Droplets that were not rain fell onto the petals in her lap. “I don’t know anything about Russia. I don’t know much about anything else, either,” she added bitterly. “On the Star of Mali, I tried to use some of the library files, but I couldn’t make sense of them. I didn’t know enough to make sense of them. I kept having to stop and look things up, until I got totally lost, trying to find meanings for the things that would tell me what something else meant. I never got all the way though any of them. And I tried, really hard. I hate POPPA!” she added with a savage sob in her voice.
“It’s going to be rough, I know that,” Simon said gently. “But you’ll have help. I’ve nothing better to do with my time, for one thing. And Vishnu’s school system has set up special classes for refugees coming in from Jefferson. The principal told me about the program yesterday, when I made arrangements for you to start classes next week. It will take hard work, a lot of it. But you can do it. Try to have faith in that, too.”
“Okay,” she whispered again.
She said very little for the rest of the day and went to bed very early, pleading exhaustion. Simon closed her bedroom door softly, wishing she were little enough to rock to sleep, and made his way into his own room. He had his daughter back. A piece of her, anyway. He was grateful for that much. But he could not stop thinking about Kafari and the war she planned to wage. She was getting ready to fight a dangerous enemy and he wasn’t thinking about POPPA. He was thinking about the machine he had once called friend. If Sonny killed Kafari…
Then Simon would kill Sonny.
It was as simple — and serious — as that.
PART FOUR
Chapter Twenty-Three
I
Yalena was not the most popular girl in school.
In fact, there was ample evidence to show that she was the most unpopular. There were no students from Vishnu in Yalena’s classes, which were special affairs designed to teach Jeffersonian children remedial everything. The closest she came to natives of Vishnu during school hours were the hectic moments in the corridors while changing classes and standing in line at the school cafeteria. Most of the Vishnu kids turned pitying glances on those known to be from Jefferson, but others were openly rude.
Given the way children of POPPA’s social and political elite behaved in mixed company, it was not difficult to see why. Yalena had truly not realized how odious a child she had been, until thrown into a society comprised of Vishnunians, POPPA’s upper crust, and Granger refugees.
Since Yalena did not fit into any of those social groupings, was trusted by none of them, and did not seek out companionship from any of them, she was quite literally the least popular individual in the entire school. For the first year, it had cut her to the bone. By the time she was sixteen, it had left her in tears on occasions that should have been special and had, instead, been merely excruciating. At seventeen and a half, she was far too busy mapping out her vengeance to bother with mere social trivialities.
She had her eye on college, which was more than enough work for a girl who hadn’t really learned anything but how to wash and dress herself. Fortunately, Vishnu’s colleges and universities had also opened their doors to Jefferson’s disadvantaged students, in a bid to create interstellar neighbors who were at least capable of reading, writing, and calculating basic arithmetic. Yalena had already applied to the college she wanted to attend, which offered the kind of classes she would need if she hoped to return home, someday, and strike back at the people who had murdered her mother and crippled her father.
Yalena’s pulse always stuttered a little, when her thoughts turned to her father. Simon Khrustinov was not an easy person to know. He had given her the things she had asked for, to the best of his ability. She had not asked for all that much, in any case, preferring to test out a new concept called self-sufficiency. Her days of demanding — or even whining — were long since over. Mostly she had asked his advice. And that, he had given unstintingly.
When the final bell rang, dismissing school for the day, Yalena gathered up her materials and stuffed them into her satchel, then headed into the crowded hallway. The swirl of happy voices, laughter, and slamming locker doors crested and splashed against her senses like whitewater on the Kirati River, where Yalena had done a whole summer of extreme camping. She had asked her father to send her there as her sixteenth birthday present.
He’d held her eyes for long moments, looking so deeply into her soul, for the motives hidden there, that she’d actually started to tremble. Then he’d given himself a little shake, smiled with a look of pain far back in his eyes, and said, “Of course you can go. If you need any advice on what to take with you, just ask.”
She’d asked. And had benefitted immensely from that advice. Yalena had enjoyed that summer, in a grim and solitary fashion. She hadn’t won herself any friends — mostly because she made no overtures, being far too busy learning simple survival skills most kids on Vishnu had absorbed by their sixth or seventh birthdays — but she’d won the grudging respect of the instructors.
More importantly, she had proved to herself that she could, given sufficient determination, overcome a decade and a half of indoctrination into the art and science of lunacy, a handicap compounded by indolent living, lazy flab in every muscle in her body and every snyapse in her brain. She’d had to overcome a learned helplessness, as well, that vanished entirely within two days of her arrival at the wilderness area that served as campground.
She’d spent her seventeenth summer in a Concordiat Officer Recruitment Program for high-school students interested in military careers. When she’d told him she planned to enroll, her father’s advice had been enormously useful.
“The one thing you must understand,” he’d told her the night she’d broached the subject, “is the purpose of that training. You’ve done a fair bit of homework, that’s clear from what you’ve said. So tell me. What do you think C.O.R.P.’s purpose is?”
She considered her words carefully. “To weed men from whiny boys and women from snivelly girls, for one. To provide the Concordiat with a cadre of trained officers for the combat arms. And to begin training on high-tech military equipment, which takes time. A lot of time.”
Her father nodded. “Yes, those are all useful adjuncts to the C.O.R.P. program.”
“But not the main reason?”
“No.” He refilled his glass, swirled the ice cubes for a few moments, watching the patterns they made in the liquid. “Combat,” he said softly, “has a nasty habit of putting you under the kind of stress that breaks people apart from the inside. Your whole world is shattering around you and you know that your decisions and your actions — right or wrong — will not only affect your own life, but those of others. Not just other soldiers, but civilians in harm’s way, which is worse.”
He fell silent again, for long moments. She waited him out. He didn’t often let her see this part of his life and she wanted to understand him, wanted to understand what had made him the kind of person he was. She didn’t want to interrupt or distract him, when he was finally speaking of it.
“When the stink and horror of it is all around you,” he finally said, voice low and harsh, “when people are dying on all sides, when you want — need, in fact — to run gibbering for the deepest hole you can find, that is precisely the time you must be at your clear-minded best. The Concordiat needs to know if you’re the kind of person who can go into a situation that would reduce most people to hysterical panic and make rational military decisions — and carry them out, which is even more important. Are you cool enough under extreme physical and emotional stress to know what must be done? Are you strong enough to do it, no matter the cost? That’s what C.O.R.P.’s main purpose is.”