Thick dark ink, in many different calligraphies, most of them extravagantly individual. Coromell took it gingerly from her hand.
"Ah! Perfect for a rather old-fashioned technology. It would take a dot only this size," and he pointed to one of the ellipsis dots between a performer's name and role, "to hold a great deal of information. We'll have to see."
He stood, then shook his head at her. "I'm sorry, dear Lunzie, but you must stay here, unknown, awhile longer. Without Sassinak, we must not lose your testimony, no matter what this gives us."
"But I…"
He had moved even as he spoke, more swiftly and fluidly than she would have supposed possible, and abruptly she faced a closed door again.
"Blast you!" she said, to that impassive surface, "I am not a stupid child, even if you are an arrogant old goat."
That got the response it deserved! Nothing. But she felt better. She felt considerably better when Coromell returned very shortly to report that the program had none of the expected microdots.
"I find myself annoyed with your Zebara," he said, dapping the program down on the table between them. If there's a message in this thing, no one's found it yet. Do you have any idea how many little specks there are in an opera program? Every single person credited with anything in the production has a row of them, and we had to check every one."
"But it has to be this," said Lunzie. She picked up the program, and flipped through it. She still thought the cover design looked pretentious. Even with heavyworlder pride at full blast on this thing, she noticed that. The opera had needed corporate sponsorship. The ads covered the inside front and back pages. Then came photographs of the lead singers, then scenes from the opera itself, then the outline of the libretto, and the east list. More photographs, an interview with the conductor. She realized she was reading the Diplo dialect much better than she ever had. It almost seemed natural. She found herself humming the aria of the suicider who refused to eat even re-synthesized meat. Coromell looked at her oddly.
"I don't know…" she said. She didn't want to speak Standard! She wanted to sing! Sing? Something fluttered in her mind like great feathered wings and the alternative slang meaning of 'sing' popped up, along with the anagram 'sign.' Suddenly she knew. "Sing a song of sixpence… sing a sign… good heavens, that man is so devious a corkscrew would get lost in him."
"What!" Coromell fairly barked at her, his patience streching, looking now very like his boisterously bossy father.
"It's here, but it's… it's in my head. It's a key… implant, keyed to this program. I think… Just be patient!"
She looked a bit longer, let her mind drift with the forces. Zebara had known she was a Disciple. She had eased his pain, she had touched his mind just a little and his heart somewhat more. She looked on the program, not knowing exactly what she was to find, but knowing she would find it. On the final page, the star's sprawling signature half covered her face, her broad bosom, the necklace… the necklace Zebara had… had not given her. So he said. The necklace… nearly priceless, he'd said. She'd said. A gift of the former lieutenant governor's son… no… that was not the link.
The necklace Zebara had not given her… her! He had not given her a necklace, and the necklace he had not given her lay innocently among her things. Cheap but a good design, she'd bought it… she'd bought it before the Ireta voyage, hadn't she? She couldn't remember, now. Did it matter? It did.
She snapped out of that near-trance and without a word to Coromell dove back into her duffel, coming up with the necklace. An innocent enough accessory, itemized among her effects on her way into Diplo. She remembered filling out the form. Not expensive enough to require duty on any world, but handy for formal occasions, a pattern of linked leaves in coppertoned metal, with streaks of enamel in blues and greens.
She laid it on the table, and pushed Coromell's hand back when he reached for it. She gave it her whole attention. Did it have the same number of links? She wasn't sure. Was it the same clasp? She wasn't sure. She prodded it with a finger, hoping for inspiration. She had worn it that last day. It had caught on something in Zebara's house. That fluffy pillow? He had unsnagged it for her, unhooking the clasp and refastening it later. She remembered being afraid of his hands so near her neck, and hating herself for that fear. The clasp it had now screwed together, making a little cylinder. Before, it had had an elegant hook, shaped like a tendril of the vine those leaves were taken from.
"The clasp," she said, quietly, without looking up at Coromell. "It's the clasp. It's not the same."
"Shall I?" he asked, reaching.
She shook her head. "No. I want to see." Carefully, as if it might explode for she felt a trickle of icy fear, she took it up and worked at the tiny clasp. Most such things unscrewed easily, two or three turns. This one was stuck, cross-threaded or not threaded at all. She heard Coromell shift restlessly in his chair. "Patience," she said.
Discipline fbcussed her attention. The real join was not in the middle, where a groove suggested it, but at the end. It required not a twist, but a pull - a straight pull, pinching the last link hard - and out came a delicate pin with its tip caught in a lump of something dark. She pulled the pin free and held on her hand that tiny, waxy cylinder.
"This has to be it. Whatever it is."
What it was, she heard later, was a complete record of Diplo's dealings with the Paradens and the Seti for the past century: names, dates, codes, the whole thing. Everything that Zebara had promised, and more.
"Enough," Coromell said, "to bring their government down… even revoke their charter."
"No." Lunzie shook her head. "It's not just the heavy-worlders. They were the victims first. We can't take vengeance on the innocent, the ones who aren't part of it"
"You know something I don't?" He was giving her a look that had no doubt quelled generations of junior officers. Lunzie felt what he intended her to feel, but fought against it.
"I do," she said firmly, against the pressure of the stars on his uniform and his age. "I've been there myself. I've been to their opera!"
"Opera!" That came out as a bark of amusement.
Lunzie glared and he choked it back. "Their very, very beautiful opera, Admiral Coromell. With singers better than I've heard in most systems. Composed by heavyworlders to dramatize poems written by heavyworlders, and for all its political bias, we don't come off very well. Tell me! What do you know about the early settlement of Diplo?"
He shrugged, clearly baffled at the intent of the question. "Not much. Heavyworlders settled it because it was too dense for the rest of us without protective suits. It's cold, isn't it? And it was one of the first pure-heavyworlder colony worlds. It still is the richest." The lift of his eyebrows said so what?
"It's cold, yes." Lunzie shivered, remembering that cold, and what it had meant. "And in the first winter, the colonists had heavy losses."
He shrugged again. "Colonies always have heavy casualties at first."
She was furious. Zebara had reason for his bitterness, his anger, his near despair! Coromell had no reason for this complacency but ignorance.
"Forty thousand casualties, Admiral, out of ninety thousand."
"What?" That had his attention. He stared at her.
"Forty thousand men, who died of starvation and cold because their death was the only hope for the women and children to survive. And even so, not all of them did. Because no one bothered to warn the colonists about the periodic long winter cycles, or provide food for them."
"Are you… are you sure? Didn't they complain to FSP?"
"To the best of my knowledge, it happened, and what I was told, what I believe is also on that chip along with Paraden and Seti conspiracy, is why the FSP never heard about it officially. Major commercial consortia, Admiral, found it inexpedient to bother about Diplo. And then, because the colonists had turned in desperation to eating indigenous animals, these same consortia threatened to have Fleet down on them. Blackmailed them, to put it simply. The whole long conspiracy, the conscription of heavyworlders into private military forces by Paraden and Parchandri families… all that results from the original betrayal."