If this was victory, Rugal thought as he tore furiously from the room, it had a distinctly ashen flavor. He stormed down the hallway and up the stairs. He got as far as the four little portraits of Arys and then had to stop. His escape was blocked by Geleth. “Quarreled again?”
He glared at her.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” She bared her teeth. “You don’t like us very much, do you?”
“Has it crossed your mind I might have some very good reasons not to like you?”
“Oh yes, that Occupation you’re always shouting about. It does bother you a great deal. It bothers me not one jot, except insofar as it has made my child unhappy. I have invested a great deal in my child. Kotan has done the same with you, although there’s something oddly altruistic in the way he talks about you.” She sniffed in displeasure. “Some people never learn, no matter how hard you try to teach them.”
“Did you have something particular to say?”
“In fact, I did. I know you think I’m monstrous, but I don’t like seeing Kotan distressed. He has a great deal on his mind at the moment, but so long as he doesn’t do anything preposterous”—she glared at him—“then he’ll weather this storm like all the rest. He’s bright and he’s worked very hard to get where he is. He’s sacrificed a great deal. That scientific business, he enjoyed that.”
She reached out to touch the picture nearest to her. Rugal felt oddly revolted at seeing her hand so close to a picture of Arys. “But that had to go. One can’t serve two masters, and family prospects count for more than personal ambition. And that girl, that mother of yours who for some reason hardly ever crosses your mind—one does wonder what’s being repressed there—he was fond of her too. Another mistake—one shouldn’t get so attached to individuals. Lost her too, doing his duty. Yes, Kotan’s been a good son, all told. He’s done a great deal for the family. He’s done a great deal for Cardassia too—that inoculation program, and the science academies, and he’s helped keep the guls in check. Real service. Not that you’ve bothered to find out anything about it. What have you ever done, Rugal, to allow you to judge him so harshly? What have you achieved?”
She took a step forward. She was only slightly stooped with age, and nearly as tall as he was. “Drifting about. Trouble at school. Friends with the most unsuitable people. You’ve made a poor impression. Your father has done some fine things, and with luck, he’ll do many more. What have you done? Wandered about, complained, argued, caused my son even more grief. Is this what those Bajorans taught you? To think only of yourself?” She smiled at him. “I always had a very low opinion of Bajorans. You confirm my prejudices almost every day.”
In that moment, Rugal hated Geleth more than he had ever known it was possible to hate another living being. “Get out of my way,” he whispered.
She smiled and didn’t move. He thought, madly, about pushing past her, but he was not so far gone that he would assault an old woman. As soon as she was ready, she sidestepped neatly out of his way. He thundered past her down the corridor to his room.
“You’re not a credit to them, you know,” she called after him. “And I’m not in the least surprised.”
He fell on his bed in a hot haze of anger and tears. He knew it would hurt considerably less if it hadn’t in part been true.
Later that day, he slipped out of the house to find Penelya. He still worried that it was not entirely safe for her to be seen with him, but he needed to speak to someone who was not part of this particular madness.
She was there on their usual bench with her legs tucked up under her. Unusually for her, she was not dutifully absorbed in her padd. That was hanging from one hand, unread; instead, she sat chewing a knuckle and frowning into the distance. Quietly, he called her name. She looked up, startled; then, seeing him, she jumped up from the bench and ran across to him. As they hugged each other, he realized how much he had missed her.
“I’ve been so worried about you. Is your father all right? Kotan, I mean.”
“He’s not dead, which I suppose counts for something.” When she frowned at him, he said, “Sorry, Pen. He’s all right. We quarreled.”
“I’d never have guessed. He wouldn’t let you speak to Migdal, would he? You know he can’t, don’t you?”
Rugal gave a deep, unhappy sigh. “I know. I fought with Geleth too.”
“I take that as read. You and Geleth are in a state of permanent hostilities. With Kotan, it’s more like... sporadic outbreaks of guerrilla war.”
“Cardassia, where only the military metaphors work. Sometimes I think you’re as mad as they are.”
“Oh, I’m sure I am! What was Geleth’s complaint this time?”
“She thinks I’ve done nothing with my life.”
“You haven’t been here all that long. But maybe she has a point—no, don’t look like that, I only say these things because I know you’re not happy and because we are friends. But don’t you want to find a place? Find out what it is you’re meant to do?”
“I already have a place—”
“I know, back on Bajor. I’m not trying to say that you don’t. But what if takes you fifteen, twenty, even thirty years to get back there?”
“Kosst, Pen, I’m not staying here that long!”
“But what if you do? What if they seal the borders and you can’t get out?”
“I’ll find a way somehow.”
“There’s a lot of empty space between here and Bajor. You could be trying to find a way back for a long time. Are you going to spend all that time doing nothing better than wishing you were somewhere else? Is that good enough for you? Is there nothing worthwhile that you could do on Cardassia? Nothing you want to do?”
He gave her a sharp look. “Are you doing what you want to do?”
She patted the padd. “I don’t mind what I do. Once I’m good at it, it will help feed people. It’ll make people’s lives better.”
“It’ll make your uncle richer.”
“There are worse compromises in life, Proka Rugal, and I hope you never find yourself having to make them.”
“Why make them at all?”
“You know why,” she said patiently. “Because I owe them.”
“What do you owe them? Why should you feel obligated to them? It isn’t your fault you were orphaned. I was an orphan too, as far as Etra and Migdal knew, and they never made me feel I owed them anything. I gave them my love because they gave me theirs. That’s all there was to it.”
“I don’t want to quarrel with you. But being like this doesn’t make you happy—”
“And all your obedience and gratitude makes you happy?”
“It’s enough. I know how much worse life could be.”
“So do I! I grew up under the Occupation. And people there weren’t content to be obedient and grateful. They said that it wasn’t good enough, that they wouldn’t put up with it. That’s the problem with Cardassia. Too many people think that this”—he swept his hand around, taking in Coranum and the city and the whole union beyond—“is good enough. But it isn’t. You aren’t allowed to speak, you aren’t allowed to think, and your reformers are part of the problem! They’re just one more elite trying to grab power. That’s not making things better! That wasn’t good enough for the Resistance. People said they could never win, but they did. They threw the Cardassians off Bajor and they brought down the caste system while they were at it. But that won’t happen on Cardassia, because nobody will speak up and say that the whole thing is rotten, right through to its heart. Everybody just keeps on playing the game. It’s gutless. Everyone props it up. Everyone is part of the problem. Well, I won’t be. I won’t roll over and say that it’s good enough. Because I’m Bajoran, and a thousand years on Cardassia couldn’t change that.”
He stopped, breathless and angry, but glad that he had said it all out loud. That was another thing wrong about this place. If you could not say what you were thinking, how could you ever work out whether it was right or wrong? How could you ever w
ork out how to make your ideas better? But Cardassia did not seem to want better ideas. It only wanted the same ideas, over and over again, even if they were useless or stupid or wrong.
Penelya was trembling. He took her hand. “Pen? Are you all right?”
She squeezed his hand so hard that he couldn’t tell whether or not she had meant to hurt him. “No,” she burst out, “I’m frightened! I don’t know how you can say all these things out loud. I don’t even dare think them!”
“More people should say these things out loud. If more people said them, all at once, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.”
“They would know!”
“Let’s see then, shall we? Let’s see what they do to me—”
“It won’t be you, though, will it? It will be Kotan they come for, or me. Perhaps they’ll tell my uncle he should think again about looking after me—”
“Then you’d come to me and we’d look after each other. We don’t need them, Pen! Not really! They want us to think we do, but in fact we can do without them. We can do and be whatever we want.”
She was still shaking. Carefully, he wrapped his arm around her and then, very gently, he kissed her on the top of her head. Don’t fall in love with her, Kotan had said. As if there was anything he could do about that. If they could not tell him to whom he should direct his loyalty, they certainly could not tell him on whom he should lavish his love.
Four
Rugal made several decisions as a result of this conversation. The first, perhaps the most significant, he did not discuss with anyone, but it was the cornerstone of everything he did afterwards. He decided not to be afraid anymore. The Cardassian madness—the falsehoods, the paranoia—had started to eat into him like acid. That had to stop. His second decision was not to return to his academy, whether Kotan’s exception ended or not. He was no longer willing to waste his time listening to Cardassian orthodoxy. There had to be something better, even here. All he had to do was go and find it.
Winter came, cutting deeper than Rugal had anticipated. Geleth told him that this one was comparatively mild. He spent his days in the sunroom, a small glass-roofed, solar-paneled chamber on the side of the house, built to trap heat. Kotan often came to sit with him. This particular afternoon, the new maid—an Obsidian Order plant if ever there was—was setting out tea. The teacups were an heirloom, coming to Arys from her great-grandmother. They were carved from the bones of a leyik, a huge furred land animal long since hunted to extinction so that the people of Coranum could enjoy their redleaf tea in style.
Kotan dismissed the maid, waiting until she had gone back up the steps into the main part of the house before speaking. “You do understand,” he said, passing Rugal his cup, “that leaving the academy means you’ll never get into the institute? And that without the institute, there’ll be no political career?”
“I know,” Rugal replied. The teapot drooped in Kotan’s hands, and he looked so sad that Rugal could not help but regret that he was dealing a death blow to the man’s hopes. But they had been foolish hopes; they had had no basis in reality. “I’m sorry. But it was never going to happen. They got to me far too late. I’ve seen too much of how things are, beyond Cardassia. I can’t believe them because I know what they say simply isn’t true.”
“I thought, perhaps, that when you saw some of the work we were doing, my friends and I...” Kotan held up his hands in defeat. “Well, that’s the end of it.”
“It’s not as if I don’t care.” Rugal clutched the handle of the cup and tried to put into words what he had been thinking. “It’s not as if I think the kind of change you want for Cardassia is wrong. But it’s not enough—”
“We have to start somewhere. Already the Council has substantially checked the power of Central Command—we forced a treaty with the Federation, another with Bajor. If you had been here twenty years ago, you’d understand. These are tremendous shifts in policy—in power. We’ll look back one day and see that this was the moment Cardassia began its transformation. But change takes time—unless you want to see people die for it.”
“Power? But what you’re doing is taking power for yourself, for your friends. Yes, you seem like good people, but swapping one elite for another isn’t change! That won’t last! It will all fall into the old pattern: you’ll disagree, turn on each other, fight, and someone will try to get ahead of everyone else. It won’t make a difference to Cardassia as a whole—”
“So what do you suggest we do instead?”
Rugal took a gulp of the smoky tea for courage. “You could start by holding some elections.”
Kotan pressed the fingers of one hand against his forehead, as if in pain. He glanced back the way the maid had just gone. “I do wish you wouldn’t say such things so loudly,” he muttered. “Rugal, what do you think would happen if we did? What do you think people would vote for? More power to the military, most likely. You have to educate people first—you can’t let them go out and vote for whatever they want! You don’t know what you’d end up with!”
“I think that’s the general idea.”
“And here is where you critically fail to understand Cardassia.” Kotan eyes were alight. Truly, he loved to debate these matters, whatever he said about his lost scientific career. “Perhaps that kind of profligacy would work on Bajor, but it cannot work on Cardassia. Don’t you understand how fine a line we walk here? How we barely scrape by with what we have? If Cardassia did not have its small elite deciding quickly what goes here, what goes there, it would collapse. There would be chaos. People would die—”
“People already die. Have you taken a walk along the river recently?”
Kotan gestured around his comfortable prison. “My horizons are sadly limited at the moment.”
Rugal bit his lip. “Sorry. But do you understand what I mean? You say that the only reason not to change the way things are done is because that’s the best way to look after the Cardassian people. But it doesn’t even do that. Although,” he held up his teacup to admire it, “I suppose the residents of Coranum don’t do badly out of the whole setup.”
“By all means try the alternative. I think you’d like it less.”
“I didn’t like the Occupation either, and I survived that. You can’t frighten me that way, Kotan.” The way Penelya was frightened, and thousands—millions—like her.
Kotan put down his cup and stared at his son anxiously. “You’re up to something, aren’t you? What is it?”
Rugal shook his head. “If I’ve learned anything here, it’s that your family and friends don’t need to know the detail.”
Kotan studied him for a while, one hand still at his forehead. Rugal drained his cup and put it back down on the table. “Any more in the pot?”
Kotan, still watching him, refilled both their cups. “As the head of the house, I could order you to tell me what you’re doing. Or forbid it outright.” Rugal snorted. “No, I didn’t think that would work.” Kotan breathed in the steam from his tea, and then sipped. “You know that it’s my duty to inform the Order that they should be watching you. I could probably have my exception lifted if I did.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“Of course I wouldn’t do that. But it might be nice,” Kotan said plaintively, “to at least maintain the fiction that I have authority in my own home.”
Rugal saluted him with his cup. “Think of us as a model for a new Cardassia.”
“Hm. Try not to get us all killed.”
Rugal ran his finger along the fine bone handle of the cup. “Someone else will probably get there first.”
Rugal was indeed up to something. He didn’t believe Kotan would mind, but secrets were safer given the man’s current position. Rugal had listened whenever Penelya had talked about the other side of Cardassian life, and he had kept his eyes open during all their trips, whenever they had gone down the river, or taken the shuttle through Torr. Rugal and his family had lived hand-to-mouth on Bajor; he knew what poverty was like
, and he had hardly been brought up to filter it out. During the day, Rugal clung to the sunroom. At night, he was down at the river.
The first time, he had gone down there by himself. He had slipped into the kitchen when Maleta’s back was turned and filled a bag with as much as he thought would go unmissed. He took a knife too, in case of emergencies. Then he went down to the shantytown beneath the Veterans’ Bridge and handed out all the food he had. It disappeared in no time. He had not used the knife. Not yet.
He spotted Erani and her friends roughly the same time that they spotted him. They had a much slicker operation: a big table with two large pots on it, from which they were ladling out soup or stew into cups. Rugal opened his hands to show the last few children tugging at his sleeves that he really didn’t have anything left and walked over to the table. This was what he had been counting on: that he would find like-minded people here already.
There were three of them—two females, one male. Rugal lifted his palm in greeting. “Anything I can do to help?”
They stared at him mistrustfully. Then one of the females—this was Erani, as he found out shortly afterwards—told him, “Help Arric collect the used cups. We can’t afford to give them away.”
Arric Maret was the male. He was about Rugal’s age, perhaps slightly older. As they went around collecting the cups, he explained more about what they did.
The three of them were here almost every night during the winter, he told Rugal. As the food stalls in the central market packed up for the day, they went around and scrounged any leftovers. They took these back to the kitchen of Erani’s apartment near the technical school in west Torr, and cooked up whatever they had in the two large pots. Then they hit the road. They had a large and ancient skimmer that Erani’s mate, Tekis, had liberated from a scrapheap and lovingly coaxed back to life. It rewarded her with intermittent reliability. Paying for the permit to keep this wreck on the road was their biggest expenditure, but Tekis loved her skimmer. Erani called it the deathtrap.
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