Outside the Pattern
The Natural Order settles the philosophy and Slavery and Service the slave system's arrangements. This is how it looks in an ordinary life.
About one adult in eleven is something other than heterosexual, which is what it has always been and what nobody has ever thought to measure: roughly one in twenty drawn to both, one in sixty to their own sex, and about one in a hundred living as a gender other than the one they were born to.
Concealing it is the failure, not having it. The philosophy demands honest self-knowledge above everything, so a person living a lie about their own nature has failed at the one thing the world insists on. Every city accepts the argument, and no city is perfectly aligned with its own philosophy. What a person meets is not persecution. It is six different kinds of pressure.
- Shining Reach
- Approves loudly and will not leave you alone. Same-sex households are too ordinary to interest anybody; what the city cannot resist is the unusual case, invited everywhere, introduced with the detail attached, and asked about endlessly by people certain they are being open-minded.
- Forgegate
- Indifferent, which a good many find the easiest of the six. Is the work good, is the border earned, does the shop run.
- Clearhold
- Does not disapprove and never stops asking. Did you examine yourself properly, or take the easy answer and call it a nature? It is the question Clearhold puts to everybody about everything.
- Eldershore
- No objection to the pairing and a serious one about the line. A line must continue, and the elders will involve themselves in how, at length and with affection. The gentlest of the six pressures and the hardest to refuse.
- Stormharbor
- Does not like it and will tell you so, at the table and on the quay. Nobody acts on it either: the Oathbond protects a person's right to live as their nature requires, and anyone who tried to take a couple's household or standing would find the Thing against him within the week. Stormharbor disapproves of you to your face and defends you behind your back, and does not find that inconsistent. What it actually minds is the fleet — a household that raises no children raises no crew — and adoption settles it.
- The Iron Coves
- Do not look at anybody, at the cost of everything else the Coves cost a person.
The same six attitudes fall on the voluntary male slave; see Male Slaves.