Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  With a deep sigh, Yosi walked out of the shadows and stepped back into the ballroom. The crowd, he reflected, was exactly what one would expect at Duke Levsson’s Paradisian birthday bash.

  Lots of Spartans. Well over half of the Leaguers present. Paradise vacations were all the rage among Sparta’s nobility, nowadays.

  The men all in House uniforms, of course. Nothing less would do here. Gold-buttoned woolen coats, plumed hats, fencing capes and rapiers for the Core Duchies. Northerners decked out in tall fur hats and fur-trimmed caftans belted with wide sashes, the precious-wood scabbards of their deadly shashkas glistening with intricate gold and silver filigree. A few men from the Southern Duchies, in cotton coats and wide-brimmed straw boaters, armed with wide, curved slashing swords worn on baldrics.

  The women positively glittered. A man could only do so much to show off his wealth and alleged taste while wearing the semi-military uniform of his House. But he could spend enough on his wife’s or daughter’s jewelry to buy a cruiser out of pocket, the better to outdo his neighbor. And the latest high-fashion gowns. Had to have those.

  The gentlemen’s formalwear may have been frozen at the end of Sparta’s Time of Isolation, down to the lethal hardware with which King Hector the Great had conquered his world, but Sparta’s noble ladies were merely restricted to House colors. Beyond that, each remained free to cleave to her favorite designer’s every fancy.

  The designers’ whims this year had passed, definitively, from the sublime to the ridiculous. At least the skirts had stayed ankle-length, even if they were cut to accentuate the curve of the hips more than was really decent. But above the waist, good heavens! Strapless, backless, plunging necklines… It was enough to drive a man insane.

  Mia and Emma Levsson, over in the center of the floor, were looking positively scandalous in matching ruby necklaces and silver-striped crimson satin so low-cut that, it seemed, a single sneeze or inadvertent jostle would send all the ample, delicious feminine roundness springing free from its inadequate confines.

  A half-dozen young men orbited the Levsson twins like captive planetoids. Or maybe like confused moths not sure which light bulb to smack into first. Chum the water and the fish come for the hook, no doubt about it.

  No one they would bother with among that bunch, though. Except maybe young Petr Mozhaisky, the thoroughly disappointing grandson of a great general, resplendent in a wolf’s fur cape to go with his dark green caftan and yellow sash.

  Probably sweating bullets under there, thought Yosi. Natural winter fur, that. No micropores. But maybe worth it. He could talk about shooting the wolves. Probably snuck up on them with his bow. They loved their recurves up there in Ledonia, almost as much as the arctic wolves loved stealing their muskoxen and raiding their muravik mounds.

  The girls might like a good hunting story. Draw attention away from his inability to get a Shock Corps commission, no matter how many strings his grandfather had pulled. The boy just couldn’t pass the Officer Selection Course, and that was that.

  Seemed like a shoo-in at first glance, to those who didn’t know him. Brave, tough, plenty of brawn, a natural leader. Famous grandfather and all that. Solid oak, like their House sigil.

  His head, too. Academic fail. Sorry, fellow, it’s the Home Guard for you. House Mozhaisky would just have to survive for a while without another great conqueror among its ranks.

  The poor Levsson girls looked a bit disappointed with the catch of the evening. The fellow they really had their eyes on wasn’t there.

  The whole year they’d followed Leo everywhere he’d gone. Didn’t miss a single chance to see him fight, or to fawn over him afterwards. His most assiduous groupies. And, as usual, Leo was paying them not the least bit of attention. There he was, on the other side of the room, chatting up some tall, slender, raven-haired thing from New Israel.

  The Israelis made up maybe forty percent of the Leaguer crowd out there. Mostly Northern Hemisphere business types. Men in white four-cornered tunics with wide, dark-colored vertical stripes. Generally traditionally green tzitzit, but a few white. Havenite influence there. Uniformly and conservatively black gartels. Loose, dark trousers, knitted kippot, short beards, impeccable natural leather sandals. The ladies more colorful, but nothing risqué here, either. Ankle-length dark skirts. Long-sleeved, light-colored blouses, with matching headscarves for the married majority. The occasional Southern-style, pleat-skirted, bell-sleeved calico dress. That sort of rustic thing had gotten popular again, apparently. A tasteful minimum of carefully chosen, ridiculously expensive jewelry. Very formal, very proper.

  Most of the Spartans were merely vacationing on Paradise, but the majority of the Israelis were here to work. Industrial reps, folks from shipping and engineering firms, navigational software vendors. Lots of security consultants and transportation efficiency gurus and whatnot. The kind of thing you’d expect at mankind’s second-busiest set of jump points.

  The Havenites were here to work, too. Otherwise, they simply wouldn’t have come to Paradise in the first place. If you lived on Haven and had the money to go on vacation off-world, you’d go visit your relatives on Bretogne or Hadassah, or book a trip to New Israel, if you were feeling risqué. You wouldn’t go traveling among the goyim, where you’d end up seeing rooms full of half-naked women and constantly have to worry about glatt kosher food.

  There was only a smattering of them in the crowd. Mostly men with long beards and gigantic curled peyot, all covered in black, head to toe. Black bekishes, black gartels, wide-brimmed black fedoras. Black trousers tucked into knee-high black boots. Only the occasional bit of white from a wraparound shirt collar to break the monochrome uniformity.

  The women were permitted some color, as a concession to femininity, however pious it might be. Mostly dark blue and green, occasionally a red so dark that is seemed almost black until the light caught it just the right way and brought out a glinting ruby highlight. High-collared dresses with loose, floor-length skirts and full-length sleeves. Snoods and turbans; no single women there. Perish the thought to expose an unmarried woman to such improprieties as might be found in a wicked, shocking place like Paradise, or to let a girl go unmarried a month past her sixteenth birthday in the first place. Neither hair nor skin showing anywhere except for faces and, occasionally, throats. Even their hands were covered. Black silky gloves, for both men and women.

  They took modesty seriously on Haven. Very seriously. Also, Haven had rain so acidic that it could raise welts on bare skin, and windblown dust that would eat holes in your flesh if you weren’t careful. And giant migratory swarms of stinging vermin. And showers of hot volcanic ash mixed with boiling water. And seasonal carbon dioxide snow. Live in a place like that for six centuries, and your fashions are going to reflect it, mused Yosi.

  The Havenites may have looked dark and severe among Sparta’s glitterati, like shards of obsidian scattered in a field of shining crystal, but poor they were not. Wealth positively screamed from the intricate brocade of the women’s dresses, from the rich gold and fine stones of their exquisite jewelry, from the heavy signet rings on the men’s fingers, from the elaborately-tooled natural-leather holsters and the fine, custom-made pistols, from the convoluted kabbalistic metalwork on dagger pommels and scabbards…

  Haven was the poorest Member of the League, that was true. But the Havenites had their elite, and it was that elite, the shippers and the bankers, the seismic engineers and the architects and the hostile-environment robotics experts, that was here to mingle with Duke Levsson’s honored guests. Nor were their numbers small here today because Haven had little to offer the wider universe. It was late Autumn over there right now, and the agricultural sector was winding down. Most of the exotic food dealers who had done a booming business shipping through Paradise to half the luxury food markets in known space these past ten standard years had gone home. But with the advancing glaciers of Winter came Haven’s Seismic Minimum. Soon enough, when the Havenites were finished with the careful busine
ss of sealing up the last of their Autumnal haunts against the inexorably marching walls of ice and moving most of their population down to the planet’s equatorial zone, the vast mines and enormous factories of Haven’s long Winter Period would open in earnest. And then Haven’s industrial reps would descend upon Paradise in force, hawking everything from waste processors to surface-to-space missiles.

  In the interim, for once, Haven’s expats had ample fodder for non-business conversation. The sole shtreimel was still in the same place, a few steps away from the southern wall, within easy reach of the glatt kosher buffet table that marked the unofficial rampart of Havenite territory. Still surrounded by a small cluster of fellow countrymen who hung onto his every word. Still holding a glass of schnapps. Probably the same glass. He didn’t seem to ever touch it.

  Haven’s nobility rarely traveled off-world. But, this time around, it was clearly an emergency of the most pressing sort.

  The story had all the elements of a classic romance novel. One of the Stern girls; one of the Eisenstein boys; a forbidden, secret love consummated only by fiery glances and encrypted, self-destructing instaNotes; the prospect of a detested shidduch; a secret elopement in the dead of night; the teenage bride, dressed as a boy, smuggled aboard a clipper; the captain finding the two lovers in each other’s arms two thirds of the way to Paradise…

  In the Serpent Swarm, such foolishness among the offspring of the great-and-mighty would make two weeks’ fodder for the gossip columnists. On New Israel, the thing would end up in court, an acrimonious three-sided haggle over bride price already paid, versus bride and dowry never delivered, versus deliberate theft of a bride, and all the usual mutual recriminations between three families who’d detested each other for several hundred years. On Sparta, some gentlemen would arrange to cross swords, or, perhaps, aim old-fashioned black-powder pistols at one another, somebody would end up floating in a regen tank with a tea saucer-sized hole in his chest, and then they’d have a lawsuit.

  But, unlike Serpent Swarm corporate sharks, Israeli bigwigs and Spartan noblemen, the chieftains of Haven’s clans weren’t limited to well-paid lawyers and armsmen with light weapons. They had tank divisions and spaceplanes, and meme dispensers, and tactical nukes at their disposal. So here stood the fourth cousin, twice removed, of the Chief Rabbi Himself. Sent to Paradise to recover the two star-crossed lovers and convey them unharmed back to Kiryat Moshe on the Chief Rabbi’s personal yacht, while Haven’s supreme ruler conducted a flurry of unprecedented face-to-face private meetings, smoothing feathers back home to ensure that the Sterns, the Eisensteins and the Rothbergs didn’t end up shooting heavy artillery at one another. Again.

  Yosi had practically had to drag Leo by the scruff of the neck to go meet Rav Nosson Krasnovitsky and exchange the requisite pleasantries. Given the size of House Freeman business interests on Haven, this was a connection worth making, or, at least, a man whom it was very unwise to snub. The man was only in his early thirties, but already the Chief Rabbi was using him as a personal envoy. Who knew how far young Rav Nosson would rise, or how he might prove useful to a future Duke Leonidas Freeman?

  Besides, the fellow was actually interesting to listen to for a bit. He had some very odd views on the astropolitics of further liberalizing trade with the Empire. And he didn’t goggle at Yosi’s decorations. In fact, for all that pretty much every Havenite around him eagerly jumped at his every request, Rav Nosson seemed quite unpretentious.

  The young rabbi was talking to someone in a zero-gee bubble. Net glasses said… A Monsieur Jack-Yves Armand, President and CEO of Groupe Courrier Intergalactique. That would be the holding company for Cargo Lemonnier, Courrier Intergalactique, Zone de Danger Fret, Crèdit Arbitra and Convoyeur Sûr Limitee. Between the lot of it, maybe twenty percent of the belter merchant fleet. They were jumping freely back and forth between French and Hebrew, but that didn’t confuse the net glasses’ lip reading app in the least.

  Ah, yes, the perennial sore topic of the populist imbeciles in Paradise’s parliament again trying to raise the jump point transit fees. Monsieur Armand sounded quite beside himself. The bill, apparently, had the necessary votes to pass, this time around. Just how many times did these people need to be reminded regarding geese, golden eggs and precisely whose warships ensured their status as a trouble-free transit point to half the universe? Did they not understand that the Council of Four might listen to the Merchants’ Association this time around, and simply exempt League traffic unilaterally from any increase in transit and tug fees? How, precisely, did these people propose to enforce their extortionate demands in such a case?

  And here came Duke Levsson, with Señor Martín, Paradise’s Minister of Trade, in tow. His own birthday party or not, no rest for the wicked. Perhaps, thought Yosi, Rav Nosson was here to do something else besides helping to prevent a pair of idiotic, hormone-crazed teenagers from accidentally starting a three-sided mini-war. Like help to keep the Paradisians from embarrassing themselves and the Navy from having to provide tug services to the likes of Monsieur Armand. With the belters about to receive the Council presidency, the Merchants’ Association petition really might succeed, if the Paradisians pushed the issue. Especially given that the Rothbergs owned a good ten percent of Haven’s clipper fleet, and the Chief Rabbi really needed to throw a bone to Aaron Rothberg now that said worthy’s son was missing a duly paid-for bride and Yehezkiel Stern would neither give back the money, nor surrender the lands he’d promised as dowry.

  There were fewer belters here even than Havenites. For people whose bodies were built to live in microgravity, going down to a planetary surface was always a disconcerting prospect. No belter could ever forget the fact that, over the long term, even a 0.3 gee gravity field was as lethal to them as microgravity was to every other kind of human.

  Serpent Swarm corporations generally hired agents, mostly Havenites or Spartans, but occasionally Israelis, to handle the face-to-face aspect of business down in the gravity wells where most people lived. But there did exist matters too potentially profitable, too prestigious or too sensitive to conduct through hired intermediaries and telepresence bots. And for that kind of thing there were zero-gee bubbles.

  Monsieur Armand was typical of the kind of belter who’d show up in person to Duke Levsson’s hundred and sixty fifth birthday gala. As gaudy as the rabbi was somber. Loose, overall-like silk robes in at least six fluorescent colors that somehow managed to impossibly harmonize together while simultaneously clashing, ruby-studded earrings, eight different gold, silver and platinum bracelets decorated with every precious stone one could possibly think of, and at least twenty-five rings on his thirty-six fingers, no two alike.

  In the asteroid habitats of the Serpent Swarm and the Normann Belt, color equaled wealth, and life was lived at its loudest. It was a short life, comparatively. Perhaps that was part of why the belters lived it with such devil-may-care panache. Now that human lifespans were again more-or-less what they used to be right before the End Time War, Rav Nosson would easily see his second century, assuming good medical care and a healthy lifestyle. Though his hair would gray and his youthful vigor pale, his eyesight would remain undimmed, and his Torah-honed mind would likely stay as sharp as ever. But Monsieur Armand would scarcely live to a hundred and twenty, even with the best medical care that money could buy. And when the progressive systemic collapse and rapid-onset madness of a belter’s old age came to claim him, he would face not the prospect of dying peacefully in his bed, surrounded by a legion of children and grandchildren, but the stark choice between a slow spiral into insanity and unbearable torture that would, in the end, leave him robbed of all semblance of dignity and even humanity, or else the quick release of the Spirit Pill and the Passing Beyond.

  When the great Francois Chirac had created his masterwork, he surely did not intend for his children to inherit such horror. But, alas, even the greatest genius has its limitations. And with those limitations Chirac’s children had to live, for there was no on
e, not during the Golden Age and certainly not today, who knew how to fix the “unexpected little flaw” in the great master’s most masterful design.

  Señor Martín was looking a bit green around the gills, now that Monsieur Armand was laying into him. The fact that this discussion was taking place in such a public setting practically guaranteed that Monsieur Armand’s extremely credible threats would be all over the local blogosphere by morning. Scarier still to Señor Martín was probably the fact that neither the League ambassador nor the personal representative of Haven’s Chief Rabbi made any effort to restrain the belter magnate’s over-the-top, arm-waving histrionics.

  Well, the Paradisians should have listened the first time, when all this was being said quietly and politely behind closed doors, thought Yosi amusedly. Stupid Outsider weaklings. What did they think would happen, once they had all but disbanded their military so they could pay for their favorite social welfare programs instead?

  And here came two members of the smallest League contingent at the party, to further discomfit Paradise’s beleaguered trade minister. Neither Admiral Ben-Dror nor General Prince Ryabin really looked like they wanted to join the discussion. But the mere presence of Navy black and Shock Corps khaki behind the ambassador’s shoulder was reminder enough of what it was that Paradise’s so called armed forces could and could not do in the real world.

  There were surprisingly few such uniforms in the ballroom today. Most of the Joint Mission’s senior staff officers had come, of course, and so had the captains of all the warships not out on patrol or combat-ready standby duty. The upper ranks of the Joint Mission’s sole Shock Corps brigade had had no choice, either. There were even a few junior officers and enlisted men in the crowd, mostly younger scions of Sparta’s nobility serving their six-year mandatory stints or just beginning their long-service military careers. A couple of Israelis from prominent families, too. But the Joint Mission was a relatively small affair, all things considered. And the senior officers’ deputies had, of course, remained at their posts.