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PRIME 7, 2678 GENRICHIAN286Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbFurPcee6R
KUUR 2, 610 ROMANOVAN
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ONCE WERE BROTHERS THREE WHO DWELT 'PON ROMANOVA286Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡO98EjaFMP0
'PON ROMANOVA THEIR HOLDINGS THEY KEEP286Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1eqF3e5g6M
AN' THEY DID CAST LOTS AS TO WHICH ONE SHOULD GO,286Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrYMBOGnFig
GO,286Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFbeLgSuqxp
GO,286Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHFVL5aQb21
A'ROVIN' AN' STARLOOTIN OUT THERE IN THE DEEP.286Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡI0CrzJPKEI
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"Pray tell, my dear Lavrenti-Mikhailov, which is it to be with the cheena, cozer or coznik?"
An appreciative titter arose from an unseen audience. LIghtyears---and another lifestyle---further away, 12-year-old Zakh Sorokin shook his head. "Cheena" was the snotty word denizens of the capital planet used for "girl," but what was that about "cozer or coznik"? Coznik were units of Cosmopolity currency, yes, but were he to look up "cozer" in the dictofile ling among his school references upon a shelf across the bedroom and Mistress Maria or Terrible Yvan were to catch him out of bed....
Zakh shook his head again. With his father gone pleasure voyaging (against better judgment, he had complained until the hour of departure), that conscientious pair were all the more serious in the execution of their duties. This mean, from a viewpoint unique to the object of those duties, considerable irritation.
In Terrible Yvan's case, Zakh's annoyance was doubled. Since his namesake and only grandson had run away offplanet last year---the youth had been in Terrible Yvan's charge since his parents had been killed a'logging-----the old man had "adopted" Zakh with the family's Sorokin approval, cared for him through this sickness, and begun teaching him many of the ancient Genrichian ways passed down, father to son, mother to daughter, over the centuries which had seen this planet rediscovered by the Cosmopolity of Romanova, one of a handful of great imperia-conglomerate which dominated the known reaches of......
The viewer caught Zakh's eye again. Across a too-colorful, make-believe drawing chamber, past overembellished furnishings and garish fixtures, a second actor, the juvenile lead, having waited through the audience reaction, ran a slender hand through his elaborate hairstyle. He grimaced at the question Zakh had found incomprehensible, an embarrassed blush revealed behind the mask---a conservative (some might have maintained, unimaginative) silver gorbachev---he'd let drop in momentary display of vulnerability. He offered nothing more in answer, but raised the mask again upon its stick, the more decently to hide his emotions
The speaker, a blond, aristocratic figure in chartreuse culottes and lavender doublet, half lifted an arm, his pale wrist bent at the lacy cuff. His mask, a classic bronze faberge, lay upon the parqueted surface of the secretary before him, demonstrating what a forthright, modern fellow he must be. In the background a hiaftochord was playing. Notes fell like celestial raindrops as if timed to the glitter of the lumitory sconces upon the walls. Standing at his secretary, the famous and fictional Lisov Jaromir-Konstantinovich produced an expensive hand-wrought inhaling tube, gave its knurled ferrule a delicate twist of adjustment, and thrust it up each elegant, flared nostril in turn.
Foma-Artemovich, Mistress Maria had explained when she lent him this file, was second son to an imaginary Oligarch-Hereditary of Valerian and a celebrated character in parlor-pieces like this. He was the soul of wit (in theory, Zakh added for himself), the spirit of his times (for what it was worth), and, she had claimed, the unanswerable social arbiter to far-flung Romanovan civilization and all who admired and wished to emulate it. he would not have lasted a single hour, Zakh through with score, in the cronsetto forests or the mist-shrouded sirleaf bogs of his own birth planet, Genrich.
Not realizing what harsh and final judgment had been passed upon him, the elegant Jaromir-Konstantinovich slipped the inhaling tube into his ruffled sleeve, exposing the polished collimator of a gold-chased kinergic quickblade strapped to his forearm. " Upon my soul," he observed with a delicate sniff, "there can be no middle court with her ilk, nyet, nor even cozer, for I have it upon good authority your enamorata plots her own course, towards the Jalovian gentle of a germane gender." The audience exploded with laughter.
Clavises! With a snarl, he jerked the dramafile, criminally misnamed, the thought flashed through his mind, from the viewer upon his blanket-covered lap. The images before his eyes dissolved in a shower of incoherent sparks. He hurled the cylinder across the bedroom. It struck the spotless wall beside rough-cast door timbers---a flower garland, beginning to brown and dry, hung from a peg there, souvenir of a festivity which, in his illness, he'd been unable to attend---and fell to the multiwood floor, scaring the boy's pet glob which had been lying upon a hand-hooked oval rug. With a chooie!, the glob leapt to all six feet and burrowed under the rug.
Zakh's room was at the apex of a tower, built of graniplastic blocks by the Sorokins' predecessors and long disused, at one corner of his father's Holdings. Zakh had claimed it for himself as soon as he was old enough to state his preference in this or any other matter. With help from Terrible Yvan and Mistress Maria, he had pried the door from the frame to which it had long been nailed, driven out the dexebats, cleaned the place up, and seen the walls beadblasted until they shone translucent white.
That had been before he had fallen ill.
He glanced up at the long, slender precolonial weapon they had found while renovating the place. Its metal parts were rough and pitted, stained with oxides. No maker's mark remained, assuming there'd been one to start with. Here and there a patch showed of the original dull-gleaming blue-black tint. It was much too heavy for strapping to the user's forearm, as was customary with quickblades. It'd been mounted in a length of grainy, unplasticized wood, carven, where broadest, with the, with the figure of an alien animal, long extinct, which Terrible Yvan said had once been imported to Genrich by the hundreds for riding, but which had failed to thrive on the local forage.
In the old man's opinion this symbol had been personal to the owner and indicated that he or she had been among the planet's first human inhabitants, long and long, as Yvan put it, before the Cosmopolity had come. They'd found other things in the tower room, a toothless comb, a bristleless brush, the top of a small plastic chest which had been in similar fashion carven.
Cleaned and oiled, though still nonfunctioning, the weapon, topped with a dented sighting tube which placed its time before that of laser designator, hung from its sling, with twelve of the tarnished chemnergic cylinders it'd used, upon the wall between the broad sails of two modern-day full-rigged model starships, products of Zakh's mentor-guided hands. As he had often been before, the boy was filled with a feeling of curiosity about the first Genrichans, wondering what it must have been like here before the quickblades of Romanovan Stoutsnarls had overridden ancient arms like this.
Outisde the arch-topped tower windows, thick polymer with calmed and beveled borders, the morning sun shone in a sky of faultless azure. A ghostly thumbnail sliver of Thoaria, the Old Moon, was visible from horizon to horizon, above the close-spaced tops of trees that marked the near edge of the forest Between the cronsettos and the Holdings, Sorokin retainers would be harvesting groundberries in a meadow where they grew year round. Birds would be singing. It was, upon those accounts and others, he thought, a terrible day, the worst kind of day for a boy to be bedridden, sentenced to stay indoors.
"Zero---Zero, it is all right, come here." Zakh whispered to the little glob. Thus encouraged, the six-legged creature emerged from its sanctuary and hopped onto the bed beside him, where the boy stroked its long, luscious fur in an attempt to soothe it, sneering down, as he did so, at the dramafile where it lay at the rug's edge.
Weighing less than a phunt (it was but seven lines in length, less than a tenth that in diameter, barcoded to---misindicate--its contents), its arrival at the wall had produced no racket to satisfy his frustration. It was, in essence, indestructible, promising him no emotional compensation had he been the kind to delight in its destruction, which he wasn't.
They were all like this, each file his tutor, Mistress Maria Petrovka, received from the capital, a tendentious hodgepodge of effete mannerism and incomprehensible fuss. Coznik? What did the currency of the Valerian Empire-Circuit have to do with anything? What did any of it mean? Half the time Zakh couldn't understand what that bugger Jaromir-Konstantinovich was saying through his cultured accent and affected tones; the other half, his features were hidden, like those of the other actors----indeed, if Mistress Maria were believed, like those of every fashionable gentlebeing on Genrich---behind masks created in the likeness of obscure historical figures whose proverbial qualities were supposed to reveal something of the mood or intentions of the characters. Mistress Maria, also instructor to Zakh's brothers, Eugene fils and Adam (and something more than this to the eldest), had shown him one of her own masks, avowing she favored a pale lavender portia, which, for some reason he'd never understood, was supposed to be clever.
"Wanque!" Zakh pronounced the word aloud, startling Zero again and dismissing the Jaromir-Konstantinovich once and for all. He glanced around with a guilty expression to see if anyone had heard him utter the boyish obscenity.
As it happened, somebody had. A perfunctory pair of raps sounded in the little room. Startled again, the much-abused glob hopped from the bed and disappeared beneath it. The door opened, spreading desiccated flower petals as it swung into the room. Terrible Yvan Dragomilov followed, bearing a handworked tray the mere sight of which---rather of the tankard upon it, an original from this room and in likewise carven with an animal's form---made Zakh shudder with recent but deep-grained reflex. Upon the tray, beside the hated flagon, lay another object which the boy thought he recognized, although the reason for its presence was a mystery.
Noticing Zakh''s expression, the old man stepped over the throw-rug, set tray, tankard, and mysterious object upon a table, bent and picked up the dramafile He gave a conspicuous nod towards the waste-chute in the wall across the room from the bookcases. "I thought I'd taught you to throw straighter than that, young master." He gave the boy a broad grin and a blue-eyed wink. "You've been real sick, haven't you?"
Zero reappeared to bump his torso which seemed to be the only head he possessed, against the old man's ankles in greeting and hopped upon the bed again. Despite himself, Zakh answered with a laugh. Terrible Yvan had that effect upon him. Stooped and withered until he was scarce taller than the boy himself, the old man was the most ancient being Zakh had ever known. Terrible Yvan's storm-blue eyes twinkled among the furrows of a face like a dried apple, and a thick shock of pure white hair stood upon end like his brother Adam's razorbristle shaving brush. For all his venerability and apparent decrepitude, he moved with the smooth alacrity and energetic purpose, without a hint of the tremble Zakh had seen afflict many a younger man than Terrible Ivan Dragomilov.
"Yes, Yvan," he answered, giving the timid animal an absent stroke. "I have been." He looked down at what he was doing. "'Sick as a glob'---though in truth I have never seen Zero sick a day. And I have been missing all the fun." He nodded towards the garland upon the door, although he might have meant the dramafile by his complaint. "A poor plain substitute such a thing as that, for games, and food, and music...."
"Da, and noise and excitement...."
"The visiting nobility...."
"And the peasant people of Genrich who came to pay their respects, more welcome to do so in the whole wide imperium-conglomerate than they might have been under any other Oligarch's roof." The old man shook his head. "Da, and all of that. But juvenile cancer is no laughing matter, boy----I had it myself at your age---and things that are no laughing matter must be attended to before they kill us. Is that not so?" Terrible Yvan raised his thick and snowy eyebrows, nodding toward the dreaded flagon on the table.
Zakh made a grudging face. With Terrible Yvan's help, he lifted the heavy container, gulped down quick as he could the vile mixture it contained, and which was, he admitted step by gradual step, making him well once more---though with less rapidity than he hoped it would.
Barely remembering his own mother, dead these eight years, he thought it a good thing, his father's taking wife again, as had happened the previous week while he lay wracked with drug-induced delirium. He was uncertain how he felt about his father's bride, the Lady Veronica Zaytseva, but he hated missing his father's wedding. Time enough to decide about his new stepmother once she and Father were back from honeymoon travels. Likewise, he would hate missing hie eldest brother's wedding, due to take place upon the senior couple's return in another month and a half. He was as fond of this particular bride-to-be as if she were already the sister she was about to become. Or the mother he'd never known. Now that he felt better---which in contrast to the time of his father's wedding meant only that he was conscious----he'd begin worrying about a gift. It must be appropriate both to the occasion and his feelings about those celebrating it.
Terrible Yvan took the flagon from him, inspected it to make sure it was empty, and set it back upon the tray. Curious, Zero leaned over to sniff at the container, gave out a strangled mewling noise, and vanished beneath the bed again. Terrible Yvan and Zakh laughed.
"Valorously done," the old man commended the boy. "Valorously done. And there are rewards for heroes." He made no move towards the other object lying upon the tray, as Zakh might have expected, but, grinning his wrinkled grin again, took a step back. "You are to get out of bed now and take such exercise as you feel capable of."
A thrill went through the boyo. "Yvan! You are not having fun with me?" Not waiting for the old man to reveal that his words had been a prank, he sat up straight in bed. "I may, really?"
"You may." The old man offered Zakh a hand as the boy threw off the blanket and swung his legs past the edge of the bed for the first time in nine long, nightmarish weeks. The dizziness or infirmity he could feel was likely from prolonged involuntary rest than the disease that afflicted him. When at last Zakh stood upon the floor, both bare feet cool from the contact, Terrible Yvan tapped an age-ravaged finger upon the object he'd brought with him. "This, youthful master, is but the first of many surprises today and the days after will bring you." He straightened, of a sudden formal, and cleared his throat. "It is the beginning, as you might someday swear, of the best and busiest time of your young life."
Standing, his knees still weak, Zakh looked down at the object with its ancient, unintelligible embossery of flaked gold metal. Not sure how it was done, though he had seen these things referred to in dramafiles about the ancient and romantic past, he picked it up, spread it open in his left palm, and let a gentle right thumb riffle through the brittle, symbol-covered sheets that it consisted of.
His guess had been right, although he had not known such things to exist within his father's Holdings or even upon the planet Genrich. He realized they were unique in one respect: they'd been invented long before ulsic, an inbuilt property of artifacts that allowed them to perform complex functions without human attention. As many words and concepts as this thing might contain, it was nowhere near as "smart," say, as the most idiotic file, or even the flagon keeping his medicine well mixed and at proper temperature.
"I believe this was called a....book," said Terrible Yvan.
