x
Maria had kept her guilt, along with the pain it caused her, to herself.
Even now, maybe especially now, the burden was more than she could bear. She knew she'd made another mistake, climbing the long spiral flight of stairs to the tower room which had been Zakh's in what had turned out, (although, like people of every century everywhere, none living through them had realized it) to be happier times. Yet, just as her mind required respite from the calculations of survival, her heart needed refuge, some fragment of the warm familiarity of a lifetime and a way of living, which, whatever happened now, was shattered and its pieces lost beyond recovery.
It was odd, she thought, and dismaying, how small a series of personal catastrophes it took to change everything beyond recognizability, to alter the appearance of everyday places and things---rather, her perception of them---until it was as if she had never seen them before. By any objective standard, this little room was much as it had always been, neither cramped nor grand, constructed from translucent plastic blocks which, not undertaking the load borne by identical blocks far below in the Holdings' foundations, displayed surfaces which were a bit concave. It had been a good room. The thinnest imaginable patina of dust, softening angles and edges all about her, was still almost invisible. Even so, the knowledge that the room's former occupant was missing, and presumed dead---in the field, even when instructed otherwise, Cossacks were unlikely to leave identifiable remnants of their victims---like the man who had helped keep it, permeated everything, from the shapes and textures of common objects to the color of sunlight streaming now through the high-arched windows of stained glass and the ringlight which sifted through them every night.
Nevertheless, she had come here for a purpose. This chamber had been searched by ruthless inhumans, like every cubic line of the Holdings, when the Black Usurper had pulled his coup d'état. Amidst more compelling preoccupations, it had been forgotten with a similar efficiency. No better sanctuary existed within these walls where she could do, in privacy and in safety---which these days amounted to the same thing---what she was about to do.
Maria wiped her eyes. They had, without her realizing it, become tear-filled and unfocusable. She took from the pocket of her skirt the slim, finger-length cylinder which had been handed her this morning by one of the groundskeepers, an elderly Genrichian who, despite the fact that he had been with the family Sorokin who, despite the fact that he had been with the family Sorokin for as long as they had been upon Genrich, had somehow been passed over, just as she had been in Zeytseva's grim series of housekeepings.
Acting as housekeeper---Zeytseva had not brought a senecschal, and Terrible Yvan, who had always seemed in charge of all, was gone----Maria thus far enjoyed free run of the Holdings. She appeared (in this way, if in no other, the tower room suited her) almost to have been forgotten by the Usurper's minions, maybe because she had been an employee rather than a retainer. In an age that euphemized chattel slavery away, the differences between the two were subtle, but real. Upon the other hand, it was her wedding to the eldest of the Sorokin sons which had been chosen for dramatic interruption. As a consequence, her precise legal status stayed nebulous, although her intimate association with the family could not be so to any observer.
In the end, Maria could not have told why she was left to herself. It was among her greatest, most continuous fears that her freedom---not to mention her life---might come to an arbitrary end at any time Never for a moment did it occur to her that she was innocent of any offense meriting such a state of apprehension. As an educated observer of history, she was too well aware that a common feature of all civilizations--anytime, anyplace, any protest to the contrary notwithstanding---is that an individual's innocence or guilt has nothing to do with the fate to which authority consigns him.
Finding Zakh's reader, a child's model they had often used while she taught him---she wondered what had become of Zero, the glob who had been his shadow, and was afraid she knew---upon a cluttered shelf, she inserted the file. The likeness of the man she loved, the face that filed her thoughts from her awakening each morning until she given in to trouble-tossed exhaustion each night, sprang into being above the reader.
"My dearest Maria...." She had been prepared for Eugene to be strained and tired, not for the fact that he looked years older. How like his father he was. "This enfiler was appropriated in one of our raids, so I thought I might finally undertake to send word to you. I can safely convey not much by way of facts, fearing this may be intercepted. I shudder at the risk it represents to what it is my fervent wish is your continued well-being."
Behind the man who may or may not have been her lawful husband, she could make out something of his background, for the image was virtual, allowing her to focus where she would, rather than wherever some lens decided. Not that much existed to see. He sat upon the ground, legs folded beneath him, under an expanse of mottled brown-green kevlar, further camouflaged with leaves and branches whose shadows fell upon the fabric. Beyond the opening of this makeshift shelter, propped with a crooked stick not altogether stripped of smaller twigs, lay a woodland clearing which might have told a botanist Eugene's latitude and altitude. It told Maria nothing. Genrich was a planet covered with trees, all of which looked the same to her.
"Nonetheless, it is possible that not hearing from me may be as trying an experience for you as not hearing from you has been for me. I would do what I can to ease that trial. In return, you must promise to erase or destroy this file as soon as you've read it. Don't permit sentiment to compound the risk to which, in my emotional weakness, I subject you."
Between the nearby woods and the rough tent, Maria discerned half a dozen figures reclining around a smokeless fire, toasting something unidentifiable upon sharpened branches thrust at an angle into the ground. Now and then, someone leaned forward to turn what he---or she; it had not occurred to Maria that females might be rebels---was cooking and sit back again.
"It will not give anything away to say I am among friends and well as can be expected. I have found allies, and, by now, you will have heard something of our activities. You are in a better position to judge their effectiveness than I, which, I am given to understand, is usually the case in war."
A portion of the entrance flap was dragged aside. A woman---barely more than a girl, yet beauteous, with glossy black hair and equally dark eyes---bent to push her head and shoulders into the tent. Eugene gave her a brief glance, nodded without a word having passed between them, and returned his attention, now divided, back to then enfiler. "For war it is, in the event they have not seen fit to tell you. Let no doubt remain. We are waging it on the Black Usurper as often and as ardently as we are able. We destroy his transports, burn his crops, sack his encampments and fortifications, harry and murder his followers. We do this not in any hope of destroying him, for he could, if he were so determined, reduce the planet to a cinder, but against the possibility that we can make Genrich too expensive for him to hold without reaching some accommodation with us."
Eugene took a deep breath, again glancing aside at the black-eyed girl. Making unneeded adjustments to the straps of the unadorned, businesslike quickblade she wore upon one slim forearm, she waited with him with an impatient, proprietary manner which set Maria's lonely and unsure heart to aching with an unaccustomed variety of pain. "Maria, dearest. Lida is telling me, in her subtle way, that I am wanted elsewhere and must go. Among my fondest hopes is that you two will someday meet under more fortuitous circumstances. By the time you get this, it will no longer matter whether I have told you that we are about to accomplish something they will not be able to keep you, or anybody else upon the planet, from hearing of. I know you are holding bravely back home, and if we ask your help, you will respond in a manner to make me proud. In the meantime, I remain your Eugene, 'the" Sorokin. Oligarch-Hereditary-in-Exile of Genrich."
The image vanished. Had it been a trifle distant? Feeling an unsortable disappointment growing inside her, Maria fought against the temptation to play the file again. Or to jerk it from the reader and dash it to the floor. Where she had expected a love letter, it seemed, she had been subjected to a political lecture intended to augment her morale. Was anything of genuine affection to be discerned in it? Deeply in love with Eugene, as she found herself almost the moment she set eyes upon him, now that this incredible disaster had befallen them, now that little Zakh (among many, many others) was dead, Eugene had become her whole life. All she had left of him was the memory of their parting....and now this impersonal military correspondence. She held back tears, caught herself at it, and, transferring the bitterness she felt to herself, shook her head in sudden anger.
No! This was her imagination playing petty tricks, colored by the well-deserved weight of her guilt, the pain of separation, the uncertainty of her status, her cowardly fear of.... whatever she was afraid of. She was Eugene Sorokin's woman. He was her man. Whatever she feared, he confronted every bit of that, and, she thought, worse every passing day. He was depending on her. Had he not told her so just now--or whenever his message had been enfiled?
She would stifle these feminine flutterings and do whatever he needed of her. In absence of instruction, she could at least force her behavior into something resembling rational channels. Unless she learned to act as wisely and nobly as the man she loved, the family she had aspired to marry into, she was indeed no more than the social climbing snippet attempting to rise above her station, which, in her blackest moods, she accused her of being.
Still, her guilt remained to be dealt with, omissions upon her part which had brought them to this unenviable estate, which had likeliest found direct result in the deaths, and worse, of those on Genrich whom she loved.
It was so simple, Zaytseva, younger son of the Oligarch Hereditary of Valerian and a personal favorite of Murad IIXI, was not a name unknown on Romanova, where she had been born and raised. It seemed to Maria that she had heard it whispered, along with certain terrifying accusations, all her life, in particular after (being without family of her own but possessing promising intellect) she had sought and won employment as a tutor among the capital's wealthiest, most influential families, whose money and power failed to prevent them shuddering at its mention. Even more responsible positions had exposed her to progressively more disturbing rumors regarding the crippled Poobah. And, in the end, he'd proven himself every bit the black and horrible presence of which her friends and bosses had warned her.
Of course, Veronica had to be considered, as well---"Veronica Zaytseva Sorokin" as she now styled herself. Maria's acquaintance with the Black Usurper's daughter was more recent. In Maria's view, Veronica had, with both hands, cast away everything which Maria herself had ever hoped for, and, with it, any right to bear so honorable a surname. Moreover, since, through her father's treachery, it had become attainted, why would she want to? Without understanding Veronica in the slightest, without knowing the particulars of her life, Maria knew her, nonetheless. She represented everything that disgusted and terrified Maria in a human being.
Thus, the unbearable guilt she felt for never having warned her kind employer, good friend, and father-in-law to be concerning his best friend, the man who had become, in what she had always privately thought a bizarre twist of events, his father-in-law. Never mind that it had not been her place to do so, even after she had become engaged to Eugene's fils. Never mind that, without doubting her sincerity, he would have dismissed it all as idle capital-world gossip. Maria felt she should have found a way. And if she had everything would now be so different.
Who was that dark-eyed girl? What kind of name was Lida?176Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5uRSYs1olJ
176Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ42KtkNHFlZ
176Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJHYStykfSH
176Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgvv0ZvBsTT
"Who do you suppose that young lady was?" Zaytseva leaned back in his wheeled chair and spun the file he'd just pulled from the reader upon the polished surface of the desk in front of him. As a matter of course he had ordered a copy made before allowing the message to be passed along, but this was the first chance he had found to view it.
Standing with one hand upon her father's shoulder, Veronica shook her head. "Another sweaty, heavy-uddered peasant cow, who will doubtless sport a mustache and hips a measure wide before she sees thirty. It was the same with his father. These elevated colonial brutes do love their prolly cunts, even given a chance at a cut or twenty that's better than he deserves."
"Like for like," the Black Usurper chuckled. "Blood calls blood. I wonder whether Mistress Maria will see what we saw, as it were, between the code-bars, and how she will react. Her usefulness could well depend on how she feels about that girl-lieutenant of young Eugene's."
Veronica's lips hardened into the implacable death line which, without surgical attention, would spoil her beauty long before Lida Khabalova was touched by time. "Mistress Maria Petrovka will make herself useful regardless of how she feels!" The words formed an unbroken hiss.
"I do believe you mean that." Zaytseva looked up at his daughter with the closest he would ever come to a father's affectionate approval. Well conditioned to obedience, she was subservient to him in every way. Out of his presence and upon her own, he could rely on her to exercise the precise mixture of ruthlessness and discretion in his behalf which he would. He was proud of Veronica, as proud as he was of all the empires he had ever built.
He touched the desk edge in a certain spot. A cube of the wood it was made of rose from the surface. Reaching to swing one side open, he revealed a space within which held an odd object. Removing it, he let the cube lower itself back into place. "However, my dear, this is the reason I wished to see you this morning. It arrived upon an adventurer, Demeter, now orbiting Genrich, in a small fibrous crate of alien construction bearing my name. Security has examined it. The master of the adventurer could only tell me it was given to him by a courier, human---with strict instruction that it be hand-delivered---when he was trading in the Stantsiya Atoma. Do you know where that is?"
Veronica frowned. "A long way away, Father, and a wild place. A neutral system, as I recall, between the Cosmopolity and the Empery-Cirot, near the open borders of both imperia-conglomerate. A haven for desperados and Deep-plunderers at the edge of unknown space."
Zaytseva was proud of his daughter's education, as well as her ruthlessness and discretion. "As you say. The captain claimed he had, by the narrowest of margins, avoided being taken in that quarter by a star-bandit of whom we hear with distressing and increasing frequency, upon his passage to Genrich. Yvan Dragomilov. Was an Yvan Dragomilov not among the casualties here, the first day?"
Veronica nodded. "An old servant who ran the estate. Both the Genirchian census and our intelligence reports are full of Yvan Dragomilovs, Yvengvy Dragomilovs, Ymir Dragomilovs, with a sprinkling of Yvana Dragomilovs, as well. I believe you had a technical subject by the same calling last month we were upon Genrich. A peasant's name, among the most common in the Cosmopolity."
"It is, it is. In any event, beloved, the Stantisya Atoma is most successful at playing one imperium-conglomerate against another. It is tolerated in its outlaw existence because it remains a reliable source of useful information and unheard-of artifacts just like this."
They both looked at the object in question, sitting upon the otherwise uncluttered surface of the desk which had once belonged to Eugene Sorokin. An unprepossessing transparent cylinder eighteen lines long, seven in diameter, it lay on its side upon an integral rectangular foot. Each end, for two lines, was metal, of reduced diameter, as if the object were a jar with screw-caps on both ends. A heavy wire bail paralleled its length, originating at the caps. Despite its transparency, it was impossible to see through it, since it seemed to be filled with a fluorescent amber gas, pulsing and glowing. Short-lived sparks filled it with effervescence.
"Of obvious alien manufacture," Zatseva remarked, "a rather primitive culture, I would surmise, since this is supposed to be its equivalent of a datafile. In short, we have a letter from a secret admirer, beloved. One is instructed to place a hand upon the bail, and, if wished, another upon whomever one wishes to share the message with. Shall we see what it says?" Unsure, Veronica nevertheless nodded. Taking his daughter's hand, Zatseva reached out and lay his other, palm-down, on the heavy wire handle.
"Yaaaaaaah!" A palpable heat blasted them. Light hammered their bodies like hurricane-born hailstones. Noise threated to tear their being into tatters. Unable to let go of the strange device, Zatseva felt himself convulse in agony. HIs daughter could not let go of his hand. All around them, the dim, cool, paneled study seemed to vanish, replaced in a blinding flash with a dazzling, alien spectacle that filled their helpless minds to overflowing.
"Customary acknowledgment of mutual existence and psychological visibility." It was like being transported into the searing depths of a Hell too bright for eyes to look upon, too hot for bodies to withstand. Only by comparison less excruciating to behold against the overwhelming brilliance of the background was the being speaking to them, a man-sized, multi-armed, soft-bodied mollusk fashioned of fire. The ambient noise was that of the inside of a waterfall, amplified a millionfold, yet the creature's voice stood above it all, each syllable a thunderclap.
"I am a psuedoresponsive communicale, possessing artificial intelligence within limits capable of answering any question that you might wish to ask, once my essential message has been transmitted. My outer envelope is necessitated by extremities existing between your natural environment and that within which I was enfiled. Without it, I would not survive exposure to your surroundings long enough to fulfill my function, nor would you survive exposure to me.
"Your inevitable questions will be: what personage is responsible for my enfilement: what is the nature of the place you experience now with me; why does my enfiler eek communication? He is Larahram, authorized Genius-Questioneer to the Justifiers of the nation-state Ohenedaat, of the Scon---as such might be rendered in terms meaningful to you---a sapience as yet unknown to your species. It is the voice-analog and physical aspect of Larahram you now experience. Genius-Questioneer Larahram has caused me to be enfiled in what would appear to you the central region of a medium-yellow sun, not unlike the primary of the stellar complex you inhabit. My first purpose is to convey knowledge of the existence of the Scon. My second is to propose a transaction of potential mutual benefit.
"It is vital that you understand how the concept of your environment---the frozen surface of a gobbet forever circling beyond reasonable light and warmth---is as forbidding to my enfiler as that of the Scon springing into existence, evolving to self-awareness, and creating a culture inside the heart of a star must be to you. Ritual formula of request: permit me to convey how forbidding. Until recent times, the Scon were cognizant of 3 phases in which matter manifests itself---plasma, gas, and liquid---the lattermost of which was contemplated only by Genius-Questioneers authorized in scientific speculation. That a fourth phase might exist was not suspected, but something they learned----to their astonishment---when, by accident, they established contact with beings like yourself during a series of experiments.
"Among those values gained from this contact was a heretofore unsuspected fact of the existence of environments---other suns---suitable for settlement and exploitation by the Scon, of structures analogous to the nation-state of Ohenedaat, and of concepts among beings like yourself analogous to trade. Following consideration, it was agreed among the Ordinators to pursue this possibility, that the appropriate structure to interact with towards this end was the imperium-conglomerate known as the Cosmopolity of Romanova, that the optimal being to approach was an Ordinator-analog known as Black Usurper Aidos Zaytseva, Second of Boshia, Oligarch-Administrative to Premier Murad IIXI, Oligarch-Interventonary and -Pro Tempe of Genrich....176Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmKP2y8dJHY
"What the Scon desire is transport and title to an unlimited number of stellar habitats within the Cosmopolity and any territory falling within its influence. Sconese occupation will in no manner alter the function these stars perform for beings of your kind. In return, the Scon offer Black Usurper Aidos Zaytseva technical means of reducing every sapient being within the Cosmopolity to a state of absolute, unquestioning obedience to his will."176Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWTdSb7rswo
176Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡi8StNqZZDL
