Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (26 page)

“A competitor?”

She stiffened, watching me with her large eyes, like a dove
startled from her hiding place. “Yes.” Her voice hardened. “That man beat my
child. So I left him.”

“What happened to him?”

“He went to prison.”

“And Kurj?”

“After that he hated anyone he thought might hurt me in any
way. What I didn’t understand was why he hated
himself
so much. Back
then I didn’t realize how my ... presence ... affected him.” She rubbed her
arms as if she were cold. “Or maybe I just couldn’t acknowledge it. Sometimes I
think his only stability came from his memories of my first husband. For nearly
a quarter of a century, while Kurj gathered his power as Imperial heir—during
all that time he held onto his memories of his father as if they were a lifejacket.”

I was beginning to understand. “And then he found those
files with the identity of his true father.”

She nodded. “Gods, he was enraged. He’s never believed it
was a lab error with my mother’s and my eggs. He felt betrayed by everyone he
loved.” Her voice shook. “In his view of the universe, the man who had what he
so wanted—the title of Imperator—had also stolen by force the only thing he
coveted as much as the power of the Imperator. A thing that was forbidden. To
both of them.”

Her hands trembled as she pushed a curl out of her eyes. “Did
he say to himself, ‘I will kill this man?’ I don’t—I don’t believe that. But he
knew the risks ... and still he forced himself into the Net link.” A tear ran
down her face. “I found him kneeling by our father’s body. He was crying.” Her
voice broke. “Despite everything—when Kurj was a baby, I held him, nursed him,
loved him. Ai, Sauscony, he was such a pride for me, my first born, my shining
light. But he changed. Bit by bit, day by day, year by year, decade by decade.”
She closed her eyes, opened them again. “Until finally I lost him.”

I spoke softly. “I’m sorry. For all of it.”

Tears traced their glistening paths down her cheeks. “So am
I.”

Do you want to be Imperator?” Tager asked. Dangerous ground.
I continued to study the figurines on his shelf, picking each 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, even down
to the eyelashes and the 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 the front up, making a bowl with her skirt to carry
seeds. The harvester was walking along a row of top-heavy graincob plants as
tall as she, their heads bending over 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.

“There’s a community of Cammish farmers who live south of
Jacob’s Shire,” Tager said. “Aside from farming, they support themselves by
making the statues.”

I turned to face him. He was standing by his desk, half
sitting on the edge of it. “They’re beautiful,” I said.

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
knickknacks. “We can till and plant and harvest. Live by the land and the seasons,
become part of life’s cycle.” I stopped and regarded him. “Or we can skip all
that and put in a food-processing plant.” The way Kurj processed. Peoples.
Cities. Planets. All were unfinished material he fitted to his needs. “Growing
food from the land is inefficient.”

Tager smiled. “It tastes a lot better.”

“Maybe taste is a luxury we can’t afford.”

“Why?”

“We don’t need it. Food is nourishment, not art.”

“We evolved our sense of taste for a reason. Just like we
learned to live off the land for a reason. The fact that we have other options
now doesn’t invalidate the desire some people still have to live in the old
ways.” Tager watched me. “Maybe there is more to it than tilling and planting
and harvesting. Maybe it satisfies a deeper part of what makes us human.”

“Then again,” I said. “Maybe it’s all just a big waste of
time.”

“Is that what you think?”

I went back to pacing. “I think Skolia needs both. Tillers
and processors.”

“Which are you?”

I stopped in front of him. “Both.”

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 yet. My mind danced around it, coming close, moving away,
unwilling to commit.

After a moment, during which I just stood there, Tager tried
another tack. “What about your brother Althor?”

I crossed my arms. “What about him?”

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

“Althor is my brother.” My
brother,
one I had loved
when I was a child, still loved even now, despite everything Kurj had done to
drive us apart.

“So is the Imperator,” Tager said.

“In name.”

Tager sat quietly, patient, not pushing. After a moment I
said, “Althor is my parents’ second child. Number two out of ten. He left home
when he was eighteen. He went offworld to attend DMA.”

“So he’s a Jagernaut.”

I nodded. “I was eleven when he left. I didn’t see him again
until he came home to visit.” My face relaxed into a smile. “He was so happy to
see Lyshriol again.”

“Lyshriol?”

“My father’s home world.”

“I don’t think I know it.”

There was no reason he should. We kept it private. “It’s one
of the ancient colonies. It was isolated for four thousand years before the
Imperialate rediscovered it. We think it started out as a small farming
settlement. By the time they were found again they had backslid so far they no
longer remembered their origins.”

“It sounds primitive.”

“I suppose. The only computers on the entire planet are the
ones my mother had installed in the house.”

“House?”

“Where we lived.”

Tager smiled. “Do you mean palace?”

“No. House. The place barely even has electricity.”

He blinked at me. “That’s where you grew up?”

“That’s right. My mother had a school and a hospital built
near the village, but other than that she didn’t change anything.”

His curiosity lapped around me in waves. “Why not?”

“Why should she meddle with it? It’s an idyll. You can’t
even go there without permission from my family.”

“Do you miss it?”

I sighed. “Sometimes. But I was so out of place. I always
knew I wanted to be a Jagernaut. When I was ten years old 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 used to fight with
swords and bows.” My brother had essentially ended warfare on Lyshriol when, at
the age of sixteen, he had ridden into battle carrying not only a sword, but also
a laser carbine. “I think it was also like that for Althor.”

“Tell me about him,” Tager said.

My memories unfolded like a scrap of handwritten 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 out of the sky.

“I was seventeen then. I thought Althor was the most
glorious person I had ever seen. I wanted to be just like him.” I spread my
hands. “Then one day, somehow, somewhere, I passed him by. I was a Primary, he
a Secondary.” Now Kurj watched to see what we would do, Althor and I circling
each other warily, so much between us left silent, unspoken.

“Do you see him anymore?”

“Not much. We don’t have a lot to say to each other.” Too
much distrust existed between Althor and me now for us to share the closeness
we had known as children. But too much memory of that love existed to let our
situation push us apart any farther. Kurj was wrong. Althor and I would never
plot against each other until only one remained. 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 started pacing again. “My mother came to see me.”

Tager switched gears smoothly. “How did you feel about that?”

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

I frowned at Tager. “Why do you put this out here? If you
brushed up against the shelf, you could knock off the vase.” Then that work of
beauty would shatter on the floor, destroyed by the person who valued it most.

He was watching me with his look again, as if I were a
cipher he wanted to decode. “I’m careful with it.”

“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. It should be cherished. Protected.” 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 didn’t feel right the way it
stretched so tight over my face. “But you’re not Rhon.”

“No,” he said softly. “I’m not.”

I went back to pacing. 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?”

That stopped me. I stood in the middle of the room and
laughed. But it wasn’t funny. “My father was eighteen when my mother married
him. Eighteen. Kurj was thirty-five. The wedding took place just days after my
grandfather died.” Just days after Kurj had become Imperator. “Kurj hates him.”

“Your father?”

“Yes.” But however Kurj felt, he hadn’t committed patricide
a second time. He had held himself back. And now he needed my father, who could
power the Skol-Net effortlessly, with no danger to the rest of the Triad.

The Fist, the Mind, and the Heart of Skolia. Just as no two
particles could have the same quantum numbers, so no two minds could occupy the
same regions of psiberspace. Kurj’s mind was too much like my grandfather’s had
been, raw and blunt. My aunt’s mind was delicacy, intellectual brilliance, an
intricate lace of complexity. Almost no overlap existed between she and Kurj in
psiberspace. They could use the same functions, go to the same “places,” but
how they existed there was so different that their presences never interfered.

The Imperialate needed three in that link. Skolia had been
smaller before my father joined the Triad, but even then Kurj and my aunt had
been struggling to meet their duties. Kurj commanded a military that now
protected almost a thousand worlds. My aunt was the liaison between the
Assembly and a computer network that spanned not only Skolia, but Allied and
Trader worlds as well. That was in addition to the demands made on them by the
Skol-Net itself, which never rested, never paused, never eased, only grew
larger and larger each year, filling a voracious ocean as deep as the stars.

Neither of them would ever have willingly relinquished those
positions. But 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
made them a Triad.

Regardless of my family’s problems, we had to keep the
Skol-Net functioning. The alternatives were unbearable. I would rather die than
live in a universe where everyone except a handful of Aristos were servers or
providers.

I suddenly felt tired. I went to a chair and sat down,
sinking into its cloth 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, on its edge
so that he was even with 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 trying to
live in a universe that makes no accommodation for that. Most everyone else has
protection, so they have no way to know how damaging their normal mode of
living is to you. To survive, you either have to isolate yourselves or else
develop drastic coping mechanisms.”

I thought of Jaibriol and his life of solitude. He was
probably the only Rhon psion alive who was normal. But the price he had paid
for it, that punishing loneliness, was too high for me. “Those coping
mechanisms are tearing us apart.”

“You’ve had the responsibility of defending an empire thrust
on you, not because you’re better equipped to do it, but because the same
traits that make it so hard for you to cope are also the source of our only
defense against the Aristos. Gods, that would strain any family.”

I thought about that. “When we were all living together, my
parents and us children, we had something. I don’t know what to call it. A Rhon
community? We were happy. Then we all grew up and left home. Reality intruded.”
I regarded Tager. “My parents have each other. But the community is gone. They
live: the rest of us survive. I want more than survival.”

“If you mean a Rhon mate, a Rhon society—”

“Yes, I know. I’m not going to find it.” The image of
Jaibriol flickered in my mind. If only you knew, Dr. Heartbender. “My parents
are people, not breeding machines. They aren’t going to provide fodder for the
Skol-Net forever. You think they want to watch all of their children die? What
if both Althor and I end up dead? Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

I got up and walked over to the shelf with the Cammish figures.
“Neither do I.” I turned to face him. “I don’t want to die. I want to find an
answer. To all of it. To the pain, the anger, the terror. To this war that
never ends. I want an answer to the Aristos.” I took a breath. “I want an answer
to Tams.”

“Do you think you can find it?”

“I think I have a better chance than Althor.”
Or Kurj.
Bitterly
I added, “And yes, I want the power for its own sake. It’s a hell of a lot
better than being a victim.” I regarded him steadily. “Yes, I want to be
Imperator.”

When I walked into the lobby of the building where I lived,
I found a visitor waiting for me. She was sitting in an armchair reading a
holozine, her feet propped up on the onerously expensive table in front of the
chair. At the same moment that I saw her, she looked up from her reading.

“Helda!” I strode over to her. “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 jeans and coffee, Earth’s most
popular exports with my people. That, and their hamburgers. I doubted there was
a major city on any well-populated planet 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 world-melting armies at each other,
Earth would quietly take us all over by flooding us with “fast food” and
convincing us we couldn’t live without it.