Win

by Vera Nazarian

  Just a few light-filled moments more. . . .

  Over dea meal, served to us in the living room that has the best panoramic view of the city, Aeson tells me the story of Anu.

  “Years before the emergence of that grim state of affairs that shall go unnamed,” he says, choosing his words carefully in the presence of the servants, “when I was fresh out of Fleet Cadet School and still wearing the Blue armband, one of my first junior officer assignments was to supervise a new talent recruitment program—an Imperial initiative to enrich the Fleet applicant pool. The program involved administering intelligence and achievement tests throughout the general population of Atlantida, especially among the less educated.”

  Aeson pauses, as he picks up a glass of qvaali, refilled by a servant. “The tests were given in remote villages, small inland outposts, various coastal areas where the residents live for generations off the land and ocean, basically in their own self-sustaining communities, and don’t have much interaction with the rest of modern society.”

  I listen with curiosity.

  “These people, Gwen—many of them have no access to high-end technology or medical care, or any other resources that we in the major urban centers such as Poseidon take for granted. They are born poor, and live rough lives. They work relentlessly, and have little opportunity for anything else except survival and day-to-day subsistence in their small insular communities. But they are very bright, clever, and handy, and they also have unique skills that we don’t even know about.” He pauses, with a serious expression in his eyes.

  “I see.”

  “So the intelligence tests, carefully structured to compensate for illiteracy, were supposed to uncover aptitudes for various tasks, such as critical thinking, logic, and creativity,” he continues. “My assignment was to follow up and investigate the flagged test results—to verify, confirm, and then recruit the most talented individuals, the ones who showed unusual promise. I had to travel up and down the small villages along the Agnios Coast and beyond, throughout the various inland provinces of the Nacarat Plateau, the forestlands, anywhere and everywhere my Father sent me and my fellow officers assigned to this program. We were supposed to interview these special candidates for recruitment, and to make placement decisions.”

  “Wow, I can see how this would be very interesting,” I say, sipping from my own glass.

  Aeson smiles. “Yes, it was fascinating for me. And it was a chance to learn more about the ordinary people whose Imperator I am eventually going to be. . . . And so, there I was, doing the coastal rounds up north along the western coast, somewhere far beyond the better known Agnios Coast and well into the less desirable coastline—the area that gets buffeted by the turbulent Nehehatlan Ocean along that side of the continent. The coastland is rocky and mostly barren, and the people who live there have little access to land-grown plants, fruits and vegetables, so they consume fish and other things from the ocean. It’s their main food staple, unlike those of us in the more developed areas who rely on the healthier and more viable plant proteins. . . .”

  I nod, recalling some of my Atlantean Culture classes, as Aeson reminds me of this local exception to the Atlantean mostly vegetarian diet.

  “So my next test-flagged candidate was somewhere in the tiny fishing village Nifa, with a population of less than forty people, basically five families. According to the test, someone there scored incredibly high on the math and tech aptitude portions, and my task was to find him—supposedly a young boy, close to my own age.”

  Aeson’s smile grows, as he continues, remembering. “And so I took a small shuttle, with my sole assistant Pheret Aduo, who was at the time my very first, newly selected, young Imperial Aide, and we arrived at Nifa. We landed on a foggy morning in the middle of the village, scaring a herd of small semi-naked children with pale pink skin and bright fire-colored hair, who abandoned their nets and ran back to their shacks, screaming at the top of their voices. Soon, a few adults came out, dressed in weather-beaten rags, with similar reddened pale white skin, and most of them with bright orange-red hair. They glared at us with wary hostility.”

  He pauses, shaking his head at the memory. “I told Pheret to go back to the shuttle and wait. Then I asked to see their elder, since supposedly he or she knew to expect us, and had been the one responsible for administering the test. Eventually they found the old woman elder and she took me to the back of the village, to the poorest, most pitiful looking shack made of a few piled rocks, wood thatch and reeds, with walls so threadbare that they were nearly see-through. The interior of the shack was basically one big room with a roof, with fishing nets hanging everywhere. . . .”

  “Wow,” I say.

  “Inside was a family dressed in rags, gathered around a wooden table and a large barrel of fish that were being cleaned and scaled, then laid out in piles on the table surface. . . . On the floor stood buckets of fish slop. Gwen, you would not believe the smell! The mother and the father were arguing loudly, and their five children of varying ages around the table screamed happily at each other and at their parents. They all went silent for a moment seeing me, and the village elder introduced me and said this was the Vei family.”

  “Aha!” I begin to grin.

  “The man nodded to me and mumbled something in a thick regional accent I could barely understand. His wife frowned at him and suddenly lashed out and struck him across his face with the nearest large fish, for silence. She then turned to me calmly, as though nothing happened, and said something like ‘welcome’ and they were ‘glad to see the Imperial Prince and his big flying fish,’ in other words, my shuttle. . . . At that point one of the younger boys began to speak. But before he could finish, his father grabbed an even bigger fish and struck the boy on the head with it. The moment he did that, his wife turned around and struck her husband once more, in reproach for interrupting. The man yelled at her and hit the woman back, across her own face with a side of fish, splattering her and everyone with a whole lot of fish guts. Then a girl wailed, and she got hit with a fish also, by one of her brothers—I think it was Anu—who yelled at her to shut up. The rest of the boys joined in, and started throwing fish guts. Someone got hit in the eye, and howled in pain. That’s when the whole family began pummeling each other with fish parts and screaming at the top of their lungs for the others to be quiet. I mean, everyone was hitting each other on the head with the fish they were working on—it was unbelievable! And the parents were the worst! At some point even the village elder was accidentally hit, and she took up a fish filet and went at it with the rest of them—”

  “Oh my lord!” I giggle.

  Aeson is chuckling as he continues. “And so I backed away very quietly and exited the Vei residence, and went outside, from the back of their hut. And there I had a laughing fit. I laughed and laughed, until I could not breathe, and some kind of mangy domesticated animal came up to me, sniffed me without fear, and then peed against the wall of the hut, at which point I laughed again, and could not stop for at least a few minutes.”

  Aeson stops because he is now laughing hard, and so am I.

  “So what happened next?” I say, barely able to gasp. But somehow—in that same moment of hilarity—I find that I’m oddly distracted from the story by the storyteller himself. In fact, I am pleasingly captivated, maybe even enraptured by the sight of Aeson laughing so easily. . . . The way his mask of composure falls and his lean face relaxes into such sweet, lighthearted innocence makes my chest constrict with fierce affection for him. . . .

  Wow, okay. . . . Gwen Lark, you’re officially a lovesick goner. . . .

  Aeson catches his breath. “Well, eventually I went back inside, and everyone seemed to have calmed down to a reasonable level. They were still shouting, and the fish parts were flying occasionally, but the mother had resumed cleaning the fish while the father emptied one slop bucket into another, and was humming a tune. The village elder meanwhile pointed at Anu and told me this was the ‘smart boy’ who made the test gadget light
up.”

  “Ooh,” I say, as I focus back on the story.

  “Well, you should’ve seen young Anu—skinny with hunger, and pale as coastal fog, with occasional odd pink blotches, with bright orange hair and more freckles than he has now, and a wary and wild expression. And when I say wild, he was a creature untamed. I’ve never seen anyone so primal in my life.”

  I snort.

  Aeson raises one brow at me and continues. “Anu gave me a nasty look and told me in a thick accent that no, he was ‘not smart at all but an idiot of the worst kind,’ and that I should go away before something happened to my ‘big flying fish.’ So I asked him if he wanted to spend all his life cleaning fish. And he told me, that there were worse things a man could do, such as talking to Imperial Princes who stupidly come to your house.”

  I chuckle.

  “Oh yes,” Aeson continues. “Anu had a real mouth on him even back then—but now you can see where he gets it from. . . . I asked him how he knew about Imperial Princes, and he told me ‘the same way I knew I had a hole in my rear end’—except he used a more colorful word. So then I asked him a few more general questions that were deceptively innocent but were intended to verify aspects of his aptitude and intelligence. I asked him how many moons were in the sky, and he told me it depended on the time of day, the thickness of the fog, and whether or not I was willing to bet valuables on it—which made me chuckle, I could not help it. After a few more minutes I confirmed that he was sharp, but the question remained if he was actually a mathematical genius, such as his test result indicated.”

  “Wow, so how did you determine it?” I ask.

  Aeson snorts. “Anu was a hard case. I actually had to trick him into it. I took out a light sequence-flashing device and told him to count the number of lights it displayed, and if he got it right, I would give his family a nice present. Anu thought for a moment, then used his fingers to draw lines in the clay floor. He’d never learned to count, except on his fingers, but his memory was excellent, and he made the correct number of notches in the clay. No matter how many times I re-played the light sequences, he returned the correct number. So his ability was confirmed.

  “But convincing him to come with me was another matter. Anu actively resisted me all the way, called me a variety of local cuss words, and refused to leave the shack in order to go outside where I needed him to be. Luckily his mother helped. She took him by the ear, smacked him a few times with a fish, and led him outside after me. ‘You take him,’ she said to me, ‘in exchange for a new barrel.’”

  “What?” My jaw drops. “Is that all? I’d think you would give this poor family something more substantial.”

  “Don’t worry. They got their barrel—plus a brand new hut with solid walls, and a year’s supply of food and other necessities for the village.” Aeson smiles, stroking the rim of his glass. “When Anu came outside with me eventually, followed by the rest of his clan, I promised his mother that she’d get the barrel and more, and that I would make sure her son got a good education and a good job, worthy of his talents—as long as he joined the Imperial Fleet as a Cadet. And then something prompted me to say to them that I was going to personally make sure that Anu succeeded.”

  Aeson pauses. “Not sure what came over me, Gwen, since I’ve never been as affected by any of the other worthy candidates I recruited for the Fleet through that program. There were others with touching family situations, extreme poverty, and troubling difficulties. But it was Anu and his family that had such a profound effect on me. I don’t know why . . . maybe because he was close to my age, or maybe because he had such an amazing irreverent attitude toward me—absolutely no respect for the Imperial Kassiopei—and I loved it. Simply put, Anu made me laugh. I knew that this guy was going to be working for me.”

  “Wow.” I nod. “He must’ve come a long way, if you say he couldn’t even count past his ten fingers.”

  “Yes. He learned incredibly fast. After we returned to Poseidon, I made special arrangements so that he could take remedial courses for a few months to catch up in general education, and then take evening Cadet School training while working for me as an Imperial Aide. Anu learned complex things in a matter of weeks that took years for others to absorb. His mind was a thing of beauty. The only problem was, his social skills lagged far behind, and his sense of restraint did not develop as quickly. So for the longest time, even after taking Court Protocol classes, Anu had trouble with proper manners. Even now, after all these years, he is often awkward and hard-mouthed, and speaks his mind with the kind of innocence that comes from his upbringing. Just as you saw today, he reverted to being crude and infantile when under pressure, or faced with the unexpected—such as the sight of us kissing.”

  As Aeson tells me this, I suddenly begin to understand why Anu Vei still has so much trouble dealing with me in general, as the Imperial Consort. The transition from “stupid Earth girl” to “My Imperial Lady” must be a very conflicting and impossible social status change for him to reconcile.

  “Well, this clears up a whole lot of things about our so-called ‘troll boy,’ as Laronda calls him,” I say with a smile. “It also explains his weird preoccupation with fish.”

  Aeson chuckles. “So now that you know, I hope you give him a bit more leeway, and a bit less judgment. I do tend to let him speak his mind—yes, sometimes he goes too far, but still I find his antics very amusing. It’s not so much that I laugh at him, but he makes me laugh at everything and anything, unexpectedly. And at a time such as now, every chance to laugh is precious.”

  I nod, continuing to watch Aeson as he speaks. Out of nowhere, once again, an overwhelming surge of emotion rises inside me. . . .

  It occurs to me, in these few minutes, not only have I learned what’s inside Anu, but I’ve also glimpsed a little bit of young, innocent Aeson—im amrevu, before he was turned, by sorrow and responsibility, death and darkness, into the hero who wears the black armband.

  Suddenly our happy interlude is over.

  Chapter 29

  “So, now for the not-so-fun news,” Aeson says, while I am still soaking in the emotion and insight. “The Imperial Executive Council meeting. The details are tedious, and you don’t yet know any of the people involved, so I won’t bore or overwhelm you with too many names. But we talked about Earth, and the impending asteroid impact on November 18 on Earth, which here on Atlantis falls on Red Mar-Yan 17.”

  Before continuing, Aeson glances around us with a closed expression and dismisses the servants. He does not resume speaking until we are the only two people in the room.

  “On this day,” he says, “according to our secret intelligence, just as Earth takes the asteroid hit, Atlantis will likely also be under some kind of unspecified attack from our mutual extraterrestrial enemy.”

  “Oh no! What do you mean?” I put down my eating utensil, absolutely done with eating, at this point.

  Aeson watches me with an intense gaze. “Gwen, I’m sorry to say but there were some disturbing reports and presentations by various Council Members during the meeting. All of them revealed signs that point to the fact that an attack here on Atlantis is imminent.”

  I feel my breathing slow down.

  Aeson reaches out and places his hand over mine, squeezing it. “Here’s what happened—and please bear with me as I explain all the political players. I know it will be a lot to take in at once. . . .”

  I nod, keeping my breathing steady, listening.

  “The meeting began with reports from our Fleet Star Pilot Corps secret surveillance officers on duty in planetary orbit and beyond. They observed deep space activity in our sky sectors that is indicative of alien sentience—moving unidentified celestial bodies and lights, radio wave signals and other minor cosmic anomalies that were too distant to be properly confirmed as alien, but were definitely not random noise and not natural in origin.

  “Next, we heard the report from the Science and Technology Agency Director, Rovat Bennu. Now, STA Director Bennu is a
n old-school Imperial loyalist and usually my Father’s mouthpiece, but he does offer solid scientific evidence. And this time he presented audio patterns recorded by our astronomical observatory equipment that were consistent with what the Star Pilot Corps officers observed.”

  “So they picked up alien activity in space? Where exactly?” I say softly in a trembling voice.

  “Yes, but it was in deep space, still far from our solar system,” Aeson says, as though that might reassure me. Honestly, it does not.

  I continue taking shallow breaths. “Okay, what exactly is Star Pilot Corps? I’ve heard this term before and I’m confused. . . .”

  Aeson raises one brow. “Oh,” he says. “That’s right . . . they didn’t go over this with you in Cadet Pilot Classes, since our orders were to give Earth refugees only the Fleet basics, and withhold anything too controversial until you arrived. Normally when you enroll in Fleet Cadet School here on Atlantis, you would get the full explanation of the Fleet structure. As I told you last night, the Fleet has two primary functions—a national defense force to protect Imperial Atlantida from military hostilities from other countries here on Atlantis, and a global force to protect this planet from alien threats. The first is the Imperial Fleet, the second is the Fleet Star Pilot Corps. When you join the Fleet, you can choose to specialize in one or the other.”

  I nod. “Ah, I see.”

  “The Imperial Fleet is the armed forces of Imperial Atlantida, our national military branch, of which I am a member. Other countries have their own local Fleet equivalents. For example, to the northwest, our neighbor Ubasti has what they call the National Fleet, and our northeastern neighbor Eos-Heket has the Republic Fleet. And our main rival on the other side of the planet, New Deshret, has the Pharikonei Fleet.”

  “Okay. . . .”

  “Now, all these Fleets offer their top Pilots the option to also apply for the Star Pilot Corps which is a special program that crosses national boundaries. Pilots from different countries attend an intensive series of advanced courses and spend time training in space. They train all around our Hel’s system, on orbiting stations around our planets such as Ishtar Station, Tammuz Station, and Septu Station—these three being largest—and many others.” Aeson points upward with one finger. “Star Pilot Corps is all up there. Even the SPC Central Command Headquarters is located on a station in Atlantis orbit. There is no formal ground-based SPC operations office anywhere on the surface of Atlantis. It’s done in order to preserve the international flavor of the program and to maintain the equality and power dynamics of all nations.”