Six Moon Dance (5 page)

“They did.”

“I can see why, the way you’re dressed, and how you always looked alike. All of us were born at home, not at the Panhagion birthing center, so you—that is, my sister Ornalia—was registered at the Temple at six months age, as all girls must be, but they don’t have a DNA sample, as they would if you’d been born there, and Oram,
he
wasn’t even registered, and
he’s
not required to make Temple visits, so why not go on being Oram?”

Momentarily shocked, Ornery thought about it. “Veils,” she said at last. “If I’m wearing veils …”

“Which Oram always would be, in public, at least. And you’re not built like me or Mama, but like Papa’s sisters, very lean, with hardly any chest at all.”

“But what will I do? I can’t live here with you.”

“No. But my soon-husband is a decent sort of man. He owns ships, Ornery. If we can think up a way, he could put you on a ship, as an apprentice boy. You’re seventeen. Old enough. Then when you’re older yet, you could buy a farm.”

“Close quarters on a ship,” said Ornery, who had heard their father talk about the summer he spent as a sailor, when he was young, a mere supernume, before he inherited the farm. “They’d soon find out I was female.”

“We could say you were sold as a chatron,” said Pearla, after a moment’s thought. “You had it cut off, but then the family that wanted to buy you was killed when the mountain exploded. So now here you are, a chatron, but you no longer need to be sold. The farm is gone, so now you’d prefer to go to sea. My dowry will more than pay your apprenticeship if I can’t get my soon-husband to pay it. I’m sure I can make him arrange it, one way or the other. He likes me, Ornery. He said he was afraid he’d have to dower some woman he couldn’t fancy making children on, but he likes me.”

This last came with a tremulous smile, and for the first time gave Ornery something to feel thankful for. Thanks be to the Hagions that Pearla had been here in Sendoph rather than at home.

Pearla and Ornery took the trouble to learn something about chatrons, it being a subject not much thought of on the farms even though male things were gelded or neutered there all the time. Chatrons were mostly playmates for city daughters, companions for young wives tired from bearing but not yet entitled to a Hunk, de-sexed beings who wore a distinctive dress of baggy trousers and embroidered vests and veils a bit lighter than most men.

Before long, Pearla’s soon-husband, all well-meaning ignorance, fell in with their plans. He had not previously known that Oram was a chatron, but then, he did not really know Pearla well, as yet, and might, if he followed custom, never know her much better. Chatron though Oram was, this brother of his soon-wife would be properly provided for.

T
he life of Haraldson (3306–3454
AZY
) has been the subject of many biographers; his abilities and intentions have been analyzed for centuries. It is true that he was a popular musician of interstellar fame, one who could move the population of whole systems with the sound of his voice or the twitch of a finger on the strings. It is true he had wed the most beautiful woman in the known universe and fathered children whose charm and poise, even in adolescence, had to be witnessed to be believed. It is true that he had no faults anyone could uncover with the most diligent search, and it was also true that he displayed the virtues of kindness, fidelity, modesty, and empathy combined with a political savvy which had not been known since before the Dispersion and had, even then, been rare. He was a phenomenon, a unique example of mankind, one whose honesty and goodwill could not be questioned, and it is probable that only Haraldson could have done what he did.

What he did was to get himself elected President for Life of the Council of Worlds (COW), with the title of Beneficent Exemplary. At his coronation, Haraldson sang the first verse of “Reflections,” the song that had first brought him to the attention of the worlds: “Mothers can not tell us who we are. Mirrors can not tell us who we are. Only time can tell, for every moment we are choosing what to be.”

“Let us choose justice and civility,” he went on. “Let us do so in the company of beauty and joy. If we have not that company, let us still honor ourselves in the choice of justice and civility.”

No sooner had the coronation occurred than Haraldson issued the Edicts of Equity, in which for the first time humanity was defined in terms of intelligence, civility, and the pursuit of justice rather than by species or form. Certain Earthian creatures other than mankind were immediately rendered human by the edicts, gaining the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfactions thereby, and some extremist individuals and groups who had previously paraded themselves as human were disabused of this notion.

The fallout from the edicts had not yet settled when Haraldson reorganized the bureaucracy of the council, setting up several departments or “Houses,” among which were HoTA, House of Technical Advancement, and HoLI, House of Legislation and Investigation. In setting up HoLI, Haraldson declared that regulation and research should be inseparable, since mankind’s societies had for too long been hip-deep in laws that had been useless, unenforceable, and despicable from inception. If a law needed constant tinkering with, he said, it is a bad law, and the goal of justice should always be superior to the rule of bad law no matter how good the intent!

It was Haraldson, almost single-handedly, who made COW an effective agent of general welfare for all member worlds—as well as any mankind worlds COW could reach—were then subject to Haraldson’s edicts forbidding slavery, genocide, settling on previously occupied planets, racial crowding, and the destruction of either habitat or biodiversity. Haraldson further provided that persons must not only advocate but assure personal rights for all races, and that they must not discriminate against born, hatched, aggregated, or budded creatures on the basis of species, morphology, color, hispidity, gender, age, or opinion, except as species, morphology, gender, et al. provably altered the consequence of any given situation.

It sounded innocuous enough until Haraldson made it clear just how inclusive he expected the term “opinion” to be. “Language, cuisine, the arts, culture, tradition, religion, sexual and reproductive practices vary widely among mankind and even more widely among other races. All these, therefore, are to be considered matters of opinion, to which every person is entitled, and the free expression of which is guaranteed up to and no farther than the point at which that expression conflicts
directly
with someone else’s opinion. Direct conflict shall be defined as incivility directed at a specific person or group as well as any action designed to alter someone else’s opinion by coercion, law, or violence.

“Students of history will recall that prior to Dispersion, our Earthian ancestors espoused civil liberties,” Haraldson explained. “Theoretical liberties, however, were too often assured at the expense of actual civilities, and as civilities were lost, litigation emerged as a way of life with a consequent reduction in
real
liberties for all persons except lawyers, who, like mercenaries, are profiteers of discord. Persons were actually allowed, by law, under the guise of free expression, to shout into the faces of those who held differing opinions and to intrude upon their privacy. Liberty has two legs. Vigilance is certainly one, but civility is as certainly the other.

“With this in mind, I hereby establish the defecation rule: A defecator is at liberty to commit the act, but he may not commit it on his neighbor’s doorstep or in the quiet street in front of his neighbor’s house, or in his neighbor’s alley, or in his neighbor’s customary place of work, or anyplace where the neighbor or any other passerby may step in it by accident in his own zone of privacy and tranquility.

“This means that any opinion may be expressed privately or in incorporated communities of the likeminded from which the non-likeminded are at liberty to depart. When an opinion moves into another’s zone of privacy and tranquility, however, civility shall reign. If the Hairless Supremacists of Thor plan to march through a quiet community of furry Krumats with the sole intent of discomfiting the Krumats thereby, they may not do so, for though freedom of expression is guaranteed, a captive audience for an incivility is not.

“Our neighborhoods are an extension of our homes. Our right to privacy does not stop at our front doors. Our rights to the tranquility of our own senses and the privacy of our own space only gradually decrease as we move from our homes to the neighborhood street, down that street through our incorporated community of likeminded persons, out of that community and into the arteries of public commerce, waning gradually as we come to areas also used by other persons and ideas. Even there, we hold about ourselves a bubble of privacy which we lose totally only when we relinquish both senses and space by voluntarily choosing to become a tourist or part of a live audience.

“Despite this rule of civility, departure from the community and open expression of opinion remain absolute rights, and every community and every government must provide both opportunities for departure and venues for expression. Such opportunities and venues shall be both fully accessible to and fully avoidable by all citizens. No one shall attempt to control the coming and going from such venues or the events occurring within them.”

The edicts of Haraldson were heralded as enlightened and were, after some false starts and befuddlement, generally accepted among the member worlds. The number of extremists began to drop as various factions killed each other off in the free-expression zones, and conflict waned as rebels were encouraged to depart. Except for gender issues, which, like Proteus, seemed capable of infinite metamorphoses, most societal agitations were assuaged and kept that way.

The House of Legislation and Investigation was charged with the periodic assessment of all mankind worlds for conformity to the edicts. During the first few decades of Haraldson’s reign, these assessments were done in an orderly and timely way, producing tranquility and openness of opportunity and serving to increase general knowledge about the worlds in question.

Eventually Haraldson grew weary of his long years at the helm. He desired to leave the post of Exemplary and spend his last years in the study of non-mankind intelligences. The Council of Worlds, however, appealed to Haraldson’s sense of duty, claiming that no candidate could possibly take his place. After a period of reflection, the aged Haraldson addressed the public.

He said he was not immortal, he had found his task arduous, and he felt that no holder of an elective office, including himself, could be relied upon to continue indefinitely a course which ran counter to so many human urges. Age or appetite would inevitably corrupt good intentions, he said, and therefore an unbiased and incorruptible agency must be created to continue the assessments of human settlements around the galaxy.

COW referred the matter to HoLI, who decided no committee or council of persons could be totally incorruptible. HoLI referred the matter to the House of Technical Advancement (HoTA) whose staff came up with an answer. They would develop a bionic construct that contained a human mind or minds, a construct infallibly programmed with Haraldson’s edicts. The construct would be capable of learning, applying, and adapting those edicts while retaining their spirit and sense. Even though the technicians would start with one or more human brains—a more ideal interface could not be found—human memories and emotions would be repressed. The construct would have no vanity or greed, it would be incapable of pique or sloth, and would, thus, be immune to influence. The brains within it would be harvested from among persons who were already dying. Haraldson, on being approached, refused the honor of being among them.

HoTA was fortunate at that time to employ a number of exceptional scientists who, even more fortunately, worked well together. When the assemblage was completed it turned out to be a conceptual and technological tour de force, decades if not centuries ahead of its time. Because it held three human brains and unlimited memory, complicated corpora callosa and storage units of enormous capacity were required, but the solutions to these and other problems of structure and design were uniformly inspired.

In fact, the most knotty problem encountered by the technicians had been not the brain but the body. There had been no conception of what the Questioner—as it was now being called—should look like. Eventually, the team agreed on a motherly image, anethnic in appearance and, since the machinery was massive, Brunhildian.

Questioner I was finished and programmed, and Haraldson himself attended the dedication. On that occasion, with his usual foresight, he advised the chief of HoTA that it would be prudent for the House to undertake a continuous update of Questioner plans and specifications in the event that Questioner ever met with a fatal accident.

Questioner I worked well among the worlds for several hundred years. Questioner was able, in many cases, to bring imperfect societies into conformity with the edicts, and it was also able to dispose of societies which were totally unacceptable. After lengthy argument, the Council of Worlds agreed that Questioner had proven flawless and might, therefore, see to such matters on its own initiative. At first COW wanted advise and consent status, but after the first few interminable debates, COW felt it best to get out of the loop and was, accordingly, bypassed.

The ruthless sentences of the Questioner were carried out rarely but thoroughly. Many were the docudramas produced concerning the final years of intransigent populations. Questioner I perished at last in the Flagian Miscalculation, the cataclysm of self-mortification that destroyed the Flagian Sector. Due to Haraldson’s foresight, however, the technical specifications and many of the core components for a new device were ready and waiting, including technical advances that had been made in the intervening centuries.