"We were taken by a people from the sky and helped by another. We know the difference. We will say when we want more."Ossa of the Fourth Delta, first speech in the Chamber, 2470
The Inari are a sentient species native to the second planet of Binami, a binary star system in the Binami sector of the Ciriban Gulf. They were the first sentient life humanity found. A survey drone of the Lief Ericson saw them on 3 June 2315: a people of about 2 million living on the river deltas of their world in villages of mud brick and reed, farming grain and keeping a domesticated grazing animal. The Binami Order of 9 September 2315 quarantined their world, and for 135 years humanity watched the Inari from orbit and did not land.
The Red Khanate landed in 2440. It took a million of the Inari's 3 million as slaves for its yards and left the rest under a garrison of Dwaii tributaries. When the Unified Solar Marine Corps landed on 24 January 2450, the Inari's village heads met it at the largest delta and asked, in the Voor pidgin they had learned from their garrison, for the humans to stay. The Republic ended the Binami Order on 4 March 2450 at their request.
The Inari have been citizens of the Unified Solar Republic since the Constitution Act of 2460, and their Council of the Deltas has sent four members to the Chamber since 14 January 2470. Under the Institute of Xenology's Binami Report of 2461 the Republic bars its companies, settlers, religions and drive from their world, at the Inari's own request, until their council puts the question to their people in 2522.
Name
The name Inari is the Institute of Xenology's, taken in 2316 from the commonest word in the delta languages for the people of a village. Each of the eleven deltas has its own word for its own people and none for the species as a whole. The Inari had no name for their world apart from their words for the land, and the Republic's charts still call it Binami II. Since the Delta School's students devised a script in 2472, the Council of the Deltas has used the name Inari in the Republic's language for the whole people.
Biology
Anatomy
The Inari are small bipeds, about 1.2 metres tall and light of build, with long arms and long four-fingered hands, one finger opposed. Their bodies are covered in a short, dense pelt in the colours of the deltas: reed-brown, mud-grey and the pale green of new grain. The Inari dye and pattern the pelt, and a village's patterns mark its people. Their eyes are large and set forward, with a clear inner lid that closes against silt and wind. Their faces are short, with a small mouth and a broad, flat nose.
The Inari breathe the same air as humans and see in much the same band of light, with better sight at dusk, when the binary's second star is low. Their hands are precise, and the reed weaving of the deltas, which the Institute's cameras recorded from orbit for a century, is finer than any human hand can make.
Life cycle
The Inari bear one or two young at a time after a pregnancy of about seven months. Before 2450 they lived for about fifty Earth years, and many of their young did not live to walk. The medicine the Republic brought after 2460 halved the Inari's infant mortality in a decade. Their population, 2.1 million in 2460, was 4 million in 2510.
Diet
The Inari farm grain on the deltas and keep a domesticated grazer. They also fish the channels and gather the reed beds' roots and seeds. The grazer, a long-legged animal of the delta pastures, gives milk, hide and labour, and is eaten only at the flood feasts.
Society and culture
The Republic knew the Inari for 135 years only as the Institute's Binami section saw them from orbit, and it has known them as people only since 2450. What follows is drawn from the section's catalogue of their villages, languages and seasons and from what the Inari have told the Delta School since.
The deltas
The Inari live on the river deltas of their world, in eleven river societies with eleven languages. They build villages of mud brick and reed, farm grain and keep their grazers, and they worked stone and, from the 2340s, copper. Each delta is its own society, with its own language, its own patterns and its own calendar. The deltas traded with each other along the coasts, and the Institute's cameras recorded reed boats carrying grain and copper between them from the 2350s.
The flood
Inari life follows the flood. Each delta's rivers rise once a year, and the flood's coming decides when the fields are sown, when the villages move to higher ground and when the year begins. Each delta's calendar counts from its own flood, so that no two deltas begin the year on the same day. The Inari hold feasts at the flood's rise and its fall, and they understand the flood as the river's gift to the people who keep its banks.
Kin and elders
An Inari village is a group of lineages, each tracing its descent to a founding household. A village head, chosen by the eldest of each lineage, settles disputes over fields, water and marriage, and speaks for the village to its neighbours. The Inari keep their dead close: the bones of the founding households are kept in the oldest house of each village, and their names are spoken at the flood feasts.
The Council of the Deltas grew out of this order. The village heads formed it under the Khanate's garrison, without the Republic's knowledge, to answer the garrison's demands with one voice. The Delta School's students later dated its first meeting to 2443. It was the first institution the Inari had that spoke for more than one delta.
History
Discovery and the Binami Order, 2315
The Lief Ericson, under Captain Moorthi, reached Binami in 2305 and could not finish the survey, because the system's second planet held life that might be sentient. On the ship's second visit, on 3 June 2315, a survey drone over a river delta recorded the Inari's villages. Moorthi had orders to claim any world his landers could stand on, and did not land. His courier reached Sol in August 2315, and President Halvorsen issued the Binami Order on 9 September 2315.
The Order quarantined the system. It forbade any landing on the second planet, placed a monitoring station at the system's Pillai radius, and barred any federal, member or company vessel from approaching within a light minute of the Inari's world without the Office of Settlement's leave. The federation had debated for three years what its duty to the Inari was, and decided that its duty was to leave them alone. The Institute of Xenology's Binami section, forty staff on the station, kept the Order for 135 years. Its annual reports to the Chamber's Member Affairs committee said the same thing each year: the Inari were a people at the beginning of their history, and the Republic's duty was to leave them to it.
The Ascension movement, 2350s to 2440
The Inari Ascension Movement began at the universities of Nkrumah on Mardak Vol in the 2350s. Its manifesto of 2352 argued that humanity, as the heir of the Mardak Vol, had a duty to the people the ancients had not lived to find. The Inari were humanity's own past on another world, at the start of a history that would take them ten thousand years of plague, famine and war to walk alone, and the Republic had the power to lift them past it and no right to withhold it. The movement took its name from the Voor word the Institute rendered as "ascend", which the Legion had used for a world brought into its order. It crossed both blocs, and from the 2360s the companies joined it, because they wanted the Binami belts, closed under the Order since 2315. Its opponents, the Wardens, were the Institute's Binami section, the Office of Settlement's remnant, the Solarite foreign affairs committee and the Haedus Territory's council. The Order held.
The Khanate, 2440 to 2450
Binami fell to the Red Khanate on 14 April 2440, at the end of the Sector War. The Institute's monitoring station was destroyed with its forty staff and its records, and the Khan's clans landed on the second planet, which the Republic had kept unlanded for 125 years. In the first year they took 1 million of the Inari's 3 million from the river deltas as slaves for the tributary yards. They left the rest under a tributary garrison of Dwaii, which took grain and labour and worked the deltas' farms until they were exhausted. The Inari learned the Dwaii's language and the Voor pidgin from the garrison. Under it the village heads formed the Council of the Deltas.
Liberation, 2450
The Retribution Fleet retook Binami on 20 January 2450. The Corps landed on the second planet on 24 January, the first landing on the Inari's world since the Binami Order of 2315. Its officers were met at the largest delta by a delegation of the village heads, who asked, in the pidgin, for the humans to stay. The Chamber ended the Binami Order on 4 March 2450, by 540 to 20, on the Inari's request and the Institute's recommendation, and the Institute's Binami section became the Inari's ministry. The Ascension movement did not claim the decision. The Institute's report of 2450 recorded that the Inari had asked for help and not for ascension, and the Chamber's Act gave them the first.
The Binami Report, 2460 to 2482
The Constitution Act of January 2460 made the Inari citizens of the Republic and gave them four seats in the Chamber, the base the Worlds Amendment set for every member. The Institute's plan for them, the Binami Report, was published in 2461 and adopted by the Chamber in 2462 over the Ascension movement's objection. It was slow by design. Its first principle was that the Inari had asked for help and not for ascension, and that the Republic would not decide for them whether they wanted the second. Its second was that the Khanate had already done to the Inari in ten years what the Order had been written to prevent, and that the Republic's task was to undo the Khanate's work before it did any of its own.
The Report's programme for its first twenty years had four parts. The Repatriation Authority found 400,000 of the Inari the Khanate had taken alive on the Khanate's worlds and carried them home by 2468. The deltas' farms were restored by 2475. Republic medicine, which the Report held was help and not ascension, halved the Inari's infant mortality in a decade. And the Delta School, staffed by the Institute at the largest delta, taught the Inari who asked the Republic's language, writing and arithmetic, while its staff learned the Inari's eleven languages, which no human had spoken before 2450. The Report barred the Republic's companies, settlers, religions and drive from the Inari's world for twenty years. The Ascension movement moved its repeal in 2465, 2470 and 2475 and lost each time, because the Inari's own representatives voted against it.
The Inari in the Chamber
The Council of the Deltas chose four of its members in 2469 to sit at New Luxor. The four had learned the Republic's language at the Delta School and had never left their world. They took their seats on 14 January 2470, the first members of the Chamber of any species but human and Voor. Their first vote was against the Ascension's motion. Their first speech, by the member the Chamber's record names as Ossa of the Fourth Delta, said that the Inari had been taken by a people from the sky and helped by another, that the Inari knew the difference, and that they would say when they wanted more.
In 2482 the Inari's council asked for the Report's bar to be renewed for twenty more years. The Chamber voted the renewal by 700 to 60, the sixty being the Ascension's heirs. The Inari's representatives abstained, on Ossa's statement that the bar was the Inari's to ask for and not the Chamber's to grant.
The forty years, 2470 to 2510
The Inari changed in forty years as the Report had meant them to, and faster than it had planned.
- The Delta School had 200 students in 2465, 20,000 in 2490 and 300,000 in 2510, in schools at all eleven deltas that the Inari's council ran and the Institute staffed.
- In 2472 the School's first students devised the Inari's first script, from the Republic's alphabet, for their own languages.
- The Inari's first physician qualified at the Delta School in 2488.
- In 2490 the Institute's Binami section was reconstituted as the Inari's ministry under the Inari's council, with the Institute's staff as its servants and the Chamber's grant as its budget.
- The Inari's first ship's officer entered the Navy's academy at Fortaleza in 2492, over the Report's bar, which the Inari's council waived for her, and was commissioned in 2496. She served in the Joint Command at Haedius.
- The Ascension movement did not move its motion again after 2495.
- The first member of the Chamber born after the Order's end took a seat in 2510.
The Inari council's report of 2510, written in the Inari's own script and the Republic's, stated that the Inari were 4 million and governed their eleven deltas under a council of their own making. It said that they held four seats in the Chamber and would ask for more when their numbers warranted it under the Worlds Amendment, which their representatives had read. It said that the question of the Republic's drive, companies and settlers would be put to the Inari's people by their council in 2522, at the second bar's end, and not before.
Government
Before 2443 the Inari had no government above the village. Each village was led by its head, and each delta was a society of villages with a common language. The Council of the Deltas, formed in 2443 under the Khanate's garrison, speaks for all eleven deltas. Since 2460 the Inari have been citizens of the Republic, and since 2470 the Council has chosen their four members of the Chamber. Since 2490 the Inari's ministry has served under the Council.
The Great Promise
The Inari were the Great Promise's test case: the first article of the Fejantris Peace of 2460, that no species would be made tributary again. The Republic's histories record that the Second Republic passed the test by the Inari's own account and not by its own. The Institute's histories record that the Binami Order held for 135 years because the Republic chose it, and that the Inari's bar holds because the Inari do.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.2 "On the Solar Wind: The Four Explorers"
- Solar Eternal, Part X, §10.7 "The Inari Ascension Movement"
- Solar Eternal, Part XII, §12.3 "The Sector War"
- Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.1 "The Reclamation of the Binami and Saolea Sectors"
- Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.8 "The Inari"