The Domination, page 74
MARCH 1, 1964
“This is the first series,” the project manager, a stocky brown-haired woman in her thirties, said. The wall lit up with a three-dimensional rendering of a virus molecule. It was color-coded, black and scarlet. “You see how we’ve replaced—”
“Doctor Melford,” the Senator said, with soft courtesy. The other members of the audience turned slightly to catch his words. “We’ve all absorbed as much technical information as possible from the prep files, and while I’m sure the computer projections would be very interesting, perhaps . . . ?”
He was a tall man, eagle-faced, with silver-streaked blond hair and mustache, conservatively dressed in indigo velvet and white lace. There was no impatience in his posture, leaning back at his ease in one of the two dozen swivel chairs that lined the little auditorium. Still, the woman in the white lab coat flushed slightly, coughed to cover it; her fingers moved on the controls.
“Well,” she said. Her vowels had a rather crisp tone, an East African accent; she had been born in these highlands. “Well, here are the recordings of the chimp results.”
The screen blanked for a moment and split. “The left is our control sample, an’ the right is the Series 24D group.” The Senator watched, stony-faced amid his silent aides, as the dance of madness and death ran to its close. The plainly clad woman at the heart of the other clump laughed aloud. A minute passed, and nothing living remained on the right-hand screen. To the left the chimps might have been a picture of the innocence before the birth of man.
“It seems,” he said, “that you’ve been makin’ progress, Doctor.”
She nodded eagerly. “ ‘Specially since you got us the new computer,” she said, one hand caressing the row of pens in her breast pocket with a nervous gesture.
The Senator smiled for the first time. “Thank the Yankees; it was the best we could steal,” he said dryly. “How confident are you that these-here results can be transferred to humans?”
“Very, yes,” the geneticist nodded. “Chimps are the best possible test subjects, they’re so close to us. Ninety-eight percent genetic congruence, only five million years since the last common ancestor, which . . . Yes. The endorphin response is modified into a feedback loop. That still needs work.”
The woman to the Senator’s left spoke, in a flat Angolan accent: “What’s y’re success rate?” She was younger than the Senator, perhaps forty-five, head of a committee in the House of Representatives that attracted little public attention.
Melford nodded at the right-hand screen. “Ovah ninety-nine percent, no point in finin’ it down further until we moves to human subjects.”
“In y’ professional opinion, is this project go or no-go?”
“Go.” A decisive nod. “Provided we get the necessary fundin’ an’ personnel. Mo’ work on the vector—we’re still relyin’ on blood to blood—and the secondary keyin’ sequence. Four years, eight maximum, an’ we’ll have it on spec.”
“Ah.” The Senator dropped his chin onto the steepled fingers of both hands, and the lids drooped over his narrow gray eyes. “Doctor, what about keepin’ it from the Yankees when we deploy it against the Alliance?”
“Well.” A frown. “Well, they’re not as, um, sophisticated at biotech as we are. Those Luddite fanatics of theirs who keep protestin’ every time they try to use somethin’, and then again they can’t test humans to destruction the way we can. Sloppy. Still, they’ve got some good people.”
The Senator looked across to his colleague; she nodded and spoke: “What’ll you need?”
“Um, more funding. More personnel, as Ah said. An’ experimental subjects, of course. Several hundred humans, assorted gender an’ age in the postpubescent range, pref’rably the same ethnic mix as the target population. Very delicate, to get it contagious but with a fail-safe turn-off. Don’t want it becomin’ a global pandemic, do we?”
“Wotan, no,” the Senator said. “Well, Doctor Melford, certain othahs will have to be consulted, but unofficially I think you can take it that the project will be approved fo’ further development.” He rose. “Service to the State.”
“Glory to the Race,” the scientist answered absentmindedly as the audience left; she was keying the machine again, reviewing the additional resources that would be needed.
“Well, how do y’like it?”
“Nice view,” the Senator said, nodding down from the terrace toward the lake and drawing on his cigarette.
The Virunga Biocontrol Institute was built in the hills overlooking Lake Kivu, at the southern edge of the Virunga range. A century old now, almost as old as Draka settlement in these volcanic highlands. Low whitewashed buildings of stone block, roofs of plum-colored tile, almost lost among the vegetation; the gardens were flamboyantly lovely even by the Domination’s standards, fertile lava soils and abundant rain and a climate of eternal spring. National park stretched north and west, to the Ituri lowlands: haunt of gorilla and chimp, elephant and hippo and leopard; of the Bambuti pygmies also, left to their Old Stone Age existence.
Plantations stretched widely elsewhere across the steep slopes, green coffee and tea and sheets of flowers grown for air-freighting elsewhere; the air was scented with them, cool and sweet. The city of Arjunanda lay two thousand feet below by the waters, turned to a model by distance: buildings white and blue and violet with marble and tile, avenues bordered with jacaranda and colonnades roofed in climbing rose and frangipani. Even the factories and labor compounds that ringed it were comely, bordered by hedge and garden. Sails speckled the waves, and they could see the pleasure boats beating back toward the docks, and dirigibles lying silvery in the waterfront haven.
“It’s a famous beauty spot,” the woman said with elaborate sarcasm, indicating the sun setting behind the mountains to their right, amid clouds turned to the colors of brass and blood. “No mo’ games, man.”
He flicked the butt of the cigarette over the railing. It’s just like her, to be cold even when she’s angry. You can see why our enemies nicknamed us “snakes,” looking at her. The burning speck fell like a tiny meteor, to lie winking for a second before one of the Institute outdoor serfs arrived to sweep it up.
“It might work,” he said quietly.
“It will work. This time you suspicions of biotech don’t wash. And this project was mah price fo’ supportin’ you pet schemes.”
“Granted.”
They gave each other a glance of cool mutual hatred and turned again to the view beneath. Shadow was falling across the city and the lake as the first stars appeared above. The streetlights of Arjunanda flicked on in a curving tracery, and the lamps of the plantation manors scattered down the hills. An airship had cast off from the haven, and the thousand-meter teardrop rose from darkness into light as it circled, bound northward with cut flowers and electrowafers, strawberries and heavengrape wine.
“Have you ever wondered,” the Senator said meditatively, “why we Draka love flowers so?”
The woman blinked, her fox-sharp face shadowed in the dim glow. “No, can’t say as I have,” she said neutrally. “Why?”
“They’re safer to love than human bein’s,” he said thoughtfully. “An’ unlike humans, they deserve it.” He turned. “I’ll be in contact after I speak to the Archon.”
Chapter One
PROVINCE OF ITALY
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
SEPTEMBER 1, 1968
It’s too crowded in here, Yolande Ingolfsson thought irritably.
The crowding was not physical. The van was an Angers-Kellerman autosteamer from the Trevithick Combine’s works in Milan, a big six-wheeler plantation sedan like a slope-fronted box with slab sides. There were five serfs and one young lady of landholding Citizen family in the roomy cabin; the muted sound of the engine was lost in the rush of wind and whine of the tires. None of them had been this way before.
Young Marco the driver was chattering with excitement, with stolid Deng sitting beside him giving an occasional snarl when the Italian’s hands swooped off the wheel. The Oriental was a stocky grizzle-haired man of fifty, his face round and ruddy. He had been the House foreman since forever; Father had brought him from China when he and Mother came to set up the plantation, after the War. Saved him from an impaling stake, the rebel’s fate, or so the rumor went, but neither of them would talk about it. Bianca and Lele were bouncing about on the benches running along either side of the vehicle, giggling and pointing out the sights to each other.
Not to me, Yolande thought with a slight sadness. Well, she was fourteen, that was getting far too grown-up to talk that way with servants.
The van had the highway mostly to itself on the drive down from Tuscany, past Rome and through the plantations of Campania; Italy was something of a backwater these days, and what industry there was clustered in the north. There was the odd passenger steamer, a few electric runabouts, drags hauling linked flats of produce or goods. Nevertheless the road was just as every other Class II way in the Domination of the Draka, an asphalt surface eight meters broad with a graveled verge and rows of trees on either side; cypress or eucalyptus here, but that varied with the climate.
Fields passed, seen through a flicker of trunks and latticed shadow slanting back from the westering sun, big square plots edged with shaggy hedges of multiflora. Fields of trellised vines, purple grapes peering out from the tattered autumnal lushness of their leaves; orchards of silvery gray olives, fruit trees, hard glossy citrus, and sere yellow-brown grain stubble. Fields of alfalfa under whirling sprinklers, circles of spray that filled the air with miniature rainbows and a heavy green smell that cut the hot dust scent. Melons lying like ruins of streaked green-and-white marble tumbled among vines, and strawberries starred red through the velvet plush of their beds.
Arch-and-pillar gateways marked the turnoffs to the estate manors, hints of colored roofs amid the treetops of their gardens. Yolande felt what she always did when she saw a gate: an impulse to open it. Like an itch in the head, to follow and see what was there, who the people were, and what their lives were like. Make up stories about them, or poems.
Silly, she thought. People were people; plantations were plantations, not much different from the one she grew up on.
Words and surfaces, hard shiny shells, that was all you could know of people. Yet the itch would not go away. You thought that you knew what they were like, especially when you were little; then a thing would happen that showed you were wrong . . . she shivered at certain memories.
The Draka girl leaned back with a sigh, feeling heavy and a little tired from the going-away party last night. She had the rear of the autosteamer—a semicircle couch like the fantail of a small yacht—nearly to herself: her Persian cat, Machiavelli, was curled up beside her. He always tried to sleep through an auto drive; at least he didn’t hide under a seat and puke anymore . . . The windows slanted over her head, up to the roof of the auto, open a little to let in a rush of warm dry afternoon air. She let her head fall back, looking through the glass up into the cloudless bowl of the sky, just beginning to darken at the zenith. Her face looked back at her, transparent against the sky, centered in a fan of pale silky hair that rippled in the breeze.
Like a ghost, she thought. Her mind could fill in the tinting, summer’s olive tan, hair and brows faded to white-gold, Mother’s coloring. Eyes the shade of granulated silver, rimmed with dark blue, a mixture from both her parents. Face her own, oval, high cheekbones and a short straight nose, wide full-lipped mouth, squared chin with a cleft; Pa was always saying there must be elf somewhere in the bloodlines. She turned her head and sucked in her cheeks; the puppy fat was definitely going, at long last. She was still obstinately short and slightly built, however much she tried to force growth with willpower.
At least I don’t have spots, she mused with relief. It was her first year at the new school, and her first in the Senior Section, as well.
“Bianca, get me a drink, please,” Yolande said, shifting restlessly and stretching. The drive had been a long one, and she felt grubby and dusty and sticky; the silk of her blouse was clinging to her back, and she could feel how it had wrinkled.
The air had a spicy-dry scent, like the idea of a sneeze. Yolande sipped moodily at the orange juice and watched as the auto turned south and east to skirt the fringe of Naples. Her mouth was dry despite the cold drink. She handed the glass back to the servant girl and wiped her palms down the sides of her jodhpurs, hitched at her gunbelt, ran fingers through the tangled mass of her hair, adjusted her cravat.
“Bianca, Lele, my hair’s a mess,” she said. “Fix it.” There was a sour taste at the back of her mouth, and a feeling like hard fluttering in her stomach.
Don’t fidget, she told herself as the tense muscles of her shoulders and neck eased at the familiar feel of fingers and hairbrush. It’s serfish. It was emotional to be frightened of going to a new school; they weren’t going to hurt her, after all. Children and serfs were expected to be emotional; a Citizen ruled herself with the mind. Bianca was humming as she used the pick on the end of her comb to untangle a knot. Yolande’s hair had always been feather-soft and flyaway.
The school was on the bay itself, surrounded by a thousand hectares of grounds. A herd of ibex raised their scimitar-horned heads from a pool, muzzles trailing drops that sparkled as they fell among the purple-and-white bowls of the water lilies.
“Turn right,” Yolande said, unnecessarily; there was a servant in the checkered livery of the school directing traffic.
The sun had sunk until it nearly touched the horizon, and the light-wand in the serf’s hand glowed translucent white. More servants waited at the brick-paved parking lot, a broad expanse of tessellated red and black divided by stone planters with miniature trees. The van eased into place, guided by a wench with a light-wand who walked backwards before them, and stopped; Yolande felt the dryness suddenly return to her mouth as she rose.
“Well,” she said into air that felt somehow motionless after the unvarying rush of wind on the road. “Let’s go.”
Deng pushed the driver back into his seat. “Not you, Marco,” he said.
The younger man gave him a resentful glare but sank down again. Deng was not like some bossboys; he did not use the strap or rubber hose all the time, but he was obeyed just the same.
Yolande ignored the stairs, stepping out and taking the chest-high drop with a flex of her knees. An eight-wheeler articulated steamer was unloading a stream of girls; that must be a shuttle from Naples, the ones coming in from the train and dirigible havens.
They were all dressed in the school uniform, a knee-length belted tunic of Egyptian linen dyed indigo blue, and sandals that strapped up the calf. She felt suddenly self-conscious in her young-planter outfit, even with the Tolgren 10mm and fighting knife she had been so proud of. They were mostly older than her; all the Junior Section would have arrived yesterday. Their friends were there to greet them, hugs and wristshakes and flower wreaths for their hair . . .
Yolande swallowed and forced herself to ignore them, the laughter and the shouts, ignored a tiltrotor taking off and turning north. She blinked; in half an hour it would be past Sienna. Past Badesse, past home. Over the tiny hilltop lights of Claestum; her parents might look up from the dining terrace at the sound of engines. Tantie Rahksan with her eternal piece of embroidery . . . Moths would be battering against the globes, and there would be a damp smell from the pools and fountains. Warm window-glow coming on in the Quarters down in the valley, and the sleepy evening sounds of the rambling Great House. Her own bedroom in the west tower would be dark, only moonlight making shadows on the comforter, her desk, airplane models, old dolls and posters . . .
This is ridiculous, she scolded herself, working at the knot of misery beneath her breastbone. The quarrel at the old school had not been her fault; even if somebody had to leave, it should have been Irene, not her. Would have been, if they had not valued peace over justice.
“Hello.”
She looked down with a start; a girl her own age was standing nearby, hands on hips and a smile on her face.
“You’re Yolande Ingolfsson, the one from up Tuscany way?”
She nodded, and grasped the offered wrist. Then blinked a little with surprise, feeling a shock as of recognition.
I must know someone who looks like her, she thought.
“Myfwany Venders,” she was saying. “Leontini, Sicily. I’m in you year, and from out-of-district, too, so I thought I’d help you get settled.”
The other girl was a centimeter taller, with brick-red hair and dark freckles on skin so white it had a bluish tinge, high cheekbones, and a snub nose; big hands and feet and long limbs that hinted at future growth. She grinned: “I know how it is. They pitched me in here last year and I went around bleating like a lost lamb. It’s not bad, really, once y’ get to know some people.”
“Thank you,” Yolande replied, a little more fervently than she would have liked. Myfwany shrugged, turned and put thumb and forefinger in her mouth to whistle sharply.
“It’s nothing, veramente. Let’s get the matron.”
“Missy.”
Yolande stretched and turned over, burrowing into the coverlet.
“Missy. Time to get up.”
That was Lele with the morning tray. She was wrapped in a robe, her own half-Asian face still cloudy with sleep.
“Thank you.” The Draka yawned and stretched, rolled out of bed, and drank down the glasses of juice and milk.
The other score or so of girls in her year and section were already gathering in the courtyard, dressed like her in rough cotton exercise tunics and openwork runner’s sandals, talking and yawning and helping each other stretch. Baiae School was laid out in rectangular blocks running inland from the water’s edge; it was slightly chilly in the shade of the colonnade that ran around three sides of the open space, and the sun was just rising over the higher two-story block at the east end. The low-peaked roof was black against the rose-pale sky, and the sound of birds was louder than the human chatter. In the center of the court was a long pool; water spouted from a marble dolphin, and she could feel a faint trailing of mist as she walked out into the garden.
“This is the first series,” the project manager, a stocky brown-haired woman in her thirties, said. The wall lit up with a three-dimensional rendering of a virus molecule. It was color-coded, black and scarlet. “You see how we’ve replaced—”
“Doctor Melford,” the Senator said, with soft courtesy. The other members of the audience turned slightly to catch his words. “We’ve all absorbed as much technical information as possible from the prep files, and while I’m sure the computer projections would be very interesting, perhaps . . . ?”
He was a tall man, eagle-faced, with silver-streaked blond hair and mustache, conservatively dressed in indigo velvet and white lace. There was no impatience in his posture, leaning back at his ease in one of the two dozen swivel chairs that lined the little auditorium. Still, the woman in the white lab coat flushed slightly, coughed to cover it; her fingers moved on the controls.
“Well,” she said. Her vowels had a rather crisp tone, an East African accent; she had been born in these highlands. “Well, here are the recordings of the chimp results.”
The screen blanked for a moment and split. “The left is our control sample, an’ the right is the Series 24D group.” The Senator watched, stony-faced amid his silent aides, as the dance of madness and death ran to its close. The plainly clad woman at the heart of the other clump laughed aloud. A minute passed, and nothing living remained on the right-hand screen. To the left the chimps might have been a picture of the innocence before the birth of man.
“It seems,” he said, “that you’ve been makin’ progress, Doctor.”
She nodded eagerly. “ ‘Specially since you got us the new computer,” she said, one hand caressing the row of pens in her breast pocket with a nervous gesture.
The Senator smiled for the first time. “Thank the Yankees; it was the best we could steal,” he said dryly. “How confident are you that these-here results can be transferred to humans?”
“Very, yes,” the geneticist nodded. “Chimps are the best possible test subjects, they’re so close to us. Ninety-eight percent genetic congruence, only five million years since the last common ancestor, which . . . Yes. The endorphin response is modified into a feedback loop. That still needs work.”
The woman to the Senator’s left spoke, in a flat Angolan accent: “What’s y’re success rate?” She was younger than the Senator, perhaps forty-five, head of a committee in the House of Representatives that attracted little public attention.
Melford nodded at the right-hand screen. “Ovah ninety-nine percent, no point in finin’ it down further until we moves to human subjects.”
“In y’ professional opinion, is this project go or no-go?”
“Go.” A decisive nod. “Provided we get the necessary fundin’ an’ personnel. Mo’ work on the vector—we’re still relyin’ on blood to blood—and the secondary keyin’ sequence. Four years, eight maximum, an’ we’ll have it on spec.”
“Ah.” The Senator dropped his chin onto the steepled fingers of both hands, and the lids drooped over his narrow gray eyes. “Doctor, what about keepin’ it from the Yankees when we deploy it against the Alliance?”
“Well.” A frown. “Well, they’re not as, um, sophisticated at biotech as we are. Those Luddite fanatics of theirs who keep protestin’ every time they try to use somethin’, and then again they can’t test humans to destruction the way we can. Sloppy. Still, they’ve got some good people.”
The Senator looked across to his colleague; she nodded and spoke: “What’ll you need?”
“Um, more funding. More personnel, as Ah said. An’ experimental subjects, of course. Several hundred humans, assorted gender an’ age in the postpubescent range, pref’rably the same ethnic mix as the target population. Very delicate, to get it contagious but with a fail-safe turn-off. Don’t want it becomin’ a global pandemic, do we?”
“Wotan, no,” the Senator said. “Well, Doctor Melford, certain othahs will have to be consulted, but unofficially I think you can take it that the project will be approved fo’ further development.” He rose. “Service to the State.”
“Glory to the Race,” the scientist answered absentmindedly as the audience left; she was keying the machine again, reviewing the additional resources that would be needed.
“Well, how do y’like it?”
“Nice view,” the Senator said, nodding down from the terrace toward the lake and drawing on his cigarette.
The Virunga Biocontrol Institute was built in the hills overlooking Lake Kivu, at the southern edge of the Virunga range. A century old now, almost as old as Draka settlement in these volcanic highlands. Low whitewashed buildings of stone block, roofs of plum-colored tile, almost lost among the vegetation; the gardens were flamboyantly lovely even by the Domination’s standards, fertile lava soils and abundant rain and a climate of eternal spring. National park stretched north and west, to the Ituri lowlands: haunt of gorilla and chimp, elephant and hippo and leopard; of the Bambuti pygmies also, left to their Old Stone Age existence.
Plantations stretched widely elsewhere across the steep slopes, green coffee and tea and sheets of flowers grown for air-freighting elsewhere; the air was scented with them, cool and sweet. The city of Arjunanda lay two thousand feet below by the waters, turned to a model by distance: buildings white and blue and violet with marble and tile, avenues bordered with jacaranda and colonnades roofed in climbing rose and frangipani. Even the factories and labor compounds that ringed it were comely, bordered by hedge and garden. Sails speckled the waves, and they could see the pleasure boats beating back toward the docks, and dirigibles lying silvery in the waterfront haven.
“It’s a famous beauty spot,” the woman said with elaborate sarcasm, indicating the sun setting behind the mountains to their right, amid clouds turned to the colors of brass and blood. “No mo’ games, man.”
He flicked the butt of the cigarette over the railing. It’s just like her, to be cold even when she’s angry. You can see why our enemies nicknamed us “snakes,” looking at her. The burning speck fell like a tiny meteor, to lie winking for a second before one of the Institute outdoor serfs arrived to sweep it up.
“It might work,” he said quietly.
“It will work. This time you suspicions of biotech don’t wash. And this project was mah price fo’ supportin’ you pet schemes.”
“Granted.”
They gave each other a glance of cool mutual hatred and turned again to the view beneath. Shadow was falling across the city and the lake as the first stars appeared above. The streetlights of Arjunanda flicked on in a curving tracery, and the lamps of the plantation manors scattered down the hills. An airship had cast off from the haven, and the thousand-meter teardrop rose from darkness into light as it circled, bound northward with cut flowers and electrowafers, strawberries and heavengrape wine.
“Have you ever wondered,” the Senator said meditatively, “why we Draka love flowers so?”
The woman blinked, her fox-sharp face shadowed in the dim glow. “No, can’t say as I have,” she said neutrally. “Why?”
“They’re safer to love than human bein’s,” he said thoughtfully. “An’ unlike humans, they deserve it.” He turned. “I’ll be in contact after I speak to the Archon.”
Chapter One
PROVINCE OF ITALY
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
SEPTEMBER 1, 1968
It’s too crowded in here, Yolande Ingolfsson thought irritably.
The crowding was not physical. The van was an Angers-Kellerman autosteamer from the Trevithick Combine’s works in Milan, a big six-wheeler plantation sedan like a slope-fronted box with slab sides. There were five serfs and one young lady of landholding Citizen family in the roomy cabin; the muted sound of the engine was lost in the rush of wind and whine of the tires. None of them had been this way before.
Young Marco the driver was chattering with excitement, with stolid Deng sitting beside him giving an occasional snarl when the Italian’s hands swooped off the wheel. The Oriental was a stocky grizzle-haired man of fifty, his face round and ruddy. He had been the House foreman since forever; Father had brought him from China when he and Mother came to set up the plantation, after the War. Saved him from an impaling stake, the rebel’s fate, or so the rumor went, but neither of them would talk about it. Bianca and Lele were bouncing about on the benches running along either side of the vehicle, giggling and pointing out the sights to each other.
Not to me, Yolande thought with a slight sadness. Well, she was fourteen, that was getting far too grown-up to talk that way with servants.
The van had the highway mostly to itself on the drive down from Tuscany, past Rome and through the plantations of Campania; Italy was something of a backwater these days, and what industry there was clustered in the north. There was the odd passenger steamer, a few electric runabouts, drags hauling linked flats of produce or goods. Nevertheless the road was just as every other Class II way in the Domination of the Draka, an asphalt surface eight meters broad with a graveled verge and rows of trees on either side; cypress or eucalyptus here, but that varied with the climate.
Fields passed, seen through a flicker of trunks and latticed shadow slanting back from the westering sun, big square plots edged with shaggy hedges of multiflora. Fields of trellised vines, purple grapes peering out from the tattered autumnal lushness of their leaves; orchards of silvery gray olives, fruit trees, hard glossy citrus, and sere yellow-brown grain stubble. Fields of alfalfa under whirling sprinklers, circles of spray that filled the air with miniature rainbows and a heavy green smell that cut the hot dust scent. Melons lying like ruins of streaked green-and-white marble tumbled among vines, and strawberries starred red through the velvet plush of their beds.
Arch-and-pillar gateways marked the turnoffs to the estate manors, hints of colored roofs amid the treetops of their gardens. Yolande felt what she always did when she saw a gate: an impulse to open it. Like an itch in the head, to follow and see what was there, who the people were, and what their lives were like. Make up stories about them, or poems.
Silly, she thought. People were people; plantations were plantations, not much different from the one she grew up on.
Words and surfaces, hard shiny shells, that was all you could know of people. Yet the itch would not go away. You thought that you knew what they were like, especially when you were little; then a thing would happen that showed you were wrong . . . she shivered at certain memories.
The Draka girl leaned back with a sigh, feeling heavy and a little tired from the going-away party last night. She had the rear of the autosteamer—a semicircle couch like the fantail of a small yacht—nearly to herself: her Persian cat, Machiavelli, was curled up beside her. He always tried to sleep through an auto drive; at least he didn’t hide under a seat and puke anymore . . . The windows slanted over her head, up to the roof of the auto, open a little to let in a rush of warm dry afternoon air. She let her head fall back, looking through the glass up into the cloudless bowl of the sky, just beginning to darken at the zenith. Her face looked back at her, transparent against the sky, centered in a fan of pale silky hair that rippled in the breeze.
Like a ghost, she thought. Her mind could fill in the tinting, summer’s olive tan, hair and brows faded to white-gold, Mother’s coloring. Eyes the shade of granulated silver, rimmed with dark blue, a mixture from both her parents. Face her own, oval, high cheekbones and a short straight nose, wide full-lipped mouth, squared chin with a cleft; Pa was always saying there must be elf somewhere in the bloodlines. She turned her head and sucked in her cheeks; the puppy fat was definitely going, at long last. She was still obstinately short and slightly built, however much she tried to force growth with willpower.
At least I don’t have spots, she mused with relief. It was her first year at the new school, and her first in the Senior Section, as well.
“Bianca, get me a drink, please,” Yolande said, shifting restlessly and stretching. The drive had been a long one, and she felt grubby and dusty and sticky; the silk of her blouse was clinging to her back, and she could feel how it had wrinkled.
The air had a spicy-dry scent, like the idea of a sneeze. Yolande sipped moodily at the orange juice and watched as the auto turned south and east to skirt the fringe of Naples. Her mouth was dry despite the cold drink. She handed the glass back to the servant girl and wiped her palms down the sides of her jodhpurs, hitched at her gunbelt, ran fingers through the tangled mass of her hair, adjusted her cravat.
“Bianca, Lele, my hair’s a mess,” she said. “Fix it.” There was a sour taste at the back of her mouth, and a feeling like hard fluttering in her stomach.
Don’t fidget, she told herself as the tense muscles of her shoulders and neck eased at the familiar feel of fingers and hairbrush. It’s serfish. It was emotional to be frightened of going to a new school; they weren’t going to hurt her, after all. Children and serfs were expected to be emotional; a Citizen ruled herself with the mind. Bianca was humming as she used the pick on the end of her comb to untangle a knot. Yolande’s hair had always been feather-soft and flyaway.
The school was on the bay itself, surrounded by a thousand hectares of grounds. A herd of ibex raised their scimitar-horned heads from a pool, muzzles trailing drops that sparkled as they fell among the purple-and-white bowls of the water lilies.
“Turn right,” Yolande said, unnecessarily; there was a servant in the checkered livery of the school directing traffic.
The sun had sunk until it nearly touched the horizon, and the light-wand in the serf’s hand glowed translucent white. More servants waited at the brick-paved parking lot, a broad expanse of tessellated red and black divided by stone planters with miniature trees. The van eased into place, guided by a wench with a light-wand who walked backwards before them, and stopped; Yolande felt the dryness suddenly return to her mouth as she rose.
“Well,” she said into air that felt somehow motionless after the unvarying rush of wind on the road. “Let’s go.”
Deng pushed the driver back into his seat. “Not you, Marco,” he said.
The younger man gave him a resentful glare but sank down again. Deng was not like some bossboys; he did not use the strap or rubber hose all the time, but he was obeyed just the same.
Yolande ignored the stairs, stepping out and taking the chest-high drop with a flex of her knees. An eight-wheeler articulated steamer was unloading a stream of girls; that must be a shuttle from Naples, the ones coming in from the train and dirigible havens.
They were all dressed in the school uniform, a knee-length belted tunic of Egyptian linen dyed indigo blue, and sandals that strapped up the calf. She felt suddenly self-conscious in her young-planter outfit, even with the Tolgren 10mm and fighting knife she had been so proud of. They were mostly older than her; all the Junior Section would have arrived yesterday. Their friends were there to greet them, hugs and wristshakes and flower wreaths for their hair . . .
Yolande swallowed and forced herself to ignore them, the laughter and the shouts, ignored a tiltrotor taking off and turning north. She blinked; in half an hour it would be past Sienna. Past Badesse, past home. Over the tiny hilltop lights of Claestum; her parents might look up from the dining terrace at the sound of engines. Tantie Rahksan with her eternal piece of embroidery . . . Moths would be battering against the globes, and there would be a damp smell from the pools and fountains. Warm window-glow coming on in the Quarters down in the valley, and the sleepy evening sounds of the rambling Great House. Her own bedroom in the west tower would be dark, only moonlight making shadows on the comforter, her desk, airplane models, old dolls and posters . . .
This is ridiculous, she scolded herself, working at the knot of misery beneath her breastbone. The quarrel at the old school had not been her fault; even if somebody had to leave, it should have been Irene, not her. Would have been, if they had not valued peace over justice.
“Hello.”
She looked down with a start; a girl her own age was standing nearby, hands on hips and a smile on her face.
“You’re Yolande Ingolfsson, the one from up Tuscany way?”
She nodded, and grasped the offered wrist. Then blinked a little with surprise, feeling a shock as of recognition.
I must know someone who looks like her, she thought.
“Myfwany Venders,” she was saying. “Leontini, Sicily. I’m in you year, and from out-of-district, too, so I thought I’d help you get settled.”
The other girl was a centimeter taller, with brick-red hair and dark freckles on skin so white it had a bluish tinge, high cheekbones, and a snub nose; big hands and feet and long limbs that hinted at future growth. She grinned: “I know how it is. They pitched me in here last year and I went around bleating like a lost lamb. It’s not bad, really, once y’ get to know some people.”
“Thank you,” Yolande replied, a little more fervently than she would have liked. Myfwany shrugged, turned and put thumb and forefinger in her mouth to whistle sharply.
“It’s nothing, veramente. Let’s get the matron.”
“Missy.”
Yolande stretched and turned over, burrowing into the coverlet.
“Missy. Time to get up.”
That was Lele with the morning tray. She was wrapped in a robe, her own half-Asian face still cloudy with sleep.
“Thank you.” The Draka yawned and stretched, rolled out of bed, and drank down the glasses of juice and milk.
The other score or so of girls in her year and section were already gathering in the courtyard, dressed like her in rough cotton exercise tunics and openwork runner’s sandals, talking and yawning and helping each other stretch. Baiae School was laid out in rectangular blocks running inland from the water’s edge; it was slightly chilly in the shade of the colonnade that ran around three sides of the open space, and the sun was just rising over the higher two-story block at the east end. The low-peaked roof was black against the rose-pale sky, and the sound of birds was louder than the human chatter. In the center of the court was a long pool; water spouted from a marble dolphin, and she could feel a faint trailing of mist as she walked out into the garden.
