But that independent use of public transport to get herself to their home after the Archangel had teleported her down to the terminal had not, apparently, been a fluke success at dealing with strange situations or new people. Maddy was now sitting in the passenger seat behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs, which were occupied by her mother and by Rachel Kane, and she was asking a question about every thirty seconds.
Well, at least bringing her child to the ancestral property of the Romanov family was a perfectly believable excuse for visiting the farmstead right now! And she had always made the trip this way, not by using public teleporters to get from MinTar to the hamlet nearest the farm, so her hiring an aircar wasn’t going to raise a red flag with anyone who might be observing her movements today. Ever since she had gained control over her own finances, Katy had been hiring aircars and eschewing the public teleporters. She hated them.
No one kept logs of how many people rode in an aircar, or even of where that aircar went from the time it was checked out until it was returned. Not on Narsai, anyway. So as far as any observer might know, Catherine Romanova was taking her daughter for her first visit to the ancestral Romanov property as soon as was possible after the young girl’s arrival on Narsai; and that would not seem odd, not to anyone who either was Narsatian or who knew Narsatian customs and values well.
The extra person, if her presence should happen to be noticed? One of the dozens of young officers Romanova and Casey had nurtured during their years together, no doubt. Dan Archer was the only one who had been given a permanent place in their household, but they often had young people around them. Guests from their own generation were more the rarity, actually.
“So your name is Rachel, and you’re going to have a baby.” Maddy spoke as casually as if the three of them were chatting at a social gathering. “Do you have a husband?”
She hadn’t asked for Rachel’s second name. Whether that was because she realized that its not being volunteered had significance, or whether she was so used to one-named Kesrans that it didn’t occur to her that most humans had at least two names, Romanova couldn’t guess. Probably the latter.
“No,” Kane said calmly. “No husband. And I wasn’t planning to have a baby; it just happened.”
“Oh.” Young Maddy accepted that with perfect equanimity. “What do you do?”
“I was a starship officer. But I left the service, not long ago.”
Should Romanova tell her child that it wasn’t polite to ask so many questions? But none of them had been impertinently personal, asking whether a person had a partner and what occupation he or she followed were both just normal social inquiries. And Kane was handling it without difficulty, offering responses that were adequate but that didn’t reveal information which Maddy should not be given.
Ye gods, the child sounded like George making small talk at a diplomatic reception. He loved those things, while Katy had always despised them.
Yes. Of course, that explained why Maddy had such unexpected poise! She might have lived all of her short life in a human enclave on alien Kesra, but without Katy to insist on a measure of family privacy no doubt George had entertained a constant stream of official company. He could afford it, he loved it, and clearly it had been the salvation of his little girl.
I never thought I’d be glad about that part of George being George, Romanova thought with a carefully suppressed smile. During their time of residence on Terra she and Linc had hosted their young friends often, but their guests were people they could help instead of people whose political or economic influence could help them; so the lively conversations at their gatherings seldom amounted to polite small talk.
“Maddy, look down at the ground,” she said now, deciding it was time to divert her daughter before any inadvertent harm could be done. “We’re over the plains now. If you watch carefully, soon you’ll see our farmstead’s boundaries.”
“Is it really ours, Mum? I thought it belonged to our cousins, to Ivan and Lorena.” Maddy frowned with puzzled interest.
“They like to be called Johnnie and Reen,” Romanova said. “Small properties, like the house back in MinTar, can belong to individuals here on Narsai. But farms belong to whole families, Maddy, and that means the Romanov Farmstead is just as much yours as it is theirs. Only they have proprietors’ control over it, and a correspondingly larger share of its income, because they earn that with the work they do there.”
“That’s not like on Kesra.” Maddy’s frown deepened. “But on Kesra there aren’t that many humans, and on Narsai there aren’t any real Narsatians.”
Romanova had been calling herself a “Narsatian” all her life, but she responded to the term in the way that her daughter had meant it and not in the way that she had always interpreted it. She said, “True. Narsai has no native sentient species, nor does Sestus 3. Of the five most habitable Outworlds, two were unoccupied when humans first arrived and two—Kesra, and Sestus 4—have accepted us only as immigrants, and only on a limited basis. Mortha’s the only Outworld where humans and native sentients been able to intermarry, to start to meld together into one people.”
“We own our house on Kesra, but most human families don’t,” Maddy admitted thoughtfully. “Most human residents are temporaries, and the government makes sure they leave when they’re supposed to. But Papa’s ancestors were given citizenship because they kept Kesra from being taken over by Terran colony-agents, over a hundred years ago.”
“I know.” Romanova smiled now, with both amusement at her daughter’s pedagogical tone and with honest reminiscence. “I lived in your father’s house on Kesra for more than twenty years, Maddy. I gave birth to all four of my babies there, and it was where your brothers grew up just as you have.”
The child knew that, perfectly well. But their visits on Kesra had always taken place in George Fralick’s presence. Today was the first occasion since her daughter had been a baby too small to walk or talk that Romanova had been allowed to spend time with her without that constraint, and it seemed that they now must talk about all the things that had gone unspoken before—that even as she introduced her child to the Narsatian half of her heritage, she must deal with the Kesran-resident half that was all Maddy had known until today.
“It’s so big,” Maddy said now, gazing at the expanse of land below them and seeing how tiny the farmhouse and the equipment barn and the control complex seemed by comparison. “And just two people run all of it?”
“Most of it’s automated. But in growing season we bring in hired hands, machines can’t do everything.” Romanova adjusted the controls, expertly. “We’re going down now.”
Down, in a graceful descent that she reversed when the readings on the aircar’s instrument panel did not jibe with those she had come to expect after having flown into this place a hundred times and more over the years since she had acquired her very first civilian pilot’s license.
What the hell…? She didn’t say it, because she didn’t want to alarm Maddy; but the young woman beside her realized something was wrong, and quietly brought the co-pilot’s seldom used control panel on line.
There was a vehicle under cover down there, and its readings didn’t belong to the Farmstead’s equivalent of the common-garage aircar that they were riding in now. Nor were those readings coming from the type of farm transports that at this season should not have been present, because Narsatians believed firmly that all vehicles should be utilized as continuously as possible in order to keep the numbers of them that must be built and kept operating down to a minimum. While the North Continent farms and ranches were resting under a blanket of winter snow, their vehicles were flown to the two southern continents and were put to use there until spring.