He was straightening from the tray when Chu stepped forward and seized his arm.
“I saw that!” Chu spun the man around and slammed him up against the doorpost. He stared at her, face blank with shock. “What have you got in that shirt?”
“I — nothing! W-what are—” he stammered. Aniobe stood up straight, putting hands on hips. The other laborers, the bureaucrat, the shopkeeper, all froze motionless and silent, watching the confrontation.
“Take it off!” Chu barked. “Now!”
Stunned and fearful, he obeyed. He held the shirt forward in one hand to show there was nothing hidden there.
Chu ignored it. She looked slowly up and down the young man’s torso. It was lean and muscular, with a long silvery scar curving across his abdomen, and a dark cluster of curly hair on his chest. She smiled.
“Nice,” she said.
The laborers, their boss, and the shopkeeper roared with laughter. Chu’s victim reddened, lowered his head angrily, bunched his fists, and did nothing.
“You notice the way that redhead was teasing those men?” Chu remarked as they walked away. “Provocative little bitch.” Far down the street was a weary-looking building, its ridgeline sagging, half its windows boarded over with old advertising placards cut to size. The wood was dark with rot, fragmented words and images opening small portals into a brighter world: zar, a fishtail, what was either a breast or a knee, kle, and a nose pointed straight up as if its owner hoped to catch rain in the nostrils. A faded sign over the main door read terminal hotel. The torn-up remains of the railbed ran beside it. “My husband’s the same way.”
“Why did you do that to him?” the bureaucrat asked. “That worker.”
Chu didn’t pretend not to understand. “Oh, I have plans for that young man. He’s going to have a few beers now, and try to forget what happened, but of course his friends won’t let him. By the time I’ve checked into my room, sent for my baggage, and freshened up, he’ll be a little drunk. I’ll go look him up then. He sees me, and he’s going to feel a little hot and a little uncertain and a little embarrassed. He’ll look at me, and he won’t know what he feels.
“Then I’ll give him the opportunity to sort his feelings out.”
“Your method strikes me as being a little, um, uncertain. As far as effectiveness goes.”
“Trust me,” Chu said. “I’ve done this before.”
“Aha,” the bureaucrat said vaguely. Then, “Why don’t you go ahead and book us rooms, while I see about Gregorian’s mother?”
“I thought you weren’t going to interview her until morning.”
“Wasn’t I?” The bureaucrat detoured around a rotting pile of truck tires. He had very deliberately dropped that scrap of information in front of Bergier. He didn’t trust the man. He thought it all too possible that Bergier might arrange for a messenger sometime in the night to warn the mother against speaking to him.
It was part and parcel of a more serious puzzle, the question of where the false Chu had gotten his information. He’d known not only what name to give, but to leave the airship just before the real Chu boarded. More significantly, he knew that the bureaucrat hadn’t been told his liaison was a woman.
Someone in his chain of command, either within the planetary government or Technology Transfer itself, was working with Gregorian. And while it need not be Bergier, the commander was as good a suspect as any.
“I changed my mind,” he said.
3. The Dance of the Inheritors
Sunset. Bold Prospero was a pirate galleon sailing toward the night. It touched the horizon, flattening into an oval as it set continents of clouds afire. Under the trees the shadows were fading into blue air. The bureaucrat trudged down the river road, passing his briefcase from hand to hand as its weight made his palms and fingers ache.
At the edge of the village, three ragged men had built a fire in the road and were roasting yams in its coals. A dark giant sat soaking broadleaves in a bowl of water, and wrapping them about the tubers. A gray, lank man stuck them in the fire, and their aged companion raked the coals back. Two television sets were wedged in the sand, one with the sound off, and the other turned away, queasily imaging at empty trail. “Soft evening,” the bureaucrat said.
“Same to you,” the lank, colorless man said. Bony knees showed through holes in his trousers. “Have a sit-down.” He hitched slightly to the side, and the bureaucrat hunkered down beside him, resting on the balls of his feet, careful not to soil his white trousers. On the pale screen, a young man stared moodily out a window at the crashing sea. A woman stood at his back, hands on his shoulders. “Old man doesn’t believe he’s seeing a mermaid,” the lank man said.
“Well, that’s the way fathers are.” Soft blue smoke wisped into the darkening sky, smelling of driftwood and cedarbloom. “You lads out hunting?”
“In a manner of speaking,” the lank one said. The giant snorted.
“We’re scavengers,” the old man said harshly. “If that’s not good enough for you, then say so now and fuck off.” They all stared at him, unblinking.
In the sudden silence, the bureaucrat could hear the show he’d interrupted. Byron, come away from that window. There’s nothing out there but cold and changing Ocean. Go into the air. Your father thinks—
My father thinks of nothing but money.
“I’ve got a bottle of vacuum-distilled brandy in my briefcase.” He fetched the bottle, took a swig, held it out. “If I could convince you…”
“Well, that is hospitable.” The flask went around twice, and then Lank said, “You must be heading into the village.”
“Yes, to see Mother Gregorian. Perhaps you know her house.”
The three exchanged glances. “You won’t get anything out of her,” Lank said. “The villagers tell stories about her, you know. She’s a type.” He nodded toward the television. “Ought to be on the show.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Naw, I don’t think so.” He raised a sticklike arm, pointed. “The road dead-ends into the first street to the waterfront. Go down to the river, to the fifth—”
“Sixth,” the old man said.
“Sixth street after that. Go up by the kirk and past the boneyard to the end, right by the marshes. Can’t miss it. Big fucking castle of a place.”
“Thanks.” He stood.
They were no longer looking at him. On the screen, an albino girlchild was standing alone in the middle of a raging argument. She was an island of serene calm, her eyes vacant and autistic. “That’s Eden, she’s the boy’s sister. Hasn’t spoken since it happened,” Lank remarked.
“What happened?”
“She saw a unicorn,” the giant said.
From the air the village had looked like a very simple antique printed circuit, of the sort Galileo might have used to build his first radio telescope, if he wasn’t confusing two different eras, a comb of crooked lines leading inward from the water, too small for there to be any need of cross-streets. The houses were small and shabby, but warm light spilled from the windows, and voices murmured within. An occasional dog stridently warned him away from boat or yard. Other than an innkeeper who nodded lazily from the door of the watermen’s hotel, he met no one by the riverfront. He turned onto the marsh road, the river cold and silver at his back. He went past a walled-in ground where skeletons hung from the trees, the bones bleached and painted and wired together so that they clacked gently in an almost unnoticeable breeze.
Beyond the boneyard the ground rose gently. He passed several large dark houses, still unscavenged, newly abandoned by their wealthy owners. Probably gone to the Piedmont to participate in the economic boom. Last on the road, just before the land wearily eased itself down into marsh, was his destination.