"Dear Lunzie, you're glaring at me. Why?"
"I was thinking of my great-great-great-granddaughter," she said, combining honesty and obliqueness at once. "You have grandchildren, you said? Then surely they cross your mind at the oddest times, intruding, but you'd never wish them away."
"That's true." He shook his head with a rueful smile. "And since mine are here in person, they can intrude physically as well. Little Pog, the youngest, got loose from his mother in my office one time. Darted past my secretary, straight through the door and into my conference room. Set off alarms and thoroughly annoyed the Lieutenant Governor and the Chiefs of Staff. He'd grabbed me by the leg and was howling because the alarm siren scared him. He made so much noise the guards were sure someone was really hurt." His smile had broadened; now he chuckled. "By the time I had peeled him off my leg, found his mother, and convinced the guards that it was not an exceptionally clever assassination scheme using a midget or a robot, none of us could get our minds back on the problem. Worst of all, I had to listen to a lecture by the Lieutenant Governor on the way he disciplines his family. What he didn't know, and I couldn't tell him, was that his eldest son was about to be arrested for sedition. This is, as you might suspect, the former Lieutenant Governor, not the one you met the other night."
The revelation about his job did nothing to quiet Lunzie's nerves. Anyone who could pretend not to know that someone's child was about to be arrested Had more than enough talent in lying to confuse her. She forced herself to concentrate on his feelings for his children and grandchildren. That, at least, she could understand and sympathize with.
"So what happened to little… Pog, was it?"
"Yes, short for Poglin. Family name on his mother's side. Well, I counseled leniency since he'd been frightened so badly by the alarms and the subsequent chaos, but his mother felt guilty that he'd gotten away from her. She promised him a good thrashing when they got home. I hope that was mostly for my benefit. She's very… aware of rank, that one." It was obvious that he didn't like his daughter-in-law much. Lunzie wondered if he'd meant to reveal that to her. "And have you caught up with all your family after your long sleep?" he was asking.
Lunzie shook her head, and sipped cautiously at the steaming soup that had appeared in front of them. Pale orange, spicy, not bad at all.
"My great-great, Sassinak, gave me Fleet transport to Sector Headquarters. She's an orphan. She's never met the others."
"Oh. Isn't that unusual? Wouldn't they take her in?" His eyelids had sagged again, hiding his expression. Lunzie suspected he knew a lot more about her and her family, including Sassinak, than he pretended.
"They didn't know." Quickly, she told him what tittle Sassinak had told her and added her own interpretation of Sassinak's failure to seek out her parents' relatives. "She's still afraid of rejection, I think. Fleet took her in. She considers it her family. I had one grandson, Dougal, in Fleet, and I remember the others complaining that he was almost a stranger to them. Even when he visited, he seemed attached somewhere else."
"Will you introduce her?"
"I've thought about that. Forty-three more years. I don't know who's alive, where they are, although it won't be hard to find out. But she may not want to meet them, even with me. I'm still trying to figure out whose she is, for that matter. I haven't really had time." At the startled look on his face, she laughed. "Zebara, you've been with your family all this time. Of course nothing is more important to you. But I've had one long separation after another. I've had to make my connections where and when I could. The first thing was to get my certification back, get some kind of job."
"Surely your great-great, this Sassinak, wouldn't have tossed you out to starve!"
"She's Fleet, remember? Under orders. I'm civilian." Sort of, she thought to herself, wondering just what status she did have. Coromell had recruited her: was that official? The Venerable Master Adept seemed to have connections to Fleet she had never quite understood. But surely he wasn't a Fleet agent? Sassinak had sent her to Liaka with the same assurance she'd have sent one of her own officers. "I wouldn't have starved, no. You're right about that. But by the time I left Liaka, I still didn't have my accumulated back pay. It would come, they assured me, but it was sticking in someone's craw to pay me for forty-three years of coldsleep. All I really wanted was the credit for time awake, but…" She shrugged. "Bureaucrats."
"We are difficult sometimes." He was smiling, but she wondered why he had intruded his position again.
They finished dinner with little more conversation, then went to the concert. Zebara's rank meant excellent seats, a respectful usher, and a well of silence around them, beyond which Lunzie could just hear curious murmurs. She glanced down at the program. She had never heard of Zilmach or his (her?) epic work. The program cover showed two brawny heavyworlders lifting a spaceship overhead. She didn't know if that was a scene from the work she would hear or the logo of the Diplo Academy of Music. She nudged Zebara.
"Tell me about this."
"Zilmach, a composer you won't have heard of, spent twenty years on this, working from the series of poems Rudrik wrote in the first Long Freeze on Diplo. Rudrik, by the way, died of starvation, along with some forty thousand of those early colonists. It's called Bitter Destiny and the theme is exploitation of our strength to provide riches for the weak. You won't like the libretto, but the music is extraordinary." He nuzzled her neck and Lunzie managed not to jump. "Besides, it's loud, and we can talk if we're careful."
"It's not rude?"
"Yes," he said quietly into her ear, "But there are segments in which almost everyone gets affectionate; you'll know."
Zilmach's epic work began with a low moaning of strings and woodwinds, plus a rhythmic banging on some instrument Lunzie had never heard before: rather Hke someone whacking a heavy chain with a hammer. She ventured a murmured question to Zebara who explained that it represented the pioneers chipping ice off their machinery. Zilmach had invented the instrument in the course of writing the music.
After the overture, a massed chorus marched in singing. Lunzie felt goosebumps break out on her arms. Although she had told herself that the heavyworlders must have creative capacity, she had never truly believed it. She had never seen any of their art, or heard their music. Now, listening to those resonant voices filling the hall easily, she admitted to herself just how narrowminded she'd been. The best she'd been able to imagine was 'kind' or 'gentle.' But this was magnificent.
She did not enjoy the staged presentation of the lightweight 'exploiters.' Although seeing massive heavyworlders pretending to be tiny fragile lightweights cringing from each other had the humor of incongruity. She remembered having seen a cube of an Old Earth opera in which a large lady with sagging jowls was being serenaded as a 'nymph.'
But the voices! She had imagined heavyworlder music as heavy, thumping, unmelodic… and she'd been wrong.
"It's beautiful," she murmured to Zebara, in a pause between scenes.
"You're surprised." It was not a question. She apologized with her expression as the music began again. He leaned closer. "Don't worry. I thought you'd be surprised. And there's more."
'More' included a display of gymnastics representing shifting alliances in the commercial consortium that had (according to the script) dumped ill-prepared heavy-worlder colonists on a planet that suffered predictable, but infrequent, 'triple winters.' Complex gong music apparently intimated the heartless weighing of profit and loss (a balance loaded with 'gold' bars on one side and limp heavyworlder bodies on the other) while the corporate factions pushed on the balance and each other, and leapt about in oddly graceful contortions.