Until she came face to face with Miranda, and saw the devastation of that legendary beauty. Cecelia wondered how the same exquisite curves of bone, the same flawless skin, could now express a wasteland. After the rituals of greeting, when the staff had placed a tea set on the low table and withdrawn, Cecelia could wait no longer. No need, when the porcelain surface had already shattered.
"Miranda, what have they told you about it—about who did it?"
"Nothing." Miranda poured a cup of tea and handed it to Cecelia; the cup did not rattle on the saucer. "I know the news media say it was the New Texas Militia, in retaliation for the executions. I know that the former head of security is on administrative leave. But they have very gently let me know that investigations are in progress, and I will be informed when it is time. Do have a pastry; you always liked these curly ones, didn't you?"
Cecelia ignored the offered pastry. "Miranda . . . I don't think it was the NewTex Militia."
"Why?" Miranda's face had no more expression than a cameo.
"I think it was someone . . . inside."
"Family?" Her voice was cool. Why wasn't she upset? Why wasn't she frightened? Had she been through too much?
Cecelia waited a moment, then went on. "Pedar said . . . that Bunny broke rules."
Miranda's mouth twitched; it might have been grimace or grin. "He did. He was so . . . so quiet, so . . . compliant, it always seemed. But from the first time he brought me a tart he'd filched from the cook, when we were children, and showed me where we could hide from our governesses . . . he broke rules."
"More important than that," Cecelia said.
"I know." Miranda stared past Cecelia's left ear, as if she saw something a long way away, but was too tired to pay much attention.
"Miranda!" Even before Miranda turned her eyes back, Cecelia had bitten back the rest of it, all that she wanted to say. You can't give up now. You have to keep going. You have a family—
"I have a family," Miranda said, in that cool level voice. "I have responsibilities. Children. Grandchildren. You don't want me to forget that."
"Yes . . ." Cecelia had lowered her voice, and strove to sit quietly.
"I do not care." Miranda turned that cameo face full on Cecelia. "I do not care about the children—not even Brun, whom I most desperately want to care about. I do not care about the grandchildren, those bastard brats forced on my daughter—" Her breath caught in a ragged gasp, giving the lie to that do not care. Cecelia said nothing; there was nothing she could say. "I do not care," Miranda went on, "about anything but Branthcombe. Bunny. Whom, in this day and age, and in spite of rejuvenations and genetic selection and everything else we invented to spare us the pain of living . . . I loved. All my life, from the time he brought me that cherry tart, and we ate it in alternate bites, sitting on the back stairs . . . I loved him. It was a miracle to me that he loved me. That he survived the hunting season we still make our young people go through, that he remembered me after my years in seclusion at Cypress Hill, that he married me. And fathered my children, and no matter what stayed loyal and decent and—" Her voice broke at last, in a gasp that ended in sobs.
"My dear . . ." Cecelia reached out, uncertain. Miranda had been, for so long, another exquisite porcelain figurine in Cecelia's mental collection of beautiful women—like her sister, like all the women of that type—and she had never touched any of them for more than the rituals of class affection—the fingertips, the cheeks. But Miranda didn't recoil, and leaned into her as if Cecelia were her mother or her aunt.
The sobs went on a long time, and Cecelia had a cramp in the small of her back from twisting to accommodate Miranda's position, by the time Miranda quieted.
"Damnation," she said then. "I thought I was over it."
"I don't think you can get over it," Cecelia said.
"No. Not really. But over it enough to function. You're right, I have to do that much. But I really do not know how."
"Your advisors—"
"Are vultures." Miranda gave Cecelia a sideways glance and pulled back a little; Cecelia took that hint and stood, stretching. "You, never having married, may not realize just how complicated the situation is. Your estate is all yours, and you have the disposal of it—"
"When my ham-fisted relatives don't interfere," Cecelia said. She had tried, and failed, to put out of her mind her sister's interference in her will. The legal repercussions had dragged on for several years.
"True. But what I have is Bunny's legacy in several separate realms, some of which I stayed out of. The political—"
"Surely no one expects you to take over as Speaker—"
"No." Miranda's voice was sour. "Everyone is sure that the political realm is the one I know least about. More's the pity—since I actually do understand it, and could take over, if they'd only let me."
Cecelia managed not to gape, by a small margin. Miranda politically minded? Then she thought of Lorenza, who certainly had been, and repressed a shiver. She sat down again and poured herself a cup of tea.
"Lorenza," Miranda said, in another uncanny echo of Cecelia's thoughts. "Now there was another case of backstage expertise. She and I used to play the most delicate games of power . . . it would bore you, Cecelia, unless you could think of it in equestrian terms, but . . . if you could imagine yourself on a very, very advanced horse, which despised you but had, for some reason, agreed to obey exactly your commands."
"I had one like that," Cecelia said, hoping to divert Miranda onto a more congenial topic. Miranda's hiss of annoyance stopped her.
"We are not talking horses. Did you ever fence?"
Fence. Possible meanings ran through Cecelia's mind, the most recent out of her Spacepilots' Glossary of Navigational Terms; she couldn't imagine Miranda as a jump-point explorer probing into unknown routes.
"Ancient sport," Miranda said. "Derived from an ancient method of warfare. Swordfighting, also called fencing."
"No," Cecelia said, feeling grumpy. She had just spent a half hour comforting a woman in collapse, and now she was being questioned like a schoolgirl about a sport she had always considered supremely silly. For one thing, it had nothing to do with fences that horses could jump over. "I don't . . . er . . . fence."
"You should," Miranda said. She stood, and moved restlessly around the room, touching the surfaces as if she felt her way, rather than saw them with her eyes. Curtain, curtain, bureau, chair . . . "It's an excellent discipline, and apt for use aboard spaceships, for instance."
"Swords?" Cecelia could not quite keep the astonishment out of her voice. Was Miranda losing her mind? Tears, then politics, then swords?
"They do less damage to bulkheads," Miranda said. "If your only purpose is to kill people, why destroy the ship?"
She must be crazy. It must be, Cecelia thought, an effect of whatever had kept her so lovely for so long. Could she have been given bad rejuv drugs?
"Cecelia, I am not crazy. Well . . . not very crazy. Distracted with grief, and frustration, and anger, but not in the way we usually mean. Fencing—if you knew anything about it—is the ideal metaphor for what Lorenza and I did, just as Bunny and her brother Piercy—but no. You don't know the terms."
Cecelia felt her temper gathering like a boil behind her eyes. She squeezed them hard shut, and spoke with them closed. "Miranda. I know you're grieving; it was good for you to cry. But please quit treating me like a silly horse-crazy schoolgirl—"
"But you are," Miranda said, in that same flat cool voice. "You always have been; you refused to grow up—just like Brun, that way. It was ridiculous of Bunny to send Brun to you, of all people—"
"You—blame me? For Brun?"
"Not really . . . I mean, intellectually I know we chose her genetic type, we chose to increase the risk-taking and the responsiveness. But there you were, such a model for such a girl—every hunting season, egging her on over bigger fences, as if horses were all that mattered. And what did it get her, to take someone like you for a model? That . . . that degradat
ion!"
Astonishment had blown out anger for the moment. "She isn't like me," Cecelia said, feeling her way.
"She's not horse-crazy, no. But that—that stubborn insouciance, that willingness to shed responsibility—"
Cecelia felt the anger gathering again just beyond her vision. "I didn't know you considered me irresponsible," she managed to say quietly.
Miranda's hand tilted quickly, a diminishing gesture. "Not in everything, of course. But no sense of family, no loyalty to the Familias—" Her head swung away; the bell of golden hair swung wide a moment, then stilled into new perfection. "And she pulled that harebrained stunt to rescue you—she could have been killed then—"
"I didn't ask her to," Cecelia said. Something tapped at the alarms in her brain, a tiny hammering. "I couldn't. She just—"
"Loved you," Miranda said. Under mint-green silk, her shoulders rose and fell; Cecelia could not hear the sigh but knew it had been given.
"She loved her family," Cecelia said. "And you didn't need rescuing."
"No." Miranda turned back, face composed as usual. "No, I never did." For a long moment, she stood motionless, silent. Cecelia found it hard to breathe. Miranda shrugged again. "Kata Saenz said we provided the wrong models for Brun; she told Bunny that, in the planning for Brun's rescue. I was glad of it at the time; I knew we'd done something wrong, though our other children turned out well. And the shock of being told it was partly his fault got Bunny out of his fury with the Suiza girl, and in the end she saved Brun's life. I just can't understand her, though she's my child."
"How about the rest of the family? Buttons and Sarah . . . ?"
"Are wonderfully helpful, as far as they can be. Buttons, of course, expected to take over as his father's heir. But Bunny's younger brother Harlis—you remember him?"
Cecelia nodded. Harlis had all the arrogance, all the faux-aristocratic foppery, and a third less sense, than Bunny had had. Bunny could always go in an instant from the foolish foxhunting lord of the manor to the sensible, practical, and very capable politician. Harlis was Harlis—all surface and no substance.
"Harlis is challenging the Family structure, and I'm not sure Buttons can stop him. I did tell Bunny three years ago that he ought to clarify the situation just in case, and he and Kevil were looking into it, but then Bubbles—Brun—disappeared."
"And of course Bunny wasn't thinking of it then."
"No, nor of anything else. Harlis managed to convince some of the distant relatives that Bunny's mind had gone, and that any of Bunny's children were likely to carry the trait. And some of them accepted that, and have thrown in their influence with Harlis. He's acquired an astonishing amount of stock in several of the corporations; even old Trema left him her shares—"
"Will you be all right?"
"Probably, but I'm going to lose a lot. And I wanted it for Brun—for her and the twins. She needs a safe place; Sirialis would have been perfect—"
"Harlis isn't taking Sirialis . . . !" Cecelia's first thought was that Harlis had never liked foxhunting and might end the annual hunting season; she slapped that thought down, ashamed of herself. Maybe she was as selfish and narrow-minded as Miranda thought.
"He's trying." Miranda dropped her voice, mimicking Harlis's. " `Oh, you'll always be welcome, Miranda, of course. You'll always have a place. But it was family property, not Bunny's alone.' As if I would go there to lurk in the apartment he so generously offered, while he strides about pretending to be lord of the manor!"
Cecelia forebore to say that he would be the lord, and no pretense, if he had his way. "And what are you doing about it—I assume you have some plan."
"Yes. But I haven't decided . . . it would mean tearing up much that Bunny built . . . family relationships, friendships, alliances. I can call on my family—" Of the founding Families, Miranda's had been known first for information management, and later for the development and manufacture of a variety of devices that were to the ordinary computer as a top event horse was to a child's pony.
"But it's—it was Bunny's, and it's rightfully yours—" Inheritance had been the one immutable aspect of law; concentration of assets within a Family, the foundation of Family power. Angry as Cecelia had been with her sister for questioning her will, she knew that if she had left her assets within the family, even to a distant relative, the will would not have been challenged.
"Cece—you don't understand how threadbare the fabric has become, since you exposed Kemtre and Lorenza. I suppose it had begun before, but that's when it became obvious." Miranda paused, frowning a bit in thought. "Bunny and I, and Kevil, were holding an alliance of Families by the skin of our teeth. All those years of social connections, business connections, and Kevil's legal skills and intuition. I swear he knew more about the ragged skeletons in Family closets than anyone had ever guessed. Bunny would talk them around, and I would smile and be gracious and work through the wives and mistresses. We were holding it together, just, but the crises kept knocking it out of balance. Kemtre's abdication, that Patchcock mess—the scare about bad rejuvenation drugs, and the Morelline/Conselline Family collapse, and then Brun's abduction . . ." Her voice trailed away.
"And I went back to Rotterdam to play with horses," Cecelia said.
"Yes. I understand it, in a way. Venezia Morrelline had her pottery, and you had horses, and Kata Saenz had her research. Most people do have their private interests, and that, after all, is what a good political system is supposed to do—leave you free to do what you are best at, whatever it is. People want to do the work they love, marry and have children, have some fun. But if too many people do that, Cecelia, it leaves gaps for people who want power for its own sake, and who may use it in ways that later degrade your life."
Like Bunny using Fleet resources as if they were personal, to rescue Brun. She didn't say that; she knew that Miranda knew what people thought. "How is Kevil?" she asked instead.
"Alive." From her tone, Cecelia couldn't tell if Miranda were pleased about that or not. Then she sighed. "I can't wish Kevil dead, only Bunny alive as well. Kevil was badly hurt—days in the regen tank, and then the head injury—he's still not himself. He may never be, the doctors say. And without Bunny—or me, if I could only find a way—he doesn't have the backing to do what he did for us before."
"I should visit him," Cecelia said.
"Yes, you should. You should tell him what you told me, with all the names you know. He might know something useful, something that would give us leverage."
"And Brun?"
"Brun . . . has a crazy notion of changing her identity. Going to the Guernesi and getting a rejuv and biosculpt that will make her a new person from the bones out. I think she got the idea from the prince's clones."
"She doesn't want the children," Cecelia said, not asking.
"Would you?" Miranda shivered, then sighed. "No, she doesn't want them. I don't want them myself, really. Bunny did. Bunny had some crazy idea that they could grow up to prove their existence wasn't a disaster, but it is."
"That's a lot of burden on them."
"Yes. Unfair, too. I know that. But nothing can make them other than they are: bastards, Brun's ruin, the ruin of all our hopes for the Familias. They are the lit fuse, poor little brats."
"What are they like?"
"Babies. Toddlers, really, at this point. Neither looks like anyone in our family, and they aren't identical. One has the brightest red hair I ever saw, and the other's is brown. Brun says one of the men was a redhead. . . ."
Cecelia noticed that Miranda had not used names; before she could ask, Miranda went on.
"The gene scan showed up some interesting anomalies—according to one geneticist, who's also looked at the women and other children, these people were seriously inbred, with a lot of undesirable recessives concentrated. They had noticed that children born of captured women were less likely to be disabled, but considered that as proof of their God's blessing on capturing women. Of course, we had the boys treated at once, although
it was too late for a complete washout."
"What do you call them?" Cecelia finally got a word in.
Miranda blushed. "We don't actually . . . have names. Brun never did, and she refuses to talk about it. Their nurses call them Red and Brownie. I know—" She held up a hand. "Those are names for dogs or ponies, not boys. Nicknames, at best. I just don't—Bunny and I had been talking about it when he was killed." She moved her cup restlessly. "Would you like to see them?"
"Of course." Cecelia stood.
Down the hall, past several doors and now she could hear the crowing of a happy child, the chuckle of another. Miranda paused just before the open door. Cecelia looked in. Two young women in colorful smocks, a floor strewn with toys, and two sturdy toddlers. One, the redhead, was bouncing up and down, clapping his hands. The other, sitting in a scatter of blocks, looked quickly toward the door, grinning.
They were normal children, not monsters. Happy children, not monsters. Children who were more than "lit fuses"—who were potentially normal, if only they didn't grow up burdened with a past they had not made.
"You have to send them away," Cecelia said, surprising herself. "There are people who want children and don't have them; there are places where these boys will be treasured as they should be."
"Bunny said—"
"Bunny's dead. They're alive. They can have a good future—and the universe is big enough that they need not be anyone's pawns in some power game."
"And you know who—?" A tone suspended between sarcasm and hope.
"No, but I can find out. Will you let me do that? Find them homes where they'll have a chance?"
Miranda sagged. "I . . . don't know."
"Miranda. You have other grandchildren, and will have more. Children you can love naturally. Children whose political importance, if any, comes with a family commitment. You haven't even given these boys names—you know yourself that's wrong. Give them up; give them a chance."