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Whoosh! Snow sprayed out in a circular pattern when the emergency jet-assist escape pack lifted the youth a hundred meters into the air. The fuel cell was only large enough to get him over the mountain to the edge of the estate. Alkirin’s scientists had calculated the quantity exactly; not another erg was left in the tanks by the time the boy landed just inside the six-meter high electronic barrier, less than two meters from the nearest security camera.
For the first time he saw the boy’s face clearly. Sergi! At once he could see the similarities between him and his son, and the differences. Alkirin had been too busy in recent years to pay close attention to him. At twenty-three, he was slimmer than his father had been at that age, and his hair was the honey-brown of his mother, but the eyes were the Alkirin eyes, blue as a clear sky, with a bright fire and intelligence behind them and that went into turbo drive whenever the body was under attack. Now he would see whether the long grooming had produced the results that the father wished.
The old man leaned over his opulent chair’s arm and touched a lighted patch.
“Intruder alert,” he said.
Sirens began to blare and security lights blazed into life. All over the compound, dogs and soldiers with guns burst out of their guardhouses. They would give Sergi, as the Earth saying had it, a run for his money. Trained serpents with maws as wide as a man’s chest slithered up and out of their subterranean cages and undulated around the enclosure, hunting for helpless prey. Occasionally one of the dogs, and very occasionally one of the men, had gone missing, but that was the price of keeping valuable guardian animals, imported at great difficulty from another planet.
Sergi heard the frenzied barking and the clanging of metal doors flung open, and sca
The boy had lived with his mother for the first seventeen years of his life. Alkirin’s wife, Tamica, was a biologist. Alkirin had not seen her in six years. He doubted that she devoted many hours of thought a year to him. She was consumed with her research. Those were two of the things that had interested him in her: her dazzling intelligence and her single-mindedness. Twenty-five years before, his staff had prepared for him lists of likely women whose brains and character suited his purposes. Tamica was far and away the best prospect. He had proposed marriage to her, talked of children, and offered her unlimited research funding. He would have threatened her or kidnapped her to impregnate her if necessary, but it simply wasn’t. She was not entirely unworldly for a scholar; the third offer had definitely made the other two more interesting.
Tamica visited him once in a while, but she was not highly sexed. Alkirin did not care; he had doxies to serve his sexual whims. Nor was she smotheringly maternal. Her offspring was interesting to her, but not quite as engrossing as her latest study of synapses or brain chemicals. She saw Sergi as more an undereducated colleague whom she enlightened when he proved curious. What she had in abundance were traits that Alkirin wanted to make use of in the next generation. He had made sure the child had na
When the boy was seventeen, Alkirin had him kidnapped and taken to the lonely desert island. Alkirin had watched him through monitors planted in his house and school. He believed him to have too trusting and friendly a nature. That needed to be adjusted. Men in black hoods had broken into his room that autumn while his mother was away at a seminar.
The mother believed that Sergi had decided not to wait for her and hitchhiked his way to the college he had chosen for his higher education. Alkirin’s staff had sent messages purporting to be from the boy, even occasionally throwing in the photo of a girlfriend or a blatant plea for money, all judged to be dismissed as a bore by his mother, who was more interested in her current biomedical research, dedicated to ridding humankind of the scourge of brain decay.
On the island, Sergi’s life was an unpredictable medley of peaceful education and terrors. He had tutors to give him lessons on statecraft, science, psychology, finance, and many other topics that he needed. Every one of the tutors was well-compensated, intelligent, at the top of his or her field, and every one with a terminal illness who had been promised that they could spend their remaining days on a tropical island with one highly-motivated pupil. Alkirin kept that promise. Some were so ill that they were able to last only a few months, and were buried there, but died happy. He did not, as the local media had it, always kill his employees out of hand. Some of them died on their own. None of them knew precisely where they were. The astronomy professor was the one risk, since he could work out the island’s location by the stars, but he kept his promise not to reveal it to the boy.
The servants on the island were poor, uneducated men and women from villages that had no electricity or clean water and were located in undeveloped nations that the overlord had not yet taken over. In exchange for generous wages paid directly to their families, they were happy to serve the “young master,” and kept the island mansion perfectly clean, cooked wonderful meals from local and imported ingredients, and did all the menial tasks with which no self-respecting despot need concern himself directly. As far as he knew the boy had never made his own bed or swept a floor in his life. That was appropriate. Even more appropriate, Sergi knew exactly how one should do a task properly, and could point out errors in execution, whether it be making a delicate sauce, repairing a drain, or assembling a complicated weapon.
At other times, Alkirin made the boy the target of live hunts. Sergi never knew when he would wake up from a drugged sleep, stark naked in the middle of the jungle, with or without a weapon, and the shouts of hired beaters and skilled hunters pursuing him. It was to make him ruthless, as he learned woodscraft and survival and how to fight. Alkirin believed Sergi came to love the thrill of the chase. He had killed five hunters in the past two years, and had become an expert in reading terrain.
Alkirin watched with avid interest as Sergi laid a false trail. The boy tested the ground and judged, quite rightly, that it was too firm to take footprints, but the hounds hunted by scent. He ran for several hundred yards in one direction, looping in between trees and up over blind ridges. Suddenly, he doubled back and hurried the other way, careful to plant his feet in the same flattened grass that he had just passed over, then hoisted himself effortlessly into a tree to wait.
The hounds came baying over the hills, with their handlers behind them in nimble, four-wheeled cars. Sergi withdrew into the canopy of leaves. There were sensors in every tree. The security overseers would have spotted the infrared signature by now. Ah, he was tearing them out! Sergi leaped from tree to tree, finding the hidden monitors and wrenching them out of the circuit. Soon there was a dead spot in the zone. Without seeing him alight in the last tree of his choice, Alkirin would not have a clear picture of where he had gone. In a fair battle of wits, Sergi would have made the first score.
The dogs found the discarded rocket pack and began baying. They ran down the scent. The dogs quickly came to the end of the trail and dashed around in circles, howling their frustration in the middle of the field. The handlers herded them back, insisting they try again.