The Kanshou (Earthkeep) (7 page)

Zude's fist hit the table.  "Revenge!" she breathed.  "Insane, mindless revenge!"  She pushed her fingers through her hair, then stood abruptly.  "Forgive me, Kanshoumates," she said, pulling in a deep breath, "but I have trouble understanding anyone who thinks that burning off a man's balls will make him docile."

Rhoda shot a glance at Longleaf, then turned back to Zude.  "I would agree, Magister, but you will admit that the symbolism of the act carries with it a powerful message."

"I'll admit no such thing!" Zude shot back.  She leaned on the table.  "Such women don't want a nonviolent world, Major.  They simply want to punish men.  And to participate  in the escalation of the violence . . . thus, I might add, damaging their own argument that men are the violent sex!" 

"Whatever the case," Rhoda replied, "Magister Win believes the spreading use of these devices triggered the uprisings, at least in Kandy and Singapore."

Zude leaned toward Rhoda.  "Lin-ci Win sent these crystals?"

Rhoda looked at Longleaf.  "Insofar as she sent us at all, she sent them with us as evidence of the new extremes that citizens are moving toward.  She is being pressured, Magister, to use her influence in hastening the Central Web to a ratification of the Testing and the Protocols . . . pressured by women from all over China and India.  And by women from your own tri-satrapy."

Something with sharp corners stirred in Zude's stomach. "What women?" she asked steadily.

"Jezebel Stronglaces has brought together most of the sentiment here in your jurisdiction.  She allies herself with many in the Africa-Europe-Mideast Tri-Satrapy as well."

Zude stiffened.  "I knew Jezebel Stronglaces.  At the Academy."

Both Amahs visibly refrained from making full eye contact with each other.  They waited in silence.

"Amahs," Zude continued, "if Jezebel Stronglaces is still the woman she was then, she would abhor such violence as this." 

"Clarification, Magister," said Longleaf promptly.  "Jezebel Stronglaces has not been identified with the women distributing the ballbakers.  The majority of women who pressure Magister Win are not associated with the crystals either.  Most are opposed to violence in any form."

Zude suppressed a sardonic rejoinder.  "I understand," she muttered, sifting and sorting the new information.  When she refocused at last on her two guests, it was with deliberate purpose.  "Kanshoumates," she said, "I have to end this encounter.  You've fanned the fires of change tonight, and I formally thank you."  She straightened, and smiled briefly.  "Do we need any closure?"

Matrix Major Densmore studied the Magister.  "Only to thank you," she said, "for the surprise -- and the gift -- of the true-talk."

Zude nodded. 

"And for the such-and-such," added the Jing-Cha.  "I thank you too, Magister."

Together the three women stood. 

Zude moved toward the exit wall.  "Then goodnight," she said.  "Captain Edge will see you to your quarters here in the Shrievalty.  Consider yourselves my guests for as long as you need to stay."  She touched the depaque control that revealed the hallway.

When the wall re-established itself behind the Australian women, Zude walked to the desk unit that held the taxidermed cat.  She rested her hand on its taut curved neck and closed her eyes.

Long minutes later she swung into action, calling up desktop, wall, and ceiling screens for the files she was seeking with her fingers.  "Flora!"

"Ma'am, Magister?"  Vigilante Flora Arguelles's voice filled the room.

"Get me Magister Lutu on flatscreen.  Tell her I must hear from her within three hours or I'll be in Crete by low rocket before sunset tomorrow."  Zude's voice lost its sharp edges.  "I also need Kayita and Ria.  At home.  They're waiting up for me.  Set it up on holofone if you can."

When Flora beeped off, Zude threw one last toggle.

"Here, Magister," said the voice of Captain Edge.

Zude worked smoothly with her adjutant, conducting conferences with her three Vice-Magisters and then reaching two old friends in simul-call at Kanshou field posts in Shenyang and Paris, each of whom had been a legal advisor to her in the past.  She set them to the task of polling every member of the Central Web as to whether or not Habitante Testing or the Anti-Violence Protocols might reach active agenda status.  "Explore any morally defensible technicality," she told them, "that could stop the Web from initiating this legislation." 

She left off her study of the Central Web's roster of members to take Flora's relay of the message from Magister Flossie Yotoma Lutu.  Magister Lutu would be free to talk early the next morning, L.A. time, by unmonitored priority holochannel.  She would call Magister Adverb then.  Under no condition was Zude to come to Crete since tonight Yotoma herself was being gerted to Rome. 

Zude was in conversattion with Aztlán's best crystal expert when Flora announced, "I've got your folks on comline three."  Zude cut short the lecture on orgone accumulators.  She pressed a strip under her desk and filled her office with the holoscreen image of an old woman's face -- a highly agitated old woman.  Behind the face -- and trying to calm it -- was a younger woman who struggled at the same time to control a small black-haired girl eager to get into the holopicture. 

"Again, again," the old woman moaned loudly, "again you are not coming!"

"Zudie!" the child cried, wiggling with joy.  When the young woman whispered in her ear, the little girl settled, still intent upon Zude's holo-image.  The old woman continued moaning.

Zude waved a sound-dampinto effect and widened the hololensto encompass her chaotic desk.  She addressed the old woman.   "Kayita," she soothed, trying to be heard over the sounds of  distress, "Kayita--"

"Zella, you are wholly without honor, worth nothing to woman or child.  Worth nothing to a man.  Worth nothing.  Why do you not come?" 

Zude overrode the tirade.  "Kayita, look at my desk, look at my office.  Look at all the work!"  She pointed to the disarray of cups, chairs, magnopads, papers, full screens, blinking lights.  "Hey," she said, snagging the image of Bosca out of the air, "there's a woman I'd like for you to meet, from Old Mexico—"

The old woman's eyes lit up.  "Oaxaca?  She is from Oaxaca?"

"Near there, at least.  I'm sure she could tell us about Oaxaca.  Why don't I bring her for a visit tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow?  'Tomorrow' you said yesterday.  You said, 'Tomorrow I will sleep at your house.'  It is tomorrow.  And you sleep in your office.  Again."

The younger woman pushed in beside Kayita, holding her, stroking her hair, talking both to her and Zude.  "Zude, it's fine," she said.

"Fine?" burst in Kayita.  "What is fine?  Fine that she is not coming?  We are her family.  Like a mother I am to her!" she railed.  "Zella, you come home tonight.  Your bed is ready."

Zude interrupted.  "I know, Kayita, I know."  She addressed Ria.  "I see generations one and three, and half of number four.  Where's the other half of four?"

"Enrique?  He's sleeping tight."

"And number two?  Eva?"

"She's at a class.  And we'll all be here tomorrow.  Bring your friend."  Ria grabbed Regina to stop her plunge into a hololens.

"Zudie!" bellowed the child.

"Reggie," Zude beamed, "I promise, we'll go flying when I come--"

Regina's face glowed brighter.  "Tomorrow!  We'll fly!  You and me and your friend!"

Zude swallowed abruptly.  "Well, not that friend, preshi.  But I'll fly with you soon."

Regina was soothed.

Kayita had lapsed into a grim silence.  She peered at Zude. "You work too much," she rasped.

Both Zude and Ria laughed.

Kayita grumbled, moving out of holorange.  "Big cocoroca.  She says she is not coming tonight.  She is not coming tonight.  When God says no, the saints are helpless."  She disappeared.

Zude shook her head.  "I can't make it okay with her."

"She'll be fine," Ria promised, "bright as the sun tomorrow, knowing you're coming."

"And by then I'll be brighter too, Ria."

Ria, her arms full, kissed the air in Zude's direction.  Regina sputtered her affection with a loud lip flutter.  Magister Adverb blew a gallant goodbye kiss toward them both.

Zude's longest and most wide-ranging strategizing session was conducted by intra-tri-satrapy conference with three trusted friends/Vigilantes: Captain Edge; Brigadier Vigilante Robin Echevarría, in charge of the tri-satrapy's bailiwick management and stationed in Buenos Aires; and Sky Commander Susana Femmesole whose staff in Old Albuquerque handled one of the tri-satrapy's three information centers.  After Edge had played the flatcube of the just-completed meeting with Amahs Densmore and Longleaf for the advisors, Zude drew responses from each of them, especially in regard to the possible threat of the ballbakers.

Within an hour the group had evolved a plan of action for data-gathering throughout the tri-satrapy.  It called for the activation of tempsquads, polling groups which operated in highly tuned personal contact circumstances; these groups would spot-interview carefuly selected cross-sections of the population to determine the "temperature" of the citizenry on the question of Habitante Testing and the Anti-Violence Protocols.  When Echavarría and Femmesole signed off, Zude called up from her personal files the names of free citizens and officers in the other two tri-satrapies who could shake loose the results of similar polls outside Nueva Tierra.  She copied their preliminary assessments of the inquiry and handed the magnopad over to Edge.

When Edge's departing footsteps had died, Zude took up her vigil again by the depaqued wall overlooking Los Angeles.  Her thoughts were no longer of violent skirmishes within the tri-satrapy or of crystal ballbakers, not even of Kayita or her chosen children.  Instead, Magister Adverb summoned the memory of an earlier world and a younger heart.  She traced in her mind the curious turns of Fate that had crossed her path with that of Jezebel Stronglaces.  Many years ago they had come together and then separated -- painfully and irrevocably.

3 – Meeting - [2041-2069 C.E.]

Said Caterpillar to Maria,   "How do you manage with only two legs? 

Isn't it tiring, bouncing back and forth like that?" 

"Yes," answered Maria, "but alas, it is my human condition."

Question
:  What does this mean?

Response
:  I both abhor violence and practice it daily, for I physically restrain the freedom of those who would harm others.  I thus live with this human contradiction, consoling myself with the reminder of the Precepts Of The Kanshoubu: that as Kanshou I serve a Greater Good by protecting others with my own violent acts; that as Kanshou I at least practice the Principle Of Least Necessary Restraint in the violence that I do commit; and that if my Kanshoumates and I do our jobs well, we may ultimately bring about a nonviolent world, a world in which Kanshou will not be necessary.

-- The Labrys Manual

Jezebel Stronglaces was born Jezebel ("Bella") Engracia Dolalicia in 2041 C.E., near the eastern shores of Lake Michigan.  The bearing mother for the ovarian transplant was Alicia Tuatha Sands, one of the revered far-seers of the Spooner Ensconcement called Lakemir.  The nucleus donor was Ola Adelia Nariño of Cozumel, whose duties as a Vigilante Sea-Shrieve kept her from full participation in the affairs of that community.

Though a female separatist society, the Lakemir Spooners did not embrace the rigid strictures of Mother Right colonies who saw men as dangerous and to be protected against.  The Spooners maintained commercial relations with surrounding towns and regularly elected their representative to the demesne web.  As Bella would learn, the Lakemir women did not think of men at all.  Within the meadows and forests of their ensconcement, men simply did not exist.

With Lakemir's other villagedaughters, Bella Dolalicia worked the ensconcement's orchards and began an early political education in the company of the older women responsible for governance.  Her deep commitment to the female culture surrounding her helped her through the early loss of both her mothers and the frequent mild-to-severe seizures which began when she was four and continued until she was thirteen -- at which  time they disappeared altogether.  She lived with her mothers's co-madres until at 13 she became Jezebel Dolalicia, an independent minor.

In all her endeavors Jezebel Dolalicia sought a mental and spiritual discipline that would enable her to control not only her voracious mind but the unorthodox psychic gifts that frequently emerged without her bidding.  Her seeking led her to the Yucatan where she mastered languages and transmogrifier manufacture, and where she apprenticed to a Mayan herbalist.  When the daughter that she and her lover, Myrtha, had so carefully planned for died shortly after Jez gave birth to her, Jezebel dedicated herself for two years to the austere practices of a Tsangpo convent.  She subsequently took up the formal study of physics in Beijing where she also worked to make transmog technology available to rural areas.  In 2068 C.E., Jezebel Dolalicia sought the discipline of Hong Kong's Kanshou Cadet academy , preparatory to a peacekeeping career as an Amah of the Asia-China-Insula Tri-Satrapy. 

* * * * * * * *

Though the child of a heterosexual union, Zella Terremoto Adverb never learned her father's identity.  She was born in midsummer of 2042 C.E., in Barranquilla, Colombia, to Sylvia Isabel Romero, and was raised with her brother's children in Barrio Santín of that city.

Even before she started to blockschool, she began to learn everything she could about Vigilantes, Amahs, and Femmedarmes, and what it meant to follow the Kanshou Code.  When she was eight, she watched two Vigilantes subdue a crowd of drunken rowdies with nothing but their persuasive voices and the judicious use of their batons.  "Principle Of Least Necessary Restraint," she reminded herself, as if the Shrieves themselves had left their voices inside her. 

Innately endowed with a finely-tuned sense of justice, enthralled by the women who in her eyes were the keepers of justice, and utterly convinced that she would someday be one of those women, Zella Terremoto Adverb consciously molded her young life.  By the time she was 14, she had organized broad-based grassroots resistance to the interference of outside commercial interests in Colombia's demesne affairs, and had turned down an appointment as teen representative to the newly forming Barranquilla Demesne Legislative Web.  That same year she left home and headed north for the Reclaimed Territory Of Aztlán where she worked in bailiwicks and pursued her studies in Kitchen Table tribunals.  It was there that she began her lifelong efforts to change bailiwicks from explosive ghettos into places where habitantes's survival, security, and social needs were met.