**** If Aleo senses the day’s edge, he doesn’t let on. Dorianna doesn’t seem to notice it either. Her eyes belie their glacial calm and seem to devour everything she sees like voracious black holes. She’s the happy anthropologist, making her way through the newest of environments. Only Ilya, walking between them through the understreets of Bes, is aware of the whip-crack tumult of adrenaline and epinephrine coursing through him, sensitizing synapses and more blunt flesh-receptors for the inevitable fight. Flesh fight and mind fight are separate entities, at home in separate worlds, but the baseline human body makes no distinctions here. And so, with the subjective, heady blow of epinephrine, and the giddy rush of adrenaline, Ilya reminds himself that the fight at hand is a bloodless one…not between himself and Dorianna, but between the span of stars and systems that define the Nemaean Stellar territories, and the Centralist corporate interests. Bigger things. Two other bodies…. Ilya knows the complexities of one…and the appetites of the other. His loyalties--beyond question--lie with the familiar, Byzantine complexities. Nemaea. Home. New Ruthenia. “They’re pilots,” he hears Aleo explaining, as they pass a cavern-bar, loud with the trance-inducing sound of drift, and hazed with the smokes of tabak and smear. “You’ll find your study--and more--in places like it.” Bes is as much an underground city as a surface sprawl, and here…the broad, vaulted definition of Sarogovna Street stretches between the facades of cavern bars and boutiques, places of arcane industry, and shops selling wares that only Nemaean tastes may judge as useful. The subterranean levels of Bes are home to such social business. Dorianna’s is the only foreign face here. She is the only one who walks with an offworlder’s gait. (Earth-native gravity is lower, and so Dorianna walks with one toe already across exhaustion’s crisp line.) Professional enthusiasm clings to her, like a cloud of some strange plasma, or phantom, hissing and crackling just beyond the range of human perception. Ilya can just make it out, can see--if he strains his senses--the way in which she marks the things she sees. The way she files them away, or blinks subtle codes that activate the recording gear wired through her optic nerves and grafted to the occipital lobe of her brain. Though still buffered, she has access to the web, and to the record-storage vaults on board the vessel that carried her here. The Persephone. It remains in orbital dock, accepting what uploads the censors at Nemaean Authority allow. “Can we go in?” she asks. Aleo shrugs. Ilya nods, his predator-sense whispering behind all other conscious thoughts, that entry into this place will serve the day‘s agenda. There is, after all, the acrobatic dissonance of drift, bleeding from overhead speakers. It is heavy with polyrhythmic drums, and half-whispered chants that carry the sound of some obscure faith. In such a place, any whisper is a subliminal, though for the pilot-swimmers here, such whispers serve a different purpose. Ilya glances in. He can see psych-manipulative holograms, flashing and shifting in hazy, glass tanks. This place, he thinks, can brilliantly serve Cloister needs, simply because it is of a sort, meticulously hidden from outsiders. Dorianna will think it an honor, a privilege to enter and to observe. She will open herself to the suggestive influences whispered here. Ilya can imagine her blush of girlish enthusiasm, as she thinks to herself that she has seen what few others of her national breed will ever know. Use this, the voice behind his thoughts demands. And Ilya nods, masking the gesture behind a pantomime of hesitance and vague distaste. “Yes,” he finally says, and though he doesn’t glance at Aleo directly, he senses Aleo’s barest hint of a smile. They step inside. Carved through ancient bedrock, the bar is a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers, not unlike the regions beneath Cloister. There are girders and cantilevered platforms like the perches of strange, avian beasts. There is laughter. There is talk in at least a dozen languages, all of which carry the glutinous weight of Slavic inflections, or the rolling, warm tones of language-families obscured in Ancestral Earth’s deepest African past. Nowhere, however, is there the hollow twang of Centralist Standard. The air is cold to the nostrils, as if tinged with differential anesthetics, and Ilya reads the telltale of pilot-scent--the salves and tinctures worn and consumed against the threat of sensory overload. “Pilots,” Aleo explains, “are delicate in their tolerances. Normal human sense will drive them mad, so they defend themselves with hif-derivates and afferential numbing agents, with holographic light shows and mind-altering music.” And that’s the smell…afferential buffers?” Dorianna asks. “Yes.” Ilya finds a booth for them, and gestures Doranna in. She nods, sliding into the corner, as if for safety, and Ilya takes the seat opposite her, thankful--oh-so-utterly thankful--that Aleo slides onto the seat before him. He touches an order onto the menu-screen that flashes onto the table face. His fingers hover, for just a hint of a moment, over the “additives” portion of the menu. He touches a single, glowing icon, and reads blinking confirmation in the neat scroll of Cyrillic then banishes the screen with the flick of a finger. “The Library has more in depth information on the pilots,” Aleo says, as if he hasn‘t seen the order. “But it’s better to experience them so that you can have some sense of what you’re learning about.” His voice, Ilya notices, is pitched subtly: like a trust-inducing announcer reading the day’s propaganda. Dorianna nods. “And the Library…it has information I can access in Standard?” “Translations are available.” “Censored?” “Most likely, but I’m a bonded diplomatic translator; I can accompany you if you’d like.” “Yes…that would be helpful. Thank you for the offer.” A server approaches with three beers in tall, glass mugs, the head on each measured to the neat width of two fingers. He is young, the server, unmodified in a way that speaks of common city pedigree. He looks like Oleg, or some probable brother, with a face composed along the lines of a squared jaw, high/sharp cheekbones, and dark, dark eyes. Ilya shoots a nodding glance at Dorianna, and the server takes the message. He places the first beer in front of her. It is lighter, Ilya reads, though he is certain that Dorianna misses this distinction. The second beer, and the third are placed and the server smiles, asks if there is anything more, and receiving an answer of no, he nods, bows oh-so-faintly, and vanishes back into the rakish shadows of the bar. At first, they drink quietly, and with little conversation, and then…after the pause lingers on the edge of discomfort, Ilya sits forward, elbows planted firmly on the table face. “When you left, all those years ago, you didn’t seem interested in following your father’s footsteps. Now, you’re back. Why?” He tastes no challenge in his words, but as he takes in the play of emotions across Dorianna’s face, he can see that she is at search for a barb in the question. He keeps his face as impassive as he can manage. After a beat, and a sip of her drink, Dorianna smirks. “Things change, Ilya.” “Just like that?” A nod, another sip of her brew. “Sometimes. Like a boy on a boat becoming an oh-so-mysterious Brother of the Nemaean Cloister.” “That isn’t a change, Dorianna…I knew even then that I’d work in service of Nemaea. It was only a matter of time.” Now, Aleo sits forward. “And your father…? He studied antrhro-biotics?” Dorianna shakes her head. “His discipline was archaeo-linguistics. He was interested in the roots of current-day Rüs, and how they survive here, but not in the Central Systems. He was also interested on the old Rüs influence on the shape of reality that Nemaea accepts. Your versions of Rüs are closer to its ancient Terra-Slavic roots than any of the languages we speak in the Centralist Regions, and he believed that the atavistic nature of your lives is a direct result of that.” She pauses for a sip of her beer. “My own study--once I’m done with preliminaries--will actually launch from much of his work. I’m interested in seeing how an atavistic interstellar language affects the society it defines. Your concepts of ‘mutation’ and ‘adaptation’ are--as I think--radically different than ours, and that influences what you’ll ultimately become. I‘m interested in that.” “So,” Ilya says. “We’re living museum relics…” “Not exactly that,” Dorianna responds. “But not exactly something else, either.” If Dorianna has a quip in response to that, she doesn’t let it out. Instead, she takes another sip of her brew. Again, there is a moment of silence. “In all honesty,” Dorianna says, after a beat, “the whole of Nemaea is something of an anachronism. You’re a viable interstellar community, but you cling to outmoded ways of living. You do things the hard way, your aesthetic sense tends towards the…ancient.” She pauses, hints of a glazed expression masking her eyes. “Humanity has evolved in a particular social direction, but all of Nemaea runs contrary to that social pattern. I think ultimately, the gulf between us will widen…not just ideologically, but physically.” “And you’re contracted,” Ilya says, quietly, “To map the direction of this…social skew?” “To establish the groundwork of that mapping, if I can.” “To what end?” There is more of a bite to his question than he intends, but the direction of this conversation rankles, like sandpaper in the brain. “Understanding.” And to that, Ilya raises his glass…biting back the words that bubble in his throat. “To understanding,“ he says. He swallows a gulp of his brew, then sits back. For a long while after that, he simply watches Dorianna and listens to the questions she poses to Aleo. Questions about the pilots in this bar, about the meaning of their numerous (though subtle) modifications. And there, she says, is the source of her curiosity. In Centralist territory, pilots are not so heavily modified, not so radically different from the whole of humanity. But here, pilots are something else…they swim in tanks of hyper-oxygenated fluids, linked physically to the vessels the steer from one system of planets to another. And, Ilya thinks, they are what you’re after, aren’t they? They’re something new to you…to your corporate governments…a resource, and you want them. Well, he thinks, take a look…a good, long look, because what you’re seeing…what you’re about to see is something you’ll never be able to explain. That thought leaves him hollow. It leaves him cold. He has seen the ultimate pattern of her study. Perhaps more than she has seen herself. And the implications that spark through the switchback convolutions of his conscious thoughts, are dark and forbidding, and promise much more blood, fire, and screams, than the Corporate War all those generations ago. That war is over. He knows it as well as anyone. But as a Brother of the Cloister, and a quiet guardian of Nemaea, he sees that the ultimate cause of war has not gone away. ****