Chapter One Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Four
24th August 1966
Piombino, Italy
“As near as I can tell without speaking to the apple, it sounds like the apple panicked” Tatiana heard her mother say into the telephone, using the strange code talk that probably wasn’t fooling anyone. It was a reminder of how they had needed to remember that they were undoubtedly being spied on during what was supposed to be a family holiday. Tatiana felt like it was a massive invasion of her privacy while Malcolm didn’t care and Marie thought it was funny to read Charlotte’s Web aloud in the room where they had found a microphone that they had been told to leave alone.
With the Emperor back in Potsdam he was now just a phone call away. That was a reminder that the Summer Holiday was waning and in a few days they would be boarding a train that would take them back to Berlin. Then another academic term would begin. It had been nice over the holiday, having her mother completely for a change. Often it felt like if Tatiana’s mother had a different family entirely and her actual children were something of a nuisance at times. There was also this Fürstin garbage. The Emperor had not done any of them any favors when he had done that and there was no way he had not known what he was doing. Tatiana knew that her mother absolutely hated what that had done to her and her family, but she had to be gracious as always. Now Louis Ferdinand was back, having issues with one of his manic daughters being reclusive at times and Tatiana wanted to throw the phone out of the nearest window.
The house they were staying had a balcony that overlooked the harbor. Their host had returned from Rome a day earlier and he was smoking a cigar out there. Opening the door, Tatiana looked at him and said, “Your house is awful, there are bugs everywhere.”
Cosimo de’ Medici just looked at her amusedly.
“Your mother understands the game” Cosimo said, “If she were not staying here then the SIM would be bothering you just as much, only they would be even more visibly intrusive.”
“I hate it” Tatiana said, “What she is. Why can’t she be normal?”
“Normality is overrated” Cosimo replied, “And for a woman like your mother, normal wouldn’t have served her well in this life.”
“I don’t want that kind of life.”
Cosimo just laughed. “Life doesn’t give you choices child, it’s a bastard that way” He said, “It serves you up as much as you can handle and then adds more until it either breaks you or else you learn to play the game.”
“The game fucking sucks” Tatiana said sharply with as much venom as she could put into her words.
“You sounded exactly like your mother when you said that” Cosimo replied, much to Tatiana’s complete embarrassment.
Jena
Kiki’s return to Jena was just long enough to sleep in her own bed and to try to reorient herself before she left for Laupheim. The problem was that life kept throwing disorienting things in her path. Ben had apologized for missing her on Pohnpei when they had spoken on the phone. She doubted that he suspected the truth. That she had gotten frightened when she had learned that he was coming to her father’s villa on the island and had hid. Perhaps going back to Laupheim was a good thing, she couldn’t run from things there the way she seemed to in the rest of her life. She certainly felt like running at that very moment as she learned what Vicky had been doing over the summer.
She had fallen asleep shortly after getting home the afternoon before and had slept through the night, only waking up about sunrise. She had come downstairs with her head full of fog and feeling slightly unwell.
That morning over breakfast, Kiki listened to Vicky as she told her all about Anna, a young woman she had met at the pottery class. She had taken the class to get to know the instructor but had met Anna instead and the previous weeks had been so incredibly wonderful. Vicky was still in the throes of first meeting someone and while not in love, she was clearly in lust. That was hardly a surprise considering how Vicky had lived for the first two decades of her life. Kiki remembered with some embarrassment how she had not seen that in herself before she had acted on it. With her being in medicine, she understood that people existed on several different levels and that intellect only being a veneer much of the time. Strip that away and people were just big dumb animals, acting on fear and impulses. There were parts of the brain that interacted with different systems in the body in ways that were not entirely understood. It seemed absurd to Kiki how often there was absolutely no thought involved in some of the most momentous decisions that people made. So, Kiki sat there with a cup of tea in her hand, hearing all about Anna and she really wanted tape her sister’s mouth shut.
“Of course, Anna is excited to meet you” Vicky said.
“I don’t care” Kiki replied. All she wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep until her body no longer thought it was on the other side of the globe.