After little Madeleine’s birth Katy had once again done what pleased her, instead of her duty. She had left her husband—not to go back to her career (something her parents had learned to accept after more than twenty-five years of watching her do that again and again), but to become an unmarried woman once more. And she had not first brought her daughter home to Narsai, to be raised where a Romanova’s daughter certainly should have been brought up. Incredibly, she had bowed to an alien judge’s custody decision and had left the girl with her husband on Kesra.
Her formal union some months later with the Morthan man who had been her friend and comrade throughout her career was just one more unpleasant surprise for her parents. Human women sometimes did marry Morthan males; and while Kourdakov personally found the rumors about those hybrid creatures’ sexual prowess disgusting, he supposed what women who weren’t Narsatian heiresses did was their own business. But his Katy was a direct descendant of her world’s original settlers! She had a social position that was worth protecting; her ancestors’ dignity should have meant more to her than whatever it was her second husband did to her in bed, that could make her forget everything that was decent.
Fralick had to have been right, she’d probably been giving herself to the mindfucker all along. Only through genetic verification had the poor fellow even been sure that Madeleine was indeed his child, and not that pervert Casey’s.
Like most human males (George Fralick included), Trabe Kourdakov knew intellectually that matings between Morthan males and human females were sterile; but in his gut he was sure that sometime, somewhere, some human woman was going to become the first to bear a child from such a union. All of Kourdakov’s intelligence and scholarship could not overcome his instinctive reaction to the idea of his daughter lying in a Morthan’s arms; as far as he was concerned, Katy had allowed herself to be contaminated.
So he’d had no contact with his child since before her boys had been killed, until now. Until this moment, when he looked up from the message after perusing it one more time—and realized that he really was hearing his daughter’s voice, that after all this time he really was seeing her face.
CHAPTER 10
“Hello, Dad.” Most Narsatian children used that form of male-parent address. Maddy’s “Papa” to George Fralick was very much a Kesran-human speech pattern, although her “Mum” to Katy was typically Narsatian.
The Standard language was spoken recognizably on all the Outworlds just as much as it was on Terra, but it did have its varying accents and permutations. Dan Archer to this day could barely open his mouth without identifying himself as a miner’s grandson from Sestus 4, for example; and Lincoln Casey had worked hard to eradicate the last traces of Sestus 3 country-folk inflection from his speech.
“Catherine.” Trabe Kourdakov addressed his daughter that way when he thought it necessary to be formal with her, and after so long a separation he could scarcely be anything else. They had lived just a few kilometers apart for the past seven months, but had not seen each other; and through all the years since her divorce from Fralick, they had not spoken once.
Until now. She was standing in his office’s doorway, with her mother at one of her shoulders and with a brown-eyed girl at the other.
Damn Cabbie, she could be sentimental at times. Which was why Kourdakov was glad he occupied the Senior Chair of the Council just now, because although Cabbie had done a good job of leading Narsai while the role was primarily that of a ceremonial parent-figure the present was a time when hard decisions must be made.
He’d never understood how Katy could do the job of a starship commander, and later that of a fleet admiral. Katy could be just as sentimental as her mother. But perhaps he hadn’t seen her in action when the situation required that she be as pragmatic as Trabe himself was capable of being; maybe, just maybe, what he had always thought of as her willfulness was that kind of strength coming out in her after all.
At any rate she was taking a gamble by coming here right now, and she had to know that. She wasn’t a stupid woman, he knew that much about her for sure.
“This is Maddy,” his daughter said now, and gently pushed her own daughter forward into the room. “Her father wants her to stay with me until the possibility of war is over.”
The possibility of war was never going to be over. Not as long as food grown on Narsai had to be shipped to Terra or one of the other Inner Worlds, even in years when it was needed more by lean-rationed colonies such as Farthinghome or Claymore. Not as long as Outworld people like Katy Romanova were welcome to give their lives in service to the Commonwealth’s defense force, but their home-worlds’ delegations on the Diet consisted of a single ceremonial representative from each planet (or incredibly, in the case of Sestus 3 and Sestus 4 which were so drastically unlike even though they orbited the same star, a single representative from one system!). A representative who could make speeches and give advice, but who could not vote; while from every ancient nation-state on Terra itself, and from every identifiable region of each of the Inner Worlds, came a representative who had full voting powers.
Having Katy as Fleet Admiral of the Star Service had given Narsai more potential for power than it had ever possessed in the past. From time to time during her tenure in that post she had come close to speaking with one or the other of her parents on official business, but she always chose to have an adjutant make the contact for her (an adjutant who was not her husband, since by then Casey had been given command of the Academy). So neither Cabanne Romanova during her Senior Chairship of the Council, nor Trabe Kourdakov after that Chair became his, had used their relationship to the Fleet Admiral as they might have been expected to utilize it.
It had been almost amusing, sometimes, to hear other philosophers singing his praises for practicing such unbending ethics. How little those admiring colleagues knew about how things really were!
But now she was here, and Kourdakov was involuntarily reaching out a hand that had grown thin with time’s passing to take the firm young hand of his grandchild. The girl was looking at him with typical brown Romanova eyes, eyes just like Cabbie’s; and she was saying softly and in perfect accentless Terran Standard, “Hello, Granfer. Mum says that’s what I should call you.”
“Hello, Madeleine.” He used the full name, not to be formal this time but to make himself get used to it. He had never called his own Madeleine “Maddy.” “So you’ve finally come to see us, have you?”
“Papa didn’t want me to before, but he said it was all right to come now,” the child said, and she smiled. Not shyly, but nevertheless with a certain reserve.
“Dad, do you know where my husband is?” Katy had waited to ask that as long as she could. In battle she was capable of waiting out an enemy forever, if that was what she had to do in order to win; but now her adversary might be the man who had held her hands while she had learned to toddle, the man in whose arms she had learned how to dance. It was possible that the same voice she could remember reading her bedtime stories had offered Narsai’s support if George Fralick took her husband away to be imprisoned and threatened in order to control her actions, and that possibility was so horrible that she had to know whether or not it was true.