Chapter 2, "Day -30", Scene 6
Har Norma Byukan
With each stride, Norma drew closer to the crest. Her lungs grabbed cold, thin air off the open slope. Her legs lifted, carried, and planted skis, then pulled her further up the snowfield. Her arms jabbed poles for balance and thrust on the slippery incline. Her body worked like an automaton. Her mind, freed from supervision, soared with anticipation of the view from the top.
Just beneath the summit, she slowed, and a moment later, she settled, astride the ridge of a saddle between two peaks. Sweeping away and up on the sides, a rough blanket of snow, glistening in the lowering double-suns, connected her with gray and black crags. Across the way, a long way through cold air so pure that it seemed to enrich the panorama, more rugged mountains lined the horizon.
Yet, she had really come for the glorious collage of blues far below, her own majestic lake set among peaks, like a silken cap within a crown of spires. Protected by isolation and regulation, the scene never failed to reward her.
A reservoir, really. Norma Reservoir. It hadn't been that much trouble to get permission — and funding — from the Continental Collective to build a hydro-electric dam and dedicate the valley's watershed to Byukan-Hamil's private use. Not much work at all, considering what she — and her organization — meant to the Collective.
She didn't think of the reservoir as an intrusion on the land. Rather, it provided a new source of life and added a new highlight of beauty to the natural diversity.
The Continental Collective hadn't known what was best for this valley — she had. The Ganj-Dareh Collective didn't know what was best for its future — she did. Irwin and all his cronies wouldn't know how to guide the consortium — she would.
It was time to do away with rules and people that prevented her from doing what was best.
Starting with the blemish of competition.
Norma lifted her chin, set her jaw. She knew how Yeibichai worked. Everything by contract; every contract open to competition; everyone expected to welcome competition as a mill for improvement.
In the guise of competition, Byukan and Hamil had gathered the reins of every combine on the continent. Then she, as their heir, had wrung that control into unmatched efficiency, uniformity, and profit. Now it was time to shed the final impediments to that consolidation.
When things change. The words echoed in her mind, this time with legitimacy. It was all right, she realized, to change Global Patterns when they needed it. Mna Josef did it. So can I.
A slug of revulsion flexed within her. Its metallic tang called these thoughts "Treason."
Wonderful! Norma stomped her feet, bound to narrow skis, and looked forward to wiping out that reflex of conscience which could still twist her stomach.
Grinning, she quivered with these promises to herself and soared on their prophetic wings.
Images of Dain broke through. Overlaying each other in montage, flashes of memory showed how Dain had worked on her. Seductively open, then menacingly closed, near then far, he flicked about her as she reconstructed the scene. He had played her. She had leveraged him and his ideas. Her scheme for Ganj Dareh had arisen out of the merger.
Norma grinned with pride — and calculation. She had chosen well. Dain, working his own agenda, would undermine the Team of Partners and gather their reins of power into his own hands. Just as she wanted.
But after Dain had accomplished all this, she had to stop him before he could challenge her directly.
Norma twisted, instinctively turning in the direction of her quarters — and the man who would soon enliven them.
Tidhar.
Norma and Tidhar.
Danielle and Josef. Their portrait came into her mind, briefly in the original, then the faces morphed until Norma and Tidhar posed together, she standing beside and behind him, her hand resting on his shoulder.
Norma saw now where the power resided in that arrangement and nodded appreciation to her mother. She had taken a partner who added strength and masculine insight, but did not dominate.
Norma would do the same. She had improved Byukan-Hamil, the consortium. Now she would improve on Byukan-Hamil, the marriage. Tidhar already outmatched Le Père as a lover. La Mère de la Norma had never commented, but her husband a sexual dynamo like Tidhar? Never!
Tidhar just had to be trained to contribute outside the bedroom. His first mission: eliminate Dain when the time came. He would begin preparing for that now.
Norma fixed her ski-poles. The snow beneath them creaked. She lifted, swung, then planted her skis, their weight trivial, the work welcome after the moments of serenity. The skis bickered with the slick surface, then settled in.
Well, maybe not right now. They had time for each other first.
Norma peered back down the slope she had climbed. Below her lay an open stretch of crusty snow, shot through with stark outcrops of granite, creased only by the wind and her tracks. Beyond that spread the forest's prickly cloak where it covered the mountain side with life.
She knew the best way through the forest, the fastest and most exciting run. The path laid itself out in her mind.
Norma leaned forward and swooped down the mountain side.
#
Somewhere near the bottom, the scent of woodsmoke cracked Norma's concentration, empty of everything but the thick trees as mute adversaries — and the challenge of getting home. Every part of her body surged with the effort and its companion warmth. Somewhere below her lay the direvnya. The forest kept her from seeing it. Yet the forest was empty enough to ski through. She glided over fine snow that had been filtered, then protected by the evergreen canopy. She dodged the hard, inert trunks with deft shifts of her weight.
Then she broke out! A snow meadow flared under her skis. She streaked across it. A blue sky opened above her. Its air stroked her face. Here, her outbound tracks, so close she could ride them home with one side-step. There, her quarters reached toward her with a subterrane spa, its flagstone mouth open to her.
She braked just under the low roof, stepped from her skis, and strode toward sounds: crackling of fire, cheery in its stone alcove; scent of burning pine and sultry musk; lapping of warm water, soothing in its wide tub, just a few paces from the hearth; percussive harmonies of Morricone, stoking the urges in her flesh.
Reds and yellows shot out from the flames, caught in the low rough ceiling, rolled across the wood paneling, bounced from the choppy surface of the hot tub as Tidhar emerged from it. He rose, climbing steadily out of the water, glinting with cascades. He reached for her with every part of his bare body. His fingers tugged at the seals of her rose-colored therma-skin, pealed it away, then moved on. His lips caressed her revealed skin, working rapidly over her neck and shoulders, slowing as they savored her breasts. His phallus stropped against her nude thighs, teasing them both.
Norma relished his aggression. She relaxed into his knowing advances as he fed her passions and gave them vent. First, here on the plush rug between fire and water, he crossed the boundaries between selves, pushing as much of him into her as he could. Later, in other parts of the grotto, she would turn on him, sucking him into just the right places for her pleasure and — from now on as partners — for his.
From this moment, she would trust no one as much as Tidhar. She trusted him with her body. She could — she must — trust him with her future.
Tomorrow, she would send him out into the world on precisely designed training missions, for there was much he had to learn, a new psychic balance to achieve, a latency to be honed into reality. So that he would be ready to kill for her, abort Dain's rise toward power, and ensure her ascent to the throne of Popovich — and Yeibichai. Then join her at the pinnacle of power.
Tonight, though, he was hers, she was his, in the only kind of meeting that ever really mattered.
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