“It was a mattah of circumstances, luck an’ opportunity,” he continued. “I’s an only chile, and mah mothah died early. Pa away most all the time, no relatives near. Raised by serfs mo’ than most, didn’t fit in well at school. Eventually realized that all the people I really cared about had numbahs on they necks, and that I was spendin’ my life grindin’ them down.” He grinned, a gaunt expression. “Had an opportunity to get out, took it. Doesn’t mean I’ve got any particular affection fo’ Yankees or Yankeeland. The air stinks, everythin’s ugly, there’s no decent huntin’ an’ the people are soft an’ contemptible.”
He checked the medical readouts built into the cycle: heartbeat, respiration, neurological profile. “Good enough. Two of you are gettin’ as near passable as you ever will in the time available; toward the top of the bottom one-fifth of Citizens. Pity, you’ve both got good potential. Bettah than average.”
Fred was using the Unitorso again, the mark of knuckles a fading red splotch on his stomach below the solar plexus. “If . . . that’s . . . so . . . why’re we . . . so . . . goddamned . . . rotten?” he asked, careful to keep his tone neutral.
The Draka looked up at him. “Time,” he said. “Y’all didn’t start early enough; that affects y’whole system. Bone-density, fo’ example, basic body-fat ratios, metabolic rate an’ so forth. Mah genes is no more than middlin’, athletics-wise, but y’all will never catch up. If you’d been in the agoge from age five, you’d be notable excellent.”
* * *
ABOARD AIRSHIP DOULOS
APPROACHING NANTES AIRHAVEN
LOIRE DISTRICT
TOURAINE PROVINCE
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
APRIL 3, 1973
Frederick Lefarge had not flown by airship since he was a child; in the Alliance countries lighter-than-air was used mainly for freight, these days. The Domination had its own turbojets and scramjets, but simply attached less importance to haste, and neither of the Powers allowed overflights by aircraft of the other. London to Nantes was the sole passenger link between the Alliance and Europe, maintained by the Transportation Directorate; the Alliance had accepted the arrangement, but insisted that only slow and easy-to-monitor dirigibles be used.
“Welcome home, Mastah, Mistis,” the serf customs clerk said, handing him and Marya the forms.
The ferry dirigible was still at five thousand feet, more than time enough to complete the paperwork, but the American agents had come early to the lounge. That was in character for their personas, Draka eager to be home.
It is a comfortable way to travel, he mused. But it gives you too much time to think. He had been learning something of the nature of fear, this trip. Swift flashes, like the moment they passed the barricades in London and stepped onto territory that was Draka by treaty. The first green Security Directorate uniform, with the skull patches on the collar. Watching the Channel dwindling away below. A slow gnawing; every moment increased the danger, and there were a lot of moments to come.
Still, dirigibles are comfortable. Particularly compared with being strapped into a windowless hypersonic tin can, boring through the stratosphere at Mach 12 with the leading edges cherry-red. The Doulos was a teardrop of fiber-matrix composite five hundred meters long; near the bow a semicircular strip of the lower hull had been made transparent, as windows for the main lounge. The clear synthetic curved sharply outward for nearly two stories above his head, and from his seat at the edge of the deck he had a view straight down that would have made an agoraphobe cringe. Countryside for the last few hours, and now the broad greenbelt that always surrounded a major Draka city. There were a quarter million people in Nantes.
None of the jumbled mixed-use fringe you saw in the Alliance; plantation fields, then parks and public gardens and manicured forest. Transport corridors, more rail and less highway than he was used to. The industrial sector was to the east, along a section of the river that had been dredged for shipping. Anonymous factories with their labor compounds of three-story flats grouped around paved courts. Shipyards bristling with overhead cranes, warehouses, all along an orderly gridwork of paved streets and rail sidings. Some of the streets were tree-lined; that grew more numerous toward the west, in residential districts reserved for the serf elite of technicians and bureaucrats.
Then the Citizen quarter, a cluster of public buildings and a scatter of homes wide-spaced amid gardens.
He turned his attention to the paper:
Name. Antony Verman.
Place and Date of Birth. Archona, 1947: a Citizen population of over two million, which cut down the chance of meeting someone who should know a personality that existed solely as pits and spots in a read-only optical memory bank. Quite a good cover; they had worked hard to slip it into the files.
“Flagged,” the instructor had said. “If the Security Directorate checks it, they’ll get a warning you’re War Directorate Military Intelligence; the War Directorate will be told you’re a Krypteia hotshot.”
The Domination’s two armed services liked each other only marginally more than either loved the Alliance, and talked no more than they had to. Of course, the cover would still not stand up to detailed investigation; there were too many records, in too many separate files.
Military Service. Infantry, XXI Airmobile; as close to anonymous as you could get.
Occupation. Ceramic design consultant, luxury manufactures like that were generally handled by small businesses, not the omnipresent Combines. A designer was doubly independent, was more free to be a rolling stone with no connections. Better still to have no occupation, but without a good excuse a person who just lived on their Citizen stipend was a figure of some suspicion and contempt, and would attract attention when travelling.
Purpose of visit abroad. Reviewing samples of American ceramics, of course. There was an interesting collection in the memory of the impeccably Draka Helot-IV analogue/digital personal comp in his attaché case, and anyone making inquiries would find a string of design studios and shops with perfectly genuine memories of the two young Draka. That had been the beginning of their assignment, seeing if they could fool Americans first. And pass the critical gaze of the Draka defectors who had been their final instructors, in everything from etiquette and gossip to fighting style and sexual technique.
He glanced aside at his sister. Tradecraft’s good enough to fool me, he thought. They had both had minor cosmetic implants to make their faces unrecognizable to anyone who knew their genuine identities, hormone treatments to change their body-fat ratios, but it was more than that. Most of all the look, the hard-edged glossy feel of one of the Domination’s elite. Not even just Draka; looking at her with his persona’s eyes he could place her, city-born, probably from the southern provinces.
He finished the form and snapped his fingers for the serf. The lounge was growing a little crowded. Two hundred or more; thirty or so Draka, settling in around them, and the rest from the Alliance, mostly Americans and English. Some on business, others well-heeled tourists prepared to pay highly for sights and experiences only the Domination could offer; Fred looked at them with a distaste most of the Citizens around him seemed to share. The Domination allowed a trickle of closely supervised visitors, as much for the Intelligence opportunities as for the Alliance dollars they brought.
There was a subliminal change in the vibration of the hull; he looked back and saw the big turbocompound engine pods swiveling. Distant pumps went chunk-whir, compressing hydrogen to liquid and draining it into the insulated tanks along the keel. Fred’s mouth was dry as he felt the slight falling-elevator sensation of descent; he sipped at his glass of sparkling mineral water. They were over the airhaven now, passing rows of dirigibles in their cradles, acres of concrete and rail. The tall cylinder of the docking tower was ahead of them, and the Doulos slid toward it with the calm precision of computer piloting.