The Devil and Deep Space (12 page)

At the same time, this man had not truly done much of what Andrej found to blame. His father had been an officer in mere Security, and at a time when Inquiry had been informal and field expedient, bearing no discernible relation to the Protocols in their current form. His father could have no conception of what Andrej’s life had been like with Captain Lowden as his commanding officer.

This was a Dolgorukij father in the presence of a wayward son, and as much as Andrej regretted the shape into which his father had forced his life, there was no sense in reproaching a man for what he had no idea that he had done.

In the end, it wasn’t his father’s fault at all.

He could at any point have turned his back and stepped away from duty and obedience that required he execute sin and practice atrocity. No one had forced him to his duty but his own will to be dutiful. He had not in all of this time turned his back and said no, because he had not had the courage to shame his father and distress his mother.

Was that truly adequate an excuse to cover the torture and murder of feeling creatures?

Having submitted to such crimes to keep the pride of his family from stain and reproach, was he now going to shame his father in front of so many of the household by refusing the basic duty of a child in the presence of its father?

It was the act of a coward to blame another for something that was not truly their fault but one’s own.

Finally Andrej’s knees began to bend. He lowered his head to show his father the white of the back of the neck above the collar. Maybe it had taken all these years for Andrej to grasp the idea that he did not have to be a filial son, but so long as he was here and had committed such horrors in the name of filial piety and the Judicial order, it would be mean–spirited of him to deny his father the respect that should naturally be between father and son.

It was not his father’s fault.

His father reached out to him as Andrej started to kneel and prevented him from kneeling, drawing Andrej to him instead, to be embraced both gently and fiercely.

His father seemed to be weeping, and the notion sent Andrej into a panic that he didn’t really understand. So many people he had hurt so far beyond the power of tears to express, or cries, or screaming. Why should one man’s purely emotional grief distress him so?

“Please, sir.”

His father relaxed his grip on Andrej the moment Andrej spoke, but he didn’t let go of him. Andrej stood in his father’s embrace in an agony of confusion and embarrassment; too much happening too quickly between heart and mind for Andrej to be able to make sense of it.

“Please, sir, don’t distress yourself. I have been wayward and unfilial, but I am your child still.” And yet he was going to go from here to the Matredonat, where he would once again defy his father and insult his mother by acting as though he were an autonomous person rather than some body’s child.

His father tightened his arms around Andrej one last time, then let him go. “And yet Cousin Stanoczk has hinted, son Andrej. You know that you cannot have my blessing for your intended actions.”

What was worse, his father apparently knew what he meant to do. How had Cousin Stanoczk come by the knowledge?

Was there ever any knowing, with Malcontents?

He’d spoken to a priest on their way out of Port Burkhayden, in order to be sure of the correct and complete ritual. That was perfectly true. He just hadn’t expected it to get back to his father, and for the Malcontent to have transmitted the information made Andrej wonder what the Malcontent had in mind.

“I am bound for four years more at least, sir, and my ship of assignment has only recently lost two of its officers, even though we are not actively engaged.” One of whom he had himself murdered, but he wasn’t going to trouble his father with that surely trivial piece of information. And he had no idea whether the death of Cowil Brem was public knowledge as yet. “I must think of my son.”

“As I of mine.” Well, the Koscuisko prince had more than one son, and they both knew that. But Andrej was the oldest of Alexie Slijanevitch’s male children; that meant he counted for more than the rest of his brothers taken together. “And I have for too many years played Sanfijer to your Scathijin, son Andrej. I don’t pretend that Scathijin did not bring the most part of his grief upon himself. But Sanfijer had no one but himself to reproach for the fact that he had not been more natural a parent.”

Never, never, never had Andrej ever imagined that it could be possible for his father to say such a thing to him. The surprise betrayed him to himself, and the frustrated affection and aggrieved resentment of the years brought tears to his eyes.

“I do not ask for your forgiveness, sir, as I do not deserve it.” He was become unfilial. He would remain so. His father forgave it, even before the fact. “But to have your forgiveness for my fault. It would be almost as good.”

It was a fault only in the context of their culture. Andrej had just realized he was no longer fully part of it; but his family was. His son would be raised here on Azanry, and have to find a way to fit himself into the society to which Andrej had been bred and born. It seemed the traditions of his ancestors had power over him that he had not begun to suspect.

“I bless thee as my unfilial son Andrej,” Alexie Slijanevitch said, very solemnly, but there was the unmistakable softness of a loving parental heart within and around the words. “That is to say, my child, who has been a man in the eyes of the greater government of this Jurisdiction for these years past. Your father’s blessing on your misguided, ill–advised, self–willed, and all too clearly Koscuisko head, son Andrej, with a full heart I grant it.”

Something inside Andrej’s chest seemed to crack open, flooding his body with grateful warmth. He bowed over his father’s hand to kiss the family seal that Alexie Slijanevitch wore on his right hand; and his father embraced him once again, and held him close for a long moment as Andrej struggled for control of his emotions.

“Now. I have already violated the terms of our agreement, son Andrej. We know you are on your way to the Matredonat.” His father put Andrej away from him at arm’s length and looked him in the eye, lovingly. “You will perhaps forgive us in turn for having wanted too badly just to see you. Go and kiss the hem of your mother’s apron, and come to us at Chelatring Side when the Autocrat’s Proxy arrives.”

It was almost unfair.

He was to have his father’s forgiveness and his mother’s understanding after all, and it was all only now. Only now that he was under some mysterious and undefined sentence of death, only now that he had already made contract with Fleet for another four years.

If he had known that his father would have softened so much toward him as to be able to cite the story of the filial son wrongly accused — the tragedy of Scathijin the Self–Minded — he might not have done it. He might have come home and trusted his parents’ change of heart to keep him safe from the threat of Chilleau Judiciary.

With a full heart Andrej hurried through the tall grass of the un–mown verge between the pavement of the airfield and the perimeter to see his mother, his head too full of wonder and amazement to have a thought to spare for anything but the moment.

###

They were too far away to hear what was being said, but what Stildyne could see was startling enough.

Koscuisko’s father.

Stildyne had only negative associations with the concept. His own father was a man he’d hardly thought twice about since the day he’d sworn to Fleet to get off–planet and away before the local authorities started to make inquiries. The chances of anybody really caring who had killed Stildyne’s father were vanishingly small, and the pitiful remains of Stildyne’s young sister were no more grievous a motive in the world that he had left than other wrongs his father had done.

He’d never embraced his father that he could ever remember, and had successfully avoided other sorts of physical contact from the day when he’d been old enough to hit back. His younger sister hadn’t had a chance. She’d never gotten quick and clever enough to escape. She hadn’t lived long enough.

And here Koscuisko bowed to his father.

Was about to kneel, if Stildyne read Koscuisko’s body language correctly, and he had studied Koscuisko’s body language with care and keen attention for years now. Koscuisko was embraced by his father, and bore it; then bowed over his father’s hand.

There was something wrong. There was something altered in the slope of Koscuisko’s shoulders, something alien and unknown creeping into Koscuisko’s body to make him a different man, one whom Stildyne did not recognize. What was it?

Koscuisko ran up the slope at a quick jog; the people between him and wherever he was going gave way to him, bowing, until he reached his goal.

Smish Smath had the best eyesight at distance, so Stildyne asked her, though he thought he knew the answer. “Who is that, Smath, can you tell?” He spoke quietly, moving his mouth as little as possible to preserve the appearance of waiting in respectful silence at attention rest.

After a moment, Smath answered. “Tallish woman compared to the women around her. Dark hair, fancy headdress. His Excellency takes her stirrup. Maybe what — kissing her knee?”

“Her apron,” Lek corrected, tolerantly. Lek didn’t have Smish’s keen sight, but he did have the advantage of knowing what went on between Dolgorukij. “He’d be kissing the hem of her apron. His mother. The sacred wife of the Koscuisko prince. A Flesonika princess, if I remember right. Old blood, in his Excellency’s family.”

Family. What a concept.

Koscuisko’s father mounted and turned his horse’s head, and the hunting party started to move. Koscuisko himself started to walk back to where Stildyne and the others were waiting for him; even mounted, the Koscuisko familial retainers backed the horses out of Koscuisko’s path rather than turn their backs on him. They all seemed so much alike, in a sense; the body types were similar and yet strange to Stildyne.

In the midst of that crowd of Dolgorukij, Koscuisko seemed strange to Stildyne, and the realization was an unpleasant one.

Andrej Koscuisko was his officer of assignment, a man whom Stildyne had trained on an almost daily basis for physical fitness and to improve on the fighting skills that Chief Samons — Koscuisko’s Chief of Security prior to his assignment to the
Ragnarok
— had so ably established in him. A man Stildyne had nursed through countless drunks and alcohol–induced psychotic episodes, dreams so vivid and horrible that they could not be dismissed as simple nightmares, agonies of mind and spirit that had sensitized Stildyne to the concept of guilt and sin and spiritual pain for the first time in his life.

This Andrej Koscuisko was none of those things. Koscuisko had been transformed from the man Stildyne knew and understood into a complete stranger, somebody’s son, a man with a community so alien and self–contained that Stildyne could not begin to reach out to him.

These people were Koscuisko’s family. All of these people were, in a sense. And here in the midst of his family, what need did Koscuisko have of Stildyne — or anybody?

Koscuisko walked down the grassy slope to rejoin them, but he didn’t look the same. His posture was different. Not even his face was truly familiar; he looked years younger than he had when they had landed, and his uniform did not seem to fit, somehow. It seemed wrong on him. It was the clothes that those other people wore that would be natural on this Koscuisko’s body; Stildyne had never even seen Koscuisko in anything but a uniform, or pieces of a uniform, or in no uniform at all.

Stildyne hated this.

He had anticipated Koscuisko’s re–absorption into his birth–culture; he had resigned himself to the probable fact of Koscuisko’s becoming so involved in personal business that he would have little time or attention to spare for his Security. But he had not realized that Koscuisko would become an alien to him, a man he could recognize only on a superficial level.

As painful as it was to be held at an arm’s length by his officer of assignment, it was worse than Stildyne had expected to realize that Koscuisko might be so far away from them in spirit once he had got home that there would be no reaching out at all to make or deny contact.

Koscuisko reached them, nodding to Stildyne to signal that they should all get back into the ground–car and get on with their business.

“Blessed or berated, your Excellency?” Lek asked. Stildyne was surprised that Lek spoke, but Koscuisko didn’t seem to be, so clearly it was something to do with the culture that Lek and Koscuisko had in common.

Koscuisko tilted his chin a bit, looking up into Lek’s face as Koscuisko climbed into the ground–car. “Blessed as well as I deserve, and a good bit better than that. My father says he will not Sanfijer my Scathijin. So it was much better than I had feared, even though the Malcontent has been talking.”

Lek could probably explain that to them all later. “Right,” Stildyne said, just to regain some illusion of control. “Let’s just go clear in–processing and be out of here, your Excellency, shall we?”

What was a scathijin, and how did one sanfijer, and why was that something that Koscuisko and Lek both seemed to understand was a good thing for fathers not to do to their sons?

This Koscuisko was a stranger to Stildyne. Having Koscuisko a stranger was almost like not having him at all; and unhappiness of a sort Stildyne had never felt possessed him, as they drove off to the airfield’s receiving station.

###

Cousin Ferinc sat in his secured observation station, watching through the heavy plate–glass window as the ground–car came across the tarmac toward the administration center where Koscuisko’s people would surrender custody of the courier ship, and have their purpose and presence here cleared and documented, by the grace and favor of the Autocrat.

There was no further sign of Koscuisko’s family; the hunting party was gone from view. Cousin Stanoczk — Ferinc’s reconciler — said that Ferinc was to come to Chelatring Side some day, to view the Gallery. Ferinc was hungry for it, for the chance glimpse he might have there of Koscuisko’s father and Koscuisko’s mother and the youngest of Koscuisko’s brothers, the barely twelve–year–old prince Nikolij. Nikosha. Koscuisko’s favorite brother, it was said. There was no love lost between Koscuisko and his brother Iosev who was the next eldest of the Koscuisko prince’s sons, and . . .