by David Weber
"When the Scrags kidnapped you?"
"You knew about that?" She blinked, and he actually chuckled.
"The story got pretty good coverage in the 'faxes," he pointed out. "Especially with the Manpower connection. And I had reasons of my own for following the stories." Again something flickered deep in his eyes. Then he smiled. "And neither your father nor Lady Montaigne have been particularly . . . inconspicuous since you came home." His expression sobered. "I've always figured the newsies didn't get the whole story, but the part they did get was bloody enough. It must've been pretty bad for a kid—what, fourteen T-years old?"
"Yeah, but that wasn't what I meant." He raised both eyebrows, and she twitched her shoulders uncomfortably, unable to believe she was about to tell Paulo d'Arezzo, of all people, something she'd never even told Aikawa or Ragnhild. She drew a deep breath. "Before Daddy and . . . the others found me, and Berry and Lars, there were three men. They'd grabbed Berry and Lars before I came along. They'd raped Berry and beaten her—badly. They were going to kill her, probably pretty soon, I think. But I didn't know that when they came after me."
He was staring at her now, his eyes wide, and she drew another breath.
"I was already pretty good at the Neue-Stil," she said flatly. "I was scared—I'd just gotten away from the Scrags, and I'd known they were going to kill me if I didn't make a break. I had all the adrenaline in the galaxy pumping through me, and nobody was going to make me go back. So when these three came at me in the dark, I killed them."
"You killed them," he repeated.
"Yes." She met his eyes steadily. "All three of them. Broke their necks. I can still feel the bones snapping. And I felt nauseated, and sick, and wondered what kind of monster I was. The nausea comes back to me, sometimes. But I remember I'm still here, still alive. And that Berry and Lars are still alive. And I tell you this completely honestly, Paulo—I may feel nauseated, and I may wish it had never happened, but I don't feel guilty and I do feel . . . triumphant. I can look myself in the eye and tell myself I did what had to be done, without waffling, and that I'd do it again. And I think that's the question you have to ask yourself about Anhur. You've already said you'd do the same thing again if you had to. Doesn't that mean it's what has to be done? What you have to do to be you? And if that's true, why should you feel guilty?"
He looked at her silently for several seconds, then nodded slowly.
"I'm not sure there isn't a gaping hole in your logic, but that doesn't make you wrong. I'll have to think about it."
"Oh, yeah," she agreed with a wry smile. "You have to think about it, Paulo. A lot. I sure as hell did! And don't think for a minute I'm not having a few bad moments over what happened to Anhur. You'd have to be psycho not to. Just don't get all bent out of shape trying to take the blood guilt of the universe onto your shoulders."
"That's, ah, a . . . profound bit of advice."
"I know," she said cheerfully. "I'm paraphrasing what Master Tye told me after Old Chicago. He's a lot more profound than I am. 'Course most people are more profound than me, when you come down to it."
"Don't sell yourself too short."
"Sure, sure." She waved one hand in a dismissive gesture, and he shook his head with what might have been the first completely open smile she'd ever seen from him. It transformed his usual, detached expression into something totally different, and she cocked her head.
"Look," she said, feeling a returning edge of awkwardness but refusing to let it deter her, "this may not be any of my business. But why is it that you, well . . . keep to yourself so much?"
"I don't," he said, instantly, smile disappearing, and it was her turn to shake her head.
"Oh, yes, you do. And I'm beginning to realize I was even slower than usual not to realize it isn't for the reasons I thought it was."
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said stiffly.
"I'm talking about the fact that it isn't because you think you're so much better than everyone else, after all."
"Because I think what?" He stared at her in such obvious consternation she had to chuckle.
"Well, that was my first thought. And I can be kind of mentally lazy sometimes. Somehow I never managed to get beyond thought number one to number two or number three." She shrugged. "I see somebody who's obviously spent that much money on bio-sculpt, and I automatically assume they have to have a pretty high opinion of themselves."
"Biosculpt?" He was still staring at her, and, abruptly, he laughed. It was not a cheerful sound, and he grimaced as he touched his face. "Biosculpt? You think that's what this is?"
"Well, yeah," she said, a bit defensively. "You're going to try to tell me it's not?"
"No," he said. "It's not biosculpt. It's genetics."
"You're kidding me!" She eyed him skeptically. "People don't come down the chute looking that good without a little help, Mr. d'Arezzo!"
"I didn't say it was natural genetics," he said, his deep, musical voice suddenly so harsh that she sat bolt upright. His eyes met hers, and the cool gray was no longer cool. It was hot, like molten quartz. And then, suddenly, shockingly, he stuck out his tongue at her.
It was a gesture she'd seen before—seen from "terrorists" like Jeremy X and scholars like Web Du Havel. But she'd never seen the genetic bar code of a genetically engineered slave on the tongue of a fellow Naval officer. He showed it to her for perhaps five seconds, then closed his mouth, gray eyes still blazing.
"If you think I'm good-looking," Paulo said bitterly, "you should have seen my mother. I never did—or not that I remember, anyway. She died when I was less than a year old. But my father's described her to me often enough. He had to describe her because he couldn't show me—Manpower doesn't let its slaves have pictures of each other."
Helen stared at him, and he stared back defiantly, almost hostilely.
"I didn't know," she said finally, softly.
"No reason you should've." He drew a deep breath and looked away, taut shoulders relaxing ever so slightly. "It's . . . not something I like to talk about. And," he looked back at her, "it's not as if I remember ever being a slave. Dad does, and sometimes it eats at him. And the fact that he and I—and my mother—were specifically designed to be attractive because that's what 'pleasure slaves' are supposed to be, that does eat at me sometimes. But he's never forgotten it was the Navy that intercepted the slaver we were on. My mother was killed in the process, but he never blamed the Navy, and neither did I. At least she died free, by God! That's why he took Captain d'Arezzo's name for our surname when he filed for citizenship. And why I joined the Navy."
"I can see that," she said, and deep inside she was kicking herself for not having recognized the signs. Surely someone who'd spent as much time with ex-slaves and the Anti-Slavery League as she had should have seen them. But why had he never dropped so much as a hint about it in her presence? He must have known Cathy Montaigne's adopted daughter would come as close to understanding as anyone who'd never been a slave could!
"Yeah," he said, almost as if he'd been reading her mind. "Yeah, I imagine you can see it, if anybody aboard the Kitty can. But it's not something I talk about. Not because I'm ashamed, really. But because . . . because talking about it takes away from me. It focuses on where I came from, the cold, sick 'businessmen' who built me and never even considered my parents or me human."
He looked out the dome, his mouth twisted.
"I guess you can also understand why I'm not quite so impressed with my 'good looks' as other people are," he said in a low, harsh voice. "Sometimes it goes a lot further than that. When you know a bunch of twisted bastards designed you to look good—to be a nice, attractive piece of meat when they put you on the block or rented you out—having people chase after you just because you look so goddamned good turns your stomach. It's not you they want. Not the you that lives inside you, the one that does things like this." He slapped the sketchpad's satchel. "It's this." He touched his face again. "This . . . packaging."
; "I've known quite a few ex-slaves by now, Paulo," she said, keeping her voice normal, "and most of them have demons. Couldn't really be any other way, I guess. But whatever happened to them, whatever was done to them, and whatever those motherless bastards in Mesa may think about them, they're people, and the fact that someone else thought they were property doesn't make it true. It just means people who think they're fucking gods decided they were toys. And some toys, Paulo d'Arezzo, are very, very dangerous. In the end, that's what's going to finish Manpower off, you know. People like Jeremy X. And Web Du Havel. And you."
He looked at her suspiciously, as if he suspected she was shooting him a line, and she chuckled again, nastily.
"Paulo, for all intents and purposes, Cathy Montaigne's my mom, and you know all about Daddy. Do you think they don't have a pretty damned shrewd idea how many ex-slaves, and children of ex-slaves, have gone into the Star Kingdom's military? We get good marks for enforcing the Cherwell Convention. That attracts a lot of people—people like you—and the way we attract people like you is one reason we enforce the Cherwell Convention as well as we do. It's a reinforcing feedback loop. And then, of course, there's Torch."
"I know." He looked down, watching his right index finger draw circles on his kneecap. "That was something I really wanted to talk to you about—Torch, and your sister, I mean. But I— That is, it's been so long, and—"
"Paulo," she said, almost gently, "I've known a lot of ex-slaves, all right? Some of them are like Jeremy or Web. They wear where they came from right out on their sleeves and throw it into the galaxy's teeth. It defines who they are, and they're ready to rip Manpower's throat out with their bare teeth. Others just want to pretend it never happened. And then there's a whole bunch who don't want to pretend it didn't happen but who do want to get on with who they are. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want people to cut them extra slack, make exceptions for them out of some sort of misplaced, third-party guilt. And they don't want pity, or to be defined by those around them in terms of their victimhood. Obviously I haven't bothered to get to know you as well as I should've, or this wouldn't be coming as such a surprise to me. But I do know you well enough to know, especially now, that you're part of that hardheaded, stiff-necked, stubborn bunch that's determined to succeed without whining, without excuses, or special allowances. The kind who're too damned stubborn for their own good and too damned stupid to know it. Sort of like Gryphon Highlanders."
She grinned at him, and to his own obvious surprise, he smiled back.
"I guess maybe we are sort of alike," he said finally. "In a way."
"And who'd've thunk it?" she replied with that same toothy grin.
"It probably wouldn't have hurt to've had this discussion earlier," he added.
"Nope, not a bit," she agreed.
"Still, I suppose it's not too late to start over," he observed.
"Not as long as you don't expect me to stop being my usual stubborn, insufferable, basically shallow self," she said.
"I don't know if all of that self-putdown is entirely fair," he said thoughtfully. "I never really thought of you as stubborn."
"As soon as I get over my unaccustomed feeling of contrition for having misjudged the motivation for that nose-in-the-air, superior attitude of yours, you'll pay for that," she assured him.
"I look forward to it with fear and trembling."
"Smartest thing you've said all day," she told him ominously, and then they both laughed.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
"And I suppose Aleksandra's going to say this isn't significant, either," Henri Krietzmann said sourly.
"Of course she is," Joachim Alquezar snorted.
The two of them sat on the seaside villa's terrace, gazing out across the ocean into the ashes of sunset. Stars had just begun to prick the cobalt vault above them, the remnants of a light supper lay on the table between them, a driftwood fire burned in a stone and brick outdoor fireplace with a copper hood, and Alquezar leaned back in a chaise lounge. An old-fashioned wooden match flared in the twilight, and smoke wreathed upward as he lit a cigar. Krietzmann sniffed appreciatively at the aromatic tendrils, then reached for his beer.
"I'm beginning to really, really dislike that woman," he said almost whimsically, and Alquezar chuckled.
"Even Bernardus dislikes her, whether he's willing to admit it or not," the San Miguelian said. "After all, what's not to dislike?"
It was Krietzmann's turn to snort in bitter amusement, but there was an unpalatable amount of truth in Alquezar's quip.
"I just don't understand the way her mind works," the Dresdener admitted after a moment. "Bad enough Nordbrandt and those 'Freedom Alliance' maniacs are blowing people up and shooting them almost at random on Kornati, but at least everyone realizes they're lunatics. Westman, though." He shook his head, scowling at the memory of the reports from Montana which had arrived only that morning. "Westman is Old Establishment. He's not a marginalized hyper-nationalist politician—he's a wealthy, propertied aristocrat, or what passes for one on Montana. And he's smarter than Nordbrandt. She started off with a massacre; he started with a joke. She followed up with assassinations and scattered bombings; he followed up by blowing up the headquarters of one of the most hated off-world organizations on his homeworld . . . and still did it without killing a single soul. He's like, like—"
"Like that ante-diaspora fictional character Bernardus was talking about?"
"Yes, exactly!" Krietzmann nodded vigorously. "What was his name . . . the Crimson—No! The Scarlet Pimpernel, that was it!"
"Maybe so," Alquezar said. "But I hope you won't think me shallow for pointing out that I, and the other RTU shareholders and directors, aren't exactly amused by his choice of targets. However much debonair style and elegance he may display as he goes about his nefarious business."
"Of course not. But," Krietzmann gazed at him levelly in the light of the oil lamps burning on the table as darkness settled fully in, "I hope you don't expect me to shed a lot of tears over your losses, either."
Alquezar looked at him sharply, eyebrows lowered for just a moment, then snorted and shook his head.
"No," he said softly, and paused to draw upon his cigar. The tip glowed like a small, red planet, and he launched an almost perfect smoke ring onto the evening breeze. "No, Henri. I don't. And I shouldn't. But the fact that I feel that way, and that other people on San Miguel and Rembrandt—like Ineka Vaandrager—are going to have even stronger feelings about it, is only another proof of Westman's shrewdness. He found a target guaranteed to polarize feelings on both sides of his particular political divide, and that takes brains. You say you have trouble understanding Aleksandra's take on this? Well, I just wish I understood how someone who's obviously as bright as Westman is could have bought into something like this in the first place. He ought to be getting behind us and pushing, not blowing us up!"
"Bright isn't the same thing as well-informed or open-minded," Krietzmann pointed out. "And everything I've been able to piece together suggests that Westman takes the Montanan fetish for stubborn individuality to previously uncharted heights—especially where Rembrandt and the RTU is concerned. Not to put too fine a point on it, he hates your guts. He doesn't really care why you people were so busy sewing up the Cluster's shipping. All he knows—or wants to know—is that you were doing it, that you were about as ruthless about it as you could possibly have been, and that his world's one of several which feels it was royally screwed by your so-called 'negotiating technique.'"
The Convention President shrugged.
"I don't really blame him for that. If you people had enmeshed Dresden in your cozy little empire against our will, I'd probably resent you just as much as he does. The only real difference between Westman and me is that, first, I believe Bernardus when he tells me how he first conceived of the Trade Union, and why. And, second, whatever his real motives—and yours—might have been, annexation by Manticore represents the greatest single opportunity, and not just in econ
omic terms, which has ever fallen the entire Cluster's way. I'm willing to forgive an awful lot to capitalize on that opportunity. But Westman's too focused on the old equation to realize how completely it's been changed."
"That's basically what Bernardus said," Alquezar said. "I suppose I follow the analysis intellectually. It's just that the mindset which can ignore all of that is so far away from the universe I live in that I can't get my understanding wrapped around the possibility it can even exist. Not on any emotional level."
"You'd better," Krietzmann said bleakly. "In the end, I think he's more likely to succeed in killing the Constitution than Nordbrandt is."
"Really?" Alquezar cocked his head. "I don't think I disagree with you, but I'd like to hear your reasoning."
"How much reasoning's involved?" Krietzmann grunted. "Oh, all right."
He leaned back in his own chaise lounge, cradling his beer mug.
"At the moment, O my esteemed fellow conspirator, you have about sixty-two percent of the delegates in your vest pocket. And Nordbrandt's extremism's actually pushed about ten percent of that total into your corner, I'd estimate. But Tonkovic and Andre Yvernau—and Lababibi—have an iron lock on the other thirty-eight percent. They've got most of the Cluster's oligarchs, aside from the delegates you and Bernardus can deliver from the RTU planets, and Nordbrandt pushed about ten percent of them away from your side and into Tonkovic's pocket when she punched the economic warfare button. Most of them could care less what happens on Kornati . . . as long as it doesn't splash onto their own comfortable little preserves. But with her blowing up banks and shooting bankers, not to mention the local oligarchs, her particular version of destabilization threatens to spill over into other systems, and they're not about to sign on to anything that would, as they see it, hamper their existing political and law-enforcement machinery for dealing with neo-bolsheviks and anarchists on their own worlds. And, since it takes a two-thirds majority to vote out a draft Constitution, as long as she can hold on to the five or six percent of the delegates you still need, she can stonewall the entire process and try to extort concessions out of you. Out of us."
