The Sundering (28 page)

This was the day fixed for the Convocation’s evacuation. Though no announcement had been made and there were no reports in the media, all the High City seemed a part of the secret. The Boulevard of the Praxis was filled with trucks taking household goods into storage, and several of the larger palaces were being shuttered. Another element that made up so much of the capital’s distinctive style was abandoning Zanshaa, and no one knew what would come, with the Naxids, to take its place.

Shutters weren’t going up on the Shelley Palace yet, but it was only a matter of days before they would. Personal possessions were being packed, to be shipped up the skyhook and received aboard the
Ensenada,
the Martinez family yacht, to be carried to Laredo along with the family. They would leave as soon as Martinez brought his honeymoon to an end by leaving for his appointment with Michi Chen’s squadron. Martinez supposed it was nice of them to wait, but he thought it was asking a lot of Terza to endure three months’ daily exposure to Roland, Walpurga, and PJ.

Daffodil
would be ready in four days, which meant Martinez’s marriage would be seven days old before he and Terza were parted, certainly for many months, possibly a year or more. Conceivably forever, if things went wrong.

The first days of marriage had been tranquil: the serenity that seemed to surround Terza had embraced Martinez in its calm, scented arms. He and Terza spent most of their time in the hotel suite, having their meals brought in, and aside from chance encounters on their short walks they saw no one.

They opened their wedding presents. Martinez managed to conceal his shock when the Guraware vases were unwrapped.
She hates me,
he thought, in sudden desolation.

He sent the vases straight into storage, where he hoped they would remain forever.

They sent thanks to wedding guests. Fresh-cut flowers had been sent to the room every day, and Terza arranged them into gorgeous displays that radiated color and scent in every corner of the apartment. Thankfully she never remembered Sula’s gift, and Martinez never had to look at Terza’s flowers arranged in Sula’s porcelain.

Terza and Martinez discovered a mutual liking for the plays of Koskinen: Terza enjoyed the sophisticated portrayals, and Martinez the cynical epigrams. They called up
The Sweethearts Divided
onto the parlor’s video wall and watched it with great pleasure.

Martinez missed the intensity he’d shared with Sula, the way their minds had seemed to leap suddenly into the same channel, the intense, often unspoken mental collaboration they’d shared when they devised the plan for the evacuation, or even—the minds leaping across star systems—when they’d created a new system of tactics.

Terza was all tranquillity and excellence—self-possessed, considerate, alert to his wishes, efficiently arranging their time together. But there was an unearthly quality to this tranquillity, and sometimes Martinez suspected he was watching a performance, a brilliant performance of the highest order, and he wondered what it concealed.

Martinez found something of an answer when he watched Terza play her harp. As her fingers drew music from the strings the habitual calm and serenity were replaced by an intensity that bordered on ferocity—
Here is fire.
Martinez was intrigued.
Here is passion.
He saw her breathe with the music; he saw the determined glitter in her eye, the throb of the pulse in her throat. Her engagement with the music was total, and the sight of it a revelation.

Martinez tried to carry the music with them to bed, to kindle the same passion there, in the bower she filled with rainbows of flowers. He flattered himself that he was successful. In the music of limbs and hearts Terza soon found her rhythm. Her trained musician’s fingers, sensitive already to nuance, learned to caress him and draw forth any timbre she desired, piano to fortissimo. She was not shy. In between moments of love there was a sweetness to her that he found touching.

But somehow his time with Terza failed to equal other, recent experience. With Sula the play of love had been more brilliant, more brittle, its peak a moment of realization, a knowledge of self and other and the whole blazing, brilliant universe beyond. In Sula he found the confirmation of his own existence, the answer to every metaphysical quest.

Martinez failed to find this with Terza, and furthermore he knew perfectly well that it wasn’t Terza’s fault. At a loss for any other options, he strove simply to please her, and it pleased her to be pleased.

The problem, Martinez thought as he paid the cab, was that he simply didn’t know on what footing the marriage stood. He couldn’t be certain if it was a business arrangement, a piece of practical politics, a folly, or a farce. He couldn’t tell if he and Terza were a man and woman bought and sold, or simply two inexperienced people trying to make the best of what fate had handed them, aware that at any moment fate could declare the whole arrangement nothing more than a joke.

Martinez opened the door to the Shelley Palace and saw PJ standing irresolute in the hall, and he thought, at least my marriage isn’t
that.

“Oh,” PJ said, his eyes widening. “I was thinking of, um…”

“Taking a walk?” Martinez finished. “You don’t want to. It’ll rain soon.”

“Ah.” PJ’s long face was glum. “I suppose I should have looked.” He returned his walking stick to the rack.

One of the maidservants arrived to take Martinez’s uniform cap. “Shall I tell Lady Walpurga you’ve arrived?” she asked.

“Not just yet,” PJ said, and turned to Martinez. “Let me give you a drink. Take the chill off.”

“Why not?”

Martinez followed PJ into the south parlor, where he saw a glass already set out on a table, the sign that this was not PJ’s first drink of the day.

“Terza’s well, I hope?” PJ asked as he made a swoop for the mig brandy.

“She’s very well, thank you.”

“Would you like some of this,” holding up the brandy, “or…”

“That will be fine, thanks.”

They clinked glasses. Rain began to spatter the broad windows, and outside Martinez saw people leaning into the downpour and sprinting to their destinations.

PJ cleared his throat. “I thought I should let you know,” he said, “that I’ve decided to stay.”

“Stay?” Martinez repeated. “You mean on Zanshaa?”

“Yes. I’ve spoken to Lord Pierre and, ah—well, I’ll be staying here to look after Ngeni interests while everyone’s away.”

Martinez paused with the brandy partway to his lips, then lowered the glass. “Have you thought this out?” he asked.

PJ gazed at Martinez with his sad brown eyes. “Yes, of course. My marriage to Walpurga is…” He shrugged. “Well, it’s an embarrassment, why not admit it? This way Walpurga and I can part and…” Again he shrugged. “And no one can criticize, you see?”

“I see,” Martinez said. He swirled his brandy as he considered PJ’s decision. “But Lord Pierre is a loyalist convocate,” he said, “and the Naxids must have him on their list of people they’d very much like to…” He searched for an appropriate euphemism. “
Interview.
And I can be reasonably certain that I’m also on the list, and now you’re related to
me
as well.” He looked at PJ carefully. “I don’t really think you’d be safe.”

PJ flapped away the danger with his hand. “Pierre thinks I’ll be all right. I’m only a cousin, after all. And it’s not as if I
know
anything…”

“There may be a great deal of discomfort before the Naxids find that out. And besides, you could be held hostage.”

PJ put down his glass and straightened his jacket. “As if anyone in the empire would alter their course of action on the chance that
I
might be killed.”

Martinez had to concede that PJ probably had scored a point.

“Gareth,” PJ said, “it’s the only way I can help. It’s
war,
it’s critical that I do…
something.
If all I can accomplish in the war is to look after some property and some farms and pensioned-off servants while Pierre is away, then that’s what I’ll do.”

Martinez narrowed his eyes. “You haven’t volunteered for anything else, have you?”

PJ blinked. “What do you mean?”

“You haven’t volunteered to work for the Legion, or the Intelligence Section, or some similar outfit?”

PJ seemed genuinely surprised, but then turned thoughtful. “You think they’d take me?”

I hope not, Martinez thought. “I shouldn’t think so,” he said.

PJ reached for his glass and took a long, morose drink. “No. I’ll just be living in a wing of the palace while the rest of it’s closed up, and making sure that my old nurse and a few hundred other folk are looked after.”

To Martinez, it seemed as if PJ was genuinely determined. “Well,” he said, raising his glass, “here’s luck to you.”

“Thank you, Gareth.”

As Martinez touched his lips with his glass, the front door boomed open and a gust of wind riffled papers on the side table. Martinez glanced through the pocket door to see Roland in the hall wiping rain water from his jacket.

“Damn it!” Roland called. “I wish I’d thought to take my overcoat. It was sunny when I left. Is that brandy?”

He strode into the parlor, water droplets clinging to his hair, poured himself mig brandy, and took a deep drink.

“Sempronia’s married,” he said. “I just came from the ceremony, such as it was.”

“I thought we weren’t speaking to Sempronia,” Martinez said.

“We’re not.” Roland took another drink. “But I was required to sign the papers permitting the whole thing to take place. Which I
had
to do, because Proney was threatening either to travel with Shankaracharya as his mistress, or to join the Fleet as a common recruit and serve as his orderly.”

Martinez concealed a smile. “She hasn’t lost her spirit, I see.”

“No. She has her young man thoroughly under her thumb, from what I could see.” There was a cynical glimmer in Roland’s eye. “In ten years, she’ll look brilliant and he’ll look fifty.”

Martinez looked at his brother. “Now you’re the only one of us unmarried,” he said. “And you’re the oldest. It hardly seems fair.”

Roland smiled into his brandy glass. “I haven’t found the right woman.”

“Why not?” Martinez said. “I’m surprised you didn’t try to marry Terza yourself.”

PJ, with his recent marital wounds, seemed uncomfortable at a question concerning the rational organization of matrimony.

Roland waved a hand. “I prefer to keep my arrangements with Lord Chen on a business basis,” he said, then shrugged. “Besides, I’d make Terza unhappy, and you won’t.”

Martinez gazed at Roland in pure curiosity. “How do you know that?”

Roland patted Martinez on the shoulder. “Because you’re a decent person who gives everything his best,” he said, “and I’m a cad who would put Terza aside the second I’d fathered an heir on her and could find a better match.”

Martinez found himself absolutely at a loss for a reply. Roland finished his brandy and smiled.

“Shall we call Walpurga and have our supper?” he said. “Signing away a sister makes me hungry.”

Supper was in the smaller family dining room, a place with yellow silk wallpaper and elaborately carved furniture inlaid with bits of white shell. PJ and Walpurga dined in amity, though without any expressions of affection beyond Walpurga’s offhand, “Pass the sauce, dearest.” Roland discoursed on political events. Martinez, when asked, said that he found marriage surprisingly congenial, something he would have said even if it weren’t true.

When Martinez returned to the hotel he found Terza lying on the bed still in the light trousers and silk jacket she’d worn to her tropical destination, curled around a calla lily she’d plucked from one of her arrangements. There was a satisfied, rather secretive smile on her face.

Martinez paused in the doorway and absorbed this sight. “What are you thinking of?” Martinez asked.

Pleasure twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Our child.”

He felt a shimmering warmth in his blood. He crossed the space between them in a few steps, sat on the mattress, and touched her arm. “You can’t know you’re pregnant already, can you?”

“No. In fact I’m reasonably certain I’m not.” Terza looked up at him, and shifted to place her head in his lap. “But I think I will be before you leave. I have a…sense of impending fertility.”

Martinez stroked the fragrant mass of her hair. Her cheek was warm against his hand.

“Four days,” he said.

She sighed. Her dark eyes sought his. “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been very good to me.”

He was puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“The marriage wasn’t your idea. You could have taken any resentment out on me—I was the one available, after all.” She took his hand and kissed it. “But you’ve tried to make me happy. I appreciate that.”

And
are
you happy?
That was the next question, but Martinez hesitated to ask it. There was an air of truth that hung in the room at the moment, and he didn’t want to tempt fate.

“I can’t imagine wanting to hurt you,” he said.

She kissed his hand again. “Four days,” she said, and smiled up at him. “We’re lucky to have so many.”

“We are.” He stroked her cheek as a warm tenderness rose in his blood. “I’m a lucky man.”

The luckiest man in the universe,
he thought, remembering Sula’s words.

He wondered if Sula would say the same now.

The day after the Convocation left Zanshaa, the new Military Governor, Fleet Commander Pahn-ko, announced that, as a safety measure, martial law was to be imposed on all of Zanshaa and that the accelerator ring was to be completely evacuated within the next twenty-nine days. As the ring that circled the entire planet possessed an enormous internal volume that housed nearly eighty million citizens, this announcement created something of a logistical challenge.

It could have been worse, Sula thought. The interior spaces of the ring, enormous but lacking in charm, were the natural habitat of the poor. Yet the authorities hadn’t wanted a critical installation like the Zanshaa ring, with its port and military facilities, its administrative centers and its quantities of dangerous antimatter, to house unstable social elements, and these elements tended to lurk among the lowly. Rents had been artificially kept high and the inhabitants relentlessly middle-class, drawn to the ring by certain privileges, such as excellent educational facilities for their children and the chance to profit as middlemen on interstellar trade, or as contractors for military or civilian transport. Most of the ring was in fact empty, with no water, power, or heat available for anyone trying to live on the cheap in the uninhabited space.