a sordid but inevitable adjunct to the conquest. In point of fact, while the Uldra men, with their tall
nervous physiques, gray skins dyed ultramarine blue and aquiline features, were in general personable,
the same could not be said for the women. The girls, squat and fat, with their scalps shaved bald against
the onslaught of vermin, lacked charm. As they matured, they retained their heavy hips and short legs, but
elongated their torsos, arms and faces. The typically long Uldra nose became a drooping icicle; the gray
skins became muddy; the hair, verminous or not, was allowed to grow into a heavy orange nimbus.
Toward these Uldra girls and women the Outker land-barons*maintained a scrupulously correct
indifference, which eventually, by a paradoxical reverse effect, came to be regarded by the Uldras as a
humiliation and an insult.
South across the Persimmon Sea lay the long narrow island Szintarre and its pleasant capital Olanje, a
fashionable resort for out-worlders. These folk, sophisticated, urbane, articulate, had little in common
with the land-barons whom they regarded as pompous martinets, without style, grace or humor.
At Olanje in an eccentric old edifice known as Holrude House sat Koryphon’s single organ of
government: the Mull, a council of thirteen notables. The Mull’s charter asserted control across Szintarre
and Uaia alike, but in practice it avoided any interest in Uaian affairs. The land-barons considered the
Mull an organ for the production of inconsequential sophistry; the Treaty Uldras were apathetic; the
Retent Uldras rejected even the theory of centralized authority; the Wind-runners were ignorant of the
Mull’s very existence.
The cosmopolitan population of Olanje generated for itself an almost hyperactive intellectualism. Social
activity was incessant; committees and societies existed to accommodate almost any special interest: a
yacht club; several artists’ associations; the Morphote-Watchers; the Szintarre Hussade Association; the
Library of Gaean Musical Archives; an association to sponsor the annual fête: Parilia; a college of the
dramatic arts; Dionys: that organization dedicated to hyperaesthesia. Other groups were philanthropic or
altruistic, such as the Ecological Foundation, which enjoined the importation of alien flora and fauna, no
matter how economically useful or aesthetically gratifying. The Redemptionist Alliance crusaded against
the Submission Treaties; they advocated dissolution of the Uaian domains and return of the lands to the
Treaty tribes. The Society for the Emancipation of the Erjin, or SEE, asserted that erjins were intelligent
beings and might not legally be enslaved. The SEE was possibly the most controversial organization of
Olanje, inasmuch as an increasing number of erjins were being imported from the Palga for domestic
service, farm labor, garbage pick-up and the like. Other less disputatious groups sponsored education and
employment for Uldras immigrant to Szintarre from Uaia. These Uldras, derived in about equal
proportion from Retent and Treaty tribes, tended to excoriate the land-barons. Often their grievances were
real; often they complained from sheer petulance. The Redemptionists sometimes brought Uldra
immigrants before the Mull, the better to prod that often discursive, airy, didactic and capricious group
into action. With practiced skill the Mull fended off such importunities or appointed a study commission,
which invariably reported the Treaty lands to be havens of peace compared to the Retent, where the
independent tribes conducted feuds, raids, assassinations, retaliations, outrages, massacres, atrocities and
ambushes. The Redemptionists declared such considerations to be irrelevant. The Treaty tribes, so they
pointed out, had been deprived of their ancestral lands through violence and deceit. The perpetuation of
such a condition was intolerable, nor could the passage of two hundred years legitimize an originally
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