Empery

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  At home waited Wyrena—a good listener and a valuable sounding board, except that this time she was part of the problem too. The farrago of thought Sujata yearned to scatter on the table for scrutiny included things she could not disclose to a plain woman, and she was not confident of her ability to selectively hold up the mask just now. And how can 1 tell Wyrena that I was glad to leave Ba’ar Tell, why I was grateful for a chance to return here—

  It was Allianora she needed to talk with, Allianora to whom she could unburden herself freely. But Allianora had not answered Sujata’s page, and the Maranit Mission Office would not tell Sujata where the Observer was. The first dismayed Sujata, the latter aggrieved her. I am a highwoman too, had been her unexamined thought. My claim on her is as important as any. Recasting her need as possessive jealousy, she had gone straight to the Unity shuttle, blindly determined to track Allianora down.

  Learning no more from visiting the Mission in person than she had by calling, Sujata had gone next to Allianora’s home. There had been no answer to the door page, which should have ended Sujata’s search. Enough time had passed for her to have shaken the impulse that had brought her there, enough time to recognize its essential foolishness.

  But she knew a name, spoken once by Allianora and filed away by Sujata in the reflexive way that a Maranit highwoman hoarded personal information, the name of a young Mission staffer whom Allianora often blessed with her company. It was an easy matter to learn the address attached to the name, and a matter of a few minutes brisk walk to reach the residential block that contained it. Everything was too easy, too fast. Even Cajiya answered the door page too quickly for Sujata to ask herself what she was doing there and turn away.

  “I want to see Allianora,” Sujata had said stiffly.

  “She’s not here,” Cajiya had said, surprised.

  Then, in a loss of control that was painful to remember, Sujata had pushed her way past the young servicrat and searched the apartment herself before she was satisfied that she had been told the truth. At that moment of realization everything she had done became clear to her, and she had wanted to hide, to disappear—anything to escape having to retrace her steps past Cajiya and subject herself to Cajiya’s judgmental gaze.

  “She went downwell,” Cajiya said quietly as Sujata neared the front door again. “Something about a festival in Majorca.” She said it in such a way that it was an apology, and the apology an insult.

  That was when Sujata’s flight had begun, a flight that could not succeed because her pursuer was her equal in speed and endurance. She did not look back because the demons that were chasing her were inside her mind and memory’s eye.

  The walls on either side of the corridor fell back, and the pathway split to become a balcony encircling a small atrium. Sujata slowed, now knowing at least generally, if not specifically, where she was. The minor atria were the anchor points for the residential blocks, linked by fifth-level slidewalks to the city core and other major nodes. If she wanted to make her way home, she could now do so easily.

  She came to the balcony overlooking the gallery and looked over the edge. Three floors below, a play was in progress, the kind of slapstick comedy that played well on an open-air proscenium. The high, affected voices of the actors and the laughter of the audience carried up to where she stood alone.

  Would that I could sit down there among them with nothing to think about but the last joke and the unfolding story. I’ve allowed myself so little time for self these last six months, denied myself in the expectation that I will receive a greater measure later.

  Sujata knew her own pattern: to plunge into the task with an obsessive fervor, establishing her presence and authority and shaping or reshaping the group to her liking, then to pull back and let people do their jobs. A technically minded friend had once offered her a useful analysis by analogy: The design and engineering of a complex system with many moving parts was a time-consuming process, but one hour of anticipation saved a hundred hours of correction. A well-constructed machine should run without supervision, requiring only occasional maintenance to insure its efficiency.

  In the same way, Sujata endured the sacrifices of the “design” phase because of the rewards of the “maintenance” phase. But Wells and Erickson had only seen the first half of the pattern. They did not understand that it was not the responsibility to which Sujata responded but the recognition that came with accepting it.

  No wonder Wells and Erickson chose me. But I never meant to live like this. Do they know how much time I’ve had to spend in sprints just to begin putting Resource in order? Do they know what I’m expecting in return? No—I would never let them. But still, I’m six months into repairing one fiendishly complex machine with the end nowhere in sight, and they want me to leave it to take on an even more dauntingly complicated one—

  In a flash of self-revelation Sujata saw that her resistance to the proposal that Wells and Erickson had laid before her and her problems with Wyrena were of a piece. Both threatened, though on different scales, to push further into the future the arrival of the rewards of her labors.

  It’s not Wyrena that’s changed, she thought as she climbed the ramp to the fifth-level slidewalks. I have. When we met on Ba’ar Tell, I felt free to indulge myself. The Ba’ar Tell office was already in order. I could give her first claim on my time because I needed so little to keep things running smoothly. But here I have my hands full. Here I push her away to protect my single-mindedness—and feel guilty even as I do because I know that what she wants is nothing more than her due.

  She let the slidewalk carry her toward the city core and her thoughts carry her toward an inevitable conclusion. Work is not life—it’s what gets in the way of living. But there are some tasks so large that once you accept them, you risk never getting back to what, until then, you thought was most important. Wyrena and I can talk. Now that I understand, I can make her understand, and we can work out an accommodation. But what accommodation can I possibly make with the Chancellery?

  Six months, and she had not yet even made a first visit to the surface. Nothing was keeping her from ending that skein. With her travel rating she could go to the terminal at any time and bump someone off any Earthbound flight. Her papers were in order. She had already accumulated nearly three weeks of compensatory time. Either her personal or her Director’s accounts could easily stand the expense. Nothing kept her from going except the knowledge that one visit would beat once too little to satisfy her and too much for her future resolve.

  A gibbous Earth was large in the windows of the UC shuttle terminal. Sujata arranged for her seat, then settled in a chair to savor the view. Africa appeared to her as a dusty brown film overlaid by broken white clouds, a mere crust seemingly afloat on a liquid-blue sphere and being chased by approaching night.

  This is the mask of the Mother, she thought as she looked out, beautiful, serene, timeless. But she wears her past on her secret face like any highwoman, in the intricate weave of the living mane she wears, the sheen and shape of her heartstone. There are wonderful ancient places down there, valleys rich with millions of years of growing, a hundred thousand species each of which is kin to me. This is what I came back for—to touch her and read her and take her inside me—

  The first call chime announced the shuttle ready for boarding, and Sujata reluctantly tore herself away. When will I know you? she thought sadly as she rose from her chair. When is there to be time for me?

  Wyrena Ten Ga’ar looked flushed and uncomfortable from the moment the link was completed and her face appeared on Wells’s display. “Lodanya Wyrena, this is Harmack Wells. Do you remember me?”

  “Yes, Comité,” said Wyrena, averting her eyes according to custom. “I remember you. I regret to tell you that Comité Sujata is not here—”

  “I know that, keefla,” he said, watching her face closely. The Maranit term described one who has given up home-keeping to become a mistress. Said with its original inflection, it was a term of affection between a
man and his lover. Said with a different inflection by one woman about another, it was a pejorative. Said that same way by a man, it was a rebuke.

  As he had expected, Wyrena accepted the rebuke and apologized. “Fraxir marya. I did not mean to presume.”

  “I called not to talk with Comité Sujata but with you—about Comité Sujata. The last time I spoke to you, I warned you that she would have difficult decisions to make.”

  “I remember.”

  “Good,” Wells said. “Those decisions are on her now. She has been offered the Chancellery of the Service.”

  Wyrena’s eyes came up, and Wells read both surprise and elation in them. “Yes, Comité. I understand.”

  “I hope you do,” Wells said. “But we’ll take a few moments to make certain you see the ramifications for all the parties concerned. When you do, I am sure you will be able to help her make the right choice.”

  Wells’s call prepared Wyrena to address the political dimensions of Sujata’s dilemma. But when Sujata returned to the apartment, it was the personal dimension that received primary consideration, and for that Wyrena was completely unprepared.

  On Ba’ar Tell they had had neither the need nor the inclination to talk self-consciously of their relationship. They had simply enjoyed each other as much as the time they could steal allowed. Wyrena had always presumed that Sujata, too, understood that emotions were to be experienced, not analyzed. The giddy excitement and self-devouring pain that were the two sides of love were not things that could be frozen and dissected with a psychological scalpel.

  She loved Janell because she could not help but love her, because being with Janell was the most uplifting state of being Wyrena had known. Such a feeling could not have its genesis in anything except the complementary perfection of the other and the rightness of sharing life with them.

  But now Sujata insisted on offering reasons for things that could have no reason except beyond their inarguable reality, taking something that was seamless and beautiful and tearing it apart with cold and calculating analysis.

  Her life in the Ga’ar enclave had been full of rules and reasons—do this to make yourself useful, do this to make yourself desirable—and the result was a life of artifice and counterfeit emotion. Now Janell was as much as saying that what they had shared was equally counterfeit, equally tainted by matters far removed from the simple equation of two hearts in synchrony.

  Just tell me what you want, she thought anxiously, not why you think you want it. It’s enough to know that there is something I can do for you. To be asked is reason enough.

  But as Sujata went on, Wyrena learned to her distress that she could not reach and heal the hurt Sujata had inside her, because Sujata wanted things that Wyrena could not give her. There was a rival for Sujata’s time and perhaps for her affections as well—a rival whose appeal Wyrena found inexplicable.

  “I want to be able to spend two or three months out of the year on Earth, wandering here and there,” Sujata protested.“But how can I do that as Chancellor? Look at Chancellor Erickson. After eight years her life consisted of office and Committee and home, one tightly circumscribed circle. The job nearly consumed her.”

  By the end of an hour, Wyrena saw clearly the direction in which Sujata was moving. She also knew by then that she had a better reason to try to turn Sujata than any Wells had provided. But Sujata had offered no opportunity for Wyrena to influence the decision, and Wyrena had found no ways to create one. Sujata was telling, not asking—talking, not listening—as she moved inexorably toward the cusp.

  For that reason Wyrena viewed the unexpected sound of the door page as a welcome interruption. Without waiting for Sujata’s approval, Wyrena bounded from her chair to answer it.

  The man Wyrena saw in the monitor displayed the dandyish affectations she had come to associate with Terran high fashion: tightly curled hair hung girlishly at shoulder length, a lacy jabot setting off the visitor’s blue silk blouse. Despite having been chided by Sujata for her ethnocentricity, Wyrena still felt a reflexive flash of scorn on seeing such a spectacle. Misbehaving Ba’ar Tell boys were sometimes dressed in their sisters’ clothing for punishment; why a man would choose to dress himself that way, she could not discern.

  But this once, her gratitude for the interruption suppressed that judgmental impulse. “Greetings of the house,” Wyrena said buoyantly.

  “And to you. Would you be so kind as to tell Comité Sujata that the Terran Observer would like to see her?” the visitor said, beaming unctuously at the camera.

  By that time, Sujata had followed Wyrena as far as the end of the entryway. “Let him in,” she said, and turned away.

  Berberon bobbed his head in salute as the door opened.“You must be Wyrena Ten Ga’ar, the Director’s new aide,” he said politely. “I am Felithe Berberon, Terran Observer to the Committee.”

  “In here, Felithe,” Sujata called from the other room.

  Answering Berberon’s bow of the head with a welcoming smile, Wyrena let him past, then followed him into the greatroom. They found Sujata seated where Wyrena had left her a few moments earlier.

  “Good evening, Director,” Berberon said. “I hope haven’t disturbed you—”

  “No.”

  “I thought you might grant me a few minutes to speak privately with you.”

  “About what?” Berberon glanced sideways at Wyrena, raising an eyebrow questioningly. “If it’s the Chancellery, she knows,” Sujata said. “We’ve been talking about it.”

  Nodding, Berberon edged toward a seat. “Then, of course, she should stay. I was given to understand you are having some difficulty deciding what to do. I thought I might be able to help.”

  “How?”

  “By providing you with information you are not likely to have received elsewhere.”

  “She doesn’t want to take the post,” Wyrena said. His eyes betraying his alarm, Berberon looked to Wyrena questioningly, as though wondering whether she were ally or enemy. Then he turned back to Sujata. “Am I too late, then?“Berberon asked. “Have you already decided?”

  “No,” Sujata said. “Not entirely. But Wyrena is right. I don’t want the post.”

  “But you may take it nonetheless?”

  “AH I can say is that I haven’t decided not to,” Sujata said.

  “I will take that as a positive sign,” Berberon said with a hopeful smile.

  Sujata did not answer the smile. “So what does the World Council have to say on the subject of Chancellor Erickson’s successor?”

  “I am not here representing the Council,” Berberon admitted.

  “Oh? Then who sent you here? Wells? Or Erickson?”

  “Neither. Though I, too, want to see you take the post, I do so for separate and personal reasons.”

  “Do you plan to offer as selective a version of the truth as they did?”

  “No. I will be honest with you—perhaps uncomfortably so.”

  “Then please sit down,” Sujata said. “I would welcome some honesty.”

  Relieved, Wyrena waited until Berberon had selected a chair, then settled herself behind and to the right of him, out of the range of his peripheral vision. It was the traditional place for a Ba’ar woman at a talk circle, but more than habit dictated her choice. Had Wyrena made herself part of the circle, Berberon would have been obliged to divide his attention between Sujata and herself. This way he could focus his attention on Sujata exclusively.

  “You can begin by explaining why Chancellor Erickson is resigning,” Sujata said, drawing her legs up and tucking her knees under her chin.

  “It’s really quite simple. Blythe doesn’t think she can beat Wells on Triad.”

  Sujata shook her head. “But why resign? Shouldn’t she go out fighting, making as much noise as possible? Shouldn’t she force him to use a recall vote and not just quietly absent herself?”

  Berberon smiled. “Is there such a thing as gambling on Maranit?”

  “No—but I’ve come across it enough time
s since leaving there. Why?”

  “I once watched a gambler facing bankruptcy bet his last dozen chips on a weak hand. Later I asked him why he’d done that, when he could have held on for several more hands hoping for something better. He said that if you’re playing to win, and not just to postpone leaving the table, sometimes you have to take a chance before the chips are gone. That’s what Blythe is doing. Having you made Chancellor is the best she thinks she can get.”

  “But she’s the Chancellor. She’s Director Wells’s superior. He has to take her orders.” Berberon shook his head. “Wells is different. He has leverage of his own.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Wells is a member of the Nines.”

  Sujata frowned. “I have encountered the term several times since I arrived here, but I don’t really understand what it refers to—or why it matters.”

  “How to describe them?” Berberon said with a sigh. “The Nines are part philosophical clique, part political party, part activist cadre. They are the champions of the individual in this generation. They believe that competition is the ideal way to allocate wealth and power in society.”

  “I don’t remember hearing of them when I was here before, as a tutelate. Or, for that matter, at M-Center or Ba’ar Tell.”

  “Perfectly understandable. They were founded here forty-odd years ago and have little or no presence elsewhere. They are uniquely Terran, though there are some parallels between their beliefs and the self-reliance code of the Rena-Kiri.”

  “What does the name refer to?”

  “To their conceit. To the rank they have given themselves. They consider themselves the elite, the intellectually gifted, the morally superior.”

  “You disagree, it seems.”

  “Yes. Before I offer further opinions of the Nines, you should know that my antipathy toward them is personal and long-standing. I was recruited by them thirty years ago. Though I take no pride in saying so, I qualified easily. But I was horrified by what they advocate.”

  “Why? What do they want?”