The staff were lined up before the round doorway; they bowed with hands before eyes as she drew on her gloves, this being a formal occasion.
“Good-bye,” she said. “You’ve served well, and while I’m gone, y’all can stay here in the villa servants’ quarters an’ grounds.” They brightened; it was a rare treat, they were usually only here when the Mistress was in residence.
“Maintenance work only, an’ Jolene’s authorized to draw supplies fo’ an entertainment, youselves and a guest each.” Cheers at that. She nodded at Jolene. “Keep ’em in order, hey?”
“You command, Mistis,” Jolene said, bending to kiss the Draka’s hand.
Yolande put the palm under her chin and raised her to meet her lips. “Be seeing you.”
Marya sank back on the cushioned seat beside Tina and watched the Draka board the airsled. Yolande ignored the steps, vaulting over the side in a complete feet-uppermost turn that looked slow motion in the .16 G, landing neatly in the bucket seat; she turned and smiled broadly at Marya, with a wink.
The serf smiled back. It’s like method acting, she told herself in some cold inner pocket of her mind. You had to construct a part of you that actually was what you portrayed; only here, you had to write the role as you went along. Impossible to do consciously—there was no way to concentrate long or hard enough; eventually you would slip up fatally. More a matter of creating and living in a persona. She suspected most born-serfs did the same from infancy, less consciously; it was impossible to tell how many retained anything beneath the role, how many became it.
Careful, she doesn’t expect you to fawn, Marya reminded herself. Yolande turned to the controls and stretched, cracking her fingers together over her head before dropping them to the sidestick. Just keep her happy and relaxed, and she’ll keep talking. Why not? You’re only a serf.
Knowing people was useful in ordinary life, the margin of survival for a spy, life itself to a serf. Yourself most of all. She isn’t cruel by their standards, Marya told herself. Nor stupid. As for last night . . . The shame was less than she had expected; decades spent in the Domination could not help but rub off on your attitudes. It wasn’t rape. You asked her. And while it was not something she would have otherwise chosen to do . . . Face it, it was physically pleasant. Yolande had been gentle, and took pleasure in giving pleasure as much as in receiving it—from what she knew, not something a serf could count on. The irritating part had been remembering always to let the other take the lead. Oh well, call it waltzing.
No, not unpleasant, she thought, letting her tired body relax into the cushions. Apart from the lack of sleep, she felt fine; the body had its own logic. Expecting it, she could handle the irrational rush of friendliness. That was a common pattern as well; hopefully, her owner would see no reason to suppress it. Yolande liked to be liked, even by her chattel, when possible.
She’s not evil, Marya thought with analytical dispassion. Neither was an apple full of cyanide.
It was simply too dangerous to be allowed to exist.
Yolande took the airsled straight up from the courtyard. It was basically a shallow dish of aluminum alloy built around a superconductor storage ring, with seats and windshields and small noiseless fans. Lift and drive were from pivoting vents on the rim, a dozen of them making the little craft superbly responsive. She glanced up into the rearview mirror.
Not the only thing that’s superbly responsive, she thought happily. Freya, but I needed my clock cleaned. That was different, not as bland as most serfs. More push-back.
A sensor went ping at three hundred meters: echo sounder, of course. Air pressure here was uniform right up until you ran into the sky. The aircraft slid forward at sixty kph, beneath a light scattering of fleecy pancake-shaped clouds.
There were times when you had to step back from a problem, turn your mind to something else, before you could see it plainly. She had climbed the command chain faster than anyone before her—native ability, connections, luck, and sustained drive—that because she had seen that the deadlock on Earth would squeeze resources into space, where they could at least accomplish something. For more than a decade, ever since Telmark IV, the knowledge that there could be nothing better here than a stalemate at a higher level of violence had eaten at her. Her mind prompted a list.
Item: Uncle Eric and the others aren’t stupid. They must realize that as well as I.
Item: Only something on the order of technological surprise could break the stalemate. And if it went on long enough, it would be the Alliance that came up with the winning card. She grinned at the thought, not an expression of pleasure, but the outward sign of a hunter’s excitement. So the Final War had to come before then—but it would be a disaster, as things stood. Seemed to stand.
Item: The Supreme Command knew that, too.
Item: Commandant of Aresopolis was high enough up the command structure to be on the verge of the circles that made policy, political decisions. High enough that she would get hints of purpose, not just code-verified orders.
So. Perhaps the incident with the Yankee prisoners was something significant, perhaps not. There were a thousand clandestine programs going on, everything from espionage to cultural disinformation. But perhaps this was different, and they had promoted her to the level where they had either to bring her into the picture or shoot her. Nor could her appointment be an accident.
I’m competent, she told herself judiciously. More than competent; but even so, there are dozens of others with qualifications as good.
Uncle Eric and his Conservatives knew where she stood; foursquare with them on domestic policy. She was a planter and an Ingolfsson and a von Shrakenberg connection, after all, and besides that, she agreed with them. On the other hand, in foreign policy nobody could doubt she followed the Militant line; nobody at all.
Yolande began to hum softly under her breath. This promised to be interesting, very interesting indeed, when she got some data to work with. Her mind felt as good as her body, loose and light and flexible, ready to the hand of her will like a well-made and practiced tool. Quite true what the alienists said: celibacy was extremely bad for you, as bad as going without proper diet or exercise or meditation, and as likely to upset your mental equilibrium.
I must do something nice for Marya, she thought as the crater slid by below.
This view always heartened her. Most of the Domination off-Earth was like being inside a building all the time at best, or more commonly imprisonment on a submarine. Efficient, necessary, even comely in the way that well-designed machinery could be, but not beautiful; difficult to love. Space and the planets were lovely, but they were unhuman, beyond and apart from humankind and its needs, too big and too remote. Here were reminders of what she was fighting for.
There was a river beneath them, meandering in from the rim, weaving between broad shallow lakes that had been subcraters once. Reeds fringed the banks, brown-green, except for a few horseshoe shapes of beach. The water was intensely clear, speckled with lotus and water lily, and she could see a fish jump in a long, slow arc that soared like an athlete’s leap. Trees grew along the shores, quick-growing gene-engineered cottonwood, eucalyptus, and Monterrey pine, with a dense undergrowth of passionflower and wild rose.