The Chronicler’s Daughter

The enormous city of U Belly bristled with street dogs, stray cows and mosquitoes, but its inhabitants were nevertheless a contented people. Governed by a City Council of five wise men, or elders (of whom, the eldest had been on his death-bed for thirty years), and cordoned off from the rest of the world, U Bellians had nothing to complain about, and everything they could dream of: food, work, houses, schools, hospitals, roads, parks, certitudes. Only the Chronicler’s Daughter, who was slim and not rotund like other U Bellians, questioned acknowledged wisdom. To her, her fellow citizens’ contentment was mere complacency, and the elders’ benevolence a ploy to retain power and privilege. Her dissent incensed the wise men who, suspending all intra-Council political machinations, bore down on her as one and pronounced their sentence—five annual Banishments. In between these yearly deportations, however, the Chronicler’s Daughter discovered allies, including the master-strategist Vet and her metamorphosed father, the Chronicler. The result: a swell in popular support and, inevitably, revolution. A new order takes over, and a jubilant citizenry installs the Chronicler’s daughter as Chief Administrator. Also inevitably, the only super-power in the world, the Banded States of Monimayniya (BSM) sends its representations to U Belly with offers of aid. Bewitched by the glamour of the BSM as much as by the charm of its irresistible President, U Belly opens itself up to external influence. The new order soon becomes corrupted and tyrannical, and the now sage-like Chronicler is once more in the vanguard of opposition—but now against his daughter.