The Stone Dogs (26 page)

We rule our human cattle—though they outnumber us forty to one, though even most of our soldiers an' police are serf Janissaries—by dominatin' their wills with ours. Where's the pride of the Race, if they're not human beings, with potential wills of their own?"

Gayner rose and walked to the opposite wall, looking at the pictures hanging there. Portraits of Eric's parents, of his wife and children. One of a serf wench, a Circassian in a long white dress.

"Yo' know," she said slowly, without turning, "that argument goes ovah well with the dinosaurs in yo' group; even with some of my people… Tickles their vanity. Yo' and I both know it's bullshit.

Which leaves me with the question, why do you use it? I think yo'

soft, von Shrakenberg, Weak-stomached. The serfs are organic machinery, no mo', and runnin' them all through a conditional'

process would eliminate major problems an' costs. I know, I know,"—she waved an unstated objection aside—"there's still unacceptable side effects on ability. But those are just technical problems. Genetic manipulation to remove the personality is even mo' promisin'. Y' real objection is squeamishness. Soft, I say."

Eric rose, too. "Yo' not the first to think that, Gayner," he said flatly. "Those that did, mostly found I could be as hard as was necessary."

" P'haps so," Gayner said. Her gaze had gone to a battle scene beyond the portraits. It showed the ruined mountain-pass village Eric's Century of paratroops had held against two days of German counterattacks, back in the opening stages of the Eurasian War. "This-heah certainly covered up yo' earlier peccadillos." She jerked a thumb at the picture of the Circassian.

Eric winced inwardly; she had been his boyhood concubine, and he had sent the child she died bearing out of the Domination. To America, to freedom… to the hereditary foe of the Race.

It hasn't helped that little Anna grew up to be a prominent
novelist,
he thought between irritation and pride. He had had works of his own win prizes; it seemed to run in the blood.

"I hope yo' not threatenin' to bringin' that up again," he said dryly. The Archon of the time had publicly said his action in the pass had saved the Domination ten thousand Citizen lives; and the Draka were a practical people.

"Oh, no, I'm makin' no threats," she said. She turned, and her eyes slid over him from head to toe. "There's an old rumor, that the Security Directorate tried to have yo' arrested 'by administrative procedure,' right after that there battle. Befo' yo'

became the untouchable hero with the
corna aurea
, of course.

Even sent an officer to do it."

"His mission was classified," Eric said with the ease of long practice. There were very few left who knew the truth of what had happened…
By the White Christ, was it really twenty-six
years ago?
"In any case, moot; he shouldn't have wandered about an unsecured combat zone."

"Two Walther 9mm slugs," Gayner agreed. Another pause. "I used to wonder about how my brother died," she continued, approaching with steps that were soundless, leaning on the table until her face was inches from his. "But yo' know, fo' the last fifteen years I haven't
wondered
who fired that pistol, at all."

Eric kept his face motionless. Inwardly he felt a chill wariness that reminded him of going into close bush-country after leopard.

"I presume," she continued, moistening her lips, "that this means yo'll agree to the Stone Dogs project, von Shrakenberg?"

With an effort of will Eric forced himself to clear his throat and speak.

"Quite right, Gayner. It's still insanely risky, but it does oppose our strength to Alliance weakness, an' if war
does
come, it'd be invaluable. I was hesitatin' because I thought it might provoke the conflict itself, if they discovered it."

She nodded, still without taking her eyes from his face; the intentness of it was akin to love, a total focusing of attention on another human being. Her pupils expanded, filling the light hazel of her eyes with pools of black, and the small hairs along his spine struggled to stand.

"That's agreement in outline, then. I'll get my people to drop their opposition to the trainin' and tribunal motions; yo' agree to puttin' the Stone Dogs through the Strategic Plannin'

committee; we shelve the chemoconditionin' trials. Agreed?" He nodded. "Let's have our subordinates draw up the draft proposals, then. I'll be goin'."

"Wait." She turned; he was standing at unconscious parade rest, with his hands clasped behind his back. "Yo' think I'm soft.

What's more, yo' think the Domination's gone soft, don't yo', Gayner? Not like the hard, pure days back in the '50s?"

"In danger of it," she said, with her hand on the handle of the door.

" Yo' should read some history, Gayner; about what things were like just befo' the Great War, when we'd had two generations of peace… but think on this, Gayner. Let's do a best-possible-case heah; let's say the Stone Dogs work, an' we destroy the Yankees. Cast yo' mind forward of that, say we've pacified them; say the Domination is coterminous with the human race, as we've always dreamed.
Whose policies do yo'

think the Race will find most agreeable then?"

She blinked at him in surprise for a moment, then relaxed.

"Well, then, we'd have only our
personal
matters to attend to, wouldn't we? In any case, by then other… hands may be at the tiller. A very fond, an' very
anticipatory
farewell, von Shrakenberg."

She swept out the door, and Eric went to his desk, sat, thumbed the record switch and dictated a digest of the legislation to be drafted. He flicked it off, thought for a moment, then thumbed it again:

"Note to Shirley. We've won, two out of three," he said. "Why is it that I don't feel too happy about this?"

In considering the Domination, the biological metaphors of mutation and evolution come irresistibly to mind. Not simply in terms of the popular image of an anachronism surviving past its time, as if in a Vemlan romance where dinosaurs were found in an Amazon swamp. It is more useful to think in terms of alternative possibilities. Probabilities, rather evolution is a probabilistic phenomenon, it depends on chance. The path taken is not the only possible one, nor even necessarily the most likely.

We are now fairly certain that a flurry of cometary impacts was responsible for the extinction of the widespread and successful dinosaurs. Of course, if we were confronted
now
with the dinosaurs as they were
then
, we would have no trouble in handling them. But then, they faced no real competition from our remote ancestors; and if they had been spared the hammer from the skies, what bipedal tool-user might have evolved to gaze curiously starward with reptile eyes? Likewise, the particular form of society that developed In early-modem Europe spread and seized the habitats of other cultural "species," aborting the possibilities of their evolution… except in the singular case of the Domination, where an eccentric fragment of that expansion was, by a political and military accident as arbitrary as the fall of comets, given time and space to grow.

We are not confronted with an archaic society that somehow has survived unchanged; if that were so, we could be as confident as humans with rocket-launchers faced with tyrannosaurs.

Instead, we are faced with the evolved descendant of another type of society—a far more serious matter. To use another analogy, consider the human brain. We are a recently arrived, cobbled-together species. Our humanity resides in the outer, forward layer of our brains; below that is the mammalian brain, below that the reptile, the amphibian. So too the Domination.

The rulers of a slave society might not have chosen a path of change and development of their own accord; the satisfied rarely do. But confronted with the necessity of either changing or becoming first a helpless irrelevance and then prey, they did change. Unwillingly, haltingly, incompletely, but with each challenge a new layer was added to the pristine simplicity of the original social organism.

Without time for assimilation, or full integration.
On the primary conquest society of estates worked by slaves was applied the monstrous machine-tyranny of the First Industrial Revolution; on that the iron bureaucracies and armies of the age of steel and petroleum. The process continues to this day.

The Mind of the Draka: A Military-Cultural
Analysis
Monograph delivered by Commodore Aguilar Emaldo U.S. Naval War College, Manila

11th Alliance Strategic Studies Conference

Subic Bay, 1972

NEW YORK CITY

FEDERAL CAPITAL DISTRICT

LIMITED STATES OF AMERICA

NOVEMBER 20, 1972

"Good to be back in the old home town," Marya said.

They were strolling along Seventh, away from the Inauguration crowds. The blustery day had begun to clear, with patches of bright sky between the tall buildings. Around here they were mostly from the '20s and '30s, Mechanist style, stepped back like wedding cakes and capped with anodized-aluminum spires. Nobody noticed two more officers out for a post-parade stroll, not in this town; take away the military and the bureaucrats, and it would be a minor port-city— although he would have expected a woman with Marya's looks to attract more notice. He glanced aside at her, and his eyes narrowed; she had shortened and chopped her stride, hunched shoulders, made subtle changes in the set of her head and the way she carried her arms. Years older, and five notches down on the turn-your-head scale.

Excellent,
he thought.
Maybe this will work, after all.
It was going to be a finesse operation, - not a smash-and-grab. The almost open warfare of the '50s and '60s had given way to more subtle methods.

"You still think of Nu Yawk as home?" he said lightly.
Do I?
he thought.
Not really.
America was home; the whole Alliance, perhaps. He glanced up at the half moon, just visible against the cool blue of the sky; it was only a few years since the last of the old coal plants had closed down, but the air was already cleaner.

Thank God for the breeder reactors.

"Yes," she said. They stopped by a stand and bought hot salt-pastry with mustard; the vendor took their change, thanked them in broad Lancashire and touched his cap. "Oh, yes, it's home." She gave him a wry smile. "I'm glad we're together on this one, too, Fred. Scared shitless, of course, but glad. Not that I blamed you for getting out of the house as much as you could, and after I left home, well…"

He shrugged. "I was glad to get off to the Academy, soon after that."

"Naturellement,
" she said. "That's… one reason this is still home. I'm afraid some of that stuff Maman tried to hammer into us took, with me." A bitter laugh. "Homesick for a country that no longer exists… and New York is as close to France as you can get, these days."

European refugees and their children were common enough; nearly ten million had made it out before the end in '44, or in the confusion just after the Draka reached the Atlantic. Most had moved on to the United States, and many had stuck here in New York City, grouped in their enclaves, organizing around their newspapers and cultural societies… bitter, aging people, facing the long slow drain as their children and grandchildren broke free into the greater world beyond. The Pacific basin cities, and now space: that was where the action was.

Marya squinted down at the pastry and took a meditative bite. "Remember her insisting that we speak French at table?"

Fred rubbed fingers across his forehead. They sat down on a bench in a postage-stamp corner park, bare but beautiful with the spare lines of winter roses and a single stone urn, a legacy of Mayor Olmstead's obsession with gardening, back in the last century.

"And I'd yell at her that I was an American—except I got so mad I yelled it in French?"

"I was angry, too. Oh, I know I didn't show it… Well, the convent school was all right, until she started pushing me about becoming a postulant. It was a good school, anyway; they didn't skimp on the math; no boys to hog the equipment the way it happens in the public system. Christ, though, I got mad when she wouldn't let me go to slumber parties with the other girls, or out to the sock hops and the soda fountain. Forever penned up in that apartment with those frowsty-smelling old ladies and men in berets, talking about
avant-la-guerre."
'

She wiped her hands. "Yet, you know, Fred, she was right.

You'll talk English with Cindy when you have kids. And in a generation or two, the only people left on earth who speak French will be serfs. Nobody will read it but linguists and historians. Maman and the others, they had this continous feeling that nobody really
understood.
Even here. Nobody except each other."

"They know so little of it," she continued, nodding to the passers-by.

Fred jerked his head in agreement as he looked out at the street and its traffic. The Stanleys and Hashimotos slid by, low hum of electrics and quiet machine-whir of closed-cycle steam.

The crowds thronged the sidewalks and the glassed overhead walkways that laced the upper stories, burst floodlike from the subways. Conservative fashions, canary-yellow suits and white cravats, snap-brim fedoras, pleated skirts and padded shoulders and four-color shoes. Quieter than he was used to; New York had always been a staid well-mannered town, the civil-servant mentality, and there was nothing like the driving energy you felt in the Pacific Rim cities, far from the closed and guarded Atlantic. But even here most people thought little about the Domination. Yes, it was terrible; they
tsk-tsked
over atrocity photos, ate up secret-agent dramas where straw-men Draka were invariably defeated by Yankee ingenuity…

"That's about the level of their interest," he said sourly. There was an Odeon across the street, old and shabby but with a brand-new crystal sandwich display. SEX SLAVES OF

ARCHONA, it screamed, showing a platinum-haired starlet in implausible lingerie cowering on a bed with the shadow of a whip falling across her. "Funny, if they're showing someone getting hurt, it's always a blond. When they show a black serf, it's a Janissary or a policeman."