Dill: “Is this what’s called a propaganda war, Dad?”
Mitch: “No, I should not say that.  This is what’s called wiping excrement off the sole of one’s boot.” There  is no good explanation of  why I have been left to drown in shit
​Extract from The Anile Heir © 2006.I, Ysabel Jehan Howard, hereby assert and give notice of my right under s.77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act1988 to be identified as the author of this book.
 
Shavli to Sarat: Actually just going on a course.  Got the logins from Gorse and shall duly appear in a puff of silver smoke.  If I’m two people, you’re two people too.  Skyhawk seems to thnk I represent Narulis!
Sarat: Fun this, isn’t it.
Shav: You wouldn’t like to be a Fidubi vet, would you. Think of all the sheep you could vaccinate and save from instartas.
Sarat: This sheep died for Kadun!
Shav: Can you really imagine it, us in Azt?
Sarat: How likely?  I’m really not sure.  I think we all have to remember – we don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do.  This is what I want to do.  You and Petrush maybe not.
Shav: You get bumped off, I’m the Anile heir.  Can’t exactly pretend none of it’s anything to do with me.
Sarat:  I do understand Azt isn’t a NoZone meet in Bara’s.  I’m not going to achieve anything dead, am I. Tell them Petrush’d be emperor.  That should make them vote republic.
Shav: Almost worth your sad demise.  Keep safe, bro.  I know you.  You stand in the open and shoot your mouth off.
Sarat: Not in a temperature of minus 10!
Shav: Ah, a deterrent, good.
Sarat: Blizzards too.
Shav:  Better and better. 
Sarat: What’s the course?
Shav: Evil grin.  Reasonably macho.  Weapon Systems Analysis.
Sarat: What d’you mean, you can’t make the tea.
Shav: They’re that bad?
Sarat: There’s a contingent.
 
VARULIN: That’s spot on, that is.  My lass, she’s 14 and right bright.  She wants to get on and I want her to get on.  There’s a phrase she got off the Grid, she says to me, Dad I know there’s a glass ceiling.  But it’s more than that.  Too young to understand.  Says her teachers are holding her back.  We do keep our girls down, there’s no denying.  Course some of it’s just prejudice.  Point is, where we are, lass gets anywhere near the top, she’s going to run into them.  Want to do politics, love?  Just run the flower-show.  We’ll do anything to protect our girls and **** what it looks like.
IRTUBIFEM:  It poisons everything, think that’s also the point.  If you meet a group of people with certain attitudes, you don’t push it, as you would if you were sure they were basically normal people.  You don’t want to get known as anything approaching feminist.
BAZ: Think it’s worth mentioning this goes way back.  As Maya’s said, what us cats were for, imperial social workers.  You had a problem, you took it to a cat and we upheld imperial law.  And of course that’s what the emperor’s stewards were for, not to mention the emperor or indeed the empress. Everyone has access, that’s basic, and what they did not do was sit faffing around in Azt: all over the place. It’s all bound up with the Kadun cock-up,  most things are.  When things got nasty, 1) we were otherwise engaged and 2) the sole concern of decent blokes was keeping their girls safe.  If that meant a woman couldn’t take the produce to market on her own or whatever, tough shit, love.  There are worse things can happen, much worse.  And of course women adapted their own behaviour.  And the key point, we couldn’t and can’t uphold the rights of women to completely independent behaviour because we couldn’t and can’t guarantee safety 24/7.
MITCH: That is what cats call it, the Kadun cock-up?  I am wholly diverted.  But yes, historically, precisely so, it may possibly be said women in Kadun were at that time put into shat shall I say a mould from which they were not sufficiently emerged to protect themselves from what we have today.  Yes, of course, understand 300% about the flower-show. 
IRTUBIFEM: We all do, that’s the problem.  I mean it is, isn’t it.  How exactly do you uproot the whole thing.
 
DIVALDIN:  I’m trying to apply this to what has happened here in Kadun.  The most obvious lack of unanimity is that the military have split.  Everyone has split.  The most obvious difference of course is the Houses.  Some of us never had much loyalty to Azt in the first place.
CHALLIN: We have split or merely reverted?
DIVALDIN: But we are still Kadun.  We are loyal to Kadun, to an idea of Kadun.  It is merely not that represented by Azt.
KARULA: I think we have to differentiate between how Kadun sees herself and the face she presents to the world.  After the collapse of empire, we remained All-KAdun as a  geopolitical convenience, a seat at the world-table.  It may not be exaggerating to say the government in Azt, which was in any case laissez-faire, was largely irrelevant to most people’s lives.
CHALLIN: That is an excellent point.  But any adoption of either the Dabidan or the Fidubi model would entail rule by central government, a rule that could only too clearly only be imposed if there were widespread agreement.
MITCH: This may be a good moment to mention our rejection of secession.  For our part here in the west a bloc of us in Var-sega’ together with Van-senok is surely capable of independent existence, and I should think Carlin equally so.  It would of course be an admission of defeat, which has many implications for our idea of Kadun, all of which blitz certain other views voiced her.  To me surrender of Vaudos would be intolerable, against everything we stand for.  In practical terms it  would leave us in a state of constant war, which is not to be tolerated, a vile and dangerous infection forever at our borders.  As an entity at war, we are to some extent of course under military governance, that extent being any impingement on our security and well-being.  We do not light up the cities at night to provide easy targets and other things indeed which I am not able to mention.  In short normality evades us and would do so if we declared independence.  It is not possible to conceive that Azt would meekly accept such a declaration.
ASDINAN: Exactly.  Narulis’ rules, OK. 
SARAT: Couldn’t Vaudos escape?  I mean if you could declare independence, why can’t Vastulis?
REWN: As far as I’m concerned, because I should ignore it!  It would be a nonsense.  I myself am vaudosi by birth.  So far as the legality of such a declaration goes, it would clearly be preposterous while Corsin remain in Vaudos: Corsin being agents of Azt.
MITCH: And you are both correct!  Undoubtedly Azt could establish a puppet government in Vaudos and equally undoubtedly the rest of us would laugh in their faces.
 
Mitch PM’d Sarat.  I think we have a great deal to talk abou.  I am just touching base here.  WE have three children and should very much like to combine business with pleasure with a beach holiday in the south.  However it seems ludicrous to come with an unfinished product and we should like to put a full stop at the end of our work first.  If I may in due course let you know some dates, that will be excellent.
 
He also PM’d Cantililp@ be here or be square!
At Mel’s Place, replied Cantilip.  You might like to check out the thread.
 
“We can’t do that,” said Karula.  “In what cage do we stash the children while we talk to Sarat.”
“We cannot possibly,” said Mitch, “lounge on the beaches of Fidub without them.”
“That would be gross,” agreed Karula, “but I am thinking in this instance I do not feel the need to wave my feminist credentials.  Perhaps you should go on ahead and do the business and I and the kids can follow later for the pleasure.  Alternatively we could have first a business trip and later a vacation.”
They both scowled at the jet-lag.
 
Sarat to Mitch: That would be brill.  Dad says he can take them out on his boat to see the dolphins.
 
“Sounds a most suitable cage,” said Mitch.  He grinned, guessing what was going through Karula’s mind.  “He has brought up four undrowned.  I think we may entrust him with our brood.”
“Maybe there were another three lost at sea.”
 
SITSI: Mel’s Place.  Well worth a look:  ‘Mel is a student of Anthropology at the Schools in Harn.  As Dabida’s heir, it’s his job to learn about cults and rites and things’.  Lot of discussion about the other matter.  No things. 
 
FILI: You did not tell us his subject!  Remiss, I call that.
But something else severely distracted them.
 
SHAVLI:  Hi guys, I’m Sarat’s sister, so I’m KP.  But I’m also FAF same as my partner Petrush.  Obviously we’re young and unelevated, but if you guys have questions,  we could answer at least some of them.  I was involved a bit with the Kadun side – receptionist! They wanted phone and mail (wo)manned 24/7 and asked for volunteers for the night-shift.  Who knows, I may have talked to you!
 
GLITIN: Well, I really don’t know about this!
FRIS:  We too are young and unelevated!  Yes, please.
HEDGEHOPPER: Always glad to see FAF.
SITSI: Well, what I think – Narulis would be quite cross with us if we didn’t say thank you!
CALUNIN: A lady officer.  At least no stripy socks.
KARULA: Mitch and I are intending to visit Fidub in the not too distant future.  I sure hope we can have the pleasure of meeting you.
 
VITI:  Did anyone take it upstairs?
CALUNIN: Probably dismissed out of hand.
 
CORIM:  ‘Cho’s family’, not ‘the men in Cho’s family.’
SHAVLI: I could get our mum here too.
PETRUSH: Or Amida (Cho’s other half).
 
VARNA:  By no means dismissed, merely more pressing concerns.  I think this may prove most interesting.
 
SHAVLI: We don’t have officers, as I suspect you well know.  Levels of seniority, like PANTHER and Sardun.
VANNINA:  Me, for instance.  This has been said before but I’ll repeat it for Shavli.  The Cult are over the hill, a Sardun commando starts commanding, they don’t even notice which sex she is.  Some of it is pure sham.
FALTARIN:  That has happened perhaps once.
VANNINA: Hell you know.  Desk-jockey based on the coast, that too.
 
FILI: Have to say no fit of the vapours.  80% of it’s class.
 
THEWALLFLOWERS:  Ma’am!   Evil grin.  An expression of adhesion, I think, gentlemen…In this case feminist solidarity.  They’ll awfully fond of defining ‘sir’ as an expression of adhesion too: means I disagree but I am still at your command or in this case that I’d love to fly. We are the partners of dashing young officers.  We have elsewhere posted under our own names, but we have cunningly achieved this login in order to  protect the innocent.  We have to say they are awfully sweet and treat us as (almost) completely equal; never once have our darlings intimated they think us intellectually inferior, which is just as well because we’re not.  However, as everyone knows, they draw the line at our fighting beside them.  We think there is a huge number of points here and our darlings, not to mention their revered superiors, probably haven’t got time to write an epic.  We, however, have.  We’ve almost finished our oeuvre and thought we’d just introduce ourselves first.
KARULA: ROTFLMAO.  Gentlemen, we are not all shy and retiring.
THE WALLFLOWERS:  Earthpower is of course both profoundly gynocentric and the indigenous culture of Kadun. It is a curiosity of certain male persons that they babble – it is not too strong a word – of the golden age while conveniently eliding what was golden about it.
KARULA: I too have undoubtedly observed that phenomenon.
CHALLIN:  But may it not be said that ‘the golden age’ is just a little mythologized.  It is hard to believe that 1500 years ago women enjoyed total equality, at least among the mass of the people.
FALTARIN: Truly, sir, you condone the presence here of foreign military?
OBAYA: Licky, licky.
FALTARIN: Shut up, damn you!
KARULA:  Honey, these are serious matters only men can debate.
OBAYA: Got to meet you one day.  Don’t get near the House much.
CHALLIN: Allies.
KARULA: I can travel.
GOTA: Can’t think why you’d go to Fidub!
DIBESIT: How much of this is going on?  This is their famous democracy, transparency?
THE WALLFLOWERS: I believe people are permitted to speak to each other.
KARULA: Most interesting to meet with old friends of the family.  Catch up on the news.  We go back a long way.
SEVERAL:  ROTFLMAO.  Deny it if you dare!
KOLA:  Start by establishing a couple of things which we all know but some of us try very hard not to know.  Some women are fighting for Kadun.  Why does this not penetrate? Cats, trees, silly little girls are wandering around with machine-pistols.  Silly little girls are being obscenely tortured and ending up dead, though only occasionally, because we are very, very good.  Other thing of course is there are women here, cats, trees, civs.  THIS IS NOT A MILITARY FORUM.
 
SARAT:  Put it there, sis!
SHAVLI: High five, bro. 
PETRUSH: Have you lectured them on instartas yet?
SARAT: Far too well brought up.  That’s next week.
MAYA: What guys have to understand is it all started with instartas.  Once upon a my beloved was going to be a vet.  Instartas is a  parasite commonly found in the faeces of sheep. Not a lot of people know that.  Now you know it too.  In imperfectly filtered drinking water, instartas causing severe swelling of the eyes, sometimes resulting in partial closure and consequent impaired vision, together with pain.  This may lead to blindness if it goes untreated. Something must be done!  Stop laughing like that. 
 
CARLUTAN: Do you by any chance have honeyed mellifluous tones? 
SHAVLI:  I remember that! 
CARLUTAN: Damned efficient young woman, this.
 
Yes, well, that silences a few hrrmphs.  For at least ten minutes.
 
VEENA:  All together now:  Chaps, you have to bloody talk about it!  Understand about not being shot down over Vaudos.  Actually capable of answering the telephone.
 
SONTAN:  I missed the announcement of alliance with Fidub.  I understand they have briefly been of assistance but surely an ally is a formal association.
 
DIBESIT: Has Sart indeed not said, the people affected by decisions must know how they are reached.
 
Is someone panicking?
 
MITCH:  Neither of us has been reticent about our politics or what we should hope to achieve.
DIBESIT: Why can you not have your conversation here at the forum?  Is that not ‘Narulis’ gig’?
MITCH: Actually no. Certainly I envisage in due course open conversation in front of the whole of Kadun.
KARULA: Partly because we have three kids.  Exigencies of security meant they had a somewhat curtailed life in the City.  The opportunity to have a real family holiday is not to be missed!
MITCH:  We shall duly sadly inform you if they are eaten by sharks.
SONTAN: Of course the real point of having Fidubi here is to instruct us on marine biology!  Are they big?
PETRUSH: Actually mostly not, no bigger than or little bigger than a dolphin. 
SONTAN: Not big enough to consume an adult but a child - ?  You swim in the sea?  I perceive another myth taking a tumble!  Fidubi striding into the surf.
PETRUSH:  Many of the smaller bays are shark-netted.  Additionally we have many ‘natural pools’ filled by the tide  in which children swim.
SHAVLI:  Dad used to take us out in his boat to swim with the dolphins.  That’s safe too.  There aren’t swarms of sharks, one peeking out of every wave! Hi, kids, look who’s here! If one does appear the dolphins just form a circle round the swimmer to protect him or her.  Of course we were never in the water without a cat in the dinghy in case of anything and we never strayed far from the ladder.
Mitch looked at Karula and laughed heartlessly.
“They are your children also.”
SONTAN: I have heard similar stories.  Quite fascinating.  Dolphins have a rapport with humans, you would say?
 
TIRO: Call me mean and callous, afraid I couldn’t resist.  [Graphic of choppy sea, leering sharks peeking out from behind every wave. Oy, mates, kids!]
 
PETRUSH: That reminds me of one of my favourite cartoons.  [Sarat surrounded by cats ~(four-legged), dogs, rabbits, hamsters, a donkey, two skaggas scrutinizing him from a half-open door.  D’you think he’s a soft touch?]
 
BAZ: Tell you a story.  All four of them, potty about animals, turned the place into a menagerie.  Essa, that’s Sarat’s dad, said fine, you’re the keepers.  How that house works is really pretty much the same as the hill. Run by cubs responsible for supplies. If in normal usage by sensible people they ran out of loo paper then cubs had to zip to the Megamart. Since we only train people who can count, that did not happen.  Sarat used the entire stock of kitchen roll looking after rabbits with the squits and he and his mate Petrush had to do the zipping.  Of course Tar only has the two of them.  Essa had four and then Mel and Hass in the summer and all their little friends. When they were all little it was simply nice family meals.  Then they got sick with adolescence, fridge-raiders.  Essa put his foot down pdq. They were capable of going to shops.  They could order on-line.  They could fend for themselves. They were given own larder and fridge and told to sort it.  And bloody well clean up after themselves. Sarat and Hass had a NoZone meeting to go to.  Sarat was talking. He’s good at that.  Somehow they just didn’t have time.  They did pile everything up as a sort of concessionary gesture.  You know how kids do.  That’ll be all right…Essa and Baya were entertaining unexpectedly. They did not appreciate the state of their kitchen.  Sarat got a right bollocking when he got back.  You have a phone.  You are capable of utterance.  He was still bleeding next morning.  Got him a plaster.
BAVENIN: Truly, no servants?  I find that very hard to believe.
BAZ: Made their own beds, did their own laundry, soon as they were old enough to, anyway.  Cubs whizz round first thing in the morning, make the place nice.  Let’s say anything that happened between then and Essa and Baya wanting to relax in the evening, on their heads be it.  Essa called them snail-trails.  Snail-trails of my children in the sitting-room, on the verandah, they were expected to wipe up their snail-trails.
GOSA:  Sure all of us are relieved to know PANTHER only train people who can count.
 
SHAVLI:  When I was 16 I decided to colour my hair.  Dark blue is quite noticeable on cream carpet.  What’s infuriating is it wasn’t noticeable on me.  Naturally black.  No-one’d told me I had to bleach the natural colour out first.  I was quite shocked when I found that out.  But the carpet.  Indeed the carpet, absolutely.  The towels I fear were a write-off, got relegated to the zoo. Essa thought blue spots were dealable with.    Of course I didn’t know how to get them out!  Mum and Dad sat me down at a monitor to find out.  It’s quite a long-winded process.  Not helped by Zik making wisecracks.  We learn!
 
MITCH: I freely admit my bed was made and my floor swept, indeed that my snail-trails mysteriously vanished as though by magic.  So far as being waited on goes, I could whistle for it. 
CHANGRI:  Too bloody right.  This House has no time for prissy-boys.
HEELA: Of course there is just the one of him and we only had to tolerate him in the holidays.  I may well suspect that in Essa’s position I should have reached the same conclusion.
MITCH: There you have it, tolerated, what a word for a father to use!  To my lasting regret, I did not attempt to colour my hair.
ASDINAN:  I think Duvi will.  Reach the conclusion, not colour her hair!  Maybe she’ll do that too.   I was brought up like Mitch but now there are four more.  At the moment they’re all under twelve but they grow larger and hungrier by the minute!
 
DIBESIT:  Only three of course pertain to my lady Duvi, the other is Asdinan’s bastard.
ASDINAN: All together now, further proof, were further proof required, the laxity of the south has corrupted Carlin.
PETRUSH: Who is this saddo?
DIBESIT:  And who is the ‘mother’ who has deserted her child, some whore, some village-girl considered unfit to be Mistress of Carlin.
MARDIS:  Uzz’n don’ ‘ole with no tark loike that.
DIBESIT: We have the yokels here now?
MARDIS:  You keep on like that, in absolute droves.  Suggest you don’t come to the Rabbiters’ any time soon.  San-yaega-baht, old boy.  Asdinan’s cousin.
 
MIDI:  Me, pig-shit, me, I’m the mother.  You listen hard, boy.  Asdinan is about the most decent upright guy you could hope to find in this country. He wanted to make a go of it.  I didn’t.  I did not and do not see myself as Mistress of Carlin!  Of course Carlin has our child, a much better life than being alone with me in the city. Turd like you are the bloody corruption, making everything normal and human dirty and sordid.  Actually what drew us together in the first place, shared loathing of shit like you.
KARULA: Kudos, honey, kudos.  I too had to choose between two very different lives. 
VEENA: Yes, gentlemen, where appropriate of course, women can bloody speak.  We are not talked about as though we are defective children with no hearts and minds of our own.
 
FILI: I shall attempt elevated discussion against immeasurable odds.  Women in command.  I fear I perceive that if a woman is not considered in charge of herself but in some sense ‘owned’, subordinate, she can hardly be in charge of anyone else.
KARULA:  I think that is a real acute observation.
 
MAYA: Mard, high five!
SARSHI: I hope everyone likes my H-W T.  [On the front doe-eyed hadin colts: Just because we don’t look dangerous…On the back four steel-shod hooves: …doesn’t mean we can’t kick!]  Where’s the slime-ball?
VEENA: I think it hath sunk back into the mire.
SARSHI: Damn!   Mitch, Vij says when the hell are you going to get your ass over here?  Molto kudos for the Sardun gig. Just been talking to Sable, that’s a women’s group in Carlin.  They’re going to hold a meeting on the world of make believe.  Because they live in a male world they fantasize that it is a male world.  Really hope some of you guys can come.
 
“My head hurts,” said Munzi.  “My lady of Carlin is a princess of Dabida.  My lady of Dabida is a princess of Kadun.
“Couldn’t we have a ceremonial swapping of Ts?”
 
VARULIN: Can we not cut to the chase here?  They don’t do it, the saluting, the sirring.  Some of us, if we admit which we don’t, don’t either.  Those of us who are close.  But the whole Army would collapse, right?
Predictable there has to be discipline etc.
PETRUSH:  We have no discipline?  We fly if we like, when we like, where we like?
FILI: Oh  I don’t know, you flip flap fly over Kadun readily enough.  Serious.  Of course you bloody don’t
PETRUSH: You do not let yourself down and you do not let other people down.  Anyone sentient knows there can be a good reason why a job has not been done but you give it 200% and you communicate, discuss with the team – find a solution. 
MUNZI: Where some of us are coming from essentially turns the sacred chain of command into jam.  Far from implicitly and scrupulously obeying our senior officers, we shot them.  Of course we saluted them and sirred them until we’d worked out precisely how to shoot them.
RITAWA: You always had the right to disobey an illegal order but of course you had to prove what was illegal about it, which in the circumstances…Following on from what Munz said, so those of us who’ve been in it do not have any time for those who haven’t drivelling about order and discipline and the rest.
VARULIN: Many evil grins, not that it was funny at the time.  .It was always dead straight, the Army, couldn’t call it kind, but if you were going to get a beating, which you only did for something serious, there had to be senior officers present see that it was all done proper. And if it was such a charge, you had to notify the Colonel it was being brought. Right from the start, straight down the line. They didn’t bother with any of that. Lads complained, course it was dismissed.  I complained, right little barrack room lawyer, good at it too, ever so formal, ever so polite, this paragraph here, sir…Course we knew our cards were marked.
PETRUSH: Molto molto kudos.  All of you.
 
MAYA: Just trying to work something out here.  The Army of All-Kadun has always had a reputation for being absolutely upright.  Sure there was stuff we couldn’t accept, but no-one ever said there was anything – slimy about you guys.  Sticking to the Army’s values got you out of the mess but – what Munzi said, only by completely over-turning the Army’s values?
MUNZI: Precisely, in a word.  Those away from the flames have the luxury of pretending nothing has changed.
RITAWA: That extends everywhere – class, gender.  Some here – I believe the expression is ‘in denial’.  What they’re denying is female cats who kill. 
VEENA: Either we don’t exist or there’s something wrong with us, pretend-men.
 
REWN: While I live and breathe, this army is a slime-free zone.
MUNZI: Sir!  That’s exactly what we mean by adhesion.  One  thing I know about CG Rewn is he would never ever surrender.  The other of course is that he engineered the execution of every rat in Consat and took command. 
VARULIN: I do absorb that.  Nonetheless my lady Shavli here is what I think we would call an officer and a lady, so where are me manners.  If we try to get the hang of this proper, you walk into a room of us with something of import to impart.  How would you expect us to behave?
SHAVLI:  Manners!  Reasonably. You wouldn’t stand or anything.  You would stop booking your holiday/doing the crossword/chatting with your mates, turn on your brains, look attentive to my pearls of wisdom.
VARULIN: I believe I can cope with that.  S’pose we didn’t.  I think I will be blunt here.  We are men.  You are a woman.  We want to wave our little – at you.  We do not take orders from women.  We freaking ignore you.  What then?
SHAVLI: Hmm!  I don’t think I know all the tricks of the trade yet – which would maybe be the point, a vulnerable young woman….Busking it.  Probable variations on exact context, whether I knew any of you.  Sound the hooter if there was one around.  That’s actually what we do to get immediate silence, brief and ear-splitting.  Make some kind of crack.  National half-day holiday’s been decreed – the bad news is that FAF are exempt.  If there was a group babbling, walk over to them. Say they were round a table.  Sit on the table and smile beatifically at them.  Say something like I’m the boss here. Look around and say who thinks he’s in charge here?  Probably be a ring-leader of two.  Try to identify and isolate him/them.  Essentially point out you’re here because you have a job to do.  If you don’t want to do it, you’re in the wrong place.  FAF does not do piss-artists, time-wasters. You have one minute by the clock, 60, 59, 58….How am I doing so far?
VARULIN: Listening most attentively, ma’am. Most of us are basically decent, reasonable blokes for obvious reasons..  Of course some have little bees in their bonnets or do I mean lower down.  Some right little fart pushes it, say he’s with a few of his mates, rest of us might tell him to shut it, or we might just want to see what happens next.
 
 
SHAVLI:  I guess I could get a bit abrupt.  Tell them to put their cocks in their pants now.  I don’t want to see them and nor does anyone else.  I’d imagine from what I’ve read here that may start a – dialogue, language no lady would use.  Ask what zoo they’ve escaped from.  There is no room in this service for ten-year-olds.  After that whoever are the most senior are catfood, which no-one actually wants to be.  The cops detain you until we’re ready.  It’s all perfectly relaxed and informal, after hours, relevant parties gathered round – that’s anyone else who was around, any witnesses, and anybody affected by your dumbfuck nonsense, say the guys who did the work instead, but you’re sitting down, you’ve got a coffee.  Only my immediate superior and I take you apart.  Mostly it’s the F word, which is functionality.  Why d’you think you can mess other people around, bloody waste of oxygen, what do you think you’re paid for, do you actually want to work here, but we’d  delve into your sexual politics, exactly why do you  think you can ignore a woman.  In the open to a backdrop of comment which would probably be something like  Aw, Shav, that was unkind!  Come on, dude, that’s garbage.  Anyone with a comment to make is free to make it.
VARULIN: I think I am diligent and well-bheaved.
MUNZI: Sounds like imperial justice to me!  Egg or chicken….I’m guessing that’s how it’s been done for a few dozen centuries or so.  So of course if you and your superior were in the wrong or you talked garbage others would say so?
SHAVLI: Others would say so.  And it’s recorded, becomes part of your record.  Two strikes and you’re out, like Dabida.  That’s one strike.
MUNZI: Among a great many other things – I am guessing being chucked out of FAF is not a good thing to have on one’s CV.  Other forms of offence?  Lovely pair of tits, darling.
SHAVLI: My brain is even bigger.  Yes, in times of yore ye scribes.
FINA, Dabidan Army, female:  We have come, we have read.  I shall start with a pretence of decorum.  It’s very kind of you to invite us and a pleasure to be here.
MUNZI: I do hope you will enjoy your visit.  May I offer you a cup of tea.
FURRIER: Pull up a chair, make yourselves comfortable
MAITLAN: Dabidan Fleet, male.  I see some of you have exquisite taste in antique furniture.
Friend of Mel’s.  Know Sarat and Maya in Zur.  I really don’t know how the ozone layer is coping without him.  .
SADIA, FAF, female: I’ve talked to some of the guys who were in Kadun.  They say you are very nice people but slightly strange about persons of the female persuasion.
MAITLAN: I too have had such discussions with the Kadun Fleet.  Usually over a flagon or two of apple-stock.  Perhaps the problem here is an excess of sobriety.
SONTO: Kadun Fleet, what other gender could I be.  Been aboard one of their carriers.  Everything A1 except of course.  Including the captain. 
SITSI: Damn! Forget to lay in the apple-stock.  Tea will have to do. Do you take milk?
 
MUNZI: The gallant army of Dabida has a somewhat alarming reputation. The socks!  The Ts!s.
FINA: Which we revel in.  The reputation, not the socks.
DITSI (Dabidan Army, male):  That really is my name.  Sometimes I think I could kill my parents.  I rather revel in the socks. [PIC of pair of socks in stripes of fluorescent yellow, pink and green]
FINA:  The Ts are pretty good too.  This is an H-W one.  Pic of doe-eyed hadin colts Just because we don’t look dangerous…On the back four steel-tipped hooves …doesn’t mean we can’t kick.  So?
RITAWA: Just trying to think of a really pompous and long-winded way of saying this..You see no correlation between military effectiveness and attire?
FINA: Yes and no.  No soldier is functional in either a ball-gown or a bikini.  If concealment is the game, natch nix on the socks.  Otherwise socks change nothing, get in the way of nothing.
DITSI: Sleeves worry us.  We get deeply concerned about sleeves.  Nix on loose ones, loose anythings that can catch. Long-sleeved anythings have to be tight fitting.  Mostly the Ts are cap sleeves or no sleeves.  We’re really very simple creatures.  You have a job to do.  If you think you’re in the wrong job, you say so – we don’t want IT whizzes staffing the sick-bay.  If you don’t know how to do something, you ask.  We expect 200%.  Anyone alive knows there can be a reason for not having done something, say you couldn’t get the part, but it had better be a good one.  You really really try.  Ditto it’s possible you didn’t have time but there’d better be something critical you did instead.  The heinous offence is leaving something necessary undone and not telling anyone.  And/or of course trying to cover up.  Two strikes and you’re out.  We don’t do dodos. So long as you perform, we don’t care.
RITAWA:  Frankley howling with laughter.  You cannot make Army life that simple
SITSI: We rhyme!  You think you have problems?  Can my parents not spell?  A matter of an intrusive H.
DITSI: My mum always told me, look for someone worse off than you are. 
 
YMOU: Enough of stripy socks! Think a lot of us think the values of Dabida and Fidub are identical but FAF always  look impeccable - ?. 
KULAN: FAF.  Smirk.  I think – we are of course a much older country.  Some matters of self-image were settled before Dabida was even thought of.  Like Kadun, if so, but Kadun of course suffered certain disruptions.  Dabida embraces an easy rationality on these things.  Never ever
MAITLAN: We too actually look rather good.  Of course we are less under general scrutiny.
SYAN: Dabidan Air Fleet.  We’re frankly tatty.  Eclipsed, I tell you!  There are actually other reasons for that, how defence is organized in the Quadrant. It’s actually on the Grid, so I’m not giving away anything here. FAF do the air, Most other fliers are basically transport.
 
VARNA:  I think a lot of the guys would be interested in the views of the Dabidan and Fidubi military on the more sordid aspects of male-female relations. We have to be frank.  In Cult regiments pornography is freely circulated no human being should contemplate. But what about mere nudity?
FINA:  We take the piss.  No-one ever had boobs that big.
ALLATSEA:  Dabidan Fleet. I think it’s also – all of us are affected by the existence of the Cult, just in reverse.  There’s a feeling that it’s inadequate to want to look at even soft porn – but then you guys don’t have our nudist beaches to satisfy your aesthetic desires!
FRENSAT: Brochures are available on the Grid? What about rape?  Let us suppose a woman soldier is working late, alone.
FINA: Cut off his balls?  It has to be a factor that we can defend ourselves.  Serious.  If we’re talking about a group of monkeys, nutters if it got to rape, unless it was murder as well – they know they’d be identified -  but maybe they’re a bit drunk, think it’s fun, she’s cornered.  It just doesn’t happen.
TANNAN: Dabidan Army, Commander Zur Region.  Female.  I recall one incident. 1.  No-one will be indulgent.  2. Absence of hierarchy means the victim has no fear of repercussion.  3.  For routine offences, it’s two strikes and you’re out.  A non-routine offence is one tried in a civilian court, as rape would be: out on your ear.
 
Quite so, ma’am.  We are finding this very interesting indeed.  Not of course that we necessarily accept it.  A woman in charge of Zur.  A lot of them knew that already.  These aren’t dodos.
 
“I do not believe women bathed topless in Narulis’ day.  Not of course that I have any particular objection.”
            “Not not like it, exactly.  Get anxious!”
            “Wish we could bloody travel!”
            “PM a couple of the guys in Carlin.” 
 
Inyulat to Corenin and Gilvat
Greetings cross the plague pits of Vaudos!  Stuck here on a hillock in V-s, foreign travel eludes us.  We are resourceful.  Heard you guys have been to Dabida?  What’s it actually like? 
 
THE WALLFLOWERS
 
1.     Kadun is fighting a war for her soul, her honour, her being.  From the perspective of her military, 50% of her population are debarred from fighting that war. This does not at first sight seem wholly logical; let us examine it further.
2.     Women who feel strongly on the matter are naturally free to join PANTHER or Sardun.
3.     Those, however, are let us say special forces; it is a curiosity that only SF are open to us, the regulars not.
4.     In earlier years, before the Army split, the crushing and conclusive argument was that there was no control over where a woman might be posted and to send her to a Cult regiment was to send her to a living hell.   This is no longer the case.
5.     We have to differentiate between the front line, the borders, and the coast, where we are.  (Since Free Kadun has a great deal of coast, we think we give nothing away.)  The danger faced by those away from the borders is surely that of being bombed, though even that is unlikely, and thus no different from the dangers faced by the civilian population.
6.     Let us cut to the chase and talk about the dangers of the borders.  Our understanding is this. Any member of PANTHER or Sardun is equally a target.  Any member of the military is so only if he refuse to submit.  Our understand is that when the Cult attempts to take a base it targets the senior officers, the rest supposed to be cowed thereby.  That majestically, heroically, they have not been or of course have pretended to be, to strike later, is of course common knowledge.  This is perhaps where it gets most interesting.  I think we can assume that the Cult would also target any woman, whatever her rank.  I do not think we need to descend into vile detail but undoubtedly the men would be forced to be spectators. 
7.     The argument from efficacy has been raised.  If we posit a scenario just as the one we have just raised, that the men apparently standing meek and defeated are in fact carrying out a contingency plan, then clearly being made spectators to obscenity might impede the carefully structured execution of that plan.  We cannot omit the Cult from the argument.  Were the Cult defeated, we should be in a new landscape.  As we have said, any member of PANTHER or Sardun is a target, and a female member of course particularly so. We have raised the question of our joining PANTHER or Sardun.  We are frankly not entirely sure we are SF material, but more generally there is we think another question.  Our darlings would be worried sick about us.  Whether or not that would impede their efficacy is open, but we know it is desperately important to them to know we at least are safe and for our part we find other ways of fighting this war.  I do not think we can have this discussion and wholly omit the antithesis of the Cult, which is love. 
8.     Do cats and trees not then have partners?  Do they not love?  Of course they do. We think the point there is these are elite forces composed of exceptional people.  While there are of course exceptional people in the military it is of its nature an organization filled with ordinary rather than extraordinary people.  In this context it becomes plaintively absurd that a woman who wishes to defend her country is forced to join PANTHER or Sardun and expose herself to great risk because she is forbidden to sit analysing data in a comfortable office on the coast in no danger at all.
9.     Last, but perhaps not least, there is the backdrop, the position of women in Kadun generally, about which of course we also have many opinions.  Suffice it to say here that the functioning of a dual-sex military is not only a question of its containing women but of where in Kadun its men come from, how accustomed they are to women in positions of any influence or authority, to women who simply regard themselves as independent beings.
 
Not intellectually inferior, dear ladies, not intellectually inferior at all.
 
MUTAN: Army, Var-sega’.  I think this is completely brilliant. I think I speak for a lot of us.  Somewhere inside we’d go nuts if we thought our ladies were in the hands of the Cult.  Yes, we are disciplined and it matters, and probably outwardly we’d be as usual, but I suspect it would be like a bomb ticking away inside us that could be set off at at inopportune moment.
FILI: As someone has said, or we are as vile as they.
SADIA: FAF.  Female. Don’t think there’s anyone sentient who doesn’t grasp where you guys are coming from on that one but there’s before and more to the point after.  How much would guys say – not intellectually inferior but intellectually different?  I see here an equation.
FINA: Love ‘plaintively absurd’.  Gentlemen, that is exactly what it is.
MUTAN: When it’s put like that, I think we have to come out with our hands up!  If we think only men are capable of fighting, do we not grossly waste manpower in non-combat roles.  Not entirely sure of my facts, but I think we are the only military in the world that refuses to deploy women in any role whatever.  Some of us do not like the idea of women in uniform.  It ‘says’ something to us that’s at odds with our basic views of female
SADIA: The question is what.  Females cannot be effective?
FRENSAT: Effective at what?  We think there is a lot in that. 
SADIA: Anything that matters?
MUTAN: Don’t think that’s quite fair.  A lot of it’s to do with power.
SADIA: Keeping women away from.  How can I put this?  All of us in FAF have a woman in command.  Her name is Airoch.
MUNZI: I am entirely sure there is no-one on the right side of sane who doubts the competence of Airoch-cha.
 
TIRIYA: There were rat-ships, manned from top to bottom with yellow-fanged rodentia.  I say were because I think we’ve sunk them all now.  Nearly all.  Said to be a couple skulking outside Azt.  I defy anyone to think it reasonable, intelligent, progressive to send a woman to sea on such a vessel, no escape except as shark-food.  1.  We are looking to the future.  2.  I think despite the manpower argument it is not sensible to make such a major change in the middle of a war.  3.  That applies to the  Fleet.  Don’t think it applies to possibility of women doing data analysis or even the cooking, other non-combat roles.
FRENSAT: We have to admit there’s  raw prejudice, women haven’t got the reaction speed or the math. 
SADIA:

FRENSAT: ROTFLMAO.
VARNA: If I may second that…Parallel with us of course, even had we highly trained and competent women, I should not permit them to fly combat missions with the risk of coming down in Azt.
SITSI: About that equation…I think a reality check tells us most men couldn’t solve it but we have to admit there’s a mind-set – all men are gifted at math, born understanding the workings of a tank.  Me, for a start, but I can see my way towards.  I did equations at school.  If you tell girls they’re hopeless at math, they’re going to be hopeless at math.  School has to be where it starts.  My sister is really bright but I think she’d just look blankbecause no-one’s given here the basics.  What I’m trying to say is it’s not a fault in women, it’s a fault in education.  If we enlisted girls we’d have to teach them all the stuff boys knew by the time they were 12 but going back to what I first said, some boys, we pretend we don’t have to teach men basic stuff.  Some lads, practically have to teach them how to breathe.  So underlying that I think you’ve got – men can learn how to breathe, fast, women can’t!
MUNZI: So many other things.  FAF, of course always look impeccable.  The gallant Army of Dabida, however, a  certain reputation  –  alarming T-shirts and stripy socks.
VARNA: See no reason why we shouldn’t side with FAF in that respect.
MUNZI: There are two distinct things here, what you said about falling into their hands and what the Fleet chap said about being under their command.
SITSI: Aren’t they the same thing?  We decide for women.
MUNZI: No they are not the same thing!  First one, you could argue a woman has a right to make the decision to risk it.  Second one, she’d have to be nuts to put herself under their command.
 
SADIA:  Just assembling my weapons.  Physical strength.  Manual dexterity.  Intellectual proclivity.  These must vary between individual women.  Equally they must vary between individual men.  Or all men are hard-wired to drive tanks?
SITSI:  I think if we’re honest – one problem for some chaps.  You start with a woman flier.  Next thing you know she gets promoted and you have a woman in command.
MUNZI: Undoubtedly some of us would have difficulty taking an order from a woman.
SADIA: Yes but why.
KARULA: Men lead.  Women follow.  That is a Kadun essential inside the military or out.  The usual expression is pretend-men
SADIA: How interesting.
KARULA: The unreconstructed Kadun male repays close study.  The essence is that human perfection lies in masculinity.  Some women do not properly understand we are a separate species and attempt to ape men.
SADIA:  Didn’t you leave out a hyphen: ape-men.  So being fully female lies in being nurturing, supportive, etc.  Male is active, female is passive, etc.
KARULA:  They claim it’s a question of the Whole.  For sure that conceals a whole load of grunting and knuckle-walking.
MUTAN: You can’t deny male and female are the two halves of the Whole.
SADIA: Looks more like 80:20 to me.
KARULA: ROTFL.  But each of us is both male and female. All the ‘hard’ attributes are assigned to men, strong, rational, hard, leaving women weak, irrational, soft.  But we are all equally human.  Each of us is a continuum from strong to weak, rational to irrational.  I am a real soft Mom, but if anyone threatened our children, I should not bleat and scream for Mitch to do something but simply blow his brains out.
SOBRENIN That much surely anyone can understand.
FILI: And we know of individual acts of heroism by women.  Unfortunately, for the purposes of the discussion, they were civilian women.  Couldn’t be anything else could they.  What do I mean, perfectly ordinary women.
SOBRENIN: Ludicrously, from the perspective of the discussion.  I think you probably mean ‘real soft Moms’.  That’s how Var-sega’ speaks these days?!
ZITAN:  Or the girls at the college in Boolan.  I’m wondering vaguely something in the idea, it’s OK for women to defend.  Attack is ‘unfeminine’.
MUTAN: I think that’s a really interesting one.  Just thinking.  Yes, we like the idea of our grisl being safe but if the line collapsed and our homes were under attack – think we rather expect/hope they’d defend themselves and our kids.
SADIA: By the time she’s blown out the brains of a few rats….
CONRULAT (Sardun, male, gay):  This of course is the root of the objections of some to gays.  That it affronts the Whole.  I certainly should not bleat and scream if anyone threatened me.  Whether I blew his brains out possibly depends on whether his name was Ban-tisol.
 
“Bomb just went off, Mitch.”
“I shall be most interested in the response.”
 
MUNZI:  No prejudice personally.  Know some here have.  Kudos for raising the matter.  I feel I half-understand, but we do have bodies.  Can you discount bodies?  There are of course aspects we would not discuss in mixed company.
SADIA: Maybe you should start trying.
DITSI: Gay. 
CONRULAT: The argument is the male unites with the female but that’s ‘male’ and ‘female’ as Karula said, he’s hard – so to speak, she’s soft, he’s rational, she’s irrational, etc.
 
CONRULAT: It doesn’t seem to have been considered that women and gays both have more at stake, more to fight for.
MUNZI: I am  unsure about that.  Not so stupid that I do not understand your fate is worse.  If we say we face absolute evil, how can it be more absolute. 
CONRULAT: I actually understand that.  Just torture us for longer before letting us die.  There is nothing they do to us they do not do to the heterosexual.male, bar of course rape of women, but as has been said you get it for what you do.  We get it for what we are.  It’s a question also of the future.  Under Cult rule we should have no future. 
OBAYA: Nor any woman who doesn’t think of herself as a stuffed toy.
KARULA: It is sure the case that, imperfect though some things are, we are all at least capable of civilized conversation.
OBAYA: Meaning they are.  OK, gentlemen, I think you probably are, you are having this conversation because you recognize things have to change.  Sensible bunnies. As touched on above, if you think females can’t be trusted with data analysis, catering, cleaning the freaking latrines, you’re out of it.  But you don’t think that.  I still don’t understand what you do think.
SADIA: Probably a lot of you haven’t – what’s funny in all this is what Airoch looks like.  Yea, under those pretty shawls is a mind like a freaking laser.  [Pic of sweet little old lady fiddling with her beads, draped in fringed dusky pink shawl.]
KARULA: ROTFLMAO if that is not disrespectful!  To one of the most powerful women in the world.  That raises questions does it not of women feeling it necessary to pretend in some respect to be men in order to succeed. 
MAYA: Airoch is superificially repeat superficially your dear old aunt.  She calls everyone darling and offers smoky tea out of bone china cups.  Then she kills you.  I shan’t tell you the name out of respect for the dead, but there was one rather senior Dabida politico who was irritated with Fidub over some obscure point of maritime law, can’t remember the details.  May he rest in peace.  Probably the Straits.  We’ve been grumbling at each other over whose Straits for 600 years and we’re not going to stop now.  Yes, dear irturbi, Fidub can be irritating!  But we love them anyway.
SADIA: Of course they’re our Straits.  Grin, duck, run.
RITAWA:  The word seems to me to be hiatus.  You can’t separate it from the whole of the circles we come from.  I know things are different in Van-senok.  I think a lot of us have been brought up to think women are a different species requiring  a different set of behaviours.  For the purposes of the argument, it doesn’t matter who the woman is socially, the key point is that she’s a she and we can’t behave what we think of as naturally to her.  A strange woman, anyway.  I’m not sure how far this goes.  I think – hope – I behave naturally to my mother, my partner.
OBAYA: So you wouldn’t bollox a female squaddy in the same way you would a male one.
RITAWA: If I am absolutely frank, I shouldn’t know how to bollox a female squaddy.  She might burst into tears.  I think if I continue being absolutely frank, a lot of us – we should of course behave correctly to Madam President but she being a she would place us in unfamiliar territory.  Understood people in the south don’t do things like stand up when a lady enters the room.  I’m not convinced everyone treats men and women identically.  Your comments, please!
DUKIN: Citizen of Zur!  Broadly I think we do.  We don’t have behaviour to men or behaviour to women, we have behaviour to people.
VATONIN: Greetings from the Leolisle!  If it was a romantic occasion, anniversary or something, I’d treat my lady like cut glass.  Think there’s an understanding special behaviours for special occasions.  Otherwise, yes, we’re all just people.
SITSI: Before things got hairy, we used to pop down to Zur sometimes, even spend a weekend.  Too damn’ far to get back in a hurry.  Yes, we found it a bit shocking!  Even in  posh places they don’t greet you with ‘Good day, sir, how may we be of assistance’ (and look at you as if you’re something the cat brought in).  They say, “Hi, how can I help?” and sound as if they mean it.  
KARULA: Perhaps a guy feels like bursting into tears also.  He has been taught a brake which a woman has not.
AGOU: Or to swap it around she has been taught that tears get her off the hook.  It’s all so much bound up with what people learn as children.
 
At which point the anti-gay mob moved in, really this intolerable nonsense has gone far enough, that we should even consider frank perversion, precisely what is meant
DITSI:  Oh dear don’t we have a little problem.
SADIA: We promised Mel we’d be polite….
DITSI: Promises can be broken.
CONRULAT: Gentlemen, which you are not, you are disturbing civilized conversation!  Or in other words fuck off!
You bloody pervert, how dare you, and blah.
CONRULAT:  Probably your bloody worthless neck I saved. 
 
SARAT: Can I throw in something the guys in Carlin told Hass.  It goes something like the further west you go the more people talk of the Whole not the Flame.  Of course V-k is the heart of the Whole but so far as it sees it in physical terms, it’s – geographical, land and water, earth and sky.  There’s more raw gut prejudice in the west because people see it as male/female.  There’s no gender attached to the Flame and you can’t give it gender.
SADIA: Interesting!  There’s something else there.  Sort of – an individual can identify with the Flame.  Don’t know anything about earthpower so happy to be shot down – is this the difference? It sounds a bit stranger for an individual to say he/she’s the Whole.
OBAYA: I am a flame,  I am a tree.  It is the same.  It is different.  Union in earthpower is with the earth/planet/cosmos.  Yes, good point, it is more concrete.
 
FILANAT:  Great goodness, the source of the rot himself, an insidious corrupting influence I understand, the forum infested by perverts, foreigners, pretend-men, the clear aim of bringing us down to the woeful level of the south.
CONRULAT:  Sardun, repeat Sardun.  Here already.
VEENA: PANTHER, repeat PANTHER.  Here already.
SARAT: Can you possibly be talking to me?
FILANAT:  Are you not yourself a pervert?  All too clearly we are to be softened up to acceptance of this preposterous young man and his vile mores.
SARAT: You really shouldn’t believe everything you read in the Azt Star.
FILANAT:  That is a vile slur in itself.
CONRULAT:  What was that again, ‘man, woman or twain’  What do you think it means?
FILANAT: Precisely.  The empire was rotten from the start, a rot which finally overcame it.
SARAT: So gays and women finally rotted the imperial court?  The fact that they were the chief victims of the rot?
FILANAT: Of course.  They had served their purpose.
SARAT:  Er….An interesting perspective.  So the Cult was behind the propagation of gay rights, women’s rights under the empire?  Or – have Igot this? It was a weakness in the Tradition they exploited.
DITSI: Then the wholeof the south is rotten.  Why haven’t they exploited us?  I think we should be told!
SARAT: Going back to what was said about concrete, that’s actually interesting.  ~You could argue it’s because the Flame isn’t concrete that the rot set in.  Nothing matters, people don’t matter, nothing of this world matters.
DIBESIT: Then you admit the Tradition is flawed.
VEENA: I did not know that!  What this says to me is there’s nothing, Flame, Whole, that can’t be turned on its head.
SARAT: The Flame, the Whole, these are immaculate, inviolate.  They can be said to be something else.
MUNZI: Exactly.
DIBESIT:  And only a rabble of perverts understands the true meaning of the Whole.
DITSI: And of course the Flame.
VEENA: Something else.  The Army’s not like the old Army, contains some of the brightest guys in Kadun – which you may or may not conclude from this forum!  Serious, guys who were preceptors, scientists, stuff like that.  What I’m trying to say is it’s not that they’re not intellectual (some of them) but the other matter is what I shall say cheerfully is another bent, you have to have a basic interest in it to be PANTHER or Sardun.  So, bluntly, we know more.
And if you tell me that the guys at the shrine in Maona-Pri or in the Viledeen haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about, but itsy-bitsy little officers who’ve never studied anything have got the whole thing sussed, quite honestly I’m tempted to…laugh.
MUNZI: History student in another life.  Who knows, I may one day be a preceptor!  You do know how much you confuse them, I take it?  What they’d rather like to say is – contemplating navels and there you are at the hard end.
VEENA: Thereby hangs a tail.
DIBESIT: So now the ‘old Army’ was stupid.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with it.  Intellectuals, of course, clear sources of corruption.
VEENA: Except it let the hebade geralis infiltrate it, clear bloody sources of corruption!
…
CALUNIN: You threaten insurrection?
VATYA:  I don’t threaten anyone, ‘cept geralis.  I’m just saying, if we stop playing your games, you can’t actually do anything about it.
CALUNIN: I see you are based at Caniba.  Perhaps a word with Tisindar?
VATYA: Just how you bloody do things, isn’t it, creepy, a word in your ear, old boy.  Haven’t got the balls to actually talk to me.
CALUNIN: Those who go out on a limb may well find it sawn off.
FALTARIN: Tisindar’s a bloody cat, you’ll get nowhere.
FURRIER: Break sacred rules fast enough when it suits you, don’t you.  What’s in the forum stays in the forum.
SARAT: No-one should be punished for what he thinks.
CALUNIN: The prospect of mass mutiny is somewhat more than an opinion.
SORG: Word inyour ear, old boy.  Actually it’s a fact.  We at Caniba are actually rather fond of Vatya.  Find him ornamental.  We tried to persuade him to take a commission but he shunned us.
VATYA: Nothing personal, Major, sir!  Good bunch, our officers, intelligent and sane.
KARCI: You have called Sorg sane.  Are you sure about that?
VATYA:  Can be, put it like that.
FURRIER:  Normal people run screaming from the room.  Caniba’s here!
TISINDAR:  I believe someone wished to speak to me?
CALUNIN: This Vatya creature.
TISINDAR:  He doesn’t tolerate fools gladly.  Nor I. 
CALUNIN:  This is nonsense.  How can you possibly command?
TISINDAR:  Rather successfully.
SORG: We’re cats, moron.  We follow imperial law.  The powers of military commanders are clearly stated.  Here, to be exact.
MITCH: Now, gentlemen, calm, centred…
BARVENIN: Of course everyone’s licks San-yaega-baht’s arse.  The nexus of capital between Alzani-Meta and Carlin that so clearly underpins thus ludicrous claim to empire must be apparent to all.
MITCH: Oh please, credit me with more taste!
SARAT: Any minute now he’ll be calling Maya the Dabidan whore
TISINDAR:  I think that might have been addressed to me?
SORG: Uzzn?  Uzzn baint but ‘armless yokels.
BARVENIN: Adolescent descent into failed attempts at wit is one of the more debilitating features of this forum.  One tries to raise serious concerns and gets no intelligent response.
SARAT:  Pssst, who’s going to tell him
SORG:  Do sit down, old boy.  Perhaps a cup of tea.  I shall try to break this to you gently.  The trouble is your ‘serious concerns’ are screaming garbage.  I think I shall mail Firas.  If that is a serious concern then clearly it must be addressed by the relevant parties.  Can Mel not be invited to join our gathering?  Yes, I have heard similar before.  Yes, I actually think Mel and As would prove highly entertaining on the subject.
 
CIOULIS: Sardun. You fucked-up pathetic little pieces of garbage, I do not think I have to explain in detail to our glorious military the depressing phenomenon of the officer (certainly not the gentleman) who is bloody full of it, who waddles around waving his grotesque self-importance at your, who regards any opposition as a slur on his greatness.  We know who are the top guns, the best of the best, we know who leads and inspires not dribbles over dinner, Challin, Rewn, Carlutan, but some of you – so maybe next time we don’t bother to save your miserable hides.  Actually we’re too noble not to do that, but you try us hard.  Endless crap about command and women and gays and order.  Total disconnect with that famous real world. Some NCO tells you the facts of life and you think you can sit on him?  Think hard, guys, hard, you think we in Sardun are going to suppress your ‘mutiny’ for you, you think PANTHER will?   Out on a limb is you farts.
VANNINA:  Calm down, Cioulis dear, calm down.
CIOULIS:  Ah, the soothing voice of a woman.  Evil grin. Vannina’s my boss.
 
PETRUSH: At school with Sarat, having also a brain.  O#rdinary decent middle-class family, backbone of Fidub.  Dad owns an electrical repair shop. 
SHAVLI: I believe someone asked about my make-up?  RIDESSENS, it’s a Harn firm.
PETRUSH:  Not of course tested on animals.
SORG: Oh I don’t know, do I not spy as fine a cageful of laboratory rats as one could hope to see.
FALTARIN: I tell you this much, young man, no nonsense will be tolerated in my command. 
MUNZI: Yes, but what will do about it?  I do not think prospective mutiny comes from Vatya.
FALTARIN: You bloody dare!  You hide behind Challin, of course.
 
MITCH:  I am shamelessly cutting and pasting this thread from Mel’s Place as I think it might be of interest to a number of people on a number of accounts.
 
CANTILIP:  Hi, I’m Cantilip from Van-senok.  I do have to say some of you guys are a little out on earthpower, confusing it with womanspirit, invented by modern Harn. We do not do healing crystals! Look forward to talking to you.
HARNWITCH:  Now, excuse me, a whole lot of scholarship went into re-creating the ancient belief-system of our foremothers and womanspirit is nothing if not authentic.  What do you think you are talking about?
CANTILIP: The Cult. 
HARNWITCH: That does not seem to me to be an answer.
CANTILIP: That’s the point.  I’m renowned for my tact.  Let me say at least I do understand where women in Harn are coming from.  They burned us, too.  When they caught us, which wasn’t often.  As I understand womanspirit, it’s a pacifist reaction to High Harn, than which of course there was nothing lower.  Earthpower is non-aggressive.  Pacifist, not.  When we caught them, we killed them.  The other thing is that earthpower is balance.  If you take a list of opposites, strong-weak, passive-active, rational-irrational   The third thing, of course, is that the Cult only crossed the water to Kadun after the fall of High Harn and it sure wasn’t healing crystals and non-violence which caused that.
HARNWITCH: I can sure see that, at least.  But if you are saying your earthpower caused the collapse of High Harn - that makes no sense!  Everyone knows the darned Cult took over Kadun.
VARIOUS:    Burned you???  WTF?
CANTILIP:    Better than the cage.
VARIOUS:    The what?
CANTILIP:    You don’t want to know.
HARNWITCH:         I know.  It was beyond obscene.
CANTILIP:    Longbows and cannon caused the collapse of High Harn.  As we know, the Cult has certain mind-control techniques, like hypnosis.  You do have to be in range, so to speak. Pacifism was not on the menu. Exactly what am I saying?  The Mosai Wars could not have happened if the indigenous culture of Harn had been pacifist.
HARNWITCH:  I am following that bit, but you are still not making any sense, if you will forgive my saying so!  Then the same must be true of Kadun and everyone knows it took Narulis to free Kadun.
NUMEROUS:  That is not the case!   Settling down to NARULIS DID NOT FREE KADUN.
HARNWITCH:  I am a little bewildered.  Would you guys please explain what you are talking about.  I have gone so far as to look up where you come from and I am not so dumb that I do not recognize that if half Kadun and half of south correct me it may be my history book in error but I trust we agree Narulis became emperor.  How did he do that other than by conquest?
            SISTENDA: That is surely one of the stranger facts of history.  The key may be silver.  I know it is all myth, but that myth dominated a more superstitious age.  Silver was seen as a kind of universal warder-off of evil.  Hence of course a certain chair!  Fidub believed she was  clean because of her silver-lodes and the singing of the Isles came from the native silver.  In myth silver destroys evil.   In fact, it's an anti-bacterial.   It's really easy to see that the medical use of silver could have been seen as magic.  We have silver, but for some reason we didn't know it.  If there is one thing Fidub taught us it is the mining, refining and casting of silver. I was researching the Dacunine  Window! As Asdinan surely knows, silver was and is used in the making of stained glass, particularly the yellows and golds.
            ASDINAN: Actually I didn’t.  Fascinated.  Keep going!
CANTILIP:    Aaaaargh!  No, no, no!  Some of us call it the Fidubi scam.  The Cult landed on our west coast.  We failed to push them back into the sea.  We drove them east.  Perhaps I should fill in a few gaps.  Narulis did not arrive in Carlin to find irturbi passive under the heel of tyranny!  He arrived to find Kadun in a state of war.  His general position appears to have been is this a private war or can anyone join in.  The armies of west and east met broadly in the middle, thus Hanif-Altan, the decisive victory
ASDINAN: That’s the broad picture.  To colour it in a bit, it’s more that all hell was breaking out in the west/ - literally - and rumour reached us in Carlin, people fleeing east to escape ye foe.  The second time it was because the Anile Court turned rotten.  This current infestation is more complicated.  There are three strands.  Industrialization and a poorly educated and plain poor population of workers to prey on.  Technology, spreading the word.  Behind both: apparently limitless capital from the banks in the City.  They snare people.  With sex, with drugs, with the promise of power for the powerless.  I know someone who answered some grubby little ad pretending to be a working-class guy.  He doesn’t know if it was Cult or not, being wise enough to get out before he found out, but it was all there, women at your disposal, promises of wealth and power. 
NONTIA-LI:  Hi guys, I’m Vasuculi, heard this was worth a look and wow, what do I find!  I’m reckoning if anyone can answer my question it’s you guys.  Why is Kadun susceptible to the Cult.  With all due respect, it seems to me there must be a vulnerability in this earthpower.  It doesn’t take any great knowledge of human nature to know that if people do not fight the bad guys take over but it has been emphatically stated earthpower is not pacifist.
CANTILIP:  The doctrines of the Cult are a foul inversion of earthpower.  Earthpower holds everything is in some sense alive, has energy, the Cult holds everything is in some sense dead, is inert, or if it isn’t now it will be.  Death is the one true reality of existence.  All life is to be lived in fear of death and if you’re not afraid of death the Cult will rectify that.  The torments they inflict in life will be yours to enjoy for eternity.  The relationship between that and inertia is not immediately apparent: what is inert is you.  You have no will, no choice, no hope.  Certainly earthpower is non-aggressive: we do not seek war.  Certainly it is not pacifist.  What one may call the vulnerability lies in the doctrine of being.  In earthpower, people simply are, at one with the universe.  This loss of self is perverted by the Cult into submission to its will, deemed co-terminous with the reality of the universe. 
NONTIA-LI: I thank you.  I am learning so much!  But how can any sane person believe you spend life after death in agony?  I personally would not be sure I believe in life after death at all, but I sure think that if I did it would be a field of flowers.
CANTILIP:  Evil grin.  What, not Va, the Silver Homeland?
NONTIA-LI: More Fidubi scam?
CANTILIP: We can be detached and academic about this or we can scream.  It’s a very simple scam.  When the empire was good it was Fidubi.  When it was evil, it was irturbi. 
MEL: And of course what the good guys in Kadun believe and think is what Fidub believes and thinks.
CANTILIP: !!!!
MEL: My innocent Dabidan mind was severely jolted by Carlin.
ASDINAN: Evillest grin.
MEL: The essence of what the Cult teaches is that people are filth. You will see that going around  merely telling people they are filth is not the most obvious way to win followers.  For that you need to refer back to what As said about sex and drugs.  By corrupting people you can get them to see themselves as filth.  By terrorizing them, you can get them to do filthy things.  Filth deserve punishment.  If I can just correct one thing Cantilip said, in the more - I use the term advisedly - diseased reaches of the adept’s brain it is possible to escape eternal pain by begging for ever greater torment.  At a certain level of self-abasement, not surprisingly ill-defined, one is released and subsumed into the Great Master.
            ASDINAN: Going back to what Cantilip said, it’s actually quite complicated, isn’t it.  Kadun sort of half thinks the opposite.  I’ll make sense in a minute!  What I’m getting at is lo our glorious empire, Narulis, symbol of the true Kadun.  Nobody thinks of Narulis as some Fidubi interloper.
            CANTILIP: Point taken!  That said, we weren’t quite so sure here in the west.  Did you know that when Narulis reached the borders of Van-senok we refused to let him in?  He carried the Flame.  Trees don’t like flames. 
           MEL: To some irturbi at least, he typed cautiously, the Fidubi belief-system was simply a particular kind of earth-power.   The archaeological evidence is fascinating.  Goes back to forever.  There’re Fidubi pottery, coins, weapons in the museum in Car-sandis and equally there’s a whole gallery in the National at M-P devoted to irturbi artefacts from the Utmost Isle.
           ASDINAN: Of course we’re sea-farers here in Carlin and Fidub meant everything to us, first landfall after the endless ocean, sign we were nearly home. 
           MEL: The lighthouse at Bela Point is said to be the oldest in the world.  That’s on the Utmost Isle.  There’s still a sort of travellers’ rest there but nowadays most major shipping goes on to the port at Famita on the Leolisle.  That’s everything from passenger liners to the Kadun Fleet.  Of course if they’re based in the west they stop off with us in Dabida.
           AFALIN: Wow, basically!  I mean I’m Fidubi and even I don’t quite think how old Fidub is. Here’s a pic I just found.  Isn’t that totally amazing.  Obviously it must have been renovated, electricity installed, but it doesn’t look renovated! Before electricity, they must have constantly tended fires.
           CANTILIP: You must therefore have met our Fleet.
           MEL: Sure, and the guys at Stok-chasit, Birindit and Insalta.
           ASDINAN: Mel’s been coming to Carlin since he was 10, it would be weird if he hadn’t.  The really fun bit is the Zur electoral roll.  Yes, there are Sybs, and I don’t mean my cousin Sarsh.  Half Zur must be descended from Jaizal’s army.
           CANTILIP: Var-sega’ of course has close ties with Vasucula and we with Ciletij.
            NONTIA-LI: Sure, I know many segani
CANTILIP:  The Fidubi scam is is of course historical and indeed biological nonsense, but it is damaging nonsense.  It would not paradoxically be an issue were it not for the Cult, for it enables them to argue that the culture of bacilli is the indigenous culture of KAdun and civilized values a foreign imposition.
ASDINAN.  ROTFL.  Sorry. Just remembered something.  Mel and I were talking to Sarat and he took us through much what you’ve just said in somewhat basic terms: if a brown rat mates with a white rat, and their babies all mate with white rats, and their babies all mate with white rats, you get the gist, no way descendants unto the 10th generation can be called brown rats.  Da looked very solemn and confessed he’d never previously thought of Brig a white rat but he would consider the propositiom.
VARIOUS: Please, guys, who are these people?
MITCH: Ah-oh.  Apologies.  Sarat is the Anile heir.  Brig, a daughter of Carlin, was Narulis’ lady, the first Anile Empress.  Susheela was the last Anile Empress. We’re all related somewhere.
AFALIN: It’s strange.  You guys think of Cho’s family as the Aniles.  We think – a hell-raising radical!
MEL: Evil grin.  Most of the time there wasn’t a lot of difference.
AFALIN: So when guys talk about the Dabidan model – they actually mean Cho.  tHat’s mind-bending.
MEL:He has certain assets and I don’t mean financial!  30 years in democratic politics.
Cho has many facets.  Shavli, Sarat’s sister.  Fighters.  [Pic of Shav on the wing of a Skyhawk immaculate in FAF uniform.]
 
PETRUSH: Questions have been asked about the formal relationship between Kadun and Fidub.  Fidubi PANTHER is a quasi-military organization.  In certain areas, most notably R+D, anyone cleared for sensitive information is a cat.  Fidubi PANTHER refuse to share with our gallant allies Ciletij, the military of which is of course both infiltrated and compromised.  This is of course contrary to the terms of the Quadrant.  It is, however, backed by Airoch, who says Varchulan must first clear out his own sewer.  A number of bears with sore heads, but life is mean, life is hard.  We have shared with Kadun and Kadun has shared with us.
VEENA:  Evil leer.  We, of course, Kadun PANTHER, do share: we share with ISS what we know of Cult infiltration.  No gratitude in this world!  Bastards claim it’s disinformation.
SHAVLI: Don’t know if I need to explain about winged cats.  When the aeroplane was invented, naturally both PANTHERs saw the advantages.  Fidub tried having an ordinary Air Fleet but as cats developed what we do and how we do it it became obvious it was much more efficient if  all crew, all mechanics, the guys who sweep the hangars, anyone directly connected to fighting birds, was a cat, so structureally FAF is an umbrella term for two services, an all-cat fighter force and everything else. As such we’re not capable of not aiding and assisting Kadun PANTHER.  Naturally Kadun’s cats joined KAF in droves.  As I’ve said, cathood is pretty vital to what we do, but obviously there were many brilliant fliers already in KAF who were not of the feline persuasion so catdom left fast-tracking them to FAF and a good time is had by all
 
VARULIN: Gentlemen called Mitch and Sarat, there is some stuff here about certain loans, but not a lot cos it’s not something blokes want to talk about, so I am wondering if it had crossed your paths.
MITCH:  No - ?
VARULIN: Goes back to when we were pretending to be one Army.  Geralis were trying to buy us.  As you may or may not know, us lower orders, we’re not allowed debt.  .  Lads got offered loans, interest-free. In return for disloyal service to certain but there are humans present. And the goods were cut-price. In direct contravention of Army regulations but that was all old-fashioned nonsense.  Now some took it hook line and sinker.  Some of us was more – take their money, cut their throats later. Then we separated out, right.  Then it depends.  One bloke I know, his whole family was killed by the bombs.  He just stopped paying.  If your family’s safe, you stopped paying.  If you’ve got family in the wrong place you have to pay or they take it on the family. What they say about us, criminals, outlaws, some of us actually are
MITCH: Balls.  Mind you I am unsure of the legal basis of balls.  That would of course depend what law.  Off the top of my head I should say the offer of the loan was illegal.  Not the officers?
INYULAT:  That’s so much what Varulin said before, spare my blushes.  Lot of playing on class.  Social advancement, move in the corridors of true power.  WE just said yessir, nossir, until we’d worked out how to shoot them.
CIOULIS: You guys did Dovantin, didn’t you.  Challin’s Four.  Just exactly what I mean.  The whole of Sardun is in awe of you. 
VANNINA: Yup, have you in my command any day.
CHALLIN: Hands off, they’re mine.
VANNINA: ROTFLOL
CHALLIN: Poaching is a serious offence. 
MITCH: Just idle curiosity, does it happen often?
CHALLIN: Rare. 
INYULAT: Really it was time people of true merit advanced, not the relics of an outmoded feudal system.  They wouldn’t, maybe they couldn’t understand that the reason people like you wouldn’t give them the time of day was because they were nasty little rodents, not what their dads did.  The basic pitch was you’ll never reach the top of the heap under the status quo.
VARULIN: Having a brain helped.  Like blokes who were half-alive, any class, rather clean up infected shit that be at the top of that heap. Basic problem, you will see, once you’d identified yourself to them, they’d got their hooks into you, could ask more, like you will attend our hebade serenat rally, won’t you, you will just do a little favour.  What I’m getting at, there are blokes in Vaudos who are going to be frankly shitting themselves.
CHALLIN: There was also blackmail. Considerably messier than the loans.  Men have shot themselves.  They would neither betray nor be exposed.  Others have got away, made a clean breast of whatever.  I have a Captain who is homosexual.  By the time’d got himself and his men out against rather considerable odds no-one much cared if he fornicated with hamsters.  Except possibly Sarat.
MITCH: ROTFLMAO. One must never abuse our dumb friends.
CIOULIS:  I thought I was rather good at it.
 
“Well now,” said Vatya, “aren’t we just sorting ourselves out here.”
 
GUTAAH: There was an incident I pretended to know nothing of.  Some chaps refused to work with a gay cat.  The cats sorted it.  I gather the men in question were somewhat muted afterwards.  I think I now have an insight into this.
 
MITCH: ROTFLMIAOW.
 
DIVALDIN: Prisoner at the bar, you are a free and equal human being.  Of course you may sit and drink your coffee.  But I deem we’ll still take your balls off.  Frankly hugely entertained. 
 
Corenin to Inyulat
 
I asked around.  Perceptions of Zur. Evil, evil grins.
 
That nightclub!  I believe the word is ‘gay’.  We of course hadn’t realized.  But they were nice to us.  Well, of course we are elegant and good-looking.  Some of them wore make-up.   Got grilled on gay rights in Kadun, whch was a bit hairy.   All reasonably good-tempered though, think Hass must have spread the word we’re nice guys, but they did take the piss.  Oh I see, if you’re gay in your army you are the invisible man, you do not exist.
 
Natives are friendly.  That’s MT and the House of course.  Got into an argument in a bar about some of the stuff that’s been in the forum – hierarchy – but no bad feeling.
 
Couples walk around holding hands, arms around each other’s waists.  I don’t just mean couples composed of a man and a woman.  Public kissing too.  Yes, it shocked us the couple a couple of tables away whispering sweet nothings to each other were both men but can’t actually see any harm in it.
 
We did a bit of socially conscious sight-seeing.  There are working-class areas, sure, but no-one looks dirt-poor or for that matter unhealthy.  Looked up some stuff after.  Minimum wage is 16.20 bucks an hour, our bucks not theirs.  If that sounds crazed, there’s a LOT of automation.  Never had the time to go into it all, unemployment and so on, but presumably the real crap work is all done by machines.
 
Sun’s out a lot.  Nobody wears very much.  Wouldn’t be like that in Azt.  Which you could have worked out.  Modesty not as my mum conceives it.  See attached pic of group of decorous Zuri youth.  No, we did not take it, don’t know if voyeurism is a crime, but we did see it.  It’s called the Leotard Look, conceived by my lady Maya and a friend of hers, as attached, caught on in Zur as the season’s fashion.. All together now: she could not possibly wear that in Kadun!  We do not have the impression Zuri females are worried by a tight fit.
 
That absolute scruff in army surplus is Mel Talal.  Well, he never looks particularly elegant in Carlin, but that’s holidays, this, I gathered is  all the time.  Virtually.  Apparently they do do formal.
 
Shrine is spectacular, as old as Zur.  Other ancient bit is unsurprisingly called the Old Port, really get a feel for how it was.  Of course if you want seriously ancient, you either stay in Kadun or cross the water to Fidub.
 
Don’t know if Zur is actually busier than anywhere else comparable but so much is out on the streets it seems to really buzz.  Stalls in the Sa’anda Senta, all sorts, ice-cream sellers, collecting for charity, selling knick-knacks, open-air public meetings, we walked into one, changes to some bus-route.  Not something to which we could contribute!  They say, no-one’s ever told Zuri to shut up, so they don’t. 
 
Is that enough?
Cheers
C
 
Pic of Maya and Fal in scoop-necked black one-pieces, Maya with a silver choker and earrings and a shimmering chiffon shawl around her shoulders, Fal with a similar shawl around her hips, like a sarong, and gold-earrings.
“I expect they were going to an exercise class.”
“Certainly apparent they keep fit.”
“We have to assume no-one has any objection.”
“Like no-one whose name begins with S!”
“Would you let your partner wear that?”
“I don’t think ‘let’ is a Dabidan word.”
“Impeccably elegant and impeccably shocking.  Every curve, every ripple.”
“Just trying to imagine my parents’ reaction if my sister tried to go out like that.”
“Yes,” said Munzi, “but why?  Most of it is no worse than a ball-gown.”
“Clear delineation of where the legs divide.”
“It’s not the legs that divide.”
“Nit-picker.”
“Don’t think we can quite put this on the forum.”
“I do.”
 “I didn’t mean the picture!  When all’s said and done, she is HIH.  Like making her a pin-up.”
“I can think of worse ones.”
“Guys have initiative.  They even have fingers.  They can look for themselves if curious.”
“Start the gay thing up again.”
“Tough.  If we’re going to have same-sex couples holding hands in the streets, we need to talk about it now.”
“Before the riot, you mean.”
“It’s not exactly going to be commonplace, is it.  Can’t be all that many of them.”
 
MUNZI: As someone’s said, we haven’t had a lot of chance to see the world.  So we asked some of the guys from Carlin who’ve been to Dabida.  These are a selection of their comments.
 
 
MAYA:  ROTFLMAO.  He can look like a civilized being.  I know all the evidence is against.  Honestly.  He says it’s his sense of occasion: it’s occasional.
 
MITCH: I shall put on a straight face and consider the word ‘automation’.  In other words some of our factories are certainly hell-holes but they are labour-intensive hell-holes, we have of course many men in uniform and unemployment is barely known.   As we know, there are parts of Kadun in a frankly delapidated condition and conseuqnetly massive amounts of work require doing of all kinds.  Together with this there will of course be clean-up of the rodent kind.  I do not think a role for the military will instanteously cease to exist with the taking of Azt.  I am considering therefore a fair distance into the future, which is good because it gives us time to retrain, time for people to discover other aptitudes, but certainly at some point, as elsewhere in the world, machines will remove work.  I think only if we are clear about this now and begin to plan for that future, indeed begin to think what other work we might do, can we weather that storm.
 
YNSULIS:  Met Sarat while he was doing a spot of charity work.  Told us a really good story about him and Mel and their friends putting to see in am open boat and getting bolloxed for it.  I can’t remember all the glorious details but I’m sure chaps would appreciate it…..
MAITLAN: The Asmodia?  Why I joined the Fleet.  I only like big boats.
YNSULIS: You were aboard? Then undoubtedly you must tell the tale.
 
CALUNIN: Frankly it all looks appalling to me, precisely what we don’t want.  Are the women all prostitutes, to thus display their wares.
FINA: No, punk, no.
MAITLAN: Is that sordid little comment worth bothering to respond to? 
BAVENIN: Surely at least women of loose morals.  The laxity of the south is a matter of common knowledge.
 
MAYA: Fal and I in the Leotard Look.  You want to make an issue of this, bring it on down.
CALUNIN: Hardly surprising they call you the Dabidan whore.
MAYA: To whom?  Astounding to me.
CALUNIN: Your father permits you to attire yourself thus, clearly for sale to the highest bidder.
MAITLAN: I’m thinking Tet now would be wanting to be part of so elevated a debate. 
MAYA: ROTFLMAO. You’ll be needing to meet Tet in the Sa’anda Senta and tell him your considered view of his Fal-girl.
SARAT: Will I do? 
MAITLAN: Certainly you have a tongue in your head but not one dipped in sulphuric acid.
SARAT: I make do with quicklime.
BARVENIN: Naturally you have no objection to public display of your latest purchase.
SARAT:  FFS.  It’s a loon.
PETRUSH: Shav wore it too.  Here we are at a party.  [PIC~}
Most people looked more at Petrush than Shav, he being somewhat is the tall as he is broad, uproot trees with one hand action-hero mould.
MUNZI: Clearly you should go to Fidub and address yourself directly to Shavli and Petrush.
FILI: He hasn’t got the balls. 
MAYA:  You could mail my dad and share the joy?  [email protected]
KARULA: I guess he cannot post at Mel’s Place.  That’s a real shame.  You will have gathered that women in Kadun do not on the whole dress in a fashion that makes it unquestionably clear we are women.
FILI: Lovely way of putting it.
MAYA: Why should I be ashamed of my body, wish to hide it?
CALUNIN: By that logic you would walk the streets naked.
BARVENIN:  But perhaps you do, like The Star.
How can you tell when a forum is suddenly paralysed, when people have frozen, their hands above their keypads.  Surely it is nonsense to detect that in what is merely a pause in posting.
SARAT: It’s cool.  They’re just morons.  Kiyana-si-tan.
A lot of people had an imperial moment. Sitsi was first to type.
SITSI: Welcome back!
KARULA: It’s been a long time!  I have a suggestion.  We start a separate folder for discussion of gender issues.  Everyone of course is free to post but non-sensible posts will be ignored and dumped back here in the free for all of the main folder.
FILI:  Excellent idea.  Who does the bells and whistles?
SITSI: Not sure.  They think they are being sensible, the voice of reason in a mad world.
MAYA: We have a rule of thumb.  If you won’t say it in the open, don’t bother.
SITSI: Think most of us would go along with that.  So if you wouldn’t say it in the middle of Zur, don’t bloody bother!
MAITLAN: I should be delighted to see them in Zur at any time.  May I ask what Sarat said, irturbi, I take it.  I thought Maya was the linguist!
MAYA:  Kiyana-si-tan.  There is no harm.  Bit like when Tar says Peace.
MAITLAN: Ah yes, generally interpreted as stop being a bloody fool and cool it.
SARAT: No.  There is no lasting stain.  It’s over, forgotten, gone downstream with the flow!
MAITLAN: Understood.
 
….
 
MENI:  I’m a working-class woman.  Mum had ideas above her station and made sure I went to a decent school and my partner’s good at IT.  Half of us haven’t got terminals and if we have we don’t know how to use them.  Think a lot of people see this as Army too, meaning men.  A few ladies here doesn’t change that.  Grew up in a small town.  We’re in Asfernin now, that’s where the work is, Go back when we’ve got a holiday, give the kids a bit of fresh air.  But what I want to say, small towns and villages, who’s running them these days, women that’s who. Different in the cities where men have more of an hold, but what you might call the bread and butter of life, bus services, road works, think there’s some men don’t quite understand.
 
VISHTU: Landlord of the Rabbiters’ Rest.  There’s some say the Rabbiters’ is the hub of Carlin Village, but you want to know who makes things happen, it’s Gerdi at the Post Office, Suti at the shop.
 
FRENSAT: Suti runs this incredible shopping service!  There are some places won’t deliver to us but you show Suti something on your phone and she magicks it up
 
GERDI:  Pot has to go through, even if we had to go and collect it.  What Suti does, contacts!  Gets it delivered where they will deliver and put in the post.
 
SITSI: Three cheers for the postal service!
 
MENI: I’ve been thinking.  Don’t think I want to fight exactly, but then they don’t, bless them, just know someone has to.  Is that fair?  Someone’s got to do the rest of the stuff, more to life than feeding the kids and fighting a war.  Sort of makes sense and sort of doesn’t, to my mind, anyway.  But what’s wrong is them that say women’s life is just home and kids, women can’t do anything else.  We made a few changes to our buses, even got a few new ones, got men in on that, I don’t mind saying.  We don’t know about enginees and fuel consumption and that, but aht’s all right.  The people who changed the routes, said it was stupid to go that way kind of thing, they were women.  I know it’s not much, but it’s what life’s about, how long does it take to get to work, can you go to the shops, what about schools.
GOTA: Exactly right.  We don’t live a normal life, hope to one day!  But it’s stuff like that that actually keeps the country we’re fighting for running.  Some chaps here, they think civilian life has ground to a halt, everything’s waiting for the war to be over?
CARIE: CLIK.  Working-class girl.  Friend of Qine’s.  What you said about the engines ad tat, you’d know if anyone’d taught you.  Kadun education teaches us to do the washing-up and sew.  What Mitch said about the clothes in the shops, absolute crap, fall apart if you look at them.  Most women make their own clothes, clothes for their kids to have decent clothes.  Tell you something strange.  Money’s tight, right, can’t afford to have everything.  People’ll have a sewing machine rather than a fridge.  Can’t spend your whole time with a needle and thread but going out every day to the shops, that’s no big deal, even if, as so rightly said, the food is crap.  Time is part of it.  Think they’re called ‘labour-saving devices’.  If you can’t afford them all, then a lot of her time is taken up with housework and stuff, but that’s used as an excuse.  If she was fixing the buses or something, not doing it for free, there’d be more money, wouldn’t there. 
OBAYA: I know this is going to sound daft, but it’s true!  Further north you go, less you need a fridge.  We do have a summer but – most young people I know have a fridge, but the older ones, if you’ve got a yard you can protect from animals, keep food in a cupboard outside.  My gran does.  Don’t know anyone who’s got food poisoning.  It works for her, in the summer she goes out more, doesn’t need to store stuff.  She’s in a town, not like she was nani from a shop.
 
Southerners boggled and if they were Sarat were last seen checking mean temperatures in Van-senok.
 
CARIE: Labour-saving things like dish-washers.  Course a lot of people can’t afford them.  The other thing is it doesn’t occur to the men anyone needs them.  Got a dish-washer, haven’t they, two-legged one. And of course it’s all women’s work.  Lads say, oh we do the heavy stuff, like you need real muscle to fix a plug.  Nothing light about wet sheets.
VARIOUS:   Owwwwww!
Qine to Carie: Think that was a direct hit.
Carie:  Might just get the hang of this.
 
QINE: Something else too, and I think this applies to rich and poor alike.  That story about Sarat, had some talk on.  I would think there are many families in Kadun, the lad has summat  to do, naturally the lasses prop him up.  If he’s rich, it’s servants.  If he’s poor, it’s his mum and his sisters.  What women are for, supporting men.
Carie: Not so bad yourself.
 
ZIKA: Pigs have wings.  I was 18 yesterday.  Means I can come here and cause mayhem.  Sarat’s other sister, the shy retiring one.  Actually there are three of us but Ven’s only 15. .  Oh, you’re going to a meeting, are you.  Far more important than anything us little girls could be doing.  More than his life was worth.  How it worked was job swaps.  We had it down to a fine art – well, some of us.  Got this essay to write.  You clean out Ven’s donkey and I’ll fix the larder.
DIRENIN: Can anyone possibly believe this nonsense? The grandchildren of one of the richest men on the continent mucked out their donkey, indeed had a donkey, surely thoroughbreds.
ZIKA:  Thoroughbreds we surely are.  Learn to read, guy.  Ven loves her donkey. Dad’s nearly as bad with his bloody wolfhounds.   Then they had puppies.  Think you could say that was the cue for Mum to have kittens.  There did have to be room in the house for humans.
 
SORVAN:  Army, bloody Tjulsit.  Again, not making excuses for garbage but what he does about the house, it is more important than what she does when it keeps the flipping place standing.  Unsafe housing, spot on, and what makes it possible to live in the bloody place, the work the lads do.  Tell you one example I know, windows were totally warped.  Would she rather lift wet sheets or have a nice icy blast roaring in on their kids?
 
MENI: If you grow up in the country, grow up on a farm, you learn a bit how things work.  I’m 43..  Meet young girls, they don’t know anything, time of the month and that. 
WALLFLOWERS: What it has to do with getting pregnant?
MENI:  Yes.  Look at me talking now.  Too shy to say that.
TILON: Ladies, this is not the place!
ZIKA:  I menstruate.  I have two ovaries.  Each month an ovary releases an egg which travwls down the Fallopian tubes into the womb and attaches itself to the wall of the womb in the hope of a friendly sperm coming its way.  Since its hopes are dashed, it then breaks loose from the wall of the womb bringing blood with it, which exists from the body via the vagina. Sarat’s sister, by the way. 
KARULA: The subject is called biology.  Alas for the poor little sperm, there is something called contraception that stops it in its tracks.  Mitch and I decided three was enough.
 
DIBESIT:  I am sure I am not alone in finding this intolerable!  Truly this forum is becoming a cat-house!
MITCH: What was that again about feeble adolescent attempts at wit?
KARULA: You do not think girls should receive sex education?
ZIKA: I was going to say ooh, we have started a rabbit.  Then I thought someone might make some stupid joke about a bun in the oven.
DIBESIT: It is of course precisely this that has no place in Kadun.
ZIKA: Dude, if I want to go to Kadun I don’t need your permission.
DIBESIT: Has no-one any control over this ridiculous child?
ZIKA: Freeborn citizen of Fidub, mate, freeborn citizen of Fidub!
DIBESIT: Exactly so and you claim right of entry to Kadun?
ZIKA: Let’s see now, if farts like you bump off Sarat and Shav gets shot down by vamps, then I’m Anile heir.
DIBESIT: Apart from the filthy slur, there can be no better reason for a republic.
ZIKA: Instead of insulting me, foul poltroon, why don’t you answer Karula’s question?
MITCH: Unhand the lady instantly, foul poltroon!
KARULA: Sure, women should be left ignorant. OF course it helps not to be wired.  Here is a diagram I just found on the Grid. [Pic of female reproductive system]
ZIKA: Obviously the parents had The Talk.  Here’s the book we had at school.
 
GOSA: That is what I call a class insult!  I shall store it for future use.
 
SARAT: How’s the project?  Underneath it all, she’s yet another scientist.
ZIKA: Can I be cudgelled into saying anything intelligent about  algae, some edible, some not.  Unique source of vanadium, one of the more obscure metals.  Apparently however a deficiency stunts the growth of rats.  So I suppose if there were aquatic rats they’d be bigger than land ones. 
 
Sarat padded off to talk to his dad.  Essa was working in the beach-house, essentially a large  wooden shed at the foot of the dunes, double-fronted,  painted a primrose that had faded to cream.
Sarat carefully cleared himself a space on the large wooden table in the middle and sat.
“The forum,”
“What about it?”
“A lot of things. Take it you read it.”
“Prudent to know how deep my children are getting.”
“Oh great!”
“If you will say Kiyana-si-tan.”
“It was a particular context.”
“One you can never evade.  Be entirely sure they know who you are.”
“And I don’t?”
“You were brought up to succeed in your own right.”
“Yup.”
“You have plunged yourself into a situation in which you can never be just Sarat.”
“Yup.”
“You wish to exit that situation?”
“Nope.”
“I thought you wanted to talk!”
“Negotiate it,” said Sarat.  “I’m only there because of who I am.  You said it: use it and be heard.”
“I did. You do.”
“The meeting Sarsh talked about.  I could go.  I’m aware – if I met some of the guys, it wouldn’t quite be – hey, cool, talked to you in the forum, as if I were no-one in particular.”
“Why not?”
“I’m really not sure.  I thought – because I represent something.  I felt somewhere I understood the sheepdog!  But what do I represent?”
“You decide,” said Essa.
“I thought it might – other people can think what they like.  That’s the opposite - ?”
“You’re my son not Tar’s.”
“You think Tar was wrong?”
“No. What Mel wears is not the same issue.”
“OK, so I don’t wander around in rags!  Actually it was Tet not – public opinion.  And if I have not a cent to my name, why should I waste it on clothing.  You have the choice, Mel.”
“What is the one thing that matters to them?”
“That’s pretty interesting, isn’t it.  Sex?”
Essa snorted.
“A wide range of views.  Long to meet Karula.  So?”
“What the doctor said, upturning everything.”
“You and Shav, do you understand how much you shock them?”
“Bit hard to miss.”
“Not your views.  It’s you who hold them.”
“We’re supposed to be – separate, somehow – “
“As normal a pair of young Fidubi as I could have hoped to raise.  Both of you straight as a dye.  Never misunderstand.  Perish the thought, but you are in direct confrontation with the Cult.  You of course tell them to go fuck themselves.  The Calunins and Dibesits are lined up behind you.”
“Oh come on!  Pure Azt Star.””
“And that shocks you?”
“Anyone called Mum a whore recently?  How about gold-digger? Loved what Karula said, you don’t win either way.  They just have it in for women.”
“They need to understand.”
“Fast.”
 “But these are the good guys.”
“Sorg and Munzi are wondering that, never mind me.”
“Two other very upper class young men.”
“Meaning what?”
“Think about what Varulin said.”
“I want to meet that guy!  Which bit?”
“Anything to protect our girls and fuck what it looks like.  What does it all come down to, Sarat?”
“Feeling threatened, I guess.”
“What they need to understand is you.”
“Then why not say I just don’t get that or something.  I don’t think I buy this.”
“In areas where such attitudes prevail, what happens to a grl in the leotard look?”
“She gets assaulted -  that is not a reason for calling every woman in Zur a tart!”
“Isn’t it?  They have to find out how you react.”
“You’ll be saying they’re all sock-puppets next.  I don’t believe it’s not real, it’s too vicious.”
“An excellent reason for its not being real.  No, it’s more complicated than that.  These are ingrained attitudes. Will you not see it’s the same thing?”
“No!  Same as what?”
“The same as executing their superiors.  They are clean.  For a number of complex historical reasons they found they nonetheless espoused beliefs to us synonymous with  desecration.  Sorg describes you as the most exciting thing to hit Kadun for 600 years.”
“You talk to Sorg!”
“Sorg talks to Sarsh. Think, Sarat.  They haven’t had a chance to travel.  Cho is their grandparents’ generation.  They haven’t risked everything to live in a vanished world.  Who represents the modern world?  You, kiddo.”
“Oh,” said Sarat.  “Sort of – they’re in midair, not sure where they’re landing?”
“I think you personally have not danced naked?”
Sarat grinned.
“Personally not.  But the Leotard Look.  What confuses them is me?”
“Tar, Pietri.  Why does it not send the same signals?”
“Why am I cool about ‘my’ woman – that’s the whole bloody point.  She’s not ‘my woman’, she’s her own woman.”
“Exactly.”
“Not the same signals.  This isn’t exactly what I thought I was going to talk about.”
“It’s all biology.”
“Bah!”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t exactly know.”
“Not sit in a lab, not conduct extensive field research.”
“Sitting in a lab is what I am doing.  Maybe it’s time for the field research.”
“Talk to Mitch.”
Sarat wrinkled his brow.
“About position?  There’s a big difference. Some Fidubi kid would not have his foot in the door.”
“You want to walk through.  Sarat – this is a lull, not a peace.  You achieve nothing dead.”
“Which is what we’re really always talking about.  I’m not going to Azt!  So far as I can tell the only reason anyone wanted to shoot Mitch was because they thought he was a traitor.”
“Mitch is not the Anile heir.  You think if you are loose in Kadun no special effort would be made?”
“They had to risk their lives.  I don’t.”
“Bottom line.   You see that you shoot your mouth off from the absolute safety of Zur.”
“I see that.  But I’m not suicidal either.”
“Your instinct is to be out there, of course I understand that.”
“That’s an interesting one.  Where’s ‘there’?  Carlin, conveniently on my doorstep.”
“Not to mention adding fuel to the flames.  Van-senok is undoubtedly safest.”
“I need to think, which is practically where I started.  Super-rich youth mooching around Zur apparently doing absolutely nothing is not my image.”
“A job?  Carlin is familiar with the specimen.  The west is not.”
“Cho.  Invaluable experience or pure nepotism.”
“You decide.  As a matter of practicality you are unused to a world not automatically F2F.”
“Someone posted one of those guides to email to the forum.  Avoid attempts at humour unless you are sure others will see the joke.”
“Remember expression and body language are vital tools in F2F communication.  What you now want to do is seek out Barvenin and invite him for a public chat.”
“Who do I think I am, the emperor or something!”
“Yup,” said Essa, “who do you think you are?”
“Sarat.”
“A good answer.  Perhaps not comprehensive.”
“No. Whatever else I am – sounds as though it’s optional.  The other things I am – Narulis’ heir, Anile heir, they’re what Sarat is, not the other way round.”
“Diligent student of the biological sciences?”
“Just goes round in a circle,” said Sarat.  “I know, I know, I decide!”
“Where is the end of the piece of string?”
“If – if there were political problems in Fidub, should I join up?  Should I mix it?  Should I stay diligently studying?”
“But a Sarat obtains qualifications and succeeds on his own terms.”
“You never thought I was going to be a research scientist.  Politics isn’t like that.  Personality.”
“Unless you are a charlatan you have a factual basis.”
“That makes the question look like how much of one.   I do not have to have a doctorate in immunology to pronounce on infection control.”
“Try this: they began by listening to you because you are the Anile heir.  They go on listening to you because you are interesting and talk sense.  They would not listen to you if all you had to say for yourself was T cells.”
“I can see that’s a specialist interest.”
“You are not lacking in confidence.  In yourself you would feel more secure if you achieve independently?”
“Oww!  Maybe a bit.  More Sarat.  I am and am not Sarat at the forum, how’s that for a head-banger?”
“Their problem.  You are absolutely Sarat.  Who is also the Anile heir.”
“Of course I confuse them!  I confuse me.  The problem is.”
“I wait with bated breath.”
“If I were creative like Midi.  Academic like you.  The only way I can really achieve independently is something – solitary, totally the product of my brain.  Unless I went to another planet!  Anywhere else, business, anywhere that’s mixing with people, there’s always who else I am.”
Essa grinned.
“You are me or you are Cho?  It is easier being one or the other.”
“Gee, I just don’t know who I am.  Actually I do.  How to be it is different.”
“It all resounds?  Mitch, Midi, Munzi, the history student.  It seems unlikely he would quietly resume his studies.”
“And they’ll all go back to being what they were before.  Is that the point?”
“If there is one, that’s the point.”
Sarat laughed.
“All in the same boat.  They know who they are.  How to be it.”
“And you of course resound with them.  In key ways you reside on Planet Normal.”
“I haven’t moved one micron forward in all this.”
“you want me to tell you if you should go to college tomorrow?”
“Ooh, that would be rude, just not turn up.”
 
Cho to Firas: Sarat is looking for a job.
Firas: Which one?
Cho: [Laughter]
 
Sarat went on thinking.  It didn’t take him long to hit the big one.  Yea, Kadun must choose!  But if she votes against gender equality, against the control of capital, can that be morally right. 
A woman can’t decide how she wants to live her life because a lot of people think she can’t?  Well, she can but the people around her might make life hard.
“What about gays?” he said to Hass.  “A guy has to go on being thought a perv because of a lot of dumbfuck crap?  I need to meet these guys.”
“Or I do,” said Hass.
“But we – people – the south – we’re not – driven by the law.  What’s given isn’t that a woman has certain rights hereby enshrined.  What’s given is we’re all individuals. Legally saying everyone has the same rights isn’t the same.”
“It has to make a difference.”
“Sure.  AT the personal level?  Your Dad discovers you’re gay and doesn’t want to know you any more.”
“I guess – you can’t make parents love their children.  The law could make you support him till he was 16 or something.  And a really happy family home that would be!”
“But you set a frame of reference.  Really, it’s OK to love your kid.  How pathetic is that.”
“It’s still different from everyone around you agreeing gay is crap.”
 
ME:  I’m a working-class woman.  Mum had ideas above her station and made sure I went to a decent school and my partner’s good at IT.  Half of us haven’t got terminals and if we have we don’t know how to use them.  Think a lot of people see this as Army too, meaning men.  A few ladies here doesn’t change that.  Grew up in a small town.  We’re in Asfernin now, that’s where the work is, Go back when we’ve got a holiday, give the kids a bit of fresh air.  But what I want to say, small towns and villages, who’s running them these days, women that’s who. Different in the cities where men have more of an hold, but what you might call the bread and butter of life, bus services, road works, think there’s some men don’t quite understand.
 
VISHTU: Landlord of the Rabbiters’ Rest.  There’s some say the Rabbiters’ is the hub of Carlin Village, but you want to know who makes things happen, it’s Gerdi at the Post Office, Suti at the shop.
 
FRENSAT: Suti runs this incredible shopping service!  There are some places won’t deliver to us but you show Suti something on your phone and she magicks it up
 
GERDI:  Pot has to go through, even if we had to go and collect it.  What Suti does, contacts!  Gets it delivered where they will deliver and put in the post.
 
SITSI: Three cheers for the postal service!
 
MENI: I’ve been thinking.  Don’t think I want to fight exactly, but then they don’t, bless them, just know someone has to.  Is that fair?  Someone’s got to do the rest of the stuff, more to life than feeding the kids and fighting a war.  Sort of makes sense and sort of doesn’t, to my mind, anyway.  But what’s wrong is them that say women’s life is just home and kids, women can’t do anything else.  We made a few changes to our buses, even got a few new ones, got men in on that, I don’t mind saying.  We don’t know about enginees and fuel consumption and that, but aht’s all right.  The people who changed the routes, said it was stupid to go that way kind of thing, they were women.  I know it’s not much, but it’s what life’s about, how long does it take to get to work, can you go to the shops, what about schools.
GOTA: Exactly right.  We don’t live a normal life, hope to one day!  But it’s stuff like that that actually keeps the country we’re fighting for running.  Some chaps here, they think civilian life has ground to a halt, everything’s waiting for the war to be over?
CARIE: CLIK.  Working-class girl.  Friend of Qine’s.  What you said about the engines ad tat, you’d know if anyone’d taught you.  Kadun education teaches us to do the washing-up and sew.  What Mitch said about the clothes in the shops, absolute crap, fall apart if you look at them.  Most women make their own clothes, clothes for their kids to have decent clothes.  Tell you something strange.  Money’s tight, right, can’t afford to have everything.  People’ll have a sewing machine rather than a fridge.  Can’t spend your whole time with a needle and thread but going out every day to the shops, that’s no big deal, even if, as so rightly said, the food is crap.  Time is part of it.  Think they’re called ‘labour-saving devices’.  If you can’t afford them all, then a lot of her time is taken up with housework and stuff, but that’s used as an excuse.  If she was fixing the buses or something, not doing it for free, there’d be more money, wouldn’t there. 
OBAYA: I know this is going to sound daft, but it’s true!  Further north you go, less you need a fridge.  We do have a summer but – most young people I know have a fridge, but the older ones, if you’ve got a yard you can protect from animals, keep food in a cupboard outside.  My gran does.  Don’t know anyone who’s got food poisoning.  It works for her, in the summer she goes out more, doesn’t need to store stuff.  She’s in a town, not like she was nani from a shop.
 
Southerners boggled and if they were Sarat were last seen checking mean temperatures in Van-senok.
 
CARIE: Labour-saving things like dish-washers.  Course a lot of people can’t afford them.  The other thing is it doesn’t occur to the men anyone needs them.  Got a dish-washer, haven’t they, two-legged one. And of course it’s all women’s work.  Lads say, oh we do the heavy stuff, like you need real muscle to fix a plug.  Nothing light about wet sheets.
VARIOUS:   Owwwwww!
Qine to Carie: Think that was a direct hit.
Carie:  Might just get the hang of this.
 
QINE: Something else too, and I think this applies to rich and poor alike.  That story about Sarat, had some talk on.  I would think there are many families in Kadun, the lad has summat  to do, naturally the lasses prop him up.  If he’s rich, it’s servants.  If he’s poor, it’s his mum and his sisters.  What women are for, supporting men.
Carie: Not so bad yourself.
 
ZIKA: Pigs have wings.  I was 18 yesterday.  Means I can come here and cause mayhem.  Sarat’s other sister, the shy retiring one.  Actually there are three of us but Ven’s only 15. .  Oh, you’re going to a meeting, are you.  Far more important than anything us little girls could be doing.  More than his life was worth.  How it worked was job swaps.  We had it down to a fine art – well, some of us.  Got this essay to write.  You clean out Ven’s donkey and I’ll fix the larder.
DIRENIN: Can anyone possibly believe this nonsense? The grandchildren of one of the richest men on the continent mucked out their donkey, indeed had a donkey, surely thoroughbreds.
ZIKA:  Thoroughbreds we surely are.  Learn to read, guy.  Ven loves her donkey. Dad’s nearly as bad with his bloody wolfhounds.   Then they had puppies.  Think you could say that was the cue for Mum to have kittens.  There did have to be room in the house for humans.
 
SORVAN:  Army, bloody Tjulsit.  Again, not making excuses for garbage but what he does about the house, it is more important than what she does when it keeps the flipping place standing.  Unsafe housing, spot on, and what makes it possible to live in the bloody place, the work the lads do.  Tell you one example I know, windows were totally warped.  Would she rather lift wet sheets or have a nice icy blast roaring in on their kids?
 
MENI: If you grow up in the country, grow up on a farm, you learn a bit how things work.  I’m 43..  Meet young girls, they don’t know anything, time of the month and that. 
WALLFLOWERS: What it has to do with getting pregnant?
MENI:  Yes.  Look at me talking now.  Too shy to say that.
TILON: Ladies, this is not the place!
ZIKA:  I menstruate.  I have two ovaries.  Each month an ovary releases an egg which travwls down the Fallopian tubes into the womb and attaches itself to the wall of the womb in the hope of a friendly sperm coming its way.  Since its hopes are dashed, it then breaks loose from the wall of the womb bringing blood with it, which exists from the body via the vagina. Sarat’s sister, by the way. 
KARULA: The subject is called biology.  Alas for the poor little sperm, there is something called contraception that stops it in its tracks.  Mitch and I decided three was enough.
 
DIBESIT:  I am sure I am not alone in finding this intolerable!  Truly this forum is becoming a cat-house!
MITCH: What was that again about feeble adolescent attempts at wit?
KARULA: You do not think girls should receive sex education?
ZIKA: I was going to say ooh, we have started a rabbit.  Then I thought someone might make some stupid joke about a bun in the oven.
DIBESIT: It is of course precisely this that has no place in Kadun.
ZIKA: Dude, if I want to go to Kadun I don’t need your permission.
DIBESIT: Has no-one any control over this ridiculous child?
ZIKA: Freeborn citizen of Fidub, mate, freeborn citizen of Fidub!
DIBESIT: Exactly so and you claim right of entry to Kadun?
ZIKA: Let’s see now, if farts like you bump off Sarat and Shav gets shot down by vamps, then I’m Anile heir.
DIBESIT: Apart from the filthy slur, there can be no better reason for a republic.
ZIKA: Instead of insulting me, foul poltroon, why don’t you answer Karula’s question?
MITCH: Unhand the lady instantly, foul poltroon!
KARULA: Sure, women should be left ignorant. OF course it helps not to be wired.  Here is a diagram I just found on the Grid. [Pic of female reproductive system]
ZIKA: Obviously the parents had The Talk.  Here’s the book we had at school.
 
GOSA: That is what I call a class insult!  I shall store it for future use.
 
 
SARAT: How’s the project?  Underneath it all, she’s yet another scientist.
ZIKA: Can I be cudgelled into saying anything intelligent about  algae, some edible, some not.  Unique source of vanadium, one of the more obscure metals.  Apparently however a deficiency stunts the growth of rats.  So I suppose if there were aquatic rats they’d be bigger than land ones. 
 
Sarat thought about the exams he’d have to take at the end of the year.  There’s no point in pretending. Either I work and do well or I don’t and scrape through.  The trouble is, observed Essa, part of him is actually interested in the course.