The Sundering

by Walter Jon Williams

  Not a third time, Martinez swore to himself. His fists clenched. Not again.

  It’s not about you! she had cried. A reassurance he found pleasing.

  It was all Sula’s mess. Let her find her own way out of it.

  Martinez let himself into the Shelley Palace, threw his overcoat over the ugly bronze Lai-own on the newel post, and made his silent way up the stairs. It was sheer bad luck that he encountered Roland, who was putting the remains of a late supper into the hallway on its tray so that a servant could pick it up in the morning. Roland straightened, adjusted his dressing gown, and gazed at Martinez with cool interest.

  “Matrimonial ambitions thwarted, I take it?”

  “Oh be silent for once, can’t you?” Martinez brushed past Roland toward his room.

  Roland’s voice pursued him. “Would you like me to take up your cause?”

  Martinez paused at his door as a savage laugh rose to his throat. “You? Talk to Lady Sula on my behalf?”

  “Talk to someone,” Curiosity entered Roland’s mild gaze. “What’s the problem, exactly? I would have thought she’d leap at the chance you offered her.”

  “The problem,” Martinez said through clenched teeth, “is that she’s crazy.”

  “Better to find out now rather than later,” Roland said. His tone was sympathetic.

  The last thing Martinez needed was Roland’s sympathy, or his help either, so he bade his brother good night and went into his room. He tore off his jacket and flung it on the bed in anger, then hopped on alternate legs while he yanked off his shoes and kicked them under pieces of furniture.

  She called me, he thought in cold fury. It had been Sula who had initiated contact after her previous flight. It was she who had come up the skyhook to meet him as he stepped off Corona. She had pursued him.

  Well. The pursuit was clearly over.

  Martinez glared at the wallpaper for a while, and then he found his eyes sliding to the comm unit.

  Call her, he thought. Call her and demand an explanation.

  He took a step to the comm, then stopped. She hadn’t given him an explanation the first time she’d walked out on him; what made him think she’d give him an explanation now?

  He stepped away from the comm, then sat on the bed, his big hands dangling uselessly between his legs.

  He stood up again. Then sat down. Then he lunged for the comm.

  Sula didn’t answer. When the automated message service clicked on, Martinez broke the connection.

  He didn’t want to leave a message. A message was something she could laugh at.

  Better to find out now rather than later. Roland’s words echoed in his skull.

  Martinez called again after twenty minutes. And again after an hour.

  He knew that Sula had no place to be but at her apartment. He pictured her sitting before her comm display, contempt glimmering in her green eyes as she watched the system log one call after another…

  Martinez went to the window and stared out at the dark, empty street, and over the sound of the wind skirling against the eaves he could distinctly hear the sound of dreams quietly crumbling to dust.

  Sula lay curled on her side in the great ugly Sevigny bed and pressed a pillow to her chest as if it were a lover. The morning light shone bright through a crack in the drawn curtains. Her eyes felt hot and sore. The scent of Martinez was still faint in the bed, and the pillow was moist with her tears.

  She hadn’t cried in all the years since she had taken a pillow very like this one and pressed it over Caro Sula’s face. That effort had wrung the last tears out of her, had made her stony, like a high, cold mountain desert. She had adopted Sula’s rank and position and moved into the place that had been reserved for her, and all the while she had despised those she’d duped, those who, like Jeremy Foote, considered themselves the epitome of creation. She had seen what the High City called worldly, and known that none of those supposed sophisticates had seen what she had seen, done what she had done, or would have dared to make the choices she had gladly embraced.

  But all that had ended with Martinez. At his appearance she had felt the first fall of rain on the arid wilderness she called her heart. She had greened under his touch, blossomed like the desert after the first rains.

  And now the moisture was being squeezed out of her again, drop by drop, by the relentless hand of remorse.

  Why couldn’t I trust him? Anger curled her hands into fists, and she battered the pillow as if she were hammering the life out of an enemy.

  Her alarm chimed, reminding her that she had to give her deposition in the Blitsharts trial. She doubted she had slept at all. She rose from her bed and felt a stab of pain in the stiffened, clenched muscles of her back.

  Sula showered and donned her undress uniform. She made a pot of tea but couldn’t bring herself to drink it. The comm display glowed at her from the desk in the front room: at some point in the long despairing hours of the night, she’d told the comm to refuse all calls and to devote itself exclusively to calling up all available information on the Peers’ Gene Bank. She downloaded the information into her sleeve display and reviewed it in the taxi, and while waiting to give the deposition.

  Rage began to simmer in her as she discovered the law to be just as Martinez had described it. A drop of blood was required for Peers not just on on Zanshaa, but on the accelerator ring and in the unlikely event that Peers married somewhere else in the system. She set out to find worlds where Peers did without a gene bank, and found nearly thirty, including Dandaphis, Magaria, Felarus, Terra, and Spannan, the planet of her birth.

  Sula could hardly accept Martinez’s proposal with the proviso that they had to travel to one of these obscure worlds for the marriage. There had to be an exception to the regulation, and she set her computer to seek through every available database for every rule and paragraph and picture and article ever written about the Peers’ Gene Bank.

  Then it was time to give her deposition, and found that the attorney for the insurance company provided a suitable target for her wrath. “Haven’t you asked that question twice already? Didn’t you hear my answer the first time? Are you deaf or an idiot?”

  The attorney for the Blitsharts, though feigning disapproval, seemed to enjoy the flaying of his colleague, at least until it was his turn. “What kind of imbecile question is that? If I had a cadet as thick as you are, I’d order him to defect to the Naxids and let him sabotage them.”

  The savagery had made her feel better for an instant, and afterward empty. She returned to her apartment, drank a cup of cold tea, and ate some of the food she had acquired in the expectation of sharing it with Martinez.

  As she sat alone in the silent apartment, the anguish began once more to fill her.

  She should have trusted him, she decided. She could have said, “I’m not the real Lady Sula. The real Sula died and I took her place. If anyone checks the records at the Gene Bank, they’ll find that out.”

  She could have trusted Martinez that far. She wouldn’t have to say how Caro Sula had died.

  But she hadn’t brought herself to tell Martinez anything, not even a fraction of the truth, and now it was too late. If he’d ever been inclined to trust her, that trust must have been shattered.

  Vipsania’s wedding was as magnificent as the short lead time and the thinned population of the High City would permit, and was held at the palace of Lord Eizo Yoshitoshi, the groom’s father. Roland delayed things by arriving a few minutes late, thus earning a frown from Lord Yoshitoshi, who had been standing amid his new in-laws in an attitude that suggested he was testing the air for bad smells.

  After Roland made his apologies, the couple, along with selected representatives of their families, convoyed to the Registrar, where the brief official ceremony was performed by one of the Yoshitoshi cousins who wore the scarlet and white sash of a Judge of Final Appeal. By the time they returned the reception was in full swing, with a Cree band playing its witty way through old standards and Lai-own wai
trons in stainless white satin jackets circulating with drinks and canapes.

  Martinez had approved of the trip to the Registrar because all he was required to do at the ceremony was stand in silence and watch, and the reception earned his annoyance because he was required to be civil to everyone present.

  He hoped that Sula would arrive to throw herself at his feet and beg forgiveness, her garments rent in penitence and her knees bloody from walking to the palace on her patellas, but it didn’t happen.

  He tried avoiding contact by feigning interest in the palace’s architecture, but unfortunately the building had been constructed during the heyday of the Devis mode, with long clean featureless lines, and had been furnished and decorated in much the same style. There was little to observe in clean featureless lines once one had observed how clean and featureless they were. The walls were mostly bare except for an occasional painting, and the paintings were mostly blank white canvas except for an intricate swirl of color slightly off the painting’s geometrical center. One particularly daring canvas was avocado-green, but the off-center swirl of color looked much the same as the others.

  “The height of restrained elegance, don’t you think?” The voice in Martinez’s ear was that of Roland.

  “Warships come out of the builders’ yards with more interesting decor,” Martinez said. He turned toward the bustling reception—more and more people were fleeing the High City for the safety of other systems, but the wedding of the Yoshitoshi heir had still managed to draw five hundred of the most elite Peers in the empire. “Here they all are,” Martinez said. “All the great names come to Vipsania’s wedding. Your triumph.”

  “I’ll feel the triumph when I see all these people at our place,” Roland said, and he sipped from his glass of white wine. He turned to Martinez. “I’m sorry to have scandalized the Yoshitoshis by turning up late.”

  “I’m sure you were late for a good reason.”

  “In fact I was.” He looked sidelong at Martinez from narrowed, catlike eyes, as if he were reluctant to face Martinez head-on. “I hope you’ll appreciate my efforts.”

  “I will if you got me a job.” Martinez was in little mood for Roland’s games.

  Roland offered a slight smile. “In a manner of speaking, I did,” he said. “I’ve arranged for your marriage.”

  Martinez answered with a cold, murderous stare. Roland looked out across the crowded room and lifted his glass in salute to a Lai-own in convocate red.

  “You did put yourself in play, Gareth,” Roland said. “And I did say I would take up your cause.”

  “I hope,” Martinez said, “you are prepared to grovel in apology to the poor woman’s family, or better yet marry her yourself.”

  Roland raised his eyebrows, all mock innocence. “Don’t you want to hear her name?”

  “I was rather hoping not to.”

  “Terza Chen.” And, in the shocked surprise that followed, Roland said, “You have no idea how hard I had to pressure her father. He’s been willing to take millions of our lousy provincial zeniths, but a provincial son-in-law was another matter.” Self-satisfaction gleamed in his eyes. “Still, I managed to convince him that our alliance really was for the long term.”

  Martinez found his tongue. “Terza Chen? That’s insane.”

  Roland’s mock innocence returned. “Really? How?”

  “For one thing, she’s in mourning.”

  “Lord Richard Li is dead.”

  Lord Richard Li? Martinez thought. One of the Fleet’s brilliant rising stars? That’s who she was in mourning for?

  “He’s very recently dead,” Martinez pointed out. “She can’t have got over it.”

  Roland took Martinez by the elbow and leaned close to his ear. “With grieving widows, it’s best to strike quickly. I assume it’s much the same with grieving fiancés.”

  Martinez shook off Roland’s hand. “Forget it.” His eyes searched the crowd. “Lord Chen has to be here, somewhere. I’ll find him and tell him the marriage is off.”

  “If you must.” Roland affected a shrug. “While you’re at it, you may as well tell him you won’t be taking your new appointment, either.”

  Martinez gave Roland another cold stare, but a surge of warmth beneath his collar told him the stare lacked conviction.

  “Oh, did I forget to mention that?” Roland’s smile was that of a well-fed predator. “Squadron Commander Lady Michi Chen needs a tactical officer aboard her flagship. And later, of course, as she rises in the service she will be in a position to offer you one choice posting after another.”

  And then, in the silence, Roland leaned close again, and his soft voice was a silken purr in Martinez’s ear. “You know,” he said, “I thought that might compel your attention.”

  NINE

  Martinez wandered through the Yoshitoshi Palace in a kind of daze, his mind unable to manage thought, exactly, but swept instead by erratic surges of pure feeling: black anger followed by weird hilarity, detached irony by profound disgust. The disgust and the irony tended to predominate, passions so strong he could taste them.

  Irony tasted like used coffee grounds, and disgust like copper.

  Behind the grace and the fine manners, he thought, behind the tailored uniforms and the brocade and the seams sewn with seed pearls, there was nothing but the circle of fat, hairless animals, molars grinding, jowls running with the thick juices of the common trough.

  He wanted to shriek at them. Shriek. But they wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t hold off their gorging even when the Naxids loomed and threatened to knock down the whole foul sty.

  Martinez found Terza standing by a Devis paper screen, white with one panel of pale blue. Her gown was a radiant contrast to the austerities of the Devis mode, in the ornate high style so popular since the war had begun, deep gold with a pattern of green vegetation and brilliant scarlet flowers, all flounces and fringes, and slashed to reveal the satin underskirt. Terza’s hair was bound with white mourning thread, and covered with an intricate net of tiny white starflowers. She was with a group of her girl friends, and listening to them with what appeared to be careful attention.

  Martinez hesitated at the sight of her, then made his way to her side. She turned to him, and her lips parted in a shy smile. “Captain Martinez,” she said.

  “My lady,” Martinez answered. He turned to her friends. “I’m afraid I must beg your pardon for taking Lady Terza away from you.”

  He drew her away, down a side corridor. His nerves flared with contrary impulses: to laugh, to whimper, to tear off his clothes and fly screaming down the hall. Instead he asked, “Has your father spoken to you?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was soft. “Just before we left home.”

  “You got the news before I did.” Terza moved with perfect grace in her elaborate, rustling gown. Martinez tried a door at random, found it opened on a kind of bed-sitting-room, a somber bed in white and black and a desk of pale cinder-colored wood with paper, glass calligraphy pens, and a stick of ink ready for use. He drew her inside and closed the door.

  “I’m sorry about the mourning threads.” Terza’s hand made a vague gesture by her hair. “I knew I shouldn’t be wearing mourning when we’re engaged, but my father only talked to me after I’d dressed.”

  “That’s all right,” Martinez said. “From everything I’ve heard about Lord Richard, he was someone worth mourning.”

  Terza looked away. There was an awkward silence. Martinez took a grip on his thoughts.

  “Look,” he said. “If you don’t want to do this, we’ll call it off. And that’s that.”

  Faint surprise marked her features. “I—” Her lips shaped a word that she failed to utter. Her eyes darted to Martinez. “I don’t object,” she said. “I know families arrange these things. My engagement to Lord Richard was arranged.”

  “But at least you knew him. You moved in the same set. You barely know me.”

  Terza gave a fluid nod. “That’s true. But—” A kind of tremor passed across
her eyes, a reflection of some inner thought, and she looked at him. “You’re successful and reliable. You’re intelligent. Your family has money. So far as I can see, you’re kind.” Her gown rustled as she raised a hand to touch his sleeve. “Those are good things, in a husband.”

  Martinez felt the world spin in giddy circles about the small room with its writing desk and austere little bed. He looked at the young woman standing before him, the perfectly schooled body with its willowy grace, the elegant hands, the lovely serene face and smooth skin, and he wondered if what he beheld was entirely art—if it was the trained response of a woman who knew her duty to her clan and who was doing it regardless of any distaste she might feel, or if by any chance there was some genuine feeling behind her words. If beneath the brocade and elegance she was one of those nightmare creatures he had seen clustered around the trough, or was what she actually appeared, a beautiful and gentle human being.

  But even if she were the former—even if there was avarice and calculation behind the mask—what did that matter? It was only fit in that case that Martinez should shoulder his way to the trough and seize what he could for himself, the appointment under Michi Chen being only the appetizer.

  And if Terza were actually what she appeared, then that was even better, and he was lucky. Sula had once called him the luckiest person in the universe. Certainly he had been lucky enough to escape Sula. Perhaps Terza Chen was another great piece of luck.

  Distantly, the dinner gong rang. The wedding guests would begin their progression toward the ballroom, where the tables had been set.

  He looked at Terza and put his hand over hers. “Just remember,” he said, “you’ve had your chance to run away.”

  Conscious of the light touch of her on his arm—the touch not of the woman he loved, but of a stranger—Martinez turned and walked with Terza toward the fate that awaited them.