Cicero took a quick, deep breath, and let it out slowly.
“Fuck it,” he repeated. “I’m staying.”
He waited in the shadows of the barred gate of Palmer College as the University proctor made his way along the lane, pausing every few yards to rustle with his long staff among the stalks of climbing bamboo that overgrew the red walls of Graces, Palmer’s ancient rival. The walls had stood against fire and riot and war in their time, but generations of peace had left them untested by anything more violent than the annual brawl with Palmer. And now that Graces was a women’s college, there was not even that; any insults Palmer’s undergraduates offered to the student body of Graces were on a purely individual basis.
When the proctor was out of sight, Cicero looked up and down the lane, tied back his hood and sleeves, and scrambled into the wet greenery. As generations of truant undergraduates had discovered – and the proctors knew full well – the bamboo was more than strong enough to support a climbing body, and its leaves more than deep enough to hide one.
Five years in Salomé’s low gravity had done nothing for Cicero’s muscle tone, but he made it to the top, and then along the tiled roofs to Labriola House, where he swung down into the open quad and onto the third-floor balcony. He unslung his satchel, paused for a moment to arrange his gown and brush the wet leaves from his hair, and knocked on the first door he came to.
After a little while, a sleepy maid opened it.
“Good morning, Leah,” said Cicero. “Is Miss Touray receiving visitors?”
The maid bobbed up and down. “She’ll receive you, sure, I’m sure,” she said. “She’s been up all night at her books. It’d be an act of charity, sir, if you’d convince her at least to close her eyes for a few minutes before chapel.”
“I shall see what I can do,” Cicero said.
Graces’ star student was, in fact, at her books. The table that Thalia Xanthè Touray-Laurion bent over was stacked with books, four and five high, and there was paper everywhere the books were not. As Cicero entered the room she kicked her chair back and pushed her hair out of her eyes.
“Cicero!” she said. “What time is it?”
“Thursday,” he said, kissing her. “The sixty-eighth of summer, though storm season seems to have come early this year.” He opened his satchel and took out a small paper-wrapped package. “These are for you,” he said, setting it down on the table. “The fruit filling, I’m afraid; with the dockworkers on strike there’s no chocolate to be had.”
She gave him a look, and he amended his answer.
“Six o’clock,” he said.
“Six o‘clock!” she said, looking back at her books and papers. “I need a window.” She stood, and stretched. “Oh, Cicero!” she said, turning suddenly. “Did you know that the real numbers can’t be counted?”
Cicero’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Did I?” He found the coffee press and upended it over the wastebasket to empty the filter. “Is that what you’ve been working on all night?”
“Yes!” Thalia said. “It’s true! And I can prove it!”
Cicero filled the press from Thalia’s bedside pitcher and set it on the burner. “What about that statistics thing for Bolte?” he said, trying to light the gas.
“Oh, that,” Thalia said. She fished around among the books and papers and came up with a canary-yellow essay booklet. “Done. Yesterday afternoon.” She picked up a pastry. “God, I’m starving.”
The gas caught. Cicero turned from the burner and picked up the booklet. Explicit quantification of subjectivity effects on prior distributions: an alternative to maximum likelihood estimation. Thalia’s handwriting was spare and direct, betraying an abundance of calligraphy lessons but also a distinct lack of patience.
“It’s very good,” he said as he turned the pages. “It’s too advanced for Bolte, though.”
And not just for Bolte, he thought. He’d had something like it back on Ahania, in History of Mathematics, or it would have been too advanced for him as well. He flipped through to the conclusion.
“Of course the real numbers aren’t countable,” he said absently, as he read, though Thalia’s overnight project had nothing to do with the essay. “For any countable sequence of them, you can construct a series of nested intervals converging to a number that’s not in the sequence.”
He turned a few more pages, and looked up to see Thalia staring at him.
“Cicero,” she said. “I spent all night proving that. I don’t think anyone else ever has. You’re an economics professor. Where did that come from?”
Cicero shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I must have read it somewhere. Eat your pastry; it’ll go stale.” He took one for himself.
“I mean it, Cicero,” Thalia said. “You’re very bright, and I love you dearly, but you’re not a genius.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “You are.” He kissed her again. “Did you know that the new Semard Professor says that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, regardless of the relative velocity of the source and the observer?”
“Yes,” she said. “I read his paper. I meant to write him about it; distance and time would have to vary with the observer’s motion for it to work. Stop trying to distract me.”
Cicero sighed. It wasn’t Thalia that he was trying to distract; it was himself.
He stood back, looking around the room for a place to sit, and finally settled on the edge of the bed. The mattress was the martially virtuous kind the upper classes of Travalle and Thyatira favored, no more than a little thin cotton stuffing over hard wood, but at that moment it seemed infinitely inviting.
All he wanted to do was take Thalia’s hand and pull her down onto it with him, to curl around her with the blankets drawn over their heads, to sleep there forever like enchanted lovers in some fairy tale, caring nothing for professors and colleges, revolutionaries and merchant adventurers. Nothing for orbiting starships overhead, invisible and threatening.
“Thalia,” he said instead. “If I had to go away—would you come with me?”
She looked at him. “Go away where?” she said. “The islands? Port-St. -Paul?”
Port-St.-Paul was the capital of one of Travalle’s island colonies; it was supposed to be Cicero’s home. Six thousand kilometers of stormy ocean separated the islands from Basia: enough to make it nearly impossible for the University to check his forged credentials, enough to paper over any number of cracks in his cover story.
He’d spent the three subjective years of the voyage from Zoa in a constant mild fever, as specialized medical nano rebuilt him into a Roka islander from the DNA up, blood type and skin color and the shape of his cheekbones and the texture of his hair. The face he saw in the mirror was still mostly his own, and by now he had grown accustomed to the differences—the flatter nose, the hair in ringlets rather than curls, the skin no longer blue-black but a richer, more complex brown that could show a blanch or a blush; all so that to the Travallese, he would appear not alien, but merely exotic. It was still enough to make Cicero an object of curiosity, and occasionally, of abuse, but he rarely minded that.
No, what he minded was what it made of his affair with Thalia. Not just a scandal but, in some circles, a lynching offense.
He shook his head. “Never mind,” he said.
His resolve had wavered for a moment. But his choice was already made, a long time ago. If he ever made it back to the world where he’d been born, it would still not be the home he had left. His family, his childhood friends – apart from a few who had made similar voyages – all of them had lived and died while he was traveling between the stars, and there was little chance he would ever see those few that had made the voyages again. That was the choice he had made; for Thalia and her people, though he hadn’t known them yet. He couldn’t ask her to make the same choice for him.
Thalia came and sat down at his side. “I’ll take you back to Thyatira,” she said, “as soon as I graduate. We’ll get my father to end
ow chairs for both of us at Scetis Imperial.”
Cicero smiled. “What will your mother say?”
“She’ll be livid,” Thalia said. “But that’s nothing new. My father will love you.”
He did take her hand then, and drew her to him.
“We’ll change the world,” she murmured. “You’ll see.”
When Thalia had gone off to chapel, Cicero left Graces College the way he had come in. He attended chapel himself, at Palmer. He held office hours, and was either too lenient with the students who came to him, or too severe, or both. He wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the leading City financial newspaper, and a more conciliatory one to Thyatira’s leading economic journal.
He even went to the main library and lurked for a while in the Round Reading Room, listening to the rain on the leaded roof, the clanking of the clockwork elevators and the pneumatic hiss of the order tubes. He had some vague idea of confronting the dealers, but either their business with the University was done or they were occupied elsewhere, because they never showed.
Cicero left frustrated but also, on some level, relieved; he had no idea what he would have said to them. He went back to his rooms, then, and sat for a while, watching the rainwater well up in the crevices between the ill-fitting windowpanes.
What am I going to do? he thought.
Cicero’s ship, Equity, had been the second to reach Salomé from the Community. Solidarity had arrived first to lay the groundwork for the mission, gathering and recording and transmitting data back by QT so that Outreach could plan how best to bring the lost colony back into human civilization. Equity, trailing the other ship by twenty years, brought the real missionaries: specialists like Cicero, trained to move among the people of Salomé like fish in water.
Equity had been in the Jokanaan system less than two years when the mission’s telescopes first spotted the dealers’ ship, half a light-year away, decelerating out of the unknown beyond. From Golden Age records and vague radio whispers, the Community knew that humanity had once spread much farther than the space they had explored; like any Outreach mission, the mission to Salomé had known there was a chance they would meet a counterpart coming the other way. They hadn’t expected it, though. And if they had, they would have expected to meet a civilization not unlike the Community itself.
The truth took some time to dawn on them. While Cicero was immersing himself in his adopted culture, paying the inbound ship no more mind than if it had turned up on the other side of the Community, Outreach linguists were trading dead languages with the newcomers, trying to make sense of paradoxical phrases like intellectual property and exploitation rights. The newcomers’ ship had the nonsensical name Elastic Demand; the organization it represented apparently was called something like Marginal, Limited. For their civilization as a whole the newcomers used the word association, which sounded like community but had troubling differences in nuance.
Even when the newcomers’ quaint obsession with commerce had earned them the nickname dealers, and some of Cicero’s counterparts back in the Community – experts in development economics – had begun to voice concerns, neither the Outreach offices nor the Salomé mission took those concerns very seriously. It simply did not seem possible for the principles that applied to orphaned, poverty-stricken planets like Salomé, with their joint-stock companies and steam-powered colonial empires, to apply to an interstellar civilization.
And then Marginal’s sales force landed in Basia, the capital of the largest of those empires, and announced its presence to the Travallese state.
And Outreach – and the Salomé mission, in particular – suddenly had to take those concerns seriously after all.
Cicero had been taking it for granted that, having come to save the people of Salomé from themselves, Outreach would as a matter of course save them from the dealers as well. Abandoning an entire planet, to be swallowed up by a civilization so dysfunctional that it carried the idea of property across interstellar space, was not to be thought of.
It had never occurred to Cicero that Outreach might decide that the problem was just too big to handle.
And if it’s too big for Outreach to handle, he thought, where does that leave me? What can I do, alone?
He picked up Thalia’s essay booklet and leafed slowly through the pages, not so much reading as simply tracing the shapes of the words.
With the Outreach mission gone, Thalia and the rest of Salomé’s people would be helpless. Cicero had to do something; there was no one else.
A knock at the door interrupted his thoughts. It came again; and then, as he stood, he heard the rattle of keys.
He went to answer it, and found the college porter with his master key already out. Old Professor Alier was with him, the Rector of Palmer himself. Next to Alier was a stocky, middle-aged man in a round hat and a black raincoat that was at least ten years out of style, followed by two uniformed City policemen.
“Professor Alier,” Cicero said pleasantly, as the rector and the man in the round hat came inside. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“This is a damned unpleasant business, Cicero,” Alier said. “The College has placed a great deal of trust in you, and you’ve chosen a fine way of repaying it.” He turned to the man in the round hat. “You will keep the name of the College out of it, won’t you?” he said.
Cicero’s mind raced. It couldn’t be that the College had discovered his affair with Thalia; that would be a matter for University discipline—or, at worst, the masked “knights” of the Secret Empire – not the official police. And while his teachings were certainly subversive, he doubted that even his enemies on the economics faculty would take them so seriously as to have him arrested. Marius’ work, of course, was quite openly subversive, and if the authorities had somehow been aware of Cicero’s connection to it, they would most certainly want to talk to him. But he didn’t think that was possible.
No, the dealers were making their move, and using the Travallese state to do it; that was the only plausible explanation.
Cicero was rarely in contact with Equity and Solidarity and the rest of the Outreach mission. For emergencies, he had a simple voice phone, implanted behind his right ear. Hopefully it still worked; he hadn’t used it since training.
He worked his jaw to activate the phone. There was an answering buzz along his jaw.
—Trouble, he subvocalized.
The man in the round hat had a lower-middle-class, City accent. “We’ll do our best, sir,” he was saying to Alier. In a reassuring tone, he added: “I don’t mind telling you that in most of these cases, we avoid the inconvenience of a trial.”
“Trial?” Cicero said. “What the Devil are you talking about?” He turned to the Rector. “Professor, who are these people?”
“Don’t pretend to be thick, Cicero,” Alier said. “This gentleman here, Mr.—?” He looked at the man, and, when no name was forthcoming, cleared his throat and started over. “This gentleman here is with the Special Police. They seem to think you can help them with their inquiries.”
“Actually,” the Special told Cicero cheerfully, “we think you’re guilty of espionage, sedition, subversion …” He leaned close, and his tone became confiding. “ … And several other charges that we expect to enumerate before the day is out.”
A murmur in Cicero’s ear distracted him.
—Is it the dealers?
He’d expected one of the communications people, but it was Livia, Equity’s captain and the Outreach mission’s nominal second in command.
• Must be, he told her. – All local so far, though, he added. He tried to cover it with a cough. —Look, Livia said. – We’ve got our own troubles up here. “There must be some mistake,” Cicero said aloud. To Livia, he added: – I’m about to be arrested.
• String them along, Livia said. – When we know where you’re being taken, we’ll find a way to get you out.
Right, Cicero thought. String them along. How am I supposed to do that?
&n
bsp; The Special shook his head. “I’m afraid we don’t make mistakes of that sort, sir,” he said. He nodded to one of the uniformed policemen, who produced a pair of manacles, and turned back to Cicero. “I’ll just take that, if you don’t mind,” he said.
Cicero looked down and saw that he was still holding Explicit quantification.
“I mind,” came a voice from the balcony. Cicero looked and saw Thalia coming up the stairs, and his heart sank.
She came up and addressed herself to Alier. “That’s my essay for Professor Bolte, sir. I asked Dr. Cicero to give me some advice on a few points.”
The Rector blinked. “Miss – Touray, is it?” he said. Cicero watched the conflicting emotions that passed over Alier’s face: irritation, embarrassment, and an evident fear of upsetting one of the University’s richest and most well-connected students. Alier turned to the man from the Special Police. “Surely there’s no need for Miss Touray’s essay to be taken in evidence,” he said.
“Here,” Cicero said, handing Thalia the essay. Their eyes met, and as their fingers touched briefly, Cicero’s composure faltered.
His fingers tingling from the moment of contact, he slowly released the booklet. Cleared his throat, he said: “I’m sure this—” with a nod toward the policemen “– will all be cleared up shortly. I’ll see you Friday at the usual time.”
“Right,” the Rector said. “Run along now, child.”
Thalia nodded, and, with a backward glance at Cicero, turned to go.
“Just a moment, please – Miss Touray,” the Special said, reaching out to bar the way. “That wouldn’t happen to be –” he fished a piece of paper from his pocket and glanced at it “– Miss Thalia Xanthè Touray, Touray-Laurion, would it?” His pronunciation of the Thyatiran names was much better than Cicero would have expected.
Thalia nodded wordlessly.
The Special smiled. “Well, that’s a bit of luck,” he said. “Two birds with one stone, as you might say.” He handed the Rector the piece of paper, and said to Thalia: “I’ve a warrant for your arrest as well, you see.”
The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Page 7
