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No Plagiarism!HyDrhYOv3cNAdPKJJMyDposted on PENANA Alexei felt that all his past, every experience before this night, had become sand curling in an hourglass. He sat near his mother hugging his knees inside a small fabric and plastic hutment---a stilltent---that had come, like the Szgany clothing they now wore, from the pack left in the 'majigger.
There was no doubt in Alexei's mind who'd put the Szgankit there, who'd directed the course of the 'majigger carrying them captive.
The traitor/doctor had sent them directly into the hands of Grady Ukrainia.
Alexei stared out the transparent end of the stilltent at the moonshadowed rocks that ringed this place where Ukrainia had hidden them.
Hiding like a child when I'm now the Duke, Alexei thought. He felt the thought gall him, but he couldn't deny the wisdom in what they did.
Something had happened to his awareness this night---he saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around him. He felt unable to stop the inflow of data or the cold precision with which each new item was added to his knowledge and the computation was centered in his awareness. It was Technopath power and more.
Alexei thought back to the moment of impotent rage as the strange 'majigger dived out of the night onto them, swooping like a big hawk above the desert with wind screaming through its wings. The thing in Alexei's mind had happened then. The 'majigger had skidded and slewed across a sand ridge towards the running figures---his mother and himself. Alexei remembered how the smell of burnt sulfur from abrasion of 'majigger skids against sand had drifted across them.
His mother, he knew, had turned, expected to meet a phasgun in the hands of Seppanen mercenaries, and had recognized Grady Ukrania leaning out of the 'majigger's open door shouting: "Hurry! There's wurmsign south of you!"
But Alexei had known as he turned who piloted the 'majigger. An accumulation of minutae in the way it was flown, the dash of the landing---clues so small even his mother hadn't detected them---had told Alexei exactly who sat at those controls.
Across the stilltent from Alexei, Alexandra stirred, said: "There can be only one explanation. The Seppanens held Rasputin's wife. He hated the Seppanens! I cannot be wrong about that. You read his note. But why has he saved us from the carnage?"
She's only now seeing it and seeing it poorly, Alexei thought. The thought was a shock. He'd known this fact as a by-the-way thing while reading the note that had accompanied the ducal signet in the pack.
"Don't try to forgive me," Rasputin had written. "I don't want your forgiveness. I already have enough burdens. What I've done was without malice or hope of another's understanding. It's my own zadacha al'-burkhan, my ultimate test. By the time you read this, Duke Nicholas will be dead. Take consolation from my assurance that he didn't die alone, that one we hate above all others died with him."
It hadn't been addressed or signed, but there'd been no mistaking the familiar scrawl---Rasputin's.
Remembering the letter, Alexei relived the distress of that moment---a thing sharp and strange that seemed to happen beyond his new mental alertness. He had read that his father was dead, known the truth of the words, but had felt them as no more than another datum to be entered in his mind and used.
I loved my father, Alexei thought, and knew this for truth. Why do I not mourn him? Why do I feel nothing?
But he felt nothing except: Here's an important fact.
It was one with all the other facts.
All the while his mind was adding sense impressions, extrapolating, computing.
Vasa's words returned to Alexei: "Mood? How dare you speak of mood to me! You fight when the need arises---the mood you're in being irrelevant. Mood's a thing for cattle or lovemaking or playing the ostriolkusk, not for fighting.
Perhaps that's it, Alexei thought. I've got to mourn my father later, when there's time.
But he felt no letup in the cold precision of his being. He sensed that his new awareness was but a mere beginning, that it was growing. The sense of terrible purpose he'd first experienced in his ordeal with the Mother Baba Petronia Maria Mustonen pervaded him. His right hand, the hand of remembered pain, tingled and throbbed.
Is this what it means to be the Sokratit' Puti? he wondered.
"For a while, I thought Botkin had failed us again," Alexandra said. "I thought maybe Rasputin wasn't a true Suk doctor."
"He was everything we thought him, and more," Alexei said. And he thought: Why's she so slow seeing these things? He said, "If Ukrainia doesn't get through to Holstein, we'll be...."
"He's not our only hope," she said.
"Such was not my suggestion," he said.
She heard the steel in his voice, the sense of command, and stared across the gray darkness of the stilltent at him. Alexei was a silhouette against moonfrosted rocks seen through the tent's transparent end.
"Others among your father's men will have escaped," she said. "We must regather them, find..."
"We'll depend upon ourselves," he said. "Our immediate concern is our family nuclears. We must get them before the Seppanens can seek them out."
"They're unlikely to find them," she said, "the way they were hidden."
"It mustn't be left to chance."
And she thought: Blackmail with the family nuclears as a threat to the planet and its spice---that's what he's got in mind. But all he can hope for them is escape into renegade anonymity.
His mother's words had provoked another chain of thought in Alexei---a duke's worry for all the people they'd lost this night. People are the real strength of a Great House, Alexei thought. And he remembered Botkin's words: "Parting with people is a sadness; a place is only a place."
"They're using Sordoi," Alexandra said. "We must wait until the Sordoi have been withdrawn."
"They think us caught between the desert and the Sordoi," Alexei said. "They intend that there be no Romanov survivors---total extermination. Do not count on any of our people escaping."
"They cannot go on indefinitely risking exposure of the Sultan's part in this."
"Can't they?"
"Some of our people are bound to escape."
"Are they?"
Alexandra turned away, frightened of the bitter strength in her son's voice, hearing the precise assessment of chances. She sensed that his mind had leaped ahead of her, that it now saw more in some respects that she did. She had helped train the intelligence which did this, but now she found herself fearful of it. Her thoughts turned, seeking towards the lost sanctuary of her Duke, and tears seared her eyes, burning them.
This is the way it has to be, Nicholas, she thought. "A time of love and a time of grief." She rested her hand on her abdomen, awareness focused on the embryo there. I have the Romanov daughter I was ordered to bear, but the Mother Baba was wrong: a daughter wouldn't have saved my Nicholas. This child is only life reaching for the future in the midst of death. I conceived out of instinct and not out of obedience.
"Try the communinet receiver again," Alexei said.
The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back, she thought.
Alexandra found the tiny receiver Ukrainia had left for them, flipped its switch. A green light glowed on the instrument's face. Tinny screeching came from its speaker. She lowered the volume, hunted across the bands. A voice speaking Romanov battle protocol came into the tent.
"....back and regroup at the ridge. Fyodor reports no survivors in Mur Eldhe and the Guild Bank has been looted."
Mur Eldhe! Alexandra thought. That was a Seppanen stronghold.
"They're Sordoi," the voice said. "Watch out for Sordoi in Romanov uniforms. They're...."
A roaring filled the speaker, then silence.
"Try the other bands," Alexei said.
"Do you realize what this means?" Alexandra asked.
"I expected it. They want the Guild to blame us for the destruction of their bank. With the Guild against us, we're trapped on Dyuna. Try the other bands."
She weighed his words: I expected it. What had happened to him? Slowly, Alexandra returned to the instrument. As she moved the bandslide, they caught glimpses of violence in the few voices calling out in Romanov battle protocol: "....fall back..." "....try to regroup at..." ".....trapped in a cave at..."
And there was no mistaking the victorious exultation in the Seppanen gibberish that poured from the outer bands. Sharp commands, battle reports. There wasn't enough of it for Alexandra to register and break the code, but the tone was obvious.
Seppanen victory.
Alexei shook the pack beside him, hearing the two kubaliters of water gurgle there. He took a deep breath, looked up through the transparent end of the ten at the rock escarpment outlined against the stars. His left hand felt the sphincter-seal of the tent's entrance. "It'll be dawn soon," he said. "We can wait through the day for Ukrainia, but not through another night. In the desert, you must travel by night and rest in shade through the day."
Remembered lore insinuated itself into Alexandra's mind: Without a stillsuit, a man sitting in shade on the desert needs five kubas of water a day to maintain body weight. She felt the slick soft skin of the stillsuit against her body, thinking how their lives depended on these garments.
"If we leave here, Ukrainia can't find us," she said.
"There are ways to make any man talk," he said. "If Ukrainia hasn't returned by dawn, we must consider the chance that he's been captured. How long do you think you could hold out?"
The question needed no answer, and she sat in silence.
Alexei lifted the seal on the pack, pulled out a tiny micromanual with glowtab and magnifier. Green and orange letters leaped up at him from out of the pages: "kubaliters, stilltent, energy caps, recaths, sandsnorkels, binoculars, stillsuit repkit, baradye pistol, sinkchart, filt-plugs, paracompass, maker hooks, thumpers, Szgankit, fire pillar..."
So many things for survival in the desert.
Presently, he put the manual aside on the tent floor.
"Where can we possibly go?" Alexandra asked.
"My father spoke of desert power," Alexei said. "The Seppanens cannot rule this planet without it. They've never ruled this planet, nor will they ever. Not even with ten thousand legions of Sordoi."
"Alexei, you can't think that..."
"We've got all the evidence in our hands," he said. "Right here in this tent---the tent itself, this pack and its contents, these stillsuits. We know the Guild wants a prohibitive price for weather satellites. We know that...."
"What've weather satellites got to do with it?" she asked. "They couldn't possibly..." She broke off.
Alexei sensed the hyperalertness of his mind reading her reactions, computing on minutiae. "You see it now," he said. "Satellites watch the terrain below. There're things in the deep desert that'll not bear frequent inspection."
"You're suggesting the Guild itself controls this planet?"
She was so slow.
"No!" he said. "The Svobods! They're paying the Guild for privacy, paying in a coin that's freely available to anyone with desert power----spice. This is more than a second-approximation answer; it's the straight-line computation. Depend on it."
"Alexei," Alexandra said, "you're not a Technopath yet; you can't know for sure how.."
"I'll never be a Technopath," he said. "I'm something else---a freak."
"Alexei! How can you say such...."
"Leave me in peace!"
He turned away from her, looking out into the night. Why can't I mourn? he wondered. He felt that every fiber of his being craved this release, but it would be denied him forever.
Alexandra had never heard such distress in her son's voice. She wanted to reach out to him, hold him, comfort him, help him---but she sensed there was nothing she could do. Only he alone could solve this problem.
The glowing tab of the Szgankit manual between them on the tent floor caught her eye. She lifted it, glanced at the flyleaf, reading: "Manual of 'The Friendly Desert,' the place full of life. Here are the punkht and burkhan of Life. Believe, and al'-Shir shall never burn you."
It reads like the Azkhar Book, she thought, recalling her studies of the Great Secrets. Has a Manipulator of Religions been on Dyuna?
Alexei lifted the paracompass from the pack, returned it, said: "Think of all these special-application Szgany machines. They show unparalleled sophistication. Admit it. The culture that made these things betrays depths nobody suspected."
Hesitating, still worried by the harshness in his tone, Alexandra returned to the book, studied an illustrated constellation from the Dyuni night sky. "Niaeb'D'd: The Mouse," and noted that the tail pointed north.
Alexei stared into the tent's darkness at the dimly discerned movements of his mother revealed by the manual's glowtab. Now's the time to carry out my father's wish, he thought. I must give her this message now while she's got time for grief. Grief would inconvenience us later. And he found himself shocked by precise logic.
"Mother," he said.
"Yes?"
She heard the change in his voice, felt coldness in her entrails at the sound. Never had she heard such harsh control.
"My father is dead," he said.
She searched within herself for the coupling of fact and fact and fact---the Bala Garrasaid method of assessing data---and it came to her: the sensation of horrifying loss.
Alexandra nodded, unable to speak.
"My father charged me once," Alexei said, "to give you a message if anything happened to him. He feared you might believe he distrusted you."
That useless suspicion, she thought.
"He wanted you to know he never suspected you," Alexei said, and explained the deception, adding: "He wanted you to know he always trusted you completely, always loved you and cherished you. He said he would sooner have mistrusted himself and he had but one regret---that he never made you his Duchess."
She brushed the tears coursing down her cheeks, thought: What a stupid waste of my bodily water! But she knew this thought for what it was---the attempt to retreat from grief into anger. Nicholas, my Nicholas, she thought. What terrible things we do to those we love! With a violent motion, she extinguished the little manual's glowtab.
Sobs took her.
Alexei heard his mother's grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief, he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a horrible flaw.
"A time to get and a time to lose," Alexandra thought, quoting to herself from the A.O. Bible. "A time to keep and a time to cast away; a time for love and a time for hate; a time of war and a time of peace."
Alexei's mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery---as if his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.
Abruptly, as if he had found a necessary key, Alexei's mind climbed another notch in awareness. He felt himself clinging to this new level, clutching at a precarious hold and peering about. It was as if he existed within a globe with avenues radiating away in all directions....yet this only approximated the sensation.
He remembered once seeing a gauze kerchief blowing in the wind and he was now sensing the future as though it twisted across some surface as undulant and impermanent as that of the windblown kerchief.
He saw people.
He felt the heat and cold of countless probabilities.
He knew names and places, experienced emotions without number, reviewed data of innumerable unexplored crannies. There was time to probe and test and taste, but no time to shape.
The thing was a spectrum of possibilities from the most remote past to the remote future----from the most probable to the most improbable. He saw his own death in countless ways. He saw new planets, new cultures.
People.
People!
He saw them in such swarms they could not be listed, yet his mind catalogued them.
Even the Guildsmen.
And he thought: The Guild---there'd be a way for us, my strangeness accepted as a familiar thing of high value, always with an assured supply of the now-needed spice.
But the idea of living out his life in the mind-groping-ahead-through-possible-futures that guided hurtling spaceships appalled him. It was a way, though. And in meeting the possible future that contained Guildsmen he recognized his own strangeness.
I've got another kind of sight. I see another kind of terrain: the available paths.
The awareness conveyed both reassurance and alarm---so many places on that other kind of terrain dipped or turned out of his sight.
As swiftly as it had come, the sensation slipped away from him, and he realized the whole experience had taken the space of a heartbeat.
Yet, his own personal awareness had been turned over, illuminated in a terrifying way. He stared around him.
Night still covered the stilltent within its rock-enclosed hideaway. His mother's grief could still be heard.
His own lack of grief could still be felt---that hollow place somewhere separated from his mind, which went on in its steady pace---dealing with data, evaluating, computing, submitting answers in something like the Technopath way.
And now he saw that he had a wealth of data few such minds had ever before encompassed. But this made the empty place inside him no easier to bear. He felt that something must shatter. It was as if a clockwork control for a bomb had been set to ticking inside of him. It went on about his business no matter what he wanted. It recorded miniscule shadings of difference around him---a slight change in moisture, a fractional fall in temperature, the progress of an insect across their stilltent roof, the solemn approach of dawn in the starlighted patch of sky he could see out the tent's transparent end.
I'm a monster! he thought. A freak!
"No," he said. Then: "No! No! NO!"
He found that he was pounding the tent floor with his fists. (The implacable part of him recorded this as an interesting emotional datum and fed it into computation.)
"Alexei!"
His mother was beside him, holding his hands, her face a gray blob peering at him. "Alexei, what's wrong?"
"You!" he said.
"I'm here, Alexei," she said. "It's all right."
"What have you done to me?" he demanded.
In a burst of clarity, she sensed some of the roots in the question, said: "I gave birth to you."
It was, from instinct as much as her own subtle knowledge, the precisely correct answer to calm him. He felt her hands holding him, focused on the dim outline of her face. (Certain gene traces in her facial structure were noted in the new way by his onflowing mind, the clues added to other data, and a final-summation answer put forward.)
There's no more childhood in his voice, she thought. And he said: "I hoped the thing any parent hopes---that you'd be---superior, different."
"Different?"
She heard the bitterness in his tone, said: "Alexei, I..."
"You didn't want a son!" he said. "You wanted a Sokratit' Puti! You wanted a male Bala Garrasasid!"
She recoiled from his bitterness. "But Alexei...."
"Did you ever consult my father in this?"
She spoke gently out of the freshness of her grief: "Whatever you are, Alexei, the heredity is as much your father as me."
"But not the training," he said. "Not the things that---awakened the sleep."
"Sleeper?"
"It's here." He put a hand on his head and then to his breast. "In me. It goes on and one and...."
"Alexei!"
She'd heard the hysteria edging his voice.
"Listen to me," he said. "You wanted the Mother Baba to hear about my dreams. You listen in her place now. I've just had a waking dream. Do you know why?"
"You must calm yourself," she said. "If there's...."
"The spice," he said. "It's in everything here--the air, the soil, the food, the geriatric spice. It's like the Truthsayer drug. It's a poison!"
She stiffened.
His voice lowered and he repeated. "A poison so subtle, so insidious----so irreversible. It won't even kill you unless you stop taking it. We can't leave Dyuna unless we take part of Dyuna with us."
The terrifying presence of his voice brooked no dispute.
"You and the spice," Alexei said. "The spice changes anyone who gets too much of it, but thanks to you I could bring the change to consciousness. I don't get to leave it in the unconscious where its disturbance can be blanked out. I can see it.
"Alexei, you..."
"I see it!" he repeated.
She heard madness in his voice, didn't know what to do.
But he spoke again, and she heard the iron control return to him: "We're trapped here."
We're trapped here, she agreed.
And she accepted the truth of his words. No pressure of the Bala Garrasaid, no trickery or artifice could pry them completely free from Dyuna: the spice was addictive. Her body had known the fact long before her mind awakened to it.
So here we live our lives, she thought, on this hell-planet. The place is prepared for us, if we can evade the Seppanens. And there's no doubt of my course: a broodmore preserving an important bloodline for the Bala Garrasaid Plan.
"I must tell you about my waking dream," Alexei said. (Now there was fury in his voice.) "To be sure you accept what I say, I'll tell you first I know you'll bear a daughter, my sister, here on Dyuna."
Alexandra placed her hands against the tent floor, pressed back against the curving fabric wall to quell a pang of fear. She knew her pregnancy could not yet show. Only her own Bala Garrasaid training had allowed her to read the first faint signals of her body, to know of the embryo only a few weeks old.
"Only to serve," Alexandra whispered, clinging to the Bala Garrasaid motto. "We exist only to serve."
"We'll find a home among the Szganys," Alexei said, "where your Zashchitnyye Missii has brought us a bolt hole."
They've prepared a way for us in the desert, Alexandra told herself. But how can he know of the Zashchitnyye Missii? She found it increasingly difficult to subdue her terror at the overpowering strangeness in Alexei.
He studied the dark shadow of her, seeing her fear and every reaction with his new awareness as if she were outlined in blinding light. A start of compassion for her crept over him.
"The things that can happen here, I cannot begin to tell you," he said. "I cannot even begin to tell myself, though I've seen them. This sense of the future---I seem to have no control over it. The thing just happens. The immediate future---say, a year----I can see some of that----a road as broad as our Tsentral'nyy Prospekt on Eser. Some places I don't see...shadowed places....as if it went behind a hill" (and again he thought of the surface of a blowing kerchief) "....and there are branchings...."8964 copyright protection153PENANAorQhjO2sLc 維尼
He fell silent as memory of that seeing filled him. No prescient dream, no experience of his life had quite prepared him for the totality whit which the veils had been ripped away to reveal naked time.8964 copyright protection153PENANA6TGHsIGrgc 維尼
Recalling the experience, he recognized his own terrible purpose---the pressure of his life spreading outward like an expanding bubble---time retreating before it....8964 copyright protection153PENANAqPc2jjn4Pr 維尼
Alexandra found the tent's glowtab control, activated it.8964 copyright protection153PENANATc1oKnbazt 維尼
Dim green light drove back the shadows, easing her fear. She looked at Alexei's face, his eyes---the inward stare. And she knew where she had seen such a look before: pictured in records of disasters---on the faces of children who experienced starvation or horrible injury. The eyes were like pits, mouth in a straight line, cheeks indrawn. 8964 copyright protection153PENANAaXunNK92W4 維尼
It's the look of terrible awareness, she thought, of someone forced to the knowledge of his own mortality.8964 copyright protection153PENANA0pXRlMHMwt 維尼
He was, indeed, no longer a child.8964 copyright protection153PENANAcT6UeoSHt4 維尼
The underlying import of his words started to take over in her mind, pushing all else aside. Alexei could see ahead, a way of escape for them.8964 copyright protection153PENANAOTHpqGcn6q 維尼
"There's a way to evade the Seppanens," she said.8964 copyright protection153PENANAOnDx2q60lc 維尼
"The Seppanens!" he sneered. "Put those twisted humans out of your mind." He stared at his mother, studying the lines of her face in the light of the glowtab. The lines that gave her away.8964 copyright protection153PENANA9EeJTCwjiO 維尼
She said, "You shouldn't refer to people as humans without..."8964 copyright protection153PENANAegrYJiS98j 維尼
"Don't be so sure you know where to draw the line," he said. "We carry our past with us. Mother-of-mine, there is a thing you should know---we are Seppanens."8964 copyright protection153PENANAdKVvxF8d4K 維尼
Her mind did a terrifying thing: it blanked out as if it needed to shut off all sensation. But Alexei's voice went on at that implacable pace, dragging her with it.8964 copyright protection153PENANAmJcBR3kEqr 維尼
"When next you find a mirror, study your face---study mine now. The traces are there if you don't blind yourself. Look at my hands, the set of my bones. And if none of this convinces you, then take my word for it. I've walked the future. I've looked at a record. I've seen a place. I've seen all the data. We're Seppanens."8964 copyright protection153PENANAKhto5sW6AZ 維尼
"A deviant branch of the family," she said. "That's right, isn't it? Some Seppanen cousin who..."8964 copyright protection153PENANATIsmOJ51Ib 維尼
"You're the Baron's own daughter," he said, and watched the way she pressed her hands to her mouth. "The Baron sampled many pleasures in his youth, and once permitted himself to be seduced. But it was for the genetic purposes of the Bala Garrasaid, by one of you."8964 copyright protection153PENANAkWtMTqdnaw 維尼
The way he said you struck her like a slap. But it set her mind to working and she could not deny his words. So many blank ends of meaning in her past reached out now and linked up. The daughter that the Bala Garrasaid wanted---it wasn't to end the old Romanov-Seppanen feud, but to fix some genetic factor in their lines. What? She fumbled in the dark for an answer.8964 copyright protection153PENANAGeDHJFovid 維尼
As if seeing into her mind, Alexei said: "They thought they were reaching for me. But I'm not what they expected, and I've arrived before my time. And they don't know it."8964 copyright protection153PENANAwyy7lkIL34 維尼
Alexandra pressed her hands to her mouth.8964 copyright protection153PENANA2dUSNTeXxO 維尼
Great Mother! He is the Sokratit' Puti!157Please respect copyright.PENANAKVEbWOgXPa
8964 copyright protection153PENANAAmjdeavPGe 維尼
She felt exposed and naked before him, realizing then that he saw her with eyes from which little could be hidden. And that, she knew, as the basis of her fear.8964 copyright protection153PENANA4LUzrPdybJ 維尼
"You're thinking I'm the Sokratit' Puti," he said. "Put that out of your mind. I'm something unexpected."8964 copyright protection153PENANA4AcVVYOxCf 維尼
I must get word out to one of the schools, she thought. The mating index may show what has happened.157Please respect copyright.PENANAglKV5zRJdK
8964 copyright protection153PENANAnBrg1BmV0t 維尼
"They won't learn about me until it's too late," he sa id.8964 copyright protection153PENANAvP4UkK3GIR 維尼
She sought to divert him, lowered her hands and said: "We'll find a place among the Szganys?"8964 copyright protection153PENANABfUMlrn070 維尼
"The Szganys have a saying they credit to Shay-khulud, Old Father Eternity," he said. "They say: 'Be ready to appreciate whatever you meet.'"8964 copyright protection153PENANAFEqAg8lxl5 維尼
And he thought: Yes, mother-o-mind---among the Szganys. You'll acquire the blue eyes and a callus beside your lovely nose from the filter tube to your stillsuit---and you'll bear my sister: St. Anista-of-the-Knife.8964 copyright protection153PENANAJ7e7gGikuR 維尼
"If you're not the Sokratit' Puti," Alexandra said, "what..."8964 copyright protection153PENANAOXOZi2NbmG 維尼
"You couldn't possibly know," he said. "You won't believe it until you see it."8964 copyright protection153PENANA7PY1pU5BM5 維尼
And he thought: I'm a seed.8964 copyright protection153PENANAvdsPYvu9hu 維尼
He suddenly saw how fertile was the ground into which he'd fallen, and with this realization, the terrible purpose filled him, creeping through the empty place inside, threatening to choke him with grief.8964 copyright protection153PENANAMSdlK2g5jp 維尼
He had seen two main branchings along the way ahead---in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: "Hello, Grandfather." The thought of that path and what lay along it made him violently ill.8964 copyright protection153PENANABVgvOyCsuq 維尼
The other path held long patches of gray obscurity except for peaks of violence. He'd seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Romanov green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor. Gustav Vasa and a few others of his father's men---a pitiful few---were among them, all marked by the eagle symbol from the shrine of his father's skull.8964 copyright protection153PENANAhFGmuLmNBU 維尼
"I can't go that way," he muttered. "That's what the old witches at your school really want."8964 copyright protection153PENANAjLVkHPyzpy 維尼
"I don't understand you, Alexei," his mother said.8964 copyright protection153PENANAitvrZxsUam 維尼
He stayed silent, thinking like the seed he was, thinking with the race consciousness he had first experienced as terrible purpose. He found that he no longer could hate the Bala Garrasaid or the Sultan or even the Seppanens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this---the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: dzhikhad!8964 copyright protection153PENANAnuPIVNZa97 維尼
I cannot choose that way, he thought.157Please respect copyright.PENANAELwTeB8Oat
8964 copyright protection153PENANAsRORXKe73K 維尼
But he saw again in his mind's eye the shrine of his father's skull and the violence with the green and black banner waving in its midst.8964 copyright protection153PENANASqhXOMh3h3 維尼
Alexandra cleared her throat, worried by his silence. "Then---the Szganys will give us sanctuary?"8964 copyright protection153PENANAaNF9wFYnMX 維尼
He looked up, staring across the green-lighted tent at the inbred, patrician lines of her face. 'Yes," he said. "That's one of the ways." He nodded. "Yes. They'll call me....Niaeb'D'd, 'The One Who Points the Way.' Yes...that's what they'll call me!"8964 copyright protection153PENANAc0G8FGH1Dg 維尼
And he closed his eyes, thinking: Now, my father, I can mourn you. And he felt the tears coursing down his cheeks.8964 copyright protection153PENANAvGXirX6LSm 維尼
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