Page 46 of Xel: Broken Bond

“I can’t make any guarantees,” Aiden said, steadfastly honest in his reply. “But I think the odds would be in your favour.” A moment of silence followed. “So if the Parliament does vote to assist you, what would you do next? What’s this master plan of yours?”

As she had done several times today, Rohinavon glanced down at her hip. And now I understood why. “Setting myself and my son free isn’t enough,” she said – a sentiment that wasn’tentirely surprising. “I want to seteverymale child free, so that he can live just as fulfilling a life as any female. I want to break the system that keeps all the women on Vangal oppressed and downtrodden for fear of punishment and torture.” She looked up at us, casting her gaze over each of us, her eyes shining bright with anger and ferocity. “I want to start a revolution that will bring the whole of Vangal to its knees.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

COLE

The room was once again silent in the wake of Rohinavon’s announcement, but it wasn’t the silence of stunned disbelief. Rather, it held the quiet tension of active minds at work. It was a brazen and reckless idea, but Rohinavon had already proven that she was serious about it. Risking being tortured to death wasn’t the sort of statement we could ignore.

“I’m sure you have some plan in mind,” I ventured after a few moments, “but that sort of thing is profoundly difficult. It’s not just about forcing people to change their laws. It’s about changing their beliefs and values. That takes time, and debate, and a few courageous souls demonstrating the values they want to see embodied. And usually, it also involves protests, injuries, possibly a few deaths, and in extreme cases, civil war. But even then, a war can only start if there are enough people to take both sides of it. Which means you need a critical mass of people already on your side.”

Rohinavon nodded. “That’s true. But I’m not talking about war,” she said, undaunted by my nay-saying. “I’m talking about the most subversive, underhanded, devious plan you could everimagine. I’m talking about playing the long game – thereally, really longgame. Let me explain,” she went on, at our confused expressions. “Right now, every male child on Vangal is shipped off to Eumad the instant they’re born. So anyone who wants to claim that males are equal and deserve to be treated with respect faces the cold, hard fact that no one’s going to listen, because there’s no proof. We’re taught from the moment we’re old enough to speak that males are inferior and that their place as slaves is part of the grand natural order. Which is, of course, complete bullshit, but no one can actually prove otherwise. So what we need, to convince the rest of the galaxy, if not the Vangravians themselves, is a handful of adult male Vangravians who have been educated, and taught a vocation, and who have been accepted into a functioning society, to prove that they’re perfectly capable of operating as independently as any female.

“The problem with that, of course, is that all adult males are already brainwashed to the point that they’re entirely dependant on their masters.” Her face paled as soon as the words were out of her mouth. “No offence intended,” she said meekly, glancing at both Xel and Kade.

“No, that’s a fair assessment,” Kade said, with a startling level of self-awareness. “It’s been proven over and over again that a dimari without his master is…” He trailed off, a ripple of violet crossing his collarbones as he glanced at Xel. Xel, who had recently lost his master, and who seemed to be doing perfectly well without him.

“Moving right along,” Aiden prompted Rohinavon, and I was as eager to gloss over that particular situation as he was, just for the moment.

“So what I want to do is not just raise my son on an Alliance planet so that he can grow up free. I want to start a colony. But this is abigproject,” she warned us, before saying anything more. “This might be asking too much, and if it is, then I’mhappy to accept a quiet life and protection for my son. That’s the bare minimum. But if we have the time and resources, then…” She took a breath, trying hard to stay calm enough to explain herself. Her foot had started tapping on the floor, and her hands fiddled with the edge of her shirt. “The smuggler I know is a regular carrier of male children to Eumad. He runs legitimate trade routes as well as illegal ones. So we get him to ‘lose’ a shipment of children – namely, by delivering them to us. Then after a couple of shipments, we have maybe ten or twenty male children that we’d need to raise. Obviously, one person can’t do all of that, so we’d need surrogate families, or nannies, or… something. But absolutely everyone involved would have to agree to be working in secret, so we have as long as possible before the Vangravians figure out what we’re doing.

“Then we need female children to be raised alongside the males, so that we prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that males and females can live together in harmony. The girls grow up to become spokespeople for male rights, since Vangal is far more likely to listen to women talking about this than men. But that raises the question of where do we get the girls from? Because there’s no way in hell we can just magic up a shipment of female children, like we would for the boys.

“So the answer is from me. I’m able to gestate one child every three months. And yes, that probably sounds horribly clinical, but I’m not talking about giving birth to twenty children and raising them all myself. They would be raised by surrogate families, just like the boys, again, because there’s a practical limit to what one person can do alone.”

“Woah, hold up, hold up,” Aiden interrupted her at that point. “You’re suggesting that you’re willing to be constantly pregnant for four or fiveyears, and to fall pregnant again immediately after giving birth? That’s crazy. Wouldn’t that be far too much strain on your body?”

Rohinavon looked genuinely confused by that. “No?” she said warily. “Why would it be?”

I raised an eyebrow as I considered the differences between human women and Vangravians. “Just to understand this properly… The child in your pouch. He’s full size, is he? I mean, that’s the normal size they are when they’re born?”

Rohinavon shrugged, as if it was a stupid question. “Yes.”

“Is it very difficult to give birth?” I asked next.

“No. You just give a couple of pushes and they pop right out.”

“Uh huh,” Aiden said, relieved about the explanation. “I’m sorry for the confusion. Pregnancy for human women is a much more arduous prospect. Our babies are born a lot larger and take nine months for the full pregnancy. And then the woman would generally need at least a few months to recover before falling pregnant again. I think we were both just comparing your suggestion to our own standards.”

Rohinavon seemed oddly surprised by that. “You’re both genuinely concerned about my health?” she clarified, frowning at us both.

“Yes,” Aiden said, now as confused as Rohinavon had been a moment ago. “Shouldn’t we be?”

Rohinavon didn’t seem to have a reply to that. “Well, I didn’t… I never really thought…”

“In the Alliance,” Xel suddenly spoke up, “men and women work together in harmony. For the most part, at least. There are always a few conflicts here and there. But gender is not a factor in why people disagree with each other. Nor is species. There are seven species in the Alliance, and all are treated as equals.”

As I realised what his words meant, I felt a rush of indignation on Rohinavon’s behalf. “You think we’d put less effort into caring for you because you’re female?” The idea hadn’t even occurred to me, but Xel seemed to have hit the nail on the head.

Rohinavon avoided my gaze. “On Vangal, any male would be treated with derision and contempt. I was always taught that if I was in a room full of men, they’d treat me the exact same way.”

“I think it’s going to take some time for you to unlearn all the things you’ve been taught about gender differences,” Aiden said gently. “Don’t feel too bad about it if you make a few wrong assumptions along the way. You’ve got a couple of decades of lies to sort through, and that doesn’t happen overnight. But back to this plan of yours. You intend to even out the colony by creating all the female children yourself?”

Rohinavon nodded. “This is the part where I’m probably getting ahead of myself. I hadn’t quite figured out where to get the male I would need in order to fall pregnant. At worst, I suppose I had some fanciful idea about convincing the Alliance to buy a dimari, so we could use him as a sperm donor – again, that’s a horribly utilitarian way of looking at it, but it was the only way I could think of to get the job done.

“But given that you already have a hundred or so dimari on Rendol 4, that makes it so much easier. In an ideal world, I’d argue for a different father for each child, simply to maximise the genetic diversity, so that if we fail to get Vangal to listen, then at the very least, the new colony has the potential to continue for generations to come. Okay, yes, I would be the mother of all the original girls, so it’s not a perfect system, but with enough unrelated boys, it could work. And then it would depend on the agreement of the dimari involved, or if that’s not a realistic possibility, then the agreement of their masters, since…” She glanced warily at Kade and Xel again. “I’m honestly not sure how much consent a dimari could give. I apologise if I’m being rude. I probably am being rude,” she amended, that flutter of colour rippling over her shoulders again. “We were taught the general gist of what it means to be a dimari, but no one on Vangal reallycares about the finer details of their lives or their training, so it’s been difficult to learn anything useful.”

“That’s a decision that will have to be made on a case by case basis, I think,” Aiden said with a frown. “The level of consent that dimari can give varies from person to person, and depends a fair bit on their relationship with their master. It’s certainly a possibility, but one we’d have to approach very carefully. But let’s go with the hypothetical that we can find suitable fathers for a cluster of girls. I think we’d have enough options to find something that would work.”