The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (95 page)

“I was so terrified when I thought I had lost you,” she said finally, “first to death, then to Princess—”

“I hope you think I have better taste than that!” he retorted indignantly, pulling away from her.

“Such as?”

He turned his head away, refusing the bait. The flickering candlelight scored his face in light and shadow, like a painted mask. Not knowing what else to do, she kissed him. He shifted, just a little, against her, allowing himself to be coaxed. But he made her work at it. She kissed him again on the neck and moved up over the curve of his jaw to his cheek and his mouth, running one hand down his back and the other down his leg.

Abruptly, with an impatient curse, he hoisted her up bodily, carried her into the inner chamber, and dumped her on the sleeping furs. She thought, fleetingly, about what words to use when she told him the truth, what evidence to present, how to do what she knew now she would have to do. Then he dropped down beside her, and she thrust all those bothersome thoughts aside. They could wait. This couldn’t.

P
EOPLE TALKED, THEIR CONVERSATION
like a stream flowing around him. Numb, he stared at his hands. He could not concentrate enough to understand the endless river of words.

“M. Sakhalin, are you listening?”

He jerked, startled out of his trance. “I beg your pardon,” he said, not sure who had addressed him. Had the person spoken again, he could not have distinguished that voice from any of the others. He looked around the oval table, marking the people who sat here: Charles Soerensen, Captain Emrys, Soerensen’s assistants Maggie O’Neill and Suzanne Elia Arevalo, a diplomat whose name he had forgotten, another man whose importance he could not recall. Usually his memory was keen. Now all he could think of was Diana’s face, the way it had closed away from him, shutting him out, rejecting him, exiling him.

How could she have done this to him?

Why?

He had been a good husband to her, hadn’t he? He had wanted another child. Maybe that was it. Or she had found out about Ilyana’s flower night and misunderstood it. These khaja misunderstood many things. What had she said?
I’ve fallen in love with another man, Anatoly, a man whose life and interests are more suited to mine.
What did that have to do with anything? Of course he felt a little hurt, but a man expected his wife to take lovers, as long as she was discreet about it. He expected her to respect him. And that was the problem. Diana didn’t respect him. Say what she wanted, she was embarrassed of him, of where he had come from, of what he was.

But how could she be embarrassed now? How could there be any shame in being married to a prince of the Sakhalin who had been confirmed in his rank by the Chapalii emperor himself?

“I beg your pardon, M. Sakhalin. But we have a great deal to discuss.”

Anatoly looked up at Charles Soerensen. Soerensen’s face gave away nothing, but Anatoly had a damned good idea that Soerensen had arranged for Diana to confront him first, to give Soerensen the advantage after. He dug down into his reserves of strength and pushed her image aside. She had already left the planet Odys. A pain stabbed through him, thinking that he might never see her again. How could it happen? How could this be? Then he reined himself in again. He had responsibilities now. Portia was still here, left with him until the hearings that would settle the schedule of parental care. She was asleep on a blanket in the corner made by the stairwell wall, her little mouth partly open, snoring softly because she had a cold. He had to concentrate. But, gods, it was hard.

“You understand,” said Soerensen, “that this changes everything.”

“You are no longer the most powerful human in daiga space,” snapped Anatoly, and was at once sorry he had said it. It was Diana he was angry at, not Charles Soerensen.

“That is true. But I have been associated with Earth and League space for my whole life. I have risked much for them, and so they trust me, despite my position within the Empire. You’re a wild card. They don’t know you, and therefore have no reason to trust you. You have nothing invested in League space.”

“Except my home.”

“Rhui does not properly lie within League space. In fact, it isn’t even in the same prefecture, since Duke Naroshi controls Earth and the other systems that make up—”

Soerensen broke off. It was the first time that Anatoly had seen him make a misstep.

“No,” agreed Anatoly. “You are right. They are all under my control now.”

“How do you intend to assert that control?” asked the other man. Anatoly dredged up his name and title, forcing it past the morass where all his thoughts got stuck: Diana. Diana at their wedding, so beautiful that she had taken his breath away. Diana on stage, a Singer who seemed at those times to be in direct communication with the gods.

Tobias Black. Barrister. There, he had it.

“Please, M. Black, go on,” he said politely, pleased at his little victory over his wife. Except she would no longer be his wife, she was leaving him, except how could that be when marriage lasted among the jaran for as long as the man lived or the mark of marriage scarred a woman’s face, which was for her entire life? Except Diana was not jaran, and she had long since undergone
cosmetic surgery
to erase the mark from her face, because an actor must conceal such disfigurements. She had called it a
flaw.

Portia sucked in a big, snoring breath and rolled half over, still asleep. Anatoly steadied himself with one hand on the table and leaned toward the barrister, fixing his gaze on him.

“M. Sakhalin, there is a difference between authority and power. Before the Chapalii Empire swallowed up League space, humans had after millennia of experimentation with such forms of government as theocracy, tyranny, monarchy, and communalism settled on what we now call diocracy, self-rule and community-rule in opposition and in balance. M. Soerensen remains a leader within the human community because of the
authority
he has derived from many years of service to the League and many years of proving again and again that he has the best interests of the League and humanity uppermost in his mind. The only
power
he has is that conferred on him by the Chapalii. You have no authority. You have only power. Without authority to persuade the Parliament and the citizens of League space to follow you, you must resort to force or coercion. That force can only come from the Chapalii and from those human quislings who have chosen to throw their loyalty away for the sake of short-term gain. You have a great deal of power, there’s no doubt about that. You can impose tyranny on humanity if you will. You can impose any kind of rule that you wish. In my capacity as an advocate, however, I would advise you not to take that course. You will alienate most of the human populations of your holdings, and those who flock to your side despite everything will probably prove to be untrustworthy allies. M. O’Neill, you mentioned coram traffic earlier?”

Maggie O’Neill tapped her finger on the table top and squinted at the numbers called up on the luminous surface. “In the last four days we have received eight thousand and ninety-four queries to the attention of one Anatoly Sakhalin. Ah, no, make that eight thousand and ninety-six.”

Eight thousand messages. How could he possibly answer each of those petitions? Anatoly stared past M. O’Neill. This oval table sat in the center of a round chamber roofed by an onion dome molded of clear glass, a material melded with plastic to give it strength to withstand the occasional typhoon that blew in over the plateau. From where he sat, he saw the tule flats extending to a misty horizon, sea and sky blending together in a distant gray haze. Soerensen’s palace extended behind him, but he would have to turn in his chair to see it.

“I have authority within my own tribe,” he said, “because I earned it. I will gain a base of power there first.”

“At what cost?” asked Soerensen quietly.

“At what cost?”

“If you go back, what will you tell them? Will you disrupt their way of life wholesale in order to bring them off planet? How will you get them off Rhui in any case? How many ships would you need? Where will you house them? How will they adapt? If you only take some at first, then who will you take? How will you choose?”

Irritated by this lecture, Anatoly broke in. “Among the jaran, all adults have a say in decisions that affect the whole tribe, although of course the etsana and the council of elders make the final decision.”

“Then what if no one wants to go? What if everyone wants to go? How will they communicate with the rest of us once they are off Rhui? Who or what will you use as interpreters?”

“There are slates—”

“You must get one for every person, then. Who will buy and distribute them? What will all these people do, who are accustomed to another life entirely? What about the khaja? What about the other continents, and the people who live there?”

“I wouldn’t do it all at once! You think I’m a fool. I don’t intend to act rashly. But how can I leave my people behind when I am here now?”

But perhaps it was true. Why should all of them necessarily want to travel to Earth? Valentin Arkhanov had not wanted it. Karolla Arkhanov had never adjusted; she lived by living a lie and by warping her family to match the image on her walls. Even he himself had not truly adjusted, not yet, maybe not ever. They all had such odd khaja ways out here, inexplicable to a civilized man, however primitive he might seem to them. They had it written down that all twenty-year-olds had to perform two years of community service in order to qualify for citizenship in the League. How barbaric to need a
law
for that, when among the tribes every child knew that she or he had responsibilities to the tribe, that every adult was needed for the tribe to survive.

But the tribes were small. There were so many humans in League space that the number was meaningless to him. And, of course, no one knew how many Chapalii there were…although perhaps a prince could find out. Perhaps a prince could get a
census
of human and alien species.

He leaned over toward Branwen and whispered the idea in her ear, and she noted it down on her slate. Realizing that everyone else was watching him, he turned back to Soerensen.

“Are you suggesting,” he said, “that I learn more about the League, about these worlds and the Empire itself, before I try to bring Rhui into it?”

Soerensen smiled, touched with irony, and Anatoly saw that while Charles Soerensen did not like relinquishing the power he had gained, that he was willing to, or at least, willing to share it. “That had been my intention all along,” said Soerensen. “Rhui has valuable natural resources. The Chapalii cannot interfere on her because she is interdicted. Therefore, she makes a good base for planning a revolt against the empire.”

“Why do you want to revolt against the empire? I always meant to ask that. The Chapalii do not rule you harshly. They leave you your own parliament for local matters, your lives are stable, and you go about your business much as you did before. What is wrong with that?”

Soerensen stood up, speaking down toward the table. “Call up a two-dimensional map of Rhui, continent A. Blush all territories known to be in the control of the jaran.”

Anatoly knew the map well, the great gulf that marked the northern sea, the spine of mountains that girdled the central mass of the continent, two delicate peninsulas to the southeast, and the large island in the southern sea that was home to the mysterious Byblos civilization, known only through the ancient scrolls and occasional merchant. He had met one, once, many years ago when he was hunting down the king of Habakar. He had bought an old scroll off him, but later lost it.

The red blush marking the territories of the jaran consumed about one fifth of the continent, nestled in the central territories and advancing toward the periphery.

“Do you suppose,” asked Soerensen conversationally, “that the khaja princes overrun by the jaran will give up their power willingly and happily? Do you suppose that their sons and daughters, however justly ruled they might be, will not listen to an old nurse’s story of how once they ruled themselves, and think that they could again? When you first came off Rhui, M. Sakhalin, you fell in with our plans swiftly enough. You did not want to be subject to the Chapalii Empire, nor have your people be subject to it. What has changed?”

The barrister Tobias Black was wrong about one thing: Charles Soerensen knew he had power, and he had come to like having it. Yet, at the same time, he might genuinely want only to further the interest of the human race rather than his own. Self and community, opposed and yet balanced.

“I have changed,” said Anatoly. “I have what Bakhtiian wanted all along. I have achieved his vision, that which he began, that the jaran rule over all the khaja lands. Why should I not lift my people up to meet their destiny?”

“At the expense of all the others?”

“Why should I care about them?” Anatoly asked bitterly. “They are only khaja. They have only caused me pain.”

“I told you it was a mistake,” muttered Maggie O’Neill. “You should have had the conference first and let him meet his wife afterward.”

His wife.
Not to be his wife any longer.

“At the expense of Bakhtiian?” asked Soerensen.

“Bakhtiian?” The question startled him, but as soon as he faced it squarely he knew that Soerensen spoke the truth. Even if the emperor would recognize Bakhtiian as a prince—and if any man had the power of a great prince, that man was Bakhtiian—there were only ten princes in the Empire, and all ten now had names again, since he had come into the inheritance of the missing prince. “It is true,” he said slowly, “that despite my great respect for Bakhtiian, I do not intend to give him what I now have, nor will I relinquish my position in his favor. Why should I? Giving it would be insulting to him in any case. And while it is true that, like a Singer, the gods granted him a vision, they did not promise that he would be the one to achieve it. Anyway,” he added thoughtfully, looking Soerensen straight in the eye, “if Bakhtiian came to space, to these worlds beyond,
he
would want to become emperor. He would die before he admitted it could not be done.”