A tap on the door interrupted her uneasy thoughts. Her carryon? "Come in," she said. The door opened, and Barin stood there looking sheepish.
"May I?" he asked. Esmay nodded; he entered, shutting the door behind him, and pulled her up from the chair. She stiffened for a moment, then relaxed against him.
"Your family—" she began.
"I'm sorry. It wasn't my idea, but it is my family. They're . . . headstrong."
"And you aren't?" She wasn't ready to think it was funny; she wanted to indulge her annoyance—such justified annoyance—a little longer, but suddenly her sense of humor kicked in. She could just imagine Barin, having planned this quiet little retreat, being maneuvered by his powerful and numerous family. She stifled the giggle that tried to come out.
"Not headstrong enough," Barin said, with a rueful grin. "I tried to tell them to let us alone, but you see how well I did."
Esmay lost control of the giggle; she could feel it vibrating in her throat and then it was out.
"You aren't angry?" he asked hopefully.
"Not at you, anyway," Esmay said. "I suppose a quiet few days alone was too much to hope for."
"I didn't think so," Barin said. "You would think the entire universe was playing tricks on us—"
"Ummm . . . I've read that lovers always put themselves in the center of everything."
"I'd like to put us in the center of a bed, a long way from everywhere else," Barin said, with a hint of a growl.
"We'll get there," Esmay said. Her arms tightened around him; he felt as good as ever, and she wanted to melt right into him until their bones chimed together.
Someone knocked on the door. "Barin, if you don't let her get dressed, we'll never get to dinner—" A female voice, one she hadn't met yet.
"Oh, shut up," muttered Barin in Esmay's ear. "Why wasn't I born an orphan?"
"It would have been too simple," Esmay said. "Let me go—I want to change. And are we eating up here, or in public?" Not that the entire Serrano family wasn't public enough.
"Here. It's coming up." He let go, went to the door, and opened it. There stood a woman in her thirties, about Esmay's size, with the Serrano features.
"Esmay, I'm Dolcent. Barin—go away, I need to talk to her for a moment."
"I hate you," Barin said, but he left. Dolcent grinned.
"Listen—I gather you were expecting a quiet evening of entertainment and you have only one carryon. If I were in that situation, I'd have brought only the clothes I meant to wear, which weren't exactly family-meeting ones . . . so may I offer you something?"
Annoyance returned, a wave of it—who did they think they were?—but then she remembered the contents of her carryon. Clothes for a casual day or so with her fiance, one nice dress to meet the parents . . . blast the woman, she was right.
"Thank you," Esmay said, as graciously as she could while swallowing another lump of resentment.
"I wouldn't like having to borrow clothes, but there are times—look—"
She had to admit that Dolcent's offerings were better than anything she'd brought, and Dolcent's blue tunic over her own casual slacks met both requirements. Esmay thanked her.
"Never mind. I'll raid your wardrobe someday. If you make my little brother happy, that is."
"Otherwise you'll blow it up, eh?"
"Something like that," Dolcent said. "Or if you call me Dolly . . . just a warning." She grinned.
Dinner was less formal than she'd feared; the hotel staff brought in a buffet and left it, and people served themselves from it, sitting wherever they fancied. Esmay had a corner of a big puffy sofa with a table at her elbow, and Dolcent beside her, offering explanations. A man's voice emerged from the general babble.
"And I told him that technology wasn't mature enough, but he's determined—"
"Iones—a distant uncle. In material research; you just missed him when you were on Koskiusko," Dolcent said. "He's a terrible bore, but what he knows he really knows."
Then a woman, close enough to see. "—and if she ever takes that tone to me again, I'll rip the brass right off her—"
"And that's Bindi—never mind her; she's not as bad as she sounds."
A shrimp came flying through the air with deadly accuracy, to bounce off Dolcent's head. "Am I not, you miserable eavesdropper?"
Calmly, Dolcent picked up the shrimp and ate it. "No, you're not. Nor am I an eavesdropper, when you're talking loud enough to be heard three rooms away."
Bindi shrugged and turned away.
"Is it always like this?" Esmay asked.
"Usually worse. But I'll be accused of dire things if I try to explain Serrano family politics. You come from a large family yourself, right? You should know."
"Ummm . . ." There was, after all, some of the same flavor in the interactions. The loud ones, staking out their space and their areas of power; the quiet ones in the corners, raising a sardonic eyebrow now and then. Bindi would be an Aunt Sanni; Barin's mother, like her stepmother, seemed to be a quiet peacemaker.
Heris Serrano pulled up a chair to the other side of the end table, and sat down, and put her plate beside Esmay's. Esmay had never thought of Commander Serrano wearing anything but a uniform, but . . . here she was in silvery-green patterned silk, a loose tunic over flowing slacks.
"Esmay—I don't know if you remember me—"
"Yes, si—Commander—"
"Heris, please. This room's so full of rank otherwise, we can hardly talk to each other. I don't think I've seen you face to face to thank you for saving our skins at Xavier—and not just ours—"
"Heris, not during dinner—I know you're going to talk tactics to her sometime, but not now." Dolcent pointed with a crab leg, a gesture that would have been a deadly insult on Altiplano. "She's going to be married; you could at least choose a more suitable topic."
"And you'd talk clothes to her, 'Centa? Or flowers, or which way to fold the napkins at the reception?"
"Better than old battles during dinner." Dolcent didn't seem perturbed by Heris's intensity; Esmay watched with interest.
"Picked out a wedding outfit yet, Esmay?" Heris asked, with too much sugar in her voice.
"No, s—Heris. Brun says she's taking care of it."
"Dear . . . me. How did that happen?"
"She just . . ." Esmay waved her hands helplessly. "She found out I had no ideas, and then the next thing I knew she was sending me fabric samples and talking about designers."
"She is something, isn't she?" Heris chuckled. "You should have seen her years back, when she was really wild. If you're not careful, she'll organize the whole wedding."
Esmay was feeling reasonably relaxed and almost full when she saw Admiral Vida Serrano coming toward her, with an expression far less friendly than those around her. Like almost all the others, she wore civilian clothes, but that failed to disguise her nature. Esmay tried to get up, but the admiral waved her back.
"There's something you must know," Admiral Serrano said. "I haven't told the others because it didn't seem fair to tell them behind your back. It's not widely known—in fact, it's been safely buried for centuries. But since those idiots in Medical sent most of the flag officers off on indefinite inactive status, several of us decided to clean up the Serrano archives, and transfer them onto more modern data storage media."
"Yes, sir?" She would call Heris by her first name if she insisted, but she wasn't going to call the admiral anything but "sir," whether or not she was in uniform.
"You know the official history of the Regular Space Service—how it is an amalgam of the private spacegoing militias of the founding Families?"
"Yes . . ."
"What you may not know is that despite the effort made to eradicate the memory of which Fleet family once served which Family, these realities still influence Fleet policy. Perhaps more than they should. The Serrano legacy—to the extent that we have one—consists in the peculiar fact of our origin."
A long pause, during which Esmay tried to guess whi
ch of the great families had once had the Serranos as no-doubt-difficult bodyguards.
"Our Family was destroyed," the admiral said finally. "We were the spacegoing militia; we were, at the time of the political cataclysm that wiped out our employers, far away guarding their ships. After that, we could not go back—for obvious reasons—and when the Regular Space Service was organized some thirty T-years later, most of our family petitioned to be enrolled. We were considered, by some, safer . . . because we were unaligned."
Esmay could think of nothing to say.
"This much is well-known, at least to most of the senior members of Fleet, and it's been at the root of some resentment of the Serrano influence. Every generation or so, some smart aleck from another Fleet family tries to suggest that we were part of the rebellion against our Family, and then we have to respond. If we're lucky, it's handled at the senior level, but a couple of hundred years back, we and the Barringtons lost two jigs in a duel."
Admiral Serrano cleared her throat. Esmay noticed that the room had grown quieter; the others had come nearer, and were listening.
"The Family we served was based on a single planet—many Families were, in those days. And that planet . . ." She paused again; and Esmay felt a chill down her back. It could not be. "That planet, Esmay, was Altiplano. Your world."
She wanted to say Are you sure? but she knew that Admiral Serrano would not have said it if it hadn't been verifiable.
"That much the Serranos know—we all know—and there were some who argued against you on those grounds. I didn't; I felt that you'd make my grandson a fine partner, and I said so."
There were murmurs from the others. Esmay looked at Barin, trying to read his face, but she couldn't.
Vida Serrano went on. "There's more, and I think I may be the first person to see this for centuries. I was down in the family archives, bored enough to look at a row of children's books written by some very untalented ancestor, when I found it." She held up a dingy brown book. "I don't think it's a children's book; I think it's someone's private journal, or part of it. The conservators think it dates from the time of the events it describes, or closely after, and the pictures it had were pasted-in flatpics. The conservators couldn't find anything in the vid archives corresponding, and with maximal image-boosting, this is the best we could get . . ."
She slipped a package of flatpics out of the book, and opened it. The images were still blurry, but Esmay caught her breath. Altiplano . . . she could not mistake that pair of mountain peaks. And the building—the old part of the Landsmen's Guildhall, as shown in the oldest pictures she had seen in her history classes.
"You recognize it?" Vida asked Esmay.
"Yes . . . the mountains are the Dragon's Teeth—" And below them, an ancient bunker . . . she didn't want to think about that now. "And the building looks like the Landsmen's Guildhall the way it was before they added onto it in my great-grandfather's time."
"I thought as much. Behind one of the flatpics, hidden by it, I found this." She held up a piece of paper that didn't look old enough. "This isn't the original, of course—that's back home, with the conservators humming over it. This is a copy. And, Esmay Suiza, it makes clear that your ancestors earned the enmity of mine, by rebelling against their patrons and slaughtering them all."
"What?"
"Your ancestors led the rebellion, Esmay. They massacred the family we were sworn to protect."
Esmay stared. "How can you know that? If no one survived—"
"Listen: Against these our oath is laid: the sons of Simon Escandon, and the sons of Barios Suiza and the sons of Mario Vicarios, for it is they who led the rebellions against our Patron. Against their sons, and their sons' sons, to the most distant generation. May their Landbrides be barren, and their priests burn in hell, for they murdered their lawful lord and all his family, man and wife, father and mother, brother and sister, to the youngest suckling child. There is blood between their children and our children, until the stars die and the heavens fall. Signed: Miguel Serrano, Erenzia Serrano, Domingues Serrano."
Silence held the room; Esmay could scarcely breathe, and cold pierced her. She glanced around; the faces that had been welcoming an hour before had closed against her, stone-hard, the dark eyes cold. All but Barin, who looked stunned, but not yet rejecting.
"I never heard this," she said finally.
"I don't suppose they would brag about it," Vida said. "What story did you hear?"
Story. She was already sure that anything Esmay said would be a story, would be false. "In our history . . . there was a war, but also a plague, and a third of the population died of that, including the Founders."
"Is that what you call the Family?"
"Yes . . . I suppose, though I never knew there was one great family. I'd always thought of them as many families."
"You never heard the name Garcia-Macdonald?"
"No. Neither name."
"Ah. I've no doubt the rebels destroyed all evidence. There was nothing to show against them when Altiplano joined the Familias Regnant three hundred years later. All we could do was watch—and we did not then know which of the people on Altiplano had been involved. By then the Regular Space Service had formed around us."
"Was that the family? Garcia-Macdonald?"
"Yes. A family Serranos had served beside as far back as the wet-navy days of Old Earth. Tell me about this war, as you heard it."
"The Lifehearts and the Old Believers," Esmay said, dredging up what she remembered of those childhood lessons. "Um . . . the Founders wanted to bring in more colonists, free-birthers and Tamidians, to work the mines and develop the land. There had been a charter—a compact, they called it—promising to settle Altiplano only with those acceptable to those already in place. The Old Believers objected to the number of Tamidians the Founders wanted to import—they knew that they'd be outnumbered in two or three generations because of the free-birth policies. And the Lifehearts wanted development to proceed with due regard for the underlying ecosystem. But the Founders wanted a quick profit—they brought in shiploads of Tamidians, and the Tamidians brought diseases alien to the Altiplanans—diseases they were immune to, genetically."
It came back to her now—the accusations and counteraccusations. Infant mortality soared among the Altiplanans, as the diseases spread into an unprotected population; they would be outnumbered in decades, not generations. The Tamidians had mocked their beliefs, throwing down shrines and trampling the icons into dust. The Founders had moved people off the open land, herding them into cities, where they sickened faster. Her great-grandmother had told her about the Death Year, when no Altiplanan baby had survived a week past birth, and about the Landbride who had called a curse on the unbelievers, at the cost of her own soul.
"For Landbrides do not curse: they bless. But she was taken from her land, and her children had died, and she escaped from the city to the mountains, and there with blood and spit and the hair of her head she made a gieeim, and offered her soul to the land if it would destroy the invaders.
"I don't know what she actually did," Esmay said. "My great-grandmother never told me, if she even knew. In her view, the hubris of the Founders angered God and brought a just punishment upon them. But a plague came out of the mountains and the plains, and up from the sea, and in the first year the Tamidians died as our children had died, spewing blood and rotting as they fell. It was said that they begged the Founders to let them leave, but the Founders brought in more, until the cities stank of death, and the Founders themselves sickened."
"A bio-weapon?" someone said, behind the admiral.
Esmay shook her head. "No—at least, nothing I know of, and Altiplanans do not use bio-weapons today. But when the Altiplanans wanted to leave the cities, and go back to the land, the Founders denied them, and then there was war . . . but not to massacre them all, only to get back to the land from which they had been driven."
"That's not the report we have," Admiral Serrano said. "That's not what this says." She
fluttered the paper.
"It's all I know," Esmay said. "Are you sure your report is reliable?"
"Why wouldn't it be? A servant . . . someone . . . escapes—"
"How? To what?"
"Atmospheric shuttle, to the orbital station. Unfortunately, he carried the disease with him, and it infected the station crew. Only three of them lived, but they passed it on . . ."
"I don't believe it!" Barin reached for Esmay's hand. "How can you believe a little scrap of paper stuck in a child's book—"
The Serrano Succession Page 37
