“And that’s why he is your ally,” Roxanna said.
“That’s why we in the Underground are in cahoots with the Carmaks Family. Besides, a person doesn’t have to be embarrassed to know them. Some of the other Exalted—as you have reason to know—have developed some pretty crass tastes over the time that they’ve been our masters, and have been able to do whatever they please.”
“So, do we have any idea as to when these musicians will be arriving here at the Base?” Roxanna changed the subject, since the topic had veered a little too close to her stint at the brothel.
“Within two weeks, is my guess,” Jorun replied.
Roxanna reminded herself that the Vultairians used a six-day week—at least “week” was the way her node translated it. Five weeks added up to a month; there were other intricacies of the Vultairian calendar that she left to her node, unless they were immediately relevant. By now, she was so used to referring issues to her node that doing so hardly seemed separate from other thought-processes.
“They’ll be meandering through a few settlements, and stopping at Bouldertown, before coming here,” Jorun continued. “Unless the government is keeping tabs on them carefully, using a flit, a couple of days’ discrepancy between Bouldertown and the next place won’t be noticeable. They might have stayed longer than planned in Bouldertown, or decided to rest a while at a camping area—nobody keeps track of the timetables of itinerant musicians.”
“And, obviously, you don’t think the Exalted are tracking them with a flit,” Roxanna finished the thought.
Jorun laughed.
“No, I don’t. That would mean some effort by an Exalted pilot, since they rarely allow ordinary citizens to fly the flits or the flyers. We’re too stupid to be pilots, apparently.”
Roxanna snorted at that. “In their dreams.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mikal r’ma Trodden paced the marble floor in front of a marble fireplace in a spacious anteroom attached to a large, opulent complex of offices located on the Space Station which orbited the world Xeon. This was the second day that he had been cooling his heels, and his patience was beginning to wear thin.
It was not that he had been made to feel unwelcome; on the contrary, the human staff of the Space Station had done their very best to make him comfortable. He had been given a lovely suite for his use, and a wrist smear which gave him unlimited access to all the eating and drinking establishments on the station without any charges being assessed against his Lamanian assets. Several high-ranking officials in the Human-Xeonsaur Liaison Office had spoken with him, and studied the Nodal Record Files that he had brought with him. They had shown especial interest in the sections of Kati’s Record which dealt with her discovery that the boy, Murra, had been in telepathic contact with a prisoner Xeonsaur on the slave ship captained by Gorsh. They had promised him that they would place copies of the Records into the hands of the Lizard inhabitants of Xeon, at the earliest opportunity.
That had been two days ago, and since then Mikal had been waiting. Oh, he hadn’t spent all his time in the anteroom; he had accepted a tracer, so that, if, and when, the summons to speak with a Xeonsaur came, he could be located instantly, regardless of where on the Station he was. It probably didn’t matter much to any Xeonsaur, if it took him a while to answer the summons, anyway, since the Xeonsaurs were an inordinately long-lived species by human standards, and they had immense stores of patience. But any delay did matter to Mikal; he had deadlines to meet, and the most important one had to do with the Official Investigative Team Maryse r’ma Darien was arranging to send to Vultaire, and which he was supposed to lead.
Therefore, when he was not sleeping or eating, or walking along the nearby store-fronted walkways to work off his anxiety, he was in this anteroom, drinking mugs of the expensive hot beverage, coffee, which apparently these offices were well-provided with, or pacing the floor in front of the massive fireplace. There were books on shelves for his reading pleasure, and files of all kinds to be found on the consoles attached to the big, comfortable lounging chairs—he could have watched the programs on the screens provided, or jacked directly into his nervous system via his nodal connector—but he was finding it hard to concentrate on anything extraneous. Sometimes the Office Workers in the Complex stopped by to chat with him, and their presence was a welcome distraction, even though they were all humans, and not given to gossiping about their employers, the Xeonsaurs of Xeon.
They displayed an avid curiosity about him. Members of the Federation Peace Officer Corps were not regular visitors to the Human-Xeonsaur Liaison Bureau; Mikal had known that before he had embarked on the trip.
“The Planet Xeon,” Maryse had lectured when she had briefed him for the mission, “has a Space Station orbiting around it, manned by humans, the whole purpose of which is to be a buffer between the Xeonsaurs and the rest of the Universe. Don’t expect to get past the Human-Xeonsaur Liaison Offices; only old, trusted men and women, who have served their lives on the Xeon Space Station are ever invited onto the planet surface. But use all of your diplomatic skills to try to get an Xeonsaur to come up to the Space Station to talk with you. I authorize you to allow the officials at the Bureau to copy Kati’s Report and send it on-planet to be examined. It’s imperative that someone down on that planet sees that Gorsh has managed to somehow tangle an Xeonsaur into his web to the extent that the Lizard is navigating through enormous expanses of space and time. Because that is what has to have been happening; that’s why Gorsh’s slaves are untraceable, why that boy, Murra, could not reach his Institute when he tried to do so, and why Kati seems to have been transported from a different galaxy to ours.
“That’s why the Xeonsaur on that vessel wanted to get word home; he knows that Gorsh has to be stopped, and if he cannot do it, his people will have to help us do it. I do think that if you can contact an Xeonsaur in person, you will be able to persuade them to help us. Not that there’s much precedent for it; the Lizards keep to themselves. There have been those in the Federation, during our long history, who have tried to get cooperation from them, but hardly ever has it worked, at least as I know history. Yet here we are, now, with a common criminal having come across a drug that has enabled him to force an Xeonsaur to take orders from him.”
Mikal had followed instructions. He had convinced the human officials at the Liaison Bureau of the seriousness of the situation—at least he believed that he had succeeded in that. Records of his pleas and a copy of Kati’s Nodal Record had been sent down to whatever Office the Liaison Officials dealt with planet-side. And now he was waiting for a response from the Xeonsaurs, spending some of his idle time telling the Bureau staff members who stopped to talk with him, about his work with the Federation Peace Officer Corps.
“I guess we’re really ignorant as to what is going on in the rest of the galaxy,” a pretty, dark-skinned young woman who had stopped to chat with him said, when he had explained to her that, yes, the Federation was still fighting the old evil of slavery. “We’re so sheltered here; there really isn’t much contact between us and the rest of the galaxy, except for trade. The people down below like to indulge in certain luxuries which their world cannot provide, and they, of course, can offer some pretty amazing things in return. But we sell what they want to sell, and buy what they want to have, and novelty only comes into it if the Xeonsaurs decide that it is time to introduce some new item to the universe of the short-lives. Very occasionally they’ll take an interest in a new product from the outside—usually one that we here on the Space Station have already been importing for ourselves for a long time.”
“Things must be pretty different for people who live for thousands of years,” Mikal commented. “Even with nodes, we don’t usually make it past a century and a half, and without those, most of us would die of old age before we reach a hundred.”
He had to exert all his self-control to keep up a pleasant, polite facade. The flirty young woman’s presence was a reminder of how much he missed Kati. He mis
sed her laughter, her banter, her arms around him, and...well, he couldn’t afford to go there, right now, not even in imagination.
“Yeah, my Great-Uncle who does Direct Liaison said the first time he went down to the planet, having been called there by a Scholar who wanted some information, things were quite disconcerting because the Scholar was expecting to meet with his father who had dealt with the Xeonsaur previously, but had passed away. He says that such things happen in Direct Liaison all the time, especially when they deal with planet-side people who don’t often contact us short-lives.”
The woman chuckled as she spoke, and batted her eyelashes. Mikal had noted the flirtatiousness of a couple of other young ladies who had talked with him, and wondered if strange men of marriageable age were a novelty on the Station. Not that he minded being flirted with; it was good for his ego. But his true love was across the galaxy, on a possibly dangerous assignment, while he was reduced to cooling his heels, and making conversation with strangers—albeit some of the strangers were pretty women.
“Have you been made comfortable here?” the woman—what was her name, she had introduced herself—asked.
“Oh certainly,” Mikal replied while getting the name from his node; it was Lucia, Lucia sha Cordobe. Oh yes, she had just pointed out that she was the great-niece of Mauric sha Cordobe, one of the big shots in Direct Liaison with whom Mikal had had one of his meetings two days ago.
A good man Mauric sha Cordobe had seemed to be; no doubt his great-niece was a nice young woman, even if she was making it pretty obvious that she would welcome any advances that the Star Federation Agent might make.
There was a commotion behind him, at an entrance to the anteroom, the one next to the fireplace by which he and Lucia were standing. Lucia’s eyes widened, and she caught her breath; Mikal quickly turned to see what was going on. It was his turn to gasp.
Two women had entered the room in the company of Lucia’s Great-Uncle. They were striding towards him and Lucia, while Mauric sha Cordobe followed, looking slightly scandalized. Both women were beautiful in an uncanny fashion which made Mikal fleetingly think of porcelain dolls he had seen at the City Cash Market—yet the image was not correct. They looked delicate as Lamanians, but there was a feel of immense strength about them. They were as hairless as Lamanians, but did not have the enlarged heads. Instead, there were horny crests of some kind on the heads, a different shape for each. Mikal slipped into his enhanced vision mode and realized that the skin of the faces, the bare arms, and the hands, was delicately scaled and very pale pastel in colour. One woman was green, and the other, blue. Something about the green one—he was not sure what—told him that she was the older one, and older by a considerable amount, even by Xeonsaur standards. He had been granted the audience he had asked for, and very quickly, by these people’s reckoning.
Instinctively, he bowed to the two women as they approached, managing his best Lamanian bow, the one which, for a split-second, left his eyes staring at the floor, and the nape of his neck open and vulnerable to those he was facing. Memories of perfecting that bow as a boy flooded his mind; his mother had called him a stiff-necked Borhquan when he had had trouble with it. Of course, with the Borhquan wedge of hair on his nape, he could never create quite the respectful effect that the Lamanians managed, but his teachers had finally pronounced him proficient, and he had then learned that it was to be used only as a sign of great respect. It was never to be used in jest or ironically; there had been a time on Lamania when such use allowed whoever saw it, to slash the neck of the joker with a sword.
“So the Troddens of Lamania taught their half-breed offspring the fine points of Lamanian courtesy,” the green-scaled woman said when Mikal had straightened from the ritualistic gesture.
She and her companion eyed Mikal with curiosity. Having just been flirted with by Lucia, Mikal was acutely aware that there was nothing sexual in that curiosity, and realized at the same time that his own feelings about the two Xeonsaur women were similarly untainted by any intimations of lust. He thought the two women beautiful, but could not have imagined himself bedding either one, ever. Likely the species difference created a chasm too deep to cross; yet he had no trouble appreciating the beauty which fronted him, or the fine cut of the simple dresses the women wore.
“He’s a fine specimen of the humankind,” the blue woman said, an appreciative smile lighting up her slightly lizard-like features. “Mixed breeds often are. It’s not surprising that Mauric’s great-niece, here, is among the women smitten, although she is wasting her time, I’m afraid.”
“Yes,” the green one added. “Mikal r’ma Trodden has already met the great love of his life, and has no intention of doing anything to risk her affection, even while he is across the galaxy from her.”
These words were directed at Lucia who was blushing furiously under her brown skin.
Mauric sha Cordobe cleared his throat.
“I guess I don’t have to introduce Mikal r’ma Trodden, nor my niece, Lucia, to our honoured visitors from the planet,” he said when he had everyone’s attention, “but perhaps Mikal would like to know that the great ladies in his presence are Xavia—“ he nodded at the green woman, “—and Xoraya of the Xeonsaur family Hsiss.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ladies Hsiss,” Mikal said, inordinately pleased to hear that his voice sounded calm and normal.
“Lucia, since you’re present,” Mauric continued, “perhaps you could show our three visitors into an empty conference room where they can discuss the business at hand. Please make certain that there are refreshments available, something suitable for both species.”
“Yes, Great-Uncle, of course.”
Lucia quickly became business-like, apparently contacting someone through her node to determine the most suitable conference room, and to pass on the order about refreshments. Then she bade the three to follow her, and led them down a wide hallway to what looked like a comfortable sitting room. Two staff members were already there, moving plush chairs and small tables into an arc in front of the fireplace. Another staff brought in a coffee-urn, bottles of wine, mugs and wine-glasses, and plates of finger food on a high-tech gliding cart, and arranged them on a table by a wall. He took out small plates and eating utensils from a wall cupboard; when everything lay attractively on the table he left. The two arranging the furniture finished, nodded to Lucia who gestured a wordless approval, and left.
“If you need anything,” Lucia said to the three, “there are call buttons at the corners of each of the small tables.” She indicated it on the nearest one. “If you press any one of them, I’ll be here in moments, ready to do your bidding.”
“Thank you Lucia,” Xavia said gently. “We will do so if we have the need.”
With that Lucia left, and Mikal found himself gently directed to the middle chair while his companions sat down at his sides.
“She will have a lot to talk about at the next gathering of her friends,” Xoraya said, “even if you disappointed her, Mikal.”
“She is a very attractive young woman,” Mikal said, somewhat chagrined. “However, I’m not in the market for attractive women. It is true, as you two seem to know, that I have met the love of my life, and have no intention of messing up that relationship.”
“This Kati of yours is also a very attractive woman,” Xoraya commented. “Even though I think that she would deem herself less beautiful than Lucia, and, perhaps, in human terms, may physically be. It has been interesting to have had the honour of visiting her mind through the Nodal Record which she—and you—have kindly permitted us to experience. I certainly hope that I have the opportunity to meet her in person—soon, I believe, it’ll have to be, at least in terms of time as my kind know it.”
Mikal stared at her. What an unexpected sentiment this was! An Xeonsaur saying that she would like meet a particular human being! All his life he had heard it said that the Xeonsaurs had zero interest in short-lives such as humans! Creatures who lived as long as they did had p
ursuits so different from those of his kind as the humans’ interests were from those of butterflies or moths! Was that not so, after all? Did the legendary lizards take an interest in the descendants of the simians, at least a bit?
“Are we boggling your mind, Mikal r’ma Trodden?” Xavia asked, watching him gape.
He rediscovered his equilibrium, and chuckled.
“Indeed,” he replied. “Have you any idea of what humans say about the Xeonsaurs? That they have no interest in the doings of beings who are born, live and die within a time frame which must seem absurdly short to the likes of yourselves?”
“On the contrary, Mikal.” Xavia’s tone of voice was definite. “We take a great deal of interest in the doings of the short-lives. We have entire Institutes devoted to the study of the humans. And ones devoted to the study of the feline species. Plus still others, specializing in the study of other sentient species, short-lives all.”
Mikal grinned at her.
“That’s not in the least bit reassuring,” he said. “We study the butterflies and moths, too. And fireflies, wasps and bees, and countless other species that we consider short-lived.”
“And you’d study the insects a lot more thoroughly if they were running a good portion of the galaxy that you lived in, don’t you think?” Xavia asked, arching the ridges above her eyes.
“I get what you are saying,” Mikal conceded, turning serious. “The humans have rather taken over this corner of the universe.”
“An energetic, exuberant species,” Xavia added. “But not always, or everywhere, wise.”
“You are right about that,” Mikal sighed. “Some of us spend our lives trying to right the mistakes that others spend their lives making.”
On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted Page 32
