AAAAAAAAA

First off, happ birth day!!!!

Second, what did I do to deserve all this kindness!?!?!?!?

First it’s chorus and now you??? I don’t mind it at all, I just don’t see why it’s me???

And yes please, I was already planning on doing you in a little bit but if you don’t mind sending me some sketches of ‘em that would help out a lot!

@april-rainer

No man has hired us

With pocketed hands

And lowered faces

We stand about in open places

And shiver in unlit rooms.

Only the wind moves

Over empty fields, untilled

Where the plough rests, at an angle

To the furrow. In this land

There shall be one cigarette to two men,

To two women one half pint of bitter

Ale. In this land

No man has hired us.

Our life is unwelcome, our death

Unmentioned in ‘The Times.’

-T. S. Eliot, The Rock

——

TRUE TO MY ASSESSMENT, Collier posted a victory in fine form. I’d consider the three thousand in winnings, I decided, as a part of my commission.

Parnaße had found this very amusing.

“Simon says,” he informed me over dinner, “That several of the drivers put you in the dressing room with Jan Collier before the race.” He shook a fork in mock accusation. “You aren’t in the business of juicing horses these days, are you?”

I laughed.

“No,” I said, “The track is Rory’s concern, not mine.”

“And the drugs?” The Director’s son wondered.

“I find that an impertinent question,” I replied, “Coming from the largest purveyor of controlled substances in the Empire.”

Parnaße, to put it simply, ran sunshield. In his academic and clinical capacities, experimental advancements in the drug fell under his jurisdictional scrutiny. As future Director of Brussels, he also managed the development and testing of commercial variants. Excepting price and distribution, nothing happened in sunshield without his approval.

“Guilty as charged,” François admitted with a laugh. All the same, I thought for a moment I caught the bitter edge of some other emotion, hovering between his lips and throat, only to be swallowed before it could fully form. “—But all the same,” the Director’s son continued, “You could have told me you were running a con on Collier. There’s not a soul in the Three Cities who doesn’t already know he’s an unscrupulous fool.”

Unscrupulous maybe, I thought, and naive in many ways, but certainly not the fool they pegged him for.

“What would it have changed if you knew?” I asked him.

“Well, I’d have placed a bet,” Parnaße admonished me, “If I had known you’d just been down to the stables to inspect the goods. An educated hunch from Mary Smith is the kind you put money on.”

“He was ready,” I said, thinking of Jan, blowing smoke in the face of Ballasteros. “It didn’t take a seasoned reader of men to see that.”

“It was a well-driven race,” François agreed, “I hate to admit it, but I almost enjoyed myself in that ghastly box.”

“Monsieur Doctor is a snob,” I said. “Put any five factory workers from Mann in that skybox, and they’d show you the party of the decade. Blame your own delicate sensibilities if you fail to be impressed.”

François was the rarified breed of Company man who could laugh at his own privilege.

“Simon said about the same,” he replied. “You know, I hate it when the two of you are right.”

“Well,” I admitted, “If I’m being honest, the people watching was probably better from down in the stands.”

Parnaße considered the assertion.

“If you prefer quantity over quality,” he remarked.

“Oh?”

“From the box,” Parnaße explained, “We had an excellent vantage of the General.”

Trustee-General Mikhail-Istvan Gorenin was, on paper, the seventh most powerful man in the Company. As the second child of the Trustee of Sarajevo, he’d been raised for the Guard. To his credit, Gorenin had intelligence and ambition in addition to pedigree, and rose rapidly in the ranks of the Guard. Under his command, the Wild restlessness of the Southeast that had plagued his father’s generation was largely subdued. More remarkably, he had managed peace on moderate terms. It was highly unusual for a Company General to enjoy the support of the Republican populace, but Mikhail Gorenin—young, liberal, and handsome—had captured the attentions of the citizenry of the Three Cities. Just as his star was reaching its zenith in the Guard, Gorenin was struck by a personal tragedy. His elder sister, Tijana-Ljubica, was killed in a traffic accident, thrusting the Trusteeship unexpectedly on his shoulders. By all accounts still struggling with tremendous grief, the Trustee-General had channeled his new authority to the extreme border lands of his dominion, nurturing the outpost of Istanbul into a thriving town. According to the rumors, he spent his few free moments there, building a utopia from the ground up.

“Did you speak with him after the race?” I asked.

Parnaße laughed and shook his head.

“We don’t fraternize across Blocs without good reason,” he said. “If I had tried, he’d have only suspected my motives.”

Parnaße’s social trepidations were rooted in Company politics. The Company Standard’s Board of Trustees was divided into three regional Archtrusteeships—Paris to the northwest, Edena in Central Europe and the northeast, and Geneva to the south and southeast. Of the three, Edena was the most powerful, with Chairman Josef Ehemann-Edel at its head. In normal circumstances, Edena and its subsidiary cities would have held an iron monopoly over Board votes, controlling a strong majority of the total Company shares.

Josef Ehemann’s tenure as chair, however, had upset the balance.

Rather than consolidating the Edels’ power, Teresa-Kristina’s marriage to Ehemann had had the unintended consequence of splitting the Chairman’s vote. Together, the Chairman and Madame Chairman held fifty-two percent of the Company’s stock: thirty from Josef and twenty-two from Teresa. If they voted together, their will was absolute.

However, the animosity between Chairman and wife had resulted in an era of complex coalition government on the Board of Trustees. Ehemann had entrenched himself with Standard Tower’s traditional allies, the Archtrusteeship of Vienna, whereas Madame Chairman, in building her bloc, had turned to the Archtrusteeship of Geneva. The selection not only made up ground in her personal deficit of stock compared to the Chairman, but had solidified an alliance of liberal elements within the Company.

With Teresa’s vote, the Geneva Bloc tallied forty-three percent of the total shares, the same as the Edena Bloc. The remaining fourteen percent belonged to the Paris Bloc, comprised of the Archtrusteeship of Paris alone. While this left Paris and her subsidiary cities without a reliable patron, it had also put them in the unique position of casting the deciding swing votes, meeting after meeting. The West was courted and shunned in turn, depending on whom she had most recently showered her favors, and what she had leveraged in the compromise.

As heir to the Directorate of Brussels, Parnaße reported to the Archtrustee of Paris—Armand Levarlet. Gorenin’s Sarajevo was the second city of the Archtrusteeship of Geneva, and a powerful player in the Geneva Bloc. Parnaße wouldn’t have wanted to approach Trustee-General Gorenin—his superior and one of Paris’s chief rivals—without an invitation.

“Do you think it’s true what they say,” I asked, “About the General in Istanbul? That he’s looking to build an independent city-state?”

Parnaße shook his head.

“I don’t really know,” he replied. “We were never close, even at the Academy. I couldn’t tell you what kind of man he is.”

Word in the Guard was that Gorenin was brave and honorable, an outward minded man, and true to his convictions. But that was neither here nor there.

“Alright,” I said, “I’ll ask the question another way. If you were Trustee of Sarajevo, would your eyes be turned to the East?”

“Mary,” Parnaße said gravely, “That’s treason.”

“Purely hypothetically,” I pressed. “If you had the chance to create a civilized entity, separate from the Company, would you do it?”

François would not bite.

“I’m not sure it’s possible,” he said, “And even if it were—Konstantin’s ghost—the responsibility that would be!” He practically shuddered at the enormity of it. “I can’t even begin to imagine what it would mean to take it on. A little like Cain, I suppose: cast from the land of plenty; cursed to wander the Earth.”

“If the rumors are right,” I observed, “It’s the garden that Gorenin thinks he’s building, not the reverse.”

“Well,” Parnaße pressed me, “What would you do, if it were down to you?”

I laughed.

“I think it’s vain madness,” I said outright. “City knows I have no great love for the Company, but why anyone would expect a second to be an improvement on the first, is beyond me.”

“It is difficult to know you and to believe,” Parnaße remarked with a skeptical grin, “That the notion of an empire to rival the Company doesn’t appeal to you.”