“We’ll talk more on the morrow. I don’t want to be late for Teenae, and I have flowers to pick up on the way,” said Hoemei.
Gaet didn’t like to see his brother brooding. “Joesai, spend the night with me and Noe at the Great Cloister.”
“No,” rejoined Hoemei. “He should stay here and study my file on Soebo. Honey will spice his time and make his rest a pleasure.”
So, thought Joesai, Hoemei offers the luxuries of the flesh to his uncouth brother who cannot inspire love. Wasn’t that Gaet’s role? He felt sarcastic until he remembered… Noe’s warm teasing… the smile that always lit little Teenae’s eyes under her lush eyebrows. “Wait,” he said, “I have messages.” He took paper and wrote two poems. For Teenae:
36
At the Conclave of Summer Heat, during the final rounds of the kalothi contest, Reeho’na, greatest living o’Tghalie, unveiled a theory of many participant games that tells us why the bargainer who seeks to optimize the gains of each member of a group can become richer than the opponent-mind who seeks to optimize his personal gain by minimizing the gains of others.
THE ALLIANCE DOCUMENT had come in from the printers. Oelita lay curled by the window of her room on the second floor of the maran-Kaiel mansion re-reading its lucid phrases, smelling the inked paper, and feeling smug. The prolog was all hers. She hadn’t let them change a word of it. Some of the free poetry was hers — she liked images — but the contract was mostly the word-smithing of Hoemei’s students, edited by the iron hand of Hoemei himself.
How could Hoemei of the hairy chest and tender smiles love Joesai? They were so different!
The writing of the agreement had been an awesome experience unlike any group work she had ever undertaken. Her confrontations with the Stgal had taught her that priestly councils were ponderous affairs where hidden decisions were made in a guise to appease and lull opponents. Her own heretical group was scarcely better and many had been the time she had been forced to castigate and cajole. In contrast, the Kaiel mongered their wares with open enthusiasm and the precision of practiced survivors.
The group assigned to bargain with Oelita consisted of six men and five women, nine of them offspring of the creches. Three might take her for a game of kol at the temple, proposing, while they played, outrageous and often conflicting deals which they would bamboozle her into buying. The others would be off studying, creating new proposals, testing for flaws.
When she finally agreed to a deal — she smiled remembering her gullibility — they would start to bicker among themselves about why they thought she might later be unhappy with that deal. Sometimes some old teacher of Hoemei would sit with them mediating, teaching, guiding their efforts. They would be radiantly excited one day and dour the next after having dreamed upon the consequences. They were obsessed with consequences.
Oelita was familiar with Stgal organizational architecture which tried for no high structures. The Stgal governed by patchwork and emergency repairs. They were always having to redo what they had just done. Policies were reversed and amended. Failed policies were frequently reintroduced after the failures were forgotten.
With a lifetime of such experiences Oelita was amazed to discover these intense young Kaiel feverishly designing an edifice built on piles driven into the past, able to support whole future generations. Each paragraph was placed in the document like it was a foundation stone under a temple whose upper stories would give solid floor to an eyrie for beloved, if chimeric, grandchildren.
Of the eleven, Oelita became closest to Taimera, a studious hedonist, almost a child, taken only recently from her creche by Hoemei, her breasts, neck, shoulders as yet unscarred. She was a mischievous girl who had a sharp eye for which threads of the past a weaver must grasp to splice strength into any future design. She was the one who probed Oelita deepest for reservations, always sensitive to conflict between Kaiel ambition and heretic morality. One time when Oelita was giving Taimera a lesson on coastal clan relationships, Taimera os-Kaiel explained why her co-workers were so thorough.
Those groupings of Kaiel who created effective laws gained power, money, influence — and the release of their genes to the breeding rooms of the creches. Predictions accurate over the immediate future were rewarded, but the big stake was in being able to control distant consequences.
The young group that Hoemei had assembled around Oelita knew that Kaiel auditors, armed with hindsight, would still be checking over the effects of this document when its authors were well into their political prime. If by then the coastal peoples were prospering in their relationship with the Kaiel, the votes of each author of such success would be enormously magnified, but if the document failed to do what they were predicting for it, then they would find themselves relegated to some petty job in the bureaucracy.
It was a matter of honor to Taimera, and some anxiety, to have the kind of record which spoke of continuous good judgment. She was ambitious. She had been driven to excellence to escape her creche, and was driven now to reach the top councils. As yet, she confessed to Oelita, she had managed a constituency of only five people, and so her voting weight was low, but she knew that the power of a Kaiel was not based on constituency size alone. In the end it was based on the craftsmanship of one’s work.
The document had already been through the financial council to insure that, if it became law, funds would be available for its implementation. There had been no trouble. It had been written with a full knowledge of the funding criteria it would have to meet. Now it was on the voting roll.
Any Kaiel in good standing was allowed to vote before the cutoff date, but few would because the Kaiel had a peculiar system. A mere yes or no was not sufficient. The Kaiel maintained that a yes/no vote did not require careful thought and so encouraged sloppy lawmaking. A Kaiel who voted, and they were constantly taking the trouble to vote on something, made a deposition in the Archives stating in detail what he believed to be the consequences of his choice. The archivist did not accept the vote unless the consequences were stated in measurable terms.
The voting on any issue was sparse, but indicated the decision of Kaiel who had taken the trouble to inform themselves and were willing to gamble their political future on their estimate of the outcome. There was no central lawmaking council. A Kaiel was trained from childhood to make laws in the areas where he felt a personal responsibility. He soon learned that, to get a law passed, he had to contact a representative number of Kaiel who were likely to vote on the issue and to work out a consensus with them before he put his suggestion on the voting roll.
Oelita was told by Taimera that there was an unwritten custom requiring twenty committed yes votes and a statistical analysis of the opposition before a bill would be accepted. Since every Kaiel prided himself on his ability to predict, little legislation was put forward that was not passed.
The nature of the attack upon the Stgal was to be a simple one. Copies of the alliance document would be distributed covertly among Oelita’s supporters so that they would know she sought their support for a game play resembling the de-priesting play of kol.