The headset reappeared. She took or made a long series of calls and at first I listened in to them. I could hardly not. She spoke cryptically, though – was that the way of police communications, or was it because she had a 6/17 with her? She appeared to be working through a list of subordinates, checking up on them. I soon lost interest, watched the road ahead as she drove swiftly through the bleak hills and undulating plains of central Dearth.

Against my own usual feelings, I had been provoked by her comment about serfdom. Of course I had an interest in the subject, but it was not a dominant one in my life. It had been, but only for a while.

My personal background, which she could not know unless she had somehow used one of her dashboard gadgets to investigate me, was that my parents came from solid vassal families. They were holders of land and obligations in fief, providers of corvée and tributes to the seignior, and were (in theory) military champions of his or her noble cause. In reality, they led unexceptional middle-class lives, enjoyed their house and small patch of land, brought up their children, worked hard, surrendered their tithes twice a year.

I turned my back on all that. It was not a deliberate rejection, but a sorting of my own priorities. As a child, a teenager, you care little for social systems. All I ever wanted to be was a writer. While I was in my late teens I wrote in my spare time: small articles and reviews for magazines, a few short stories. As my ambitions and skills steadily grew I decided to take a leap into the unknown, give up my steady but boring job in an office and become a full-time freelance writer.

Because of strict rules from the seigniory I knew that as well as taking on the uncertainties of being able to make a living I would be forced to abandon my status as the son of a vassal family. I would become a citizen, a non-manorial serf, a small step above a peasant, a small step below the administrative villeins with their zones of power and bureaucratic influence over petty matters.

In the eyes of society I would be permanently unemployed, a drain on public funds. The shift down to serfdom was theoretical but also practical. I had no land, no fief to a lord or landowner.

Writers never fit into a social system. It’s the same for writers all over the Archipelago. I see it as practical and artistic freedom. Because we are independent we are not and cannot be treated as peasants, but as citizen serfs. Not much practical difference, but that suits me fine. The social structure means little to me – the lure of books and writing is a flame in me that I cannot extinguish. That is how it was when I started. It is still like that now.