Think! Can you have something physical that doesn't have abstract
structure?"
There was a moment's silence.
"Water?" Small Kae asked. "Because if you put two drops of water
together with two drops of water, you just get one big drop."
"You're ahead of yourself," Maati said. "That's called the doctrine of
least similarity. You're not ready for that. What I mean is this: is
there anything real that can't be described by its abstract structure?
Any of you? No one has a thought about this? I answered that one
correctly before I'd seen ten summers."
"No?" suggested Irit.
"No. How many of you think she's right? Go on! Take a stand about it one
way or the other! Good. Yes. Irit's right," Maati said and spat at the
floor by his feet. "Everything physical has abstract structure, but not
everything abstract need be physical. That's what we're doing here.
That's the asymmetry that lets the andat exist."
In all their faces, turned to his, there was the same expression.
Hunger, he thought, or desperation. Or longing halfway forged into
something stronger. It gave him hope.
After the lecture, he made them run through grammar exercises, and then,
as the moon rose and the lanterns smoked and the rats came out to chuff
and chitter at them from the shadows, they considered the failed
bindings of the women who had gone before them. Slowly, they were
developing a sense of what it was to capture an andat, to take a thought
and translate it into a different form. To give it volition and a human
shape. To keep the binding present in your mind for the rest of your
life, holding the spirit back from its natural state of nothingness like
holding a stone over a welclass="underline" slip once, and it is gone. Maati could see
the knowledge growing in the set of their poses and hear it in the
questions they asked. He had almost reached the end of his night's plan
when the small door to the street flew open again.
Eiah strode in, her breath labored. She wore a drab cloak over a silk
robe rich with all the colors of sunset. The others fell silent. Maati,
standing before a wall now covered in white, ghostly notations and
graphs, took a pose that expressed his alarm and asked the cause of hers.
"Uncle Maati," she said between gasps, "there's news from Galt. My father."
Maati shifted toward several poses at once, managing none of them.
Eiah's expression was grim.
"That's all for tonight," he said. "Come back tomorrow."
He had intended to assign exercises, translation puzzles for them to
work in their time away from class. He abandoned the idea and shooed
them out the door. All of them left except Eiah, sitting on a low chair
in the warehouse office, her face lit by the shifting flames in the grate.
The letters had arrived by fast courier. Against all expectation, the
Emperor's benighted mission to Galt had borne fruit. Danat was to be
married to a daughter of the Galtic High Council. Terms were being
arranged for the transport of a thousand Galtic women of childbearing
age to the cities of the Khaiem. Applications would be taken for a
thousand men to leave their lives among the cities of the Khaiem and
move to Galt. It was, Eiah said, intended to be the first exchange of many.
There were protests and anger in only a few cities. Nantani and
Yalakeht, hit hard by the war, were sending petitions of condemnation.
In the low towns, the anger burned brighter. Galt was still the enemy,
and there were rumors of plots to kill whomever of them dared set foot
on Khaiate soiclass="underline" talk and rumor, drunken rhetoric likely to come to nothing.
The greater mass of the utkhaiem were already gathering their best robes
and most garish jewelry in preparation for the journey south to
Saraykeht to greet the returning fleet and see this Galtic girl who
would one day be Empress. Maati listened to it all, his frown deepening
until his mouth began to ache.
"It doesn't change anything," he said. "Otah can sell us to our enemies
if he wants. It doesn't affect our work here. Once we have the grammar
worked through and the andat back in the world-"
"It changes everything," Eiah said. "Danat is marrying a Galt. The
utkhaiem are either going to line up like sailors at a comfort house to
follow the example or resist and restart a war we'll never win. Or
worse, both. Perhaps he'll divide the utkhaiem so deeply that we turn on
each other."
Maati took the tea from the fire and filled his bowl. It was bitter and
overbrewed and scalded his tongue. He drank it anyway. Eiah was looking
at him, waiting for him to speak. The fire danced over the graying lumps
of coal.
"The women's grammar won't matter if the world's already passed us by,"
Eiah said softly. "If it takes us five more years to capture an andat,
there will already be a half-Galt child on its way to becoming Emperor.
There will already be half-Galt children born to every family with any
power, anywhere in the cities. Will an andat undo that? Will an andat
unmake the love these fathers feel for their new children?"
If it's the right one, yes, Maati thought but didn't say. He only stared
down into his bowl of tea, watching the dark leaves staining its depth.
"He is remaking the world without us," Eiah went on. "He's giving his
official seal to the thought that if a woman can't bear a child, she
doesn't matter. He's doing the wrong thing, and once a wound has healed
badly, Uncle, it's twice as hard to put right."
Everything she said made sense. The longer it took to bring back the
andat, the harder it would be to repair the damage he'd done. And if the
world had changed past recognition before his work was complete, he
wasn't sure what meaning the effort would have. His jaw ached, and he
realized he'd been clenching it.
"So what then?" Maati said, taking a pose that made his words a
challenge. "What do you want me to do I'm not doing already?"
Eiah sat back, her head in her hands. She looked like Otah when she did
it. It was always unnerving when he caught a glimpse of her father in
her. He knew what she would say before she spoke. It was, after all,
what she'd been steering him toward from the conversation's start. It
was the subject they had been arguing for months.
"Let me try my binding," Eiah said. "You've seen my outlines. You know
the structure's sound. If I can capture Returning-to-NaturalEquilibrium ..."
She let the words trail away. Returning-to-Natural-Equilibrium, called