For more reasons than one. He dropped his eyes to the man and woman talking not far away.
* * *
What did I ever see in him? Sally Hosten thought.
Her husband—soon to be ex-husband—stood at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back. Karl Hosten was a tall man even for one of the Chosen, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, as trim at thirty-five as he had been twelve years ago when they married. His face was square and so deeply tanned that the turquoise-blue eyes glowed like jewels by contrast; his cropped hair was white-blond. He wore undress uniform: gray shorts and short-sleeved tunic and gunbelt.
“This parting is not of my will,” he said in crisp Chosen-accented Landisch.
“No, it’s mine,” Sally agreed, in English.
She’d spoken Landisch for a long time, her voice had been a little rusty when she went to the Santander embassy to see about getting her Republican citizenship back. She’d met Maurice there. And she didn’t intend to speak Karl’s language again, if she could help it.
“Will you not reconsider?” he said.
Twelve years together had made it easy for her to read the emotions behind a Chosen mask-face. The sorrow she sensed put a bubble of anger at the back of her mouth, hard and bitter.
“Will you give John back his children?” she said.
A brief glance aside showed that her son John wasn’t nearby anymore. Where . . . twenty feet or so, bending over a cargo net with another boy of about the same twelve years. Jeffrey Farr, Maurice’s son.
Karl Hosten stiffened and ran a hand over his stubbled scalp. “The law is the law; genetic defects must be—”
“A clubfoot is not a genetic defect!” Sally said with quiet deadliness. “It’s a result of carriage during pregnancy”—a spear of guilt stabbed her—”which can be, was, corrected surgically. And you didn’t even tell me you were having him sterilized in the delivery room. I didn’t find out until he was eleven years old!”
“Would you have been happier if you knew? Would he?”
“How happy would he be when he found out he couldn’t be Chosen?”
Karl swallowed and looked very slightly away. He is my son too, he didn’t say. Aloud: “There are many fine careers open to Probationers-Emeritus. Johan is an intelligent boy. The University—”
“As a Washout,” Sally said, using the cruel slang term for those who failed the exacting Trial of Life at eighteen after being born to or selected for the training system. It was far better than Protégé status, anything was, but in the Land of the Chosen . . .
“We’ve had this conversation too many times,” she said.
Karl sighed. “Correct. Let us get this over with.”
She looked around. “John!”
* * *
John Hosten felt prickly, as if his own skin were too tight and belonged to somebody else. Everyone had been too quiet in the steamcar, after they picked him up at the school. He’d already said good-bye to his friends—he didn’t have many—and packed. Vulf, his dog, was already on board the ship.
I don’t want to listen to them fight, he thought, and began drifting away from his mother and father.
That put him near another boy about his own age. John’s eyes slid back to him, curiosity driving his misery away a little. The stranger was skinny and tall, red-haired and freckled. His hair was oddly cut, short at the sides and floppy on top, combed—a foreigner’s style, different from both the Chosen crop and the bowl-cut of a Proti. He wore a thin fabric pullover printed in bizarre colorful patterns, baggy shorts, laced shoes with rubber soles, and a ridiculous looking billed cap.
“Hi,” he said, holding out a hand. Then: “Ah, guddag.”
“I speak English,” John said, shaking with the brief hard clamp of the Land. English and Imperial were compulsory subjects at school, and he’d practiced with his mother.
The other boy flexed his fingers. “Better’n I speak Landisch,” he said, grinning. “I’m Jeffrey Farr. That’s my dad over there.”
He nodded towards a tall slender man in a white uniform who was standing a careful twenty meters from the Hosten party. John recognized the uniform from familiarization lectures and slides: Republic of Santander Navy, officer’s lightweight summer garrison version. It must be Captain Farr, the officer Mom had been seeing at the consulate about the citizenship stuff.