Michael Flynn - On the Razor’s Edge

“You’re too cynical,” the Fudir told him. “Méarana always said so. Ambitious Oschous may be, but there are safer ambitions than raising the red banner.”

And would Ekadrina fight so doggedly were she not equally fervent in her loyalty? asked the Silky Voice.

“The drivers of doggedness and bravery needn’t be devotion and conviction. Ekadrina and Epri are Korpsbrüder, trained together by Shadow Prime himself. She’s in it because Epri is in it, and Epri stayed loyal because Manlius did not…”

“And Dawshoo rebelled because Manlius did … Never mind. We get the picture.” Motives were complex and seldom known, even to the actor. Purposes were easier, and often could be teased out. Two men might conspire to murder a third: but one to protect himself, the other merely to rob him.

The inner door opened and a fourth magpie emerged. This one betrayed no emotion on noticing Donovan, and the young man tagged him as “enthusiasm unknown.” The other two magpies rose and the three left the room together, murmuring in low voices.

The paraperceptic did not look away from her work. Hands danced across touch screens, eyes scanned scrolling images on her goggles, information whispered in her ears. She spared a moment of her mouth. “He see you now,” she said with admirable concision.

The scarred man hesitated and waited for Two’s reaction to the hesitation.

“He wait.”

Donovan grinned at her. “What are you doing after work, babe ?”

The term of endearment was Terran, and unfamiliar to her; the essence of the question was not. “No ‘after work,’ me,” she told him. “You wish enter ‘jade gate pond,’ I multitask.” The face she turned to him was rendered beetlelike by the flickering data goggles, and she seemed suddenly a strange and alien thing.

Donovan recoiled, his joke gone sour in his mouth. He could imagine her busily manipulating multiple information streams even while she beat her chosen lover wet, and the pleasures of the latter would in no wise interfere with the efficiencies of the former. There was something in that which repelled him. One ought to take pleasure in one’s pleasures.

Gidula sat in a high-backed black padded chair at the far end of a long room. The carpeting was hard and durable, and woven in a tapestry of interlocking brightly colored lines against a sable background. The pattern reminded the Fudir of vines and creepers; the Sleuth, of mazes. The sable was shot through with silver threads, which lent it an odd sense of depth, as if the pattern comprised a catwalk above a deep and dimly lit cavern.

Crossing the room, Donovan made a play of walking carefully on the tapestry, as if he feared falling into the illusory sable pit.

“Really, Gesh,” Gidula said. “We know better, don’t we?” He gestured broadly with his left arm. “Please, sit.”

Gidula had no desk, as such. He sat within a nest of shelves and surfaces and glowing screens, some of which seemed permanent, some mobile, and some of which recessed into floor or ceiling as needed. At his word, a chair slid up from the floor, locking itself in place. Donovan made himselves comfortable and waited.

Gidula gestured with his right hand and a door slid open on the back wall to admit an androgynous servant bearing hot drinks on a wooden tray. The fey offered the drinks first to Donovan, who selected one at random, then to Gidula, who raised the second to his lips.

Donovan sipped from the steaming mug. If Gidula had wanted to poison him, he would have been poisoned while lying helpless in the autoclinic. The beverage was an infusion of some sort, with a hint of licorice. He blew on it to cool it.

“Why play the scatterbrain?” the Old One asked. “We brought you back to lead us, to lend your legendary name to our cause.”

“You brought me back to learn the entry into the Secret City.”

How better to lead us, Gidula’s shrug proclaimed, than to lead us to victory? But Donovan had long decided that the last thing a triumvirate wanted was a fourth man.

“Naturally, your infirmity dismayed us and we had almost given up hope you would recover your wits. Oschous promised to revive you, and Olafsdottr went with him to assist. And it is clear from your actions at the Battle of the Warehouse that they succeeded. Surely,” and here Gidula’s voice took on a note of disapproval, “surely the continued pretense does not mean that Geshler Padaborn has gone shy!”

The scarred man pondered his reply. If Gidula had hoped for a broken Padaborn, what would he do when faced with a whole? Ravn Olafsdottr had advised him to act disintegrated, and it was clear now that in doing so she had betrayed her master. “You know you get scatterwit,” he said in the Terran patois. “Billy Chins tell him so.”

Gidula sighed. “Billy turned his coat and threw in with the loyalists. We thought he meant to dissuade us from recalling you. But no man can be impaired in the mind and still be standing after a battle with Ekadrina Sèanmazy.”

“What man unimpaired would engage her in first place? Besides, we were barely standing.”

“Barely is more than her other opponents have stood.”

“Ravn slain,” he said, “we see red; go berserk, fight like madman. Which,” he added in a different voice, “is appropriate, seeing as we are a madman. Perhaps facing prospect of certain death focus our minds most wondrously.”

Gidula said nothing for a moment. Then he crooked a finger and summoned the fey once more to his side to refresh his mug. This time, he took a deeper draft and set it on the waiting tray with a satisfied sigh. “You’ve hardly touched your drink,” he pointed out.

“I just woke up,” the Fudir said.

“It’s a stimulant. Tell me, Gesh: why will you not join us? It’s not for lack of inducements. Vengeance for what the Names did to you. The glory and honor of your name. Not even for Terra! I’m certain Oschous Dee took you to the mountaintop and showed you Terra. I’m disappointed.”

He really did sound disappointed—but the nature of that disappointment remained elusive. “True Terry-fella, me. But Oschous no Terry-man.”

Gidula invited details with his silence. So the Fudir recited the Terran rhyme:

“There be no fur-face foxes among the races of Terra.”

“Did Oschous claim to be a Terran? That surprises me. Dee Karnatika is generally more careful in his lies.”

The Pedant mulled over the conversation in the fox’s shipboard sanctum. No, Donovan decided, Oschous never had made that specific claim. The best lie is the one you induce your hearer to tell himself. “His promise was smoke. Terra can never be truly free,” Donovan said. “Not in the Triangles. She stands too near to Dao Chetty and Delpaff, to Old Eighty-two.

“Too close for one to escape domination by another. It requires only a would-be conqueror with enough swagger in his step—or enough steps in his swagger.”

“Would you rather it be Terra dominating the others, as in the ‘golden age’? I’m sure the Delpaffonis or the Eighty-seconds have other perspectives.”

Donovan sat forward in his chair. “Those with a stake in the status quo might feel some disquiet at the thought of change.”

“A great deal depends on the nature of the change, does it not? Most change is for the worse. Delpaff and Old Eighty-two—and a dozen other worlds beside—may chafe under Dao Chetty’s thumb, but they’d not exchange it for Terra’s. As for those worlds far from the centers of power—Henrietta, for example—they find the yoke endurable and the checkreins lightly held.”