“‘Drink makes truth.’”
“‘Wise is the sober man.’”
“Would only that such wisdom extended to the movements of princes.” White advanced a second hound on the other side of the field, threatening Red prince.
“‘Long-lived are the fish that rise not to the bait,’” Red observed, shifting a minion laterally to take a White minion. “Why do our cousins in Sèan Company preen? Strange words have been said. With the aid of sand and iron, they shall make the Ardry himself their minion.” He raised his head from the board and met his companion’s eyes. “Hard words, those; and what did the speaker mean by their saying?”
White shrugged. “It is not for poor Chettinad traders to know such things. To move excellent goods at fair prices is all they desire. The moods and wants of high kings are nothing to them. But what if their rivals should gain such power over kings?”
“Then woe to the poor Chettinad, and to his wives and children.”
Bridget ban placed her cup on its saucer with a tiny click and said, as if to no one in particular, “The Ardry has ears everywhere, but knows not always the meaning of what he hears.”
White bowed his head, and a small smile played across his lips. “May the wisdom of the Ardry increase—or that of his ‘ears.’” Red grunted in amusement.
“The Ardry,” said Bridget ban, “is the servant of the League and its Member States.”
White cupped his chin and studied the board. “The Ardry may be a servant of the League, but he cannot wish to be a servant of Sèan Company.” He moved a councilor down a diagonal.
Red made the sign of the wheel and touched his chakras. “May the Bood forbid such a thing.”
Bridget ban returned to her hotel room and prepared for her “assignation” with Pulawayo. She stripped herself of the uniform, and showered the heat away. Afterward, she inspected the clothing she had brought, mentally inventoried that which remained aboard her ship, and sighed with frustration. Pulawayo had asked that she wear the uniform; but did she really care about the wrapping for the confection she desired? (He, she amended the thought. The surgery was done by now.)
She needn’t worry about dressing seductively. The conclusion was tacitly agreed. So, comfort, convenience, and inconspicuousness were the order of the day. Something she could remove and don with relative ease, and which would not stand out on the street.
Which was sounding more and more like a topless srong in bright, gaudy colors.
She went to the ’face that sat on a desk by the wall and accessed the hotel’s system, accepted a nuisance charge to her bill, and slid out into the information slipstream. She screened on the Director’s name, found it moderately common, and fined up the mesh size with job position and hobby.
Teacup patterns. There! As she had thought, Pulawayo took enormous pride in her…in his hobby—damned genderbending nuisance custom—and had set up an information locus where people could see examples, comment approvingly, and even purchase complete tea sets. Hah. One commentator had written that the designs were insipid.
Well, there was more than one way to practice seduction. If the body’s surrender was a foregone conclusion, that of the mind was not. And what the Hound wanted from the Director was not the body.
She downloaded the pattern for the teacup she had seen at the STC tower and extracted the colors from the duck’s feathers. These, she entered into a drawing program and set it for smooth abstract shapes and long sweeping lines.
The result was a pattern that suggested the duck’s plumage from the teacup without being a mere representation of it. Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. Pulawayo might not consciously notice, but seduction need not be conscious and no one ever made an enemy of a parent by praising the child’s beauty.
When the pattern had downloaded, she consulted Benet’s Sumptuary Guide to the Spiral Arm until she found something she could reasonably wear as a top for a srong: a light poncho used by the Kushkans on ’Bandonope. It was short and made of diaphanous cloth. She entered her personal measurements.
Then she went to a drawer, pulled out two bolts of anycloth she had brought with her, and inserting the data-thread into the port, downloaded the design and the cut into the cloth. The micro-electromechanical weave shimmered and became…a duckwing srong and matching poncho top. The gaudy ensemble would win no kudos in the fashion houses of Hadley Prime, but it would pass for inconspicuous here.
The Director’s home lay in the Nolapatady, a district of the capital easily reached on the maglev’s Sandpipe line. The house proved an oval building of intricately carved dark wood that encircled a central courtyard open to the sky. In the courtyard, interlocking fishponds were fed by an elaborately decorated terracotta rain-catcher and cistern. Planters, atria, and the artful placement of furniture served in lieu of internal walls, so that from any point around the orbit of the house, one could cross to any other point. Overhanging eaves and runnels in the courtyard prevented rainwater from entering the residence itself.
Pulawayo met all of Bridget ban’s fairly low expectations that evening. She—now he—proudly displayed the results of the surgery, and panted and pawed and squeezed and made numerous exclamations of what were apparently intended as signs of masculine appreciation and pleasure. Bridget ban made a few comments herself; but they were planned, and intended to achieve a certain rapport with the Director. She had earlier applied a numbing agent so that she would not be distracted by untoward sensations at crucial moments, but in retrospect she thought that she needn’t have bothered.
There was a Terran proverb she had heard: Practice makes perfect. But Pulawayo had not spent enough continuous time as either man or woman to get much practice at either.
She was slightly nettled that the Director had not noticed the effort she had put into her outfit. The deliberation was not supposed to be noticeable, but some comment would have been welcome. Instead, the Director had pouted a bit that she hadn’t worn her uniform, and the Hound wondered if this indicated some need for dominance. So she took the upper role, told him exactly what to do, praised him when he did it right, slapped him when he didn’t. She could not help thinking of how one trained puppies.
She had worn a crystal pendant—a product of Wofford and Beale on New Eireann—and as she moved rhythmically above him, it swung to and fro, catching the light from the foyer. She murmured to him in a low monotone, at first using standard terms of endearment and pleasure, but after a time shifting to suggestions of sleepiness and fatigue. Are you tired? You can’t be tired already. You can hardly keep your eyes open…
Soon, aided by the physical release, Pulawayo lay in a drowsy, hypnotic state upon the cushions and silks that ’Cockers used for beds. Bridget ban softly dismounted, pulled a sling chair to the side of the bed, and set to work.
It did not take long to learn the pass codes and the location of the hard key to the STC database. Suspecting that the ’Cocker love of indolence meant a great deal of telefacing from home, she tried the keys and codes on Pulawayo’s home ’face, and was gratified to find her assumption justified.
She used the data-thread to download the information into her clothing. The database was rather large, and she could leave nothing but the “duckwing” outfit in active memory. That was chancy. One system crash, and she’d be wearing two gray towels around her waist and shoulders.