Shadow of the Swan (Book Two of the Phoenix Legacy) (20 page)

“I guess that means your bargain is still in force.” He paused, knowing there was nothing more to be said, but reluctant to give up even this tenuous contact. “Tell Ben everything’s under control here, and I’ll report tomorrow at about the same time.”

“I’ll tell him. Alex, be careful, please. Ben hasn’t a franchise on worrying, you know.”

“There’s enough to go around. Erica, I’m . . . glad we had a chance to talk.”

“So am I. Now, get some rest.”

“All right,
Doctor
Radek. Good night.”

Her voice seemed to fade away. “Good night. Alex.”

Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness, and the milky blue light of Pollux seemed bright. Her bare feet sank into the warm, silencing carpet, and the fabric of her robe was too gossamer to make a sound even as her movement set it fluttering against her body.

And yet he was awake. Perhaps he hadn’t slept at all. Adrien hadn’t even attempted sleep; she’d been waiting in the private darkness of her room counting minutes. And calculating days.

It would be close; tomorrow or the next day would be better, but he’d be gone.

Her shadow fell across his face. She knew he was awake, but he hadn’t moved, nor had the slow rhythm of his breathing changed. She realized she should speak, should identify this intruder in the room, but no words came.

He lay with his head turned away from her, the covers thrown back, cleanly naked and outwardly relaxed, and she smiled to herself.

A beautiful creature this was, long-boned, tawny-skinned. Lithe as a cat; a leopard; radiating that same contained animal energy, a hoarded power to be expended with effortless efficiency and unaware grace. The weeks at the Cliff had left their mark in a stringent leanness, but that only seemed to refine the grace.

And what would the Lady Galia say to such thoughts?

Adrien felt the tears burning in her eyes. The Lady Galia would be shocked. To regard a young man as an object of beauty and grace? It bordered on sensuality, and in her mind that translated immorality. Only
second
-class Elite thought in sensual terms, and they, like Lady Galia, would reduce the essence of this vital creature to what they found between his thighs.

But the true measures of grace lay in the rigors of years, the terrible strictures of discipline and experience, that formed those subtle contours of flesh and muscle and bone. And the true meaning of sensuality was
of
the senses, and the senses were rooted in the mind.

The medallion gleamed with every breath. The wolf was uppermost, the lamb toward his heart.

A male child it must be; his name would be Richard.

She watched the glint of the medallion, feeling paradoxically alone, even knowing he was awake and wondering whose shadow was cast across his face.

Alexand, how far does your courage and faith go
?

She wouldn’t test it by telling him the full scope of her intentions, the sum of her calculation of days, the sum of her hope. Even then, she wondered if he might not turn her away out of fear for her.

He moved, only the turning of his head toward her, yet she was startled.

“Adrien?”

“Yes, Alexand.”

He sat up, his eyes fixed anxiously on her face.

“Adrien, what’s wrong?”

I’m afraid, she thought; afraid to find out you love me too much or too little, afraid you won’t give me what I must have to deny anyone else a claim on me.

“Nothing’s wrong, love. Nothing.”

She sat down beside him, watching him relax against the headboard, his eyes still fixed on her face. She could read the quickening pulse beat in his throat, and wondered if she would have to put it into words, or if she could. The silence stretched on, and finally he looked down at her hand.

The ring was on her left hand.

His eyes flashed up to hers, the question waiting there, but he didn’t speak or even move; nothing but the faint cadences of breath through his parted lips.

“Alexand, don’t you understand?”

Still a hesitation, then he reached out and pushed her hair back over her shoulder, but he didn’t touch her skin.

“Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, I understand.”

But he was still afraid.

She waited as the silence expanded, reading the thoughts behind his eyes, hooded, strangely dark. He’d made a pledge that he wouldn’t try to confine her to the safe tower of passivity, and he meant to keep it, but it wasn’t so easy to put aside his fear.

He would understand that it wasn’t impulse or simple need that brought her here tonight. She was here because she’d promised him she’d never be a bride to Karlis Selasis, and this was part of the means to that end.

But he would also understand the potential repercussions if the Selasid marriage couldn’t be stopped, if Karlis found his bride had lost her treasured virginity somewhere between Leda and the wedding. It was this danger that constrained him; he wouldn’t believe she’d take the risks inherent in the sum of her purpose. This danger was enough in itself, and in asking him to be a party to something that would make her so vulnerable, she asked much of his courage.

But he’d made a pledge.

The smile that shadowed his lips was poignantly sad.

“The Rule of Priority. Calculations. Even in this, little one?”

“Yes. Even in this.”

Still he didn’t move for some time. Then a hint of irony came into his smile. He leaned toward her until his mouth was nearly touching hers, her face cupped in his hands.

“I could almost muster a little pity,” he said, laughter hidden in every word. “Pity poor Karlis, losing his bride to Lord Alexand, nearly five years dead.”

Bravado, those words and that laughter. She went into his arms, laughing because she was so close to tears. An act of faith; a gift of love.

“Devious Selaneen.” Still the undercurrent of laughter in his voice. “Where’s the steel in you? Where do you hide it?”

There was no steel in her now. She pressed her cheek into the comfortable curved juncture of his neck and shoulder and silently asked to be something less than steel for once in her life, and for a time he only held her, recognizing her need for simple comfort.

But gradually, by the nuances of his voice, the gentle, evocative pressures of his hands and lips, he shifted the focus of her need. She acquiesced to that subtle manipulation, savoring and sifting sensations, recognizing and welcoming it. Her eyes were closed, shutting out everything but Alexand. Her flesh recorded his every movement, every breath and heartbeat; recorded the pause as he unfastened her robe and pushed it back over her shoulders, making that small act gently ceremonious.

She let the robe slip from her arms to the floor, watching him now, again aware of that unconscious, contained grace, studying the contours of muscle and bone under her fingers as her hands moved up his arms and across his shoulders. She knew he found grace in her, too; she was intensely cognizant of her own body as he apprehended it; she wanted to stretch herself, pulling every muscle tight, making long, taut curves.

But now his mouth pressed to hers, his arms closed around her, and her breath caught, then came in short, shallow respirations, echoed in the sound of his ragged breath.

It asked strength, a kiss so unequivocal; one that made a beginning, that wasn’t subject to the restraints that had always bound them. Her mouth was open to his, a vertiginous, suffocating darkness closing in on her. She thought she was falling, but he was only pulling her down into the bed with him, an unexpected shock in the feel of his body against the length of hers. And he was laughing, a soft, warm sound, a sound she would remember, she knew that even now, and part of the laughter was her own.

Take joy in me, love, and in my body, the vessel for all I am, for all I feel and think, for all my love and hope.

For a time she could still laugh, giving herself up to learning mental and physical states for which she had no verbal vocabulary, and Alexand yielded himself to a similar revelation in the sensations she elicited in him. An energy exchange that fed on itself.

Too fast, she thought numbly, it was happening too fast, and she wondered if that would make any difference. Naive and ignorant as a child in some ways. But they still had hours before them; half the night.

A shivering tension radiated along her legs and within her upward as if it were transmitted through her bones along the double curve of her spine. Her perception was blurring. No—focusing. A warmth like fever on her skin, her body racked with random tensions that she knew weren’t born solely within her body. She was presciently aware of everything happening within his body, and conscious of her movements as if they were his, her breath coming faster with his, his heart pounding with hers, and finally welcoming the invasion of cogent, rigid flesh that would be, must be, a part of her, as the child she would carry would be a part of him.

Alexand, it must be
.

All constraint dissolved in an exalting satisfaction rooted in nerves and muscles, barely reaching the level of consciousness. Something alien within her body, yet she surrendered herself to it, to an insentient, impelling will, testing second by second the limits of physical capacity, and second by second exceeding them. And yet, in the end, there was a sense of triumph rather than surrender, possession rather than submission.

It must be
.

Half the night, she thought in the languid aftermath, a sweet, nerveless exhaustion loosening every muscle. He kissed her gently, but she didn’t open her eyes, only holding his mouth against hers for a long time.

“Adrien, never doubt I love you.”

His voice was a murmuring whisper. She looked up at his face so close to hers, the milky light and shadows soft upon it.

“Alexand, I never have. I never will.”

PHOENIX MEMFILES: DEPT HUMAN SCIENCES: BASIC SCHOOL
(HS/BS
)

SUBFILE: LECTURE. BASIC SCHOOL 22 FEBUAR 3252
GUEST LECTURER: RICHARD LAMB
SUBJECT: POST-DISASTERS HISTORY
:
PANTERRAN CONFEDERATION (2903–3104
)

DOC LOC
#
819/219–1253/1812–1648–2223252

In speaking of the Golden Age of the PanTerran Confederation. I’ve emphasized the lack of change in governmental and social structures during and since that period, but I don’t want to give the impression that they’ve been frozen in place all this time. There were certain practices and customs pertaining in the Golden Age that are very different from those pertaining today. Some of the most telling are associated with the scientific and technological explosion that occurred during the period.

For instance, consider the first Lunar expedition. Unlike the post-Mankeen extrasolar explorations, which were sponsored by the Concord, the Lunar expedition was organized and financed by the House of Selasis in a coalition with Ivanoi, Galinin, and Daro. (The latter two merged a few years later when the first beamed-power satellites were put into orbit.) Selasis at that time was a new House founded on franchises for rocket-propulsion systems, and its alliance with Galinin and Daro, who both held power franchises, is understandable in light of the potential of beamed solar power. Ivanoi, with its rare metals franchises, was one of the wealthiest Houses in the Confederation and had a strong interest in reaching the potential treasures of ore on Luna.

So, here we have two fundamental premises in Confederation technological development. It was funded and organized by Houses, not by the Confederation, and often entailed joint efforts between several Houses. Those sometimes resulted in House mergers, which tended to balance numerically the new Houses emerging, usually as offshoots (Cognate Houses) of established Houses, based on newly developed devices, processes, or services. Another premise hinted at here is that of speculation.

A spirit of speculation was necessary to fund and encourage technological and scientific development, and during this period House interactions and attitudes toward franchises tended to promote speculation. It took various forms, and sometimes its motivation wasn’t entirely profit oriented. As a case in point, there’s the laser, which was reinvented (it was, of course, one of the many inventions we owe to the twentieth century) in 3047 in the House of Cobar Wale, which was the franchised weaponer of the Confederation, and therefore one of its most powerful Houses. Lord Vincent Wale financed the development of the laser as a weapon with the intention of setting up his second born, Willem, with his own House based on laser franchises. I wonder if in later years Vincent didn’t regret his benevolence. Apparently he regarded the laser as a rather limited device of war and no more, but he lived to see his own House collapse into bankruptcy while Willem, as First Lord of the new House of Corelis, grew rich and increasingly powerful, constantly discovering new uses and markets for that “limited” device.

Occasionally a Fesh benefited from this budding process, and Fredric Cadmon is an example. He developed the MAM-An generator for the House of Badir, working from the principles delineated by Ela Tolstyne in her
Treatise on Matter/Anti-Matter Interactions
—and I’ll get back to her later. At any rate, Cadmon, a Fesh scientist, with the backing of Tristan Badir, was awarded a Lordship and the franchises for electrical field screens, another project he was instrumental in developing.

Generally, however, Houses speculated on an idea with nothing more in mind than its potential profits. All the industrial Houses had extensive research facilities and eagerly sought gifted people for them. The competition for the gifted was fierce, and the Fesh benefited immeasurably from it. The Guild system, whose origins predate Pilgram, came into its own, as did the University system established by Paul Adalay; its science departments became a prime source of techs. (That term first came into common use during this period, along with University Board of Standards tech grade ratings.) Allegiance shifts of promising scientists and techs could always be arranged. There were also frequent allegiance shifts from one House to another, and in many cases these shifts were literally bought. In the same way franchises were also bought and sold between Houses, which is indicative of the flexibility in the franchise system. The Lords of the Franchise Board inevitably became extremely powerful, and their practices increasingly underhanded until the Board Reform Resolution formulated by Benedic Daro Galinin, the first Galinin Lord elected to the Chairmanship. (Benedic also established the Civil Standards Code of 3065 and the famous Galinin Rule protecting Bond religious practices.) The Reform Resolution established the revolving membership we have now on boards manned by Elite, and guaranteed that no Lord would remain on any board more than five years.

Speculation was generally the prerogative of the Elite; they had the resources and the power for it and stood to benefit from it. There was one Fesh, however, who profited rather spectacularly on a speculative gambit, and not only made himself wealthy, but a First Lord—the last transmutation of the kind, in fact. That was Orabu Drakon, regarded by historians and even many scientists as the greatest physicist of all time. He was also a very pragmatic man, unlike most of his academic peers. In that regard it’s tempting to draw a comparison between Drakon and Ela Tolstyne, and I won’t resist the temptation.

Tolstyne was that rarity in Post-Disasters history, a woman of notable accomplishment in her own right. Patriarchy is another part of our feudal heritage we haven’t yet escaped. She was born into the Confederation and her interests and talents inevitably led to her assignment to the University, and she was too brilliant to be relegated to the lower echelons where most women are confined in both bureaucratic and guild hierarchies. She also found a mentor and patron in Orabu Drakon, who served as lector in the University in Victoria for ten years.

Tolstyne was, incidentally, a very handsome woman, and apparently her male peers found that dismaying, as if a woman of intellectual brilliance had no right to be beautiful. There is a story—or perhaps it’s only a legend—that Lord Tristan Badir’s second born, Stevan, was deeply in love with her and wanted to marry her, but Tristan, who made Frederic Cadmon a Lord, wasn’t generous enough to make Ela Tolstyne a Lady if it meant letting his son marry a Fesh. Obviously, the fact that Cadmon developed the MAM-An generator from her theories didn’t sway him. But Tristan Badir didn’t long enjoy the profits of Tolstyne’s genius. His House was forced into a merger with Selasis in 3093 that was achieved by nefarious, even brutal, means. Lord Gidion Selasis wanted full control of the MAM-An generators that powered his ships, and like later Selasid Lords, he wasn’t a man to let anything stand in his way.

At any rate, Tolstyne’s
Treatise on Matter/Anti-Matter Interactions
made possible the MAM-An generator and drive, and that in turn made possible the near-light speeds necessary to SynchShift. Her work also made nulgrav possible, and it was a one-time student of hers, Domic Peresky, who seized upon one interaction of matter and anti-matter, repulsion, to design the first nulgrav mechanisms, much to the delight—and profit—of his Lord, Robert Hild Robek.

Orabu Drakon, like Peresky, was in Tolstyne’s debt, and to his credit, he always recognized that debt publicly. Synchronal metathesis was only a mathematical abstraction without MAM-An. She undoubtedly appreciated this recognition, but it had little real effect on her life. She continued in a research professorship for thirty years at the University in Victoria after the publication of her
Treatise
. It was then, at the age of fifty-eight, that she entered a Sisters of Faith convent—
not
immediately after her frustrated, and perhaps apocryphal, love affair with Stevan Badir, as some vididramatists would have it. She died eleven years later, her passing unheralded, the only ceremony marking the interment of her ashes a funeral canta in the convent chapel.

Drakon’s career and life ended five years later with an Estate funeral attended by all the Directors as well as most of the Court of Lords, and the eulogy was given by the Chairman, Benedic Galinin.

But Orabu Drakon was a pragmatic—and audacious—man.

He looked the part of the scicntist-genius—at least, the general preconception of it. He was lean, as if physically consumed by his genius, with aristocratic features and a lofty forehead. The extant imagraphs of him remind me of Andreas Riis, although their racial heritage is quite different. Drakon was born in Victoria, allieged Confederation—like Tolstyne—but he was of Sudafrikan, and thus negroid, stock, but fortunately for him in that period, it was more obvious in his forename than in his appearance. He was also, from all reports, a man of great wit and charm, and early accounts note, presciently, his “gentlemanly” bearing.

This gentlemanly genius was not satisfied, as Tolstyne was, to let his work be his reward. He recognized the practical potential of his Theory from the beginning, and deliberately withheld its publication for several years after it was formulated. No doubt the delay was due in part to his recognition of the importance of Tolstyne’s work in relation to his. In fact, he didn’t publish his Theory until after Cadmon produced the first MAM-An generator in 3057, and even then, before making his Theory available to the public—and Lords—at large, he went first to Lord Benedic Galinin and outlined its potentials. Then, with Galinin backing him and overseeing the negotiations, he approached Gidion Selasis, who had a franchised right to any developments pertaining to extraplanetary transport. Drakon offered Selasis a bargain: SynchShift, the ultimate leap to the stars, in exchange for a Lordship and the energy franchises in the first habitable extrasolar system discovered. That meant a concession on Galinin’s part—those energy franchises would otherwise be his—but he made it graciously, and saw to it that Selasis kept his part of the bargain, which was to petition the Directorate to recognize the new House of Drakonis with Orabu Drakon as First Lord, as well as financing—liberally—the new House for fifty years. The first Drakonis Estate—it was actually only a residence, but a palatial one—was in Victoria until that habitable extrasolar system was discovered and the Home Estate was established in Danae on Perseus.

In 3078 the first SynchShift ship was launched toward our nearest stellar neighbors, and in that same year Drakon married the Lady Rondal, daughter of Simon Ussher Peladeen, who shared Drakon’s high hopes for the colonization of Centauri, and with this marriage made himself a partner in that great venture. Drakon was fifty-three at the time, and I’ve always wondered why he hadn’t married earlier. Was he simply too consumed with his work in his youth, or did he even then recognize the importance of keeping himself free for a House marriage should he achieve his metamorphosis into Lordship?

The marriage was blessed with two sons and two daughters. None of the subsequent Drakonis Lords have shown anything like his genius, but they have all been remarkably astute men, all noted for their wit and charm, and all exceptionally pragmatic.