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“Welcome to Morning Assembly, and a particular welcome to those joining us for the first time.” Aaron Foord was one of these, and he looked round in bewilderment. Dust motes circled in the sunbeams which slanted down into the Assembly Hall. The Principal’s voice echoed. “We know this must be a confusing time for you. We’ll do all we can to end your confusion. To put right the events which brought you here to us. You’ll find us a close community, but you’ll find we particularly value new friends. We value the challenge you will give us. We look forward to making you part of something bigger than yourselves. You’ll find a community here which will seem like it’s been waiting just for you. You’ll have experiences here which will last all your lives.”
Twenty-five years ago, when Aaron Foord was twelve, his mother was diagnosed. She died within six months, and his father, after nursing her and becoming infected, within a further six weeks. He had no other relatives still living, so he went to a State Orphanage. He went because he was literally an orphan, though the term Orphanage was also figurative: it was a place for those Orphaned from the State, which considered itself their true parent. In other words, a centre for the treatment of young criminal and political offenders. The handful of genuine orphans who also went there did not usually survive unaffected.
It was not a stereotypical institution, at least in appearance: there was no forbidding architecture, only a collection of bland functional buildings with curtains and walls and furniture in beige and orange and brown. It was reasonably clean, and not immediately threatening. Aaron Foord noticed, with a sense of novelty, that things like teapots and saucepans and cooking vessels were all industrial size. All the things he had been used to doing alone, or as one of a family of three—eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, reading and working and playing—he now did among dozens, or hundreds.
His parents had stayed together through his childhood. He couldn’t define or recognise love, either then or later, but he noted carefully the details of their companionship, their ease with each other. He remembered summers on beaches, the murmur of voices. He always liked voices murmured and nuanced, and would try later to recreate them on his ship. His mother and father had given him a solitary childhood, but not an unhappy one. They were quiet and orderly people, and he grew up liking quietness and order.
He knew the Morning Assembly welcome was ambiguous. He knew there were unspoken words behind the spoken ones, and soon found out what they were: corporatist psychobabble. No room for optouts. No room for outsiders. You’re Us or the Enemy. Community, Greater Good, One Of Us, There Is No I In Team. Most heavy gravity planets supplied Special Forces and mercenaries to other parts of the Commonwealth, and their societies were corporatist and authoritarian. Aaron Foord’s planet was no exception.
The orphanage was run by State officials, some of whom were civilians and some, to his surprise, priests. The priests had a particular way about them. They had open regular faces and smiled a lot. They didn’t walk but strolled. They didn’t shout but spoke quietly, something he found likeable until he started listening to them. They punctuated their speech with swingings of their rulers, those instruments of love and certainty; three feet long and made of dark heavy hardwood and even marked with calibrations, though he never once saw them used as instruments of measurement. Some of the priests, he learned, liked beating girls, some of them boys, and some of them both. Some did it out of simple cruelty, some out of complex cruelty. Others, the worst, did it out of genuine love.
The girls wore uniforms with box-pleated skirts. He had raped one of them, the last one he should ever have forced, the one who had shown him how to make places where the priests couldn’t reach. She was a year younger than him, and came a year later. Her name was Katy Bevan.
“Welcome to Morning Assembly, and a particular welcome to those joining us for the first time.” Aaron Foord noticed her among the newcomers. The others were bewildered or afraid or defiant, but not her; she was different. Dust motes circled in the sunbeams which slanted down into the Assembly Hall. The Principal’s voice echoed. “We know this must be a confusing time for you. We’ll do all we can to end your confusion. To put right the events which brought you here to us. You’ll find us a close community, but you’ll find we particularly value new friends. We value the challenge you will give us. We look forward to making you part of something bigger than yourselves. You’ll find a community here which will seem like it’s been waiting just for you. You’ll have experiences here which will last all your lives.”
Afterwards, he went up to her.
“Where is it?”
“Where is what?” She was unusually small and slight; blonde, with sharp features. She had a way of looking askance, as if smiling privately.
“The place you go to escape them when they’re talking.”
“Oh, that. It’s in my head.” She glanced at him. “You’re the first one who’s seen. I’ll show you how to do it.”
She called it Subvocal Subversion. Where did she get that from, he thought, at twelve? Politically deviant parents? She never told him why she’d been sent there and he never asked. “You create a space where they can’t reach you, and the way you do it is by simple subvocal denial of everything they say. Even if the denials are contradictory. Actually it’s better if the denials are contradictory, because it means that what they say is too. And follow their grammar, so the denials are grammatical. But think it, don’t say it, and don’t ever ever write it. Then it stays where they can’t reach. It won’t make their institutions collapse, but it’ll give you a place they can’t reach. Everybody needs that.”
They did it together in Assembly, stealing glances at each other.
“Welcome to Morning Assembly, and a particular welcome to those joining us for the first time. We know (No you don’t) this must be a confusing time for you. We’ll do all we can (No you won’t) to end your confusion. To put right the events which brought you here to us. You’ll find us a close community (No we won’t), but you’ll find we particularly value new friends….”
It was a small private act of rebellion, invented by a small private person. She did it when they were beating her, and telling her why they were beating her; and he adopted it when they were beating him. It worked, because it existed only as thought. But it was small and silent and private, and what the priests taught was large and loud and public, and supremely confident of its ability to prevail. They heard its confidence echoing in the Principal’s voice at every Assembly. Even the dust motes were scared.
“This community we share has a mighty strength. It will not be denied. It embraces all of us and each of us, and it will not be denied. It demands to make us greater than we are, and it will not be denied. Compared to it, we are almost nothing. Like pebbles before a mountain. Like the atoms in pebbles before a mountain. Almost nothing. My reading this morning is from Job, chapter 9.
He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength.
He removeth the mountains, and they know not: He overturneth them in His anger.
He shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble.
He commandeth the sun, and it riseth not: and sealeth up the stars...”
But the Subvocal Subversion still worked for Katy Bevan and, increasingly, for Aaron Foord. It was small and private, like Katy, and perhaps that was why. Reach outwards, the priests said, become part of something bigger than you. No, she said, turn inwards. Build a private space where they can’t reach you. Then another and another. Add them together and make a universe. It’ll last you the rest of your life.