"Oh, shut up, you pompous fool," Magda snapped.
Olmstead glanced at her with what looked like scorn poorly masked by kindliness. "Even after exposing one of them, are you still blind to the fact that the Service makes such heinous blunders?"
"No, and I'm not blind to the fact that that's really Sabium up there either, the way you seem to be. Which gives the locals some excuse for being a little less restrained than usual, wouldn't you say?"
Olmstead, for once, said nothing at all, though his mouth silently opened and closed several times. The rest of the group from the Hanno made up for him; as they exclaimed and pointed, they were suddenly noisier than the natives around them.
Stavros had been paying more attention to the crowd than to what was going on up on the platform. Nowhere in any of the data on Bilbeis IV had he seen mention of a ceremony where so many priests mingled with the laity. He had been wondering why they were there until Magda's words made him stand on tiptoe and stare toward the platform again. He had never heard of the goddess's coming out of the Holy City, either. The priests had to be guards, to make sure nothing went wrong.
Someone took him by the right elbow: a priest, he saw as he turned in surprise. "What are you doing?" he asked. He had a moment of pleasure and pride: he got his grammar straight, and his voice did not squeak.
"You will come with us, please," the priest replied. To emphasize her words, another priest, this one a man, seized Stavros's other arm. He tried to shake free and could not.
As he struggled, he saw that all the Terrans had been netted with similar efficiency. No one else had been disturbed. No wonder Sabium's clergy were out in such force, he thought as the priests hustled him along. Finding out why too late seemed worse than never learning at all.
Magda, he saw, was going along quietly and without resistance. He remembered she had been taken by the clergy before. He managed to steer his way close to her and muttered his aphorism.
"Finding out too late, eh?" she echoed with a sardonic grin. "If you could come up with a better epigram for this whole bloody planet, I don't know what it'd be."
XI
Paulina Koch punched execute. She would not have minded implementing the command on the investigators who still peered at the Service like so many scavengers making sure the carcass they were going to eat was really dead. Hitting a computer button seemed a poor second best.
If this program runs, though, she thought, it may combine the literal and symbolic. She had thought that before, more than once, and been disappointed each time. Roupen Hovannis was even better than she had figured at covering his tracks.
The Chairman waited. Every time she had tried it before, her only reward had been a blank screen. Seconds stretched, but whether in the computer's circuits or only in her own mind she did not know. No matter how she armored herself against them, she was not immune to anticipation or hope.
Surely now, she told herself, things were taking longer to develop than they had before. . . . The screen lit. Paulina Koch nodded once in satisfaction. Hovannis had been clever, but not clever enough. Now that she had access to one of his files, the rest would yield more easily.
Then she began to examine what the External Affairs Director had stowed away for stormy times. Her pleasure gave way to cold anger. A copy of the Jêng Ho's report on Bilbeis IV, complete with the original, suppressed FSY date—Hovannis hadn't wasted any time taking his own precautions, had he? Recordings of several conversations between the two of them. She listened to a few moments of each of them and frowned. Taken all together, they were even more damning than she remembered. Others were not in this file and had to be stored elsewhere.
She began the process of scrubbing the file—carefully, carefully, so that no trace it had ever existed was left behind. At last she knew she had done a proper job. And even while she was deleting that first dangerous chunk of information, her program, like a killer fish scenting blood in the water, had latched on to another. That one, she saw when she could look up from what she was doing, lurked in a completely different index. Clever, Roupen, she thought, but not clever enough.
She wondered how Hovannis was doing in the field. Now that his little data collection was being neutralized, an unfortunate accident might be much the tidiest thing that could happen to him. Had she been certain of breaking his codes, she would have arranged for one.
She still had hope. Hovannis was ruthless and able but, like herself, had risen though the Survey Service central bureaucracy. He had never been out on his own on a primitive planet. Any small mistake, Paulina Koch thought, could easily be his last.
* * *
"We apologize for the indignity to your persons," one of the priests told the people from the Hanno. She had said it at least a dozen times. She even sounded sincere.
"Give us back our clothes and gear, then," Pierre Bochy shouted. Other Terran voices echoed him. Once inside the temple, the priests had stripped the study team and confiscated everything they were carrying. A few people fought back and got lumps for their troubles. As Magda had already found out, the priesthood of the eternal goddess knew some decidedly unprimitive combat tricks.
A couple of male priests came in with armloads of robes. "Here, you may don these for the time being," the woman said as they began to pass them out. "They are finer than the ones you were wearing. As I have said already, your own garments and goods will be returned to you, along with a goodly reward to salve your tempers."
"Believe her; she's telling the truth." Magda had repeated that almost as often as the priestess had made her apology, and with almost as little effect. Whatever Sabium's priesthood was, Magda felt confident it was not vicious. As with so much on Bilbeis IV, that reflected the character of the goddess.
Stavros, at least, had followed Magda's lead and offered no resistance. He glanced down at himself as he belted the new robe, which was indeed of better quality than the one that had been taken from him. "I'm just glad we were thorough with the dye job."
She chuckled. "Yes, that would have been embarrassing, wouldn't it? I wonder what they'd have thought if they'd found us two different colors apiece, and that the hair hither didn't match the hair yon."
The priests had not gone so far as stripping off the Terrans' rings and bracelets, perhaps to help reassure their uninvited guests and perhaps, Magda thought, simply because it never occurred to them that such trinkets could be anything but what they appeared. The people of Bilbeis IV had gotten sophisticated quickly, but they were not to the point of looking for recorders and video cameras disguised as jewelry. Several men and women from the Hanno moved their arms and turned this way and that to capture their surroundings on tape.
A plump functionary stood in the doorway and clapped his hands for attention. Magda grew alert. This fellow had been at Sabium's court before; if he was here now, Sabium could not be far behind. A moment later, his words confirmed her thought: "Bow, all of you, bow before the eternal goddess!" Despite his best efforts, his voice was shaky.
"I'm glad he's nervous, too," Stavros muttered as he bent from the waist.
When he straightened, Sabium had taken her chamberlain's place. She was silently studying the group from the Hanno. Stavros had to work to keep from dropping his eyes when her gaze fell on him—and he was prepared for the moment, which Magda had not been when the Jêng Ho arrived. Tapes offered only the faintest suggestion of the calm majesty Sabium projected. She was, he thought, used to being worshiped, and used to deserving worship, too.
Once she released him by looking away, he found he was not the only Terran to have fallen under her influence. Nearly everyone seemed as awestruck as he was himself. The effect, he saw with ironic pleasure, was particularly strong among the Survey Service personnel, who had perhaps thought themselves immune. Pierre Bochy, for one, looked almost ready to go down on his knees.
"Serves the obfuscating bastard right," Magda answered when he whispered that to her.
She felt uneasy herself; Sabium's glance kep
t returning to her. "We have met before," Sabium said. It was not a question.
So much for disguise, Magda thought. "Yes, goddess."
"Is this your true seeming, or do you wear it merely to appear less noticeable among my people?"
"The latter, not that it seems to have worked any too well."
Magda's candor made Sabium smile, but the expression slowly faded as the goddess continued to look around the chamber. She turned back to Magda. "I fail to see your former companion, even in the guise you choose to wear now. Irfan was what he called himself, was it not?"
"Yes, goddess, that was his name." Magda felt sadness wash over her, sadness and rage at what had happened to Irfan Kawar. "I fear you will not see him again, goddess. He is dead."
The word hung in the air. Sabium recoiled, almost as if against physical attack. "Dead?" she whispered, sounding for once not the least bit queenly. "How can that be?"
Her priests glowered at Magda; seeing their goddess upset rocked their world. She suspected she understood better than they what the trouble was. Sabium must have assumed all her long, long life that people from the Federacy were at the very least messengers from the old gods she alone remembered. Learning they were mortal after all had to come as a shock. Next thing you knew, Magda thought, she might even wonder if they were fallible.
On the record, people from the Federacy looked quite a bit more fallible than Sabium had been for centuries. Fortunately, the goddess would still be a while realizing that.
Watching Sabium adjust to an idea that looked to change a millennium and a half of assumptions only made Magda admire her more. Had she been that old, she suspected she would have rejected out of hand anything that did not fit her view of how the world worked. The goddess showed no signs of that. Maybe, Magda thought, the continuing changes that sprang from her incentive-for-inventions scheme had helped keep her mind flexible. And maybe, too, she was simply an extraordinary individual, and not just for her length of years, either.
On second thought, that last was too obvious to need a "maybe" in front of it.
Sabium turned to her priests. "I will speak more with these strangers later. Feed and house them as you would yourselves, but do not let them leave." She looked at the group from the Hanno again and rubbed her chin. "Take their ornaments from them, and sequester those with their other belongings. Who but they can say where their power resides?" She left the chamber.
Magda swore under her breath as the priests confiscated her bracelets, which held a video link, and her earrings, which were just jewelry. The little transceiver implanted behind her ear still gave her an audio link with the Hanno, but a lot of data was going to go down the drain.
Stavros's trinkets, like everyone else's, were also a mixture of the technological and the innocuous. After he surrendered them, he said to Magda, "She doesn't miss much, does she?"
"Wouldn't do to count on it," Magda agreed soberly. She'd thought the jar of wine she and Irfan had planted between the guards they'd stunned when escaping from the Holy City would explain why those guards had fallen asleep at their post. Evidently not.
Pierre Bochy pushed his way through the crowd to Magda. His broad face was troubled. "I am beginning to think I may owe you an apology. If that is truly the Sabium from the days of the Leeuwenhoek—"
"If!" Magda's momentary pleasure vanished. She bristled. "What do you want, letters of fire across the sky?"
"Please." Bochy spread his hands placatingly. "Whoever she is, she is a most remarkable woman." With that, not even Magda could argue.
"It is Sabium, the one you mean." That was Nina Pertusi, the linguist from the Noninterference Foundation contingent. She sounded very sure of herself, and explained why a moment later: "I have—I mean, I had—a voiceprint comparator in my jewelry. There's a perfect match between this woman's voice and the old recordings of Sabium."
"Is there?" Bochy said.
Magda and Stavros could not resist a simultaneous triumphant, "You see?"
Servants soon fetched in food and drink. The meats and bread were strangely spiced but plainly well prepared and were served on silver. The beer was flat and the wine too sweet, but the locals liked them that way. Magda had tasted worse on some Federacy planets. She ate and drank her fill and used one of the chamber pots set against a wall without thinking twice about it.
Nina Pertusi approached her again. Magda was sure the linguist would have been scarlet without her makeup. "How can you do that so casually? I am almost ready to burst."
"Haven't you—" Magda began, and then reflected that maybe Nina hadn't. Linguists could get a lot done from tapes without going into the field. Magda patted her on the shoulder and said as kindly as she could, "Honey, when it's really a choice between bursting and going, you'll go, no matter who's around. The first time will be dreadful, the second one'll be mortifying, the third embarrassing, but after a while you won't think about it at all."
Nina made a small, wordless skeptical noise.
"It's true," Magda insisted. "Just remember, everyone else will be doing the same thing. That helps a lot. What they say about planets without soap is true—where everybody stinks, nobody stinks."
"I very much hope you are right," Nina said, "but I fear it will not come easily for me."
"Don't worry about it," Magda told her again. The whole Bilbeis IV affair, though, had taught the anthropologist not to say everything she thought. By the look of things, Nina Pertusi was liable to have plenty of time in Mawsil to learn to lose her inhibitions.
* * *
As a professional, Hovannis admired the efficiency with which the locals had scooped the party from the Hanno into captivity. He would have admired it even more if they had proceeded to send the survey team on to the next world with appropriately bloody rites. That would have made his job a lot simpler once the Hanno got back to civilization. From the reports he had reviewed, though, he gathered this Sabium creature didn't operate that way. Too bad.
Still, he felt like cheering when the goddess's minions confiscated everyone's data-gathering instruments. These scientists, he thought, wouldn't admit the sun had come up until they checked a recording of it. The less information they brought home, the better the Survey Service would end up looking.
But the more he monitored the tapes still coming in from the survey team's transceivers, the less happy he got. Nina Pertusi's confirmation that Sabium was Sabium did not bother him. She was, after all, from the Foundation. What really did matter there was sticking to the story that Survey Service Central had never found out about what was going on on Bilbeis IV until just before the Hanno took off.
That was why Hovannis scowled when he heard Pierre Bochy sucking up to that Kodaly bitch. If things hadn't gone wrong with her too many times, the Service—and Hovannis—wouldn't have been in this mess. Didn't Bochy and the rest remember which side of their bread had the butter? Probably not, he thought, even if Paulina Koch had picked them for that.
He slapped his desk drawer. The stunner in there looked—and scanned—as nonlethal as any of the others allowed on the Hanno. That only proved Hovannis knew more tricks than the people who made scanners. The stunner's range was hardly more than arm's length now, but it would do the job.
No matter what the Survey Service scientists thought, he was not going to let this mission get out of control.
* * *
The investigator gave Paulina Koch a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look that he must, she thought, have practiced in front of a mirror. He said, "I truly resent the necessity of having had to obtain a court order to gain access to these codes."
You've made me work for a living, which is strange and unpleasant, the Chairman translated mentally. Out loud, she answered in the same formal language he had used: this was on the record. "The Survey Service has maintained the principle of privileged information since its inception. Despite the ruling of the court, I still maintain it and strongly protest this seizure."
"But you will comply?"
&nb
sp; "Reluctantly, I will." She handed him the data card with the listings he needed.
"Thank you, Madam Chairman. Though my unit should have had these ten days ago, I am certain they will still prove invaluable to our inquiry."
She politely inclined her head. The investigator left, clutching his prize. Paulina Koch had not been lying when she defended the idea of confidentiality, but she had known the Service's court fight was foredoomed. As the investigator said, all it had done was waste time. The Service lawyers had told her the same thing, but they went out and fought for her anyway. That was what lawyers were for.
No matter how many codes he had, though, he could not find data no longer in the system. Now Paulina Koch was certain she had scrubbed away all of Hovannis's poison. Ten days ago, she had not been.
She did not show any outward signs of relief. Even if such had been her style, things were still too tight for that.
* * *
If these truly are divine messengers, Sabium thought, they are doing an excellent job of concealing it. They ate, they drank—they drank quite a lot—they produced full chamber pots as foul as anyone else's. Among themselves they spoke a language no one knew, but from the sound of things they mostly used it to quarrel. The priests had already broken up three or four fights before they got well under way. Divinities, by Sabium's lights, ought to act better than that. She certainly tried to herself.
Were it not for the curious objects the priests had confiscated from the strangers, she would have judged them mere men, foreigners from some distant land masquerading as subjects of hers. But those enigmatic objects were like nothing known in her dominions. Whatever they were made of, it was neither wood nor metal nor pottery nor bone. Some could be felt to quiver, almost as if alive, when held in the hand.
None of which would have made them any more than strange, but when an incautious priest pushed a button she should not have, the two people beside her and two more in the next room were suddenly rendered unconscious. Every one of the strangers carried a device like the one that produced that remarkable effect. None of Sabium's scholars and savants had any idea how it worked or how to make anything like it.
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