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 kept 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?"
"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.
The discovery had not surprised Sabium, not after the way the last two of these—personages—vanished out of her palace. And how, if not divine, had the woman changed her coloring so completely? Its implications, though, worried her. With powers such as the strangers possessed, where in the world did they come from? Why hadn't her own folk found them long before, or they her empire? Even more to the point, why had they not come as conquerors? They were no normal people, that was certain.
And if they weren't people and weren't gods either, what did that leave? The only way to find out, Sabium told herself, was to ask. She had seen she could read the strangers almost as if they were her own subjects; they could not hide their bodies' involuntary responses to her questions.
When the goddess came to a conclusion, she wasted no time acting on it. "Fetch me the woman who was here before, the one who then had hair the color of copper," she told Bagadat. "Bring her new companion as well, the lean young man."
The majordomo gave a doleful nod. He resented the strangers for disrupting the smooth routine of the palace and even more for vexing his deity. "Do you wish guards, goddess?"
"No, no," Sabium said impatiently. "There is no danger in these—personages; that is another thing about them that puzzles me. Go now, if you please. I assure you, I will be safe."
"As you say, goddess." Bagadat had trouble disbelieving her, but did not sound convinced, either.
"Why does she want me, too?" Stavros asked for about the fifth time as priests hurried him and Magda through torchlit passageways toward the goddess. They were perfectly polite and made no move to touch the Terrans, but Stavros thought they would simply drag him if he faltered or balked. When Sabium bade them do something, they were not used to getting no for an answer.
Magda, on the other hand, was by then out of patience with the question. "How should I know why?" she snapped. "For all I can tell, she's divined what you said back on Topanga and intends to invite you into bed with her."
For a moment, Stavros waited for the priests to react in horror to her words. Then he realized that, unlike him, she had spoken in Federacy Basic. Some of her slips of temper, he thought, were very calculated things. Annoyed, he shot back, "Then it's you who ought to be asking what you're along for."
"Maybe just to give helpful advice," she said sweetly.
He refused to be drawn. "With the experience Sabium has, I doubt she needs it."
"I didn't mean her," Magda murmured.
Feeling his cheeks grow hot, Stavros gave up. The banter was making him nervous anyway. Wondering what bedding a woman fifty times his age might be like was one thing back on Topanga: a topic of academic interest, so to speak. Even there, the prospect had been daunting. It was quite a bit more so when in the goddess's power.
Besides which, Sabium had shown about as much attraction for him as for one of the local draft animals, beasts that seemed to combine all the worst features of camels and zebras. In its own way, Stavros thought, that was reassuring.
Certainly the goddess's chamber was not set up for a seduction. Sabium waved the Terrans into chairs and seated herself in one facing them. A servant brought in wine and cakes, then silently departed.
"What would you do if I told you I had ordered you put to death?" the goddess asked without preamble.
Magda and Stavros exchanged appalled looks. Magda had been thinking for some time that Sabium was not showing the group from the Hanno the same deference Irfan Kawar and she had gotten, but there was a lot of difference between less deference and a death sentence.
"Are you telling us that, goddess?" she asked.
"Answer my question as I asked it." Sabium's face was an unrevealing mask; her words might have issued from one of the countless images of her that were reverenced over this whole continent.
"First I would ask why, then I would start trying to figure out how to evade your doom," Magda said.
Sabium's gaze swung to Stavros. "First I would ask if you are telling us that," he said after a moment's thought. That drive for precision was part of him, Magda thought, and a valuable part when he did not, as sometimes happened, let it run away from him. He got no reply from the goddess; seeing he would not, he sighed and resumed. "After that, I would do as Magda said, though in the opposite order."
Humanity returned to Sabium's features. "That is as good an answer as I could have hoped for," she said with a small, amused smile.
"Why are you trying to make us afraid, goddess?" Magda asked, sensing no trip to the headsman lay in the immediate future.
"To see what you are, of course." Secure for ages in her power, the goddess did not bother dissembling. "You and yours seek to hide your purposes from me, just as you hide your true appearance beneath colors that ape my people's."
Since that was exactly so, Magda kept her mouth shut.
"And you." Sabium returned to Stavros. "What do you really look like, without your false pigments?"
"Me? I am a dragon, goddess, about twice as tall as this temple," he said in a sober, reasonable voice. "I breathe fire."
She gaped at him, then burst out laughing. "Are you indeed? I must say, you hide it very well."
Seeing Sabium's mood softened, Magda dared ask, "What do you seek of us, then, goddess?"
"Still I do not know." Sabium frowned, as if she did not care to make that admission. "At times I feel in your folk the condescension a grown man might show watching children playing with toys. And yet at other times your comrades have in them more awe of me than my own people display. You would help me if you could explain how both these things can be true at once."
Magda knew she was treading on dangerous ground, even more so than in past conversations with the goddess. She picked her words with care. "For the first, I can only apologize; rude people are part of my nation, as they are of any other. For the second, well, your people know you, as they have for so long. Mine, on the other hand, have heard only travelers' tales. Those so often grow in the telling that the wonder is all the greater at finding them, this once, less than the truth."
"That is it precisely," Stavros agreed. He did not think he could have done such a smooth job of telling the literal truth without giving away the essential secrets behind it.
It did not do to count on too much in that regard, he discovered. Sabium's years let her fit together seemingly irrelevant bits of data as well as one of the mainframe computers back at the Federacy capital.
Her eyes measured Magda like a pair of locking calipers. "Yes, I know of travelers' tales. What I do not understand is where in the world they might have reached you. By the goods you carry, your people grasp the mechanic arts more deeply than my own, however hard we strive to learn. Yet we have found no land where that is so. Why have you not made yourselves known long before this?"
She no longer conceived of the Terrans as fellow gods, Magda noted; familiarity had bred contempt, at least that much. "We are a quiet, peace-loving people, goddess. We have little interest in other lands."
"Then why are you here?" Sabium's pounce was quick and deadly as a hunting cat's. "I think you have told me a lie. With the skills and devices you have"—the goddess was searching for the word "technology," which her language lacked—"you could not help gaining control over your neighbors without them, no matter how little you wanted to. I have listened to too many kings and princes proclaim how quiet and peace-loving they are, most of them just before they attacked me. No, those who have power will use it, and I do not see how you and yours could have gained your power anywhere in this world without brushing against my own folk more than you ever have."
Silence followed the goddess's words. Now neither Magda nor Stavros risked even a glance at the other; whatever they did or said could prove too disastrously wrong. For Sabium was right, of course: where technology existed, it would be used, and Bilbeis IV had no room for a technology—about which the goddess had only the slightest hints—to grow without impinging on her own state.
Magda wondered what that left. It left the existence of the Federacy, and precious little else she could see. She hoped Sabium's vision was not wide enough for her to make the same connection. It had not been when the Jêng Ho had been here.
No sooner had that thought passed through Magda's mind than the goddess said, "How much simpler to believe all you oddly colored people spring from another world. Then we would have no report of you save when you wish it, and then you might own all sorts of strange arts without anyone around you learning of them." Her tone was musing, but Magda was not taken in by that. Sabium's centuries had left her better than a polygraph at gauging reactions to what she said.
This time, Stavros's thoughts ran along a slightly different track. As far as he could tell, the game was up when Sabium used the word "simpler." The goddess might not know Occam's razor by that name, but she had to use it.
Neither Terran, then, for whatever reasons, felt much past a sense of inevitability on hearing Sabium's sudden sharp intake of breath. "And I had thought myself but making an idle jest," she whispered. "You will tell me at once how you accomplish this marvel. Is it a magic spell, or is there after all some means of flying my folk are as yet too ignorant to have come across?"
"Do not belittle your own people, goddess," Stavros said. "They have learned very much very quickly." He conceded otherworldly status but hoped his praise of Sabium's subjects would keep her from noticing he had not responded to her main question.
He should have known better. For the first time, he heard menace and chilly warning in her voice. "I am not a child, to be evaded by such small, silly ploys. Answer, or learn of my displeasure." She sounded very much a goddess then, dreadful and remote. Stavros shivered. So did Magda, but she asked, "Are you sure that is truly your wish, Sabium?"
Again came that sudden indrawn breath, but on a rising note this time. Magda saw with relief that she had reached the person behind the divine façade. Only the Terrans—and Sabium herself—now recalled that name. Her subjects had forgotten it an age ago; to them, she was but the eternal goddess.
"I had thought it so," she replied slowly. "I take it you claim I am mistaken."
"Only that you may be." Magda fought for steadiness. "I would but remind you that what is given is often valued less than what is earned. Or have you not found it so?"
Sabium, who rarely hesitated, took a long time before saying, "You used the same argument when you were last here, or led me to find it myself. Perhaps it is so. I will think on it, then, before I demand your reply, and will also question others of your party." She nodded, as much to herself as to her guests. "Yes, that is what I shall do. Return now to the quarters my priests have assigned you."
By this time, much to Nina Pertusi's delight, the Terrans were out of the central hall and in individual cubicles. Magda's and Stavros's had that convenient invention so many races stumble upon, the connecting door. He threw himself on the bed in her chamber, while she, too restless to sit still, paced back and forth. "Wonderful!" she cried, throwing her hands in the air. "Not only is she immortal, she's figured out the bloody Federacy, too. Next thing you know, she'll be running for the Assembly."
"I'd vote for her," Stavros said at once. "Wouldn't you?"
"In a minute," Magda agreed. "She'd do wonders for us. But picture the scene when the chaplain gives the invocation and she stands up and says, 'Thank you.'"
Stavros tried to, then gave up and laughed. After a while, he said, "It would never do. When was the last time you heard plain good sense in the Assembly?"
"The day they decided to go after Paulina Koch," Magda said, her voice suddenly savage.
But Stavros tossed his head in Greek disagreement. "They even botched that, or we wouldn't be here—they'd have accepted your last report and strung your dear Chairman up by the thumbs. Instead they sent out the Hanno, and this trip has done more to interfere with the development of Bilbeis IV than anything since the Leeuwenhoek. Before this, Sabium had no idea why she was the way she was or about anything off Bilbeis IV. Now she does, and—"
"—by the time some of the people we have with us are done jabbering at her, she'll know everything short of how to design a stardrive motor," Magda finished for him. She took off her sandals and hurled them against a wall. A guard knocked on the outer door and asked if everything was all right. Sighing, Magda reassured him. She turned back to Stavros. "I really feel like smashing this whole place up, but they'd probably break in the door and stop me. That wouldn't look good."
"No." Stavros rolled over onto his back. "Why don't you come here instead? With this leather strap arrangement underneath, the beds don't creak." He held out his arms.
"Well, why not?" Magda pulled her robe off over her head. "It's one way to work off my nerves." Hardly a romantic commitment, Stavros thought, but better than nothing. He had long since concluded he was not going to hear many words of romantic commitment from Magda. One day, back in the Federacy, with no one hot on his trail, he would worry about that. Not now.
Afterward, Magda leaned over and nipped him on the shoulder. He yelped. "What was that for?"
Her expression lay somewhere between mischief and malice. "I was just wondering if you still fantasized about having Sabium, now that you've met her."
He thought about it. After a moment, he tossed his head again. "Thank you, Magda, no. I only imagined I knew what intimidation was till I met her. I don't think I could manage it, even on divine command."
She snorted, a sound he had learned went with suppressed laughter. He poked her in the ribs. "'If it weren't for the honor of the thing, I'd rather walk,'" she quoted. He poked her again. He was getting tired of ancient literature.
"Good evening, sir. It was kind of you to invite me here again tonight. No, thank you, I don't care for anything to drink or smoke, but do by all means please yourself." Paulina Koch waited while the prime minister fixed himself a gin and tonic. Not even now, she knew, could she afford any relaxation from full alertness.
Amadeo Croce sipped, then set the drink down. "I appreciate your joining me on such short notice, Madam Chairman. Really, I should have invited you to Government Mansion more often."
"In my years at the Survey Service, I've been here many times, sir." When Croce only nodded and did not respond to the veiled barb, the Chairman felt her confidence grow. The prime minister was as much weathervane as executive; he shifted with the winds of power. By his manner, Paulina Koch had gained strength since their last meeting. But she was too old a hand to ask how the investigation of the Survey Service fared. Instead she made small talk and waited; let Croce lose face by having to bring it up first.
At last he did. "I am glad to see that no evidence has been unearthed to connect you with the unfortunate turn of affairs we have witnessed in regard to Bilbeis IV."
Not "that you are innocent," she noted, admiring the careful phrasing. The prime minister owned more subtlety than she'd thought. "I'm glad too, sir, and I know the reason no such evidence has been unearthed is that it never existed. Undoubtedly the entire contretemps will in the end be discovered to have originated from some clerk's inadvertent deletion of the report on Bilbeis IV before proper corrective actions could be implemented."
"So it would seem," the prime minister said. It did not sound like agreement. It sounded more like, "Well, we haven't been able to pin this one on you; too bad." Considering the way things could have gone, that would do nicely.
"A remarkable woman, Sabium, truly a remarkable woman," Justin Olmstead declared, his rich baritone rising slightly to show just how impressed he was. More than ever, Magda chalked him up as a pompous ass. Neither she nor any of the other Terrans sitting around the table, though, could readily disagree with him.
The priestly guards in the big audience chamber looked bored. The group from the Hanno preferred Federacy Basic to the local language. Magda was relieved Sabium still let the Terrans gather together. Even if she no longer thought them divine, she still had to keep some lingering respect. It was, Magda suspected as she half listened to Olmstead pointlessly rambling along, more than they deserved.
She abruptly sat bolt upright, and she was not alone—several Survey Service people who had been enduring Olmstead's drone also seemed to wake up at the same instant. Her bellowed, "You did what?" was, however, the loudest of the chorus.
"I told her something of the working of the Federacy's parliamentary system when she asked," the other anthropologist replied, taken aback at the uproar he had caused. "She asked how we chose our kings, and when I told her we had none, she was interested in what we used instead. She grasped the principle very quickly."
"I'll bet she did." Magda spoke in loud, clear tones for the record being continuously taped on the Hanno. "I charge Justin Olmstead, a Noninterference Foundation appointee, with interfering in the cultural development of Bilbeis IV." When she turned back to Olmstead, she was snarling again. "You blundering booby, why didn't you teach her nuclear physics, too, as long as you were about it?"
"I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head," he said, scowling at her. "And what is this nonsensical talk of interference? I merely answered a few of her questions, in quite abstract terms."
"Yes—questions about things she'd never thought of before, and wouldn't have, without you. Service personnel get warned about that somewhere around the second day of training. And abstract ideas—say, like religions"—she smiled nastily as she rubbed his nose in what was especially obvious on Bilbeis IV—"can change societies just as much as technology."
"Oh, but Magda, he's with the Noninterference Foundation, as you said, so how could his motives be anything but good and pure?"
She stared at Pierre Bochy in surprised admiration. The stateliness with which he delivered the sarcasm only made it more effective. She had not thought he had it in him.
"Fortunately," Stavros put in, "Sabium has better sense than Justin here and won't necessarily rush out to try everything he blabs on about."
It always came back to that in the end, Magda thought. Because Sabium had good sense, things ran well on Bilbeis IV. As long as she was here, things would . . . and she looked likely to be here about forever. After so many centuries, Bilbeis IV was unimaginable without her.
The longer Roupen Hovannis listened to the scientific crew sing paeans to Sabium, the longer his face grew. Paulina Koch would not be grateful when the Hanno came back and filed a report that made the Survey Service look even worse than the Jêng Ho's did. And when Paulina Koch felt ungrateful, bad things had a way of happening. Having caused a good many of them, Hovannis did not relish the prospect of being on the receiving end.
He wondered what the Chairman would do were she here now. Of one thing he was certain: sitting quietly in the Hanno, kilometers away from the action, was not her style. But once she got to Mawsil, what then?
However tempting the notion was, Hovannis decided he could not take out the whole scientific contingent. The affair had already seen too many such tragic but convenient accidents. One more would draw too much notice. Too bad, he thought. Even the supposedly pliable Survey Service group was out of control. Dealing with a reasonably authentic goddess was more than they were prepared to handle.
He wondered if he could arrange things through that chamberlain of Sabium's. That local—what was his name? Bagadat, that was it—plainly feared the Terrans for threatening whatever influence he had gained on his ruler. Reluctantly, Hovannis abandoned the idea. Sabium could read her people the way he read a printout. Knowing that, Bagadat would never even try to set up the job.
That moved Hovannis's thinking one step further down the line. What would Bilbeis IV look like, he wondered, without Sabium? She had lived an enormously long time; not many people back in the Federacy, his gut feeling told him, would be upset or, more to the point, suspicious if she happened to pass away. Down deep, people who hadn't seen her in action could not believe she was what she was.
And if she died, how would the locals take it? Only one image occurred to him: they would act like ants after somebody kicked in their hill. In that chaos, all sorts of interesting and profitable opportunities might arise. At the very least, Bilbeis IV would stop looking so outrageously abnormal.
What had Pierre Bochy said? Hovannis had it on tape somewhere—something to the effect that lots of peoples worshiped immortal goddesses. Only Bilbeis IV really had one, though, and if she suddenly became as legendary as all the rest of them—
That would fix a lot of problems, Hovannis thought. Paulina Koch couldn't have come up with a neater solution. He took out his modified stunner and tucked it into a pocket of his coveralls.
He drew a few odd looks when he checked out a flier in Bilbeis IV disguise but Federacy clothing. The only people who would have asked serious questions, though, were already in detention in Mawsil. None of the technicians and engineers did more than scratch his head when Hovannis skimmed silently off into the night.
Stavros rolled the wooden die, thumped his thigh with his fist as he saw a four turn up, and took Magda's last man. She said something rude. "That's fifty-five you owe me now." He grinned.
She stared at him. "The hell you say. I was up fifty, not down—you only owe me forty-five now." Putting five a pop on one of the local board games made it more interesting. They'd been playing since Magda had begged a set from a priest not long after they had taken enforced residence at the temple. They'd also, evidently, kept their running totals running in opposite directions.
"Come on, Magda," Stavros protested. "Remember that hot streak I had a couple of nights ago?"
"Sure I do," she retorted. "Without it, you couldn't have afforded to get back to the Federacy. Weren't you bitching that I was going to end up owning your grandmother?"
"You'd be welcome to her; then you could put up with listening to how nothing that's happened to her in the last eighty-odd years has been her fault." Stavros set his jaw. "But you have to win her fair and square. I'm not going to let you cheat me out of her."
Magda started to laugh, then stopped. "Damn it, I'm not cheating." As absurd arguments have a way of doing, this one was turning serious. She took a deep breath. "You really think you're up on me?"
"Yes, I do. In fact, I'll put another fifty on it."
"You're on." Glaring at him, close to being really angry now, she kneaded the transceiver behind her right ear. "I'll show you," she muttered.
"What are you doing?"
"Calling the ship. You get in on this, too, so you can't say I'm diddling with the count. We'll listen to the tapes of our game sessions and figure out who owes whom what."
"That will take hours," he protested.
"Do you have any urgent appointments?" she asked, and he had to chuckle as he denied it. "All right, then." She waited and swore. "God, are they all asleep over there? Where is everybody?"
At that moment, she and Stavros heard a voice in their heads. "Richards here." Magda told the first officer what they wanted. "Can't do it," he said, "not right away, anyhow. Captain Hovannis is out of the ship."
"So?" Magda's voice was dangerously quiet.
"So no traffic from the ship to you people without his authorization. Standing orders. Sorry." He did not sound sorry. He sounded bored. Magda had not had much to do with him aboard the Hanno, but did not think he worried about standing orders, except with regard to how he was going to carry them out. Usually that was a good trait in a first officer. Now it was only frustrating.
"Get him on the comm circuit," Magda said.
"No, wait," Stavros broke in. "Where is he? What's he doing?"
"I don't know," Richards said. Plainly, he had never thought to wonder.
"We're just fooling around here," Magda said, "but what if somebody needed something really important? It's a silly order, Richards. Get me Hovannis and get him now; I'll tell him so myself."
"Very well." There was a pause before Richards came back on the circuit. For the first time, his voice held a trace of uncertainty. "He's not answering."
Magda rolled her eyes, a piece of dramatics unfortunately wasted because the first officer had no vision screen in front of him. "That's good. That's really good. In his absence you're in charge, right? Countermand that stupid piece of nonsense and give us what we need."
She was so intent on what was directly in front of her—and on proving herself right—that she did not worry about anything else. Stavros, more suspicious of Survey Service people generally and of Hovannis in particular, interrupted again. "You didn't answer me, Richards. Where is Hovannis? The flier must have a tracer on it, in case it crashes or something."
"It does," Richards admitted. He went off-circuit again. A couple of minutes later he said, "The machine is grounded a couple of kilometers outside Mawsil. Sorry I took so long; the tracer seems to be inactive, and I had to home on engine emissions. Otherwise, the flier is mechanically sound. Still no response from Captain Hovannis. Odd." From Richards, the word spoke volumes.
"What is he doing?" This time Stavros was talking to himself.
"Coming into Mawsil, sounds like," Magda said. "But why is he sneaking in instead of just coming ahead?" She suddenly cut Richards out of the conversation and gestured for Stavros to do the same. He cut off the first officer in midquestion, as puzzled as Richards was himself.
"What the—" Stavros began.
Magda's frantic gesture reduced him to silence again. She opened the outer door and nodded to the pair of guard-priests outside. "Would one of you please fetch me a slate and a lump of chalk?" The woman of the pair nodded back and ambled away; Sabium had made clear that her guests were to have any reasonable requests met. The little while the guard was gone seemed like forever to Magda.
She shut the door in the guards' bemused faces and scrawled a note to Stavros: Hovannis here for no good reason. Why else sneak?
"You're right! You have to be. He—"
Stavros shut up again; Magda was scribbling, Richards can still listen—everything gets recorded. Is he safe?
"I don't think it matters," Stavros said. "If Hovannis is coming here for reasons of his own, this will all be decided before Richards can raise him. And if what he's doing is against the rules, he won't call back to the Hanno to advertise it. Am I right?"
Magda hesitated, then conceded. "Seems reasonable."
"All right, then. The next thing we have to do is think, and think hard. Otherwise we'll go rushing off and maybe give him the opening he needs. My first guess would be that he's after us, or maybe after the whole group here, now that the rest of them know about Sabium, too. It would fit everything the murdering bastards who run the Service have done so far: Fogelman, and Andrea, and the Clark County, and your apartment complex, too."
Magda started to jump up, then stopped. "You're right and you're wrong at the same time. What does the Survey Service need most from Bilbeis IV?"
"A clean bill of health, and they're not likely to get one."
"Too bloody right they're not. But they won't get one from a dead crew of scientists, either. That would probably be one too many coincidences for anyone to swallow, don't you think? The Service can't afford more bad publicity; for once, they have an interest in keeping us healthy."
It was Stavros's turn to consider. "Well, maybe so," he said grudgingly. "All right, then, maybe Hovannis isn't coming here to slaughter us in our beds. He's not on his way to give us a great big kiss, either. He wouldn't have to skulk in to do that. What does that leave?"
"Nothing." Magda did not like the answer. Roupen Hovannis was not coming into Mawsil—or was inside by now, she thought uneasily—for any good purpose; Stavros was dead right there. But she was still sure Hovannis would not, could not, move on them. A decimated Hanno returning to Topanga would look even worse than a damning report. Magda balled her hands into fists. She felt as if her mind were running in a treadmill, a treadmill with no way off.
Then she saw there was one, after all. Stavros must have reached her conclusion at the very moment she did, for they both spoke the same word at the same time: "Sabium!"
They ran for the door together.