“Possibly; but even if that’s true, it’s no solution to our problems.”
“Shit, you always did want solutions, didn’t you? Most of the things that bother you two aren’t problems, and they don’t have solutions: they’re the conditions of life and you have to live with them.” She sighed at the tightening of his lips. “It’s like talking to a rock, with either of you. Mind you, Pa’s more often right on some things, to my way of thinking. Politics, certainly.”
“You don’t think I should have gotten Tyansha’s child out of the Domination?”
“Oh, that—that was your business. And she was yours, after all. You could have done it more . . . discreetly. The law is intended to discourage escape, not a man sending his own property out. I can even see why you did it, not that I would have myself; with her looks, that one was going to have trouble once she was into her teens. Tyansha was very lucky to end up belonging to you. No, I meant the other stuff, real politics.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “I can’t remember you ever taking much interest in party matters.”
“Well,” she said, sitting up and stretching. “I’m a voter now. I mean, how long has it been since the Draka League party lost an election, even locally? Sixty years, seventy? Regular as clockwork, seventy percent of the vote. The Liberals—‘free enterprise’—doesn’t it occur to them that three-quarters of the electorate are employees of the State and the Combines? They could all be underbid by serf labor if the restrictions were lifted, then there’d be revolution and we’d all be dead. That the Liberals get as much as three percent is a monument to human stupidity. Then there’s the Rationalists. I suppose you support them because they want a pacific foreign policy and an end to expansion. Same thing, only slower; we’re just not compatible with the existence of another social system. And we’re unique . . . ”
“The government line, and very convenient; but this war might kill us both,” he said grimly. “The way our precious social system already killed our brother. I wouldn’t be much loss to anyone, even myself, but you would, and I miss John.”
They turned their eyes to the portrait beside Johanna’s bed. It showed their elder brother in uniform, field kit; a Century of Janissaries had stood grouped around him. It was policy that those earmarked for advancement hold commands in both the serf army and the Citizen Force. John was smiling; that was how most remembered him. Alone of the von Shrakenberg children of this generation, he had taken after their mother’s kindred: a stocky, broad-faced man with seal-brown hair and eyes and big capable hands.
He had died in the Ituri, the great jungle north of the Congo bend. That was part of the Police Zone, the area of civil government, but there was little settlement—a few rubber plantations near navigable water, timber concessions, and gold mines in the Ituri that were supplied by airship. The rest was half a million square kilometers of National Park, where nothing human lived but a few bands of pygmies left to their Old Stone Age existence, looking up in wonder as the silvery shapes of Draka dirigibles glided past.
The mines were conveniently isolated. They were run by the Security Directorate, and used as a sink for serf convicts, the incorrigibles, the sweepings of the labor camps. The Draka technicians and overseers were those too incompetent to hold a post elsewhere, or who had mortally offended the powers that were. There had been an uprising below ground, brief and desperate and hopeless. The usual procedure would have been to turn off the drainage, or dump the tunnels full of poison gas. But the rebels had taken Draka hostages and John’s unit had been doing jungle-combat training nearby. There was no time to summon Security’s Intervention Squads, specialists in such work. Their brother had volunteered to lead his troops below; they had volunteered to follow, to a man.
Eric had never wanted to imagine what it had been like, he had always disliked confined spaces. The fighting had been at close quarters, machine pistols and grenades, knives and boots and picks and lengths of tubing stuffed full of blasting explosive. The power lines had been cut early on; at the last they had been struggling in water waist high, in absolute blackness . . . Incredibly, they had rescued most of the prisoners; John had been covering the withdrawal when an improvised bomb went off at his feet. His Janissaries had carried him out on their backs at risk of their lives, but it had been far too late.
They had been able to keep his last words, spoken in delirium. “I tried, Daddy, honest. I tried real hard.”
“I’m not surprised they brought him out,” Eric said into the silence. “He was an easy man to love.”
“Unlike you and Pa,” Johanna said drily. “Rahksan was head-over-heels for him; Pa . . . took it hard, you’ll remember. I thought he was going to cry at the funeral. That shook me; I can’t imagine Pa crying.”
“I can,” Eric said, surprising her. “You were too young, but I remember when Mother died. Not at the funeral, but afterwards, I went looking for him, found him in the study. He’d forgotten to lock the door. He was sitting there at the desk with his head in his hands.” The sobs had been harsh, racking, the weeping of a man unaccustomed to it.
They looked at each other uncomfortably and shifted. “Time to go,” Johanna said at last. “Pa wanted us down in the Quarters when the recruits get selected.”
They had taken horses, this being too nearly a formal occasion to walk. The path led down the slope of the hill between cut-stone walls, through the oak wood their ancestors had planted and patches of native scrub where the soil was too thin over rock to grow the big trees. The gravel crunched beneath hooves, and light came down in bright flickering shafts as the leaf canopy stirred, lancing into the cool wet-smelling green air of spring. Ferns carpeted the rocky ground, with flowers of blue and yellow and white. The trunks about them were thick and twisted, massive moss-grown shapes sinking their roots deep into the fractured rock of the hill.
Like the von Shrakenbergs, Eric thought idly, as they clattered over a small stone bridge, well-kept but ancient; the little stream beneath had been channeled to power a gristmill, in the early days.
They passed through a belt of hybrid poplar trees, coppiced for fuel, and into the working quarters of the plantation on the flat ground. The old mill bulked square, now the smithy and machine shop, about it were the laundry, bake house, carpenter’s workshop, garage—all the intricate fabric of maintenance an estate needed. The great barns were off to one side, with the creamery and cheese house and cooling sheds where cherries and peaches from the orchards were stored. Woolsheds and round granaries of red brick bulked beyond; holding paddocks, stables for the working stock . . . then a row of trees before the Quarters proper.
Four hundred serfs worked the fields of Oakenwald; their homes were grouped about a village green. Square, four-roomed cottages of field-stone with tile roofs stood along a grid of brick-paved lanes, each with its patch of garden to supplement the ration of meat and flour and roots. Pruned fruit trees were planted along the streets; privies stood behind the cottages, with chicken coops and rabbit hutches. Today was Saturday, a half-holiday save during harvest; only essential tasks with the stock would be seen to. Families sat on their porches, smoking their pipes, sewing, mending pieces of household gear; they rose to bow as Eric and Johanna cantered through on their big crop-maned hunters, children and dogs scattering before the hooves.