Reclamation(163)

Arla looked that way too and sighed. There was a deep, cold pain in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nail himself, well, we were husband and wife and that was a lot and very little at the same time. But the children … he’ll keep them and pass them to whomever he marries next, unless I can come up with a blood-price and make a deal. He might just give me Little Eye, because of the stones, but I doubt he’d give up the boys’ hands.” She shivered.

“I could order him to,” said Eric quietly.

Arla’s eyes opened wide. Her expression shifted from surprise to fear to hope and finally to trepidation.

She squeezed his arm and lifted her hand away. Eric let her go.

“Let’s get rid of the Vitae first,” she said. “Then, if we’re still standing, we’ll deal with the laws of the Nameless.”

Eric chuckled. “The Royals haven’t got a prayer.”

She laughed with him briefly. The wind picked up around them, rattling the reeds and rippling the brown pond water. They both glanced up at the sky reflexively. The clouds were mottled dark grey and white.

“Rain soon,” remarked Arla.

“Yes,” Eric agreed. He kept his gaze on the sky. “You know, you can see it from here.”

“What?”

The clouds thickened slightly, the charcoal grey deepening to swallow the more benevolent white. “Just a thought.” Eric shook his head at the sky. “On May 16, Sealuchie Ross told me that the Servant’s Eyes are one of the stars in their sky, which means the May sun is one of ours, and I just thought that was a fine irony. A couple of worlds nobody understands within sight of each …” Eric’s throat closed around his words even though his jaw dropped open. His hands fell to his sides.

A dozen different ideas fell into place and inside his mind, he saw. He saw the way it had happened as clearly as he could see the building clouds above him.

“Garismit’s Eyes, Eric.” Arla shook his shoulder. “What’s hit you?”

He lowered his gaze to her puzzled face and blinked. “Arla, I need you to listen to something for me, with the stones.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything. She opened the pouch and drew out one of her namestones.

“Promise me you’ll finish before we get rained on.” She cupped her hand around the ice white sphere.

Slowly, the personality drained from her face and, even though it was full daylight, her pupils widened as far as they could go.

Eric licked his lips. “Human beings started colonizing the Quarter Galaxy, about ten thousand years ago, according to the best guesses. The distances involved, however, even with the third level drive and communications systems, were too great for everyone to keep in touch. Then there were revolutions and plagues and famines and all the chaos of history. So the colonies lost track of each other, found each other, and lost track again.

“But not everybody left the Evolution Point. Some, maybe even most, chose to stay there. They already had an advanced technology and a coherent history. While the colonists were going on creating new worlds, they just kept building on the old. Out in the Quarter Galaxy, civilizations rose and fell; on the Evolution Point, they just kept rising.

“But ten thousand years is a long time, and the Nameless alone knew how long humans had been on the planet before then. They had a good enough bio-technology to breed whatever they wanted, even—” Eric waved his hands—“telekinetics or human datastores.” He gestured at Arla. She didn’t even blink. “But resources still got used up, or the climate got unfriendly, or any of a hundred other changes happened. Ten thousand years is long enough to show up on even a geologic scale.

“So the inhabitants of the Evolution Point decided they needed a new home. What were they going to do? Send out a survey team to find a new planet and take their chances like a bunch of colonists? No. They were going to make very sure that they had a home fitting of their elite status as the first human beings on the first human world.

“They built one. They built May 16.

“The next question they faced was how to get their whole population, that could have very well numbered in the billions, to their new home. The most convenient way would be to move the ground they were standing on to the new orbit. Then they could transfer all the people to the new world using short-range shuttles, or whatever their equivalent of short-range shuttles would have been.

“But not everyone wanted to leave the Evolution Point. The genetically engineered segment of the population, your ancestors and mine, didn’t want to move to this new home for some reason. Maybe they were already tired of being slaves and this just pushed them over the edge. They went into rebellion. If they fought, they won and kicked the entire population off the world to become the Rhudolant Vitae. Or maybe they never fought. Maybe the Rhudolant Vitae were the ones who were on space stations or in ships at the time.