INSURRECTION VOTE
1560 4D
Wearing the black skinsuit that had become her trademark, Ezzar strode with her three aides into the hall. Two mothers of men she had killed in vengeance glared in fury at her as she passed; she smiled at them.
Her finger traced the three-pointed cheek scar left her by the first assassin. No one at the meeting would mention her vendetta, counting it a recognized completion, a recovery of the colls' power balance, a just application of Coll law.
Two years after Ezzar‘s final revenge killing, she led a ten-member reserve militia group in Arcus Coll. Monford, their base, was a coll stronghold city, where Arcus, Incarnastar, Gellin Sintherou, and Novander Wye governed jointly, fiercely resisting interference from regionals or the corpos. Now the colls, so often locked in feuds and betrayals, were talking haltingly of joining forces in war.
Ezzar reviewed matters. Coll members in Gran Dar, the City, the world’s major population center ten times the size of Monford, were being pushed out; her cousins and their children had fled to Monford to jab elbows with her aunt and uncles and two half-aunts. The family, even the coll itself, were in turmoil.
Ezzar wormed her way past the door guards, nodding and getting a strong wave of acknowledgement. Three thousand people jammed Monford‘s great lower meeting chamber, fumed with florals all the way to the hazy top of its pale-gold dome. On the dais, the coll chiefs sat in two rows, under a focused acoustic arch.
Here and there, to Ezzar‘s surprise, pairs and threesomes of pale-skinned andros sat in the sea of darker humans, murmuring quietly and occasionally breaking into the hiss and crackle of anjive. It was bad to let them in. Renegades, probably, and on the run from the City police. Some had most likely killed; that was a death sentence.
Ezzar sat down in the front row, to take her turn speaking. She wasn’t enjoying nearly as much as she had hoped she would the furious stares of the assassins’ mothers; her rib cage seemed empty, and her missing breast weighed heavy as if still part of her.
“The corps and the govs are bleeding the City again,” a man’s voice behind her shouted, cutting off the speaker. “What are we waiting for? They’ve always wanted the colls out, and now they’re doing it to us while we sit here.”
“We have assurances that our members will be treated with due priority in the staged relocative downsizings,” one of the Incarnastar chiefs on the dais called back. “Please let the speaker finish his report.”
“Who is reporting on the SRDs in Forto Zone?” a brawny woman at Ezzar‘s left called. “They say Gellin Sintherou lost seven hundred and five in the last one — went to the Pass and froze with the others. There’s no work, not even in the northern mines like they promised. Damn Arlen and Rhin and all the rest!”
“Same as the one before,” a graying man cried out.
A roar of fury. Ezzar stood up, her anger surging with everyone’s.
The chair, a woman from Arcus Coll, waved for calm. “We’ll never get to these problems unless we keep things orderly.”
“The negotiations are continuing with the corps in the City,” the speaker tried, “and they’ve offered financial advantages to the first thousand from Gellin and Arcus. We’re trying to get them to extend the offer to Novander and Incarnastar, and progress looks good—“
“What advantages? That buttfodder scrip they print and hand you when they take your home?” An Incarnastar woman jumped to her feet and bared her raised forearm; her birth inscription blazed reddish in her dark skin. “Here’s what matters. Our names and our nouess, our souls. They’re killing us, and we’re waiting for it.”
Ezzar chafed. Her youngest aide, a chunky girl in black coveralls, handed her a datasheet, listing the names of those most recently gone in the latest SRD. In the midst of the list, she read the names of her father and mother, Derizan Alumaras Uni Junusium and Astina Turianoch Teron Harridium, and five more: all from her own family.
Stunned, she counted. Among the new thousands, nearly all coming from the four colls at the meeting, her father, her mother, her father’s father Alumaras, her father’s sister Ajina and her husband Selech, her mother-uncle Daryuz and her father-uncle Denzari had been taken, sent by government train to the Northwest Marshes over seven thousand kilometers from the City. They had had no chance to contact her or leave word — probably the rest of them, husbands, wives and children, were gone too.
The elders. Always the elders, the wise, the weaker ones, the City took. Her parents! The shock rattled through her, reverberated; she swayed; her aide gripped her arm and steadied her.
She’d go find them, she’d get them back, she’d… join them? No, none of them would get back. The relocations were permanent; the military made sure of that. What could she do?
While the speaker kept on, she wrestled with her rage and loss, then jumped to her feet. “Let me speak.”
The current speaker, droning now through the text of a long declaration of unity, glared at her. The moderator cut in, “You are scheduled in two more hours.” A grumble from the crowd.
“Look at this.” She brandished the datasheet, her hand shaking. “My parents and their family have just been taken.”
“We have all lost relatives to the SRDs. That is what this meeting is about.”
“And it will do just what the last eight meetings have done. Nothing!” Ezzar turned and climbed on her chair, bared her forearm inscription, and brandished the datasheet to the audience, shouting, “Who has lost family in the City? Who is afraid to lose more? Come to me! Our nouess and our names! It’s time to fight.”
“No!” the speaker shouted back. “We have far too much to lose.”
“We are losing it anyway!” Ezzar responded. All the fury of the cramped life in Monford, battling other colls for space and city resources, surged up in her. “We have fought each other enough. I have killed, and mine have been killed, for nothing more than coll revenge. But this is far worse. We must fight for our lives! Our enemy is one!”
A stunned pause, and a roar went up. The coll chiefs on the speakers’ dais raised their hands for quiet. The roar continued. The crowd ignored calls for order, and surged down the aisles and over the backs of seats to where Ezzar stood, and passed her, and gathered around their chiefs on the dais, gesturing with bared arms and fists and fingers.
The gathering discontent had reached a flashpoint. “Do you wish to vote on armed resistance?” the chairwoman called out. Her voice knifed shrilly through the hubbub.
Another roar of assent.
“Do you take the burden from your representatives for this vote?” The woman stood out front on the dais, her arms spread out, upraised, her knotted hair glistening in the sharp lights.
Again, a thundering agreement.
“Now we cast our fates with our own hands.” The ceremonial phrases rang harshly through the large room, and silence slammed down. “Raise now your voice if you agree: Do we stand to oppose the relocations with our blood, our bodies and our lives, and the fates of those we love?”
“Yes!” The word rang like the blow of a monstrous hammer.
“Raise now your voice if you wish to stay the path of battle.”
Silence.
Softly now, “We go to war. Let us grieve this cast of fate.”
The chamber’s silence lengthened out.
The chairwoman spoke again. “We call the colls to appoint leaders to form their forces and plans, and co-ordinate all the efforts. We want two from each coll up here in an hour with proposals.”
The crowd cheered and began breaking up into small groups, chattering and gesturing.
An Arcus Coll elder bent down from the dais and asked Ezzar, “Will you lead interdiction on the arms route from Monford to the City? We will back you in the vote.”
“Yes,” she said. Her spirits lifted. At last.
Her elders turned to the heads of Novander Wye, male and female, her sole potential coll opposition. “Do you ratify this appointment?”
All the Novander Wye heads nodded in unison. Whether it was in fear or respect she never found out; the acknowledgement warmed her all over, even in the tingle of the scars on her chest.
