Rhythm of the Imperium (26 page)

“It’s so easy to lay something where one can’t locate it,” I said, finally taking pity on him. I guessed that the others had been teasing him for days. “Anna swears that I did not give her my souvenir memory crystal of my visit to the surface, and I swore that I did. Then it turned up in a wall pocket on the shuttle. The pilot brought it back to me.”

“I suppose that was it,” Nalney said, grateful to have had a verbal life-ring tossed to him, after suffering the inevitable embarrassment. After all, we were family. “In the end, my beach attendant ran out to buy me a new pair. Not of the quality of the ones I lost, but good enough to spare my blushes. Of course I rewarded him most handsomely.” His brow wrinkled then, as though touched by a distant thought. “I forgot to mention, in all the confusion. I could swear that I had seen Nole on the beach, but how could he have been there? He’s still at home with his precious ship.”

I had given my word not to reveal Nole’s secret, so I joined in the general puzzlement. “I can’t understand why he decided to forego the spectacle.”

“Who knows why he does what he does?” Nalney said.

Xan fanned out the images of his holiday conquests, and made them swirl among the rest of us. Suddenly, nubile females appeared in ancient temples, museums, and among Nell’s prized elephants.

“You should have come with me, Thomas,” Xan said. “You could have had your pick of lovelies, Thomas. When they learned I was the Emperor’s cousin, they could not get enough of me. I think I met everyone in an entire province. Such pretty things, too, with luscious figures and long, dark hair.”

I mused upon Laine, whose delicate face and form were never far away in my thoughts. I suppose a foolish grin played upon my face. Nell interrupted my reverie.

“Thomas, you have been holding out on us!”

“I have?”

“Yes!” Guiltily, I shoved Laine’s image behind my mental back. “No, I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have!” she insisted, pounding on my knee with her fist. “The Zang! There’s a Zang on board, and you knew about it. The shuttle pilot who brought us up from Counterweight said you flew back with one
days
ago. You’ve been hogging it to yourself all this time!”

I permitted myself to look sheepish and modest. “Ah. That. Yes. Well, Parsons asked me to help out a bit, you know. Asked me to escort it back to the ship. It cut my holiday a bit, but … .”

“Never mind all that! We want to see it. Now!”

“Now?” I asked, in a teasing manner, guaranteed to drive my younger sister mad. It worked. She acquired a wild-eyed expression that boded no good for elder brothers generally and in particular.

“Yes!”

“Yes!” Xan said. “Elder race of the galaxy, and all. You can’t keep that a secret from us, cousin. Fair’s fair.”

“Well, all right,” I said, as though letting go of a deep-dyed confidence that otherwise wild horses would have failed to dislodge. I rose to my feet and held out my hand to Nell. “Come along, then. We’ll drop in on it.”

As one happy and ever-so-slightly tipsy crowd, we bundled into the lift and descended to the cargo level. I escorted them to the correct hatch, activated the signal and waited.

Within a few moments, Laine opened the door a crack, and peered out in puzzlement at the crowd. Her small round face lit up when she saw me.

“What a relief! I thought the Kail had come back!”

“They’re not here?” I asked. “That’s a relief. Although we might feel like more of an intrusion than they are.”

“Thomas!” Nell protested, poking me in the ribs.

“My poor attempt at humor,” I said, absorbing the blow with gallant obliviousness. I bowed. “Dr. Laine Derrida, please allow me to introduce my sister, Lady Lionelle Guinevere Murasaki Loche Kinago.”

Nell extended her hand and shook Laine’s vigorously. “Just Nell.”

“I’m Laine! Nice to meet you!”

As one, my family recoiled from the assault Dr. Derrida’s voice made upon their eardrums, but they surged forward in a friendly mass to be introduced in their turn. I knew that the crowd of cousins was a bit overwhelming to someone who preferred solitude with Zang, but Laine handled the incursion with her usual grace.

“Come on over,” Laine said, beckoning us through. “Proton’s off in the void as usual, but I think it’s on its way back.”

She let the door open the rest of the way, revealing the shining alien in the corner. My family let out a collective gasp that I found most satisfying. They surged forward like an onrushing tide, wanting to get a closer look.

I had by no means become jaded as to the effect Proton had upon the senses, but I forced myself to look away to observe my cousins’ reactions instead. Nell’s eyes were shining with a glow from within every bit as luminous as Proton’s. Her grin stretched nearly from one small but perfect ear to the other. Our cousins ran the gamut from gobsmacked to awestruck. With my sister’s hand in one arm and Laine’s in the other, I brought them to Proton’s side, close enough to feel the cold it radiated.

As if the chill were a glass of cold water, it brought all of them out of their trance. Immediately, Nalney took his viewpad from his belt pouch and began to take images of the noble Zang. That started off a virtual frenzy of photography among my relations. For its part, Proton simply stood there and glowed at us.

Xan was unusually subdued. He walked around the Zang, surveying it from every angle. He looked as though he had been given a particularly marvelous present.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. You can feel the way it seems to stretch out over parsecs.”

“It’s amazing,” Nell breathed, clutching her pocket secretary to her heart. “I can see why primitive cultures worshiped them.”

“We’ve visited a few worlds where they still do,” Laine said. “I was telling Thomas about the place I was studying when Proton and I met. They think of it as a benevolent presence.”

“But does it actually protect them at all?” Xan asked.

“I think so,” Laine said. “I saw it get rid of some dangerous animals on at least one planet.”

As though floodgates had been opened, my cousins deluged Laine with questions. Every bit the visiting professor, she handled each one seriously, with charm, and in language that any layman could comprehend. I herded them all back to Laine’s sitting area (now furnished with a collection of brown-upholstered armchairs and a rolling serving table) and activated the coffee maker and the other hospitality technology while she held court. She smiled up at me as I brought her a cup, prepared as I had come to learn she liked it, with a twist of lemon peel and a pinch of raw sugar.

Though we were capable of clamoring for her collective wisdom until her throat grew raw, it had been hammered and welded into our collective consciousness over the course of decades that one half hour was the correct length for a call. We knew to the moment when that period was up. As the time expired, my family rose as one. Surprised, Laine put down her cup and saucer and got to her feet.

Nell extended her hand and advanced upon her. “Thank you so much for allowing us to visit you, Dr. Derrida. I hope you didn’t mind having us descend on you in a mob, but we were all so curious!”

“Not at all,” Laine said, beaming, shaking her hand with enthusiasm. “Come back any time.”

“I will!”

“Will you join us this evening?” Xan asked, measuring her with his eye. I marked that look, and resolved to pull him aside for a private warning. “For dinner and entertainment? We would
all
love to have you there.”

Laine wrinkled her nose, an adorable expression that drew admiration from several of my cousins.

“I’d love to,” she said, “if Ambassador Melarides can keep the Kail busy. It’s hard for me to get away if they’re here.”

“Until tonight, then,” Xan said, bowing over her hand. He fixed her with a warm look of his deep blue eyes. “It’s been … delightful.”

We withdrew, leaving peace and quiet behind us.

I waited as long as I could, the distance along the echoing metal corridor from her door to the lifts.

“What did you think?” I asked at last.

Nell could hardly collect her feelings into simple words, and instead resorted to polysyllabic utterances.

“It’s fascinating. Amazing. Monumental!”

“Yes!” I agreed, signaling for the lift. Jil fixed me with a summing, humorous look.

“But you’re not asking about the Zang, are you?”

“I suppose not,” I admitted. How well she knew me! Jil shook her head.

“She’s darling, Thomas, but …”

I held up a hand to forestall her. “But? I know she’s a commoner. We have no future together but for this moment.”

“It’s not that, Thomas. Her voice! It could shatter
glass
.”

I shrugged. “A minor distraction from an otherwise marvelous woman. The path of true love never did run smooth, as one of our ancient prophets so accurately said.”

“I’d say it’s more than a bump in the road,” Xan said, clapping me on the shoulder hard enough to knock me through the floor. “I’d keep her around only on the grounds that she never open her mouth.”

“Then you would lose out on her discourse,” I argued. We stepped into the shaft. The lift did not need to be told where we were going. It knew us well by then. “She has had a fascinating life, and she is a most intelligent, charming woman, warm and exciting.”

Xan shot me a look of pity. “It’s your ears that will suffer, cousin. Not mine. I would never keep someone around who wasn’t perfect in every facet.”

Somehow, everybody in the lift was overcome by a fit of coughing. The cadre of Xan’s unsuitable loves, from the day puberty struck him until the present moment, could fill a very large gallery.

“All right!” he said, recognizing that he had the lower hand, no matter what cards I showed. “But if you plan to keep her around, do suggest she listen to the sound of her own voice for a while. Perhaps she’ll moderate the shrieking when she knows how it strikes others.”

“That is possibly true,” I said. “She is alone so much, and Proton does not appear to have ears or a voice of its own.”

“Has the Zang spoken to you?” Jil asked, enviously.

“Not speak, in so many words. I felt as though I was overhearing its thoughts, only once so far.”

“What did it say, er, think?” Xan asked.

“It complimented Dr. Derrida,” I said.

“Really?” Xan asked, in disbelief. “Perhaps it can’t hear her voice.”

“Or it sounds different to a Zang,” I said. I strode into the day room and threw myself full length upon the nearest divan, propping my feet upon the rolled arm. “To me, Laine is divine in every way. The fact that the Zang can see her excellent qualities is a tribute to the Old Ones, not the other way around.”

“Amazing,” Nalney said, his eyes dreamy as he previewed the tri-dee images on his viewpad’s horizontal screen. The small figure of the Zang still retained its inscrutable aura of eternity. “I wish Nole was here to see. He would never have thought the day would come when we were rubbing elbows with a Zang and a host of Kail. He would laugh.”

I chuckled. “Indeed he would.”

Nole lounged in the pilot’s couch on his private shuttle. He was baffled by the lack of comm signals coming from Counterweight traffic control. It had been smashing fun following his cousins and brother around the planet, watching them sightsee and shop, without an inkling that he was anywhere about. Once they had cleared an area, he had done his own looking about and made his own purchases. He could always catch up with them at the next tourist site. The LAI car that he had hired was a genius at discreet pursuit. She wouldn’t admit it, but Nole suspected that she had worked as a private investigator.

It hadn’t been quite as lonely on his own to visit Counterweight, since family had been just an arm’s length away, but he was ready to spring the surprise and have done with all the sneaking about. To do that, he needed to fly his new ship, the
Spectre
, to the platform and shout, “Surprise!” at his cousins. To do
that
, he had to get back to the ship and steer it toward the next jump point just far enough ahead that the
Jaunter
and its attendant warships could detect its power signature but not see the structure.

A shame he had never visited Counterweight before. Lovely place. Though just as warm, its climate was a bit wetter than Keinolt, rendering his dark hair rather frizzy. He smoothed it in the nav screen’s surface, pulling a few tufts down near his ears. Was it time to ask his valetbot for a trim?

He admired his reflection yet further, turning his blue silk collar up for best effect. Amazing how much of a knack Cousin Thomas had for locating the very best in fashion design! That tailor of his, Hugh, was brilliant. Nole had employed seamstressbots before, but Hugh was something above and beyond any of them. He had the knack for identifying precisely the ideal cut, the perfect length, the naturally becoming fit that made a garment less an item of assembled fabrics and more a showcase for the body it encased. The metallic blue silk-and-linen tunic Nole had on was as crisp as the first frost, with a warm sheen that invited the eye to linger and fondle the texture. It flattered his broad shoulders, and lent an interesting and mysterious tone to his dark brown skin. Four or five times that day, while tailing Cousin Lionelle back to the shuttle field, he had been tempted to let himself be seen, so she would praise his couture. Her own style was as impeccable as Thomas’s or her mother’s, whom Nole had always admired. For a woman who had to wear a uniform sixty percent of the time, Aunt Tariana knew good clothes. He shot a glance over his shoulder at the parcels of fabric that he had purchased in the same market as Cousin Leonat had hers. Perhaps he would share some of his bounty with his favorite aunt. Still, all that was
ages
in the future.

He glanced out over the controls at the airfield. About sixteen small ships still awaited permission to lift. Night had fallen, revealing the sparse spray of constellations that this sector possessed. That was one thing in which Keinolt excelled. The skies around the Core Worlds were brilliant with stars.

“Attention, please, the tower?” Nole said, thumbing the communications control for the ninth or tenth time. “This is Lord Nole Kinago in
Spectre One
. I have dinner waiting for me on my ship. I’d like to leave, if someone would give me the go-ahead?”