by Dave Duncan
“You like it, Your Highness?” the director inquired, somehow managing to make the simple question condescending.
“Very much. Not Earth, though. That’s a stable beach profile. I’m too young to remember those.”
Alya thought she had won that round.
She took a chair next to Jathro but did not move it close to his. She had no intention of letting Hubbard Agnes intimidate her. Well, not much, anyway. She tried not to remember that Director Hubbard ate presidents and generals raw.
There were six of them gathered around the big table—Alya herself, and Jathro, and his two political sidekicks from Banzarak, who were staying silent as nonentities should. Moala had been left outside. For the Institute there was only Old Mother Hubbard—but then the door closed behind Dr. Devlin Grant, the King of the Rangers himself.
He bent low to tickle the back of Alya’s hand with his moustache. He smiiiiled at her. He looked her over with much the same analytical, speculative gaze that Cedric had used. In Cedric it had been a curiously innocent and unconscious lechery, and rather flattering. In Devlin it was not innocent, and it made her flesh creep. Compared to Devlin, Jathro was a blushing virgin. Kas had warned her about Devlin.
The door was closed, the meeting brought to order. Bargaining was about to begin. That was Jathro’s problem. There were some preliminary pleasantries: inquiries about Piridinar’s health, and about Kas…
Alya wondered what color would seem best on two meters of mop handle with ochre hair, and how that hair would look if decently styled. Then she saw that Hubbard was addressing her.
“Your brother’s call was not unexpected. We have a feast of Class Two worlds on our hands just now, a surfeit. We have never had so many. The last three years have been sparse, and suddenly we are deluged. The obvious problem is—which one do you want?”
Tiber.
“We are using river names again now. We have eight worlds under scrutiny—Nile through Usk. Grant, would you review them quickly for Her Highness?”
Blue-gray, to match his eyes, Alya decided; those big round Nordic eyes.
Devlin showed teeth from ear to ear. “Delighted! With the exception of Rhine, most of these seem to be short-period bodies. You do understand, Princess, that since both the Earth and the target world are moving, and since certain wave functions must be in phase, our effective access is restricted to the brief repeating periods we call ‘windows’?”
Alya nodded again. Of course, Cedric might look real cute in dark blue, to set off that baby’s-bottom complexion.
“…estimate Rhine at eight days, approximately. That’s why we are anxious for you to take a look at it tonight—last chance for a week. Po is the shortest—it’s lining up at twenty-hour intervals, and the windows are already shrinking. If you choose Po, then you’ll give me serious problems.” Devlin smiiiiled again.
“What Dr. Devlin means,” Hubbard interrupted acidly, “is that we just do not have time to run a thorough check on Po and later transmense a significant number of people there. We believe that three thousand is about the minimum viable plantation.”
Alya shuddered. She was to be responsible for three thousand lives?
“More is better, of course,” Devlin said, keeping his glittery snake eyes on her. “We managed forty thousand for Etna.”
“Omar?” It had been Omar who had gone to Etna, five years before. Happy, laughing Omar! She had never known anyone more stubbornly joyful than Omar—until his call had come. Like her, he had endured a day or two of moping and rising strain, and then he had been gone, and Oh, the hole his passing had left in her life! It had been then, at fourteen, that Alya had first really felt the agony of the buddhi, the first time she had truly understood that one day it would carry her away also.
“Yes,” Hubbard agreed, her blue eyes lancing across the table at Alya. “Prince Omar. We must assume, Your Highness, that he lives on, that the colony prospers. We have no reason to believe otherwise in his case.”
Alya shivered again. “Do you sometimes?”
Hubbard pursed her lips, then spoke cautiously. “Never since your family became involved. In a couple of our early attempts, before we knew all the gruesome tricks that Nature can play—Oak, for example. You have heard of Oak.”
“Cedric’s—your son?”
It was old history—but had Hubbard ever shed tears? “Yes. My son. We were almost at the end of the string. The planting was complete—sixty-five hundred and supplies. Then the lab reports showed excessive concentrations of organic antimony compounds. No one had thought to check for those. Antimony is an element similar to arsenic in its toxic effects.”
After a nasty silence, Alya said, “You could not bring them back?”
“There was no time.” Hubbard was being clinical, as emotionless as stainless steel. Was she testing? “We had two more windows, of a few minutes each. We sent all the relevant information, of course, and what supplies we thought might be effective. Then contact was lost. We have never reestablished contact, with that or any other world. Our probing is basically random, you know.”
She was trying to frighten Alya, or judge her dedication.
“And the antimony would poison them?”
“Unless it was a local problem and they managed to move to some other area free of the contamination. We never have time to explore more than a tiny fraction of a world.”
“But you had time to say goodbye, in effect,” Alya said, wanting to crack the metallic facade. “Why did you not at least rescue your own son and his pair?”
“I tried. Of course I tried! They refused to leave the others.”
There was no feeling there at all, except maybe contempt for stupidity.
“So today, when you reported that eighty-six people have died in the Institute’s explorations—”
“The true number can never be known.” Hubbard Agnes smiled her ghoulish smile. “Other plantings must have failed after we lost contact. It is inevitable. I am surely one of the great mass murderers of history.”
“So you see, Your Highness,” Devlin said in his greasy voice, “how vital it is that we investigate these candidate worlds as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Nile we may discard. It is strictly Class Three, of scientific interest only. Orinoco looks good, very good. I am inclined to think that Po is hopeless—there just is not enough time. Even leaving Po out, we face a severe shortage of equipment and trained personnel.”
“Tiber,” Alya said miserably. “It’s Tiber.” Jathro’s shoe slammed hard against her anklebone, too late.
Devlin and Hubbard glanced at each other.
“You are sure, child?” the director said.
“Certain. I saw the list. That name crawls off the paper at me.”
The old woman nodded in clammy satisfaction. “And your brother called a few hours after we made first contact. Usk came later. Well, that helps. Grant, you had better keep your best for Tiber. But do not neglect the others.”
Devlin leaned back and beamed toothily. “Who knows? We may have hit on two Class One worlds at once?”
“Possible, I suppose.”
“I had better get away to Cainsville as soon as possible, then?” Alya resisted a temptation to push her chair back. “If I am to do whatever it is you want with Rhine in the middle of the night. I’m feeling jet-lagged.”
“I was hoping we might have dinner together. You can go on the ten o’clock lev.” The snow-haired bitch smiled her thin-lipped smile.
Trapped! “I was hoping to travel with Cedric,” Alya admitted.
“Wait, please!” Jathro said angrily. “We have certain arrangements to negotiate yet.”
But Alya had cut the ground from under him by revealing that name.
Dr. Hubbard made a faint shrugging gesture. “The arrangements are fairly standard now, Your Excellency. You choose the first five hundred, and we the next five thousand…We can discuss this again when we know which NSB we shall be colonizing—how long its windows are, how frequent, an
d how stable. What is the Tiber schedule, Grant?”
Devlin had his facts to hand. “We caught a shadow contact on April second. First focused contact at those coordinates came on the fifth. We opened a Class Two file right away and transmensed a robbie. It’s very Earthlike—gravity, oxygen, temperature. In fact, next to Orinoco, it’s the obvious candidate. We expect to meet up with it again tomorrow, around noon.”
“Waxing or waning?” Jathro asked.
“Can’t tell yet.” Devlin favored Alya with another leer. “He means, are the windows growing longer or shorter?”
“I know.” She did not care about any of that. She cared about Tiber, and the thought of seeing it tomorrow was like air to a woman drowning. But mostly—right now, before anything—she wanted to go in search of a certain overgrown adolescent. She wanted to hold his hand. She was crazy. He was leaving on the four o’clock lev.
Jathro was glaring murder at her. Poor Jathro!
“We’ll have every telemetry gadget ready to go,” Devlin promised Agnes, “plus a full overnighting expedition. I’ll rip that planet to shreds for you.”
Dr. Hubbard rose gracefully. It was impossible to believe she was so old. “I expect no less. Thank you all. This meeting can adjourn, but I wish a private word with the princess.”
Two thousand years of royal blood be damned—princess be damned—there was no doubt who ruled here.
“Wait!” Jathro banged a fist on the table. “We must discuss this matter of refugees. Banzarak is a small and a poor country, Director. It has suffered grievously. Yes, many of its citizens have been allowed to emigrate to better worlds—but it has done far more than its share for refugees from other lands. We have almost a million in our camps now. They outnumber the natives! Yes, the Institute has helped generously, but money does not solve everything.”
Hubbard frowned, as though that were heresy.
“It is essential,” Jathro protested, his voice rising, “that the refugee portion of the planting this time be taken from camps in Banzarak. We can no longer—”
“Talk to Dr. Wheatland!” the director snapped, cutting him off without mercy. “I repeat that details can be better discussed when we have more data.”
Jathro tried to protest more, but Devlin’s powerful hand assisted him from his chair. Willing or not, he departed, his two flunkies scurrying after, not having spoken a word. Alya felt like a gnat stuck in a web as she watched the door close, leaving her alone with the all-powerful Hubbard.
The director sat down and stared thoughtfully at that door. “Your friend shows great compassion for refugees,” she murmured.
“He has ambitions,” Alya said.
Hubbard studied her for a moment, and then something like real amusement touched her face, revealing ghosts of excised wrinkles. “Do they include yourself, by any chance?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, really!” Hubbard shook her head in disbelief. “Tell me!”
“He has a big following in the camps,” Alya said glumly. “And in the country. If he can arrange for a large contingent from both—and all others will be fragmented, is this not so? Many groups from many places?”
Hubbard nodded, still amused. “So he will have a working plurality? He thinks that that, plus a royal wife…”
Alya nodded, and found herself returning a smile. “Exactly.”
“I do not think he quite appreciates the problems he will face.”
“Probably not,” Alya said. “He’s smart, but very limited—a child of the slums. He cannot imagine a world that is not confined and bounded. I mean, people don’t live under demagogues from choice, do they?”
In frontier worlds there could be no kings, no tyrants; barely even civic mayors. Anyone trying to seize power would find himself a leader with no followers.
Then Alya realized that she was next item on the agenda. Hubbard was evaluating her, not Jathro. She dropped her eyes and vowed to guard her tongue more carefully.
The carpet under the table showed patches worn by years of feet. The office was unusually austere and frugal for a person as prominent as the director of 4-I.
“Your presence at the news conference today was a surprise to me, Your Highness.”
Not since she was a tiny child being handled by gigantic adults had Alya felt so helpless, so conscious of unlimited power. That dangerous old woman could do whatever she chose—and would. Alya kept her head down and said nothing.
“What provoked your attendance? Intuition?”
Alya nodded.
“And what exactly has my grandson got to do with you?”
“You treated him abominably.” Alya forced herself to meet the basilisk scrutiny.
“Yes, I did. What has that to do with you?”
“I don’t know. But it has.”
Hubbard’s eyes narrowed and she tightened her lips.
“What were you doing?” Alya demanded. “Testing him?”
The old woman breathed a ghost of a laugh. “He hardly ranks a test on the scale of what happened today. Did you understand his remark about seventeen stories?”
Alya shook her head.
“Last night he blundered into danger. Early this morning Dr. Bagshaw rescued him, but in the process he was forced to drop Cedric fifty-five meters out a window. He was strapped inside an armored box at the time, yet that sort of experience could easily turn a man into a gibbering moron. Cedric, I am informed, merely complained that he had not been warned what to expect.”
“Is that what you’re trying to do—turn him into a gibbering moron? Because you made another try at it this afternoon, didn’t you?”
Hubbard’s thin smile mocked Alya’s anger. “In Cedric’s case it would seem to be impossible.”
Time was running out—Alya could feel it. The lev would go without her. But she had to ask. “What do you mean?”
“It is a complex story. May I offer you some refreshment? Coffee? Wine?” The old witch was picking at Alya’s impatience like a hangnail.
“No, thank you.”
“Very well. What I told Cedric was the truth. He was sired by my son on Dickson Rita Vossler. As a zygote, he was removed from his mother’s uterus and frozen. Common enough procedure nowadays, of course. In Cedric’s case, his parents went to Oak, where they almost certainly died. Most of our clients simply vanish, but in John’s case I had already arranged a cover story about a broken string and a lost expedition. We do that for anyone whose absence may be noticed.”
The Banzaraki royal family did the same. Omar had “drowned while fishing.” In a few days or weeks, Kas would find a convenient air crash or hotel fire, and the country would officially mourn Alya.
“So, ironically, John did die—and in what may have been the only sentimental action of my life, I had the embryo thawed out and brought to term in vitro.” Hubbard smiled that razor-thin smile of hers again. “A foolish impulse? You think I felt a debt to my son?”
“I doubt that my opinion is relevant, Director.”
“Or welcome. Anyway, I had Cedric salvaged and reared.”
“Reared in an organage!”
“Don’t jump to conclusions!” Hubbard’s voice cracked like a rifle. “There are a thousand worse places for a child than Meadowdale. It is one of the best foster homes in the country. Some of the children are exactly what they seem—the offspring of prominent persons who cannot otherwise guarantee their safety. They are given a very healthy upbringing, with as much outdoor activity as modern climate permits.”
Alya’s temper sprang up and trampled caution underfoot. “Some are? But most of the inmates are clones, aren’t they? Being raised as meat, as spare parts! And the healthy exercise is designed to produce strong organs for autografts!”
Hubbard dismissed that irrelevancy with a shrug. “Buying organs on the open market is expensive. Rejection is always a danger. So is disease. The children are well looked after.”
“Physically!” Alya shouted. “Looked after physically—fed and exercised
like horses! But their minds are deliberately retarded. You almost won a Nobel Prize, and your grandson probably can’t even read!”
For the first time she had penetrated the ice—Hubbard had felt that thrust, but her voice went quieter, not louder. “His father wrestled livestock. I told you that Cedric was a foolish impulse on my part. I threw out my son’s old underwear; I should have had his genital excretions flushed down the sewer.”
Alya was beyond speech.
Hubbard leaned back in her chair and studied Alya thoughtfully. “This intuition of yours—have you ever heard of GFPP?”
“No.”
“It is a relatively new technique, Genetic Factor Personality Prediction. It seeks to estimate a person’s character by analysis of his genotype.”
“Does it work?”
“Within limits. About three years ago I thought to run it on Cedric’s DNA.”
“And?”
“He scored high on intelligence, and sociability, and several minor factors. He was low on ambition. Very low on aggression.”
Even when Cedric had been angry, he had barely raised his voice. Alya could not imagine him wanting to hurt anyone. “A gentle giant!”
“Sentiment! I am talking science. The truly remarkable feature of his profile was tenacity. There he registered as high as the test results would go.”
“Tenacity?”
“A complex of perseverence, single-mindedness, and stubborness.”
“Courage? Why not say it—‘courage’?”
“Portmanteau term. Can’t be scientifically defined.”
Alya was being provoked to lose her temper. Trouble was, she was going to. “I know what it is, even if you don’t. What about Cedric’s tenacity?”
“I admit I wondered then if I might have wasted a valuable resource.”
God in Heaven! Why can’t she think of him as a person?
Hubbard chuckled soundlessly, as though she had heard that thought. “I said that GFPP has limitations—that is because inheritance is not everything. We are molded by our environment, also. Indeed, the usual estimate is that nature and nurture play a roughly equal role in making us what we are.”
