Eric kept his face motionless. Inwardly he felt a chill wariness that reminded him of going into close bush country after leopard.
“I presume,” she continued, moistening her lips, “that this means you’ll agree to the Stone Dogs project, von Shrakenberg?”
With an effort of will Eric forced himself to clear his throat and speak.
“Quite right, Gayner. It’s still insanely risky, but it does oppose our strength to Alliance weakness, an’ if war does come, it’d be invaluable. I was hesitatin’ because I thought it might provoke the conflict itself, if they discovered it.”
She nodded, still without taking her eyes from his face; the intentness of it was akin to love, a total focusing of attention on another human being. Her pupils expanded, filling the light hazel of her eyes with pools of black, and the small hairs along his spine struggled to stand.
“That’s agreement in outline, then. I’ll get my people to drop their opposition to the trainin’ and tribunal motions; you agree to puttin’ the Stone Dogs through the Strategic Plannin’ committee; we shelve the chemoconditionin’ trials. Agreed?” He nodded. “Let’s have our subordinates draw up the draft proposals, then. I’ll be goin’.”
“Wait.” She turned; he was standing at unconscious parade rest, with his hands clasped behind his back. “You think I’m soft. What’s more, you think the Domination’s gone soft, don’t you, Gayner? Not like the hard, pure days back in the ’50s?”
“In danger of it,” she said, with her hand on the handle of the door.
“You should read some history, Gayner; about what things were like just befo’ the Great War, when we’d had two generations of peace. But think on this, Gayner: Let’s do a best possible case heah; let’s say the Stone Dogs work, an’ we destroy the Yankees. Cast you mind forward of that, say we’ve pacified them; say the Domination is coterminous with the human race, as we’ve always dreamed. Whose policies do you think the Race will find most agreeable then?”
She blinked at him in surprise for a moment, then relaxed. “Well, then, we’d have only our personal matters to attend to, wouldn’t we? In any case, by then other . . . hands may be at the tiller. A very fond, an’ very anticipatory farewell, von Shrakenberg.”
She swept out the door, and Eric went to his desk, sat, thumbed the record switch and dictated a digest of the legislation to be drafted. He flicked it off, thought for a moment, then thumbed it again:
“Note to Shirley. We’ve won, two out of three,” he said, “Why is it that I don’t feel too happy about this?”
Chapter Eight
CHATEAU MOULIN
PROVINCE OF TOURAINE
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
FEBRUARY 8, 1973
The chateau was south of the Loire, in the Sologne. A nobleman by the name of Philippe du Moulin had built it five centuries before. Most of the time since, it had been a hunting seat, for the Sologne was an area of poor acid soils, of marsh and forest. When the Draka came they decided that the effort of reclamation was not worth the cost. Too many richer lands lay desolate, their tillers dead in the slaughterhouse madness of the Eurasian War; the remaining French peasants were deported elsewhere, or set to planting oak trees. For two decades the mansion lay empty, until the Security Directorate needed a place of refuge for a defector with very specific tastes.
“Here he is,” the Farraday Combine representative muttered with throttled impatience. “At last.”
The Tetrarch from the Directorate of Security shrugged and raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness, then let them fall back to the surface of the table. There were three terminals and keyboards built into it, the only outward sign of modernity in the room with its tapestries and suits of plate armor.
“Hi!” David Ekstein said, as he bounded in. The Security officer winced and looked away. Not quite so disgusting as he was, she thought resignedly.
“Dave, it’s really impo’tant not to keep people waiting,” the officer said.
“Oh, gee, sorry, Cathy,” Ekstein replied. He was in his mid-twenties but already the wiry black hair was thinning on top: a short man with a sticklike figure that turned pudgy at face and waist and buttocks. Acne scars, and his skin was still wet from the pool, mottled brown from the sunlamps. Bitterly, she told herself that the defector probably thought he was fitting in with Draka custom by coming to the business meeting in a black pool robe . . .
Tetrarch Catherine Duchamp Bennington gritted her teeth and smiled back at him. Officially she was Security liaison here. Actually, I’m bearleader to this little shit, she thought. Much of her effort was spent keeping him away from Draka. He was officially an honorary Citizen, but half an hour in normal society would have left him with a round dozen challenges to pistols at dawn.
Not that he was nasty, just . . . like a damned smelly fat puppy, she thought. Providential that a castle in France had been his private daydream, so they could immure him in the middle of this hunting preserve. Even better if they could have stuck him in an SD property in Africa or Russia, but the orders were for soft hand treatment. You could see why. Creativity was so delicate a quality, and this slug was a hothouse flower of the first order.
“Mei-ling was playing handball with me, and I really wanted to win,” he continued.
At least that was going well. The Directorate had bought him two dozen concubines, every one of them from the top crèches and with special training to boot. The Domination wanted full value from David Ekstein, and the wenches were leading him with patient subtlety into healthier habits. He had already lost a good deal of weight. It was unlikely that Ekstein would ever be anything remotely resembling what a Citizen should be, but with luck, in a few years and fully dressed he could avoid arousing actual disgust. His social skills had been marginal at home and were nonexistent here, but with careful management that could be handled. The Eugenics people had a sperm deposit in their banks, anyway.
“So, what’s your problem?” he continued, rubbing his hands and turning to the Combine exec. “I thought those designs were pretty good, really.” Servants bustled in with trays of coffee, fruit, and breakfast pastries.
“Ah,” the exec began. The electrowafers were excellent, and had opened up a whole new range of near-space applications, not to mention the eventual civilian uses. “Well, we’re havin’ real quality problems. Seventy percent rejection rate, even on our best fabricators, an’ we needs those wafers.” He caught himself just in time, not mentioning the use to which the sensor-effector systems would be put. The American—the ex-American, he reminded himself—was a defector, after all, and quite startlingly naive politically, but it was better not to remind him of certain things without need.
Ekstein frowned, took the data cartridge from the man and slipped it into the table unit. His hands skittered over the keyboard and the ball-shaped directional control; Bennington noted how their clumsiness vanished, turning to fluid skill. “Hey, no problem,” he said after a minute. “It’s the amorphous layer that’s causing it. You’re getting uneven deposition. How do you—”
Tetrarch Bennington tuned out the technical discussion and stared moodily out the mullioned windows of the salon. It was a cold bright morning outside; the courtyard’s brick pavement was new-swept; white snow in the mortar grooves between herringbone red brick. Gardens laced with white-ice hoarfrost, fairy-silver grass, and black tree trunks beneath hammered-metal branches, flowerbeds pruned back and dormant beneath their coats of mulch straw. The edge of the forest was a black wall, and the surface of the moat clear gray ice. It would be warming soon, though. She was a banana-lander from Natalia, born in Virconium, and the clear freshness of the northern spring never failed to enthrall.