Primary Inversion

by Catherine Asaro

  Char Iaki, the Commandant at JMI, took me into his office one afternoon. He nodded toward the window. Outside, in the slanting light of Forshires' gilded sun, cadets were walking across the quad, heading to classes, the library, the simulation rooms.

  “They need more time for class work,” Char said. “They’re too exhausted at the end of the day to move, let alone study.”

  “We had stricter requirements at the DMA,” I said. The Dieshan Military Academy, which trained Jagernauts, lost half of each entering class by the time graduation came. But with reason. “These men and women have to be our best. If they can’t make it, we need to find out now instead of when lives depend on their ability to operate under pressure.”

  “Training them,” Iaki said dryly, “and breaking them are two different things.”

  So now I sat in my apartment and wondered if I were going overboard. Why bother training cadets at all? The Traders were inexorable. They would break us no matter how hard we fought. What was the use? We were all going to die, or worse, be devoured by the Aristo war machine.

  Cut it out, I told myself. I picked up a holobook I had dropped on the sofa last night. The title glowed in rosy letters: Idioms from Afar. It was my hobby, learning figures of speech from other languages. My brother Kelric and I had done it all the time when we were young, always searching out clever turns of phrase. Sauscony está construyendo castillos en el aire. Sauscony is building castles in the air. Here was a good one from English: shot to high heaven.

  I blew out a gust of air and set down the book. Then I went to a window in my living room and looked out at the countryside. The building stood at the edge of Jacob’s Shire, a park of rolling hills covered with cloud-grass that rippled like golden clouds scudding across the land. The amber sun was low in the sky. It was a softer evening than on Diesha, shorter than on Delos.

  Of all the places I had lived aside from my childhood home, I liked Foreshires best. It was the second world of an orangish star that had acquired the name Ruth from the explorer who discovered its planetary system. Prior to ISC occupation, the people here had simply numbered their twenty-three cities according to when each was built. Some poetry-minded administrator in Imperial Space Command had renamed this city Eos, after a dawn goddess he had read about in Allied mythology.

  Kurj didn’t have a poetic bone in his body, and he preferred literal names. But the mythology of Earth had always fascinated him, especially the works of a tragedian named Seneca. I had never read the stuff myself, and I doubted even Kurj knew why it enthralled him. Whatever the reason, he let Eos stand as the name for this city that before had been Ruth-2, #17.

  I understood why someone would wax romantic about this place. It evoked reams of poetry from its people, the descendants of colonists who had settled here one hundred years ago. At this latitude, 30 degrees north, the planet’s rings spanned the sky in a bridge, reaching their highest point directly south. Had I been at the equator, they would have gone straight overhead in a strip so narrow it almost vanished. Here they curved in a wider band, their lower edge 41 degrees above the horizon and the upper edge 45 degrees above it. Most of the arch was a pale whitish-gold, but as it curved to the mountain-rimmed horizon in the east and west, it shaded into a orange, then pink, and finally red.

  I wondered what it had been like all those centuries ago when an asteroid glanced off Forshires’ surface. It couldn’t have been too catastrophic given that the planet was well on its way to healing, with only the rings as evidence of the event. The plants and animals were still adjusting, though. Friction with the upper atmosphere and collisions between rocks caused chunks of material to fall from the rings to the planet. They showered like meteors in the night sky. Dust floated in the air, chemical impurities and ash, a natural smog that never blew away. The amber sunlight also peaked closer to the red end of the spectrum than on most habitable worlds. It all came together to give this world a golden sky instead of the blue more common on planets with oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres.

  For all its beauty, the sky looked strange to me. I didn’t want to look at pretty sky anyway. I wanted to see people. Real people. Not robots or machines or Jagernauts. Normal people.

  I bent down and rubbed my calf, working out a cramp. The gravity here was on the heavy side, though no more so than on the world where I had grown up. But it took me a while to adapt after I had been on Diesha or in space.

  I went to a window that faced west, toward the city. A boulevard far below basked in the gilded evening light. Most of the street was hidden; the lush trees created a green canopy that started a few meters below the level of my apartment and rolled out west and north for kilometers. It was like being above leafy green clouds. A tower poked above the trees nearby, and others showed farther in the distance. Although they were the same as this one where I lived—metal and casecrete—they looked like delicate constructs of rosewood, ivory and ebony, as if an artist had crafted them to hang against the gold sky. Each curved in a crescent reminiscent of the rings. The convex side on the tower nearest me faced to the west, but others faced in other directions.

  I peered down at the boulevard. Wasn’t anyone around? Here and there, when the wind blew aside the leaves, I glimpsed the pale blue stones that paved the empty street.

  A couple appeared, strolling along. They wore skimpy clothes that reminded me of rose and grey petals fluttering in the breeze. It was hard to see from up here, but it looked like the woman was laughing. The man laughed as well, a big fellow with dark hair and a big laugh. Like Rex.

  I turned away from the window. What was the blazes wrong with my brother, sending me here with nothing to do but think?

  Well, I didn’t have to sit like a lump. I could go out. Do something. But what? The only people I knew on Forshires were military personnel. I kept getting asked to formal dinners at the Imperial Embassy where I stood around in my gold dress-uniform, with its glittering pants and tunic and sash, and that saber hanging at my hip, serving no useful purpose other than to glint along with everything else. It was awful.

  I squinted at the wall console, a mesh system known as a Pak 20. It could do anything for me. Almost anything. I didn’t think husband-providing was within its capabilities. Hell, maybe it could even do that. Virtual reality in the bedroom.

  “Pako,” I said. “I want some clothes.”

  A light glowed on the console. “Dress or duty uniform?” Pako asked.

  “Not a uniform. Clothes. You know, like normal people wear.”

  “What style?”

  Style? “I don’t know. Pick something. What a woman here would wear to go for a walk.”

  Pako’s screen came on and a holo appeared, a naked image of me standing in the air. It startled me to see how young I looked. Clothes appeared on the image, a bare-shouldered wrap that barely covered my breasts and buttocks.

  “Is this acceptable?” Pako asked.

  I reddened. “I said clothes. Not scraps.”

  The wrap changed to a filmy blue dress that came almost to my knees. “Is this acceptable?”

  It was still less than I usually wore, but compared to what I had seen—or not seen—on the people here, it was conservative. “I guess so. Send it over.”

  It arrived within minutes, delivered by a young man in a blue uniform who smiled shyly. Shoes came with it, blue slippers with little silver bells that hung around the edge at the ankle. After the boy left, I put on the dress. The whole thing was lace. What was the function of that? The neckline went too low. And it had no sleeves, just straps that crossed in the back. I felt naked.

  “So what?” I muttered. Then I went out for a walk.

  Outside, I had no idea where to go. This district had few buildings, mostly just trees and plazas with those blue tiles. Some paths had rose and gold mosaics swirling through the blue. Mercifully, no nervoplex showed anywhere.

  I crossed the street to a park. For a while I wandered down paths under the trees. The air quality was good tonight, the concentration
of dust low enough that it didn’t bother me. People strolled by, nodded, wished me a good evening. Men smiled at me. Everyone wore those shoes with the bells, so a sweet, faint music filled the park. It had to be a new style; I had never seen it before. Then again, I had never taken a walk like this. I felt like an intruder. I didn’t belong here. This lovely evening was for normal people.

  Eventually I came to a cafe with an giltwood sign that said, Heather’s Dream. I wondered what Heather dreamed. Curious, I pushed open the door.

  A big woman in an apron appeared, smiling broadly. “Good. You’re right on time.”

  “I am?” I asked.

  She bustled me over to a crescent-shaped table of unpolished wood and sat me down on a bench in its concave side. “Here you go.”

  A youth who couldn’t have been much more than twenty slid into the seat next to me. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Pulli.”

  As I blinked at him, the woman said, “Do either of you want a drink?”

  “Rootberry juice for me,” Pulli said.

  Rootberry juice? People who drank rootberry juice took vitamins and ate noxious vegetables that looked like miniature cabbages. Why had the woman put me here with this Pulli person?

  Before I could escape, more people showed up, then more, and even more. They crowded around the table, filling up its convex and concave sides, ordering drinks and introducing themselves. Within moments I was surrounded by a herd of rootberry drinkers. Everyone was talking at once, saying where they lived, what they did for a living, where they went to school. They were university students and young professionals, all glowing with health.

  A lanky man folded himself in on my left, grinning at me. “So, Green Eyes, you got a name?”

  “It’s not Green Eyes,” I said.

  He laughed. “I’m Hilten. Raik Hilten. Everyone calls me Hilt.”

  I nodded, wondering how I was going to extract myself from Hilt and his healthy friends.

  At the far end of the table a woman stood up. “All right everyone, let’s get to business. I’m Delia, your excursion leader. We’ll only go a few kilometers tonight. Next time we’ll do a full day, but I wanted you to meet each other first.” She smiled. “Well, happy hikers, let’s catch the trail.”

  For flaming sake. I had been trapped by a gang of rootberry-guzzling happy hikers. As the group squeezed out from the table, I prepared to make my escape.

  Hilt stood up with me and took hold of my arm. “Listen, Green Eyes. You can have the honor of being my partner tonight.”

  “Thanks, but I can’t stay.” Call me Green Eyes again, I thought, and I’ll dump a pitcher of rootberry juice over your head.

  Someone nudged my mind with silent laughter at my image of Hilt doused in juice. I turned and found myself looking at a youth across the buzzing group, a man with bronze curls and brown eyes. He smiled at me. His touch on my mind hadn’t been strong, but it was enough to reveal he was an empath. He was also gorgeous, shy, marvelously well built, and bore absolutely no resemblance to either Rex or Jaibriol. I smiled back at him. Maybe I would stick with the group after all.

  So I went for a hike with a crowd of exceedingly healthy people I had never seen before in my life. It was an easy walk along dirt paths that meandered through the cloud-grass of Jacob’s Shire, a chance for members in a newly formed hiking club to meet each other. The youth who had touched my mind turned out to be Jarith, a music student at the conservatory.

  I should have enjoyed the walk. Here I was, on a beautiful evening in a beautiful place and with beautiful people. But I couldn’t relax. What was I doing, acting normal? I was an impostor, pretending I had the right to behave like everyone else.

  Stop it, I told myself. I had earned the right to enjoy one evening’s rest.

  Tell that to Rex, I thought. Tell the providers while they scream. Tell that to Tams Station.

  I pushed my hand through my hair. My arm was shaking. What was wrong with me? Hilt had been talking to me for several moments, and I had no idea what he said. I could face death in combat a thousand different ways, yet I couldn’t deal with a simple conversation.

  We climbed to the top of a hill that let us look out across the countryside. The sun was dropping to the horizon in the west where the rings met the mountains, though this early in the summer it was too far north to sink behind that great arch. In the distance, the roofs of Jacob’s Military Institute reflected its rays like liquid glass.

  Hilt motioned toward JMI. “Take a look, Soz. That’s where they train the robots.”

  I glanced at him. “Robots?”

  He wasn’t smiling any more. “That’s right. Robots trained to salute and kill.”

  It took conscious effort for me to remain calm, an effort far out of proportion to his comment. “Those cadets you call robots are all that stand between you and the Traders.”

  Hilt scowled. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those.”

  “One of what?”

  “Parrots of the empire, our dearly beloved military dictatorship.”

  A woman named Mika spoke. “You have it wrong, Hilt. For a dictatorship you need a dictator. We don’t have a dictator. We have a Triad.” Dryly she said, “That’s three dictators, my friend.”

  “That’s absurd,” Pulli said. “The Assembly rules Skolia. Not the Triad.”

  “If you believe that, you are woefully naive,” Mika said.

  “What Triad?” Hilt demanded. “Everyone knows Lord Valdoria is just a propaganda figurehead they prop up there because the people love him.”

  I went rigid. He was talking about my father. Eldrinson Althor Valdoria. True, he became an interstellar potentate by accident. A simple farmer from a backwater planet, he had neither the interest nor knowledge to rule the Imperialate. The only reason he ever left home was because of his epilepsy; without treatment, he suffered such severe convulsions he could barely function.

  A memory jumped into my mind: twenty-seven years ago, the Traders had tried to assassinate Kurj. Only a Dyad existed then, Kurj as Imperator and my aunt as Assembly Key. After the attempt, while Kurj lay near death, the Traders launched an assault against our capital world. In the ensuing chaos, my aunt’s bodyguards whisked her to the hidden base Safelanding. Then the Traders penetrated our computer defenses—and crashed the Kyle-Mesh.

  The entire interstellar network collapsed. Telops managed minor patches, but only Kurj or my aunt had both the Rhon strength and Dyad access required to restart the system. But my aunt was unreachable at Safelanding and Kurj was in a coma. It left Skolia blind and deaf, floundering like a crippled animal with its brain gutted.

  The Traders moved in for the kill. But they had miscalculated. My father—the “nobody” of the Rhon—had been at an ISC hospital, seeing the doctors who monitored his epilepsy. When the Kyle-Mesh failed, he had been only a few minutes away from one of its control centers. So the desperate Skolian military had sent him in to join the Dyad and make in a Triad.

  No one knew what would happen when my father joined Kurj and my aunt in that circle of power. It might disintegrate, unable to spread itself over three such disparate minds. Or it could overload, killing them all in one galaxy-wide short circuit. Or maybe, just maybe, my father would survive long enough to repower it. Never mind that he had no idea how it worked, that he came from a society so primitive it had no electricity, that he might die from a mental overload even if the system survived. It was either put him in the Triad or let Skolia fall to the Traders.

  No one expected what happened. My father told me later that the Kyle-Mesh had looked like a toy that day, like the nets that we, his children, used to play with when we were small. Except this sparkling net was broken. So he fixed it—and reactivated the star-spanning brain of Skolia.

  He didn’t understand the technology. To this day he can’t access it without help. But none of that matters. Once he enters Kyle space, he becomes it, supporting the mesh like the ocean supports a huge net floating within it. He handles it with an innate gi
ft no one else in my family can match.

  My voice came out cold enough to chill ice. “Without that man you so blithely call a figurehead, you wouldn’t be standing here free to insult the Rhon. You’d be a Trader slave, mister.”

  Hilt snorted. “I always wonder if you people who spew out Imperial propaganda have any comprehension of reality.”

  Pulli spoke uneasily. “Maybe we shouldn’t be having this discussion.”

  “That’s the whole point.” Hilt’s voice snapped. “We’re so oppressed by the Rhon we’re afraid to discuss them. All that’s allowed is worship. Well, I don’t worship tyrants.”

  Gods. Where had that come from? “Why do you think the Rhon oppresses you?” I asked.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Hilt told me.

  That was a good feat, considering I didn’t. “What?”

  “That the ISC ‘occupies’ planets for their own good.”

  “We don’t live in a gentle universe,” I said. “To survive, we need strength, and that includes people, territory, and resources. It we don’t get them first, the Traders or the Allieds will.”

  “That’s one hell of a justification,” Hilt said. “What makes it any more right for the Rhon to do the conquering instead of the Traders or the Allieds?”

  Rebeka, another woman in the group, spoke up. “The Allieds don’t conquer anyone. They offer citizenship as a choice.”

  I glanced at her. “You think we ought to do the same?”

  She spoke carefully. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’re forced to follow laws enforced by the leaders of a military occupation who never gave us a choice?”

  My anger flared. “You don’t think Imperial law is just?”

  “You’re missing my point,” Rebeka said. “When ISC occupied this world, they took everything, even the name of our planet. We never had the right to choose.”

  “To choose what?” Why was I so incensed? “If Foreshires hadn’t become part of the Skolian Imperialate, you would still be struggling to survive instead of enjoying the affluence that lets you join hiking clubs and spend your time strolling in meadows.”