by P. J. Fox
Droplets still glistened on Aria’s veil and she brushed them off absent-mindedly. The atmosphere was comfortable, the furniture more so as the women relaxed. Fortified with her throw, Aria felt the circulation return to her toes and thought again what a lovely home this was. Deliah had more than made her feel welcome and it was obvious that Alice at least was extremely happy living here.
“You know,” Deliah remarked, fixing herself another cup of coffee and settling back in her chair, “something similar happened to me when I got married almost thirty years ago. My parents had arranged a match with a young man I’d never met but was nonetheless certain that I loathed.” She chuckled. “I found out later that he felt exactly the same! And then, as if I wasn’t nervous and unhappy enough, all my luggage was lost. I got married in the most hideous bag you’ve ever seen—and I was much thinner then, too, so that was an opportunity wasted.”
Arranged marriages weren’t common on Brontes, but they did happen. Usually in situations where a great deal was at stake, such as an inheritance. Or, as had been the case with Deliah and her husband, where the parties involved were doing a miserable job of it on their own. Still, by Solarian standards, Aria reflected, almost all marriages were arranged marriages: women rarely had the chance to meet men their fathers or brothers didn’t consider suitable.
Aria sipped her drink, something like lemonade but made with hibiscus.
“My husband was a total stranger, too,” Lei volunteered. “The first time I spoke with him was on our wedding night.”
“What did you talk about?” Sachi asked, a trace of humor in her voice.
“I told him I didn’t like him,” Lei said seriously.
Deliah burst out laughing. “I saw my husband three times before I married him and talked to him two of those times; the first time I was too shy. Immediately after our wedding he came down with one of those ghastly fevers you only contract in the colonies and I nursed him back to health. He claims that’s why he fell in love with me. Romantic, I know,” she added dryly.
Alice looked back and forth between the two women, frankly amazed. Aria was more than a little taken aback, herself, but she’d learned to guard her emotions over the years. “You don’t…like your husband?” she asked cautiously.
“I do now,” Lei told her. “But on Braxis, marriage is far more formal. We’re not savages like you Bronte.” She winked at Deliah. “The match was arranged between my parents and his. I knew who he was, and I thought he was a self-important idiot.” She colored. Braxi, owing to their blood being green instead of red, blushed a beautiful shade of moss. “If a handsome one,” she added. “And, eventually, I began to appreciate his other qualities as well.”
“I can’t imagine that,” Alice said, a bit tactlessly in Aria’s opinion.
“Which reminds me,” Deliah cut in, “we need to find you a husband.”
Alice bit her lip, immediately nervous. “If marriage is supposed to be an eternal sacrament,” she asked, “how can you possibly agree to spend forever with a stranger?”
It was Sachi who replied. “Love matches are still rare on Brontes, which I think is a good thing as they usually defy considerations like age, financial situation, and all the other factors vital to securing actual happiness. It’s nice to find your husband charming, of course, but can you respect him? Love,” she added, “is something that comes with time and that grows from a basis of shared commitment. Of wanting to be married.”
“But what about chemistry?” Alice sounded somewhat plaintive.
“That, too, comes with time—and can be lost as well as gained, believe me.”
“I made my husband sleep on the couch for the first month,” Lei said.
Alice turned to Aria. “Did you make the governor sleep on the couch?”
Aria blushed scarlet to the roots of her hair. “No,” she said in a small voice.
“Well I wouldn’t have either,” said Sachi, “if my husband looked like that.”
Everyone laughed, including Aria.
Deliah, Sachi and Lei all agreed that it was wonderful to finally have a woman in the governor’s house—or, at least, in the chief commissioner’s. Governor Jhansi had been married, but he’d left his consort on Brontes as many of those in the military and the civil service did. That seemed lonely to Aria, but Deliah had explained that not everyone was equally enchanted with their spouse; and, moreover, many women were simply not willing to abandon the security of the Home Worlds for the danger, isolation and sheer tedium of colonial life.
Aria had, she explained, joined something of an exclusive club: women willing to chance it.
Because the cantonment was hardly a hotbed of excitement and outside travel was highly restricted, the women had to make their own fun. They hosted each other for teas and lunches and poetry readings, ran book clubs and writing groups and card games, and whatever else anyone could think of that didn’t sound too dreadful. They were, Lei opined, open to suggestion.
Friendships among the women were particularly important, added Deliah, because the men were never around. Even those permanently assigned to the cantonment traveled constantly, often leaving for weeks at a stretch. And worked such long hours when they were home that, Sachi joked, it was hard to tell the difference.
“Writing groups?” Aria inquired hopefully.
“So far,” Lei confided, “it’s a writing group of one. Me.”
The two women shared a smile.
“You should join; our meetings would become much more interesting.”
“I’d love to,” Aria replied, shyly pleased.
“You’ll have to host a dinner,” Deliah told her, “or maybe a luncheon. And Alice can find a husband.”
FIFTY-FOUR
When Kisten was an upper sixth and had already applied to the naval academy, a master of his said something that haunted him forever. He taught mathematics, and he was someone Kisten greatly respected and had purposefully sought out as an instructor. Kisten had always loved mathematics because the subject was, in a sense, a series of riddles. And he enjoyed solving each new riddle as it came along, but what he loved was wondering how the logic he’d uncovered would apply in similar—or, indeed, completely different—situations.
Mathematics was like sex: it could give practical results, but that wasn’t why he did it.
During his last year, Kisten was pursuing a primarily self-directed course of study along with a handful of other oddities who, to their classmates, were completely daft and utterly inexplicable. Even Keshav, who was good at mathematics because he was good at everything, found the subject horrifyingly dull. He preferred to lounge around smoking and speculating on such earth-shattering issues as whether something was true and not false, false and not true, both true and false or, indeed, neither true nor false. And as Kisten’s other friends were mostly still grappling with intermediate algebra, there wasn’t much chance to share his enthusiasm. So he ended up sharing it with Master Nagarjuna, who proved to be a wonderful listener and something of a wit.
And in class, he’d challenged Kisten in a way that most other masters did not and never had. Kisten was smarter than they were, which intimidated them—or enraged them, depending on their temperaments. Very few masters seemed to view students as other than adversaries, their so-called teaching style a constant effort to prove their intellectual superiority.
On that fateful morning, Master Nagarjuna had been lecturing about chaos theory and Kisten had been pondering the equally thorny problem of how to sneak a certain girl onto campus. And then, in response to a rather off-color joke by another student, Master Nagarjuna had replied bitingly that he who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
Kisten, furious and injured, had ignored the rest of the lecture and later abandoned his problem set for the polo field. He moped about, feeling personally betrayed. A week later, he was called into the man’s office
to explain why he hadn’t made any progress on his term thesis.
They’d talked through dinner and, finally, Master Nagarjuna had ordered coffee. He’d asked Kisten why he wanted to enlist. The empire liked to claim that men enlisted because they were patriots, but the truth had more to do with financial need and social ambition. Recruiters targeted men—boys—with nothing else going for them. Men from rural areas, men with limited options. Men like Aros, as Kisten would come to understand years later. Aros was the child of farmers; his only hope of advancing beyond the borders of his farm had lain in enlisting.
Kisten was hardly in the same boat. He’d pondered the question, and the answer had depressed him. Beneath the vague notions of “patriotism” and “duty to the empire” lurked something far darker: the need to escape. He hated life at court but, more, he had something to prove to himself about his ability to succeed on his own merits. And that, strangely, his master had understood.
You know there’s going to be war. It hadn’t been a question. Kisten had nodded; he did know.
Master Nagarjuna, now more than ten years in his grave, had accurately predicted the causes of a war he didn’t live to see. In his conversation with Admiral Zamindari, Kisten had summarized the conflict as having arisen from a mutiny. But while the actions of those soldiers and the reign of terror that followed might have ultimately forced a declaration of war, in truth the war had begun long before. It had begun when his grandfather was a young man, and the native Charonites first began suspecting their overlords of misdeeds. Charon II had never willingly yielded to Alliance rule. One local leader expressed the general flavor of their hostility quite succinctly: Take away your missionaries and your opium, he’d said, and you will be welcome.
The original purpose of Alliance colonization had been trade; and the same trade that had grown their economy so prodigiously could now destroy it, because the Alliance had become dependent on the products of its colonies for survival. And, as the Alliance continued to expand, demand for one good in particular increased dramatically: coffee. There were two optimal growing climates: high altitude subtropical regions with well-defined dry and rainy seasons, and low altitude equatorial regions. Charon II had both in abundance, allowing for multiple harvesting seasons per year on both of the continents where coffee was grown.
Initially, the exchange was wholly positive: money flowed in, coffee flowed out, and both colonists and natives alike made fortunes. The Charonites, if not fond of their new masters, were at least willing to tolerate them; Alliance rule on all of its colonies had always been laissez-faire, and at first its presence on Charon II was regarded by most as mutually beneficial. The colonists and their overlords brought hospitals, universities, and job training.
But over time, a trade deficit developed and a young, inexperienced—and some would say, easily led—Emperor made a decision that would ultimately change the course of a great many lives. It was the decision that Master Nagarjuna claimed would cause a war.
Trading companies, acting under imperial writ, paid in the coin of the realm for the coffee that was then shipped all over the galaxy. But too many darics were staying on Charon II and not flowing back into Alliance coffers; the government needed some way to earn them back. So the Emperor signed an agreement establishing a counter-trade in what had been described as the pleasure of the grave: opium.
In all fairness to the Emperor, a man who’d devoted so much energy to attaining the throne that he had none left for figuring out how to sit on it, the Charonites wanted nothing else. Alliance traders offered medical supplies, scientific instruments, glass, fine art, and wool. We possess all things and of the highest quality, responded Premier Niran, the head of the native government. I set no value on your strange and useless objects.
The Premier should have, perhaps, been more accommodating; the Emperor, after all, had allowed him to remain in power. True to form, after conquering Charon II, the Alliance had left the local political machine more or less intact. It made more sense to govern the governors than to control the unwashed masses directly. People were more comfortable taking orders from people who looked like them and who, they felt, therefore understood them.
Moreover, the Premier and his ilk actually were still in charge, in a great many respects; the Alliance had no interest in the day to day operations of its colonies, only in whether those colonies were obedient and productive. Charon II should, said many in the senate, be grateful for its portion. Perhaps the Premier disagreed with the Emperor’s right to “allow” anything on a planet not his own, for a people he’d never met and didn’t understand. The last Emperor had come on a state visit but his son, the 69th Emperor, had yet to grace the restive colony with his presence. No one knew, because no one asked; instead, ignoring the Premier’s protests, the Emperor granted writs to a handful of private trading companies.
In return for their monopoly, these companies agreed to sell coffee at fixed prices. Despite the hefty taxes imposed for the privilege, everyone involved made fortunes—and several of those involved held connections in the senate. Seats in the Upper Senate were hereditary; the men now responsible for making decisions about the future of Charon II were the same men whose political connections had allowed them to become involved with it in the first place.
Battles raged on the senate floor. The unscrupulousness, the sheer mendacity of the situation was not lost on many of those in power. Love was hardly lost, either, on the cartel originally chartered as the Governor and Company of Merchants of the Alliance Trading on Charon II and now simply known as the Charon II Company. Trade should, the opposition argued, be open to all; the locals should be allowed to trade with whomever, in their opinion, made them the best offer. Economic success should result from merit! That the Charonites might not want to trade with the Alliance had scarcely occurred to anybody.
The consequences of the opium trade were devastating; the infection of addiction spread like gangrene, rotting all it touched. And as demand for the poison rose, so did its price—until there was nothing left, only need. Reformers debated what to do. Decades later, the destruction wrought by the Alliance would be pointed to as evidence that none of the so-called “advances” brought by colonization were worth the price demanded by their overlords. The Black Devils, called so for their slitted eyes and caramel-colored skin, had brought an entire planet to its knees. By the time war broke out, fully half the native population was in thrall to the drug—as were a good number of the men sent to govern them.
Again, in fairness to the Emperor, no one had anticipated this result. Opium, and indeed numerous other intoxicants, had been known on the Home Worlds for millennia. Recreational drug use was neither uncommon nor frowned upon, although overuse was of course discouraged and addiction recognized as a serious medical problem. Hedonism had been woven into the fabric of Bronte social life, and there were rules—stated and unstated—about how, when, and what was too much. Many Bronte viewed opium as little different than tobacco or alcohol.
Opium had been described by a famous courtier of the Fourth Age as a substance that could be used to enhance the art of alchemists, sex, and court ladies. How the drug enhanced court ladies, Kisten wasn’t sure; he’d been with a great many of them, stoned and sober, and couldn’t say that he’d noticed much difference. The drug supposedly helped with premature ejaculation, but as he’d never suffered from this problem he had no opinion on its efficacy in that department.
Kisten had tried a number of drugs in his younger days and still drank heavily, but had never even flirted with addiction. Drugs, like most people, ultimately bored him. He drank, because he enjoyed drinking. But he’d met a man in prison, an experience he sometimes drank to forget, who’d described his own addiction thus: After ten years or so of curious dabbling, I woke from my pleasant dream to find that I’d died. His eyes had been as dark as caves.
He’d met another man in the hills above Dharavi, before he was captured, who’d told him about how he’d once owned 150 sheep. He’d s
old them off, one by one, to pay for opium. Kisten had gone to see him, believing—correctly—that he had information to share about the Rebel Coalition. Diwan Beg had been the headman of his village, back when there was a village.
Opening the door to his house had been like opening the door to a massage parlor: thickly scented smoke had poured out into the thin mountain air, making Kisten’s head swim. Inside, Kisten had discovered both man and family: gaunt-faced, their hair glued in greasy mats to their heads, they’d been taking turns with a small reed pipe. And they’d stunk, all of them; as Beg’s female companion had explained, if they had half a daric and the choice of whether to spend it on opium or soap, they chose opium.
He’d heard his grandmother talking about the problem, when he was younger; the opium trade had begun when she was little more than a child, in the years before she met his grandfather and came to Brontes. But none of her stories had prepared him for that moment—or for the grim reality of life on Charon II, the life she’d escaped by marrying Ceres.
Have you considered, Master Nagarjuna had asked him, whether the Charonites find opium so appealing, because their lives seem so hopeless? They harvest coffee they can’t afford to drink; they knot rugs they can’t afford to own. It’s back-breaking work on both counts, and both the men in the fields and the women in close, unlit garrets complain that their eyes water and their backs ache. What is it to them if, for a few minutes at least, the pain floats away? For what, they might ask, are they saving themselves? And the old man had had a point, in that opium was used to treat not simply aches and pains, but a grinding poverty that long predated the Alliance.
If that’s so, Kisten had replied, it only means they need us all the more. We were able to conquer Charon II in the first place, because her people were not united. It’s been under our rule that schools have been built, administrative systems established. A great many of those addicted, according to my grandmother, started using opium to numb the pain of injury—because even if, by some miracle, there is a hospital within a week’s walk, it’s unaffordable. He hadn’t understood, then, how an entire people could be so resentful of efforts to civilize them; didn’t they want clean running water? Access to medical care?