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Weideranders Station was different. That vast space-going roundhouse was too alien. Pollya
Pollya
She could not have endured it without Korando's help.
She was easing him into the role Frog had vacated by dying. He seemed to accept it.
The Mountain was terrifying too. Though it was the gentlest of worlds, it lacked that without which a Blackworlder never felt secure. It had no dome. Neither she nor Korando ever learned to face the open sky.
Lucifer Storm was almost too easy. She was sleeping with him, loving him, and married to him almost before she herself knew what was happening.
Janos Kasafirek was impressed with her abilities. She was astounded and delighted. He had a reputation as a savage, unrestrained critic.
For a time she was thoroughly content. Life seemed perfect, except that she did not get to see Korando as often as she would have liked. Albin was her sole touchstone with her past and home.
Then, a year after their arrival on The Mountain, Albin a
"There's been trouble," he told her. "A skirmish in the Shadowline."
"What can you do?"
"I don't know. Mr. Blake will need me, though. Be calm, Polly. You've got it under control. I'm nothing but excess baggage now."
She cried. She begged. But he went.
Looking back later, she chose that as the day when everything started going wrong.
During her tenure at the Modelmog, Lucifer's father and Richard Hawksblood fought a brief war on The Broken Wings. Lucifer followed the news uneasily. She tried to comfort him, and quickly became engrossed in the action herself, seizing every sketchy report from the Fortress of Iron, skipping from newscast to newscast to find out the latest. It was her first exposure to mercenary warfare. She was intrigued by the gamelike action and by the odd personalities involved. Once she did become enthralled, Lucifer lost interest. He expressed a virulent disapproval of her interest.
She was disappointed because the war ended so quickly.
A few months later Lucifer a
"To the Fortress?" She became excited. She would be a step closer to Plainfield. And closer to the mercenaries she found so interesting. Lucifer's father had come to their wedding. What a strange, intriguing old man he had been. Two hundred years old! He was a living slice of history. And that Cassius, who was even older, and Lucifer's brothers... They were like nothing Blackworld or The Mountain had ever seen.
What had begun as an ecstatic honeymoon was fading fast. She did not mind leaving a scene that promised to become unhappy—except that she would miss Janos Kasafirek and her studies.
"I don't want to go," Lucifer told her. "But I have to. And it's cruel to take you away from your studies when you're doing so well."
"I don't mind that much. Really. Janos is getting a little overbearing. I can't take much more. We both need to cool down."
Lucifer looked at her oddly.
He changed after they reached the Fortress. His joy, youth, and poetic romance fled him. He became surly and distant, and ignored her more and more as he tried to fit into the Legion. The Legion tried to adjust to him. He could not meld in.
Inadequate to the mercenary role, he would be little help during the grim passage he had returned to help weather. Pollya
Pollya
Knowing why he was hurting her did not ease her pain. Understanding had its limits.
Loneliness, self-doubt, her own frustration, and spite drove her into the arms of another man. Then another, and another. It became easier each time. Her self-image slipped with each one. Then came Lucifer's father. A challenge at first, he began to remind her of Frog. He gave her moments of real peace. He was gentle, considerate, and attentive, yet somehow remote. Sometimes she thought the body she clasped in their lovemaking was a projection from another plane, an avatar. The quality was even more pronounced in Storm's associates, spooky old Cassius and the Darkswords.
Plainfield, wearing the name Michael Dee, finally appeared. She met him with some trepidation, sure her hatred would shine through, or that he would remember her.
He did not remember, and did not sense her odium. Her scheme progressed with such ease that she lost herself in its pace. Before she knew it, she and Plainfield were aboard a ship bound for Old Earth and, eventually, Richard Hawksblood.
Her life seemed to become an ancient black and white movie. Jerky and depressing. Events followed Blake's script perfectly, yet she had a growing feeling that everything would fall apart.
She had lost a marriage that had meant a lot. She did not like the person she had become. Sometimes, lying beside Plainfield while he slept, she held discourse with Frog's ghost. Frog kept telling her nothing was worth the price she was paying.
It worsened. Storm forced her return to the Fortress. She would have killed Plainfield then had she not still felt an obligation to Blake, Korando, and her home city.
She became lonely in a way she had never known in Edgeward. She felt as if she had been dropped into the midst of an alien race. The men helped, for a few minutes each, but when a lover left her he took with him just a little more of her self-respect.
Then Plainfield was beyond her reach, ru
Frog's ghost called her a little idiot. That stopped her.
She still had her duty to Edgeward. She had been living with soldiers long enough, now, to see herself as a soldier for her city. She could persevere.
Forty: 3052 AD
How important is a place? A place is just a place, you say. And I tell you: Not so! You are either of a place, or you are not. If you are, then it is in your heart and flesh and bones; you know it without thought, and it knows you. You are comfortable together. You are partners. You know all the quirks and bad habits and how to sidestep them. If you are an outsider...
It is the difference between new and old boots. You can wear both, but new boots can be trouble if you don't have time to break them in.
Blackworld was new boots for my father and the Iron Legion.
—Masato Igarashi Storm