The Stone Dogs (59 page)

Yolande called up the medical image and placed it beside the laughing youth. Explosive decompression is not a pleasant way to die, especially combined with a wash of radiant heat that melts equipment into flesh across half the body. Two-thirds of the face was still there, enough for the final expression to survive.

A long moment, and then she closed her eyes and began to dictate. "Dear Citizens. As your son's commanding officer, I…"

It took an hour to complete the messages; they were brief, but it was crucial to give each one the individual attention it was due. These were Citizens, the hope of the Race.
Cells must die for
the whole to live. But we must mourn them, because we are
cells who know what we are. That is our immortality.

She shook off the mood and rose, calling the lights back to normal.
Coming home,
she thought wryly. Half her existence these days seemed to be spent in illusion and shadows, riding the silica threads and photon pulses, until she could hardly tell waking from sleeping.

"Call Tina," she said to the machines that always listened.

"Brandied coffee, please." Absurd to use a form of courtesy with a computer, but it was another connection to real life.

This outer room of her sanctum—was this home?
As much as
anyplace, the last five years.
A long box-rectangle, her desk at one end. Lunar-basalt tiles, covered by fur rugs from animals created by Biotech. Leather-spined books, and shelves of real wood, expensive on Luna, but Loki knew there were some compensations for this job. The outer wall was set to a soft neutral gray for concentration's sake; it was a single blank sheet five meters by ten, a thinfilm sandwich holding several hundred thousand thermovalves per square centimeter. It could be set to display anything at all, well enough to fool even an expert's eye until you touched, but she was suddenly weary of vicarious experience. And of the fresh clean recycled air.

"Transparent and open," she said. It blinked clear and slid up with a minor
shhhh
as she walked out onto the balcony.

That was near the top of the ring wall, a lacy construction of twisted virryl, filaments of monocrystal

titanium-chromium-vanadium alloy and glass braided together.

Those were words; the reality was smooth curves of jade-green ice, thin as gossamer, stronger than steel. The sky above was of the same material, a shallow ribbed dome across the hundred-kilometer bowl of the crater. A thousand meters over her head one of its great anchor cables sprang out, soaring up and away until it dwindled into a thread and disappeared into the distance; the sky was set to a long twilight now, and she could just make out the bluewhite disk of Earth. She walked to the waist-high balustrade, looked out and down.

The crater was in natural terrace-steps to either side and sheer cliff below, nothing but air and haze three kilometers to the tumbled jungle-shaggy hills at the base. To her right a river sprang out of the rock, fell with unearthly slowness in a long bright-blue arc until it misted away into rain; a lake gathered underneath, and the river flowed like silver off through the mottled greens of the landscape below. Clouds drifted in layers, silver and dappled with earthlight; they cast shadows over fields, meadows, forest, roads. There was no horizon, only a vast arch that melted green into blue. Lights were appearing here and there; far and far, she could just make out the high spike of the mountain at the crater's center, bright-lit, with the thin illuminated streak of the vator-tower rising to the landing platform on the airless side of the dome.

"Mistis."

A presence at her elbow; she took the cup without glancing around, murmured abstracted thanks, propped one haunch on the balustrade, sipped. Kenia Mountain Best, diluted with a quarter of hot cream and a tenth of Thieuniskraal. Warmth and richness flowed over her tongue, with a hint of bite at the back of her mouth and down her throat. It was very quiet, the thunder of the falling water far enough away to be a muted background.

The soft wind that flickered ends of her gray-blond hair about her face was louder; she ignored their tickling caress. All about the balcony, rock that had lain lifeless since the forming of the Earth was covered in rustling vines that bore sheets of pale-pink blossoms; they smelled of mint and lavender.

As they had been designed to do. So had the multicolored birds that flitted through the flowers been designed for the intricate flutelike song they trilled; farther out a yellow-feathered hawk banked on four-meter wings and called, a long mournful wailing. Yolande sipped again, feeling a sensation that was half contentment, half the repletion that followed the end of a poem.

This was a composition, and she one of its manifold creators; part of what she had dreamed, as a child looking up at the new lights in the sky over Claestum. The Glory of the Race was more than power; that was just the beginning. It was accomplishment; it was to
do.

She closed her eyes, squeezing them against a flash of old remembered pain.
Myfwany, darlin', if only
you could be here
to see it with me,
she thought. Then somewhere far back in her mind a ghost met her gaze with sardonic green:
Freya, what a
sentimentalist yo' are, Yolande-sweet, to let me haunt yo' so.

One thing I never aspired to be was the drop of gall in yo' cup;
yo' alive, so live, girl.

"Such good advice, and as always easier to give than to follow," she murmured to herself.

"Mistis?"

"Nothin', Tina," Yolande said to the serf who squatted at her feet and peered through the finger-thick rods of the balustrade.

The wench rose. Tina had a glass of milk in one hand, and a white mustache of it on her upper lip that she licked away with unselfconscious relish; then drank more, taking the slow care needful in one-sixth gravity. Eighteen and softly pretty in a doe-eyed Italian way, big-hipped, the four-month belly just starting to show. Yolande smiled and laid a hand on it; the serf smiled shyly back and put her hand over the Draka's in turn. For a moment Yolande wondered what it must feel like, to bear a living child beneath the heart. She was too old herself, of course, even if there had ever been time, and bearing your own eggs was eccentric to the point of suspiciousness now, anyway. Strange to think that she herself was of the last generation of the Race born of their mother's wombs.

She rubbed her serfs stomach affectionately. "Time to get yo'

home to Claestum, Tina," she said.

The later stages of pregnancy did not do well below .3 G; in theory, regular centrifuge was enough to compensate, but she did not intend to take any chances at all. Strictly speaking, there was no need to get involved in the process to this extent; a lot of people just sent the fertilized ova in to the Clinic and picked up the baby nine months later. Yolande had always found that too impersonal; she insisted on being present at the implantation and the birthing, and used only family servants as brooders, volunteers from the plantation. It seemed more… more
fitting,
somehow. Birth was no less a miracle because the Race had mastered its secrets, after all. And this was the most important of all, truly hers and Myfwany's, now that the ova-merging technique was perfected.

"Yes, time to get home, Mistis," Tina said with a sigh, leaning into the caress and looking out over the crater. "I will miss this.

It so pretty."

And such a vanity,
Yolande thought. Oh, not so difficult, not when you could use fusion bombs and bomb-pumped lasers for excavation; not when energy poured down in vacuum, to be stored as pressurized water or liquid metal or in superconducting rings… Anything local and not too complex was cheap, given autofabricators, and the whole construct was basically titanium and glass. Oxygen and silica and light metals were abundant on the moon; launch-lasers and magnetic catapults at Gibraltar and Kilimanjaro and in the Tien Shan were part of the War effort, and might as well be kept to capacity with cargo loads; an abundance of water and volatiles was coming in from the outer system. Also, a closed ecosystem was a tricky thing; the bigger you made it the easier it was to manage.

Also a chance to put the Drakon's eye up here on the Moon,
looking down,
she thought.
And wouldn't
the Yankees love to
stick a thumb in it.

Which was why the bulk of Aresopolis was burrowed kilometers deep into the lunar crust, factories and dormitories, refineries and chemosynthesis plants, the fardown caverns with their stores of liquid hydrogen, oxygen, methane, ammonia, metals, a Pamir's horde gathered from as far out as Saturn. The orbital battlestations clustering about Earth were largely armed and built from here; so were the outposts at the L-5 points, the far-flung bases, Mercury, the Venus study-project, Mars, a scattering of outposts in the Alliance-dominated asteroids. Half the two million souls the Domination had sent into space lived here, in this strange city of warriors and warriors' servants; a third of them free Citizens, the highest ratio of any city in the Domination.

All of them beneath her command—and able, in their leisure, to come out here to walk naked under living green, swim in water that bore silverspeckled trout, to fly with muscle-powered wings as no humans before them had ever done. She flicked the last droplets from the cup out into the void, watching the long dreamy slowness of the fall.

"They say the neoredwoods we've planted down there will grow a thousand meters tall in another fifty years," Yolande said, softly. "I'll bring the children here, and we'll rent wings and fly off the highest branches like eagles." She should still be hale, then, with modern biotech.

"Will you bring me to watch?" Tina asked, and snuggled another question.

"Yes," Yolande said. "That's a promise. And no, get yo' off to a nice, quiet bed, wench; mind yo' health."

The serf left with the long glide-bounce of an experienced Aresopolite. Yolande lingered for a moment, yawning and rolling the still-warm porcelain of the cup between her palms. The sky had gone true-dark, and the hard bright stars were out; the clouds below reflected blue-silver earthlight back into her eyes.

Moving stars, many of them, and she could see another rising swiftly to join them from beyond the crater rim, a laser-boost capsule from one of the emplacements that studded the mountains around the city. That was one of their functions; another might be to rip targets as far away as Earth, one day.

Suddenly she was on her feet, shaken with a wild anger. The flung cup arched out into emptiness with maddening slowness; there was nothing on the planets or between that could express the wash of loathing she felt.
They
were there, too, the Yankees, the destroyers of all happiness, the oaf-lump impediment that stood always in the Race's path. This single city, an ornament above a fortress, when the Moon might be laced with them like living jewels. Scorched meat made of lordly golden boys who should be here playing tag with eagles, or going out to make green paradise of frozen Mars and burning Venus. Always intriguing, threatening with their sly greasy-souled merchant cunning, menacing the future of her blood. Gwen, Nikki, Holden, Johanna still un-born, whose years ought to stretch out before them like diamonds in the sun…

"I
will
be back with them, in yo' despite," she said in tones quiet and even and measured. "Everythin' yo' are, well bring to nothin'; well grind yo' bones to make our bread, and yo' children will serve mine until the end of days."

With an effort she turned back into the office.
A
consummation devoutly to be wished
, she thought.
To
which
end, I'm going to get Uncle Eric to tell me
preciscily
whats been
goin' on here.

"Message:" she said to the sensors. "Strategos Alman Witter, Vice-Commandant; Allie, I'm droppin' down to HQ fo' the week.

Yo' step in as per, stay on top of the patrol incident an' keep me posted soonest. Message: Transport, Aresopolis to Archona."—She looked at her desk: 2140—"departin' 1100 to 1200 tomorrow. Message: private, code follows—"

"
One-hundred-forty
-nine,
one-hundred
-fifty," Marya Lefarge gasped as she finished the series of situps, and sank back on the exercise table, panting.

No more
. That finished her daily three-hour program, but there was a druglike pleasure to exhaustion as hard to fight as sloth. The 1-G exercise chamber was crowded and close, a slight smell of sweat among the machinery that glistened in the overhead sunlamps. The floor had a slight but perceptible curve; it was a wedge section of a giant wheel spinning deep beneath Aresopolis. Dual-purpose like most things offplanet, a flywheel storing energy for burst use, but time here was still limited and rationed. Most of the occupants were pregnant brooders, wearily putting in their minimum on exercise bicycles, with a scattering of others whose owner's credits allowed or tasks required high-gravity maintenance. Mostly they leafed through picture-books, listened to music on earplugs or chattered among themselves, leaving her in a bubble of silence.

Cows
, she thought bitterly, looking at them as she swung her legs off the table. Then:
That's unfair. Not their fault
. Some of them looked back at her out of the corners of their eyes, then away again. She felt the slight ever-present tug of the controller cuff on her right wrist, more than enough reason to shun her; who knew what she had done, to need an instant pain-paralyzer?

Guilt was contagious, especially here, where every word and gesture was observed by the never-sleeping senses of the computers and the endless probing vigilance of the AI programs.

There was a man working with springweights near her who did not look away. Handsome, younger than she, a Eurasian with smooth olive skin and bright blue eyes; he smiled, lifted his brows. Lathe-bodied and strong, he could be anything from a dancer to a Janissary…

Why not
, she thought, hesitating a second, then shook her head as she smiled and left, towel thrown over one shoulder. She felt his eyes on her neck, memorizing her number. Probably he could reference it through Records, probably he would sheer off when he learned who owned her.