THE (tlpq-4) by Daniel Abraham Read Free Book Online Page B

with two drops of water, you just get one big drop."
     
    "You're ahead of yourself," Maati said. "That's called the doctrine of
    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.
     
    The greater mass of the utkhaiem were already gathering their best robes
    and most garish jewelry in preparation for the journey south to
    Saraykeht to greet the returning fleet and see this Galtic girl who
    would one day be Empress. Maati listened to it all, his frown deepening
    until his mouth began to ache.
     
    "It doesn't change anything," he said. "Otah can sell us to our enemies
    if he wants. It doesn't affect our work here. Once we have the grammar
    worked through and the andat back in the world-"
     
    "It changes