Four Ways to Forgiveness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  As a property of the Corporations, having no government of its own, Yeowe Colony was considered by its Werelian owners to be ineligible for Ekumenical membership. The Ekumen continued to question the right of the Four Corporations to ownership of the planet and its people. During the last years of the War of Liberation, the Freedom Party invited Ekumenical observers to Yeowe, and the establishment of a regular Envoy there coincided with the end of the War. The Ekumen helped Yeowe negotiate an end to the economic control of the planet by the Corporations and the Government of Voe Deo. The World Party nearly succeeded in driving the Aliens as well as the Werelians off the planet, but when that movement collapsed, the Ekumen supported the Provisional Government until elections could be held. Yeowe joined the Ekumen in Year of Liberation 11, three years before Werel did.

  Yeowe

  Natural History

  The third planet out from its sun, Yeowe has a warm-moderate climate with little seasonal variation.

  Bacterial life is ancient and of normally vast complexity and adaptive variety. A number of microscopic marine Yeowan species are defined as animals; otherwise, the native biota of the planet were plants.

  On land there was a great variety of complex species, photosynthetic or saprophytic. Most were sessile, with some “creepers,” colonial or individual plants capable of slow movement. Trees were the principal large life-form. South Continent was almost entirely tropical jungle/temperate rain forest from the coastlines up to timberline in the Polar Range and to the taiga of the Antarctic Circle. Great Continent, forested in the extreme north and south, was a steppe and savannah landscape at the higher central altitudes, with immense areas of bog, marsh, and sea marsh on the coastal plains. In the absence of pollinating animals, the plants had many devices to use wind and rain to cross-fertilise and propagate: explosive seeds, winged seeds, seednets that catch the wind and float for hundreds of miles, waterproof spores, “burrowing” seeds, “swimming” seeds, and plants with mobile vanes, cilia, etc.

  The seas, which are warm and relatively shallow, and the vast sea marshes nourish a huge variety of sessile and floating plants, on the order of plankton, algaes, seaweeds, coral-type and sponge-type plants forming permanent constructions (mostly of silicon), and unique plants such as the “sailers” and the “mirrorweed.” Vast connected “lily mats” were harvested by the Corporations so efficiently as to render the species extinct within thirty years.

  Heedless introduction of Werelian plant and animal species killed off or crowded out about 3/5 of the native species, aided by industrial pollution and war. The owners brought in deer, hunting dogs, hunting cats, and greathorses for their hunts. The deer thrived and destroyed a great deal of native habitat. Most introduced animal species failed in the long run. Werelian animal survivors other than humankind on Yeowe include:

  birds (domestic fowl brought in as game or as poultry; songbirds were released, and a few species adapted and survived)

  foxdogs and spotted cats (pets)

  cattle (domestic; many wild in abandoned districts)

  deer (wild, called fendeer, adapted to the marsh regions)

  hunting cats (feral, rare, in marshlands)

  The introduction of some fish species in the rivers was disastrous to the native plant life, and what fish survived were destroyed by poison. All attempts to introduce ocean fish failed.

  Horses were slaughtered during the War of Liberation, as symbolic possessions of the owners; none remain.

  The Colony: The Settlement

  Early Werelian rockets reached Yeowe 365 years BP. Exploration, mapping, and prospecting were eagerly pursued. The Yeowe Mines Corporation, owned principally by Voe Dean investors, was given sole right to prospecting. Within twenty-five years, larger and more efficient ships made mining profitable, and the YMC began regular shipments of slaves to Yeowe and ores and minerals to Werel.

  The next major company established was the Second Planet Forest Woods Corporation, cutting and shipping Yeowan timber to Werel, where industrial and population expansion had reduced forests drastically.

  Exploitation of the oceans became a major industry by the end of the first century, the Yeowan Shippers Corporation harvesting the lily mats with immense profit. Having used up that resource, the YSC turned to the exploitation and processing of other sea species, especially the oil-rich bladderweed.

  During the Colony’s first century, the Agricultural Plantation Company of Yeowe began systematic culture of introduced grains and fruits and of native species such as the oe-reed and the pini fruit. The warm, equable climate of most of Yeowe and the absence of insect and animal pests (maintained by scrupulous quarantine regulations) permitted an enormous expansion of agriculture.

  The individual enterprises of these four Corporations and the regions where they operated, whether in mining, forestry, mariculture, or agriculture, were called “Plantations.”

  The four great Corporations maintained absolute control over their respective products, though there were over the decades many battles (legal and physical) over conflicting rights to the exploitation of an area. No rival company was able to break the Corporations’ monopoly, which had the full, active support—military, political, and scientific—of the Government of Voe Deo, a major beneficiary of Corporation profits. The principal investment of capital in the Corporations was always from the government and capitalists of Voe Deo. A powerful country at the time of the Settlement, after three centuries of the Colony Voe Deo was by far the richest country on Werel, dominating and controlling all the others. Its control over the Corporations on Yeowe, however, was nominal. It negotiated with them as with sovereign powers.

  Population and Slavery

  For the first century only male slaves were exported to Yeowe Colony by the Corporations, whose monopoly on slave shipment, via the Interplanet Cartel, was complete. In the first century, a high proportion of these slaves were from the poorer nations of Werel; later, as slave-breeding for the Yeowan market became profitable, more of them were sent from Bambur, the Forty States, and Voe Deo.

  During this period, the population grew to about 40,000 of the owner class (80% male) and about 800,000 slaves (all male).

  There were several experimental “Emigration Towns,” settlements of gareots (owner-class people without slaves), mostly mitts and service communities. These settlements were first tolerated, then abolished, by the Corporations, who induced the Werelian governments to limit emigration to Corporation personnel. The gareot settlers were shipped back to Werel and the services they had set up were staffed by slaves. The “middle class” of townsfolk and tradespeople on Yeowe thus came to be composed of semi-independent slaves (freedpeople) rather than gareots and rentspeople as on Werel.

  Prices on bondsmen kept going up, as the Mining and Agricultural Corporations in particular squandered slave life (a mine slave during the first century was expected to have a “worklife” of five years). Individual owners increasingly often smuggled in female slaves as sexual and domestic servants. The Corporations, under these pressures, changed their rule and permitted the importation of bondswomen (238 BP).

  At first bondswomen, considered as breeding stock, were restricted to the compounds on the plantations. As their usefulness for all kinds of work became evident, these restrictions were eased by the owners on most plantations. Slave women, however, had to fit into the century-old social system of slave men, which they entered as inferiors, slaves’ slaves.

  On Werel, all assets were personally owned, except the makils (bought from their owners by the Entertainment Corporation), and asset-soldiers (bought from their owners by the government). On Yeowe, all slaves were Corporation-owned, bought by the Corporation from their Werelian owners. No slave on Yeowe could be privately owned. No slave on Yeowe could be freed. Even those brought in as personal servants, such as maids of plantation owners’ wives, had their ownership transferred to the Corporation that owned the plantation.

  Though manumission was not allowed, as the slave
population increased very rapidly, causing a surplus on many plantations, the status of freedperson became increasingly common. Freedpeople found work for hire or independently and “rented freedom,” paying one or more Corporations monthly or annually whatever fee (usually about 50%) was levied on them as a tax on their independent work. Most freedpeople worked as sharecroppers, shopkeepers, or mill hands, and in service industries; during the Colony’s third century a professional class of freedpeople became well established in the cities.

  By the end of the third century, when the population growth had slowed somewhat, the total population of Yeowe was about 450 million; the proportion of owners to slaves was less than one to one hundred. About half the slave population were freedpeople. (The population 20 years after Liberation was again 450 million, all free.)

  On the plantations, the original all-male social structure set the pattern of slave society. Work gangs early developed into social groups (called gangs), and gangs into tribes, each with a hierarchy of power: Tribesmen under a slave Headman or Chief, under the Boss, under the owner, under the Corporation. Bonding, competition, rivalry, homosexual privileges, and adoptive lineages became institutionalised and often elaborately codified. The only safety for a slave was membership in a tribe and strict adherence to its rules. Slaves sold away from their plantation had to serve as slaves’ slaves, often for years, before they were accepted into membership of the local tribe.

  As women slaves were brought in, most of them became tribal, as well as Corporate, property. The Corporations encouraged this. It was to their advantage to have slave women controlled by the tribes, as the tribes were controlled by the Corporations.

  Opposition and insurrection, never able to organise widely, were always crushed with the instant and brutal finality of infinitely superior armaments. Headmen and chiefs colluded with the Bosses, who, working in the interest of owners and Corporations, exploited the rivalries between tribes and the power struggles within them, while maintaining an absolute embargo on “ideology,” by which they meant education, information of any kind from outside the local plantation. (On most plantations, well into the second century, literacy was a crime. A slave caught reading was blinded by dropping acid in the eyes or scraping the eyes from the sockets. A slave caught using a radio or network outlet was deafened by white-hot picks thrust through the eardrums. The “Fit Punishment Lists” of the Corporations and plantations were long, detailed, and explicit.)

  In the second century, as slave population shot up to the point of surplus on most plantations, a gradual trickle of both men and women towards the “shop-strips” run by freedpeople grew to a steady stream. Over the decades, the “shop-strips” grew into towns and the towns into cities entirely populated by freedpeople.

  Although doomsayers among the owners began to point to the ever-increasing size and independence of the “Assetvilles” and “Whiteytowns” and “Dustyburgs” as a looming threat, the Corporations considered the cities safely under control. No large buildings were allowed, no defensive structures of any kind; possession of a firearm was punished by disembowelment; no slave was allowed to operate any flying vehicle; the Corporations kept tight guard on raw materials and industrial processes that could provide weaponry of any kind to the slaves or freedpeople.

  “Ideology,” education, did exist in the cities. Late in the second century of the Colony, the Corporations, while censoring, filtering, and altering information, formally gave permission for freedpeople’s children and some tribal children to be schooled up to age 14. They allowed slave communities to set up schools, and sold them books and other materials. In the third century the Corporations instituted and maintained an information and entertainment network for the cities. Educated workers were becoming valuable The limitations of the tribes had become increasingly evident. Rigidly conservative, most tribal chiefs and Bosses were unable or unwilling to change any practices in any way, at a time when the abuse of the planet’s resources called for radical changes in methods and objectives. It was clear that profit on Yeowe would increasingly come not from strip-mining, clear-cutting, and monoculture, but from refined industry, modern plants staffed by skilled workers capable of learning new techniques and following unfamiliar orders.

  On Werel, a capitalist slave society, work was done by people. Slave labor, whether simple brawn-work or highly skilled, was hand labor, aided by an elegant but ancillary machine technology: “The trained asset is the finest machine, and the cheapest.” Production, even of very high-technology items, was essentially traditional craft of very high quality. Neither speed nor great volume was particularly valued.

  On Yeowe, late in the third century of the Colony, as raw material exports failed, slave labor was used in a new way. The assembly line was developed, with the conscious purpose not only of speeding and cheapening production, but also of keeping the worker ignorant of the work process as a whole. The Second Planet Corporation, dropping the words Forest Woods from its name, led the new manufacture. The SPC quickly surpassed the old giants. Mines and Agriculture, reaping huge profits from the sale of mass-produced finished goods to the poorer nations of Werel. By the time of the Uprising, more than half the freedworkers of Yeowe were owned by or rented to the Second Planet Corporation.

  There was far more social unrest in the mills and mill towns than on the tribal plantations. Corporation executives ascribed it to the increase in the number of “uncontrolled” freedpersons, and many advocated closing the schools, destruction of the cities, and reinstitution of sealed compounds for all slaves. The Corporations’ city militia (gareots hired and brought from Werel, plus a police force of unarmed freedmen) increased to a considerable standing army, its gareot members heavily armed. Much of the unrest in the cities and attempts at protest centered on mills that used the assembly line. Workers who, feeling themselves part of an intelligible process, would tolerate very harsh conditions, found meaningless work intolerable, even though working conditions were in some ways improved.

  The Liberation began, however, not in the cities, but in the compounds of the plantations.

  The Uprising and the Liberation

  The Uprising had its origin in organizations of tribal women in plantations of Great Continent, joining together to prevent ritual rape of girl-children and to demand tribal laws against sexual enslavement of bondswomen by bondsmen, gang rape, and the beating and murder of women, for none of which was there any penalty.

  They acted first by educating women and children of both sexes, then by demanding proportional voice in the all-male tribal councils. Their organisations, called Woman Clubs, spread across both continents throughout the third century of the Colony. The Clubs spirited so many girls and women off the plantations into the cities that the chiefs’ and Bosses’ complaints began to be heard by the Corporations. Local tribesman and Bosses were encouraged to “go into the cities and get their women back.”

  These incursions, often led by plantation police and aided by the Corporation city militia, were often carried out with extreme brutality. City freedpeople, unused to the kind of violence normal on the plantations, reacted with outrage. City bondsmen were drawn to defend and fight with the women.

  In 61 BP, in Eyu Province, in the town of Soyeso, the slaves’ successful resistance to a police raid from Nadami Plantation (APC) escalated into an attack on the plantation itself. The police barracks were stormed and burned. Some of the chiefs of Nadami joined the uprising, opening their compounds to the rebels. Others joined in the defense of their owners in the Plantation House. A slave woman unlocked the doors of the plantation armory to the insurrection—the first time in the history of Yeowe Colony that any large group of slaves had access to powerful weapons. A massacre of owners followed, but it was partially restrained: most of the children of the Plantation House, and twenty women and men, were spared and put on a train to the capital. No adult slave who had fought against the uprising was spared.

  From Nadami the Uprising spread, by way of guns and amm
unition, to three neighboring plantations. All the tribes joined, defeating Corporation forces in the quick, fierce Battle of Nadami Slaves and freedpeople from neighboring provinces poured into Eyu. The chiefs, the grandmothers of the compounds, and the leaders of the insurrection met at Nadami and declared Eyu Province a free state.

  Within ten days, Corporation bombing raids and land troops had smashed the insurrection. Captured rebels were tortured and executed. Particular revenge was taken on the town of Soyeso; all the people left there, mostly children and the old, were herded into the town squares and trucks and tread-wheeled ore-carriers ran over and over them. This was called “paving with dust.”

  The Corporations’ victory had been quick and easy, but it was followed by a new insurrection at a different plantation, the murder of an owner’s family here, a strike of city freedworkers there, all over the world.

  The unrest did not cease. Many attacks on plantation armories and militia barracks were successful; the insurrectionists now had weapons, and learned how to make bombs and mines. Hit-and-run warfare in the jungles and the great marshes gave the guerrillas’ advantage to the rebels. It became clear that the Corporations needed more armaments and more manpower. They imported mercenary soldiers from the poorer nations of Werel. Not all of these were loyal or effective troops. The Corporations soon persuaded the government of Voe Deo to safeguard its national interest by investing troops in the defense of the Owners of Yeowe. At first the commitment was reluctant, but 23 years after Nadami, Voe Deo decided to put down the unrest once and for all, sending 45,000 troops, all veots (members of the hereditary warrior caste) or owner-volunteers.