If they absolutely won't swear by Apollo, perhaps they could swear by Artemis instead.  They think they're so bloody important, they really think I'm supposed to be heedful of a bunch of butchering criminal traitors, think they're set above me, a ruling-class to which I should think myself subordinate (except of course being clearly mad I don't).  In the ordinary course of events people going about their lives are supposed to think doctors and nurses their superiors, their betters, those who shape their lives - oh they do that all right.  They're grotesques who think they run the country, what they say goes.  Oh did slummy Mummy bob a curtsey to Doctor?  Christ knows what gives them their delusions of grandeur, maybe it's a drug they're given in Medical School. Nurses of course are even funnier, a bunch of bestial, brutish, feral , stupid, criminal ignorant, illiterate, ineducable cleaning-women think they're the ruling-class.

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.
We hold Carlin.  We hold Var-sega’.  We never ceased to hold Van-senok.  The southern Press, with in any case no great enthusiasm for war-zones, continued to gather at the coastal towns of west and east, picking up what crumbs they could. So KAdun has split? A purely temporary division, they were assured.  So what happens next?  Naturally we wish to tell Azt.  Spo you’re planning how to retake Kadun, right?   Since they had to write about something, they homed in on secession.  Studies were unearthed analysing the economies of V-s, V-k and Carlin.
We are KAdun.  We don’t want to split.  We do not, cannot, shall not accept Cult rule In any case what would it achieve, a permanent state of war.  Azt equally would not accept. That brings us to the middle of Sarat’s second year.
 
PANTHER set up a Grid-site, Free Kadun.  Since they had other things to do, initially it was simply the necessary to link Carlin with the west, an Announcements column on the landing page for anything deemed of nationwide importance, and a private forum in which cats, trees, military and civilians who were guaranteed good guys could talk to each other, freely.  A couple of invalided cats, Veena and Furrier, were roped in to, no, not moderate it, but oversee it.  As with any forum, there were vastly more readers than writers.  Everyone was expected to check the Announcements daily, in case there were any.  Decorating the page was dodgy.  It had the imperial flag in one corner and the flag of the old republic in the other.  Monarchists and republicans equally sighed but recognized Kadun had to choose and had not yet chosen.  A list of links began to appear, amongst which the A-M site, of which Mel’s Place was a part.
Mel had set up the forum when he’d taken himself off to the Schools in Harn.  Superficially it was somewhere for Dabidans to natter to him while he was away. 
 
Then there are  couple of hundred thousand others who are also going to matter: the military of All-Kadun.
 
One fateful day towards the end of the second year…Mooching through the Collegium, Sarat spied a poster asking for student volunteers.
We retain the old name ‘seaman’s refuge’ for what is today a thriving hub of emotional and social support for seafarers everywhere.  Not only do the Fleets of four nations, Dabida, Kadun, Fidub and Verin, put in at Halsta, but merchantmen from all over the world.
Obstacle: what will they make of B+P.  If it were Maya, they wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at the H-W in tow.  Suck it and see.
The three of them pitched up at Halsta.
“Know of you, of course.  Not a lot of trees in our work.”
“I thought I’d do something different.”
“Not much doubt of the social skills!  Any basic work experience?”
“I did a stint as dogsbody in the Senate.”
Welcome aboard.
 
Carlin was in stitches.  Got drunk and missed my ship.  Awfully nice young man sorted it for me.  Actually Sarat’s work was more carting around boxes of kitchen roll and printer paper  and making coffee for visitors, but the place was open plan, there were always a variety of different people around, people stopped and asked him things like where’s the loo and where the canteen, and it was fun.  They reckoned he was fit for the dizzying heights of occasionally answering the phones and yes the occasion dismissed as urban myth actually did happen.
It was late in the day, a 4 pm lull, a decidedly irate Kadun Fleet officer marched in with the intention of sorting out the situation of one of his lads who’d been arrested on shore, and the first thing he saw was Sarat’s profile.
“It’s bloody Narulis!”
“You must be Filintis,” said Sarat.  Narulis’ captain.
The guy howled with laughter.
“Nice one.  Take it you are. Who do I see about a lad currently languishing in Zut’s jails?”
Maitlan and Junin, Mel’s friends in the Dabidan Fleet, dined out on anecdotes of Sarat and our furred friends. Sarat got invited on board ships Dabidan and Fidubi.  There he met irturbi and ended up invited for dinner on ship of the Kadun Fleet 
 
“Severe enthusiasm for Fidub right now.  Wondered if you’d like to come aboard for dinner.”
 
“And of course you chaps are PANTHER.”
“Admit it!” said Baz.
“Kadun something of a family concern, one might say.”
Aw, bless, thought Paw, they’re shy.
A couple of drinks later they got there.
“Of course constitutional monsarchy – the Dabidan model is one of the alternatives open to Kadun.”
Sarat who wasn’t a drinker anyway, poured yet more mineral water into his apple-stock, aware anything notable he might say would be all over the Fleet. 
“Sure,” he said cheerfully.  “Cho’d be terribly good at it.  Not sure he’d like the weather in Azt.”
“You yourself are interested in Kadun, I think.”
OhIsee.  He grinned.
“Trolling gets you noticed?” 
They grinned back.
“Social conditions,” said SArat.  “I’m quite good on waterborne parasites and industrially induced lung disease. I’d like to take part in social change.  Not quite the moment to land in Azt and start a political party.”
“Wow!  Are you a medical student?”
“Biology.  Actually it’s called Biological Sciences.  It’s not all pure science.”
“Sounds absolutely fascinating to me,” said one of the younger guys.
“Not just a lot of hot air, like most politicos.”
 
“You spent the evening discussing the diseases of livestock,” said Cho in tones of acute disbelief.
“I was explaining how originally I was going to be a vet and a couple of them come from farms.  How parasites get into the human food chain.  We did talk about other things too.”
“I shudder to think.”
 
Nor was this the sole invitation.
The first time, Sarat was just curious, but he didn’t do a social life without Maya
“May I bring Maya?”
“Grief, yes, of course.  We’re in Dabida.”
Somewhere in the midst of pleasant waffle about Fidub’s relationship with the sea, wicked Baz said, “Tell ‘em about the time Mel nearly drowned the whole lot of you.”
“Not the Asmodia!” said Maya.
“The good ship Asmodia.  We all got it in the neck for that one.  Mel was supposed to understand simple things, winds, currents, sea-lanes, intelligence.  The Straits are not a kiddies’ paddling-pool.  Mel had this little boat.  Mostly they just mucked around on it in harbour, that’s Mel, Hass, Sarat, Mel’s mates Reakoed, Fal, Tet and Maitlan.  They painted it.  Repainted it.  Dived off it, lounged around on it, pootled round the harbour, but they were forbidden, is that absolutely clear, to go out to sea. So they decided to pop over to M-P, I mean come on, it’s not like going out into the ocean. Storm came out of nowhere, it began to
 
 
 
 pour, and they found themselves heading for Fonsni. They actually did pretty well to keep afloat.  Tar did not bother to tell them that.”
“Just slightly hairy,” said Sarat.  “Everything went wrong at once.  Maitlan efficiently pulled up charts.  He came out on deck to us and said Mel, it’s 130 nani!  We’d better go back.  We said bright things like what!  Can’t be!  Oh shit, said Mel, at which point a nasty cold gust hit us. I need to explain.  It’s half an hour on the hover, about three minutes in the air, so in the depths of our idiot brains we really thought it was a short distance.  It was just penetrating that it’d probably take us three hours when the weather really hit.  We tried to do sensible stuff like tie ourselves to the deck and didn’t have enough rope.  Hass practically threw Fal and Reakoed into the galley. Mel yelled I can’t hold her and we concentrating on staying vertical or do I mean horizontal. We knew to throw ourselves flat but you can’t actually bail out your hopefully not sinking ship if you’re flat. Visibility was zilch.  We thought we were still probably in sight of Dabida.  Flares, what do we need  flares for, all we do is poddle round the harbour.  At least we kept stuff in waterproof boxes.  We found a torch and started signalling SOS. The storm passed and we had no lights, no connectivity, and no clue where we were but one good thing about this continent, it’s big, so we thought if we went west – repharse that.    Land ho! At about the time the coastguard zoomed up.  The captain just looked at Mel. Tar would really like a word with you.  Do I get a last request? asked Mel.
We were delivered into The Room.   Everybody’s parents were there, mine, Maitlan’s, Fal’s. Nobody cooed over us, nobody said so glad you’re safe darlings. Tar said to Mel: I expect you to know what you have done.  Mel said, we could all have died.  Maitlan’s Dad said no great loss in your case.  Fal said: We didn’t realize! How far it is, said Maitlan.  We thought we were popping over to M-P like on the hover.  Tar looked at us in total disbelief.  Tet said it was my idea.  I said, why do we not go to M-P, I’ll not be having Mel take all the blame.  The captain is not responsible for the ship, asked Tar coolly. Ice is warmer.  He turned back to Mel.  You failed to check the weather. I sort of half-realized that was deliberate.  Tet snapped Am I not able to read the shipping forecast.  Clearly not, said Tar. I stuck my oar in.  It’s not like we thought we’d sail round the Isles. Maitlan said we all know Mel’s going to take the blame, we all know Mel’s not going to bleat it was all of us.  But that’s not fair because it was all of us.  Tar said: You miss the point.  I don’t said Mel. Not fit to be on the loose on my own. Mental age of five.  Tar turned to me: Sarat?  When I’m with Mel and Hass.  They assume the H-W.  When we’re on the boat, said Mel.  They assume I’m sentient.  There isn’t really room for all of us.  They know nothing’s going to happen or we’ll call if we need.    You are not witless, said Tar, or wholly so. A failure of trust.  Intention to deceive.  All of us, said Reakoed’s mum, assume that when you are with Mel you are supervised. Mel was scarlet.  Hang on, said Hass.  We go out on our own.  You know that.   Truly? asked Saski.  A 30-minute skive? You have called out the coastguard, you have petrified your parents for a 30-minute skive?  Caused an international incident…They didn’t actually tell us Carlin was on the case.  There was actually more more more.  We had to apologize to everyone in sight.  Then I had to face those two.  They weren’t kind.”
 
Kids!  What would you do with ‘em!  Sea-faring Kadun loved it.  It filtered into the vast hinterland.  Water, nasty dangerous stuff, wet, too.  Yes, but is he - ? Oh no, no question, good strong broad lad, 100% male.  Hass is also a good strong broad lad, 100% male, but stereotypes will be stereotypes.
 
“Darlings,” said Sarsh, “now you simply have to come to Carlin.”
Sarat hadn’t been to Carlin for the simple reason the vamps were bombing it.  The raids were now few and limited to bombing the living daylights out of buttercups and cow-pats, but it was thought if anything was likely to really encourage the vamps to try harder it was Sarat mooching around, so probably not the brightest idea.  Saryulin decreed the decision was Varna’s.
“I can think of no more superb an affront to them.”
 
“Just stand in front of the Window, all I ask,” said As.
CLICK.
Narulis’ heir in front of Narulis’ Window found its way a lot of places not immediately foreseen, first to Sorg at Caniba then all over the western Army.
And as for the politics!  Well, really, one feels quite faint.
Baz looked up from the monitor.
“They’re talking about you.”
 “What are they saying!”
“You’re cool.  Well, you know that.  The thought of you kicking well-heeled ass is delectable.  When all is said and done, you will hardly call for the abolition of capital!  An enthusiastic young scientist, social conscience, excellent young man.  Really, what he appears to propose is little short of revolution.  I’m sure Grandpapa will make him toe the line.  Well, some of you guys are well in fantasy-land, Narulis walking the streets of Azt!  How can it possibly work today?  Even the so called Dabidan model is surely a quirk of Zur.”
Paw looked at Sarat’s face.
“Light blue touchpaper?”
Sarat grinned.
“Sarat in indepth discussions with Kadun military!”
“PANTHER forum,” said Baz.  “It won’t leak.  Much.”
            Paw nodded.  It’ll trickle into Kadun.  No-one there is going to run to the Zur Gazette.
            “Rule One,” said Baz, “what’s in the forum stays in the forum.  Else half of them’d be on charges.”
            Sarat cocked his head.
            “Hairy?”
            “It can be.”
            Sarat had previously looked at the forum but there wasn’t much going on.  They hadn’t got their feet under the table yet.  Or he hadn’t.
 
SARAT:
Hi guys.
This is a PANTHER forum and I’m a cat.  Appreciate perhaps unexpected.  I’ve just been doing a bit of reading about myself.  Always happy to talk.
Maya is sitting beside me saying no, no, no, in response to the Dabidan model being a quirk of Zur.  She’ll post separately. PS, she’s a cat too, not, what was it one of the  ‘hooved wonders’.  Well, she’s that too.  This may get biologically complicated.
Sarat.
 
FURRIER: Welcome to our hearth! 
 
Should it have been caught for posterity?  How could it?  Guys the length and breadth of Kadun, in tents, in caves, in barracks, in well-appointed drawing-rooms and shabby kitchens, in immaculately pressed uniforms or torn and dirty fatigues, ordinary clothes for work in a bank or for work in a factory, RItawa, Munzi, Inyulat and Varulin, Challin’s Four, stretching their legs in the lair they had improvised behind the canteen, Varulin writing to his daughter, Ritawa and Munzi playing cards, Munz taking a deep drag on one of the few cigarettes he allowed himself and Ritawa coughing theatrically, Inyulat reading, over in Carlin little Sitsi looking at the stars on a clear night, see if I can make out the Bowman, so many guys who were going to matter to Sarat and whose lives he would irrevocably change, some guys who ended up dead. It was the vacation and midnight in Zur, 6 on the easternmost extremities of Var-sega’, mid-afternoon in Vaconik on the western tip of Van-senok.  It only takes one person in the corner, well guess who’s turned up at the forum!
Was there an overall reaction?  How could there be?  Mild curiosity is probably the closest.  You didn’t drop everything to see what Sarat had to say for himself, you probably didn’t even pause in raising your glass to your lips or flipping the screens on your phone, but at some point when you had a free minute you might have perused the forum when you wouldn’t otherwise have done.
 
Cats conferred.
“You’d have to be pretty thick not to grasp the dynamics here, and nothing I know about him tells me he’s that.”
“They weigh in on our side, what does that do to them?”
“Won’t it just be so jolly interesting to find out.”
“Think I’ll just stir it.”
 
VEENA (PANTHER, female): As you will have perceived, we are a wildly, even biologically, varied bunch of cats, trees, military, civs, united of course in a common cause.  Wide range of views on the future.  Think everyone knows the Dabidan model or the Fidubi model are the options reasonable people are considering but of course in both cases these are really different ways of doing certain things.
MAYA: Obviously I know there are different attitudes to some things today, but historically that’s just not true. Narulis’ gig, always was, always will be. There’s nothing established by Zani that wasn’t in imperial law.  But it had gone wrong.  I think I need to be exact here: there’s nothing established by Zani that wasn’t implicit in imperial law, but because it wasn’t explicit there were loopholes, which is part of the reason it went pear-shaped.  The Constitution of Dabida is an attempt to close the loopholes. 
VEENA:  Just testing…
FURRIER:  I love you, I love you, I love you!  Or is that frantically disrespectful?
SARAT: Fidubi law was pretty similar to IL.  Fidub developed her law with the same aim of closing the gaps.
FRENSAT:  Was Fidub a republic?
SARAT: In Narulis’ time there wasn’t even a  political entity Fidub. Each of the Isles was self-governing.  That said they all recognized the – moral authority of the shrine at M-P and the group of islands was of course known as Fidub. By Zani’s time yes, each of the Isle sent representatives to the Senate at M-P.  Taken directly from Kadun of course. 
FRENSAT: Scales fall from my eyes!  Yes, that makes a lot of sense, there have to be defences against infestation.  I’m thinking Dabida and Fidub must be pretty much the same legally and then I’m thinking – if you add monarchy, that has to be legally incorporated, can’t just sit there on its own.
MAYA: When they came to design Dabida they thought it worked as yet another check and balance.  Basically there are six pillars, Crown, H-W, State, People, Military, Law.  Nothing happens without the consent of five of the six, one of whom has to be People.  The first bits because of the Kadun cock-up, of course, PANTHER finding themselves in direct opposition to the emperor.  so  People are independent of the government they elect, the State, and so of course are Military and Law.  At its simplest if the government turned rotten, the people would be on the streets, the law wouldn’t carry out its decrees, the military wouldn’t be subordinate to it. Come to think of it, that comes from the Kadun cock-up too, when Jaizal’s army turned against him.
SARAT: There isn’t a Fidubi alive who thinks monarchy is necessary to being clean.  Trust me on that one!  Yes, including me.
CALUNIN: Exactly.  To some people republic is a dirty word because being a republic left us open to this mess but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with being a republic, Fidub does just fine, and you can hardly say  empire was a lasting success. 
FRENSAT:  Think there’s a certain amount of yearning for ye ancient golden age but Sarat doesn’t live in the world of 1600 years ago and nor does anyone else.
 
 “I just think,” said Ritawa, “this is somehow so terribly important I can’t even get my head round how important it is!”
“From the actual horse’s mouth.  Blows away a few cobwebs, doesn’t it.”
“Rather suspect that’s why they’re here, actually.  Realization some people don’t live in the real world.”
 
SKYMAN: Not someone who knows what she’s talking about!  Nonetheless you can’t tell us certain – what some people think of as excesses of the south were enshrined in imperial law.
FRENSAT: Surely it’s a question of boundaries.  It’s not that imperial law said you could dance naked or something, it’s that it didn’t say you couldn’t.
FILI: They do that? Could you give me directions?
MAYA: Only on nudist beaches! 
FILI: Defo give me directions.  I guess you have to take the climate into account.  Nobody is going to dance naked in Azt.
CALUNIN: There is something called modesty.
FILI: Yes of course, but I’m thinking – if one person hasn’t got much on, that’s shocking, but if no-one’s wearing much, who’s noticing.  We are talking about the beach.
CALUNIN: You can’t make too much of that.  We’re not exactly short of countryside, places people go for a day out.
FILI: Yes, dear, but – can’t help thinking Sarat and Maya are howling – the beach is somewhere you go especially to take at least most of your clothes off to swim in something called the sea.
FRENSAT: Assumes particularly solemn air.  In that respect it is a unique phenomenon.
FURRIER: They say Fidubi have fins.
SARAT:  And gills.
MUNZI: We are somewhat land-locked.  Saw a river once.  Didn’t know quite what to make of it.
CALUNIN: So you’re saying beachwear is normal wear.
FILI: Don’t think I’m quite saying that.  Saying exposed skin is  normal.
MAYA: Yes and no.  People do not wander Zur in their bikinis and trunks.  Come in off the beach, they put something else on, but not a lot, a T, shorts.
SARAT: Pic of my dad at work.  He’s a beachcomber, you know.  Evil grin.  What he actually is is an expert in fossils, which the beach is littered with.  He doesn’t see any need to put on anything more formal because it’s work not play.  {Essa in shorts, sandals and a fine cotton shift.]  Just trying to think – he would dress up if he was going to teach at the Collegium, wouldn’t bother if it was something personal – popping into M-P to get Mum a birthday present or something.
 
Papa is an academic?  That is really quite superb.  Less friendly jokes about old fossils.
 
MAYA.   Of course we do have some standards.  Evil, evil grin.  Tell you about the sheepdog. Mel at 16 was what the revered elders called bloody impossible. Just the age Tar and Saski thought he should start to mix with the grown-ups. The rules of Tar’s ship were few.  If they’d been on the foreshore all day, mostly they just came in and fended for themselves.  This was dinner with half the Cabinet.  Mel pitched up really dressed much like Essa.  Except the sandals.  I believe the flip-flops were yellow.  I got it all from Hass, delighted witness.  Tar just looked at him, the sort of look, said Hass, makes most people quail. Mel was/pretended to be impervious. Tar told him to go away and change. Saski pointed out that others had taken trouble with their appearance.  Mel argued.  Usual teenage stuff, how can a piece of fabric affect the essential me.  Tar explained that Mel had been somewhat unwell of late, a disease generally known as adolescence.  Saski suggested he go and lie down and return when he wasn’t embarrassing.  Mel said that they told him to think and he’d thought and he really couldn’t see what the problem was.  Out! said Tar.  Shoo, scram! Mel slunk away.Tar had really had enough of him and thought he needed a quick kick up the backside.  If he wanted to argue in the grown-up world, he could make his case to the whole of Zur, so he told The Straits Times, in consequence of which the cartoon of Mel as a large muddy sheepdog slinking out of The Room looking guiltily behind him at his muddy paw-marks.   It was the difference between public and private.  When Mel was representing A-M, he had to look how Dabida sees A-M, which is actually not as a bunch of beachcombers.
SARAT: Another good one was Mel holding up a placard demanding rights for those with uncombed hair.  Mel’s relationship with sartorial elegance is just a little bit rocky.
MAYA: Aw, he’s trying.  That was Tar’s view at least.   So Mel had to defend his position in the Saa’anda Senta while the whole of Zur howled with laughter.
CALUNIN: So that’s the Dabidan model, your cousin taking on all comers.  Must say it does sound quirk of Zurish.
MAYA: It does get a bit more complicated than that.  Tar and Saski are pretty peripatetic.  They like seeing Dabida.  Wherever they go, they talk to people, people talk to them, factories, schools, bars, markets. Just generally whatever’s eating people at the moment, might be a political issue, might be that idiot at the bank. And of course A-M are spread throughout Dabida too.
Everyone has access, that’s fundamental.  If you pitch up on the hill at 3 in the morning, the N-W look after you, calm you down.  If when you’re sober, you still want to talk to Tar, that’s fine.  If you want to talk to A-M somewhere nani from Zur, you go to the H-W, who are all over the place.  They’re not gate-keepers.  If they can’t sort it, they’ll fix for you to go to Zur but a huge amount of stuff never gets to us.  Something like people are happy knowing it could if they demanded it.  And of course today there huge numbers of other outlets for discussion, mechanisms of social support. Of course it’s not that every Dabidan with a headache comes running to A-M, that would be ridiculous.  I’m trying to think of a parallel.  Maybe the lifeguard at the pool!  You’re a perfectly competent swimmer, but you still like knowing the lifeguard’s there. Maybe especially today with the Cult back.
FURRIER: I think if we just circle that last line….
 
FILI: All the same it can’t possibly work in modern Kadun with about a hundred times the number of people.
SARAT: We were and would be equally peripatetic.  Same gig: stop for lunch in Giraga.  The emperor’s stewards were and would be equally local support and of course PANTHER were essentially – are still when not otherwise engaged – would be imperial social workers.  Something twitching you, you tell a cat.  As above there’d be everything else as well.
MUNZI: I defo see the principle.  Two buts. One is – yes, the cut and thrust of political debate or even the idiot at the bank, but Dabida is essentially a settled society, not one that has been and will be turned upside down.  People are going to have a great deal more to say  And possibly not express themselves in words:   the other of course is security.  I think all of us know this war will not end with the last shot fired.  It would be ridiculous – imbcilic to thnk we can wholly disinfect Azt.
SARAT: Couple of things, not suggesting by any means that these are total answers.  First of course is once we’ve been through something with someone thoroughly and it’s on line, of course that won’t stop people having more to say, but it does help.  I know that a lot of people aren’t wired but I don’t see that Kadun can talk about her future without.  Imperial Azt had a lot of public spaces.  Maybe they could be developed into computer-caffs, and of course everywhere else has its meeting halls, bars.  PANTHER security scanners are very discreet, look like a normal doorway.  Overall, I think the balance would have to be found on the ground.  None of us would tolerate life behind bullet-proof glass.  It’s simply not what we’re about.  In practice we’d be surrounded by cats and are cats.  Anyone who tried anything up close and personal would be doomed.  That of course leaves a large number of other ways of trying to kill us.  And of course there’s a great deal of Kadun besides Azt.  Getting around is very much part of the model, as Maya’s said.
MUNZI: Still iffy about the detail, but that’s not really the point, is it. Or you could say it’s totally the point: the transformation of public life, particularly in our glorious capital of Azt.  But it would require massive investment, which some people would think is not entirely necessary, money better spent elsewhere.
SART: Kadun isn’t poor and there’d be a lot of money freed up from the Ministries of Malignancy.  If the whole apparatus of repression and all the ridiculous bureaucracy were scrapped.  I’d say it was pretty basic.  Decisions can’t be taken without the people affected by them having a say.
MUNZI: And how much do Corsin cost?  That of course is something called democracy, which some people – decisions are taken by those who (think they) know best.
VARULIN: What, you mean us proles can speak!
MUNZI:  Volumes.  This is Comrade Varulin, also comrade-in-arms.
VARULIN:  Pleased to meet.  Now some blokes here, don’t know if they’ll come out of the woodwork, it’s just not how things are done, arguing about them.  Think the posh word is paternalist.  I can think of other ones.
SARAT: Patronizing?
VARULIN: Plonkers.  Other words beginning with P.  It’s just not necessary, it has been decided, word over dinner.  Course now public life is limited by security but that’s just an excuse, won’t always be like that.
SARAT: Piss-artists. It’s basic, people can’t say if they accept what the politicians are doing unless they know what it is.
 
“And how many people have just had heart-attacks?”
“Eek, it’s a democrat!  Run for your lives!”
 
VARULIN: The very word I was looking for. I would mention some of our bars have got tellies but I would also mention a lot of our bars are men-only.
SARAT: So you can’t go out for a drink with your partner?
VARULIN: Have to go somewhere a bit posh for that – if they’d let you in.
SARAT: FFS!
VEENA: As I said, different.  Some of us cats ignore it and they don’t say anything because we’re cats but they really don’t like it.
CARSIN: If you could afford it, which a lot of people can’t.
FURRIER: Some people, he said distantly, while of course elections and so on, espouse what one might call a more limited form of democracy.
SARAT: Loopholes.  A lot of stuff in Fidub and Dabida is about giving power nowhere to hide.
FURRIER: So that’s why the loathing!  Example?
SARAT:  Everyone with assets above a certain amount, Cho, Tar, everyone, has to submit detailed accounts to the Public Audit Office where everything above a certain amount is checked, and those accounts go on line.  There isn’t any space for pay-offs or buying tanks or something.  I mean you couldn’t get away with something like ‘Miscellaneous services’.  Exactly what, please?   Nobody’s checking the weekly shopping, but say if that were suddenly 10 times the usual and labelled ‘party’, someone’d check who was entertained.
FURRIER:  OK, now we know why they hiss ‘frank communalism’.  Next question?
VARULIN: So your esteemed grandfather could not pay people to vote for him, not of course tha he would want to.
SARAT: Well, technically speaking he could, but he couldn’t hide it and people’d notice if he’d tried to do it in kind, hey the elections in six months, so I’ll just fund a new ward for sick kids or something
MUNZI: If that was what they funded, they wouldn’t be quite so repulsive.  Propaganda, rallies, drugs.
SARAT:  Heard a good deal about that from As and Mardis.  They were in Azt.  Grubby little small ads promising success with women and so on.
MUNZI: Of course, the Carlin connection.  Heard a good story about the S-y-bs escaping.  True?
SARAT:  Probably not the bit about Pilo slaying 30 rats single-handed.  I know it got a bit exaggerated. 
 
DIBESIT:  This is essentially a military forum.  The presence of foreign nationals is entirely inappropriate.  I cannot understand the logic of admitting any citizen of a foreign country and have indeed already mailed Firas.
FURRIER:  Oh do talk sense!  If this was Army World, what’s Firas got to do with it.
FRENSAT: All the same, he has a point.  If it was people interested in the future of Kadun, have the whole continent here.  Yes, I do see Sarat has a particular connection with Kadun.
GINAS: They’re cats, we’re cats.  Purr.
FRENSAT: How cats? Fidubi PANTHER?
VARIOUS: Oh.  No. Sarat’s really going to be an employee of the State of Fidub!
FILASIN: Seriously confused.  He’s Fidubi, isn’t he.  Sort of honorary membership?
FURRIER: All Cho’s family are Kadun PANTHER.
FILASIN: Guess it’s traditional!
 
CALUNIN:  The relationship with sartorial elegance of the Dabidan Army of course is notorious. 
FRENSAT: Bunch of scruffs.  Frankly.
SITSI:  Can’t be anyone the world over doesn’t recognize the disease known as adolescence.  That indeed reached us in Carlin.  Of course we were far too polite to say anything.  Much.
 
 
FRENSAT: Trying to put it together.  So the gallant Army of Dabida isn’t on public display, Sarat’s papa isn’t on public display.  Is that more or less the rationale?
MAYA: Just thinking here.  It would be so much better if you talked directly to them.  I guess you’re not allowed to post in public forums?
FRENSAT: Ah.  Hmm.  I know some of us do.  For the high jump if you’re found out.  They reckon senior officers aren’t combing the forums of the continent searching for miscreants.  Though someone might be.  I like to think we aren’t totally stupid.  I mean no-one’s saying my name is…my map reference is..
SITSI: There’s anonymization software which is (said to be) foolproof.  I don’t know that.  I didn’t say that…
SARAT: Get Shav along? My sister in FAF.  She’s pretty busy, but maybe she and Petrush (partner) could answer at least some of your questions. 
 
HEDGEHoppER: I shall pre-empt.  Foreign nationlas, foreign military, ever more appalling hrrrmpth, hrmmph.  Consider it all said, guys.
 
Of course they didn’t.
 
SITSI: Can’t we be nice and say thank you.
CALUNIN: A lady officer.  At least without stripy socks.
 
GOSA:  There’s a much broader issue here.  It’s generally known as intelligent discussion, considering all perspectives, which we can’t unless we know what they are. The future of Kadun is in our hands!  It’d bloody better be.  Everything should be on the table.
MAYA: Thought I’d just be inflammatory.   Both of us know guys and girls in the southern military.  How do people feel about inviting them here to chew things over with you, a cross-section. 
 
 
 
The forum went into deep thought. 
 
SITSI: We’ve probably posted stuff that could haunt us, but I don’t think there’s anything here we don’t want anyone else to know.
FRENSAT:  It’s certainly an interesting idea and unless we’re paranoid – busy people are not combing the forum for the juicy bits.
OBAYA: I think it’s coolest, but then I am a hopeless minority being female.
VEENA: They have to talk about it.
CARVENIN: Who knows, romance may bloom!
CALUNIN: For def it’d have to be cleared on high, military on high I mean.
SISTENDA: As most of us know perfectly well, there are many civilians here.  Since we’re free to post in open forums, that tends to be where we congregate.  We therefore talk to people in the south.  It seems to me an excellent idea.  We at least are willing to examine new ideas.  Or of course very old ones.
VEENA: Couldn’t you have more of your chat here?  It doesn’t seem to me a very good idea to – they live in a male world and here they pretend it is a male world.  The whole of Kadun should be talking.
SISTENDA: Good point but as has been pointed out the whole of Kadun is not wired. 
 
Shavli to Skyhawk:  As you know I’m a very junior chick. As you also know I’m Cho’s grand-daughter and Kadun is considering the Dabidan model.  This appears to make me two different people – I’m working on it.  Sarat has invited me to a PANTHER forum to chat to the Kadun military about women in uniform.  Petrush, my partner, says we have notably failed to find on the Grid delineation of the formal relationship between FAF and KAF and we suspect they will ask.  Please advise.  Thank you.
 
SITSI: I am dynamic!  I am self-starting!  But possibly I don’t have a very large brain.  I have actually looked at the site of the Dabidan government.  Found I got a bit lost.  It’s just really good to have people to ask.
HEDGEHOPPER: Same with me, well, apart from the small brain.  I looked at the FAF site, but because certain things just aren’t issues, there isn’t really anything for those of us to whom they are issues.
FRENSAT:  OK, who’s first off the blocks?
HEDGEHOPPER: Hrrmph, hrmph, wholly unacceptable.  Sir!  Does anyone actually know exactly why civilization as we know it has not collapsed because no-one in the Dabidan Army says sir?  Or of course, where are the smelling salts, ma’am.
CALUNIN: The basic point of course is whether Dabida epitomizes civilization.
HEDGEHOPPER: No: Fidub.  Most of us have a lot of difficulty with the idea Fidub is seriously flawed.
FILI: Some things we can ask my lady Maya.
 
FILI: Just curious.  If I may ask.  If your uncle visited a military installation, what would happen?
MAYA: Nothing.  Tar’d want to see normality, not a hsow put on for him.  Guys’d be getting on with their work as usual.  Tar and Saski would wander around chatting to them, asking them about what they’re doing, get into a couple of arguments, have their ears bent about a failure in the supply-chain, whatever.  Have lunch in the canteen with the guys.  Wander off again.
 
VARULIN: Not wanting to be funny, that’s normality right down to the stripy socks?
MAYA: Yes!
VARULIN: And no-one’s saying Sir!  Ma’am! - ?
MAYA: Correct.
FRENSAT: So it doesn’t make any sense right down the food-chain.  Now, ma’am!  You are a student in Zur.  You are also the niece of the King of Dabida.  I believe no-one accords any special behaviour to you.  It would be awfully interesting to have the rationale direct from the horse’s mouth.
 
MAYA: If you think I’m behaving like a complete loon, you tell me. We’re all equally human, no-one who can’t be wrong, misinformed, flawed in his reason, talking complete crap or just plain malign.  You don’t let me think you think I’m wonderful if you don’t.  You don’t observe nervously that you think I might reconsider.  You don’t say to your friends Maya’s on another planet and say nothing to me.  In one line garbage doesn’t stop being garbage because of the status of the person who’s uttering it. So what’s the point?  The star of our show is the matrix.  The matrix says the rich guy called king who lives in the rabbit-warren on the hill is top of the ant-heap.  Yea, we move in all the (supposed to be) best circles.  Some of the people in those circles aren’t necessarily nice to be near.  They can’t touch us, the way they can flatten little guys.  The point is to move and shake in a hierarchical world, to keep power away from the people who want to push other people around not to set ourselves above the guy in the street. We call it the matrix.  The matrix says the rich guy called king in the rabbit-warren  on the hill is top of the ant-heap.  Obviously that preceded formal democratic structures but it still works on the international stage, and of course as needs internally, if someone’s just totally lost in the system somewhere we kick down the door at the top, metaphorically speaking, of course.  There are two sides to it, internally mainly the moral authority of A-M, people actually care what we think, externally – operative word is rich, people care what we think but only because we’ve got the greenbacks.  Sometimes both.  Example.  Mel’s at the Schools in Harn.  He really upset dear Van Sandos.  ANE other Dabidan would probably have been on the next flight out.  Instead they had a cosy chat about the Cult in Harn.  ‘Get away with’ things that have to be done which some people would much rather weren’t done.
FRENSAT: May we ask what he did?
QINTAS: ROTFLMAO.  That one crossed the water.  The Dabidan Rep Centre was entertaining monster rats.  Mel and Hass pistol-whipped them, other matter, I hasten to add, not literally.
CALUNIN: I really think in some circumstances sartorial inelegance may be forgiven.  Naturally there are acute implications for us in Kadun.  One does what one is told or one does what is right.  The former naturally assumes right is on the side of one’s superiors, but of course as we all know, however fervently we espouse notions of deference and respect, that is not necessarily the case.
 
SITSI: We thought we were all nice reasonable people because we – here – are all nice reasonable people.  Mostly!  You know what I mean.  Trust comes into it.  People we trusted turned out not to be nice or reasonable.
FRENSAT: No doubt we’ve had a wake-up call.  We were happy little nice reasonable people! 
Loopholes is just exactly it.  There had to be some in how we were doing things.
 
CALUNIN: Trust is a fundamental element.  In terms of how some people think to question is to mistrust.  Sarat, you’ve said Fidub took the idea of a Senate from Kadun.  Narulis, of course.  It’s pretty much of a perennial here, egg or chicken.  Wondered what your view is. 
FRENSAT: If you say it all came from Narulis, you’re saying it’s all Fidubi, but it obviously wasn’t.
 
BAZ: One of Sarat’s cats, BTW.  Fidubi born and bred but Kadun PANTHER.  You have to be to look after the family, State of Fidub isn’t going to pay, which is one of the things we’re talking about.  Just been reading what you guys have said.  You have to factor in the music. The Isles sing.  No-one knows why. Eminent geologists get all shaky.  Everyone’d love it to be because of the silver, but normal healthy silver just doesn’t do that.  Of course at first Fidubi thought everywhere was like Fidub but the first thing they did was stand on their hind legs and the second was put to sea so they soon found out everywhere wasn’t.  Trade  and conversation had been going on for centuries before Narulis.  The upshot is that educated people and well travelled people, which over the years is a lot of honest sailormen,  really didn’t see much difference between the Tradition and earthpower.  If you have singing land, that’s earthpower.  As far as I understand it, they thought the Tradition was simply a variant of earthpower.
 
Perceptible pause.
 
MUNZI:  Everyone of course calls Fidub the Singing Isles, but – literally?  My gut reaction is doesn’t it drive you mad?
SARAT:  Think the word is subliminal, hovering at/just below the level of consciousness.  If you were meditating on the Utmost Isle in the middle of night, you’d get it.  In the middle of M-P you wouldn’t hear a thing.  Except traffic.
RITAWA:  There’s a story – when Narulis reached Van-senok they wouldn’t let him in because he carried the Flame.  Trees don’t like fire!  I guess he convinced them it’s all – one earth.  Just underlining ‘Trade and conversation had been taking place for centruies before Narulis’.  I’m guessing it looks rather simpler from the east.
SUTAN: (Sardun).   [PIC]  In the National at Vaconik, gift from Fidub to the Suzerain of Van-senok in 670, yonks before Narulis.  Educated people knew Fidub. Kew of her, anyway.  And Vaconik has been a major port since forever.  No reason why sailors from the west shouldn’t have been there.
 
CALUYA: ‘Oh know ye not the Singing Isles/Where once fair Maya leapt and danced.’  Could not resist.  For us honest sailormen Fidub was always precious, first landfall after the endless ocean, sign we were nearly home.
 
Skyhawk to Shavli: Think what Shavli-ban-essa-eban-Narulis does off-duty no concern of mine.  It’s not FAF you’re representing.  WRT the other, there is no formal agreement.  Since there is no formal government of Free Kadun, one was not thought necessary.  A friendly.
 
Skyhawk to Nodsi, Varna and Carlutan:
Forwarded message below.  You know about this?
 
SARAT:  The throne is pure Fidub, empire not.  In the Tradition Va is the Silver Homeland, the joyous realm, the realm of light, untouched by pain, fear, death. I know some of you knew that when you were 10, but others maybe not.  The symbol of Va is a silver coronet above a silver chair.  The silver chair was a gift from Fidub to Narulis.  The IoD symbolizes the destruction of Va.  If you want to be all rationalist, you can say Va can’t be destroyed because it never existed in the first place but symbolically Va is everything clean, everything whole, the light they can’t put out, so they have to make do with destroying people instead. The IoD is a fairly recent addition to the scene.  Until that ape Catunin declared Cult rule the symbol of the Cult had  been Death on a black stallion, but he of course defined the enemy asVa.  For all practical purposes, the values of Va are those of earthpower, I mean concerning the sort of things IL dealt with, how to treat other people.
BAZ:  Know some of you are segani cats, vaudosi – are there any senoki cats or are you all Sardun?  But the heart, the soul, core, DNA of all PANTHER is the shrine at M-P, where they developed it all.  Far yonder in the west, other guys developed it at the Viledeen.   In neither case, as I understand it, had it been developed as a weapon, cos there hadn’t been an enemy who’d developed it.  Oh,you might have zapped the guy who was trying to steal your cattle, but nothing more than that.  Bloody Cult came along and guys learned fast.  PANTHER as a defence organization was Narulis’ creation and spread back to Fidub, where as we all know Fidubi PANTHER is Fidubi State Security.  House of Fire took it up, Narulis’ lot, who ruled, it will amaze you to learn, the Sohenisle.  Other thing there, and it’s important, is the Cult came from the west so the first guys to develop a weapon were of course earthpower.  Then again there’s a Shrine at Carlin but all the traditional customs are earthpower.  Mel was completely hornswoggled, how people welcome births, mourn deaths.  I personally think egg chicken is just a really good way to get a headache.
 
VANNINA:  Sardun, by the way.  Yes, exactly.  What Baz said.  Think a lot of people look at it rather simplistically.  The reason the geralis were able to progress into the heart of Kadun is precisely because they zapped us.  We learned extremely fast, found ways to trap them, examine them.  So then we gave chase.  This is generally depicted as sending them into Narulis’ arms, but I don’t think it was quite like that, much more confused, since the guys in the east didn’t know what the F had hit them either.
SARAT: As Mel heard it from Carlin, Narulis arrived to total mayhem.  The guys in the west had sent messengers to the east but there just wasn’t any email…Of course some guys could do teletalk, but not the breadth of Kadun.  It was communicated, mostly by fast steed.  And so the guys in the east were sharpening their brains fast.  Added to that were refugees fleeing the advancing Cult.  The first thing Narulis did was get word to the shrine at M-P, and a lot of Fidubi pitched up.  I think some places there’s a myth Narulis had an army.  He actually landed with 22 guys.  The ‘army’ were the Fidubi mentors.  Meanwhile there were other ways of holding the Cult, fire, water, like you guys did at Caba-san, freaking brilliant.  The upshot was they were trapped in the middle, hence Hanif-Altan, but a lot of confusion first.
 
“Some Fidubi kid, guv’nor, thinks we’re freaking brilliant.”
Rewn beamed.
“Excellent, quite excellent.”
“’Course we knew that already.”
“What we did not know was how well informed is the Fidubi kid.”
 
REWN: I of course was in command at Caba-Sen.  Appreciation is always valued.  On behalf of all, I thank you.
 
This of course gave Sarat precisely the small problem Rewn wanted it to: how to negotiate addressing the entire military.
 
SARAT: Many of you have done amazing, heroic and terrifying things.  I think you know who you are.  Not going to risk a list in case I leave out people who should be on it.  The whole continent knows what’s at stake. I think I can fairly say a lot of people appreciate you outside Kadun as well as in.  I think I can thank you on behalf of the whole of Free Kadun.  Someone has to.  If there were a President, it would be his/her job, but there isn’t.  Fill a gap.
 
“Nicely done,” said Varna.
Naturally there were nay-sayers.  An ancient title, a rusting throne.  It is nonsense!
 
Varna to Skyhawk: Read the forum – at any rate since Sarat and Maya pitched up.  
FALTARIN: You have the presumption to speak on behalf of Kadun, a Fidubi student?
SARAT: Just trying to unravel that one.  I think if I were saying something that was debatable, you’d have a point.  You mean Kadun doesn’t want to thank you?  I’m still Narulis’ heir. Think Narulis would be quite cross with me if I didn’t say thank you.
 
Bite lip.
 
FALTARIN: It was a very long time ago.
SARAT: Yes.  So?
FALTARIN: Surely the title is meaningless.
SARAT:  The title doesn’t mean much to me.  Va, the chair, what it represents, does.  In the circumstances in which we find ourselves, with the Cult as the enemy, the IoD flying over Azt.
 
You’ve probably seen the famous painting ‘The Meet’ of Narulis in the grounds of the Jumesit Palace.  You might not have seen the version where those around him have speech-bubbles: The presumption!  You dare speak on behalf of Kadun?  You’re a Fidubi.  You’ve seen it if you’ve been in Cho’s study, because that’s the one he has on the wall.
 
SARAT:  Good one.  All the same, it must have happened.  People wouldn’t be people if they hadn’t noticed Narulis came from somewhere else.
TIRO: I think a lot of it stems from the Houses.  Think I’ve just written the opposite of what I mean.  We’re five countries who decided to be one country.  Can’t help feeling it would be awkward if any of us decided to be top cat. An outsider was better.
 
Carlutan to Skyhawk: Excellent idea.  Look forward to the fireworks.
Varna: Concur.
Nodsi:
 
VARTAN: Defo a lot in that.  We all know the Narulis architect of our victories bilge, more because he wasn’t, I’d say.  More like an arbiter.  Much more iffy if V-k or V-s had jumped to the top.
RITAWA: I think there’s a lot there of what we were saying earlier, too.  Earthpower isn’t one single homogenous entity, especially then.  The variant of earthpower in Carlin was actually more obviously like the Tradition.  In a sense Fidub was much less a freign country than V-k.
VARTAN: All the same for the Houses to accept an – overlord.  Always thought that weird.
SARAT: First among equals.  Anile, as I’m sure you know, means powerless.  The emperor had very few special powers.  Everyone was bound by IL, including the emperor.
VARTAN: Interesting.  I’m thinking something like, we were stronger together than apart.  Like after the collapse of empire we remained All-Kadun.  But ‘emperor’ isn’t an ‘equals’ word.
RITAWA: Maybe it wasn’t directed at Kadun, directed internally.  What were the special powers?
VARTAN:  I can see that too.  Yeah, fuckers, you try it again you’re facing an empire!
SARAT: The powers of all military commanders.  The power to preside at the imperial court.  The power to remit sentence passed by a lower court.
RITAWA:  Interesting!  So when it went wrong right at the top – the emperor could let them off, essentially.  That was a loophole.
VARTAN: I guess anything can be rotted.  The power to magnanimously pardon a felon! 
 
SARAT: Just doing a bit of reading. Not sure if empire is a threat to civilization as we know it or capitalism’s last best hope.  Looks like a lot of people see Sohenoil and AMI and think empire is the safe option.  The boat will not be rocked.  We’ll side with the bosses.  Not.  I think some guys need to understand that if any of us, no matter how aged and venerable, Cho, my father, Maya’s parents, walked into some hell-hole factory the sky would fall in.  Twice.  The matrix live on line is that Cho would be on the phone to whomever is at the top and thinks he can’t be reached, can’t be touched. And of course the law would move in.  It is actually possible to make a profit without giving your employees emphysema.  Brutally, the only thing that frightens big capital is bigger capital.  Creeps like Sar-fenan and Searc have entire governments running but if Cho rings them, and he does occasionally steel himself so to do, they have to talk to him, because he can and does touch them.  Constitutional monarchy is Kadun’s choice, but it’s our choice too and we couldn’t see our way to being part of government that left big fish untouched.  Absolute refusal to be cosy figurehead, ra-ra-ra, our glorious empire, surrounded by a load of dumbfuck crap.  Narulis wouldn’t have tolerated it and nor should we!
VARNA: I think the only possible answer to that is whew!  So that would be a deal-breaker?
DIVALDIN: Absolutely but you can’t claim Narulis legislated for hell-hole factories.
SARAT: Yes, deal-breaker.  Of course not but the whole of imperial law is a sort of treatise on how to treat other people.  ‘These rights shall apply to all, whether man, woman or twain.’.  ‘Of each we uphold the right to live without hindrance.’  Being made ill by your job is a hindrance.  When it comes to detail, human nature hasn’t changed a lot.  They had adulterated flour, giving short weights and so on, even rules about building-site.  I assure you no-one got killed or injured in the building of imperial Azt – or rather they didn’t after the first accident.  Seriously.  I’m told…Seriously there are regs about weights and loads.
CARLUTAN: That is bloody amazing.  Of course when you think about it, however rudimentary the equipment it can be secure or not, the rope on a pulley can be strong or frayed, it can be overloaded to save time/money.
VARNA: Gender equality, that’s a deal-breaker too?
SARAT: Yes.  For Cho, for monarchy.  Don’t see why I shouldn’t hang around campaigning and being difficult like any republican politician would
DIBESIT: Young man, you are a spokesman for your grandfather?
SARAT: We’re a family.  We talk to each other.  Mail him if you like: [email protected].
FURRIER:  Keep straight face.  Not that Sarat hasn’t already told you.
DIBESIT: So you have arrived here in the full knowledge your grandfather may read your words.
SARAT:  Yes.  In the full knowledge the whole of Kadun PANTHER and half the Kadun military can read them.  Your point is?
DIBESIT: Or yours.  You seek to prove what?
SARAT: Er.  Exactly nothing? 
DIBESIT: Perhaps that you will voice your republican principles in defiance of your family?
SARAT:   Cho was a member of the Senate of the Republic of Fidub.  If my politics hadn’t pointed me towards Kadun, it’s at least a possible I’d follow Cho into the Fidubi Senate.
DIBESIT: I find it hard to believe any family could approve the manner in which you have behaved here.
SARAT: Examples, please.  Neither I nor Maya raised the matterof the Dabidan model.  It was on the table and guys were talking about it.  They were also talking about me.  I prefer people talk to me, not about me.
DIBESIT: Indeed you have expressed yourself freely on a number of topics.  What is your evidence for the existence of ‘hell-hole factories’?
SARAT:  Just bear with me two ticks, I’ll list the references.   Some of them are internal PANTHER publications.  I’m guessing you’re not a cat, but I expect if you ask nicely they’ll let you read them. 
FURRIER: It’s no good, I can’t contain myself.  ROTFLMAO.
Sarat posted a list of 20 references with titles such as Report on the Brabantin Steel Complex, Giraga and The incidence of asbestos-induced pylmonary disease in four factories in Tjulsit.
SARAT:  Here are some more.  These are about how diseases of livestock are transmitted to humans.
REWN: You excellent youg man.
SARAT: I have one fan!
FURRIER:  I think you probably have rather more than that.
 
A lighted match in a powder-factory.
 
Brass are well here, aren’t there.  Does this surprise!
 
“Dear boy,” said Heela, “when Colonel-General Rewn calls you an excellent young man, you do not say I have one fan, you say thank you sir.  That of course is not because he is the Anile heir, that is Fidub. A gulf in how we bring up our young.”
Kyle said, “Pehrpas he doesn’t know who Rewn is.  But I doubt it.”
“Oh yes,” said Heela. “I do not think he is a young naïve, no idea who anyone is.”
 
 
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.
 
MUNZI: Are your politicos equally accessible?
SARAT: Within reason, as in they do have work to do as well as gabbing to the public.  They don’t creep around in closed cars.  You can see the Minister of Transport or someone walking across M-P and if you’re livid about the new highway you can stop her but she doesn’t have to be held up for half an hour having her ear bent, probably tell you that if it’s just you you’re a minority of one but if there are lots of people you should exercise your democratic right to arrange a meeting and invite her to it.  I guess that mostly doesn’t happen because people are doing that anyway, sounding off in the papers, arranging meetings.  Of course they can all be mailed directly.  Suppose oh shock or horror you organized a meeting and invited Sassia, said Minister to attend and she didn’t reply, then she’d expect to be cornered in the street.
MUNZI: Democracy is simply the relationship of people to power.  Sure that’s been said before, not claiming any wondrous insight
SARAT: No-one ever should be too frightened to say what’s on his/her mind.  If it turns out to be crap, people will say so fast enough!
TIFANIN:  Really enjoying this.  I write from the great age of 35!  Point is we did have normal civic life just not so the younger guys remember.  Not so upfront, certainly not so open or free.  Normal is the key word.  Before everything was coloured by the hebade geralis. Evil grin.  Oh dear, am I compelled to translate: fucking cunts.  After that, we do in Carlin, Var-sega’, Van-senok to some extent, but of course we have military rule. 
MUNZI: Most of what I remember growing-up, my father and his friends being furious, their bloody rallies in town with flags with the IoD, school, home, everyone telling me to keep my mouth shut, keep away and leave it to the grown-ups.  Now we are the grown-ups.  Rule One is you never say anything to anyone you don’t 200% trust.  I remember once I said, What’s happening? And Dad said, Desecration. Which was of course true, but not really something I could understand at 16.
MAYA: Something I’ve never been able to understand, don’t know if you can shed any light.  Death is not a cheerful encouraging image.  Why did people fall for it?  You’d think they’d go as far as possible in the opposite direction.
MUNZI: Vile, isn’t it.  You have enemies!  Death will kindly destroy them for you. Kadun had enemies, the whole of the south was the enemy.  If you were rich, the poor were your enemies, they were going to seize your assets.  If you were poor, the rich were your enemies…. That one wasn’t quite so simple.  It didn’t mean dirt-poor and it didn’t mean just those with loads of dosh.  It was aimed squarely at the Houses and the old upper class.  They were keeping ordinary people down.  If they couldn’t get people slavering with hate, at least they got them terrified.
MAYA: I was only a babe too, but I could understand Sarsh screaming, my father livid.  First they tried to buy Saryulin, which would have been funny if it wasn’t so awful.  Of course he didn’t give them the time of day.  I guess that must have redoubled the class war.
MUNZI:  I suppose they tried it on Heela too. They absolutely wanted people to overthrow the Houses.  In the context of what you’ve said about the Dabidan model/Narulis’ gig, really they took over in tandem with the military.  And what Tifanin said, we had our democratic structures, if not quite those of the south, the Houses were in abeyance – it’s actually really fascinating.  Completely unofficially, they’d always had the roles of the emperor’s stewards for some people. 
TIFANIN:  They just never stopped doing it, did they, instead of being overthrown they became the focus for resistance, and all power and all kudos to them.  But buy Heela ban-sarndit-vaq!    Think they can buy bloody everything and everyone.
SARAT: Cho called it chequers, I know that much.  Capital Warz!  They did try to buy everything and they got countered, southern capital, clean capital in Kadun.  I think a lot of the root of the loathing is there.  They hate Cho for the same reason they hate Saryulin, Heela and Marula.  They can’t touch them and they can be countered by them.
VENZA: Sorry, who is Sarsh.
MAYA: My sister-in-law Sarshi san-yaega-baht Talal, SAryulin’s niece paired with my brother Vij.
VENZA: Oh well, in that case you’re obviously an honorary carlini!
MAYA: Thank you!
CAL~UN~IN:  They bought Micheal, dud they not.  Something of a fantasy, the virtue of the Houses.
VARULIN: Some of us segani – shoot on sight.
TIFANIN: Susheela’s heir, maybe SArat could inherite Var-sega’.  At least he cares about Kadun.
MAyA: Vij can’t believe it, says there must be some kind of reasonable explanation.  I don’t know.  Heela wouldn’t let him fight, not in the front line, any more than Tar would let Mel fight if we were at war.  And most unhappy about it he would be.
TIFANIN: Unhappy is not emigrating!  Confess I hadn’t thought of that angle, though.
CALUNIN: More probably the gold-digger is behind it, that appalling woman of his
 
“Mitch must come back,” decreed Marula.
“Don’t know much about princesses,” said Vanina, “but I think they ought to be intelligent, witty, informed and give as good as they get.”
“I don’t just get the cosy figurehead bit, I love it, but all the same, that’s what a monarch is, a representative.”
“Precisely,” said Marula.  “The world has changed.  Cho is not to mount a charger and ride to war.”
 
Mitch received a cryptic message from Sardun.  Time you came home.  Not on to you, no panic.  Important development.
Mitch arrived in his office and announced he was shutting up shop and returning to Kadun.
“Something wrong at home, Mitch?”
“No, no. What happened to paperless?  OK, two heaps.  Pack or shred.”
“Something to do with - the situation?”
“War,” said Mitch.  “I cannot continue sitting on my ass in this City.”
“You know my politics,” said Hunrit, his art director.
“Sure do.  Do we really need these files?”
“We is the operative word.  Mitch – “
“Ah-hah?”     
“You know how much I hate them.”
“You want - I apologize.  I was about to say something stupid.”
“It isn’t just Kadun’s war. A real chance to hit the bastards.”
“I am going to Van-senok!  It is not exactly a pulsating hub.”
“Not home?”
“I may get around.”
“I grew up in a small town.  I can actually cope without 24/7.  Don’t tell me you won’t need an extra pair of hands.”
“Me, me, me,” said Tingle.  “I have always so much wanted to travel.”
“That’s settled, then,” said Hunrit.
“Lastly,” said Mitch.  “It’s practically in the Arctic Circle.  OK, I exaggerate a bit.  The word I seek is cold.”  He relented.  “They do have heating.”
Tingle’s hair is dark green. 
“There is perhaps something I need to tell you,” said Mitch.  “Dark green hair.  It is not commonplace, but for instance in the district around the colleges, among students and political activists it is a - kind of political statement.  You know where I stand without having to bother to ask me!”
“What does it mean?”
“It means,” sighed Mitch, “you subscribe to a particularly radical branch of earthpower.”
“Sounds cool.  What’s earthpower.
“A relationship with the planet.”
“Hair dye,” said Tingle “is not a natural part of the planet.”
“I do not know, frankly,” said Mitch.  “I mean I know a little about earthpower.  I guess they use natural dyes.”
“I really was not sure how to call it,” he said to Karula, “but I know both of them can shoot.  They will not be wilting lilies.”
            “Hunrit?”
            “National Service.”
            Tingle is a farm-girl.  She learned to shoot at much the same time she learned to walk.
 
            Cantilip finished reading Mel’s Place.  There is more garbage here about earthpower than I thought existed!
 
CALUNIN:  I’m still trying to work out how Sarat can be Kadun PANTHER and a good citizen of Fidub.  Yes of course he’s not just any citizen but that’s exactly the point.  What is the relationship between PANTHER and the Aniles? 
 
FURRIER:  Kadun PANTHER is Narulis’ cub.  It all stems from there.  The critical bit is the Kadun cock-up.  When the dust had settled a bit - two things.  What does it mean to be PANTHER when there’s no emperor?  PANTHER had to be financially independent.  Previously we’d been paid by the empire.  The empire’d stopped paying us.  Not good times for cats.  As far as we were concerned, metaphorically, Falnos was emperor.  Death does not sit on the Anile throne!  Narulis’ heir sits on the Anile throne.  We chewed it all over with Susheela and Falnos and Sohenoil was born to fund us moggies, same as Zani got together with what would be the H-W and founded AMI.   Which is not that we’re employees of Sohenoil, I hasten to add.  That would not do.  Shareholders.  PANTHER holds 65%.
 
Silence.  A good deal of Waaa!  Come on, it’s no great secret.  Yeah, well, other things to do besides ask cats about their freaking wages. 
 
CALUNIN: Catunin, Jaizal equally were Narulis’ heirs.
FURRIER: Biologically, of course.  Not of course in terms of representing Va.
 
BAZ: What you need to understand is that the turd could not sit on the Anile throne.  Fidubi ores  Goes back to what Isaid about the music.  Whatever is weird about Fidub – don’t answer that – is weird about the chair, affects them physically.  Same as if they come to Fidub, hurts their tootsies.
 
FALTARIN: Everyone knows there are many legends about the throne, but surely this is superstitious drivel.  But they did sit on the bloody throne!
 
BAZ: No, the one in Azt is a fake.  Cats got the real one out of their reach so they couldn’t destroy it.
 
CALUNIN: That too is in Fidub?
BAZ: No.  We don’t tell anyone where it is.
 
FALTARIN: Then of course your nonsense can’t be tested.
BAZ: Actually it can.  Next time you have an adept prisoner, ship him over.
 
SARAT: Ask Krarlik!  He came sliming to see Cho once, claimed to be a historian doing research.  He basically wanted to know where the chair is.  As if we’d tell him!
 
Sarat was back at college.  Biological sciences had gone out of the window, but he was not yet quite ready to admit it.
“What do I think I’m going to do if I drop out, parachute into Azt?”
But he needed to think about this matter of Kadun and workload precluded that.  Valiantly he sturged on.  He enjoyed it when he did it.  It was stretching, interesting.  It just happened not to be what he wanted to do.  He tried telling himself sternly studying the circulation or something isn’t particularly what people want to do when they want to be out there practising medicine, caring for real live patients,  just something you have to do first.  This injunction didn’t have much effect.
 
ANNOUNCEMENT:
SABAN: I am pleased at last to tell you that Micheal and Karula ban-sarndit-vaq are now back at the camp with us, having done important work for Sardun in Harn.
 
Bloody hell, think I could kill myself.  Ought to have trusted – why.
 
“I knew,” said Heela.
“And you let me denounce him as a traitor.”
“Of course.”
 
The children are safely in bed, the surrounding smiles are perhaps a little fiendish.
“Now,” said Mitch, “what is the important development.”
“Got you logins,” said Vannina.
“Logins?”
“A private forum,” said Saban
“Simply anyone who is anyone,” said Veron.
“PANTHER,” said Vannina, “suggest it is possibly the single most important development for the future of Kadun.”
“A forum,” said Mitch, no friend to jet-lag.
“The Anile heir describes himself as a Fidubi republican and has what we identify as politics identical to your own.”
“Lot of people with heart-attacks,” said Veron cheerfully.
“Leave you to it,” said Vannina, “lot of reading to catch up on.”
“I am truly taken aback,” said Mitch.  “I think I may need to get to know this young man further.”
 
“Mitch,” breathed Karula.
“Your one-stop guide to PANTHER, honey.”
“How have I been alive and sentient and not known all this!”
“It’s like,” started Mitch.  “The history of Kadun starts to make sense!  I feel like kicking myself.  Sure, sure, they established a monarchy in Dabida.  Everyone knows that.  But it had gone spectacularly wrong they must have added something to make sure it didn’t happen again.”
Karula giggled.
“New improved empire with added special ingredient X.”
 
MITCH: Greetings, cats, trees and other virtuous beings.  I am aware there has been acute negativity concerning our absence in the City.  We are now safely back Kadunside having toiled selflessly for Sardun. Ours was not derring-do, though of course it would not have been a good idea to have been caught by Searc, not least since I dined with him and attended several other events in circles not wholly virtuous. Naturally my reputation preceded me but young men are headstrong, are they not, they mature.  As a marketing consultant it was reasonably easy to argue that my chief concern in life was now selling soapflakes and establishing the public image of morons, and of course our three kids enabled Karula to play the perfect stay-at-home Mom, while occupying her rather fine brain with the real family business, Kaduna-gar-jaht, this matter of Kadun.  Naturally also of course a rift with my father, I wished no part of the politics of Var-sega’, of course the kids had occasionally to visit their grandparents, but we really could not stand the place. We actually got rather good at it.  At any rate we are still alive.  Our business was twofold, to use our position to get the hang of the undersea world and financial analysis.  The derring-do was that of those who extracted the information from Azt, where they are somewhat behind the times and still record critical information on dead trees.  This is not the place for spreadsheets for a variety of reasons but I think it may be useful to delineate the rationale for our work.  At its simplest, if the City banks are to evicted from Kadun, what is the extent of the deficit, if any?  Certainly there is clean capital and certainly also there is a place for southern capital.
REWN:  Bloody impressive stuff.
MITCH: We thank you. If I summarize the situation to date, there was an attempt to buy KAdun lock, stock and barrel by the banks in the City.  Those of us with an eye on the financial ball – both inside KAdun and outside, I may say – naturally countered this.  Those who dismissed it as part of the normal activities of a capitalist society are not readily forgiven.  There is of course an old saying there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.  This of course was before overt Cult activity, fertilizing the soil, one might say. The Cult corrupts individuals, specifically the poor and vulnerable, has indeed just been delineated by Asdinan (I should love at some point to hear more about that).  The City banks provide apparently limitless funding for the Cult.  Central government subsidizes the building of housing that is dangerous and the manufacture of food that is poisonous and so claims to assist the poor. If you ask how the housing is dangerous, how many ways can housing be dangerous? The wiring is unsafe, the foundations are inadequate, the roofs crack under heavy snow - I swear that actually happened. Fortunate indeed we are not in an earthquake zone. Fine shiny hospitals are built by big pharma, setting an example to the world, only down the road people are dying of pneumonia because they afford neither heat nor medicine. If someone from the south or from Harn  were to go to Giraga on business, he or she would think it looks much like anywhere else, shops, supermarkets, theatres, but would probably not stray into where the workers live, and would not wear the clothes they are offered or  eat their food, especially the meat, unless possessed of a penchant for rat. Azt tells the world it has public health inspectors and food hygiene laws like everywhere else. It forgets to mention no-one pays the slightest attention to them.
The reasons for this are complex and capital is at their root.  Simple corruption.  As we know, parts of Kadun once steadily progressing executed a remarkable U-turn and began to go backwards.  Because they are clever, fairly standard legislation regarding for instance safety at work remained untouched.  To counter it, legislation was sneaked in making it almost impossible to gain access to a premiss to see the conditions there.  The rights of property became completely sacrosanct and any objection was dismissed as rampant communalism.  Gender equality was nominally upheld but – any excuse will do, schools and other organizations were encouraged to find pseudo reasons for educating girls differently, treating them differently, excluding them from areas of employment which were deemed ‘unsuitable’, and so keeping them away from power.  Thus women should not think to become engaged in the law for the sordidness of crime is not fitting to their refined natures.  This of course readily became self-perpetuating: as the Cult took hold, the first instinct of men and women both was to keep themselves and their daughters out of reach.  I have two daughters and I am the first to say I understand where people are coming from on this, but that is not of course to say how it should be.
 
Oh what can possibly have brought Var-sega’ back.  Two of them?
 
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 hold 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 towls I fear were a wite-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.
 
VARULIN: In my experience real posh blokes wouldn’t give them the time of day. Real eye-opener.
SORG:  That’s garbage.  Name you 20 posh rats off the top of my head.
MUNZI: Varulin’s theory of class isn’t exactly textbook.
SORG: ?
VARULIN: Well, since you ask….now, ladies and gentlemen, if it isn’t who Daddy is and it isn’t money, what is it.  Course it’s both those things but not on their own. To my mind you have to add the right kind of confidence which in my experience comes from the right kind of Daddy and the right kind of money.  Oh, they’re absolutely confident all right, the other kind.  What they’re confident of, you’ll worship Daddy, worship money, worship them. They don’t actually have to be human beings, make any effort to be human.   The ones underneath them who are basically jumped up snotty little pretending to be gentlemen, they despise them cos they haven’t got the Daddys, the money or the confidence but the way they behave is just the same, treat everyone like dirt, think it proves how superior they are, which of course is exactly what blokes like you and Sarat do not do.  A  good clean decent middle-class lad like young Inyulat, he would’t give them the time of day either.  Blokes like him, they’re happy being themselves, if you know what I mean.  How he was brought up.  It’s what you think matters.  He’s brave and he’s honest and he doesn’t give a  - monkey’s about social stuff.  But a lot of middle-class boys, they’re brought up all wrong.  Brought up to think you have to get on and way you do that is being cowards, cock-suckers, liars.  I actually know a bit about one or two of the blokes here.  Oh they mix with what they like to think are the best people.  Course the House wouldn’t give them the time of day.  They just don’t understand what crap they are.
 
DIBESIT:  How readily the posh boys despise the true backbone of Kadun.  What on earth is this filth?  An effete and corrupt upper-class sucking up to the dregs of the gutters, lectures by self-confessed pesants. Lady officers in stripy socks teetering onto the parade-ground, fetch my hairspray, Sergeant.  The whole thing is a mockery.
 
CHALLIN: Ritawa impersonated a senior Cult officer.  Inyulat and Munzi were his diligent aides, Varulin the driver.  Their courage, initiative and possibly madness retook Dovantin.  Unless you have done something similar, shut the fuck up.  You obey your superiors, don’t you.
 
VATYA: Not meaning to be licky, guv, but ROTFLMAO.
 
GOSA:  Bloody hell, Challin’s Four!  Didn’t quite know exactly your courage and daring.
 
SHAVLI: Oh come on, it’s a joke.  Which zoo?
CHALLIN: Except of course this time there is a lady officer reading your honeyed words.  I certainly have no objection to Maya’s suggestion.  None  of us does.  I have mailed Maya to say so.
 
“Let them take it up at the highest levels now,” said Munzi viciously.
“Could always try Azt.”
“That’s the bloody point, isn’t it.  Gender is a dividing line and we all know it.”
“We also know perfectly well that not wanting a female mess – could I have put that better – does not bloody well make you an adept.”
“That’s not the bloody point!”
“What is the bloody point!”
“I’m not sure.  You’re not sure.  I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be very unsure.  It’s how they talk about it, how they talk about women.”
“Oo, where are me hairgrips?”
“Ex-bloody-xactly.  Whether a woman can carry a pack is one thing.  To say a woman can’t be a intelligent competent adult is quite another.”
“Last bloody one to defend them,” said Varulin.  “It’s how they were brought up.  You know that.”
“IT’s all absolute crap, isn’t it.  Foreign military, chunder, chunder.  What they mean is they don’t want to face intelligent competent adult women.”
“Cats and trees have never been kind.”
“That’s an abstract.  THi is reall.  Poetentionally anyway.
“Relax,” said Ritawa.  “Look forward to the Dabidan Army being quizzed a out its heairpgips.”
“I’m going to stir it.”
“Everyone duck!” said Varulin.
 
QINE: Sardun, CLIK: There are folk here who are surely rolling, and I would like to ask them their views on capital. I would first say I’ve been up here with Sardun for many years now, segani by birth, and mixing with folk from different backgrounds broadens your views.  Then again like us all I’m only too aware of how capital can work for good or we wouldn’t flipping be here.  I have friends in CLIK in Zur and I am aware that AMI might as well be in a different world for all in resembles what the  average working-man in Kadun thinks is a factory and I know there are folk who’ve made a packet on the Grid though no labour but their own, so I do not want to be stupid about these things and I hope no-one else will be, either. It seems to me Kadun is somewhat divided between one lot of capital and another lot which for all the nice talk about democracy seems to me to mean that the power stays with the money.  I would like people’s views on that.
[Mitch PM to Qine: Where are you!]
Qine: I will catch up with you later, Comrade Var-sega’.]
 
MUNZI: I want to raise something even fewer will want to discuss.  There are two profoundly separate perspectives here and I don’t mean for or against.  I am unsure.  Many, many of us are unsure. But by far the majority of us undecided have no difficulty in regarding women as competent adult human beings not intellectually and emotionally incompetent children.  We feel no need to belittle and denigrate the feminine.  We’ve all heard it, ineffable stupidity about breaking fingernails and checking lipstick, fetching hairspray and of course simple crudity, 
 
CALUNIN: Somewhat licky.  Rather humourless.
 
MUNZI: I think we shall see who lacks a sense of humour.
 
CHALLIN: Munzi, an excellent post.  I concur.
 
OBAYA: Any time, guys, any time.
 
SARAT:  Shall we talk about basic human rights, as accepted by international law, not to mention imperial law, regarding everyone as an individual, guys to whom that’s a major issue, want a society in which everyone’s in a neat little box and the label on the box says what they can and can’t be, can and can’t do.  Of course not every woman can be a fighter pilot, but nor can every man.  Every man or woman who desperately wants to be a fighter pilot can’t qualify because he or she hasn’t got the necessary individual talents.  But if you say no man can be…no woman can be because of the chromosomes, it’s obvious garbage.  People are individuals, people are very different, some people are thick but have other qualities.  I want a society that takes the best in everyone, encourages people to be themselves not what some dumbfuck says they have to be.
CALUNIN: Do you have to be so bloody offensive?  Completely adolescent.
SARAT:  You have no idea, have you, how bloody offensive you are.
CALUNIN: I cannot accept a woman in the cockpit next to me.
SARAT:  Your problems aren’t my problems.  Let’s have it all in the open.  What’s eating you guys is the belief you have problems.  You’re brave and you’re bright and you’re furious at the idea anyone,  let alone some little prick of a Fidubi thinks there’s something wrong with you but I’m throwing it open to everyone, if you can’t see 60% of the human race as fellow human beings, as individuals with wants and rights and feelings like you, you mean there isn’t?  What d’you think women and gays feel like when you pronounce on who and what they are, tell them what they have to be?  Precisely how did you come by the omniscience that tells you you know.
MITCH: Excellent posts, Sarat.  I concur.  Damn it, I may be enjoying this.  Of course I’m just another posh boy. 
DIBESIT: Both of you, have you any connection with the real world at all, a pair of fantasists with no clue what ordinary decent people think, shrouded in a world of wealth and privilege.
SARAT: I went to school, for a start, the school attached to the Shrine at M-P.  It’s selective but free, takes the brightest kids not the richest.  Sorry, I actually have a brain.  That brain got me into the Collegium at Zur, where I’m a student of biology, mixing with students from the whole of Dabida and a good few other places besides.  I’ve been mixing it politically at public meetings since I was 17.  And you?
MITCH: Power is the capacity to commit evil and equally the capacity to stop or prevent evil. Power is neutral and so is capital. When I was 17 I wanted to give the whole lot away but really, what would that have achieved, other than to render me powerless and penniless.        I saw that power and capital can change things for the better.   As you know, in the City I moved in circles not wholly virtuous.  I should have had no chance of entering those sewers, were I not Var-sega’.  It is my view you fight fire with fire, not a leaky bucket. 
MAYA:  If you don’t spend it, it accumulates and we don’t spend it.  I shall pause for the screaming, what no gold taps.  Sorry, not one.  We are simply not interested in conspicuous consumption.  As a family we’re scattered all over place but no-one lives anywhere ginormous. The hill is sort of everyone’s private hotel, conference centre, formal party, informal party, we accommodate your needs!  It’s such a mad maze there’s room for half a dozen separate events at once.  The parents have four bedrooms and Vij and I have flown the nest, so of courses they can always put people up, but when Pilo and Sala come to see Sarsh they stay on the hill.  Just trying to think.  We put up personal friends.  If  friends of Sarat’s from M-P are in Zur for a few days, of course they stay with us but if Essa and Baya come over – family stay on the hill. 
 
FURRIER:  Tell you what’s an acid test, some fart dribbling women aren’t capable of being doctors.  See how he reacts when he’s wounded.  If he’d rather die than be treated by a woman, then clearly he’s a lost cause.  Just thinking really, war and medicine are quite similar, people’s lives depend on the right decision.  If you trust a woman to give the right dose of the right medicine, then you’re pretty weird if you think she can’t select the right bullet for the right gun.
Have to think fast too.
 
SORG: Always thought that one epitomizes our weirdness.  No women in uniform, even medics.   However, women doctors are ‘attached’ to the military – no jokes, please – reservists in case of need so plenty of chaps are familiar with the sight of and have been treated by – if they’ve ever been near any action, of course.
 
KALA:  ROTFLMAO.  Not-Army doctor.  The fastest cure for modestry is a gut-wound.  I have never had anyone refuse to be treated.  Been hugely entertained by all this.  Some of course will frown and say it really isn’t funny.  There is a very great deal of hot air.  My own take on it may amuse you more.  I don’t really think it’s about the military at all or only peripherally.  Not the word.  Women in uniform can only happen after a sea-change in the whole of society in which everyone, including them, comes out of those little boxes Sarat so accurately described.  This is a society in which too many people define themselves in terms of their status-relationship to others.  The military of course encapsulates two above/below relationships, one to women and one to one’s juniors or superiors.  Varulin I thought equally acute.  I shall strive not to embarrass Inyulat yet more, but yes, precisely, to be happy being oneself rather than what others think one should be is rare in certain sectors of society.
 
KARULA: I am sure you are real busy but I see you are in V-s and I can travel V-s. I wonder if we might meet at some point.
 
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!
 
VATYA: Someone was bleeding brought up right.  Speaking as a member of the ‘lower orders’. I might just point out to certain so-called gentlemen there are more of us than there are of them. Of course real gentlemen don’t fart about waving their egos around, might tear your balls off, fair’s fair, but I tell you this much, us ‘other ranks’ can tell the bloody difference.
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.
 
Isn’t he so cute!  Of course he wasn’t my Cioulis then, nor would be for some years to come and both of us would have howled with laughter at the idea we were meant for each other.  What’s that again about war making strange bedfellows?
 
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 sot of charty 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.
 
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.”
 
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 thought about the exams he’d have to take at the ened 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.
 
Firas arrived in Fidub, a smally skinny unassuming looking man
He settled himself in Cho’s drawing room and sipped iced tea.
“Born for it.”
Cho smiled.
“I know.”
“Another Fidubi brat,” said Firas.
“Would he want the job?”
Cho smiled again.
“Which one?”
“That too,” said Firas.
“Both of them,” said Cho, “they’d be so bloody good at it.”
“Settled into the forum like a hot bath.”
“It met  a need barely recognized.”
“A human need,” said Firas, “to know we have good friends.”
“I shall invite them over,” said Cho.
“I shall not mention the second part.  For that I must talk to the General Staff.”
“I shall talk to the Houses,” said Cho.
 
“Glad to see you’re dressed properly,” said Cho.
“Have I ever sunk to Mel’s level!”
“We have a guest. You will find him interesting.”
Cho led them into the garden.
“Ah, good evening,” said Firas.
“Good evening,” said Sarat. 
“I am Firas.  I understand you are looking for a job.”
Sarat glanced quickly at Cho.
“You could say that.”
“Let us say we need a PR man.  You would be excellent on a number of counts, not least of course security.  Indeed you seem to us to be doing to job already.”
Well, isn’t life just full of surprises.
“What exactly,” asked Sarat, “would the job entail?”
“Initially you will undergo standard assessment and psychometrics, our selection board, then you will come to Kadun and learn how we work.”
“Both of us?” asked Sarat.
Firas smiled.
“That is a deal-breaker?”
“Yes,” said Sarat.
“Excellent.  We expect nothing else.”
Sarat said: “I’m an outer and eso kind of guy.  Maya’s the frantically eso one.  I guess that doesn’t matter for the job I’ll be doing.  Thought I’d mention.”
“Does he know anything?” Firas asked Cho.
Cho laughed.
“Something.  Not I think a lot.”
“Undoubtedly for your safety you cannot roam Kadun a deadhead.”
“He’s not quite that bad,” said Maya.
Sarat was sighing.
“Understood.  You said come to Kadun, so that would be - ?”
“At the Shrine in Maona-Pri,” said Firas in a tone that said ‘of course’.
“As we approach the final stretch, the matters debated at the forum cease to be of purely academic interest.  PANTHER has had enough.  As you – “ he inclined his head to Maya. “ – have so accurately delineated, the foundations of the building are unstable.  The geralis are not again to gain a foothold. The demands of PANTHER are those of you and Micheal.  You will therefore represent us, the public face of modern Kadun.”
“I think I can do that,” said Sarat.  Yes, thought Cho, but how deeply will you think about it. “Couple of questions.  Obviously some of it’s one-to-one - ?”
Firas smiled. 
“There are things we need from you not or less required in the field.  How do you deal with stress, loss of sleep, conflicting demands?”
“OK…Five phones not five adepts!  Following on from that, in fact.  I’m me, not The Perfect PA.  I can be pretty upfront, even with plenty of sleep.”
“We shall not cage you.”
“Fine!”
“There is a handbook on the Grid with routine information..”
“Assault courses?”
“In your case only mental.”
“This is a joint appointment?” asked Maya.
Firas grinned to himself.
“Totally.”
“Meaning ten phones?”
“I think we’d be pretty interchangeable,” said Sarat.  “Neither of us would stick only speaking to me.”
“Excellent,” said Firas.
“On the other hand,” said Maya, “we know about widely different things.  Not too much point in grilling me on parasites.”
“You are a linguist, I think?”
“Has PANTHER a perspective on irturbi?”
“Perhaps you would like to formulate one?”
“I’ve looked at it, which definitely isn’t started to learn it!  It’s an interesting language but I don’t think the use of the present participle has mass appeal.”
“I don’t know,” said Sarat, “how many irturbi speakers are there.  They might like people knowing about it.”
“The Fidubi scam?” asked Firas.
“Absorbed.”
 
The Will caused him to flinch: ‘and in the event that she predecease me’.  It’s not going to happen.  A more immediate financial question was how to get his hands on money, any money, fifty cents to buy a bar of chocolate.  He’d vaguely heard that ATMs weren’t common in Kadun, nor retailers who took plastic.  He hadn’t paid much attention and indeed hadn’t wholly believed it for surely Kadun was a major player in the global economy.  Certainly some people were excruciatingly poor but there were many many people of middling income who must have bank accounts.  Mustn’t they. The prospect of carrying a wallet full of notes struck him as ludicrous.  Of course he knew what a cheque-book is!  He’d read about them in historical novels.  He thought he could see that war and uncertainty meant people liked money they could actually see. He searched the forum on ‘money’ and found nothing apart from the loans and Big Capital, the occasional ‘A group of us went out…’ but nothing about how they paid, concluded that people didn’t talk about it and could see that people maybe didn’t want to share how much they had and what they did with it, particularly with him, though that wasn’t exactly what he wanted to know.  He mailed As.
As: ROTFLMAO. A complex issue.  We don’t have banks.
Sarat: Be serious!
As: I am, very.  People stopped trusting banks.  By ‘banks’ I mean nationwide/international money emporia which equally process dirty money, which lend without moral scruple and which not least could sequester your account if someone didn’t like you. We call them money-shops.  They call it the First Bank of Carlin.  It’s discrete – discreet for that matter.  Just looked it up.  It has ten branches in the towns and in Car-sandis
Sarat: Interesting.  But it’s the middle of the night.  I want ten bucks for a cab fare.  I have to walk?
As: Yes.
Sarat: FFS!
As: Tsk, tsk, planning, foresight.  Serious, we have a war, we have a black-out.  People wanting cabs in the middle of the night are not common.  Yes, it’s a cash-economy and it’s also very much a 9-5 one.  But the post office is critical, forgot to mention that, you can take money out, pay in at any post office.   So I hear you cry how do the people who work 9-5 – post office is open 8 to 8.  There are holes in the wall, but they’re not common, like they are in Zur, and they’re inside not out, which means in the middle of the night you’d only find out at one at one of the few places operating 24/7, stations, airports, big hotels. 
Sarat: That begins to make sense.  So I’m stranded in Car-sandis and I go to the train station!
As: You’ll have worked out that everyone who has a bank account has a debit card, but you might be hard-pressed to pay for goods with it.  Big stores, train-tickets, sure.  I’d rather suspect – you’re a very urban little greenie, you know!  I’ve been around Dabida a bit.  I know that the newsagent in Timanis takes plastic!  But I bet he didn’t 20 years ago. Small town in Carlin like Dalin, they’d just look at you strangely.   So that particular revolution has somewhat passed us by.  Of course other things have happened.  Probably a thesis to be written on the exact connection between the two.
 
Our little child of wood and hill-top realized with a bump that he was completely Urban Man, assumed the facilities of the city would be there for the taking.  The newsagent in Timanis, he suspected, was still not open 24/7.
“Planning, foresight,” he said to Maya.  “Nobody does!  Well, they do, but it doesn’t matter, that’s the point.  You want an omelette and find you’ve got no eggs, you pop to the Megamart.”
They wondered what PANTHER had in store for them.  Living rough?
“We’ve both been camping,” said Maya.
“Field-trips,” said Sarat.
Thus diverted to the minutiae of daily living, they realized just ordinary food would probably be very different.  Sarat  thought he could cautiously enquire what people ate.  Obviously we eat a lot of fish in Fidub….
The academic year ended earlier in Van-senok to allow students the whole summer off.  Cantilip and Venga had their own rather alarming plans for the hols.  Mention it to Mummy ever so casually.
“Venga and I thought we’d go off for a few days, travel around a bit.”
“What is your relationship with him?” asked Marula.
“He’s gay,” said Cantilip.
Marula heaved a sigh of relief.
Mummy is acute, Mummy is perceptive, but even Mummy does not readily guess her ewe-lamb intends to pop over to Ciletij to see the Anile throne.  That summer got rather complicated. 
 
So, sharpens pencil. At the time of which I write Cantilip had returned to her flat in Vaconik, Hass was just going off into what are poetically called the sands but are actually more scrubland to be with the Morag-Fahdi, Mel is back in Zur, Venga is on his way to Fidub, Sarat and Maya have just oresented themselves at the Shrine and Baz and Paw are deciding to do a bit of independent research combined with sight-seeing, just what is life actually like, and decided to start at the furthest possible point, Van-senok.  and work their way back.
 
Sarat and Maya were told that transcripts and recordings would be sent ‘to anyone who might be interested’.  Fine, we have no idea who might or might not be hearing us.  They guessed this probably meant something like if they expressed an opinion of Carlin, select persons = the House, the Rabbiters 0 would be entertained thereby.  That was optimistic of them.  However, they guessed correctly that this meant two sets of parents and one set of grand-parents, whence doubtless to Tar, Saski, Mel and Hass.  You are live on mic.
            There were three interlocutors each – make that interrogators.  They didn’t introduce themselves – is that polite?  OK, you’re Kadun PANTHER, silent, nameless and deadly.  The scrawny one gave a thin smile. 
Ed note: I asked Sarat to fill in his thoughts at the time.  They add a certain piquancy.
 
The interrogation committee next day were all strangers.  I just hoped they weren’t going to ask for the same stuff all over again.
“You are bisexual?”  As if I’d missed the point, the little one chucked a mag at me,  a particularly entrancing picture of me and Hass.  “Your precise relationship with Hasiyata is what?”
“We’ve made love.  Once. Twice.  In the same evening.”
“Your heart was given to another?”
 “Before Maya.”
“Some indecision then about your direction?”
“None.”
Make them work for it.
“An experiment, then?”
“No.”
“A more detailed answer would be appreciated.”
“We’ve known each other since we were in our playpens.  At a certain point it seemed a natural thing to do.  I’m not gay, so we didn’t continue.”
“Tell us how it happened.”
 “Rehearsal for Glitz?”
“Please continue.”
“It was the last summer Mel and Hass came over.  Mel had said he’d had enough of beetles and taken himself off to M-P.  Mum and Dad had taken the girls out for the day.  We were alone in the house.  Except for PANTHER of course, but PANTHER don’t barge into a guy’s bedroom.”  I looked at them.  “At least not at the time.  We were working.  Not very hard.  Bugs and beetles.  And joshing about.  I’m sure neither of us had sex in mind but we – our hands touched and suddenly – we looked at each other.   You know how it works in a set like ours.  Unless you fall head-over with someone outside the set, if you just want to see what it’s like, you do it with a friend, someone you trust absolutely.   The rest you can work out, except it was slow and dreamy and eso and unfrantic, except  the obvious bits.  I’m sure you’re dying to ask, so we did it both ways. Except when we heard the front door.  Unfrantic, I mean.  We did not want to be woken from our dream by Ven!  Baby sister.”
“After, immediately after?”
“Of course we talked about it!  Half the night.  And we did it again.  We were working something out, working something through.  I hadn’t been and I’m not attracted to guys.  It was something – eso, apart from the world, about us.  I loved him.  I love him.  I always shall love him.” 
Someone entered my mind.
I jerked out of my romantic reverie fast.  What the fuck!
So throw me out.
Great waves of foreboding filled me and visions of extremely nasty things rising from graves.  I don’t like this.  What do they teach us when we’re having a bad-hair day, a lousy mark in math?  Focus, focus, focus. Everyone’s going to die.  That’s reality.  Focus.  Light.  There might have been a pinprick in the darkness but I was so angry – use that anger, it’s just energy, light.  Gather that energy – oh really, what is the point.  Helpless, drained.  I am not bloody well helpless! There was a great deal of unpleasant laughter.  Try harder, dumbfuck, try harder.  It was like an enormous weight pressing down on me. I was just going to nimbly fling myself out of the way, when they took the image over.  I have been washed overboard and the ship’s propeller is coming closer and closer.  Any minute now I’m going to be purėe.  All in my mind, all in mind…In my mind I can swim for hours under the water.  I headed for the ocean-floor and the propeller passed harmlessly overhead.  Oh look, there’s a shark and above is only darkness for the ship is vast, a destroyer, a tanker, a liner, a whole bloody fleet. Trapped, helpless.  It’s not a very big shark.  It instantly became enormous but all in my mind, if I get on its back it may not like it but it can’t eat me.  All in my mind, that’s the basic one, all in my mind  because actually I’m – no time for actually I’m sitting in a high-backed swivel-chair because I am going to get eaten.  What crap is that?  No time for breath-control exercises to quell the visceral fear – all in my mind. Make it a dolphin.  So then we struggled.  So it’s a small bottle-nosed shark but what is more to the point the assault became three-pronged, lungs bursting, must have air, but above is total darkness.  I am Sarat with an aqualung swimming with the dolphins.  Keep that one unified thought. The pressure grew.  They let go.
“Not at all bad.”
“What is this, Lesson One!”  My chest felt as though it hurt a bit, though presumably not as much as it would have if I’d just almost drowned.  I told it not to be stupid and pushed my hair back fighting off the conviction it was sopping.  “Isn’t anyone going to offer me a towel?”
“Have a sip of water.”
“I did that.  It was salty.” 
“What have you just learned?”
“I couldn’t escape from the dream.  I wanted to reject it.  I’m here in this room.  I could only function inside the dream.  And I guess.  If I’d learned the eso stuff, I could have tickled its little sharky brain and told it I wasn’t edible.”
“There’s an interesting picture on the wall behind you.  Go and look at it.”
The problem, you will  have guessed, is that there was no wall behind me. I am not damned well standing in the Saa’nda Senta!  Have you ever tried to stand up when you’re already on your feet?  I really do not recommend it.   The fountain continued to sparkle in the morning sun.  Lemme just be logical about this…Oh! Use the dream.  OK, OK, I am walking towards the fountain but it is not bloody well the fountain it is the long table behind which are three guys, so  I can turn my back on the fountain/table and walk in the opposite direction towards the wall/Kendar’s.  I really need to go to Kendar’s to get Mum a birthday-present.  No,  I don’t!  I need to go to Saba’s, the gallery.  There’s a new -  I began to feel a bit pleased with myself, tinged with a liking for reassurance I was on the right track.  Of course no such reassurance came.  You surrender to the dream, at least until you find the weak spot. If there is one, of course.  Hass had raved about Ban-finsil’s exhibition, there’s an abasanth in bloom I really have to see.   Flaw.  I haven’t seen the abasanth but I do know what one looks like.  OK, I’m going to look at the first picture I see. Since I don’t know what that is, I can’t superimpose the image. I am entering Saba’s and looking at a painting.  I am not repeat not in Saba’s, I am in a room in the retreat on the Leolisle which I believe is pale green, though just to thwart me they might have made the walls lilac.   The bay window is to my right and it looks out over gardens, what kind of gardens.  I rather hoped I had a photographic memory, perfect recall, but I didn’t think I did and, even if I did, I’d been so intent on the interrogation committee that I’m not sure I noticed the gardens in the first place.  Focus, focus, focus on what?  What did I remember about the room behind me?  This is fiendish.  OK, this is 3D: me standing in the middle of – space – behind me is a high-backed swivel-chair, a rug intricately patterned in greys and greens, a long highly-polished certainly antique table but I couldn’t place the period, three men, a small one with closely cropped grey hair, a high-bridged nose, in front of me is Saba’s and a miniature of a ruined tower on an outcrop being battered by the sea.
They withdrew.
Yes! 
The rest of the room came into focus and I drank it in.  Might need it again some time.
I turned.
“Where is it?  The tower, I mean!”
“Harusin Point.”
Eeek!  Harusin Bay is where Narulis first landed.
“I can see it’s very old.  That old?”
The skinny one smiled.
“Not that old.”
“So you decorate the retreat with mementoes of Narulis!  Or just for me?”
“Maya.”
“The Dabidan whore, you mean, the one sold to Sohenoil by AMI to gain power in Kadun.”
That got a brief grin, at least.
“How did your relationship begin?”
“It’s a good thing I have a sense of humour.  OK…I was staying on the hill.  Pietri, Caluna and Maya came to dinner.  The four of us – Mel, Hass, Maya and I – excused ourselves after dinner.  Mel had an essay to write.  Between sex and revolution we’re very studious.  That left the three of us sprawled around the pool.  Maya said she wanted to make a phone call.  She shot us a completely wicked grin.  If you can be trusted to be alone together. Hass blew her a kiss.  So long I said as you don’t tell me you and Maya - ?  He just grinned and said, Maya is someone it’s really easy to talk to.  You don’t have to explain things.  Yes, I said, though I couldn’t possibly have said what I meant. Both of them of course are frantically eso.  Surprised they bother with words.
Nothing happened till Hass’s birthday party, which was pretty much an all-day event.  Lunchtime till late.  The vague theory was the afternoon and the early evening was adults and young children, family, and then we turned the volume up.  Loads of people I didn’t know. The family is large.  Anyhow – do you know the hill, it’s like a rabbit-warren.  Anytime they wanted more room they did more tunnelling.   There’s this crazy crooked outside stair that’s the quick way down to the stables.  You have to come up for air sometimes.  In this case down.  Halfway down I found Maya, sitting hugging her knees.  I didn’t know her then!  Are you OK?  occurred to me. Do you feel all right? It is noisy, isn’t it.  Absolutely nothing to stun and sweep her off her feet.  Maybe she just wanted to be on her own.  She just smiled and patted the step beside her.  Oh wow, I said.  She turned and grinned and said I found this place when I was a tot.  It’s my favourite view.  As we know, Maona-pri is the Silver City and lights up at night to make the point.  This was a view directly across the Straits to M-P.  I like looking at the shipping too, she said.  Where have they come from, where are they going?  Am I not an islander!  I do shipping.  All right, most Zuri do too.  We talked about our respective harbours.  How romantic can you get!  Broadened our scope to all things sea-faring.  Somewhere in the middle of telling her about the lighthouse on the Utmost Isle it began to wriggle around in my brain I like this.  Maya is someone I want more of.  The sentence – this’ll make you laugh.  I’m not usually lost for words.  The sentence you’re really nice occurred to me.”
“Now we know what shuts you up,” muttered the little one.
“After a while we became aware it had got much quieter.  Yikes! she said.  D’you think everyone’s gone home?  I made wide eyes.  No search-parties?  Mel and Hass know I come here, she said.  Indeed, as we got to the top of the stairs we collided with Mel.  Ha! he said.  Well, well, well!  Some of us, she said, prefer the pleasure of civilized conversation.  Him, civilized? said Mel. I shall ignore that remark, I said.  Found her! he carolled to I don’t know who. Them, he muttered.  Gazing into each other’s eyes.  Shut up, Mel, said Maya, before I could.  Seconded, I said.  We were reunited with our loving families and Maya went home.   I lay in bed thinking I didn’t even get her number.  Ah well, hardly as though she’d vanished off the face of the planet.  I think – I think that was the beginning of my – awareness of what’s basic to our relationship.  It – touches somewhere I don’t want to share.  I’m not exactly shy and retiring but somehow it had seemed impossible to ask her for her phone number in front of people.  How, I hear you cry, does that mesh - ?  Our relationship is.  It’s not for explaining.  Of course every tabloid on the planet will explain it.  We don’t have to.  I’m hungry.  May we stop now?”
“No.”
“Great!  A crust?  A dry biscuit?”
Presumably there was tele-talk because a guy duly appeared with a plate of what looked suspiciously like ship’s biscuit.
Meanwhile…”How did the relationship develop?”
“Would you like to know what I had for breakfast on the day of the biology practical? I took her out for the day to the Utmost Isle.  Tell you in a minute.  Can we apply brakes here?  We all know the Press is going to ask dumbfuck questions and we all know I’m not going to enthusiastically tell them about my first date, gee, Sarat, what it did feel like when you first kissed her, so the point of this is what?”
“A brash Fidubi brat,” said the little one.   “Narulis was the same of course.”
As though that were last week.
“An attractive young man, doubtless desirable to women. Again like Narulis, of course.”
“They must throw themselves at him.  Do they not?”
“Could have any woman in the world.  Even without the title.”
This time I thought I was ahead of the pack.
“Brig, Nautschka and Vrim.  Maya really wouldn’t like it.”
That actually got a laugh from them.
“But you, would you like it.”
“No.”
Fractionally I was still ahead.
“I love Maya.  You’ll say ah, but have I not said I love Hass.”
“Very well.  You are not gay.  Hasiyata is.  You therefore do not wish to continue the relationship with a person of the same gender.  Suppose he were female, lesbian.  She would not wish to continue the relationship but you do.”
Guys….
“Simple.  I don’t.  Wouldn’t.  Wasn’t with Maya at the time.”
“if we ask if Maya is perhaps a feint to ward off unwanted female attention, whether or not that is the case indeed, must we not arrive at why she so successfully achieves that?”
“So – in your interesting fantasy world I’m pretending to have a relationship with Maya.  Why should the unwanted attention be solely female?
“You have been propositioned by young men?”
“A measure of hint and innuendo. But I’m with Maya.  If I follow your drift, you mean something like Maya’s A-M, so Zur won’t want to upset her.  That’s debatable, whether any randy female Zuri who thought she’s brighter and prettier than Maya – male is different because Hass is heavily involved in GASH and knows most of Zur’s gay men.  But none of that is actually the point because I was in Fidub.  At which you will say, ah yes, Maya sitting quietly in Zur leaving me to play the field in M-P – why you sexist brutes you, should she not have been playing the field in Zur.  I am and was head over but I did still have to go to school.”
“There were no rifts, no misunderstandings, no s/he’s just a friend.”
“No.  You have to understand and since you’re cats you can understand the level our relationship is at.  It just is.  Maya is where I find my eso.”
“A female Hasiyata.”
“A separate unique adorable individual.  But of course accepted that the two people with whom I’m fused are both very very very eso.”
“So what do you lack?”
“How can I lack?  I love with every molecule of my being.”
“You have both dropped out.”
“We have both dropped out.  Found full-time work.”
“And you call yourself a feminist?”
“You have derailed the career of an intelligent and I understand intellectual young woman purely to sate your grandiose ambitions.”
“Not only that but you have put her life at risk.  Is that love?
“And if you die? A Dabidan princess alone on the Anile throne?  What nonsense is that?”
“I hadn’t seen that one coming, guys.  Silly of me.  One at a time, puh-lease.”
“Well?”
“We are sentient life-forms.  We have talked about it.  With Shavli.  Where would you like me to start?”
“A promising linguist.”
“She is.  She finds irturbi fascinating.  She does not find the ancient languages of the Malpurian sub-continent more riveting than the prospect of defeating the Cult.  She is A-M, about which two things.  Does Zani fail, does Zani quail, no, no, not he, our brave Zani, come hadin come!  That’ll do for one.  Like me, Kadun has been a normal topic of family conversation all our lives.
She is not some quiet bookish little Zuri without thought of the world-stage whom I am dragging into the limelight.  Last and not least – that’s four things, will that do to be going on with – she does not need a career to keep the wolf from the door.  Your questions suggest she is a victim, a child.  They do not suggest you see her as my social or intellectual equal.”
“Actually the frantically eso Maya is far more interesting.”
“But unfortunately not Narulis’ heir.”
“That’s me put in my place.  Your next question?”
“One of you may die.”
“Context.  War, republic, constitutional monarchy, ingrained sexism?  Given we don’t know that Kadun wants monarchy at all?”
“The personal.”
“It would be a pity to die before I’d achieved something worthwhile.”
“A sad and pointless demise.”
“Guys are risking everything without undergoing the third degree.  You’ll say it’s their country.  I say it’s the Cult.  There’s not some – convenient ravine making evil not my business.”
“Nonetheless your friends, Mel, Hasiyata, must recognize the convenient ravine.”
“They weren’t born half on the other side.”
“They were not?”
“There are no little boxes, each separate. This one’s the history of Kadun, that one’s the history of Fidub, third one’s the history of Dabida.  You could argue Narulis had even less reason to get involved.  And Zani.  I mean, what was with this guy?”
“Why, in your view, did Zani not take the Anile throne?”
“The size of Kadun.  He didn’t want the job.  PANTHER didn’t want him to take the job.  No-one wanted him to take the job.  Empire had failed to do the one job it was founded on.  There weren’t any aeroplanes.  Serious.  No meeting in the middle like before.  Something like Zani would have had to travel the whole of Kadun touting for support.  If and only if he’d got any, he’d probably have got back to Azt to confront a republican army.  He left them to it.”
“Nonetheless a monarchy was established in Dabida.”
“Since PANTHER established it, you probably know more about that than I do!  See if we can make it work better second time round.”
“Why bother? Pristine Fidub?”
“I think two things.  The model had mostly worked.  Crown provided yet another pillar.”
“So if Fidub thought there was no basic design flaw why did she not adopt monarchy?”
“That’s an interesting one.  Fidub presumably didn’t, took the long view, Kadun obviously did.  But – kind of the same reason.  Fidub having been semi-independent islands.  One of them couldn’t rule Fidub, any more than one of the Houses could rule Kadun.”
“Tell us about the collapse of the empire.”
“Has Cho attended properly to my education?  I’m a biologist.”
“Your perceptions, please.”
“Oh well, if you say please. Zani defeated Jaizal at the Great Gates, Zur’s favourite story! But it was still a day into Azt and in that day Azt was in turmoil, insurrection, chaos. The cry was the empire is dead!  News of a potentially murderous mob reached Susheela.  She was fortunately in the Summer Palace, outside the city walls.  Consternation, terror and a certain amount of – get the brats.  It seems they were all loyal to Susheela, or if not actually loyal at least didn’t want to cut her throat, but empire was a different matter and while there was an Anile heir empire was a threat.  She said they understood she was as much a slave and a prisoner as they were.  Most of the guards had fled or submitted to her.  The key point seems to have been that everyone understood she was not Cult and she’d managed to remain alive.  She said even Jaizal understood but he loved her.  She was a non-person, no threat, cloistered in a sort of one-woman harem.”  He was watching their faces.  “No reason you should know the story behind the story.  I, however, do.”
“Please continue.”
“The mob in Azt doesn’t seem to have thought of her, perhaps didn’t even know she existed.  The Jumesit was ransacked but that seems to have been a question of loot.  PANTHER did remember her. They came haring up out of the countryside and what do we do now, guys.  As you know, the Summer Palace isn’t far from the river.  Obviously they ouldn’t take everyone but freed servants and slaves weren’t going to be in any danger.  They dressed everyone as peasants and told them to get dirty, rub grease in their hair and so on and loaded them into a donkey-cart, which had to have a PANTHER escort.  There wasn’t room for cats on board.  Why does it need a PANTHER escort? Wbo cares?  Friends, we zao them, foes we zap them.  The river was pretty busy in those days, the main artery for trade with the inland.  They went down to the landing stage, where there was a workaday barge, not the imperial barge, I mean.  Jaizal always arrived by water.  And so they sculled gently down to Azt.  By this time the main army had arrived and there were cats everywhere, mayhem everywhere and The empire is dead!  Clearly Susheela announcing she would now govern was not on the menu.  It was not difficult to commandeer a ship.  And the point about planes!  For neither of them was popping over to the west to see what people there thought on the cards.”
“May we ask to whom Susheela narrated her life as Anile Empress?”
Interesting, thought Sarat, they sound polite.  Have they just twigged who I am?
“She wrote it down.  A very private journal.  I guess it helped her debrief.”
“So you know – exactly what passed.”
“Shall we stick to my sex life.  Do you understand? A particularly chaotic moment in history from which came everything I am, both sides of me.  Yes, of course NArulis, but everything I am is Susheela’s heir.”
“Your hatred of the Cult is personal.”
“Everything they did to Jaizal.  He knew, you see, he knew what had been done to him.  That’s why he kept her locked away, the one part of him that was still Jaizal.  She was the only person in the world who called him Jaizal.  He talked sometimes in his sleep.  Sometimes he screamed.  He had to have the chair.”
“You know who you are,” said the skinny one.
“May I take that as a compliment?”
“And so the wheel is to turn full circle and everyone is to call you Sarat.  If they do not?”
“I’m not going to throw a hissy fit if someone wants to call me sir.  So long as it’s clear it’s his stuff not mine.”
“Imperial Master?”
“Don’t try and wind me up.  It’s not even funny.”
“Nonetheless you are also JAizal’s heir.”
“As a matter of biology I am Jaizal’s heir.  I am also Severin’s, Kaminua’s, Varstantis’ and that of any other emperor you might name.  For that matter I’m Amida’s heir.”
“Not Airoch’s?”
Sarat burst out laughing.
“The more recent sins of the emperors.  Amida noticed being pregnant.  About paternity it can be possible to argue.  Maternity not.”
“Nonetheless your grandfather and Airoch-cha have remained close.  The enthusiasm of the Republic of Fidub for empire may be perceived as having roots other than political expediency or moral fervour.”
“Look forward to the press-fiends queuing up to tell Airoch that.  And a good time shall be had by all. 
“A free democratic and prosperous Kadun is a clear threat to Fidubi pre-eminence, unless of course Fidub stands to profit thereby.”
 
 “You do not deny the threat.”
“Only to ‘pre-eminence’.  Kadun in her right mind must dominate the continent.  Fidub is not part of the continent.  The south is a counterweight.”
“Of course no light is shed on what became of Jaizal.  What is your understanding?”
Ah, you are live on mic, Sarat.  And your select audience is composed of  - whom? Those so select that they already know and those who would go ape.  Keep talking.
“Zani defeated etc.  No he didn’t, he defeated Corsin, any more than I shall defeat Krarlik at the Great Gates.  Jaizal wasn’t there.  They said, he was killed by his own guards, but no body was found.  They said, he escaped by water and died at sea, and no wreckage could be found.  They said, the rat has fled.  Disguise accent, disguise body language, to disguise the profile is hard but he still had his power, blurring vision, erasure of what you just saw, and Kadun was not densely populated.  Nonetheless he was the single most hated man on the continent.  It was his belief that the chair, the real one in Van-senok, could heal him.  Even if that were possible, there wasn’t much chance of a happy ever after, since anyone who recognized him would probably kill him on sight.  Many many years later a rotting corpse was found on the chair. Visitors to Casin-ruhn were few, Ciletij wouldn’t go near it, believed it haunted by evil.  Later the myths were compounded by its being haunted by Jaizal. It’s not impossible he reached Van-senok and killed himself on the chair.   The truth is rather stranger.” Keep watching their faces, every movement of the fingertips.  “He arrived at Casin-ruhn and sat on the chair.  He had no idea what if anything would happen.  At first it seemed that he was burning and then the dross was burned away and he tripped, in the modern sense, visions of past and present and who knows where and then it seemed to me like unto death, but it was only sleep and wakefulness found me on a couch of furs and a great man did tend the fire but must this not be another dream.”
“Sarat!  But how - ?”
“I seem to have told you something you didn’t already know. He wrote to Susheela.”  I think I can enjoy busking this.  A man and a woman of most esoteric bent.  Cats, of course, guardians of the Throne.”
But I did become persuaded they had found immortality among the trees, though a strange immortality where one’s needs are those of men for assuredly they eat and drink as mortals do and this is beyond my understanding.  For my evil I would atone but there is no atoning in the world of men, only death.  But Kaminua and Asyrion aren’t without a social circle.  “But not without a social circle. Sardun dropped – drop? – in from time to time.  From them he got news and quill and parchment. And they said, let her forget. And he said, no, she must know from me I am alive and whole and at peace and that is her peace. So he wrote to Susheela.  My love.  And she wrote back.  They corresponded so far as was possible. I mean this wasn’t pop to the post-box.  Sardun were the couriers.  And when the youngest was 18, she said, I go now, and she took ship, which was a lot safer than crossing Kadun, for anyone,  and lived the rest of her life with him in Casin-ruhn.”
“You have Jaizal’s letters.”
“we have Jaizal’s love-letters.  They’re amazing, he managed to both pour out his wounded heart to her and be totally without self-pity or self-justification.  He saw everything with painful clarity.”
“Something else happened. New nations were formed.”
“Oh yes,” said Sarat. “Boundaries were drawn up.  Casin-ruhn became part of Ciletij.  Jaizal and Susheela after years of peaceful exile died in Ciletij.”
“Your family want your chair back.”  It wasn’t a question.
“Dear Varchulan, You have something of ours, please may we have it back.  We could try…I don’t know if PANTHER could steal it back, drive up with a furniture van.  I’m really not sure of the detail, if there are people anywhere nearby, if the forest is practically impenetrable.”
 
            Cantilip’s friend called her.
            “Are you OK, honey?  You sound a bit - you haven’t caught that virus going round?”
                        The stars, the stars, thought Cantilip.
                        “Everything’s just fine!  Just a bit - pre-occupied.”
                        “I hope I haven’t interrupted.”
                        “Kettle’s boiling,” said Cantilip with the sort of finality appropriate to announcing the end of the universe.  “Talk to you soon, promise!”
                        Sarat must know.  Or Maya.  But they are with PANTHER! Then I go to the shrine.
Or I go to Zur. Tar must know.  A family party?
                        She got up.  She sat down again.  She decided, got dressed, drove to the airport and after considerable tedium landed in M-P, tedium during which she had had plenty of time to brood upon what to say to whom.  A cab dropped her at the shrine.  She hadn’t expecte it to have a redption desk but delicately set aside as an unfortunate necessity was shop and also information.  That she turned heads was inevitable; the huge wide-brimmed hat and shinining sheet of dark-green hair cascading down her back helped. Cantilip was now tired, filled with detestation of airports and feeling even more distracted than when she’d set out.  She walked firmly up to the information desk
“hi,” she said brightly, “I’d like to see one of the mentors, please.”
The little Fidubi behind the counter, whose own locks were pink and blue, smiled enviously at the hair.
“Sure, sure, I’ll see who’s free.”  Click, click.  “Does sex matter?”
Cantilip wasn’t so distracted that she didn’t gurgle/”
“Gender.  Not at all.  Sex, depends on the occasion.”
“Did I just say that?  Morin could see you.  I’ll give her a call.” The call was given.  “Be with you in just a tick of a flea-bite’s tail.   Envy, envy!  I have to ask where did you get that colour?”
“A long way away,” said Cantilip.  “Tell you later. It comes from the bark of the sibaowa.”
“You mean it’s natural?  That is so cool.  You want to just take a seat.”
Cantilip sat and watched the dark confident and half-dressed people who had just become significant in her world.
A dark confident and half-dressed woman approached the desk, Cantilip was pointed out, Morin, short black bob, shorts and bandeau approached her and introduced herself.
“Tell you who and what away from the throng,” said Cantilip.
“I don’t think you’re from round here,” said Morin.
“We say stand out like a blackbird in a snowfield.”
The stone began to sing to her.  She remained outwardly collected.
“I am a little – just had a similar experience.  Waves of memory broke over her.  “I had to come.  Do you understand, I had to come?”
She wasn’t even sure it was she talking.
Morin pointed at the stone bench carved into the wall.  Suppose that should be sculpted. 
Cantilip sat.
“I am Cantilip za-fenan.  I’m looking for Sarat.”  Sarat-ban-essa, Anile Emperor, Master of Kadun but no, Zani is Master of Kadun – shut up a minute, she told her mind.  At least she didn’t say Sarat Who?  ‘I’ll be all right if you leave me.  It’s safe here.”
“That it is,” said Morin, and went to find Taja.
Taja looked her up and down and thought as most Fidubi did when they thought of Sarat and Cantilip in the same breath, thank goodness he’s paired; the further west you went, the less this response could be relied upon.  Greater shocks are to come.  Tell you later.
He said, “They’re studying.”
“You are – in charge of tuition?”
“You could say that,” said Taja.
“I have sat on the Anile throne.”
“Then you must see Cho.”
“Sarat and Maya,” said Cantilip, “It concerns Zani.”
Sarat and Maya were arguing about the laws for the distribution of corn to the poor in years of bad harvest, who constituted the poor in terms of median income, snd were not displeased to havea  visitor, though they hadn’t been told her purpose.
“Put it this way,” said Taja, a little grimly, “she does not fly around the continent and pitch up here because she wants to show off her new hat.  Poor child is practically fainting.  Refreshment shall be brought!  No hurry.  Cho is on his way.”
 
Cantilip ank gratefully into the hammock
                        “I apologize for the intrusion,” said Cantilip. 
                         “Loely to meet you,” said Maya.
                        Taja handed Cantilip a glass of water.
                        “Nobody’ll mind if you splash it over your face.”
“I look as though I wilt?”
“Airports,” said Sarat, “terrible places for trees.”
We make polite conversation or – Cantilip saw an inroad.”
“You know Venga?”
“No.”
“He is eban-Tole, not of course the heir.”  Fas-sigree.  “He is a strange and fascinating man.  He exists as a sort of wandering pilgrim.  You may thin the things of this world mean nothing to him but suddenly he is concrete and to the point.”
Sarat gave an audible sigh.
“All the eso people I know are, starting with.”  Maya grinned.  “She and Hass both, their souls are wandering the sands with the Morag-Fahdi.”
“Interesting!” said Cantilip.  “Position of course.”
“Position,” said Maya, “made, makes us both very political, which is a little hard to express contemplating infinite really on a threadbare hillock.”
“Venga earns a living as an itinerant worker, puts up fences, paints front doors, mows lawns.  He is excellent. I should highly recommend him!  He went to Simtian-Li, like Asdinan, but he is several years older.”
“Sorg calls it the basket-weavers’,” said Sarat.  “Don’t know if that’s commonplace.”
Cantilip laughed.
“It is not.  But yes, that embodies it, posh progressive, we must be rounded, learn to use our hands as well as our brains.  Venga is both a friend of the family and well known throughout Van-senok.  Venga said he would come to Fidub but – he is probably walking.”
Coffee and sandwiches arrived, together with a huge bowl of fresh fruit.
“I noticed the orange-trees,” said Cantilip, with a sort of ecstatic sigh.  “The scent in the air, that is orange-blossom?”
Maya and Taja exchanged glances: they’re going to talk trees.
But no! Sarat has his mind on the job!
“I guess you don’t have a lot of fruit in Van-senok?  I know there’s a lot of fertile land south of Vaconik but I don’t think it’s all that warm.”
Cantilip grinned.
“Lots and lots of wholesome veggies.  Must be four years since I saw an orange.”
The nutrition of senoki filled the gap until Cho and Amida arrived, dressed for the beach.
 Cantilip felt slightly embarrassed but said nothing.  Cho and Amida settled themselves and began munching. 
“Now,” said Cho.
“As you know,” said Cantilip, “Casin-ruhn is in Ciletij.  Venga and I went.  You will correctly assume we did not present our passports at the border-post.  Mummy went ape.”
“As one would,” said Amida.
“There is no physical border,” said Cantilip.  “It is not we scaled – “
“That’s crazy,” said Sarat. 
Cantilip shrugged.
“Perhaps once a strand of wire now rotted.  On the map the border follows the Gent.  On the ground there is nothing.”
“It is not,” offered Cho, “inhabited territory.”
“They drew up a border and no-one’s been there since!” said Maya.
Cho smiled.
“Perhaps only a few with a particular destination.”
“We wanted to see.  We sat on the chair.  It was all – a little traumatic.”
“I have been,” said Cho softly.  “There came the Master and Mistress of Kadun.”
“Cho,” breathed Taja.
Sarat seemed paralysed, then said, “Susheela.”
Cantilip frowned.
“Asyrion!”
“That is another story,” said Cho.  “It can wait.”
“Venga said he wanted to know what was true.  He didn’t mean Kaminua and Asyrion.  He meant what the chair does.  Only one way to find out...We walked days, aeons through the trees, never far from the Gent, so we had water.  We could not have carried water.  We lived on berries, deer.  There are settlements.  They are senoki.  I am Van-senok.  We were welcomed, feted.  We rested.  It grew colder, the trees were thinner.  We ploughed on.
“At last we came to the lake.”  She looked at Cho, who looked encouraging.  “I shall try.  Has anyone got a piece of paper and a pen?”
Flurry of people looking mutely at phones and realizing how hip and paperless they were. 
Maya reached in her bag and produced a paperback. She tore out one blank pages at the end and found a biro.
“Thank you...You come out into a clearing.  The lake is in front of you.  There's an old wooden jetty.  In the far corner of the clearing is a wooden house, hut, cabin, rotting of course.”  She paused a moment.  “Only it's not.  What you see also is  newly constructed jetty, a newly constructed cabin with logs piled outside.  And there are things in the air, bats, shafts of light.  It's like entering a dream.”
“The commonplace element,” said Cho, “is that regrowth is rapid at the site of a conflagration.  Someone keeps the clearing open and someone of course built both cabin and jetty.  We think the Denzines but we don't know why.”
“Or both are illusion?” suggested Taja.
“Neither I nor Vax could break it.”
“Inside are a table, a bench, a bench intended for sleep, with a simple mattress, a fire  burning in the grate, furs, a cap.  It is impossible.  That is half the cabin.  In the other half stands the  throne.  We – we thought a guardian.”
“No guardian of this time,” said Cho.
“Venga said, I mean announced, we are not trespassers.  It is our right.  It echoed.  I felt it could be heard in Azt.  He said after he wished he hadn't.   He – he sat on the throne.  For a moment  I felt a pang of disappointment.  He stretched out his legs.  Nothing had happened.  Then his face changed.  Intense curiosity.  Then he just wasn't there.  Mentally, I mean, not that he vanished!  I knew everything was OK, but he just wasn't there.   Then I got frightened anyway.  We weren't quite so stupid that we had no phones and – we’d noted when we went out of range, then came in again, then signal lost.  It’s the hills.  There are habitations, not close, but people need doctors, people need to be able to report wildfires and Ciletij is good at things like that.  We do actually have that in common, we understand living in the wildernessNot that I exactly yearned to ring the House.  Mummy, please can you come and rescue me from Casin-ruhn...But then Venga came back.  He sort of stumbled down and I moved towards him and then – as for a fraction of a second I didn't think he was real, solid.  I can't explain that either.  I hugged him and assured myself and he clung to me like a drowning man to driftwood.  I half led, half dragged him to the bench.  You have to understand rationality had gone out of the window.  I felt the water in the bowl was probably magic like in fairy-stories, but we didn't have much and so I got him a cup of water.  He sipped it and I half-expected him to transform into a bear or something but he slowly became coherent.  The first things he said were, so beautiful, so perfect, and obviously I thought – what I thought was oh shit, because I really didn't feel up to defending my honour against a deranged Venga.  But then he said, the stars, the stars. Ban-varna must know the stars.  Finally he was back to normal and he said he had to see Cho. Then it got worse.  There were  huge sides of smoked meat, I guess moose.  There were utensils, pans.  There was a wooden chest.  Venga opened it.  Tinned food?  We must take it, said Venga.  I made squeaky noises about the occupants not liking our stealing his provisions for the winter.  Venga reasoned that if they could get tinned veg in the first place he could get more of them.  Venga said perhaps it is here for guests.  There is no harm, Cantilip, do you understand there is no harm?  Frankly, no, but it was getting dark and I was hungry and it was the first roof over our heads for what seemed like years.  We made a meal and a hot drink and huddled by the fire.  I can't continue.”
“They came, my lord, my lady of Kadun,” suggested Cho.
 “In furs, laughing, stamping their boots at the door.”
“He swung her round and she fell laughing into his arms.  They seemed to notice us and smiled.  Sir, said Venga.  My lady Asyrion.”
 “A story,” said Cho, “of a worm-hole in time and immortality for those who desire it.  They say he spent the rest of his life grieving.  Why so if they were to be together for eternity.  Let us pick other holes in all stories.  Aside from the morality, the Anile empress ordered the massacre of Ciletij,  Why was she there?  Immortality requires tinned veg?  Offered immortality, would you not choose somewhere more clement and less remote?”
“Discovery?” 
“There is a Ciletij Commemoration Society.  Each year they visit and plant a tree.  I have seen pictures.  There is nothing, no jetty, no cabin, nothing.”
“This is - “
“Out of this world?  Perhaps.  What happened finally?”
“They went out again into the snow, still laughing, holding hands.  Then it was like - I didn’t know if was awake or asleep.  I became aware.  Venga was out for the count, sleeping like the dead.  Perhaps I should have put that better.  I think I was pretty out of it.  I sat.  I don’t know.  It wasn’t my sanest moment.  Maybe I hoped the chair would tell me how I’d come to talk to Kaminua.  Nothing happened. Then - I’ve never taken drugs but I guess it was like tripping.  I but I wasn’t I was - with someone I knew was Zani and I knew the me was the Mistress of Van-senok. We were arguing but though I was arguing I didn’t understand what the argument was about.”  She looked at Maya rather shyly.  “Though I guess we can guess.  It gets worse.  He said: Marry me!  I said: My lord, I cannot.  Then I was travelling through the trees, very, very fast and there was screaming and flame, which was obviously.  Asyrion said, it is finished.  I guess then I lost consciousness.  When I came to I was slumped on the chair and Venga was kneeling beside me, patting my hand and trying to soothe me.  Which was extremely hard because we knew there were other people there, smiling on us and wishing us well, but they weren’t solid, apparently mortal like Kaminua and Asyrion.”
“Jaizal and Susheela,” guessed Cho.
“I guess,” said Sarat, “at least we know where we go when we die.  This is – “
“They looked so like you and Maya.  I thought I was hallucinating you and Maya.  I’d never seen a picture of her.  She seemed to be the same size, same mass of black curls.”
“Oh great,” said Sarat. 
“I actually said, Sarat and sort of felt a negative and then I knew and I just stared, then they weren’t there and maybe I was hallucinating that.”
“No,” said Cho.  “Others have talked to Jaizal.” He saw Taja’s expression. “You think Cantilip the first pulled by curiosity to Casin-ruhn?  It requires only mind-speech.”
“But if – “ began Sarat.  “Was anyone impertinent enough to ask!  Choose your own immortality.  This is crazed.  Is it because of the chair?  I mean I can’t see Ciletij kindly giving it me back but if it were removed would the whole thing collapse and they’d just be dead?”
“No-one sees a way for the chair to create the entire illusion.”
Maya said: “Then while the chair was in Azt the emperor was safe.  We know Van-senok stole it because of ye greate evil among the trees.  Surely the empire – “
“Not if you were senoki,” said Cantilip.
“And then – by the time they realized they needed to give it back – was ye greate evil gone – Azt was so corrupted – does the corruption of the empire date from the removal of the chair?”
“No.”
“But the loss of the chair – the punishment for those turning bad above a certain rank anyway was to sit – and it didn’t work.  That must have indicated the emperor had lost his power.  Can we start with something basic.  Yea, there are many theories of the after-life, should it exist.  None of them requires subsistence on tinned veg.”
“The chair,” said Cho, “must be considered distinct from the – movie.”
“Then it’s all illusion.”
“Then someone is conjuring it, which is impossible.”
“Denzine knowledge is not shared.  What happened next?”
 We had more tinned veg then left and returned to the House.  We stole some tins of course.  Isn’t that stupid?  I feel ashamed of stealing the supplies of people who cannot possibly have existed.  Or if they do are running on something more than canned granya.”
“Conclusion?” asked Cho.
Cantilip sighed.
“Somewhere normal mortal people are involved.”
“And?” asked Cho.
Cantilip considered.
Mummy took one look at us and demanded explanation.  We told her.”
“What did she say?”
“She knew.  All of it.”
“Ciletij must realize there's no way a clearing could stay clear.”
“Unless the ground is polluted,” suggested Sarat.
“Or not ground at all,” muttered Taja.
“There was one thing. Mummy asked did I look?  Look for what?  She meant did I look at Kaminua and Asyrion, did I try to see what was really there.  No, I was out of it by then.  She kept on about it.  She asked if I'd been afraid to see thousand year old corpses. Apparently see.  I mean,if I'd been rational enough to look, I'd have been rational enough to grasp that rotting corpses were just another layer of illusion, rotting corpses weren't offering me tinned veg.”
“But were they?” demanded Sarat.  “I mean here is ye steaming pot of moose stew and if we just throw in a can of beans there’ll be enough for all of us?”
Cantilip choked.
Cho said: “Jaizal said he never saw them eat.”
“Jaizal!” squealed Cantilip.
New readers start here.  She was filled in.
“That is mind-bending.”
“OK,” said Maya, “they’re mortal and what they vanish for is to eat.  If they have visitors, of course, which can’t be all that often.”
“Neither PANTHER nor Sardun has come across their actual home.”
“So they’re mer-people and live in the bottom of the lake,” said Sarat.  “The point is still why would anyone bother to keep it up for a thousand years.  If they’re Denzine shape-shifters, we can guess they turn into something pretty nasty if the bad guys pitch up, but it still doesn’t explain a mad joke.”
Cantilip nodded.
“There are other things.  You don’t just drive up.  By the time you’ve got there, you’re not at your best.  And for sure if anyone’s watching they saw you coming.”
“Or the bad guys never arrive?” suggested Cho.
“Even the non-certified good guys.  You said there are people.  I can see Casin-Ruhn might not be somewhere you’d reach if you took the kids out at the weekend, but hikers, explorers, hunters, foresters, loggers, indeed.  It’s a freshwater lake.  It’s water.  Presumably it has fish so it’s food. We’re not talking daily visitors, but over nearly a thousand years ordinary people must have been there.”  He remembered.  “Or is too cursed?  But today.  If you tell me healthy outdoors-loving Ciletij all believe it’s a place of absolute evil, I’m not sure I believe you.”
“Or does the casual visitor get a different movie?” asked Maya.
“Military land,” said Cantilip.
“That may be a bridge too far,” said Sarat. “~You went – rambling over a military installation.”
“Perhaps missiles rise from the lake,” said Cantilip, sounding magnificently indifferent.  “What is for certain is there are neither military nor any other humans there, untouched forest, no trails, no patterans, no marks on trees, no signs of clearing.”
“In other words Ciletij are in this up to their necks,” said Maya. 
“Disused military land,” tried Sarat.  “unexploded ordnance.”
“Darling,” said Amida, “I am really quite surprised your mother did not strangle you.”
“So this commem,” said Sarat.  “The public-spirited and generous Ciletij military naturally let the good citizens in once a year.  How do they get?”
“I’m sure Cantilip will be able to find out,” said Cho.
“From behind a monitor,” said Sarat.
“Promise,” said Cantilip, “promise I shan’t do it again!”
Maya sat back and considered them all.
“So in sum this matter of Kadun is centred on the shore of a lake in Ciletij off-limits to anyone, let alone us.”
“Promise!” said Sarat.
“I am sure,” teased Cho, “the natural history of such an untouched wilderness must be fascinating.”
“Oh it is, it is,” said Sarat.  “Dead emperors.  Not previously known to science that one.”
Cho looked at him intently.
“Do you in your heart believe it?”
“Instinctively, no.  But it has to be investigated.”
“Mel must talk to Qartly,” said Maya.
“The Denzines will not talk.”
“If they murder ordinary Ciletij, they wouldn’t.”
Cho frowned.
“Pehraps as Maya said the casual visitor gets a different movie.”
“A place of evil?”  Sarat turned to Cantilip.  “You wouldn’t by any chance like an absorbing job for the rest of the hols?  They’re occupying us 24/7 here.”
“So long as Mummy allows me!”
“It’s only combing the Grid.  Any Ciletij who’ve disappeared, alas believed dead, hikers, outdoors freaks, that kind of bod.”
“Would it reach the papers?” asked Maya.
“Two lines,” suggested Cho.  “I don’t think they can silence sorrowing parents.”
“They’re not at war, and I don’t think there’s a plague, so there can’t be many people who’ve died under 30.”
Cho looked a bit grim.
“Our noble allies,” suggested Maya.
“Are not the Denzines,” said Sarat.
“They brought down High Harn.  As you well know, Ciletij want to cut down trees, not leave them untouched.”
“Has anyone looked at it from the air?  What about the satellite pix?”
“Drones,” said Maya.
“We must assume that if there are watchers there will be interception.”
“Can you tell from a crashed drone where it was sending data to?”
“Where would it be sending data to!”
“Us,” said CAntilip.  “Where else?”
“Children…” said Cho.  “From my great age I dare!”
“It’s the tinned veg,” admitted Sarat.  “When I first knew – OK, crazy, but other matter.  Cho told me he’d been and talked to Kaminua and sat on the chair.  I guess I thought there was probably a reasonable explanation somewhere but it wasn’t topmost in my mind. By the time you’ve got the interesting features of the chair, what’s unreasonable takes a tumble. Lot of stuff I don’t know in that department. But there is absolutely nothing in Jaizal’s letters about tinned veg.  It sort of annoys me.  Feels as if someone’s taking the piss.”
“Perhaps they were trying to be helpful,” said Cho.
“Don’t have much idea of human digestion,” retorted Sarat. 
Cantilip sighed.
“We did in fact have diarrhoea.”
“What someone said at the forum,” said Sarat.  “Keeping food outside.”
“Suspended in the lake!” said Maya.  “Bet the water’s freezing. A piece of metal says Zani was in the west.  Don’t quite know what Tar will make of it.  There’s just nowhere,” she continued with some enthusiasm, “where any of this makes any sense.  It doesn’t make sense if you believe in an after-life, it doesn’t make sense if you’re a biologist, it doesn’t make sense if you’re the guys who deposited the chair there.”
“It doesn’t make sense if you’re a historian,” added Cantilip sourly.  “I checked our archives. That whole period has obviously been destroyed, there’s nothing, not so much as a curling corner of parchment. I already knew the Rape was missing.  220 years obliterated.”
“Dates?” asked Sarat
“Year Nought, Narulis proclaimed emperor, and by the way why did Fidub adopt the new calendar. 917, Zani proclaimed King of Dabida.  694, Rape of Ciletij.”
“What does Marula say?” asked Cho.
“For most of those years we were at war.”
“Someone,” said Sarat, “very badly doesn’t – didn’t – want people to know something.Zani was introduced to the chair and said thanks but no thanks.”
“A simple guy,” cooed Maya.  “That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.”
Sarat said: “Fidubi cats would provide an independent opinion.  Added bonus: no international incident if they’re caught.”
“Nature-lovers,” murmured Taja. 
“The lynx, the wolf, the bear,” said Sarat.  “Tourism.  There is nothing to stop Fidubi citizens taking an adventure holiday in Ciletij and quietly disappearing into the trees.”
“I have not heard this conversation,” decided Cho, “or might it not be my civic duty to mention it to Airoch.”. 
“There is of course the question that anyone who established any kind of evidence, a blood sample, would never make it back to the lab.”
“Look around,” said Sarat.  “Get a feel for the place.  Who would know and how?”
“We have to assume somewhere normal humans texting each other.”
“OK, you’re chopping the tinned veg and you accidentally cut Kaminua, who bleeds in a satisfyingly human fashion, and you slip the knife into the plastic bag you have in your pocket for forensic analysis.  In no narrative are they there when anyone else pitches up, they always enter.”
“If they’re Denzine shape-shifters, they’re not going to have a problem generating a little blood.”
“I don’t think we can go any further on this,” said Sarat, “in the total absence of a scrap of anything anyone could call evidence.”
“Read up on Jaaba-Sen,” said Cho.
“I know this is very obvious,” said Cantilip, “but they were real tinned veg. Sarpstan’s, a segani company.”
Sarat began to laugh.
“if we could just find who bought them, we’ve nailed it.  Did you or did you not, on the 30th inst, enter the Megamart – this is probably going to seem a crazy question but where actually is the nearest shop?”
“Aaargh,” said Cantilip.  “Nani, nani, nani, I’d guess the other side of the lake and then way over the hills onto the coast.”
“They go shopping daily,” said Maya.  “That’s why they’re never in.  Simple.  What’s Jaaba-Sen?”
“A delight that awaits you,” said Cho.
Cantilip went to stay with Cho and Amida and had the opportunity at last to shower and check her phone.  Where the hell are you this time?
She called her mummy.
“Well?” demanded Marula.
“I detect a note of mistrust,” said Cantilip sorrowfully.  “Be advised I am on the Sohenisle, about to dine with Cho.  A most fruitful afternoon with Sarat and Maya.”
“Then you do have a brain,” allowed Marula.  “The idiot Venga?”
“Not sight or sound.”  She paused.  “Sarat is of course a scientist.”
Marula laughed.
“Yes, my dear, I know.”
“Do I take it you and Cho have discussed a more rationalist approach?”
Marula laughed again.
“What does he want to do, take x-rays?”
“Pretty much.  He is, however, not quite as mad as I am.  I think Fidubi, repeat Fidubi, cats may be heading our way, armed with pretty little Fidubi passports.”
“They must liaise with Sardun.”
“I shall return with presents,” said Cantilip, “to buy your forgiveness.  Peaches, oranges, grapes, satya. I’m told the best fruit in Maona-Pri is at Rutin’s Market and if I ask nicely they’ll pack a box for me.”
“Six boxes,” said Marula.
Thus when B+P pitched up to do a spot of sight-seeing, they were the subject of a small misunderstanding.  Baz is pretty much standard issue, apart from the tan, a burly guy with wavy dark-brown locks and grey eyes that could get away with having come from most parts of the continent, but Paw, straight black hair, earrings, tall and lean, screams Fidub.
“Couple of cats pitched up to see you, they said to Saban.  That is not news.  Say they’re Sarat’s cats. At a loose end and thought they’d look around, see how other people live.
Oh really.
But our dynamic duo made no mention of Casin-ruhn, so Marula bowled straight.
“You go to Casin-ruhn?”
“See the chair?  We’re not that dynamic.  Thought we’d wander around V-k.”
“You are Fidubi PANTHER.”
“Nope.  Can’t be, the State of Fidub isn’t going to pay to protect Sarat.  We started Fidubi PANTHER, guys protecting the family have always come from Fidub, cos nothing else makes sense, not going to come from V-s, are they, but you have to cross the Great Divide, so we did.”
“You know Sarat talked to Cantilip.”
“No.  Getting a bit lost here.”
All was explained.
“Not that we’re not tempted…I think caution is our by-word here
The Sardun guys recommended they took the train and were informative about road and rail routes negotiating the forest.  The main line ran down the coast.  That was an obvious one.  Less obvious were snaky little tracks along valleys, single tracks with two trains a day, and trains that stopped by request at that.  Of course you had to ring ahead to the station.  The nearest station to the House was at Da-conan, described as a country town.  Pix were pulled up and they beheld streets of grey stone building interspersed with occasional weathered brick.  Da-conan boasted a shopping precinct, but really thought Baz you could hardly tell.  Da-conan clearly didn’t do garish.  Paw examined the list of enterprises and mentally ticked off the essentials of senoki life, heating engineers, plumbers, IT.  It must be a services hub.  The history of the precinct was described to them.  At first  a general store, of course a cobbler, a tailor, and of course traders, traders who traversed such of Van-senok as was traversable then a small group of shops, then someone thought it sensible to cover them all in, then some entrepreneurial type thought the happy shopper would like coffee and something to eat without venturing outside. The general store had presumably become Loni’s Mart.  Paw decided he very much wanted to see Da-conan and find out what people ate. The railway was clearly vital to trade.  All goods were distributed to the hinterland by rail.  Baz  examined a rail-map. It was clearly a long journey up the coast then east to Ciletij.
“Not easy to get to Ciletij.”
“There used to be a line,” said one of the Sardun guys.  His finger traced a route from a junction in the hinterland due north.  “We closed it.”
“Ah,” said Baz.  “Not a lot of trust.”
“Those who need to visit fly.”
“Trade has suffered?” asked Paw.
“Theirs has!  What we got from Ciletij, we get from Var-sega’.”
“We always got,” said another of the Sardun guys, “agricultural produce from Var-sega’.”
“Is any of Van-senok arable?” asked Baz.
“In the south we grow wheat, barley, cabbage.”
Not the most varied of diets.  Wholesome, thought Paw. He returned to the map of Da-conan. He hoped the Four Bears Inn (is that supposed to be a pun?) was a good place to stay.  It was the only place to stay.
Expect to be followed.  Do not detour via Casin-ruhn.
 
Baz pulled his woolly hat further down over his ears.  Maps didn’t show that Da-conan, in a wide valley at the meeting of two rivers, boasted a permanent gale that appeared to his delicate Fidubi flesh to come straight from the Arctic.
“Thought it was summer.  I have never in my life felt this much enthusiasm for a shopping mall.”
Double doors excluded the polar blast.
A mooch around the IT store confirmed all state of the art.  If there’s anything they need up here it’s comms. 
A seductive pile of sweaters caught their eye.  They walked firmly into The Great Outdoors.
“We’re visitors,” said Baz cheerfully.  Obviously.  Paw, chisel profile, long straight black hair, earrings, walnut tan, screamed Fidub.  “We’re really not sure we’ve got enough clothes.”  He managed to avoid wailing we thought it was summer.
“Especially around the ears,” said Paw.
She examined their jackets and pronounced them good but recommended hats with ear-flaps.  Fur hats.  They grinned at each other both thinking Sarat’d kill us. 
Tough, kill the whole of Van-senok.  Survival fur and fashion fur are clearly morally different.
            “I’m sure there’s a man-made equivalent,” said Paw, imitating Sarat.
            “Ah,” said Baz, “but think of the natural resources that go into its manufacture.”
            Now for Loni’s Mart.  See what they eat around here.
            In-te-res-ting!  Frozen fruit, canned fruit, yes.  Fresh fruit, no.
            This is a peach-free zone.  Can we survive!
            Hang on, there are no veggies, either.  Must have to go to a greengrocer.  Hope yet.
            Baz examined a few labels.  Not AMI!  None of the nutritional stuff you get in the south.  Probably 50% sugar.  Frozen won’t be.
            They checked a few more labels, especially those of a hearty stew to keep the family glowing and calcium is essential for strong bones and teeth, help your children grow tall and straight with our delicious yoghurt dessert.  Just doesn’t say how much calcium.  Defo no food regs.
            Our delicious yoghurt dessert came in a variety of flavours.  They selected blackcurrant and raspberry, and decided what went with their picnic-lunch, yeah right, we’re going to recline under a tree sheltered from the sun’s burning rays, was bread and cold meat. Similarly a butcher and a baker were required.  Convenience shopping in Da-conan extends, we hope, to all in one mall, not all in one store.  Home-delivery, they wondered.  Local shops have always done that.  Presumably if they can reach you through the snow-drifts. 
They found a scrumptious smelling baker, bought a loaf and asked where they could get some cold meat, smoked beef, maybe, a bit of ham.  While the assistant was slicing and wrapping, they surveyed the goods.  Woo-hoo, beef labelled not pre-frozen is twice the price.  Somewhere, presumably south a bit, is a prize herd.  Ah, a greengrocer.  You can tell that by all the greens.  Clearly senoki get their veggies.  There were many varieties of cabbage and onions, leeks, a sort of frondy lacy thing on a stalk which reminded them of seaweed but surely couldn’t be. There were large pink and green apples in plenty and a few oranges.  The woman in front of them was paying cash in small denomination coins, and apparently her eyesight was not good. The shopkeeper was being kindly. 
“We’re foreigners,” said Paw, “and this is going to seem a stupid question. Do you get soft fruit up here at all?”
“Is it because of the war?” added Baz.
The shopkeeper bellowed with laughter.
“You are from the south?  It is very different here.”
“Fidub.”
“I think Fidubi do not shop.  They pluck the peaches from the trees.”
“Bit like that,” said Paw.
“I have been.  When I was younger, merchant fleet.” We didn’t think of the sea.  Stupid of us.  “In season we get a little from Var-sega’  Mostly it goes to children and the Army.”
In-te-res-ting!  We didn’t have the Imperial Miltiary down as fructivores, though we have heard that for a lot of the lads the Army is the first decent meal they’ve had.
“Of course!” said Baz.  “Guess it’s apples or apples.  Don’t mean to be rude, but where do the oranges come from?”
“Harn.”
The sea, the sea!  Think hard about that one, wonder what else comes from Harn and it’s not necessarily edible.
“Could we have six apples and an orange, please.”
The shopkeeper gestured to them to help themselves. Not worried about transferring bugs.  Probably too bloody cold.
They arrived back at the double doors, where a small crowd was assembled, through which weaved their way a larger number of people coming in.  It had started to rain.  Women with shopping-trolleys were on their phones.  Can you come and collect me, guessed Baz.   OK, the total Van-senok experience. It’s not far to the inn. 
“Afternoon!  Would you have two rooms for two nights, please.”
“Good afternoon to you!” said the receptionist.  “Will that be with dinner?”
“Yes, please,” said Paw.
They filled in the register.
“Wow!” she said, “Fidub!  I’ll need to see your passports.”  She sounded very apologetic about it.
They reached in their jackets and produced the circular, apple-green (yes, well, they stand out) passports of the Republic of Fidub.  Even Fidubi think the circles on the cover are weird, pretty, but weird: top left, off-centre and bottom right are embossed concentric silver circles.  She flipped through their passports.  All PANTHER passports have diplomatic stamps.  If she noticed, she didn’t say anything.
“Would there be lunch?” asked Paw, yoghurt desserts abandoned at the prospect of hot food. 
“Need to go to the bar for that,” she said.  “Plenty of time yet, finish lunches at half-two.  Show you to your rooms.”
The rooms were about the width of three beds and little longer with low ceilings and ye olde beams that were probably real.  They were also warm.  They sat on Baz’ bed.  Paw tore a hunk off the loaf. 
“No trace,” said Baz.
“How can you tell!” said Paw.
Whatever they saw and heard would get back to Sarat.  They assumed Sardun would track them out of an intelligent curiosity as to what that would be.  They also assumed that, this near to both House and Camp, anyone and possibly everyone could be Sardun.  Since they enjoyed the thought of Saban being regaled by their interest in agriculture, they didn’t bother to get serious about whether they were being followed.
            Not followed, exactly.  A healthy curiosity as to whether they’d dive off into the undergrowth and make tracks for Casin-Ruhn, did they make it to Da-conan, a casual chat with the greengrocer, don’t see many foreigners up here..
            Vannina remembered Sarat’s recent posts and made a noise suspiciously like a giggle.
            “I think he’s really interested in what people eat.”
            “I trust we are well-nourished,” said Marula.
            That still left Venga goddess knows where.
“We can assume no-one’s perishing of hypothermia in Da-conan.  Vaconik might be different.”
“Clean Air Act,” said Baz.  “I mean let’s assume everyone’s got a grate.  Every house here is going to have been built with a grate.  Modern housing maybe not.”
“Ciletij has masses of coal,” said Paw.  “No way anyone’s flying in coal.”
“Non-perishable.  Rail?”
They decided to stick to plain food, not because they weren’t adventurous but because there was no disguising what it was. After looking at the menu, they realized this was just as well because plain food was all there was.   Baz had a steak in a huge roll with fried onions on the side and Paw had tench and potatoes with mint and butter.
“Guzzling,” said Baz between mouthfuls.
“So fresh it’s wriggling,” said Paw.
“Don’t do gourmet specialties.”
“Bar lunch.  Maybe at dinner.”
Dinner indeed proved more exacting.  There was a choice of four main courses, one was grilled pork, one was fried shark, and the other two were written in irturbi. 
“Do a few things well?  This must be where the locals come when they want to dine out.”
“And the plain stuff is for aliens?”
“Really sorry,” said Baz, “we’d love to try something new, but what is it?”
“Moose.  It is a stew.”
“I’ll have that please.  Do you eat it with potatoes?”
“Bread.”
“Whatever’s usual, please.”
“I’ll have the shark please,” said Paw.
After they’d completed their order, Baz said, “That didn’t swim in any local river!”
“That’s the interesting bit,” said Paw.
Baz’ phone gave a small meow to indicate he had mail.
Taja to Baz:  What the pluperfect iridescent 3D quintessential hell are you two doing? 
Baz: A little recce-ing.  You mean someone noticed? 
Taja: Marula has been on the phone to Cho asking if he’s seen Venga.
Baz: Who the pluperfect etc is Venga?  Everyone keeps asking us about Venga.  So when we pitched up they assumed this Venga?
Taja: Cho says he knows who Venga is.  I actually don’t.
Baz: Try asking.
Romance of the Year!  Zeph was to write.  Now, guys, this has to be romance of the year.  Their eyes met across the sands...As my spies tell it, Hass announced he was off with the Morag-Fahdi for the summer see First Event, birthright, heritage, and all that jazz. I mean, come on, you’re not Alzani-Meta if you don’t stand silhouetted against the sunset surrounded by the hadin. Specially if you look like Hass.  The H-W were over the moon and drew lots over who too could spend the summer camping out under the moonlight,  Who needs annual leave with a job like that?.  Sem and Reakoed drew the long straw and off they rode and met the M-F at the Tap.
Just short of where the GD finally dries to a trickle, there’s a village.  They were just dismounting and tethering and unpacking saddle-bags when an old banger chuffed along the road towards them.  Some of us, I think, know Venga, BV as he’s known, by reputation, sort of wandering sage. Bastard sat on the bonnet of his banger and began to call the hadin. Is that nerve or is that nerve? So the hadin are going ape and what is our handsome young prince to do!  So he doth approach this impertinent stranger.  Excuse me, that’s my job!  No, no!  He says may I ask your name, sir?  You have to give Tar credit, the way those boys are brought up.
Life is actually more complicated than that.  For once in my life, thought Venga, I don’t know where to start.  I shall go with the flow!  The flow meant he sat with Hass under the stars and revealed all, if not yet literally, with the upshot that the pair of them returned rapidly to Zur, babbling, as Tar unkindly put it, about Zani in V-k.
On the word of a piece of metal.
“It is documented,” said Tar patiently, “he went to the Great Gates.  He returned.”
Perhaps later?
Tar accepted that not every second of Zani’s later life was accounted for but very much doubted these episodes gave him time to get to V-k and back.
Before, said Hass with absolute certainty.
While certainly Zani had roamed the scrub with the M-F, one feels he would have mentioned having traversed a Cult-infested imperial Kadun.
One does not interpret the revelations of that particular bit of motile metal literally, but no-one in our cast of thousands yet had the easy familiarity with her that was to come later.  If truth be told, Tar and Saski were far more interested in having acquired a prospective son-in-law or, to be exact in what they had acquired as a prospective son-in-law.  Venga carefully explained his occupation was iterant labourer, in the course of which he revealed that he was wanted by the police in Var-sega’, though for no more serious an offence that being without fixed abode – being a little awry on the ways of bureaucracy, he had thought his mother’s address in Azt sufficed.  Being gay, he had thought it prudent not to fall into the hands of the law and had sought sanctuary in V-k.  Any time you want the place redecorated, Tar.  But you must see Cho! declared Saski.  But Cho on the phone explained he had seen Cantilip.  This was relayed to Venga who said No need then! Saski thought it a little odd that he had sat on Cho’s chair and saw no need to talk about it.  Venga gave his beautiful smile and said his experience of void and stars and light perhaps was not critical to a busy man and Saski watched Hass’ face and saw that he was smitten.
Hass took Venga off to see Zur.  They’re holding hands!  Is it love!  Zur, you will have gathered, has no objection to gay guys holding hands; hysteria can be positive.  What, asked one or two holding a candle for Hass, has he got I haven’t?  Dark, wiry, intense Venga can clearly charm birds off trees.  It does not of course take long to surface.  You’re irturbi!  Ah, said Venga with delight, a separate species.  What’s it like, being gay in Kadun?  The perfection of non-existence, said Venga.  Fine, so long as you don’t tell anybody.  He put his finger to his lips.  Sssh! Then he began on the Whole, which was the first some Zuri had heard of earthpower.  They looked curiously at Hass.  That’s sort of what you believe, right?  You and Sarat.  Where is Sarat, anyway?  Doing some stuff for Cho, said Hass vaguely.  Work experience.  This particular bunch of Zuri at least was far more interested in the burgeoning of love.  In which they were not alone, as gay Kadun went quietly insane.
 
CONRULAT:  It’s love!  [Pic of Hass and Venga
DITSI: Here’s to alliance between our two great nations!
MITSA:  Gay cat, just caterwauling.
FOEN: And other one
 
MITCH: And of course one knows who ‘this Venga creature’ is.  Evil evil grin.
CANTILIP: One does.  Should Vastulis not complete the party?
 
CALUNIN:  Then at least the line is extinct.
MITCH: It went sideways to a cousin.  Venga is a cousin of the descendants of that cousin.
GOSA: Then there is an heir to Fas-sigree, were it to exist?
MITCH: There is.
GOSA: You say no more
MITCH: That would not be prudent.
CALUNIN: Games!
MITCH: Yes.
GOSA: Surely this person can be traced.
 
It got worse.  The pair of them had espied a tumbledown cottage off the Senshal Road and were determined to renovate it.  Hass, we have noted, was a good strong broad lad, such as any builder would welcome as a mate, if not literally. 
Tar mailed Heela to say Venga is staying with us in Zur.  Suggest address amended to The Hill, Zur, Dabida, and the file closed.  He refrained from adding Poste Restante.  Heela communicated this to the coppers with a nearly straight face.
Are you neat on the street, are you mean on the scene? Zur Live.  What’s cool on the spool tonight kids?  Our spies tells us Hass is getting in some work experience as a builder’s mate.  You gay guys stop drooling now, give the girls a chance to gape!  Hass has a friend, folks and it sure ain’t Sarat.  There’s a little old cottage on the Senshal Road and they’re doing it up.  Do we hear hearts and flowers all the way?
Whether we do or not we hear zoom lenses and learn Venga is not just a pretty face.
“Welcome to the party!” said Venga.  “There's just one condition.  No slackers, puh-lease!  You do not laze around watching us toil!  We are not a stage-act.  You want to hang around here, that's cool.  You help.”
“More the merrier,” said Hass, handing the nearest journo a saw.
“Brick-laying,” said Venga, “is an art.  I should be delighted to teach.”
“Two conditions,” said Hass.  “You go home at sunset.”
“You don't want to be here after dark,” said Venga.  “In this isolated place without electricity.”
“Spoo-keee!” said Hass.
The journo got a word in edgeways.
“Doesn't seem to worry you!”
“Used to it,” said Venga. “You do not seem to be doing anything with that saw.  I do mean it, you know.”
The interesting thing, reported Sem, is they know he means it.  Our Venga is no dodo.
Can't imagine Hass falling head-over for a dodo.
We can do that, said Zeph.
Loosely, reported Sem, the place has become a sort of drop-in gay advice centre, day out in the country.  Good line in shepherding away the idle too.  Hass is of course Hass.  Venga is just something else.
What is something else?
Mentor.  He is very, very good.  Active meditation!  He gets them mixing cement and pouring their hearts out at the same time and by the time they go home the broken heart or whatever doesn't matter quite so much.
Mel arrived back in Zur.
A 460 coupé, low and sleek and mean.  I approve, thought Venga. The door was half-open, the owner sitting half-out, one long leg coming to the rest on the ground.  He was fiddling with something with a lot of wires, looked up.  Expression quizzical.
“You’re Mel?”  Mel nodded.  “Nice wheels.”
“I’m a pollutant,” said Mel in shocked tones. “Do you not understand the threat to the ozone layer?”
Venga laughed.
“What!” said Mel.  “You are not a member of the Environmental Police?”
“I think we shall hit it off,” said Venga.
 
ZINAN: Gay and speaking on behalf of.  Couple of blokes I know, I’ve mailed Firas to ask for anonymous logins, so long as the cats know who they are.  They do not want to identify themselves because they do not want to find themselves a heap of broken bones.  Before we all get carried away here, prejudice is mean and vicious and alive and well and the first thing we have to do is talk about that, talk about mongols who think good soldiers can be put out of action because of what we are. 
 
HASS: Yes.  Venga is KP, so I am too.
DITSI:  Eeeek!  Can’t Zeph come too?  Ladies, gentlemen and mongols, the honorary chair of GASH.
FIRAS:  I have no problem with both Hasiyata and Mel being here.  They are Zani’s heirs.  I trust we approve at least of Zani.
MEL: Someone disapproves of me? 
HASS: Gay rights in Kadun just became a family matter.  Bring it on down, guys, bring it on down.
MITCH:  I should wish to state my wholehearted approval of both Narulis and Zani.
FIRAS:  At least someone knows which side is which.
MITCH: I believe I hear screams.
CHALLIN:  I really don’t think there is anyone on the side of the angels who would wish to upset Alzani-Meta.  Welcome to Kadun, gentlemen.
MEL: We thank you.  Now, about that A-M-Carlin nexus…
OBAYA: Heard some stuff about you in the City.  Nice one.
SORG: You!
MEL: Little me.
HASS: Actually he’s large and hairy.  The sheepdog didn’t come from nowhere.  I think we were discussing serious things, like guys being half-killed.
CONRULAT: Has gone quiet around here, hasn’t it.  First of all, it depends who the senior officers are.  Second of all it depends on the number of mongols. Throw the book at five, maybe not 25. In fairness most prejudice is foul but verbal, not because they’re too high-minded but because it gets complicated,  oh have we here a heap of broken bones, truck fell on him.  Most of them actually are high-minded enough to object to a mongol mob ganging up on one guy.  Punch-up is quite different. 
 
Sarat meanwhile was being dragged off into the furthermost reaches of ultimate reality protesting all the while he was the kind of guy who fixes the drains, when not besieged by visitors and phone calls after four nights without sleep.  He observed that ‘the PR guy’ wasn’t expected to work 9-5 or even 8-8 and put it down to the absolute mayhem that would follow taking Azt.  Someone has to know what’s going on everywhere, be the point of contact.  Perfect Pas to an entire nation.  Something between perfect PA and war-reporter.  He decided the pulsating hub needed some kind of an office and found something between a patio and a conservatory – a patio with a roof and two walls, looking out on a long lawn studded with orange-trees.  You want me, you know where to find me.  He had been stripped of his phone but was now permitted his laptop.  He found much had changed in his small world.
            Sarat to Hass: Brilliant!  So pleased.  Can’t wait to meet him.
            Hass: They let you speak!  Venga is amazing. 
            Althought they weren’t giving him time to think, Sarat thought anyway. He and Maya talked far into the night, when they had any night.  Those who saw a glimmer of light under the door or bumped into one of them going to the loo at 4 in the morning had earthier explanations.  Hope the contraception’s good.  Maya getting pregnant was not part of the script.
 
Meow.
People around looked up once more.  I think Vibrate mode.  Did not expect to be in demand.
Cho to Baz: Crossed wires, I hear.  Truest you are not seated on the Anile Throne even as I write.
Baz: Doing good by stealth.  Looking at the local shops, seeing what’s available to eat round here.  I’m just working out how to break it to Sarat.  Fresh fruit, not a lot of.  Make that soft fruit nil.
Cho: I’m sure he will survive.
Baz: Lots of veggies.  Get their vits.Other stuff is pretty yummy too.  Get Deelan [Cho’s cook] to cook you up some figisi-jahsonan. If she can get the ingredients, which I doubt. 
Cho: ROTFLMAO.  You are at the camp?
 
Five trains a day run from Vaconik to Ge’at in Var-sega’, a journey of thirteen hours.  The train stopped at This Halt and That Junction only if required.  Seems sensible, don’t suppose the numbers hold it up.  Oh right, think I get it, leave work in Vaconik, pick up your backpack, catch the 19.32 and you’re in Ge’at at a reasonable time to get some work done.  Sounds less aggro than flying.  Do it in reverse but who uses it the rest of the time?  From Da-Conan to Vaconik, the journey is three hours and 22 minutes according to the timetable.  Clearly not for commuters, then.    What do people go to Vaconik for, a day in the city, must be museums, theatres, big shops of course.  All the same, seven hours travelling.  S’pose you can sleep. The last train back to Da-conan was at a highly respectable 23.20.  Go to the theatre, if you want to get home at 3 in the morning.  Maybe not something to do all that often.  Paw differentiated firmly between 3 in the morning in a bloody blizzard when it was probably -200 and 3 in the morning on the Leolisle.  When they arrived at the station for the 8.47 they thought there’d be maybe half a dozen other travellers.  More like 20, 25.   Even Baz can’t walk up to total strangers and demand their purposes. After all, he didn’t have a clipboard.  Just doing a survey… Added to the list of find out more about.  The train was warm and comfortable with a buffet car in which they sat and watched Van-senok speed by.  At last the trees thinned out and gave way to heath, and then the beginnings of a built-up area, at first sparse, then modern housing, builders’ merchants, hoardings, a park, a playing-field.  Vaconik Central possessed what they ticked off as attributes of main-line stations, restaurants, a grand hotel, cash machines, a pharmacy, a newsagent and stationer’s, a coffee-shop, a food-store and senoki and presumably also some segani quietly availed themselves of these facilities.  Buzz, it did not.  Frivolity, such as art, music, entertainers, was absent.  Well, they are at war.  Paw gazed at the departures board and thought somewhere underneath this is wow!  Down to Wintawa, up and round to G-T, reach the whole continent.  Then they go to Vasucula and Vasuculi arrive.  A quick look round espied no obvious Vasuculat.  Train came in some time ago?   Central it certainly was and within minutes they were in Gava-san, the hub, a broad and ancient highway, still cobbled, closed to traffic, down which they slowly ambled.  Again, ‘everything’ was there, movie-houses, theatres, department stores, a music-shop or perhaps more exactly a shop for musicians, for it was huge, a department store in its own right, and, unusually, appeared to sell everything from grand pianos and exquisite violins to the latest drum-kits, synthesizers and amps.  Hip young men with green hair argued vociferously about guitar strings, but it didn’t break the tone, the mood of the place, which Baz thought decidedly subdued.  They wandered into a network of alleys and found ‘usual shops for alleys’, specialist book-sellers,   jeweller’s, shops selling items of the ilk of incense-burners, floor cushions, rugs, tapestries, scented candles and cheap sets of bowls and cutlery, which Paw designated ‘furnish your student lodgings shops’ together with grocery-stores and a bicycle-shop.  They must, they thought, be very near the Collegium: ‘usual shops for student quarter’.  We cannot have come this far and not see the ocean.  Their alley ended in a large plaza.  Oh.
            “The Shrine,” said Paw softly.
            “Maybe they don’t call it that,” said Baz cautiously, suddenly feeling totally ignorant of earthpower.
            “Old, old, old,” said Paw, “maybe as old as M-P.”
            It looked like but of course couldn’t have been a single block of marbled grey stone the length of the plaza, two storeys, two rows of round windows, a steep over-hanging roof, the edge of which was carved with leaves and flowers.  In the centre, the door, nearly the height of the building, had carved in it a silver birch and two women, one in armour bearing a sword and one with a bow.  Gaurding the door were two stone bears.
            Hasty consultation of phones.
            ‘The Viledeen is the oldest building on the continent still in use today.  The foundations were laid in 6700.’ 
            ‘The Ladies, as they are called, were once believed goddesses, one of the fight and the other of the word.’
            ‘The inscription at the foot of the door reads ‘Enter, who can.’  The meaning of this has long puzzled historians and archaeologists.’  Baz frowned.  ‘Perhaps ironically, the Great Door is now kept sealed.  Entrance is at the side.’
            “There’s a side-door on the left.”
            The side-door led through a long  passage to a (warm, covered) courtyard with noticeboards on the walls, benches and a single large slatted wooden doors with great black hinges opposite the Great Door. A couple wrapped round each other consulted their phones.  There was no centre-piece.  A tree before it got warm and covered? Can’t believe they’d have felled a tree! 
            The two rows of windows on each side lit the grey chamber.  They saw the roof was supported by pillars.  The walls were intricately carved, with trees, with flowers, with bears, with wolves, with stranger things, fantastic creatures, half-stag half-man, giants with many heads. Fragments of paint remained. There were inscriptions but in irturbi, so they didn’t understand.  There were thick dark green carpet (added? replaced?) and benches cut into the walls on which were thick dark green velvet cushions (added? replaced?)
            What, thought Baz, do you do here, what did people do?  He liked the absence of any plaques, sign-posts, translations, it made it current, not just a museum-piece, but they clearly didn’t expect strangers.  Right now, any way.  He thought that before the war Vaconik had probably enjoyed a steady stream of travellers if not tourists eager to partake of their ancient culture and doubtless knowledgeable about it. 
            It must have had some rites and rituals.  Mel would know.  There’s no centre, no centre-piece, focus.  It is the centre-piece.  You’re ye ancient trader, come in out of the forest with your skins or meat or whatever and this is the meaning of Van-senok.  What is? 
If you have the forest, you don’t need pictures of the forest.  Go back, back, back, impossibly far back.  What else was here in 6700? Probably nothing. It would have stood majestic, alone.  Don’t understand.  People who worship goddesses don’t do it sitting on benches.  Then he wondered if he did.  A house for them? Of course it was all painted.  Must be a reconstruction on the Grid. No furniture?
            Paw had already let go.  Time loosened not slipping.  Shadows of the past.  Green, green, their robes were forest green and they had flowers in their hair.  Then death, blood, such violence, pain, then tiny flowers, everywhere, the walls, the ceiling, a carpet, a canape of tiny red flowers
            Something happened, he said rather feebly.
            I know, said Baz. Not human…
            The violence was that of animals, grizzlies ripping and tearing, wolves devouring still living flesh.  And trees drinking blood.
            They had a zoo here?  Trees in zoos don’t drink blood. People were sacrificed to wild animals?  Not unheard of but the venue, no, the venue does not mesh with that. 
            At the First Turn, the pain, blood, death were gone.  I think I see, do I see, an attempt to conquer, an enemy repelled, the enemy? Now the carvings on the walls were all of trees and flowers, great trees, small trees, trees of fantastic size and shape, leaves and branches in spirals, leaves climbing up the walls, leaves in circlets as no leaves ever grew.  For a moment he saw it as it was, a magic forest of brown and green and gold. 
At the Second turn they are in what was probably a starry vault, painted, painted, remember it was painted.  Stars, constellations, spheres, sun and moon are carved into walls. Look up! hissed Paw. The ceiling gave the illusion of open sky, all grey but distinctly full of cloud in more shades of grey than they had thought existed.  
At the Third Turn they are in the sea, fish, crustacea, seaweed, crashing waves, and great ice-floes, seals, polar bears.  Totally amazing.  Why has my sadly limited Fidubi education not told me about the Viledeen.
The woman with the bow came to meet them.  Baz smiled, suddenly feeling he understood everything about earthpower, everything, nothing, it didn’t matter, all he needed to know.
            But of course there was no-one there.
            “I think,” said Baz. A succession of wild thoughts came to him.  Sarat must come.  He must meet her.  Narulis met her.  That explains everything.
            They emerged shaken back into the courtyard. For a while they just sat.  Whew! 
            They padded off to see what lay behind the Viledeen and followed the path round.  You can walk all the way round the outside too.  Does that mean anything to you?  At the back was cluster of single-storey buildings also of grey stone.  Clearly it was thought fitting modernity impinge on them for covered walkways linked them and there were signs directing you to conference rooms and café.  They made a beeline for the caff. The furnishings included the sort of hyper-hip chairs that don’t have individual legs, instead consist of a curved metal frame that is three sides of a rectangle.  A poster covered in diamonds in various shades of pink, red and purple, against which some rock hero unknown to them strutted his stuff was entirely in irturbi.
            They sipped coffee thoughtful.
            “An eye-opener,” said Baz.
            “Broadening of perspective,” said Paw.
He consulted a map of Vaconik, then brooded over a larger map of the coast.  “So the port is there but we’re well inland.  Flooding?”
            Baz said: “Funny.  Earthpower.  Has to include water!  I was thinking – did Narulis represent the sea?  Like the two halves of the Whole.  Can we get a bus?”
            “Oh, this is mega,” said Paw.  “The Cult marched in from the sea and headed for the Viledeen.  Vaconikans or whatever the word is apparently sat back polishing their nails and having another coffee.  The Cult had – like a totem, the IoD, they carried before them. 
After a while senoki wandered in to remove the corpses, all of which if not stricken by arrows – as well as being stricken by arrows – bore the marks of wild beasts.  History of course tells it as an ambush, hidden archers, couple of tame bears.  The totem was smashed and covered with tiny red flowers.
            “I have just had the Viledeen Experience,” said Baz.  “At this moment I’d believe anything.  Whether I do believe anything – does it say anything about her?”
            Paw was grinning.
            “Don’t laugh.  The general belief is she was a construction-worker.”
            “Say that again slowly.”
“Yes, she looks as the goddess was depicted, but the goddess was depicted as an upper-class senoki huntress.  They even have a name for her, Mivalia za-plenit, It seems she was killed in an accident on the site, as happens on the best regulated building-sites. And some people see her ghost.”
“I want,” said Baz, “to say that was no ghost!  However, my experience of ghosts is zero, so what do I know!”
“This is interesting.  Apparently the people who built it were all exiles, rebels, whose concept of earthpower was more sophisticated than that current at the time.”
“If there’s one thing for sure,” said Baz, “this place does not function on the level tree not like fire.”
Consultation with the girl behind the counter revealed a bus linking Vaconik to the next town on the coast, more of a suburb really.  Of course it’s really nice in the summer.  Nothing going on there right now.
            The bus-driver said cheerfully that he stopped on the promenade.  He did.  Baz and Paw pulled their hats down to their eyelashes and their scarves up to the tops of their noses and leant against the railings of the sea-wall watching a malevolent dark-grey ocean batter the shore and smash onto ancient groynes.
            Visibilty was good and far on the horizon were frigates.  Makes you think, doesn’t it, said Baz.  Coastal security, must be a freaking nightmare.  Anyone could slip ashore.  Don’t really think about the Fleet, admitted Paw.  A particularly vicious gust assailed them.  Don’t think we need to linger.  Behind them shops and cafes were heavily boarded up and battered hoardings gave glimpses of another world, half a smiling brown child wearing water-wings.  A quick circuit of Hinsinil told them its core was another Da-conan, neat grey stone houses, with modern bungalows on the outskirts.  Guess you don’t build high. Baz continued to mutter about the antithesis between sea and land.  I mean, sea is basically lethal.  You can’t drink it, you can’t water your pot-plants.  There’s something there and I’m missing it.  Paw pulled up pictures of Hinsinil in the season, unrecognizable, a fun fair with a roundabout with highly painted horses, families on the beach in swim-gear, the shops along the promenade adorned with tubs of shrimp-nets and flip-flops.  
            “There’s a documentary I saw once about the tundra.  How it comes alive in summer, covered in flowers.  I think it’s all like that.”
            Baz grinned.
            “Senoki?  They’re little green shoots just below the surface.”
            “It really throws us, doesn’t it, no street-life.”
            “Commuter-land, either working or at school.”
            Two men passed them, accompanied by large, thickly furred and very lupine-looking pooches.
            “hmm.  Nice fluffy pet for the kids.”
            “Cross-breeds?”
            “Dunno how it works.  If you let your bitch in season into the wilds, does she saunter back in an orgasmic glow?”
            “Is there abortion for dogs?  I mean seriously.  Do you sincerely want a litter of wolf-cubs?”
            “A few tame semi-wolves.  In the Viledeen?”
            Baz was chortling to himself.
            “Just thinking, vet up here, maybe Sarat just needed something a bit more dangerous.”
            “Steel gauntlets to talk to your patients?”
            “Bet you anything they’re fish fans,” said Baz.  Paw’s face said yer what? “Tropical aquaria, exotic jewel fins darting about the room.  Or else they like everything grey.”
            “Tundra,” said Paw again.
            A large square van decorated with pictures of baskets of veg and bread, smiling cows presiding over pitchers of milk, a cheeseboard with crackers slowly passed them.
            “Bet you that’s home-delivery.  They just don’t have to go out.”
“What about exercise?  Can’t have pools in the basement, can they?”
“I run.  You run.  I just do not have the urge.”
Baz slowly lowered his scarf.
“Mainly cos I feel the air would be ripped from my lungs.”
“They must get used to it.  Be used to it.  Think if you grew up here.”
They returned to the  train-station.
            “We could go all the way down to Wintawa.”
            “Recline in the sun-soaked lagoons of the archipelago.”
            “It’s the job,” said Paw sorrowfully.
            “How do we get from this Ge’at to the House?”
            Ghey returned to Vaconik.  Vaconik clearly required detailed exploration.
 
 
 
            “I want to talk to Cho,” said Sarat.
            “That,” said the skinny one smoothly, “will not be possible.”
            Sarat got up.  “I’ve been doing some thinking.  I have to talk to Cho.”
            “First tell us why,” insisted the skinny one.
            “No,” said Sarat.  “Family business.”
            “you have no money,” pointed out the skinny one.
            Sarat said: “I’ve mailed Zik.  She’ll be along in a mo.”
            “Who is Zik?” enquired the little one, Sarat thought genuinely.
            “Baby sister,” said Sarat in an unexpectedly withering tone, which conveyed a great deal of what he was thinking: don’t you know anything about me.  He went to the door, half-expecting them to stop him, but they didn’t. “Catch up with you, later, guys.  The world does not end because of two hours.”
            The cab dropped him at Cho’s.  Cho was out.  Sarat vanished into the Library, which is actually a small room, being a repository of ancient volumes rather than where the latest thrillers go to die. 
            Cho appeared.
            “Library,” said Vax.  “We thought he probably wanted to check something they’d told him.”
            Cho smiled.
            “Very Sarat.”
            Sarat sat at a small round table. He looked up.
            “I needed to be here.”  He gestured at the faded volume on the table.  “Susheela.  I’ve been very careful.  I just wanted to touch it.”  Cho looked at him intently. “I take it I have your permission to be Anile Emperor.”
            “I see,” said Cho.  “You have talked to Firas?”
            “Worked it out,” said Sarat.  “I haven’t told the cat-fiends.”
            Cho gave a quick bellow of laughter.
            “We talk here or?”
            “Here,” said Sarat.
            “Coffee, I think,” said Cho.
            Three hours later Vax rang the Shrine to say that Sarat was on his way back.
            “The matter is resolved, I hope,” said the skinny one.
            “I think you could say that,” said Vax.
            Sarat mooched back to the conservatory and waited for something to happen.
            “Ah, you’re back.”  The scrawny one.
            “It was only polite to talk to Cho. If you guys think I’m going to be Anile Emperor.”
            “Too little sleep has affected your brain?”
            “I doubt it,” said Sarat.  “Maybe yours.  It’s a question of infrastructure, the rule of law.”
            “So?”
“I got the ratters are out of the barn and demanding their perspective be recognized.  Go ratters!  But that wasn’t quite all of it.  The demand is that perspective govern.  So I’m thinking about this.  First and foremost, yay, Kadun must choose, but in the presence of wholesale corruption, free elections are going to be a farce.  I come up with the R-word, revolution.  Nobody actually says there has to be a revolution first to clean out the rat-nests. It’s sort of – subsumed. The military will dot dot dot. Under what law?  Totally ignorant of Kadun military law, but I don’t think it covers financial malpractice by civilians.  Make it up as they go along? Azt has been taken!  Kadun is united!  It’s pretty vacuous if everything goes on just the same.  There has to be the imposition of a recognized body of law governing the whole of Kadun.   Then I’m thinking what exactly do I think I’m going to do because what I have been thinking what I was going to do I realized was in a democratic framework, everybody puts their views forward, as political parties, and then people vote.  But Kadun right now doesn’t have a democratic framework it has a lot of men with guns and tanks, which rather strikes me as what they’d ‘vote with’, or in other words more civil war, which is not what I had in mind.  So I’m thinking what can contain that and thinking maybe possibly nothing, if guys are total loggerheads, except maybe if they’re sure that there will elections. No revolution is democratic but it can be legitimate.  What it can’t be is rule by the - whim of the revolutionaries, which I guess is what most revolutions are.  And then they murder everyone on the other side. But if it imposed rule by an independently recognized body of law which upheld everyone’s rights, for or against, that’d – maybe – contain it.  Which in this case would be either international law or imperial law.”
 “Oh and one other thing.  Firas is Field Head of Kadun PANTHER.  Cho is Head of Kadun PANTHER.  It doesn’t mean boss, it means the job I was offered, or one of them.  It’s part of the emperor’s JD.  I didn’t think my lightning brain was the first to trot along this road.  Cho confirmed it.”
            The skinny one was already calling Firas.
            Sarat took the phone.
            “Were you going to break it to me gently?”
            “No,” said Firas.  “We were going to tell you you were fit for the job.”
            “OK…Am I?”
            “Yes.”
            “Yippee.  Do I want the job?”
            “Of course up to you.
            “Possibly a temp job.  Or not.”
            “You have other solutions?”
            “Not only have I said I’m a good republican, I actually am a good republican.  I’m also 23.”
            “That impedes the revolutionary tendency?”
“Dynamic young revolutionary is not Anile Emperor.”
“Is it not?  You don’t give a damn.  That is why it will work.”
“I get to do all the things I want to do.  In the face of murderous opposition, considerably more hysteria than if it were international law.  But who has the right toimpose international law?  The victorious military?  They’d rather have me?”
            “Much rather.  Solves a problem for them.”
            “If anyone has the right to impose himself on Kadun it’s Narulis’ heir.  Which is crazy.  Is perceived as having the right?  Bit less crazy.  I impose international law as the dynamic young leader of revolution and everyone bursts out laughing.  Go the whole way, Sarat, go the whole way!”  Firas chuckled.  “Once I’m in I can’t get out.  I see that.  We thought a lot of things.  Yes, I’ve talked to Maya.  Why d’you think we’re so tired all the time?”
            “Should’ve bugged the room,” muttered the little one.
            “We thought a lot of things,” repeated Sarat.  “Just let our minds wander.  This is no deal-breaker, can see good reasons why not.  A question of the time-frame.  Yea, Kadun is united!  Stage coup.  First you need to listen hard to the next bit.  If I do anything this crazy - when I first got political, Dad told me people would try to box me, label me, define me, and I had to stay Sarat.  There is absolutely no way I am prepared to be anyone’s idea of what the Anile Emperor is.  The Anile Emperor is what I am.  If people don’t think I’m behaving properly, tough shit.”
            “Really, sir, that is hardly appropriate,” cooed Firas.
            “Ex-actly. Further and heretofore – there probably aren’t many things I know more about than you, but I think the southern Press is one of them.  Transparency ends with protecting the guys on the ground, yes?”
            “Yes,” said Firas.
            “After due consultation etc, etc.  We need oversight.  We need transparency. The Press can do this for us.  You appointed me PR guy, didn’t you.  I do this my way, at least as far as the PR.”
            “Deal,” said Firas.
            “And Dibesit can mewl to the Straits Times.  Media circus,” said Sarat.  “How would that work in a war-zone.  Make it work for us.  What we thought was this.  Getting Corsin out of Azt.  If the imperial flag is raised and Maya and I are mooching around Carlin being inflammatory, with the eyes of the world upon us.  We think they’ll have to come.”
            “What alternatives do they have?” pressed Firas.
            “Turn north and try to take Ciletij. Isn’t that the big no-no.  You want Ciletij to invade Kadun?”
            “Invasion of a sovereign state is an offence against the statutes of the Quadrant.”
            “Cult sympathizers in Ciletij are going to care?  If ever they had an excuse to invade on behalf of Azt.”
            “We think Fidub will take care of that.”
            “Who is we and does it include Airoch?”
            “FAF are stationed in Ciletij as part of the mutual defence pact.”
            “OK.  They don’t like me anyway.  You know that.  By the time I’ve ripped off their comfort blanket.”
            “Precisely why Kadun loves you.”
            “It does?”
            “Key parts at least.”
            “CinC?  They can run their own war!  They’re very good at it.”
            “Of course.”
            “What does of course mean?  Discipline!  The chain of command!”
            “The F word.”
            “Whatever your problem is, you keep it out of work.  But I don’t see not calling someone sir as a problem.”
            “I am sure you will resolve that satisfactorily.”
            “Oh for - !  However guys are hacking it, it works for them.  This does not seem a brilliant moment to revolutionize the Army.”
            “So long as they’re functional,” said Firas.
            “They’ll all resolve it like nice reasonable people.” Said Sarat in tones of acute disbelief.  “We’ve had the mutiny line at the forum.  Guys like Vatya say don’t think I’m going to call you sir any more and guys like Fulnarin says fine, absolutely fine?”
            “They are all bound by imperial law.  What can they do about it?”
            “Plot?” suggested Sarat.
            “As you say, the opportunity to campaign, to vote.”
            “They’re facing the Third Army in Vaudos and they’ll stop to make speeches?  OK, you think they’ll stay functional.  I’m not so sure but against that you’ve met them and I haven’t.  Dad – suggested it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.  Seeing how the budgie bites.”
            “You being the budgie?”
            “Flap, flap.  Something else.  I’m pretty techy.  Maya’s the frantically eso one.  We thought we might be able to make that work for us.  Synthesizers, distortion, recording, I know it’s been used before but this would be a bigger scale.  Don’t know if Corsin would fall for it, where’s PANTHER supposed to be, but – a couple of idiot kids think these days it can all be done by tech?  Confuse them, maybe?  If everyone in Carlin moved south of the House and Corsin walk into a  sound and light show?”
            “By the time you have done that,” said Firas.  “I doubt they would care if their new uniform were torn and dirty T-shirts.”
            “FAF,” said Sarat primly, “always look impeccable.”
            “You must talk to Sorg at Caniba.  His field is VR.”
            “I think life just got interesting.”
            “Imperial Majesty!”
            “Sarat, puh-lease.  Now Maya and I need to go to our homes and explain to our respective parents they’ve raised a couple of straitjacket cases.”
           
            Of course they already knew.
            “The weight of history,” said Cho. 
            “He can bear it?” asked Baya.
            Cho smiled.
            “He will stay Sarat.  Mental image of cats with arched backs and bottlebrush tails.”
            “Do they quite know what they have acquired?” asked Essa.
            “Fast learners,” said Cho.
 
Firas to General Staff, Heela, Kyle, Mitch, Karula, Marula, Cantilip, Behna, Saryulin, Duvi, Asdinan, Sorg, Sistenda, Carvonis, Ban-Dolan, Baz, Paw, Essa, Baya, Shavli, Petrush, Cho, Amida, Pietri, Caluna, Vij, Sarshi, Tar, Saski, Mel, Hass and Venga.
            Recording of a conversation with His Imperial Majesty, Sarat-ban-essa-eban-Narulis, Anile Emperor, Master of Kadun.
 
            Meow
            Baz and Paw were relaxing in a café in a small park. It was quite croswded with families with kids.  Baz stared.  It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s here.   He silently passed the phone to Paw.
            “I think we just need to find somewhere a bit.” 
            They took their trays back to the counter and sauntered off.  The park was slightly hilly and there was a fine elevated slope with a tree to sit under.
            “The responsibility,” said Paw.
            “Not,” said Baz firmly, “for both of them.”
            Baz:  We’re Sarat’s cats.  Either two cats for Maya or would Tar prefer H-W?
            Sarat’s not the only one who can cause bottlebrush tails.
            Mitch: I think you do not play games with Fidubi biologists.  They may be brighter than you.      
            Another born diplomat.
            Sistenda: Worked it all out, of course he can do the job.
 
            Baz to Sarat:  Dad, Dad, I’ve got a proper job at last!
            Sarat: Aaaargh!  Where are you?
            Baz: In a park in Vaconik!  Masses to tell you.  Been to the Viledeen.  Special appearance of the Woman with the Bow.
            Sarat: Triple wow! What did you make of her?
            Baz:  I really really don’t know.  Anti-climax.
            Sarat: They’re penning me here a while longer.  They say now they’re going to make things really difficult…Oo, can’t wait.  We can still meet up in V-s.
             
            Tar to All: They say they’ll be around.  Mostly because they don’t want to miss the party.  Entirely confident PANTHER can do the business.
            Sarshi: Eeeeek!  Cool, isn’t he.  I told you Sarat was cool.
           
It’s coming, it’s coming it’s here.  I think if we just talk among ourselves.
Rewn to General Staff: I draw the line at torn and dirty T-shirts.
Carlutan:  It’s a Sarat!  Every home should have one.  Quite mad, of course.  Like us.
Za-remin: My breath leaves my body.
Rewn: How is the republic?
Za-remin: Frankly stammering in a corner. A remarkable young man.
Ban-talat: Now, guys, how are we going to hack this?  Confess I had not previously come across biting budgies.
Za-remin: Your children have no pets? 
Challin: I merely relish their mewling to the Straits Times.
Rewn: Certainly an outlet unforeseen.
Ban-talat:  And all shall rally to their cry.  Against this.  Just found it.  [Pic of Sarat abord a grey on beaches of Fidub]
Challin: One almost feels sorry for them.  I think we must be transparent. 
Divaldin: Absolutely.  Nothing of course can stop private bile but we can still have the expectation opinion be aired openly.  If that is your view, form a party and see who votes for it.
Rewn: Frankly nosy.  Want to know more of Papa’s view.
Challin: Did ears burn?
Divaldin:  Who are these punks, Dad?
 
            Rewn to All: Some of us of course have made a determinedly bad impression.  I think all of us might benefit from Essa’s views of the forum.
            Essa: I said they are up in the air.  They know they will land in a different world but it is one of which they know little or nothing.  How does this different world work?  What are its boundaries?  Has it any?  I told him that were he to tell Krarlik to go fuck himself they would be four-square behind him.  Clean is all that matters or they would be on the other side.  As is apparent, he was unconvinced.
Ca,jna: I just want to be there when Maya meets them F2F.  Can that be arranged?  Are there no special privileges for mothers?
Essa: I fear parents will just have to watch Channel Nine like everyone else.  I trust the Sarat and  Maya Show will not interfere too much with the scheduling. If Valden Park is cancelled, I shall complain in the strongest possible terms.
Mitch: Now about the southern Press…Karula and I have seen a free Press in full cry in the City but others have not had that pleasure.  Our own Press of course has been curtailed on the grounds of security but I should not think them innately less carnivorous.  And of course there is Ciletij.
Essa: Varchulan is not a complete fool.  He sits on the fence, in case Azt win.  A free and democratic Kadun is the best thing that can happen to Ciletij. Airoch and Vanya ran out of patience some time ago.  As you know, FAF share R+D with Kadun.  As you possibly do not know, it does not share with Ciletij, despite the famous statutes of the Quadrant.  Fidubi PANTHER do of course enthusiastically share evidence of Cult infiltration of the Ciletij military. We seem to have digressed?  No Grid forum of course is the real world, how great the divergence the issue.
Karula: That surely is the heart of the can of worms to madly mix my metaphors.  As a general principle, one replies in kind, gives what one gets, thus bruising another person who may feel unjustly bruised, he is simply not that bad, but of course all that is seen of him is and until he presents a more rounded personality on line he will continue to be perceived as something picked up in a field on the sole of one’s shoe.
Varna: I think you should post just that. So, bluntly, if Ciletij are stupid we are one up.
Essa: And know it.
Mitch: Perhaps develop the theme.  Your posts indicate you are a piece of shit.  However these are not the entirey of the unique lovable individual you surely are, a friend in need to gays, single mothers and even Dabidan princesses.  Those who know you and love you best, not least of course your good self, are appalled to learn any ill may be thought of you.  Certainly, should I have the pleasure of meeting you in RL, I should embrace you as a friend and brother (please rest assured that I am not gay), at least until you insert a poisoned dart in my ribs….I do not think any of us would be quite that abandoned but I think the benefit of the doubt. At least one I think has been identified as a ‘desk-jockey’, though speaking as one myself that does not necessarily negate a real contribution.  For others the mere intimation they should stand up and be counted and have not is a mortal offence. In principle it is an extremely delicate situation but I nor more than Sarat feel inclined to delicacy when my other half is being grossly abused.
Varna: And that.
Venga: More Grid.  Sarat must meet them.  If they like each other, all is resolved, if not, the shape of the ball park is more clearly defined.
Mitch:  That is actually very true.  I think we can all name political opponents who are if not good friends, then assuredly not mortal enemies.
Venga: I think somewhere non-threatening…They tell me Sarat is to be deposited in the Falsit, which I know well.
Challin:  !!!  Perhaps a word of explanation.  The Falsit caves are a PANTHER lair for cats on the move.  If it were a camp, it would have certain facilities.  It has none, bar a battered kettle, a nearby stream and a farm over the hill.
Essa: Do they like trees?  This may prove critical.  Has it trees or is it open land?
Venga: Very leafy.
Cho: Whom will they meet? Would it not be a golden opportunity to eliminate?
Venga: 1)He has accepted the job.  He has not started work.  I see no reason why what is true elsewhere should not be true here.  You accept a position in Sohenoil.  You are not Assistant Manager until you enter the office.  He does not disguise he is Anile heir.
2) Yes.
Karula: Sarat survives first assassination attempt.  I am not sure this is a good idea!  At least in the Falsit.
Venga: Search and disarm.  I didn’t say they’d like it.  It may shock them their hostility is taken seriously.  Or not.
Cho: Then why the summons?
Venga: A wonderful opportunity to meet you guys F2F and really thrash it out.  He is still PANTHER PR, learning how cats live in the field.  That they may know.
Cho: Deceit?
Venga: An elision of time.  I do not know your age.  In 20 years he will be Anile Emperor?  The hostility I think to class and rank.  I do not know that which rank is critical.  In truth the emperor has no more power than his heir – I looked this up.  The Anile heir once 21 has equally the powers of any military commander.
Cho: Therefore, were I in Azt, Sarat could clobber them, were he of such mind. Entertaining.
Karula: Maya?
Venga: Also.  I frankly do not believe they will sit on tree-stumps in the Falsit and either insult Maya or want to.
Karula: My funny-bone is attacked!  There is something about the vision of these guys sitting on tree-stumps.  Would they not find it – contrived?
Essa: Sarat won’t.  Plenty of camping and field-trips.  I think they are not so stupid that they cannot tell when a man is at home laying a fire.
Mitch: Too long since I assayed the Great Outdoors.  Damned if I can remember. 
Saban: Return to this camp immediately!
Karula: Have to confess I never knew in the first place.
 
Shavli to Sarat:  You’ve gone and done it.  Half the world will be at your feet.  The other half will be trying to kill you.  Of course you know that.  Is there any point in telling you to be careful?  Careful stays in Fidub.  Careful is not bloody live bait!  Just wish there was another way.  You gotta do what you gotta do.  Tell you one thing, WCS, whatever happens they are not getting me to the Shrine for the third degree! Take it I have to stay out of Kadun, which is (and isn’t) a bit of a bummer.  Sure the world’s Press will keep us informed.  All our love, Shav and Petrush.
 
Varna: I’m sure Sarat can be persuaded to be formal if it is sufficiently inflammatory.  Undoubtedly we must present him with Narulis’ sword.
Cho: ROTFLMAO.
Mitch: In of course the presence of the world’s Press.  On this auspicious occasion…
Sistenda: And a vamp for his desk.  One of the ones that squeaks and flutters helplessly.
Varna: Of course.
 
Ed note: Narulis left a number of swords strewn over Kadun, all apparently, according to meticulous dating, authentic.  It seems what he didn’t have was a sword-sharpener and so acquired a new one when the old one got blunt.  Not sure Sarat would approve – planned obsolescence, conspicuous consumption.