"Vote so registered, none dissenting. Determination made and entered effective as of this hour and date."
The gavel came down. The bailiff brought her the paper, and it was signed and sealed by the whole lot of judges. Writ of Certification,it said at the top. With her name: Ariane Emory.
She gave a deep breath and gave it to uncle Giraud when he asked for it.
"It's still stupid," she whispered to him.
But she was awfully glad to have it, and wished she could keep it herself, so uncle Giraud wouldn't get careless and lose it.
The reporters were notmean. She was real glad about that, too. She figured out in a hurry that there weren't any Enemies with them, just a lot of people with notebooks, and people with cameras; so she told Catlin and Florian: "You can relax, they're all right," and sat on the chair they let her have because she said she was tired and her arm hurt.
She could swing her feet, too. Act natural, Giraud had said. Be friendly. Don't be nasty with them: they'll put you on the news and then everybody across Union will know you're a nice little girl and nobody should file lawsuits and bring Bills of Discovery against you.
That made perfect sense.
So she sat there and they wrote down questions and passed them to the oldest reporter, questions like: "How did you break your arm?" all over again.
"Ser Nye, can you tell us what a horse is?" somebody asked next, out loud, and she thought that was funny, of course people knew what a horse was if they listened to tapes. But she was nice about it:
"I can do that," she said. "Horse is his name, besides what he is. He's about—" She reached up with her hand, and decided that wasn't high enough. "Twice that tall. And brown and black, and he kind of dances. Florian knows. Florian used to take care of him. On Earth you used to ride them, but you had a saddle and bridle. I tried it without. That's how I fell off. Bang. Right over the fence."
"That must have hurt."
She swung her feet and felt better and better: she Had them. She liked it better when they didn't write the questions. It was easier to Work them. "Just a bit. It hurts worse now, sometimes. But I get my cast off in a few weeks."
But they went back to the written ones. "Do you have a lot of friends at Reseune? Do you play with other girls and boys?"
"Oh, sometimes." Don't be nasty, Giraud had said. "Mostly with Florian and Catlin, though. They're my best friends."
"Follow-up," somebody said. "Ser Giraud, can you tell us a little more about that?"
"Ari," Giraud said. "Do you want to answer? What do you do to amuse yourself?"
"Oh, lots of things. Finding things and Starchase and building things." She swung her feet again and looked around at Florian and Catlin. "Don't we?"
"Yes," Florian said.
"Who takes care of you?" the next question said.
"Nelly. My maman left her with me. And uncle Denys. I stay with him."
"Follow-up," a woman said.
Giraud read the next question. "What's your best subject?"
"Biology. My maman taught me." Back to that. News got to Fargone. "I sent her letters. Can I say hello to my maman? Will it go to Fargone?"
Giraud didn't like that. He frowned at her. No.
She smiled, real nice, while all the reporters talked together.
"Can it?" she asked.
"It sure can," someone called out to her. "Who is your maman, sweet?"
"My maman is Jane Strassen. It's nearly my birthday. I'm almost nine. Hello, maman!"
Because nasty uncle Giraud couldn't stop her, because Giraud had told her everybody clear across Union would be on her side if she was a nice little girl.
"Follow-up!"
"Let's save that for the next news conference," uncle Giraud said. "We have questions already submitted, in their own order. Let's keep to the format. Please. We've granted this news conference after a very stressful day for Ari, and she's not up to free-for-all questions, please. Not today."
"Is that the Jane Strassen who's director of RESEUNESPACE?"
"Yes, it is, the Jane Strassen who's reputed in the field for work in her own right, I shouldn't neglect to mention that, in Dr. Strassen's service. We can provide you whatever material you want on her career and her credentials. But let's keep to format, now. Let's give the child a little chance to catch her breath, please. Her family life is nota matter of public record, nor should it be. Ask her that in a few years. Right now she's a very over-tired little girl who's got a lot of questions to get through, and I'm afraid we're not going to get to all of them if we start taking them out of order. —Ari, the next question: what do you do for hobbies?"
Uncle Giraud was Working them, of course, and they knew it. She could stop him, but that would be trouble with uncle Giraud, and she didn't want that. She had done everything she wanted. She was safe now, she knew she was, because Giraud didn't dare do a thing in front of all these people who could tell things all the way to her maman, and who could find out things.
She knew about Freedom of the Press. It was in her Civics tapes.
"What for hobbies? I study about astronomy. And I have an aquarium. Uncle Denys got me some guppies. They come all the way from Earth. You're supposed to get rid of the bad ones, and you can breed ones with pretty tails. The pond fish would eat them. But I don't do that. I just put them in another tank, because I don't like to get them eaten. They're kind of interesting. My teacher says they're throw-backs to the old kind. My uncle Denys is going to get me some more tanks and he says I can put them in the den."
"Guppies are small fish," uncle Giraud explained.
People outside Reseune didn't get to see a lot of things, she decided.
"Guppies are easy," she said. "Anybody could raise them. They're pretty, too, and they don't eat much." She shifted in her chair. "Not like Horse."
v
There was a certain strange atmosphere in the restaurant in the North corridor—in the attitude of staff and patrons, in the fact that the modest-price eatery was jammed and taking reservations by mid-afternoon—and only the quick-witted and lucky had realized, making the afternoon calls for supper accommodations, that thoroughly extravagant Changeswas the only restaurant that might have slots left. Five minutes more, Grant had said, smug with success, and they would have had cheese sandwiches at home.
As it was, it was cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, spiced pork roast with imported fruit, in a restaurant jammed with Wing One staff spending credit and drinking a little too much and huddling together in furtive speculations that were not quite celebration, not quite confidence, but a sense of Occasion, a sense after hanging all day on every syllable that fell from the mouth of a little girl in more danger than she possibly understood—that something had resulted, the Project that had monopolized their lives for years had unfolded unexpected wings and demonstrated—God knew what: something alchemical; or something utterly, simply human.
Strange, Justin thought, that he had felt so proprietary, so anxious—and so damned personally affected when the Project perched on a chair in front of all of Union, swung her feet like any little girl, and switched from bright chatter to pensive intelligence and back again—
Unscathed and still afloat.
The rest of the clientele in Changesmight be startled to find the Warrick faction out to dinner, a case of the skeleton at the feast; there were looks and he was sure there was comment at Suli Schwartz's table.