“Gwen.”
“—two months to Pluto! Granted we’ll be there a year settin’ up the base, but—”
“Gwen, honeychile, I was on the design committee.”
Her daughter laughed and waved acknowledgment. “Sorry, Ma.”
“You’ve been noble not talkin’ shop, Gwen. I recognize true love when I hears it.”
“And, well, I am sorry to be leaven’ you. And not . . . Know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes, child of my heart, I know exactly.” A long laugh, and she reached up to squeeze a shoulder. “Fo’ reasons too numerous to state, I’m feeling first-rate just now. But you are always a . . . string of lights around my heart, child. Ah, here comes Marya.”
Gwen rose. The serf stopped at arm’s length and threw back her head; she had never stooped, but Yolande thought she saw a different curve to the neck. “Thank you, Missy Gwen,” she said.
The young Draka embraced her. “Always welcome, Tantie-ma,” she said. “Well—”
Her mother made scooting motions. “Alois and you have notions on how to spend the afternoon. Honestly, with an eighteen-month cruise ahead of you—”
“Ma!”
“But youth will be served. Or serviced—”
“Ma!” Mock indignation.
“Run along, you, Tantie-ma and I will find some way to pass the time.” Yolande winked, and thought she caught a hint of real embarrassment on her daughter’s face. One thing that hardly changes, she thought. It never seems quite natural when the older generation doesn’t lose interest.
“Strange, Mistis,” Marya said, watching the child she had borne walk away into the palms and oleander and hibiscus.
“How so?” Yolande turned her attention back to the serf. Her half-hour by the waves seemed to have composed her, at least. The coffee-brown synthtan suited her, as well.
“When . . . when she was little, she was so helpless as I held her. Now I can feel how gentle she’s being hugging me, and she could crush me like an eggshell. Strange to remember her so tiny.”
“True enough. Lie down here.”
Marya sat beside the Draka, wrapping her arms around her shins and laying her head on her knees.
“You want me?” she said, smiling faintly.
“You and a snack and a nap befo’ dinner,” Yolande said. “Settle for the snack and nap if you tuckered out.”
“Not yet,” Marya said, with the same slight curve of her lips. “You have been very . . . energetic, since Archona.”
“Good news does that to me, and no, I can’t tell you what.”
CLAESTUM PLANTATION
DISTRICT OF TUSCANY
PROVINCE OF ITALY
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
APRIL 4, 1998
“Hello, Myfwany,” Yolande said, sitting by the grave with her elbows on her knees. Wind cuffed at the spray of roses.
There was another nearby, now, her father’s. There were a few clouds today, white and fluffy. The air was just warm enough to be comfortable sitting still, with an undertone of freshness that was like a cool drink after the tropical heat.
“Tina’s coming along well,” she continued. “Gods, it’ll be interestin’ to see what a merger of my genes and yourn comes out to! With all the little improvements they puttin’ in these days.”
The wind ruffled the outer leaves of the flowers. They were still a little damp from the sprayer in the arbor where she had picked them. Yolande leaned forward to smell the intense wild scent.
“And Gwen . . . ah, love, you’d be proud of her. Assistant com officer on this new ship, the Lionheart. Exploration voyage, really; establishin’ a study base for the outer system and the Oort clouds. Cold out there . . . Hope it works out for her. Hope she settles with Alois, he’s a good sort.”
She smiled and touched the flowers and the short dense grass. “And there’s somethin’ else. Wotan and the White Christ, it’s so secret I hardly dare tell you, sweet! Gods witness, I’d begun to despair of the whole Domination, we seemed to be goin’ nowhere, until Uncle Eric let me in on the secret. Been in the plannin’ since”—she swallowed—“since befo’ India. A chance to put an end to the struggle, once and fo’ all.”
Yolande stopped for a moment. This is the most painful pleasure of my life, she thought. “I’m . . . worried, though. About Uncle Eric. He’s . . . not frightened—it’s just so easy to be indecisive at these levels, love! Always easier not to decide. He hates the idea of usin’ it, takin’ the risk. Even of the killin’ involved.” Slowly: “I admit it, love, I don’t like the idea either. The fighters . . . they take the chances, same as I. Always hated hurtin’ the helpless, and as fo’ throwin’ sunfire across the land . . . ” She made a grimace of disgust, looking out across the hills of her birth country. Birds went overhead, a flock almost enough to hide the sky for an instant.
She hammered a fist on her knee. “But what can we do, love? I could live with the thought of everythin’ bein’ destroyed, when there was no choice. Now there is. And the longer we wait, the worse. Ah, Myfwany, it’s so hard to know what’s right.”
Shaking her head, she rose and dusted her uniform. “I wish you were here, honeysweet,” she said. “I promise . . . I’ll do my best fo’ the children. Good-bye fo’ now, my love. Till we meet again.”
“What the hell is that?” Marya exclaimed. “Mistis,” she added hastily.
“That,” Yolande replied, “is the most expensive toy evah built.”
She had managed to shake most of the crowd of officials at Florence Airhaven; even the officer from TechSec, who was reasonably interesting when he got onto the yacht’s construction. Enough of crowding hack on Luna, she thought, and besides, she had checked out fairly thoroughly on the simulators. They were almost alone on the floater; even this backwater had modernized maglev runways, now. The craft before them was not something it had seen before, or most other airhavens in the Domination, either. Ninety meters long, a slender tapering wedge; the bottom of the hull curved up at the rear into the slanted control fins. There were control-cabin windows at the bow, scramjet intakes below the rear edge. And what looked like a huge four-meter bell pointing backward at the stern.
“It’s from the test program fo’ the fifth generation pulsedrives, the Rex class.” A sliver of afternoon light fell within the thrust plate, and glittered off the lining. “Synthetic single-crystal thrust plate, stressed-matrix/mag equalizers, deuterium-boron-11 reaction. They had two of the first units left ovah. Decided to try matin’ them to a heavy scramjet assault transport; first Earth-surface to deep-space craft ever built, is the result.” A Yankee might have junked the test units, but Draka engineers had a rooted abhorrence of throwing anything that still worked away.
“The power-to-weight’s good enough you could take off on the pulsedrive,” Yolande continued, as they came to the lift and stepped on board. It hummed quietly and swept them past the black under-surface heatshield; the top of the craft was dark as well, but the texture was subtly different. “Though that wouldn’t be neighborly. Actually it’s a waddlin’ monster in atmosphere, and mostly fuel tank inside; liquid hydrogen, of course. Got good legs, though; that reaction is energetic. You could make it to Mars or even the Belt, iff’n you didn’t mind arrivin’ dry.”