least similarity. You're not ready for that. What I mean is this: is
there anything real that can't be described by its abstract structure?
Any of you? No one has a thought about this? I answered that one
correctly before I'd seen ten summers."
"No?" suggested Irit.
"No. How many of you think she's right? Go on! Take a stand about it one
way or the other! Good. Yes. Irit's right," Maati said and spat at the
floor by his feet. "Everything physical has abstract structure, but not
everything abstract need be physical. That's what we're doing here.
That's the asymmetry that lets the andat exist."
In all their faces, turned to his, there was the same expression.
Hunger, he thought, or desperation. Or longing halfway forged into
something stronger. It gave him hope.
After the lecture, he made them run through grammar exercises, and then,
as the moon rose and the lanterns smoked and the rats came out to chuff
and chitter at them from the shadows, they considered the failed
bindings of the women who had gone before them. Slowly, they were
developing a sense of what it was to capture an andat, to take a thought
and translate it into a different form. To give it volition and a human
shape. To keep the binding present in your mind for the rest of your
life, holding the spirit back from its natural state of nothingness like
holding a stone over a well: slip once, and it is gone. Maati could see
the knowledge growing in the set of their poses and hear it in the
questions they asked. He had almost reached the end of his night's plan
when the small door to the street flew open again.
Eiah strode in, her breath labored. She wore a drab cloak over a silk
robe rich with all the colors of sunset. The others fell silent. Maati,
standing before a wall now covered in white, ghostly notations and
graphs, took a pose that expressed his alarm and asked the cause of hers.
"Uncle Maati," she said between gasps, "there's news from Galt. My father."
Maati shifted toward several poses at once, managing none of them.
Eiah's expression was grim.
"That's all for tonight," he said. "Come back tomorrow."
He had intended to assign exercises, translation puzzles for them to
work in their time away from class. He abandoned the idea and shooed
them out the door. All of them left except Eiah, sitting on a low chair
in the warehouse office, her face lit by the shifting flames in the grate.
The letters had arrived by fast courier. Against all expectation, the
Emperor's benighted mission to Galt had borne fruit. Danat was to be
married to a daughter of the Galtic High Council. Terms were being
arranged for the transport of a thousand Galtic women of childbearing
age to the cities of the Khaiem. Applications would be taken for a
thousand men to leave their lives among the cities of the Khaiem and
move to Galt. It was, Eiah said, intended to be the first exchange of many.
There were protests and anger in only a few cities. Nantani and
Yalakeht, hit hard by the war, were sending petitions of condemnation.
In the low towns, the anger burned brighter. Galt was still the enemy,
and there were rumors of plots to kill whomever of them dared set foot
on Khaiate soil: talk and rumor, drunken rhetoric likely to come to nothing.