He nodded out the windows. The reception office was on the second story, and beyond lay Archona. It had long outgrown the original site; there were twelve million dwellers now, Earth’s greatest city. Hereabouts were mansions and gardens, like the townhouses of country gentry, used when business or politics brought them in from their plantations for a few weeks; for the whirl of social life in season as well. Tile roofs set amid green on the low slopes below him, red- and plum-colored, the flash of sunlight on water or marble. Quiet residential streets, lined with jacaranda trees as municipal law required. A mist of purple-blue in this blossom-time, spreading down over the hills and into the valley below and up the far slope, kilometer after kilometer. There were few tall buildings, and those were for public use.
The blue haze of the flowers sank into the languorous sienna-umber tint of the high-summer air, giving a translucent undersea look, as if the Domination’s capital were Plato’s lost Atlantis still living beneath the waves. At the center, the House of Assembly loomed, a two-hundred-meter dome of stained glass on thin steel struts, glowing like an impossible jewel amid its grounds. From there, the Way of the Armies ran east to Castle Tarleton, west to the Archon’s Palace, each set on the bordering rim overlooking the old city. He could recognize other landmarks: the cool white colonnades of the University, the libraries and theaters, pedestrian arcades lined with shops and restaurants . . . gardens everywhere, small parks, streets lined with marble-and-tile low-rise office structures. More parks beneath the tall pillars of the monorail. A train slashed by with the smooth speed of magnetic induction.
There was little noise, a vague murmur under the nearer sound of children playing. Draka hated blaring sound still more than crowding, and even in the central streets voices and feet would be louder than traffic. The air smelled freshly of garden, hot stone, water; there was only the faintest underlying tint of the vast factory complexes that sprawled north of the freemen’s city, the world of the Combines and their labor compounds. Decently hidden away, so that nobody need visit it except when business took them there. His mind filled in the other hidden things: the vast engineering works that brought in water from the Maluti mountains and the headwaters of the Zambezi a thousand kilometers away, the nuclear power units buried thousands of feet below in living granite . . . He had known this city all his life, and still the sight was enough to catch at the breath.
“What wonders we’ve built and dreamed,” he said softly. The aide leaned closer to listen. “Wonders and horrors . . . ” Above the horizon tall summer clouds were piling, cream-white and hot gold in the fierce sunlight. Aircraft made contrails high overhead, and the long teardrop shapes of dirigibles drifted below. “Gayner . . . it’s a melodramatic word, but she lusts for control over the Race. And she’ll never have it, because to rule them she would have to . . . love this world we’ve built. And to do that she’d have to understand it, understand how beautified and how utterly evil it is . . . ”
“Suh?”
“Forget it,” Eric said. “Just keepin’ up my reputation as a heretic.” He turned, and his face went as cold as the flat gray eyes. “At seventh and last, I hate Gayner because she’s a distillation of our bad qualities without our savin’ graces; like a mirror held up to the secret madness of our hearts.” A pause. “And if she and hers had their way, there’d be nothing human on this earth in a hundred years. Things that walked on two legs and talked, but nothin’ we’d recognize.”
Louise Gayner snapped the box file shut and sank down in the rear seat of the runabout. It was a hired vehicle rented by the month. She preferred them: less bother than maintaining your own. Her house was temporary, too, a modest four-bedroom rental in the eastern suburbs. Archona was not her home; she was city-bred, but from the west coast, Luanda. And not interested in luxury for its own sake.
Unlike some I could name, she thought sardonically as the car turned under the tall wrought-iron gates of the mansion. The wheels rumbled on the tessellated brick of the drive, a louder sound than the quiet hiss on asphalt.
Five hectares: the von Shrakenbergs had arrived early, and kept wealth and power enough to preserve what they took. A slope, on the southern side of the basin that had sheltered the original city. Generations of labor had turned the stony ground into a fantasia of terraces and tiled pools, fountains, patios. Native silverleaf and yellowwood, imported oaks and paper birch towered to give shade, and the high wall that surrounded the estate was a shape beneath mounds of rose and wisteria. The car soughed to a halt before the main entrance.
“Why are we bothering?” her assistant said, as they emerged into the dazzle of sunlight, then gratefully forward into the shade of a huge oak.
Gayner flicked her wrists forward to settle the lace, adjusted her gunbelt. “It’s like dancin’, Charlie,” she said flatly. “You have t’ git through the steps. Speakin’ a’ which—”
The half-moon of the drive was fronted by a last stretch of rock garden, with topiaries in pots. The stairway ran up the middle of it, polished native granite casting sun flecks back at them; dark foreshortened strips of shade lay slanting across it, from the Lombardy poplars along the edges. Servants came forward as they disembarked, one to show the driver the way to the garages; two more knelt smoothly to offer glasses on trays.
Gayner looked down at them, holding her gloves in her right hand and tapping them into her left. Wenches, a matched set; about nineteen, their movements as gracefully polished as the silver and crystal in their hands. One an ash-blond Baltic type, the other the gunmetal black of a Ceylonese Tamil, both in tunics of colorful dashiki, hand-embroidered cotton from the Zanzibar coasts.
The two Draka took the wine and poured out ceremonial drops before sipping. The aide’s eyebrows rose. “Constantia,” he said.
Sweet, with a lingering aroma as of flowers. Priceless; there was only one estate which produced it, down in the Western Cape province, and that was preserved as a historical landmark by the Land Settlement Directorate. Gayner smiled grimly as she replaced the glass; it was all faultless Old Domination manners, emphasizing that they were guests of the house. The finest of welcoming cups, presented with art . . . but no Citizen to greet them, subtly reminding her of status. Von Shrakenberg was a senator, she merely a committee head of the House of Assembly. He a retired Strategos, a paratrooper four times decorated, while her military service had been with the Security Directorate. Her family moderately obscure Combine execs and bureaucrats, descended from rank-and-file Confederate refugees, his among the oldest in the Domination. The von Shrakenbergs had been mercenaries in British service during the American Revolution, and they had arrived in the then-Crown Colony of Drakia with the first wave of Loyalist refugees. And every generation since had produced a leader, in war or politics or the arts.
“Up,” she said to the serfs. They rose with boneless grace and led the way, up the steps and into the colonnaded veranda, into the cool shade past the ebony doors. A house steward bowed them in; he was elderly, a dark-brown man with a staff of office that he had probably borne for thirty years. Estate-bred, she decided; he had the look common in the southern Police Zone.
“Mistis, Mastah,” he said, with a deferential smile. “My Mastah bids youz free of his house. Does you wish to be shown to the reception room at once, oah is there anythin’ you desire first? Rest, refreshments?”
“No,” she said dryly. “It’s excellent wine, but we didn’t come here to drink.” Tempting to keep the senator waiting, but childish. Nor did she wish more conversation with this relentlessly polite serf, who spoke far too much like a Citizen for her taste.