Hearts and Minds

[Tyvia]

Golden sap ran free down along the asquite's thick brown bark, leaving tiny trails in its wake which caught the light and reflected wonderfully to give the tree a pleasant ochre glow. It filled the room with a sickly-sweet aroma as the wind brought it in through an open window, the musk given greater substance by the high humidity of the spring air. The aperture had been left ajar so as to provide relief to those lacking the Commissioner's famed iron lungs, his locally-produced cigars known to create thick and pungent clouds of flavorful – if stifling – smoke. He smoked one such device now, the fat cylinder perched almost precariously at the edge of his thin lips, kept barely aloft only by the moderating pressure provided by his upper teeth.

A gentle trail of grey vapor rose towards the ceiling.

He was not an altogether imposing or impressive man in of himself. In his early forties, of slender build, the Commissioner was already beginning to lose hair from the top of his head. His formerly proud and dark curly locks were beginning to turn a stark white, and fall out in equal number. Decades of chain smoking and a distinct fondness for expensive and unhealthy cigars had granted him permanently yellow teeth and wispy facial hair; the man known to pant on occasion when ascending the flights of stairs to his fourth floor office. He had a wide face, with a broad, gently protruding chin, underneath gaunt if wide cheeks, and intelligent brown eyes.

They sat together, the Commissioner and the Chief, opposite one another and atop a set of russet brown lounge chairs positioned perpendicularly. The latter, a man with comparatively gaunt and significantly more aged features, had his feet – clad in fine brown boots with silver buckles – up on the thin mahogany table between the two seats. It was the antechamber to the Commissioner's office; and though it was oft occupied by Lt. Ngale, the Commissioner's intrepid aide, it'd been commandeered for the two men's purposes for the time being.

Rifling idly through the pages of a local newspaper, the Mos Attraya Guardian, Dr. Kusayi Juma was forced to answer a difficult if intriguing question.

“So now,” Commissioner (and Major) Thomas Kiya-Aduis let out, having mastered the ability to speak with a cigar in his mouth, “I needs ask, you understand. Isn't it then a violation of the precepts of the revolution– of the principles you set down?”

The question seemed to catch him off-guard, certainly, and by the furrow of his forehead and brow – his contemplative gaze – he was finding it difficult to consider. Gossamer strands of smoke billowed upwards as they both sat there, questing tendrils which grasped continuously towards the ceiling. “I wouldn't say so,” Juma stated, lowering the newspaper, speaking in Atta. “We will stand by them, but my colleagues and I have grown greatly in wisdom, both collective and individual, since that time. It isn't statism itself we oppose, despite the early rhetoric– a fair bit of it inspired by Duke, unfortunately, when he was still a red.”

“The bureaus which had been utilized as instruments of slavery can be suborned for the purposes of emancipation?” Kiya-Aduis questioned, lifting up a single dark eyebrow. His cigar rolled from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Not quite,” came Juma's response, the man decidedly setting the newspaper down for the time being as he regarded his companion directly. “These aren't the same institutions, my friend. They don't exist as part of some vague administrative structure ruling by decree from some distant overseas empire. These are local institutions dedicated specifically to the maintenance, and administration of whatever domains are assigned to them.”

“To serve the negroes at last?” Kiya-Aduis put in, forcing a smile onto his face.

To that, Juma could only let out a sigh. Shaking his head, he removed his feet from the table separating them, leaning slightly forward in his seat now; the Professor's hands moving emphatically as he spoke: “to be frank with you,” he solemnly began, “I only barely understand the basis for their protests in this issue.”

“It's not difficult to comprehend, my friend. This is the first time they've an opportunity to sell their grain internationally, and you're denying them that – you're doing the same thing the imperialists did.”

“I won't deny that it's a drastic measure,” Juma easily conceded, bobbing his head forward and nodding once. “But we've had dozens of those in the last few years, out of necessity. We're bound to the whims of nature and the weather in our current state, are we not? The magazine system will be worth the trouble once it's fully operational; a famine of the sort we experienced last year cannot be allowed to happen again.”

“I'm not arguing with you on that point, but you should understand the bitter perspective of the landowners,” his smoking compatriot helpfully put in, lifting his cigar away so as to sip from a glass of water stationed nearby. “It seems almost as though you're coercing them into selling grain to you, what with these tariffs of yours – they're right to call them restrictive, you know – and I'm not entirely sure that they're wrong. Hell, another method would've been to match or pay more than the international prices–“

“You know we can't do that.”

“Not on our own, but with credit–“

The laugh which followed Kiya-Aduis' remark was a remarkably hollow and bitter one, Juma quickly shaking his head from side to side. He spread out and collapsed languidly back into his armchair, staring at the commissioner with an expression of almost haughty amusement. “Don't you think I've thought of that, my friend?” he asked, rhetorically as it turns out. “We've considered that, and we accepted initially that for the purpose of creating goodwill, it'd be a better one. But who the hell is going to loan to us? I've got an interview planned tomorrow, and I hope to build some foreign support for us, but–. . we're in a difficult spot as concerns investment or potential loans. Our republic is still a rogue state to many.”

“Look, all I'm saying is that it's kind of hard for these people to swallow these policies. We don't even have civilian administration in most of the provinces yet! Surely you can understand why they might view it as an extension of colonial policies if soldiers are still policing the streets and the government continues to enforce trade edicts?”

“This,” Juma emphasized, waggling his finger testily towards Kiya-Aduis, “is a temporary state of affairs.”

 

[Tyvia]

An entire row of office buildings and warehouses barely preceding the revolution itself had to be torn down to accommodate the new canal; ripped apart in the span of only a few days as eager workers, sympathetic architects, and assorted building planners gathered to create an appropriate memorial to the revolution.

It had been initially difficult for the committee charged with that task to decide upon a design. Hundreds of artists, both foreign and domestic, sent in sketches, and letters – some even appearing in person – to plead their cases and attempt to step into the limelight on the back of Attreyan post-revolutionary fervor. Yet even in those early days of tentative relief and stability, the sheer psychological trauma inflicted upon the Attreyan state and people was already quite obvious, and so even the most heroic, self-aggrandizing, and blatantly revisionist proposals were ultimately rejected by the committee.

In the end, it was Juma that proposed the winning suggestion – in an ironic and perhaps somewhat appropriate twist of fate.

Though the majority of the former Engellexic garrisoning fleet had managed to survive the wars intact, a handful of vessels were nonetheless inevitably lost. In its mad dash to escape from growing revolutionary forces within what was now known as Mos Attraya, the “Centaur” was lost only a kilometer out from the city's harbor due to an accident in one of its portside munitions arsenals. An explosion had ripped a gigantic hole in her side which was simply too large to manage, and so the venerable cruiser had been subsequently abandoned by her commander.

Upon the completion of the canal, which was barely large enough to house her, more than a dozen rented heavy tugboats congregated over the half-sunken wreck – the water shallow enough that the Centaur's towers and smokestacks poked up over the lapping azure waves – and set to the task of extracting the ship from her watery tomb. It'd taken them even longer to finally free the Centaur than it had for the workers to build the canal, and then several weeks on top of that to set her up in dry-dock where the work of comprehensive repairs could properly begin. Of course, the facilities, tools, and expertise required to actually bring her up into active service weren't there – but the ability to make her look presentable certainly was.

With a new flag hanging from her masts, she made the final voyage she ever would with help from several tugboats, and settled into the Martyr's Memorial Canal, thus forming the centerpiece for what would become the Attreyan Martyr's Memorial Museum, which commemorated and taught about the revolution.

“I feel almost as though there's a new shine to this place every year,” Juma testily murmured to his aide, a lanky youth fresh from some state school in the Haigsland. Juma had plucked him up out of deference to a trusted political colleague, to whom the boy was a nephew, making him into only his third secretary.

He had a particular use: he seemed to be able to scrounge up information, however trivial, quite well. “That might be because there literally is one, sir,” the boy – Adumo was his name – Juma abruptly recalled, said. “Work on the museum has never actually halted, as it's never technically actually been finished. The curator would have the details, but–. .” he consulted his notebook here, a small leather-wrapped thing, “all save for the lower levels and some of the crew quarters are presentable and accessible to the public. Little signs et all.”

To utilize a symbol of oppression in the form of this old imperial cruiser as a new one of liberation had been an idea that quickly became quite popular among the committee that Juma had put together to create such a memorial, and the funds had been scrounged up from various sources to make it a reality.

“Of course,” Juma simply responded, a thin smile coming to his face. He tilted his head sideways so as to survey the procession of priests and attendants which now scuttled across the deck, innumerable caskets aligned side-by-side from bow to stern.

The evacuation of the ship had not been comprehensive nor entirely clean, and hundreds of men had died beneath deck as it slowly sunk into the harbor. Now, with repair and renovation crews having stalked through most of the ship, attempting to shore up damage and make the wreck more or less presentable for tourists and visitors, almost all of the bodies had been located and respectfully entombed within a mesquite casket apiece.

“Professor,” called a voice from nearby, drawing Juma's attention away from the throngs. “Will you be making a speech to commemorate the hand-off?”

Extending his right hand out, Juma grinned widely, his dark eyes alight with a sudden warmth as he looked upon Adama Alexandre-Nge. The broader, taller, and overall healthier man was clad in full military regalia, medals et all. His major-general's pins, newly forged, were pinned tightly to his lapel, and his grey dress uniform was freshly pressed and as yet sweat-free.

“I suppose I'd better, don't you think?” Juma responded, only half-jokingly.

“The send-off would go more smoothly that way, I think. The whites are terribly literal at times, aren't they? I don't think they'd appreciate the gesture unless we told them it was one,” Alexandre-Nge pointed out, his wide face contorted by a similarly broad smile.

“Four hundred Engellexic dead, nearly sixteen thousand prisoners, and you think they wouldn't appreciate it?” Juma asked, a sour look on his face. “I suppose you feel that they'd see it another way?”

The military man could only nod here, his features rapidly becoming similarly solemn. “Four hundred dead here, who knows how many dead in the mainland? Sixteen thousand in camps, and–. . twelve million formerly productive slaves lost.”

Juma couldn't help but cringe at that, turning away from his colleague and moving towards the nearby railing. Alexandre-Nge took up a place beside him a moment later, leaning into the metal slightly so as to peer on down into the murky blue water of the canal.

“I like to think that they eventually begin to believe their own rhetoric, the whites,” he'd finally respond, drawing in a deep breath. “I'll give a speech, but I hope that they do, in this case. How many philosophers has their damned continent produced, that they should at least by now come to grips with something halfway progressive?”

“It's just a gesture on our part, my friend. It remains to be seen what they do in response to it.”