The Serrano Succession

by Elizabeth Moon

  Like this, in a warren of indoor rooms in a tall building, with windows that looked out on more tall buildings. Prima would have given anything for a bit of ground to walk on, sky to look at.

  "And there are laws about the children, about schooling."

  That she could answer. "I am not sending my children to some heathen school to be taught vileness—"

  "There are religious schools," Hazel said. "I brought you a cube—"

  A cube. Which she could access only with a cube reader. A machine. Machines, the parsons had always said, would make women lazy.

  "I need to change my name," she said abruptly. Hazel looked surprised. "I'm not Mitch's Prima anymore," she said. "Ruth Ann was my birth name, and I should be Ruth Ann again."

  "Ruth Ann," Hazel said softly, tasting it in her mouth. "It's a pretty name."

  "It sounds strange to me; no one's called me that since my parents, years ago."

  "Didn't they keep calling you—?"

  "No, it wouldn't have been fitting. I was Prima Pardue from the day I married Mitch, and Prima Bowie from the day he became Ranger." She fidgeted a bit, wishing she didn't have to ask what she wanted to know. "Hazel . . . I never see anyone like Simplicity, even on the vid, when I do watch it. Surely your people have children that turn out . . . not quite . . . right?"

  "Not many," Hazel said. She flushed; Prima knew something forbidden was in her mind. "I know you don't like to hear it, but—people do tests and medical treatment even before babies are born, to be sure nothing is wrong with them. Then, if something happens during pregnancy or birth, they fix it."

  "Fix it." Like a door? But people weren't doors and shutters and shoes and . . . "How can you fix a mind?" she asked, greatly daring.

  "I don't know." Hazel's flush faded. "I'm still young; I haven't finished my schooling, and I never studied any medicine."

  "Could they fix . . . Simplicity . . . now?"

  "I don't think so," Hazel said. "I can ask. But I think they have to be younger." She cocked her head. "But Prima—Ruth, I mean—there's no need to 'fix' Simplicity. She's a sweet, loving person the way she is."

  "Your people don't value sweetness," Prima said. "They value intelligence."

  Hazel paused, looking thoughtful. "There are many places in the Familias where that's true, but there are also many places that will value Simplicity for her gentleness, her kindness. I think you misjudge us. If you want to find a place—"

  "No. I don't want to send her away! That's what Mitch said!" That's what Mitch had done. It still hurt her, that Simplicity had had to endure months in that nursery away from the home she loved.

  "I didn't mean send her away. I meant go with her to a place where she'd be welcome."

  "I can't go anywhere without my—without Ensign Serrano's permission."

  "You could tell him what you want."

  "Hazel—you know I can't do that. He's my—well, not husband, the way he should be, but he's our protector. It is for him to decide what to do with us."

  "That's not how it works, here," Hazel said. Prima had heard that before, but it was hard to believe. Ensign Serrano was her protector, on the guarantee of his grandmother; he had the right to decide where they would live, and how. "He'd probably be delighted if you found a place where you and the others could be happy."

  "I don't know how to do that," Prima said. "I don't know where to start."

  "You could ask Professor Meyerson."

  "Waltraude?" This had not occurred to Prima; she knew that Meyerson claimed expertise in Texan history—though a very strange version of it, from Prima's viewpoint—but what could she know about other worlds?

  "She's a professor—finding things out is what she does best."

  "Could you explain it?" Prima asked. She was much more comfortable with Hazel, even Hazel in men's pants, than with Waltraude in a dress. Waltraude looked at them all as if they were carrots and beets and potatoes on the kitchen table—as if she were considering how they would fit in a stew.

  "If she comes back in time. Prima—one thing I came to tell you—I'm leaving later today. I should be on my way to the ship now—clearing customs is going to take longer than usual. I'm going back to my family."

  "Oh." She had known, in a way, that Hazel would leave, as the former captive women had left. Those women—she still worried about them, but they had all insisted on going, some to restorative surgery, others with voice synthesizers, back to their families if they had any, or a life of independence that Prima could not imagine wanting. "I'll miss you, Hazel," Prima said, feeling the hot tears rise.

  "You were good to me," Hazel said, and came to hug her. Prima could feel the girl's young breasts now . . . Hazel was breeding age, but she would not breed. She would do—might already have done—terrible things to herself so that she would have no babies until much later. She might already be an Abomination.

  Yet Hazel was a good girl—honest, kind, gentle. She had been so desperately worried about the two little girls, in the beginning; she had been so sweet to all the children. If she'd been Prima's daughter, Prima would have been proud of her. But now she'd go off to some school, or fly on a ship, or—Prima could not even imagine all the possibilities, and knew she couldn't. How could a child like this know what she wanted, what was right?

  "God's blessing on you," Prima said, greatly daring in offering a blessing to a heathen. She wanted to tell Hazel not to use any abominable technology, but she knew that was futile. The girl was the product of that technology; her family used it, she would use it too. She prayed silently that God would keep Hazel safe.

  Sector Seven Headquarters

  "We now know what happened, Admiral." The chief medical officer touched the display controls, and blurred blots of color sharpened into focus. "The Surgeon General's office sent this out by ansible; the research labs finally figured it out. In a normal rejuvenation, on the left, the metabolites of the rejuv drugs are each involved in scavenging specific degradation products."

  "In plain language?" Vida Serrano asked. She knew, and knew they knew, what was meant, but she was determined to make them say it in language that anyone could understand. She had already been briefed, very secretly, by Marta Katerina Saenz.

  "The rejuv drugs break down in the body into other chemicals, and those chemicals—metabolites—bind to and remove the chemical compounds characteristic of aging."

  "Very well."

  "In a normal rejuvenation, that leaves only healthy, undegraded tissues as a matrix for replication, the second part of the rejuvenation process."

  "So the first part throws out the old, as it were, and then the second part builds up the new?"

  "Yes, Admiral. But on the right—if you'll look right here—you can see that these tissues, which stain green, are not being removed. No green on the left, and green—"

  "On the right. Yes. And I presume that means that age-deteriorated tissues are left in the matrix when the rejuv proceeds."

  "Exactly. Which replicate into age-deteriorated tissues, so that after some years—it depends on the amount of deterioration in the original as well as the exact kind of faulty drug—the deterioration affects brain function like any other senile dementia."

  "So—how do you fix it?"

  "Unfortunately, we don't know. It appears that if no actual functional degradation has occurred, then a rejuvenation with good drugs produces a fresh start. But when we tried that on one of the first patients, it didn't work. The body rejuvenated to a young age, but the mental function stayed the same. We have been observing him for months now, and while the deterioration has not progressed, it has also not improved."

  "What about other treatments? Surely you had something for this kind of problem before rejuv?"

  "No, not really. Admiral—I know that nobody likes to hear this, but medical miracles are rarely miracles."

  Marta had told her the same thing, but she'd hoped for better news.

  "How early can you detect the problem?" If they couldn't re
verse it, perhaps catching it early would work.

  "Within a year of a bad rejuv, which is plenty of time to correct it. But the tests take weeks—maybe we can speed it up later, but not yet—and we have a lot of people to test."

  What were they going to do with those whose rejuvs had failed, who had already been damaged . . . Vida shuddered. Rejuvenate them to youthful bodies and senility of mind? Who would take care of them? For how long? Or . . . let them die? Neither horn of the dilemma seemed tenable, and for once she was glad that it wasn't her decision. Let the Grand Admiral and the Surgeon General figure it out; the mathematics of equity in this escaped her.

  Zenebra, two days before

  the Senior Trials

  For dinner, Pedar had chosen Raymond's, that year's fashionable restaurant. She steered him away from discussing the Trials—he wanted her to dissect all the other competitors for his amusement.

  "It's not right," she insisted. "They're my friends as well as my fellow competitors; it's not honorable to pick them apart like that." She touched the table controls and brought up the chessboard. "Let's play."

  "Don't be naive, Cecelia," Pedar said. Had he rejuved yet again? She couldn't tell. He still dressed more like an actor in some deep-historical play. Her interest in history didn't extend to clothing styles, so she wasn't sure what period. "There's no place in real life for honor. In sports, perhaps—" He picked up a black knight and a white, and made them bow to each other. "But even you know that what really matters is winning." He clashed the pieces together.

  "If you break the rules," Cecelia said, trying to be reasonable, "they eliminate you."

  Pedar tilted his hand. "Then you might say that Bunny broke the rules."

  She could not believe what she was hearing. "You—"

  "Cecelia—the rules are on a different level, when you're talking about realities . . . surely you know that." His tone indulged her, the knowledgeable adult to the ignorant adolescent. "Men like Bunny make the rules . . . until someone else displaces them." He pushed the white king along the board, knocking the other pieces askew, until it rested on the edge of the board. "Yet there are always rules beyond rules . . . the rules that keep a man in his place—or move him away." His finger touched the game piece; it teetered a moment on the edge of the table, then fell.

  Her body tensed, as if she had seen an unexpected ditch looming beyond a jump she thought she knew. His expression shifted, reflecting hers; she hated that he had noticed. But he kept smiling, waiting her answer. She couldn't think what to answer. She had to say something, though; she could feel his smile beginning to stiffen in place, like overbeaten egg whites.

  "I see," she said, buying time. She didn't understand about Bunny yet, what rules he had broken that brought this man and his faction to the desperate action they had taken. She didn't understand why he had hinted so broadly, or what he expected her to do about it. But she did see that none of it was accidental, not Bunny's death, or this dinner meeting, or anything else Pedar did. Perhaps as far back as the Trials several years ago, her first ride in years. He had tried then to talk to her about the politics of the Rejuvenants, and she had dismissed it as mere fashion. "I do wonder," she said after a long pause, "what, if anything, the New Texas Godfearing Militia has to do with Rejuvenants."

  He relaxed just that fraction which told her she had chosen the safer alternative at that conversational fence.

  "People need something to blame for their disappointments," he said. "As some opportunities are foreclosed, others must be seen to open. Or unrest might become general."

  Cecelia puzzled at this. Again, he waited for her, that indulgent smile which told her he expected her to be slow to understand. She hated that patience; if this was what she would become, as a Rejuvenant, she might just as well run her horse over a cliff and be done with it. Opportunities foreclosed—that had to be because Rejuvenants could live well-nigh forever, and who was going to give up power and privilege while still young and capable? Mentally, she transferred the problem to horse breeding, where it made more sense to her. If the old horses didn't die off, and you kept breeding at the same rate . . . well, of course.

  "I wonder if rejuv drugs would work on horses," she said, before she could get a lock on her tongue.

  Pedar burst out laughing, and the bald man at the next table looked up. "Cecelia, my dear! Only you would think of rejuvenating a horse!"

  She could feel the heat in her face. Yet—if he laughed at her like that, he was not afraid of her wits. She allowed her voice to carry a little sting. "I see what you mean, Pedar. Those who cannot afford rejuvenation, or who are simply impatient, see ahead of them a lifetime of blocked opportunities—blocked by the Rejuvenants. But the universe is large—if they are discontented and ambitious enough, there are colony worlds—"

  "Theft is always more profitable, until the thief is caught," Pedar murmured.

  "That's—" She was about to say ridiculous, when a tension in Pedar's face silenced her.

  She had too much to think about, and she did not really want to think about any of it. Of what use were her wealth, and her skills, and her rejuvenated body, if she couldn't do what she liked without having to worry about the rest of the universe? What she had wanted—what she hoped to gain—was a long life full of her own particular pleasures . . . which began, though they did not end, in that stable block on Rotterdam. Which centered on horses and the people who had identified themselves as horse people since long before humans left Old Earth.

  She reminded herself that she had time for both, now. No longer need she fear the advancing years, the aging of joints and bones that would make her slower, clumsier. She could afford to spend a few months now dealing with whatever complication Pedar meant, without losing it.

  But she didn't want to.

  And Pedar knew that. As she dipped the asymmetrical spoon always used with Biaristi cold soups, as she refreshed her mouth afterwards with a sip of Eran ale, and went on to the crunchy-coated strips of spiced rock grouse, she was aware that Pedar, in sounding her out, was expecting exactly the retreat she most wanted to make. He had turned the conversation back to the Trials, to her chances, and his. She answered automatically, but watched as from a distance the subtle signals of his expressions.

  What a toad the man was, after all. He would dangle some conspiracy in front of her for his own amusement, sure that she could not concentrate on anything but horses for long enough to learn anything dangerous, or do anything . . .

  "I think you're quite right to ride anyway," Pedar said. "After all, it's too late to attend any ceremony."

  "The horse is ready," Cecelia said, fighting back an urge to change her mind and not ride after all. "And so am I. You're staying too."

  "For the same reasons," Pedar said. "I'm ready; my horse is ready, and my competition . . . is here."

  And because it gave him a strong apparent alibi. While someone had plotted Bunny's assassination, Pedar had been very publicly visible a very long way away, supervising his horse in training for the Senior Trials. Cecelia knew it would have been possible to have it done—anyone knew that—but finding and proving the links would be more difficult. And dangerous.

  She was, she discovered on the day, more ready than she knew for this particular event. While nothing could make the Senior Trials effortless, she was hardly aware of the effort she exerted. Seniority reacted well to her detached calmness, and put in faultless cross-country and stadium rounds . . . which, in the end, were enough to win, when the dressage leader (also faultless in cross-country) had a rail down the next day. Liam Ardahi had to withdraw during the cross-country, when Plantagenet refused the water repeatedly. Cecelia wondered if that were entirely an accident; Plantagenet had always been bold into water. But if Pedar wanted her distracted by a major win . . . he was ruthlessly competitive, but he had won a much larger competition—as he saw it.

  She smiled for the press on her victory gallop, and remembered to thank all her staff, enclosing a personal not
e with the bonus credit each received. At the reception that evening, she wore her amber necklace carved in the likeness of Epona. Like that enigmatic goddess, she smiled and accepted congratulations, finally pleading a sore elbow in order to leave before midnight.

  An hour later, wearing a groom's overall, she was hacking down the dark road to the spaceport on Max, whose alert ears and brisk movement revealed that the horse, at least, thought this was a fine idea. If anyone asked, her groundcar was parked in the stable lot, and everyone knew that she was likely to have gone to the stables to end the night's celebration there. Colum had had Max saddled for her—an extra hack would do that one no harm—but had been out of sight when she led the horse out.

  Five kilometers away, where a service road met the tracks of A Course, Phase C, Dale waited with the truck and trailer, in which a horse stamped its impatience; Roz had driven her own battered little groundcar. Cecelia swung off Max, helped load him in the trailer beside Dulcy—Max could be difficult to load in an empty trailer—then struggled with the car's cranky driver-side door. Roz slammed it from outside, and climbed into the truck; Cece drove off alone to the regional airport.