His own surprise fell away; he grimaced, involuntarily.
“I’m sorry …” she murmured. “I know now how very painful it must have been for you. I only meant to pay you the honor your achievements, and your true kindness toward me, deserve.”
“Perhaps we have both been guilty of the same oversight. Netanyahrkadda,” he said softly.
She nodded. “Yes, Gundhalinusathra.”
“Then let me do what I can to set things straight. There are always other names and estates available, if you know where to ask.”
“No,” she said, almost sharply. Her hands knotted in her lap.
“Why not?”
“In order to take your estates away from me again, when they were legally mine, the litigators you hired filed a proscription. I am ineligible for the rank of Technician forever.”
“What were the grounds?” he asked, in disbelief.
“Genetic insufficiency.”
“But that’s absurd—” He broke off. Genetic insufficiency meant that someone was a certified mental defective. “You have several high technical degrees, and demonstrable creativity—” And humor and beauty and social grace— He stopped himself before he said that.
“But still I couldn’t earn my way into your estimable class, sathra, with all that. 1 had to buy my way in. Do you really find it so absurd that I could be judged defective—?”
He looked away.
“The heritage that I truly wanted to be mine was yours, Commander—for the sense of continuity it would have given me, for myself and for my children, into the future… . But the honor of the Gundhalinus lies in deserving hands, and there is no other Technician lineage that meant as much to me. So perhaps I am content, after all.” She shrugged, glancing away.
He thought of his brothers, and said nothing. He listened to the voices begin a new song, and the sudden flurry of appreciative noise from the patio crowd. “So you would have done this in part for your own family … for your children? How many do you have?”
“None, yet. But I shall.”
“You’re married, then—”
“No. Do you consider that one must follow the other?” He looked back at her. “Many people don’t, of course,” he said.
She stared at him, as if she were trying to decide whether he was being sarcastic, or possibly about to make a pass at her. “And what about you?”
“Married to my work, I’m afraid.” He thought suddenly of Reede Kullervo, walking beside him through a park on Number Four. Married to your work—? Kullervo had asked him.
“And so am I.” She smiled, still looking at him that way. “But not monogamously…”
“Netanyahrkadda,” he murmured, “would you ever consider—”
“Yes—?”
“Consider… consider showing us what you can do with your own creation, here tonight?” he finished, gesturing toward the patio as an excuse to look away; feeling like a man who had almost stepped into quicksand.
Her face became expressionless. Her own hands, held tightly in her lap, twitched. “If you would like me to, Gundhalinusathra.”
“I would like it very much,” he said weakly. He felt oddly giddy, as though he had drunk too much, which he had not.
She led the way this time, back to the partiers, and took the headset as it passed by, putting it on without hesitation. What she did then with the sensuous luminous cloud of matter from the carven box made him exceedingly glad that he had been a coward two minutes before.
And far later that night, when the party had ended and he lay alone in his bed, he was painfully sorry. He spent what was left of the night wide awake in the unfamiliar room. Only after dawn did he manage to sleep. He woke in the late morning to a spot of wetness on his nightshirt, and knew that it had not been the old dream, the usual dream, that had haunted his sleep this time….
He reminded himself that today he would see KR Aspundh; that in a few hours more they would talk together about Tiamat. He needed suddenly, desperately, to talk to someone about Tiamat.
KHAREMOUGH: Aspundh Estates
Gundhahnu arrived, alone for once and precisely on time, at KR Aspundh’s front door. Flowering vines spilled down from the roof of Aspundh’s manor house, which blended with studied artistry into the rolling land around it. Aspundh met him in person. The silver trefoil was prominent against his dark, silver-threaded robe, and as they touched hands in polite greeting Gundhalinu felt the brief, hidden handsign that told him he was welcomed as a stranger far from home.
“Good of you to come,” Aspundh murmured, and beckoned him into the house.
Gundhalinu slowed the barely suppressed urgency of his own strides to match the older man’s gait, forcing himself to appreciate the artful use of light, the play of shadows on a wall, the subtle inlays of the carpet as Aspundh led him through the seemingly endless house. “You live alone?” he asked.
“Yes, except for the staff. My children visit me, and my grandchildren, of course.” Aspundh did not say whether his wife was dead, or simply out of his life. Gundhalinu thought of his own mother, an archaeologist, who had abandoned her family out of unhappiness when he was five. He had thought, after all these years, that while he was on-planet he would go to see her, now that she could be nothing but proud of him. But Vhanu’s search of records had told him she had died, three years before his return. Classical archaeology as a profession lay somewhere on the scale of risk between microsurgery and the bomb squad. Her research team had unearthed some Old Empire system that had utilized smartmatter, only to discover, too late, that it had decayed disastrously. The resulting catastrophe had obliterated the entire site, and everything else for kilometers around. There had been no survivors. … He walked on in silence, suddenly unable to make small talk.
At last they reached a sitting room where a wide expanse of window framed in colored glass looked out over Aspundh’s exquisite ornamental gardens. Aspundh settled himself on a low cushioned seat beside a table inlaid with amethyst, which already held a set of frosted glasses and a pitcher of drinks. Gundhalinu had a sudden disconcerting flash of deja vu, staring at the table and out at the view. Aspundh looked up at him curiously, waiting.
“I feel as if I’ve seen this room before.” Gundhalinu shook his head, attempting a shrug; surreptitiously his fingers proved the reality of the table’s inlaid edge.
“Odd how that happens, isn’t it?” Aspundh said, and smiled. “I chose this room because it always makes me think of Tiamat. The last time I sat and talked about Tiamat with anyone, it was in this room.
“. . .the gardens. And we drank lith, and ate sugared fruits.…” The words echoed in his memory. He realized that Aspundh was still staring at him, waiting, expectant. He found his voice again. “The people you were speaking of it with, KR … was one of them a sibyl named Moon Dawntreader?”
Aspundh sat studying him for a long moment. Gundhalinu realized that Aspundh was weighing whether to trust him with a secret that could easily be considered not only dishonorable but treasonous. “Yes,” Aspundh said finally.