Attempting to Do Away With It Entirely, But Through Its Absence, Referring to It Indirectly
In the eighteen days between Mittermeyer leaving Odin to presage His Majesty’s transference of the capital to Phezzan, and Kaiser Reinhard’s own departure, Reuenthal decided that he should try growing a beard.
It was the feeling of reinvention that came with crossing any threshold, the permanence of leaving Odin. Although it was an unreasonable thing to assume, he was almost certain that he would not return to the planet again in his lifetime, and if he was leaving, why should he maintain the habits he had for years? He was over thirty; he could experiment with leaving behind childish scruples. Ever since he was a teen in his father’s house, a house that he later inherited and currently lived in, he meticulously shaved every offending inch of his face (even when he had been young enough that there was almost nothing to shave). It wasn’t exactly vanity: he always examined his own upper lip and jaw with the brutal detachment of one inspecting a horse’s mouth to determine what he might get for it at auction.
Things would be different now. This was unavoidable, and he should make use of that in as many ways as Kaiser Reinhard was, purging whatever weaknesses remained inside him. Moving the seat of government was a deliberate shock, reminding the galaxy that this was no longer the Galactic Empire as it had been; they were in Kaiser Reinhard’s Neue Reich . Kaiser Reinhard had no need to lean on the old habits and establishments of the Goldenbaums— he was above them, and he would make sure that the rest of the galaxy couldn’t fall back on those old ways either. No matter what happened, Reinhard would never relocate his command back to Odin.
If it had been anyone else making this change, trying to sever ties with the past, Reuenthal would have derided it. But since it was Kaiser Reinhard’s policy, Reuenthal tried to think of it as an admirable goal, and an achievable one. In every meaningful way, Reinhard had already destroyed the old order. All that was left now were its symbols and signs, and those should have been the most ephemeral and easiest to rid themselves of.
There was much to do in those three weeks, to prepare to move the entire government from one part of the galaxy to another, but despite the frantic pace of his underlings, as soon as Mittermeyer left, Reuenthal felt disconnected from the rush, distracted and his mind drifting away whenever he found himself alone.
Luckily, his staff was used to being an army on the move, so the government’s business, at least on his part, was merely complicated and not unprecedented. His personal business, he tried to deal with quickly, so he had to think about it as little as possible.
Preparing for the move left his house feeling alien. Reuenthal was not bringing much with him to Phezzan: most of his few sentimental belongings already had permanent places in his quarters on the Tristan , and he had no desire to haul furniture and housewares from his father’s house across the galaxy. The crew he had hired to store all his belongings and prepare his father’s house for long-term disuse covered all the furniture in white sheets to keep the dust out.
When the workers left one evening, Elfriede sprawled across one of the couches in the drawing room, atop the white fabric.
“You’ve filled this house with even more ghosts than it had before,” she said, gesturing at the grandfather clock covered in the corner. Its gears still ticked audibly, and it had chimed a muffled hour a few minutes ago, but the face was obscured. It would likely run down in a few days with no one winding it.
“I didn’t know you were superstitious,” Reuenthal said. The liquor cabinet remained free of drapery, and he fixed drinks for both of them— no point in letting good alcohol go to waste. When he left, he was sure whatever remained would be pilfered by the maintenance staff that he had contracted to take care of the place in his absence. He passed her the glass before she responded.
“I’m not superstitious. I just like to be comfortable.”
“You’re in the wrong place if you’re looking for the comforts of your old life,” Reuenthal said. It was a familiar jibe— a call and response.
She ignored him. “This place feels like a tomb.” She took a sip of her drink, then laughed. “I suppose it always has been one. But you’ve made it inhospitable.”
“Are you coming with me to Phezzan or not?” Reuenthal asked. “If you don’t like the furnishings, you can leave. I’m not keeping you prisoner here.”
She was silent for a long time. Reuenthal didn’t bother to look at her, but also didn’t leave the room. He had been asking her this question for weeks, ever since he had learned of the plan to move the capital, and he had not yet gotten a clear answer. He let Mittermeyer assume that she would be coming with him, and perhaps he held that assumption too, but she had thus far refused to say one way or another.
He wasn’t surprised when she refused to answer the question this time, too. “I still don’t understand why Mein Kaiser ” — her voice was a perfect mockery of Reuenthal’s usual tone— “feels the need to uproot the whole government.” She tilted her glass, letting her drink catch the light. “If he’s looking for legitimacy, he should stay on Odin.”
“What legitimacy?” Reuenthal snapped. “What more legitimacy does he need, than what he has?”
“You’re a very stupid man, Oskar,” she said.
“Oh?”
“ Your Kaiser has the legitimacy of holding a gun to the rest of the universe’s head,” she said. “Fine. There’s no point in pretending like he doesn’t, and you claim that’s the only legitimacy you respect, anyway. But you seem to have deluded yourself into acting like He is going to live forever, and that his children won’t need to borrow some legitimacy of their own. Odin is a place used to having dynasties— I wonder if he’s about to discover that Phezzan isn’t.”
Reuenthal’s upper lip curled over his teeth in involuntary disgust, though he tried to stifle it. “ He is nine years younger than I am,” he said. Although he inflected the pronoun as a mockery of Elfriede’s taunt, it still was unpleasantly genuine. “I doubt I’ll outlive him, and I don’t care what happens after I die.”
“Your own children will have to care.”
Reuenthal barked out a laugh and turned away. “Are you coming with me to Phezzan, or not?” he asked again. “Make up your mind, and don’t dodge the question. You’re running out of time for me to get you off this planet.”
“You would have to buy me the ticket,” she said. “I don’t have any money.”
“You got back to Odin somehow.”
“I had money then, and that was what I spent it on. It takes a lot to pay bribes for a journey out of exile.”
“What papers did you use— or do I have to find those for you, too?”
Elfriede stood up and stretched. She passed her empty glass to Reuenthal as she left the room, and he refilled it while she was gone, leaving it on the mantlepiece above the fireplace. When he placed it there, he caught a glimpse of himself in the large horizontal mirror high on the wall. The beard he was growing was still patchy after a few weeks of not shaving, but it was enough to change his appearance— softening his jaw and filling out his cheeks, giving his face a rounder shape. He looked away quickly, wishing that the workers had covered the mirrors, too.
Elfriede returned with a booklet of official transit papers, which she held out to him. He opened the booklet and glanced it over.
“Whose papers are these?” Reuenthal asked, reading the name on the documents. The woman in the photo was not Elfriede, but if Elfriede straightened her hair, put on a pair of glasses, dotted her face with freckles, smiled, and claimed that she lost a significant amount of weight after the photo was taken, she might bear enough of a resemblance for an unwary inspector to let her by. “Brigitte Taubman?”
“A family servant,” Elfriede said. “When we got word that our house was going to be raided, I broke into her room and stole her name.”
“You don’t look much like her.”
Elfriede took the papers out of his hands. “And you look too much like yourself.” She reached up and covered his black eye with the palm of her hand. Reuenthal closed both his eyes, leaving himself in darkness, just the feeling of her hand on his face.
“Oh?”
“Why do you want me to come with you to Phezzan?” she asked.
“I don’t care. I just want to know if you’re coming or not.”
Her fingernails pressed into his forehead, pricking the skin above his eyebrow, and the heel of her palm pushed against his eye, the pressure making him see flashes of false light.
“It’s not like I’m giving you status,” she said. “You’re flirting with treason by even having me here. Why haven’t you gotten rid of me?”
“I could ask why you haven’t killed me yet.”
“You’ll kill yourself without my help. All I need to do is see it.”
“And you’ll leave without me kicking you out.”
“Do you think that things will be different when you go to Phezzan?” she asked after a second.
“Does it matter?”
They hadn’t discussed it, but Reuenthal decided that it was safer to get Elfriede to the airport himself, rather than leaving her to her own devices. They departed the afternoon of the sixteenth, heading for the commercial spaceport several districts away from the capital city. It was quite a long drive, much of it along the coast. Most people would take the train there, a journey of only an hour or so, but Reuenthal didn’t want to be seen on the train, so they drove.
The commercial spaceport was a high-traffic place, which was why it was so far from the capital— some Kaiser around the time of the capital’s construction had considered it unpleasant to have the constant low drone of ships ascending and descending through the atmosphere, so only a privileged few military vessels were allowed to take off near the capital itself.
But where there is a port, there is a city. Unlike the stately capital, this one catered to industry, and the stream of people arriving from and leaving the planet. Phezzani money flooded the place, which meant that so did Phezzani tastes. It was almost appropriate that he was bringing Elfriede here, to this dull place, where Imperial marble-and-brick buildings were adorned with garish neon signs. Practice, before they made it to Kaiser Reinhard’s new Phezzan properly. It was dark when they arrived, and so the flashing lights danced in the corners of his vision.
He found a hotel, one that looked like it wouldn’t ask too many questions, and walked in with her on his arm. It was one of the larger establishments, and it catered directly to Phezzanis. There was a casino in the bottom floors, and several different restaurants to choose from, according to the map posted on the walls of the lobby. The lobby itself was quiet and brightly lit: cream colored furniture and potted plants surrounding a bubbling fountain.
Reuenthal felt incredibly exposed, though when he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflective gold panels on the walls, he didn’t recognize himself at all. His civilian clothes were unfamiliar and stiff with newness— he wore his uniform almost every day of his life— and he was wearing a single blue contact lens to hide his other eye. In theory, he should have been used to the slow creeping growth of his beard, but it startled him still, every time he happened to catch sight of his reflection, or absently touch his face.
At the desk, he paid for a suite under false names: Herr and Frau Taubman. Nothing about his voice, at least, rang false, and the concierge didn’t ask for any ID— Reuenthal’s cash payment was sufficient, especially since he paid generously for one of the nicest suites. Elfriede clung to his arm the entire time, her weight half-dragging him down to the floor.
In the elevator on the way up to their room, she looked directly into the camera in the corner and tried to undo his belt, her hands slinking across his hips. He almost let her.
He got them an upper floor room, not quite the penthouse, but high up. In the room, Elfriede tossed her small suitcase on the bed and changed out of her traveling clothes, while Reuenthal went out to stand on the room’s balcony. Looking out over the city, he could see the late flights lifting off from the spaceport, one going up or down every thirty seconds or so, their lights staining the sky until they vanished into the clouds above. The characteristic throb of their gravity engines made the clouds they passed ripple, like the sky was reflecting the image of a rock dropped into a pond. If he listened closely, he could hear the pulsing sound over the wind blowing past his ears.
Mittermeyer had sent him a short message earlier that morning, which showed a hotel room not dissimilar to this one, only it looked at Phezzan’s towering space elevator instead of this port. Until permanent lodgings could be found for the whole staff on Phezzan, they would all be quartered out of hotel rooms, seized under Kaiser Reinhard’s authority, and Mittermeyer had been showing off the ones he had saved for Reuenthal. Remembering the message now, he could almost pretend that the flash of blonde hair in the corner of his vision belonged to someone else, that he was on Phezzan already.
Elfriede came up behind him. She had changed into a different outfit, one that she had bought in preparation for their trip, reflecting the different fashions in a different part of the galaxy: a thin blue dress that bore no resemblance to Imperial wear whatsoever, except in that it was a dress, and not men’s clothing like he had seen Phezzani women wear. She traced her hands down his back, though if she was trying to claw him, his own black jacket was too thick for him to feel it. She stopped when she felt the lump of metal against his back— his sidearm hidden beneath his coat in its usual holster. She reached under the fabric and pulled it out; he made no attempt to stop her, though he felt naked without its weight.
“There wasn’t any reason to bring this,” she said.
“Oh? Didn’t you prove to me that I always have to be wary of assassins?”
She seemed almost unfamiliar with the weapon, hefting it and turning it over, though she had enough sense to keep her finger away from the safety and the trigger. Had she never fired a gun before? He was momentarily entranced by the way it dwarfed her hands. He tried to remember what it had felt like the first time he held a gun, but that was when he had been a cadet in school, and that was so long ago that it felt like a different lifetime, and there was no way to draw a comparison between the two of them.
“You won’t be able to take it downstairs,” she said. “They search you before you go into the casino.”
“I have no interest in gambling.”
“Pity. I do.” She turned back inside, still holding the gun, though she left it on the bedside table.
“With what money?” Reuenthal called after her.
“Yours,” she said. “Isn’t that what a husband is for?” She picked up her purse, then fished in it for something. She held up his wallet, and he realized that, at some point between the front desk and the room, she had managed to pick it out of his pocket— likely when he was distracted by her trying to undo his belt in the elevator. She went through it, pulling out the cash, then tossed it on the bed.
“And isn’t a wife meant to obey?” He stepped back into the room, and she took an equal number of steps backwards, maintaining distance between them until she reached the hotel room door.
“Isn’t it a shame that money doesn’t buy loyalty,” she said. “I’m going downstairs.”
She left, the door banging heavily shut behind her. Aside from the wind that buffeted the open sliding door to the balcony, the hotel room was now eerily quiet. Reuenthal opened the mini-bar under the huge television and took out a few of the tiny bottles of cheap alcohol, the two ounces of vodka or rum in each. He was not in a mood to gamble— playing cards with Mittermeyer was a desirable activity primarily in its function as an excuse, something to do with his hands and eyes while they sat and talked. He had no desire to sit and talk with Elfriede, and even less to go down to the casino. It was a risk to be identified, and he was repulsed by the atmosphere and the fact that it was designed to be a place where there was no way to win.
So he sat on the bed and drank, looking out the open balcony door and watching rainclouds roll in lower and lower over the spaceport. With nothing to mix his drinks with, and nothing to distract himself from his own thoughts, it was difficult to pace his drinking.
He picked up his gun from the bedside table where Elfriede had left it. His own hands looked nothing like Elfriede’s, but nevertheless he thought about her hands on the gun as he pointed it, first out the balcony door, tracking the ships that rose into the sky until he got bored with this activity, and then at the large sliding mirror that covered the closet. Looking at his own reflection, he could imagine that he was Elfriede, aiming the gun at his head.
He finished his couple tiny bottles of alcohol, and then there was nothing to do but think. The idea of her downstairs in the casino disgusted him. He couldn’t help but imagine her finding some other man, leaning over a card table together, speaking in his ear in seductive whispers. Introduce herself as Frau Taubman— he realized that while they pretended to be a married couple for the concierge, neither of them were wearing wedding rings. It would have been a major flaw in their disguise, should the concierge not have been used to men and women sneaking away and pretending to be married in order to get a hotel room in which to have an affair.
They weren’t married. Still, the idea of her with someone else made a sick anger rise up in his throat, and he couldn’t escape the idea of it, picturing it over and over, the images fragmented and on loop.
Eventually his disgust overtook his rational better judgment, and his distaste for letting Elfriede get under his skin. He got out of bed and marched downstairs, though he at least had the drunken sense to leave the gun where it was. She had been right: he was searched at the door, which was an indignity that he wasn’t used to.
The casino was loud and dark, with colorful lights from the slot machines twirling in rows down one side of the huge room. At the other end, a band played to tables of people eating or talking. Men and women moved in small groups, little protective schools of fish, from slot machines to card tables to dining area. The ceiling was uncomfortably low, covered with sound-dampening foam disguised as decorative molding, to stop the ding-ding-ding of the machines from traveling further than the men hunched over them, feeding them coins and pressing buttons like mindless automatons. Although the room itself was dark, each individual table seemed to be an island of illumination, where people’s faces were carved out of the gloom, eyes sparkling dots of blue, like the chips in front of them.
It took him a moment to locate Elfriede. She was at one of the craps tables, her back turned to him, and she had managed to gather a crowd of men around her, some playing the game with her, others merely at her shoulders. She was laughing, and had drinks on the table in front of her that had clearly been ordered by other people, a mismatched assortment of half-drunk cocktails.
He stalked over, approaching from behind, and he wasn’t exactly gentle when he elbowed his way past the man who was hanging behind her. He put his hand on her shoulder, his fingernails digging into the hollow of her collarbone. She looked up at him, and though she smiled, it didn’t reach her eyes.
“See, gentlemen, I told you that my husband would be here presently. Oskar—” She held up her hand, two translucent red dice tucked in the space between her fingers. “Give me some luck.”
The intent was for him to blow across her fingers and the dice, a rather feminine thing to do, but instead he took her wrist roughly and kissed her knuckles. “Oskar!”
She was laughing, but the sound was a performance. He wondered if anyone else noticed how false it was. They seemed uncomfortable, her gaggle of admirers and fellow dice players. She rolled the dice and laughed again when she lost money on the roll. It didn’t matter— she shoved more chips forward from her pile.
“Sit down,” she told Reuenthal, making space for him on the open-back bench she perched on. Another man had to move out of the way to let him sit, but he did sit. “Do you want to play?”
“No,” he said shortly.
“Good,” she said with a laugh. She turned to the other players. “Should we all be so lucky to marry someone who hates to gamble, but loves to watch you win.”
The other players looked at her antics, looked at her hands dancing as she shook the dice, and his, folded on the glossy wooden edge of the table— no rings.
“What do you do for work, Herr Taubman?” one of the other men at the table asked, making conversation.
It took Reuenthal a moment to realize he was being spoken to. Only Elfriede jabbing him in the leg under the table got his attention, and he processed the last few moments of the scene on a delay, sounds lagging moments behind the movement of the man’s lips.
“Investments,” he said shortly, accompanying the word with a cool stare that dissuaded people from further attempts at conversation with him, though Elfriede still kept up a charming monologue that engaged her listeners— all of them except for Reuenthal, who barely heard her voice, and instead glared at the other players at the table.
Elfriede still laughed and played dice, but Reuenthal’s arrival had thoroughly dimmed the flirtatious mood she had been cultivating. The drink that had last been ordered for her was brought over by one of the waiters roving the floor, and she sipped it with a nasty smile at the man who had paid for it. Beneath the table, her hand crept across Reuenthal’s lap, kneading his inner thigh.
She lost the dice game resolutely, laughing every time like she had won. Her pile of chips dwindled, and so did the number of men around her, as it became clearer and clearer that she was more trouble than her company was worth.
Eventually, they were nearly the only ones left at the table. It was almost midnight.
“You have to be up early tomorrow, don’t you, beloved?” Elfreide asked him, though she stared at one of the now very drunk men across the table as she did. The lines were performance for that audience, no matter that the audience no longer cared. “Should we make our exit?”
Reuenthal stood without saying a word, and pulled her up by her elbow. She stumbled along with him, her heels catching on the trailing end of her dress, and it seemed to be only him holding her upright, bracing her at the elbow and then leaning heavily on his side.
Her feint of drunken disorientation was only a feint, lasting until they were alone. In the elevator she grabbed the lapels of his jacket. “Beloved husband—” she said.
“Darling wife,” he said in a vicious, mocking tone.
She didn’t laugh, but she pulled his head down by the back of his neck and kissed him. “Remember the day you married me?” she whispered against his lips. “My whole family was there.”
He pictured pointing a gun at her grand-uncle, some cousins who wore her face. “The happiest day of my life.”
The elevator dinged, and they spilled out together, one creature as they wandered blindly down the hall, pushing and shoving.
They stumbled into the hotel room. She had already peeled his jacket off in the elevator— it was dangling from his wrists— and she tossed it to the ground before they were even through the doorway. It ended up caught in the door, half sticking out into the hallway like a flag. The sliding door to the balcony was still open; he had neglected to close it when he went downstairs, and the rain had arrived, torrential. The balcony was covered, so not much of it made it inside the room, but the rain roared louder than the rush of blood through his ears, and the room was freezing cold. Neither of them cared.
Her dress was so slinky and loose that it wasn’t an obstacle. He grabbed fistfuls of the slippery fabric and hauled it up over her head. She cooperated. It didn’t surprise him that she was wearing nothing at all underneath. He ran his hands down her sides, feeling the taut skin over her ribs, the rapid rise and fall of her breathing, like the flank of a sleek animal. He combed his fingers through the hair between her legs, then roughly into the wetness of her cunt.
When she tried to touch him, he shoved her backwards towards the bed. She sprawled across it, watching as he methodically pulled off his own shirt. “You don’t want your wife to do that for you?”
“The laundry?” he asked as he folded his shirt. Her game was too compelling, dangerously so, and he tried to shake himself out of it. “I thought you’d say that’s what servants are for.”
“What is a wife for?” she asked.
He was fully undressed now, and he looked at her. “You tell me.”
His experience with wives as a species was limited: his mother, Mittermeyer’s wife. Elfriede resembled neither. The person she most often reminded him of was Him , with the wild mane of golden hair, and the piercing, hateful look in their eyes. He didn’t think about that now.
“No,” she said. She tossed her head back as he climbed into the bed with her, baring her neck. He ignored the invitation, and instead knelt over her, pinning her shoulders down.
“A wife is meant to obey.”
“A soldier is meant to obey,” she said. “A wife—”
Even with her movement limited with his weight bearing on her shoulders, she could reach between them and grab his cock. She wrapped her legs around him and tried to pull him down towards her.
“A wife has her husband’s child,” she said. “Is that what you want me to say?”
He slid down against her, and she let go of his dick so that he could grind against her, not entering her, though she tried to angle herself so that he would. She reached up to touch his face, and the feeling of her hand moving through the bristles of his newly-grown beard made him feel ill. It was all wrong— the simulacrum of normality that they couldn’t even play at well.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I want.” Or it was what some other man wanted— someone Reuenthal should have been, but wasn’t.
He repositioned himself so he could enter her, and she gave a low moan when he did, though he was silent, closing his eyes, focusing on the motions for some time. Oddly mechanical, in a way that they usually weren’t— but they usually didn’t do this.
She mumbled something half-incoherent, and wholly impossible. “A real family—”
“Better than the one you had before,” Reuenthal said in reply, which managed to get a reaction out of her of some sort, clawing her hands down her back.
“Everybody wants that,” she mumbled.
And nobody gets it , he thought. “You want me to take care of it,” he said. He pressed his hand to her lower abdomen, leaning on it hard.
“Yes,” she said, her voice coming out strangely.
“Then when it’s born, I’ll have to aim higher— for its sake—” He punctuated his sentence with his movement, the white heat growing between them. He moved faster, seeking out the climax. There was only so long he could play this charade before the disgust became too overwhelming.
“Yes,” she said again. “The highest.”
“But how can I be sure—” Reuenthal tried. “How can I be sure it’s mine?”
“He’ll have your eyes,” she said.
It was the wrong thing for her to say, though it was perhaps the only thing she could say— the only thing that would matter to him at all. Her eyes widened when he grabbed her throat. It only took one hand, crushing her neck down against the mattress. She made a whining sound of breath collapsing out of her, and then couldn’t make any more noise. Her legs pulled him more tightly against her, though she clawed at his chest with one hand.
With his hand wrapped around her throat, her face was a mottled red, and she couldn’t say anything, though her lips moved incoherently. With the last of her strength, she reached blindly for the bedside table. She found his gun, knocking the alarm clock to the floor to get it in her hand. She pressed it to his face: his open, panting mouth. He welcomed the cold metal passing his lips, knocking against his teeth, and the tang of it on his tongue was the metallic taste of blood.
Her finger was on the trigger. He closed his eyes and wondered if she would kill him. His fingers closed harder on her throat, sure to leave bruises of each individual point of contact, and he came inside her.
He let her throat go, and she wheezed incoherently, her whole body shuddering. She dropped the gun, and it fell against her chest.
The release was without whatever relief he had been hoping for. He felt nauseated, and the feeling of her smooth skin beneath his hand and her body still moving sympathetically against his was suddenly disgusting, made him gag.
He got off her, trying to stabilize himself, unable— he stood on shaking legs and barely made it to the balcony, where he clutched the cold, thin glass railing and leaned over it. The rain drenched his upper body where it leaned out into the abyss. He didn’t know if he was trying to breathe or vomit, but he couldn’t manage either.
He woke up far too early in the morning, around four, tired enough that it hardly felt like had slept at all. He got out of bed, leaving Elfriede turned away from him in the mess of blankets. He showered, though no amount of scrubbing made him feel any cleaner. He stared at himself in the mirror, one eye dry and red from the contact he had forgotten to take out before going to bed. He pulled down his lower eyelid to get it out, then threw the pale blue sliver into the garbage. A stranger still stared back at him from the mirror: some man with a short black beard, a mustache that didn’t quite meet up with the hair on his chin.
With savage, jerky movements, Reuenthal dumped out the basket of complementary toiletries that rested on the wide counter by the sink. Past the makeup remover pads and the toothbrushes and the little bottles of shampoo, he found the individually wrapped disposable razor. He lathered his face with the bar of soap and attacked it methodically, not even caring when he nicked the tender skin on his throat. The trickle of blood mixed with soap-foam and slid slimy down his chest.
Behind him, the door to the bathroom opened, bringing with it cold air and Elfriede. She shut it again and stood behind him, barely visible in the steam-wreathed mirror. She watched him shave, saying nothing. The only sound was his occasional turning on of the faucet to rinse the hair out of the razor.
When he was almost done, she said, in a completely dispassionate voice, “You would make a terrible father.”
Her words were a relief, though she couldn’t have known that. She was just trying to insult him, as usual. But it freed him from the lingering remains of whatever game they had been playing the previous night, and he met his own mismatched eyes in the mirror. “Yes,” he said. “It’s a good thing I have no intention of being one.”
She stared at him through his reflection. He scraped the razor across his cheek.
“You probably should have killed me when you had the chance— just to stop any possibility of my nuisance spreading,” he said.
She shook her head, then left the bathroom.
He finished shaving, then went out to get dressed. He went through her purse for the remains of cash from last night. Once he made sure that she had enough cash to buy a ticket to Phezzan, and he left the counted amount flattened out in a neat stack on the dresser, and the rest crumpled in her purse. His gun, he retrieved from the bedside table and tucked into his holster.
She was on the balcony, mostly ignoring him, looking out over the still-dark city. The rain had stopped. The sun wouldn’t rise for hours yet, though lights were beginning to blink on in buildings, and the ships leaving and entering the spaceport still moved with an uninterrupted regularity, up and down ceaselessly.
He didn’t say anything to her when he left, and she didn’t look back at him. He wondered if she would take the cash and go elsewhere with it, not follow him to Phezzan. He could no longer bring himself to care.
It was around eight thirty when he got back to the capital city, the morning of the seventeenth. The autumn fog still clung to the branches of the trees, and although the sun was now up, it was too cloudy above to see it as more than a vague lightening of the air. All the lights on the road wore crowns of mist, their green and red glows forming small halos. The whole planet seemed still and quiet.
He didn’t return to his father’s house; there would have been no point. Nor did he head immediately towards the Ministry of War, where his office and staff were; or the military spaceport where he would need to be in the afternoon; nor towards Neue Sanssouci to join up with the rest of His Majesty’s retinue. Instead, he turned his car along the outskirts of the city, heading north, until the stately townhouses came to an abrupt ending, and the landscape changed to sweeping fields of grass, interspersed with the occasional copse of trees, cut through with winding paths. Gravestones stood tall and white on the hillsides, and the morning’s fog collected in the lower parts of the ground. Reuenthal parked his car and got out, entering the Imperial Central Cemetery by one of the smaller side entrances, not the main gate through which funeral processions passed.
Many of his maternal relatives, the Marbach family, were buried here, as were Elfriede’s kin. But they weren’t who Reuenthal was here for. His footsteps left crisp impressions on the dewey grass as he headed for Siegfried Kircheis’s gravestone, all alone in its own part of the cemetery. Reuenthal had only been there once before, for the funeral, but he remembered its location well.
As he had expected, Kaiser Reinhard was there. He could see him from far off, alone by the graveside, though his entourage waited a respectful distance away, out of earshot. Oddly, he was out of uniform, wearing a green jacket and with his blond hair tied back with a matching ribbon. This was not an event that was intended for public consumption, so perhaps the uniform was unnecessary— though he wondered who had chosen the outfit. The boy Emil, perhaps. Regardless, it suited Reuenthal well— he wasn’t wearing his uniform either.
Reuenthal made sure to approach in the direction of his guard, getting the attention of the omnipresent Commodore Kissling. He didn’t need, and certainly didn’t want, Kissling’s permission, but he didn’t want the Kaiser’s twitchy personal guard to start shooting at him. He brushed past them all with a cold stare, and Kissling just nodded and let him by.
Reinhard heard Reuenthal’s footsteps rustling across the damp grass, but he didn’t turn until Reuenthal was almost at his shoulder. There were flowers laid at the foot of the grave, and Reinhard stood before it, his hand on the locket he always wore. He glanced at Reuenthal with an unreadable expression, though that was better than being sent away immediately. Reinhard wouldn’t want to disrupt the sanctity of Kircheis’s grave by doing so— perhaps this was the safest, the only, place where Reuenthal could approach him as something other than a vassal, even if that was what he was.
“ Mein Kaiser ,” Reuenthal said, and bowed, though Reinhard was no longer looking at him.
“Did you come here because you knew We would be here, or because you wanted to pay your respects, Reuenthal?” Reinhard asked after a moment.
It wasn’t a question that needed an answer. “Neither of us will be back to Odin for quite some time.”
Reinhard nodded silently. The only sound in the cool morning air was the susurration of Reinahard repeatedly wrapping and unwrapping the chain of his locket around his finger, the whisper of the metal links rubbing together.
“It’s necessary to move the capital,” Reinhard said. He sounded like he was convincing himself. “There’s no reason to remain associated with the seat of power of the old dynasty— and a more central position will be useful politically.”
“And would he agree?” He was pushing too far, by being here, and then by presuming things about the dead. Reinhard’s hand tensed in the locket chain, then deliberately relaxed.
“Yes,” Reinhard said shortly. “We would still be moving the capital if he was alive.”
Perhaps that would be the only thing that was the same. Reuenthal nodded.
“Why are you here, Reuenthal?” Reinhard asked again. “You’re very presumptuous to interrupt Us.”
He couldn’t say the real reason, of course, that he was looking to shake the lingering wrongness of Elfriede’s vision, and that he needed to find the single clear light again. “I did want to pay my respects. Mittermeyer came before he left.” He paused. “Things would be different.”
Reinhard turned towards Reuenthal at last, looked him over as if he was seeing him for the first time, and reached out his hand towards Reuenthal’s face. He didn’t touch him, but his hand hovered just close enough to his cheek that he could feel the warmth of it, the staticky charge of an almost imperceptible distance. “You shaved that awful beard you were growing.”
“I had wondered if a change would suit me, considering our move to Phezzan. It didn’t.”
“No,” Reinhard said. He dropped his hand and looked back towards the grave. “Change doesn’t suit Us, either.”
“Oh?”
“We’ll be buried here,” Reinhard said.