Trabe Kourdakov’s surprise was genuine as he asked, “What are you talking about, Katy? As far as I know your Morthan’s wherever he usually would be at evening first-hour. And I think you and your mother had better come in here and shut the door, because this comm I’ve just read through about six times without being able to decide how to answer it is about you.”
“Is it what you were expecting, Trabe?” his wife asked. She stepped into the office, pulled Katy in with her, and sealed the entrance with a light touch.
“Yes, I’m afraid it is.” Kourdakov held out the message, and watched as Katy took it and read it and tried to absorb it.
“Mum?” Maddy asked. She was standing between her grandparents now, and each of them was holding one of her hands. And although she had seen neither of these two old people until today, she looked comfortable; it was only the expression on her mother’s face that was troubling her, the way that Katy’s normally dusky rose cheeks had turned chalky white.
Katy sat down in the guest chair. She said quietly, “I’m being called back to active duty, Maddy. I guess that’s one way for the Service to make sure I won’t answer any Reb draft—but I’ve got to admit I wasn’t expecting this, even if your grandfather was.”
“If you refuse to do what they tell you, it’s treason. Isn’t it, Mum?” Young Maddy spoke first, ending the hush that had filled her grandfather’s office.
It was indeed coming on toward evening. The girl had eaten a swift meal at the Romanov Farmstead, hours ago; but she was just a child, she had to be tired and she must be getting hungry again. Katy found herself focusing on those maternal concerns, and realized as she did so that they were a way she could distract herself just as much as they were issues to which she truly must attend.
But Maddy didn’t look or sound tired, and her question was exactly the one that was in the mind of each adult. Cabanne Romanova asked quietly, “Is she right, Katy? Can’t you refuse, especially if you have a personal crisis that needs your attention right now?”
“Retirement doesn’t cancel my service oath, Mum.” Katy shook her head. “Only resignation would have done that, and frankly I don’t know whether it’s possible to resign after accepting retirement. That’s one issue I’m sure the Judge Advocate General has never had to rule on!”
“But didn’t you just try to tell us that something’s happened to Linc, that you don’t know where he is?” Long ago, when Lincoln Casey had been simply her daughter’s comrade, Cabanne had liked the man and had enjoyed talking with him about Morthan culture and biology. She had found him far less inhibited about such matters than were most members of his species, and with that frankness he had more than made up for his lack of knowledge in some areas. The old woman found she did not like hearing that Casey was missing, no matter how many times during the past twelve years she had thought she wished he would disappear from her daughter’s life. “Surely you won’t be expected to drop everything and take passage to Terra, they certainly ought to give you time to arrange your affairs here. And if you have a family concern, for gods’ sake if your husband is missing….!”
“Surely nothing, Mum,” Katy said, in a way that just missed rudeness. “Linc is gone, yes. He vanished from our home sometime while Maddy and I were away from it today, and I know damned well he didn’t just disappear because he wanted to! But even if I had him right here beside me, I’d still be wondering what in hell I’m going to do now. I feel like that Terran general must have felt, the one in the North American civil war—what was his name?”
She looked automatically toward her father, who although his professorship was in philosophy had forgotten more Terran history than many scholars had ever studied. Kourdakov supplied, “Robert E. Lee, Katy. A graduate of the old United States of America’s equivalent of our Star Service Academy; a general in his country’s army, who finally decided to side with the rebels because he found that he couldn’t take up arms against soldiers from his home district. Or his home state, as they called it then.”
“Yes. Anyway, I know just how he must have felt!” Katy sighed. “Whichever side I come down on, if the worst does happen I’ll be fighting against people I care about. I wonder if that General Lee person ever considered just running away to live in some other nation-state?”
“Well, Katy-love, you won’t have to do that.” The old paternal endearment slipped out on its own. Not that Kourdakov had been trying very hard to hold it back, of course. He was interacting with his only living child again, and remaining cold and formal with her was something he had known at the conversation’s start he would not be able to do for very long. “There’s a new Commonwealth accord we’ve been able to obtain for Narsai, that you probably don’t know about because there hasn’t been time to publicize it since it was finalized. None of our citizens can be accepted into the Star Service now without the Council’s consent. So although in your case there’s obviously room for interpretation—you’re a retiree being recalled to duty, not a prospective cadet about to take the oath—we may be able to block that recall, at least temporarily. If you want us to. And that’s why the order came to you through me as Senior Chairholder on the Council, instead of being routed directly as such a comm would have been before the new accord.”
Katy was glad she was sitting down. She stared at her father, and then she shook her head. She said, “Let me understand this, Dad. That’s a new ‘right’ that you’ve ‘obtained’ for Narsatian citizens? Which will make sure that no other eighteen-year-old can do what your daughter did, and sign up at the Academy against her or his family’s wishes. Very good! It took you forty years but you finally fixed the problem.”
“Your mother said you’d take it this way when you found out about it.” Kourdakov had braced himself, and now he knew it had been with reason. “Actually we on the Council were thinking about Narsatian sailors on merchant ships, running up against Terran press gangs.”
“That was how you sold the other members the idea? I’ll retract that ‘very good,’ then, Dad. I’ll have to make it ‘spectacular,’ instead.” Katy smiled, bitterly and crookedly. “I came here to see if the captain of the Archangel had the Council’s consent when he ordered my husband kidnapped, because I’m damned certain that’s what has happened to him. I also wanted to know if Narsai Control knew more than what their grief counselor told me about the explosion of a trade-ship called Triad, in orbit this morning. But I guess coming to my father was the wrong thing for me to do! You’d think I might have learned that by now, though, even if I haven’t been paying attention to every puff of hot air that the Council blows.” She rose from the chair, nodded to her mother, and reached for her child. “Come on, Maddy. Visit’s over.”
“Are you going to answer the recall order, Katy? Or are you going to stay here and resist it, or leave Narsai to join the Rebs while you still can?” Cabanne Romanova did not leave her husband’s side as her daughter headed for the door, but she spoke quickly in hopes of getting an answer.
“She won’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Trabe Kourdakov said, his voice suddenly the ringing one of a philosopher in debating form. “Katy, give me that hard copy. I’ve already ‘lost’ the message itself; it’s been erased from university computer storage, even the record that it came in is gone from the relay at the orbital comm station. Now let’s lose that hard copy.”
“This won’t solve it, Dad.” But Katy’s eyes were stinging as she turned back. She gave him the sheet of flimsy fiber-based material, and she watched as it turned into fine gray ash. “When I don’t answer, they’ll just go around you and contact me directly after all.”