The Serrano Succession (11 page)

The next day, back in the main house, she walked past the glass cases of antique weapons as she had done so often before, and paused. Bunny had fenced only because it was an expected social skill, keeping her company in the salle as she kept him company in the hunting field. But he had had a strange passion for old weapons, both blades and firearms.

It was a mixed collection, though displayed with all the organization possible: long blades in this case, short blades in that one, short-barrelled firearms here, long-barrelled ones there, glass-topped floor cabinets with helmets and breastplates and mailed gloves.

Miranda stopped in front of the wall-hung case of swords. The broadest blades below—the single broadsword, the two sabers, one straight and one curved slightly. Two schlagers, a rapier, five epees, four foils—the latter displayed in pairs, angled and opposing, their tips crossed.

On a whim, Miranda opened the case and took down the broadsword, turning its blade to the light to see the dappled pattern of refolded and beaten steel layers. When she rapped it with her knuckles, it rang a little, and its edge was still sharp enough to cut.

She wished she knew its history. Bunny had suspected it of being an ancient reproduction from the early space era, not a genuine prespace relic. But when they'd done a forensic scan on it, there'd been human blood in the runes incising the blade. Only a trace, and the scans weren't able to date it closer than a couple of hundred years, but . . . she'd always wondered.

The sabers were easier to date. One of them had been a presentation sword made for one of Bunny's ancestors as a fiftieth wedding anniversary present, with a dated inscription. It had never been used for anything but ceremony—carried upright in processions, or laid along the top of the coffin at funerals. The other had been an officer's saber—also ceremonial, she assumed, inherited over the blanket from a family she'd never heard of, some two hundred years before.

The schlagers at least were old—one was certainly 20th Century old reckoning—but while she had drilled with such blades, they hadn't ever warmed her interest. The rapier, so seemingly similar, did. This one, with a graceful swept hilt, balanced easily when she lifted it out, and swung it around.

She put it back almost guiltily. What was she thinking? Nothing, she told herself. Nothing at all. She closed the case and locked it. These were priceless antiques, not toys; if she wanted to practice, the salle held modern weapons and equipment far better suited for her sport.

And she had no time. She headed back to the big square office that had been Bunny's estate office, and was now her workplace as she tried to figure out just what Harlis had done.

Luci Suiza had expected the furor over her cousin Esmay's engagement to an outlander to dispel interest in her own plans, but somehow the discussion at the dinner table spilled over onto her. She had a mouthful of corn soup when Papa Stefan opened with a volley of complaints about the quarterly accounts.

"—And that ridiculous expense for equipment we don't need, to develop a foreign market we've done very well without for centuries. We're not that sort of people, is what I say. Luci! You can't tell me this was all Esmaya's idea!"

Luci swallowed quickly, burning her throat on the soup, but managed not to choke. "No, Papa Stefan. But we were talking about the future of her herd, and I had researched—"

"Researched!" Papa Stefan in full huff would interrupt even generals; unmarried girls didn't have a chance. "You don't know what research is. You were seduced by all those outlander magazines you read. If my mother were still alive—"

Luci found that she had inherited the gene for interruption, surprising herself. "She's not. Esmay's the Landbride, and she approves. The outlanders need our stocks' genetic input, and we need theirs."

"You interrupted me!" Papa Stefan did not quite roar, but he looked as if he might.

"You interrupted me first," Luci said. She heard the shocked mutters of her parents, but ignored them in the excitement of attack. "And the genetic equipment was my idea, and is my responsibility, and I did check with the Landbride, who approved the expenses, which she thoroughly understood."

"Not like a Landbride at all," Papa Stefan growled. "A Landbride should conserve resources, not waste them on crackpot schemes—"

"Like the Barley River irrigation project?" That was Sanni, who could never resist a dig about Papa Stefan's one big mistake. As a young man, he'd been convinced that irrigation of dry coastal land with water from the Barley would be practical and profitable. His mother, then only newly Landbride, had allowed him enough money to unbalance the estancia budget for a decade.

"It's not the same thing at all," Papa Stefan said.

"It's not," Luci said. "My idea is on schedule and on budget, and in fact it's costing us less than the Landbride approved, because I got support from other breeders."

"Which is another thing," Papa Stefan said, ignoring the part about on budget and on schedule. "You went outside the family to bring in outsiders—"

"Our allies for generations," Luci said. "After all, I'm marrying Phil—" It had slipped out, not at the moment she'd planned.

"Philip? Philip who?"

"Philip Vicarios," Sanni said quietly; her quick glance admonished Luci. Papa Stefan stared a moment, then turned to look at Casimir and Berthold.

"She's marrying a Vicarios?"

Luci had not really doubted what Esmay told her, but now a chill sank through her as she saw, in their faces, additional confirmation.

Berthold shrugged. "She has Esmay's approval, I understand."

"And you, Casi?"

Casimir nodded. "The family is our ally. Paul is my friend—"

"Does she
know
—?"

"Children, you may be excused," Sanni interrupted. The younger cousins, eyes already wide, scrambled away from the table with only the briefest duck of the head to the elders. Luci's younger brother gave her a look that meant she would be ambushed later and expected to Tell All. When the door closed behind them all, Luci spoke into the silence.

"I know. Esmaya told me. She said it didn't matter, that she held no grudge against the family, and if Philip was kind—"

"Kind! Marriage is not about kindness!" Papa Stefan had turned an ugly red.

"It is," Sanni said. "Not that you would know—"

"Quiet!" Casimir rarely interrupted at these family fights, but this time he did, with all the power of command built over years of active service. "Too much is at stake here to rehash old battles or waste energy and patience yelling at each other. As the Landbride's Trustee, I know that she did in fact approve Luci's desire to marry Philip Vicarios. She did in fact approve Luci's expenditure of equipment to allow us to export genestock, and her reasons were sound enough to convince me, and the other Trustees, that this was a good idea. This is not, after all, the real issue. The real issue is, the Landbride wants to marry an outlander, and continue to live offplanet, and the other landholders would like to use this as an excuse to reduce our influence in the Guild. I see no chance of changing Esmay's mind—for all the reasons we know about—so I suggest we turn our attention to minimizing the damage to the Suiza Family, and quit inflicting more on ourselves."

Luci had not expected her uncle Casimir to be so sensible. To her surprise, Papa Stefan went back to his meal, stabbing the sliced cattlelope as if it were an enemy, but silent. Sanni sipped the rest of her soup in thoughtful silence; Berthold helped himself to a pile of potatoes in red sauce, and began eating steadily. Casimir looked at Luci.

"Have you any more bombshells to drop, Luci?"

"No, Uncle."

"Did Esmaya mention anything to you about passing on the Landbride duties?"

Luci felt herself going hot. "She did . . . in a way . . . but—"

"She spoke of you." It was not a question. Casimir tented his hands and looked over them at her. "Did you agree?"

"I told her it was too soon," Luci said. "I'm only—"

"The age that two Landbrides were invested, in the old days. A year older, in fact, than Silvia." Luci had never heard of Silvia, though she had, like all the children, memorized a hundred years of Landbrides Suiza. "It may be that having her designate you Landbride-to-be would help—that plus your marriage to a Vicarios would prove that the Suizas were not involved in interstellar politics."

Hobart glared at Oskar Morrelline, former head of the Morrelline branch of his sept. "You were outmaneuvered by Venezia," he said. "That fuzzbrained sister of yours cost us market share and dropped profits twenty-eight percent—"

"It's not
my
fault," Oskar said. "If—"

"Oh yes, it is." Hobart interrupted smoothly. "Your daughter Ottala—what is it with the women in your family, anyway?—goes haring off to Patchcock and gets herself killed. That's what started it—a daughter you didn't control any better than Bunny controlled Brun—"

Oskar had flushed an ugly color; Hobart enjoyed that as he always enjoyed exercising power. "No, Oskar. I can't trust you to do it right, whatever it is. I cannot give you a Ministry. In a few years, I expect the public climate will change, and then, perhaps, we can find something for you."

"You expect my vote but you aren't giving me anything?"

"I expect your vote because you know where your advantage lies. Even if they had it to give, you would get nothing out of that clique Bunny ran. And they do not have it to give, not anymore."

Oskar glared, but subsided, as Hobart had known he would. Oskar was a blusterer, but if that didn't work he had no second weapon. Hobart always had a second weapon—and a third and a fourth, he thought to himself. He changed his tone, and went on; if Oskar could get it through his head what the problem really was, he might be useful.

"Whoever controls the rejuvenation process controls everything—as long as the public doesn't rebel against rejuvs. We must take steps against the Ageist conspiracies; the shortlifes, if they realize the danger they're in, outnumber us at this point and could be dangerous."

"But Venezia says—"

"Venezia is a fool. Yes, something had gone wrong there, something serious. A Benignity spy, if I understand the little that's been declassified. But it's not as bad as all that. Women are so excitable, not to mention sentimental, and Venezia in particular—"

Oskar nodded eagerly; Hobart smiled to himself. How the Morrelline brothers hated having Venezia in charge! "All she ever did was play with pottery—" Oskar said.

"Quite so. How could she know anything about the real world? She could not be expected to realize how many lives would be disrupted—prematurely ended, with the shortage of rejuvenation drugs—because of her finicky insistence on exact procedures."

"But Hobart—how do we get it back? How do we get her out of there?"

Exactly the opening he'd hoped for. "By doing precisely what I tell you," Hobart said. "I need your support at all the Grand Council sessions; I will let you know what I need you to say, and how to vote. With more sympathetic, more cooperative Ministers, we should be able to ease dear Venezia back into her supportive role."

"She won't like it," Oskar said, puffing out his plump cheeks.

"I don't care whether she does or not," Hobart said. "I am not going to let one woman stand in the way of progress for the Conselline Sept." He looked forward to that moment, probably more than Oskar did. Venezia had been a constant nuisance at sept board meetings, poking her nose into all sorts of inconvenient corners. He'd had to roust her out of his own offices more than once, where she chatted up the clerical staff and wheedled who knows what out of them. She seemed to think she had a moral mission to clean up the whole sept.

"Our responsibility to the whole Familias . . ." she would say, while Hobart ground his teeth. They had no responsibility to the whole Familias; they had a responsibility to Family shareholders. Period. He wasn't going to urge her to go on making faulty drugs. Bad for business, and people would be watching carefully. Beyond that, though, it wasn't their business to be saints, if that's what she had in mind.

"If Kemtre had not been a weak man, none of these disasters would have happened. He drugged his son into stupidity, and then created those damned clones."

"I don't see that cloning is such a bad thing."

"No, nor do I, except that we have a rapidly growing population anyway. We don't need clones; we need sensible strong men who know how to handle the hysterics. No offense." He eyed Oskar, but Oskar didn't mind if Hobart called his sister hysterical. "Now, Oskar, I want you to have a word with the Broderick Institute, and tell them to do their homework a little better—"

"The Broderick Institute? What have they done?"

Sometimes he wondered if Oskar had a brain. Venezia, for all her impracticality, had wit enough. "Oskar, the Broderick Institute is where Dr. Margulis works." Oskar still looked blank. "The same Dr. Margulis whose report on the so-called bad drugs coming out of Patchcock started a near panic in the market—"