Below is a copy of Plato's Children, my first Science Fiction novella (with an emphasis on the fiction... and the philosophy, as you might imagine). This HTML file needs a good bit of formatting, but as I don't have time to read and format all 54 pages of this right now, it's presented for you in a raw format.

Mark Wagner
Final Draft
3-5-96

PLATO'S CHILDREN

1.

               Anyone (man or woman) who is going to be a truly good guardian of our community, will have a philosopher's love of knowledge, and will be passionate, quick on his feet, strong,.. and, within reason, very good looking.
The Republic , 376c (456a) & 535a

 There! What was that?

 In the year 4041 post-founding, spring came early to the southern hemisphere of Quotiss. This particular day the small white afternoon sun poured its goodness over the land, and the hills around the Polis of Lecardia were bright with almost as many colors as the sparkling mid-month rings in the sky overhead. Wild nebra fields had turned from matts of flaccid pink grass to proud seas of firm stems, now brilliant mauve.  Thickets of kuckla, the weave of their sky scrapping canopies tight with leaves, once again teamed with new life. Everywhere, sprouting from the wet ground, even from residual patches of dirty snow, were flowers of every sort.
 The scene brought to mind a simple verse from the Fifth Tome of the Founders, one of the first anyone ever learns.
The Coalition is confusion
The galaxy at guns
Our motherworld is murdered
Humanity undone

But paradise was proven
By the greatest of the Greeks
His masterpiece is moving
Utopia, we seek

On Quotiss we have planted thee
Our children, our seedOn Quotiss we have left for thee
These Seven Tomes
        Succeed...

 At the time I couldn't claim to understand it all, but the last few lines seemed appropriate on such a day.
 There! I saw it again.
 Our phalanx rode double file along a wide gravel highway, winding through the countryside. Exhausted from the days' training maneuvers, my fellow auxiliaries stared blankly ahead, loosely gripping the reign-yokes of their B'neds. The massive six-legged beasts, also fatigued, shuffled lazily forward, brainlessly following the scent of the beasts before them. It seemed that I alone was invigorated by the beauty to be found in every unique detail of the landscape. Like the others, I'd seen similar things every year, but I'd never truly appreciated them before. Now... well, I guess Andid's attitudes were already rubbing off on me.
 There! My heart skipped a beat. Then there it was more plainly, a flash of movement between the kuckla trees.
 A blue and yellow flash, like the summer dress that, despite the chill of the spring air, Andid had worn that morning.
 Coincidence? Maybe. That is, if you didn't consider what a beautiful day it was. No, it had to be her. I would never have said so at the time, but I could feel that it was her.
 I looked at my friend Efra, riding his B'ned next to me. The big man looked especially fatigued, and neither he, nor anybody else for that matter, had seemed to have noticed anything.  Good, I didn't want him to follow me anyway.
 I gripped the yolk, steering my B'ned out of line, and spurred it on ahead of the other auxiliaries.
 "Centurion," I called out.
 "Lieutenant Nohro?" He didn't look at me as my B'ned lumbered up beside his mount.
 "Permission to run my B'ned, sir?" You could already see the towers of the Lecardian skyline over the next few hills. I figured he would let me.
 "Be present and prepared at meditation, mister."
 "Thank you, sir." Without even looking back at Efra and the others, I pulled hard on the yolk and pumped the spur peddles. With a grunt my B'ned scrambled off the road, down the shoulder and into a field of waist high nebra. The muscles in its massive hump rippled in front of me as its six stubby legs built up a powerful speed. Soon we were enveloped in a cloud of dust and nebra fragments. I lowered my faceplate and hugged the hump.
 I was sure the centurion had smiled when had I turned to go. His specialty happened to be B'nedmanship and I knew he favored me for my riding talent. He even once said the Potentates had erred when they chose my specialty; that summer I was to be promoted to mathematician. The centurion was like that, often joking.
 I circled around the field as the phalanx rode on, but as soon as they were out of sight over the next hill I bolted for the thicket. There I climbed down off my B'ned, patted it on the ramplate, and dropped an olfactory beacon at its feet.
 If Andid was in among the trees, and hadn't seen me coming, then I wanted to surprise her. Out of habit, I drew my blaster, a green striped Mercury level weapon, and started into the thicket as stealthily as possible. The undergrowth was challenging, but I never made a sound, not even disturbing the etyrps' clicking songs. A wild juji swung overhead, paying me no heed.  Soon, I had made my way to the bank of a creek bed at the center of the thicket. I'd seen no sign of Andid, and was settling down from my anticipatory high, disappointed that it wasn't her I had seen after all.
 I guess I couldn't kid myself anymore. When every budding trust-me-not made me think of her, and every elusive movement in the kuckla was her running freely through the outback, then I had to admit it. Despite every effort to the contrary, I had fallen in love.
 Suddenly, there was a whoosh and a rustling behind me. My blaster was knocked from my hand and sent skittering into the creek before I could turn around. My legs were swept out from under me and an arm guided my falling body firmly onto my back. Even through my armor, rocks jabbed into my ribs. A pair of knees pinned down my shoulders, and before my reflexes ever kicked in, I found myself staring down the double barrels of a hand blaster.
 "Hi, Nohro."
 She smiled and bit her lower lip. God, she was beautiful. And sweaty. Her simple blue and yellow dress draped loosely over her firm thighs and fanned out over my chest. The whole thing seemed to hang precariously from her well toned shoulders by a pair of thin straps. Those straps were so often in my fantasies... well, I forced down those thoughts.
 "And you were chosen for promotion this summer?" she teased.
 I found my voice.
 "Well, done, Deed." I was genuinely impressed. She was a fine auxiliary. "What are you doing out here?"
 "What are you doing out here?" she countered, standing and releasing me.
 "I happened to see you from the road on the way back from maneuvers. Thought I'd best come see what trouble you were up to." She smiled. Had she meant for me to see her? I whipped myself up onto my feet. "So, what are you doing here?"
 She thought intently for a moment while I stepped into the creek to retrieve my blaster. She holstered her identical weapon behind her back.
 "Why don't you come with me and I'll show you," she said in a tantalizing sort of way.
 I put my gun away and frowned. "Where?"
 Then she took off running.
 In retrospect, it's amazing how little I ever questioned her fancies, or paused to consider my role in them. I ran blindly after her.
 Recklessly now, we thundered through the thicket. At one point she scurried up a rock and leapt the creek. I followed her graceful arch through the air, and her drop roll under a low kuckla branch on the opposite bank. We both came up sprinting, and though it turned out the thicket spanned quite a distance on the opposite bank we never fell into a steady pace. My body, tight from B'neding all day, loosened up as blood and excitement pounded through my arteries. I began to breath heavy. Then she stopped.
 "Shhhh." She put a finger to her mouth and her other hand on my chest to stop me. I froze in my tracks, but my right hand rested on the pistol butt at my side.  My heart and my imagination were racing.
  "No, you won't need that." She took my gun hand and led me up a pile of boulders that lay ahead. At the top she peered over the edge.
 "Look." Her voice was full of a reverence and awe for whatever she saw on the other side.
 I inched upward beside her and took a peek myself. It took me a moment to absorb what I was seeing. The rock formation was much larger than it appeared from our side, and at the center there was a sort of crater, and at the middle of the crater was a single table-like rock behind which sat an old woman in rags, with her eyes closed and her arms raised. She swayed from side to side. A small fire on the central rock sent a thin trail of blue smoke up into the kuckla canopy above. As soon as the truth of the situation hit me, I jerked Andid back behind the rocks again.
 Words failed me for a moment.
 "She's... she's an out-caste," I finally managed.
 "I know." Her eyes searched mine for a glimmer of understanding, but...
 "I don't understand," I said. "Why did you bring me here?"
 "This is where I was going."
 "By yourself?" She didn't answer. "Without you're armor? Without telling anyone? Andid, have you reported this?"
 "No..."
 "Why not?"  I cut her off.
 "I can't. I can't report her."
 "Wait a millicycle. Why can't you..."
  "And you had better not tell anyone, Nohro." She jabbed me with her finger.
 "Why?"
 "You can't. You just can't.... Ok?... Please?"
 I bit my lip and stared at her, puzzled.
 "Please? You've got to promise me, Nohro." Now she took my hand. Hers were strong.
 "In the name of Cygnus, Deed, how can I? She's an out-caste."
 "Nohro, Just give me your word. Tell me you won't say a thing about this... to anybody."
 A long moment passed, and she seemed to be boring into me with her eyes, as if she could concentrate hard enough to force her thoughts straight through my skull. My hand grew hot in hers.
 "Nobody," she pleaded. She didn't even bother reasoning with me. Maybe it was because she didn't really have any rational reasons for asking in the first place, or maybe she just knew the power even her simplest requests had over me.
 "Fine," I relented. "I won't tell anyone."
 "You promise."
 "Yes, yes, I give you my word." She let my hand go.
 Apprehensively, I  looked back over the rocky ledge, but the old woman was gone. The fire was out and there was no sign that either had ever been there, let alone only moments before. It took that frail old out-caste no more time to clean her mess and scramble out of the crater and out of sight, than it took me to tell it.

2.               Those with this natural aptitude should be properly molded. From childhood onward they should only hear such morally sound stories as will inculcate them with the proper values...
       The Second Tome of the Founders
       The Tome of Explication
Book Four, Chapter VII

 I sat in meditation, my mind wrapped in thoughts like my body was rapped in the simple robes of a guardian. I had been only abstractly aware of a droning voice, Teacher G'sendoo reciting one of the great epics of The Fifth Tome in its original Galactin. He concluded with a Seventh Tome prayer asking our God-Guides to counsel our thoughts. I'd already heard them both countless times in my young life, but with those familiar words as my focus, I was able to clear my mind of Andid, and the nagging hunger I felt for having missed dinner. So the speech served its purpose.
 It wasn't until somebody's hand tapped my shoulder that I realized that at least a centi had passed since the teacher had stopped speaking. Andid?
 No, it was Efra. I felt a slight failure at the thought of Andid jumping so readily and unnecessarily back into my mind. Then all focus was lost and my stomach growled.
 Efra's neck muscles bulged as the massive man indicated the nearest door with a jerk of his head. Other young auxiliaries were slowly leaving the cavernous Common Hall, alone or in small groups. Some, though, stayed sitting on the floor, continuing their evenings meditations of their own accord.
 As we walked out, I saw Andid among those who were staying. Transformed since I had last seen her, she now sat wrapped in a bundle of beige robes just like everyone else's. Only her bowl of golden hair, and the angelic profile of her tranquil face separated her from the other robes sitting around her. That, and everything inside, I thought. She was sitting upright, yet seemed completely at rest, deep in thought. Sometimes she would stay for centis after mandatory meditation, even as long as another decicycle. Little did I then suspect the heresy she must've been meditating on.
 Efra and I walked silently out into the courtyard, bathed by the glowing crimson tint of the nebula in the night sky above. A handful of local stars and the flickering belt of Quotiss' own rings accented the gaseous backdrop. A chilling night breeze stung my face and ears.
 "I saw that. You were looking at her, Nohro," Efra said when we were at a respectable distance from the Common Hall.  A big grin crept onto his face. "Permision to run my B'ned, sir?" He laughed. "What was that all about?"
 "It was a beautiful afternoon for a good ride," I said flatly and shrugged like it was nothing.  At least I wasn't lying.
 "Oh, no, no, no. You were out past dinner, Nohro, and your B'ned was far from run ragged when you got back. Also, incidentally, and not coincidentally, I think, one auxiliary Andid was absent from evening meal as well. So... " He was a little too proud of his deduction in my opinion.
 "So, what's you're point?"
 "What were the two of you doing? Did you plan to meet her out there... maybe she likes a little more privacy than the commons, huh?" He chuckled a little.
 "You know she's not like that, Ef.  At least, its not like that between us."
 "Could've fooled me, the way you were looking at her just now... the way you act around her. The way she looks at you..."
 Damn, that got a reaction out of me.
 "She was just on a cross-country workout for second exercises, and I happened to see her from the road... so, I asked the centurion for permission to run my B'ned," I explained.
 "And then you spent all that time doing what?" He was a full head taller than me, and closed the distance between us.
 "I raced obstacles with her in the forest," I conceded. It was a common and approved past time for auxiliaries to compete against each other, especially in friendly races or wrestling matches.
 "And..." He moved closer, with a mock implied threat.
 "And talked..."
 "And..." He stretched himself to his full height.
 "And that's it." That wasn't actually a lie. Seeing an old out-caste didn't count as doing something. That was far more passive than active. If he had asked what happened'...
 "What'd you talk about?" he asked.
 "Oh, you wouldn't want me to tell you." Again, not a lie - as far as I could tell. I couldn't possibly tell him anything that we talked about. So much of what she said, what I talked to her about, was forbidden. Anyway,  I couldn't break my word to Andid.
 Still, I wasn't about to lie either, especially to a fellow guardian, especially Efra.
 "Come on, Nohro, you usually can't wait to download this stuff to me." Funny, the idioms that survived the Founders' techni-cleansing. Neither Efra nor I, nor anyone I knew, had ever even seen a computer. Those were things of legend, beyond even the Saturn level tech-clearance of the Planetary Council.
 "I'm sorry Efra, I still need some time to think about it first."
 Well, that absolved me of having to tell him for the time being, but I knew that, as my friend, he would remain curious. After all, he was the only one who knew how much I felt for her, how inappropriately I longed for her and only her. How much I favored her. Still, I could never have fathomed he would later become as suspicious as he did.

 The rest of the evening I stayed at the dormitory avoiding Efra, and hoping Andid would turn in early so we could talk. But, she didn't. Then,  I tried to stay awake as long as I could so that I might be able to at least see her before we both fell asleep. Unfortunately though, from the time I left the common hall with Efra,  I didn't see her until we were woken up the next morning for exercises. Ah, the life of an auxiliary. I was glad I was soon to be promoted to mathematician.

3.

 As I said, I couldn't possibly tell him anything we talked about. So much of what she said, what I talked to her about, was forbidden...

 The sun had gone down, but through tiny holes in the kuckla canopy, like so many kaleidoscopes above us, the rings were showering the crater with multifarious streams of reflected sunlight.
 "So there's a whole tribe like her?"
 "Yes."
 "And you've befriended them?" I asked, still in disbelief.
 "Ooo!" Andid winced as I rubbed a knot out of her back. "Yes. And it's been the most educational experience of my life, Nohro."
 "Come on Andid. You've learned more from a pack of uneducated out-castes than you have from years of training as a guardian?" I kneaded the spot on her bare back with both thumbs. Already, I had slipped those thin straps down off her shoulders, and the upper part of her dress was now rumpled up beneath me, around her waist. She was lying belly down on a bed of kuckla fur that we had stripped off of a nearby tree, and I was straddling her, sitting on her gun belt.
 We'd already been waiting several centis for the old woman or one of her tribe to reappear.
 "They don't like the name out-caste," Andid said. "They prefer to be called the Allodial People,  and they may be uneducated by our system and according to the Potentates, but they are far from uneducated. Her tribe has traditions all their own, some reaching as far back as The Founding. Some even farther. They have knowledge that someone from a polis can't even imagine."
 I knew I should tell her that was impossible, that out-castes were infecting her with lies. Instead,  I just listened.
 "Take that woman for instance."
 "Intifa?" I tried to remember the name I had just been told.
 "Yes. For instance, She actually has a specialty in a way. Each of them does. Of course, they have to. But, they get to choose theirs."
 I wanted to say, "That's craziness, Deed." It was against everything we were raised to believe. How could anyone possibly hope to reach their potential of goodness, and happiness, without knowing for certain their function in life, and without being led down the proper path to fulfill it?
 "So what's her specialty?" I asked. Despite the fact that I couldn't imagine what else an out-caste would specialize in but some form of crude survival technique,  I was strangely fascinated by everything she was telling me.
 "Intifa is a student, and a teacher, of the way of the Taali," she paused to allow me to recognize the name. I did not. "It's a way of life that has been respected, revered, since the days of the Galactic Coalition, since before the war that sent the Founders to Quotiss. Even today, she is held in the same esteem by her tribe as we hold the Potentates. She's part leader, but also part priestess, and part... artist. A great artist, an artist of life."
 That didn't sound like much of a specialization to me, but the part about being an artist made sense. Many out-castes were just that, artists who, in the name of freedom, had run from their polis and, I should add, had run to their near certain death. In order to survive the Lecardian outback, at least, they would need to form a band with other out-castes, to cooperate as any healthy society should. But, of course, no other government or social organization was allowed outside of a Polis and any significant band was always taken care of before it became a problem. Only the few and resilient ever survived as out-castes. And those few, they were dangerous.
 Some part of me was thinking these things, a part that knew if I were to step back and regard the conversation from a less intimate distance, it would all seem like nonsense. But at the time, I was only thrilled to be sharing her secrets, and hoping she would soon share more. I gently massaged her tiny neck, and let my finger caress the cool skin of her cheek.
 "She's earned my respect," Andid continued, seeming to almost directly address my dissident thoughts. "She's taught me so much. Nohro, she's shown me things I never thought possible. Things I never knew about myself. Things I never knew about the world, about our universe. She has a way with... well, with everything, but mostly with people. She has skills that I would almost call... powers. It even seems at times, that she can... well, I almost believe she can read my mind. And that's really just the beginning. She's opened me up to so many new experiences..."
 Read her mind? "Impossible," I wanted to say again.  Yet, again, I let her go on.
 "During the great cleansing, the Founders erased from our literature any mention of the Taali or their way. Like the knowledge of so many other things, things we can't fathom, the wisdom of the Taali has been denied us."
 "Probably with good reason," I finally said. I was playing with her hair now, massaging her scalp.
 "No, Nohro," she said, stiffening. "There are so many things they've kept from us. So many wonderful, beautiful things. You can't even begin to imagine. I can't even begin to imagine all of it, what we left behind in the galaxy."
 "Now what's the point in talking like that?" She had emphasized the word galaxy like it was some heavenly place one would want to visit. But, never again would a Quotissian visit the coreworlds. Since the founding, when the perambulaters were destroyed, we've been cut free of the outside galaxy, and free of the strife, the imbalance, that caused three galactic wars. And, on the far side of the Redorb Nebula, neither were the coreworlds ever likely to send another slowship to Quotiss.
  She started squirming under me. Was the moment over? I knew it was getting late and we had to be back, but I still couldn't help feeling that I had ruined the atmosphere somehow, that if I could only have said the right thing and continued to play along, then it would have lasted the whole night. I had to let her get up. Yes, it was over, and I hadn't even kissed her yet. I hadn't even tried.
 I was once again left only dreaming of distinguishing myself in battle and thus earning a kiss from her along with everyone else in the phalanx. Even that would not be the same.
 She slipped her dress straps back over her shoulders and tugged the blue and yellow fabric up over her breasts. She had to be freezing. I tried not to watch, but instead only pretended not to. In the nude, most girls, even those in the auxiliary commons, were a disappointment in some way. Not Andid.  She was perfection. Her dress again hanging from those straps, she turned and stood before me. Perfection.
 She looked into my eyes. Hers were the blue of the kuckla fur behind her, and the same texture, only richer, as if she were part of the forest. Above us the rings had faded into the night. The dark blue sky had started the slow change to a deep red, and the evening's first stars had appeared. I could see all of this in her eyes.
 "Sometime I will show you, Nohro. There is so much more to life than the Seven Tomes and their pre-packaged contentment..."
 "But right now," I drew a deep breath and finished for her, "We're going to be late for meditation."
 She turned to go.
 I closed my eyes and drew another deep breath, this one slowly and through my nose, just to savor the lingering smell of her, a sent that was simple, naturally feminine, and uniquely, instantly recognizably, Andid.

 By that time we had already missed dinner and, racing home - me on the back of my B'ned, and she ridding precariously fast on a domestic juji - we barely made it to the stables and then the dormitory  in time to prepare for meditation.

4.
               The Guardians will have no family life - or rather, they will regard one another as all belonging to a vastly extended family. There will be no formal marriages between them, and their children will be brought up communally. In the context of maximizing the communities benefit, it is both morally and eugenically sensible to control sexual pairing (in the sense of who mates with whom, and when), and to dispose of unsound children.
The Second Tome of The Founders
The Tome of Explication
Book Five, Chapter III

 The very next night... well, perhaps I'd best fill you in on the next day first.

 I was woken as I had been every morning for the last four Quotissian years. From across the courtyard on the balcony of the Common Hall, the shrill notes of a trumpeters' quartet leapt into the room through thin slits in the high stone walls of the dormitory, and a rich echo resonated within. The grey light of the morning sun filtered by a low cloud cover reached in sheets of glowing dust from the slits in the east wall to trapezoids of light on the floor.
 I was famished, I realized immediately upon waking.
 I sat up, and was surprised to see Andid climbing out of a bed not far from me. Though I had waited up as late as I could, I had fallen asleep before she had ever gone to bed. Some of the other auxiliaries were slow to rise, including myself, but she seemed, as always, full of energy. Full of life. She showed no signs of fatigue for having stayed up, and out, so late, doing the gods only knew what.
 Yes, definitely, that was it. She was always so full of life. I think now, that must have been what attracted me to her, the very life she held within her, as if she knew all the secrets that no one ever knew, the answers to life's unanswerable questions.
 Everyone made the bed they had used and did their part to leave the dormitory clean and arranged for the next night, and then took turns in the showers.
 The showers, like everything else the auxiliaries were given by the community, were communal. Men and women bathed together, ten or twelve to a shower, and, usually, thought nothing of it. All of our lives, those of us who had been weeded out to train as guardians had self discipline drilled into us. By the time we were twenty eight years old Quotissian, or seventeen by the Plato's calendar, and we were assigned to the auxiliaries, each of us was beyond slavery to our hormones. The men and women in my company were like brothers and sisters to me; as the founders had planned, we felt little or no sexual attraction to each other.
 Despite this, sex, in moderation, was not strictly forbidden in the commons, and in fact, sometimes it was sanctioned. It wasn't uncommon for young auxiliaries to experiment with each other; that's what Efra had insinuated I had been doing with Andid the night before. Even Efra and I had long ago found an opportunity to experience each other; it was one of the reasons, I think, that we were so close. Also, during spring festival, a lottery was held to choose who would be allowed to reproduce that year.
 Sometimes, though, an auxiliary would prove incapable of controlling his or her self. A perceived lack of control, signs of an outright addiction to sex, a rape, or especially an unwanted pregnancy  was punishable by anything including reassignment or exile. But usually, by the time we are inducted into the military as up-and-coming guardians, the dangerous types had been weeded out. Personally, after four years of training with them day in and day out, a  female body held no sense of mystery or excitement for me.
 At times, though, I think something other than hormones can cause similar feelings. That morning, Andid and I were in the showers at the same time, and when I noticed how I was studying her... and the effect it was having on me, I finished bathing as quickly as I could, reciting lines from a Seventh Tome meditation as I did so.

     I will be
     Among
     The pure men
     Only of
     Pure intentions
     And above
     All Inclinations
     Of my body

My erection abated and I made a mental note not to shower with her any more. I only had to hold out until summer when we would be reassigned.
 I didn't even want to, didn't even dare to, hope that I would draw her in the lottery for spring festival.
 Each auxiliary then dressed in a functional outfit of a tunic, loose trousers, all purpose soft leather boots, a utility belt, and a beret signifying our rank by color. Most were green. The centurions' was the blue of  Mercury level tech-clearance.
 The city of Lecardia was organized exactly as every other polis on the planet was, and had been for the last four thousand Quotissian years. The House of the Potentates, a simple, single story, unadorned stone construct at the center of an open courtyard was at the very heart of the city. Surrounding the Potentates' home were the auxiliaries' equally partisan dormitory - a much larger building where we all lived, the common mess (where ate all guardians including the Potentates), the Technic Hall, the Lecardian Court Hall,  and by far the largest and most ornate building of the guardian complex, the Common Hall. Circumventing  these buildings, and separating them from the sprawling outside polis, which was in turn circumvented by the high city walls, were our athletic fields. It was to those fields that, following showers and morning cleaning, we reported for first exercises.
 On the eastern field, in ten columns of ten soldiers each, the auxiliaries of my phalanx, the Alpha Phalanx of the Lecardia Auxiliary, lined up in front of the centurion; being a lance lieutenant I stood at the front of my column, my lance. Each of the other lieutenants and myself reported all of our lancemen accounted for. Then the centurion marched us to the main parade ground, south of the central complex. There we met with Lecardia's four other centurions and their phalanxes, including one of which Andid was a part. There also, we were met by the commander of Lecardia's auxiliary forces, General Anoth.
 Though he had never been promoted out of the military (it was his permanent specialty), General Anoth was the fourth most powerful person in Lecardia, second only to the five Potentates.  Customarily, the general would make a short speech each morning before leading us in first exercises. This was his way of communicating his, and the Potentates', thoughts on recent events. Thus, I was disturbed by his short message that morning.
 "It has come to my attention," he started after the usual formalities. "That some of you may not be partaking of all of your meals."
 When he paused for effect, my stomach seemed to take the opportunity to growl my guilt for all to hear. Happily, no one looked my way, and when the general spoke again, his booming voice drowned out the sound.
 "Need I quote the Fourth Tome? Neglect of diet is the cause of a great deal of ill health, as the neglect of discipline in emotion is the cause of crime.'You are provided with three meals a day for your health and for the benefit of this community. If you are not consistently well fed, your peak performance in your function to Lecardia is jeopardized. I am sure that you all understand this, and that you will each make every effort to attend the meals that the people of this polis provide for you, if not with your lance mates, then at least within the hours allotted."
 He went on to other business, but I hardly heard any of it. The general had specifically, though subtly, reprimanded Andid and I for our escapade the day before. Dinner was not technically a required activity.  Nearly every auxiliary I knew had, at one time or another, missed a meal. I had even missed dinner on occasion before, usually vowing by this time the next morning never to be so stupid again. That morning, too, I felt lightheaded and literally weak from hunger during the ensuing exercises; if it weren't for the familiar regiment of them, I'm sure I would've collapsed during the decicycle of workouts. Of course, the sick feeling that the general's speech had left me with may have been a factor in my weakness.
 In essence, it had been a veiled expression of disapproval on the general's part, and to me, as he no doubt intended, the meaning was painfully clear. Don't, on a whim, spend several centicycles gallivanting or lounging around the forest. And that was assuming he had no idea what we had seen or talked about.

 After exercises, and after showering again, the four hundred auxiliaries almost unanimously made time to visit the common mess for breakfast before the day's first duties. Sitting with Efra and a few other lancemen, I unleashed my voracious apatite on the meal of dried fruits and our usual hot nebra porridge. The servers were constantly refilling my plate and my water glass. Looking back on those years, I can definitely say that our meals were absurdly bland, but that morning I was still starving and, knowing no better, I loved every bite.
 Except that, of course, my appetite was also reason for more of my fellow auxiliaries to question me about the day before. In the light of the grilling I got at the mess, Efra had been eminently kind. At breakfast I gave the others the same explanations I had given Efra, but they turned my words around against me, pinning me with some implied guilt at every chance their clever young minds could create, and some of these remarks, though mostly meant in jest, made me a little too nervous. I think now that Efra may have noticed my squeamishness. I originally though he was simply not participating in the mean spirited fun, but he was strangely quiet through the whole meal, especially after one of the younger girls in my lance elicited a suspicious reaction from me.
 "So, you're trying to see how far you can go before getting exiled... just for fun, before you go to live with the out-castes?" she asked.
 It was a grossly sarcastic exaggeration, but I admit I must have inhaled sharply and jerked my head up from my meal before shrugging and laughing it off.
 "So, do you want to make it two in a row tonight? I'd miss dinner for a brisk cross-country workout in the forest..." she teased, and I shrugged this off more easily. In later decadays I learned that, coming from her, it was more likely a serious offer than a jestful jab. A year after, following a rash of similar transgressions, she was reassigned to a specialty that required a good deal less self-discipline. Last I knew, she was working as a paid hand on a small outlying nebra farm.
 Before I was full or satisfied, I lost my appetite  and quit the company of my comrades to get an early start on my days' duties.

 My lance was slated for midday street patrol, so I went through the checklist quickly, donning my armor and weapon belt in the process, and then hit the street early. I spent the better part of the day policing the polis alone. Despite the fact that by the end of my shift a light rain was falling, it was easy duty, much less monotonous than sentry duty, either on the wall or in the border hills. The marketplaces and neighborhoods were always entertaining, and the people always friendly.  And, thankfully, lunch was much easier than breakfast had been. Patrol men were never expected to return to the mess for meals. The people simply offered us food wherever we went, wether we were wandering into their shops, in front of their homes, or simply past them on a street or an alleyway. We were their guardians, and they were our providers, a relationship prescribed by the Plato's Republic and established millennia ago by the Founders and their Seven Tomes.
 I was glad to find that I still felt perfect in the people's eyes. None of them knew that only the night before I was alone with a woman in the forest, hoping to talk with a withered old out-caste. It was a relief to be able to escape my guilt for a couple of decis.
 Soon, though, I had to return to the commons. My phalanx had no maneuvers that day, but instead, a lengthy classroom session with the centurion. We assembled in the Common Hall and again, I was the butt of several jokes and the target of several more auxiliaries' questions.
 When the centurion finally arrived, I was spared for the time being, and for the next deci and a half, he reviewed our performance during the previous days' maneuvers and through grueling dialectic interrogations led us each to discover where we had erred and how we would improve the following day. Most of the time, I was so absorbed in the discussions that I wasn't even conscious of the relief I then felt from my earlier guilt.
 Toward the end of the session, the centurion had wrapped things up.
 "Now," he said, "I want each lance to meet with their lieutenant and I want you to discuss, as a unit, how to best improve your performance during tomorrow's maneuvers. We will be running the same scrimmage. Centurion Donce's phalanx will be the foreign aggressors, and, again, we will be on the defensive. Understood?"  Defending Lecardia from invasion by another polis was one of the prime functions of the auxiliaries. The Second Tome tells us that the Founders believed that by allowing warfare between the poleis each would become stronger, and only the most functionally efficient would survive, thus causing the collective poleis of Quotiss to continually improve.
 The centurion then called out each lieutenant's name.
 "Understood Lieutenant Tec-pefer?"
 "Yes, sir," he barked back.
 "Lieutenant Gosta?"
 "Yes, sir," she affirmed.
 "Lieutenant Nohro?" and looking directly into my eyes, he glared at me. In that tiniest of moments, and from a look that was probably insignificant to any of the others in the hall, I knew I had enjoyed my last special privilege under the centurion's command. He never said a word to me about the night before, and yet there was no doubt in my mind that it was going to be a very long spring.

 That night, after dinner, a significantly less embarrassing meal - the novelty of my misbehavior having already worn off, and after a much needed meditation session, I took a short walk around the commons, enjoyed the warmth that the light steady rain lent the night, and then turned in early.

5.

 Reflexes that had been drilled into me cut my dreams short. My body reacted independent of thought. I rolled evasively to my right, and gripped someone's wrist, automatically twisting it to wrench free any weapon it might be holding. My other arm was cocked back, ready to strike. I opened my eyes, adrenaline burning my veins.
 "Hey," Andid whispered her discomfort at me, "let me go."
 At first I only frowned at her, then I released her.
 "What's going on?" I asked. A quick glance around revealed that everyone else in our wing of the dorm appeared to be asleep.
 She held her finger up to her mouth to quiet me.
 "What's going on?" I whispered. I had the feeling I'd only been asleep for, at most, a few centis.
 "I want to go for a walk," she said.
 I must've looked puzzled.
 "Outside. Do you want to go with me?" she leaned closer.
 "Where?" I shaped the word carefully.
 "Outside..." she motioned to the door. I could hear the rain spattering on the stone roof above and on the cobblestone walks in the courtyard.
 I had a funny feeling that outside' meant something more than just outside the dorm. "Cygnus, Andid," I took the god of balance's name in vain for the second time in two days, but rolled out of bed wearing only my night shirt, pulled on my boots, and walked with her, eyeing the others as we crept past them. We didn't make a sound.
 Once in the courtyard, Andid handed me a slick floor length wetrobe. I slipped into it. She was already wearing one.
 "What's going on, Andid? What's this all about?"
 "I want to show you something... come on," she started off, leading the way, but I stayed standing where I was, with my brows creased together.
 "Where are we going?" I asked and she turned around. She smiled.
 "I think I know where Intifa's tribe has been camping," her eyes were burning with passion, intense like the blue of a flame. "We can find them tonight. I know an easy way past the sentries, and a ranch in the fields where we can saddle up some juji. We'd be back before morning and nobody will ever know the difference."
 My day had been more than enough to discourage me from flitting about, whimsically following my passions on dangerous and punishable adventures, but here she was asking me to sneak out after dark. And not just out of the dorms either. Sure, we used to do that when we were young preliminaries of only twenty or twenty five years Quotissian, back when our days consisted of arithmetic and geometry, and sports. In those days we feared getting caught by a teacher or auxiliary patrolman more than death.
 Now, she was talking about sneaking out of the polis, beyond the walls. Now, wether from the outback after dark, or from getting caught and then exiled into the outback, we would literally have death itself to fear.
 "You've got to be crazy Andid, didn't you hear what the general was saying this morning?" I didn't even think to ask how she knew where the out-castes would be camping.
 "I'm not going to miss any meals, Nohro. I'm just going for a walk... ride," she took on a pouting sort of look.
 For a long time I didn't answer. I think I managed to walk in a circle a few times, tugging my wetrobe around me. Andid stood with her arms crossed, waiting for the inevitable, for me to say yes.
 "If you don't want to go," she prodded, "I'm still going to, with or  without you. I just thought you might want to come along."
 Then with a self control I didn't expect to find, I told her that no,  I wouldn't go. It wasn't right. Oh, the look she had on her face, like all the answers that she seemed to know, the edge she had on each of us, had suddenly failed her. For some reason, she didn't even try to argue, or persuade, or seduce, or whatever, me out of it. She just turned and walked into the gentle rain. Her wetrobe fluttered in her wake, trailing thin streams of water. The hood still hung around her neck and her hair was slowly matted down onto her small head. Then she disappeared around the corner of the dorm.
 That scene in itself threatened to move me from where I was rooted to the cobblestone.  That may even have been her plan. If so, it was a good one; more than anything else, I wanted to follow her. But, No, I thought. I must not go. Eventually, mentally chanting another Seventh Tome meditation I had learned as a child, I returned to my bed and a fitfully broken sleep.
 For the rest of the night, every little thing kept me awake. A change in the beat of the rain. A change in the breathing of a nearby auxiliary. Every one who rose to relieve themselves. Everything.
 It has since occurred to me that even though we were as silent as possible in sneaking out, if someone had seen us, they could have been equally stealthy in following us, and except for one, I didn't keep track of just how many people got out of bed, and how many returned, or when.
 Even when the only one I cared about had returned, mere centi's before the crack of dawn, I did not rest well. In the morning, I was as surprised to see her bright eyed and full of life when the trumpets blared as I was to actually be awakened by them after such a restless night. Unlike Andid, I went through the entire day in a mechanical daze, experiencing the world through a fog of fatigue and introversion.

6.

 The next day, that fog did not lift from my mind. Nor the next day. Nor the one after that. Nor for nearly a decaday after. It grew increasingly difficult to make it through each morning's exercises, and I became reprimandably sloppy in my days' duties. I was quiet at meals, and ate very little. I blundered during maneuvers, undermining the confidence of both my lance and my superiors. When I was on police duty, the people of the polis even seemed in darker spirits. On sentry duty, the burgundy hills of nebra and the cobalt vales of kuckla seemed a dull representation of their usual vibrancy. Despite the end of the snow season, I did not find the spring rains to be the bearers of new life and the prelude to a summer. I saw only the greyness on every horizon, the matted fur of my B'ned, and the mud beneath my boots.
 Often, I would catch myself lost in a contemplative daze, and would try to concentrate on what I was doing, try to apply myself to the task at hand, to fulfill my function, but my focus and my will power were fragmented by an endless stream of reflective thought.
 Mostly, I thought about Andid.
 We had known each other from the time she was six years old, when she was transferred from one of the nurseries to Lecardia's primed school, where I was already being groomed as a young potential guardian. Each day I would pour over every significant event that we had shared in the twenty seven years since then. That's how I came to think of my life, in terms of my interactions with Andid.
 I remembered the geometry group we had been in together when I was only sixteen or seventeen, before even the onset of puberty. Already, I had recognized something special in her, or at least so I thought in retrospect. When we were older, twenty five perhaps, our class had been swimming in the Golden Falls swimming hole near the polis. This was a time when our hormonal impulses were still new and untrained. I remembered maneuvering to be near here between exercises; even then I was happy just to be close. I remembered a long and deeply honest conversation we had shared at a meal when I had already been promoted to auxiliary and she was still looking forward to the transition in coming decadays. There were dozens more such events, each of which I could replay a thousand times in search of any shred of meaning, any sign that she thought the same way about me. Admittedly, each of these times in my life was only a stage, and during the intermittent times I would mostly forget about her, but this time was different. This time, I knew, the feelings wouldn't go away. Were these intensified feelings, though, only an effect of her strange behavior and the strange things she had shown and told me?
 Despite the monopoly she had on my thoughts, and despite the hundreds of conversations I had with my internalized, imagined version of her, I did not speak to Andid even once in those seven days.
 Each night, I would lie awake thinking about her. And each night she would get up and head toward the common bathrooms,  but would not come back. Then, usually in the last decicycle of darkness before dawn she would return to bed as if she had only been gone for a few millis. The room would grow lighter and the trumpets would blare, and Andid would seem every bit like she had enjoyed a revitalizing nights' rest. And me, I would struggle to start another foggy day.
 I don't know how she was handling her duties, but when I happened to have meals at the same time as she did, I would see her flirting and laughing with the men and women of her phalanx. Sometimes I could even overhear them talking about their duties, or how things had gone during their training sessions or maneuvers.  The things she'd shown me, and her midnight adventures began to loose their sense of reality, as if I was only dreaming them, and the dream had become an obsession. Somehow, I couldn't confront her about them.
 Then, on the seventh night, a light shone through my fog, and the reality of these things came flooding back.

7.

               The principle we established, and then repeated time and again, as you'll remember, is that every individual has to do just one of the jobs relevant to the community, the one for which his nature has best equipped him.
The Republic 433a

 It was later than usual when Andid rose from bed. I was still awake, though, staring at the high vaulted ceiling in an apathetic stupor, and I saw her only peripherally. The dormitory was silent, and the cold night air, motionless. I could see her scan the room with a turn of her head, retrieve a bundle from under her bead, and then turn toward me. I didn't turn my head, but my eyes strained in their sockets to look toward her. I had made no mistake, she was headed my direction. I closed my eyes and strained uselessly to hear her footsteps on the stone floor. She was silent and I could not discern her approach.
 Then I knew she was standing beside me. Her sweet and familiar sent penetrated the deepest recesses of my soul. I tried to keep my breathing regular, and only lay there, letting the smell of her envelop me. I knew she had to be nearly touching me.
 "Nohro," she whispered into my ear as sweetly and disarmingly as I had ever heard her speak. I let her call my name another time before opening my eyes and turning slowly toward her, pretending to be more groggy than I was. In truth I felt more alert and more awake then than I had in days.
 "Nohro, wake up," she sat down on the bed.
 "I'm awake," I said sleepily as I could manage.
 "Well, get up," she whispered, and then leaning over to speak into my ear. "I've got somewhere to take you."
 Her breath was warm, and so was her cheek as it brushed against mine. I had to get up.

 It was the same sort of necessity that found me once again standing in the courtyard with her in the middle of the night.  She unbundled what she had retrieved from under her bed and again offered me a wetrobe, but at the time, the sky was relatively clear. Clouds, perceived only as an absence of light, crossed the sky like water flowing down a window pane, obscuring the mauve glow of our guardian  nebula, the few bright stars, and the faint glow of the rings just below the horizon. The cobblestone paths were still wet and the grass still muddy.
 "I knew you wouldn't want to miss this," she said and led the way.
 I didn't demand any more information, or argue. I only followed and it felt more natural than anything I had done in the last seven days. Of course, part of me was scared of that feeling. It was not my natural inclinations I had been trained to follow. Rather I had been taught that a good soul was governed by a strong rational mind.
 This wasn't the only thing to disturb or scare me though. We walked casually across the eastern athletic field, attempting to look as if we knew exactly where we were going, and that we were supposed to be going there. At this stage of our egress we weren't likely to be stopped, or questioned, and if we were, we could still give dozens of acceptable explanations for where we were going or what we were doing. After we left the central compound, we found ourselves in the empty streets of the polis marketplace, where, as we passed through the flickering light of a kerosene street lamp, a patrolman from another phalanx was walking out of an alleyway less than a block in front of us.
 Andid and I both knew the man. We knew most all of the auxiliaries, even those initiated only last summer. He simply waved back when we acknowledged him, raising our hands in the sign of respect.
 What worried me was getting past the polis walls. Many times over the last four years , I had served a decaday of night sentry duty. I knew very well that it was impossible, or near to impossible, I guess I should say, to sneak beyond the walls. Every quarter kilometer along the top of the walls was a lookout cupola tower where a pair of auxiliaries watched over the city and the surrounding fields and hills. Other sentries would march the length of the walls, both inside, outside, and along the rim. There were only six gates out of the city, one main gate on each of the four walls, one specially large gate used during the harvest, and one small personal gate used to dispatch messengers or spies during a siege. All of these were watched by at least two other guards, all of them acquaintances or friends of ours, but none of them willing to freely let us leave, and each of them willing to shoot us if we were seen trying to sneak out in some way.  Granted, they probably wouldn't shoot to kill, but use the stun setting on their blasters instead. I'd been stunned before, during full scrimmages against Port Bachwen. It was an excruciatingly painful experience that I had no desire to repeat. Nor did I wish to face the consequences of getting caught.
 Still, I let Andid lead the way. Of course, I admit that at the time, I was willing to accept the fact that maybe she had convinced one or more of the guards to allow her safe passage in and out of the city. She seemed to have the same power that she had over me, over nearly every other male auxiliary that I knew, and almost without exception, the women in the phalanxes respected her nearly as much.
 Soon we were winding through the producers' residences, headed for the eastern wall. We encountered no more patrolmen, and only one citizen out after dark. He smiled and raised his hand in the sign of respect when he saw our guardian robes. We returned the gesture, and other than that, the man payed us no head.
 Eventually we were very near the wall, and there Andid climbed the front steps of a  small dwelling.  I stayed in the street below. Muddy water swirled by, around and over the unevenly shaped and colored stones of the gutter. There lived and worked, the sign above the door told us, a shoemaker.
 The door opened and a small shadowy form, back lit by a soft flickering light, exchanged a few words with Andid. It sounded like a man's voice. Though he whispered to her, I could still hear the deep resonations of his speech. Andid turned and gestured toward me. The red light of the nebula shone on the boys face. I say boy, because I could then see that he was, though not very young, certainly younger than either of us. Probably around twenty seven or twenty eight Quotissian, the age he would've become an auxiliary were he meant to be a guardian.
 He motioned for Andid to come inside, and she for me to follow.
 Crossing the threshold of the door, I took in the small parlor. Shoemakers needed no more than a Luna level tech-clearance, I had gathered from the dull red technic-insignia on the door frame. Only a single yellow candle lit the room. Other than that exception, a lack of electricity, the room was far more comfortable than anything allowed the guardians. Two old, but plush, couches were pressed together in one corner. A small, ornate, wooden table sat between them, upon which sat a silver pitcher and six small silver cups. A portrait of the philosopher saint Ipeotyri hung above the larger of the two couches.  Near the front window was a pair of carved wooden chairs with thick seat cushions, another table, and a set of curtains inlaid with an intricate design woven with golden thread.
 Andid gave the boy an affectionate hug and then, with her arm still around him turned to introduce us. Was this where she had come all those nights?
 "Nohro," she said. "This is my friend Triast. He is a shoemaker's apprentice."
 The boy wore a simple tunic, trousers and boots, but over this, a heavy fur lined coat. It was my estimation that his master was successful.
 "Its a pleasure to make your acquaintance Lecardian-friend," I said and raised my hand in the respect sign.
 "And," Andid went on, a hint of mystery in her voice, "He plays the guitar. You will have to hear him tonight."
 I'd never heard of a git-ar and could only guess it must be some kind of musical instrument, probably forbidden. There was some rustling, and then the sound of something heavy being pushed along the wooden floor in the next room. I began to get a bad feeling about being there.
 "Shall we go?" Triast asked, looking up into Andid's face.
  "Lead the way," she smiled back at him, her mouth precious few centimeters from his. She let the boy go and he went from the room. Then she looked to me.
 "Nohro?" She came and hooked her arm around mine. "Come on. You won't believe what we have to show you tonight."
 We went into the back room of the house where an older man was pushing a table against a wall. He turned around and smiled at us.
 "My children," he said and seemed to indicate the floor.
 I have no idea why it happened at that moment, because of what he said I suppose,
but just then I had the thought, for all I know, this man could be my father.
 Triast, the boy, bent down to the floor where the old man, the shoemaker I was assuming, had indicated. I was both surprised, and at the same time perfectly expecting it by the time that it happened, to see the boy pull up several loose floorboards.
 Andid smiled at the old man and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you again, Dounger."
 "Always my pleasure, sweetie," His voice was full of benevolence.
 Andid lowered herself into the hole in the ground.
 "You next, mister Nohro," the boy said.
 "Thank you," I said dumbly, and then equally so to the old man, "Thank you, sir."
 I dropped myself down what turned out to be a three meter shaft onto the muddy floor below. Triast and the old man exchanged a few words, and then the boy dropped down behind me. He held a lantern, pulled a match out of a pouch on his belt, held it to the lamp until it lit, and then waved to the old man above. The light from the house was slowly blocked off, one floorboard at a time, until the three of us were sealed into the tunnel.
 What could I do but follow. Triast and Andid led the way through the tunnel. I gauged we were traveling nearly perpendicular with the city wall, which we would pass under in less than a hundred meters.  It was cold and damp and I began to feel the absence of the blaster that had always hung from my belt anytime I had ever been outside the city walls since being assigned to the auxiliaries.
 Andid came up beside me. I settled down a little. I had been very tense, I realized.
 "There is a special gathering tonight," she said.
 "Oh?"
 "Someone, one of the Allodial, an important Allodial, a prophet I think, has come up from Port Bachwen with news that's got everyone excited."
 "Everyone?" I asked. "Who's everyone?"
 "The whole band," she said. "Intifa's people. The Allodial tribe I've been visiting."
 I shook my head in disapproval but smiled at her as if I appreciated her craziness. I did. But, the very idea of a whole band of out-castes still made me nervous.
 "So what's the news?" I asked.
 "We'll find out tonight. But, it's got to be important. Three other bands are meeting with us tonight."
 Three Bands! How many of them are there, I wondered, alarmed despite myself.  And where did the important' out-caste come from? Who was he?  All in all it was Quotiss shatteringly scary.
 All in all, I felt strangely... alive.

 When the tunnel came to an end there was a few crude wooden steps set into a wall of mud. Triast climbed them, pushed aside some floorboards and climbed out of the tunnel.  I followed and then Andid was the last to climb up.
 The building was hot, and moist, and smelled of a heavy animal sweat and a gut wrenching mixture of dung and urine. Through holes in the tattered wooden ceiling, nebula light spilled into the structure in small patches. From the looks of things, we were in a juji stable somewhere in the fields surrounding the polis. There was a row of wooden stalls on either side of us, and bales of substandard nebra were hanging from the ceiling.  A juji grunted and kicked at the wooden door restraining it.
 Bang. Bang. Bang. Three kicks in a row. A pause. Then three more. Bang. Bang. Bang. It was, as caged juji are want to do, spinning and lashing out with each of its legs in anger. If left to its natural inclinations, a juji would roam the nebra and kuckla of the outback, paying heed to no territory, much less to artificial walls.
 Triast climbed the boards of the stall from which the kicking came. "Calm down girl. It's only me, friend Triast. It's only me girl. The farmers won't be back till morning. You won't have to work till morning. Now, you wanna go for a run."
 There was a gruff snorting from within. Similar sounds came from nearby stalls.
 "Good, good," said the boy. He turned to me and Andid, "Well, saddle up... underside."
 "Underside?" I asked, but instantly understood the answer to my question. Juji were three legged animals that could swing through trees with an awe inspiring agility, or run effortlessly and continuously on open ground faster than any human or B'ned could ever.  Their three limbs were versatile, allowing them to move them across the ground or through a kuckla canopy in any orientation. There was no up, down, or sideways to a juji. They were impossible to ride if unsaddled and untrained, and even then, it was a hazardous enterprise. They had to be rigorously taught not to toss their ridder.
 Sometimes, for various reasons, a rider would decide to ride "underside." The saddle was attached slightly differently, and the rider is specially strapped in, so as not to fall out. My early training as an auxiliary had included this technique.
 Hopefully, I assumed they were planning, we would appear to the guards on the city walls to be nothing more than a pack of wild juji romping in the farmland. We would, if all went according to plan, be ignored.
 If anyone suspected the ploy, or could make out the form of a human being clutching to the bottom of one of the juji. Well, then we were likely to be chased down, shot, and taken back to the city to await judgement, then reassignment, or worse, permanent exile... a death sentence. That was all, I realized, assuming we were shot on stun to begin with.

 In heart pounding contrast to my last seven days, and most of my life even, I soon found myself with my arms wrapped around the torso of a juji, hanging on for dear life. We hopped and bounded through fields of brittle nebra. Shafts of the crop snapped and splintered against my unarmored back.
 I was very conscious of my lack of armor. Most of the time, my face was pressed deep into the rank fur of the beast, but I kept trying to look back at the walls of the polis, trying to see our fate before it befell us. Unfortunately, the rise and fall of the juji, and the clouds of nebra frags that exploded around me, made it nearly impossible to see even the scattered lights of the cupolas.  Then, before I ever expected it we were skipping down the backside of a hill and then up into a kuckla canopy... free from the eyes of the polis and my fellow auxiliaries. Andid and Triast were leading the way. My juji just followed, and once we were in the canopy, from time to time, I caught a glimpse of a fourth juji following mine. A wild one, consumed by curiosity, I assumed.
 I guess that's why I was going to be promoted to mathematician, and not sent through special training to become an auxiliary spy.

8.
               You're forgetting, my friend,' I said, that the point of legislation is not to make one section of a community better off than the rest, but to engineer this for the community as a whole. Legislators should persuade or compel the members of a community to mesh together, should make every individual share with his fellows the benefit which he is capable of contributing to the common welfare, and should ensure that the community does contain people with this capacity; and the purpose of all this is not for legislators to leave people to choose their own directions, but for them to use people to bind the community together.'
The Republic 519e-520a

 In the next few centis, avoiding most kuckla for the sake of greater speed, we traversed several kilometers of barren rocky hills and rolling nebra fields. Then, far from any regularly traveled or sanctioned trail, we could see the living plateau of a particularly high kuckla canopy over the next hill.
 At the hill's rocky peak we paused and looked down into a deep vale. These kuckla were even taller, and older, than they had seemed. A thick layer of fog hid the ground, and like pylons supporting the elevated road to Port Bachwen, thick kuckla trunks, their blue fuzz seeming to glow a deep purple in the red light of the nebula, reached skyward, supporting familiar, but no less improbably uniform, layers of branches. The bottom layer could barely be seen, deep in the blanket of fog.  Each successive layer was separated from the one below it by nearly fifteen meters of bare fur covered trunk. And somehow, though each tree might have taken root at a slightly different elevation, the branches meshed into a perfectly horizontal layer of interwoven kuckla limbs, each sprouting hundreds or thousands of thin vine-like leaves, which in turn wrapped themselves around other branches, both photosynthesizing their own food, and parasitically cannibalizing nutrients from the other trees. If one individual tree could not glean enough necessary nutrients from the sun above and the soil below, then, via the network of parasitic branches, the rest of the patch could and did provide for the lacking individual. A kuckla tree rarely perished except with the extinction of the thicket. Invariably, when a single tree did die an individual death, it was due to a biological malfunction; its branches had grown at different altitudes from the rest of the patch.
 I looked at Andid strapped onto her juji, which was perched heroically, I thought, on a boulder that jutted out from the hill. She looked beyond me at Triast, who gave her a sign to proceed. Now ridding on top' of our juji, still strapped in underside' but ridding them in essence upside down with respect to how we saddled them, we all bounded down the hill. Andid led the way, and Triast brought up the rear.
 Tendrils of fog seemed to climb up the kuckla trunks, and as we approached they seemed to reach purposefully toward us, as if in welcome. The world around us grew darker as we descended to the vale floor. Soon we were enveloped by the mist, and I had every sense that the outside world, stars, nebula, and all, had ceased to exist.

9.

               Only the modes and rhythms of music which do not titillate or indulge emotions that we would not normally sanction shall be allowed. All other modes only hamper reason and do nothing to establish an ordered, moral inner constitution, and if such a constitution is already established, they threaten to subvert it. Then as the Plato has told us, instead of law and the shared acceptance of reason as the best guide, the kings of your community will be pleasure and pain.' (607a)
The Tome of Implementation
The Second Tome of The Founders
Book Four, Chapter XXXIII

 As our juji climbed along a low level canopy, the weave of the branches came to an abrupt halt. So, oddly, did the fog. Several meters below us, we could, for the first time, see the rocky ground. But that was the least of the spectacles to simultaneously assailed my senses!

 There was an explosion of sound. I couldn't imagine how even the heavy fog had obscured it before.
 "There's Triast and Andid!" Someone shouted in a strange accent.
 A cacophony of other voices rattled off greetings and carried on conversations, mostly in languages I did not recognize. Some were singing, but it was like no singing I had ever heard before. The Allodial People's voices sounded as inhuman to me as their unidentifiable  instruments, and their music... It filled the air with a richness I still cannot describe, the sounds tugging at my heart, making me feel emotions I had no reason to be experiencing.
 The colors in the clearing nearly made me dizzy. To me, those people were the glittering sunset rings, fallen to the surface.  Each was uniquely and intricately clad in various designs that drew my eyes from one to the other so quickly I could not hope to absorb the nuances of any single one.
  Nearly smokeless fires burned in small pits of rock, each generating only a narrow serpent of blue haze that danced toward the canopy far above. Whether it was these people, or whatever they were burning, something gave the clearing an overwhelmingly musty and heavy, yet sweet, smell. I could literally taste it  when I inhaled, like the air itself were a syrup.
 "Intifa," Andid called. Her juji dropped to the clearing floor and she dismounted. Then I saw the old woman that we had seen at the crater a decaday ago. She wore the same outfit, I was sure, and literally it was a collection of torn and tattered rags, but seen in this new light, I saw the beauty in it. Like the others around her, her dress was a complex statement that even then I sensed must've been an assertion of who she was, of her individuality.
 Andid embraced the old woman.
 Triast dropped to the ground and unstraped from his juji. Several of the men below came and greeted him, embracing him with more emotion than I had ever seen within even the most closely nit of auxiliary lances. For a long time, I watched, dumbfounded, an outsider among outsiders.
 Finally, it was Triast, not Andid, who remembered me. The boy waved up at me to drop down to the clearing. I did and freed myself from my juji.  I was introduced by Andid's young friend to several of his fellows. Each of them was unbathed, unshaven, dirty, and an almost revolting collection of smells when encountered up close, yet I did not want to distance myself from them. These men had an attraction to them that I had never felt before except in Andid; they were full of life.
 I glanced over my shoulder and saw the girl already deep in conversation with the withered Intifa and several other older women. Right then I felt the magical attraction I had for her stronger than ever. More than anything, at that moment, I wanted to be a part of this strange new world of hers. I turned back to Triast and his companions to try to do just that.  Luckily, most of them, in addition to their unfamiliar tongues, spoke either Common or the older Galactin.
 An amazing flood of information and sensory input filled the next several centis. I was barely conscious that a milli had passed, and yet,  everything seemed locked in a timeless, eternal sort of state.
 Then there was some shouting, the music stopped, and everybody quieted down. Upon a large rock situated at the center of the clearing stood an aged man in a simple green cloak. Firelight flickered across his form and his features. It was then I noticed that a circle of similar large rocks, jutting vertically up out of the ground, circumvented the entire clearing.  Amazed, I saw that each was intricately engraved with scenes of every sort of human pursuit. Even with a quick glance I could tell that these carvings, unlike those on the buildings of Lecardia and the guardian complex, delved into the darker, and brighter, elements of human nature, unlimited by the heroic or moral ideals of The Plato, the Founders, or generations of Potentates since. The old man held his hands high in the air. His sleeves slid down, revealing bone thin arms. I didn't imagine these people had an over abundance of food.
 The last of the straggling conversations came to a close. A small girl laughed and was shushed by her mother.
 I was stunned. In all likelihood, that was the girl's biological mother. The girl had been raised, I thought with utter shock, by the very woman who had borne her. A man stood beside this woman, and in his features I could see the face of the child. He was her father! From somewhere deep inside me, a surprising surge of envy breached the surface of my thoughts.
 Then the old man spoke. His voice boomed, filling the silent clearing.
 "The prophet is ready to speak." He announced.

10.

               Not only poetry, but every artefact and every natural entity can display grace or inelegance, and so be poor food for the guardians. Moreover, not only do inelegant things harm a person's character, but are also products in the first place of a bad character. This can create a downward spiral of increasing badness in the community, whereas a spiral of increasing appreciation of goodness and beauty is possible through proper education. And this appreciation in turn binds the members of a community together in shared authentic (non-sexual) love.
The Third Tome of The Founders
The Tome of Exposition
Book Four, Chapter XM

 "Andid, this is foolish, imprudent, senseless." I implored. "Please, you've got to come back with me."
 Triast stood behind her. I felt that an invisible tether bound her to him, and that nothing would move her. The boy was her link to these people.  All around us, the Allodial were busily breaking camp with an impressive efficiency.
 "No, Nohro. You heard what the prophet said. How can I not go with them? This is more than just a chance of a lifetime... this is a chance of the millennia, of several millennia."
 "What that... man said was a fairy tale, Andid. A Myth. Pure nonsense. These are uneducated people you're talking about. Look, I understand their charm, and the lure of the things they've shown you.  I've seen a lot tonight that will probably change the way I look at things, how I see the world, for the rest of my life, which is wonderful, and I'm thankful I've come. But this is illegal, strictly against the Potentate's wishes, and exactly what the Founders hoped to protect us against. If we're caught we'll be exiled for sure." I had a sudden vision of the three of us standing, small and alone and feeling naked, before a tribunal of white robed Potentates, giants high up on the stone platform at the front of the Lecardian Court Hall. Throngs of producers, and of our peers, were watching from the balcony of seats in the rear of the hall.
 However, if I didn't talk Andid into coming with me right then, the Potentates would never get the chance to exile her. She will have chosen her fate for them. "If you don't come with me now, you'll never be able to return to the Lecardia, Andid.  No Polis will ever accept you into its gates, you'll be an out-caste, doomed to living in the outback. You'll die out here."
 I was drawing harsh looks from the people around me, and really, in the face of what I had learned that night, I didn't really know why I was saying the things I was. In my defense, a life time of upbringing and my own common sense were hard to override. Mostly, though, I think it was fear... I guess.
 "Nohro, I would be happy to die out here," Andid said sweetly, stepping closer and taking my hand, maybe for the last time I thought. "You are free to go home, but I am staying with these people. And, I am going with them. I just don't feel like Lecardia is where I belong, Nohro. Something else is beckoning to me. I think it always has been. I need to follow whatever it is. I need to know what's.... out there."
 She looked up toward the canopy above, and seeing the longing look in her eyes, it suddenly hit me that she'd been this way since we were children. Recollections came to mind of a time late in our last year together in primary education.  Andid, two other primeds, and myself were at marketplace and faced with the unusual task of entertaining ourselves for the afternoon. Most of us were content to enjoy a deci or two in the market, but Andid was determined to climb up on the roof tops to watch the sunset and see the nebula glowing low on the summer horizon.
 A recollection of my thoughts at the time came back to me as well. When children play in a proper manner lawfulness guides their growth,' the words of the Plato rang in my head, and when pastimes become lawless and children follow suit, it is impossible for them to grow into law-abiding, exemplary adults.' Was the wisdom in these words here being proven?
 I had been the only one to climb with her and watch the sunset that night. All she did was ask me to go along. The Plato once said that the artist of the heavens has constructed them and all they contain to be as beautiful as such works could ever be.' On that night, the wisdom in those words was most certainly proven.
 "You can come with us, too," Andid said now, looking me in the eye. It was a genuine invitation, just like years ago, as if she sincerely wanted me to stay, and to go with them on the prophet's crazy, fantastic quest. What did it really mean, though? Did she really want me to come along?
 Here, among the Allodial People, it would be accepted for me to be in love with her. It would be accepted for her to love me. We could be an exclusive couple. We could have children, by choice, and raise them... ourselves. We would be mother and father, not simply brother-citizen and sister-citizen of the same auxiliary class. Was that what she wanted?
 Of course, maybe that was why she seemed so close to Triast. Maybe she was paired off with him out here among the out-castes.
 Even then I could see the same longing looks in is eyes, pining for Andid, that I knew he must see in mine.
 For a moment I looked instead into Andid's eyes. Sometimes I still wish I never had to look away. Maybe if I had looked long enough, then I would be able to know her the way that Intifa could when she looked into her eyes. Maybe I could've learned the answers to my questions, or more, all the answers Andid seemed to know.
 Maybe if I did, I would've learned that more than anything, she was hoping for me to stay. Maybe she was only trying to do the right thing by giving me the choice to go home. Maybe it was a test to see if I really loved her. I'm sure the Allodial would've been skilled in such interpersonal communication. Andid had probably already learned a lot. But as far as I could tell, she hadn't been treating me any differently than Triast, or the other men in the out-caste band, or even the other auxiliaries. Had I always just gone farther out of my way to spend time with her? Or was that it at all? Maybe I was right in thinking she cared about me in a special sort of way. I had no idea. My brain, supposedly so well trained over the years, was turning out thoughts at a feverish pace, and yet was paralyzed.
 Eventually I broke her gaze and looked up at the canopy myself. I doubted that sunlight ever shone directly on this clearing, and though time still seemed frozen in a single eternal moment, I knew that Quotiss rotated beneath us, unchecked, and that soon we would once again turn toward the sun.
 I needed to be in the dormitory, and safely in my bed, by the time the rings began to shine with refracted rainbows of the pre-dawn morning.
 "I need to go," I said.
 But my insides, my heart, my mind were staging a repeat performance of my initial reaction to the Allodial music. Perhaps it was a lingering effect of the forbidden modes, but my very essence was in a state of limbo, divided against itself. It seemed that the whole of me wanted to rush back to the dorm, to safety, and yet the whole of me, almost another me, wanted to run away with Andid. But, I'd only be going with the out-castes to be with her, not to be a part of what they stood for, not to be a part of their quest.
 I wanted to tell her how I felt about her, and ask if she felt the same, or at least find out how she felt, so that I would know for sure that I had made the right decision, that I had not missed my opportunity to be with her.
 No, I told myself , thinking more in a moment than seemed possible, I am not missing an opportunity right now.  I know I can't go with her. My destiny lies back at the polis, as a guardian, and hopefully, one day, as a Potentate.
 And, I knew that the opposite was more important to her. I could see then that she was more in love with the ideals of the Allodial People and of their quest, than she could ever be with any human being, even Triast - if that's the way things were. Still, I wanted to tell her... but he was still there, hovering just over her shoulder.
 So instead, I found myself strapping onto my juji while the out-castes finished packing their things. Amazingly, the clearing had resumed to a natural state. Even the perimeter rocks had been returned to natural looking positions, laying in the dirt, shrouded in the fog that had encroached upon the place as soon as the fires were put out. The mystery of Intifa's miraculous disappearance the first time I'd seen her  became clear to me then. Moving quickly, and leaving no trace was a way of life for these people. They had made many adaptations to survive in the outback, but this was an adaptation they had made to survive the auxiliaries of the poleis.
 Andid stood beside me and helped me tighten the straps on my juji. Triast approached and held his hand up in the sign of respect. I returned the gesture.
 "Dounger will let you back in the city," he said. "Please tell him about our decision. I don't want him to worry about me."
 "We won't be leaving for Port Bachwen until several days from now," Andid said, standing up beside me. "The elders are awaiting the arrival of several other bands. You can still come back if you want."
 That was a very vague and open ended statement I remember thinking even then. It was also her way of saying good bye. I latched onto it as a hope that I would see her again, and knew right away that before they left I would find a way, I would see her again. I did not say good bye either, but only agreed with her, "then perhaps I'll see you again, soon."
 With that, I spun my juji around and leapt to the edge of the canopy we had jumped from when we arrived. I turned to wave, but everyone was gone and the fog had reclaimed the clearing. A breeze had come up and, whipping my rain robe, it was even then carrying away the thick smell of the gathering. I inhaled deeply, but smelled only the bitter morning dew of a kuckla patch. Everything around me was wet with the fog and the coming day. My eyes were wet with something else.
 I held it in, spun my juji again, and took off through the trees.
 As I raced away, I only ever caught one flash of movement behind me, and only for the briefest of moments. And I don't even think that it was one of the out-castes. A wild juji, it looked like in the fog.

11.

 Before that excursion my days had seemed pointless. After the out-caste gathering, though,... I was reduced to sheer nihilism. Nothing seemed worth doing - especially that first day. I was operating on only three centis of sleep. Again.
 I actually faltered in my morning exercises, unable to continue.  This earned a stern reprimand from the centurion, his disappointment so thick in the air between us I could almost taste it. I had been his favorite. Had been. I think he could sense, no, I'm sure he could outright see the imbalance brewing inside me.
 Meals. Well, meals were hardly food to me after the dishes I had sampled in the outback. Their food may be hard won through hunting and gathering, or whatever they do to survive, unlike the food that guardians were provided with and took for granted, but the Allodial made sure they would savor what little food they had. Ancient Quotissian cooking techniques, outlawed by the Founders, had survived fourty centuries in the collective memory of scattered out-castes.
 My duties seemed downright rediculous the more I considered the things I had seen. Why did we.. why did the Founders and Potentates go to all the trouble to regulate our lives the way they did, when so many people were clearly surviving on their own, and in the wilderness of the outback? Why the Polis walls? Why the guardians? Why any of the castes and specialties? Why the Seven Tomes?
 Even as I contemplated such heresy for the first time in my life, my mind was already finding excuses to go even further, to entertain the possibility that the prophet's' fairy tales were true.
 On top of it all, I couldn't clear my mind of visions of Andid. She was always with me, ever present just over my shoulder, watching everything I saw or did, and I measured these things by her reactions to them and what her out-castes would say about it. The little I had learned of their philosophies was budding in my imagination, and I turned the critical eye of my own incarnation of the Allodial philosophers on the works of my sovereign Lecardian Potentates and the Holy Founders.
 On that first day after the gathering, maneuvers only served to remind me that I had been separated from my natural parents at birth, then raised and groomed to be a guardian. For the good of the community the Potentates gave up my life before I ever had a chance to decide if I wanted to offer it. And what about Dounger, the old shoemaker, I thought. In theory he was among those in the polis best suited for the task of shoemaking, and theoretically that is what would make him the most happy. But, was that truly the case. Would shoemaking be his specialty if he lived with the Allodial People, or with the Galactic Coalition of old?  For the first time in my life I began to resent the words of The Plato. I could hear Teacher G'sendoo's voice in my head.
 " You're again forgetting, my friend,' Socrates said, that the point of legislation is not to make one section of a community better off than the rest, but to engineer this for the community as a whole. Legislators should persuade or compel the members of a community to mesh together, should make every individual share with his fellows the benefit which he is capable of contributing to the common welfare, and should ensure that the community does contain people of this capacity; and the purpose of all this is not for legislators to leave people to choose their own directions, but for them to use people to bind the community together.' "
 Once I had seen the logic in these words. Once I had seen the logic in the Second Tome assertion that the happiness of the whole is more important than that of any of its parts.' Now I found myself blind to all but the injustice of them.
 I no longer looked forward to my future. In summer I would be promoted to mathematician, still on the track to becoming a Potentate, a philosopher king. I would spend the next seventeen years studying the forms of mathematics, then another eight immersed in the pursuit of dialectic philosophy. My next twenty five I would be made to play the role of teacher G'sendoo, tutoring the young auxiliaries and primeds. Eventually, at eighty three years old Quotissian, I would finally be looked to as one of the few Potentates of Lecardia, the final and unerring word in all decisions concerning the welfare and future of this Polis. I would be allowed a few days per decaday in pursuit of my own enlightenment, but the rest of the time I'd be forced by the law and by the conscience instilled in me by the teachings of the Seven Tomes to return to the cave' and it's prisoners, and to sacrifice my happiness to solve their daily problems. Was this what I wanted in my future?
 Sure, I understood the Plato's distinction between genuine and illusory pleasures, but my only answer to this question was an unending stream of fantastic images, Intifa moving to the sounds of her own chants - following her prophetic dreams - and master of her own fate, young Triast playing his guitar (for I had seen him with the amazing instrument that night), and of course many times - Andid running free in the outback. While the marching drums of the phalanx pounded in my ears, the songs of the Allodial still echoed in my imagination.
 Little did I know I would so soon have to choose between the two. On the second day after I had returned, there were no maneuvers after lunch. Instead we met in the Common Hall, all four phalanxes, to discuss the a battle plan. An emergency military action had been called by the Potentates, to be executed that day, one demideci after nightfall.

12.
               It is clearly stated by the Plato that Potentates should constantly be on their guard against innovations which transgress our regulations.
The Second Tome of the Founders
The Tome of Explication
Book Five, Chapter XI

 A map maker unfurled another huge sheet of paper on the wall behind general Anoth, a topographical map of the local outback.  Even in two dimensions, the hills depicted by the swirling elevation lines were sickeningly familiar.
 "Here," said the general indicating a deep vale with his pointer. "For the past several nights, an alarmingly large out-caste uprising has been assembling here, in this kuckla thicket. They are, according to our source's best reports, numbering well over two hundred, almost two hundred and fifty individuals. At least half of them are trained warriors."
 The auxiliaries seemed to collectively shuffle on their benches at the shocking news, but I was petrified, frozen staring blankly at the wall before me. Intifa's people had numbered only a quarter of two hundred and fifty, if that, and none that I had seen, besides Andid, had been warriors.
 "Reportedly, several citizens of this polis have already traitorously betrayed the founders and run to join the savages."
 Andid had been reported missing immediately upon her failure to appear at exercises the first morning. Her arrest and an investigation were pending her reappearance.
 "We must not allow the poison to spread in our community. We must not let the savages continue spreading their blasphemous lies among unsuspecting citizens, ill equipped to rationally reject them. Such a colony of exiles and rejects, such a cancer to a healthy society, must not be allowed to grow.
 "It is the duty of this auxiliary, as guardian of Lecardia, to rid our polis of this growing menace. We must stop it from spreading and stop it now while we can still contain it. Gamma phalanx will follow a standard double night patrol pattern. Delta phalanx will be back up for beta phalanx and alpha phalanx, which will lead this raid... in one point four eight decicycles."

13.

 Once again I found myself on the rocky hill, overlooking the foggy vale. Tentacles of hovering moisture climbed the purple tinted kuckla trunks as they had before, oblivious to the army amassed before them. The night sky was perfectly clear and the nebula especially luminous, bathing everything in a sharp crimson hue.
 This time it was my giant of a lanceman, Efra, who's mount stood perched heroically on the outstretched rock, and this time it was no domestic juji, but a huge war B'ned that he sat upon. To the right and slightly behind him, where I had been only two nights before, I sat on the back of my B'ned. The rest of our lance sat on their mounts, huddled together behind the hill. The other lances of alpha phalanx spanned the ridges facing down on the vale.
 On another hill, to our right, to the south of the vale, there were several  white flashes, and I felt my stomach lurching up toward my throat. Explosions flashed through the forest below, yellow, red, orange, then swirling black smoke, tinted crimson by the nebula. Shock waves rolled past us. More flashes, from an opposite hill. More explosions, yellow, red, orange, then crimson smoke. Then the pounding of more shockwaves.
 It was impossible to tell how accurate the plasma grenades had been, but smoke continued to rise from the thicket, indicative of spreading fires.
 "There's the signal," said the young girl in my lance. She had been watching for the mirror flash from the centurion's command post to the south. Despite myself, my training took over. I screamed at the top of my lungs and led the way down the hillside.
 "Long live Lecardiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" I hugged the hump and pulled the trigger on my yolk, firing an olfactory stimulant under the nose of my B'ned. The creature was instantly in a furious state of instinct induced hyper performance, its natural mode of fight or flight.  Together we careened down the hill with the rest of the lance only steps behind.
 The plasma grenades were to have done most of the damage, but as the surviving out-castes scattered we were to hunt them down and pick them off, one by one. Just before dipping down beneath the canopy I saw the launchers flash again. There was no escaping to the east now. Those flashes marked the laying of a wall of fire, blocking the only other way out of the foggy vale.
 We crashed into the lower canopy. Our B'neds, unlike the more agile juji, stayed put on the ground and only smashed their way through the undergrowth and the lower levels of kuckla branches. All around me the weave of branches and vine-leaves was being ripped into lifeless shreds and dashed violently into the air, trailing a yellow blood. The ten men and women of my lance thus advanced on the clearing, a wave of thunderous destruction.
 Before I ever saw any out-castes, and when I knew we were still far from the clearing, Efra was already firing his blaster into the fog. Hot pink flashes of lethal neural inhibiting energy, crackling unnatural lightning, rippled through the haze and disappeared in the near distance.
 One bolt terminated in a bright glow and a screaming form in the mist.
 To my surprise, our charge was met by a line of B'ned at the perimeter of the clearing. I hadn't realized there were any formal soldiers among the out-castes. Maybe the general's intelligence was correct after all. What else hadn't I seen?
 Taking position between the vertical rocks, each of the defenders reared their B'ned up on its hind four legs, a position usually used to repel an assault from a final line of defense. Unfortunately for them, they had not chosen the proper place to make their stand. Blaster in hand, I squeezed off a few shots, sizzling pink bolts, and then hugged the hump. My B'ned lowered its head, and before the defender could pound down on us, we had uprooted his B'ned from its feet and sent it toppling over. My mount roared its victory. The waves of the primeval sound rumbled up through my body.
 I pulled back on the yolk. I was in the clearing.
 My B'ned was standing in the smoking remains of an out-caste fire. Jagged potholes, where the plasma grenades had landed, now lit the area instead. These billowed a foul tasting, almost wet, deep black smoke into the air. Broken bodies and scattered limbs of every age and sex littered the clearing. The living darted frantically all around, and on every side, war B'neds were crashing through the defenders and into the clearing. Pink flashes, and the green-black memories of them on my retina, filled my vision, but the usual sizzle and crackle of blasters frying the air was flooded out by the piercing sound of human screams.
 Though I hadn't admitted it to myself yet, I knew what I was going to.  I scanned the throngs of out-castes, flinching each time one of them was dropped by a flash of pinkness.
 Just before she shot at me, I saw an out-caste only meters away pulling back on a huge bow, about to release a menacingly long arrow. I could never blast her in time, but in the instant before I would learn if the arrow could pierce my Mercury level armor from that range,  the woman was lit up by a web of bright pink energy. She spasmed, sending the arrow careening off well over my head, and then dropped to the ground wound up in a contorted position from which she would never rise. Efra rode past and nodded at me, thus saying don't mention it sir, just doing my duty.' I was far from grateful. The out-caste could've been Andid. Though I knew, I looked again to reassure myself that it was not.
 Suddenly I heard her battle yell, and looked to see her leap up onto the back of a large B'ned and viciously stab the rider, then toss him from the seat. She knew exactly where the seams were on a suit of auxiliary armor.
 Through the thick smoke, I could barely make out that she now wore the colorful rags of the Allodial. Her disheveled hair whipped around as she stood in the saddle-chair and surveyed the battlefield. I stomped on the spur peddles and steered my B'ned for her as fast as it would go. Bright pink fire danced all around her, miraculously never finding purchase on her skin. If a blaster bolt even so much as grazed her hair, it would instantly flood and fry her nervous system, leaving her a lifeless chunk of flesh.
 I saw a small guitar like instrument disappear underneath my B'ned as I charged, but couldn't mourn its loss; another of my lance mates, the young girl, was going to beat me to Andid. I saw Andid drop into the saddle and whirl around the stolen B'ned just as my lance mates' searing pink blasts slammed into the hump in front of her. The B'ned, of course, was undazed. I already had my blaster set to a lower stun setting and took a bead on the young girl. The air snapped around me when I squeezed off two bursts, but missed high. The two B'neds collided, ramplate to ramplate. Each rose slightly off its hind most legs, inertia at work. The two auxiliaries, one friend and one foe (though which should be which confused me) yanked on their yolks and jockeyed for position. The heads of their B'neds bobbed up and down as they continued to bat into each other.
 I was approaching them both broadside. My training was pulling me toward Andid. Though I had already shot at my young lance mate, I was bound by everything I had ever been taught to think feel or believe, to aid her, a soldier under my command. That meant that Andid was my true target.
 As I charged, my subordinate girl suddenly got the upper hand, tucking the head of her B'ned under the right foreleg of Andid's. The girls legs pumped hard on the spur peddles and her animal lurched forward, its stubby legs seeming to spin beneath it.  Andid's B'ned was toppled over. Was she crushed beneath it?
 I could've halted my charge. My target had been overcome, but instead, at the last possible micri, I yanked on the yolk. My B'ned turned and plowed right into my lance mates' mount. I was hugging the hump and never saw the young girl's reaction, but she had enough wits to  leap to safety before being crushed. Once past her, I turned in my chair and blasted her, square in the chest. A hot pink web coursed over her body, and she wilted, stunned for at least a centi. My blaster was set to the highest non-lethal setting.
 I strained my neck to see a sign of Andid. Instead all I saw was the choreography of carnage, as the centurion calls it. Bodies entangled, tearing each other viciously apart. Often times, neither was victor. The arrows and blades of the out-castes had left many bloody and dismembered auxiliaries dead or dying on rock studded muddy ground.  Much more numerous, though, were the  contorted corpses of seemingly unscathed out-castes, men, women, and children, the life shocked out of them. And, still everywhere were remains of the victims of the initial blast.
 Finally, I saw that Andid and two other out-castes were cornered by another auxiliary on B'ned back. He raised his blaster to fire. I charged. Before I could get there, one out-caste dropped in a blaze of pink death. I gripped my yolk with one hand and leaned off the B'ned to my left. Another out-caste, raising a musical instrument of some kind to defend himself, screamed. His head actually exploded from the point blank shot. Blood, skull, brains, and pink lightning filled the air, splattering Andid, my B'ned, and myself. The next blast struck the right flank of my B'ned, luckily missing my leg. Andid grabbed my outstretched arm with both hands and lifted her feet. She was swept along with me, leaving the two bodies behind.
 I could feel my shoulder straining to pop free from its joint, and luckily, while my exposed back was an open invitation for the auxiliary to kill me, he was stunned into inaction by my traitorous heroics. Then we were gone in the smoke.
 Andid pulled herself up behind me and I shuffled forward in the saddle-chair.  I tugged at the yolk, sending my B'ned smashing back into the lower canopy, out of the clearing.
 "Wait!" Andid screamed in my ear.
 I turned my head and followed her outstretched arm. She pointed to a shadowy figure running towards us, pursued by beams of crackling energy, whizzing perilously close to his body.
 "Triast!" She called.
 "Andid!" he stumbled, his guitar swinging awkwardly on is back.
 I had to turn around for the boy. As I entered the clearing, pink bolts slammed into my B'ned from every side but the rear. The boy, miraculously, ran around back and scurried up the hind quarters of the beast. I backed out of the clearing as quickly as I could. Andid was standing, leaning over me onto the hump, squeezing off suppression fire with my blaster. I didn't even know how she got it into her hand.
 We had backed into the hole I had already made in the clearing when she dropped down behind me again.  She screamed in my ear, "Go, Go Norho, Go!"
 I wrenched the yolk and my thighs burned as I stomped on the peddles. We turned and smashed through he kuckla like it was open ground. Out of the smoke behind us came a few lingering pink flashes. They struck nearby kuckla to no effect but a light show.
 I realized, with a sick feeling, that we were headed straight east, where the fire wall blocked the only way out of the kuckla. I stopped the B'ned. It snorted and huffed, the great body heaving beneath us, struggling to repay its oxygen dept. Triast readjusted his grip on the back of the saddle-chair. Through the kuckla trunks in front of us we could see that the fog was too dense.  It was a dark smoke, and through it we could see the flickering of flames. Now that we had stopped, I could even sense the heat.
 "Good Gods, Andid," I said.
 She only panted in my ear. Her breath was warm and moist, and the world suddenly smelled like her.
 "What do we do now?" I asked.
 Andid took a breath to answer.
 "Run!"  Triast screamed, his voice breaking.
 Behind us two auxiliaries, each ridding a juji, came swinging out of the clearing. They would easily over take us if I turned north or south. To the East was the fire wall. I turned to face them and backed my B'ned toward the fire, giving Andid a chance to squeeze off a few shots, to try to remove the threat. The auxiliaries must have been equipped with Mars level blasters. They were fully automatic; hot pink bolts sizzled through the air around us like a rain swept in from the west by gale force winds. The B'ned, which took the brunt of the neural attack, even screamed in pain, a sound I'd only ever heard but once before in my life.
 "Get ready, Nohro!" Andid yelled down at me. I knew what she meant.
 She pulled the secondary trigger on my blaster. A bright flash and a thump sent the grenade in the lower barrel sailing toward our attackers. The white hot plasma explosion gave us a micri of freedom from the death-storm of sizzling pink rain, a window of opportunity, during which I whirled the B'ned around and sent it bounding into the wall of flame.

14.
               Er said each individual had been punished - for every single crime he'd ever committed, and for every person he'd ever wronged - ten times, which is to say once every hundred years (assuming that the span of human life is a hundred years), to ensure that the penalty paid was ten times worse than the crime. Take people who had caused a great many deaths, by betraying a country or army, and people who had enslaved others or been responsible for inflicting misery in some other way: for every single person they hurt, they received back ten times the amount of pain.'
The Republic, 615a,b
 How thick the wall was, I still can not tell you. We weren't through it in a micri, I can say that, after all, we had time to catch fire. But, I can't say it seemed to take forever, either. I honestly had no concept of time, only of heat, an omnipresent searing pain, and a deep fear for Andid - she was without armor. The moment just was, and in a way, it still is, over and over again in my mind and in my dreams.
 Years of training kept my grip on the yolk firm, and my legs pumping on the spur peddles. Luckily, my B'ned had been equally well trained and plowed straight ahead through the inferno. We must've come shooting out of the other side, a swirling fireball, trailing flames like a comet. In the smoke and blaze, I couldn't see a thing. I felt Andid jump from the B'ned. I didn't know what had become of Triast, but I too leapt from the fireball, smashing down through the first layer of branches.  I hit the ground, instinctively rolling with the impact, and then kept on rolling, to put out the flames that had left the B'ned with me.
 The undergrowth was moist, and I quickly jumped to my feet, the residual impressions of the heat and pain still stinging me all over. The lowest canopy level, really only a few widely dispersed branches, was about chest high, and the undergrowth grew right up to it. Twenty meters farther from the wall, the B'ned was thrashing about, screaming, wailing, an all too human sound. Then I saw the boy rise up, so that his torso stuck out over the thick undergrowth. I could feel myself sinking into the marshy ground, and so started moving, searching for some sign of Andid. The boy was moving toward me.
 "Andid!" he yelled before I could.
 Thankfully, she popped up only a few meters from me, dripping wet, smeared with mud and soot, and blood.
 "Oh thank Plato... " I said. Ironic, isn't it.
 I wadded through the bushes toward her, and she to me. We embraced.
 "Thank you, Nohro," she said and kissed me. Then I simply held her, and she was solid beneath the pressure of my arms. Her damp and grimy hair stuck to my face, and I drank in the strangely grotesque smell of smoke, singed flesh, sweat, and the residual of her natural aroma. Wether or not the kiss was a token of the same love I felt for her, or merely the Plato's traditional congratulations for distinguished bravery, I felt complete.
 "Andid," the voice came from behind me. She reached out and pulled the younger boy into our embrace.  Still, her fingers gripped my back strongly, and I was content to remain so close. I was virtually oblivious when the boy kissed me, too.
 Awareness intruded again. There was a crash nearby, and an inhuman roar of pain that filled the thicket, rocking the trunks of the kuckla. We all three flinched. Twenty meters from us, my B'ned had plowed blindly into a tree and now lay moaning next to it, a burning heap of dying flesh. The death moan had a sort of hypnotizing effect to it, but Andid broke the spell by speaking.
 "We'd better get moving. They'll be searching for survivors soon."
 "I know the search patterns they'll use," I said. "Follow me."

15.

  Three days later, at about the same time of the morning, I found myself laying on my back, staring up at the nebula as it faded in the coming light of dawn. The rings sparkled overhead, further obscuring the gaseous cloud. The whole sky seemed to shift from side to side above me, but it was I that was rolling back and forth on the deck of a small merchant galleon that had just set sail from Port Bachwen. The deep swells of the Southern Ocean lulled me into a contemplative state. It was a welcome respite from the hectic events of recent days, and my first chance to look back on everything that had happened to me.

 The green robed old man held his arms high in the air. His sleeves slid down, revealing bone thin arms.
 "The prophet is ready to speak," his voice boomed, filling the silent clearing.
 He stepped down off the central rock, and in his place, up crawled a gnarled creature, shrouded in layers of dark robes, and bent over so far, and at such a grotesquely twisted angle that it barely resembled a human form. There was a general gasp of awe passing among the people.
 "An advanced Taali," I overheard Intifa whisper to Andid. Both stood beside me in the crowd. "You too could reach his stage of mastery. You have the gift." The thought of Andid's perfection striving to be anything like the distorted old man revolted me.
 A face appeared beneath the hoods of the robes, and a voice seemed to come from both the outside world, and from inside my head, all at once.
 "Oh, Allodial People of the Lecardian Hills, great Taali who lead them, oh, liberated men and women of Quotiss, descendants of the truly free Old Quotissians - in spirit if not in blood, oh you who are hungry for change, hungry for a revolution in this world. Hunger now no further!
 "What you have yearned for since your childhood, I bring you. Wether you have always been a creature of the outback, or wether you were born behind the walls of a polis, you all know, you all feel, that you came into this world not to fulfill a prescribed function, but, unlike the submissive, the passive, the weak, the indoctrinated - of whom the Potentates are the worst victims, each of you was born as a free spirit, free to shape your own destiny, free to seek the change you have always hoped would come to this world.
 "This flame, this desire for freedom has burned in the chest of many women and men, and many Taali, these four thousand years. Revolution they sought. And, in their efforts to topple the work of the Founders and the technology left behind in the hands of the guardians, these revolutionaries have always paid the price of death. Their numbers, your numbers, have dwindled from a once proud culture that ruled the planet to the few scattered bands you have become.
 "I am here to tell you that you no longer need to be passive, running and hiding from the masses, that you no longer need to fear the guardians' pink death, nor the many deaths that await you in the outback where you hide from them, because no longer need you fight them, but neither need you hide.
 "For the change I bring is not to change this world, but none the less, is to change each of your lives. Change there will be for each and every one of you that chooses it! If you decide to join me, to follow me on a quest for the freedom you have always sought - If you choose this, then not only that freedom, but so much more can be yours as well!
 "Wonder no more what was left behind when a hundred generations ago your ancestors were the last to step into a perambulater back to the core worlds. Wonder no more what comforts, what luxuries, what mysteries of the universe, and what choices in life could've been - if only the galaxy was still yours to explore. Come with me, my people, my kindred spirits. Come with me, free people of Quotiss, and wonder no more!  Time and space are once again yours to cross in a single step...."
 The old man stepped forward off of the rock and levitated there, nearly three meters above the ground, at least a meter above the crowd. The already excited throngs now gasped in unison, then hummed with the hushed conversations of suppressed excitement. The prophet was still speaking. I was in denial of what I was seeing. This was all just an out-caste fantasy and a simple trick, I told myself. Each of these people, more than anything in the world, wanted to believe this man, wanted a meaning in their life and a place where they could belong. I already had these things, and so did Andid. We, I thought with a superior air, had no need for these fantasies.
 "There is yet a galactic teleportal, an ancient perambulater, on this world," the lies of the old man went on, in my ears and in my mind, "The Redorb does not isolate our Quotiss from the galaxy! We need not pray for the arrival of a galactic slowship as you have for so many centuries.
 "No, for I am born of a long line of Old Quotissians who have carefully guarded this knowledge, carefully passed it on to bands of the Allodial like yourselves, and carefully, dutifully led them to their salvation... to the last perambulater, and to the galaxy beyond!"

 These were the words that had enticed Andid to stay with the out-castes when I returned safely to the dorm.  Later, after escaping the ambush at the clearing, these were the words that drove the three of us, Andid, Triast, and myself, along with several other survivors to follow the gnarled, bent, old Taali on his fantastical trek. Now, despite my many sleepless days, it was these words that were keeping me up long into the morning.

16.

 On the first day after the ambush, I was in spirit, a spectator. In body, I was, for the first time in my life, a laborer, the out-caste's equivalent of a polis' paid hands.
 That morning I had led the survivors of the ambush out of the thicket, past the auxiliary sentries. Sadly, I led only six people, including the three of us, to their safety. I could only assume the rest had met their end in the foggy vale.
 Once we were safely beyond the prearranged perimeter of the auxiliary search pattern, Andid took over as leader. A deci later we were once again in the crater where I had first glimpsed Intifa, swaying in front of a small fire, when both had seemed to almost magically disappear. That night now paled in memory compared to recent events.
 To my surprise, when we arrived at the clearing, we were greeted by several other refugees. Soon we were joined by still more, including the gnarled old prophet, whom special care had been taken to evacuate. In all, our party was now eighteen in number. Volunteers were sent to intercept the other tribal bands before they reached the clearing and the auxiliaries that would still be lying in ambush there. Then, that afternoon brought the arrival of two of these bands to the crater, bringing our number to an impressive forty men, women, and children. It was during this time that I was working as a paid hand,' but for free. Many preparations were made for the journey west to Port Bachwen and my strength and dexterity were appreciated by the Allodial elders.
 That night I stood a shift as sentry, and once released from duty my body forced me to sleep. I would've fallen instantly into a dreamless slumber regardless, but it was a comfort to know that although I was deep in the outback, far from my dormitory, and my life, I was at least near to Andid. My last memories of that day are the sounds of a wild juji and the clicking song of the etyrps accompanied by the soft notes of Intifa's moaning voice and Triast plucking his guitar.

 On the second day, before the sparkling of the rings, we started for Port Bachwen. Still exhausted, my mind was in no shape to be thinking about what I was doing, and my body only obeyed the simple orders it was given. Lift this, cut this, carry this. On the road, I shouldered one of the largest packs of our group, and I plodded along, content just to walk beside, or behind, or anywhere near Andid, to talk to her when I could, but to listen to her jabber away with the others, even Triast, when I could not.
 By the end of the second day we had crossed out of the outback and waded our way across twenty kilometers of the Ginvig, a marshland teeming with plant and animal life far different from that found in the rugged outback. When we reached the end of the swamp, I was surprised to find the Allodial collecting an absurd amount of tolin fruit, a plant that only grew naturally in Ginvig. I had often dined on the vaguely sweet nectar that filled the bulbous fruits. It was nutritious, I knew, but the bulbs took up a ridiculous amount of space, and equally good food could be found at the base of  the coastal range mountains where we were to camp that night.
 For whatever reason, that evening we dined on the nectar of the bulbous tolin fruit. Oddly, though, the Allodial made a sort of ritual of draining the fruit from only the tiniest of pin holes and then resealing the hole with a gummy substance when they were done. Much of what the Allodial People had done since I had joined them had been meant to reduce they harm the did the planet around them.