The Stone Dogs

by S. M. Stirling

  "I presume," she continued, moistening her lips, "that this means yo'll agree to the Stone Dogs project, von Shrakenberg?" With an effort of will Eric forced himself to clear his throat and speak.

  "Quite right, Gayner. It's still insanely risky, but it does oppose our strength to Alliance weakness, an' if war does come, it'd be invaluable. I was hesitatin' because I thought it might provoke the conflict itself, if they discovered it."

  She nodded, still without taking her eyes from his face; the intentness of it was akin to love, a total focusing of attention on another human being. Her pupils expanded, filling the light hazel of her eyes with pools of black, and the small hairs along his spine struggled to stand.

  "That's agreement in outline, then. I'll get my people to drop their opposition to the trainin' and tribunal motions; yo' agree to puttin' the Stone Dogs through the Strategic Plannin' committee; we shelve the chemoconditionin' trials. Agreed?" He nodded. "Let's have our subordinates draw up the draft proposals, then. I'll be goin'."

  "Wait." She turned; he was standing at unconscious parade rest, with his hands clasped behind his back. "Yo' think I'm soft. What's more, yo' think the Domination's gone soft, don't yo', Gayner? Not like the hard, pure days back in the '50s?"

  "In danger of it," she said, with her hand on the handle of the door.

  " Yo' should read some history, Gayner; about what things were like just befo' the Great War, when we'd had two generations of peace… but think on this, Gayner. Let's do a best-possible-case heah; let's say the Stone Dogs work, an' we destroy the Yankees. Cast yo' mind forward of that, say we've pacified them; say the Domination is coterminous with the human race, as we've always dreamed. Whose policies do yo' think the Race will find most agreeable then?"

  She blinked at him in surprise for a moment, then relaxed. "Well, then, we'd have only our personal matters to attend to, wouldn't we? In any case, by then other… hands may be at the tiller. A very fond, an' very anticipatory farewell, von Shrakenberg."

  She swept out the door, and Eric went to his desk, sat, thumbed the record switch and dictated a digest of the legislation to be drafted. He flicked it off, thought for a moment, then thumbed it again:

  "Note to Shirley. We've won, two out of three," he said. "Why is it that I don't feel too happy about this?"

  Chapter Eight

  In considering the Domination, the biological metaphors of mutation and evolution come irresistibly to mind. Not simply in terms of the popular image of an anachronism surviving past its time, as if in a Vemlan romance where dinosaurs were found in an Amazon swamp. It is more useful to think in terms of alternative possibilities. Probabilities, rather evolution is a probabilistic phenomenon, it depends on chance. The path taken is not the only possible one, nor even necessarily the most likely. We are now fairly certain that a flurry of cometary impacts was responsible for the extinction of the widespread and successful dinosaurs. Of course, if we were confronted now with the dinosaurs as they were then, we would have no trouble in handling them. But then, they faced no real competition from our remote ancestors; and if they had been spared the hammer from the skies, what bipedal tool-user might have evolved to gaze curiously starward with reptile eyes? Likewise, the particular form of society that developed In early-modem Europe spread and seized the habitats of other cultural "species," aborting the possibilities of their evolution… except in the singular case of the Domination, where an eccentric fragment of that expansion was, by a political and military accident as arbitrary as the fall of comets, given time and space to grow.

  We are not confronted with an archaic society that somehow has survived unchanged; if that were so, we could be as confident as humans with rocket-launchers faced with tyrannosaurs. Instead, we are faced with the evolved descendant of another type of society—a far more serious matter. To use another analogy, consider the human brain. We are a recently arrived, cobbled-together species. Our humanity resides in the outer, forward layer of our brains; below that is the mammalian brain, below that the reptile, the amphibian. So too the Domination. The rulers of a slave society might not have chosen a path of change and development of their own accord; the satisfied rarely do. But confronted with the necessity of either changing or becoming first a helpless irrelevance and then prey, they did change. Unwillingly, haltingly, incompletely, but with each challenge a new layer was added to the pristine simplicity of the original social organism.

  Without time for assimilation, or full integration. On the primary conquest society of estates worked by slaves was applied the monstrous machine-tyranny of the First Industrial Revolution; on that the iron bureaucracies and armies of the age of steel and petroleum. The process continues to this day.

  The Mind of the Draka:

  A Military-Cultural Analysis

  Monograph delivered by

  Commodore Aguilar Emaldo

  U.S. Naval War College, Manila11th Alliance Strategic Studies ConferenceSubic Bay, 1972

  NEW YORK CITY

  FEDERAL CAPITAL DISTRICT

  LIMITED STATES OF AMERICANOVEMBER 20, 1972

  "Good to be back in the old home town," Marya said.

  They were strolling along Seventh, away from the Inauguration crowds. The blustery day had begun to clear, with patches of bright sky between the tall buildings. Around here they were mostly from the '20s and '30s, Mechanist style, stepped back like wedding cakes and capped with anodized-aluminum spires. Nobody noticed two more officers out for a post-parade stroll, not in this town; take away the military and the bureaucrats, and it would be a minor port-city— although he would have expected a woman with Marya's looks to attract more notice. He glanced aside at her, and his eyes narrowed; she had shortened and chopped her stride, hunched shoulders, made subtle changes in the set of her head and the way she carried her arms. Years older, and five notches down on the turn-your-head scale.

  Excellent, he thought. Maybe this will work, after all. It was going to be a finesse operation, - not a smash-and-grab. The almost open warfare of the '50s and '60s had given way to more subtle methods.

  "You still think of Nu Yawk as home?" he said lightly. Do I? he thought. Not really. America was home; the whole Alliance, perhaps. He glanced up at the half moon, just visible against the cool blue of the sky; it was only a few years since the last of the old coal plants had closed down, but the air was already cleaner. Thank God for the breeder reactors.

  "Yes," she said. They stopped by a stand and bought hot salt-pastry with mustard; the vendor took their change, thanked them in broad Lancashire and touched his cap. "Oh, yes, it's home." She gave him a wry smile. "I'm glad we're together on this one, too, Fred. Scared shitless, of course, but glad. Not that I blamed you for getting out of the house as much as you could, and after I left home, well…"

  He shrugged. "I was glad to get off to the Academy, soon after that."

  "Naturellement," she said. "That's… one reason this is still home. I'm afraid some of that stuff Maman tried to hammer into us took, with me." A bitter laugh. "Homesick for a country that no longer exists… and New York is as close to France as you can get, these days."

  European refugees and their children were common enough; nearly ten million had made it out before the end in '44, or in the confusion just after the Draka reached the Atlantic. Most had moved on to the United States, and many had stuck here in New York City, grouped in their enclaves, organizing around their newspapers and cultural societies… bitter, aging people, facing the long slow drain as their children and grandchildren broke free into the greater world beyond. The Pacific basin cities, and now space: that was where the action was.

  Marya squinted down at the pastry and took a meditative bite. "Remember her insisting that we speak French at table?"

  Fred rubbed fingers across his forehead. They sat down on a bench in a postage-stamp corner park, bare but beautiful with the spare lines of winter roses and a single stone urn, a legacy of Mayor Olmstead's obsession with gardening, back in the last century.


  "And I'd yell at her that I was an American—except I got so mad I yelled it in French?"

  "I was angry, too. Oh, I know I didn't show it… Well, the convent school was all right, until she started pushing me about becoming a postulant. It was a good school, anyway; they didn't skimp on the math; no boys to hog the equipment the way it happens in the public system. Christ, though, I got mad when she wouldn't let me go to slumber parties with the other girls, or out to the sock hops and the soda fountain. Forever penned up in that apartment with those frowsty-smelling old ladies and men in berets, talking about avant-la-guerre." '

  She wiped her hands. "Yet, you know, Fred, she was right. You'll talk English with Cindy when you have kids. And in a generation or two, the only people left on earth who speak French will be serfs. Nobody will read it but linguists and historians. Maman and the others, they had this continous feeling that nobody really understood. Even here. Nobody except each other."

  "They know so little of it," she continued, nodding to the passers-by.

  Fred jerked his head in agreement as he looked out at the street and its traffic. The Stanleys and Hashimotos slid by, low hum of electrics and quiet machine-whir of closed-cycle steam. The crowds thronged the sidewalks and the glassed overhead walkways that laced the upper stories, burst floodlike from the subways. Conservative fashions, canary-yellow suits and white cravats, snap-brim fedoras, pleated skirts and padded shoulders and four-color shoes. Quieter than he was used to; New York had always been a staid well-mannered town, the civil-servant mentality, and there was nothing like the driving energy you felt in the Pacific Rim cities, far from the closed and guarded Atlantic. But even here most people thought little about the Domination. Yes, it was terrible; they tsk-tsked over atrocity photos, ate up secret-agent dramas where straw-men Draka were invariably defeated by Yankee ingenuity…

  "That's about the level of their interest," he said sourly. There was an Odeon across the street, old and shabby but with a brand-new crystal sandwich display. SEX SLAVES OF ARCHONA, it screamed, showing a platinum-haired starlet in implausible lingerie cowering on a bed with the shadow of a whip falling across her. "Funny, if they're showing someone getting hurt, it's always a blond. When they show a black serf, it's a Janissary or a policeman."

  "We brunettes are obviously an inferior race," Marya said, as she rose to throw the napkin in the wastebin; the usual obsessive New Yorker neatness. I guess this really is still home to her. To his surprise, she laughed outright at the marquee.

  "Maman still gets really upset at that sort of thing; spits in the street and crosses to the opposite side. Not surprising, all things considered." More seriously: "Particularly after she opened up to Anna about what happened to her; a lot of it was in The Kisses of the Enemy, remember the sensation that one made?"

  Fred nodded. Anna von Shrakenberg was uniquely well-placed to write a novel set in the Domination, having been born there herself, a serf concubine's bastard.

  "Maman admired the book," he said. For certain someone would have told him if Marya and their mother were talking enough to discuss that sort of thing. "Even if she couldn't read it more than a page at a time. But when ABS-Pathway started sniffing 'round' for a movie contract Anna had to spend a solid day convincing her she wasn't going to sell out. You know," he considered meditatively, "I've always wondered… You're a lot closer to Maman than I ever was, really. You fought with her less. Why was it you were the one who ended up barely talking? Not that Maman and I can really talk, but she tries."

  She gave a sigh. "Because she and I were more alike. She didn't try to live through you, and I had to fight harder to break away. Good old Latin double standard, too…" A pause. "How do we loll Ekstein, by the way?"

  Fred suddenly felt the chill of the November afternoon, and turned up the collar of his uniform greatcoat. "Well, we'll have to be careful how we use local assets. Remember Paris."

  She winced. That had been in 1951, just after her fourth birthday, but nobody in the OSS was going to forget. A team had gotten into the household of the Draka military governor of northern France and poisoned her and her staff at a banquet. Felice Vashon had been an animal even by Draka standards; the idea had been as much humanitarian as anything, a threat to restrain the worst mass-murderers.

  "Bad tradecraft," she said. "Even worse psychology." The Domination's aristocrats did not respond well to threats, and the Security Directorate had caught some of the locals who helped insert the OSS specialists. Ten thousand serfs from the pens and compounds of Paris had been impaled along the avenues, dying slowly on wooden stakes rammed up the anus. "Remember Barcelona, come to that."

  Barcelona had risen against the Yoke in '52; hundreds of Citizens had died, and the last survivors had been pulled out by helicopter. An hour later, the city had gone up in a gout of radioactive flame.

  "The Snake idea of riot control, a one-megatonne sunbomb," he said.

  "Necessary, from their point of view," Marya said dispassionatly. "They probably hated to do it, in their own backyard. Europe was shaky then, still primed to explode at the slightest sign of weakness. I doubt that they'd do that now, especially since the locals are all owned by somebody. Vested interests, you see."

  He laughed. "You have been around Uncle Nate a lot recently, Captain Sister. I recognize that detachment."

  "Detachment?" She turned and looked at him. "Actually, I've been researching more of the family history." She reached inside her greatcoat, carefully tore a strip of gum in half and began to chew. He noticed suddenly that her nails had the slightly lumpy appearance of a reformed biter. The Mexican habit of gum-chewing had been spreading north since smoking went out of fashion.

  "She never told you? Maman wouldn't. She saved that for Anna, more than got into the book. Anna told me; we're still friends. There… was a gang-rape in Lyon, when Maman was arrested; her and her little sister. Didn't know we had an aunt, did you? Still over there, under the Yoke."

  A long silence. "Detached? No, I'm not in the least detached. I'm going to warn you straight up, brother, what I am is a fanatic. A reasoning fanatic. I've got a debt to collect."

  "Remind me never to establish a credit account at your bank, ma soeur," he said. "Lunch?"

  "Why not. As long as it isn't the canteen," she replied.

  That's the problem with a French mother, it sort of spoils you for fast food, he thought.

  CHATEAU OF MOULIN

  PROVINCE OF TOURAINEDOMINATION OF THE DRAKAFEBRUARY, 1973

  The chateau was south of the Loire, in the Sologne; a nobleman by the name of Philippe du Moulin had built it five centuries before. For most of the time since it had been a hunting seat, for the Sologne was an area of poor acid soils, of marsh and forest. When the Draka came they decided that the effort of reclamation was not worth the cost. Too many richer lands lay desolate, their tillers dead in the slaughterhouse madness of the Eurasian War; the remaining French peasants were deported elsewhere, or set to planting oak trees. For two decades the mansion lay empty, until the Security Directorate needed a place of refuge for a defector with very specific tastes.

  "Here he is," the Farraday Combine representative muttered with throttled impatience. "At last."

  The Tetrarch from the Directorate of Security shrugged and raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness, then let them fall back to the surface of the table. There were three terminals and keyboards built into it, the only outward sign of modernity in the room with its tapestries and suits of plate armour.

  "Hi!" David Ekstein said, as he bounded in. The Security officer winced and looked away. Not quite so disgusting as he was, she thought resignedly.

  "Dave, it's really impo'tant not to keep people waiting," the officer said.

  "Oh, gee, sorry, Cathy," Ekstein replied. He was in his mid-twenties but already the wiry black hair was thinning on top: a short man with a sticklike figure that turned pudgy at face and waist and buttocks. Acne-scars, and his skin was still wet from the pool, mottled brown from th
e sunlamps. Bitterly, she told herself that the defector probably thought he was fitting in with Draka custom by coming to the business meeting in a black pool-robe…

  Tetrarch Catherine Duchamp Bennington gritted her teeth and smiled back at him. Officially she was Security liaison here. Actually, I'm bear-leader to this little shit, she thought. Much of her effort was spent keeping him away from Draka. He was officially an honorary Citizen, but half an hour in normal society would have left him with a round dozen challenges to pistols at dawn.

  Not that he was nasty, just… like a damned smelly fat puppy, she thought. Providential that a castle in France had been his private daydream, so they could immure him in the middle of this hunting-preserve. Even better if they could have stuck him in an SD property in Africa or Russia, but the orders were for soft-hand treatment. You could see why. Creativity was so delicate a quality, and this slug was a hothouse flower of the first order.

  "Meiling was playing handball with me, and I really wanted to win," he continued.

  At least that was going well. The Directorate had bought him two dozen concubines, every one of them from the top creches and with special training to boot. The Domination wanted full value from David Ekstein, and the wenches were leading him with patient subtlety into healthier habits. He had already lost a good deal of weight. It was unlikely that Ekstein would ever be anything remotely resembling what a Citizen should be, but with luck, in a few years and fully dressed he could avoid arousing actual disgust. His social skills had been marginal at home and were nonexistent here, but with careful management that could be handled. The Eugenics people had a sperm deposit in their banks, anyway.

  "So, what's your problem?" he continued, rubbing his hands and turning to the exec. "I thought those designs were pretty good, really." Servants bustled in with trays of coffee, fruit, and breakfast pastries.