"Have a child or produce the work?" Isis asked with a chuckle, and Colin felt some of their shared sorrow fall from his shoulders.
"Both," he said.
"It was a risk," she concluded, "but the fact that 'Hidachi' was Oriental helped cover his appearance—we've always found that useful, though the emergence of the Asian Alliance has complicated things lately—and he chose his time and place carefully. Clemson University is a fine school, one of the top four tech schools in the country, but that's a fairly recent development. It wasn't exactly on the frontiers of physics at the time, and he published in the most obscure journal he could find. And there were some deliberate errors in his work, you know. All that, plus the fact that he never went further than pure theory, was intended to convince any of Anu's people who noticed it that he was a Terran who didn't even realize the significance of his own work.
"As for having me," she smiled more naturally, "that was an accident. Mom was his eighth wife—'Tanni's mother died during the mutiny—and, frankly, she thought she was too old to conceive and got a bit careless. When they found out she was pregnant, it scared them, but they never considered an abortion, for which I can only be grateful." She grinned, and her eyes sparkled for the first time Colin could remember.
"But it was a problem. As a rule, none of our Imperials interact openly with the Terran community, and on the rare occasions when they do, they appear and disappear without a trace. They almost always act solo, as well, which meant he and Mom had already stepped totally out of character. That very fact was a form of protection for them, and they decided to add me to it and hope for the best. And it helped that Mom was Terra-born, blonde, and a little, bitty thing. She and I both looked very little like Imperials."
Colin nodded. No one in his right mind would offer his family up for massacre; hence the presence of a family was a strong indication that "Horace Hidachi" was not an Imperial at all. It made a dangerous sort of sense, but he shivered at the thought, and wished he might have had the chance to meet the quite extraordinary "little, bitty" woman who had been Isis's mother.
"Still," Isis went on sadly, "we knew they'd keep an eye on 'Hidachi's' family. That's why I went into medicine and Michael was a stockbroker. We both stayed as far away from physics as we could, but Cal was too much like his great-granddad. He was determined to play an active part."
"I still don't understand why, though. Why risk so much to plant a theory the mutin—" Colin broke off and flushed, and Isis gave a soft, musical laugh.
"Sorry," he said after a moment. "I meant, why risk so much to plant a theory that Anu's bunch already knew?"
"Why, Colin!" Isis rolled her eyes almost roguishly. "Here you sit, precisely because that theory was made available to the space program. If the southerners hadn't followed up, we would've had to push it ourselves, sooner or later, because we needed for your survey instruments to be developed. Of course, Dad and Mom were pretty confident 'Anu's bunch,' as you put it, would pursue it once they noticed it—the 'Hidachi Theory of Gravitonics' is the foundation of the Imperial sublight and Enchanach Drives, after all—but we couldn't be certain. One reason we wanted them to believe a 'degenerate' had set the stage for it was to be sure they produced the hardware rather than opposing its development, because the entire point was to do exactly what we did: provoke a reaction from Dahak, one way or the other."
"Provoke Dahak?" Colin pinched his nose. "Wasn't that a bit, um, risky?"
"Of course it was, but our Imperials are getting old, Colin. When they go, the rest of us will carry on as best we can, but our position will be even more hopeless. The Council had no idea Dahak was fully functional, but we were already placing a lot of our people in the space program, like Sandy and Cal. Besides, if the human race generally knew what was up there, functional or not, Anu's position would be far more tenuous."
"Why?"
"We never contemplated what Dahak actually did, Colin, but something had to happen. Anu might try to take over any exploration of the ship, but we were prepared to fight him—clandestinely, but rather effectively—unless he came into the open. And if he had come out into the open, don't you think he'd've needed more than just his inner circle to control the resulting chaos?"
"Oh! You figured if he risked waking the others and they discovered all he'd been up to, he might get hit from behind by a revolt."
"Exactly. Oh, it was a terrible chance to take, but as I say, we were getting desperate. At the very least, it might be a way to add a new factor to the equation. Then too, we've always had a lot of people in the space program. It was possible—even probable—that if the ship was partially functional one of our own Terra-born might have gotten inside. Frankly—" she met his gaze levelly "—we'd hoped Vlad Chernikov would fly your mission."
"Vlad? Don't tell me he's one of yours!"
"Not if you'd rather I didn't," she said, and he laughed helplessly. It was his first laughter since Sean's death, and he was amazed by how much it helped.
"Well, I will be damned," he said at last, then cocked an eyebrow. "But isn't it also a bit risky to plant so many people in the very area where Anu is pushing hardest?"
"Colin, everything we've ever done has been a risk. Of course we took chances—terrible ones, sometimes—but Anu's own control is pretty indirect. Both sides know a great deal about what the other is up to—we more than him, we hope—but he can't afford to go around killing everyone he simply suspects."
She paused, and her voice was grimmer when she continued.
"Still, he's killed a lot on suspicion. 'Accidents' are his favorite method, but remember that shuttle Black Mecca shot down?" Colin nodded, and she shrugged. "That was Anu. It amuses him to use 'degenerate' terrorists to do his dirty work, and their fanaticism makes them easy to influence. Major Lemoine was aboard that shuttle, and he was one of ours. We don't know how Anu got on to him, but that's why so much terrorism's focused on aerospace lately. In fact, Black Mecca's claimed credit for what happened to Cal and the girls."
"Lord." Colin shook his head and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the console and propping his chin on his palms. "All this time, and no one ever suspected. It's hard to believe."
"There've been a few times we thought it was all over," Isis said. "Once we even thought they'd actually found Nergal. In fact, that's why Jiltanith was ever brought out of stasis at all."
"Hm? Oh! Getting the kids out just in case?"
"Precisely. That was about six hundred years ago, and it was the worst scare we ever had. The Council had recruited quite a few Terra-born even then—and you'd better believe they had trouble adjusting to the whole idea!—and some of them took the children and scattered out across the planet. Which also explains 'Tanni's English; she learned it during the Wars of the Roses."
"I see." Colin drew a deep breath and held it for just a moment. Somehow the thought of that beautiful girl having grown up in fifteenth-century England was more sobering than anything else that had happened so far.
"Isis," he said finally, "how old is Jiltanith? Out of stasis, I mean."
"A bit older than me." His face betrayed his shock, and she smiled gently. "We Terra-born have learned to live with it, Colin. Actually, I don't know who it's harder on, us or our Imperials. But 'Tanni went back into stasis when she was twenty and came back out while Dad was still being Hidachi."