5 - Slap Him Silly

Da was knocked over by the ceo's attack.  He couldn’t even sustain his sitting up, but went straight to bed, which pleased his doctor.  Kyrus didn’t feel so well, himself.  Thank the light and dark both that the fakin’ owner didn’t realize they were there and wasn’t coming after them with his hoarded technology.

Ilax said that if the ceo had means to contact people off this planet... what a weird, disorienting thought was. It was one thing to swear ‘by the home planet’ or talk about ‘the home star’ and think of it like kids’ stories or bedtime songs.  It was very different to look up at the night sky and know that all those stars... even the moon... had people and monsters living up there.  And not only monsters but people -- to be polite to, to speak to, to learn their language -- who happened to be shaped like monsters.

... but if he had means to buy it, then he had to have the best technology he could get, and Great Grand-da's recordings made it clear that if he could almost kill everybody a thousand years ago, the stuff he had know probably made that look like sticks against mandery.  It was a scary thought.

Kyrus stood on the balcony and clung to the banister, looking up.  He had to cling with both hands or it would make him dizzy.  It was like trying to look through the sky.  It makes me feel about the size of an oyuck egg.  But as big as all of it, all at the same time.  The ceo is keeping that from us. He stole that from us.  Ma says the first Empress makes it clear.  Our ancestors signed away our learning to pay for their passage here and for their place on this planet.  They signed away even our being taught to READ.

My mind feels like an overstrained muscle.  There's so much I have to unlearn just to make space for the new stuff.

A bit more than a year ago his world had been focussed on a single idea, find the man who killed his father and convince him that he was owed teaching, because of that.  It was as if the whole world had been turned inside out.  His father wasn’t dead by Ilax’s hand or anybody else’s.  It had all been faked and kept up as a fake from everybody for ten years. Because da and stepda were lovers and in Lainz that had been an exposure-sentence under the old law.

On top of that... once that was all straightened out... these Rasheem had showed up and said that he and da were the only two left of his Radiance’s line and they had to leave Milar and come to Lainz to become the new Heir and crown prince, the old man was dying – oh it was just too complicated and no one would believe it if a storyteller in the marketplace tried to tell it as a fiction instead of a history.

“No one would believe it,” he said quietly.   “Great grand-da...”  He was tending to talk to the old man, as if he could hear him.  It was hard to think of him as dead, with all the recordings and instructions he left behind.  Him being dead certainly made it hard to either argue with him or smack him silly because some things he left behind weren’t just inconvenient, but downright awful.