Empery (12 page)

“Could it be Wells himself?” Wolfe asked with a note of concern.

“I’m reasonably confident that Chancellor Erickson would be able to block that.” Berberon turned his eyes on Tanvier as he continued. “But I would prefer not to see it get that far. No matter who is eventually elected, Wells is certain to have more influence than he does now with Erickson. By successfully removing a Chancellor who opposed him, he will have warned others against doing the same.”

Continuing, he addressed himself to the group as a whole.“This is one of several reasons why it’s very important that Erickson win this vote. I have already talked with Ambassador Ka’in about it, and I will see Ambassador Bree on my return. Wells will be lobbying them as well, of course, but I am reasonably confident that at least two of the other Observers will stand with me.”

Tanvier contemplated his hands, folded and resting in his lap, as he replied. “I’m afraid that we do not share your appraisal of the situation, Felithe.”

“In what respect?” Berberon demanded.

It was Breswaithe who answered, stepping in in a manner suggesting that it had been prearranged. “There are consequences to this business that you’ve overlooked or minimized. The efficiency and effectiveness of the Service will be affected by the time spent haggling over elections, as well as by the long period of readjustment that is bound to follow.”

Berberon stared at Breswaithe disbelievingly. “I don’t see where the prospect of weakening the Service argues for Erickson’s removal. I would think the opposite were true.”

“We believe that having the Service in internal disarray, however briefly, works to our advantage,” Breswaithe said quietly.

“
Who
believes that?” Berberon demanded, giving Breswaithe a scathing look. “Oh, I know the Nines do, because of their paranoia about an interplanetary government. They’d love to see us seize control of the USS and end any drift toward federalism. But who else in their right mind? The USS is the glue that holds the Unified Worlds together.”

No one spoke, and Berberon searched their faces for explanations. “Is that it? Is annexation officially on our agenda now?”

“Nothing as extreme as that,” Tanvier said, gesturing in the air with one hand. “But I am increasingly uncomfortable with the degree to which we are dependent on an organization as potentially—ah—unpredictable as the Unified Space Service. This would seem to offer an opportunity to gain some additional leverage and thereby reduce that dependence.”

“We seem to be having some trouble finding the right words,” Berberon said with a tightness in his throat. “You say the USS is unpredictable, and yet it seems that what you’re really saying is that you don’t control them. And what you see as undesirable dependence looks to me like a perfectly benign interdependence.”

“Honorable minds may differ on the latter,” Hu said.

Berberon stared. “When did this Council turn isolationist? How are we harmed by ties with the Service or the other worlds?” he demanded challengingly. “Tell me how that diminishes anything except the chances of the Nines gaining the kind of control that they seek.”

Wolfe made one feeble effort to cast events in a better light. “If Wells is truly as potentially disruptive as you have lately been arguing, perhaps you can look on this as an opportunity to throw an obstacle in his path.”

It was painfully clear that the matter had been fully discussed and the decision made even before Berberon had been recalled to Capital. “It won’t be an obstacle,” Berberon said angrily. “You’re doing him a favor. Perhaps I’ve misread this from the start. Is that fleet he’s building to be Earth’s rather than the Service’s? Has some deal been struck under which he’s to become Chancellor and give us what would be too much trouble to take? If so, then for life’s sake tell me now. I operate best when I have the maximum available information.”

“No such deal exists,” Tanvier said, less convincingly than Berberon would have liked. “Certainly annexation has been discussed in High Council. And I won’t say that the possibility has been ruled out. But for the present we will content ourselves with more modest goals—such as control of our own spaceports and of ground-to-orbit travel. Erickson has been unequivocal in her refusal even to negotiate such a transfer. Hopefully her successor will be more reasonable.”

Berberon sank back into his chair. “You’d better spell out what you expect from me, then. This is not the game I thought we were playing.”

“I fully intended to,” Tanvier said amicably. “Your instructions are to stand mute on the question of the recall of Chancellor Erickson.”

Berberon shook his head in disgust. “I tell you again, it is a mistake of the first order to consciously try to weaken the Service.”

Tanvier refolded his hands in his lap. “That may be, from their perspective. But your first obligation is to us, Felithe. Please do not make us think that you have been away so long as to have forgotten it.”

Janell Sujata had had to leave much of Maranit behind when she came to Unity the first time, as a member of one of the early tutelary classes from that world. She had left behind the familiar pastels of the heath, the faintly gingerish scent of maranax on the summer air, the noisy camaraderie of the kinderhouse. But by bringing her lifecord with her, she felt as though she somehow had brought all of that and more with her.

Five years later, when she and two others from her class had chosen to stay in what her home tongue called the world of outsiders, she had given up still more. Contact with the outside was too new for Maranit to have a legal concept of planetary citizenship, but that did not mean it had no sense of community. By staying behind, the three gave up a claim to belonging as tangible as any in law. Sujata of Murlith signed her first Service contract as Janell Sujata, put away her
feya-
cloth hipwraps, and faced the fact that opportunities for
xochaya
would be few and far between.

It was not all sacrifice—far from it. She had learned by then that the Service was eager to dilute the dominance of Earth and Journa by assimilating representatives from other worlds. It was the key reason why they so willingly brought in hundreds of young colonials, then clothed, housed, fed, and educated them at Service expense. Having had the chance to evaluate them at length and in detail, at the end of the tutelary period the Service coaxed and wooed and eventually hired the best of them.

That was the other thing Sujata learned: that she was good at doing the things the Service needed done. She had a knack, more trained than inherited, for making groups function smoothly—not by inspiring them, not by mastering every last detail of their task herself, but by reading the strengths of each individual and placing them where they could be most effective.

In the world of outsiders there was opportunity for one with such a skill. On Maranit the road to the top was congested with other aspirants. Kinship and friendship and personality often counted as much as ability, and in those categories she had no special advantage. Seduced by praise she deserved but rarely heard, she stayed.

Perhaps because of her lineage, rather than despite it, she had been well rewarded. Her first job had been as a minor project leader during the construction of USS-Central; her portion had come in ahead of schedule and within the conservatively set budget. From there she had gone to Microscopium Center as an associate deputy manager of base operations.

Two promotions later she had moved on to Ba’ar Tell as Director of the Service’s office there. At each stop she had become more a part of the Service and less a part of Maranit.

But throughout she had kept the lifecord, and if she had had fewer chances to wear it those years, that was not to say that it had become any less important to her. She still faithfully cared for it: the core of the sugar-brown necklace of intricately woven and knotted hair was now nearly twenty years old, but was still as silky and supple as when it had been part of her uncut tresses at age twelve. She had been late to menarche and so had welcomed the chance to begin work on her lifecord when it finally came.

And she still faithfully observed the requirement to add to the lifecord yearly, so that the record it contained might be complete. According to tradition, the fragile strands held the memory of each hour and minute of that person’s life. When that individual died, the lifecord was treated with more reverence than the body and was commonly kept by the family as a memorial.

Inevitably, anthropologists had come to dissect Maranit customs. With the imperiousness of superior knowledge, they had announced that while hair did indeed contain a continuous record of health and diet, dead protein offered neither the mechanism nor the structure to preserve emotion and experience. Like most Maranit, Janell Sujata found she did not care. What matter if a lifecord was not really a vault of memories, so long as when she contemplated it and touched it, she remembered?

Concealed by the loose Shinn-style blouse she wore, Sujata’s lifecord was around her neck now as she walked through the corridors of Unity’s diplomatic section. Hanging from the cord was a smooth-surfaced pendant made of what seemed to be a finely grained wood but was in fact a tiny piece of Maranit itself. She had chipped her heartstone from the mother rock in Murlith the same day her hair was cut for the lifecord. Like all new heartstones, it had broken off jagged and ugly, characterless. The beauty it had since acquired had come solely from her.

If the lifecord was a testament to accumulated experience, the heartstone was a test of character. Many a young girl made her fingers bleed trying to accomplish too much too quickly. It had taken Sujata eight years to work her stone, hand-rubbing its roughness smooth, imprinting her soul on its malleable heart. Only then had she been proud enough of her stone to hang it from her lifecord and so proclaim herself an adult.

Lifecord and heartstone together—the merging of learning and experience with commitment and inner strength—made for the most precious and the most private possession a Maranit woman owned. Sujata had never allowed Wyrena to see it, or even to know that it existed. Created by Maranit sensibilities, it was fit only for Maranit eyes.

She turned onto a wide boulevard flanked by yard apartments whose front doors opened not onto a sterile corridor but to a private patch of landscaped life lit from a high-arched glassine ceiling. The ground cover and flowers chosen by Environmental Maintenance were egocentrically Terran, to be sure, but the effect was still pleasing. Had the whole block that contained it not been security-restricted, Gegenschein Way would likely have been featured on the standard Unity tour.

As she came up the walk toward the entrance to one of the apartments, the door slid open and a woman stepped to the opening.

“Come in, Sujata,” Allianora said, and stepped aside to admit her.

Wordlessly they readied themselves, shedding jewelry and blouses, scrubbing away makeup. The ritual of
xochaya
was familiar to each separately, even if they were relatively new to each other. It was not uncommon for sisters or close friends to sit down together weekly, or lovers daily. Sujata’s relationship with Allianora fit none of those categories, and in the three months since her arrival the two women had performed
xochaya
only three times.

That was admittedly more Sujata’s doing than Allianora’s. As the senior ruler, Allianora had made the customary offer on first meeting, and Sujata had accepted, as politeness demanded. But whether due to the difference in age, Sujata’s separation from her own traditions, or simply as a matter of random incompatibility, they learned that time that Sujata did not read Allianora well.
Xochaya
required mutual trust, involved mutual risk, but could not promise mutual rewards.

With a long-time mate on her diplomatic staff Allianora could gracefully sustain an occasional unequal match. Sujata was too aware of the one-sidedness to avail herself often of Allianora’s generosity. But there were times, like this, when the need was too great.

Bare to the waist, hipwrap knotted on the private right instead of the public left, they sat down on opposite sides of a low table decorated with elaborate abstract carvings. Sujata placed her hands side by side on the table, palms down, fingers parallel, thumbs touching tip to tip. Allianora did the same, completing the cradle. Allianora’s hands reminded Sujata of her mother’s: the skin life-toughened, the ring finger almost as long as the middle. Closing her eyes, Sujata focused on her own breathing until it became deep, peaceful, and regular. The heartstone dangled between her breasts, swaying like a metronome and pacing her body’s fundamental rhythm.

Sujata opened her eyes to find Allianora studying her closely. The focus of Allianora’s gaze was not Sujata’s face but just below. Sujata showed her acceptance of the scrutiny by returning it. Opening herself to Allianora’s reading, Sujata reached out with her eyes toward what Maranit artists called the “second face”—the breasts, lifecord, and heartstone of another. Together they spoke the pledge:

Selir bi’chentya

Darnatir bi’maranya en bis losya

Ti bir naskya en bis pentaya

Loris bir rownya

Qoris nonitya

I lower my mask

Open my heart to your eyes

My ears to your words of guidance

Expose the flaws in my essence

Make me whole

Breaking the cradle, Allianora reached out with her right hand and closed her fingers around Sujata’s heartstone. Closing her eyes, she explored its sinuous surface with her fingertips, as if drawing through them the residue of Sujata’s unresolved emotion. After several minutes she released the stone and sat back on her heels.

“You are unhappy,” Allianora said, opening her eyes. “The little one has complicated your life.”

Sujata sighed deeply. “She’s working so hard to get close to me that she’s driving me away. She is endlessly solicitous. She apologizes anytime she imagines she has displeased me—and she imagines it often.”