The Ulta delegate cocked his head in puzzlement. “The Chinese love to trade as much as the Danes, but they hurt themselves with the way they do it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Neema.
“The past couple emperors have been obsessed with moral purity. Clothes have become more and more modest. We can’t buy from India anymore. Everyone knows Indian cloth is the best in the world, but in the Great Ming you can’t find it because garments are stopped at customs and inspected for lewdness.”
The Tunumiu delegate mused, “It doesn’t sound much like a trade problem.”
“Agreed,” continued the Ulta. “It’s more a matter of preserving the old ways. This emperor has been talking about not letting tradition fade since I was little. I heard he just ordered the execution of an entire monastery in Dengfeng because the priest was advising the villagers not to beat their children.”
The Tlingit shook her head. “Was it a monastery of his own religion?”
“There are no others left.”
The Tunumiu woman chuckled. “I wonder at what generation the Emperor started actually believing he was divine.”
“What he believes is all the same to me,” said the Ulta. “I’d let him call himself savior of the world if only he stopped being so harsh on women.”
That sparked Neema’s curiosity. “What’s happening to women in China?”
“Legally, they’re not people. They can’t run their own businesses, they can’t inherit land, they can’t remarry. On the way here, I chatted briefly with the Hui delegate, and he says there’s talk of forbidding girls from reading.”
Neema frowned at that news. “I wonder how the Emperor’s daughters feel about that. Not that he’ll care to hear it, from what you’re telling me, but he must be very insecure about the future of the state if he’s so attached to keeping things in the past.”
The Ulta continued, “This has been going on for longer than people outside China know. My father told me that in his youth a Persian chemist who was working with some Ottoman colleagues had prepared a drug extracted from cow urine that could prevent pregnancy in women.”
The Tlingit’s eyes opened wide. “That would change everything.” Her tone sounded unreal to Neema, but she couldn’t say why. “With such a drug, we could postpone conception until the moment we wanted it. Why haven’t we heard any of this?”
“The Emperor thought the drug threatened the sacred order of the family. So he sent spies to Persia to kill the chemist and burn his notes.”
Neema found the situation horrific. However, the particular interest the Tlingit was showing in the story struck her as odd, even though she couldn’t ascertain from her gestures what it all meant. She thought she might try to get her to talk more. “What did your people think about the documents we sent them?”
“You mean about antonite?”
“Yes.”
The Tlingit took a moment to consider her reply. Neema saw the Tunumiu was just about to open her mouth, but the Tlingit seized the chance to speak first, “Our chief has questions about small-scale applications. Portable antonite generators would be of great help.”
“I’m not sure they can be made that small. Why do you need them?”
The Tunumiu replied, “With the anathema on artificial light, we’ve all had problems trying to build hydraulic generators. They’re not exactly easy to hide.”
“Yes,” conceded Neema, “but California is independent of the Iberian Empire.” Somehow she had the sense she was responding to the wrong argument, as if the Tunumiu had lost track of what topic they were on.
“It’s still a Catholic country,” said the Tlingit, who fell incongruously silent as she searched the next thing to say. “Maritime trade is seeing a reduction in the amount of items destined for household use that are susceptible to improvement from the Likasi Renaissance.” She made another pause. “Censorship reform has caused printing shops to reduce their sales by—”
“I see what you’re doing,” said Neema, pulling her chair away from the table. “You brought me here to make me listen to a staged conversation. You practiced your lines, you knew where to hit, and I fell for it. Even after I made it as clear as I could that I won’t support declaring war, you hoped your words would sway me.” She stared at the three of them, her anger mixed with pity. “Do you believe I don’t know how terrible things are? Those things have happened to my people too.”
The Ulta stood to face her. “Then you should be able to see why we want to kick them out.”
“I want them out too, but not like that.”
“Then how? Antonite is the best chance we have.”
“You don’t know that. I’ve calculated the effect of such a weapon. I can show you my forecasts if you want. It goes beyond any war this world has seen.”
“We’ve made those calculations too. We know exactly what impact it would have.”
“And doesn’t it make you shudder in horror?”
The Ulta hesitated before answering, “I can’t speak for everyone. But life under imperial dominion has taken away my capacity for horror. All I’m capable of feeling is that this way of life has to end, and it’s up to us to make it end.”
Before Neema was able to reply, the Tlingit woman interjected, “We see things the same way you do: history has stopped. We have to shock it back into motion.”
“That is not what I meant.”
The Tlingit insisted, “If we don’t act, our children will know the same suffering.”
“What you’re proposing will cause even more people to suffer. You’re talking of killing whole cities in a blink.”
The Ulta held out his hands. “I’m not here to try to compare between measures of pain; that’s a fruitless discussion.”
“I think it’s exactly the discussion we should be having.”
“Most of us here have already discussed this with our leaders. For the first time, the tactical advantage is on our side.”
Neema started screaming. “Our advantage is our minds! We can use what my school has achieved to prove the Inquisitors wrong, to defy their surveillance, to build! That’s what my family has been working toward for three generations, and I hold it as a sacred legacy!”
“They don’t care what we think is sacred,” he said in a sorrowful tone. “They even kill their own if they find the smallest disagreement. What they did to Hagia Eirene they can do to us at any time.”
Words failed Neema. She knew he had a point. It had been one of the most horrifying episodes of the war. The Chinese had secured control of the Arabian Peninsula and were planning to advance westward. The Ottomans had requested Iberian aid in a joint operation to prevent the capture of Jerusalem. But on the day the steel cars arrived, all airships deserted the battle and headed northward. While Ottoman troops were occupied in the ultimately doomed defense of the holy city, the Iberians carefully positioned themselves above Istanbul to drop bombs on every single Orthodox temple, ending eight hundred years of schism by eradicating the last remainders of the rival faith. The only reply from Madrid to the Sultan’s irate protest was that one heretical nation in control of Jerusalem was as bad as another.
The Tunumiu delegate’s next sentence fell like icy water on Neema’s ears. “Now we have the chance to do the same to them.”
“What?”
“What they have done to our sacred places deserves like retribution.”
“I won’t let that happen,” said Neema, leaving the table and heading for the Iberian section. “Gilberto! Where are you?”
Her assistant ran toward her. “Do you need me?”