At the prospect of coming to the attention of a senior KOTIS officer for such a trivial issue, Oriel moved to put the matter back into proportion.
"I’m more than capable of slapping faces that need it," she assured them. "Understanding the situation removes what made it confronting." The man would follow her about and then make some kind of art piece, and then she would not need to care about the matter any longer, unless whatever work he produced was entirely intolerable. "What did he say? When he saw us?"
"Enduring exile," Kaszandra said. "Which I have to admit made me enormously curious, but if it’s something you can’t talk about, tell me now so I stop prying."
"It’s no secret," Oriel said, with a shrug. "At the very least, I doubt Maxen and I reached this island without a thorough investigation of our pasts."
"I don’t get to read those security briefings," Kaszandra said. "Even the Setari on duty today wouldn’t have a reason to be told someone’s personal history. You mean you really are exiled from somewhere?"
"Technically. I don’t know how much you know about early Kolaren settlement."
"A bit."
"Nothing," Tsa Dale put in. "Tell me."
Oriel settled back, knowing this was just a story now, not a secret, a plan full of holes and hope.
"On Kolar the Planetary Rift is located in the Sear, the zone just on the edge of human tolerance. There’s no surface water in the Sear, but in that region there are infrequent, very heavy rains that drain into cave systems. The largest cave became Koltanar, Kolar’s first town, and dozens of smaller caves—some connected underground, and some reachable only by the surface—became outlying villages.
"It took nearly a century before the settlers were able to move north of the Sere, into the great grass plains of the Gold, and Kolar was shaped by those caves. Survivable spaces surrounded by baked earth. Water that must be kept carefully clean, which could run dry in the unconnected caves, and would only be replenished unpredictably. And not enough room. Rules were strict, and each cave came to be managed centrally."
"Little kings?" Tsa Dale asked.
"More like Nuri’s Houses," Kaszandra said. "Except everyone in the whole settlement belonged to the same House."
Oriel nodded. "Maxen and I are from one of the unconnected caves, a place called Sirelle. We were Outer Family, which means we have no relationship by blood to the Inner Family, the settlement’s owners, but the Inner Family are able to make decisions that parents would ordinarily make. More than that—as long as you are a Sirelle, the Inner Family are in charge of your Arrangements. All the major decisions must be approved by them, and often are set in place by them. Marriages, careers, where in the settlement you live."
"Okay, somewhere I wouldn’t be able to cope with," Tsa Dale said, her face drawing into lines of mock horror.
"It’s all a good deal less restrictive than it used to be. Wages have been a legal requirement for many decades, so it is not a matter of outright slavery. And anyone is free to leave."
"To wander around without water and shelter?" Tsa Dale shook her head.
"Before Kolar North expanded into the Gold and the Grey, being expelled from a Family would mean almost certain death, but that was a long time ago. Now there is mandated transport, and the Dorinari, the Family of the Ormon of Nent, Kolar North’s ruler. The Dorinari welcomes all who wish to belong—and scoops up any kinless who can’t demonstrate an ability to keep themselves. Once part of the Dorinari, there is never any threat of being expelled."
"So you’re part of the Ormon’s family, in a way?"
Oriel shook her head. "No, we’re still kinless. The Dorinari is a means of survival, not a haven. Like any large bureaucracy, it can grind you up without even noticing, and while matters such as marriages aren’t subject to interference, it organises your time for its own convenience."
She smiled wryly, finding it so strange to be explaining this to someone like Kaszandra, who everyone knew was highly privileged, but who was also in practical terms owned by the Triplanetary. There were specific laws dictating what she and Liranadestar could and could not do, and an interplanetary committee decided the things she would work on. It was all done very carefully, but Touchstones were too rare to be free. There was no chance Kaszandra would ever be permitted to leave the Triplanetary to return to her home world.
"We always knew we’d be cast out," Oriel said, trying to decide if it was worse to be unwanted or too precious. "Our mother was unfavoured—she had offended one of the Inner Family in some minor way that grew weight over the years—and it was only a matter of time before Sirelle met its population cap and arranged a Leave-taking."
"Is that a nice word for Culling?" Tsa Dale asked.
"It’s more complicated than just exiling people. For valued Family, it’s even an opportunity to take a period of extended absence. Attending a prestigious school instead of remote education, or being sponsored to work in the Grey, where water is plentiful, but living expensive. But Leave-taking is also an opportunity to rid the Family of the useless and the lazy." She smiled. "Being neither useless nor lazy, our mother was always working for the day we would be cast out. Saving money, pushing us to learn as many skills as possible. She died when I was…" She calculated. "Eight, in Muinan years. That delayed our expulsion—it wasn’t until I was nearly thirteen Muinan that they held a Leave-taking. By that time Maxen and I had decided to aim for Kolar South."
Tsa Dale curled her legs up in her chair. "Is it that much better to live in Kolar South than Kolar North?"
"Without Family, Kolar North has very limited opportunities, no matter your abilities. Kolar South is harsher in many ways, but Maxen could at least work toward becoming a pilot. It’s too coveted a career to manage that in the North without support."
"Can a couple of kids just immigrate from Kolar North to Kolar South? Or, for that matter, live on their own in Kolar North?"
Tsa Dale didn’t sound disbelieving, but instead seemed to be encouraging Oriel to speak, as if she thought this a story Oriel needed to tell. But Oriel’s early life was no secret. She’d had to explain quite a bit of it during the immigration process, though perhaps not in such blunt terms. And with certain…gaps.
Did she truly want to tell these two strangers the bare truth? She’d already said more than she ordinarily would, but it felt ungrateful to shrug off Kaszandra herself off with non-answers. This person who had changed the course of history, and who was sitting watching her with warm interest, quite as if Oriel wasn’t an unknown who had intruded on a family party.
"As long as you can afford it, you can live anywhere," Oriel said, at last. "We didn’t have enough money to live independently indefinitely, but small amounts earned and carefully invested over many years gave us…oh, it would have been two or three years' worth of living in the Gold. If it had been necessary, we could have stayed where we were, working while completing increasingly advanced studies, and qualified for any number of careers. If Maxen hadn’t wanted so much to fly, perhaps we would have done that. Instead, we spent the years leading up to the Leave-taking working out the best approach, given we didn’t have the connections or enough bribe money for a straightforward application."
"Bribing is the straightforward way?" Kaszandra asked. "I’m beginning to understand why everyone says it would be complicated for me to visit Kolar."
"I don’t think you’d have any difficulties," Oriel said. "Perhaps, before the Ionoth numbers decreased, and everyone was scrabbling for any edge to combat them. Now…well, there’d be a lot of invitations to dinner, I expect."
"Dignitaries in every direction," Tsa Dale said. "So, you went to Kolar South in a non-straightforward way?"