langie.”
When he indicated the stack of discarded cards, she made a disgusted sound. “And the wolf?”
Velmeran indicated a card without hesitation.
Consherra stared in surprise. “How can that be? I was making that up!”
She lifted the card and set it down again. “Damn! Well, so much for that.”
Velmeran stared at her as she began to collect the cards. “What is wrong? How did I do?”
“You did perfect,” she told him. “But what about the wolf?”
She lifted the card for him, revealing it to be a wolf. “I had no idea what cards I put down. Either chance outsmarted me, or I have a touch of your own talent.”
She set the cards aside and picked up a small cardboard box, which she placed on the floor in front of him. “There are several objects in the box. Name as many as you can.”
Velmeran stared at the box a moment before glancing over at her. “More children’s games?”
“No, not at all.”
“I can see that.” He stared at the box a moment longer. “There are five plastic figures that I identify as large reptilian forms, perhaps Terrestrial dinosaurs. Please do not ask me the type; paleontology was never one of my strong suits, although I do consider these ruling diapsids of the Mesozoic. There are several coins of various types, mostly copper and bronze although one is almost pure silver. There are four machine parts of types that I cannot begin to identify. There is a pan, a rubber ball, and… teeth?”
“Human dentures… that is Dyenlerra’s contribution,” Consherra explained. “And do not look so horrified. Our teeth might be self-repairing, but humans are not so lucky. Anything else?”
“There is a photograph,” he said.
“Of what?”
“How should I know? It is dark in there.”
Consherra rolled her eyes to indicate her impatience with him. Velmeran frowned as well. He had little desire to be a part of this from the beginning, and now he was convinced that this was only more trouble for him, much more than it was worth. His new talents held no fascination for him. Instead they had frightened him from the first, not in themselves but because they were one more way in which he differed from his own kind. He was alone, and he would always be alone. Even Consherra, as much as she meant to him, could not fill that strange longing he had for someone just like himself.
“Velmeran, what is it?” Consherra asked, noticing his distraction. “What is it about this that troubles you?”
Velmeran glanced up at her, and was about to tell her that she could not understand. Then he caught himself. She had always made an effort to understand him, and she did know him better than anyone else could.
“I am not certain,” he said at last. “Velmeran the Magnificent has grown somewhat, coming even closer to immortal status. Perhaps he is becoming a little too complex for me.”
Consherra nodded. Velmeran the Magnificent was their own term for a living legend, his own alter ego, the great one who had lead the raid on Vannkarn and five more missions just like that. He was the person that Velmeran became when duty required. But the real Velmeran was simple, sensitive, and often insecure. Only she knew him as he really was.
“I understand,” she said slowly, and glanced up at him. “Velmeran, do you still dream of what our race will become when the war is over and we are free?”
“Of course,” he replied. “That dream gives me the courage to do what I must. If I lose that dream, then I will be no more than an ordinary pilot.”
“Well, I believe that you are leading us along the path to what we will become,” she continued. “You have many special talents, not all of them psychic. But being a leader, you are in front of the rest, alone and by yourself. I understand the sadness that is a part of your life, since you must pay for this greater dream with all your own personal dreams. I wish that I could make your sadness and hurt go away and still your longing, but I cannot. You need the understanding of someone like yourself, which I am not. No one is like you, but I think that you are not so different as you believe.”
“Perhaps you do know me well,” he conceded. “But if I am not Kelvessan, then what am I?”
“Something more,” Consherra said, pointing to the medical scanner aimed at his back. “Dyenlerra wants to study you very closely. The suggestion has been made that you are a mutation, perhaps the first evolutionary step our race has taken since our creation. In short, you are the real Kelvessan. We are only the prototype.”
2
The palatial structure in the mountains south of Vannkarn was called Rane Manor after its first owner, although the dynasty he had founded now bore the name Lake. This was not the original mansion; few things built by man could survive chance accident and natural disaster that long. In all those years, fifty thousand in all, only one thing had remained unchanged: the same family had ruled there in a line of descent that had remained unbroken. The family name had changed often and clan leaders had frequently turned to the offspring of near or distant cousins to adopt an heir.
Richart Lake had come to that high position with the sudden if not unexpected death of his grandfather hardly a year before. Richart was not the same sort of man Jon Lake had been, and the sector already reflected his changes. Jon Lake had been philosophical and reflective, while Richart was calculating and coldly efficient. He ran the sector as he had run Farstell Trade, as a business, a tool to control the population, with definite goals to be met and a profit to be made. And he was in his own way even stronger.
Donalt Trace, the Sector Commander, was like neither of those two. He disdained both government and business; according to his own philosophy, a society existed primarily to serve the needs of its military. His whole life had been shaped around the single, all-important task of defeating Starwolves. Richart, on the other hand, had been taught that the Starwolves were a threat that could not be effectively countered, a problem that could be quietly worked around but never eliminated. That was perhaps their main difference. Donalt would have them always fighting, while Richart knew that they could not win. Neither of them had an effective solution. Until now.
Jon Lake had divided the two great tasks of his life between his two successors. Donalt had inherited the problem that the Starwolves represented, but Richart had received the greater responsibility of ensuring the survival of their race. The human species was in rapid decline, too long apart from the rules of natural selection that had shaped their very being. Weak and defective traits had polluted the genetic resources of the entire species. A large portion of their race was impaired physically or mentally beyond the ability to function normally. This escalating problem was a drain of resources that the Union would be unable to afford before long.
Richart Lake was the key supporter of a daring, even dangerous plan to correct this problem. His grandfather had first proposed to trim back the population of the Union by at least half. Forced sterilization would be employed on a large-scale basis, having already begun on those with severe mental or physical impairments. But those standards would slowly be increased to include everyone below a certain intelligence level or a victim of any physical defect, a subsidized return of natural selection, while genetic enhancement would be used to predispose groups of people to certain tasks.
The problem of enforcing that plan was obvious. The implement of the first phase, four months earlier, had led to unrest on every Union world, rioting on twenty and the complete overthrow of Union authority on one. Before the next phase could be put into effect, the full force of the military would be needed to intimidate or punish the general population into compliance. And for that, the problem of the Starwolves must somehow be eliminated. That last point was vital, for the Starwolves would quickly use the Union’s troubles to defeat it.
And that was Donalt Trace’s specialty.
Trace had been nervously pacing the hall outside Richart Lake’s office in Rane Manor for the past half hour. Now he straightened his back cautiously and eased himself into a chair. Circumstance had not been kind to him
