Downtime (12 page)

“How
do you get them to stand still long enough to see if they have any scars? They’re
so fast!”

“Well
there’s where a little human cunning comes in. Don’t be overly eager, Chief.
You know, of course, that you can’t take any of the danae from around here.”

“Oh,
of course, sir. They’re protected for the study at Sylvan Amber.”

“Right.
So you go to one of the unprotected areas and spend some time watching the
danae, spotting the one or more that are scared. Keep your weapon handy, too,
just in case you do get an opportunity to get off a good shot. They can’t hear,
you know, and if you stay downwind, sometimes you can sneak up on them.”

Marmion
chuckled. “Bet that’s rare with that eye in the back of their head.”

“True,
but not impossible. And if you’re quick with your weapon . . . I
always like to keep it out and handy . . .”

In
plain sight, you mean, Calla said to herself, smiling inwardly, right where the
smart danae will be sure to notice it.

“And
keep the power low,” Jason advised. “They may be paying as if the crystals were
diamonds but they’re nowhere near as hard. Destroy the body and chances are you’ll
destroy the gall, too.”

“Thanks
for the advice.”

“Any
time,” Jason said, and he began whistling as they walked.

***

Jason had chosen a round table for supper and dismissed
her officers and his so that they could dine alone with Praetor D’Omaha and Stairnon.
The table and the intimacy of the dinner were both highly irregular in terms of
ordinary ceremony, but seemed to suit the Praetor and his lady. Calla was
further surprised to discover what an amiable host Jason could be, for he’d
always disdained anything that sounded “official.” He’d even worn his green
silk ranger’s cape fastened to his stellerator with silver moons of his rank.
He’d shed the apparatus for dinner, of course, and she noticed that the moons
on his collar were polished and gleaming, his khakis spotless. Someone had
trimmed his black curls and his face and neck were recently depilated, all of
which seemed to make the gray of his eyes sharp and penetrating.

“More
wine?” Jason said to Praetor D’Omaha.

“No,
thank you.” He was tall even in his chair, the lean body type preferred for
generations. His hair was slate gray, his eyes very blue.

“My
lady?” Jason said, offering to fill Stairnon’s goblet.

Her
hair was white and no amount of curling it could disguise that it was thin. She
too was lean, but seemed frail in comparison to the Praetor.

“Just
a few drops. It’s very good wine, and such lovely goblets. Not military issue,
I’ll wager.”

“No,
my lady. They’re mine, from Sinn Hala. A crafter who claims to have Picasso
genes made them in the style of the ancients.”

“Hand
blown?” Stairnon raised the goblet to see it better before sipping the wine
Jason had added.

“Well,
so claims the freetrader I bought them from. But I bought them because they
were beautiful, so I don’t care if he lied to me.”

“Exquisite,”
she said, taking another sip. She put the goblet down, holding the stem to
trace the etching. “The entire meal was exquisite . . . the
whole day.”

“Thank
you, my lady.”

“Could
you call me Stairnon?”

“My
pleasure, Stairnon.” He looked over at Calla and smiled. “Your glass is empty.”

“Leave
it that way,” she said, “or I won’t be able to walk home under my own power.”

“We
can arrange a zephyr.”

“I
could use the walk,” the Praetor said. “It didn’t seem very far.”

“A
kilometer, Praetor,” Calla said.

He
shrugged. “Do you feel up to that, my dear?” he asked his wife.

“It
sounds lovely. You’ve pampered us so nicely today, Jason, that I feel quite
refreshed. You won’t mind if we walk? Calla can show us the way.”

“As
you wish.” He took it as a signal that the meal was ended and he excused
himself to fetch their stellerators and wraps.

“Calla,
he’s charming,” Stairnon said behind her hand. “Was he always that way?”

Calla
shrugged. “I think he’s acquired some social acumen over the years.”

“How
has it gone for the two of you?” the Praetor said carefully. Because he was
Calla’s backup, she knew he had studied her records carefully and knew of her
involvement with Jason so long ago.

“As
I expected,” Calla said lightly. “It has been thirty years; it’s not the same.”

“Only
ten years for him.”

Don’t
remind me, Calla thought. He went away, and I can’t forget him, not even after
thirty years. But after only ten . . . no, it was over for him
before he left. Maybe he even left because it was over.

“I’ll
see you to the trailhead,” Jason said, returning with the stellerators and
capes and handing them over. When they were ready, he led the way to the door
into the staging area and across to the ramp-tunnel that took them to the
surface. “Praetor D’Omaha, forgive me for having to ask, but might you be the
same Praetor D’Omaha who was serving in the Decemvirate a few years ago? My
nomenclator said nothing about it, but I have the feeling, a memory of you in
those chambers.”

Praetor
D’Omaha paused, then said, “Yes. I retired recently.”

“But
decemviri never quite really retire, do they, sir?”

Jason
glanced at Calla as if to say, why didn’t you tell me? Hosting a Praetor is
trauma enough without discovering he’s decemvir as well. And D’Omaha looked at
her, too, in an entirely different way. Politically unobservant, eh? his raised
brow seemed to say.

“Anything
he says now will be a lie, Jason, or at best a half truth,” Stairnon said. “I’ll
tell you the whole truth. He’s a hanger-on. He can’t bear being cut off from
the center of things, so he hangs around. It’s not too hard to figure out that
when the active decemviri become tired of him they know exactly what to do.
They send him on a junket. And here we are, Jason, way outback where they can’t
hear him.” She took Jason by the arm as they approached the ramp. “But it’s a
nice outback. Sylvan Amber was one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen on
any world. Are the other danae villages as lovely as that one?”

“Even
more lovely,” Jason said. “You seem to appreciate beautiful things. Perhaps you
would enjoy having this.” He handed something to Stairnon. When she opened her
hand to examine it herself, Calla saw it was a tiny skein of thread. Color
danced like a rainbow in the thread. Stairnon raised her hand, to the light
Calla thought at first. But Stairnon sniffed the skein.

“It
smells like the scent you’re wearing, Jason.”

“It
was the esters in the thread you detected. They’re too strong to be pleasant
when they’re fresh, but after boiling, like the thread you’re holding, they
leave a pleasing scent. A little skein like that makes a nice cachet.”

“I
could embroider my handkerchiefs with this,” Stairnon said looking brightly at
D’Omaha. She had been worried about how she would spend her time on Mutare
without Aquae Solis to occupy her.

“The
smell will be gone the moment you launder them,” Calla said, not particularly
impressed.

But
Jason shook his head. “The scent molecules are soluble in hot water, but
cold-water washing or sonics won’t harm them. They seem to last forever, almost
like crystal itself.”

“It’s
a heavenly aroma,” Stairnon said. She sniffed the thread again. “Slightly
spicy, but sweet. A pity there isn’t enough to make a scarf.”

“I
have a pillow full of the stuff, and there’s plenty more where that came from.
It’s just ravelings from cocoons I’ve found after the danae have emerged. I’ll
see to it that you have as much as you need,” Jason said.

“Why,
thank you.” Stairnon and Jason started walking again.

Calla
and the Praetor followed them silently, listening to Stairnon’s engaging
questions and to Jason’s dutiful but sincere replies. Outside, in the light of
a nearby galaxy of stars and a few distant moons, she took her husband’s arm
and thanked Jason again for a lovely day, dismissing him with certainty. He
bowed slightly, unnecessary but a gesture sure to please, then went back the
way they had come.

“The
whole truth was really too unkind, Stairnon,” the Praetor said to his wife when
he was sure Jason was far enough away to hear. But he kissed her cheek and
hugged her very close. Calla always liked seeing these two together, for their
love for each other was evident. Both of them were older than Calla, yet Stairnon
would shiver with excitement when D’Omaha looked at her or touched her, even
though he’d been looking at her and touching her for half a century.

“Do
you think I told Jason too much?” Stairnon asked, looking under D’Omaha’s arm
to Calla.

“Don’t
worry about Jason. I all but told him outright that we are here to make elixir.
To his way of thinking that is more than reason enough for your being here,”
Calla said.

“Does
he know about the traitor, too?” Stairnon asked.

“No,
nothing about that. He’ll be genuinely surprised when our decemvir friend
arrives.”

“I
will, too,” Stairnon said, sounding worried. “No matter which one of the
Decemvirate it is, it will be someone I know. I still can’t conceive of anyone
of them doing it, let alone try to guess which.”

“One
did,” Calla assured her. “He went to a great deal of trouble to keep this new
fabrication plant secret from the full Decemvirate, not to mention the Council
of Worlds. Only an active decemvir has such power.”

“And
only one who was fully involved in the rebellion would have a reason to do it.
It would have ruined all the probability studies if this place had successfully
been kept secret from the rest of the members. They never would have known that
the rebellion had its own supply of elixir when the war started.”

“I
keep worrying about what else we don’t know,” Calla said.

Stairnon
leaned her head on D’Omaha’s arm for a moment. “I just wish I could understand
the thought process that makes you positive the traitor will come to Mutare.
What’s in those genes of yours that makes you
know
?”

“Common
sense,” D’Omaha said with a laugh.

“To
an uncommon degree,” Calla added, and an incredible perception for how humans
behave, she thought both singularly and in groups; put ten of D’Omaha’s kind
together and they were nearly soothsayers and foreseers. But she also knew that
individually they were not infallible.

They
walked silently for a while, Stairnon and D’Omaha hand in hand. The night was
cool, but not too cold to stroll leisurely and listen to the calls of night
insects. The way was lighted by footlights set between carefully placed border
rocks on either side of the trail. Calla was sure that neither the lights nor
rocks had been there the day before. Jason was having his people spend a great
deal of time improving and beautifying what was supposed to be only a temporary
trail, time that should have been spent on the construction of the tunnel,
which was important to the entire facility’s security.

“Something
wrong, Calla?” D’Omaha asked.

She
must have been frowning. “Maybe, but I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

“Is
it Jason?” he asked, persisting.

“Yes,
but not what you’re thinking,” Calla said. It was D’Omaha’s persistent probing
all during the trip from the Hub to Mutare that had made Calla admit to him and
to herself that she still cared for Jason, even though for decades she had
pretended it was not so. She had told D’Omaha that she did not expect Jason in
the flesh to measure up to her memory of him. She was far too practical to
expect that, too ready to put the ghosts aside. Not wishing to bring up the
problem of the tunnel, which, because she did not know what the problem was,
could put her in poor countenance with the Praetor, she said to him in an
easy-sounding voice, “As I have said before, it has been thirty years. I’ll
cherish the memories as I guess I always have, but I can’t pretend those thirty
years haven’t gone by.”

“I
told you before that it could go either way, but not if you continue to insist
that your age difference separates you. If you do that, it will keep you apart.”

“You
don’t understand.”

“I’m
decemvir. It’s my job to understand what cannot be understood. Besides, who
could understand better than one whose circumstances are nearly identical?”

Stairnon
was older than he, much older because for all the years that he served the
Decemvirate he’d had a steady supply of elixir to keep him young. Calla knew he
had offered time and again to share his supply with Stairnon, but she would not
accept it. The rigors of the office were so harsh that some decemvir aged
somewhat or came to poor health despite the elixir. Still, it was not the same
for them. “You have been together all these years, adjusting gradually.”

D’Omaha
nodded. “And if you’d let yourself, I know that you, too, can adjust, quickly
and happily. I told you that when we were still aboard
Belden Traveler
. The question never was you, Calla, not if you
wished it to happen.”

“Jason,”
Calla said. “You studied his personnel file and still you could not tell me.
With all your experience in knowing how to predict human behavior, you said it
could go either way.”

“It’s
easier to predict how a group of people will behave; lots of statistics to base
it on. I told you that if we had a hundred people very much like Jason and in
similar circumstances, half of them would be willing to rekindle the love, the
other half would not. I simply couldn’t tell which ones would do which. I didn’t
know which group Jason would be identified with. Now I have some added data,
for I’ve met him.”

Calla
caught her breath, felt her heart pound furiously, and couldn’t bring herself
to ask what his opinion was now. She was simultaneously grateful and frightened
when he continued speaking.