Vasily's Carpet
3 September 199_
My Darling Daughter,
I know the recruiters have contacted you, and that you are considering entering the game. I know because of the questions you asked me this holiday. "How did you meet Daddy?" was artless and cute when you were five. At twenty, it takes on new meaning.
Of course, they want you for your education and your facility with languages, but there is also the matter of your pedigree. I don't think, in all these years of your training, that anybody has explained this to you. I will do so now, with more detail than my usual "I met Daddy in Chicago.”
I tried to teach you what I know about the next world, and the things that have been proved necessary for getting there. I have also given you basic skills for living in this world, in the civilized, sunlit world, where you have, for now, the privilege of going to school.
The others have taught you, and taught you well, all the necessary family survival skills for the black world, where secrets are both weapons and currency. Of course, these skills do not merely protect you in our world; they also draw you into it.
Heredity counts for nothing in the face of free will. Your inheritance is merely another gift to be used or rejected. But the recruiters think they want you for it. Even if whatever genetic combination you are were immaterial to them, they would want you for your family connections. These remain, no matter what or who you are. There are people who love you, and, the recruiters believe, will do anything for you. I hope to give you some idea of what 'anything' can be — another subject where your training has been vague.
In writing this, I had to step back in time within myself. Memories tend to be two-dimensional, black and white newsreels without emotion, but what I have to tell you is about an event in my life that involved all of me. I've tried to tell it so that you will not only understand, but will also feel a little of what I felt then, which, I think, is the principal intent of any writing. I have the advantage of distance in time so that I can be more objective than I could have been twenty years ago, but your father was my beloved, remember, and I miss him still.
No document can fully reveal the living man, despite the faith bureaucrats may place in their reports. Still, your recruiters don't have any of this in their files, nor should they.
I did try not to, but I know that I've allowed a few words of advice to creep in here and there, and one or two lectures. I am a mother. I cannot resist giving advice. Here's the first piece of it, no doubt unnecessary: Do destroy this when you've finished, won't you, Dear?
Your loving mother,
Alexandra Feodorovna
CHAPTER TWO