“Because that would set his brother off, and Magni seems volatile enough as it is. Besides, this has given us a great opportunity.” Pearl lifted her hands to brush back her blonde hair and rolled it into a loose bun.
I scrunched up my face. “To do what? Beat Khan at chess?”
She chuckled. “Did you see his face? I have to say I rather enjoyed winning.”
“I saw.”
While I was speaking to Pearl, I noticed her piling the sugar cubes on top of each other in the large sugar bowl.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You asked what opportunity I was referring to so I wanted to explain it to you.”
“Okay.”
“In the beginning of the twenty-second century there was a woman named Martha Beck, who came up with a theory which you might have heard of.”
The name Martha Beck rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember the name of the theory.
“The pyramid represents the kind of power structure that ruled the world for thousands of years and still rule here in the Northlands. The people on top,” she said and pointed to the highest sugar cube, “are the ones with the highest ability to force, harm, dominate, kill, amass wealth, and hold power over others.”
“Lord Khan,” I said and stared at the pyramid as Pearl continued explaining.
“Martha was one of many to point out that rebellions will never work as they only serve to create a new pyramid of power.”
“Okay, so what are you saying?”
“My colleagues in the council and I would love nothing more than to include the Nmen in our society. It’s silly that we can’t all live together and that we have millions of men living isolated up here.”
My eyebrows arched upward. “But we have rules that men can’t be in power, and I don’t think you understand how different they are from us. They practically break all our laws on a daily basis.”
Pearl smiled. “I know. It’s understandable with centuries of separation that we will be very different culturally.”
“So what do you plan to do? Take out Khan and force the men to be part of the Motherlands?”
“Oh, Mother of Nature, no!” she exclaimed. “We are pacifists and peacekeepers. Violence and oppression is not our style.”
“Then what?” I asked confused.
Pearl picked up the teapot and poured a cup for me and her. “Our society is the opposite of a pyramid. We have a flat structure where everyone has value and no one is above others.” She pointed to my cup of tea. “Our society is flat like a pool of water. No one is above or below others, and our system works because we are like concentric circles of waves that energetically connect and overlap.” She held up the teapot and let drops from the spout form rings in the surface of the tea to illustrate what she had just said.
“I know this,” I said. “But the men aren’t interested in that sort of life. They compare it to communism and think we’re being treated like children with all our protective rules. I guarantee that they won’t give up their hierarchy easily. They look down on us, Pearl. I know they do.”
She smiled. “So let’s say that they see us as inferior, as nothing; we’ll start from the lowest point.” She held the pot of tea over the sugar cubes that she had formed into a pyramid. “Do you know what happens when a pool of water forms around a pyramid like this?”
“No.”
“Then observe.” She said and poured the tea around it. “All we need is a group of people to become enlightened and from the bottom up dissolve the power structure.”
I watched the sugar cubes soak up the brown tea and melt.
“It’s the people on the bottom who are more likely to give up their old way of living first, because they have less to lose. The pool of enlightened people won’t destroy the pyramid,” she said and tilted her head while looking at the pyramid of sugar cubes tilting down as the sugar melted. “We just absorb the people around us because we’re made of inclusion and love. We’re not planning a revolution, more like a dissolution, an inclusion.”
I sat quietly and stared at the dissolved pile of sugar where only a few cubes were still melting away.
“The ones on the top,” Pearl said quietly, “are usually the last ones to know what is happening.”
“But how?” I asked in a low voice. “How do you plan to do this?”
