x
The door stood ajar, and Alexandra stepped through it into a room with yellow walls. To her left stretched a low settee of black hide and two empty bookcases, a hanging waterflask with dust on its bulging sides. To her right, bracketing another door, stood more empty bookcases, a desk from Eser and three chairs. At the window directly ahead of her stood Dr. Rasputin, his back to her, his attention fixed on the outside world.
Alexandra took another step into the room.
She saw that Rasputin's coat was wrinkled, a white smudge near the left elbow as if he had leaned against chalk. He looked, from behind, like a fleshless stick figure in oversized black clothing, a caricature poised for stringy movement at the direction of a puppet master. Only the squarish block of head with long ebony hair caught its silver Suk School ring at the shoulder seemed alive---turning slightly to follow some movement outside.
Again, she glanced around the room, seeing no sign of her son, but the shut door on her right, she knew, led into a small bedroom for which Alexei had expressed a liking.
"Good afternoon, Dr. Rasputin," she said. "Where's Alexei?"
He nodded as if to something out the window, spoke in an absent manner without turning: "Your son grew tired, Alexandra. I sent him to the next room to sleep."
Abruptly, he stiffened, whirled with mustache (his facial trademark) flopping over his parted lips. "Forgive me, my Lady! My thoughts were far away....I....did not mean to address you in the familiar."
She smiled, held out her right hand. For a moment, she was afraid he might kneel. "Grigory, please."
"To use your name that way, I...."
"We've known each other for six years," she said. "It's long past time for formalities to have been dropped between us---in private."
Rasputin ventured a thin smile, thinking. I believe it has worked! Now she'll think anything bizarre in my manner is due to embarrassment. She'll not look for deeper reasons when she believes she already knows the answer.
"I'm afraid I was woolgathering," he said. "Whenever I....feel especially sorry for you, I'm afraid I think of you as...well, as Alexandra."
"Sorry for me? Why?"
Rasputin shrugged. Long ago, he realized Alexandra was not gifted with the full Truthsay as his Ashura had been. Still, he always used the truth with Alexandra whenever possible because it was safest.
"You've seen this place, my---Alexandra." He stumbled over her name, plunged ahead: "So barren after Eser. And the people! Those townswomen we passed on the way here wailing beneath their veils. The way they looked at us."
She folded her arms across her breast, hugging herself, feeling the crysnozh there, a blade ground from a saandwurm's tooth, if the reports were correct. "It's just that we're strange to them---different people, different customs. They've only known the Seppanens." She looked past him out the window. "What were you staring at out there."
He turned back to the window. "The people."
Alexandra crossed to his side, looked to the left forward the front of the house where Rasputin's attention was focused. A line of twenty palm trees grew there, the ground beneath them swept clean, barren. A screen fence separated them from the road upon which robed people were passing. Alexandra detected a faint shimmering in the air between her and the people---a house barrier---and went on studying the passing throng, wondering why Rasputin found them so absorbing.
The pattern emerged and she put a hand to her cheek. The way the passing people looked at the palm trees! She saw envy, some hate---even a sense of hope. Each person ranked those trees with a fixity of expression.
"Do you know what they're thinking?" Rasputin asked.
"You profess to telepathic abilities?" she asked.
"Those minds," he said. "They look at those trees and they think: 'There are one hundred of us.' That's what they think."
She turned a puzzled frown on him. "Why?"
"Those are date palms," he said. "One date palm needs forty liters of water a day. A man replaces but eight liters. A palm, then, equals five men. There are twenty palms out there---one hundred men."
"But some of those people look at the trees hopefully."
"They but hope some dates will fall, unmindful of it being the wrong season."
"We look at this place with too critical an eye," she said. "There's hope as well as danger there. The spice could make us rich. With a fat treasury, we can make this planet into whatever we wish."
And she laughed silently to herself: Who am I trying to convince? The laugh broke through her restraints, emerging brittle without humor. "But you can't buy protection," she said.
Rasputin turned away to conceal his face from her. If only it were possible to hate these people rather than love them! In her manner, in many ways, Alexandra was like his Ashura. Yet that thought carried its own rigors, hardening him to his purpose. The ways of the Seppanen cruelty were devious. Ashura might not be dead. He had to be sure.
"Worry not for us, Grigory," Alexandra said. "The problem is ours, not yours."
She thinks I worry for her! He held back tears. And I do, naturally. But I must stand before that black Baron with his deed accomplished, and take my only chance to strike at him where he is weakest---in his moment of triumph!"
He sighed.
"Would it disturb Alexei if I look in on him?" she asked.
"Oh, not at all, not at all. I gave him a sedative."
"Is he taking the change well?" she asked.
"Except for getting a bit overtired. He's enthusiastic, but what fifteen-year-old wouldn't be under these circumstances?" He crossed to the door, opened it. "He's in here."
Alexandra followed, peered into a shadowy room.
Alexei lay on a narrow cot, one arm beneath a light cover, the other thrown back over his head. Slatted blinds at a window beside his bed wove a loom of shadows across both face and blanket.
Alexandra stared at her son, seeing the oval shape of a face so much like her own. But the hair came from the Duke---space-colored and tousled. Long lashes hid the lime-toned eyes. Alexandra smiled, feeling her fears ebb. Suddenly she was caught by the idea of genetic traces in her son's features---her lines in eye and facial outline, but sharp touches of the father peering through that outline like manhood emerging from boyhood.
She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns---endless lines of happenstance meeting at this nexus. The thought made her want to kneel beside the bed and take her son in her arms, but she was held back by Rasputin's presence. She stepped back, closed the door softly.
Rasputin had returned to the window, unable to bear watching the way Alexandra stared at her son. Why did Ashura fail to give me children? he asked himself. I know as a doctor there was no physical reason against it. Was there some Bala Garrasaid reason? Was she, maybe, instructed to serve a different purpose? What could it have been? She loved me, I'm sure.
For the first time, he was caught up in the thought that he might be part of a pattern ore involved and complicated than his mind could grasp.
Alexandra stopped beside him, said: "What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child."
He spoke mechanically. "If only adults could relax like that."
"Yes."
"Where do we lose it?" he murmured.
She glanced at him, catching the odd tone, but her mind stayed fixed on Alexei, thinking of the new rigors in his training here, of the differences in his life now---a life so different from the one they had once planned for him.
"We do, indeed, lose something," she said.
She glanced out to the right at a slope humped with a wind-troubled gray-green of bushes---dusty leaves and dry claw branches. The too-dark sky hung over the slope like a blot, and the milky light of the Dyuni sun gave the scene a silver cast---like the crysnozh hidden in her bodice.
"The sky's so dark," she said.
"That's partly because of the lack of moisture," he said.
"Water!" she snapped. "Everywhere you turn here, you're involved with the lack of water!"
"Water is the precious riddle of Dyuna," he said.
"Why is there so little of it? There's volcanic rock here. There are a dozen power sources I could name. There's polar ice. They say you can't drill in the desert---storms and sandtides destroy equipment faster than it can be installed, if the wurms don't get you first. They've never found water traces there, anyway. But the mystery, Grigory, the real riddle is the wells that've been drilled up here in the sinks and basins. Have you read about those?"
"First a trickle, then nothing," he said.
"That's the riddle, Grigory. The water was there. After it dries up, there is never again any water. Yet another hole nearby produces the same result: a trickle that stops. Has no one become curious about this?"
"Yes, it's curious," he said. "Do you suspect a living intelligence? Wouldn't that have shown up in core samples?"
"What would it have shown? Alien plant matter---or animal? Who could recognize it?" She turned back to the slope. "The water is stopped. Something plugs it. That is my suspicion."
"It's possible the reason's known," he said. "The Seppanen's censored many sources of information about Dyuna. Maybe there was a reason for that."
"What reason?" she asked. "And then there's the atmospheric moisture. Little enough of it, naturally, but there's some. It's the principal source of water, caught in windtraps and precipitators. Where does that come from?"
"The polar caps?"
"Cold air takes up little moisture, Grigory. There are things here behind the Seppanen veil that bear close investigation, and not all of those things are directly involved with the spice."
"We are indeed behind the Seppanen veil," he said. "Maybe we'll...." He broke off, noting the sudden intense way she was looking at him. "What's the matter?"
"The way you say 'Seppanen," she said. "Even my Duke's voice doesn't carry that weight of poison when he uses the name. I didn't know you had personal reasons to hate them, Grigory."
Great Baba! he thought. I've aroused her suspicions! Now I must use every trick my Ashura taught me. There's only one solution: I must tell her the truth as far as I can.
He said: "Well, you see....my wife, my Ashura...." He shrugged, unable to speak past a sudden constriction in his voice. Then: "They...." The words just refused to come out. He felt panic, shut his eyes tightly, experiencing the agony in his chest and little else until a hand touched his arm gently.
"Forgive me," Alexandra said. "I did not mean to open an old wound." And she thought: Those beasts! His wife was a Bala Garrasaid---it's written all over him. And it's obvious the Seppanens killed her. Here's another poor victim bound to the Romanovs by a cherem of hate.
"I am sorry," he said. "I do not permit myself to speak of it." He opened his eyes, giving himself up to the internal awareness of grief. That, at least, was truth.
Alexandra studied him, seeing the upangled cheeks, the dark sequins of almost eyes, the buttery complexion, and stringy mustache hanging like a curved frame around purpled lips and narrow chin. The creases of his cheeks and forehead, she saw, were as not so many lines of sorrow, not age. A deep affection for him came over her.
"Grigory, I'm sorry we brought you into this hellish place," she said.
"I came of my own free will," he said. And that, too, was true.
"But this whole planet's a Seppanen trap. Surely you know that.'
"It'll take more than a trap to ensnare the Duke Nicholas," he said. And that, as well, was true.
"Maybe I should have more faith in him," she said. "He's a brilliant tactician."
"We've been uprooted," he said. "That's why we're uneasy."
"And how easy it is to kill the uprooted plant," she said. "Especially when you put it down in hostile soil."
"Are we sure the soil is hostile?"
"There were water riots when it was learned how many people the Duke was adding to the population," she said. "They stopped only when the locals learned that we were installing new windtraps and condensers to handle the load."
"There is only so much water to support human life here," he said. "The people know if more come to drink a limited amount of water, the price goes up and the very poor die. But the Duke has solved this. It doesn't mean that the riots mean permanent hostility towards him."
"And guards," she said. "Guards everywhere. And barriers. You see the blurring of them everywhere you look. We did not live that way on Eser."
"Give this planet a chance," he said.
But Alexandra continued staring hard-eyed out the window. "I can feel death as a tangible presence in this place," she said. "Botkin send advance agents in here by the battalion. Those guards outside are his men. The cargo handlers are his men. There have been unexplained withdrawals of large sums from the treasury. The amounts were only one thing: bribes in high places." She shook her head. "Where Eugene Botkin goes, death and lies follow him."
"You malign him."
"Far from it: I praise him. Death and lies are our only hopes now. I just do not fool myself about Eugene's methods."
"You should...keep busy," he said. "Give yourself no time for such morbid...."
"Busy! What is it that takes most of my time, Grigory? I am the Duke's secretary---so busy that each day I learn new things to fear---things he doesn't even suspect I know." She compressed her lips, spoke thinly: "Sometimes I wonder how much my Bala Garrasaid training figured in his choice of me."
"What do you mean?" He found himself caught by the cynical tone, the bitterness that he had never seen her expose.
"Don't you think, Grigory," she asked, "that a secretary bound to one by love is so much safer?"
"That is an unworthy thought, Alexandra."
The rebuke came naturally to his lips. There was no doubt how the Duke felt about his concubine. One had only to watch him as he followed her with his eyes.
She sighed. "You're right. It's not worthy."
Again, she hugged herself, pressing the sheathed crysknife against her flesh and thinking of the unfinished business it represented.
"There'll be much bloodshed soon," she said. "The Seppanens won't rest until they're dead or my Duke destroyed. The Baron cannot forget that Nicholas is a cousin of the royal blood---no matter what the distance---while the Seppanen titles came out of the CCOAM purse. But the poison in him, deep in his mind, is the knowledge that a Romanov had a Seppanen banished for cowardice after the Battle of Probeg."
"The ancient feud," Rasputin muttered. And for a moment he felt an acidic touch of hatred. The ancient feud had trapped him, and these people were part of that poisonous thing. The irony was that such deadliness should come to flower here on Dyuna, the one source in the universe of smesh, the extender of life, the giver of health.
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
"I am thinking that the spice brings six hundred and twenty thousand kopeks to the decagram on the open market right now. That is sufficient wealth to purchase manythings"
"Does greed touch even you, Grigory?"
"It is not greed."
"What is it, then?"
He shrugged. "Futility." He glanced at her. "Can you remember your first taste of spice.
"It tasted like cinnamon with nuances of mint."
"But never twice the same," he said. "Just like life, it presents a different face each time you take it. Some hold that the spice produces a learned-flavor reaction. The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable---slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized."
"I think it would have been smarter to go renegade, to take ourselves beyond the Imperial reach," she said.
He saw that she hadn't been listening to him, focused on her words, wondering: Yes---why didn't she make him do this? She could make him do almost---anything.
He spoke fast because here was truth and a change of subject. "Would you think it bold of me, Alexandra, if I asked you a personal question?"
She pressed against the window ledge in an unexplainable pang of disquiet. "Of course not. You're my friend."
"Why haven't you compelled the Duke to marry you?"
She whirled, head up, glaring. "Made him marry me?! But..."
"I shouldn't have asked."
"No." She shrugged. "There's a good political reason---as long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for an alliance. And...." She sighed. ".....motivating people, bending them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude towards humanity. It degrades everything it touches. If I made him do.....this, then it would not be his doing."
"It's something my Ashura might have said," he murmured. And this, as well, was truth. He put a hand to his mouth, swallowing convulsively. He had never been closer to speaking out, confessing his secret role.
Alexandra spoke, breaking the moment. "Besides, Grigory, the Duke is really two men in one. One of them I love very much. He's charming, witty, considerate....tender....everything a woman would desire. But the other man is...cold, callous, demanding, selfish---as harsh and cruel as a Ditovi slumlord. That's the man shaped by the father." Her face contorted. "If only that old man had died when my Duke was born!"
In the silence that came between them, a breeze from a ventilator could be heard fingering the blinds.
Presently, she took a deep breath and said, "Nicholas's right---these rooms are nicer than the ones in the other sections of the house. She turned, sweeping the room with her gaze. "If you'll excuse me, Grigory, I want another look through this wing before I assign quarters."
He nodded. "Certainly." And he thought, If only there were some way not to do this thing that I am forced to do.
Alexandra dropped her arms, crossed to the hall door and stood there a moment, hesitating, then let herself out. All the time we talked he was hiding something, holding something back, she thought. To save my feelings, I'm sure. He's a good man. Again, she hesitated, almost turned back to confront Rasputin and drag the hidden thing from him. But that would only shame him, frighten him to learn he's so easily read. I really should learn to place more trust in my friends.126Please respect copyright.PENANAECSpOrvYZP
126Please respect copyright.PENANAmIHwtzPpLR
126Please respect copyright.PENANAHrAvJxQSv5
126Please respect copyright.PENANAO1YCKKkdd7
126Please respect copyright.PENANAB9mpTj5NHw
126Please respect copyright.PENANAPEfMhgnrc6
126Please respect copyright.PENANABfe2fBQERg