and his cock. Back up a little, he said with plaintive irritability. I don’t want to wet your shoes. The young man stepped forward instead, bringing his gun right against Esdan’s groin.

The zadyo made a slight gesture. The young man backed off a step. Esdan shuddered and suddenly pissed out a fountain. He was pleased, even in the agony of relief, to see he’d driven the young man back two more steps.

Looks almost human, the young man said.

Esdan tucked his brown alien cock away with discreet promptness and slapped his trousers shut. He was still wearing lenses that hid the whites of his eyes, and was dressed as a rentsman in loose, coarse clothes of dull yellow, the only dye color that had been permitted to urban slaves. The banner of the Liberation was that same dull yellow. The wrong color, here. The body inside the clothes was the wrong color, too.

Having lived on Werel for thirty-three years, Esdan was used to being feared and hated, but he had never before been entirely at the mercy of those who feared and hated him. The aegis of the Ekumen had sheltered him. What a fool, to leave the Embassy, where at least he’d been harmless, and let himself be got hold of by these desperate defenders of a lost cause, who might do a good deal of harm not only to but with him. How much resistance, how much endurance, was he capable of? Fortunately they couldn’t torture any information about Liberation plans from him, since he didn’t know a damned thing about what his friends were doing. But still, what a fool.

Back in the car, sandwiched in the seat with nothing to see but the young men’s scowls and the oga’s watchful nonexpression, he shut his eyes again. The highway was smooth here. Rocked in speed and silence, he slipped into a postadrenaline doze.

When he came fully awake the sky was gold, two of the little moons glittering above a cloudless sunset. They were jolting along on a side road, a driveway that wound past fields, orchards, plantations of trees and building-cane, a huge field-worker compound, more fields, another compound. They stopped at a checkpoint guarded by a single armed man, were checked briefly and waved through. The road went through an immense, open, rolling park. Its familiarity troubled him. Lacework of trees against the sky, the swing of the road among groves and glades. He knew the river was over that long hill.

This is Yaramera, he said aloud.

None of the men spoke.

Years ago, decades ago, when he’d been on Werel only a year or so, they’d invited a party from the Embassy down to Yaramera, the greatest estate in Voe Deo. The Jewel of the East. The model of efficient slavery. Thousands of assets working the fields, mills, factories of the estate, living in enormous compounds, walled towns. Everything clean, orderly, industrious, peaceful. And the house on the hill above the river, a palace, three hundred rooms, priceless furnishings, paintings, sculptures, musical instruments—he remembered a private concert hall with walls of gold-backed glass mosaic, a Tualite shrine-room that was one huge flower carved of scented wood.

They were driving up to that house now. The car turned. He caught only a glimpse, jagged black spars against the sky.

The two young men were allowed to handle him again, haul him out of the car, twist his arm, push and shove him up the steps. Trying not to resist, not to feel what they were doing to him, he kept looking about him. The center and the south wing of the immense house were roofless, ruinous. Through the black outline of a window shone the blank clear yellow of the sky. Even here in the heartland of the Law, the slaves had risen. Three years ago, now, in that first terrible summer when thousands of houses had burned, compounds, towns, cities. Four million dead. He had not known the Uprising had reached even to Yaramera. No news came up the river. What toll among the Jewel’s slaves for that night of burning? Had the owners been slaughtered, or had they survived to deal out punishment? No news came up the river.

All this went through his mind with unnatural rapidity and clarity as they crowded him up the shallow steps towards the north wing of the house, guarding him with drawn guns as if they thought a man of sixty-two with severe leg cramps from sitting motionless for hours was going to break and run for it, here, three hundred kilos inside their own territory. He thought fast and noticed everything.

This part of the house, joined to the central house by a long arcade, had not burned down. The walls still bore up the roof, but he saw as they came into the front hall that they were bare stone, their carved paneling burnt away. Dirty sheetflooring replaced parquet or covered painted tile. There was no furniture at all. In its ruin and dirt the high hall was beautiful, bare, full of clear evening light. Both veots had left his group and were reporting to some men in the doorway of what had been a reception room. He felt the veots as safeguard and hoped they would come back, but they did not. One of the young men kept his arm twisted up his back. A heavyset man came towards him, staring at him.

You’re the alien called Old Music?

I am Hainish, and use that name here.

Mr. Old Music, you’re to understand that by leaving your embassy in violation of the protection agreement between your ambassador and the Government of Voe Deo, you’ve forfeited diplomatic immunity. You may be held in custody, interrogated, and duly punished for any infractions of civil law or crimes of collusion with insurgents and enemies of the State you’re found to have committed.

I understood that this is your statement of my position, Esdan said. But you should know, sir, that the Ambassador and the Stabiles of the Ekumen of the Worlds consider me protected both by diplomatic immunity and the laws of the Ekumen.

No harm trying, but his wordy lies weren’t listened to. Having recited his litany, the man turned away, and the young men grabbed Esdan again. He was hustled through doorways and corridors that he was now in too much pain to see, down stone stairs, across a wide, cobbled courtyard, and into a room where, with a final agonising jerk on his arm and his feet knocked from under him so that he fell sprawling, they slammed the door and left him belly-down on stone in darkness.

He dropped his forehead onto his arm and lay shivering, hearing his breath catch in a whimper again and again.

Later on he remembered that night, and other things from the next days and nights. He did not know, then or later, if he was tortured in order to break him down or was merely the handy object of aimless brutality and spite, a sort of plaything for the boys. There were kicks, beatings, a great deal of pain, but none of it was clear in his memory later except the crouchcage.

He had heard of such things, read about them. He had never seen one. He had never been inside a compound. Foreigners, visitors, were not taken into slave quarters on the estates of Voe Deo. They were served by house-slaves in the houses of the owners.

This was a small compound, not more than twenty huts on the women’s side, three longhouses on the gate side. It had housed the staff of a couple of hundred slaves who looked after the house and the immense gardens of Yaramera. They would have been a privileged set compared to the field hands. But not exempt from punishment. The whipping post still stood near the high gate that sagged open in the high walls.

There? said Nemeo, the one who always twisted his arm, but the other one, Alatual, said, No, come on, it’s over here, and ran ahead, excited, to winch the crouchcage down from where it hung below the main sentry station, high up on the inside of the wall.

It was a tube of coarse, rusty steel mesh sealed at one end and closable at the other. It hung suspended by a single hook from a chain. Lying on the ground it looked like a trap for an animal, not a very big animal. The two young men stripped off his clothes and goaded him to crawl into it headfirst, using the fieldhandlers, electric prods to stir up lazy slaves, which they had been playing with the last couple of days. They screamed with laughter, pushing him and jabbing the prods in his anus and scrotum. He writhed into the cage until he was crouching in it head down, his arms and legs bent and jammed up into his body. They slammed the trap end shut, catching his naked foot between the wires and causing a pain that blinded him while they hoisted the cage back up. It swung about wildly, and he clung to the wires with his cramped hands. When he opened his eyes he saw the ground swinging about seven or eight meters below him. After a while the lurching and circling stopped. He could not move his head at all. He could see what was below the crouchcage, and by straining his eyes round he could see most of the inside of the compound.

In the old days there had been people down there to see the moral spectacle, a slave in the crouchcage. There had been children to learn the lesson of what happens to a housemaid who shirked a job, a gardener who spoiled a cutting, a hand who talked back to a boss. Nobody was there now. The dusty ground was bare. The dried-up garden plots, the little graveyard at the far edge of a woman’s side, the ditch between the two sides, the pathways, a vague circle of greener grass right underneath him, all were deserted. His torturers stood around for a while laughing and talking, got bored, went off.

He tried to ease his position but could move only very slightly. Any motion made the cage rock and swing so that he grew sick and increasingly fearful of falling. He did not know how securely the cage was balanced on that single hook. His foot, caught in the cage closure, hurt so sharply that he longed to faint, but though his head swam he remained conscious. He tried to breathe as he had learned how to breathe a long time ago on another world, quietly, easily. He could not do it here now in this world in this cage. His lungs were squeezed in his rib cage so that each breath was extremely difficult. He tried not to suffocate. He tried not to panic. He tried to be aware, only to be aware, but awareness was unendurable.

When the sun came round to that side of the compound and shone full on him the dizziness turned to sickness. Sometimes then he fainted for a while.

There was night and cold and he tried to imagine water, but there was no water.

He thought later he had been in the crouchcage two days. He could remember the scraping of the wires on his sunburned naked flesh when they pulled him out, the shock of cold water played over him from a hose. He had been fully aware for a moment then, aware of himself, like a doll, lying small, limp, on dirt, while men above him talked and shouted about something. Then he must have been carried back to the cell or stable where he was kept, for there was dark and silence, but also he was still hanging in the crouchcage roasting in the icy fire of the sun, freezing in his burning body, fitted tighter and tighter into the exact mesh of the wires of pain.

At some point he was taken to a bed in a room with a window, but he was still in the crouchcage, swinging high above the dusty ground, the dusties’ ground, the circle of green grass.

The zadyo and the heavyset man were there, were not there. A bondswoman, whey-faced, crouching and trembling, hurt him trying to put salve on his burned arm and leg and back. She was there and not there. The sun shone in the window. He felt the wire snap down on his foot again, and again.

Darkness eased him. He slept most of the time. After a couple of days he could sit up and eat what the scared bondswoman brought him. His sunburn was healing, and most of his aches and pains were milder. His foot was swollen hugely; bones were broken; that didn’t matter till he had to get up. He dozed, drifted. When Rayaye walked into the room, he recognised him at once.

They had met several times, before the Uprising. Rayaye had been Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Oyo. What position he had now, in the Legitimate Government, Esdan did not know. Rayaye was short for a Werelian but broad and solid, with a blue-black polished-looking face and greying hair, a striking man, a politician.

Minister Rayaye, Esdan said.

Mr. Old Music. How kind of you to recall me! I’m sorry you’ve been unwell. I hope the people here are looking after you satisfactorily?

Thank you.

When I heard you were unwell I inquired for a doctor, but there’s no one here but a veterinarian. No staff at all. Not like the old days! What a change! I wish you’d seen Yaramera in its glory.

I did. His voice was rather weak, but sounded quite natural. Thirty-two or -three years ago. Lord and Lady Aneo entertained a party from our embassy.

Really? Then you know what it was, said Rayaye, sitting down in the one chair, a fine old piece missing one arm. Painful to see it like this, isn’t it! The worst of the destruction was here in the house. The whole women’s wing and the great rooms burned. But the gardens were spared, may the Lady be praised. Laid out by Meneya himself, you know, four hundred years ago. And the fields are still being worked. I’m told there are still nearly three thousand assets attached to the property. When the trouble’s over, it’ll be far easier to restore Yaramera than many of the great estates. He gazed out the window. Beautiful, beautiful. And Aneos’ housepeople were famous for their beauty, you know. And training. It’ll take a long time to build up to that kind of standard again.

No doubt.

The Werelian looked at him with bland attentiveness. I expect you’re wondering why you’re here.

Not particularly, Esdan said pleasantly.

Oh?

Since I left the Embassy without permission, I suppose the Government wanted to keep an eye on me.

Some of us were glad to hear you’d left the Embassy. Shut up there—a waste of your talents.

Oh, my talents, Esdan said with a deprecatory shrug, which hurt his shoulder. He would wince later. Just now he was enjoying himself. He liked fencing.

You’re a very talented man, Mr. Old Music. The wisest, canniest alien on Werel, Lord Mehao called you once. You’ve worked with us—and against us, yes—more effectively than any other offworlder. We understand one another. We can talk. It’s my belief that you genuinely wish my people well, and that if I offered you a way of serving them—a hope of bringing this terrible conflict to an end—you’d take it.

I would hope to be able to.

Is it important to you that you be identified as a supporter of one side of the conflict, or would you prefer to remain neutral?

Any action can bring neutrality into question.

To have been kidnapped from the Embassy by the rebels is no evidence of your sympathy for them.

It would seem not.

Rather the opposite.

It would be so perceived.

It can be. If you like.

My preferences are of no weight, Minister.

They’re of very great weight, Mr. Old Music. But here. You’ve been ill, I’m tiring you. We’ll continue our conversation tomorrow, eh? If you like.

Of course, Minister, Esdan said, with a politeness edging on submissiveness, a tone that he knew suited men like this one, more accustomed to the attention of slaves than the company of equals. Never having equated incivility with pride, Esdan, like most of his people, was disposed to be polite in any circumstance that allowed it, and disliked circumstances that did not. Mere hypocrisy did not trouble him. He was perfectly capable of it himself. If Rayaye’s men had tortured him and Rayaye pretended ignorance of the fact, Esdan had nothing to gain by insisting on it.

He was glad, indeed, not to be obliged to talk about it, and hoped not to think about it. His body thought about it for him, remembered it precisely, in every joint and muscle, now. The rest of his thinking about it he would do as long as he lived. He had learned things he had not known. He had thought he understood what it was to be helpless. Now he knew he had not understood.

When the scared woman came in, he asked her to send for the veterinarian. I need a cast on my foot, he said.

He does mend the hands, the bondsfolk, master, the woman whispered, shrinking. The assets here spoke an archaic-sounding dialect that was sometimes hard to follow.

Can he come into the house?

She shook her head.

Is there anybody here who can look after it?

I will ask, master, she whispered.

An old bondswoman came in that night. She had a wrinkled, seared, stern face, and none of the crouching manner of the other. When she first saw him, she whispered, Mighty Lord! But she performed the reverence stiffly, and then examined his swollen foot, impersonal as any doctor. She said, If you do let me bind that, master, it will heal.

What’s broken?

These toes. There. Maybe a little bone in here, too. Lotsalot bones in feet.

Please bind it for me.

She did so, firmly, binding cloths round and round until the wrapping was quite thick and kept his foot immobile at one angle. She said, You do walk, then you use a stick, sir. You put down only that heel to the ground.

He asked her name.

Gana, she said. Saying her name, she shot a sharp glance right at him, full face, a daring thing for a slave to do. She probably wanted to get a good look at his alien eyes, having found the rest of him, though a strange color, pretty commonplace, bones in the feet and all.

Thank you, Gana. I’m grateful for your skill and kindness.

She bobbed, but did not reverence, and left the room. She herself walked lame, but upright. All the grandmothers are rebels, somebody had told him long ago, before the Uprising.

The next day he was able to get up and hobble to the broken-armed chair. He sat for a while looking out the window.

The room looked out from the second floor over the gardens of Yaramera, terraced slopes and flowerbeds, walks, lawns, and a series of ornamental lakes and pools that descended gradually to the river: a vast pattern of curves and planes, plants and paths, earth and still water, embraced by the broad living curve of the river. All the plots and walks and terraces formed a soft geometry centered very subtly on an enormous tree down at the riverside. It must have been a great tree when the garden was laid out four hundred years ago. It stood above and well back from the bank, but its branches reached far out over the water, and a village could have been built in its shade. The grass of the terraces had dried to soft gold. The river and the lakes and pools were all the misty blue of the summer sky. The flowerbeds and shrubberies were untended, overgrown, but not yet gone wild. The gardens of Yaramera were utterly beautiful in their desolation. Desolate, forlorn, forsaken, all such romantic words befitted them, yet they were also rational and noble, full of peace. They had been built by the labor slaves. Their dignity and peace were founded on cruelty, misery, pain. Esdan was Hainish, from a very old people, people who had built and destroyed Yaramera a thousand times. His mind contained the beauty and the terrible grief of the place, assured that the existence of one cannot justify the other, the destruction of one cannot destroy the other. He was aware of both, only aware.

And aware also, sitting in some comfort of body at last, that the lovely sorrowful terraces of Yaramera might contain within them the terraces of Darranda on Hain, roof below red roof, garden below green garden, dropping steep down to the shining harbor, the promenades and piers and sailboats. Out past the harbor the sea rises up, stands up as high as his house, as high as his eyes. Esi knows that books say the sea lies down. The sea lies calm tonight, says the poem, but he knows better. The sea stands, a wall, the blue-grey wall at the end of the world. If you sail out on it, it will seem flat, but if you see it truly, it’s as tall as the hills of Darranda, and if you sail truly on it, you will sail through that wall to the other side, beyond the end of the world.

The sky is the roof that wall holds up. At night the stars shine through the glass air roof. You can sail to them, too, to the worlds beyond the world.

Esi, somebody calls from indoors, and he turns away from the sea and the sky, leaves the balcony, goes in to meet the guests, or for his music lesson, or to have lunch with the family. He’s a nice little boy, Esi: obedient, cheerful, not talkative but quite sociable, interested in people. With very good manners, of course; after all, he’s a Kelwen and the older generation wouldn’t stand for anything less in a child of the family, but good manners come easy to him, perhaps because he’s never seen any bad ones. Not a dreamy child. Alert, present, noticing. But thoughtful, and given to explaining things to himself, such as the wall of the sea and the roof of the air. Esi isn’t as clear and close to Esdan as he used to be; he’s a little boy a long time ago and very far away, left behind, left at home. Only rarely now does Esdan see through his eyes, or breathe the marvelous intricate smell of the house in Darranda—wood, the resinous oil used to polish the wood, sweetgrass matting, fresh flowers, kitchen herbs, the sea wind—or hear his mother’s voice: Esi? Come on in now, love. The cousins are here from Dorased!

Esi runs in to meet the cousins, old Iliawad with crazy eyebrows and hair in his nostrils, who can do magic with bits of sticky tape, and Tuitui who’s better at catch than Esi even though she’s younger, while Esdan falls asleep in the broken chair by the window looking out on the terrible, beautiful gardens.

Further conversations with Bayaye were deferred. The zadyo came with his apologies. The Minister had been called back to speak with the President, would return within three or four days. Esdan realised he had heard a flyer take off early in the morning, not far away. It was a reprieve. He enjoyed fencing, but was still very tired, very shaken, and welcomed the rest. No one came into his room but the scared woman, Heo, and the zadyo who came once a day to ask if he had all he needed.

When he could he was permitted to leave his room, go outside if he wished. By using a stick and strapping his bound foot onto a stiff old sandal-sole Gana brought him, he could walk, and so get out into the gardens and sit in the sun, which was growing milder daily as the summer grew old. The two veots were his guards, or more exactly guardians. He saw the two young men who had tortured him; they kept at a distance, evidently under orders not to approach him. One of the veots was usually in view, but never crowded him.

He could not go far. Sometimes he felt like a bug on a beach. The part of the house that was still usable was huge, the gardens were vast, the people were very few. There were the six men who had brought him, and five or six more who had been here, commanded by the heavyset man Tualenem. Of the original asset population of the house and estate there were ten or twelve, a tiny remnant of the house-staff of cooks, cooks’ helpers, washwomen, chambermaids, ladies’ maids, bodyservants, shoe-polishers, window-cleaners, gardeners, path-rakers, waiters, footmen, errandboys, stablemen, drivers, usewomen and useboys who had served the owners and their guests in the old days. These few were no longer locked up at night in the old house-asset compound where the crouchcage was, but slept in the courtyard warren of stables for horses and people where he had been kept at first, or in the complex of rooms around the kitchens. Most of these remaining few were women, two of them young, and two or three old, frail-looking men.

He was cautious of speaking to any of them at first lest he get them into trouble, but his captors ignored them except to give orders, evidently considering them trustworthy, with good reason. Troublemakers, the assets who had broken out of the compounds, burned the great house, killed the bosses and owners, were long gone: dead, escaped, or reenslaved with a cross branded deep on both cheeks. These were good dusties. Very likely they had been loyal all along. Many bondspeople, especially personal slaves, as terrified by the Uprising as their owners, had tried to defend them or had fled with them. They were no more traitors than were owners who had freed their assets and fought on the Liberation side. As much, and no more.

Girls, young field hands, were brought in one at a time as usewomen for the men. Every day or two the two young men who had tortured him drove a landcar off in the morning with a used girl and came back with a new one.

Of the two younger house bondswomen, one called Kamsa always carried her little baby around with her, and the men ignored her. The other, Heo, was the scared one who had waited on him. Tualenem used her every night. The other men kept hands off.

When they or any of the bondspeople passed Esdan in the house or outdoors they dropped their hands to their sides, chin to the chest, looked down, and stood still: the formal reverence expected of personal assets facing an owner.

Good morning, Kamsa.

Her reply was the reverence.

It had been years now since he had been with the finished product of generations of slavery, the kind of slave described as perfectly trained, obedient, selfless, loyal, the ideal personal asset, when they were put up for sale. Most of the assets he had known, his friends and colleagues, had been city rentspeople, hired out by their owners to companies and corporations to work in factories or shops or at skilled trades. He had also known a good many field hands. Field hands seldom had any contact with their owners; they worked under gareot bosses, and their compounds were run by cutfrees, eunuch assets. The ones he knew had mostly been runaways protected by the Hame, the underground railroad, on their way to independence in Yeowe. None of them had been utterly deprived of education, options, any imagination of freedom, as these bondspeople were. He had forgotten what a good dusty was like. He had forgotten the utter impenetrability of the person who has no private life, the intactness of the wholly vulnerable.

Kamsa’s face was smooth, serene, and showed no feeling, though he heard her sometimes talking and singing very softly to her baby, a joyful, merry little noise. It drew him. He saw her one afternoon sitting at work on the coping of the great terrace, the baby in its sling on her back. He limped over and sat down nearby. He could not prevent her from setting her knife and board aside and standing head and hands and eyes down in reverence as he came near.

Please sit down, please go on with your work, he said. She obeyed. What’s that you’re cutting up?

Dueli, master, she whispered.

It was a vegetable he had often eaten and enjoyed. He watched her work. Each big, woody pod had to be split along a sealed seam, not an easy trick; it took a careful search for the opening point and hard, repeated twists of the blade to open the pod. Then the fat edible seeds had to be removed one by one and scraped free of a stringy, clinging matrix.

Does that part taste bad? he asked.

Yes, master.

It was a laborious process, requiring strength, skill, and patience. He was ashamed. I never saw raw dueli before, he said.

No, master.

What a good baby, he said, a little at random. The tiny creature in its sling, its head lying on her shoulder, had opened large bluish-black eyes and was gazing vaguely at the world. He had never heard it cry. It seemed rather unearthly to him, but he had not had much to do with babies.

She smiled.

A boy?

Yes, master.

He said, Please, Kamsa, my name is Esdan. I’m not a master. I’m a prisoner. Your masters are my masters. Will you call me by my name?

She did not answer.

Our masters would disapprove.

She nodded. The Werelian nod was a tip-back of the head, not a bob down. He was completely used to it after all these years. It was the way he nodded himself. He noticed himself noticing it now. His captivity, his treatment here, had displaced, disoriented him. These last few days he had thought more about Hain than he had for years, decades. He had been at home on Werel, and now was not. Inappropriate comparisons, irrelevant memories. Alienated.

They put me in the cage, he said, speaking as low as she did and hesitating on the last word. He could not say the whole word, crouchcage.

Again the nod. This time, for the first time, she looked up at him, the flick of a glance. She said soundlessly, I know, and went on with her work.

He found nothing more to say.

I was a pup, then I did live there, she said, with a glance in the direction of the compound where the cage was. Her murmuring voice was profoundly controlled, as were all her gestures and movements. Before that time the house burned. When the masters did live here. They did often hang up the cage. Once, a man for until he did die there. In that. I saw that.

Silence between them.

We pups never did go under that. Never did run there.

I saw the…the ground was different, underneath, Esdan said, speaking as softly and with a dry mouth, his breath coming short. I saw, looking down. The grass. I thought maybe…where they… His voice dried up entirely.

One grandmother did take a stick, long, a cloth on the end of that, and wet it, and hold it up to him. The cutfrees did look away. But he did die. And rot some time.

What had he done?

"Enna," she said, the one-word denial he’d often heard assets use—I don’t know, I didn’t do it, I wasn’t there, it’s not my fault, who knows…

He’d seen an owner’s child who said enna be slapped, not for the cup she broke but for using a slave word.

A useful lesson, he said. He knew she’d understand him. Underdogs know irony like they know air and water.

They did put you in that, then I did fear, she said.

The lesson was for me, not you, this time, he said.

She worked, carefully, ceaselessly. He watched her work. Her downcast face, clay-color with bluish shadows, was composed, peaceful. The baby was darker-skinned than she. She had not been bred to a bondsman, but used by an owner. They called rape use. The baby’s eyes closed slowly, translucent bluish lids like little shells. It was small and delicate, probably only a month or two old. Its head lay with infinite patience on her stooping shoulder.

No one else was out on the terraces. A slight wind stirred in the flowering trees behind them, streaked the distant river with silver.

Your baby, Kamsa, you know, he will be free, Esdan said.

She looked up, not at him, but at the river and across it. She said, Yes. He will be free. She went on working.

It heartened him, her saying that to him. It did him good to know she trusted him. He needed someone to trust him, for since the cage he could not trust himself. With Rayaye he was all right; he could still fence; that wasn’t the trouble. It was when he was alone, thinking, sleeping. He was alone most of the time. Something in his mind, deep in him, was injured, broken, had not mended, could not be trusted to bear his weight.

He heard the flyer come down in the morning. That night Rayaye invited him down to dinner. Tualenem and the two veots ate with them and excused themselves, leaving him and Rayaye with a half bottle of wine at the makeshift table set up in one of the least damaged downstairs rooms. It had been a hunting lodge or trophy room, here in this wing of the house that had been the azade, the men’s side, where no women would ever have come; female assets, servants, and usewomen did not count as women. The head of a huge packdog snarled above the mantel, its fur singed and dusty and its glass eyes gone dull. Crossbows had been mounted on the facing wall. Their pale shadows were clear on the dark wood. The electric chandelier flickered and dimmed. The generator was uncertain. One of the old bondsmen was always tinkering at it.

Going off to his usewoman, Rayaye said, nodding towards the door Tualenem had just closed with assiduous wishes for the Minister to have a good night. Fucking a white. Like fucking turds. Makes my skin crawl. Sticking his cock into a slave cunt. When the war’s over there’ll be no more of that kind of thing. Halfbreeds are the root of this revolution. Keep the races separate. Keep the ruler blood clean. It’s the only answer. He spoke as if expecting complete accord, but did not wait to receive any sign of it. He poured Esdan’s glass full and went on in his resonant politician’s voice, kind host, lord of the manor, Well, Mr. Old Music, I hope you’ve been having a pleasant stay at Yaramera, and that your health’s improved.

A civil murmur.

President Oyo was sorry to hear you’d been unwell and sends his wishes for your full recovery. He’s glad to know you’re safe from any further mistreatment by the insurgents. You can stay here in safety as long as you like. However, when the time is right, the president and his cabinet are looking forward to having you in Bellen.

Civil murmur.

Long habit prevented Esdan from asking questions that would reveal the extent of his ignorance. Rayaye like most politicians loved his own voice, and as he talked Esdan tried to piece together a rough sketch of the current situation. It appeared that the legitimate government had moved from the city to a town, Bellen, northeast of Yaramera, near the eastern coast. Some kind of command had been left in the city. Rayaye’s references to it made Esdan wonder if the city was in fact semi-independent of the Oyo government, governed by a faction, perhaps a military faction.

When the Uprising began, Oyo had at once been given extraordinary powers; but the Legitimate Army of Voe Deo, after their stunning defeats in the west, had been restive under his command, wanting more autonomy in the field. The civilian government had demanded retaliation, attack, and victory. The army wanted to contain the insurrection. Rega-General Aydan had established the Divide in the city and tried to establish and hold a border between the new Free State and the Legitimate Provinces. Veots who had gone over to the Uprising with their asset troops had similarly urged a border truce to the Liberation Command. The army sought armistice, the warriors sought peace. But So long as there is one slave I am not free, cried Nekam-Anna, Leader of the Free State, and President Oyo thundered, The nation will not be divided! We will defend legitimate property with the last drop of blood in our veins! The Rega-General had suddenly been replaced by a new commander in chief. Very soon after that the Embassy was sealed, its access to information cut.

Esdan could only guess what had happened in the half year since. Rayaye talked of our victories in the south as if the Legitimate Army had been on the attack, pushing back into the Free State across the Devan River, south of the city. If so, if they had regained territory, why had the government pulled out of the city and dug in down at Bellen? Rayaye’s talk of victories might be translated to mean that the Army of the Liberation had been trying to cross the river in the south and the Legitimates had been successful in holding them off. If they were willing to call that a victory, had they finally given up the dream of reversing the revolution, retaking the whole country, and decided to cut their losses?

A divided nation is not an option, Rayaye said, squashing that hope. You understand that, I think.

Civil assent.

Rayaye poured out the last of the wine. But peace is our goal. Our very strong and urgent goal. Our unhappy country has suffered enough.

Definite assent.

I know you to be a man of peace, Mr. Old Music. We know the Ekumen fosters harmony among and within its member states. Peace is what we all desire with all our hearts.

Assent, plus faint indication of inquiry.

As you know, the Government of Voe Deo has always had the power to end the insurrection. The means to end it quickly and completely.

No response but alert attention.

"And I think you know that it is only our respect for the policies of the Ekumen, of which