13'Sao-La
The void let him up easy. 13'Sao-La lay on his side, crunched into a ball, thirsty, hungry, hot,
like hiding in a tsegi till his father gave up looking for him. After a while, his senses unfolded
into reveal. His down side, muffled in coarse cloth, pushed against a cushion. His up side
brushed some kind of surface. His brow drizzled sweat that dried and cooled. Other parts soaked
that cloth with sweat that steeped and stank. He heard voices ... and engines ... and he couldn't
wait: he opened his eyes for recce.
He lay in a cell. Vertical bars ... in four sets ... that formed a square of walls that were
nothing but those bars. Bunks hung from the bars, four to a side, on two sides of the cell.
Across the top stretched canvas just beyond his best leap.
Inside the cell, seven more ollomani. Three Unknowns stood and stared outside already. The others
fugued in their bunks — or like him, did they feign to hide their recce?
Rules? What are the rules in here? What are the rules out there?
Outside the cell, a flood of packed earth, stretching flat to a horizon defined by fey-banyan.
That yellow-green line tremored, a quiver that could be wind — or the fey-banyan's evil spirit
that sucked at his soul through his eyeballs. He recce'd on.
Closer in, he now cannied the ruins of Ganj Dareh's drome, the New Order's finest moment, contained
in a past that promised glory, a past now closed as it had closed the past containing the Tlaxtli
League, which —
He wrenched his gaze away, only to see cells clogging that flat bed of gray-brown. Six columns of
cells, every one stocked as his was. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of ollomani locked up
as only men could lock up other men. He cannied no guards, but expected surveillance and automated
response to escape, probably with weapons like the one that had filled him with daylight and closed
down his glory-filled past.
And the engines? Crews plummed the ruined drome, looking for ways to undo the chaos and rescue
what had not succumbed to chaos. In time, even that victory would sink back into the Voiceless, as
had the Tlaxtli League, as had his father, as had even his mother.
What rules in this unformed, unknown zhuhndí that engulfed him? He couldn't even leave this bunk
without a guess at the rules. Do the mother rules still apply? He dredged them up for testing.
"Listen and obey" — no Authorities ruled this gulag, only tedium, so no. "Rigid earned rewards"
— got him almost killed last time, as did all the others. He didn't finish the list, sullied by
zhuhndí beneath the fey-banyan.
Wait. The first mother rule he had named, maybe, here it should be just "listen," listen and you
will canny the rules, just listen. So he rolled to his feet and listened. Well, watched
and listened — and smelled.
