The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Women always felt safer to me.”

  “That must be a nice way to live,” Barhu muttered, quite against her resolution to be charming.

  “How so?”

  “Women have never been safe for me, Your Grace.”

  “Really? In my experience people don’t notice tribadists.”

  Barhu stared at her. “I feel like an actuary most days. Putting a risk on every glance.”

  “Tain Hu made it seem like she just reached out and plucked women like grapes. No one gave her much trouble because . . . well, because Yawa protected her, of course, but also”—Heia giggled, actually giggled at this thing that had terrified Barhu all her life—“it was as if people didn’t understand what she was doing.”

  “Didn’t understand . . . ?” What was there to not understand?

  “They really didn’t imagine that women could—you know! There were always women who married women, even among the Stakhi. Women did it to unite households. But the Stakhi didn’t consider women as . . . capable of conjugation with each other.”

  “Or they did, and the Masquerade erased the evidence of that belief.”

  “Perhaps,” Heia conceded.

  “Your husband certainly understood women were ‘capable of conjugation.’ Did he ever go ahead and report me?”

  “No,” Heia said, into the fire.

  “Why?”

  “Bel had reasons. Something that happened to a boy in school with him. It’s not my story to tell.”

  Barhu was startled by the idea of an actual Falcresti schoolboy, and a man at that, suffering under Incrastic hygiene. Heia saw her expression: “I know. It caused some uproar. The way it doesn’t, when it’s done to people like us.”

  “Incrastic hygiene scours harsh,” Barhu murmured.

  “And yet,” Haradel Heia sighed, “for the first time in its entire history, enough of Treatymont’s babies survive childhood for the city to grow without immigration.”

  “I think that’s a false dichotomy.”

  “Your pardon?”

  “I don’t think our choice is simply between accepting Incrastic hygiene in its entirety, or going back to the days before modern sewers and soap.”

  “Aren’t the theories which justify the hygiene also the theories which gave us inoculations and handwashing?”

  “Do you think the sewers and the roads justify the rest of what they do?”

  Heia clasped her hands and thought.

  And of course Barhu fell in love with her. Just for an instant. She saw a tiny duchess with sharp eyes and an ocean of blood on her hands, staring into the fire, considering the possible futures she might engineer. Of course, in that moment, she loved her.

  “I don’t know,” Heia said. “My father served the Masquerade because he took a vow. I’ve never thought of their presence as . . . something that could be changed.”

  “It might be.” Barhu leaned forward, hands on her bare knees. “If you make the right choices.”

  “I won’t leave Bel, you realize,” Heia said, quietly. “I just . . . I’m sorry. I can’t imagine making my life with a woman.”

  “The Necessary King is a man. You could make a life with him.”

  Heia leaned forward into the firelight. Behind her, Iscend shook an armsman’s hand with her blood-caked own, and walked off into the forest to bathe.

  “You know that if Bel dies I’ll blame you? You and Yawa? No matter how subtle and accidental it seems.”

  Barhu growled in frustration and prodded the fire with her bone. “I’ve made no plans to kill him. But I can’t let Aurdwynn be lost because of one man.”

  “Well,” Ri said, firmly, “I won’t break his heart.”

  “Fuck,” Barhu muttered.

  “No, but thank you.”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “You do think I’m funny,” Heia said, smiling. The firelight was painfully flattering. “I can tell.”

  “I need to take a piss,” Barhu lied.

  She got up and went out to the dark.

  Oh, please,” Barhu groaned. “Don’t pretend you weren’t waiting for me.”

  “I don’t mean to be alluring,” Iscend said, placidly. “I was washing, and wanted to think.”

  She floated in the stream, side-on to the current, moored to the north bank with one finger and to the south bank with one foot. She had to arch a little to keep her backfloat. The effect was immensely, unwantedly flattering.

  “Stop,” Barhu begged her. She had never had the slightest trouble separating incidental nudity from sexuality: what was it about these Falcresti women that denied her that clarity? “Please, please, don’t play this ridiculous role. You were trained to read people! You know I don’t want this.”

  It was not that Barhu didn’t want sex (she was not yet twenty-five, for Himu’s sake, she deserved to wander) but that the incredible discomfort of Iscend’s conditioning made Barhu sick at the thought. She kicked a rotten stump in frustration. It spilled over and a centipede of prodigious size scuttled away. She yelped.

  Iscend frowned up at her. “You interest me. Your responses are strange. In the Metademe, we find people are enticed and aroused by the naked body. But you’re not from a society where desire must be coded and hidden. You don’t react the same way.”

  “I don’t like to mix sex and business.”

  “A taboo I don’t share.”

  “Why not?” Barhu challenged her. “Doesn’t it bother you when everything women do is read as sexual provocation? Doesn’t it frustrate you when your professional encounters are taken as invitations?”

  “Sex is a useful tool in espionage. It makes people talk. It can draw them into error, which can be leveraged. Sex is one of the basic elements of blackmail, and blackmail is one of the One Trade’s nine methods for running an agent.”

  “I don’t like it,” Barhu said, stubbornly.

  “Tell me, are you familiar with the archetype of the seductress?” Leaves pasted themselves across her upstream flank, glued by pressure to her skin. “The woman who uses sex as an instrument of politics, and manipulates her partners through their desire.”

  “How couldn’t I be,” Barhu said bitterly, having read plenty of books about Falcresti spies on Taranoke.

  Iscend let herself swing sideways, like a rudder in the current, and kept her place by gripping the stones. Her arms corded with the effort. Leaves plumed away downstream. Various factions inside Barhu begged her to leap in the water and do something, anything, drown herself if necessary, just stop looking, it was unbearable.

  “In my review of popular literature,” Iscend said, “I discovered that the seductress usually appears as a villain. She generally succeeds in the seduction of other characters. This provides the reader with a kind of secondhand sexual encounter. But she always fails in the ultimate attainment of her goals.”

  The stream parted over her, around her graceful neck, down the smooth grid of her abdomen and the muscles in her thighs. The whole world caressing her existence. Barhu hated her mind for thinking this way; she was genuinely fascinated by Iscend’s thoughts.

  Iscend continued. “Generally a writer strives for characters the reader finds credible, wouldn’t you say? Yet savvy readers must instantly discredit seductresses as an antagonist or threat. Why, then, does the archetype still recur, when it must have been robbed of all effect?”

  Barhu thought of Duchess Nayauru, who had very nearly wedded her way to control of Aurdwynn. She’d also been a patron of engineering and a cunning politician. But Barhu had for too long thought of her merely in terms of her liaisons.

  “Punishment, I suppose. Negative reinforcement.”

  “Exactly. The seductress establishes the manipulation of sexual access as a social threat, and her failure discourages the behavior as ineffective. The titillation of the sex act rewards the reader for their contempt. They will be at once aroused by the seductress and satisfied by her downfall.”

&
nbsp; Barhu sat down on the streambank. “It’s rather like managing different currencies in one economy, isn’t it? The seductress enters her desirability into the economy as a commodity. But the law forbids her from exchanging it for other currencies. Such as political influence, or money. She is punished for the attempt: whether by those who fear the power she would gain, or those who fear the negative consequences it would have for other women.”

  Iscend giggled. “What a silly way to put it.”

  “You’re very good at pretending to giggle, you know that?”

  “Thank you,” Iscend said, rewarding Barhu with a sly look. “The interesting question, I think, is why this seductress is always a woman.”

  “A very anti-mannist sentiment.” Barhu frowned. “Why is it called anti-mannism, anyway? Why not womanism?”

  “There was a woman’s movement, early after the revolution. They demanded the vote, a law requiring gender-blind legislation, hysteric self-determination, and so forth. Iro Mave was involved—”

  “Who?”

  “Lapetiare’s tactician. She was of Oriati ancestry, which is rarely touched on in popular histories. She caused a schism in the movement over issues of race. Afterward, ‘womanism’ was seen as a word too closely tied to racial affairs, particularly the rights of Oriati women. Anti-mannism, a movement against the preeminence of men in society, became more socially accepted.”

  Barhu made a note to read more about Iro Mave. “Why do you think the seductress is always a woman?”

  Iscend twisted to duck her face underwater. Barhu, relaxing into the conversation, found herself still idly admiring Iscend’s body. Iscend seemed to welcome Barhu’s eyes—but did Iscend welcome it? Or had she been conditioned to make herself seem welcoming to Barhu’s eyes, so that the choice was not actually hers at all?

  “I suppose it lies in the difference between men and women,” Iscend said. “It is as apparent in birds as in human beings. Males make displays to illustrate their value, and females choose the males whose value they like best. A seductress invites the display.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be the other way? The women advertise and the men choose? Aren’t women more . . .” Barhu struggled to imagine how a man might look at a woman. “Contoured?” she tried, desperately. “Featured? Interesting? In Treatymont, most of the dancers and prostitutes were women, and they certainly made displays. . . .”

  “That is only a side effect of desperation; their sexual availability is valuable because normally a woman is hard to obtain. Incrasticism says that it’s this way because women must spend more effort having a child. We can’t afford to choose inferior males as our mates. That’s why men fall to promiscuity, but women fall to perversion. The man’s desire for many children is deranged into the desire for many mates. The woman’s desire for a particularly good mate is deranged into the desire for a particular perversion.”

  “But that can’t be right,” Barhu protested.

  “Why not?”

  Because of greatfamilies like Ulyu Xe’s, or Barhu’s own, where women did not adhere to one man. “It’s just what you said—each child is a huge investment! A woman can’t afford to have all her children with one father, because then the babies would all die to the same diseases, they would all have the same strengths and flaws. And if all her men think they might be the father of a child, then they all help care for the baby. This is why it’s good luck for the wife to be with all her husbands on the marriage night.”

  “But the truth of biology is that a child has only a single father.”

  “If biology explained everything about parents and love, would there be adoption? Would anyone raise stepchildren as their own? Yet they do, Iscend, you can’t deny it!”

  “Perhaps so,” Iscend conceded. “But you’re an accountant, aren’t you, not a eugenicist? How could you possibly challenge the Incrastic account of heredity with your knowledge?”

  “I bet you I can,” Barhu said, with that offhand confidence that Hu had always used to drive her mad.

  “Oh?” Iscend raised her head from the water. “What will you stake in the bet?”

  But Barhu, already racing ahead into thought, entirely missed the flirtation.

  Account for the existence of the tribadist, the sodomite, and the doubly-taboo omnamorous, using only economics. Can it be done?

  Imagine a man and a woman (or anyone with a womb, man or laman or any other sort, but, for brevity’s sake, a woman).

  Imagine that each person, man or woman, has a hundred coins to spend on childbearing. The man can spend as little as one coin and walk away: one drop of seed to make the child. The woman must at minimum expend nine months of coin to get the child to term, and then, assuming she does not forecast poor finances and leave the child to die of exposure (a practice that had happened nearly everywhere in the world), spend even more coins to raise the child to adulthood.

  So the man wants to spend only one coin and the woman must spend nearly her whole fortune. Why, therefore, don’t the men all fuck and run? Why are babies not raised by mothers alone?

  Because babies are so expensive that they need two parents’ investment to keep them alive. Especially if conditions are harsh. So it is important, as a mother, to draw investment from others. A husband is one way to get that investment. Incrasticism says those without husbands will not see their children survive, so they will not pass their behavior down. Incrasticism says this is why women are suited to forethought, planning, conspiracy, and entrapment: because their biology favors such traits in securing husbands and building futures for their children.

  But why would a woman spend a hundred coins on the same man’s children over and over again? There is incentive to hedge and diversify, and to confuse the paternity of a child, even to the mother herself. That would give women as powerful an incentive to fuck around as men. It could explain the Tu Maia greathouses and the families of Taranoke, where many men and women might marry each other.

  But all of this still required a mother and a father. It did not explain people like Barhu.

  What if it was impossible for the mother to get support from the father? What if you lived in a society like the Bastè Ana, where husbands left after one night? Or like the Stakhieczi, where all the husbands might go to war?

  You could get investment from one of your sisters instead. Say she loves only women. Say she has no children and never spends her coins. She is fierce and fast, she goes out hunting and she brings back her kill to share with you. Or she is soft and gentle and she knows how to cook safe food and how to treat a baby’s maladies while you sleep. But let us imagine her as a huntress, because huntresses are attractive. A sister who loves women, childless, but devoted to the survival of her sisters’ children. . . .

  But that didn’t make any sense at all. It was impossible.

  If a woman took only women as lovers and had no children, then the huntress behavior would never be passed down into the hereditary particles. Perhaps if she fucked her sisters, and taught them the behavior to go into their children . . . but the thought of incest disgusted Barhu. Second cousin Lao, fine, Barhu would admit to certain adolescent longings. But never a sister.

  So there was no way for these huntresses to have children who were like them.

  Only—the world was full of women who loved women—

  So where did they come from? Why was the behavior not extinguished?

  “Where do I come from?” Barhu asked, aloud.

  Do you concede the bet?”

  “No,” Barhu snapped, “but I’m stuck.”

  “There is,” Iscend said, conspiratorially, “a certain heretical idea among the Clarified.”

  “What is it?”

  “We breed plants for our heredity experiments. They grow quickly and they do not, ah, complain if radically modified. In the course of our breeding we have found . . . certain stubborn failures of Torrindic heredity.” Iscend shuddered, a full-body wriggle of disgust, and grimaced for a moment. Then she relaxed: she had f
ound some way to rationalize this to her conditioning.

  “The things we do to plants, like pruning off all the leaves on one side, do not seem to be inherited and passed down. The orthodox account says that plants lack the flesh memory of a living being. Since they have no behavior, of course they cannot inherit it. But we know that plants can learn; we have taught plants to grow toward certain sounds or colors. If plants can learn, why is this learning never inherited?”

  “Tell me,” Barhu said, to give her that push of approval. Tell me everything, Iscend.

  “We have a model . . . a toy model, a thought play . . . which explains the patterns of inheritance we see in plants. In our pretend world, our alternative account of heredity, everyone is born with a set of particular fixed traits, called, ah—”

  “Coins.”

  “Coins, then. The coins determine how they behave. But the coins are not themselves altered by behavior. Your life is set by the coins you’re born with.”

  “That’s quite grim,” Barhu said, delightedly. “So there might be coins for anger, or greed, or brilliance, or so forth.”

  “Exactly. This sheds interesting light on the problem of the isoamorous.” Iscend caught a mosquito from the air and twisted to wash the smear from her hand. “If the coin for isoamorous behavior is not created by isoamorous behavior, it must have some other function.”

  Barhu sighed. “But, again, those with the coin can’t pass it down. It should vanish.”

  “Not,” Iscend suggested, “if it can be passed down through sisters.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Perhaps the coin can land heads-up or numbers-up. Perhaps those who receive it heads-up are isoamorous, and those who who receive it numbers-up have isoamorous siblings. The numbers-up carriers would have children. The heads-up women would not have children of their own, but they would help their sisters. Perhaps these sibling teams end up with more surviving children than siblings who are all competing to raise their own.”

  “Yes!” Barhu paced right into the shallows. “That fits! The huntresses don’t have to have any children, but they still help their sisters pass the coin down. It’s as if the extra surviving offspring their sisters have are their own children, in a way!”