Bronson rose, and she rose with him. "We would be obliged if you would begin at once. Tonight, we have an important dinner . . . . You will, of course, join us." He looked pained. "There is the matter of suitable clothing . . ."
Hadn't Dan Carmichael said the same thing to Ellie? No, Wyn didn't think she'd stop speaking to Ellie.
"When I earn it," Wyn said. She had a sudden crazed vision of stripping open the seams of her faithful green bag, extricating the pearls she had sewed within it, and wearing them with the coverall that was the convict's badge.
He flinched. "Consider it a condition of employment. You must appear . . . presentable. One of the Hamiltons will be there."
Well, thank you, sir! She was a Baker; of course, she was presentable. Then she thought about what else his statement might mean. She intended to teach. But there was always that other way. Marry one's way up and out.
At her age?
Why not even that? After all, when Great-Aunt Phoebe had gotten thrown out of China, she'd come back to Boston, and she'd married (which branch of the family was it?) . . . But Bronson was waiting for her reply. Wyn copied Ellie's, even to the downcast look and the breath held long enough to let her blush.
Decent clothes, fabrics that didn't chafe. And chances to stop being "the weak." She could hope. It was dignified to hope.
Count no man happy until you have seen the hour of his death. She recalled the old caution from Herodotus.
But don't write him off till then either. Or her.
Bronson escorted her through the Processing Center, and onto the launch bound for Castell City. A light snow was falling, and the fresh air filled her with new hope as she gazed at the huge, feline primary reflected in the water. When the launch docked, Bronson made half the dockyard stare by handing her, dressed as she was in convict's gray, down from the boat. She nodded thanks, then followed him out into her future.
"And the town being now strongly besieged, there being also within some that practiced to have it given up, they yielded themselves to the discretion of the Athenians, who slew all the men of military age, made slaves of the women and children, and inhabited the place with a colony sent thither afterwards of five hundred men on their own." (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, translated by Thomas Hobbes, University of Chicago Press, Book 6, p. 372.)
Yuri Ilyich Kronov scowled as he slapped the wet snow from his coat and hat and hung them, sodden, on the rack by the radiator. Moscow was a misery of slushy wet snow, and his office, like every building in Russia during the winter, was an oven. By the time his coat and hat were dry, he was perspiring freely, and had stripped down to shirtsleeves.
Kronov was a clerk in the Moscow branch of the Bureau of Relocation, whose offices looked across Red Square to Saint Basil's Cathedral. Today the cobblestones of the square were covered in a gray-black soup of half-melted snow and half-dissolved banners and leaflets. Another Russian Nationalist rally had been staged without permission two days ago, and the sweeper trucks were Waiting for the snowplows, who were wailing for the sweepers, both thus ensuring that nothing interfered with their drivers' vodka intakes. Kronov sighed. He wondered when it had all started going to shit.
Kronov's musings ceased with the abrupt rattling that shot through the building's heating pipes like machine gun fire. He took his hammer from the desk drawer and was crossing the room to administer the only repairs he knew when the door opened.
"Good morning, Yuri Ilyich." Genadi Ivorovich Kirichenko bustled in with a new armload of papers for him. Kirichenko was Kronov's supervisor, a CoDo representative from the Ukraine, and Kronor detested him. Kirichenko was a party apparatchik without peer, unofficially a self-made millionaire, and only too willing to talk about both to anyone who'd listen. It was an open secret that he'd bought his seat on the CoDominium council.
"Good morning, Genadi Ivorovich." Kronov looked at the hammer in his hand, idly considered planting it in Kirichenko's forehead, then decided it wasn't worth the aggravation it would bring him. Almost, but not quite.
"Had quite a round-up over the weekend, old man," Kirichenko said, and Kronov winced. Educated at Oxford, Kirichenko affected English expressions in Russian. He wore French shoes, German suits, and American cologne, and complimented himself on his international good taste. In short, he was a thoroughgoing boor.
Oblivious to Kronov's stony silence, Kirichenko went on: "Two or three hundred of those Russian Nationalist chaps rounded up in St. Petersburg." Kirichenko pronounced it "chee-yeps." "Moved them down south last night to the holding facility at Riga."
Kronov's head shot up. "Riga? That's in Latvia. Why weren't they sent to the detention center here in Moscow?" He immediately regretted his tone. Privately, Kronov was a staunch supporter of the Russian Nationalists, but that support had to be very private, indeed. The Pamyat movement, fiercely pro-Russian, nationalist and openly racist, was an embarrassment to the Soviet hard-liners who so fanatically supported the CoDominium. It was thus as strictly censured in Russia as was the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Only scientific research institutions were more closely monitored.
Kirichenko shrugged. "No room. The one here in Moscow is full up. Besides, what difference does it make? Their kind all wind up deported in the end, anyway."
Kronov's paranoia put deeper meanings into Kirichenko's tone, and he too shrugged in dismissal. "Of course. Just seems inefficient to me. How are we to cycle them through for deportation when they spread them out like that?"
Kirichenko beamed. "Afraid of a little hard work, Yuri Ilyich? That's no way to get to the top, mate." Kirichenko's mangled British idioms were becoming unbearable, and his use of Kronov's patronymic was entirely too familiar, but Kronov indicated no offense.
"Tell you what," Kirichenko said, putting the files on Kronov's desk. "Here's the paperwork; consolidate the names, and ship the deportees anywhere you like. Just be sure to maintain the dispersal ratios, and you can take the rest of the day off."
Kronov looked up over the rims of his spectacles at Kirichenko's departing smile, wave, and inevitable "Cheerio." The crack about taking the day off was an insult to Kronov's intelligence. The task as given would take Kronov the better part of twelve hours, and Kirichenko knew it. CoDo dispersal ratios were designed to ensure that not too many forced deportees of the same political stripe went to the same world. A mob with common cause was trouble anywhere.
But in practice, BuReloc's human cargo was moved with no regard whatsoever for the dispersal ratios. Only when there were special instructions, like this, which pertained to particular groups, like the Russian Nationalists, were the ratios taken seriously. Kirichenko had just saddled Kronov with the most onerous task available at BuReloc's Moscow desk.
Miserable Ukrainian pig. Kronov could scarcely keep from grinding his teeth. If the Pamyat has its way, he'll be back where he and the others like him belong: grubbing potatoes and begging crumbs from Russia's table. Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians; all those worthless hangers-on who enjoyed the protection of Soviet Russia for decades, then tried turning their backs on her when the Dark '90s hit us and shook things up so badly for a while.
Uncharacteristically, Kronov had a flash of insight. He turned to the ancient Soviet-made Agat desktop computer and waited while it accessed its files with agonizing slowness. Deportee lists were exceedingly detailed and very well-documented, a legacy from the vast amounts of CIA, NSA, GRU, and KGB staff workers BuReloc had inherited. With a grinding rattle and a loud crunch, the Agat produced a spreadsheet screen showing deportation figures sorted by nationality and destination.
Now, let's see, Kronov thought (generations of surveillance had bred out any Soviet citizen's capacity for talking to themselves aloud when alone). A nice out-of-the-way place, with a lot of Ukrainians. He thought about the treatment his nationalistic countrymen would be getting in Riga, and shrugged. Even Latvians would do, I suppose. In the end, he decided on Estonians, whom he didn't like any better than Lithuanians or Latvians.
The place was a large Estonian colony on a harsh little moon called Haven. Kronov snorted; they'd named their area "Tallinn," worked hard, and had begun coaxing decent farm land from the alien soil. So much the better.
Well, let's see how they like having a few thousand Russian patriots for neighbors, Kronov thought with grim satisfaction as he began the paperwork.
Kirichenko's instructions regarding the dispersal ratios could go, along with Kirichenko, straight to hell. If confronted, Kronov would claim that he'd taken those instructions no more seriously than Kirichenko's obvious jest of taking the rest of the day off. Or that, had Kirichenko been serious about the holiday, he'd obviously intended Kronov to process the work in the most expedient way possible and then go home.
With any luck, Kirichenko himself. will be censured for sloppiness, Kronov considered, then indulged himself in the pleasant fantasy of processing Kirichenko's unplanned and permanent vacation. It helped to pass the time.
It was midnight before he'd finished, but he was tired only with the fatigue of a man finishing a job well done.
Kronov turned off the lights in his office, putting on his coat as he closed the door and headed for the elevator.
Kronov thought about the Russian Nationalists-his Nationalists-arriving in the Tallinn Valley, finding all that good farm land prepared and ready for them by the unwitting Estonians. Then, naturally, subjugating those Estonians, and establishing a more natural order to things on that world, at least. Unconsciously, he shrugged.
There can be no other outcome. We Russians are, by definition, rulers of other, lesser peoples.
The elevator had arrived, and he took it down to the street. The weather had cleared, and Kronov looked up at the brilliantly starlit sky.
Too bad it couldn't have been Ukrainians, he reflected.
But Estonians would have to do. It changed nothing. Russians were Russians, Balts were Balts, and that was that.
HANG TOGETHER
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
Anton P?ts awoke in darkness. He had gone to bed in darkness, with neither Byers' Star nor Cat's Eye in the sky. He would go to bed in darkness again, for this stretch of truenight lasted more than forty hours.
His heart thudded in his chest as he rose. The Tallinn where he had grown up was by the sea. Tallinn Town, in what the Estonian departees who'd founded the place had named the Tallinn Valley in memory of their lost home, was at the equivalent of about 2,500 meters. He would never be used to thin thin air, or to the unrelenting cold that pierced a man's bones like an awl. Tallinn, the real Tallinn, had had winter, yes, but it had known summer, too. In the Tallinn Valley, it was always November.
His wife and daughters and son-in-law still lay snoring in the big communal bed, huddled together for warmth. He let them sleep. He pulled on his boots and a wool cap, then rubbed his hands, the gnarled hands of a man who had fought the land for years with only hand tools as weapons. The heat the rubbing yielded was faint and fleeting. He cherished it anyhow.
A guttering tallow dip gave just enough blood-colored light to let him make his way to the door without tripping over the shoes that lay everywhere. He went outside. The wind nipped at his cheeks above the border of his bushy brown beard, now heavily streaked with gray. Even the patterns the stars scrawled across the sky were meaningless to him. No one had ever bothered naming Haven's constellations, and without names they had no power. The stars were lost to him and his anyway, lost forever.
In front of his wood cabin stood a pole, cut from as tall and straight a tennis-fruit tree as he'd found after long searching. At the top of the pole fluttered a large flag, a horizontal tricolor of blue, black, and white. He took his cap off to it, as he did every time he went outside. Though he was light-years from Earth, he would not let the idea of Estonia die in his heart.
Not that Tallinn Town is much like the true Tallinn, he thought with more bitterness than he usually felt after close to two decades on Haven. Here were no stone towers, no medieval walls, no jutting spire to mark St. Olaf's great church. Here were only cabins much like his own, and unending labor to harvest enough oats and barley and rye and vegetables to keep people and animals going from one day to the next.
His gaze traveled over the low rooftops toward another pole, even taller than his. In the darkness he could not really see it, could not see the banner that flew from it, but he knew they were there.