War World X: Takeover (63 page)
Voorhees nodded. “Yes. Quite right, Aishya. We shall have to think of something to call them….”
Cavor stiffened. “Look. The Supreme Chairman of the CoDominium is talking to the Royce girl. Getting his picture taken with her too, I see.”
“And the American Secretary of State is right there with them,” Broome added, smiling. “I wonder what they are promising her? Golden apples, perhaps?”
“The world, no doubt.” Cavor said.
“But which one?” Broome asked lightly, and they all laughed.
“If I were her,” Voorhees said, “I should hold out for the golden apples. I don’t think the other offer will amount to much in the long run.”
MERITOCRACY
Earth, Olympic Village, Brazil: 2082 A.D.
Despite having grown up on a farm and making many trips with her parents to Market Days in Castell City, Becca thought she had never seen so much food in one place at one time in all her sixteen years.
In the past year of schooling and training for Haven’s Olympic team, Becca had gained seven pounds and an inch of height, by the Church’s Old Standard measurements.
She was neither distracted nor tempted by the many young men who worked so hard to impress the young girl from the colony moon no one had ever heard of.
She was, however, very distracted by the food.
Becca was frowning at a miniscule ear of corn, wondering why on earth anyone on Earth—hungry, hungry Earth—would ever bother with growing such a nonsensical waste of effort. She shrugged, popped it in her mouth and reached for a strawberry.
“Those won’t mix well,” a voice at her shoulder warned.
Becca turned to see a tall man about her father’s age smiling at her. He wore a steel-grey suit and a deep red tie. Medium brown hair and steel-rimmed glasses completed the image she had seen on so many newspads: Mikhail Utkin, the Supreme Chairman of the CoDominium, himself.
Becca had stopped with the strawberry halfway to her mouth and realized she was doing a fair interpretation of one of the family’s muskylopes: Staring, slack-jawed, unblinking and just about to make a sound that would come out like something between a cow’s low and a snore.
Utkin smiled and put an arm around her shoulders, turning them both to smile for a conveniently close photographer.
“Smile, Miss Royce,” another voice said. Becca saw he was equally well-dressed, sporting a pin in his lapel that was a perfect miniature replica of the flag of the United States. “We have lots to talk about.”
And talk they did, until an ever-growing crowd of news people began to press in on them all and Becca actually managed to break away into the crowd of athletes and some semblance of anonymity. She never noticed the three members of the serving staff who had culled her from the photographers and the squabbling statesmen. The Sauron waiters had culled her from the herd as artfully as wolves isolating a young elk calf.
Becca found herself in a mix of young men and women closer to her own age. All fit, all glowing with vibrant good health, and all of them apparently happy to see her.
“Hey, it’s the golden girl,” one of the girls said, smiling. Her jersey showed she was an athlete from the American-sponsored colony of Tabletop. Becca thought she was the most exotic creature she’d ever seen. Golden-hued skin, bow-shaped lips and black eyes that actually slanted, like a cat’s! All framed by hair so straight and black it might have been painted on.
The girl held out her hand. “I’m Bao-Yu Colson,” the girl announced. “Equestrian, Tabletop.”
“Becca Royce,” she said, shaking hands. “Um, Track and Field, Haven.” The others had formed a semi-circle and regarded her with expressions ranging from polite interest to positively grim resolve, though all had smiled or laughed when she had told them her name and events.
“True enough, Becca,” a boy in New Hibernia colors asserted with a grin, “We
all
know
your
events!” he too offered his hand, though he’d been one of those whose expression showed that he was somewhat wary of meeting her. “Bruce Ede, Boxing, New Hibernia.
Och
, and I am going to be in
big
trouble when my girlfriend finds out I spoke to you. Ye’re nae exactly her favorite person in the ’verse right now.”
Becca smiled at his funny accent; all his
r’s
sounded like little motorboat engines, but his smile was warm, his handshake was just enough beyond brotherly to be flattering and his eyes were very, very blue.
“Sara’s not your girlfriend, Bruce; you’ve only known each other for three days and after the games end next week you’ll probably never see each other again.” A lanky young man with ebony skin and golden eyes clarified Bruce’s relationship status, much to the other’s dismay. “I’m Ronnie Nwosu; Ronnie’s short for Badrani. I’m on the Panafka swim team.”
And so it went ’round the circle of athletes, only two of whom were competing in Women’s Track and Field. Not surprisingly, these gave Becca the coolest reception, but in a few minutes, both had warmed up to her, as well.
One of them was a pretty girl with short, dark hair and eyes like old ice, a Ukrainian girl named Illyana Volkova who was competing for the CoDominium. She said she was relieved that her standing had not put her up against Becca in any events, but Becca noticed that Illyana’s nails were raw and bitten down to the quick.
As she spoke with and learned about her fellow athletes, Becca remembered a story from Sunday school when she was a child. It was about a little boy with a voice so beautiful the other children resented him for it. The boy wanted friends so badly he stopped singing in church, lowering his voice more and more each week until finally he was only mouthing the words. One day all the other children were sick and the Priest asked him to sing, only to find he had been silent too long, and the gift he once had was gone forever by his failure to use it. ’Those who excel at anything must accept the responsibility to do so,’ the lesson ran. ‘An aria is not meant for a chorus.’
Becca reflected that as friendly, as kind, as good as all these people were, above all else they were here to win. Each was the very best their country or their world had to offer, and each felt the overwhelming burden of their obligation to their country or world to excel. It made her feel humble and proud at the same time.
They talked about home, friends they had made, plans for life after the games. Bruce Ede’s ‘girlfriend’ was from Tabletop; she was the girl who had come in a distant second behind Becca in the Women’s 100meter. She arrived a few minutes later and, despite Bruce’s misgivings, hugged Becca warmly. “God, you’re fast!” she said, and nothing more was said of the race.
And so the evening passed, pleasantly, in good spirits. On the field, in shared events, these were all mortal foes, but they could never be enemies. Whatever the differences of their nations or colonies, the enemies for these young people were a missed step, an off-stroke, a hundredth-of-a-second miscalculation, and always the ever-present specter of a crippling, or even deadly, injury.
They spoke of how short life was, feeling themselves very wise and lucky and immortal. The oldest among them was nineteen.
Around them, the wait staff collected glasses, and napkins, and unfinished bites of food. Occasionally one would offer a comb to a preening young man, or deftly pluck a strand of hair from a girl’s jersey. None of the athletes noticed any of the wait staff. Most of them were, for all intents and purposes, invisible.
All of them were Saurons.
ETHNOCRACY
Sauron, Autonomy Day: 2112 A.D.
“Citizens of Sauron; today we celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of our entry into the community of independent nations as a free and autonomous world, and a full member of the CoDominium Assembly.
“Our independence was not won in battle. We were not cast out from colonial forebears. We did not tear asunder the bonds of kinship, of culture, of loyalty from the nation which first sponsored our struggling colony here on Sauron, or from the Home World of Earth which supported us as we grew to our own maturity.
“No, we did not gain this state through violence; rather we have earned our place in this universe by the fruit of our own labors. We have worked to make our world wealthy. We have strived to make our culture rich. We have suffered to make our people safe. And we have dreamed, to make all our efforts worthwhile.
“It has been nine years since the Great Tragedy that devastated the Home World in a nuclear fire of wasted ambition and petty, nationalistic squabbles. We of Sauron are all descended from that Home World, and while we forever grieve for the loss of Earth, we resolve too that we shall never embrace the twin follies that destroyed her; provincialist nationalism coupled with an unwillingness to see the greater destiny that awaits the human race in the vast expanses of the galaxy.”
Voorhees was sitting in the back of a diplomatic limousine, listening to a recording of the Autonomy Day speech by First Citizen Kallas of Sauron.
Not a bad speech,
he thought,
although it is a terrible name for a holiday. And whatever speechwriter came up with that
“provincialist nationalism
” phrase should be sterilized.
Contrary to the First Citizen’s avowal, Voorhees did not, in fact, grieve over Earth’s fate. On the one hand, he felt such grieving would be hypocritical; his own agents’ role in supporting the Russo-American nationalist groups had certainly been part of America and Russia collapsing into the nuclear war that had rendered large portions of the Earth a poisonous, mass grave. And, while unfortunate, Voorhees did not consider the ‘Great Tragedy’ either especially great nor even particularly tragic; extinction was a part of life, after all. It was merely an example of what one of his professors had described as “evolution in action”.
In any case, today Voorhees had a flight to catch.
He had wanted to make this journey for some time, but he had been simply overwhelmed with work, especially in the last four years, since the Exodus of the CoDominium Fleet from Earth. Sauron had received millions of survivors, all of whom required screening and approval for—or rejection of—asylum on Sauron.
Sauron had dutifully accepted its quota of Earth refugees; almost none of whom met Sauron’s standards of genetic acceptability.
However, sterilization was absurdly easy to implement and even easier to blame on the refugees. They had simply been exposed too long to the increased levels of radiation on Earth; such a shame, Sauron offers her condolences, etcetera.
With the bulk of that work behind him, Voorhees had finally decided to take the time to book the many inconvenient Alderson Jumps it would require to reach the little backwater moon where lived the Mother of his Atalanta; who was destined also to be, in many ways, the Mother of Sauron’s Supermen.
He wanted to tell her many things, about his triumphs, about her part in them. She who had been the only willing participant in the Project that he had re-named because of her daughter.
Because of
our
daughter
, he amended.
He had lied about Becca Royce being an infertile mutation. It was the only way to allow her to return safely to her mother on Haven.
Now, after more than fifty years, Voorhees too would finally return to Haven, to see the only two women that had ever mattered to him.
Only to find he had come too late.
Haven, Royce Farm: 2113 A.D.
Becca Royce Jeffries Parmenter held the last note of her mother’s favorite hymn as the voices of the other mourners faded into silence. Then Becca, too, finished the measure, and released her mother’s spirit to join the great song of the Universe.
Becca’s sons and daughter, along with her grandchildren, stood on either side of her as the Church elders filed by to tender their condolences and offer their respects. They were followed by friends and neighbors, a few tradesmen from the town of Redemption, but no one who had to travel more than a few miles.
Becca didn’t blame them. Nobody traveled very far from home, anymore. Things were very bad on Haven, these days. Earth was dead, and the CoDominium was overextended everywhere, trying to maintain some cohesion among worlds which had overnight gone from colonies to the sole remaining preserves of the human species. Across the human-inhabited universe, people withdrew, retrenched, and awaited the storm they feared might come and destroy them any moment.
Which was why she was surprised to see a mourner she did not recognize, standing by the bier after everyone else had left.
“Do you know that man, Mother?” her daughter Bao-Yu asked. Bao-Yu Jeffries was curvaceous, blonde and blue-eyed; the physical antithesis of her namesake, a friend of her mother’s who had died in a Jump Catastrophe over thirty years before.
“I do not,” Becca admitted. The mourner was looking calmly at Becca, but had not stirred from his place by the gravesite. “But I believe I will go and say hello.”
Becca was something of a local legend. She had buried two husbands—the second only last year—and today, her remaining parent. She was a successful rancher and had been Professor of Veterinary Medicine at Castell University until it had closed four years ago. At fifty-seven and a mother of four, she looked no older than thirty and was still regarded as a great beauty; there were several unabashed suitors who were checking off days on their calendars until they could approach her at a respectable distance in time from her latest bereavement.
“Good trueday to you, sir,” Becca addressed the man. “Were you a friend of my parents?”
The man standing before her was tall and slender, obviously very athletic in his youth and still appeared quite vital despite a cane he apparently needed, if only at intervals. He looked to be in his early seventies, perhaps a bit older, but Becca knew from her own experience that such appearances could be deceiving.
The man nodded. “In a way. I knew your mother when she studied at the University.” He stepped closer to Becca and extended his hand. “My name is Larson Voorhees.”
