% A History of Torei
% Gospodin
% 28 June 2012

There's a lot of talk about Torei, lately.  You hear folks chatting about it
in hushed tones, wondering if what other folks say is true.  People want to
know how to get there, how safe you are once you get there, and would you
get in trouble when you come back.  You see people scowling angrily about
Torei's human rights problems, but those same people are the ones who have
copies of *Torean Love Slave* hidden away someplace private.

But most of all, people want to know how such a place could have existed all
this time.  How could human life have developed on this isolated planet in
the middle of nowhere while we were busy inventing intergalactic travel and
coating every inhabitable surface of the Milky Way with our culture?  We've
become so used to human life being the only sapient intelligence on
Earth-like worlds.  So why, then, is Torean culture so...*alien* to us?

Well if you listen to me closely, I will tell you what I know.  I'm a
historian, of sorts, and history is an alchemical sort of discipline.  We
find symbols in old sources, and then we have to analyze our sources
themselves.  We put all these symbols in the context of other symbols, and
sometimes--if we shake real hard--out comes a compelling narrative.

I think you folks appreciate a cracking good yarn; so if you'll permit, I'll
embroider the facts as much as I'm comfortable.  Some of what I'll say isn't
*known* to be true, but we don't yet know that it *can't* be true.  I'll
leave the hair-splitting to the *Journal of Toreology* and just tell you all
my tale.

## The Milky Way

Long long ago, back when humanity had only begun to spread out of its spiral
arm of its home galaxy, an empire had ambitions.  This empire, known only to
history as "The Laminate Culture" or "The Lamination People" because of the
clothing they produced, saw the end of expansion within the Milky Way before
most of the rest of us had.  Due to coincidences in the angular momentum of
outer-spiral stars, they were hedged in by strong nations in a tense yet
stable peace.  They needed somewhere to grow, but didn't dare move in on any
of the stars in their neighborhood.

And so they hatched an ingenious yet barmy plan to send colonists to the
Andromeda galaxy.  They intended to settle those stars with Laminate Culture
colonies early, and spread outward through *that* galaxy before anyone else
had managed to start an expedition.  To their credit, they thought big and
they thought long-term: the journey would take a thousand years, and they'd
have no way of ferrying wealth from these new stars to the motherworld.
This was a very very long game, and it took a special kind of desperation to
even want to play it.

You can't send a live crew on a thousand-year journey that never comes close
to any stars.  A generation-ship would need more fuel for life support on
such a journey than it would for deceleration.  The fleet they designed was
effectively a big dumb intergalactic comet: machinery and gene banks and
artificial intelligences wrapped in a giant geode of protective minerals and
ice.  Everything would just sit inactive and safe and inert until it came
near the energy of a star again.

## Off Course

Of course, as you can all guess now, this little spore *never made it to
Andromeda*.  Stories differ on what happened to it.  Some say that the geode
craft had some sort of purely analog course-correcting device that locked
onto a stray stellar cluster in intergalactic space.  Others say that
something went wrong, and emergency systems woke to active mode and changed
the ship's course.  The more fanciful tales tell of signals sent from the
Milky Way to sabotage the project by changing the objectives.

Whatever the reason, the ship took a rendez-vous course that brought it to a
stable orbit around the most suitable of a handful of lonely stars stuck
like an island out in the nowhere between the galaxies.  The light of this
star melted the geode and woke up the machines, who began building factories
and supply lines to construct a suitable habitat for the colony.

As I've mentioned before, the amount of planning that went into this project
is breathtaking.  The original implementors hadn't considered their payload
would get mired in this backwater, but they'd designed the construction
phase to bootstrap itself even in harsh conditions.  Simple machines built
factories that spat out more complicated machines that built more factories
to make even better machines.  This process continued until at least three
of the AIs in the fleet had been augmented enough to begin the next phase.

## Building Habitat

Once the brains were awake, it was time to build a home for organic life.
None of the planets in the cluster were likely globes, so the machines took
a rocky ball on the edge of the Goldilocks zone and launched all the chunks
of ice and carbonaceous chondrite they could find.  If you think the
timescale for the original mission was long, well the AIs had near-infinite
patience.  Piece by piece over tens of thousands of years, they built up a
planet from dry stone into something that could support life.

Machines around the various stars in the cluster lensed starlight to knock
matter out of stable orbits and off toward the new planet.  I've been on
expedition, and seen the lens devices with my own eyes.  They're impressive
machines, like vast engines of war from our distant and more violent past.
I'm told they still work, if the AIs ever choose to use them again.

The planet's new crust slowly cooled around the freshly molten core, and
this is where the Torei we know today began.  The machines set down at the
two poles and dug intricate tunnels through to the hot mantle beneath,
boring in impossibly complicated fractal corkscrew patterns.  Through
coriolis forces, heat, pressure and other simple physics the magma was
separated out into component elements useful for generating an atmosphere.

The machines built tetrahedral "caps" of sorts atop the vents from these
tunnels, and did all of the final distillation and synthesis in them.  These
pyramids are apparently still there inside the current-day ziggurats.  The
real machinery for atmospheric generation descends down into the network of
tunnels, but there is a hollow space inside the zigs where the caps can be
seen.

Ah, I suppose you all have the famous image of the Dahom ziggurat in the
snow.  Well imagine that landscape with no snow yet, because the air was
still too dry.  Now imagine that the vast stepped pyramid is only
one-twentieth the size, and smooth-sided.  That's how they got started.
Those little pyramids worked tirelessly for centuries to generate an
atmosphere suitable for garden crops and large mammals.

The ziggurats of Mazos and Dahom were built later, and we have hints that
they were an act of desperation.  We think that the AIs realized that they
weren't making enough progress on a self-sustaining biosphere.  They created
the zigs as habitat domes with the hopes that human workers could help speed
up the project.

## First Humans

If that was the plan, then it worked.  The first humans probably awoke
inside the bottom level of one of the zigs, before they built the upper
layers.  They'd have had hydroponic gardens already running to give them
fresh food and filtered water.  There would have been some livestock, but
likely no birds: the air wouldn't have been clean enough yet for fragile
avian lungs.

Life for these first few generations was probably pretty miserable, even by
what we see at the Torean poles today.  The AIs were still completing their
program of habitat creation, and to them the humans were little more than
lab rats and plough-mares.  The ziggurat was a castle of horrors full of
biological experimentation and vat-grown chimeras.  We have reason to
believe that this work resulted in tissue cultures that are still alive as
membranes inside the atmosphere generators today.

The era when Torean humans lived only inside the ziggurats is somewhat hard
to pin down, historically.  Most of what we have is myth from the humans and
propaganda from the AIs, so who knows what to believe.  All we can really
say is that this period marked the development of the current social system
at the poles.

## Husbandry

The goal of the AIs was to make Torei habitable for normal humans, but the
death rate among the early populations was too high.  The bio-engineering
research program produced humans who were more durable, and could withstand
more of the half-made world.  Specialized organisms were seeded at the
equator, to try and build up biomass where the conditions were most
favorable.  Life on Torei began slowly to step outside, but it was all
strange new breeds custom-built for that world.

Since this was a breeding program, the human genotype was altered to produce
nine females for every male.  The reproductive systems and sexual drives of
these humans were cranked up to unusual levels for maximal fertility.  Each
man would impregnate one woman per month, like clockwork.  The population
grew and new levels were built to make the ziggurats we know today.

Controlling such a population was not the same task as it had been before.
During each pole's summer, when the sun did not set, humans were let out
onto the planet's surface in laminate environment suits.  These were an
early form of today's isolation laminates worn by Emissaries, and they did
far less.  The wearer was protected from the unfinished atmosphere outside,
and infosystems in the helmet kept the AI in control of what the occupant
saw and heard.

What originally started as an environment suit for humans being let outside
soon became a population control mechanism.  A misbehaving colonist could be
locked into one of these suits and made to act as an internal police force.
The suits could simulate almost any sensation to the wearer's flesh, which
made it an efficient system for re-training.

The colonists' ramped-up sex drive and lack of almost any other means of
entertainment meant that the AIs had a convenient reward system.  Pain is
always an effective punishment, but the AIs learned how to prey on a
person's fears and desires.  What we've seen in the present day suggests
that even a limited time in the isolation suits completely changes a person.
And this was important, because if the AIs were going to start actual farms
on the equator, they'd need to be able to trust the farmers.

## Farmers

I'm not a geologist, but even I am stunned by the dramatic difference
between the equatorial band and the rest of Torei.  You can drive around in
the badlands for days without seeing anything but igneous and metamorphic
rock formations.  You joyride through dusty craters, follow fissures down
tectonic thrusts, and then suddenly out of *nowhere* everything is covered
in lichen.

If you turn in the direction of the blooms, you start to see little green
shoots in the dusty cracks, here and there.  Plants with long taproots
extend fernlike fronds up to the daylight.  And as you continue, within only
a short time you find yourself on a dirt-like surface driving through low
scrub.  You can tell your latitude to a novel degree of accuracy simply by
looking at vegetation around you.  There's a reason the planet's flag has
that thin green belt around the globe.

It can also be educational to dig down through equatorial soil.  The topsoil
itself is very thin, but well-managed as a sort of sacred trust.  Once you
lift that off, you find caustic stuff that could make for devastating dust
storms if allowed to become airborne.  Early farms were planted just to
control this layer of atmospheric fallout and keep it buried where it
wouldn't be a problem.  Ask a Pembric plantation master about "leechcorn"
some time, and you'll get an amazing education in bioremediation techniques!

The farms were a success, in small part thanks to the controlled watering
the equator gets.  The AIs control underground aquifers via long tunnels
that are off limits to most humans.  When it's time for crop watering, they
engineer rain showers that bathe a portion of the equatorial region.  It's
run like clockwork, and typically during the evening.  You sometimes see the
rain schedule next to the train timetables, for example.

At this point, the habitat creation project sadly stalled.  The AIs needed
the farms to supply its biotech machines with ingredients, and the humans
needed the AIs to keep the rain falling and the air flowing.  As one of the
old poems put it (and apologies for my somewhat unskilled translation): "And
the Dæmons kept dominion of the sky, and Men claimed dominion of the land."

## Sharecropping Wars

Of course, the "Dæmons" kept dominion over the humans, as well.  The end of
expansion on Torei meant that there weren't enough isolation suits for all
of the troublemakers, but the ones that were bound in them made effective
police for the rest.  Well, at least for a while, anyway.

The problem with releasing an incredibly randy and fertile population to the
furthest corner of a planet from your control is that your carefully
controlled breeding program will go wildly off course.  It didn't take many
generations for the natural-born humans at the equator to see the isolates
as foreign oppressors and set plans to overthrow them.  This begins what is
possibly the bloodiest time in Torei's history, which Toreologists have come
to call the *Sharecropping Wars*.

At first, the AIs saw this population as expendable, and simply eradicated
whole towns when it encountered trouble.  There were usually enough eager
human rats at the poles who were willing to colonize an evacuated farmstead
and live out under the Torean sun.  But eventually the costs of this became
clear to both sides.

The exterminations and re-population efforts brought more and more humans
over to the revolutionary side.  Furthermore, the rebel humans had taken to
destroying the crops that were destined for the ziggurats.  A human colony
could survive on tubers and ruminant milk for a year if they had to, but a
critical missed shipment of seed oils or other organic chemical ingredients
could mean trouble for the whole planet.  Time and again, the humans showed
the AIs that they were willing to ignore the threat of ecological disaster
in pursuit of independence.

This is something that seems predictable to you or I, but the AIs genuinely
seemed to have trouble accepting it.  They kept up their program of
recolonization for over a century before finally recognizing the equatorial
ring as independent.  Now the "Dæmons" became "Emissaries", and they
negotiated air and water rights in exchange for necessary crops.  They traded
technology for the food needed to keep the population in the ziggurats
alive.

From this point on, aside from the occasional nation that tested the AIs'
wrath or surrendered sovereignty to one of the Emissaries, the political
role of the AIs remained in this stalemate nearly into the present day.  For
a thousand years, humanity was able to build its own society on the equator,
and the "ringdoms" as we now call them were formed.

## Free Humanity

The politics get boring for a while here, but wars are now waged between the
ringdoms more often.  Alliances form, nations conquer other nations, and
realms are partitioned up for heirs who then fight one another.  Throughout
all of this, the threat of interference by the AIs looms.

It's not really useful as a scholarly classification, but I find it's
easiest to describe this period to people as *feudal*.  The culture was
based heavily on male inheritance of arable land, and conduct of war was
often regulated by the AIs.  Commonly, when a dispute between ringdoms broke
out, war would be a last resort after bringing the case to an Emissary.

The art from this period often depicts the AIs as turbulent gods, bringing
bounty and destruction on ineffable whims.  The laws of men could be
appealed to an Emissary, but the result would sometimes leave everyone
suffering.  Humanity wrestled with its relationship to the AIs, hating and
fearing and ultimately relying on them even in independence.

For a time, a class of priestesses emerged, promising to interpret the
"Dæmons" for their masters.  The story goes that an Isolate raped the women
of a powerful landlord, to threaten the legitimacy of any heirs.  The
daughters of these unions were believed to have insight into the AIs, and
allegedly they were seen talking to their biological father (a difficult
claim to prove, as all male Isolates effectively look the same).  These
women were ejected from the estate their mothers belonged to, and began
prophesying in the streets on market days.  Their prescience became
legendary, and soon it became common for stray women to claim insight into
the plans of the AIs.

This trend improved the lot of unowned women immensely over the years.
Originally the term "freewomb" meant a woman whose children were not by her
owner, but the word soon came to mean the children themselves.  Cast out of
an estate, these girls had to make their way alone in societies that did not
consciously value the roles they could play.  A lack of loyalties made them
neutral mediators, taking over some of the duties that the Emissaries had
performed before independence.  But the association with Dæmon-scrying
proved devastating

## The Princess Thrall

There are Toreologists who spend their whole careers studying just one
period for one house of one nation during the warring states era.  Land
and loyalties switched around like plains rivers during a storm, but
a stalemate between five remaining ringdoms held off unification for three
generations.  The details of this struggle make up much of the high art on
Torei, and people sometimes identify culturally by which of the five empires
they descend from rather than which of the current ringdoms they currently
live.

There was a courtesan named Theca or Nebla (depending on the language of the
tale), and the emperor of Falon made a grand present of her to the emperor
of Prellatia.  This gift was part of a court gesture of great magnitude, but war
demanded the Falonian emperor's attention at the home front.  So he locked
her into Falon's symbols of state (scepter, crown, and boots) and sent her
along with an escort formed of his most trusted palace guards.  He would be
present in a ceremonial sense, and would arrive in person later to wear the
diadem once more.

By the time Theca reached Prellatia, the war in Falon had claimed the lives
of the four emperors.  The Prellatian emperor gloated, and tried to take the
crown from Theca's head.  Her guards dispatched this ruler expertly, and in
a legendary battle managed to hold the Prellatian palace.

There were further battles, but within a year all of the noble houses on
Torei were swayed by Theca's calls for peace.  She was but a slave, yet she
wore the Falonian and Prellation crowns.  She seduced hundreds of powerful
men who came to her court, and each man felt he owned a piece of her.  The
planet was tired of war, and Theca offered a new model for human self-rule.

In a coronation ceremony that is the subject of all the great murals and
hangings on Torei, she bound herself with circlets made from the crowns of
the five empires: one on each ankle, one on each wrist, and Falon's about
her throat.  The remaining symbols of state were made into a multi-colored
chain that kept her locked to the throne for the rest of her life.  Torei
now knew life without war for the first time since it had settled the
equator.

## Polar Relations

With the ringdoms no longer fractured, the need for Emissary intervention or
alliances with the poles almost vanished overnight.  People worried what the
Dæmons would do at first, but soon forgot their fears: the rains kept coming
on schedule and no waves of slick black bodies descended on their
habitations.

The polar AIs, for their part, seemed to enjoy this era of peace.   Without
war to sap resources, the cost of equatorial goods went down.  They exported
fewer engines of war and more agricultural and lifestyle goods.  The peace
dividend seemed to pay out to everyone.

Unfortunately, the freewombs on the streets suffered terribly.  With a
culture no longer nervous about the mood of the polar Dæmons, they soon
found themselves scapegoats for all kinds of problems.  During the Princess
Thrall's rule, the ruling houses enacted hundreds of strict laws governing
their lives.  Many sought enslavement in poor houses to escape persecution,
but most soldiered on in the oppressive regime.

After the death of the Princess Thrall, the Council of Regents continued to
meet and honor the peace for some time.  One woman would be offered up from
each of the original five empires per year, and chained to the throne as a
group.  Many of the festival queens you see today are inspired by this
tradition.

## Dissolution.

With human society stable and peaceful, it was only a matter of time before
revolutionary thinking cropped up again.  This time it was more of a
nationalist flavor.  In the time since the wars, local cultures had a chance
to flourish.  Language was largely uniform thanks to the AIs' influence on
communication, but customs and traditions gave people a national identity
that they wanted to see reflected.

Over the next two centuries, local independence movements chipped away at
the authority of the Council of Regents.  Some set up their own copies of
the Council, claiming authority over all of Torei.  Some brought in polar
Emissaries and boasted that they'd bring back the heroic age that had
settled their land.  In all, the Regents were as tone-deaf as the AIs had
been, and they responded to uprisings with brutality.

Once the dust settled, the rough borders of modern Torei were laid down.
One can look at a map of Torei from three hundred years ago and still
identify almost all of the nations based on a modern atlas.  Unity was gone,
but trade struggles replaced war as the means for jockeying among the
ringdoms.  The AIs had become experts at the use of political economy to
control the human settlements, as the ringdoms weren't so eager to sacrifice
quality of life once they'd re-gained stability.

And who knows where Torei would have gone if this had been allowed to
continue?

## Discovery

All the guidebooks tell you, Cmdr. Stave Fedman was the first human from
mainstream intergalactic civilization to visit Torei.  While it's true that
he was the first to join Torei and the rest of humanity in contact, there is
ample evidence that others discovered Torei's stars long before this.

We have records of a pirate fleet from the early days of Andromedan
colonization.  The logs hint of a "cache of starrs(sic)" where their plundered
booty could be staged far from intergalactic jump points.  Some
micro-asteroids found around other stars in Torei's cluster are believed to
be wreckage from an orbital battle, but little conclusive evidence has been
collected.

The AIs themselves have marked certain ravines and cave systems on Torei as
off-limits to humanity.  Some of the more creative analysis of long-range
reconnaissance hints at a structure shaped rather like the hull of a
long-space frigate of the sort used five thousand years ago.  It's sketchy
at best, but it's at least somewhat corroborated by faint burn marks on the
surface rock when the regolith layer is cleared by wind.

At any rate, Torean humans themselves had no contact with the outside world
until Commander Fedman's expedition.  Torei's cluster had been known since
regular passage to Andromeda had opened up, but the cost of visiting it
hadn't been justifiable.  Once the price of habitable land in the Milky Way
had climbed back up and the technology for space travel had advanced enough,
it was only a matter of time before someone visited each little isolated
star out in intergalactic space hoping for a homestead.

Fedman's diaries were cleaned up for the official record, but at least three
versions claiming to be the originals can be found in bookshops all over
Torei.  Each one tells a slightly different tale of the debauchery and
revelling he engaged in on his visit, but they're all really based on
interviews with his crew.

## Off-Route Trade

The ringdoms built landing pads to attract visiting ships, but all of the
orbital infrastructure was controlled by the AIs.  Voidcraft would stay in a
solar orbit for ages before being permitted to even approach a Torean orbit.
The AIs vetted and quarantined visitors fastidiously.  When a ship was allowed
to the surface, the humans paid top prices for any cargo aboard.

At first, the humans bartered: the AIs had spent tens of thousands of years
perfecting genetic manipulation and biotechnology as part of the habitat
creation project, and Torei had the capacity for medical services
unavailable anywhere else in the cosmos.  Eventually all of the nations were
able to trade in common currency, and word started to get out that they paid
handsomely for certain cargoes.

A flotilla of rough trading ships sat idle in orbit of Torei's star, each
waiting for permission from the Dæmon Dockmasters to land.  From time to
time a chaff-runner would make an attempt at unauthorized landing, and some
would succeed.  The AIs dutifully broadcast the registration IDs of all
impounded vessels, and there are some downright chilling recordings from the
captured pilots who claimed to have "defected" to Dahom or Mazos.

In retrospect it's obvious why the AIs were so picky, but at the time they
seemed as mysterious to us as they did to the Torean humans.  The AIs were
still pulling the strings of the human economy, and wanted a surplus in
goods needed at the ziggurats and a defecit of items needed at the equator.
So generally a lot of food and water and hydrocarbon mixtures made it
through, while processed goods and technology stayed in orbit.

## Gunboat Diplomacy

Unfortunately for the AIs, it was the manufacturers of technology and
processed goods that had the strongest space forces.  The Zanweg Cartel
sent an armada directly into Torean geosynchronous orbit and began to lower
a tether to the peak of the highest mountain on Torei's equator.  With
fighter escorts running interference swarm patterns around the tether, a
full-scale orbital lift was built along it's length.

The space elevator on Torei changed everything.  The mountain it was built
on was not very high, but it never had a chance to build up any soil layer
of note.  It had been disputed territory for centuries, and several ringdoms
that abutted it considered it a national treasure.  Once the base anchor
port was completed, the borders were formalized and the tower was declared a
neutral intergalactic trade zone, and all ringdoms on that side of the
planet were granted access corridors to the base.

Once trade in industrial goods opened up, the neighboring ringdoms were able
to build vast tower arcologies around the planetside port spire.  The more
wealthy nations were able to build skybridges to the orbital lift tower from
the tops of their own structures.  It's a common for a vast city to spring
up around one of these, but Torei has over a dozen!

I said this was unfortunate for the AIs, and it really was.  The economy has
swung out of their control, and the habitat-creation project is seriously
compromised by this.  If the planet never becomes self-sustaining, they may
resort to force once more.  It remains to be seen how well Mazos and Dahom
adapt to this new reality.  They've been slow to change before, probably
because a biosphere-building project requires a very patient long-term
mindset, and they seem to treat the human economy as yet another ecological
system.

## The Future

The ringdoms seem to be doing a brisk business in sex tourism, tax havens,
and basic medical services.  The AIs could outclass them on the last one, if
they ever decided to.  Of course, it could lead to their biotech secrets
getting out, which would ruin any advantage they have. 

The AIs have always held control over the badlands, but they appear to be
stepping up their game lately.  Word is that they're losing population and
have to spend more and more of their resources sending Emissaries further
and further afield.  The unrest at the poles is helped by agitator-liberator
groups that run a sort of underground railroad to help people flee to the
ringdoms.

One of the reasons the AIs are stretched thin is that they've begun to
maintain a space fleet.  It's a rag-tag collection of used and commandeered
vessels, but they've been spotted at ports in three galaxies.  They may be
trying to export their services, and they seem to buy exactly the same
things they've always needed.

And of course Torean expansion to other stars was always part of their
mandate.  The Dockmaster is largely silent, and only issues quarantine
orders from time to time.  It could be busy managing the polar fleets and
preparing for conquest.  We just have no way of knowing.

## Academics

People often ask me why Toreology even matters.  Surely it must just put an
erudite face on whoring and carousing!  I wish I could claim innocence on
that part, but there is much more to be learned from Torei than fancy
biotech and sexual practices.

One thing that makes Torei unique is its status as a time capsule of human
society back when we were still confined to just the one galaxy.  The
AIs raised the humans with materials from the Laminate Culture's archives,
and much of the art and craft still retains something of their fingerprint.

We don't have any surviving samples of written or spoken works from the
era of the Laminate People, but the language spoken on Torei is almost
certainly an unmodified form of their common tongue.  Our research on Torei
shows almost no change in dialect during its entire recorded history, no
doubt due to the influence of the AIs on reasserting "High Torean" when
local drifts occur.  We often see local subcultures branching off, but they
quickly become historical curiosities or caricatures as the population
aspires to rejoin everyone else.

The clothing, in particular, is produced in almost exactly the same manner
as that found in Laminate Culture rubbish mounds dating back ca. 100,000
years.  The resulting garments are flattering to all figures, form-fitting,
glossy and eye-catching, and resistant to the elements while breathing well
for dermal health.  I've taken to wearing Torean small-clothes beneath my
professional attire when I return home for conferences, just because I've
come to love the feel of it.  These clothes also make me feel something of a
connection with my own ancient Milky Way ancestors when I run my fingers
over their smooth surface.

## Field Life

How do I get on in such a strange world?  Well, for starters they're a
people that understands hierarchy better than qualifications.  I'm always
amused that they're less interested in my degrees or publications, and more
curious about how many people work under me.  I've built up a medium-sized
staff of interns and paid workers just because some requests get ignored if
you haven't got a "dozenhand", or twelve people following your orders.  They
love ship's captains, for obvious reasons.

Slaves?  Yes, of course many of my staff are slaves.  It's not really what
you think, and I'm going to have to beg out of any arguments over ethics or
human rights.  Suffice it to say that these are skilled professional women
who signed up for my protection in exchange for their loyalty.  I said it
was like feudalism, and they have effectively sworn fealty to me.  If I had
them on contract the way I do my off-world staff, their lives would be much
harder without the ability to wield my authority in certain situations.
I've complicated my life in more ways than just having to field irate
attacks on my feminist principles!

Another problem with hired women is that they are subject to curfew and are
unable to sign for things in my name.  I often send the slaves in my
team on solo journeys to deal with paperwork hassles, and they're authorized
to use my signet on any document.  I hope you see now that this is not what
you see in *Torean Love Slave* or any of the sensationalist documentaries
that have become popular.  I also use the legal safety practices advised by
the Abolition League: should something happen to me, these women will be
able to re-incorporate under a structure of their own choosing.

## Conclusions

I hope you've enjoyed my little sketch of Torei's history.  I simplified in
places, and as I said many of the elements of the story don't really have a
historian's standard of evidence behind them yet.  We're always revising the
narrative as we do our research, but this is to my mind the most coherent
tale the facts tell us so far.

You can tell I'm a great lover of the planet, and I enjoy my time there.  I
hope, though, that you won't take me the wrong way when I tell you *not* to
visit.

It's a lovely world, and if you go past the casinos and the sex clubs there
is a whole planet of people living their lives in a culture that couldn't
exist anywhere else in the universe.  But also it's a very proud world, and
they don't make it easy to take that long climb down through the ringdoms
and into an everyday Torean's life.

They have a saying: "chained legs don't open for new guests."  Toreans live
in a surrounding atmospheric pressure of rules and powers and consequences
that make it unlikely for them to open up to every well-meaning off-worlder
who drops by.  You won't be able to just dress up in their clothes and learn
their language and be welcomed as one of them.  Believe me, I've tried.

The real trick is that you don't walk on Torei's surface without a powerful
master of your own.  You can be a military figure with your own superiors,
a diplomat serving a powerful government, or a member of a religious order
(they have no word for "monk" or "nun", and call them all slaves).  You need
to conduct yourself as a representative of a higher power.  On Torei, even
the masters have masters.

But the real reason to stay away is that every off-worlder who paws around
in the lives of Toreans leaves a bit of outside culture behind.  We taint
the place with our very presence, and in a few years our clumsy fingerprints
will be all over everything.  We upset trade imbalances and threaten the
very air they breathe.  We naïvely try to liberate their slaves, and ruin
lives with no lasting emancipation.  We think we know what's best for them;
but when we try to explain, their questions reveal assumptions a hundred
millennia distant from ours.

So do not go to Torei.  Wait for Torei to come to us.  Without fail, some
day it will.