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

​Devastatingly grotesque, aren't you, all the 'cream of London medicine', devastatingly obscene and filthy and mad.  How exactly have you fixed it that lies, bestiality, corruption, psychosis, fascism, treason rule?   Let you know when the book is finished.
 
1.             THE QINE AFFAIR
 
Narulis kumsit var-goan Kada.                                                       Narulis kumsit var-goan Carla, Fas-sigreen, Van-senokka, Vaudon, Var-seganin, var-goan Kada. Narulis, author of Kadun. Narulis made Carlin, Fas-sigree, Van-senok, Vaudos, Var-segan and so created Kadun.
No, says Mitch.    Five kingdoms united under the imperial crown. Mitch is heir to Var-segan.
It is helpful to think of the empire as a coalition, a pact, says Mitch.                                                           In business terms, it was an agreement, a merger: we were stronger together than apart. Of course there was a Chairman of the Board. In the end neither side complied with the agreement and so we went our separate ways.
The facts of the matter are these: invaders from Harn brought the Cult to Kadun from across the ocean. Narulis, outsider, scion of the House of Fire, formerly rulers of what was even then the Republic of Fidub, happened to be around at the time, together with 22 of his doughty shipmates.                                                         In consequence of his contribution to the war-effort, they made him emperor and the Masters of Carlin, Fas-sigree, Van-senok, Vaudos and Var-segan became his stewards to hold the land in trust.
Since this unlikely sequence of events actually happened, historians have tied themselves in exquisite knots inventing reasons for it.
Cantilip tells it differently.
Earthpower is the energy of the cosmos, the erosion of valleys, the movement of continents, the orbiting of the planets, the heat of the sun.                                As the source of life, it encompasses life.                                The true ancestral culture of Kadun is power in balance, the union of life with the physical world and the union of male with female. However, the universe is generative, begets life, and so is seen as female.                                The ‘female’, the universe, is both complete in herself and creative; the ‘male’, life, is not; life cannot exist in vacuo: the ‘female’ is capable of independent existence and the ‘male’ is not.     This was not of course a perspective tolerable to the Cult.                        Most reproduction naturally requires both equally, despite the practices of High Harn - I believe some worms are hermaphrodite?
Sarat would know. Our men did as much running around waving swords and bashing each other as any other group of men.                       They did considerably less bashing women. The female was regarded as equally human. Kadun before the Cult was marked by some semblance of civilization.                                             We had literature, learning, art, rather than human sacrifice. Invaders came from Harn.                                    They tried to burn us.                            We fought.                                             Into this tripped Fidub, who took the glory and replaced irturbi culture with her own.
Cantilip is heir to Van-senok.
History or herstory?                                                       Either way, it’s a long one, long and sticky. You have probably heard of the Lays of Cafanine.                                                   Possibly you can even quote them.                It is less likely you know they were originally written in irturbi. (If you haven't heard of them, the reason so many people have is that the lays as in songs are also the lays as in sex, early examples of erotic poetry).
The empire turned rotten.                                       Some 900 years later, when the great experiment

had failed, the empire was in tatters and the Emperor Jaizal deranged, Zani defied him before the Great Gates of Azt. A framework had been breached - what, again?      Prudent men slipped away to discern the new new world order.                In the slave-states of the empire, rumour grew.                          Sea-dogs told of a kingdom in not-yet Zur.                                                   What passed for Jaizal's mind broke and the empire shattered.                          They killed Jaizal.                          Later other prudent men wished Kadun to endure.
Jaizal's killer, usurper of the Anile throne, was murdered in his turn.                                                      That sort of thing went on for some time.    One Cuisa-ban-paduan-coan said, Enough!
Enough or there will be nothing left.                                         Slowly, fitfully they reached an accommodation: the return of oligarchy.                                         Gentlemen, if we do not squabble, then all are supreme.                          For four hundred years nothing much happened.                                         For the literate few, newsheets reported from an apex of ineffable superiority the prancings and prattlings of the barbarian hordes. The covens were abased, castrated, content.                            Where there is no justice, a veil is drawn over the odd human sacrifice.              The Cult was a pestilence, always there, incurable.                                             Our power is absolute over our serfs and vassals.                                               Let us draw in our horns and be content.
Susheela, last Anile empress, daughter of Var-segan, fled with her children, and so the Aniles returned to Fidub.                                 It was congenial.                                                          No-one bothered them with the ludicrous notion of ruling Kadun. Some 600 years passed.                                                           For old guard and egalitarian alike, there had been no benefit in restoration of the Anile throne.                                                       There were no Grid, no satellites to signal the Anile heir's mildest criticism to 160 million irturbi, make him the pin-up of millions of radical teens.
Sarat-ban essa, licit heir (Anile emperor, Master of Kadun) was born, so they said later, mobile in one hand, modem in the other.                                                             In fits and starts the generations ran in parallel and Essa, his father, close to Tar, King of Dabida. But Essa was an ecologist and so there are two sides to our hero, the brash Fidubi radical, and the other.
“Try seeing Sarat as the middle-class son of professional parents,” Vij will say.        “I know it’s hard!                            It may make more sense then.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“How the other half of Sarat lives?                                        Has lived.”
“I suppose Mitch is also the ‘middle-class son of professional parents’.” “Mitch is Mitch and things aren’t always how they look.                             Sarat is not
running off with Var-sega’s heir.    OK, you can laugh at me for fatuous remark of the year.                                       What bonds them is radical politics.            Position gives them a vehicle, a relationship, the means to rock the world – do you understand how radical Sarat is?”
Sarat can’t rock Kadun without ending up on the Anile throne.              It’s a problem.              We are getting ahead of ourselves.  Sarat starts obsessed with the natural world.              He is going to be a vet. Bar a few genealogists and those of similar mind, people had forgotten there was an Anile heir. We need to go back just a bit, to Cho, Sarat's grandfather, and Airoch (not Sarat's grandmother nor yet President of Fidub) walking the river-front at Azt, straying into ill-lit streets where shabby workmen hurry home.
Darling, one cannot say, I abhor your urban conditions, I wish to restore the Anile throne! One has, said Cho, a responsibility. And so Cho entered Fidubi politics and changed the world.
Why not?    Sarat did. But Kadun had changed – regressed.                                       In the Age of Information, with a thousand Grid-sites from which to recruit, the Cult will be back.
Well, all right, it never went away.                                        The graves opened, the creatures from

the pit of desecration once again walked the earth.                       Something like that.                       What actually happened is                    a question more of economics than of cerement.
The world discovered mass production.                                                 The wealthy literate few saw Kadun finally become a museum-piece, a fossil preserved in amber, powerless.
Labour was cheap in Kadun and wealth not lacking, a manuscript sold to Mukal's, a handful of diamonds to Enbahaluk - Kadun gained her factories and her trade. All-Kadun, rich in both oil and ores, verdant, is essentially self-sufficient.                                                            For this reason, the Houses elected to remain All-Kadun.                                                             As Karula will put it, it is a geopolitical convenience, a place at the world-table.
The men who make things became a new power in Kadun and the men who make things knew nothing and cared less and were gobbled alive by the Cult's bankers in the City and so were spawned the squirming guts of our story, Capital Warz.                                                            To keep it simple, Kadun doesn't have an economy: it has two economies, which interact.                                                                                                                           The guys at the top deal with their own and the guys at the bottom don't know who the hell they're dealing with, hence the interaction. Broadly, Var-segan, Van-senok and Carlin kept the Cult out and everywhere else welcomed it in.                                                             At the time of which I am about to get around to writing, the City owned half Kadun and naturally wanted to own the other half.
Kadun's other problem is geography.                                                                                                                  Between Var-segan and Van-senok in the west and Carlin in the east lie the badlands.                                                             If this were not the case, Kadun would have long since split, but it is and it didn't.                                                   Borders in the head maintain the integrity of Narulis' Kadun and make unthinkable for the moment Carlin allied with Dabida and Fidub in the south in one blocs and Var-segan and Van-senok with Vasucula in another. The maintenance of the fiction of All-Kadun keeps open communication between west and east.
Vaudos, which is not nice to be near, holds the bulk of the coal, but oil and natural gas spurt in a huge band along the northern border. Borders between the Houses were historically as currently largely a matter of people ceasing to call themselves senoki and starting to call themselves segani.  The border between Kadun and Ciletij to the north is largely a matter of trees.                                               Historically as currently the Morag-fahdi roamed the entire continent and so formed such trade-routes as existed, north to south and east to west, and the south and Ciletij equally content to let the MF be middle-men; foreign traders clung to the edges, the general consensus being that the interior was neither welcoming nor safe, with the chief exception of Tjulsit, at the junction of the great crossroads, but Kadun's great ports were ever bustling cosmopolitan centres.                                                     Wicked people like me thought it was all rather like the advice given to women out after dark: keep to the main roads and areas that are well-lit and populous, and never ever accept lifts from strangers.
The world began to speak in bits and bytes.                      As information lacerated Kadun, the people learned desire.                     The vast hinterland of Kadun was slow to become a
consumer society and no People's Revolt had propagated the strange notion of human equality but now there were stirrings.                                              What happens to a bright boy who goes to the city and gets an education is he becomes a Nudra.                                     It is debatable whether this
constitutes progress.    Elementary education is good in Kadun; the people can read, write, calculate.                   Thinking is discouraged, there being too much it is distressing to think about, but bored soldiers hop about the Grid and senior officers turn a blind eye.             Neither Army

nor Fleet is attuned to what is happening in Kadun.
“It cannot be a question,” says Mitch, “of changing just one thing or indeed of many persons working separately. All of us have tried that, the unions, my grandfather setting up hospitals.   It makes not one whit of difference to the whole. There are lines you do not cross.    Many people live decent lives.           So long as they do not challenge the indecent.      Not least the assistance of people like me enables some semblance of civilization to prevail in the country.                  In the cities people are buried alive.      They think that tomb is poverty and lack of education.       I say that tomb is there if you are me.        I just get to stand upright.    There is a granite slab above our heads and its name is infrastructure. You make people better and you send them home to damp rat-infested tenements. You shorten their working-hours but they can barely afford to eat, let alone engage in what the south called leisure-time activities.             And the food is crap anyhow.   I hold there is that which is not negotiable, over which there is no choice.   What Fidubi landlord asserts his right to let property unfit for habitation? Everything must change, what and how people think, whether they respect all people. Entrenched power shifts only with revolution.”
How can you charge rent when you don’t own the land?                 Oh, right, in trust. Imperial Majesty, here’s 600 years of back-rent!                 How come he owned the land?                 Thus Mitch at 16, the age when every compromise, every inconsistency of the elders is an offence.                 Mitch at 17 wanted to give the whole lot away. There are a lot of stories about Mitch and Qine.                           Some of them are even true. It’s nonsense that Qine left school at 14 to work in a factory.                           Qine went on to college, too, not the Schools, but a decent education. Qine worked in a factory to pay his way and there he joined the union.       Qine’s good     with numbers.                 It didn’t take him long to work out he was being paid 50% of what it costs to live decently.
The pixie, they call Mitch’s lass in Var-segan. Big bloke like Mitch, doesn’t he squash her. Apparently not, because they have one, two, three in quick succession, the get it over and done with school of child-rearing.
Karula’s friends have been appalled by the whole thing, marrying a rich man and settling down to breed, as the less than friends put it, even if he is a
fellow-revolutionary.    Karula argues her corner forcefully. Correct me if I have missed something, but the revolution is not I think tomorrow.    I could be menopausal before there is change!                             As I see it, there is possibly only one thing worse than being in a crisis situation with teens or tweens, and that is being in a crisis situation with infants in arms. At least the tweens are mobile and able to feed independently and fetch Mom more ammunition should she need it.
Mitch too comes in for flak. Mitch has established a marketing consultancy in the City, Harn’s horrendous capital. Glam biz, Mitch.                That has what to do with the struggle?    There are powerful international civil liberties organizations with a Kadun section,                gatherings of exiles, but these too are part of the furniture of stasis. Mitch subscribes to Liberty Now!, the Movement for Economic Reform and the rest, but as he has matured                and reached his own analysis of this matter of Kadun it seems to him they don’t understand.                Anyhow, says someone, conditions in Kadun are a non-issue.
Unless you’re living in them, shoots back Mitch.                                           Worse places, look at Enbahaluk! Beneath this Mitch detects something dirtier. Bloody irturbi!                                          They don’t want to change anything. They like it like that.                                    They’re cattle. The lads in the union have had a lot of

time for Mitch, but now it seems Mitch has mellowed, too much to lose, and anyway it’s the way of the world, young men start families, have other commitments. Mitch clearly dotes on his daughters.
Not Mitch, says Changri
The lads consider.               There’s reasons for thinking not Mitch, all right. Ask Qine! The thought niggles.             What’s he doing then?.
Changri chuckles.    Lad and his lass…What do you think he’s doing? “Taking a little R+R, I reckon,” says Changri.                             “Before the real war.”
Regrouping, Mitch calls it.                                                                           Unfortunately I am a group of one.       So I start my own organization!          He ponders.                                       I want this to work, not unravel at the seams because all they see is Var-segan.                                       We secede from All-Kadun?            He grins to himself. Now there’s a thought!
Someone has to make a non-issue into an issue.                                       What else is marketing for? Karula logs on and gets on with the real family business, Kaduna-gar-jaht,
this matter of Kadun.    She reads through the economic reports from the Schools, makes notes and intermittently nurses, soothes, gets on the floor in the playpen, recites nursery rhymes and constructs castles out of brightly coloured bricks.
Mitch too has problems with Fidub.
“I hold there are human values and anti-human ones. We do not wish to go the way of Harn! That is the cry. The south ripostes: we do not go the way of Harn!
That the way of Harn is precisely – is a powerful counter-argument in certain circles where values antipathetic to those of Fidub are held to be indigenous and Narulis’ values alien. The empire civilized almost a whole continent.               It then uncivilized it, made Kadun so hated, so base…We abandoned the values brought from Fidub and reverted to those that had been dominant.                          That is the kernel of truth.                   But it is argued no native held those values called Fidubi, which is belied by history or how did thousands back Narulis. And it is argued that after 500 years Fidubi culture remained separate, imposed.         And it is argued that Jaizal represented the true culture of Kadun. All these arguments are trash. There is of course the anomaly.               When the empire was a force for good it is held to be Fidubi.     When it was evil, it is held to be irturbi. I do not think anyone has ever called Jaizal Fidubi. Narulis' values were squeezed out of Kadun on the pretext they were foreign.”
For most of 600 years, the Cult has been contained by PANTHER, formed by Narulis to eliminate the Cult from Kadun.                PANTHER cleave to the simple notion they're the best there is. They’ve been at it longest. Neither of these statements is entirely true, as we shall see.    Pioneers Against Nutters Threatening Harm to Everyone's Rights is a bit contrived, but when you've been called PANTHER for 1500 years you have to make it stand for something.                   Where there is FATCAT (the Federation Atrocities Tribunal Can't Abide Torture, just never does anything about it), there must also be PANTHER to chasten it.
PANTHER was not in the Age of Jaizal so sensitive of academic freedom that it refrained from destroying the odd grimoire and much knowledge was lost that only the rampantly psychotic would miss.                                                 PANTHER taught a public lesson.                     For six hundred years the Cult had had much the significance of a sect of snake-worshippers and the big cats had become part of the mythology of Kadun, oral history garbled in transmission.
To this day, historians, not zoologists, true, but they really ought to know better, teach

that PANTHER took its name from an indigenous wild cat now extinct and naughty children are told the big cats will get them.     Kadun is kept from closer links with her friends in the south by the sensation the south is not quite safe and travel does nothing to dispel these ancient notions.                        Fidub, the Singing Isles...Shaken visitors return - well,  they sing.                        What, demand the scoffers, is the tune?                    It's not like that it's more like - I don't know what it's more like, it just makes you feel that life is wonderful.                    The Institute of Geophysics in Arit has failed to find a satisfactory explanation and those who are less than lovable are made distraught by the Isles, as though the heat of the ground was burning through the soles of their shoes, but Kadun always had sent her young men abroad, to further their education, let them experience the wider world.                    To become civilized, though Kadun did not admit the word.
There were other links.                                       There had to be.                                       Dabidans had always got on well with the Kadun Fleet.                                       They'm be honest sailormen.          Coastguards, meteorologists,
rail-engineers, road-workers - sweet, lovable people they found them.                                                            But there's a case to be made that the power of the past is stronger than that of the present; at any rate the multiplicity of contacts with Ciletij along the northern border has never noticeably done much for cementing bonds of friendship between their two great nations.
PANTHER maintains a presence in Kadun, loose, transitory, mentors, artists and iterant labourers, curling up by the hearth only if welcomed.                        These proved enough to keep the Cult abased        but the debt is rarely acknowledged.                      There are 1500 years of reasons for this which we shall unravel slowly.          When the young reach an age to question, they find their elders disparaging.  Nothing like a good ratter, only let him stay in the barn. Cats and rats, the image is as old as Kadun.    But when they meet the ratters they find them educated, entertaining, and sometimes even people like us.                                     It is the kittens, they discern, who are unwelcome, freedom, democracy, disrespect.       The workers and peasants have less difficulty with the kittens. Working-people, country people, above all know which end is up.       It is not my lords and ladies invited to gatherings under the stars.              From generation to generation it has been passed down, Kinsqol, Xu-laman, Vasemalis and Jihina, solstice and equinox,             the four Days Celebrant as the Cult called them.             On these they performed their repulsive rites but because these days are equally the festivals of earthpower they are celebrated throughout the entire continent and (bizarrely) known even in the free world by their Cult names not their irturbi ones and so on Kinsquol Dabidans take the children to the zoo or visit Aunt Marsilva, but if you are invited to a celebration in Kadun, you say no – politely, mind.
You got your cooking, your carving, wood to chop, kids to tend – more latterly, you got calls to make, you got your homework.                                            You stay inside.    But we are in the modern world.    Things like that don’t happen any more.
From Zani Fidub established the dynasty Alzani-Meta, a second attempt at the great experiment, ruling the lands south of the Great Divide, the ravine that separates Kadun from what is now Dabida.                To understand fully the curious history I relate, you have to grasp the vital role played by the hotel trade and the food-processing industry.
The source of A-M’s lucre is Alzani-Meta Industries - the Cannery, the Confectioner's and the Cooler. Well, actually it's fish. In days of yore, Zuri dried fish, which they bartered. Then they canned it.  Finally they froze it.  Later, they dried, canned and froze fruit.    You get the gist.
What you probably don’t get is that it’s irturbi fruit.                                         The relationship

between Dabida and Carlin you could, I suppose, call fruitful.                                                          What one wants the other has, Dabida possessing apparently limitless supplies of natural gas, about which in due course even worse jokes will be made. Carlin stretches from south of Azt to the Great Divide, by which time it's scrub and the Master of Carlin lets it grow wild rather than struggle to cultivate that which resists cultivation, but in the spring there are flowers and people bring their kids for picnics and wave if they see someone on the other side.
There's a bridge. For the more athletic there're cramponing down the almost vertical face of the ravine, spanning the torrent (poetic licence; in the dry season you can wade across) and cramponning up the other side.
OK, let me try to be chronological. A number of young persons of roughly similar age could become confusing.    It may be better, though not much better, to delineate them by their year of school and later college than by their birth-dates; Mel (Dabida's heir) and Asdinan (Carlin's heir) are in the same year, though Asdinan will confuse things by dropping out and starting again. Cantilip (Van-senok's heir) is in the year below.                      There are only two months between         Sarat and      Hass (Mel's brother) but, the cut-off point of                      the school-year being what it is, Sarat is the year below Mel and Hass two years below, with Maya (Mel's and Hass's cousin) in Sarat's year.                      Despite Asdinan's being the heir and his papa, Saryulin, the elder of two brothers, the twins Sorg and Sarshi, Asdinan's cousins, are seven years older than he, and Mardis, their younger brother, two years older.                      Vij, Maya's brother, is 11 years older than she, she having been something between an accident and an after-thought. Fal, Kyse and I are the year below Mel.        Lastly, you may be relieved to learn, Mitch and Karula are some 14 years older than Mel and As, with whom we shall start. 'Where the woodcock sleep and the fox-cubs leap/Carlin, the prize'.
Saryulin, darling, there is nothing to do. The new Mistress of Carlin had been young and beautiful and kind and even loved animals; for a time she and Saryulin were besotted with each other, but she was bewildered by Carlin.                                                            She was also an airhead.
She put up such struggle as fitted her self-image as the perfect mother to sweep her grey-eyed boy off to Azt.                                             He would be deprived? asked Saryulin coldly.                                             Indeed he
would have been, a mere accessory to be shown off then tidied away.                              If she missed him, she hid it well.            He grew not to miss her, pedalling around Carlin after his father on a little blue tricycle with special wide puncture-proof tyres.
Thus Asdinan, at 4 much as at 24, pink of cheek, ruddy the word, indeed, stocky, wavy brown hair.              Sorg looked the dashing heir, a cause of irritation in years to come.              Worse, Sorg looked soulful.              As was the bookworm.              So we saw it at least.               It took a long time, after Sorg’s head had been blown away and Fal stood trembling with her knife at the murderer’s throat, for us to learn Sorg wrote good poetry.               Most of us lived.
Duvi returned to Carlin.                                                             She had left when she was 17 to travel the world, thought now to explore closer to home. She had spent 10 months at the commune on the Delta my mother was at three years later. My mother of course is Estanzia Morsen, Harn's leading exponent of womanspirit, as they think they call earthpower in Harn. To get Cantilip on this subject is dangerous, her basic position being that Mum’s main achievement is to make all women look as stupid as she is. True, this is much the conclusion I reached by the time I was 15, but she is my mother and she is actually not stupid, it’s just she has crossed wires on a couple of basics.

Soola (Carlin's mentor) invited Duvi to talk about her travels. As was 6. Saryulin had fallen hard for one of nature's morons and in retrospect was surprised at himself, mistrusted his judgement in these things.                                                         That Duvi was a non-moron was evident but that she had passed 30 without settling seemed to indicate she had no great desire for her own children, let alone anyone else's.                                                                                                              Nonetheless he invited her to the house and soon all three of them were on the floor with Asdinan's trains.                                                         Duvi talked of the wider world, and even to As it was obvious Duvi was more interesting than his mother.
The following afternoon Duvi turned up at Soola's cottage. "I've come to gossip.                      What happens to As during the day?" Soola laughed.
"The hairless terrier school of child-rearing.  Loike un pup. Half the business of Carlin is conducted with Asdinan curled up on someone's lap. He behaves himself as tiresome pedagogues might put it because he has no reason not to."
“It must be hard for him, though.                                       May I ask?”
“It's a complicated story.                                                             She had certain preconceptions.                                                         These were not met. A constant social whirl is not Saryulin's style."                                                         Sweet and stupid. And she came to me in tears, said no-one respected her, everyone laughed at her.                                                              He must have been mad. “Nor – other things. Deference is not part of the package.” He smiled                                                          “You know that.
Farvia didn't.    They met in Azt, of course, at Pilo's, a whirlwind romance.                         For a start she was appalled at the size of the house.”                         At twelve rooms Carlin is hardly bigger than a large farmhouse.                         Sorg called it our little wooden hut.     “I think you get the picture.
Even were Saryulin    persuaded to entertain, there is nowhere for the legions of guests to stay.”

 
 
different.”

They talked on.
“Change must come,” said Duvi. “He said, we do not know how to be
 
Soola laughed.
“I do not think Saryulin intends Carlin overtaken by history.”
“What, then?” challenged Duvi.    “No, not what.                                        We know what.                                                      How?” “Half Kadun asks itself that.”
Duvi found herself a small flat in Car-sandis, continued her freelance work

and after a while wondered if she intended being overtaken by Saryulin, whose hostility to entertaining clearly did not extend to not inviting her to dinner, tea, As's school's Open Day and anything else he could think of.                                                       When she went into the village, everyone was very, very, very nice to her, as though she were someone special, and she had no doubt tongues wagged.
“We should go away,” he said. Their eyes met. “I think that would be nice,” she said.
They planned a trip to the Lausanine suitable for small legs.                                               While As dissolved into the coma of a particularly weary little log, they sat by the fire in the bar and discovered each other.                                     Now she is telling him of camping on the Leolisle and he is reciting poetry, a dangerous sign, if not terminal.                                               'O know ye not the Singing Isles!'
"We must go again to Fidub," he said. "We?" she said.
He laughed and took her hand.

"There are difficulties?"
"We are independent," she said. He laughed again.
"We are."
"There must be a party!" said Duvi.
"We require no public ceremony," said Saryulin. Soola nodded approvingly.
But the neighbours must come to the party, if only to maintain the link which is never wholly acknowledged and never wholly severed, and so Mel, Tar’s eldest, first visited Carlin when he was nine.
Por stroked the house.                             The whorls and spirals smiled back at him. I was not prepared.
As threw open Ye Greate Door of Carlin.                                                          More poetic licence there, but it’s shorter than listing every step of enabling a nine-year-old to pretend to fling wide a door that weighs about ten times more than he does.
The sun pranced through the Window, bouncing off a thousand prisms. "Zeshanzesh," breathed Mel..
The Dacunine Window shimmered remorselessly in the afternoon sun. “Who is that?” asked Saski.
“Kaminua.”
“Cho!” said Mel. “That’s some profile!” “It is Narulis’ Window,” protested Tar.
Kaminua lived 600 years after Narulis.
“It was – repaired,” allowed Saryulin. “Carlin has not always been so
tranquil.”
The hall in Carlin stretches to the foot of the stairs which rise to a
half-landing dominated by the Window.                                          Beyond it is the Great Hall: there is another Window on the other side, but people never get so excited about that one.                                                  Beyond the Great Hall is the courtyard, around which the remainder of the house is built.                                                   There is music trapped in the Window, but Mel doesn’t know that yet.
It is a wedding-party with many guests and even the lizard (the Azt
slime-machine) can’t make much of it, even though the guests do include Mitch's parents, Heela and Kile (Marula, Cantilip’s mother, had a                                                           prior engagement; Vastulis, Master of Vaudos, is not the sort of person with whom one cares to mix, and Fas-sigree had been subsumed into Azt, another long story, not immediately relevant), but Mel and Hass discover ‘Opshar’s Glade and fall in love, and worse, hit it off with Asdinan.                                                           They stay on a few days.
Of course you must come to us! carolled Mel..
When the children had gone to bed, Tar bit the bullet.
“And the next thing is why don’t we all go and stay with Essa.” “And then we can all have dinner with Cho,” added Saski.
“I see no objection,” said Saryulin. “Perhaps in the summer, towards the end of the holidays.”
Plenty of time for Mel to babble about Carlin to Sarat and Sarat to demand to be taken to Carlin, but that would have happened anyway.
“It’s educational, it’s history.                                 Anyway, it’s my heritage.”

“You do not enter Kadun,” said Essa.                                                        He didn’t use that voice very often, the one that meant N-O, no, no room for negotiation, no space for argument.
The boys retreated to Sarat’s bedroom to confer.
“It’s politics,” said Mel.                                   “Azt will think Carlin is plotting.” “Plotting what?”
But Mel couldn’t make the leap to Cho on the Anile throne. “Plotting against them.”
“Conspiring with the enemy!” said Hass.
“You are the enemy!” said Sarat.                                                    “The hated, the loathed, the despicable, the foe, right?”
Mel was unfazed. “That’s different.” “How?” demanded Sarat.
They went back to Essa.                                We're not arguing.                        We just don’t understand.
Hmm, thought Essa
“Sit down, kids.”    You understand, he thought of beginning, but what do you understand, you’re eight.                                            “You understand we are all us protected by PANTHER.”
“Because Cho’s leader of the Senate,” said Sarat. “”Because I might be kidnapped!”
“Because Cho is head of PANTHER,” said Essa. Mel’s eyes widened.
“He’s head of intelligence and it’s top-secret!” Essa laughed in spite of himself.
“Not exactly.”    Then he wished he hadn’t said it, because it’d do.  “It’ll do.
PANTHER is active in Kadun.                                          You would be a target to get at Cho.”
“OK,” said Sarat.    It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. But Mel said: “It still doesn’t make sense!                      Aren’t we targets too?” “Tar’s head of the H-W,” said Hass.
“But not Anile emperor,” said or possibly sighed Essa. “To some people the Anile throne is significant, whether or not there's anyone on it.”
“It’s 600 years!” said Sarat.
“Being head of PANTHER sort of makes him emperor,” hazarded Mel More being emperor makes him head of PANTHER.                             It'll do
“The simple bit is we, the Aniles, are hated.  The complicated bit is that Zani's heirs have a formal position in the world and Narulis' heirs do not.          As Mel said, it's intelligence!         The rules are different.  Anyone of course may be targeted by some lone wolf, some stray nutcase, but what we are talking about is action by government agency.                We think Azt would try to kill us if we set foot in Kadun.”
“Wow!” said Hass.
After three years of hard labour, Zulagan was thrown out of Kadun, for there are still powerful elements with an older and relatively more civilized approach to dissent: the door is over there, let us hold it open for you.                                                     He founds the Campaign to Liberate Kadun (CLIK) in Zur. That is not part of the jolly old game and he is mauled by the lizard, an ex-convict, a common criminal.                                                            Do his politics not amply display his criminal mind! Zulagan has little time for the rights of property and CLIK an agenda more radical than is usual among the earnest. People imagine groups of honest working-men in floppies and

dungarees sitting at slatted tables, probably with sawdust on the floor.                                                    Clean sawdust, mind.
Anyone targeted by the lizard must be a good bloke and there are plenty of hardened bruisers in Dabidan politics spoiling for a fight. Zulagan is a good bloke and readily makes friends.                At a conference on Kadun: which way forward? he gets deep in conversation with a trio of Fidubi.
“Interesting chap,” he says afterwards.                                 “Knows an 'eck of a lot about

Kadun.”


His Dabidan comrade chortles. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he!” “Why’s that, then?”
“I’m really not sure you want to know this.    Guy’s full name is

hoit-ban-varna-eban-Narulis.”
“Flaming hell!” says Zulagan.                                 “You’re kidding - I understood he were in
politics.”
“Oh he is.    Thirty years in the Senate, my son.                    You want to know how
things work around here, you talk to Cho.”
Working-people know PANTHER is not on the side of the ruling class. “Social workers!”    said Mellow.                   “If someone's ill we make him better. The
problems are ingrained, part of the fabric of society.                                          What are we achieving for Kadun?"
"What do you suggest?"
"There's nothing to suggest.                                              There has to be a whole new infrastructure, someone who can form a government, hold the asylum together.                                           Narulis had a policy! All we can do is destabilize."
As the young Krarlik bent to his books, as he deepened his unique personal knowledge of the Cult, so he knew in his bones the Great Master ultimately must triumph, the flaw in irturbi at the critical moment they had weakened, his mission to crush the barbarian Ciletij, avenge.    Jaizal's weakness had been his pride.                                            He had not thought serfs and peasants capable of wielding such power.          He Krarlik, must be humble, learn.
Meekly he must defer desire.                                                Krarlik has an interesting streak of self-abnegation, his ancestress no Mistress of Kadun but a concubine, a worthless whore.
Cho and Zulagan had dinner. The agreement lay on the table between them. “Call it giving something back,” said Cho.
“Looks to me as though it’s giving rather a lot back.                                               Without wishing to seem ungrateful, I would like to ask – to note that our policies are not – I would not be suggesting because frankly I do not see we pose any threat.”
“The opposite,” said Cho succinctly. “If there is a price, it’s turning the heat up, not down.                          Someone has to put a bomb under them.”
“You have a reputation as a radical,” conceded Zulagan. “We have not talked frankly about – “
“My other aspects? We have not. “ “Kadun is a personal concern, should I say.”
“There were,” said Cho. “accommodations.               You may call it a protection racket.    In sum dues became paid to the Houses, taxes, security.” He smiled.               “By them as int paid nowt before. In Carlin and Var-segan, much has been given back.               In

Van-senok no charges were levied.                                                     In Vaudos the word is extortion.      Fas-sigree of course disappeared up its own.                                             And then there is the sale of land not theirs by right to sell. There is an issue, charging rent for land one does not own.”                                            He smiled again. “What duty can one owe to a non-existent emperor?           They went their own way.
Effectively each became an independent state.                                                          Only in the modern age did they agree once more to be All-Kadun to be a power in the modern world.                                                            The propertied class.                                                                 I think the propertied class needs shaking up.”
Saryulin received notification tank-traps were to be laid across the meadow, barbed wire fences erected.                                                Clearly it was insufficiently macho a nation of the importance of Kadun cease as a matter of mere geography.                     He responded tartly.                     This is twice nonsense! Shall our friends in Dabida invade? Do their tank have wings? Duvi drew irresistible little winged tanks fluttering across the Great Divide.                                    The Straits Times published both letter and cartoon.
The actual problem of course was it's perfectly easy to get out of Kadun if you're reasonably athletic.                                 You walk out.
Bluff?    thought Tar.                                 They wish to see what they provoke? Whom? Let us be provoked!
"Darlings," said Airoch to the journos, "Fidub would have no alternative but to see it as a hostile act.  We seek closer links with our friends in All-Kadun.   Are we not both signatories to the Convention?"  You know, the one that upholds free passage of peoples.

 
 
 
 
Carlin!

The Dabidan Representative at Fidub looked plaintive.
"Don't talk about us as though we don't exist!                                                  Makes us feel in the way." A buffer-state between Fidub and Kadun.
Naturally Alzani-Meta resists any threat to her lucrative trade-links with
 
An old war, not even sabre-rattling, more like kicking tin cans, verbal

wall-paper, a radio permanently burbling                                                             in the background.                                                        This time it might be serious, but as ever 95% of the people on both sides of the border spared it five seconds' attention then got on with their lives,
That is how it was, but how it was was not precisely how it would have been, but for Qine.
By the time the summer came, Duvi was pregnant, and in fact she too had three in rapid succession, first Omnian, then Liande, then Auscu.                                         She subscribed easily to the hairless terrier school of child-rearing.                   The tiresome bit, surely, is having them, get that out of the way.                           There were other perspectives.           At it loike rabbits.                             No-one had ever thought Saryulin short on hormones.                                         Nor did he lack former-single-parent  guilt but, like most sufferers from this dismal ailment, he was not sure what to do about it. We must act as a family! he thought fervently.                                                                  How, when the age-gap is so great?
Mel and Hass went regularly to Carlin but the Great Visit was postponed and family holidays taken at 'Dunswimming', the beach-house.                                                     Asdinan seemed content to tag along, build or help build sand-castles, and                                                           read and scribble.                                                         True, he was soon more than old enough to go to Zur on his own, but that too was postponed until the dust had settled from the Qine affair.
Wandering the Grid instead of doing his homework, As suddenly went, “Waaa!” and ran downstairs, but it was spring and a warm one for Carlin, everyone was

in the gardens soaking up the first hot-rays of the sun.                                                  Aargh!                                                        Try the herb-garden. There Duvi was pottering, Saryulin lounging and Omnian failing to help,
“The news!” babbled As. “Turn the TV on!” Reverie turned to consternation.
“It's Micheal!”
Not harmed, we trust.    No, no, it's just, look, just come!
Mitch was in his final year at the Schools.                                                   Now he was speaking to the world from Var-segan..
“I have known Qine since we were born.                       I do not think I am a bad judge of character.                    He is not capable of not having done it.                    His politics come from his being a decent man, are in fact those of CLIK, which you will know is a wholly legitimate organization based here in Zur. Qine stands, as do I, for a society in which people are not executed for crimes they did not commit, a society in which there is the rule of law, a society in which people are not executed for their opinions. Qine is a workers’ democrat. He is outraged, as am I, by the condition of the working-class.                    That condition rests in good part on the right of landlords to let property unfit for human habitation.                    When you have finished fulminating, nowhere else on the continent, though there are rich and poor, large houses and small, is that right accepted.     No Vasuculi landlord is allowed to let
rat-infested hovels, as no Vasuculi employer is allowed to fire workers who reject unsafe conditions. I did not think Kadun had sunk so low that it hanged the innocent for their politics.                 There is not one scrap of evidence. You cannot even bring a man to court with no damn’ evidence.                 There is something called Justice and there is something called Evil.”
Kadun on trial. You next, Mitch? Mitch at home.
“Qine, you stupid, stupid bastard!”
He’d been shooting his damn’ mouth off about the capitalist class, rich bitches, bloated bastards, exploiters of the poor.                                                       One poor little ‘rich bitch’ had been raped and murdered and Qine had no adequate alibi.
Mitch displayed an awesome talent for agit-prop even at that early age (that and getting the best damn’ lawyer in the entire City). Var-segan became packed with every student agitator the Schools had spawned.                                                       Then the world’s press arrived.
Mitch remembered to mail his tutor.
There is a quota of permitted international incidents. There may on occasion be points awarded in camera, as opposed of course to on camera, for bringing such an incident to a successful close.                      You will return to the City to sit your Finals if you have to commute daily to do so.
There was a rally in Var-segan.
A red-headed pixie called for revolution.                                      Mitch thought: I like red-headed

pixies.


“Great speech.                Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.” “Why, thank you!                    Karula.”
There was a rally in the Saa’nda Senta.
“Hi, I’m Vij.    I’m Tar’s nephew if you be folk from far away – Tar’s the guy

called King who lives in the rabbit-warren on the hill.                                                              So I get to speak on behalf of

Alzani-Meta and everyone yells at me that I’m talking garbage.” [Shouts of hey Vij, we love you!]
“I have fans!”
[Of course he has fans, muttered foreign journos.                                         He looks like a bloody
rock star.]
Vij, like Mel, is striking: large with lots of black curls and on this occasion
the attire of a beachcomber.
“”I just grabbed the mic to say that as far as I can tell there is no-one at all in this country who is not on the side of Mitch and Qine. I’m also of course a beneficiary of AMI, not to mention a share-holder.                               Mitch isn’t the only one who knows guys in unions. I was at school with some of their kids.                               What is the big deal?                               And if they think things aren’t right, they                               say so, which is how it should be.           That’s                     it, really.                     Except of course they are both very, very brave.                               They say what they think in a society that goes ape over people saying what they think.             As we all shoot our mouths off here, I think we should remember that we’re fortunate to be able to without fear.”
Mitch spilled his coffee. Heela smiled.
Chants began of so-li-da-ri-ty!
“Shut it!” said Vij (amicably).                   “Guys have serious things to say.” Several hours later Vij plugged ‘Varsegan’ into the search-engine. Did you mean Var-segan?
Vij scowled.    Since when did search engines do hyphens?
Var-segan’s Gridsite invited anyone who cared to go join the party. Anyone? thought Vij, anyone at all?
He rang Tar.
“An excellent notion,” said Tar.                                                         “I do not think they will close the border with Alzani-Meta on the wrong side.”
“Alternatively,” said Vij after a moment, “my quiet unassuming life just got interesting.”
He mailed Mitch.
Love to have you, mailed back Mitch.
Even with the H-W?                               Tar doesn’t want me to be lonely. Always room for one more, mailed back Mitch.
He wandered into his parents’ bedroom.
“How does one announce a prince of Dabida?” “Look it up,” said Kile.
“You invited him?” asked Heela. Mitch looked shocked.
“Oh no, papa. He asked if he might come.” “You require my consent?”
“I suppose,” said Mitch, “actually I do.” “Meaning he is coming anyway?” Mitch nodded.
“I shall speak – “ said Heela with mock ferocity, “ – to the guy who lives in the rabbit-warren.”
Vij walked into a barrage of cameras.

This official, Vij?    You representing A-M, Vij?                                 What does Tar say, Vij? “I sit back,” murmured Essa, “and count the tripwires.”
The Zur Star picked up Vij’s line.                                 What is the freaking big deal here!
Nothing, nothing in the politics of these two guys would merit more than two seconds’ attention in the civilized world.
It’s that word again. Kadun has not thought to be democratic but considered herself on the whole civilized.
Rape the Dabidan model.                                                              It’s all garbage, put on for the camera.                                                   Bollocks! said three million Zuri.
The lizard gave its first belch in Vij’s direction. This disreputable juvenile presuming to comment on the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.                                                    Surely Dabida is a constitutional monarchy.
The Dabidan Press guffawed.                                               You know what they say.                                          Dabida is a constitutional monarchy: the monarchy wrote the constitution.
Enter the Dabidan Constitution, smiling engagingly for the camera. Effectively there is only the Constitution.                                           If the State tear it up, there are the
Crown and the people.    If the Crown tear it up, there are the people and the State.                               If the people tear it up, demand anti-democratic legislation, there are the State and Crown. It is not classic democracy.                                        That is why it works.
Mitch blinked.
“Who in hell devised that one?” “Need you ask!” sighed Vij. “Fidub?”
“PANTHER!    We shall establish a kingdom in Dabida! cried Fidub.                                  You know, like the last one we established that’s just gone right down the tubes…We shall devise further checks and balances to ensure that this time it works!”
Come on, Tar.    Mitch, Tar.                     My lord of Var-segan, Tar! You got views on
Mitch, Tar?
“Certainly I have views on Mitch.                                          He seems to me an excellent young man.
We are all of us aware that differences of approach exist between the south and Kadun, differences that have been respected.                                                        There can be no respect for indecency.                                                     Clearly if one shred of decency remain in Kadun, if she is ever again to hold her head up in the community of nations, Qine must be instantly released.”
The lizard dribbled over the personal power of Alzani-Meta and attempted to convince Dabida she was an absolute monarchy.
“Cho is livid,” said Vij. “Cho?”
“Micheal!”
“Have I put my foot in it?”
“Choit-ban-varna-eban-Narulis, head of Sohenoil, former leader of the Senate of Fidub.                   Known universally as Cho.”
“I feel myself blushing,” said Mitch. “I rarely blush.                                                     It is a strange and novel experience.”
“You wish me to present you?” teased Heela.
“It is with the deepest regret, sir – this appalling object is my son. You know
the guy.”

 
 
with them.”

“I know the guy,” admitted Heela.
“Essa and Tar are like that,” said Vij.                                                               “Mel and Hass spend the summer
 
Pause.
“Ban-varna has grand-children?”
“Four.    Sarat’s the eldest, then three sisters, Shavli, Zika and Ven.” “Your cousins visit Carlin, I understand.”
“Mel and Asdinan are about the same age.” “And - Sarat?”
“Sarat’s more Hass’s age.”
Azt continued to treat the affair as though it were a trivial local incident

involving young malcontents.                                           Consequently when Mitch dressed up and went to Azt to see the ‘Minister for Justice’, the Minister refused to see him.       Nothing continued to happen.
“No-one,” said the hot-shot lawyer, “really believes they’ll bring it to trial any more.           Digging their heels in.”
In such circumstances the Press tend to lose interest.                                              Fortunately there was the story behind the story.
Even here in Fidub there are guys with a strong personal link to Kadun.              One such man is Choit-ban-varna-eban-Narulis, head of Sohenoil, eminent politician, notorious radical. Cho lives in Narulis’ family residence, no less.                          You have seen shots of Var-segan.        It’s a pre-fab in comparison.
Camera dwells lovingly on the family home. All-Kadun convulsed.
A little it is like the Summer Palace at Khole, Cho's des res on the Sohenisle. The front consists in one enormous highly polished room supported by pillars, ball-room, throne-room, who can say for it is not precisely a room but roofed space, the front open, protected from rain by a covered terrace.                                                     Perhaps it is the scene of amateur dramatics for there is a stage along the right-hand wall, stage or dais.                                                               In the far left-hand corner there is a small door to the rooms beyond and the courtyard.
“It would be slightly less appalling,” said Essa, “coming from me.” “Would it?” asked Tar.
Essa shrugged.
Press-fiends at the gate, Cho.
“We say the Anile throne has a symbolic significance, regardless of whether there is anyone sitting on it. That significance, the fight for truth, justice, decency, is epitomized by Mitch’s current struggle.                            I am delighted to see we still breed ‘em right.
Ciletij began to froth at the mouth.
“I maintain close ties with PANTHER.               I have seen the file on Qine.               He seems to me an excellent young man. The conditions of the urban working-class in Kadun are an affront to all civilized people.               They are wholly unacceptable and from Wintawa to the Leolisle they are not tolerated.               There are no unfettered rights of property. There is gross cowardice, is there not, in the refusal of open debate on the matter.               No evidence exists against Qine.      Must I really turn the screws?”
Airoch cold.
“The Republic of Fidub does not presume to dictate to Sohenoil with whom it

may trade, still less to AMI.”
“He has threatened Kadun!”
“He has expressed an opinion.                                                  Darlings, one understands that to express an opinion is in Kadun a capital offence. This is not Kadun."
“One says,” murmured Vij, “what one thinks not what others would wish one

say.”


“Of course,” said Heela.
Brazen it out, thought Vij.    He began to laugh.
“Couldn’t you have tried, Cho!” He grinned what he hoped was engagingly at

his hosts.    “To sound like any other outraged democratic politician.” “We need the south,” said Mitch hesitantly.
“Ciletij too is part of the Quadrant.”
“How damn’ dependent are we?                                      Surely the banks in the City - ?”
Eggshells, thought Vij.    It is his politics that are offended or his nationalism?
Both!    Ah me, the global power of capital.
“Between us,” sighed Vij, “we can turn screws                         in the City.” “Zeshazesh!” said Duvi.                           She took Saryulin’s hand.
“His Imperial Majesty,” said Saryulin, then stopped. “Who?” said Qine’s mates in the union.
Zulagan said: “He’s just bloody declared war on Kadun!” “Notorious radical,” said Hunri.
“You gonna boycott Kadun, Cho?”
“That would scarcely benefit the urban poor.”
The lizard didn’t hiss.                                                    Why should it have when Ciletij was howling the door down?
Kind of inflammatory, Cho, why did you say that, Cho, walking a tightrope, Cho, careful you don’t fall, Cho.
“Fall where?    The true empire,” said Cho, “united five kingdoms under the imperial crown.                             It had no designs on neighbouring territories.       The perversions of the years of decline have come – perversely – to represent the whole.                                   Pick,” added Cho, “my lord Krarlik, on someone your own size!”
Who the hell is Krarlik?
Statements are being made, thought Mitch.                                                              I am not sure that I understand the language.
The summer holidays began and Mel and Hass went off to Fidub.
Essa and Tar are like that, babbled some chatty Zuri.          The camera arrived at the white house on the dunes.                                         Click, Ven is talking to the donkey, click, Shavli is just off to a party, click that is Zika in the pool. Click, the camera rests adoringly on the
pin-up..    Darling, he is delicious! Death, really one had thought the Aniles atrophied! This pin-up the Anile heir.      There is an Anile heir.                His father is an ecologist, I understand.    How – extraordinary.
Sarat’s first encounter with the press, Gorse was to recall fondly, was not harmonious.
“Why don’t these guys get a life!”
“What happened to the agreement?” asked Mel.
There had been an understanding with the hill.                                          Take all the pictures you like

of Tar’s baby boys, so long as you do it with a zoom lens.
Rumour, new evidence, rumour, discussions at the highest level, rumour, gross miscarriage of justice, rumour some poor dumb bastard will be scapegoat.                                                     Qine was released.
“I’ll be off in the morning,” said Vij.                                  “Books to read, essays to write.”
“Tell me about it!” said Mitch.                                              “I really cannot thank you enough.”                                                       Pause. “I have written thank-you letters.    I should appreciate it if you would be so kind as to deliver them.”
“Not a problem,” said Vij.
Qine, leaner, paler, harder, walking slowly up the drive to the House. Mitch came out to meet him and they went off into the Orangery.                     Only two people know what they said to each other and they aren’t telling but to his mum and dad Qine said, “I can’t repay that.                     Can’t stay here, neither.”
“I understand that,” said his dad.
“There’s one more person I have to talk to,” said Qine. “So I should hope!” said his dad.
Heela looked up.
“I have brought more trouble to this house.” “Nonsense. We thrive on it.”
“I don’t know how to thank you.” “No matter. What will you do?” “Go underground.”
“We won!” howled Mitch. Heela raised his eyebrows. “We?”
And so now it is acknowledged there is another player in the game of Kadun or, as people put it more succinctly, the cat is out of the bag.                     On warm summer evenings when all is still the strange sight can be seen of people lying on the ground on their sides, grazing their hip-bones and getting dirt in their ears, listening for the sound of money talking.                It is thought.    It is understood.         It is believed.   All these are good beginnings for sentences that people don't know how to end.                            The emperor (not that there is one, of course) concerns himself with this matter of Kadun.                                                    The empire is 600 years distant and as near as the expression of taut fury on Searc's face when he is
out-manoeuvred.    A lot of years will pass before I rejoice in the ludicrous title of Economic Liaison Officer to the Anile Throne.   For the moment Cho's main achievement is probably contributing to men and women of good will doing exactly nothing.                 There is a variety of reasons for this.      As Cantilip was more or less to put it, lads 'ave their pride, don't want ter go cap in 'and ter big 'ouse.
No-one knows what Cho would do in the event of whatever the latest plot was coming to fruition and no-one wants to ask him.            Asking the leader of the Fidubi Senate for assistance in overthrowing the government in Azt is treason and overthrowing the government in Azt oneself is patriotism.                     What is asking assistance from Narulis’ heir?            Wicked people like me said that Kadun was like a teenager pretending it could operate independently of its parents. Even more wicked people said that Kadun was schizophrenic about the empire                                     By this they meant not that the empire was both its
glory and its shame, thought that was true too, but that empire was both Fidubi and irturbi.

After all, Fidub had spent the last 600 years being the official enemy and the unofficial friend.
Grid-sites appeared devoted to the Cult of Death of High Harn.                                                     Denzine Master Chief Preceptor Fugitry contacted Alzani-Meta, Fugitry who was to be Mel's tutor and also mine: later Kyse will describe me as 'world-expert' in the Cult of Death, but there are a lot of years to go there too.                                                            The number of titles I shall accrue, deservedly or not, is itself ludicrous, and that's just the flattering ones                                                            (I'm also the Harn-bred whore, a camp-follower and Sarat's little joke, the more printable ones).                                                             For the moment thinking irturbi were disturbed by encroaching centralization not encroaching sorcery and nobody much was getting excited, except of course PANTHER: snake-worshippers have Grid-sites too.
Kadun is old, Kadun is subtle.   You went for meetings with the management team of the refinery at Tjulsit.  They were civil enough (in, you said to yourself, the inevitable, patronising irturbi way) but you knew you never wanted to meet those people again.    Telecoms as advanced as they are now, what need?                   You skied in the
purpose-built resort in the Lausanine Heights.  The scenery was magnificent, but the hotel was awful. I swear the staff tried to make you feel in the way!               Next year, you tried Ciletij.               As a gust of cold air on a summer's evening drives people indoors, fewer people visited Kadun.
Small-ads in thick smudged lettering promised charisma and pornography flooded Kadun.                    Grid-sites multiplied, bureaucracy festered and PANTHER were grim. Rules for a past age!                    What price derring-do in the sands with the world's media watching?    Shall Dabida invade Kadun to stamp out sorcery!   Shall Fidub violate the integrity of a sovereign state by sending the Aniles to conquer, occupy and rule?  And what is PANTHER in this modern age but a bunch of castrate tom-cats? In this modern age, with its electronics, its telecoms, its in places free Press, its Federation, its technological warfare, rules could be broken.
Kadun has never led the world in respect for human rights, but now the allegations grow darker and even insane.                                         Malcontents.                                                   Blown out of all proportion. Any bloody fool can get a load of gobbledy-gook off the Grid.                                                     What is unbearable cannot be real.
What are PANTHER doing!
But it becomes evident that though things are bad they could be worse, that the Cult is being stayed, covens blossom but shortly afterwards wither and perish and this of course adds to the schizophrenia.                                                            The old gentleman in Fidub who keeps cats is clearly operational.
Ship of the Vasucula Fleet Torrential Haze (some people think Vasuculi are a bit strange) mooched into northern waters, supposedly, if anyone were so gross as to ask, or search them or something, loaded with materiel for their gallant allies in Ciletij, though why their gallant allies in Ciletij, whose life-blood is heavy industry, should want materiel from Vasucula is less clear. Anyhow, they ran out of steam before they reached Ciletij and found it necessary to put in at the naval base at Samandit in Van-senok, which they could do since technically there is absolutely no war, and even if there was even Corsin acknowledges that the cunt witch bitch Marula, Mistress of Van-senok, far away in the northern forests is a law unto herself. The only way to get Van-senok is to kill every tree in sight                     The Kadun Fleet joined them on board for a drink and found it

regrettably necessary to requisition their cargo.                                                           The Vasuculi smiled.                                                           The first time they had wondered how much of it actually reached the resistance, but they’re good capitalists in Vasucula and of course the middle-men get a cut.                                                               It turned out to be 20%.
Long-range weapons are at a premium in Kadun, their distribution curiously limited.                This is because ordinary guys can take on Cult guys so long as they can stay out of the range of the Cult guys’ minds.                What that range is depends on the degree of the Cult guys and people can make and have made bad mistakes. You will swiftly riposte, ah, then ordinary guys can take on PANTHER guys.                The key is of course that ordinary guys do not on the whole want to take on PANTHER guys because the PANTHER guys aren’t threatening to tear their brains from their moorings.
The most obvious long-range weapon of course falls from the skies.                                                           Most of the Kadun Air Fleet cannot be wholly relied upon to bomb the right people.                                                          There are people in Azt who would actually rather most of the Kadun Air Fleet didn’t exist but since clearly its non-existence would leave Kadun a sitting-duck, its existence is grudgingly tolerated, if not its possession of long-range weapons from Vasucula.                                                          Gosh, one never knows when they might come in handy.
Anyway, think of the bears: if Kadun is perceived to be not merely divided, which she obviously is, but fragmented, Ciletij opportunists may seek to join the party.
The Cult achieved governance in Azt, but really, mused people, it appears to be more they have achieved governance of Azt.                                                         There had been troop movements and a flurry of ill-reported incidents, even air battles. Civil war in Kadun! But then it became clear to outside observers that Kadun both resisted and succeeded in resisting and large swathes of territory continued to behave largely as normal. Borders have been redrawn. Only a matter of time before Kadun splits.                                                          From time to time something exploded somewhere, there was a vid on the Grid of rubble and a few guys were reported dead.                                                                If the bang had been loud enough, the southern Press asked: Is this civil war in Kadun?
The furore quickly died down as it obviously wasn’t and in fact Kadun appeared to be in stasis.      Why is Kadun not bombed into submission! The word was rather that, if anyone was bombed into submission, it would be Azt.       Certainly Azt terrorized people but it had failed miserably to terrorize the right people and in particular the military, who clearly held the balance of power.   Some people who’d never had much time for Kadun’s officer corps now markedly warmed to them.              Others continued to wonder when and if they were ever going to do anything about the conditions of the poor. Why on earth does the Kadun Air Fleet not simply bomb Azt!      I guess some of the guys are loyal to the government?            They don’t want to fight each other?       To horrific allegations of torture and murder were added stories that, thought outside observers, were just plain weird.      In the age of the smartphone complete with video recorder, both sides tended to a maidenly coyness regarding the exercise of the more graphic aspects of mind-war, at least until Caniba, but from time to time stories surfaced of air-battles which didn’t look like air-battles, but much more like firework displays or maybe the kind of stuff you get at air-shows with pretty coloured smoke.              Someone is making this stuff up!        Like maybe cat-people.              Everyone knows what kooks there are on the Grid.  Probably made up by a kid in Harn.         Close analysis would have revealed two sets of aircraft, both apparently members of the Kadun Air Fleet.                  But one had VS emblazoned on its wings and occasionally a silver birch, and the other had FV and a death’s head. FV is the motto of the Cult squadrons.    It stands for Forever Victorious. Depends which circles

you move in: others render it Fucking Vampires.
Corsin collectively describes the six Cult regiments. The vampires are their air-arm. There’s a very simple concept at stake here. What your mind tells you is happening to you is what is happening to you, unless you tell it to stop drivelling and start freaking out the other guy, and if your mind tells you there’s a very large boulder falling on you and that notion overwhelms you, you will curl up into a ball to attempt to shield yourself or try to run, without the other guy working on your bones and soft tissues,  which if he is Corsin is what he will do next, slowly separating the constituent parts of your body while holding your screaming mind intact and alive.   Not a lot of people   know that. Fortunately, not a lot of people can do it, either.  Also fortunately, some  people can resist and destroy it. Corsin are based around Azt and do not routinely  concern themselves with events in the vast hinterland of Kadun, which either do not require their control or are for the moment at least beyond their control.  True, if they  scent fresh blood they may suddenly appear, torture and kill a large number of people and go away again, but there aren’t so many of them as to be expendable and being hanged by PANTHER is not part of their agenda. They like to know what’s on the ground first.   Still, their mere existence exacts a certain docility.
And their growing numbers. Couple of things here about training-times.  If you are PANTHER, you can fairly rapidly adapt your skills to other media but it takes much longer to become either Corsin or capable of destroying Corsin.  An air-arm is of  no use to Corsin if all it can do is drop bombs and provide transport like the regular guys. It has to be able to do what Corsin suspects Fidub can do, but doesn’t know. Of course Fidub being able to do it doesn’t mean KAF can do it.  If  Corsin dominate the skies,   then it’s all over. On the other hand an  expensive mistake could cost them everything.  On the third hand, insufficient aerial mind-warriors could still be defeated by very large numbers of regular guys. Finding out how to do things on your own by trial and error takes longer than being taught how to do them. Lastly, Corsin do not think it inconceivable in the particular eventuality they conceive that Dabida and Fidub would come to the aid of KAF. All they would have to say to the public is that the Cult tried to get the regular guys.  Since they scarcely even govern Kadun, Corsin are not ready for  war with Dabida and Fidub.
KAF can think too and what it thunk was how to get our guys trained by
Fidub.
Couple of things about the  skills themselves.                                         There is the mechanical  skill
of acting on muscle and the more complex skill of acting on mind. Thus you can stop someone shooting you without interfering with his free will, just as you can physically. Acting on his mind somewhat deflects his attention from shooting you to the giant cat lunging at his throat. It still doesn’t interfere with his free will: he reacts as he would physically.
Thus Kadun is two countries.  One is Cult.  No-one is quite sure what the  other one is. Some people are loyal to an idea of Kadun which leads them to obey what they like to call the lawful government, oblivious to the cat-calls asking what is lawful about it. Others are loyal to a different idea of Kadun whether that be Kadun before the Cult crawled back or the ideals of Narulis’ Kadun.   Some people want democracy.   A   lot of people are loyal to their Houses but it is not as simple as wishing Carlin or Var-segan  seceded from  All-Kadun;  Narulis  generally creeps  in somewhere.    Then of

course there are the rationalists, some of whom back or at any rate obey the ‘lawful’ government because they have never seen the Cult in action and so don’t believe it can be as black as it is painted. Obviously there must be order. So far as there is a government     of .Kadun at all, that government is Corsin, who are something the  members  of  the civilian administration which is the face Azt shows to the world are not: intelligent and informed.   Thus when the Minister squawks there must be a show-trial of General Prog   or of Nodsi, Regional Commander (air) for the entire Lausanine, Corsin say get real.   Or at any rate not yet. For the moment the keys to the submission of All-Kadun are stealth, cunning and undermining the moral authority of the old ruling-class. Corsin understand that if they do anything stupid they can lose, particularly if Kadun were to  split,  Var-segan and Van-senok in the west allying with Vasucula and Carlin in the east allying with Dabida. Thus the fiction of a united Kadun must at all cost be maintained and the Great Divide between the south and her neighbour imprinted on every irturbi’s brain.  Their ways are not our ways, particularly of course with regard to women and gays.  To  be a gallant flier fighting with every brain cell and sinew for Kadun’s soul does not mean you want a woman in the cock-pit next to you.
That said, few in Kadun think the south would be a push-over because of the composition of her forces and the gender of the President of  Fidub.  Beyond  the knee-jerk reaction, all possible futures are on the table, though some less likely than others. There is general recognition among civilized people that Kadun must change at  the socio-economic level.   Grinding poverty must be alleviated.   People should not die  of readily treatable diseases. And of course the criminal justice system  could  be improved upon.
If Kadun wished to come into line with the south and become a freedom-loving democracy with equal rights for all, Sarat’s story would be a simple one, but Kadun has yet to be persuaded of the necessity of these things and it isn’t. In a nutshell, for the moment all shades of sane opinion are united against Azt. Nonetheless, people acknowledge a time may come when they may end up fighting each other. The Army in particular regard this eventuality with horror.
So much for the backdrop against which our heroes and heroines grew up.
 
2.             MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PICTURES
 
Mitch has a boat on the Delta.       She noses through the reeds, emerges in clear water, moors at Kreel.                 The family book in at the inn, fake ye olde, with ten-year-old timbers.                 After dinner Mitch and Karula relax on the veranda, the babies safe in the arms of the gophers.                 Later they dance.                 Besotted with each other.
“Impatient, charming, dominant – and kind.                                   Maybe even tender. Oh, and

bright.”


A veritable paragon.    The sort of guy who could really rock Kadun. PANTHER watch Mitch and Mitch watches everyone.
Sear and Ravish launch their new campaign for Marquis.                                                                  A beautiful

woman in a cage.    Upper-class porn.      Harn’s feminists rage, midst the counter-cries of Prude!    Censorship!    It echoes an older image, the feminists say, can we not move on! Any spotty adolescent in an agency can pick on an image.    There is no censorship in Harn, at least that kind.    The ancient spidery things behind the scenes keep their

activities well concealed. These guys do what? Is not something you would catch the Chief Minister of Harn saying.                             Torture, murder, general humiliation and abuse?                              We know, guys, we know. So Harn is seamy.                                         There are boats you do not rock.     You let PANTHER rock them.    PANTHER, a little discreet enquiry tells Mitch, hang out in the cat-house, an annexe of the Fidubi Rep Centre.
The Jumesit Palace still stands in Azt, its delicate ironwork gates padlocked, and people go about their business just as though it weren't there.                                                        Where else could it be? is a surprisingly good question, but of course Krarlik didn't know that as he slipped one night inside the gates, dogged in his search for the throne.                                                          There was a banshee howl.
Good evening, brother, riposted Krarlik.                          Children ran across his path in the broad daylight of their time.    One has heard something, muttered Krarlik.
There is a step up.      It is all pale green and white and gold; no harsh bands of solid colour here despoil.                                    A huge floor seems to stretch endlessly, giving an impression of limitless space and light,                                        and beyond it a garden, the people-space where Azt met and talked and laughed.                                                                                    There is an arch.                                    Krarlik walked through into more of the same. The Star came tumbling into the throne room, naked, shaved, lithe, every fraction of her body covered with fragments of silver, an intricate metal head-dress cascaded, cartwheeled, twisted turned, tumbled, then fell to the ground before Jaizal.
Master.    He smiled.    Krarlik continued his search.    There came the Bronzes, so called because against a copper sky in a copper world unfolds a panorama of line and curve and perhaps those are horsemen but who can tell, at least until one stops, silhouetted against the skyline, and raises his spear.            The walls of time and space are very thin here but there is no passage. Our radical young heroes and heroines are in for one or two shocks.
Occasionally Mitch visits his parents. “It is nonsense,” said Heela.
“History written by the victors?                                                       It’s the biggest con in history. How many people subscribe to this garbage?”                                                   Mitch rambles on.                                                    “You ever think CLIK has a whole load of money behind it?”
Heela and Kile exchange glances. “Truly you do not know?” “Know what?”
Heela logs on.
CLIK is proud to list its sponsors. “Sohenoil! Oh come on!”
And who does the PR?            And who does Sohenoil’s PR?     Lo, it is the same firm.            I am so surprised.
Mitch sits back cackling.
“Fidubis are good democrats.                                 Maybe the decision came from elsewhere.
What do we actually know about sir?”
Steamy affair with Madam President in her wild youth.                                   Well, well, well!
Rumoured to have trounced his chances of her job.                                                      Don’t get that.                                                            If holier-than-thou Fidub operates a double-standard, wouldn’t it be her chances?
“Perhaps he had no chance,” said Kile.
“Maybe, maybe.    Even Fidub baulks at being governed by the Anile
emperor.”
I see.    He lives in the Summer Palace.             He is almost never seen without

PANTHER.    He is hand-in-glove with PANTHER and probably is PANTHER. Sohenoil makes generous donations to CLIK (I love that one!).                       Former leader of the Senate of Fidub, thirty years in democratic politics.                       Of course he has absolutely no interest in this matter of Kadun. Who knows that better than I. It is absurd, is it not, sir, to think that you would be interested in anything so uncouth as      putting a fire-cracker under them.
“I should prefer,” said Mitch,                                                           “to be hanged for the coup I am plotting not the one I’m not.”
“Indeed,” said Heela. “Meaning?”
“Talk to him.”
“I have your consent, father?” asked Mitch, suspiciously meek.                                    “Why?”
“I trust him to protect the interests of our class?                                                                I do not.”                                                        Heela assumed the expression ordinary parents might assume for initiating discussion of contraception. “Micheal, there is the question of your education.                                                           You must speak with PANTHER!”
“You just told me that, papa.”
Sarshi took  herself off to college in Zur.      She met Vij not through Carlin but at the party.                             That's the party, not a party.                 The party is what they call the caff attached to the shrine.                             You go to the party if you're distressed, you go to the party if you're cool and of course you go to the party if you're curious.
Sarshi held her glass up to the light. "'The wine they sip...'"
"This is the question?” asked Vij.
"'The vision gone now, stars are laid to rest, the moon lies sundered.                       Comes to every stricken breast the weird of night, the tapping of the blind man's cane and governance.                       By death.'    Isn't that our version?" She laughed.      "I spoil the party."
"No chance," said Vij.
“What about your average ego-maniac? "We're not naive."
"In the worst there are hidden depths!                                                Everyone's all right, really.                                                      Excuse me, I come from a country where they torture people."
We were out all night! wrote Sarshi. We talked about you-know-what.
Enlighten you when I get home.
My daughter becomes Hadin-Wadud.
"A few steamy affairs," said Pilo wistfully.
Sorg is Sarshi’s twin. He completed basic training and crossed fingers and toes. Where would they post him? Some transport depot in the back-streets of Tjulsit! But no!    But worse!    Aargh!   Caniba.
Caniba Base is an odd place, a law unto itself.        It accommodates Layat, General Commanding the Fourth Army, on the grounds (according to Caniba) of being the Fourth Army's brains.    The cultural arm, they call themselves.                 Caniba is the home of the cerebral, the educators and the intelligence gatherers, the odd-balls, according to the rest.           Officers and men come from all over to attend courses.    To the relief of the residents, they go away again.
"We do not squander talent," said General Prog smugly, Uncle Athanou to Saryulin's children, not a real uncle but an old friend.                                                Saryulin made positive noises.

Sorg from a tender age had been described as    'difficult'.
Sarat 16 babbled only about a demo to be held outside the Ciletij Rep Centre against               development of the northern wilderness.               He's signed the on-line petition.
Baz and Paw exchanged glances. “A little talk, I think," said Baz "Birds and the bees," said Paw.
"'Wanton destruction of one of the few remaining - '" said Baz.                                                         "The Anile heir thinks they're a bunch of total savages, right?"
"Him and half Fidub," said Paw.
"And whose name are they going to pick on?"
"Oh come on!                     You mean anyone reads these things?” “And then he went to the demo!” said Baz enthusiastically. “Thinking of it,” said Sarat.
“If no-one reads them, what's the point?” “Numbers!”
"We, the undersigned, we think you should talk about this."
"Make a speech, you mean?                                            Are you telling me I can't sign petitions?" "You can't pretend you're just a citizen of Fidub."
"Of course I'm just a – Cho.” “Cho.”
“OK, somebody tries to make something - I didn't mean it! I bleat.                                    I do mean it, just not like that.                                            Everyone can say what he thinks except me?"
"You have to think it through," said Paw.                              "You can't be just Sarat.                     I know you don't like it.                           If you so much as said you like Crumbles, it'd be Anile heir endorses Crumbles!"
"Calm down.    Be a good little teenager and talk to your mum and dad." He talked if not calmed down.
"I thought," said Baya cautiously, “you wanted to be a vet."
"I do.    I care.    I'm not going to have my caring bit cut off to satisfy a load of prats in Ciletij.        I mustn't care enough to actually say so, right?"
"You will be defined," said Essa.   "Others' expectations, others' behaviour to you.    they will assume you are something you are not.     You must resist definition, remain Sarat.  Think before you speak. Or sign petitions.
“People will see,” hazarded Sarat, “a whole lot of stuff that isn't there.                                                                 I can't make a speech about all the stuff that isn't there before I – add a note to the petition, no, I'm not winding up Ciletij, I just care about trees.”
“Just be aware,” said Baya.
Essa suppressed a sigh.                                                     Kadun must blow.                                           It is important Dabidans, Fidubi play their part in her reconstruction.                                                       Steer her away from pernicious elements bent on turning the Caniba Plain into a multi-storey car-park.                         It is just possible Sarat's chosen sphere is such he may escape - definition.                                                           Fat chance.
Sarat went off to see Cho.
“The message I'm getting – you and PANTHER – people will think - “ “What?”
“That – I'm somehow part of it.               I want to go to a sit-in.” “About what?”

“Ciletij want to rip the forest open.                                               I do know about the rape.”
Emperor Kaminua massacred Ciletij by burning them alive, setting fire to the forest they hid in, or not, according to whose version it is.
“A sensitive issue to this day.”
“I'm not completely thick.                                                    Most people don't even know about you and PANTHER.”
“Sarat – the people you talk to in, what is it you call it, RL, they know you. Once you speak to the world, you speak to people who know nothing of you, who can readily be manipulated by – the people who know about me and PANTHER.”
“People will think – I'm making some kind of statement.” “Fidubi moral supremacy springs to mind.”
“Then I can't speak out.    No way!”
“Use it, then.    Use it and be heard.               But think first.                  What are people

hearing?”


“I can't help what people think.    Dad said I had to – reject it, just stay me.” “Do not be drawn by it.    Do not explain.                             Your turf is – fairly clear-cut.

The chief polluters of the continent are Kadun and Ciletij, but that is at least known to be the south versus the rest.                                           The micro is better than the macro.         Perhaps not bacteria!
The threat to    feeding-grounds or migration of a particular beastie, perhaps. Pictures of its cute offspring.”
“Aw,” said Sarat.    His particular obsession was the skagga, a sort of large and repulsive hairless rat.                                             “Lichen!                                             Truly, there are lichen on the ancient trees of                                             the northern forests found nowhere else.”
“Lichen are excellent.”
“Would it be right – steer clear of people.                         NoZone is about people.” “Be especially clear about that.                              You are a biologist or a politician?” “I'm me,” said Sarat.            “That'll really impact, talking about lichen!” Cho looked at him thoughtfully.
“We are not in fact discussing your profound scientific concern - ?” “There's no point if you don't get people's attention.”
“We appear to have moved on from a voice in a crowd.”
“You're making me think,” said Sarat reproachfully.                                      “What you're saying -
“
“People will hear you if you say grass is green.                                     Except they won't.                                        They
will find an alternative meaning.    Fact is better than moral judgement.”
“What they're doing is wrong,” said Sarat.                                                     “Mum said be aware.                                                           Of – of people making an issue of what they think I've said, not what I have said.”
“Sarat – if you envisage a future in front of the camera – I do advise not yet! ” Ancient spidery things take a discreet interest in the proclivities of Var-segan,
and here is Mitch, with difficulty containing his temper, while around him is spewed contempt for the rest of humanity.
It has been made clear these are men-only gatherings or at least business meetings at which the attendance of partners is not expected (to which it happens that no female business-persons are invited).                                                       Mitch wants to tell them where to put it, but Karula wants to know what the bastards talk about on their own.                         I have my babies!
What more can a woman desire?

“I do not think that is the case,” says Mitch. Searc (known as Shark) smiles.
“You have a reputation as a radical!” Beejay thinks to rescue him.
“We are all radicals when young! Dear boy, you must dine with me, present your case. A certain intimacy with Kadun may be required to understand you. Then of course I shall demolish your arguments.”
“Indeed? I think I did not catch your name, sir.”
“Karba ban-jaizat-stoan, Kadun Representative at Harn.” Shark’s voice is expressionless.
“A charming habit of the Vasuculi, is it not, calling the aged and decrepit ‘sir’.
Come now, we shall leave these gentlemen to their own devices.” We shall?                    Out of the frying-pan….
“Offal,” says Beejay in the safety of the car.
“Lord Shark has an interesting reputation,” says Mitch. Mitch returns.
Make you some coffee? Well. Ha!
He is wicked, Mitch reports. He is wicked about Shark, he is wicked about Dabida, he is wicked about Zani, he is wicked about the workings of the government of Harn.    He is especially wicked about the machinations of Azt.      He is universally wicked, witty, a delight.
Only how does he survive if he’s not a front?
He asked me about my education!                                                               I dished back some tripe about life being a continuing process of education. Mitch can’t help laughing.                                                        Here I sit, product of some of the most rigorous and not to mention expensive education in the world and people hover over me like I was some poor kid in a tenement.
“He told you,” said Karula, “what to do to survive.” “Interesting, isn’t it.”
The Imperial Air Fleet is a group of Fidubi pilots wearing Kadun uniform  who have appeared out of the mist and built a nest in the heart of Regional Command. They are instructors. They are providing training in special ops (an elite corps, you understand). They are also PANTHER. Intricate negotiation had been required, culminating in Cho meeting senior officers of KAF. . Clearly assistance from Choit-ban-varna-eban-Narulis is entirely different to assistance from the Republic of Fidub.  Indeed, Cho had made that most clear.  There are two distinct aspects to this  matter of Kadun. That thing does not sit on a silver chair. The other of course is the  future of Kadun after the Cult is defeated. These subtleties would be lost on Azt and indeed most people do not care to look too closely at the deep water under them and all the sharks in it. We are practical men. All cats are grey in the dark.  (Joke: Kadun  uniform is pale grey.) Whatever else they are, they are hardly a threat. We have other concerns.  Can they do the business?  How can we use it? What is life like in FAF?   About half FAF are female. Life’s little difficulties arise over gender politics and other questions of mores, not enemy aliens training our pilots. These are friendly aliens, but aliens nonetheless.    Of course it could never work in Kadun.
“You cannot tell me the female mind is not weaker.”

“You want to meet some of the girls, you really do.” “It is not appropriate.                                      It is not feminine.”
“What is feminine?”
“You accept a woman in command?” “I have a woman in command.”
Evil Fidubi grins.
“We all do.    Her name is Airoch.”
“The exception that proves the rule?” teased one of the Fidubi, but there was a certain tension in the air.                                              Time to talk about the weather again. Maybe when we know each other a bit better.                                                  Just what is it, guys?                             What is your problem?                       We are guests.
Thus too of course in Carlin but in Carlin they were more used to our good friends from the south.
Mel returned babbling from Carlin. “You could have warned me!” “About what, darling?”
“About the music!” “Fidubi timbers.”
“Window.    Music.    In the.”
“Oh that,” said Saski. “Hardly our business.” “Cho’s, possibly,” said Tar. “Not ours.” “What is it!”
“That’s a rather long story,” said Tar. “Why has no-one let it out!”
The music.    Window.     In the.                Trapped.
Tar grinned
“Ancient legend has it,” he intoned.                                     “When the emperor returns.”
“Oh,” said Mel.    Pause.                                                “Couldn't they let it out anyway!            I mean things have changed.”
I don't suppose they know how to, thought Tar.                         Should I teach them! “You made that up,” accused Saski afterwards.
Tar grinned again.
Professional advice, thinks Mitch.                                                            One should not be too proud to take professional advice. So I walk into the Fidubi Rep Centre?                                                                  I think perhaps we should be a bit subtle about this.
The PANTHER site is uncompromising. If you have a problem with the guys with the strange head-gear, click here.
“Gulp,” says Mitch. “The trees,” says Karula. He laughed.
“Oh indeed the trees.” He played with his pen. “The Isles sing. Carlin sings. These things are troublesome, are they not, to the modern rational mind. Because they are indisputable.”
“It would be a pity,” said Karula, “if we ended up at the bottom of the river because we didn’t know how to look after ourselves.”
“But that is in any case true,” said Mitch.                                            “It requires no mind-games.                                           Let

us just have a little look at the other matter.”
The true face of Kadun.                               Death sitting on a silver chair and wearing a silver coronet leers at her from the monitor.                                             The image of desecration, they have been taught to call it, but now she wants to be exact. The                        name of the Anile Emperor is mud.    And if this is perceived to be his true face who is surprised.               Something stirs in her mind, something she learned as a child, but she can’t quite remember.                               More links to click on. Same old image.                               What do they actually think, so to speak. ‘The mystics confuse with an objectivist overlay the fundamental truths of existence.’                                       Oh, right.                               Death the only and ultimate reality.
Discussion forum?    OK, who shall we be?                          Kaminua and Asyrion!            But there are many Kaminuas and Asyrions already, which may or may not be revealing, since opinion is divided as to whether Kaminua and Asyrion were the good guys or the most evil people who ever lived.                                           Asyrionn32 and [email protected] begin to read the messages.    They post: oh puh-lease!                 What century is this?                          They post again: I have never in my life read such a load of confused babble.                          They’re                          rather enjoying
this, but duty calls.  They return to the search engine.          “Anile Throne” +myths.                    Got it! ‘The Anile Throne permits only the true Master of Kadun to sit upon it.’                                 So Death is Master of Kadun?                “Silver coronet” +”silver chair”. ‘Beyond the edge of the sea lay the legendary kingdom of Va, the realm joyeux, the earthly paradise.                                 Here in truth no pain, no death, no fear, its symbol a silver chair. This Narulis took as his symbol.                    This may
be considered just    a leetle presumptuous, but explains a great deal about the subsequent history of the empire. It was supposed to be inviolate.                              It is.                              People aren’t. ‘ It is? little Grid-site author.                      You are who?                But they looked in vain for a bio and  couldn’t find anything about the coronet. They went back to the results of the search.      And Carlin and Carlin and Carlin and the Dacunine Window and Carlin.                              They grinned to themselves wondering if Saryulin quite understood there were approximately 30,000,000 mentions of Carlin on the Grid.                         Indeed the world changes.                “Dacunine Window”.              Now we are out of fantasy-land into academe.              One of the masterpieces of the Silabrian School.
We must visit, Mitch!    I have to see that Window.
“Death is Master of Kadun.                                                    Do you not find that a somewhat unyielding piece of baloney?”
Marketing.                      Looks like someone’s had the same idea. Man, there is such shit on this Grid!
“It sings?                   The Anile throne sings?                   Oh come on!” Mardis raged about urban blight.
"Let's pretend it doesn't exist, then we don't have to do anything about it!" "What do you suggest I do, take my trusty revolver and shoot the bloody

rats!" rodentia."


"They'd just come back."
"They would indeed.    You tell me truly Fidub is rat-less, devoid of
 
"What I'm telling you is it's like Carlin!" Sorg fiddled with his ear.
"Come again, I fear I may have misheard - "
"The cities are like they are because no-one gives a shit.                                                       Saryulin gives a

shit.    Fidub gives a shit.    It's not difficult."

 
shit."

"Perhaps a trifle shitty?    So what you're saying is someone has to give a
 
"That's what I'm saying," said Mardis.      "One has a responsibility." Whoops!    What says the sage elder now?
"One, perhaps.                         Two, no.                        Finish your education first!" "Don't start!" said Mardis.                     "Would you help?" "Mardis, for - you're recruiting me?"
"No!    Just curious."    Sorg took a deep breath. "What we have to do is

work out what we're going to do next."
"We?"
"You know you're a good chap underneath it all.                              Everybody sits on the

fence."
 
 
 
 
again.


"There are worse places.    Under it, in a shallow pit pushing up daisies." "Why shallow?" asked Mardis.
"I don't know.    Sounded more sinister?"
Cho looked at the message from the cat-house and laughed: Karula preggers
 
“Darling,” challenged Amida, “name me one theory of revolution that takes

into account both the necessity of reproduction and the primary role played therein by the female of the species.”
Cho laughed again.
Sarat and Hass at the annual conference of NoZone in Zur were ravished by the camera, followed back to the hill.                                                          His short presentation on lichen and liverworts even earned him a nod of approval from his biology mistress.
Sarat bought his first pair of mirror-shades. Mel edged around the subject of the Window.
“It’s my heritage!” Sarat growled mutinously, but said nothing more.
That's sick, that's garbage.                                    Such were the sounds of the Sarat in its natural habitat, but his head                 remained    firmly in the ozone layer.       There was school, there were family, the menagerie to tend, the skagga to be saved, that unappealing little beast with its pink piggy eyes, probably                                       threatened with extinction solely in order that someone with an exceptionally soft heart dive to its rescue, but Kadun could not be dismissed from consciousness, a pimple under the skin, a whitehead an unreachable itch, the bane of his life, a part of his being.         Every grown-up he knows is concerned about Kadun. It’s getting worse, not better.
The quickest way to Var-segan is through Vascula and so Cho, delegate at some conference or other in Wintawa, turned into a black cat at midnight and disappeared into the dark.
“Dad works in the estate office,” said Changri..              “Like his grandad and his dad before him. Qine thought young Mitch was a right pain in the – all his talk about rights.            What does it mean to a bloke who’s starving?              Qine got his pecker up.              Oh well, if the young master says so, that’s it, isn’t it, sir.              It doesn’t mean anything, you stupid little prick.    There was people around.  They got a bit – flustered, you could say…You have to understand..”
Cho laughed. “I understand.”

“Say what’s on yer mind but be polite about it.             Mitch said, you call me sir, you mean it.                        You call me Mitch, you stupid bastard, you mean that.                        You do not say what you do not mean.   That’s how I see it.                        Qine said, all right, you stupid bastard, you come with me! Took him down the tenements.”
“That were when it dawned on Qine Mitch couldn’t do owt. His dad couldn’t.    Because they didn’t own the land. Live on the estate, you live decent, you get a good school.               You get a chance.   Other places, you haven’t got a hope from the time you first see the light of day..       The whole of folks’ lives, their health, their kiddies’ schooling, it all depends on the capitalists.”
“Young Mitch went off to college, had his young friends to stay, took them to poor folks’ places. Bad as him?             They were worse!                     Qine had his mates.      So there they all were, up half the night drinking and arguing. Lads behaving as lads do, and then of course..              But then lads find lasses, get more settled in their ways.”
“Or more measured in their plotting,” said Cho. Changri laughed.
“You want this straight up?”
“Being polite about it, mind,” said Cho.
“Buggered to that!    What Mitch wants to do and what Mitch can do, they're poles apart. You want to know what I think his problem is?
“Aye, lad, that I do.”
“He can't do it on his own, can he.                                                          Him and his radical friends can no more hold Kadun together, so all he ends up with is a civil war and lot of people dead.”
“So?”
“Needs to talk to people.              Marula, she has her own views.   Carlin, I don't know.              I know young Duvi were right radical before she got herself Mistress of Carlin and I would not think Saryulin would wed someone opposite in views.              The three of them, that's what do-you-call it, a pincer action, but as you well know, it's a lot of other stuff besides.”
“The Fidubi model?” asked Cho.
“Ah well, there you have it.                                                          Now we get to the juicy bit.                                                           He does not like Fidub, calls it the Fidubi scam.”
“Calls what?” asked Cho cautiously.
“Everything good the empire did was Fidubi.                                   All the crap was irturbi.” Cho bit his lip.
“A certain amount of horrible truth in that.”
“Aye, Jaizal, our last Fidubi emperor. There's one other thing you might bear in mind.                  He's a rationalist. I don't ask how you crossed the border on your
paddy-paws because I know.    That, you will see, is an – aspect, the Cult is trying to retake Kadun and Micheal ban-sarndit-vaq dismisses the other matter.”
Cho looked perplexed.
“How can he!    By which I mean how can he be a frequent guest in Van-senok, as I know he is.                                                               Marula could show him.”
“That, you'd better ask him.                           Or her!                            What I am trying to say is he doesn't understand Kadun.      I know that sounds very terrible.                      He has all the facts and figures, probably knows everything from the movements of the Fleet to the cost of a loaf in Tjulsit, but if he moves he will fail because he has no idea what he is moving against.”

“Die,” said Cho.                               “Is Heela mad?”
“I would suggest also you put that question.             I think you are asking me if he's given up.                          Never.    Like the rest of us, if we knew what to do, we'd have done it.”
Cho and his party proceeded on their way. “I don't believe I heard that,” said Fox.
They slipped into Van-senok.                                   From deep in the forest there came a howl. “The werewolves,” said Cho.
“I’m a southerner,” said Vax then after a while.                                                “Uh, Cho, the path is opening before us.”
“Of course,” said Cho.                                      “Note equally it is closing behind us.”
“This experience,” announced Fox, “gives a whole new dimension to the word ‘safe’.”
In Van-senok is the headquarters of the underground because nothing penetrates the trees. They learn fast, the rebellious, the resistant, the scarred, the enraged. Little in Kadun is as they thought it. Qine has changed.        He walks better, no longer challenging the world but confident of his place in it.   He talks better, don’t help to lose your temper.            Someone wants to see him, head of PANTHER, they say, that’ll be interesting, no doubt of it.                A tall bloke, but slight, bit like an ash.                        Face seems familiar, but I can’t place it.
“Tell me about you and Mitch,” said Cho.
“On me own I’m just a piece of trash shooting me mouth off but I weren’t on me own.  ‘Course I’d never have admitted it, but I thought I was protected.”
“Instead you were a threat.”
“So when he’s back at the Schools, it’s his final year,they thought he wouldn’t be bothered.                                       Tell you something, would have shot meself if he'd failed!”
“You may not wish to answer this.                                         Does he want to be Master of Var-segan?”
“Or do you mean why?” “Both?”
“How the world works.                         Opens doors. It’s his family, his history.” “His views on land.             Rent, for instance.”
“He doesn’t think that’s right,” said Qine after a moment. “But you don’t think it’s your business to talk to me about it.” “That is correct.”
“Why?”
“I think you are here because PANTHER is thinking of backing him and if that is the case there is only one person you should be talking to about what he thinks.”
“Mostly right,” acknowledged Cho.                             “The trouble is no-one knows what there is to back.                             He’s dropped out of politics entirely.”
“Don’t believe it,” said Qine.
“Nor do we.    But we’re not quite sure what to do about it.”
“I assume you – investigate people.                      My future lady Var-sega’.” Cho grinned.
“Oh yes,” said Cho, “we have                            investigated the politics of my future lady
Var-sega’.”
“They’re plotting, all right.”                                       Pause. “I’m not the only one as found people

hate him.”


“I understand that,” said Cho.
“Do you understand,” said Qine.    “Mind, I’m not quite sure how to put this.

There’s some say, in the City he’s seen what the odds are.                                                      I would not wish to be thought to be speaking for Mitch but – “
“He can’t do it on his own,” said Cho.
“I would not think he likes that,” said Qine. “I would not think he likes that at
all.”
Sarat and Hass were profiled in The World This Week: 'More Beautiful   Than
Pictures?'    Tar and Hass went into  a huddle.     Tar knew Hass was gay.                 So far no-one else did.                 Sarat beamed at the camera but the shades veiled his eyes.
"Gods’ teeth!" said Saryulin. “Wa-a-a,” said Karula.
“Photogenic,” observed Mitch.             He doodled.                        “CLIK + Ban-varna may be bad enough.                        CLIK + a media-savvy and photogenic grandson.”
“Boys become men real fast these days,” said Karula.                                                     “It can’t work in Kadun, Mitch.”
“It did once.”
He typed in Alzani-Meta +protocol.
Alzani-Meta is of course notorious for its rejection of all propriety. “Oh this is sniffy!            I love it.”
According to A-M, the point is that everyone is fundamentally a fellow human being and one can say anything to them one would normally say to anyone with whom one is on first-name terms.                                      One may note that one is answered in kind!                                                          I have observed that to be dashed rude to His Highness earned the comment: Are you always this rude or is it something you ate?                                                                                                 spoken, I may add, with great good humour. This is clearly an alien form of communication to us.                       I would not hesitate to emphasize that what it is not is meek acceptance of incivility.
It may be useful to contrast this with an alternative approach most notoriously articulated by Micheal ban-sarndit-vaq.                          Mitch, as he is commonly known, said: You call me ‘sir’, you mean it.                 You call me Mitch, you stupid bastard.    You mean that.
You do not say what you do not mean.                                                    One hesitates to associate the heir to Var-segan with vulgarity; there is, shall we say, a crude honesty in this approach
“You suggest I am vulgar, sir?                                          How dare you?”
Sarat +family.                        Sarat +friends.                        Sarat +education.                        Sarat +politics “Eeek!” squeaked Karula.
“Eeek?”
“His Imperial Highness is an item with Maya Talal, Vij's sister.”
“I do not believe it! I suppose if one considers they all grew up together.” “They're kids. It won't last!”
“Honey, why do you not look up Vij?”
Mitch went on doodling.    It looked like a little daisy, five petals around a central core.                Karula knew what it actually was.
“OK, the kid has a brain.                                    He has access to more money than most people can conceive exists.          The camera falls down and worships him.                                    He is clearly deeply socially aware. He is 17. His grandfather, however, is not 17.                                    Nor are his grandfather's

politics apparently centred on the ozone layer!”
“Mitch, it’s obvious to whom we should be talking.”
“Carlin, the prize.    From where did Narulis start?             I cannot think Ban-varna unaware of these things.”
“1500 years!”
“Much has changed, indeed. Our question may be what hasn't. There are things here of which I should like further clarification. I do not think I shall get that by walking up to the front-door.    If there is a plot, it must surely eventually show itself.
There is something here we are missing.                                             Fidub, Fidub, Fidub!                                                  What in hell is the relationship between PANTHER, the Aniles and the Republic of Fidub?”
Karula grinned.
“Lost in the mists of pre-history!”
“That may not be a joke.                                  These guys have been going so unspeakably

long…”
 
 
 
 
stuff! Oh.


“Notes my lord Var-sega’.                      The House of Fire used to run Fidub.” “Used to?      Let’s just try…”
Choit ban-varna +PANTHER.
Protected by PANTHER.    Lives with PANTHER.                         Yeah, yeah, know that
 
“According to this dude, His Imperial Majesty heads PANTHER.                                                    Implicitly.

PANTHER are Narulis’ cubs and agents of the House of Fire.” “That’s crazy.”
“Most things we read these days are.                                    Ever notice that?”
They return to the PANTHER site, sift through the dreary but necessary stuff about lines of accountability.  So this Faun guy reports directly to Airoch.                                        And the rest? History of PANTHER    Ah-hah.    Huh?
PANTHER was founded by Narulis and spread to Fidub, not as is commonly believed the other way around….After the collapse of the empire, PANTHER came from Fidub to assist our comrades in Kadun…
For a history of PANTHER in Kadun, click here. “There are two PANTHERs?”
Oh dear.
PANTHER were left up a well-known creek without a paddle, betrayed by everyone in sight – the Houses, the Aniles, the people, everyone let us down! We do not forget that. The fact remains we are Narulis’ cub.                 We stand for Narulis’ values. Narulis founded PANTHER.                  Narulis was a sprog of the House of Fire.       The House of Fire ran Fidub.    PANTHER spread to Fidub.    Not, note, the other way round. Some 900 years later, a handful of limping cats, scarred mentally and physically, arrived back in Fidub.
The House of Fire did not want to know that Narulis’ little venture had gone pear-shaped. PANTHER understood, Fidubi PANTHER, that is.                                                        They paid not the slightest attention to the House of Fire or of course to the cavortings in Azt.                                              PANTHER obey no-one, never have and never will, especially after the Kadun cock-up.
In the midst of all this a guy called Zani had a personal quibble with the Anile throne. PANTHER was re-established in Kadun as watch-cats.                          As some tell it, we ran off with Zani.    But we weren’t going to travel the same road twice: we could have but did not put Zani on the Anile throne.               Jaizal was defeated in front of his court, in front of

what counted as his world.    We got Jaizal’s empress out to Fidub with her children. Jaizal went over the edge and was assassinated elder sons.  The collapse of the empire began.
So far as our relationship with the Aniles went, Sheheela, Jaizal’s Mrs, and daughter of Var-segan, who (poor girl) had spent her every second in Azt being scared out of her wits, felt she had a duty to us moggies and we had a duty to Kadun.  We argued about it.                             We came back to where we started. We’re Narulis’ and this is what we’re supposed to do. In between we had to rethink the universe. We say the Anile Court turned rotten.                          They didn't see it like that.                   Metaphysically they arrived at a sort of amoral detachment.                          This they called the doctrine of essence. From it, it was easy to go either way so they did.                          Consider Kaminua’s Court.               They discuss UnMaking.                             Do they not look as though they discuss the weather!                             Hunger, weariness. urination, menstruation, the messy parts of being human, these they do not care for.                    The doctrine of essence leads them to wish not to be human.                          Comes now the Master of Kadun.
Enough!    My lord Heba. shall I command my servants strip the clothes from your body and the flesh from your bones that you become this essence of which you prattle!            Is not all One! he mimics, pain an illusion, life and death but one continuum?                  The Anile Court believed – arrived at affecting to believe – the Creator separate and detached.                  Nothing human had any reality.       They were mad.                  Consequently they became indifferent to human suffering. Human suffering no longer evoked human responses. A man viciously beating a screaming child. PANTHER could not and cannot be everywhere.                  After
Casin-ruhn    we felt a Creator concerned with its Creation would have intervened. PANTHER arrived at its current metaphysic.                      ‘Can Light fill Light/The One become more whole?’ The Creator is co-terminous with the created.
“There are things we learn,” said Mitch a little drily.             “You get dirty. You get sweaty.          You roll up your sleeves.         One had not previously endowed them with metaphysical significance.”
“Mitch, what is this all about!”
Mitch typed    “Kadun PANTHER” into the search-engine.
Jaizal all but destroyed PANTHER in Kadun.                                                    When after the collapse of empire help came, it came from Fidub.
So Kadun PANTHER became Fidubi PANTHER.                                                    Then our pet cats are foreign agents? I do not believe it.                                                    That is not the tradition.
He clicked on.    PANTHER allowed Jaizal.     Someone’s made a conspiracy theory out of it.   PANTHER engineered the collapse of the empire.         Here a voice for the defence.         PANTHER found themselves out on a limb.       Yup, I got that bit. He reads on.         This is heavy stuff, man!         And the thought niggles: this is the modern world.     All of it, it’s so much hooey. Party-tricks. You check your facts. You do your research. I cannot play this game until I know which game I’m playing.
“Look at the Hadin-Wadud,” suggested Karula.                                                               “If anyone knows about this crap, it has to be Alzani-Meta!”
Mitch grinned.
“Why don’t we just climb the hill!”
“Why don’t we?                        Because, Mitch, if you don’t I shall.” “Honey…”
“We have all heard the stories, Mitch.                                        They only have to be one tenth true.”

Jaizal +”Great Gates” +Zani.
“Oh man, what a story now!                                   This has only to be one tenth true!” “Zani smashed the empire, Mitch.”
“PANTHER smashed the empire.                                  PANTHER built it.                                   PANTHER knocked it down. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder.”
“How about you stop wondering and ask!” Other people thought like that too.
I am, said Hass.    I’m not, said Sarat.
There was of course a very great deal of lizard spittle.                Their ways are not our ways.          Inconceivable the perversions of the south gain a foothold in our glorious Kadun.                Etc.    How can I put this?                Sarat’s choice of best friend did not immediately earmark him as emperor material in the eyes of Kadun.
“It did occur to me,” admitted Karula, “but then why would he not say?” “Waiting for his    sister to marry?” suggested Mitch.                              “Heirs are expected to
produce successors.    They do not do gender, any more than we, but all the same.”
Karula arrived at a gay forum where the matter had been enthusiastically discussed, not least by Maya.
Oh, I see! Maya had posted, it's a plot to make me reveal the intimate secrets of the bedroom to Glitz!                                           Guys, take it from one who knows.        SARAT IS NOT GAY.
No need to shout, darling. Scream? Maya had suggested.
Then Hass posted two words: I wish!
That, posted the moderator, would kind of seem to settle...
Of course as far as the lizard was concerned it settled nothing. The combination of 'anile' and 'probably gay' was a gift to the slime-machine even when Hass was paired and Sarat had shown himself remarkably effective. We ignored it and concentrated on lichen. Reasonably sophisticated people reached their own more or else accurate conclusions about the youthful experiments of upper-class young men, about which more later. Probably more words were wasted on How The Aniles Got Their  Name than on any other single aspect. We didn't bother with that, either, because we  didn't know.