The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  After a few minutes, Adele seated herself cross-legged and got out her handheld unit. There were enough people to keep an eye on the natives—who appeared to be happy drunks after all, so long as spacers continued to pour refills—while Daniel and Tovera between them would prevent anybody from accidentally stepping on the librarian sitting in the dirt. When Daniel pointed out the feathered creatures flitting about the stump from which Hogg shot the limb, Adele could plunge straight into the database to see what was known about them.

  Apparently nothing was known. Commander Bergen's was the only formal account of Morzanga in the Cinnabar archives, and Uncle Stacey hadn't shared his nephew's interest in natural history. Perhaps a paper: Notes on Aviform Species of Morzanga, by Daniel Leary, Lieutenant RCN. . . .

  "Friends!" called the son of the dead man who now stood, a trifle wobbly, beside the corpse; he held a flint knife. He must've gotten to his feet while Adele was lost in her unsuccessful data search.

  The whole assembly rose; those who were able to, at any rate. Daniel kept his eyes on what was happening around him, but he held his left arm out as a bar on which Adele could lift herself. She gripped it and pulled herself upright with one hand as she put away the data unit with the other.

  "My father bids you greet him so that he can give you his final gifts!" the son said. "Praise him as you go about your business in this world, so that he may have honor in the afterlife!"

  The Captain walked forward, tugging the uncertain Klimovna along with him. The son raised a string of money and snipped it with his knife. He tossed the section to the Captain, cut another and gave it to Valentina, and—as the Captain pulled Valentina out of the way—gave a third piece to the new Lieutenant.

  The whole village began filing past the corpse, getting gifts of money. The length of the string didn't seem to matter; the sections ranged from a foot or so long to about a yard. The son flicked a loop up with one hand and clipped it with the other, thus stretching a greater or lesser amount depending where the other end lay in the pile.

  The Klimovna showed her string to the rest of them. Daniel and the Count learned forward; after a moment, and with a vague sense of irritation, Adele bent closer also. Deep in her soul she believed that information was something you looked up instead of collecting yourself, but the Sailing Directions' cursory description of Morzanga didn't cover seed money any more than it did feathered creatures.

  The seeds were symmetrical ovals, flat, and of a pale ivory color. The string was some sort of vegetable fiber, knotted on either side of each seed. The money seemed to smell faintly of camphor, but the odor might've come from the paint covering the dead man's body.

  A good half the village had filed past to get their gift. The son jerked a fresh string loose. Now that so much had been dispensed, Adele could see that the money was heaped around a glittering ball resting in the lap of the corpse. She nudged Daniel and pointed; he adjusted his visor magnification with a quick ease that she could never manage. The Klimovna turned to see what they were looking at.

  Husband and wife reacted simultaneously—she by screaming, him with a choked cry, "The Earth Diamond!"

  Valentina lunged for the gleaming object, the string of money dangling forgotten from her right hand. Daniel grabbed her from behind by the collar and jerked her back, so quickly and hard that her feet both kicked off the ground for an instant.

  "What?" said the Count, an outraged expression forming. He started toward Daniel; Hogg body-checked him dead in his tracks.

  "Valentina," Daniel said, releasing the woman but keeping himself between her and the adorned corpse. "Please. We'll get it, I promise you; but not in a fashion that we're all butchered on a pile of wog corpses, please."

  The Klimovna shook herself. Her icy fury melted with the suddenness of snow slumping off a roof. "Yes, Captain," she said. "You will fetch us the diamond when you can; but if you please, don't be too long about it."

  The Captain stood sipping his liquor in the midst of the party from the Princess Cecile, ignoring—apparently unaware—of the by-play among them. Daniel turned to him and, gesturing a rigger named Nussbaum closer with his just-refilled bucket of slash, said, "Captain, is that jewel on the old Lieutenant's lap going to be given away also? And say, why don't you have another glass of slash?"

  The Captain gulped down the last of what was in his mug, then doubled up coughing. Daniel worked the mug out of his grip and gave it to Nussbaum to dip full. The native straightened and drank again, but with proper care.

  The dead man's son whipped more money from the pile; Adele took her left hand out of her pocket and relaxed. Whatever the object was, it wasn't a diamond.

  Now that she could see almost the whole thing, an engraved sphere a foot in diameter, she wasn't even sure it was mineral. It had the opalescence of a soap bubble rather than a diamond's sharp refractions. Besides, the Earth Diamond was supposed to be flawless. Granted that historians might gild reality, even a politician would've choked before claiming purity for an object so translucently milky.

  "Ah, the Sky Ball," the Captain said. He leaned down and wriggled his free hand under the sphere to lift it from the strings of money. The other natives continued with their business, unconcerned by what was happening. "It stays in Captain's House, except when officer dies."

  He handed it to Daniel. Before Daniel could pass it to the Klimovna, she snatched it greedily away from him.

  "It's light!" she said. "But—Georgi, look at this! It's not a diamond, but it's carved with the continents of Earth as they were before the Hiatus. Is it not?"

  "Daniel, hold this for me," Adele said curtly as she handed him her data unit. She couldn't hold it and operate it at the same time, so in lieu of a table in this present need her friend's hands would have to do. Her wands flickered, retrieving the image of the Earth Diamond, the real one, where she'd cached it. She projected it as an omnidirectional hologram in the air beside the clumsy fake that the Klimovna held.

  "Waugh!" said the Captain, jerking backward. His feet didn't move as they might have done ten ounces of slash ago; he'd have fallen if Hogg hadn't caught him around the shoulders with the reflex of long experience in dealing with drunks.

  "In addition to the obvious differences in outline . . . ," Adele said. The "continents" on the Sky Ball could've been outlined by a child drawing in mud with his fingers. "You'll note that the Earth Diamond is etched on the interior of the sphere by an artist working through a pinhole at the North Pole."

  She expanded the northernmost ten degrees of the image, then rotated it to bring the concave interior into view. The Captain stared at the transformations with the complete amazement of a man seeing a pig walk down the street on its hind legs.

  "Whereas this object, the Sky Ball . . . ," Adele continued. She needed to record imagery of the object, she realized as she spoke. "Is carved on the outer surface in the normal fashion."

  "It appears to be of vegetable origin," Daniel said, frowning. He straightened, looking across the faces turned to his. "Though the important fact is that whatever its origin—and I assume it's local—it could only have been made by somebody who'd seen the Earth Diamond. John Tsetzes or at least the loot he escaped from Novy Sverdlovsk with has been here on Morzanga."

  "Can we buy it?" the Count said, looking troubled.

  "It's trash!" Valentina said angrily. "Why would we want to make fools of ourselves?"

  She shoved the ball back at the Captain. Startled and unprepared, he'd have let it hit the ground had not Daniel snatched it as it fell.

  Valentina's fierce eyes locked on the Captain's. "Where did this come from?" she demanded. "Do you have the original it was carved from?"

  "It's from seaweed that floats up on the beach of the big water three days journey toward sunset," the native said. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with the back of the hand that didn't hold the mug of liquor. "This is very big bubble, though. Nobody ever has seen so big a one again."

  Daniel nodded approvingly. "Yes,
of course," he said. "A flotation bladder from a deep sea plant. Storms would occasionally break pieces loose to where the currents could carry them to shore."

  "I don't care where the plant came from!" Valentina snapped. She jabbed the Captain with the tips of her index and middle fingers. "It's the design that matters. Where did you get the design, you?"

  He looked even more puzzled. "We've always had the Sky Ball," he said. "My father's father had it."

  The second part of the statement was probably true, Adele realized, since he'd said his mother's father's father had been from the crew of the ship destroyed by gunfire. Daniel's suggestion, that John Tsetzes had destroyed the other vessel when it first appeared, looked increasingly probable.

  The alert from the Princess Cecile winked simultaneously in her helmet and Daniel's. They straightened together.

  "What ship? What ship? What ship?" queried a vessel in orbit above Morzanga. Its transponder declared it was the Belle Ideal of Condon's Planet, one of the independent worlds loosely allied with Cinnabar; Adele recognized the signal as coming from the Goldenfels even before the analysis program—which was part of Mistress Sand's equipment—confirmed her assumption. No two radio transmitters are perfectly identical, any more than any two human voices are.

  Because Adele had set her handheld unit to echo emergency signals automatically, she didn't have to bring up the commo display. Her wands twitched, locking the bridge and Battle Center transmitters so that the duty officer—Chewning—couldn't respond. The wrong response—the truth—would be suicide.

  Her eyes met Daniel's. The rest of the group from the Princess Cecile continued to talk among themselves, scarcely aware that the two officers were only physically present at the moment. "Daniel, it's the Goldenfels," she said. "Will you trust me to handle this my way?"

  "Yes," he said. The data unit was rock steady in his hands, though he couldn't see its display or guess what she had in mind. "Woetjans, move other people away from us, please. There's a problem and Mistress Mundy mustn't be bothered while she's dealing with it."

  "Goldenfels, this is Adele Mundy of Bryce," Adele said. There was a bustle among those nearby, but her world had shrunk down to her screen and her mind as she used the only weapon that could possibly save them: information. "I'm secretary to a pair of rich boobs from Novy Sverdlovsk. Listen, they've found the Earth Diamond! I repeat, they've found the Earth Diamond! If you'll help me, we can save it for Guarantor Porra instead of having it go decorate some hog farm in the back of the beyond! Over."

  She was taking a series of risks, the first and greatest being that she'd replied using the Goldenfels' real name instead of the false identity coming from the ship's transponder. Adele's offer was only believable if it was made by an Alliance citizen to an Alliance ship. With luck they'd overlook the question of how she'd recognized them or at least give her a chance to explain.

  The fact the Goldenfels had tracked the Princess Cecile from Todos Santos and was giving a false name indicated that Captain Bertram hadn't come to talk. Because of their relative locations, the Sissie was a sitting duck.

  High Drive motors didn't do a perfect job of combining antimatter and normal matter to create thrust; unconverted antimatter in the exhaust reacted violently with any normal matter outside the nozzle. A ship in vacuum could fire missiles to the surface with reasonable accuracy, but missiles fired from the bottom of an atmosphere would destroy themselves before they climbed to a target in orbit.

  "What ship? What ship?" continued for two beats before the transponder shut off. After a brief pause, a male voice said, "Unknown caller, identify yourself. Over."

  "This is Alliance citizen Adele Mundy aboard the yacht Princess Cecile!" Adele said. She'd lived on Bryce long enough, working in the Academic Collections, that she could easily counterfeit an upper-class accent. "I'm alone in the control room because the officers are all getting drunk with the local savages, but somebody may come in at any moment. Listen, the Klimovs have bought the Earth Diamond from the savages! Look it up, I don't have time to explain, but it's valuable beyond belief! Land your ship nearby, pretend to be friendly, and I'll see to it that we get the diamond without any fighting. The Guarantor will reward us all. Do you understand, over?"

  There was another pause. The Goldenfels' signals compartment was separate from the bridge. The hatch had remained closed while the inspectors boarded above Todos Santos, so Adele had only her imagination and the speaker's tone from which to picture her opposite number: a little angry, a little worried; frowning because now he must relay uncertainty to a superior officer who expects merely assurance that they have the correct target for their missiles.

  "Citizen Mundy, hold one," the voice said. "Do not break contact or it'll be the worse for you! Over."

  There was a longer pause. Adele took a deep breath and became aware that she was the center of attention. Concerned spacers had enforced a ten-foot circle about her by shoving people back with their weapons; they glanced at her. The nervously angry Klimovs glared at her from the other side of the spacers. Puzzled natives watched her and the Sissies do unintelligible things. And Daniel Leary, holding the data unit more steadily than any terrified slave could've managed, smiled engagingly through the hologram at her.

  "I think they're trying to learn what the Earth Diamond is," Adele said. Her first syllables were croaks, because her throat was very dry. "It'll take them longer than it did me, but a vessel like that—"

  A spy ship.

  "—will have a data bank with enough of a description to make them believe me. Then—"

  "Citizen Mundy," a different voice said through Adele's commo helmet. "We will be setting down after the next orbit. We'll invite the owners and officers of your ship aboard ours for a banquet. See to it that you come with them. Goldenfels out."

  Adele cleared her throat. She smiled at Daniel, knowing that her expression was wan compared to his.

  "Then," she concluded, "we'll figure something else out."

  "I think I already have," said Daniel, who'd smiled even more broadly when he heard the final orders from the Goldenfels.

  CHAPTER 19

  There was seating for twenty at the Goldenfels' banquet table. The compartment was austere—it was ordinarily the petty officers' mess, the lieutenant to Adele's left had informed her—but the attendants were uniformed and she didn't recall ever seeing a better wine list, even in the old days when her parents were entertaining the rich and powerful of Cinnabar.

  "How did you come to your present position, Mistress?" the lieutenant asked politely. His fingers played with his wine glass but his eyes were on her with the intensity of a bird of prey. His name was Greiner, the Goldenfels' Signals Officer. His was the voice she'd talked to four hours earlier.

  Adele snorted. "Necessity," she said. "My father was in shipping and lost everything to Cinnabar privateers. What do you think? Did you suppose I like working for unlettered boobs from Novy Sverdlovsk? Though the woman isn't so bad, for a farmer."

  She glanced past Greiner toward the head of the table, pretending to be concerned that she might be overheard but too resentful to keep a close bridle on her tongue after the second glass of wine. Adele was playing a part, but it was an easy one: any one of a score of the pupils she'd studied with at the Academic Collections would do for a model. Given the way the recent war had gone—the reference to Cinnabar privateers was perfectly believable—she suspected that several of them were trading on their education to stave off poverty instead of living as cultured dilettantes as they'd expected.

  The same thing had happened to Adele, of course; but a little earlier, and the result of the Three Circles Conspiracy rather than war. The worst trouble she'd had in being the librarian to the Elector of Kostroma wasn't the pay or even the conditions; it was quite simply that nobody really cared about the things an educated person knew and did. Her presence had been only a bauble for the Elector to dangle in front of other vulgarians.

  Oh, yes; Adele Mundy understo
od the feelings of a resentful savant working for wealthy Philistines. . . .

  "And yet it appears most of your yacht's crew come from Cinnabar," Greiner said. "Don't you find that very difficult, given your background?"

  "If it were my yacht," Adele said with a trace of asperity that wasn't feigned, "then you'd have a right to be puzzled. As it is, I find the situation less difficult than starvation—which was the only choice on offer."

  She looked around morosely. The Goldenfels' purser sat to her right and Vesey to the purser's right at the far end of the table. Betts was directly across from Adele, but even if he'd tried he couldn't have heard what she was saying. In addition to the general noise of dinner, the music of a live pipe band was being transmitted through the ventilating ducts.

  The Klimovs sat beside Captain Bertram and his first officer at the head of the table. They were talking loudly and with animation; from snatches Adele heard, John Tsetzes was the primary subject. Daniel was across the table between the Goldenfels' Second Lieutenant and her Engineering Officer.

  "And yes," Adele continued. "They're not only from Cinnabar, most of them, they were the ship's crew while she was in the Cinnabar navy—"

  She carefully avoided saying "RCN," because the acronym was RCN jargon. She'd known as a scholar, long before she became a spy, that sometimes the form of a statement was as important as its content.

  "—until a few months ago. The Klimovs bought the ship and hired the crew at the same time."

  "Remarkable," Greiner said, though he must have been aware of that ever since the two vessels had rubbed against one another on Todos Santos.

  "That's why I didn't suggest you capture the officers tonight and rush the ship," Adele said, taking a spoonful of the excellent pork fricassee a steward had just served in response to her nod. "I heard them discussing it before they accepted the invitation. The watch officer, he's a clod named Chewning, will vent the fusion bottle into the hull if that happens. That'll destroy the Earth Diamond, and I shouldn't wonder if it'd damage your ship as well since it's so close."