Five Ways to Forgiveness

1. PRONUNCIATION OF NAMES AND WORDS

In VOE DEAN (which is also the language of Yeowe) and GATAYAN, vowels have the usual “European values”:

a as in father (ah)

e as in hey (ay) or let (eh)

i as in machine (ee) or it (ih)

o as in go (o) or off (oh)

u as in ruby (oo)

In Voe Dean the accent is normally on the next-to-last syllable. Thus:

Arkamye—ar-KAHM-yeh

Bambur—BAHM-boor

Boeba—bo-AY-bah

Dosse—DOHS-she

Erod—EH-rod

gareot—gah-RAY-ot

Gatay—gah-TAH-ee

gede—GHEH-deh

Geu—GAY-oo

Hame—HAH-meh

Hagayot—hah-GAH-yot

Hayawa—hah-YAH-wah

Kamye—KAHM-yeh

Keo—KAY-o

makil—MAH-kihl

Nadami—nah-DAH-mee

Noeha—no-AY-hah

Ramayo—rah-MAH-yo

rega—RAY-gah

Rewe—REH-weh

San Ubattat—sahn-oo-BAHT-taht

Seugi—say-OO-ghee

Shomeke—sho-MEH-keh

Suhame—soo-HAH-meh

Tazeu—tah-ZAY-oo

Teyeo—teh-YAY-o

Tikuli—tee-KOO-lee

Toebawe—to-eh-BAH-weh

Tual—too-AHL or TWAHL

veot—VAY-ot

Voe Deo—vo-eh-DAY-o

Walsu—WAHL-soo

Werel—WEH-rehl

Yeowe—yay-O-way

Yeron—YEH-rohn

Yoke—YO-keh

Yotebber—yo-TEHB-ber

Yowa—YO-wah

Names formed with the name of the deities Kamye (Kam) and Tual tend to keep a stress on that element, thus:

Abberkam—AHB-ber-KAHM

Batikam—BAH-tih-KAHM

Rakam—RAH-KAHM

Sezi-Tual—SAY-zih-TWAHL

Tualtak—TWAHL-tahk

HAINISH

(The extremely long lineage-names common among the Hainish are cut down for daily use; thus Mattin-yehedarhed-dyura-ga-muruskets becomes Yehedarhed.)

araha—ah-RAH-ha

Ekumen (from an Ancient Terran word)—EK-yoo-men

Esdardon Aya—ez-DAR-don-AH-ya

Hav­zhiva—HAHV-zhi-vah

Iyan Iyan—ee-YAHN-ee-YAHN

Kathhad—KAHTH-hahd

Mezhe—MEH-zheh

Stse—STSEH (like the capitalized letters in English “beST SEt”)

Tiu—TYOO

Ve—VEH

Yehedarhed—yeh-heh-DAR-hed

2. THE PLANETS WEREL AND YEOWE

From A Handbook of the Known Worlds, printed in Darranda, Hain, Hainish Cycle 93, Local Year 5467.

Ekumenical Year 2102 is counted as Present when historical dates are given as years Before Present (BP).

The Werel-Yeowe solar system consists of 16 planets orbiting a yellow-white star (RK-tamo-5544-34). Life developed on the third, fourth, and fifth planets. The fifth, called Rakuli in Voe Dean, has only invertebrate life-forms tolerant of arid cold, and has not been exploited or colonised. The third and fourth planets, Yeowe and Werel, are well within the Hainish Norm of atmosphere, gravity, climate, etc. Werel was colonised by Hain late in the Expansion, within the last million years. It appears that there was no native fauna to displace, as all animal life-forms found on Werel, as well as some flora, are of Hainish derivation. Yeowe had no animal life until Werel colonised it 365 years BP.

Natural History

The fourth planet out from its sun, Werel has seven small moons. Its current climate is cool temperate, severely cold at the poles. Its flora is largely indigenous, its fauna entirely of Hainish origin, modified deliberately to obtain cobiosis with the native plants, and further modified through genetic drift and adaptation. Human adaptations include a cyanotic skin coloration (from black to pale, with a bluish cast) and eyes without visible whites, both evidently adjustments to elements in the solar radiation spectrum.

Voe Deo: Recent History: 4000–3500 years BP, aggressive, progressive black-skinned people from south of the equator on the single great continent (the region that is now the nation of Voe Deo) invaded and dominated the lighter-skinned peoples of the north. These conquerors instituted a master-slave society based on skin color.

Voe Deo is the largest, most numerous, wealthiest nation on the planet; all other nations in both hemispheres are dependencies, client states, or economically dependent on Voe Deo. Voe Dean economics have been based on capitalism and slavery for at least 3000 years. Voe Dean hegemony permits the general description of Werel as if it were all one society. As the society is in rapid change, however, this account will be put in the past tense.

Social Classes under Slavery:

Class: master (owner or gareot) and slave (asset). Your class was your mother’s class, without exception.

Skin color ranges from blue-black through bluish or greyish beige to an almost depigmented white. (Only albinism affects hair and eyes, which are dark.) Ideally and in the abstract, class was skin color: owners black, assets white. Actually, many owners were black, most were dark; some assets were black, most beige, some white.

OWNERS were called men, women, children.

The unqualified word owner meant either the class as a whole or an individual/family owning two or more slaves.

The owner of one slave or no slaves was a staffless owner or gareot.

The veot was a member of an hereditary warrior caste of owners; the ranks were rega, zadyo, oga. Veot men almost invariably joined the Army; most veot families were landed proprietors; most were owners, some gareots.

Owner women formed a subclass or inferior caste. An owner woman was legally the property of a man (father, uncle, brother, husband, son, or guardian). Most observers hold that the gender division of Werelian society was as profound and essential as the master/slave division, but less visible, as it cut across it, owner women being considered socially superior to assets of both sexes. Since women were property, they could not own property, in­cluding human property. They could, however, manage property.

ASSETS were called bondsmen, bondswomen, pups or young. Pejorative terms: slaves, dusties, chalks, whites.

Luls were work-slaves, owned by a person or a family. All slaves on Werel were luls, except makils and asset-soldiers.

Makils were sold to and owned by the Entertainment Corporation.

Asset-soldiers were sold to and owned by the Army.

“Cutfrees” or eunuchs were male slaves castrated (more or less voluntarily, depending on age, etc.) to gain status and privilege. Werelian histories describe a number of cutfrees who rose to great power in various governments; many held posts of influence throughout the bureaucracy. The Bosses of the bondswomen’s side of the compound were invariably cutfrees.

Manumission was extremely rare up until the last century, restricted to a few famous historical/legendary cases of slaves whose supernal loyalty and virtue induced their masters to give them freedom. About the time the War of Liberation began on Yeowe, the practice of manumission became more frequent on Werel, led by the owner group The Community, which advocated the abolition of slavery. A manumitted asset ranked legally, though seldom socially, as a gareot.

In Voe Deo at the time of the Liberation the proportion of assets to owners was 7:1. (About half these owners were gareots, owners of one or no assets.) In poorer countries the proportion dropped lower or reversed; in the Equatorial States the proportion of assets to owners was 1:5. In Werel as a whole, the pro­portion was estimated to be about three assets to one owner.

The House and the Compound

Historically and in the country, on the estates, farms, and plantations, the assets lived in a fenced or walled compound with a single gate. The compound was divided in halves by a ditch running parallel to the gate wall. The gateside was the men’s quarters, the inside was the women’s. Children lived on the inside, until boys reaching working age (8 to 10) were sent over to the longhouse. Women lived in huts, mothers and daughters, sisters or friends usually sharing a hut, two to four women with their children. The men and boys lived in gateside barracks called longhouses. Kitchen gardens were maintained by the old people and small children who did not go out to work; the old people generally cooked for the working people. The grandmothers ruled the compound.

Cutfrees (eunuchs) lived in separate houses built against the outside wall, with a surveillance station on the wall; they served as Compound Bosses, intermediaries between the grandmothers and the Work Bosses (members of the owner family, or hired gareots, in charge of the working assets). Work Bosses lived in houses outside the compound.

The owning family and their owner-class dependents occupied the House. The term House included any number of outbuildings, the Work Bosses’ quarters, and animal barns, but specifically meant the family’s large house. In conventional Houses the men’s side (azade) and the women’s side (beza) were strictly divided. The degree of restriction on the women reflected the wealth, power, and social pretension of the family. Gareot women might have considerable freedom of movement and occupation, but women of wealthy or distinguished family were kept indoors or in the walled gardens, never going out without a numerous male escort.

A number of female assets lived on the women’s side as domestics and for use of the male owners. Some Houses kept male domestics, usually boys or old men; some kept cutfrees as servants.

In factories, mills, mines, etc., the compound system was maintained with some modifications. Where there was division of labor, all-male compounds were controlled entirely by hired gareots; in all-female compounds the grandmothers were allowed to keep order as in country compounds. Men rented to the all-male compounds had a life expectancy of about 28 years. During the shortage of assets caused by the slave trade to Yeowe in the early years of the Colony, some owners formed cooperative breeding compounds, where bondswomen were kept and bred annually, doing light work; some of these “breeders” bore a baby annually for twenty or more years.

Rentspeople: On Werel, all assets were individually owned. (The Corporations of Yeowe changed this practice; the Corporations owned the slaves, who had no private masters.)

In Werelian cities, assets traditionally lived in their owners’ household as domestics. During the last millennium it became increasingly common for owners of superfluous assets to rent them to businesses and factories as skilled or unskilled labor. The owners or shareholders of a company bought and owned individual assets individually; the company rented the assets, controlled their use, and shared the profits. An owner could live on the rental of two skilled assets. Thus rentsmen and rentswomen became the largest group of assets in all cities and many towns. Rentspeople lived in “union compounds”—apartment houses supervised by hired gareot Bosses. They were required to keep curfew and check in and out.

(Note the difference between Werelian rentspeople, rented out by their owner, and the far more autonomous Yeowan freedpeople, slaves who paid their owner a tithe or tax on freely chosen work, called “freedom rental.” One of the early objectives of the Hame, the Voe Dean underground asset liberation group, was to institute “freedom rental” on Werel.)

Most union compounds and all city households were gender­-divided into azade and beza, but some private owners and some companies allowed their assets or rentspeople to live as couples, though not to marry. Their owners could separate them for any reason at any time. The mother’s owner owned the children of any such asset couple.

In the conventional compound, heterosexual access was controlled by the owners, the Bosses, and the grandmothers. People who “jumped the ditch” did so at their peril. The owner myth-ideal was of total separation of male and female assets, with the Bosses managing selective breeding, chosen stud asset males servicing the females at optimal intervals to produce the desired number of young. Female assets were mainly concerned, on exploitive farms, to avoid undesired breeding and yearly pregnancy. In the hands of benevolent owners, the grandmothers and cutfrees often could protect girls and women from rape, and even allow some affectional pairing. But bonding was discouraged both by the owners and the grandmothers; and no form of slave marriage was admitted by law or custom on Werel.

Religions

The worship of Tual, a Kwan Yin–like maternal deity of peace and forgiveness, was the state religion of Voe Deo. Philosophically, Tual is seen as the most important incarnation of Ama the Increate or Creator Spirit. Historically, she is an amalgam of many local and nature deities, and locally often refragments into multiplicity. Nationally, enforcement of the national religion tended to accompany Voe Dean hegemony in other countries, although the religion is not inherently a proselytising or aggressive one. Tualite priests can and do hold high office in the government. Class: Tualite images and worship were maintained by the owners in all slave compounds, both on Werel and Yeowe. Tualism was the owners’ religion. The assets’ practice of it was enforced, and while including aspects of Tualite myth and worship in their rituals, most assets were Kamyites. By considering Kamye as “the Bondsman” and a lesser aspect of Ama, the Tualite priesthood included and tolerated Kamyite practice (which had no official clergy) among slaves and soldiers (most veots were Kamyites).

The Arkamye or Life of Kamye the Swordsman (Kamye is also the Herdsman, a beastmaster deity, and the Bondsman, having been long in service to Lord Nightfall): a warrior epic, adopted about 3,000 years ago by the assets, pretty much worldwide, as the sourcebook of their own religion. It cultivates such warrior/slave virtues as obedience, courage, patience, and selflessness, as well as spiritual independence, a stoical indifference to the things of this world, and a passionate mysticism: reality is to be won only by letting the seeming-real go. Assets and veots include Tual in their worship as an incarnation of Kamye, himself an incarnation of Ama the Increate. The “stages of life” and “going into silence” are among the mystical ideas and practices shared by Kamyites and Tualites.

Relations with the Ekumen

The First Envoy (EY 1724) was met with extreme suspicion. After a closely guarded deputation was allowed to land from the ship Hugum, alliance was rejected. Aliens were forbidden to enter the solar system by the Government of Voe Deo and its allies. Werel, led by Voe Deo, then entered on a rapid, competitive development of space technology and intensification of all techno-industrial development. For many decades, Voe Dean government, industry, and military were driven by a paranoid expectation of the armed return of conquering Aliens. It was this development that led within only thirteen years to the colonisation of Yeowe.

During the next three centuries the Ekumen made contact at intervals with Werel. An exchange of information was initiated at the insistence of the University of Bambur, joined by a consortium of universities and research institutions. Finally, after over three hundred years, the Ekumen was permitted to send a few Observers. During the War of Liberation on Yeowe, the Ekumen was invited to send Ambassadors to Voe Deo and Bambur, and later Envoys to Gatay, the Forty States, and other nations. For some time nonobservance of the Arms Convention kept Werel from joining the Ekumen, despite pressure from Voe Deo on the other states, which insisted on retaining their weaponry. After the abrogation of the Arms Convention, Werel joined the Ekumen, 359 years after first contact and 14 years after the end of the War of Liberation.

As a property of the Corporations, having no government of its own, Yeowe Colony was considered by its Werelian owners to be ineligible for Ekumenical membership. The Ekumen continued to question the right of the Four Corporations to ownership of the planet and its people. During the last years of the War of Liberation, the Freedom Party invited Ekumenical observers to Yeowe, and the establishment of a regular Envoy there coincided with the end of the War. The Ekumen helped Yeowe negotiate an end to the economic control of the planet by the Corporations and the Government of Voe Deo. The World Party nearly succeeded in driving the Aliens as well as the Werelians off the planet, but when that movement collapsed, the Ekumen supported the Provisional Government until elections could be held. Yeowe joined the Ekumen in Year of Liberation 11, three years before Werel did.

Natural History

The third planet out from its sun, Yeowe has a warm-moderate climate with little seasonal variation.

Bacterial life is ancient and of normally vast complexity and adaptive variety. A number of microscopic marine Yeowan species are defined as animals; otherwise, the native biota of the planet were plants.

On land there was a great variety of complex species, photosynthetic or saprophytic. Most were sessile, with some “creepers,” colonial or individual plants capable of slow movement. Trees were the principal large life-form. South Continent was almost entirely tropical jungle/temperate rain forest from the coastlines up to timberline in the Polar Range and to the taiga of the Antarctic Circle. Great Continent, forested in the extreme north and south, was a steppe and savannah landscape at the higher central altitudes, with immense areas of bog, marsh, and sea marsh on the coastal plains. In the absence of pollinating animals, the plants had many devices to use wind and rain to cross-fertilise and propagate: explosive seeds, winged seeds, seednets that catch the wind and float for hundreds of miles, waterproof spores, “burrowing” seeds, “swimming” seeds, and plants with mobile vanes, cilia, etc.

The seas, which are warm and relatively shallow, and the vast sea marshes nourish a huge variety of sessile and floating plants, on the order of plankton, algaes, seaweeds, coral-type and sponge-type plants forming permanent constructions (mostly of silicon), and unique plants such as the “sailers” and the “mirrorweed.” Vast connected “lily mats” were harvested by the Corporations so efficiently as to render the species extinct within thirty years.

Heedless introduction of Werelian plant and animal species killed off or crowded out about 3/5 of the native species, aided by industrial pollution and war. The owners brought in deer, hunting dogs, hunting cats, and greathorses for their hunts. The deer thrived and destroyed a great deal of native habitat. Most introduced animal species failed in the long run. Werelian animal survivors other than humankind on Yeowe include:

birds (domestic fowl brought in as game or as poultry; songbirds were released, and a few species adapted and survived)

foxdogs and spotted cats (pets)

cattle (domestic; many wild in abandoned districts)

deer (wild, called fendeer, adapted to the marsh regions)

hunting cats (feral, rare, in marshlands)

The introduction of some fish species in the rivers was disastrous to the native plant life, and what fish survived were destroyed by poison. All attempts to introduce ocean fish failed.

Horses were slaughtered during the War of Liberation, as symbolic possessions of the owners; none remain.

The Colony: The Settlement

Early Werelian rockets reached Yeowe 365 years BP. Exploration, mapping, and prospecting were eagerly pursued. The Yeowe Mines Corporation, owned principally by Voe Dean investors, was given sole right to prospecting. Within twenty-five years, larger and more efficient ships made mining profitable, and the YMC began regular shipments of slaves to Yeowe and ores and minerals to Werel.

The next major company established was the Second Planet Forest Woods Corporation, cutting and shipping Yeowan timber to Werel, where industrial and population expansion had reduced forests drastically.

Exploitation of the oceans became a major industry by the end of the first century, the Yeowan Shippers Corporation harvesting the lily mats with immense profit. Having used up that resource, the YSC turned to the exploitation and processing of other sea species, especially the oil-rich bladderweed.

During the Colony’s first century, the Agricultural Plantation Company of Yeowe began systematic culture of introduced grains and fruits and of native species such as the oe-reed and the pini fruit. The warm, equable climate of most of Yeowe and the absence of insect and animal pests (maintained by scrupulous quarantine regulations) permitted an enormous expansion of agriculture.

The individual enterprises of these four Corporations and the regions where they operated, whether in mining, forestry, mariculture, or agriculture, were called “Plantations.”

The four great Corporations maintained absolute control over their respective products, though there were over the decades many battles (legal and physical) over conflicting rights to the exploitation of an area. No rival company was able to break the Corporations’ monopoly, which had the full, active support—military, political, and scientific—of the Government of Voe Deo, a major beneficiary of Corporation profits. The principal investment of capital in the Corporations was always from the government and capitalists of Voe Deo. A powerful country at the time of the Settlement, after three centuries of the Colony Voe Deo was by far the richest country on Werel, dominating and controlling all the others. Its control over the Corporations on Yeowe, however, was nominal. It negotiated with them as with sovereign powers.

Population and Slavery

For the first century only male slaves were exported to Yeowe Colony by the Corporations, whose monopoly on slave shipment, via the Interplanet Cartel, was complete. In the first century, a high proportion of these slaves were from the poorer nations of Werel; later, as slave-breeding for the Yeowan market became profitable, more of them were sent from Bambur, the Forty States, and Voe Deo.

During this period, the population grew to about 40,000 of the owner class (80% male) and about 800,000 slaves (all male).

There were several experimental “Emigration Towns,” settlements of gareots (owner-class people without slaves), mostly mills and service communities. These settlements were first tolerated, then abolished, by the Corporations, who induced the Werelian governments to limit emigration to Corporation personnel. The gareot settlers were shipped back to Werel and the services they had set up were staffed by slaves. The “middle class” of townsfolk and tradespeople on Yeowe thus came to be composed of semi-independent slaves (freedpeople) rather than gareots and rentspeople as on Werel.

Prices on bondsmen kept going up, as the Mining and Agricultural Corporations in particular squandered slave life (a mine slave during the first century was expected to have a “worklife” of five years). Individual owners increasingly often smuggled in female slaves as sexual and domestic servants. The Corporations, under these pressures, changed their rule and permitted the importation of bondswomen (238 BP).

At first bondswomen, considered as breeding stock, were restricted to the compounds on the plantations. As their usefulness for all kinds of work became evident, these restrictions were eased by the owners on most plantations. Slave women, however, had to fit into the century-old social system of slave men, which they entered as inferiors, slaves’ slaves.

On Werel, all assets were personally owned, except the makils (bought from their owners by the Entertainment Corporation), and asset-soldiers (bought from their owners by the government). On Yeowe, all slaves were Corporation-owned, bought by the Corporation from their Werelian owners. No slave on Yeowe could be privately owned. No slave on Yeowe could be freed. Even those brought in as personal servants, such as maids of plantation owners’ wives, had their ownership transferred to the Corporation that owned the plantation.

Though manumission was not allowed, as the slave population increased very rapidly, causing a surplus on many plantations, the status of freedperson became increasingly common. Freedpeople found work for hire or independently and “rented freedom,” paying one or more Corporations monthly or annually whatever fee (usually about 50%) was levied on them as a tax on their independent work. Most freedpeople worked as sharecroppers, shopkeepers, or mill hands, and in service industries; during the Colony’s third century a professional class of freedpeople became well established in the cities.

By the end of the third century, when the population growth had slowed somewhat, the total population of Yeowe was about 450 million; the proportion of owners to slaves was less than one to one hundred. About half the slave population were freedpeople. (The population 20 years after Liberation was again 450 million, all free.)

On the plantations, the original all-male social structure set the pattern of slave society. Work gangs early developed into social groups (called gangs), and gangs into tribes, each with a hierarchy of power: Tribesmen under a slave Headman or Chief, under the Boss, under the owner, under the Corporation. Bonding, competition, rivalry, homosexual privileges, and adoptive lineages became institutionalised and often elaborately codified. The only safety for a slave was membership in a tribe and strict adherence to its rules. Slaves sold away from their plantation had to serve as slaves’ slaves, often for years, before they were accepted into membership of the local tribe.

As women slaves were brought in, most of them became tribal, as well as Corporate, property. The Corporations encouraged this. It was to their advantage to have slave women controlled by the tribes, as the tribes were controlled by the Corporations.

Opposition and insurrection, never able to organise widely, were always crushed with the instant and brutal finality of infinitely superior armaments. Headmen and chiefs colluded with the Bosses, who, working in the interest of owners and Corporations, exploited the rivalries between tribes and the power struggles within them, while maintaining an absolute embargo on “ideology,” by which they meant education, information of any kind from outside the local plantation. (On most plantations, well into the second century, literacy was a crime. A slave caught reading was blinded by dropping acid in the eyes or scraping the eyes from the sockets. A slave caught using a radio or network outlet was deafened by white-hot picks thrust through the eardrums. The “Fit Punishment Lists” of the Corporations and plantations were long, detailed, and explicit.)

In the second century, as slave population shot up to the point of surplus on most plantations, a gradual trickle of both men and women towards the “shop-strips” run by freedpeople grew to a steady stream. Over the decades, the “shop-strips” grew into towns and the towns into cities entirely populated by freedpeople.

Although doomsayers among the owners began to point to the ever-increasing size and independence of the “Assetvilles” and “Whiteytowns” and “Dustyburgs” as a looming threat, the Corporations considered the cities safely under control. No large buildings were allowed, no defensive structures of any kind; possession of a firearm was punished by disembowelment; no slave was allowed to operate any flying vehicle; the Corporations kept tight guard on raw materials and industrial processes that could provide weaponry of any kind to the slaves or freedpeople.

“Ideology,” education, did exist in the cities. Late in the second century of the Colony, the Corporations, while censoring, filtering, and altering information, formally gave permission for freedpeople’s children and some tribal children to be schooled up to age 14. They allowed slave communities to set up schools, and sold them books and other materials. In the third century the Corporations instituted and maintained an information and entertainment network for the cities. Educated workers were becoming valuable. The limitations of the tribes had become increasingly evident. Rigidly conservative, most tribal chiefs and Bosses were unable or unwilling to change any practices in any way, at a time when the abuse of the planet’s resources called for radical changes in methods and objectives. It was clear that profit on Yeowe would increasingly come not from strip-mining, clear-cutting, and monoculture, but from refined industry, modern plants staffed by skilled workers capable of learning new techniques and following unfamiliar orders.

On Werel, a capitalist slave society, work was done by people. Slave labor, whether simple brawnwork or highly skilled, was hand labor, aided by an elegant but ancillary machine technology: “The trained asset is the finest machine, and the cheapest.” Production, even of very high-technology items, was essentially traditional craft of very high quality. Neither speed nor great volume was particularly valued.

On Yeowe, late in the third century of the Colony, as raw material exports failed, slave labor was used in a new way. The assembly line was developed, with the conscious purpose not only of speeding and cheapening production, but also of keeping the worker ignorant of the work process as a whole. The Second Planet Corporation, dropping the words Forest Woods from its name, led the new manufacture. The SPC quickly surpassed the old giants, Mines and Agriculture, reaping huge profits from the sale of mass-produced finished goods to the poorer nations of Werel. By the time of the Uprising, more than half the freedworkers of Yeowe were owned by or rented to the Second Planet Corporation.

There was far more social unrest in the mills and mill towns than on the tribal plantations. Corporation executives ascribed it to the increase in the number of “uncontrolled” freedpersons, and many advocated closing the schools, destruction of the cities, and reinstitution of sealed compounds for all slaves. The Corporations’ city militia (gareots hired and brought from Werel, plus a police force of unarmed freedmen) increased to a considerable standing army, its gareot members heavily armed. Much of the unrest in the cities and attempts at protest centered on mills that used the assembly line. Workers who, feeling themselves part of an intelligible process, would tolerate very harsh conditions, found meaningless work intolerable, even though working conditions were in some ways improved.

The Liberation began, however, not in the cities, but in the compounds of the plantations.

The Uprising and the Liberation

The Uprising had its origin in organisations of tribal women in plantations of Great Continent, joining together to prevent ritual rape of girl-children and to demand tribal laws against sexual enslavement of bondswomen by bondsmen, gang rape, and the beating and murder of women, for none of which was there any penalty.

They acted first by educating women and children of both sexes, then by demanding proportional voice in the all-male tribal councils. Their organisations, called Woman Clubs, spread across both continents throughout the third century of the Colony. The Clubs spirited so many girls and women off the plantations into the cities that the chiefs’ and Bosses’ complaints began to be heard by the Corporations. Local tribesmen and Bosses were encouraged to “go into the cities and get their women back.”

These incursions, often led by plantation police and aided by the Corporation city militia, were often carried out with extreme brutality. City freedpeople, unused to the kind of violence normal on the plantations, reacted with outrage. City bondsmen were drawn to defend and fight with the women.

In 61 BP, in Eyu Province, in the town of Soyeso, the slaves’ successful resistance to a police raid from Nadami Plantation (APC) escalated into an attack on the plantation itself. The police barracks were stormed and burned. Some of the chiefs of Nadami joined the uprising, opening their compounds to the rebels. Others joined in the defense of their owners in the Plantation House. A slave woman unlocked the doors of the plantation armory to the insurrection—the first time in the history of Yeowe Colony that any large group of slaves had access to powerful weapons. A massacre of owners followed, but it was partially restrained: most of the children of the Plantation House, and twenty women and men, were spared and put on a train to the capital. No adult slave who had fought against the uprising was spared.

From Nadami the Uprising spread, by way of guns and ammunition, to three neighboring plantations. All the tribes joined, defeating Corporation forces in the quick, fierce Battle of Nadami. Slaves and freedpeople from neighboring provinces poured into Eyu. The chiefs, the grandmothers of the compounds, and the leaders of the insurrection met at Nadami and declared Eyu Province a free state.

Within ten days, Corporation bombing raids and land troops had smashed the insurrection. Captured rebels were tortured and executed. Particular revenge was taken on the town of Soyeso: all the people left there, mostly children and the old, were herded into the town squares and trucks and tread-wheeled ore-carriers ran over and over them. This was called “paving with dust.”

The Corporations’ victory had been quick and easy, but it was followed by a new insurrection at a different plantation, the murder of an owner’s family here, a strike of city freedworkers there, all over the world.

The unrest did not cease. Many attacks on plantation armories and militia barracks were successful; the insurrectionists now had weapons, and learned how to make bombs and mines. Hit-and-run warfare in the jungles and the great marshes gave the guerrilla’s advantage to the rebels. It became clear that the Corporations needed more armaments and more manpower. They imported mercenary soldiers from the poorer nations of Werel. Not all of these were loyal or effective troops. The Corporations soon persuaded the government of Voe Deo to safeguard its national interest by investing troops in the defense of the Owners of Yeowe. At first the commitment was reluctant, but 23 years after Nadami, Voe Deo decided to put down the unrest once and for all, sending 45,000 troops, all veots (members of the hereditary warrior caste) or owner-volunteers.

Seven years later, at the end of the war, 300,000 soldiers from Werel had been killed on Yeowe, most of them from Voe Deo, and most of them veots.

The Corporations began to take their people off Yeowe several years before the end of the war, and during the final year of fighting there were almost no civilian owners left on the planet.

Throughout the thirty years of the War of Liberation, some tribes and many individual slaves sided with the Corporations, which promised them safety and rewards and furnished them with weapons. Even during the Liberation there were battles between rival tribes. After the Corporations and the army pulled out, tribal wars smouldered and flared up all over Great Continent. No central government was able to establish itself until Abberkam’s World Party, defeating the Freedom Party in many local elections, seemed to be on the point of setting up the first World Council elections. In Year 2 of Liberation the World Party collapsed abruptly under accusation of cor­ruption. The Envoys of the Ekumen (invited to Yeowe by the Freedom Party during the final year of the war) supported the Freedom Party in activating their constitution and setting up elections. The First Election (Year 3 of the Liberation), managed by the Freedom Party, established the new Constitution on rather shaky ground; women were not allowed to vote, many tribal votes were cast by the chiefs alone, and some of the hierarchic tribal structures were retained and legalised. There were several more fierce tribal wars and years of unrest and protest while the society of free Yeowe constructed itself. Yeowe joined the Ekumen in Year 11 of the Liberation, 19 BP, and the First Ambassador was sent in that year. Major amendments to the Yeowan Constitution, assuring all people over 18 the vote by secret ballot and guaranteeing equal rights, were voted by free general election in Year 18 of the Liberation.