‘I’m embarrassed – I assumed you were a professional, a vassal.’
‘That’s just your assumption,’ I said. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m a writer. All writers are serfs.’
7
The Enigma of Change
We returned to the car, Frejah leading the way. It was chillingly cold in the basement because of the open entrance, but it was sheltered from the worst of the icy wind. Looking up along the ramp into the daylight I could see drifts and hummocks of snow.
Frejah swung herself into the driving seat and started the engine while I was still settling myself. The doors thumped down. She turned on the heater.
We made it back to the road through standing snow so deep I would have thought it would make driving impossible – the powerful engine, temporarily held back by an inertial transmission system, sounded as if it was fretting at its containment. We eased through. The wheels rarely spun. The road was narrowed by the piles of snow on each side, but the surface was relatively clear and soon after leaving the retail park we came to a long downward stretch of the road, in the lee of the wind.
The headset reappeared. She took or made a long series of calls and at first I listened in to them. I could hardly not. She spoke cryptically, though – was that the way of police communications, or was it because she had a 6/17 with her? She appeared to be working through a list of subordinates, checking up on them. I soon lost interest, watched the road ahead as she drove swiftly through the bleak hills and undulating plains of central Dearth.
Against my own usual feelings, I had been provoked by her comment about serfdom. Of course I had an interest in the subject, but it was not a dominant one in my life. It had been, but only for a while.
My personal background, which she could not know unless she had somehow used one of her dashboard gadgets to investigate me, was that my parents came from solid vassal families. They were holders of land and obligations in fief, providers of corvée and tributes to the seignior, and were (in theory) military champions of his or her noble cause. In reality, they led unexceptional middle-class lives, enjoyed their house and small patch of land, brought up their children, worked hard, surrendered their tithes twice a year.
I turned my back on all that. It was not a deliberate rejection, but a sorting of my own priorities. As a child, a teenager, you care little for social systems. All I ever wanted to be was a writer. While I was in my late teens I wrote in my spare time: small articles and reviews for magazines, a few short stories. As my ambitions and skills steadily grew I decided to take a leap into the unknown, give up my steady but boring job in an office and become a full-time freelance writer.
Because of strict rules from the seigniory I knew that as well as taking on the uncertainties of being able to make a living I would be forced to abandon my status as the son of a vassal family. I would become a citizen, a non-manorial serf, a small step above a peasant, a small step below the administrative villeins with their zones of power and bureaucratic influence over petty matters.
In the eyes of society I would be permanently unemployed, a drain on public funds. The shift down to serfdom was theoretical but also practical. I had no land, no fief to a lord or landowner.
Writers never fit into a social system. It’s the same for writers all over the Archipelago. I see it as practical and artistic freedom. Because we are independent we are not and cannot be treated as peasants, but as citizen serfs. Not much practical difference, but that suits me fine. The social structure means little to me – the lure of books and writing is a flame in me that I cannot extinguish. That is how it was when I started. It is still like that now.
Jo is also self-employed, an artist, a citizen serf. Technically and officially, according to the paperwork that turns up sometimes, we are both in fief to the Lords Seignioral of the Antient and Allodial Demesne of Sallaye, but as serfs we hand over our insignificant tithes every year to the villeins in the local administration office and remain effectively invisible to the system. In some of the past years, when earnings had been thin, my own tithes have been calculated as being no more than a couple of free copies of one of my books, to be donated to the local lending library. In those years I handed over more, because I know the librarian and she operates the library well. I have worked alongside the library for years. For instance, I have run writing workshops at the library once or twice, and would do so again if asked.
Being a citizen serf changed my social status, but it neither raised nor lowered me in any practical way: no one tells me when to work, how to work, what I should write in my books, where I might travel.
Some of my literary colleagues, the ones who make the most money, describe themselves as the new intelligentsia, but for me that is self-serving and vain. They write a best-seller, make television appearances, judge literary competitions, and as a result feel themselves elevated to quasi-vassalage, taking on airs and assumptions. But their fame, their money, their reputations, change nothing. They remain serfs for life, and so do I.
I continued to dwell on this as we drove north, the weather outside gradually becoming less horrible. The landscape remained bleak and wind-carved. I said nothing about what I was thinking to Frejah Harsent. I did not want to seem defensive about serfdom, because I was not. I did not want to seem obsessed with the subject, because again I was not and in fact I took it so much for granted that my social condition rarely impinged on my awareness. On the other hand, she clearly had some kind of attitude that she had never dealt with. That was of interest for another reason. I wondered briefly what those two serfs, long ago, had done to her to warrant her antagonistic feelings?
At least an hour passed in silence, all but for the growling of the engine and Frejah’s intermittent remarks. Then, unexpectedly, she twisted the headphones away from her and pushed them back beneath the dash.
She said: ‘Someone on the staff of the hotel mentioned you had problems overnight, with horizontal mutability.’
‘The hotel was mad and unforgiving!’ I said at once, because this was something else that had been passing through my mind as we drove along. I gave vent to my feelings. ‘They charged me a pile of money, and I didn’t understand why. When I asked for an explanation the receptionist told me I should have read a booklet in the room. The only warnings I saw were opaque, and the cost of the penalties was undefined.’
I had been wondering privately about trying to find out who owned or managed the hotel, and sending some kind of protest to them. However, the unexpected and profitable refund of the train fare had taken the urgent edge off that need.
‘It’s not the hotel’s fault,’ Frejah said. ‘Dealing with mutability is a problem for everyone, but it’s worst of all in the south. Every home and office has to take similar precautions. It’s more acute in a big hotel like the Plaza. Because they take in visitors from islands all over the world, people like you, their infrastructure is much more vulnerable. They have to account for everything that happens.’
‘Well, their warnings are not clear. I accidentally used the wrong key—’
‘It happens in hotels all the time. Late at night, dimly lit corridors, people leaving the bar, in a hurry to get back into their rooms for whatever reason. Wrong key goes in. Easily done—’
‘It sounds familiar,’ I said, remembering my erratic meandering back to my room. ‘Maybe they shouldn’t give everyone two keys.’
‘Well, they have to. But if several people make the same mistake at the same time the whole building can be immobilized. That’s difficult to fix, and expensive.’
‘I had no idea what the risks were, or even what was happening. Why do they hand out those keys if they can cause so much trouble?’
‘It’s a safety law. Used properly the key can’t do any damage. You were assumed to know what to do, or at least that you would have read the information in the room.’
‘I was hardly in the room. I didn’t have time to take it all in.’
‘Then I suppose you could say that’s
the reason for the surcharge. You’ll be certain not to do it again.’
‘It sounds like the Dearth penal code,’ I said. ‘Deterrence for others.’
‘You might be right. We hand out a lot of fines.’
‘I still don’t know what mutability is.’
‘I’m not the person to tell you.’
‘You’re the only one I can ask,’ I said.
Frejah said: ‘All right – if you ask the mutability specialists they will tell you it is a natural phenomenon, not a science. They say mutability is best understood as existing somewhere between quantum physics and psychology. That means two kinds of perception, outer and inner, both of which are difficult to grasp. What ordinary people say is that the effects of mutability are real, and also unreal. Something happens, but later you only think it happened. That doesn’t help much either, but at least I can follow it.’
‘It still doesn’t make sense.’
‘That’s what I’m trying to say. Mutability makes physical changes. Most of them are minor changes, not even noticed, but others can be drastic. You can see the changes, be affected by them, but afterwards you can’t be sure they happened. What the hotel worries about is the safety of their guests, because they lose their licence if they fail. A mutability event could change the physical shape of the whole building. The room doors might warp and not be openable, or there could be an electrical fault and a fire, or a flood. The building would become unsafe. That’s why they have extensive precautions. In time, the mutability would stop, things return to normal, and the people involved would start questioning if the event had really happened.
‘About a month ago, there was a serious mutability event in Dearth City. The people who monitor the phenomenon warned that one of the mountains on the outskirts of the city was about to undergo a change of dimensions. Because of the snow coverage, this meant there would be an increased risk of avalanches. It’s happened before. People living in the affected zone were evacuated from their homes, roads were closed and the rescue services were put on alert. Twenty of my officers were involved in that.’
‘A change of dimensions?’ I said, incredulously. ‘You mean the mountain physically changed size?’
‘It changed shape as well. Within a few hours a major avalanche and landslide came down. Three people were reportedly killed. Two of my officers narrowly avoided being overwhelmed. The event was filmed, shown on television. You can find the footage on the internet. My officers were working with the mountain rescue people, and they had cameras monitoring the gully where it began. There’s no doubt it happened.’
I said: ‘How can a mountain change shape? That’s unbelievable! I mean – the avalanche would have been a real event, but not for that reason.’
‘The gully was in an area of the mountain which had developed a measurable bulge. It was surveyed from the air – the survey was still going on when the slip started.’
I said nothing more, it being a subject about which I had zero knowledge, and, in fact, had even less belief. I doubted what I heard. Frejah sounded serious, though.
Eventually, I said: ‘So is the bulge still there? Couldn’t it be geologically investigated, explained?’
‘The bulge is not there. It was caused by mutability. It was a real event, witnessed and recorded, but afterwards most people seemed to doubt it had happened at all.’
‘What about the victims?’ I said. ‘The people you said were reportedly killed. Was that imaginary?’
‘They died. Their identities are known. Two of them were from Dearth City; the third was a visitor from one of the other islands. The avalanche was a real event, but the cause of it is in doubt. Now, a month later, most people accept that it was imagined.’
‘Mutability can change physical dimensions? I can’t believe that.’
‘Nor can most people here. We have to live with the phenomenon.’
‘All this is new to me – I had never heard of mutability until yesterday.’
‘You told me you’re from the Salay Group?’
‘Salay Raba, yes.’
‘Salay’s an interesting case. According to the mutability experts Dearth is not the only island that experiences the phenomenon. There are thought to be between two and three hundred islands in other parts of the Archipelago where there are gravitational anomalies. The vast majority of islands are unaffected.’ Frejah was driving noticeably more slowly as we talked about this. The engine was making a distinctive back-burning hunting sound as we gradually decelerated. ‘But there are a few islands, several hundred, which are described as potentially vulnerable. They are classified as Mutably Incipient. Some islands in Salay are included in that. Salay Raba is one of them. In fact at a high level.’
‘I’ve lived on Raba all my life. I’ve never experienced anything like it, never heard about it and I don’t know anyone who has.’
‘I was born on Salay Hames, the fifth. That’s even higher on the scale of incipience, but until I moved to Dearth as a kid I’d never known it either.’
Again I was silent, trying to work out what to believe, and how much of it. I glanced at my wristwatch, moving normally – it was an hour or so since I had last looked, and it was showing what felt subjectively still the correct time. The tiny digital clock on Frejah’s dash confirmed it. Mutability affected even the flow of time on this island? Somehow that was easier to believe than that a mountain could temporarily produce millions of tonnes of bulge – but isn’t time also immutable, an absolute? If that was so, then it must be the clocks, the chronometers, the cellphones, which drifted away from true?
Then I remembered the train – still only the day before. It had braked to a sudden halt, because, the crew said, the track was at the incorrect gauge. An impossibility! The track was a permanence. What must have happened was that the engineer, the driver, or one of the control instruments in the cab, had perceived a change in gauge.
I mentioned this to Frejah, but she said immediately: ‘That’s a regular occurrence on the trains. The tracks are often out of true. It’s extremely dangerous. Especially on that line, because it passes one of the main gravitational nodes. There have been several accidents.’
‘Caused by a perception?’
‘The problem of mutability. It is both real and unreal, it happens or it is only thought to happen.’
‘I still don’t get it,’ I said.
‘No one else does.’
She started fingering one of the touch-enabled instruments beneath the dash, glanced at a graphic that instantly appeared on the HUD.
‘We’re approaching another off-road area,’ she said. ‘Are you ready for lunch yet?’
‘Getting that way, yes.’
Ten kilometres further along we drove off the highway and into a cluster of low-level modern buildings. As before, Frejah ignored the directions about where and where not to park, and headed for a subterranean garage. It was marked Strictly Private – Authorized Vehicles Only. There was only one space vacant – Frejah took it.
A long lunch followed.
8
Sad Story of the Death of Kings
By the time the food was brought to our table we were both hungry, and while we ate we said little to each other. I still had at the back of my mind Frejah’s remark about serfs, but I was hoping the subject would not come up again.
The feudal system, still almost universal in the Archipelago, was the subject of an extended debate going on in political and seigniory circles: it was one of those subjects that kept cropping up on news broadcasts, whenever someone else had an argument to make about it. The debate was beyond me – I understood it, but it was a subject that you could not help feeling was seized on by opportunistic politicians and administrators, trying to make their name. The needs or wants of ordinary people were disregarded, except in some general way. The arguments were based on theory, not the reality of everyday life in the islands as known to millions of islanders.
The debate was about social change, the governance of the
islands.
A handful of islands, after losing their seignioral succession, had experimented with democracy. The results differed. Two mainland countries in the north provided examples, good or bad, depending on your point of view. The Republic of Glaund was in theory a state founded on revolutionary and enlightened social principles, but it was now inflexibly ruled by a military junta, the result of a coup in the previous century. Glaund’s bitter rival, Faiandland, a liberal democracy and the world’s most militarily powerful country, was known and feared as a colonizing power with territorial ambitions. Neither of these alternative systems of government was attractive to islanders, the military régime for reasons that were obvious, democracy slightly less so.
The instinct amongst most islanders was the wish not to change a system that had survived for many centuries. For all the many annoying faults, freely admitted and often complained about, the feudal systems on each island had led to the present state of independence, stability, peace and a general sense of well being. But of course there were populist and fringe groups campaigning for change, any kind of change. And ambitious young politicians who wanted to make a mark. There always were people like that, and always will be.
While we were waiting for the coffee to be brought, Frejah took a call on her phone and left the table to speak. When she returned she of course said nothing about it, but the call had somehow lightened her mood. She smiled as she sat down again.
She started asking questions again about my writing. I had already tried to divert her on this. Today she ran through familiar questions: where do ideas come from, how can an idea be turned into a plot and from that into a book, did I work with a pen or a typewriter or a computer, did I use a literary agent, who chose the cover illustrations? And so on. She said she had read two of my novels, and questioned me about them, although not closely.
One of them was my only attempt at a police procedural. Since discovering what she did for a living I had been secretly hoping she did not know about it. I was defensive about it. A police procedural is an unusual kind of novel because it is in effect about a job, and the people who work in it. The novelist is a novelist, not a police officer, but the result is a novel about police days at work.
The Evidence Page 7
