Assegai

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Silvie,’ Alex said, musingly, ‘picked the wrong legend. She should have said Ulisanus and the Sireni.’

  ‘Oh?’ Migan knew him well enough now to interpret that innocent tone correctly, and her response was suspicious.

  ‘The Sireni,’ Alex said, ‘were beautiful maidens who lured ships to their island with enchanted music, so that they could have their wicked way with the sailors.’ He paused for a moment and felt her preen a little at that. ‘And then eat them.’

  ‘Oh – you pig.’ She rolled onto him and made like a monster about to devour him, at which Alex, laughing, responded appropriately.

  ‘I trust you’re getting enough sleep at the croff, sir.’ Dr Payling said, catching up with him next morning for his routine weekly health check.

  Alex had had about three hours sleep and felt as if he’d run a marathon. Could Dr Payling see that from the medical results, was he being sarcastic, or pulling Alex’s leg?

  But no. Dr Payling was not being impertinent, didn’t have the sense of humour for it.

  Alex wondered how the medic would react if he answered, Yes – lots and lots of great sleep, thanks.

  But he was a gentleman, so he just smiled.

  ‘Yes – fine.’ He said. ‘Thank you.’

  Seventeen

  Migan got to visit Alex’s world the following day.

  President Prince Glynvawr was giving a dinner party – a private dinner at his palace. Migan had received an invitation in her own name, not merely ‘plus one’, and had been anticipating the occasion, now, for days.

  It was even more special than she had expected, since Shion had agreed to attend the dinner in her Chamlorn’s regalia.

  Even before Shion arrived, Migan was having the time of her life. She was not in a borrowed gown and Granny Miggy’s jewellery, today. She had a russet gown which had been tailored for her and brought out the glow of her complexion admirably, with deceptively simple jade jewellery which brought up the green in her eyes.

  She was, perhaps a little to Alex’s surprise, perfectly at home in the palace environment. He shouldn’t have been surprised, he realised, watching her kiss-fingers and have a smiling conversation with their host. Migan was a civil servant working at regional level, a role which involved routine attendance at such things as civic dinners and through that, occasional passing contact with royalty.

  She had been to the Embassy, too, first to an event hosted by the Trade and Industry Attaché bringing civic planners together in a networking session with representatives of the building industry. It was questionable how much productive discussion had taken place, but Migan did say she’d learned quite a lot about load-bearing walls from her neighbour at table.

  Her second visit to the Embassy had been on the evening when she’d met Alex. She’d been sent an invitation for that as guests were selected on the criteria of representing a broad cross section of society, and that they’d been to an Embassy event before and received a discreet dot against their name indicating that they were socially confident.

  Migan was that. Conscious that she was looking her best, she moved through the party with easy style, head poised high, her smile beguiling and her conversation perfectly judged to her company.

  Alex, going around with the robotic half-smile which was the most sociable he could be in this milieu, was conscious of a ridiculous and embarrassingly primeval pride. That’s my lady, he thought, watching her listening with interest to a garrulous little man waving a drink about with such vigour that it was miraculous the liquid stayed in the glass. And she is the most elegant lady in the room.

  Whether Migan merited that description or not, she and everyone else at the party found themselves outclassed when Shion arrived.

  ‘Chamlorn Lady Ariel Mgwamba et Savurai!’ the major domo at the entrance announced, and with a deep breath and great relish, ‘Grace of a Noble House! Purest of Blood! Breath of the Karlane!’

  Lady Ariel entered. She was tall and slender even in shipboard rig, but the clothes she was wearing then made her seem uncannily tall and slim. Her hair was dressed in a dark cloud around her head, her skin had been burnished with make-up which accentuated deep blue highlights, her robes flowing about her as she walked.

  Those robes… seventeen separate pieces of fabric, Alex knew, each of them of ceremonial significance and put on her by attendants in a lengthy dressing ritual. There were no fastenings to them at all – keeping them on depended entirely on the skill of the dressers and on maintaining perfect poise. One wrong step, Shion had told him, and the whole lot could come sliding off.

  But she would not, it was obvious, make a wrong step. She walked with the poise of a regal ballerina, every step measured, perfectly controlled. Her expression was one of remote detachment, as if she walked alone, unaware of all the people moving aside and gazing at her as she passed.

  She wasn’t alone, however – she had two attendants, each clad in a rather less risky tunic-robe with a long, filmy sash trailing over one shoulder. They were members of the Assegai’s crew who’d volunteered to be honorary Pirrellothians for the evening. They walked behind her in a pair, like bridal attendants, one carrying a preserved flower in a crystal bowl, the other with a folded length of fabric.

  ‘Your grace…’ President Prince Glynvawr was entranced, going to meet her in the midst of the reception room, under the awed scrutiny of the eighty or so guests. Min was amongst them, standing there with her mouth slightly open and her eyes as round as coins.

  ‘My lord.’ They linked fingertips lightly and exchanged formal greetings – a touch of the forehead towards the back of her hand from the Camag and an air-kiss over his fingers from the Pirrellothian. Lady Ariel smiled – it was nothing like Shion’s frank grin, that, but tranquil. And as her attendants stepped forward to present the ritual gifts, she spoke softly, ‘From my house to yours…’

  The gifts duly presented and passed on to aides, the prince led Lady Ariel, the rest of them following, through to the banqueting hall.

  This was a magnificent room. The dining table alone was a global treasure, a great sweep of golden wood hand-crafted from Millennial Oak – great trees grown especially to be felled after a thousand years to make a table for the palace. The frescoes which covered the walls were by one of Camae’s Old Masters, and the angel-roof ceiling with its intricate beams and riotous gilded angels was one of the sights of Camae in itself. Thousands of visitors a day trailed through this room, on the days when it was open to the public.

  Today, though, nobody had eyes for anything but Lady Ariel, moving like a dark swan through a room full of ducks.

  Arrangements had been made for her. She could not sit at table in those robes. Nor did custom permit her to feed herself. So a dais had been placed to the right side at the head of the table, with a carved marble seat, like a backless sofa heaped with tiny silk cushions at one end.

  Lady Ariel disposed herself on this with a movement which created soft, trailing folds in her robes. Her attendants sat on the plinth, one at her head, one at her feet.

  The rest of them took their places on rather more conventional chairs, and once they were settled, dinner was served.

  The food was as Alex had come to expect on Camae; healthy and fresh, served in small, delicious portions and eaten at leisurely pace. Many of the dishes came as sharing platters – guests, even at this most elevated level of society, handing around dishes and passing one another the bread just as they would at a family table.

  Lady Ariel ate the same as the rest of them, only in her case the dishes were placed on the table out of her reach. Her attendants, then, transferred tiny morsels onto other dishes and brought them to her, even putting each morsel into her mouth for her with needle-thin chopsticks.

  This, Shion had told Alex, was an exercise in humility, symbolising the absolute dependence of the chamlorn class on the labour and care of their people. It reduced her, as she said, to little more than a baby, barely able to move in robes which could fall off
at any moment, not allowed to feed herself, and restricted, too, by a code of conduct which dictated that she must maintain utter serenity throughout.

  Slippery robes and being fed with chopsticks aside, Prince Glynvawr was in very much the same position. What he wore, what he said, how he spoke, everything about the way he conducted himself in his role as a prince was so prescribed that it was inconceivable for him to scratch an itch or laugh at an unmannerly joke. It was not a job he had ever applied for, though there had been a point at which he could have stepped aside, declining to take up his hereditary role on the death of his father. Like Lady Ariel – and Davie, come to that – his destiny had been set by his birth. And while Lady Ariel was merely revisiting her role as chamlorn as a courtesy to the royal house of Camae, Ris Glynvawr would have to live by those rules, day in, day out, for the rest of his life.

  Alex didn’t envy him. But then, he wasn’t entirely sure that he would completely trust him, either. When the mask was so much of the man, where did social performance end and the real personality begin? Alex would have felt more comfortable, really, if Ris Glynvawr had dropped his uber-charm urbanity in private and talked to him in an open, natural way. But even in their private meetings that invisible crown was still there on his head.

  He was not, of course, wearing a crown. Princes only did so these days for state ceremonial occasions. This was a private dinner party, so he wore a tuxedo. It was in the Camag style, a creamy shirt in gossamer linen, knee-length overtunic with so much embroidery to it it could probably stand up on its own, pleat-folded pants and shoes with white heels.

  Owun Glyn – aka Glyn ip Glyn, aka Able Star Glyn, aka Glynno to his shipmates, was wearing a tuxedo too. It was less lavishly embroidered than the prince’s but it was elegant, fitted him perfectly and carried the ornate ceremonial brooch which declared him to be an Honoured Son. He was seated far down the table, but was very much at ease, here – Alex, in fact, saw that he was telling his neighbours at table about the frescoes on the walls, speaking with the assurance of someone who knew what he was talking about.

  One of his neighbours was Bennet. Alex had not forgotten the Samartians, getting daily reports on how they were doing. But they were very short reports, and repetitive, pretty much the same every day. Got up, took exercise, had breakfast, worked with training group from 0700 to 1200 local time, had lunch, spent afternoon on a sightseeing visit to a place of interest, went to a dinner somewhere, retired early to bed.

  This was the first time he had seen them, though. They and the members of the training group were all here this evening, with Skipper Eldovan creating a merry little patch midway down the table while Dan Tarrance, right at the bottom of the table, was chatting up an army officer who’d been seated opposite.

  Jarlner and Bennet had passed completely under the media and public radar here, even though they were going about in public every day with no attempt to disguise them other than putting them into Fleet uniforms. It was possible that the media and people here were just so unused to offworlders that they didn’t realise how unusual the Samartian genome was, even with their grey hair, vivid blue eyes and just three slender fingers. They had been hidden in plain sight, housed with the training group in quarters at the Port Admiralty office. And they were working, too. They had a lot of analysis and writing up to do from the heavily practical phase of the training they’d done aboard ship, so were working in a conference room, each morning, compiling their reports. And they were, Alex had been told, very much enjoying their visit to Camae, Jarlner and Bennet as much as the rest.

  This evening, though, Jarlner was finding it hard to keep his eyes away from Shion. He had been taken as a child to visit ancient temples on Samart, all in ruins now, and had been taught that belief in gods was a primitive phase which his people had evolved out of into an enlightened, secular society.

  Only there, right there, sitting at the end of the table, was a goddess.

  The Samartians had managed to get past their incredulity over Shion during first contact, though admittedly mostly by setting it aside as something too tricky to deal with right then. And they had, eventually, understood that although she came from one of the races they remembered as the Old Ones and had worshipped as gods, she was in no way claiming any kind of status as a deity, far from it, absolutely the opposite.

  Jarlner and Bennet had got to know her too, on the Assegai, as the cheerful, hard-working pilot instructor and as a very able linguist. They had almost forgotten, in fact, that Shion wasn’t human.

  They weren’t alone in that. There had been amazingly little publicity about Shion in the course of the Beeby Disclosure. The Fourth had admitted at that point that they had an officer serving with them who had come from outside the League, had identified Shion as that officer and had confirmed that her physiology was not that of homo sapiens.

  Somehow, though, the media hadn’t worked up any excitement about that, for all that they’d been trying for years to force the Fourth to make that disclosure. Now they had made it, but the media was still not allowed to identify the world Shion came from or to even speculate about that. And there was, it turned out, not really a lot to be said about her other than that she was a fabulous pilot and was very good with languages. She didn’t have, at any rate, anything like Silvie’s glamour, so had tended to fade into the background. Which was, ordinarily, just the way she liked it.

  This evening, though, she was paying her respects as the daughter of a royal house, albeit socially, not diplomatically. She would not appear like this at an official state event, nor would she undertake any kind of official contact or discussions on behalf of her people.

  Right now, she and Prince Glynvawr were discussing the presentation Kate Naos had given that afternoon. Alex had been there too – the timing of the event, in fact, had been scheduled so that he could attend, after he had indicated that he wouldn’t miss it for worlds. Shion and quite a lot of the Assegai’s officers had been there too, either to hear the paper or simply to give the cadet their support.

  President Prince Glynvawr had been present as well, in his capacity of honorary president of the Camag Academy of Sciences, along with four-hundred odd academics, members of the planet’s prestige, historical scientific association, some of them turning up three hours ahead of the talk so as to bagsy a good seat. Fifty members of the media had been admitted, too, to the observation gallery. And all of that attention focussed on the slight figure of the teenager standing on the stage, with her red hair and a hint of freckles brought on by the sun.

  There had been worshipful silence all the way through her presentation. A professor of astronomy who had the misfortune to have a nervous cough had been so prodded in the back and kicked on the ankles by his neighbours that he’d ended up nearly suffocating himself in his desperation to stop himself coughing, but even then, he would not get up and leave.

  Kate – introduced as Dr Katrin Naos, Reader in Wave Space Physics at Chartsey System University, Cadet Officer at the Chartsey Fleet Academy – had talked for an hour and a half without pausing. She’d filled screen after screen with equations and immensely complex diagrams, sliding them off round the walls till eventually they’d surrounded the room. At the end, she had wrapped things up with what she considered to be the mathematical proof of her discovery that the structure of wave space was fundamentally different from their previous understanding, that the multi-dimensional cosmos was a pulse which was at one and the same time instantaneous – in the mathematical sense of happening outside time, no possible unit of time small enough with which to measure its duration – and infinite.

  ‘I think I understood that, in a way,’ President Prince Glynvawr said. ‘I think she was saying that it is both a point of cosmic singularity and an infinite wave form, depending on your point of view. Which makes sense to me at an intuitive level, though I won’t pretend I could follow her into the math.’

  Shion smiled placidly. She was one of the few people in that room who stood any chanc
e of understanding what Kate was saying, and even she had said it would need some thinking about.

  ‘I believe,’ Shion said, with the courtesy of contribution, not of contradiction, ‘that she was saying that it is both a point of static cosmic singularity and an infinite wave, simultaneously, irrespective of the observer’s point of view. And if I understand her correctly, I believe that her theorem rests on the proposition that a point of static singularity and an infinite wave form are the same, in wave space geometry.’ She looked across at Alex, who occupied the secondary place of honour on the prince’s left. ‘Is that your interpretation, Captain?’

  She wasn’t teasing him, he knew that. Shion had a tendency to over-estimate Alex’s intellectual acuity, even after all the time she’d known him she was often a little surprised when she tried to explain something to him at her own level and found she had to dumb it down.

  ‘Oh,’ Alex said, ‘I was only there to applaud.’

  Which he had – not quite the first on his feet when Kate had stepped back from the rostrum with a concluding, ‘Thank you’, because several academics had apparently been poised like a leaping-to-standing-ovation performance team. But he’d stood, too, applauding Kate and feeling so proud of her. The first time they’d met she’d been so shy and socially inept that the Second had sent an officer-liaison with her. Much of his job in the first few weeks had been to stand in front of Kate when she hid behind him, speaking on her behalf. Alex could still remember how that kid had peeped out from behind her minder at him. And look at her now. Just look at her now.

  ‘But,’ Alex said, succumbing both to the looks of polite expectation from his host and from Shion, and to the lure of talking spacer-shop rather than the mindless small-talk of a civilian dinner table, ‘I came away with the impression that she was saying that the tension between the singularity and the wave is how energy is generated, the force which drives the cosmic pulse, as it were. But my impression is purely intuitive, my grasp of the math is too shallow for more.’