Contara D'Arc
CONTARA D’ARC
Contara d'Arc of the Pigmy Proles woke up one morning with a tear drying on her cheek from a dream. It gave her a dangerous thought. Then, she dressed and went to work before dawn as she always did. In the orchards, she moved with practiced skill through the branches of the Ryeberry trees, catching snails. Counting them as she put them into a satchel, she entered a mnemonic trance of rhythm and numbers. As she relaxed into the work, her thoughts wandered in and out of her head, ruminating on a solution.
Each Prole had a quota to reach every day, but each tree was given an audit by a pick boss before collecting could begin. In order to ensure a constant harvest, the Land Lords had passed an edict that no more than 2/3rds of the snails in a tree could be picked so that a constant supply could be guaranteed. On average, a Prole had to climb a dozen trees to meet quota, and it took most of the day.
While most terrestrial snails are hermaphrodites, the Polypigma Snail is gendered, so it was also important that a picker know how to identify the difference in order to protect the female breeding population. Sexing snails is no easy task. But in that, the Pygmy Proles had a special skill. Having additional cones in their eyes - that the Land Lords did not - the Proles could see in a broader color spectrum. The Proles had discovered that male snails have small ultraviolet markings behind their heads.
Out of curiosity, Contara gently squeezed the head of a male snail. Like a tube of paint, pure ultraviolet coloring oozed out. This led to Contara's second dangerous thought. She pulled out her canteen, gulped down all her water (because water is better stored in your body anyway), and began to fill her canteen with the goo as she picked.
In the evening, when she reached her daily snail shell quota, Contara got in the line to weigh her catch and go through inspection.
Now, the Land Lords did very little work themselves. They had delegated all their tasks to the Pigmy Proles, except one. Making absolutely certain that pickers met their daily quotas and that no one smuggled any shells from the fields was too important to leave to anyone else. The caste system created by the oligarch Land Lords depended on the total control of the currency.
The Land Lords sat in the shade of the singular gate in and out of the orchards and, as the pickers waited in the sun with their harvest, they weighed the shells with a rudimentary checkweighing scale tied to a bag of rocks. (Every so often, they added another rock to secretly increase the quota.) After verifying that each individual picker had met their measure, the Land Lords searched through their things and patted them down. If caught stealing shells, the punishment was death.
Contara took a deep breath. Although it wasn't shells, she wasn't sure how the Land Lords would react to the ultraviolet goo in her canteen. They could be violent with very little provocation, sometimes on suspicion alone. She was nervous as they patted her down, turned out her pockets, and opened the canteen.
"Not thirsty today, huh?" said the Land Lord.
Avoiding his gaze and keeping her eyes respectfully on the ground, she shook her head "no."
"Next!" called the Land Lord, and Contara exited through the gate on the road home.
The Land Lord thought it was water! He had zero perception of the color! She had bet her life on a theory, and it had worked.
Over the next two months, Contara d'Arc snuck out at night and painted with the ultraviolet snail goo: "We are sad. We could be happy. Why serve the Land Lords?"
Unable to see the messages, the Land Lords didn't suspect a thing. Amongst the Pigmy Proles, some started to have their own dangerous thoughts. And then, they started sharing them.