Liaden Universe Constellation Volume 3

by Sharon Lee

Having divested himself of the outdoors comm unit and running shoes in favor of house boots, he was about to start on his way to his upstairs staff quarters when the security ’bot rumbled into view.

  “Ah, Rifle,” the AI said familiarly, in Terran, “I have a message from Nelirikk Explorer that will interest you. He apprises the house that he will be somewhat detained this evening . . .”

  Diglon paused, his feet suddenly leaden with concern. It had been a very long time . . .

  Turning to face the ’bot, sorting choices, in his mind, sorting sudden back-up plans. His made plans included a time scheduled ahead with those at Ms. Audrey’s, for never before had he had a visit to that place. As he was going as winner of a Poker Night Special at the new Space Port Lounge, there was to be a ceremony as well, as he understood it, a—

  “Oh, forgive me, Rifle,” said the AI, “please! I had not meant to alarm you! The Explorer informs the House that he has made arrangements for a ride: If you’ll be ready at the front door they’ll take you directly and on time to Ms. Audrey’s where he’ll meet you. He reminds that, in his absence, you should confer with a member of the house about proper dress.”

  “Can you not suggest proper dress, House?”

  There was a pause, which was unusual, and then a nearly diffident reply.

  “I have not been long enough in this house, in this place, to feel confident of such suggestions, Rifle, given that they affect many protocols and expectations I do not have direct experience with. I suggest that though I, the cats, and the Tree may wish you well, all of us together would not be able to establish the proper dress mode for a celebratory visit to Ms. Audrey’s. Perhaps an adult male member of the household would be best.”

  Brought to a standstill momentarily, the Rifle stood rooted, gathering to his mind’s eye interleaving chains of command, recalling that most things in the house could be sorted out immediately by one resolute person.

  “Yes,” he said with determination, “an adult male!” Holding his wind jacket close to him, he went in search of the butler in the more formal front of the house, the AI’s rumble behind him.

  Alara chel’Voyon Clan Silari, Field Ecologist, Scout, Daughter . . .

  Today, she was working in a field far from the Port of Surebleak, and far from her recent haunts of rugged rooftops and near-secret garden rooms filled with old dirt and tired strains of tubers, greens, and vitaplants. She knew her thoughts ought to belong to the leaves she measured and photographed, but Ecologist was not the top role in her thoughts today, melant’i be damned.

  Her recent arrangements with Conrad, Boss of Surebleak, were as temporary and as non-standard as any she’d had since she’d been a working Scout: Local expenses, food, and housing covered here on this end-of-spiral-arm planet in exchange for agronomy expertise and insight. The duties-as-assigned part was not unexpected in a situation where her home-base had been destroyed, the scout home office couldn’t tell her when, if ever, the exploration team she’d been destined for might ever be reconstituted, and the field situation was elsewise fluid, if not chaotic. Staying here, on Surebleak, meant at least some stability in a life and career that was otherwise in extreme disarray. Staying here with the tacit connivance of her superiors was useful. Staying here when it was the destination of her soon to be displaced clan . . . was only common sense.

  The manual leaf-sorting she was doing was on automatic, which it most assuredly should not be.

  Alara, Delm Silari . . . and no, that did not bear thinking on with everything else going on—her delm lived, the clan—if inconvenienced—was still intact, and it fell to her to recall her role as Daughter.

  All thoughts must come back to daughter. Her own daughter had gone to Line chel’Mara in a contract marriage before she took on her Scout training, and had been an appropriately squalling and healthy bundle when released into the care of the chel’Mara nurse. It wasn’t that child that brought the daughter to mind, but the note that had gone through a tortured line of hold-boxes and Scout-tracking to get to her, a note headed URGENT, addressed to Alara chel’Voyon, Daughter of Clan Silari.

  In truth, she wasn’t much used to thinking of herself in the daughter role, and particularly not in the favored daughter role. It had come to that, though, with Delm Silari, long thought to be bordering his dotage, not unexpectedly favoring the Korval side of the business of the great hole put in Liad by Korval’s forces.

  Here she sighed, and put the leaves down a moment to wipe unexpected sweat from her brow; sometimes the thinking was an effort, especially the thoughts of these recent events. Korval’s retreat into Plan B, the Scout’s suffering a rebellion in their midst, and the attack on Liad itself by the very clan thought by most as the great protector of the planet.

  Yes, the attack had been a threat to the home world, but Silari himself had long muttered about the Council of Clans eating up progress for comfort. His having been a deciding vote in allowing the quite young Pat Rin yos’Phelium into Teydor’s at Daav yos’Phelium’s suggestion also figured into the question, but then he’d been a contemporary of that delm’s mother.

  It should not have mattered, given his age, but he’d promised her he’d not make her delm while she was happy as a scout, and now things had to change because Silari had been the subordinate business partner in an arrangement generations old . . . and so Clan Forban taking both the other two daughters of Silari—and the daughters of those daughters had not seemed so out of place until the weak-brained council had thrown Korval off world. Forban supporting the Council, Silari—in the person of Delm Valad chel’Voyon—had opted out of the partnership. Someone needed to be in charge.

  Valad was not such a one to be stupid after having made such a momentous decision, and having unretired from the world at large and begun the slow dissolution of business and homestead to vacate Liad along with a hundred other clans, he’d issued orders to the one remaining member of his clan who had not yet fulfilled the second part of her duty to the clan and demanded her duty of her: A replacement heir for herself.

  That had been the first shock, but they kept coming, for his orders had included the necessity that she do this soon, without coming home to Liad, in place on Surebleak for the love of space!—because the clan would likely relocate itself there!—and . . . with a husband buy-in price of a pair of cantra now, and the rest to be determined as the clan settled.

  Then the surest shock: “The delm wishes this at the earliest moment; my physicians complain of my recent exertions and while I mean to leave them and their strictures both on Liad in the near future it is certain in my mind that we must move forward—that you must move forward so that when the clan lifts from Liad your tenure as nadelm may begin in earnest, and with an uncomplicated heir in hand. Changes are happening and it would be good to know Silari will one day be led by a Scout.”

  Nadelm. Heir to the delm! He was too young to be thinking thus—she was too young . . .

  Knowing she was both resourceful and a biologist, he’d leave the choice of an acceptable marriage to her, other than requesting that the genes be of a long lineage, the husband respectful of her and the rules of marriage they’d long followed. And he’d invoked old names and relationships and short lists of rules . . . including the hint that if all else failed, she could go to the Delm of Korval, and a reminder that yes, a husband closer to Korval’s interests would be closer to Silari’s.

  So she vaguely sorted leaves, here where plants did better than they ought, as long as . . . as long as . . . as long as something she wasn’t sure of happened, and pondered the necessity brought down upon her.

  That the Delm of Korval was uniquely available to her, she knew. The delm—at least one of them—was in the house right there, under the tree. As for the other, she knew the Scouts on port included any number willing to bed her. Her doubt was that there were many, given ties of clan and the uncertainties attendant to the evolving role of the Scouts, able to fall in with the kind of wedding-contract her own delm desired, one at
least shadowing the proprieties.

  Alara found her ankle cramped, and stood, suddenly, letting the leaf stay where it was. She found the work a little more awkward without the Rifle, who often carried, dug, and searched with her. Paradoxically, his height allowed him to work closer to the ground it seemed, and he could hold position immaculately in pulling and replacing probes.

  He was an odd man, was Diglon, though perhaps not as odd as some of the scouts she knew, large even by Terran standards and thus huge to her. He’d first been an extra guard to her as she studied the plantings at the spaceport, where he apparently envisioned his role of bodyguard to mean he literally stood between her and threats, daring any such to come through his bulk.

  And there was one of the mysteries she’d someday tell her grandchildren about—that she was relying heavily, in the city, on the ability of a genuine Yxtrang to guard her. Liadens were taught to fear and despise the soldier hordes, to consider them forever a threat to the universe, a menace to civilization. And here was Diglon, who a city contact not knowing his background had declared to be a pussycat of a guard: Polite, efficient, watchful, helpful, aware, respectful, honest.

  His eye being good and his ability to hand-carry phenomenal, he’d become both guard and assistant during her tour of the in-city grow-rooms and private gardens. He’d been excellent with the grandmothers, especially, who shared as much with him as with her the secrets of their medicinal plots, the special timing of the tuber plantings, the necessity of planting in rotation of these groups, this way.

  Thus, she, Liaden and daughter of a Liaden, had swept aside her cultural schooling in favor of her Scout-training, and requested him as her daily guard and then asked he be allowed, later, to accompany her to the fields at Yulie Shaper’s place when the farmer himself was unavailable—and then, as the project grew, the assignment became a matter of requesting attendance when his schedule matched hers, and finally, that he be assigned as assistant in title. If he no longer thought himself Yxtrang, then neither would she.

  She’d seen him earlier, on his off-day run, but had been unable to acknowledge him, her body shielding an in situ absorption study from the breeze then, and she wondered if she’d missed seeing his return. It was perhaps best, since his concept of duty made it far too easy to hold him over hours, and more than once he’d joined the field work in his own time. It had slipped, at one point, from an exchange she’d overheard between Hazenthull Explorer and the delm’s aide Nelirikk, that Diglon’s need was occupation.

  Standing, the wind buffeted Alara’s face, and the smell of soil carried with it grit and a hint of moisture. Her day . . .

  Her day, checking the chronometer, had been over sometime before. She laughed, knowing that her thinking had put off thought and action. Her stretch told her the cramp of legs could use true relief, and she began gathering together her supplies. She’d be staying here under tree this night, as those of Korval sometimes called it. Maybe tomorrow, before she packed for a five day at the cramped laboratory in Boss Conrad’s block, perhaps tomorrow she could approach one of the house to see if the Korval might spare a moment.

  A half-dozen days now, and she’d yet to reply to her own delm. He was not only dear to her, and her father in fact, he was the delm.

  Pulling her jacket a little against the wind, she poked a marker into the ground, firmly, so she’d know tomorrow where she had stopped. Picking up her supplies after a final friendly brush at the leaf she’d been studying, she emulated Diglon’s march, and headed off. Today, today—right now—she would ask staff to inquire of a moment with the delm.

  The protocols of a proper Liaden house in the country might see a member of the clan on door duty assuming a secure situation, else as security an inconspicuously armed doorman or woman, front and back . . . but then Jelaza Kazone, the house, had hardly been a proper Liaden house for these last seven or eight hundred Standards and was not likely to start now, nor was a house staffed with a robot . . .

  She regretted the robot, at times, as polite as it was. Korval, though, must be seen . . .

  Ah, and why, Alara asked herself as she approached the door, was she trying to do this by the book now? By the Code itself? With Liad’s influence clearly fragmenting, with—

  She caught her breath, feeling the urge to back away from her mission strengthening the more she questioned, and knowing that, indeed, she was at risk at disobeying her delm, her father, her . . .

  She was a Scout, and knew better.

  The rainbow of serenity flashed through her consciousness, and the resolve to do this rebuilt itself before her eyes, as well as the recollection that she gave importance to her universe and not the other way around.

  Her delm’s decision would not be wasted by her: Liad itself might falter but her clan would hold the loyalty that had supported Korval and the pilots of Korval. This arrangement had kept her clan and her line steady these centuries, and if Liad varied there was no cause for Silari to vary.

  And so, though she was by rights guesting in the house and able to enter a side door, she still went to the front entrance, and rang.

  Mr. pel’Kana’s demeanor so far had been fair, but stern. They stood in the hall; the conversation not loud, nor was it precisely heated. It was pointed, however, and Diglon Rifle, permitted presence, was quick to note that the butler and the former butler had resisted going up the ladder of command all the way to The Captain herself, but they had both, without hesitation, referred concisely to the strange bit of Liaden troop lore called the Code as if, in fact, dealing with standing orders.

  With Jeeves calling on the necessities of security and the fact that the matter had been referred to him by the Captain’s aide, Nelirikk Explorer, Mr. pel’Kana’s side of the discussion drew heavily on his own role as butler and head of internal operations for the house, explicitly drawing on the notes of his predecessors as well as the Code.

  “I’ve never had the dressing of a soldier for a visit to a whorehouse, Jeeves. The house is unused to maintaining quite so wide a measure of clothing as you assume; certainly you have access to the records and can understand that the house has not generally outfitted our security—and particularly one of such proportions—for their own private amusements.”

  They’d both argued around the conflicting bunker of truth that Nelirikk, as the Captain’s aide de camp, was able to give instruction to both of them on some topics, as if the order came from the Captain. The difficulty was the bunker pel’Kana had built around his own lack of experience at dressing for such an outing and the necessity—agreed by both parties—that an inappropriate suiting decision would be worse than none at all.

  “You have a visitor at the door, sir,” said Jeeves in a formal Liaden, which Diglon took to mean both that there was someone coming to the door and that security was building status points against the butler’s arguments.

  For his part, Mr. pel’Kana stood straighter, showing form altogether as nice as that you’d show at a Commander’s parade, and waited until the bell actually rang though the hall before moving toward it, and then, pausing to bow and mutter, “by your leave, Mr. Rifle, I must attend the door,” he opened it inward with a flourish.

  Diglon, for his part, was surprised—surely the ecologist retained the same privileges he had to enter by the common door near the back staircase rather than the formal door at the front of the house.

  Not only did she come by that way, she also performed an extremely elaborate bow, executed to all of them and including the building itself, as she spoke in a Liaden so complex Diglon could only gather the sense of the words rather than know them.

  “The house of Korval is of the oldest and most honorable and it is with all humility that I enter. A clan’s hope is that Delm Korval will see and advise this one, far from home, with an urgent delmic order upon me and necessity crowding possibility until confusion reigns. As Clan Silari has always acknowledged a debt to the clan of the Pilot, and as Clan Silari follows Korval’s lead even now, this traveler
seeks a word with the Delm of Korval, that I may be enlightened and empowered to act with propriety in an uncertain moment, on a mission most urgent to my clan. A word, a moment, an audience, I beg of the house, in the name of Silari, with utmost humility.”

  The butler made a hand gesture that became a lean, that became a bow, his voice firm.

  “I hear for the house, oh traveler, and for the house I offer welcome to one on a mission. If you will but accept the hospitality of the house I will ascertain as soon as I may the delm’s availability.”

  The butler bowed her toward a sitting room, but Diglon saw the concern in her eyes and leaned toward her for a moment, catching her eye, opening his hands in question . . . “Please,” she told the butler, suddenly bereft of flowery language, “I’ll wait here if it isn’t long . . .”

  Pel’Kana bowed to Alara, half-nodded to Diglon before saying, “Your situation is not forgotten,” and strode away at a respectful pace, and then around the corner, where his rapid footsteps faded as he mounted the stairs.

  “What do you do, my comrade?” Diglon asked her in Terran. “Are you in danger? May I aid you?” he bent toward her, voice soft and even concerned.

  Alara struggled for a moment with the question, the irony of being named comrade at this moment hard on her sensibility. Her role was stretched across so many melant’i points that she could see herself in a play . . .

  “Thank you, Diglon,” she managed. “Not in danger, but in flux. I’m not sure anyone can help me, which is why I am here. . . .”

  “If this flux regards the fields, can you share with me . . .”

  She waved him off with a Scout sign, allow space, please, and he saw it, hands testing . . .

  “Another room?” she heard him venture, and then he admitted, “I have not all of the languages yet, Ecologist, and not all of the forms. There is very much in flux also for me, I fear!”

  She sighed up at him, nodding.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “the whole of the world is in flux, and us within it. But how came you here to be delayed by my needs . . . ?”