**In "The Guardian" we were introduced to the characters Ilya, Aleo, and Dorianna and the events that unfolded on the world of New Ruthenia. "Death and Rumors" is the direct follow-up of "The Guardian" and takes place immediately after the events of "The Guardian." ______________________________________________________________________ **** “The problem is simple,” Dorianna says, three weeks into her residence in Fyodorov. She wears a look of haggard exhaustion. “Too many filters…too much separation.” Ilya shrugs. “It takes time. The web is still learning to read your links.” “I’m not learning anything. Not like I used to. So the web can‘t possibly be learning anything from me!” Node replacement,” Aleo says, “can be a touchy process. Your only real choice is to go with it.” They are seated in the conversation pit of the living room that Ilya and Aleo share. There is greater opulence here than they knew at Cloister-house in Bes. Nemaea is a different world: the heart of the great celestial lion emblazoned on the souls--if not the sleeves--of all humans who claim leonine pedigree. Fyodorov is a bigger city, an older city. “There has be a way to compensate.” Ilya has heard much of this before…in one barrage of complaints or another. He understands Doranna’s difficulties, the burdens she has placed on herself by coming here, and his sympathies lie with her. It’s his job to help her through this, his job and Aleo’s…but the more he hears of her discomforts and nagging failures at acclimation, the more helpless he feels. Though not his planet by birth, Nemaea is home. The city of Fyodorov--at one time or another--calls to every initiate-brother within the Cloister. But now, seated in an apartment far more opulent than the cell he shared with Aleo on New Ruthenia, he feels lost. Helpless. “There are ways,” he says, behind a faint shrug.” And in that instant, he thinks that he’s just said too much. “There are ways,” Dorianna repeats, thickening the words with a parody of Ilya’s accent. “But…” she continues, left eyebrow cocked in wordless challenge and adding interrogative punctuation to the sentence. “But,” Ilya continues, taking her bait and fully aware of it. “Aleo is right…you’ve had full node replacement. You’ve been on immune-response repressants for a week. Give it time…you’re not going through anything new…every Nemaean has been where you are. It won‘t do you any good to stress yourself.” Dorianna leans forward and fingers the rim of her glass. She’s barely touched the stimulants that Aleo mixed in lieu of much-forbidden alcohol. She cannot drink until her battery of treatments has ended, until she is Nemaean--deep in her genetic core--as everyone else is. “Not exactly…you boys were born with that stuff that passes for blood around here. I’ve still got that good old-fashioned Terran-derived stuff. You went through this acclimation crap when you were all too young to care.” She tucks an errant fall of hair back behind her ear. “And you’re going through it now,” Aleo says, quietly. He shifts, oh-so-slightly, the crisp, black collar of his cassock open over a neat, garish “V” of yellow fabric. His favorite undershirt: an obnoxious holdover from his childhood in the outback wilds of Mala-Dahomey. Raised by pagan wolves--he always says of himself--You learn a thing or two, but refined taste was never on the syllabus. Raised by pagan wolves! Ilya doubts that Aleo has ever even seen a real wolf. Ilya allows himself a moment’s loss in that thought, and the incongruity of what Aleo likes to say of himself. Aleo is nothing, if not elegant. Even now, in cassock and buskins, sparked with garish yellow undergarb, he embodies more than the most casual of leonine ideals. Self depreciation is one of his talents, however: a manipulative force he wields, whip-like and with inhuman precision. “Dashenka…you’re not alone in this,” Aleo says. “We’re here to help you. And though you wouldn’t know it from Ilychka’s charming manners…we want to help you.” “So…” Dorianna begins. “What do we do?” She smiles, faintly, and for a moment, the chiseled set of her features takes on the cast Ilya remembers from her adolescence more than a lifetime ago. Ilya shrugs. “We come up with a plan to help you.” “No!” Dorianna says, though there is laughter buried deep inside her voice. “The last time you two…helped me…I slept for twenty-two hours and woke up with a headache.” “That,” Ilya says. “Was necessary.” Dorianna nestles more deeply into the plush cushions of the semicircular couch. She settles her gaze on quartzite table that glows with soft, amber light. She gazes at the crystalline clarity of her drink, as if scrying some vague and nebulous future, and then she draws a deep breath. “I’m not making this easy for you,” she says, and though Ilya knows she is addressing them both, he also feels the bulk of her statement. A single sentence, but it is like the concentric shock-ripples of a cruiser, dropping out of FTL transit and shedding velocity at the cusp of one stellar system or another. “I know you have your difficulties…and your duties as well, but if you can manage, I’d like something to…I don’t know--something to hold onto. I’m loosing what I assumed was my inherent humanity here…and I know that those feelings are wrong. Dead wrong. But right now, my feelings are all I’ve got, and they’re telling me to do something…to feel something familiar.” And the plea in her voice strikes Ilya like blows to an anvil. He is a fool, he thinks, if he can presume to know what she feels, if he can pretend to understand it. He is cruel, he thinks, if he says as much; so instead, he inhales deeply and reaches to his side, taking Doranna’s hand in his own. “I don’t know what I can tell you, Dashanka…I know this is uneasy for you. If there is something we can do…something reasonable, then we will do it. But now, Aleshka is right…you must simply ride this through. Let your nodes re-grow--adjust to the new protocols we’ve embedded in your memory centers. In time, you’ll have the web again.” It is here that he smiles, but the expression feels pale and feeble on his face. “And when you’re re-connected to the web, you’ll get to complain about the endless, nonsense chatter that we Nemaeans love so much.” Whether this is enough or not is hard to say, but down inside of Ilya’s shadowed and secret parts, the skinny, long-limbed son of an aquaculture specialist hopes that it is. He is sure that Dorianna senses this; he feels her fingers flexing into the most subtle clench. She releases her grasp, reaches for her drink and takes a sip. She grimaces. Aleo has mixed her a cocktail of vitamins and likely Aniracetam-derivates. Ilya can detect no telltale scent, no betrayals of color, but for three weeks, Dorianna has been fed countless, varied exposures to the chemical broths and vapors that are as much a part of Nemaean life as the ambient atmospheres of human-friendly environments. He is sure that she can taste Aleo’s assiduous ministrations. Dorianna considers her drink, and then casts a gaze to the window-wall that marks the front of the apartment. The room beyond the pit is dark--lit here and there, by reflections cast from the table-glow itself. She steals another sip of her drink, and then inhales as if she’s discovered sudden inspiration there, or in the cityscape beyond. All of Fyodorov gleams like some mock galaxy in the shades of high-pressure sodium vapor and halogen light. Lasers glare in the distance, casting advertisements and the promise of relax-club diversions onto the bellies of low-hanging clouds. The skies of Fyodorov are dark, Dorianna maintains, in comparison to the glare of city-night that she has learned in the various cities of Earth, Venus, and other Sol-system masses. “What about a pilot?” she asks. “A pilot?” Ilya echoes, sure of the pattern that her thoughts have taken. He can read signs of this in her expression, in the subtle way her fingers--at first, clenched--oh-so-slightly, relax in their grasp on the crystalline glass. The question makes her nervous, he can see; he watches the way she rakes through the dark and wavy cascades of her back-swept hair with outstretched fingers. “Whether I have the right ’ware or not…they’re a reasonable stop-gap aren’t they? I can feel the web if I’m in contact with one. I’m all dried out; I need a good dip in the datasea…I’ve had that for my entire life. “Except for the time that my web was buffered--when I first arrived here--I’ve never been out of web interface for more than a few hours. But a pilot--” “--Is unpredictable,” Ilya says. “No more so than I’ve already dealt with.” “It could be dangerous. More so than you‘ve experienced.” Now, Aleo shrugs. “It could be any number of things--none of them pleasant. Even if we’re marked out as your shepherds, there are a million-and-one things a pilot can do. Nothing malicious, of course, but unpredictable nonetheless.” “The risks,” Ilya adds, “are too high.” “But is it a real possibility?” “Maybe…?” Aleo nods, but the gesture is curt and nearly lost to the darkness. Dorianna sees it, Ilya is certain of that; her posture stiffens, tension seems to migrate up her spine and back down like waves propagated in some strange and gelatinous sea. “There may be a way,” Aleo says after a long pause. There is vodka on the table and he downs his glass. Ilya--bound more by drinker’s-tradition than the desire for more alcohol--finishes his glass and wordlessly accepts the next substantial shot: two shots by outsider’s reckoning, and he’s aware of this, only as a distraction from the conversation at hand. He senses surrender in Aleo’s gesture, in the clear spirit itself, and he thinks that this shot will go badly, not even the best zakuski will chase it. Aleo will drink, Ilya thinks, and stink of defeat. “Really?” Dorianna asks, so obviously unaware of the blow she has delivered. “We’ll need time to think…to work things out,” Aleo says. “But we can’t give you a definite yes.” “I’m not asking for a definite yes,” Dorianna says. “Just…” and her words break into staggered silence between vague, hand-waving shrugs. “Just…something,” she says Ilya nods. “We will talk about it.” But what is there to say? He knows Aleo’s mind, he can read it with a touch, can share with that same touch. Like a pilot, but only with another who Nemaean. Not with Dorianna, and as he recalls the afternoon’s dance around tonight’s talk, he thinks that he can sense--at least in retrospect--profound disappointment. He rankles at that, and now it’s his turn to rake through his hair with outstretched fingers. He needs a trim, strands tickle the back of his neck, just beneath he starched border of his collar. “Thank you,” Dorianna says, after a moment. Aleo simply nods. Ilya says nothing; the power of speech has betrayed him and leaves only silence. ...