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"No", Valentine said. "I saw someone I knew, briefly".
"You need some air". He turned to the Reaper. "Can we go into the greenhouse?"
For a moment it seemed as useless as talking to a statue; then their escort Reapers moved to flank the other door. Silas waved Valentine over and it opened.
Valentine smelled fresh, humid air and open space. Above, a crystalline dome diffused and admitted light, whitening the sun a little. A red path covered with a no-slide coating led them up to a little prominence, with a couple of comfortable human lounge chairs before a pool, which flowed over into a waterfall somewhere below.
Staggered was the only word for what Valentine felt. The space was bigger than any stadium he'd ever seen, and filled with a winding archipelago that was half-bayou and half-beachfront.
Red and purple trees topped with bristles of tresslike leaves dropped green vines into the water. Spongy-looking yellow growths clung to the bare trunks of the trees, sending out vast, delicate webs to catch deadfalls from above. Wind swirled around the interior of the dome.
"This is a piece of Ehro, home planet of the Dau'ar".
Valentine felt invigorated. "I thought they came from Kur. Someone told me it was a dry, almost lifeless place".
"A castle under siege runs out of even rats eventually. But Ehro is where they evolved, I'm told. That oxygen's nice, isn't it?"
"I wish they'd go back to it".
"They can't, but then you know that, I expect. We're just a part of a bigger, older war. I worry sometimes that the Dau'weem will apply the same strategy to our planet that Adler does to the suburbs".
Something translucent buzzed by on pink wings. "They'd never do that".
"Remember what I told you the other night about nevers? I never wanted the role of interlocutor. I decided to take what they'd hand me
and go out East, build an academic ivory town and seal myself into it. But you'd be surprised, once you learn the true history of the world, just what parasites those things that laughably call themselves 'Lifeweavers' are. I've got a book or two I could loan you".
"I've seen the propaganda. Your master's the real parasite. Black bloody leeches. Worse than leeches, leeches at least leave the host alive. The Lifeweavers are interested in conserving life, not devouring it".
"Tell that to Silvers. He says a disease killed most of his people back home. They didn't want the Grogs used to conquer any more worlds".
"Not every plague has a purpose", Valentine said. "Seems just as likely your own masters would use a tactic to get them to quit their lands, force them to hitch up with Kur to find healthy land on another planet".
"Kur hates purposeless death".
"I can agree with you on that".
Silas sighed. "They've accumulated wisdom we can't even guess at in their long years. They're going to guide us up to heights we'd never reach on our own".
"I've had enough of this view. And the heights. I want to go to work".
Silas looked at his heavy gold watch. "Good. You'll start tomorrow".
pieces: Every Kurian organization depends on layers of intermediaries between the Kurian Lords and their human herds. Seattle is no different.
All the layers of police, troops, secret police, church investigators, even diplomats to other Kurian Zones, report to one man's office in Seattle, and that man is Maxamom Silas. Impressive looking, with a good eye for clothes, and an even more impressive speaker and judge of character, he's something of a born second-in-command. Some in the know of the ins and outs of Seattle's realm believe him to be more important than the lesser Kurian Lords in the feudal conglomeration, especially with recent desertions of the Kurians supposedly guarding the borders of Seattle's empire.
He has his faults, of course. If an original thought ever entered his head, it got lonely and left. He's also a man who lives very much in the present day. "The past can't be changed and the future has too many variables", he's been known to say.
Maxamom Silas watches over his city from the old Space Needle, overshadowed by the greater Kurian Spire doubling the highest heights of the Seattle skyline, as if contesting Mount Rainier itself. Why he chooses the Space Needle as a location for the meetings of his highest military, industrial, and church leaders might be answered better by psychology than logistics or practicality or even sybaritic comfort - after all, he often weekends at the much more congenial Gates estate. He's earned the view. As a Seattle-born NUC altar boy, he impressed the church hierarchy enough for them to send him East for an education. He returned a bright young
graduate of Harvard's Population Management School, not inspired with any particular vision, but crammed with the latest skills and theories.
Silas receives credit for his division of the city into neighborhood-sized "quads" - each ruled by a Kurian. School and work and sports teams encourage quad loyalty. These in turn are gathered into "conferences" where a presiding Kurian clan works out squabbles. In theory, a human need never leave his conference; the whole of his existence is encompassed in the square miles that make up a conference, though he will sometimes travel to another conference to root for a home team in a championship, or listen to a political speech.
Seattle himself oversees the conferences as sort of a supreme judge. His conferences reside in his own massive tower, where they may be more easily watched and controlled. Treachery has been unknown since the great purge of Year Forty, when three leading conference clans were killed in a single deadly night.
It is this simple system that allowed Seattle to expand his realm in the 2050s, owning all the land between the Grogs in Oregon and the thinly inhabited coastline north of Vancouver. From the Kurian point of view, the apparently powerless "quad" role was attractive, for the number of human auras he had to pass up the food chain was strictly limited, and in return he received the military protection of Quisling formations organized at the conference level. While there is some dispute on the matter, Seattle can at least be credited with being the only Kurian overlord who regularly saw his fellow Kurians petition him to be included in his empire.
