Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (4 page)

“Don’t underestimate yourself,” Rex said. “The traits are hereditary.”

“That’s the strange part.” Tiller spread his hands. “My
parents are just average types. They’re as surprised as everyone else by their
children.”

“The genes are recessive,” I said. “Maybe they carry them unpaired,
like a blue-eyed person with brown-eyed parents. With psions, we know now that
hundreds of genes determine the traits.”

“If you know which do the trick,” Tiller said, “why not just
engineer a race of super-telepaths?”

“It’s been tried.” My grandmother had been “born” that way. “But
the genes are linked to lethal recessives. Even if the fetus survives, its
brain is often abnormal. The Skolian Convention was written to discourage
governments from engineering psions.”

Tiller tilted his head. “I thought it was written as a
protest against the formation of the Trader’s Aristo government.”

A bead of sweat rolled down my neck. “It was.”

“The Aristos were created in the Rhon project,” Rex said. “Rhon
was trying to engineer humans with a high resistance to pain. The Project’s
other purpose was to select for empathy.”

“Rhon?” Tiller sat up straighter. “You mean like the
Skolian
government?”

“No,” Rex said.

“Your government isn’t called the Rhon?”

Soz? Rex thought. Do you want me to stop?

I tried to relax. No.
Go ahead.

“Our government is called the Assembly,” Rex said. “It’s a
council of the heads of state from the leading Skolian worlds.”

“Then what’s Rhon?”

“He was a geneticist,” Rex said. “The word is also used now
for the few remaining descendents of a human dynasty that ruled on the planet
Raylicon five thousand years ago.”

“And that dynasty predates your modern government?” Tiller
said.

“That’s right,” I said. “Six thousand years ago an unknown
race took humans from Mesoamerica on Earth, seeded the planet Raylicon with
them, and then disappeared.”

“Why?” Tiller asked.

I shrugged. “We haven’t figured it out yet.” I didn’t think
the Allieds had yet recovered from that shock. In Earth’s twenty-first century,
when she finally sent her emissaries to the stars, they got one hell of a jolt.
We were already here. We and the Allieds had rapidly absorbed each other’s
cultures and DNA, until now, less than two centuries later, it was hard to
believe we had been separated for millennia. But the differences were still
there, running deep under the surface. It would be a long time before we
stopped being wary of each other.

Rex leaned forward. “The humans stranded on Raylicon developed
space flight and went looking for Earth. But they never found it. Their fragile
civilization rose—and fell—during your Stone Age.” He paused. “It wasn’t until
four centuries ago that we finally moved out to the stars again. Rhon began his
studies then. He worked with the descendents of the Raylican dynasty trying to
bring back the empathic traits that had made them legendary. That’s why people
call the few of them living now ‘the Rhon.’ It refers to their psi rating. When
Rhon finished with them, their ratings were too high to quantify.”

“I had always assumed Rhon was their name,” Tiller said.

Rex shook his head. “Their family name is Skolia. That’s why
the Imperialate is the Skolian Imperialate.” He glanced at me. “Though not all
of the Skolias use their name in everyday life.”

Tiller considered us. “So Rhon selected for empathy and got
Skolians, and he selected for pain resistance and got Aristos? I still don’t
get it. What do Aristos want with empaths?”

“Aristos have a KAB, but no KEB or paras,” I said. “And
their KAB is abnormal. It detects only emotions caused by pain. But they can’t
interpret that input. Their thalamus tries to decrease their sensitivity to it
by relaying the data to the pleasure centers of their brain. It triggers an
orgasm.” I gritted my teeth. “They’re a bunch of sadists. They get off on
torturing people.”

“But why empaths?” Tiller persisted.

A fan in the wall whirred erratically, with a hiccup that
grated on my nerves. I was having trouble breathing. “We send stronger signals.”
I couldn’t keep my voice steady any longer. “We—provide for them. The stronger
the empath—the stronger the link—and the more the Aristo—enjoys ...” My fists
clenched and my words balled up into knots.

Tiller waited. But neither Rex nor I continued. Tiller
shifted in his seat. Finally he peered at his screen and traced his finger
through a winged icon on it. “I’ve sent a copy of your report to the chief.” He
regarded me uneasily. “But unless this Aristo breaks a law, we can’t do much.”

I nodded. It was up to them what they did with the warning.
But we had given it.

We headed to the lobby after we left Tiller’s office, but I
stopped before we had walked even a few meters. “Rex, I’ll meet you at the inn.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just forgot to tell Tiller something.”

He touched my cheek. “Soz ...”

“I’m all right. Really.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. I’m fine.”

He brushed a curl of hair out of my eyes. Then he spoke
gently. “I’ll see you later, yes?”

Why was he looking at me with that strange, tender look? “Of
course.” It wasn’t like I was going anywhere.

I found Tiller’s door still open. He was sitting on the edge
of his desk reading a book.

“Tiller?” I said.

He looked up, his pleased surprise lightening my mood like a
gust of cool air on a sweltering day. “Did you forget something?”

“No.” I came over to him. “I thought you wanted me to come
back.”

He winced. “Am I that easy to read?”

I smiled. “Only to another empath.”

“I was just thinking—” His voice gentled. “It took a lot for
you to do what you did, coming here like this.”

“All we did was talk.”

He spoke softly. “Something hurt you somehow, and our talk
stirred it up.”

I stiffened. “I’m fine.”

“I wanted to say thanks, that’s all.” Tiller pointed to the
notebook on his armchair. “And for that too. With a record of two high-ranking
Imperial military officers saying I’m an empath, I may be able to convince a
grant committee at the university to take me seriously, maybe even sponsor me
to
get
testing.”

“Well. Good.” I didn’t know what else to say. I was used to
people going in the other direction when I came around.
Thanks
wasn’t a
word I’d had much experience dealing with.

“Here.” Tiller handed me his book.

I held it awkwardly, wondering what he wanted me to do with
it. The book was old style, bound in soft cloth the color of ivory, with
parchment pages inside instead of a holocomp screen. My translator gave the
title as
Verses on a Windowpane,
written in English.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

He smiled. “Keep it. As a thank-you gift.”

A gift? This Allied citizen who didn’t know me was giving me
a gift simply for talking to him. For some reason my eyes felt wet.
Block,
I
thought. But the psicon didn’t flash.

Night was folding its cooling darkness around the city when
I headed back to the hotel. I took the speedwalks that bordered the streets,
avoiding the nervoplex. I didn’t want to feel what it would tell me about
myself. I already knew. I had lied to Rex and Tiller. I wasn’t fine. My mind
had started to reply that scene again, the one I so wanted to forget, the one
that had lived on in my nightmares for so many years.

I had been walking along a dirt path that day on Tams ten
years ago, for all appearances a normal citizen going about my business. The
flycar hummed by me, then stopped and backed up. In slow motion, I saw it
happen again and again; Kryx Tarque, the Aristo governor of Tams, leaning out
to look at me, lifting his long finger while his lips formed words:
That
one. I want that one.

That one. Me. Sauscony Valdoria. He wanted that one.

I ran. But there was no way even a Jagernaut could escape
six soldiers plus an armed Aristo in a flycar. When they caught me, I faced a
decision that still haunted my memories:
Should I fight?
I wanted to
hurt them the way I knew Tarque planned to hurt me. But it would give away my
military training. They would know they had someone far more interesting than a
simple Tams citizen. They would investigate until they discovered my identity,
not only my military rank but also the civilian title I carried. Unless I
waited until the odds were better, I would have no chance of escaping.

So I fought like a frightened civilian instead of a
Jagernaut. Tarque found it amusing. He took me to his estate in the hills above
the city, holding me prisoner for three weeks. It was late into a long Tams
night, midway between sunset and dawn, when I finally worked free of the
restraints he had used to bind my wrists to the bed.

Then I strangled him.

Rex was the one who found me that night, after I fled the
house. He had been searching for me, desperately trying to infiltrate the
estate. He caught me when I was running blindly across a field, my mind still
screaming from the aftershocks of the pain. He held me tight, so tight, as if
he feared I would vanish if his grip loosened even the slightest bit. His voice
shook as he told me, over and over
again,
I would be all right, I would
be all right, I would be all right.

But I wasn’t all right. Tarque had been the antithesis of an
empath, a human being with a mental cavity where his capacity for compassion
should have been. Sadist and empath, parasite and host: his mind was the
negative of mine. When he concentrated on me, I fell into his emptiness,
filling it for him, connecting us in a bond he craved even more than orgasm. He
spoke in soft, loving murmurs while I screamed and screamed and screamed ...

We left Tams that night. I spent only a few days in the
hospital; Tarnth hadn’t wanted his provider scarred, so my physical wounds were
minor. But the doctors told me to see a heartbender. When I didn’t go, my CO
ordered it. So I went and told the heartbender what she wanted to hear; I am,
after all, an empath. In her report she said I would be all right, that all I
needed was time to heal.

As for my true feelings about what happened—those were my
business. Not my CO’s, not the heartbender’s, not anyone’s.

_T
he hallway outside Rex’s room was carpeted with
a rug so thick that it muffled my footfalls like a wine-red cloud. The lustrous
red paneling on the walls was real wood. Next to Rex’s door, a pager showed a
palm-sized relief of a man with the tail of a fish. He was rising up in a spume
of water, huge glistening drops of water spraying about his head and a trident
held high in his hand. When I touched the pager, the door chimed softly, like
bells heard through the whisper of sea waves lapping on a shore.

Rex’s voice came over a hidden speaker. “Come.”

I laid my palm against the door and it swung open, revealing
a room paneled in the same sinfully luxuriant wood as the hallway. A carpet
covered the floor like burgundy velvet. The only light came from a lamp with a
rose-hued glass shade. Rex sat in the middle of the bed, cross-legged on its
wine-red cover, his head bent over his work. He was cleaning his Jumbler.
Sections of the gun lay all around him on the bed, the black metal gleaming in
the dusky light.

“Planning to shoot someone?” I asked.

He glanced up as I closed the door. “You’re the one who
insists we clean the pugging things so often.”

I sat on the bed next to him. “I set up a guest account on
the Inn’s system. We can upload our data on the Traders as soon as Taas and
Helda get back from dinner.”

Rex nodded, still bent over his weapon. He was polishing the
ejector that fit into the accelerator dees inside the main body of the Jumbler.

“I expected you to be out with that girl from the bar,” I
said.

He finished the ejector and went to work on the hand grip. “She’s
young.”

“I thought you liked your women that way.”

He kept polishing. “I guess I’m just tired tonight.”

I wondered at his mood. He seemed so subdued. Could it have
been what happened in the bar? But that made no sense; knowing Rex, seeing an
Aristo would have wound him up. Something else was bothering him. I nudged his
mind but he blocked me out, keeping his mental doors closed.

“Rex.” I laid my hand on the grip, stopping his movements. “What’s
wrong?”

He looked up at me. For a moment he just watched my face.
Then he said, “I’m going to retire.”

“What?”

He exhaled. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I’ll
be forty-seven soon. All of the other officers who were cadets in
my
class
at DMA have retired by now.” Neither of us said what he left out:
or else
died.

“You can’t retire.” I tried not to remember he had been a
year behind me at the Dieshan Military Academy. “I need you.”

He pushed his hand through his graying hair. “I’m not like
you, Soz. I can’t put off getting old.” He exhaled. “I’ve had enough. I want to
go home, have a family, dig in the garden.”

“You can have a family now.” I was talking too fast. “You don’t
have to retire to do that. And you can dig holes in the ground wherever you
want. I’ll get you a special hole-digging commission.” He wasn’t
old.
He
wasn’t any older than me. All right, yes, my genetics gave me a potential
lifespan twice the human average. But nowadays most humans lived well into
their second century. Rex had plenty of time.

Rex smiled, but it was like this strange mood he had
tonight, gentle instead of wild. Then he really went over the cliff. He slid
his hand around my neck, drew my head closer to his—and kissed me.

“Hey.” My protest came out muffled around his lips. “What
are you doing?”

He pulled back and smiled. “Kissing you.”

“What for?”

“Well, let me see. Maybe it’s a new way of checking the
weather.”

“Very funny. Why are you acting so strange?”

He spoke quietly. “Soz, I want you to marry me.”

Flaming rockets. “You drank too much at the bar.”

“I didn’t drink anything. We never got our ale.”

He had gone crazy. I didn’t know how to respond. “I can’t
marry you. It’s against regulations.” Good reasons existed for the ban on
fraternization. It compromised the ability of the people involved to carry out
their duties. It happened anyway, despite regulations, but it often ended in
disaster. If I married Rex, there was no way I could send him into battle. I
would spend the whole time obsessing on the fact that he might get hurt. Or
worse.

Except he wanted to retire.

“I don’t want to retire,” I said. I wasn’t actually sure if
that were true, but for the moment it would do.

“I’m not asking you to,” Rex said.

So. He wasn’t giving me an out. Did I want an out? I tried
to untangle my thoughts. Could I see Rex as a husband? He had been my closest
friend for fifteen years, my confidant, someone I could always rely on. He was
like a brother. In fact, I was closer to him than to most of my many brothers.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What happened to all these women
you have pining for you all over the galaxy?”

“You’re evading my question.”

“What do you want to marry me for?”

He made an exasperated noise. “Because I have a fetish for
women with the romantic instincts of a cork.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Then I guess we’re compatible.”

“Sauscony, I’m serious about this.”

If he was calling me Sauscony, he had to be serious. No one
called me Sauscony but my parents. “I would hate it if you left me.”

“Why would I do that?”

Could I say it? Sixteen years had passed, time enough to
dull the pain. “My first husband did.”

His voice quieted. “I didn’t know you had been married more
than once.”

“Twice.” My second husband had died a few years ago, not
long after we had married. But I couldn’t think about that now. Maybe not ever.

“Why did he leave?” Rex asked.

“It’s a boring story. You don’t want to hear it.”

Rex stroked a curl away from my face. “Tell me.”

It was a moment before I spoke. “He hated what I did for a
living. He was afraid I would die. He asked me to quit.”

“I thought you couldn’t quit.”

I stiffened. “I’m not indentured. I can retire if I want.”

“But if you do, don’t you lose your position in the Imperator’s
line of succession?”

I wanted to say
so what?
I had never asked to be born
into the remnant of a dynasty that was three thousand years dead. Right now the
title of Imperator belonged to my half brother Kurj. “Technically Kurj has no
heirs in his line of succession. He’s my mother’s only child by her first
husband and he has no children of his own.” No legitimate children, anyway.

“I thought he chose you to follow him.”

I shrugged. “I have seven full brothers and two full
sisters. He could have chosen any of us. Hell, he could make my mother his heir
if he wanted.”

Rex gave me his wicked grin. “No one would fight. They’d all
be in love, too busy trying to look at her to think about going to war.”

I scowled at him. “Only a man would say that.”

He laughed. “I don’t know about that. Helda might.”

I had to smile. In truth, I couldn’t imagine my mother as a
war leader either. She was a superb diplomat and a lovely ballet dancer, but
the military was a foreign language to her.

Before I married anyone, though, I had to sort out how I
felt about my heritage. I brought up my thoughts on it like a game player
setting up a board. There were three main pieces: the Imperator, the Assembly
Key, and the Web Key. Or, more popularly, the Fist, the Mind, and the Heart of
Skolia. The Triad. As Imperator, my half brother Kurj commanded the Skolian
military. My aunt presided over the Assembly. For her heir, she had chosen my
mother. My father was the third side of the Triad, Key to the Web, a title that
for him was primarily ceremonial.

I knew my mother had married my father because he was a Rhon
psion, which meant he could provide Rhon heirs. Kurj hated him, this man who
had become his stepfather when he was half Kurj’s age. If I married Rex, what
would it be like for him? The fact that he wasn’t Rhon could make his position
among
my
family even less comfortable than my father’s.

But was that a fair comparison? When my parents met, my father
had been living on a primitive world. His people were the remains of a colony
established by the ancient Raylican starfarers and then isolated for thousands
of years after the decline of that fragile civilization. Over the millennia,
his people had backslid so far that they no longer had electricity, steam
power, or even a written language. Marriage to my mother had yanked him from
that simple culture into the Byzantine morass of Rhon politics.

Rex was far more experienced in Imperial intrigues, perhaps
more so even than myself. My parents raised us on my father’s world, hoping to
spare us the fierce machinations of Skolian politics. They hadn’t foreseen the
consequences. Only I and a few of my brothers had managed to adapt to life away
from the simplicity of our home, and it hadn’t been easy for any of us.

In Kurj’s unforgiving view of the universe, any children produced
by my father were flawed. But we were still his best candidates for an heir.

“Kurj needs a military heir,” I finally said. “Someone who understands
Space Command.”

“You.”

“No.”

“But I thought—”

“He chose three heirs. Me, and the two of my brothers who became
Jagernauts.”

“Why three? Only one of you can be Imperator.”

I gritted my teeth. “That’s right.”

Rex stared at me. After a moment he spoke in a quiet voice. “The
one who survives.”

“Yes. Only two of us are left now.” The muscles in my shoulders
bunched up under my jacket. “Kurj knows I can’t stay on active duty forever.
And I’ve proven myself for over a quarter of a century. But sixteen years ago
it was different.”

“That was when your husband wanted you to quit?”

I nodded. “If I had quit when Jato asked me to, then yes,
you’re right, it would have meant abdicating any claim I had to become
Imperator.”

Rex made an incredulous noise. “What did this Jato expect
when he married an Imperial heir?”

I looked down at my hands. “I got pregnant. I didn’t know. I
was injured in battle and lost the child.” I made myself look at Rex. “It was
just too much. Jato stayed with me until I recovered. Then he left.”

“Soz,” Rex murmured. He tried to put his arms around me, but
I held back. I’d always wondered if my brother knew how much Jato and I had
wanted a child. But that was another item hidden in my mental file of things
not to think about.

“You ought to know I wouldn’t leave you,” Rex said. “I don’t
expect you to retire.”

I turned the idea over in my mind like a child with a newlyminted
coin. Kurj couldn’t keep me in combat forever. With my rank and experience it
made more sense to have me behind a desk now, planning strategy. If he killed
off all of his heirs, he wasn’t likely to get more any time soon, at least not
as adults. None of my other siblings were remotely qualified.

Rex was a good man, I’d known that since I first met him. He
was also a potent telepath, probably the strongest I would ever find. He wasn’t
Rhon, but I couldn’t spend the rest of my life looking for that
one-in-a-trillion person whose mind matched my own.

The only time I had ever shared my mind with another Rhon
psion had been an accident; usually only lovers had close enough ties to make
that bond. But once, when my younger brother Kelric was seven and I sixteen, we
went hiking. A storm caught us, pale blue sleet raging down from the sky. We
took shelter in a spine-cave hidden among the cliffs of the Backbone Mountains.
As Kelric and I huddled in the cave, clinging together for warmth, our minds
merged.

It lasted only a few hours, the most fulfilling link I had
ever made with another human being. And it never happened again; the bond was
too intimate to share with a brother. But neither of us forgot. After that day,
I knew I would search everywhere to find a Rhon mate.

Except there weren’t any. In all the studies trying to
engineer a healthy Rhon psion, my grandmother had been the only real success.
In the generations since her birth, on a thousand plus worlds and a billion different
peoples, we knew of only two people who had been born naturally—and
survived—with the full complement of Rhon genes: my father and my grandfather.
The rest of us, fourteen in all, were their descendents.

“Soz?” Rex touched
my
cheek. “Where are you?”

I looked at him, really
looked
at him in a way I had
never done before. This was the man who had been at my side for fifteen years,
gone into combat with me, laughed with me, mourned with me. We had traveled
together across Skolia, both on duty and off, learning to know each other with
an intimacy that had nothing to do with sex. Could I lie with him as wife? The
answer was easy, now that I considered it. The only surprise was that it had
taken me so long to realize it.

I smiled. “Who else would want me inflicted on him for the
rest of his life?”

“What were you planning on inflicting?”

“My sense of humor.”

Rex grimaced. “I’ll try to endure it.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?” He tilted his head. “Yes, what?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Do what?”

“You know. The thing.”

“What thing?”

“You know.”

He put his hands on either side of my head and mussed up my
hair. “Say it.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Go on.” He was laughing now.

I scowled at him. “Keep this up and I’ll change my mind.”

“I don’t know, Soz. If you can’t say it, how can I believe
you’ll do it?”

“All
right.
I’ll marry you. Satisfied?”

He stopped grinning and spoke in that strange gentle voice
he had been using tonight. “Yes.”

So. It didn’t feel so strange after all, now that it was
said. I touched his chest, sliding my hand across the black sweater he wore
under his jacket. He pulled me down with him on the bed, lying on his back as
he wrapped his arms around me.