Regeneration

by Stephanie Saulter

  Eli repeated the story now, several hours after the memorial ceremony out in the estuary, where the boats had clustered in the lee of one of the battery banks Pilan had lived to see built. The words had been said and the tears had been cried and the boats had returned up the river. Gabriel stopped off with Agwé and Lapsa, still settling into their new quarters in Limedog, and Rhys took a weary and aching Callan home; Mikal, Sharon, Aryel, and Eli had come back to the apartment above the café and sat there now with Gaela and Bal, listening to the sounds of the children playing in the garden below which came drifting in through an open window.

  “I do not want to be agreeing with Zavcka Klist,” Mikal declared from his seat deep in an old and frighteningly comfortable armchair. “I’ve had to do a lot of unpleasant things in my life, but I’m struggling with that one.”

  “I’m tempted to say it’s not her fault that she’s right,” Eli replied. “I won’t,” he added, as they all looked at him.

  “It’s instructive,” Aryel murmured, “to know what Zavcka’s strategy would have been. We were lucky, in the end, that she wasn’t behind this.”

  “I suppose,” said Sharon. “She’s cold, that one. Did she even pretend to regret that Pilan lost his life, while she was busy critiquing Mitford’s tactics?”

  “She’s not as cold as she was,” Eli told them. “She wanted to know if Eve knew the man who died, if he’d been a friend whose death would affect her. I told her that yes, he’d been a friend of the family and her brother’s boss, and his death was being felt very keenly. There didn’t seem any point pretending otherwise.”

  He hesitated for a long time, but Mikal knew his friend well and knew that he wasn’t done. He sat up, expectant, as Eli pulled a small, flat package wrapped in delicate, pale gold paper out of the slide-pocket where it must have rested next to his tablet. He held it carefully, as if he was not sure how to continue.

  Aryel put an encouraging hand on his knee.

  “She said she was sorry, then,” Eli said. “And she gave me something.”

  They had been in her book-lined study once more, sipping the exquisite coffee Marcus had served and talking, although the subject this time was current events rather than history. Eli had hoped for this, despite knowing that questions about Eve would inevitably be part of the price. He was braced for a diatribe that did not come, although he decided later that Zavcka was most likely saving it up for Aryel.

  Instead, she had looked at him over the rim of her cup: quiet, reflective. “So,” she said, “you’re Uncle Eli.”

  “I . . .” She would have heard and seen, there on the riverwalk. She had heard and seen Eve with all of them. “Yes, I’m Uncle Eli.”

  She did not look angry, or sad, or happy. She was just waiting, so he added, “I don’t think I’m her favorite, if it makes you feel any better.”

  She waved that away as a matter of no moment, put her cup down, and said without rancor, “No, I would guess that’s most likely Uncle Mikal, although I think she’s very fond of you too. And Rhys of course, and Callan.”

  He had said nothing, just watched her.

  “And her Aunts Sharon and Aryel,” she had murmured, and there, finally, was a touch of the bitterness he’d been expecting, along with something else: the lingering amazement of someone who has witnessed a marvel and was still coming to terms with it. “And is it Aunty Gwen as well?”

  “When she’s around, which isn’t that often.”

  “I see,” she said, and asked about Pilan, and he told her.

  “So he wasn’t one of the uncles. A friend, but not . . . one of the family.”

  “No. I mean,” Eli said, thinking he had to explain, thinking too that even now he must be careful not to explain too much, “she knows we’re not her biological family.”

  “That hardly matters, Dr. Walker, as I think you understand very well.” Zavcka got up and walked over to the books, arms folded as they had been the first time he’d seen her stand there, although the attitude was different now: less calculated, less concerned with his presence. Her head was bowed in contemplation of something resting on the shelf. Then she picked it up in a rustle of wheat-colored tissue paper and came back to stand next to him.

  “This is very, very old,” she said. “When I was born it was already almost as old as I am now.”

  She handed the book in its wrapping to him and he gasped. It was a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, with a brightly illustrated cover: the toy abandoned in the garden, bright button eyes peeping out from beneath a riot of pink and blue and yellow flowers and clumps of vivid green grass.

  “It’s for Eve,” Zavcka said, standing now at the window that overlooked the elegant park with its bare-branched trees. “Read it first, go through it. Check to make sure I haven’t tagged it somehow, or changed the text or anything. I haven’t, but you’ll want to make sure. Gaela will be able to tell. And Eve . . . She doesn’t need to know who it’s from. Make up whatever story you want.”

  “Ms. Klist,” he said, awestruck at the ancient, beautiful thing that he held. “Zavcka. This is priceless.”

  “So is she,” she said, and then, gazing out the window, “I never understood why I liked it. I love that story, but I never knew why.”

  “Because it touches on immortality?”

  Her face when she turned from the window to look back at him was like nothing he could describe.

  “But that’s not what it’s about, is it? I read it again last night. That’s not what it’s about at all.”

  “Eve won’t understand,” he said. “She’s eight years old. She’s not you. Whatever it is you hope she’ll grasp from this, she won’t.”

  “Not now. Not for a long while, and maybe not ever. But time is a funny thing, Dr. Walker. It turns everything over in the end.”

  Now he reached over and handed the book to Gaela. “I’ve checked it,” he told her and Bal. “I checked the text against archives of the original, I verified the edition with the university library, I had them run a spectrometer over it to make sure there was no hidden text or other tampering. I didn’t want you to have to be the one to find it if she’d done anything, hidden anything. It’s clean. The library was desperate to keep it.”

  “What’s she up to?” Bal asked, gently turning the pages. “Does she really expect us to give this to Eve? What are you thinking?” he asked Gaela.

  “I’m thinking that it’s beautiful,” she said softly. “And I’m also wondering what she’s trying to do.”

  “If I had to guess,” said Eli, “I’d say she mostly just wants to give Eve a present.” Four pairs of eyes turned to him in disbelief. “I know,” he went on, “I know how unlikely that sounds. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it is some kind of gambit. But I honestly don’t think so. It’s not subtle enough to be one of her schemes, and there was something about her when she handed it to me—” He stopped, remembering. “I’d never seen her like that before.”

  “Aryel,” asked Gaela, still leafing through the pages of the old storybook, “do you think we should do it? Give this to Eve?”

  “I think you should read it first, and judge it on its own merits,” Aryel replied. “The book is not at fault for the person who owned it. As for what she’s up to, I’ll tell you what I think tomorrow.”

  The next day Aryel Morningstar flew west, and alighted on the roof of an elegant townhouse situated in an exclusive garden square in the most expensive part of the city. Marcus met her up there in the cold sunshine and conducted her down to the apartment, into the presence of Zavcka Klist.

  “Thank you for coming,” Zavcka said, her voice even but brittle.

  “I told you,” Aryel replied, “that I would if you asked.”

  “You also told me that Eve was safe.”

  Aryel regarded her steadily for a moment. They were in the study that Eli had described, with its walls of books, the low tables and comfortable chairs, Zavcka’s work console on which she had been studying something when Aryel entered, the high windo
w looking out onto the street and the square. It was a deeply personal space, neither austere nor intimidatingly lavish, the casual wealth no more calculated for effect than were Aryel’s wings. This was, Aryel thought, the place where Zavcka was most purely herself. And the self she was being now was concerned, but not angry; upset, but not defeated; querying, because she was puzzled. There was something Zavcka wanted, but first there was something she wanted to understand.

  “We believed she was,” Aryel said. “The threat didn’t come from the direction we thought most likely. But we’ve always known there was a risk that someone, somewhere, would work out her link with you.”

  “They only worked it out because she was visible to them. You could have almost completely eliminated that risk. You could have put her in a private school, or had her home-tutored, like I was. You could have made sure she was never allowed at a public event, let alone on the street. You could have kept her completely out of sight, unreachable.” She waited for a reaction. Aryel did not give her one. “It’s one thing to have kept her kidnapping and my involvement off the streams, but have you changed any of the things that made her vulnerable in the first place?”

  “No,” Aryel said. “Eve’s life continues as it was.”

  “Why? It’s not as though you don’t care for her, beyond whatever value you think she might have as an asset. I saw that: all of you charging in, all those aunts and uncles. Gabriel, her brother. Gaela and Bal, her Mama and Papa: they’re not just playing those roles. They adore her. They were sick with fear—I saw it. The look on Gabriel’s face when she went to him, when he picked her up—”

  Zavcka blinked and gave her head a tiny shake, as though she still could not quite believe what she’d witnessed. “You weren’t faking, none of you. I’ve had a hundred and twenty-odd years of dealing with sycophants and believe me, I can tell. So why are you letting her lead the kind of life where something like that can happen?”

  Aryel seated herself, uninvited, on one of the low-backed chairs. “You’ve just answered your own question, Zavcka,” she said steadily. “Eve is not an asset, not remotely. If I were ever to think of her in those terms, I’d be more likely to conclude that she’s a liability. But I don’t, and I never will—none of us ever will. She lives the life she does, with all its risks and exposures, for the simple reason that her parents and her brother—and her aunts and uncles—love her dearly. We care for her far, far too much to let her have the childhood that you did.” She caught Zavcka’s eyes and held them. “That is the risk we will not run, and I think you already knew that. So why are you asking me these questions?”

  She was half expecting an explosion, had chosen her words deliberately to provoke. Zavcka remained still and silent for a long moment, dark eyes burning with some emotion that was neither fury nor outrage. She sank into her own chair, the inner turmoil flaring finally into the briefest of outbursts, a note not of anger but of anguish; the cry of one trying to convince herself.

  “I haven’t—” She stopped, and now she looked trapped behind those eyes; hunted. She closed them and breathed deeply. Her hands twitched, but remained steady.

  When she spoke again, her voice held just the faintest hint of a tremor. She sounded like someone who has committed herself to a course she knows will be painful, but necessary.

  “Because I wanted confirmation,” she said. “I wanted to see if you would make excuses, or try to convince me she’s unimportant to you. I didn’t think you would, but I wanted to be certain.”

  “And now that you are?”

  “Now that I am, I have a proposition for you. A business proposition.” A shadow of Zavcka’s usual hauteur drifted back, as though she was moving onto surer ground.

  Aryel felt a jolt of surprise, and caution. “Really? The last one didn’t work out that well,” she said acidly.

  Zavcka smiled. “I’d say it worked extremely well, for you and the people who, as you put it, you represent.” She indicated the screen. “I’ve been looking into Bel’Natur’s finances, and the current corporate structure. That idiot Crawford got me access. It’s been enlightening.”

  “I’m glad you think so. Is this where you tell me what you’ve been up to?”

  “Nothing as terrible as you probably imagine. Stress-testing, mostly. I wanted to see how this new hierarchy—or nonhierarchy—would stand up.”

  “You must be disappointed,” Aryel said evenly. “There are some very good people there now. They don’t get pushed over easily.”

  “I can see that, and no, I’m not disappointed, not in the least. I was ready to be annoyed about it a couple of weeks ago, but under the current circumstances it’s helped me come to a decision.”

  Zavcka looked at Aryel and smiled again: an anticipatory smile, the smile of someone who is about to say something shocking and is looking forward to the reaction. “I want you to become my business partner, and my executor.”

  Aryel stared at her, thinking she could not possibly have heard correctly. Zavcka’s knowing smile told her she had.

  “That’s impossible,” she said, and then, “Why?”

  “Partly because of this.” Zavcka flicked at the tablet screen, scrolling with an elegant finger. “The way you set up the endowment from Bel’Natur to fund reproductive gemtech.”

  The customary disdain in her voice was merely a top note now to her amusement at Aryel’s discomfiture. But there was something deeper in it as well, something that sounded very much like admiration. “The way the payment schedule maximizes income from the compensation we agreed for Herran is one of the cleverest things I’ve seen. It must give the accountants nightmares, but it’s all legal so they can’t complain. The governance structure is so transparent, I’ll bet hardly anyone’s noticed how completely sewn up the process is. What you negotiated with me was a contract that would last only for as long as we owed you money. I failed to grasp that you could translate it into an arrangement in perpetuity, especially if Herran continued to work on the development of psionic-interface technology. I also didn’t foresee that you could leverage that into an ongoing presence within Bel’Natur, in the name of protecting the assets you hold in trust.”

  She pushed the console aside, shaking her head ruefully at the screen as though it was to it that she was speaking. “You’ve got no shareholding, no seat on the board, yet you have managed not only to materially affect the direction and structure of the company but to take out a chunk of its profits. Amazing.” She looked Aryel full in the face. “I couldn’t have done any better, not even when I was at the top of my game. Then there’s your contribution to the company’s overall resilience, which I suspect is considerable. In fact, my guess is that you had a word with the executives after you came to see me in prison. Am I right?”

  Aryel nodded silently.

  “Thought so. To say nothing of Bel’Natur’s new reputation as an upstanding corporate citizen, which appears to be exemplary. That’s astonishing, considering the gutter I left it in eight years ago; the recovery should have taken twice as long. That’s real talent. It’s what I want for my own affairs.”

  “You haven’t answered me, Zavcka.” Aryel heard the stridency in her own voice now and forced it down. “Why?”

  “For Eve,” Zavcka said. “I want everything that I have to be placed in trust for her. I want to retain only enough for my own needs. I want to start to structure it now.”

  “You want her to have everything?” Aryel asked, disbelieving.

  “Yes.”

  “You know that she’s not you, and she’s not going to be you. Her mind is her own.”

  “I know that. I can see that. I have no designs on her.”

  “Why do you need me? You could do this yourself: set it up, name her as the beneficiary.”

  “I could, but then how would I convince you—or the world—that I’m not pursuing some strategy of which she is to be the eventual victim? It’s one thing to have you working against me when our aims are opposed, Aryel, but it would be r
idiculous when we both want the same thing. We both want what’s best for Eve.”

  “Why do you think having your fortune is what’s best for her?”

  That knocked her back a bit. For all her years in business, Zavcka had no experience, Aryel thought, when it came to questioning the value of money.

  “What am I going to do with it?” she said finally. “Despite what those idiots in the Klist Club think, I’m not going to live forever. I have no children, nor any other family.” She rubbed her fingers together meditatively, looking at them as she spoke. “I’m aging, Aryel. I may not look it, yet, but I feel it. My extended middle age is coming to an end.”

  “You once had ambitions of extending it even further,” Aryel said, watching her narrowly.

  “Once I did. I no longer do, but how many people are going to believe that?”

  “Not very many,” Aryel said, beginning to understand. “Unless I’m involved.”

  “Exactly.” Zavcka tilted her head, looking up and to the side. It was a gesture so like Eve’s when she was trying to explain something difficult that Aryel’s breath caught in her chest.

  “You once accused me of a lack of integrity,” Zavcka went on, “and at the time you were probably right. Times have changed, but it’s too late for me. I am tainted, irrevocably, and that is not a legacy I wish to pass on. I do not want Eve subjected to the whispers, the suspicion that I’ve pulled another fast one, the fear that she’s me come again. Let her make her own choices, her own mistakes. I don’t want her carrying mine.”