Divine Right

by C. J. Cherryh

  Surprised her again when he got up and grabbed her arm at the door.

  "Be careful," he said, "for God's sake be careful. If it's getting that bad, that they're after kids—"

  Meaning the They that ran things, meaning the governor and Tatiana and them that knew things weren't going all that smooth, and people weren't all that happy, and they were arresting kids for saying, the way kids would, This ain't right—

  "Yey," she said, feeling a little queasy feeling. "But he's in Kamat. He's all right. Ain't no way they're going to drag 'im out from there."

  "Just be careful, dammit, Jones, don't tell me what they can't."

  "Yey, yoss," she said. Dead right in that one. Mondragon knew those waters, real well.

  SECOND OPINION

  Janet Morris

  Summertime, and Merovingen stank to high heavens from the weed choking the canals and rotting where the sun couldn't reach it, which was everywhere the disadvantaged lived in the shadows of hightown.

  Thomas Mondragon couldn't fathom why the hightowners didn't realize that this plague of water-plants down below was going to crawl up the tiers and choke them in their comfy beds. But they didn't. Not yet. And Tom Mondragon was too smart to go running around advertising his connection with the Sword of God by predicting where increased hardship canalside and increased regulation (read: repression) by high-town was bound to lead: right into the hands of Nev Hettek's revolutionary Sword of God.

  Merovingen already had Cassiopeia Boregy prophesying fiery revolt; it didn't need another prognosti-cator, even though Mondragon's words would have carried more weight, since he wasn't doped out of his mind by a faction of the Revenantist College.

  Mondragon couldn't—wouldn't—take the risk of being the messenger with the wrong message, hot here where people Disappeared for less all the time. He hadn't lived this long against all odds by neglecting his own best interests.

  The trouble was, the hightowners couldn't see past their pocketbooks. Chance Magruder maneuvered his Sword agents like a virtuoso conducting an orchestra; the tune was the Insurrection Waltz; the audience, Merovingen-above.

  Mondragon had helped bring revolution to Nev Hettek and watching it happen here all over again was making his skin crawl. He just couldn't figure out how Magruder had gotten those weeds into the canals. It was a stroke of genius—or (if Magruder hadn't been behind the seeding) a piece of luck that was good enough to make you believe in karma.

  As yet, not even the stink of the rotting weeds was evident among the upper tiers, and that galled the pole-boaters and the canal-rats even more as their blisters bled and festered in the heat wave and the edict came down from hightown that you couldn't even use your motors but on Grand Canal, West, Port, and Archangel. If you were lucky enough to have a motor, you took serious umbrage at that, when you were down at Moghi's or anywhere it was safe to take umbrage.

  If, like so many, you didn't have a motor, you just blistered and bled, trying to pole through the weed-choked mess of canals that were once the circulatory system of the tiered city. Mondragon's heart went out to Jones and her proud canal-rat friends, but he couldn't do anything for them. And times were too dangerous for him to let his feelings show.

  People were beginning to talk about Merovingen as if it were the rotting corpse it smelled like. The medical students from the College likened it to a fat old man with arteries clogged from dining too high on the hog—this "hog" being everybody who sweated on the lower tiers, and one of those students being Raj: Raj had a real knack for shooting off his mouth in the wrong places, and soon after he'd done so, a blackleg three-team had come knocking at Kamat's door "investigating rumors of treasonous rhetoric."

  Richard Kamat had had his hands full smoothing that one over—which meant that Tom Mondragon did.

  So he was down here on Ventani this evening with a pocket full of gold sols—thirty, to be exact—to be handed to a particular blackleg watch commander so that Raj's metaphor would be stricken from memories and report books and the kid's foot could be surgically removed from his mouth.

  The tongue was costlier than the sword in Merovingen this season. For that kind of money, Mondragon could have Disappeared the complainant in question and a few well-chosen friends to make his nonverbal message abundantly clear. He would have done so, personally, and kept the money himself, if Richard Kamat hadn't anticipated the obvious solution and expressly forbidden it.

  Maybe in the old days, Mondragon would have done it anyway—to keep his sword arm in practice, to vent some of the frustration he felt, and to teach Tatiana Kalugin's greedy blacklegs a lesson they badly needed, a lesson about who muscled whom and how hard.

  But Mondragon was nothing if not a professional survivor and his professional opinion was that bloodshed wasn't going to solve anything, or even slow down the rush of Merovingen toward revolution.

  Well, the Merovingians revered that damned Angel of Retribution, sword in hand, whose statues watched over Hanging Bridge, and over the harbor. They believed in karma, in debt and debit, in all manner of paranoid fantasies. That was what "paranoia" really meant: seeing causally unconnected events as a pattern organized to your benefit or detriment.

  You'd think that somebody of a Revenantist bent could see the pattern of revolution—of real societal change brought about by Sword of God agents at Karl Fon's behest—now that it was all around them.

  But revolution moved slowly among a populace at first, like a communicable disease. And who was to say that the disease was worse than the cure? Was hightown society worth preserving? By now, Mondragon had been too close to too many corrupt Merovingian houses to tell himself he believed that.

  Neither did he believe in Karl Fon's revolution anymore, because the rebels in Nev Hettek had set up a government more repressive than the one they'd supplanted, one based on subtractive reasoning that made a larger part of the population equal by lowering the standard of living sufficiently that almost everyone was poor, so there was no longer an entrenched middle class to envy. And as for how the ruling class lived . , . that was the business of the revolutionary council, and nothing for anyone to envy: you had to have a government strong enough and rich enough to treat with other governments.

  So maybe Mondragon didn't care if revolution came to Merovingen. Or maybe he'd get out of here before it did. After flood season, if the fires really started in Merovingen-below, he'd flee the riots that only Cassie Boregy saw coming. More truthfully, he'd flee Sword vengeance, which would fall on him like a shroud once Magruder didn't need him to report on the goings-on in hightown mercantile society.

  Merovingen-below was going to go up like a tinder-box, if the licensing fees survived the Council's legislation and Tatiana turned her blackleg police loose on the poor bastards who couldn't pole through clogged canals, couldn't afford the licenses, and couldn't afford not to have motors because their boats were their livelihoods.

  Waiting for his contact among the shadows of- Ventani Pier, Mondragon wondered if there was any use in trying to explain all this to Jones. The trouble with Merovingians, hightowners and canal-rats alike, was that they didn't think beyond tomorrow; they were too busy surviving today. That was something the revolutionaries turned out by the Sword's training program counted on. The revolution was based on creating terror, creating chaos, creating change by making the status quo unstable.

  It worked every time. Or at least it had worked when he'd been on the planning staff in Nev Hettek. And it was working now, in Merovingen, or else Chance Magruder was the Angel of Retribution himself and karma was using the rest of them, one and all.

  God, he'd been here too long. Been waiting too long for the blackleg he'd been sent by Richard Kamat to meet. Been waiting too long for Magruder to slip and give him an opening to find a way out of this trap. Been waiting too long to find a way to stop caring about Jones and her brood of doomed youngsters.

  Been waiting too long to get his strength back. Thomas Mondragon kicked a barrel as he stepped out of the sha
dows and moved off down the pier, thirty gold sols in his pocket.

  He was as doomed as any of them if he stayed here. He had enough gold on him to get out. Now. Right now, if he just headed out tonight. He wasn't helping to preserve the power structure; he wasn't helping to bring about the revolution; he wasn't helping himself by playing every side of this game.

  He was going to get himself mangled and crushed in the inevitable collision to come. He moved faster, the long muscles in his legs beginning to burn from the effort of not running—or from the effort of just moving. He wasn't old, he'd yet to turn thirty. But he wasn't young any longer, five years in a Nev Hetteker prison had seen to that—and Merovingen-below took its toll on you. He'd paid that toll last winter and found that recovery was a relative term. He was relatively healthy, relatively secure in relatively improved circumstances, and relatively capable of assessing the stability of Merovingen.

  If he was even relatively honest with himself, he'd get the hell out of here before he got himself relatively screwed from tarrying too long where he didn't belong.

  He could go to Tyre, where nobody knew him and insurrection was still offshore: buy a boat and take his chances with the Strait of Storms. Or he could play it safe, sail down the coast to the Chattalen.

  But it would be hot as hell down there, this time of year. And as far as Tyre was concerned . . . Jones would never go, and he'd be wondering for the rest of his life if leaving her and hers to face revolution on their own made him a complete and utter coward.

  Did he care that much? This night on Ventani, he told himself, he didn't. He couldn't. He couldn't afford to care.

  It was just luck—or karma—that the blackleg he'd been waiting for crossed his path just as he was leaving the rendezvous, on his way—once and for all, with Jones—or, more likely, without her. . . .

  "You're late," he said to the blackleg. Then, halfheartedly: "Too late. Deal's off."

  "My ass," said the other man, a black, backlit shape he knew by a limp like none other, from an old wound in an old skirmish.

  They all had too many wounds from too many skirmishes. Peacekeeping was a young man's game. Revolutionary movements were, too, unless you were high in the power structure. If you were high enough, then the young men weren't your friends any longer: they were your pawns, the faceless underclasses who'd die for the right to be freer, or at least for the rhetoric of freedom, while you and yours got richer and more powerful with every pint of blood shed.

  The dark shape held out a demanding, greedy hand and took a step sideways to block Mondragon's path: "Give. The deal's struck. You're just the courier; unless you want me to take a closer look at who you are and what you're trying to do . . . bribe an officer of the Kalugin—"

  "Don't even finish saying that. Don't tempt me. Don't give me even half a reason to feed you to the canal and keep this money." It was a plea, an honest and rasping bit of counsel torn from Mondragon's lips by some impulse to honesty he didn't understand.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, it came out sounding like a threat.

  The blackleg shifted his weight and a bit of errant starlight, cascading down the tiers, caught the whites of his eyes. The two men stared at each other for the time it took to take three breaths apiece, breaths of which each man was jealously conscious.

  Was it worth fighting over: thirty gold sols, the unguarded bravado of a College student, the good name of Richard Kamat, the unsurprising revelation that blacklegs took bribes on a regular basis?

  You felt your pulse at times like these, felt it in your veins like an old friend you didn't want to lose. Your body pumped itself up toward readiness while your mind judged everything: escape routes, your chances, the other man's temperament, any telltale sign of weakness, of aggression, or strength.

  Suddenly Mondragon was absolutely unwilling to give his life on Ventani Pier for Raj's waggling tongue or a chance to risk it again, trying to negotiate the Strait of Storms in some second-rate boat he might be able to buy on the spur of the moment.

  Yet there was no way out, if the blackleg wanted to push matters.

  Just as Mondragon was opening his cottony mouth to give them both a chance to back down, the blackleg said, "Look, friend, just give me what I came for and we'll both walk away from this, no hard feelings. My word on it."

  "Your word's good enough for me," Mondragon said in a nearly inaudible voice from a mouth with no spit in it.

  His hand shook when he held out the leather sack of sols and handed it over.

  The other man didn't seem much steadier, taking it.

  The blackleg turned jerkily on his heel and strode off as fast as he could, saying he was late for an appointment; the dark shape moved stiffly until it was swallowed by the night.

  Mondragon stood there and watched until no movement could be discerned in the deep shadows of the tiers.

  Scared spitless by a blackleg. Damn, he had to get hold of himself. It was hellish to see everything falling into ruin around him and not be able to do anything but wait.

  If he'd moved a little quicker, decided a little earlier, he'd have been on his way to buy that boat. . . .

  But who was he kidding? He could steal a boat, if he had no money, anytime; steal one from the Kamats or one of their business associates. With one well-chosen hostage or a blade at the right throat, he could comandeer a sweet yacht at a hightown party, any night of the week.

  He hadn't yet. It didn't mean he wouldn't. It meant, though, that right now he couldn't. Whether it was karma, bad luck, or Altair Jones, Tom Mondragon was stuck in Merovingen like a fly in varnish, and he couldn't seem to do a damn thing about it.

  The night brought the riverboat Detbird into port as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. She was made fast at Chamoun Shipping's cargo dock, right between the Detfish and the Det Queen, on schedule and without a hitch.

  A runner was sent to inform Magruder, and the three passengers sat in the riverboat's big salon, awaiting further instructions from the bridge or from the shore.

  Danielle Lambert could hear the baby crying in her stateroom; she ignored it, rebellious and full of the past, staring at the doorway through which Karl Fon was as likely to walk as Chance Magruder.

  If she knew Magruder, he'd send staffers, silent men with ready weapons and orders not to engage in small talk. Talk was the only thing Chance was afraid of— except emotions. She hadn't been able to get anything more than a surface briefing out of Karl; expecting more from Chance was ludicrous, and she knew it.

  Still, the past ought to count for something. Enough to excuse the fact that she'd been shipped down here pregnant, and arrived with a new baby in tow, and everybody had known that was likely to happen. Well, the revolution had to come first. Except sometimes it didn't, not with her.

  It did with her two companions, young and hard, creatures of the revolution who still were unknown to her, despite the interminable boatride from Nev Hettek—despite the fact that they'd helped, under her less than professional direction, deliver her baby en route.

  Fon and Magruder must simply have assumed that, being an obstetrician, she could handle any complications that might arise if she gave birth on their damned boat.

  Still, she wanted to blame somebody for all the pain and for having looked through her spread legs at the machinist and the metalworker who shared the cabin and the wait.

  Sword agents had to handle whatever circumstance threw at them. She had to handle whatever mess Magruder was making down here; she'd promised Karl personally that she would.

  But with a new baby she hadn't really wanted in the first place?

  If she could have stayed in Nev Hettek another month. . . .

  but the revolution came first. She'd have that graven on her tombstone, if she was lucky enough to die where she'd get a decent burial.

  She was going to make Chance regret asking for her, if it was the last thing she did. She'd called the baby Hope, after Magruder's mother. It was only fair.

  "Y
ou all right, ma'am?" asked the machinist/mechanic/assassin named Kenner, with a flicker of nervous eye toward her, then away, to the generator he was worrying with blackened fingers.

  "M'sera," she corrected primly, to remind him who was boss. "Might as well practice up." Kenner was her hole card here, if Magruder got out of bounds, Karl had told her—and him. The protocol would hold, despite the baby's birth, despite everything.

  "Sorry—m'sera Dani," Kenner replied, again with a flick of a glance that had to pass for respect offered to a superior officer. Kenner was only five or six years younger than she, but a lot depended on how old you were when the revolution hit the streets in Nev Hettek.

  Kenner had had his own death squad when he was nineteen. In a way that she could never be, he was a child of the revolution she and Karl and Magruder and the others had made.

  Kenner was lean and dark in a way that had nothing to do with skin tone or hair color: those were merely nondescript. This was a deeper darkness. His eyes didn't stay long in one place, never on a face . . . except in a crisis. He'd watched her carefully, attentively, while she was grunting in pain like a sow. She had to think of Kenner as a weapon at hand—her weapon. Otherwise, this quiet, coiled killer was going to scare her to death.

  Damn that baby, for coming when she had and giving Kenner a chance to feel male and protective and to take charge. The Sword agent liked her, for god-sake. She was going to have to do something about that.

  Jacobs was another matter: sitting beside Kenner, you could see the difference between the two. The dark efficiency of Kenner was all calculation; Jacobs was lighter, still unformed, a pale man who topped Kenner by two inches in height and a good ten kilos in weight. Baby fat augmented by a tendency to nibble when nervous. He'd been under fighting age when the revolution took hold. He wasn't now, and the Merovingen action would make or break him.

  Jacobs knew it, and he was struggling to take everything Kenner threw at him in stride. Her labor had nearly been too much for him, and Kenner had upbraided him unmercifully.