He had imagined this moment a thousand times. His arrival at his new post, and the heroic, grave impression he wanted to give to the people who were now under his control. It was important that they should see him as something near the platonic ideal of a wise governor—stern, merciful, wise. And he also wanted them to recognize his loyalty to the High Consul and Laconia, as a model for them. As an example to be followed.
Now that the occasion was actually upon him, he was mostly aware of just how badly he needed to visit the head.
He heard his cabin door open, and then the soft padding of feet on the deck. Mona smiled down at him. She had her formal dress folded over her arm, ready to be put on. It was high-waisted and high-collared with layers of lace in Laconian blue. She was dressing for this moment not in her role as soil scientist but as the spouse of a governor. Her eyes betrayed only a little of her tiredness and anxiety. To anyone who didn’t know her, not even that.
“Ready?” she asked.
Are you ready to take control of a planet? Are you ready to command the lives of millions of people and forge the most valuable planet in the greater human sphere into a tool that will, in time, feed trillions of people under a thousand different suns? He told himself that the flutter he felt in his stomach was excitement. Not fear. Never dismay.
If she had been anyone else in all of humanity, he would have said Yes, I am. But it was Mona, and so his true feelings were safe.
“I don’t know.”
She kissed him, and the softness of her lips and the strength of them were a comfort and a promise. He felt his body starting to react to her and stepped back. Distracted and aroused was no way to start his tenure as governor. The millimeter lift of her eyebrows meant she understood everything he hadn’t said.
“I’m just going over to my cabin tochange,” she said.
“That sounds wise.”
She took his hand, squeezed it. “We’re going to be fine,” she said.
Less than an hour later, he walked down the gantry and stepped for the first time onto the planet. His planet.
From sunrise to sunset lasted a little over four standard hours on Auberon, with cycles of light and darkness changing only slightly with the seasons. By local convention, day was two cycles of light and one of darkness, night the reverse. Noontime on Auberon was always dark, and midnight was bright. It was midmorning, but it looked like sunset. Red clouds high above them, and huge sessile organisms like trees or massive fungi lifted red streamers as if all the world were touched by fire.
The small group that had been invited to greet him was by definition the most honored citizens of Auberon. The order in which he acknowledged them was important. The formality with which he held himself, whether he smiled or didn’t when he shook their hands. Everything mattered deeply, because what High Consul Duarte was to the empire, Biryar Rittenaur was to Auberon. Beginning now.
The streets of Barradan were narrower than the broad boulevards of Laconia, with buildings that crowded the pavement. Brick the gray-green color of the local clay. The lights all glowed with the full spectrum of sunlight to say that this darkness was daytime, and would become dimmer and warmer when consensus night came. Security forces with rifles and riot gear kept his path clear as he moved through the maze of intersections. If someone had planned the city, they’d done it with the aesthetics of an earthbound ghetto. More likely, Barradan had bloomed with no intention beyond satisfying the needs of the moment.
Biryar traveled in an open car, the wind of his passage stirring his hair. Something smelled foul. Like a sewer that had failed. Mona wrinkled her nose at it too.
“Indole,” she said. She saw the blankness of his response. “Technically 2,3-benzopyrrole. Just a couple carbon rings and some nitrogen. The local biome really likes it. Nothing to worry about.”
“It smells like…”
“Shit. Yes, it does,” Mona said. “The soils team tells me we’ll get used to it in a couple days.”
“Well. Elements are elements, and there’s only so many things you can make with them, I suppose,” he said. “Some smell better than others.”
The compound was lit for noon when they pulled in. The house was shaped like a horseshoe, with pink stucco walls and polished metal sconces every few meters. Local insect analogs swarmed around the brightness. The courtyard in the center was paved in plates of carbon-silicate lace engineered to shine blue as a beetle’s carapace. Starlight seemed to swim in its depths, reflections of the galactic disk overhead. The capital city of his planet didn’t yet generate enough light pollution to drown the sky. The stars were the only things that reminded him of Laconia.
His personal staff stood at attention beside the building’s wide central doors. Laconian guards and local administrators, all in formal dress, all waiting for Major Overstreet’s inspection before they met their new master.
He was home now. For better or worse, this was his place in the universe, and might be for the rest of his career. Mona’s sigh was barely audible, and he thought there was regret in it until she spoke.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
* * *
The reception began a few hours later. The sun was directly overhead in the second of the day’s two brightnesses, and Biryar kept reflexively thinking of it as midday. He was impressed by the heat of the sunlight and the humidity of the air. Either the sewer stench had gone down with the rising sun or he was already growing used to it.
There were easily a hundred guests at the reception. Many of them were on the lists he’d committed to memory, but there were some others: a thin-faced woman with her hair in an elaborate plait, an older man with a thin mustache and a prosthetic arm, an agender person with a pinstriped linen suit and the studied respectability of a banker. Today was Auberon’s first glimpse of what Laconian rule would mean, and the people—city, planet, and system—were driven by their uncertainty and their fear. It was Biryar’s duty to project calm and strength, the implacable authority of the new regime, and its geniality and benignity to those who gave it their undivided loyalty.
He’d intended to wear a jacket, but he gave up the idea. He was happy to see that the guests had also chosen lighter shirts and soft, airy blouses. Mona’s blue lace looked almost heavy by comparison, but she wore it with grace. She moved through the party as assured and confident as if they had lived in these rooms for years, not hours. She laughed easily and listened intently as she spoke to the man with the prosthetic arm. He felt the twinge of jealousy in his breast as a mixture of admiration, love, and exhaustion.
As he moved among the guests, he found himself orbiting her. Touching her arm as they passed, laying claim to her the same way he was laying claim to the world. The glitter of amusement in her eyes, invisible to anyone but him, meant she saw what he was doing, and that she forgave him his weakness. Or that she enjoyed the power she had over him. They were two ways to say the same thing.
The first sign of trouble seemed so trivial that he didn’t see its significance at all at the time. They were in a side garden where the local plants pushed their ruddy way up from a lawn of grass. A fig tree from Earth had spread its limbs above a small carved-stone table. The fruit was ripe to splitting, and added a sweetness to the foul air.
Mona was sitting across from a woman maybe twenty years older than either of them. The woman’s graying hair was starting to escape an austere bun, and her cheeks were flushed from one drink too many. When he saw Mona’s frown, Biryar stepped lightly over, ready to act as his wife’s savior. He found he had misread the situation.