He remembered as a youth the night of terror when his father had disappeared. The Earl/Iseline controversy had risen to a fevered pitch, and the demagogues of the government, refusing to recognize local system self-determination, had mandated the name Earl only could be used; for under that name, it was always a colony, and never a state.

Six men in metallic suits had forced their way into the family's small home on the shores of the broad river Darcyfarrell, many miles from the disreputable neighborhood in which he now found himself. He remembered the men, their hand-beamers waving menacingly, grabbing his father from his console seat where he sat writing warpmails to those of the Cause all over Plimsoll and hidden, as well, in the canyons and mountains of Iselene herself.

"We're here for a bushburn , and you're the bushburnee!," they yelled, grabbing him from his chair and forcing him up against the wall. They blackmasked him and kevlared his hands. The boy, all of thirteen, stood up and screamed at them, but they just cuffed him backhanded on their way by, and he lay stunned ont he floor watching his father being taken off. He didn't know what a bush burn was, then. He remembered he had idly wondered between sobs where the expression had come from. He had forgotten about that...