XII
A Time To Plant

 

"Do you want to be Imperator?" Tager asked.

That was dangerous ground. I studied the figurines on his shelf, picking one up, turning the glass statue over in my hand, and placing it back on the shelf. He had a collection of country pieces, each formed in minute detail and color, down to the eyelashes and fingernails. The tiller was bent over, holding a hand plow in his gnarled grip. The planter wore a layered dress that feathered down around her calves. She held up the front, making a bowl with her skirt to carry seeds. The harvester walked along a row of rye-cobs, tall stalks of grain that bent under the weight of their ripe cobs. She held one cob in her hand and carried a bag bulging with more.

"Where did you get these?" I asked.

"A community of Cammish farmers live south of Jacob's Shire," Tager said. "They help support themselves by making the statues."

I turned to him. He was across the room, half sitting on his desk. "They're beautiful pieces."

He had that look again, as if he were trying to decipher my non sequiturs. "Yes. They are."

I walked around the office, looking at his other knick-knacks. "You can till and plant and harvest. Live by the land and seasons, become part of life's cycle." I stopped and regarded him. "Or you can skip all that and put in a food processing plant." Like Kurj processed. People. Cities. Planets. All were unfinished material he fitted to his needs. I motioned at the Cammish figurines. "Growing food from the land is inefficient."

Tager smiled. "It tastes better."

"Maybe taste is a luxury we can't afford."

"Why?"

"We don't need it. Food is nourishment, not entertainment."

"We evolved our sense of taste for a reason," Tager said. "Just like we learned to live off the land for a reason. That we have other options now doesn't negate the desire some people to live in the old ways." He watched me. "Maybe it's more than tilling and planting and harvesting. Maybe it satisfies a deeper part of what makes us human."

"Then again," I said. "Maybe it's just a big waste of time."

"Is that what you think?"

I went back to pacing. "I think Skolia needs both. The tillers and the processors."

"Which are you?"

I halted again. "Both. I hope."

He spoke quietly. "That answers 'how.' But not 'Do you want to?'"

Did I want to be Imperator? I knew the answer—but I wasn't ready to meet it. My mind danced around the idea, coming close, moving away, unwilling to commit.

Tager waited. When I just stood there, he tried another tack. "What about your brother Althor?"

I crossed my arms. "What about him?"

"What if Imperator Skolia never makes the choice? What if he dies leaving the question of his heir unsettled?" Tager spoke as if he were walking on a layer of eggshells. "Or what if he waits to let the answer sort itself out?"

"Althor is my brother." My brother, whom I had loved when I was a child, still loved despite everything Kurj had done to drive us apart.

"So is the Imperator," Tager said.

"I know." I had yet to sort out how I felt about that.

Tager sat quietly, patient, not pushing. After a moment I said, "Althor is my parent's second child. Number two out of ten. He left home at eighteen to attend the Dieshan Military Academy."

"So he's also a Jagernaut."

"That's right. I was fourteen when he left. I didn't see him again until he came home to visit." My face relaxed. "He seemed happy to see Lyshriol."

"Lyshriol?"

"My father's home world. We all grew up there."

He looked puzzled. "I don't think I've heard of it."

No reason existed he should have, at least by that name. "We keep it private. It's one of the ancient colonies. It had been isolated for over four thousand years. By the time the Imperialate found it again, the colony had backslid so far they no longer remembered their origins. The only mesh nodes on practically the entire planet are the ones my mother had installed in the house and starport."

"House?"

"Where we lived."

Tager smiled. "Do you mean palace?"

"No. House." I smiled slightly. "My mother changed things as little as possible."

His curiosity lapped around me in waves. "Why?"

"Why meddle with it? It's idyllic."

"Do you miss it?"

That was too a complicated for an easy answer. "Sometimes. But I was so out of place. I always wanted to be a Jagernaut. When I was ten, I could take apart a Jumbler and tell you how it worked. By the time I was twelve, I could derive the equations for inversion. This on a world where armies fought with swords and bows." My brother had essentially ended warfare there when, at the age of sixteen, he had ridden into battle with a laser carbine. "I think Althor struggled with it, too."

"Tell me about him," Tager said.

My memories unfolded like a scrap of parchment found in an old style book bound in leather. I saw Althor in his Jagernaut uniform, a Jumbler on his hip, kneeling on one leg before my father with his head bowed in respect, the traditional greeting that a son on Lyshriol gave his sire when he returned from war. Our father stood there, so proud he looked ready to shout it to the village—and so confused, struggling to understand this son who came home in a starship.

"I was seventeen when he came back," I said. "I thought he was incredible. I wanted to be just like him. Then one day, somehow, somewhere, I passed him. I was a Primary, he a Secondary." Now Kurj watched to see what we would do, Althor and I circling each, so much left silent, unspoken.

"Do you and Althor talk about it?" Tager asked.

"We don't have a lot to say to each other." Too much distrust existed for us to share the closeness we had known as children. But the love remained. Althor and I would never plot against each other until only one survived. If Kurj was waiting for us to make his decision for him, he would wait forever. In the end, my mother was the one who suffered, forced to watch the ugly game of power and death played by the children she loved so dearly.

I walked back to the shelves on his walls. "My mother came to see me."

Tager switched gears with his knack for smoothing out my abrupt changes of topic. "How did you feel about it?"

I peered at a vase on one shelf. It was exquisite, molded from rose glass with gold swirls looping through it. The surface glimmered, reflecting different colors when I looked from different directions. It was finely made, so delicately spun.

I glanced at Tager with a frown. "Why do you put this here? If you brushed against the shelf, it could knock off the vase." That work of beauty would shatter on the floor, destroyed by the person who valued it most.

He was watching me as if I were a cipher he wanted to decode. "I'm careful."

"How do you know someone else won't destroy it?" I shook my head. "Some treasures are too precious to put where they can be touched."

"Because they might get hurt?"

"Yes."

"The vase is stronger than it looks. It's fallen before. It didn't break."

I folded my arms, rubbing my hands up and down them as if I were cold. "That doesn't mean it didn't hurt. It can only fall so many times before it breaks inside. If you don't cherish it, protect it—" I pointed at the vase. "Suppose someone comes in here and fights with you for this, someone obsessed with it beyond all reason and sanity? And during the fight the two of you knock over the vase. What will you do when it shatters on the ground? How will you put it back together?"

"I wouldn't fight."

Although I tried to smile, it stretched tightly over my face. "But you're not Rhon."

"No," he said softly. "I'm not."

I went back to staring at his shelves. Tager watched me, giving me time, giving me space. Eventually I said, "Kurj thinks my father is a simpleton."

"Your father is the Imperator's stepfather, isn't he?"

I would have laughed it if hadn't hurt so much. I turned to Tager. "My father was eighteen when my mother married him. Kurj was thirty-five. The wedding took place just days after my grandfather died." Just days after Kurj became Imperator. "Kurj hates him."

"Your father?"

"Yes." But however he felt, he hadn't committed patricide a second time. And now he needed my father, who could power the Kyle web effortlessly, with no danger to the rest of the Triad.

Kurj, my aunt, and my father: the Fist, Mind and Heart of Skolia. Just as two particles could never have the same quantum numbers, so no two minds could occupy the same regions of Kyle space. Kurj's mind was raw and blunt, sheer power. My aunt's was delicacy, intellectual brilliance, a intricate lace of complexity. In Kyle space, she and Kurj could go to the same "places," but how they existed there was so different that their presences never interfered.

They needed three minds in that link. When Kurj and my aunt had supported the Kyle-Mesh alone, they had struggled with the overload of work. Kurj also commanded a military that protected almost a thousand worlds. My aunt served as liaison between the Assembly and a mesh that spanned not only our civilization, but Allied and Trader worlds as well. They had those jobs in addition to the demands of the Kyle-Mesh itself, which never rested, never paused, never eased, but only grew larger each year, filling a voracious ocean as deep as the stars. No one, no matter how ambitious, dedicated, or strong, had the resources to manage that balancing act for long. Eventually it would have killed them, as it had been doing, slowly and relentlessly, before my father turned their Dyad into a Triad.

Regardless of my family's problems, we had to keep the Kyle-Mesh functioning. I would rather die than live in a universe where everyone except a few thousand Aristos were Trader slaves.

I suddenly felt tired. I went to a chair and sat down, sinking into its cushion. Leaning forward, I rested my elbows on my knees and stared at the floor.

Tager came over and sat in the chair next to me. "What are you thinking?"

"About my family." I looked at him. "We're a mess."

He spoke gently. "You're like people without skins living in a universe that makes no accommodation for that. Most everyone has protection, so they have no idea how damaging their normal mode of living is to you. To survive, you have to develop drastic coping mechanisms."

I thought of Jaibriol and his life of solitude. It had protected him, but the price he had paid, that punishing loneliness, was too high. "Those coping mechanisms are tearing us apart."

"You've had the responsibility of defending an empire thrust on you, not by your choice, but because the same traits that make you so vulnerable are also the source of our only protection against the Aristos." Tager shook his head. "Gods, that would strain anyone."

"When we were living together, my parents and us children, we had something." I struggled to find the right words. "I don't know what to call it. A Rhon community? We were happy. Then we all grew up and left home. Reality intruded. My parents have each other, but our community is gone. The rest of us just survive." I regarded him steadily. "I want more than survival."

"If you mean a Rhon mate, a Rhon society—"

"Yes, I know. I won't find it." An image of Jaibriol flickered in my mind. If only you knew, Doctor Heartbender. "Contrary to what the Assembly seems to think, my parents aren't breeding machines. They can't provide fodder for the Mesh forever and then watch the children they love gives their lives for it. What if Althor and I both end up dead? Then what?"

He let out a breath. "I don't know."

I got up and walked over to the shelf with the Cammish figures. "Neither do I." I turned to him. "I want to find an answer. To all of it. To the pain, the anger, the terror. To this war that never ends." I met his gaze. "I want an answer to Tams."

"Do you think you can find it?"

"I think I have a better chance than Althor." Or Kurj. I regarded him steadily. "And having that power is a hell of a lot better than being a victim."

Then I said, "Yes, I want to be Imperator."

When I entered the lobby of my building, I found a visitor waiting. She was relaxed in an chair reading a holozine, her feet propped up on the onerously expensive table in front of her.

"Helda!" I strode over. "What are you doing here?"

She stood up, a grin spreading across her wide face. "Heya, Soz."

"I almost walked by you." I wasn't used to seeing her out of uniform. Of all the bizarre outfits—she had on blue jeans. She must have bought them in one of the import shops that sold Allied clothes and coffee, Earth's most popular exports with my people. That, and their hamburgers. I doubted a major city existed anywhere that didn't have one of their hamburger places. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I was convinced that while we and the Traders were busy hurling planet-melting armies at each other, Earth would quietly take us over by flooding us with "fast food" and convincing us we couldn't live without it.

Helda chuckled. "Some people walk by me on purpose. I just scared away a golden boy." She tilted her head upwards. "Said he would wait up there."

Had Jarith come by? Probably not; I didn't see him anywhere. Although the lobby was open during the day, he couldn't go farther into the building without a pass. And I hadn't given him one.

"Come on upstairs." I smiled. "Maybe we can find this mysterious fellow."

As we walked to the airlift, I spoke carefully. "How is Rex?"

"Good. He has some contraption for his legs. It will let him walk when he learns how to use it."

"Is he happy?" What I really wanted to know was did he have a woman in his life. But I couldn't ask that.

"Ya, he's fine." Helda chuckled. "The usual. All his nurses are in love with him. He often asks for one in particular."

I told myself that didn't hurt. After all, I had Jarith. Then I thought, Oh, cut it out. You know it hurts. So let it. That won't kill you. And it was true, I did have Jarith.

When the lift opened on my floor, I saw Jarith down the hall sitting by my door with his satchel in his lap, reading a holobook. Helda and I went over to him, our feet padding on the carpet.

I smiled as he looked at us. "How did you get the lift to work?"

He stood up, watching Helda. "I don't know. Pako just let me in."

Huh. Interesting. I had never told the computer to let Jarith into the lift. Not that I had any objection. Pako could let him into my apartment if it wanted.

Helda grinned at him. "Heya, Hoiya. We meet again."

Jarith reddened. "My greetings."

"This is Helda," I said. "She flies in my squad."

"Used to." Helda gave me an annoyed look as I opened the door. "We fly nowhere for months."

I glanced at her. "Kurj hasn't sent you and Taas out with another squad?"

Jarith dropped his satchel, his holobooks spilling all over the floor. He flushed and dropped down on his knees to scoop up his things.

Helda and I helped him gather up the mess. When I gave him a questioning look, he wouldn't respond. What had I done? Sometimes it was hard to understand his moods.

Helda thumped a book into his arms. "He sent Taas out with Eighth Squad." She stood up with Jarith and me. "Put me in a think tank. Military strategy. But I miss flying."

I closed the door. "I also."

Jarith crossed the room, leaving us alone. Helda watched him unload his schoolwork on the table. Then she spoke quietly. "Imperator Skolia asked me to give you a message."

Well, that was odd. Using the Mesh was more efficient than sending a courier. If Kurj wanted the message secured, he could pattern it to my brain with a lock only I could release.

I glanced at Jarith. "Perhaps we should wait."

"It's only a few words."

"What?"

"He said: 'Come to HQ immediately. Quietly. Tell no one I ordered it.'"

"That's it?"

"That's it."

So. Kurj reached out his long arm and pulled me back. I could see him, metal in a uniform, setting us all on trajectories that ended in places only he knew. But maybe it was time to face him. Time to calculate my own trajectories. "Why did he send you to tell me?"

"I don't know." Her gaze flicked over my shoulder and her voice changed. "Want to go sightseeing?"

I turned to see Jarith headed our way. When he reached us, I smiled. "Want to sightsee with Helda and me?"

He regarded Helda warily. "All right."

So we went to the boardwalk. We strolled on the piers, bought puff-cube balloons, let them go, laughed a lot, and ran on the beach. The entire time I had an odd feeling, the inexplicable sense that I was seeing an end, though to what I didn't know.

Jarith sat on my bed. "I like your friend."

I went to the closet and handed it my sweater. The robot arm hung it up. "I thought you were going to run like a wind-antelope the first time you saw her."

"I was." He smiled sheepishly. "But she's all right."

"Is that why you dropped your books this afternoon?"

"Oh. That." He averted his eyes. "No. I was just clumsy."

I came over and sat cross-legged next to him on that bed. "That's not the reason."

"Why do you say that?"

"Something was wrong. I felt it."

"I—it was nothing." He studied the pattern on the comforter.

"Jarith." I turned his face so he had to look at me. "What's wrong?"

"What you said startled me. That's all."

I lowered my arm, puzzled. "What did I say?"

"That name."

"What name?"

"Kurj."

That wasn't a name I wanted to discuss, not with Jarith, not with anyone. Tager had taken all I had to spare on that subject. "What about it?"

"In the context of your conversation it could have only meant one person."

"I'm a soldier. He's my commanding officer."

His look turned incredulous. "Even Primaries don't call the Imperator by his personal name."

That stopped me. Of course I never called him Kurj when he was acting as my CO. But in a casual conversation with Helda it hadn't occurred to me to use his title any more than I would have called one of my other brothers Prince Whatever.

"You live in a penthouse rich even for an Imperial Primary," Jarith said. "You have a rank as prestigious as an admiral even though you're not even thirty. And you know the Imperator."

I got off the bed and walked to the window. Outside, Jacob's Shire rolled out, golden in the setting sun.

"Soz?" Jarith asked.

"I don't know what you expect me to say."

Jarith took a breath. "Imperator Skolia—are you and he—have I presumed—?"

Flaming rockets. He thought Kurj was my boyfriend. I almost laughed. Instead I went back and sat next to him. "You haven't presumed on anything. I've known him for many years, that's all."

"You're older than you look, aren't you?"

"I'll be forty-eight in a few days."

His mouth fell open. "You're kidding."

"No." I squinted at him. "Does that matter to you?"

Jarith shifted his weight. "I don't know. You're older than my mother."

Gods. The next thing I knew, the ISC ethics squad would come looking for me. You're under arrest, ma'am. For cradle theft.

But what he said hurt in another way. I had yet to have a child, and a woman younger than me had a son old enough to father his own children. Although my extended lifespan let me delay childbearing longer than most women, I couldn't wait forever. But I hadn't wanted to start a family while I was flying with the squad, not after what happened the first time.

Jarith watched my face. "Soz?"

I spoke quietly. "I'm not sure how to say this."

He tensed. "Just say it."

"Helda brought me a message from my family. I have to leave for Diesha tonight."

"You're going offworld? Tonight?"

"As soon as I pack."

"Soz, no. Don't go." He put his hands on my shoulders. "Was it what I said? I can handle the age difference."

I took his hands. "It's nothing you said."

He started to add more, then stopped. I felt what he didn't say. He wanted to go with me. Part of me wanted him to come. But it would mean asking him to start over on a strange world where he knew no one. I couldn't press him to make that change unless I was willing to offer him more than what we had now. And I wasn't. Too much remained unsettled in my life.

"You mean a lot to me," I said.

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Say things that sound like a preface to 'I think you should start seeing other people.'"

"I think you should."

Jarith swore under his breath. "Soz, stop it."

"Do you really understand what I do for a living? Every time I go out, I could die. Do you want to live with that?"

"No. But I'm willing to try."

I spoke softly. "I don't know if I am."

He exhaled. Then he drew me into his arms. "Will you come back to Forshires?"

I lay my head on his shoulder. "I hope so."

We held each other for a long time. Finally Jarith lay down on the bed, pulling me with him. We made love in the clouds, floating together one last time.