by David Weber
JANUARY 1923 POST DIASPORA
White Haven
Planet Manticore
Manticore Binary System
Star Empire of Manticore
“Eat your peas, Raoul.”
Honor’s tone was supposed to be firmly commanding. It actually came out about midway between a command, a request, and an admission of defeat, and she tasted Hamish’s unbecoming amusement as his offspring shook his head stubbornly.
Again.
“No,” Raoul Alfred Alastair Alexander-Harrington said with the invincible stubbornness of his twenty-one months.
“They’re good for you,” she persisted. “Besides, you like them.”
“No,” he repeated, despite the fact that he did normally like them, and sent his spoon flying across the dining room table.
“Raoul—!” Her own valiantly suppressed laughter eroded the sternness of her tone.
“Want ’paghetti,” he announced.
“You’re having peas,” she informed him.
“’Paghetti!” he insisted, and she tasted his very self-centered delight in expressing his independence.
“No spaghetti,” she said sternly. A mother, even one who spent so much time in space, had to draw the line somewhere, she figured. “Peas.”
“’Paghetti!”
“Peas!”
She sat back, crossing her arms, and regarded him with a frosty maternal eye.
“You do realize they can sense fear, don’t you?” Hamish asked helpfully.
“You so do not want to go there, Hamish Erwin MacGregor Simpson Alexander-Harrington,” she told him ominously, never looking away from their son.
“You do seem to be having a bit of a problem, Honor,” Emily Alexander-Harrington observed.
Her life-support chair was parked beside their daughter Katherine’s highchair while she supervised Katherine’s dinner. Which, Honor observed, seemed to be going somewhat more smoothly than their son’s. Emily couldn’t actually feed Katherine herself, given the fact that she had only limited use of one hand, but she smiled encouragingly at the toddler’s green peas-smeared face and got a huge answering smile in return.
Honor would have preferred to put that down to the fact that Emily had the home-court advantage. It was true that the weeks on end that Honor spent aboard Imperator limited the time she had with their children. There’d been times—more than she could count—when she’d bitterly resented that as Raoul and Katherine raced from babes-in-arms, to self-propelled quadrupeds, to shaky steps, to determined, hyper-velocity toddlers shrieking with laughter as they dodged around the nursery, playing keep away with nannies and treecats. She’d missed so much of that transformation, and she could never get it back again, and she knew it.
You’re not the only parent who’s ever been stuck aboard ship while her kids grew up without her, she reminded herself sternly. And you’re a heck of a lot luckier than most of those other parents were! You’re at least close enough to home that you can get there for visits every couple of weeks. And, she admitted, when you are here, you can actually taste their mind-glows. That’s something no other parent—no other two-leg parent, she corrected, glancing at Samantha and Nimitz—has ever been able to do. Something Emily can’t do. Or, really, something else she can’t do.
Her mood darkened briefly as she watched Sandra Thurston wipe the outer few centimeters of pea paste off Katherine’s chin. While Katherine appeared far more amenable to the evening’s menu, she still plied her own spoon with more enthusiasm than precision, although, to be fair, peas were less spectacular than the results she could achieve with Raoul’s favored “’paghetti.”
There was no trace of self-pity in Emily’s mind-glow as she watched Sandra do what she couldn’t, but that only made Honor more aware of her senior wife’s loss. And she seemed so tired again. It was almost—
She put that thought aside and returned her attention to Raoul.
“No ’paghetti,” she said firmly.
He sat back in his highchair, looking at her stubbornly with almond-shaped brown eyes very like the ones she saw in the mirror, and she tasted the developing mind behind them as it grappled with the problem. His ability to put sentences together lagged considerably behind his ability to comprehend what was said to him. According to the pediatricians, that was to be expected at his age. In fact, his spoken vocabulary was well ahead of the norm. He had at least a hundred words in his mental vault by now, and he was adding at least a half-dozen a day. And he did take a certain delight in using them to affirm his independence.
That, too, was right on the curve, she thought. Of course, some children were more stubborn than others. Raoul definitely fitted into that category. Undoubtedly the fault of his father’s genetic contribution.
“No ’paghetti?” he said after a moment.
“No ’paghetti,” she confirmed in a no-nonsense, listen-to-your-mother tone.
He cocked his head, and she twitched internally as something…brushed at the corner of her mind—that wasn’t the right verb, but that was because there wasn’t a “right verb” for what she was experiencing—and her eyes widened. She’d thought she was sensing something once or twice before, but she’d never been certain, and each time she’d convinced herself she was imagining things. This time she couldn’t, and her eyes slid sideways to Sun Heart, the senior female of the half-dozen ’cats who’d immigrated to White Haven.
In many ways, Sun Heart was Lindsey Phillips’s co-nanny where both children were concerned. A “retired” elder of Bright Water Clan, she wasn’t a memory singer, like Samantha, but she was over a hundred T-years old and the mother of “hands of hands”—the vagueness of treecat arithmetic could be frustrating—of kittens of her own. Most of them were adults now, which freed her to focus on the two-leg offspring of Death Fang’s Bane Clan, and she—and all of Bright Water’s ’cats took their responsibilities seriously. Although Sun Heart tended to spend her nights sleeping on the foot of Raoul’s bed, her mate, Bark Master, spent every night on Katherine’s to be sure both bases were covered.
Honor had never been able to decide all the reasons the treecats did that. Partly, she knew from her own ability to taste their mind-glows, it was because all of the ’cats loved the kids so deeply. And it was because they were determined that nothing would harm either of them. But there was something else going on, as well. Something she suspected not even the ’cats fully understood. There was a complex, subtle…flow between Raoul and his furry guardians. Katherine was a bright, sunny, incredibly smart little girl, but without that interwoven tapestry. Sun Heart had made it clear to all of the various parental two-legs that both Raoul and Katherine were almost certain to be adopted when they were older, when their mind-glows had settled a bit. But there was more than that at play here, and she suddenly wondered how her own ability to taste the treecats’ mind-glows might have looked if she could have seen it from the outside.
Now Sun Heart met her gaze—and the more pointed question of her emotions—with calm, grass-green eyes. Then she flipped her ears in the equivalent of a shrug.
Lot of help that was, Honor thought, and Sun Heart bleeked in soft laughter that was echoed from Nimitz and Samantha.
“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” she told the furrier members of the dinner party. “I think—”
“’Elery,” Raoul interrupted with the air of a high-level diplomat offering up a compromise solution.
“You need to eat more than just celery,” Honor responded. She wasn’t sure whether Raoul really liked celery or if his craving for it owed more to watching the treecats devour it.
Or, she thought, thinking about that subtle flow of mind-glows, maybe he actually…I don’t know…experiences whatever it is they get out of eating it. I’ve certainly tasted Mister Gobble Guts’s fondness for it!
Nimitz bleeked a harder laugh.
“The peas were only one thing you were trying to get down him,” Hamish pointed out. “Maybe you
’ve got an opening wedge.”
“Bargaining creates a future position of weakness,” Honor replied darkly, regarding Raoul with calculating eyes.
“Honor, he’s not quite two. You’ve got decades to work on him.”
“Oh yes?” She turned to give him a withering glance. “Do you have any idea how hard it was for my mom to get back any ground she ever yielded to me?”
“I don’t have to. I know how hard it’s been for me and Emily!” He shook his head. “I’m just saying that sometimes a canny tactician settles for a partial victory rather than reinforcing failure.”
“You two do realize you’re feeding a child, not fighting a battle?” Emily asked. Then she paused, thought a moment, and shook her head. “Forget I said that.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” Honor said, returning her attention to Raoul.
“No peas, you get the celery, but you have to eat the mac-and-cheese and drink every drop of the milk,” she countered. “Deal?”
He pondered carefully, considering every aspect of the proposed compromise. She could tell that the “I’m-a-big-boy” corner of his mind wanted to lay down additional conditions. Fortunately, she had a hole card. The Meyerdahl genetic mods were hard-coded, which meant he’d inherited her metabolism. Debating what he was going to eat might turn into a tussle, but there was no doubt he was going to eat something. Keeping the Meyerdahl furnace stoked was a full-time occupation. So she sat back, arms folded, and waited him out. He wavered back and forth for a moment, then nodded.
“’Eal,” he said firmly. “But ’elery first!”
“Done,” she sighed, and reached out to remove a stalk of celery from Nimitz’s tray. The treecat bleeked indignantly, and she snorted. “You’re so darned amused by all this, you can provide the celery,” she told him.
Raoul didn’t care where it had come from. He grinned from ear to ear, grabbed his prize, and started to chew.
“Now, if only the Sollies were that easy,” Hamish said.
“The Sollies don’t have a clue about real stubbornness,” Honor informed him with crushing scorn.
* * *
“I do wish both of you could get home more often,” Emily said as the three of them sat in the garden Hamish had built for her fifty T-years ago. She and Hamish held cups of coffee and Honor sipped from her own cup of cocoa as they gazed up through the cool night air at the stars of Manticore. “And I really wish your schedules would let at least one of you go to Briarwood with me!”
“So do I,” Honor sighed, lowering the mug. “They grow up so fast!” She laughed with an edge of sadness. “I’m sure every parent who’s ever lived said exactly the same thing, but that’s because it’s true. And I’m missing so much of it.”
“I know you are, sweetheart,” Emily said. “But I think maybe you’re also more aware of how much they’re growing and changing. I see it happening right here in front of me on a day-to-day basis; you see it after being away, and that probably makes it even more impressive.”
“And what was all that business with you and Sun Heart?” Hamish asked.
“You remember how I said it was going to be really interesting seeing how kids raised by treecats turned out?” Honor smiled crookedly. “Well, I think Raoul’s determined to prove my point. There’s something going on there.”
“Only with Raoul?” Emily asked, and Honor glanced at her in the garden’s dim light. Emily’s tone was only curious, and Honor tasted her mind-glow carefully, then relaxed ever so slightly, for that mind-glow was as tranquil as ever.
“Only with Raoul for right now,” she said, “but I think he got more than his metabolism from me. And, honestly, from what the ’cats have told Adelina, I probably got a head start on whatever it is I’ve got from Mom and Dad. So it’s not too surprising Raoul might be showing signs of something like it. It’s a lot earlier than I did, but, then, while it’s true I spent as many hours in the woods as I could get away, I wasn’t actually raised by treecats, whatever certain people may have said over the years. They got hold of me a little later than that.”
Nimitz laughed quietly from the back of her chair, and Samantha joined her mate. Sun Heart had headed off to the nursery with Raoul and Katherine, but Crooked Toe—so named to differentiate him from his twin brother, Straight Toe—another of the male treecats who’d attached themselves to White Haven—lay stretched luxuriously across Emily’s lap. One or more of the ’cats were always in evidence wherever Emily went on the White Haven estate.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see Katherine start showing a sensitivity to the ’cats a lot younger than other kids do,” Honor went on more seriously, “and Samantha and the memory singers working with Adelina seem to think they may actually be able to figure out how to make two-legs ‘hear’ memory songs. After a fashion, anyway. From the way they’re talking, I’m pretty sure they figure Raoul’s going to be their initial success story, but they’re hoping Katherine’s will be the real breakthrough when she’s a little older.”
“That would be wonderful to see,” Emily said.
Honor tasted an edge of wistfulness in her wife’s mind-glow and reached out to lay one hand gently on Emily’s. The older woman looked at her and smiled, but neither of them said what both were thinking, and Honor’s eyes prickled.
“That will be wonderful to see,” Hamish said with a firmness which fooled neither of them. Then he sipped coffee with the air of a man changing the subject.
“Willie and I have a meeting with Tony Langtry and Tyler Abercrombie tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Since I have no intention of talking ‘business’ once we retire for the evening, I thought I’d see if either of my top analysts had anything to offer.”
“From the list of attendees, I assume you’ll be talking about the Mandarins’ version of what happened at Mesa?” Emily said. “Among other things, I mean?”
“You assume correctly.” Hamish’s tone was rather grimmer than it had been. “It’s not like there’ve been any surprises about how they’re trying to use it, but we still have to figure out how we’re going to respond to it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t see much of a way we can ‘respond’ to it,” Honor sighed. “Aside from what we’ve already said and done, I mean.”
“It would help—a lot—if our rabbit-excavators weren’t finding so many card-carrying members of the ‘Mesan Alignment’ who genuinely don’t know a damned thing about the Yawata Strike or Harahap’s ‘Operation Janus,’” Hamish growled. He shook his head. “Every single time one of them opens his or her mouth, newsies like O’Hanrahan point at the fresh evidence that even though there was an Alignment, we obviously grossly overreacted to—or totally misinterpreted—our own intelligence data.”
“And the fact that we were that far out of touch with reality only makes it even more likely we nuked Mesa in a surfeit of xenophobic, paranoiac incompetence.” Emily’s tone was as grim as his had been, and he nodded.
“Exactly, love. And every time we say we didn’t, the Mandarins point at our denial as exactly what you’d expect out of people desperate to dodge responsibility for their own acts.”
“Like I say, I don’t see much else we can do at this point.” Honor sipped cocoa, then shrugged. “I don’t like it, and I wish I had some silver pulser dart, but I don’t, because there isn’t one. Unless you come up with something at the conference, that is.” She smiled faintly at him. “You are going to have quite a brain trust assembled.”
“And so far, not a single one of the brains involved has any better idea of how to respond than the three of us do,” Hamish retorted.
Honor nodded, less at what he’d said than at the unspoken portion of his thought. Whether or not any of the people scheduled to assemble at the conference in Beowulf had a better idea of how to respond, they’d have to respond somehow. It was their job to figure out how, and just this once, a cowardly part of her was delighted her own responsibilities would keep her far, far away from the decision-making process.
Chairman Chyang Benton-Ramirez, as the chief executive of the system hosting the conference, would have the dubious pleasure of presiding over it, although he probably wouldn’t be there for the actual working sessions. He had too much other work on his plate, and he’d undoubtedly head back down to his office in the planetary capital as soon as he decently could after he’d gaveled the conference to order. Which made sense, really. He might as well get on with doing something useful with his time, because if the megaton or two of talent assembling aboard Beowulf Alpha couldn’t come up with an answer, nobody could.
“Is Willie going to be able to attend?” she asked now.
“I don’t think so. Not initially, at least, although he’s planning on making at least some of the later sessions.” Hamish shrugged. “President Ramirez and he have several things they need to discuss, and he was already scheduled to visit San Martin before the conference was scheduled.” He shrugged again. “To be honest, a lot of this will be assembling information and building models—trying to come up with a range of possible options. So it actually makes sense, in a way, to keep the people who’ll have to choose between those options out of the scrum while they’re hammered out.”
“Keep any of them from getting personally invested in the hammering process so they’re genuinely neutral when it comes time to pick. Smart,” Emily said approvingly.
“That was Elizabeth’s thought.” Hamish nodded. “And it looks like Tom Theisman won’t be there, either.”
“He won’t?” Honor cocked her head. “I thought all the Joint Chiefs were attending?”
“All of them except Theisman.” Hamish grimaced. “He’s decided to ride along personally for Charnay.”
“Nobody mentioned that to me.”
“Nobody’s officially mentioned it to L’anglais, either,” Hamish told her, and she frowned.
Operation Charnay was an extended exercise scheduled for Task Force Two, the Havenite component of Grand Fleet. Pascaline L’anglais had found several spots of rust she’d decided needed sandblasting, and TF 2 was about to spend two or three arduous weeks in Trevor’s Star removing them. For her own part, Honor thought the rust spots were rust specks. She was completely satisfied with TF 2’s performance, but she wasn’t TF 2’s CO, either. And the truth was that anyone’s performance could always be improved. Since the time of Edward Saganami and Ellen D’Orville, the RMN’s position had always been that there was no such thing as too much training.