49 - The kind of people who'd steal an election

I sat in the room Kall had taken me to for a bit to recover, making the pain fade with doses of whack-weed. He’d struck me on the side of the head, luckily, so I’d have no obvious mark during the day’s meetings. I knew Kaninjer would want to put me on the concussion regimen tonight, but he wouldn’t if I didn’t tell him I’d been hit; if he could tell from examining me, so be it.

My next audience was a half-bead off still. I’d started on the next letter when Binchera peeked in and said that the Pages writer Roras Jaenenem was here to ask me whether, during an Imperial election, paying a poll clerk to look away from the voting-chip box for a bit was illegal.

The answer, of course, was no. Arko had only had votes of any kind for three years and the procedures were still being refined. And those of us who were the teachers were all from a land where the vote had been held sacred for centuries, so that such things were so unthinkable we couldn’t think to enact laws against them.

I didn’t want to tell Roras that; he’d quote me and people who’d never dreamed of the idea would read all about how it was perfectly lawful, in the Pages. I really wanted to know, however, why he was asking. I had Binchera send him in.

“There was a fellow who’s going to be a poll-clerk down at the Ministry of Scales I overheard talking to the staff just now,” Roras told me when I asked. “He was thinking that doing something with the boxes while the clerks weren’t looking might be illegal and wanted to make sure it wasn’t before he took money for it.”

Only in Arko, I thought. “This clerk, did you get his name?” He couldn’t be arrested, but he could be talked to sternly, and I knew two people at least who’d be perfect for that.

“No, Imperator; I was just overhearing.” So much for that idea.

“What did they tell him?”

“They weren’t sure, so they told him they’d look it up and if he came back tomorrow, they’d tell him.”

“And he left?”

“Yes, Imperator.” Probably never to return, I thought. “But I came to you curious, more than anything, I guess,” Roras went on, musingly, “because sometime in the conversation he mentioned ten or so other poll clerks he knows who are also wondering.”

Signing “no” to the trap-booth people had become a reflex, almost as much as the freezing stock still with the spear-through-the-chest look on my face. I had to hope that, one of these days, I wouldn’t do it when the other person should be spring-darted. Roras lifted his notebook and poised his pen. “Imperator, this raises the possibility of a widespread effort by one or more of the Imperial candidates to seize power by stealing the election—what are your thoughts on such a prospect?”

“Roras… Roras, wait,” I said, when I found my voice. “You don’t understand—no, quit writing, don’t quote a word of this! If this is true, providing comments to a Pages writer should be nowhere near the top of my list of priorities!” I jumped up out of my chair. “Out of my office—I’m going myself—I’ll be back with you later.”

“Then there is no such law!?” he said, the pen beginning to fly across the page.

“Do not quote a single word of what I’ve said!” I barked, doing the almost-running toes-out strides that are the beginning of sprinting on skates out the door.

I’d just been cleared for exertion; this would be a good test. On the route I took there are some nice long straight corridors and a spiral ramp with the outer half canted, which gets you going faster than you possibly can on your own power on a level floor. Setting my restrictions, my loves and my healer had thought of flying and riding but not skating, fortunately, making this the only way to feel the wind in my hair by myself. I used my warning-whistle for all I was worth.

The Arkan Assembly meets in the audience chamber, where the Crystal Throne is; once the constitution was ratified the Imperator would be required to be there whenever they were in session. They were in session now. Screeching to a stop next to one of the runners, I gave him a note saying “Call a recess; I have something more important than anything you’re doing,” to slip to Sanas Kurian, who was the Arkan version of the angaseye dagra krisa, except that he always presided.

He called a recess, and came out with a look of alarm on his middle-aged acquiline Aitzas face. I rushed him into his own office. “I’m sorry to disrupt,” I said, “but I have it on good authority that a poll clerk went to Scales asking whether it was illegal for him, and ten-odd other poll-clerks he knows, to accept payment to look away from the vote-chip box for a short time. Which it isn’t, so we’ve got to make it so, oh, in the next bead or so.”

Sanas was as a strong an adherent to the vote as you can imagine an Arkan could be, and no fool when it came to seeing implications. His eyes went white all around. “Oh my noble God, yes, we must, Imperator.”

“How fast can it go through? I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be unanimous… Kahara, I hope so.”

“I think so, Imperator, but it’s the wording that takes the time… and this is a law about voting, so we Arkans—”

“Need help, yes” I said. “It needs two laws, one for those who’d attempt to bribe a clerk, one for the clerks themselves”—I hadn’t thought to bring pen and paper, so I grabbed up a pen from his desk and snatched a sheet from his blank pile. “No one shall bribe—no, it could be threaten also—bribe or threaten—no, influence by any means, a vote official—”

“Imperator, em… may I scribe it?” he asked contritely. “That way we don’t have to attempt to read your, em, writing.” I never did learn to write Arkan both legibly and fast enough to take notes. I gave the pen and paper into his hands and got up; at least this way I could glide back and forth while I composed, the faibalitz form of pacing.

“No one,” I said, “shall attempt to influence by any means a vote official with the intent of altering the results of an election and thus violating the will of the Arkan people, read it back—no, wait, not an election, it could be a referendum—a vote and thus violating, and so on, no one shall attempt to influence by any means a vote official with the intent of altering the results of a vote and thus violating the will of the Arkan people, punishment… fine in the amount of the bribe times five, up to fifty lashes of the ten-beaded whip publicly and exile without safe conduct, read it back”—he did—“good, second law, no vote official shall accept any attempts, no, scratch that out, no vote official shall alter the result of a vote in any way and thus violate the will of the Arkan people as the result of, no, scratch ‘as the result of,’ it has to be three laws, that was the second one complete, no vote official shall commit any act with the intent of altering the result of a vote and thus violating the will of the Arkan people, punishment… immediate dismissal from the position as vote official and ineligibility for any position of trust with respect to votes in Arko for life, fine in the amount of the bribe times five, up to fifty lashes and exile without safe conduct, read it back”—he did—“good, third law, no vote official shall fail to report any attempt made by any person to influence him by any means with the intent of altering the results same as the others, punishment immediate dismissal, possibly ineligibility for life same as the other by judge’s discretion, up to thirty lashes, read it back”—he did—“good, and it’s even in writing you can read, so when it’s gone through—oh wait! Fourth law. Enshrining all the current election procedures as set out by the Ministry of Posterity as law, use the standard wording for laws enshrining Ministry procedures, punishments… by discretion of the judge commensurate with the first three laws, I’ve got to get back upstairs, I’m already late but I’ll be there for signing when it’s passed, again I’m sorry to throw this at you at the middle of something else, I should have thought of it a long time ago… thank you Sanas.”

“Certainly, Imperator,” said Sanas, shaking the cramps out of his pen-hand. “I’ll get these passed as close to immediately as is possible.” I skated back up to the office, whooshing past Roras waiting outside and ignoring his question, “Did you just put the law in the works?” to greet the delegation from Tor Ench who were my next appointment. My chest heaved; either the wound or being out of training a month and a quarter, or both, had wreaked havoc on my endurance.

There should be yet another law, I realized, setting out that in case of any cheating coming to light a vote could be subject to recounting or even revoting, if necessary… but I could initiate it tomorrow. That I was writing laws at all, of course, was only possible because the new constitution had not yet been ratified; when it was, the Imperator would lose such power, similar to a Yeoli semanakraseye.

“Chevenga,” Binchera said urgently, once I was done with the Enchians and the next people were waiting, “can you do four signatures between? It’s a matter of priority from Sanas Kurian, he says.” I signed and banged the four seals onto the papers without even reading them. “Have them copied and the first copies sent down to Scales right now,” I told Binchera, then leaned my head out the door.

“Roras, you asked me whether the action of which you heard is illegal; the answer, and on this you may quote me, is yes.”

†

I should have known I’d never get away with not being put on the concussion night-regimen. Not a chance when someone as impeccably honourable as Kallijas Itrean knocks you out; he will tell your healer.

In case you’ve never been under the care of a Haian after having your chimes rung and so don’t know what the regimen is, it is this. They run a one-aer sandtimer, and every two turns they wake you up, give you drops and grill you, what’s your name, what’s mine, where are we, what day is it, how many fingers, does your head hurt and so forth. They also examine the pupils of your eyes, which in my case, because my eyes are so dark a brown, means a flame at what seems like a fingerwidth away.

It’s all to make sure your mind doesn’t drift away for good in sleep, as can happen, so you are best to accede to it, but after the second or third waking you just want to scream, “My name’s the same as it was two aer ago and so’s yours and we’re in the same place and of course my kyashin head still hurts, let me sleep!” If you do scream this, they make a note of another concussion symptom, “irritability,” and give you drops for that. On the second waking I usually can’t get back to sleep for one or two turnings of the sand-timer, and when I do they wake me up after two, of course, and then I can’t get back to sleep at all.

So the next day, as we waited in the hope the poll clerk would come back to Scales, I was not in the most cheerful mood.

He did indeed come back, to find two Sereniteers and Roras Jaenenem waiting for him. He was not arrested, as he had committed no crime, but he was asked to undergo truth-drugging on pain of being arrested for obstructing an investigation. When asked under the drug whether he intended to take the bribe he’d been offered, he said no, of course, and they were kind enough not to ask him if he’d been planning to before he’d been truth-drugged.

His friends were in fact nine in number, but between them they knew thirty-eight others who’d been offered similar bribes, as their questionings under the drug revealed. Between those thirty-eight, it grew to a hundred and nine, mostly within the City Itself but a few beyond. By the end of the day they knew it was an effort that spanned the Empire, in all the sizable cities. They’d also managed to trace it back to those who’d offered the bribes, arrest them, and find out which candidate they were working for. Truth-drug makes for lightning-fast investigations.

I’d been distracting myself, running over in my sleep-deprived mind who it might be. Mil Torii Itzan? He seemed far too affable and, when it came down to it, honest, for that sort of thing. Adamas Kallen I doubted was devious enough, but then he might have people who were. The main suspect in my mind, in the end, was Kin Kazien, trying to salvage his horse-sullied hopes in the final stretch.

Rafas Iteras Izas, my Minister of Internal Serenity, was the one who reported to me, none of his underlings being willing. “Everyone arrested for offering bribes was working under one person,” he told me grimly, “named Kamalas Iren.”

Why did that name sound familiar? “Who is Kamalas Iren? Aitzas? Fessas? And which candidate is he serving?” Rafas had said it slowly, as if with reluctance, which was not like him.

“Em… pardon me, Imperator… I don’t speak Yeoli, as you know, and so don’t pronounce the names well. No ‘s’ at the end, it’s Kamallo, actually, Iren.”

The world went very still, then started fading in and out. I didn’t know it then, but I was told later, I froze so badly I didn’t even make the charcoal sign. Luckily the trap-booth people knew Rafas was too trustworthy to spring-dart. I heard his voice distantly, “Imperator, I think you need to put your head down,” and felt his hands on my shoulders.

Kamallo had been a long-time aide of Faraiko Terero, one of the worst, and definitely the most outspoken, of the Yeoli hawks. They had announced their support for Mil Torii Itzan, but backed off somewhat when they’d been attacked for interfering in Arkan politics as foreigners should never do. (Here Minis had very effectively cited Notyere’s part in the massacre that had abolished the Ordeal, while I bit my tongue hard.)

It was commonly known, though they denied it, that they were throwing their money-chains into Mil’s campaign too; it had been noticed he was outspending everyone else, including us, and there’d even been a story in the Pages about Inatalla Shae-Krisa, who was as close as the hawks got to a leader, calling Mil down for spending too much of it on parties and not enough on pamphlets.

My cheek on my blotter, I clenched my eyes shut, while Rafas rubbed my shoulders and said to someone else I couldn’t see, “Best get his healer, I think; it’s not all that long since he took the wound.” It all fell together in my mind. Of course the hawks would do this; Arko had always been their spoils to reap and nothing more, in their minds, not a people whose votes were sacred. It wasn’t as if they were Yeolis.

I knew the hawks had been worried, understandably, that an Arkan Imperator might find legal, or at least publicly-accepted, ways to confiscate back the fortunes and properties they’d seized during the sack and send them packing back to Yeola-e, chainless—or worse. It was natural that they’d try to buy one by putting him on the Crystal Throne.

Still, my heart felt ripped asunder. After all we had done to give Arko our customs of freedom, after all the sacrifices we’d made—after all the sacrifices we’d forced on them for it—all Arkans would now know Yeolis had tried to steal the most important vote they’d take in their lifetimes. I lifted my head back up, saying, “I’m all right, no need to get Kaninjer,” but inside I was screaming, and wishing I could scream out loud. “Sorry, Rafas… go on.”

Through Kamallo they’d traced it back to Faraiko, and found that the plan was to replace the true ballots with false ones that would give it to Mil Torii Itzan. The agreement they had made with Mil was that they would ensure he became Imperator, and he would, sure enough, allow them to retain their Arkan citizenships and property.

But they had not specified every way they’d work to make him Imperator, Faraiko said under truth-drug, and kept Mil innocent of this particular tactic. So not only was the plot carried out by Yeolis, but the one Arkan who might have been part of conceiving it, and would benefit by it, had been kept in ignorance out of concern he was too honest to trust with it. Why, oh why, I asked myself, did I let Kall put the seals back on my hands this morning? Why didn’t I just say “Fik you all, Yeoli and Arkan, every one of you,” and run away to live what days I have left alone on a man-height-long island in the Miyatara?

Right on Rafas’s heels was Roras, who’d been following it all like a dog a trail of meat. “Imperator, you look upset,” he said, poising his pen.

I said what was in my heart. He quoted it thus:

“I've been steeped in Yeoli politics since I learned to speak,” Shefenkas said. “And part of my education was the history of it, right back to our founding. If anything like this ever happened, history does not know it. I was always taught, and I hold as a sacred truth still, that the will of the people is the will of All-Spirit, the closest we Yeolis have to what Arkans would call a God. So I never dreamed...” Here the Imperator was momentarily unable to speak, for tears.

“When I heard about this, I thought—I hope Arko will forgive me for saying this, but I thought what you might expect a Yeoli to think—that, sharing our customs with Arkans, we have to expect them to be corrupted.

“But it was Yeolis who did this.

“I must seem to Arkans like the most naive and innocent creature, but… what was inconceivable to me before has not only become conceivable, but has happened. I have to wonder what kind of mind can conceive, and then decide to execute, this. I ask myself... have we as a people been permanently changed by what happened to us? Have we been corrupted beyond healing?”

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