by Doris Egan
It was the first I'd heard about words on the inside of the band. They sounded like a motto. A rather contradictory, motto, in fact.
Ran was handed back the handkerchief, and we thanked the steward and left the Poraths'. My allergy-pummeled body was glad to leave, but my mind had more ambiguous feelings. Having told Lord Jusik Porath that we were innocent of any involvement in the death of his son, we'd just wound up our first foray into the investigation by pocketing the main piece of evidence and taking it away with us.
Perhaps it wasn't wise, but at the time I really don't know what else we could have done.
I called ahead to the Tellysian Embassy for an appointment that afternoon. I was fairly curious, actually, perhaps more so than I was about Kade. People get murdered all the time on Ivory, but extraplanetary junior ambassadors had never gone out of their way to look me up before.
I was passed directly from a functionary to Van Gelder. "I'm so glad you called," she said. The visual circuit was open and I could see that she was in fact the woman from the party. A closer view showed her as older looking, but deserving of Stereth's "handsome," with strong, clean-cut features. She wore elegant modified Tellysian clothes, a silky one-piece suit whose pants were tailored a little on the full side, making them resemble an Ivoran robe. "I haven't had lunch yet. Have you? It's been a terrible day and I'm longing to get out of here for a bit. There's a terrace in the Imperial park where they serve some standard dishes; would you be my guest?"
It was a little like being hit by a small cyclone. "I hadn't planned on—"
"Oh, please come; if you're not hungry, you can order one of those sherbet things and a fizz."
Well, it was a good restaurant—I'd eaten there a couple of times with Kylla and Shez. And I was still curious. "All right, but I don't think I can stay very long. Couldn't you give me some idea of what you—"
"Damn! Another call. They haven't stopped all day. I'm really very sorry to be so scatterbrained over the Net. Shall we make it in forty minutes?"
I gave in. "Fine."
"Excellent, I'm looking forward to seeing you. Oh, if you need a lift after, don't worry about it—I have the use of a carriage and driver!" And she signed off.
Well. That hadn't told me a lot. And the Imperial Park was a half hour's walk from where I was, in the full midday heat. It was a good thing I'd brought along a straw hat.
Somehow I always end up carrying things. My hat, my extra handkerchiefs, my money, a deck of cards, a list of Net numbers for vehicle rentals that had been folded so many times it was approaching unreadable, any number of hairpins—I was going to have to get this mop cut pretty soon—a copy of Kesey's Poems that I hadn't gotten very far in reading… Fortunately my robes have lots of pockets.
I was a little disappointed, actually; I'd been looking forward to seeing what the inside of the Tellysian embassy was like. The facade was pure, sculpted, classic Ivoran style, but the gods only knew what they'd done indoors. Athe-nans and Pryenese are minimalists; Ivorans tend to the baroque; I had no idea what Tellysians approved of. Except that their own government limited them technologically in what they could bring on-planet, they might have anything there. Solid gold drinking fountains. Grav lifts with Old Master paintings on the walls. Ask an Ivoran, and he'd tell you they could afford it, with what they squeezed out of other planets for their tech designs. But I wondered. How many things had Ivory, for example, actually bought from Tellys? Not very many that I knew about.
The Imperial Park is cool and green, as cool as you can get in the capital in the summertime, with trees, paths, fountains, statues, artificial wading streams, and a contingent of Imperial Security whose efficiency is matched only by their extraordinary politeness. A set of terraces leads down to the river, and on the final terrace, just above the water, you will find a fairly small restaurant surrounded by a flagstoned area with white tables and chairs. I highly recommend it. The chairs, considered a pointless luxury,
have seats more than half a meter off the ground— something an outworlder can appreciate—with intricate backs and arms. An overhang of crisscrossed wood provides a sun shield while creating a dappled effect. Just across the river you can see the striped dome of the First Wife's Palace through the trees.
And the food's not bad, either. I was hot and tired when I got there so I immediately ordered a cherry fizz and snow sherbet. Then I waved the brim of my hat at myself until I'd gotten back into a cheerful mood. Midway between lunch and dinner, the place was empty, so I tucked one foot under my knee on the chair in a most unladylike position and watched the white birds flying among the trees across the way, trying to remember details of a legend I'd heard about how the First Wife's Palace got built. The sherbet was delicious.
"Theodora of Pyrene?"
I squinted up toward a patch of sunlight and eased my foot surreptitiously down to the flagstones. "Yes." The woman from the Net call was there, her long blond braid falling past the shoulders of her sky-blue suit.
"Keleen Van Gelder, junior ambassador from Tellys." She extended a hand, the first hand I'd shaken in a long time. I took it. "This is my colleague, Jack Lykon," she continued. The man beside her was younger, perhaps in his early thirties, brown hair thinning on top and darker brown eyes with a friendly look to them. I shook his hand, too.
"It's a lovely place, isn't it?" she asked, pulling out a chair. Jack Lykon took the third.
"Yes, I've been here before. They've got some Pyrenese beer stocked, but it costs a fortune."
Lykon said, "They do?"—looking interested. "How much is it?"
Van Gelder turned to him with a slight smile, slanting her eyes. "Imagine paying someone to carry the mug to you personally from the south coast, Jack. That's about how much it costs."
He seemed disappointed.
Van Gelder said to me, "I see you've ordered sherbet. I may myself. Where's the waiter?"
I reached over and pushed the bell in the center of the table. The lone waiter, an old fellow who covered about an inch a minute, tottered out. Van Gelder, interestingly, ordered tah with her meal. Lykon settled for beer from the Northwest Sector.
"We're the only ones here," said Lykon, looking around uncomfortably. "I wouldn't have known the place was even open."
It occurred to me suddenly that I might have been uncomfortable once myself, sitting alone on a terrace being served by a thousand-year-old waiter. All those social doubts: Should I be here? Are passersby watching me? What do the restaurant people think? But I'd been hanging around Ran too long. Wherever you were is where you were supposed to be, by definition; Cormallons are never treated below-status, except by the confused; and waiters and cooks can think what they like, as long as they provide the excellent service you are paying them to give. End of story.
Or perhaps it was just that I was getting old.
Van Gelder shrugged. "If we're alone, so much the better."
Enough of comparative social philosophy, too. I said, "The Minister for Provincial Affairs made your invitation intriguing. May I ask how you know him?"
She grinned. "A good diplomat never claims greater acquaintance than a local figure may wish to allow. You'll have to tell me what Minister Tar'krim said about our relationship, before I can confirm or deny."
So, she could be inoffensively discreet, too. I said, "Is it asking too much to inquire about why you wanted to see me?"
"Not at all, Theodora.—I hope I don't offend in calling you Theodora. I know Pyrene custom only provides one name for its people, and I understand that you're Pyrenese."
I looked down at my empty sherbet bowl. "I was born on Pyrene, but at the moment I've actually got joint Athenan/Ivoran citizenship."
"That must make you virtually unique."
"I wouldn't know. I don't have any statistics on the matter."
She seemed to be flipping through an invisible folder. "Pyrene, Athena, Ivory. Out of the four habitable planets in this sector, Tellys is the only one you've never seen. Or have you?"
"Well, it's nothing personal. You know what interstellar travel costs, ambassador, it's not something many private citizens can afford. Other people picked up my tab—well, except for one trip, and I had a little help on that—and I had to go wherever the ticket was stamped. I was on a government scholarship to Athena, you know."
"I'd heard that. I also heard that you paid your own fare from here to Athena a couple of years ago. A remarkable achievement, at your age."
I blinked and said, "I had no idea I was such a topic of conversation in embassy hallways."
She cracked a smile. "Perhaps we don't get out enough," she acknowledged.
Our waiter began his snail-like progress from the pavilion of the restaurant proper. We were speaking Standard, but none of us made any attempt to continue the conversation until he'd deposited his load of three large plates, tah cup, and beer mug, and returned inside. You wouldn't think he could carry a sheet of paper successfully, but he negotiated the load with a flawless execution. This was a man with experience in his field.
"He must have been waiting tables while our ancestors were still working to go multicellular." I'd said it aloud. Lykon broke up. I looked at him, surprised.
"I was just thinking the same thing," he said. Then he went into another fit of chuckles.
Van Gelder raised a perfectly groomed eyebrow and said to me, "Jack gets set off by things sometimes." She took a sip of pink tah. "Anyway, he takes an interest in biological references. But we'll get to that."
Would we? This would be an unusual lunch.
Chapter 8
The junior ambassador from Tellys wiped grease from her fingers. She was talking about sorcery, a subject I have more than a passing interest in. "There've been two Standard papers on Ivoran 'sorcery'—only two, in the hundred years we've been in contact. Both by eccentrics, both paid little attention to by the Athenan University Committee. The latter one was slightly more exhaustive. Written by a kinsman of mine, a Tellysian, named Branusci."
I leaned forward, already interested. Following my first stay on Ivory I'd hunted the Athenan libraries obsessively for any work on Ivoran sorcery, and found a single paper. The second, if it existed, must have been indexed under some other subject.
"It was indexed under 'Stage Magic,' " she said, veering into telepathy. "Not an appropriate category, really, but that was the approach the article took. Branusci studied eight marketplace sorcerers—not perhaps the best pool, to begin with—and decided, in the end, that any of their effects could be duplicated in some 'rational' fashion. If there was no visible and outward evidence—as in a luckspell, where the results could so easily be ascribed to random chance—then what did it prove? If there was visible evidence—say, with a visual illusion—then a holographic projector could do as well. Or any number of other methods, to achieve other effects."
"There are no holographic projectors on Ivory."
"Branusci points out they might have been smuggled in."
"You don't sound impressed with your kinsman." She shrugged. "If a man can levitate an elephant, saying that you can do the same thing with strings and pulleys is hardly the point, is it?" She put down her tah cup. "The Athenans like to think of themselves as rationalists, but I suspect they're just afraid of looking silly."
I'd had the same thought myself more than once.
She went on, "Otherwise, why wouldn't they put the same rigorous, thorough study into it that they put into dissecting the dozen variants of a legend?"
"Interesting you should choose that metaphor. My field of study was cross-cultural myths and legends."
She smiled austerely. "What an amazing coincidence."
I laughed.
She leaned forward. "Let's hypothesize for a moment that 'Magic is real.' Or to put it another way, the more respectable sorcerers of Ivory are tapping into something we have not previously had experience with. They've learned rules for using this… whatever it is… that seem to work for them. Whether they want to call them spells or something more acceptable to standard culture is irrelevant to our purpose, for the moment."
It was nice to hear somebody talking about Ivoran magic in the language I'd grown up in. I don't mean Standard.
She wiped her lips with the green linen napkin our ancient waiter had provided. "Even given the extraordinary lack of interest on this planet in strictly academic matters, there must be theories about magic. Where it comes from, why it can be accessed by some people and not others…" She let her voice trail off.
I said, "I've heard the three most respectable theories and about twenty more oddball ones. But nobody really knows—knows in a good Athenan sense, I mean. Nobody has any evidence." This is the simple truth, and I saw no reason not to share it.
She nodded. "It doesn't surprise me. But one can hardly help zeroing in on some genetic relationship."
I was silent.
"This is speculation, of course. But I understand your present husband accompanied you to Athena a couple of years ago. He's a top-ranked sorcerer here in the capital, they tell me. One can't help wondering if he was able to continue using his abilities away from this planet. You would think that he would be able to, if sorcery is more linked with genetics then geography. But the whole subject is so out of the usual ken, I'd hesitate even to guess."
I was becoming uncomfortable. My Athenan past taught me to revere the free sharing of information, and on one level I would have been pleased if a serious inquiry into the messy category of magic had been taken up by the standard community. After all, they might make some breakthrough on the subject, bringing it into a neat line with the laws of the universe as I had once known them, and they might do it before my death. That bothered me, you know. That I'd gotten involved in a subculture based on a force that even the people who used it didn't understand; and that someday, people would figure it all out— too late to tell Theodora.
On the other hand, this was veering close to House secrets. Ran had indeed tried to use sorcery during his foray into culture shock on Athena, and I knew what the results were.
As a Cormallon, I did not feel at liberty to tell anyone.
I said, "Life is complicated, isn't it?"
"More so every year," she agreed. "When I was twelve, I understood the universe thoroughly."
"Me, too."
Jack Lykon spoke up suddenly. I'd nearly forgotten he was there. "Keleen," he said, "tell Theodora who I am."
She touched his hand. "Jack is a very talented genalycist."
"Is he?" I looked at him with new interest.
"He'd be just delighted, intellectually, if he could meet your husband."
"Yes, I'm beginning to understand that." I took a deep breath, knowing I ought to head them off before they made the mistake of offering a fee. "Look, it's nothing against you or Tellys. I know that someday people are going to have Ivoran sorcery down pat, quantified, boxed up in little boxes with ribbons. And good for them. They'll probably call it something other than sorcery when that day comes. But they're going to have to do it without my help." Damn, they looked so understanding. I hate it when people do that. "You seem to know a lot about sorcery, for an out-worlder. But I don't know how much you know about the Houses of Ivory. They're all paranoid, all selfish, and their loyalty is only to themselves."
Van Gelder quirked a smile. I said, "I know. I'm making them sound so attractive. They do have one great virtue,
though: They won't go out of their way to hurt you if you don't present an obstacle."
Van Gelder's smile had vanished. She said, "Not something that can be said of all human cultures."
I didn't pick up on it at the time, I was too busy going for my point. "What I'm trying to say here is, I'm a Cormallon. Sorcery is a Cormallon specialty, and I can't share information on our House business with anybody. It would be considered as working against our best interests—even if you offered to pay us."
She said, "A minute ago you spoke of the Houses in the third person; now you speak in the first."
> "Blame it on my schizoid history. I'm not Pyrenese, and I'm not really Ivoran; all I really know I am, at this moment, is Cormallon. And if the universe takes five centuries to get around to cracking the sorcery game, then that's how long they'll have to wait."
They stared at me, and the pause lengthened. I felt myself getting red. It was probably as close to a patriotic speech as I'd ever been qualified to make. The silence became more awkward, and I groped to fill it. "Look, the bottom line is, my House will never agree to share any secrets with the Tellysian government."
They looked at each other. Van Gelder leaned back in her chair and tapped her silver spoon once against her empty sherbet bowl. She said, "But Theodora, my friend, we do not speak for the Tellysian government."
I hoped my jaw wasn't touching the floor. "What?"
Lykon said, "Keleen—"
She rode over him. "No, we speak neither for the Tellys Unity nor the Sealed Kingdom. We speak for a much smaller, more controllable group. Your families here make House allies, don't they? I think we'd like to be regarded in that light."
"We?"
She crossed her arms, still leaning back, and smiled. Lykon looked unhappy. "Tell me, have you heard much about the Tolla?"
I sat up, shocked. "Great gods of scholars."
She nodded. "That's right."
* * *
I'm going to have to stop here and tell you about the Tolla. If you already know about them, you can skip ahead, but I don't want to leave anybody behind.
I think you already know I don't like Selians. What you may not be aware of is that the Selians are a historically recent development, only germinating after the destruction of Gate 53 cut off our sector. Unlike Tolla propagandists, I can't tell you that they were involved in blowing up the gate, because they didn't exist at the time, but I have to admit that that's about the only obnoxious act that can't be laid at their door. As a group, I mean. As individuals they may be perfectly fine. I'm sure someday I'll meet a Selian I can like… The nice ones probably stay home and don't go out in public.