Change of Command

  "If you arrange your beds so the tall plants don't shade the low ones, you'll get more yield," Becky was telling Raffaele. "See, you've got them crossways . . . if the plant rows went the other direction—"

  "Oh . . . well . . . look, Becky, why don't you tell me how it should be, and I'll draw a plot of it for next season's planting."

  "Fine—"

  Terry had gone upstairs to work on the bedrooms—although they'd slept last night, Ruth Ann had been very aware of the clutter and dust. The boys were at work in the front courtyard on simple furniture: rope-strung bunks to get them all up off the floor. When Ruth Ann looked out the tall dining room windows, she saw a crowd of men standing watching. It was backwards, men learning from boys, but it was right that the boys and men were together. She carefully ignored the two women wearing pants in the same group.

  By dinnertime that day, the shuttle had brought the rest of their things down from the spaceship, including the pop-up cots Lady Cecelia had bought. The whole house smelled different, and Ronnie had the expression Ruth Ann liked to see on the head of a household. Of course, he wasn't her husband—she kept reminding herself of that—but she did enjoy watching a man eat with relish.

  Cecelia left a few days later. Ruth Ann hardly noticed; she had her worktable in the expanded kitchen, and had also set up a summer stove outside, for preserving.

  "What we need is a school," Raffa said, watching the crowd around the stove as Shelley demonstrated jelly testing. "A really big kitchen, where everybody could come to learn cooking, and maybe a sewing room where they could learn sewing."

  "A weaving shed," Ruth Ann said. "That fabricator cloth is too harsh. And a really big bread oven."

  Raffa looked around. "This would almost work, if Ronnie and I moved into one of the smaller houses."

  "No," Ruth Ann said firmly. "Your husband's the governor; you need this house. We'll build one."

  More quickly than even she had hoped, the school went up. The engineering cubes Cecelia had brought, and the bundles of reinforcing whiskers, made it possible to pour solid walls quickly. One of the other colonists, who had been a hobby potter on her home world, found a lens of good clay in the riverbank, and knew how to make tiles.

  "Not really good ones yet," she admitted. "We don't have a kiln hot enough. But for starters, better than plain concrete or dirt." The school was the first building to have locally made tile floors.

  A proper school for proper women, with a kitchen in which they could all learn the way she had learned—from watching and doing and being knocked on the knuckles with a wooden spoon when they needed it. A big outdoor oven to handle dozens of loaves of bread at once. A weaving shed—she regretted the loss of the captive women, who had been such talented weavers, but Tertia Crockett—she used Anna now—was almost as good. Sunrooms for embroidery. Gardens for the children.

  The gardens for the children produced another benefit—everyone in the colony wanted their youngest children there, under Simplicity's gentle guidance, for part of the day. Raffaele brought her twins when she came to learn cooking, and the other women copied her. As Ruth Ann had suspected, Raffaele would never be more than a middling baker. Her hand was too heavy for pastry, and not firm enough for yeast dough, though both her pie crusts and bread were now at least edible. But the other women followed her lead, and the gardens were full of busy little children.

  Raffaele's twins, though—the twins gave Ruth Ann a funny feeling in the chest. Salomar, in particular, was all too familiar . . . she had seen that quirk of mouth, that shape of eyebrow and set of eye, before. She looked again and again at Raffaele and Ronnie, trying to trace in their faces the source of those details of Salomar's. What kept nagging at her had to be impossible. She had to be imagining it. Didn't she?

  She put her mind firmly back on the school. A few of the other former wives were being courted by men whose wives had died, but enough of the women wanted no part of remarriage that she was sure of enough teachers for years to come. Her daughters had suitors, too, the older ones.

  And her sons, about whose acceptance she had been so worried, were every one of them more expert at tool use than these city folks, for all that those men had taken courses and been passed as expert enough. They may've been, Ruth Ann thought, with the fancy electric tools they'd trained on, but few of them knew anything of unpowered tools.

  Everything from beds and tables to bowls poured out of the boys' workshop. Nobody minded that it was plain stuff, though one of the other colonists began making stains out of local plants to give the wood different tones of soft red and yellow. And nobody here minded if a few girls took up woodcrafting. All through the rest of that spring, and into this new world's long summer, Ruth Ann blessed the long series of chances that had brought them here.

  "I never thought nineteen women and a bunch of children could make this much difference," Ronnie said one hot afternoon. He'd taken to coming by to fetch the twins, and he often stopped to chat, leaning on one of the planters. "You've galvanized the colony, is what you've done. The extra supplies helped, but it's you, Ruth Ann, you and the rest of them, who've waked us up and gotten us moving."

  She glanced sideways at him, thinking that he hadn't learned it all yet, even so. Greatly daring, but also confident, she reached to the basket of hand tools. "While you're resting," she said, handing him a weeder and nodding to the planter he leaned on.

  He grinned at her. "You never do stop working, do you?"

  "You don't have to rush if you don't get behind," she pointed out. "Those stickery ones are the weeds."

  "Yes, ma'am." He grinned at her. "I'll learn in the end."

  "By the way," she said, finding it easier to bring this up when he was bending over the tangled growth, weeding. "Those twins of yours . . . I can't believe your Raffaele bore them—she's so tiny."

  Ronnie's ears turned redder. "She didn't," he said shortly. "They're adopted."

  "It doesn't matter to God," Ruth Ann said. "What it is, though—and I know I'm being presumptuous, but—that Salomar. He reminds me of someone."

  The back of Ronnie's neck went three shades darker, not counting the sunburn. "Who?" he asked, more coolly than Ruth Ann expected.

  "I'm thinking," Ruth Ann said, folding her needle away, because her hand had started shaking. "I'm thinking he minds me of my—of Mitch. And I'm thinking, if there's any reason he should mind me of Mitch, that you might be worrying that I'd notice. You've been awful good to us, and I don't want to worry you. So if—if it is that, what I'm thinking of, then—then I want you to know that I don't mind, and I'm glad to have the boy around. Both of them."

  Ronnie said nothing; his shoulders bunched, and the dirt flew.

  "I won't say any more," Ruth Ann said.

  "It's . . . all right." He turned around; his eyes were bright with unshed tears. "I—we didn't know you were coming, or—but— Oh, I'm making a mess of this, Raffa will kill me. But if you've guessed, you've guessed—"

  "I bore nine of that man's children; I know their stamp," Ruth Ann said. She said nothing of Peter's father, though she knew exactly who that red hair reminded her of.

  "Brun wanted a good home for them; she was afraid they might be stolen away and used against her."

  "You don't have to defend her to me," Ruth Ann said. She still could not understand a woman not clinging to her own flesh and blood, but she wasn't going to argue that now. If their mother had been a natural mother, she herself wouldn't have this chance. "You don't know what a blessing it is, to have those children here," she said. "I've worried and worried—that's the last bit of Mitch I'll ever see; I wanted to know the children were safe. Will Raffaele mind? I'm not going to interfere, I promise you."

  "She'll skin me, but she'll hug you," Ronnie said. "Ruth Ann—you are a very, very unusual lady."

  "I try to be a good woman," Ruth Ann said, but a bubble of delight rose and would not be denied. She stood up, and let her head fall back. "Praise God, you aren't angry with me for seeing what I
saw, and you won't keep me from him. I never thought to be happy again, and here I am happier than I've ever been."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BENIGNITY OF THE COMPASSIONATE HAND

  NUOVO VENITZA, SANTA LUZIA

  Confession, for a member of the Order of Swords who had been on a mission, must always be to a priest of the Order. Even so, there were things no one confessed, not if he wanted to live; the priests had the right—ecclesiastical and legal—to mete out punishment, including death.

  Hostite Fieddi knelt in silence, awaiting the priest's arrival, and thought about what he had to confess, and what he had to conceal. As a young man, he had found distinguishing between debriefing and confession very difficult, but now it was second nature.

  The soft chime rang; Hostite began the old, familiar ritual, "Forgive me . . ." Even as his voice continued the opening phrases, his mind was dividing, as sheep from goats, the truths he must repent from the other truths of which he must not repent, as long as he was a Swordmaster.

  "It has been a long time," the priest said.

  "I was on a mission," Hostite said. "To distant worlds."

  "Beyond the Church's dominion?" asked the priest.

  "Nothing is beyond the Church's dominion," Hostite said. "But this was far from any priest of the Order of Swords."

  "Ah. Go on then."

  Category by category, he laid his soul's burden out, the temptations acted upon and those merely dwelt upon in the mind, the orders followed which ought not to have been followed, the orders not followed which ought to have been followed. He was heartily sorry for them all, for the necessities which his duty placed upon his conscience, when he would—were he other than he was—have been happy to live in peace all his days, with no more to confess than a lustful glance at someone's daughter.

  "And have you any other sins . . . lust perhaps?"

  They always asked about lust, though by now they should know that his conditioning had destroyed that possibility. He answered as always, and as always received his penance in true submission of spirit. When he was too old to be of service, when the Master of the Order of Swords commanded, he would confess the last of his sins, and go to his death clean-hearted, no longer the Shadow of the dancers, but filled with light. So it had been promised him, and so he believed.

  There was no other life but this possible, and no other future to which he belonged.

  "Hostite—!" The Master's call brought him out of the reverie which a long penance produced.

  "Milord." Hostite rose smoothly from his knees and turned.

  "The Chairman would like an expansion of your report on the situation in the Familias."

  "Milord."

  "We will be granted an audience this afternoon. I will accompany you, as will Iagin Persius." Persius, another who had recently completed a mission in the Familias. Hostite was elder by three years, but he knew Persius as a competent agent. "You will report to the Order's Clothier for a fitting now."

  "Yes, milord." Hostite bowed; the Master withdrew from the chapel, and Hostite made his way to the storerooms in which the Order kept all the costumes its members might need. He did not dwell upon the afternoon's meeting. Rumor had many things to say about audiences with the Chairman, but Hostite had been there before, and in any case feared nothing, including death.

  The costume appropriate for a Swordmaster in this instance was simple enough. The bodysuit of black stretch-knit fit like skin and incidentally left no space for hidden weapons. The scarlet velvet cap matched scarlet velvet slippers, and denoted his Swordmaster rank. Looped through the shoulder epaulets were cords of gold, green, and red silk—the level of experience, the number of assassinations domestic and foreign, the whole story of his career, if one knew how to read it—and the Chairman certainly did. As he was checking the fit of the slippers, Iagin Persius came in. He nodded but did not speak. Hostite nodded in return. They could not discuss their missions until after the report to the Chairman, lest they be suspected of colluding in some error.

  From then until lunch, Hostite reviewed his debriefing cube, correcting minor errors in transcription with a coded datawand; four seats down, Persius was doing the same thing. At lunch, they ate at different tables in the Order mess; Hostite restricted himself, as his penance required, to clear soup and water with a lump of "sinners' bread"—a hard, sour, unleavened lump that offered just enough nourishment to ensure that the penitent could perform any necessary duty.

  Outside the Chairman's office, the Master of the Order of Swords handed his red cut-velvet cloak to the gray-uniformed guards, and unbuckled his sword belt. Hostite wondered why the Master was required to wear full dress, and then relinquish the cloak and swords, but he pushed the question aside. Tradition required it, that was all. He and Persius doffed their velvet caps for inspection, then put them back on.

  The Chairman sat behind his great black marble desk, his face reflected dimly in its gleaming surface. On either side, his personal guards.

  "Fieddi, you were sent to see the Barracloughs . . . what, then, did you find?"

  Hostite bowed, then began his recital, carefully gazing at the bronze plaque on the wall behind the Chairman's head. "This was my third visit to the Barraclough senior branch, in the persona of a sabre-dance troupe's visiting instructor. On my fourth day there, the assassination of Lord Thornbuckle was reported. The dance troupe is comprised of locals, though they have been trained by Swordmasters; their reactions indicated that they were aware of friction between Lord Thornbuckle and his younger brother, and between Thornbuckle and certain Families: the Conselline-Morrelline Sept in particular."

  "Did you have speech with family members?"

  "I gave private lessons to six family members while there, including Stefan, the present head of Family; Mieran his wife; Rudolf and James, his sons; Katarin his daughter; and Viola, his niece. Stefan spoke only of the art of fence; he is proficient in three weapons, but wishes to become expert. He asked advice on hiring a permanent master; this request had been anticipated by the Master, and I recommended Alain Detours, as instructed. Mieran expressed the opinion that Lord Thornbuckle's death was a dreadful nuisance, but that he had brought it on himself, and she hoped that the New Texan assassins would be satisfied with one death."

  "How does she fence?" asked the Chairman.

  "With that same wit," Hostite answered. "She answers a threat well enough, but always directly. She cannot see beyond the next thrust. Most women of the Seated Families are more astute."

  "And the others?"

  "Rudolf prefers parpaun; he fences only because it is done in his set, and is content with mediocrity."

  "His mother's son . . ." the Chairman said. "Go on."

  "James competes in school tourneys; he seeks praise from me when I visit. He may mature into a good fencer someday."

  "Weapon?"

  "Epee, I think, though perhaps saber later."

  "Continue."

  "Katarin and Viola both fence well, for women."

  "You have no more to say about them?"

  "No . . . they fence because it is done, as they play at nets or ball or swim."

  "Are they pretty, Fieddi?"

  Hostite cast his mind back; he could see the faces clearly but he had no grasp of what the Chairman's standard of beauty was. "They are young, and rich," he said. "They are not Dancers."

  The Chairman laughed. "Your standards are strict, I see. Well, then . . . Iagin Persius. You were sent to the Consellines. What did you find?"

  "Hobart Conselline continues in his belief that he is ill-treated. Although he is now the acknowledged head of that family and sept, he still hungers after the approval he feels was given his brother. He is ambitious for himself and his friends; he wants to ensure his secure hold on power for the rest of his life."

  "And he is a Rejuvenant?"

  "Yes, a multiple. He despises the short-lived who cannot afford rejuvenation."

  "And does he know where the Compassionate Hand stands on
rejuvenation?"

  "He does, sir, and he says it is the one weakness of the Compassionate Hand."

  "His religion?"

  "He has no belief in any higher power than wealth and influence, sir."

  "Ah. Such men are ripe for superstition. Hostite, how about the Barracloughs?"

  "Some in the family are believers, but not in our faith. Theirs is debased, decadent, a descendant of those rebellious faiths of Old Earth, which broke away from Holy Church so long ago."

  "Hostite! I did not know you could be eloquent." That arch surprise was dangerous; Hostite tried to empty his mind of all but his duty. "So you are passionate about the Church?"

  "Sir, I am a member of the Order of Swords; I have given my life to the Order since childhood."

  "I know that, Hostite. But I sense in you some deeper emotion. Have you ever had a vision or revelation of Our Lord?"

  "No, sir, none that could not be explained as a child's wishful fantasy. But the contact with those unbelievers in the Familias has made me realize what a treasure the True Faith is. They play with their faith as a child with jacks and balls, putting it away in a mental box when it is not convenient. That is not real faith."

  "No, of course not. But let us go back to the matters at hand. How stand the Barracloughs on rejuvenation?"

  "Most of them over forty have been rejuvenated, sir, but several of the seniors have refused. The Barraclough family has an elective power structure: Stefan, the current head of family, is not actually the eldest son of eldest sons. His older brother Viktor specialized in legal theory, and he refused rejuvenation. His objection was legal—the turmoil that would be caused by multiple rejuvenations. Viktor is now in his seventies. Viktor's daughter Viviane was rejuvenated with the new process at forty; she is now forty-five, but my sources say that she is determined not to repeat the process. Stefan is fifty-seven, and has received two rejuventions, giving him an apparent age of thirty. However, he disapproves of what he calls `frivolous' rejuvenations."