by Bill Adams
Domina—Lady West—felt obliged to call the decor corny, but she warmed to the excellent service. A new manager had taken over a few weeks before, and always served the Pretender’s table personally. This Freeman Van Damm was a tall, lean young man with platinum blond hair and watchful gray eyes. He managed to be extremely attentive without any suggestion of bootlicking; but that was the Venezian ideal, to take a master craftsman’s pride in whatever job you happened to hold that week.
“What good-looking people you see here,” Domina said, after Van Damm left with our orders.
“Natural selection,” the Pretender answered. “They marry for love on Venezia.” He said it lightly, but Julia blinked, and Domina elaborately ignored it.
The whole meal went like that, small talk with undercurrents I couldn’t always follow. The Pretender sober treated Domina differently from the Pretender drunk. Tonight he was entirely Julia’s suitor, praising her acting to the skies, quoting little remarks she’d made, playing with her hand on the table.
Julia, sad to note, bought the whole package. She had never looked lovelier; a racy green Venezian gown brought out red highlights in her chestnut hair. She couldn’t stop laughing, in a breathless way that seemed almost scared. Here she was at the grownup’s table, outshining her mother as a woman.
At lunch that afternoon, she had told me how uneasy she was at the prospect of the get-together. “Mother doesn’t approve of Evan,” she had said. “He shouldn’t have tried so hard to win her over that night she came back. That was a mistake. I’m sure she thinks he’s a social climber.” But I was sure that something quite different was passing between Domina and the Pretender, and I didn’t see any reason to change my opinion tonight, watching him use the daughter to inspire jealousy in the mother.
Domina’s aristocratic poise was unruffled, but I knew her well enough to sense danger under the surface. What the hell was going on? Julia’s story of her mother’s life haunted me. Forty years Domina had slept in a glass coffin before allowing herself to age at all. Forty years—the same amount of time the Barbarossa was supposed to be away on its survey trip. Could she have been waiting for me—despite everything that had passed between us? If so, it wasn’t hard to imagine how she’d feel now, six decades after she’d stopped waiting—to see Evan Larkspur back at last, still young, with his arm around her daughter.
But I wasn’t attending to the conversation. The subject was whether Julia could stay and perform the part of Astarte in the Pretender’s play.
“It’s time you went to college, darling,” her mother said. “You should have gone last year, but your father was worried about security.”
“Father is always worried about security,” Julia said. “I’ve hardly ever seen him without a distorter field between us.”
“That’s not something to talk about in public,” Domina said gently. “Your father’s position…weighs on his mind.”
“I’m just saying”—Julia struggled a moment, then came through—“that people in our position have only so many opportunities like this in a lifetime. I’m already here, already rehearsed. You played in one of Evan’s productions once. Surely you won’t deny me the same chance?”
“I was the most virtuous Roxanne ever seen on stage,” Domina said, smiling. “The snickers of those who knew me ruined the whole performance.” But her face, always pale, was deathly white.
“Besides,” Julia said. “You’re staying for the premiere yourself.”
“But I’m leaving that night, with Captain Marius.” She hesitated, then turned to the Pretender, who had been careful not to say a thing. “If it is understood that she may play at the premiere only—and someone will have to take over the role after that—if that is acceptable to you—”
“I’m grateful for however long you lend her to us,” the Pretender said. “I’ll accept any terms. But perhaps once you’ve seen her in the part, you’ll let her continue.”
“As I said, Julia, your father is sending Captain Marius. If I let you stay until then, you must return with us.”
Julia must have had mixed feelings, but her eyes flickered to the Pretender, and when he nodded, she thanked her mother effusively.
After that the meal was more convivial. The Pretender, on his best behavior, offered to escort the West women back to the palace for an early evening. I begged off and watched them go. Through the mock porthole next to me, I could see a crew of dead men reefing an elaborately tattered sail in the holographic squall. To avoid Barbarossa reflections, I began to think about the mysterious Lord West. It was odd that I didn’t remember a West among my Columnard classmates—most of the wolf pack had been members of the Nexus Kanalist chapter. I would have to look him up in the Column peerage registry sometime. Julia certainly painted a paradoxical picture of him—the almost mummified recluse who still held all the loyalty of his red-blooded younger wife…
Van Damm appeared and I ordered coffee and brandy. He took the order, and looked almost as if he was about to say something else, when Foyle stepped up behind him. “May I join you, Handsome?”
“Of course. Two of both, please.”
Van Damm smiled and bowed out.
Foyle looked smashing in some of Venezia’s opera-chorus street clothes: snug black pants and bolero jacket, white blouse, dark red sash, and—in her hand—the flat black hat gondoliers never wore. The matador cut of the clothes suggested her readiness for action; her long red hair was gathered in back just like the Pretender’s. All in all, the revolutionary woman incarnate.
I knew I should stay away from her, but she amused me. “Handsome?” A racy and fraudulent Foyle; she didn’t play the role very well. I’d seen her all week in the Pretender’s haunts, chatting up everyone. After fending off advances from many Hard Men and an occasional woman, she usually wound up nursing drinks she clearly didn’t enjoy and sitting alone, a lost soul. She was undoubtedly a spy, like me. Just like me—desperate, amateurish, and ineffectual. She would even be working on a version of the same puzzle. Since she had already met an Evan Larkspur two years ago, who was the Pretender, really, and should a good Old Rite Kanalist give him her support?
Just a few nights before, catching me alone as the Pretender tottered off to a back room with a giggling tourist woman, Foyle had accosted me and tried to find out what the great man was really like, the inside dope from his best friend. I’d quickly put her off.
But tonight I was fed up with the passive, limply charming Christopher Sly. Seeing Domina across the table in a low-cut dress had made me want to raise a little hell. But I did remember, as always when dealing with Foyle, to alter my voice from the one she’d heard two years ago—not much; it couldn’t be obvious if I had to do it in front of other people who knew me here. I just gave it a rounder, more actorish delivery.
“We’ve seen a lot of you since the Maelstrom, Citizen Foyle,” I said.
“Just Foyle, thanks…is it Freeman?”
“Just Handsome.”
Her mouth twisted. “Handsome. Sure, you see me, but your Boss never has time to talk to me.”
“He says you ask too many questions,” I lied. He’d never mentioned her at all.
“I can’t help that,” she said reasonably. “I’m an archaeologist. The past is my business, and he’s a man from the past.”
“There are still a number of people around who were born when he was. They’re just older.”
“That’s right. They’ve had more time to forget. Though I suppose your dinner guest tonight is an exception.”
“Julia’s mother, you mean? I don’t get the joke.”
“Oh, didn’t you know about her?”
I shook my head and let her tell me the deep-suspend story while our drinks arrived. She’d spied out that much, at least.
“I guess that explains her old-worlds style,” I said. “Fascinating woman. Mysterious and beautiful.”
“Certainly mysterious,” Foyle said. “I’m surprised to see Larkspur with her, considering h
er reputation.”
“Reputation?”
“Everyone says that she’s a political player, but no one trusts her. She’s been thick with Senator Mehta, who is definitely for more civil liberties, provincial autonomy, and so forth. There’s a persistent rumor that she’s the Consultant’s mistress, and that she has influenced his popular reforms. But at the same time, she’s Admiral Wintergrin’s daughter and Lord West’s wife, and that’s her style, don’t you think? You can feel the power and privilege of the great families just standing across the room from her.”
Foyle had opened up some intriguing possibilities. “The Consultant’s mistress?” I asked.
“Well, so they say. From her lips to his ears, anyway.”
“What do you know about the Consultant?”
Her eyebrows arched; I was pushing it. “Just what everyone knows.”
Everyone raised in this era, maybe—if parents were willing to tell what the history books wouldn’t. “Not everyone is as political as you Kanalists,” I said, giving it even more of an actor’s delivery than usual. “Pretend I know absolutely nothing.”
She looked poised to ask a question, but must have decided it was more important to make progress with me. “Well, no one even knows his name anymore. He started out in the navy—at least, he was head of some bureau of naval intelligence, fortyish years ago. Traditionally, the bureau head was anonymous. At the time, there was a position in the Senate’s cabinet, Consultant on Intelligence Affairs, with oversight over all the spy services. The man who occupied it was the Director of the Shadow Tribunal, Chung. He’d held on to it year after year by blackmailing key senators or their great family backers. But Chung died mysteriously—”
“Murdered?”
“Sure, but by whom? There were a lot of suspects. Anyway, there was a big struggle within the Tribunal over who was to succeed him. Eventually, the great families are said to have installed one of their own as Director; I think he’s called ‘V.’ But meanwhile the Consultant position had to be filled on a pro tem basis, and the naval officer got it.”
“Is this ‘what everyone knows’?”
She shrugged. “If they take an interest in politics, they do. Anyway, the new Consultant had no intention of being temporary. He had his own blackmail resources, and a team of assassins from his old department, which he didn’t hesitate to use whenever he felt threatened. At least, a lot of prominent people got murdered, committed ‘suicide,’ or just disappeared in those years. In addition to getting rid of enemies, the new Consultant got rid of his own past—every record of his previous existence. Once he was finally secure, he began to expand the legal powers of his office.”
“So his power does have some legislative basis?”
“Sure. The Internal Security Act of ’78 and the Emergency Consultancy Act a few years later. He’s the Column’s executive. But he has no palace, no headquarters—at least, none known to the public. He has rarely, if ever, made personal appearances, and descriptions of him vary wildly. There must be people alive who knew him in the navy, and that limits the mystery a bit: if he’d been a woman, for instance, it would have been hard to stamp that memory out. But you still hear all sorts of stories—that he’s just a head maintained by a robot body, or an alien who passed for human.”
“What do you think?”
“I think he’s a very smart, very dangerous bastard.”
“Is he a real reformer?” I asked.
“He’s had nearly forty years to reform things. He’s let the leash go loose in the fringes, stopped some of the worst abuses of authority—and that’s all. Look at the Middle Ages on old Earth. The kings of those days did the same thing, played up to the populace to keep their strong nobles in line. It wasn’t because they were looking forward to a democracy. When the Column goes, he’ll have to go. At least, that’s what I think.”
I yawned. “I’m sure you’re right. Care for a dance?”
“What?—yes, all right.”
The small ballroom was down a flight of stairs. Here the restaurant managers had wisely opted out of the storm theme. A holographic diorama turned the room into the deck of a ship anchored near an inviting little island; during the evening the view slowly cycled from a sunset to a dusk lit by fireworks and bonfires on shore. The band played from a sort of forecastle suggesting the rest of the ship.
Their tune was slow but syncopated, a neo-classical ballroom dance. A few other couples were doing the Indigo, and we followed suit. Foyle was within a centimeter of my own height, but no taller, no problem adjusting to. I’d thought to put her at a disadvantage—having to follow my lead, and so forth—but she danced superbly. Undoubtedly one of the things her late husband had taught her.
The diary cube I’d stolen from her didn’t go back many years, but I’d learned a bit of her history the first time we met. The husband had been named Roger something. He’d been her literature professor in college, a Larkspur scholar—not a fit job for a grown man, but that’s a minority opinion—and a fanatical Old Rite Kanalist. He saw himself as a Renaissance man out of a Larkspur play: scholar, writer, mystic, athlete, warrior, you name it. And he trained his teenage bride to surpass him, to excel in many skills.
He found a place for them in a small community of like-minded people, eco-wardens for the Vesper Preserve, an unspoiled, Earthlike planet. When the Column changed its policy and opened up the Preserve to human colonists, Roger led a harebrained guerrilla war against them that ended only when he was killed. Foyle, who fought by his side, finally negotiated the peace, and must have got good terms, since she was still a citizen; but I knew she considered herself a sellout for having given in at all. A remarkable woman in every way, and a good ally in a fight, as I knew from two years ago. But her loyalty might be hard to obtain.
“You dance well,” she said at length.
“You’re a good sport,” I said. She cocked an eyebrow. “The point of the exercise is to pump me for information. So far, I’ve asked all the questions.”
“How far are my questions going to get?”
“I’m tempted to ask how far you’d go for them…but let’s just say the Boss is my friend. I can’t violate his privacy.”
“I don’t see where you fit in this picture,” she said. “You don’t strike me as the sidekick type. You don’t share his women; you’re not sweet on him yourself, like his last bar buddy—”
“So you have learned a few things.”
“I’m not a Tribune, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I know. Your archaeological work revives popular interest in the Old Rite. That’s the last thing the Tribunal would do.”
“They could be using it, though. This whole Pan-Kanalist movement of your Boss’s could be a Tribunal trap for the Kanalist underground.”
“It isn’t.”
“Because he’s Evan Larkspur,” she said. “But suppose he weren’t?”
“A fake Larkspur? I suppose it could be done…You still couldn’t judge his movement. You can see where most of his time goes—real or fake Larkspur, he’s only a figurehead leader. Someone else is running the show, but I don’t think it’s the Tribunal.”
“But the Tribunal isn’t the only power within the Column government. And you’re curious about the Consultant.” She had a quick mind.
“Isn’t everyone?”
She smiled. “Have you no politics?”
“I’m strongly opposed to whoever blew Arturo’s head off,” I said.
“I can see how you would be.”
“What about your friends among the Hard Men? How did they feel about his death?” I asked.
We made slow circles to the music. Torches appeared on the imaginary island.
“Perhaps I could find out,” she said finally. “Perhaps you could work on my question, too.”
“But what’s it to you? Who do you work for?”
“I’m alone. I’m a Kanalist. I’d love to see the Column smashed, but more important, I want the
Old Rite to survive. A fake Larkspur could do the Order much harm. Isn’t there anything you can tell me?”
“I’m alone, too. An actor.” Why did I say that?—some traitorous impulse to hint at the truth; I quelled it. “If I trust the wrong person, I could get killed. But you can get the answer to my question. You’re a Hard Man’s sort of woman. Or so they’d like to think. Keep talking to them.”
“You’re not promising me anything.”
“I don’t want to lie. I’d like to help you, but I want to stay alive.”
“Then why stay on Venezia?”
I stared at her. “The part, of course. I’m playing Manfred!”
She laughed in surprise, and a few of the spooning couples around us jerked their heads in irritation. She remembered to keep her voice down when she spoke again. “The show must go on? Please!”
“Yeah, I know, actors. Pretty-boys and shallow egomaniacs. And I’m not going to tell you that’s not true, because it is. But you’re an archaeologist—you know where stage plays come from. Ancient Greek religious rites. The actors didn’t even show their bare faces, but came in masked. It was the gods who spoke.”
“Sure,” she said. Her smile was gently mocking. “And aren’t you glad that’s over, with a face like yours.”
“But it’s never been over,” I told her, trying to keep my voice to a whisper. “You don’t know what it’s like backstage, in the dark, waiting to go on, unable to leave, muttering over and over words you cannot change. Players of twenty years’ experience panic, lose their breath, or throw up. But they always go on. And then—”
I groped for words as we made our turn at the end of the room; those tilted green eyes still looked skeptical. “—and then you step forward into what you most fear. Bright lights blind you and expose you. Those you woo so desperately are hidden in the dark, just sounds. Silence or laughter. While the only words you can offer them come down from above; you are just the mask they come through. And so you perform, as constrained as a slave, in terror of a mistake, burning in the gaze of every eye. And yet. In that moment, you create something out of nothing, a life, a history, a world. You hold the multitude suspended.”