The Stone Dogs (24 page)

Lefarge snorted, and his mentor nodded. "Yes, I know, but we're professionals, Fred. And you have personal reasons to keep the truth fresh. All the Draka would have to do is ease up, tell some convincing lies, and we'd have our work cut out for us keeping even a minimal guard up."

A sour twist of the mouth. "You wouldn't remember it, but there were substantial numbers who refused to believe the truth about Stalin, until Hitler and the Draka between them released the pictures and records of his death camps. The Draka could have railroaded our credulous types just as easily. Instead they've virtually flaunted what they are, and pushed at us every chance they got. Trying to scare us, but Americans don't scare easily. It's the flip side of our weakness; we're the Good Guys, and therefore have to win in the end. All the stories and the movies and the patriotic pablum the schools dish out instead of history prove it.

God help us if we ever lose a big one; we'd probably start doubting we were the Good Guys after all."

"I thought you said the Draka were smart?"

"Ayuh. Very smart, and very, very tough. But they don't
understand
us; some of them do, intellectually, but not down here." He touched his stomach. "Our reactions don't make sense to them, emotionally, any more than theirs do to us, and they're… a little less flexible. They know it, they repeat it to themselves, but it's… hard… for them to really believe anyone could fudge a power contest, could
want
to fudge one. For them, life is lived by the knife. That's reality for them. They believe in enemies; they don't have our compulsive need to be liked. For a Draka, if you've got an enemy you destroy or subjugate them; it's their lifework. Subconsciously, they assume that everybody else is the same, only weaker and less cunning."

Fred grinned wolfishly. "The way we assume that deep-down everyone is just plain folks, and you can always make a deal and square the differences, and the guy in the black hat either repents or gets shot five minutes before the hero's wedding?

That's the point of these Socratic dialogues you've been putting us through?"

"More like Socratic monologues, I'm afraid," Stoddard said.

"Also the temptation is, when we realize somebody isn't like that, to hate them. Which interferes with the task at hand."

"Elucidate, as you Ivy League types would say."

"The task of wiping every last Draka off the face of the Earth,"

Stoddard said calmly, and touched a control on the surface of his desk. A printer began to hum, and pages spat out into a tray with a rapid
shft-shft
sound.

The younger man snorted. "Glad to hear you say it, Uncle Nate; the sweet reason was beginning to wear a little."

The general paused with his finger on the control. "Ayuh, not so sweet, Fred." A pause. "I grew up in a world where the Draka were a blot, not a menace. I've had to watch the Domination grow like a cancer, metastasizing. Watch my children,"—he paused again, face like something carved out of maple—"nieces and nephews and their children grow up in the shadow of it."

His eyes met the younger man's. Frederick Lefarge had seen danger. Leading an incursion-team ashore in Korea, to snatch a fallen reconnaissance-drone from the coastal hills. Once on the surface of an asteroid, when a friend turned around and saw his hands reaching for the air-controls of the skinsuit. Never quite so strongly as now, in the gentle horsey face of the New Englander. There had been Stoddards who signed the Mayflower compact, stood at Bunker Hill, helped break the charge of the Confederate armor at Shiloh.
Certain things you shouldn't
forget about Uncle Nate,
he reminded himself. The memories were real, visiting the New Hampshire farmhouse, snowball fights and treeforts and sitting in the kitchen with Uncle Nat and Aunt Debra… and this was real, too. Every man had his god; Stoddard's was Duty, and he would sacrifice both the Lefarges to it with an unhesitating sorrow, as he had his own son, as he would himself.

Stoddard blinked, and the moment passed. "It doesn't pay to get emotional about it, is all. You'll be happy to know the Ekstein problem is what I want you working on. He has to go."

"I thought you were sorry for him, general?"

"I am. What's that got to do with the barn chores? I've selected a partner for you, too; Captain Lefarge will be your backup on this one."

"Captain
Lefarge?" Marya sat bolt upright at that.

"You deserved it," Stoddard said. He pulled a small box out of a drawer. "This job has a few compensations, anyway."And here's the Ekstein file," he continued. "All but the eyes-only portion. Marya, you covered this before you left for India."

"Yes, sir, partially." Marya said. "Need to know," she added to her brother. "He's really quite formidably good. And I attended a few lectures of his at the Institute."

Frederick looked a question at the general.

"MIT, their Reserve Training Program." Fred nodded, he had known that much. "We wanted her to qualify as an electronics specialist, microwafer design and compinstruction both." Fred blinked surprise; it was not at all common to be an expert in designing computers and in the instructional sets that ran them as well.

"We put the captain through MIT under an assumed name, and fudged the physical records on her military service; enough to keep the Security Directorate from tagging her with a routine border scan."

"You
have
been a close-mouthed little sister," Fred said.

"Need—"

"I know, I know. Why do you think I never asked where you were, when you dropped out of sight for three months at a time?" The general's last words sank home. "We're going in?" he asked sharply.

"Certainly." Stoddard rose and walked to the window again.

"You'll both be in for intensive briefing, starting Monday. Take the next few days off, rest. This may get messy, but we certainly can't afford to let them keep Ekstein much longer." The general looked aside at the black-bordered portrait of his son, whose F-91 had taken a seeker-missile over the Pacific. Just a skirmish, border tension… and a valuable indication that the Alliance electronic counter-measures were not as good as they had hoped.

"Not much longer at all."

VON SHRAKENBERG TOWNHOUSE

ARCHONA, ASSEGAI BOULEVARD

ARCHONA PROVINCE

DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA

NOVEMBER 21, 1972

"Gayner's next," the assistant said.

Senator Eric von Shrakenberg tipped his chair back from the desk. "Spare me," he muttered, rising and pacing with a smooth graceful stride.

It was a warm summer's afternoon, and the windows of the office room were open on the sloping gardens that overlooked the city below. The von Shrakenberg townhouse was old; the core of it had been built around 1807, in the time of his great-great-grandfather, when Archona had been new. He tried to imagine it as it had been then, a vast rocky bowl on the northern edge of the great plateau; olive-green scrub, dense thickets of silverleaf trees around the springs and the Honeyhive River. A chaos of muddy streets and buildings going up by fits and starts, mansions and hovels and forced labor compounds, bars and brothels and fitting-out shops for the miners and planters, the hunters and slavers and prospectors pushing north into the great dark bulk of Africa.

"Why exactly do yo' detest Gayner, suh?" the assistant asked.

She was just back from the yearly reserve-maneuvers of her Legion in the Kalahari, bronzed-fit with rusty sun-streaks through her black hair. "Apart from her bein' a political enemy."

"Why?" Eric stroked a finger over his mustache in an unconcious gesture of thought. "Because she's totally ruthless, insanely ambitious—personally, as much as for the Race— and has no more scruples than a crocodile."

"Yes, but what does she want? And… we're idealists?"

"No, Shirley, we're utterly unscrupulous for the greater good,"

Eric said, smiling without turning. At fifty he was a generation older than his assistant, dressed in a gentleman's day-suit: jacket and trousers of loose cream-silk brocade trimmed in gold, ruffled shirt and indigo sash, boots and a conservative ruby stud in the right ear. The clothing brought out the lean shape of his body: broad shoulders tapering to slim hips. The long narrow skull bore faded blond hair worn in an officer's crop, short at the sides and back, slightly longer on top. His eyes were gray, set over high cheekbones in a face that was handsome in a bony beak-nosed fashion.

"What does Gayner want? I suspect she doesn't know herself; at a minimum, all this."

He nodded out the windows. The reception office was on the second story, and beyond lay Archona. It had long outgrown the original site; there were twelve million dwellers now, Earth's greatest city. Hereabouts were mansions and gardens, like this the townhouses of country gentry, used when business or politics brought them in from their plantations for a few weeks; for the whirl of social life in season as well. Tile roofs set amid green on the low slopes below him, red and plum-colored, the flash of sunlight on water or marble. Quiet residential streets, lined with jacaranda trees as municipal law required. A mist of purple-blue in this blossom-time, spreading down over the hills and into the valley below and up the far slope, kilometer after kilometer.

There were few tall buildings, and those were for public use.

The blue haze of the flowers sank into the languorous sienna-umber tint of the high-summer air, giving a translucent undersea look, as if the Domination's capital were Plato's lost Atlantis still living beneath the waves. At the center the House of Assembly loomed, a two-hundred meter dome of stained glass on thin steel struts, glowing like an impossible jewel amid its grounds. From there the Way of the Armies ran east to Castle Tarleton, west to the Archon's Palace, each set on the bordering rim overlooking the old city. He could recognize other landmarks: the cool white colonnades of the University, the libraries and theaters, pedestrian arcades lined with shops and restaurants… gardens everywhere, small parks, streets lined with marble-and-tile low-rise office structures. More parks beneath the tall pillars of the monorail. A train slashed by with the smooth speed of magnetic induction.

There was little noise, a vague murmur under the nearer sound of children playing. Draka hated blaring sound still more than crowding, and even in the central streets voices and feet would be louder than traffic. The air smelled freshly of garden, hot stone, water; there was only the faintest underlying tint of the vast factory-complexes that sprawled north of the freemen's city, the world of the Combines and their labor compounds.

Decently hidden away, so that nobody need visit it except when business took them there. His mind filled in the other hidden things: the vast engineering works that brought in water from the Maluti mountains and the headwaters of the Zambezi a thousand kilometers away, the nuclear power-units buried thousands of feet below in living granite… He had known this city all his life, and still the sight was enough to catch at the breath.

"What wonders we've built and dreamed," he said softly. The aide leaned closer to listen. "Wonders and horrors…" Above the horizon tall summer clouds were piling, cream-white and hot gold in the fierce sunlight. Aircraft made contrails high overhead, and the long teardrop shapes of dirigibles drifted below. "Gayner… it's a melodramatic word, but she
lusts
for control over the Race. And she'll never have it, because to rule them she would have to… love this world we've built. And to do that she'd have to understand it, understand how beautiful and how utterly evil it is…"

"Suh?"

"Forget it," Eric said. "Just keepin' up my reputation as a heretic." He turned, and his face went as cold as the flat gray eyes. "At seventh and last, I hate Gayner because she's a distillation of our bad qualities without our savin' graces; like a mirror held up to the secret madness of our hearts." A pause.

"And if she and hers had their way, there'd be nothing human on this earth in a hundred years. Things that walked on two legs and talked, but nothin' we'd recognize."

Louise Gayner snapped the box-file shut and sank down in the rear seat of the runabout. It was a hired vehicle rented by the month. She preferred them: less bother than maintaining your own. Her house was temporary, too, a modest four-bedroom rental in the eastern suburbs. Archona was not her home; she was city-bred, but from the west coast, Luanda. And not interested in luxury for its own sake.

Unlike some I could name,
she thought sardonically as the car turned under the tall wrought-iron gates of the mansion. The wheels rumbled on the tessellated brick of the drive, a louder sound than the quiet hiss on asphalt.

Five hectares; the von Shrakenbergs had arrived early, and kept wealth and power enough to preserve what they took. A slope, on the southern side of the basin that had sheltered the original city. Generations of labor had turned the stony ground into a fantasia of terraces and tiled pools, fountains, patios.

Native silverleaf and yellowwood, imported oaks and paper birch towered to give shade, and the high wall that surrounded the estate was a shape beneath mounds of rose and wisteria. The car soughed to a halt before the main entrance.

"Why are we bothering?" her assistant said, as they emerged into the dazzle of sunlight, then gratefully forward into the shade of a huge oak.

Gayner flicked her wrists forward to settle the lace, adjusted her gunbelt. "It's like dancin', Charlie," she said flatly. "Yo' have't'

' git through the steps. Speakin' a' which—"

The half-moon of the drive was fronted by a last stretch of rock-garden, with topiaries in pots. The stairway ran up the middle of it, polished native granite casting sun-flecks back at them; dark foreshortened strips of shade lay slanting across it, from the Lombardy poplars along the edges. Servants came forward as they disembarked, one to show the driver the way to the garages; two more knelt smoothly to offer glasses on trays.

Gayner looked down at them, holding her gloves in her right hand and tapping them into her left. Wenches, a matched set; about nineteen, their movements as gracefully polished as the silver and crystal in their hands. One an ash-blond Baltic type, the other the gunmetal black of a Ceylonese Tamil, both in tunics of colorful dashiki, hand-embroidered cotton from the Zanzibar coasts.