Hovannis was sweating and swearing as he neared the city walls of Mawsi. He was also filthy; he had taken a couple of nasty falls walking in the darkness through fields and in a dirt roadway full of holes.
Though he did not realize it, he was lucky the town's gates were open. Most places locked themselves tight after nightfall. Had the eternal goddess not spent so much time in Mawsil, it would have done the same. But pilgrim traffic was beginning to shift away from the Holy City, and Mawsil had opened itself to accommodate the sudden—and profitable—influx.
All the same, the guard yawning in his sentry box cast a dubious eye on Hovannis as he trudged toward the town. "Why aren't you carrying a torch to light your way, fellow?" he called.
The true answer was that Hovannis had not thought of it; he had never had to worry about such things before. "It went out a ways back," he said lamely, adding, "When I fell in the last pothole."
The guard laughed. "A few potholes before that, by the look of you. What are you coming to Mawsil for?"
Despite Hovannis's bedraggled state, the question was strictly pro forma. The guard heard the same answer hundreds of times a day: "To see the goddess, of course." Had Hovannis taken a moment to consider, he would have realized that. But the topmost thing in his mind was that his mission had to stay secret. Not only that, he was offended that this native, this savage, dared question him. Thus his answer came out as a reflex snap: "None of your damned business!"
"No, eh?" The guard was suddenly alert. He hefted his spear. "Come along with me, then. We'll make it my captain's business instead. You keep your distance there, too," he warned as Hovannis took a couple of steps toward him. "By the goddess, I'll stick you if you come any closer."
"I don't need to come any closer." Hovannis twisted the doctored stunner on his belt so it pointed at the local and squeezed the firing stud. He hoped he was close enough for the weapon to work. He was. The guard toppled bonelessly. Hovannis eased him to the ground so his mail shirt would not clatter, checked to make sure he was not breathing, and then, feeling a bit like a primitive warrior himself, sauntered into Mawsil.
He soon decided the best thing anyone could do with the place was bomb it and start over. It stank of sewage and smoke and unwashed people. Hovannis heard scuttlings in the darkness around him. Some were vermin; others, he was sure, were vermin that walked on two legs. He wished his stunner had more range.
The people he could see disturbed him almost as much as the ones he could not. Disease and injury did not leave their mark so openly on civilized worlds. He had never seen a woman with an empty eye socket before; now he spied two in the space of a couple of blocks. Till now, he had never thought himself fastidious. He was finding his standards for comparison had been deficient.
Relief flowed through him as he spotted the mud-brick building—ugly pile, he thought—where Sabium was staying. He gave the stunner an affectionate slap. The sooner this job was done, the sooner he was back aboard the Hanno, the happier he would be.
"Harm me? Why should he wish to harm me?" Sabium stared at the two—whatever they were—as if they had begun to speak in a foreign language she did not quite understand. She wished they did not wear the seeming of her own people; their true, alien colors would have helped remind her how strange their thoughts were.
"It has to do with the politics of our, uh, homeland," replied the woman called Magda. The goddess sensed she was telling the truth. A wave of sadness swept over Sabium. No matter what she had thought, no matter what she still wished, these were truly no gods after all. Yet their kind had made her immortal. She would have to think long and hard on what that meant.
No time now. The young man with Magda—"Stafros" was the best Sabium could do with his name—said, "This man means more than harm, goddess; I think he will kill you if he can."
Sabium's servants gasped at the blasphemy. The goddess saw that, like his companion, this "Stafros" was speaking the truth as he saw it. As he saw it—there was the rub. She could also tell he hated and feared this "Hofannis." Maybe even he did not know how much that influenced his perceptions, and if he did not, how could she?
A priest came into the chamber and bowed before her. "Goddess, I pray your forgiveness for disturbing you," the woman said, "but outside the temple is one who would have speech with you."
"Yes, I know," Sabium replied calmly.
The priest accepted that with barely a blink; the goddess was the goddess and had her ways. The priest resumed, "A street vagabond, or even a magnate, we should of course have turned away to ask for a regularly scheduled audience, but this man wears the garb described in your Rituals of Search: the trousers and tunic all in one, and all over pockets. He is colored as we are, but—" She eyed the two strangers with Sabium.
"Yes, that matters less than formerly," the goddess agreed. She took a deep breath. "I will see him. Prepare the audience chamber in all ways."
She had to raise her voice to finish. Magda and "Stafros" were trying to interrupt with shouted objections. Her servants stared in open-mouthed horror; no one ever interrupted the goddess. None of her subjects would even have thought to. The strangers might not be divine, but they were very strange. Sabium had thought that before, often enough.
Now it was a nuisance. "Silence," she proclaimed, and was gratified to find that the tone of command worked on the strangers, though more slowly than on her own people.
The priest had already gone to do her bidding. She turned to Bagadat, faithful, fearful Bagadat. "Have these two escorted into the chamber after me. Make sure the escorts are large and powerful. I will not tolerate interference from them."
For some reason, that touched off hysterical laughter in the woman called Magda. Neither she nor Stavros resisted the soldier-priests who took their arms. Bagadat paced along beside them, trying to look strong and stern and not succeeding very well.
Sabium set her hands on the arms of the throne in the audience chamber. They did not feel quite right; she realized they were not worn to conform to her flesh through centuries of use. Neither, sadly, was the seat, and a goddess, she knew instinctively, must not squirm. She sighed instead.
"Fetch in the stranger," she said.
"Is she crazy? Does she want to die? Does she think we're kidding her?" Stavros said. He had lost track of how often he'd repeated that on the way to the audience chamber and now here inside it as they waited for Hovannis to arrive. His guards must have thought it some kind of prayer.
Magda had her own litany. "Goddam denim coveralls," she muttered over and over, which made little sense even to Stavros. But the Service's field costume had been standard so long that Sabium had seen it on the crew of the Leeuwenhoek . . . and she, above all others, had a special reason to remember it.
Set against that, comfort and practicality did not, for once, count for much. They should never have had the denims aboard the Hanno. Fine time to think of that now, she reflected bitterly, as the priests hustled her into the audience chamber.
Flanked by their keepers, she and Stavros were made to stand to the left of Sabium's throne. "Neither by word nor deed shall they meddle in the judgment of this man, for it is mine alone," the goddess warned their captors. She turned to the Terrans. "Know you shall answer to me if your accusations prove false."
A tide of despair washed over Magda. No matter how long Sabium had lived, she looked to be an innocent, after all. A planetful of people loved her, and she could not conceive of anyone who did not.
"Goddam denim coveralls," Magda said again. It did not help, but nothing else did, either.
Following the local priest, Roupen Hovannis felt as though he floated upon a rising tide of confidence. Ever since he had knocked over that guard, everything had gone well. He'd more than half expected to be kept cooling his heels till morning. As things were, though, he'd likely be back in his own bed by then.
He gave his stunner another slap, liking the idea.
The native, who smelled overdue for a fumigation, threw wide a door. "The goddess awaits you," the fellow declared.
Hovannis strode in. His eyes darted around the room, as they did when he entered any unfamiliar place. He spared not even an instant for the play of light and darkness on the filigreework walls; he wanted to see where the people were, the better to work out his upcoming getaway.
He spotted Stavros and Magda in the crowd to the left of the raised chair near the far wall. They did not make him hesitate. Once Sabium unexpectedly expired, all the locals would rush to her. Then the traitor and her lover could meet misfortune, too. The stunner was silent. A couple of people falling down would attract no attention. If they didn't get up afterward, too bad—surely they had been trampled in the confusion.
Checking the place out took only moments. Then, at last, Hovannis looked toward Sabium. He was glad he had not glanced her way before, by accident; he surely would have revealed himself had he met her eyes unprepared. He found out what other Terrans had before: films just did not convey the awe she inspired. Perhaps part of it lay in the way she sat, as if she had all the time in the world. Why not? he thought—she did. Her gaze was the most arresting he had ever known, and he could never have told anyone why. But it was.
Still, he did not falter. He had kept secrets from Paulina Koch, and done it so well that she had never suspected. He had, in fact, kept secrets all his life; that was what an External Affairs Director, or even a security chief, got paid for. And did being an old primitive—or even an old, old primitive—make Sabium any less a primitive, or anything more than a primitive?
That he posed the question at all meant the answer was yes. He did not let it bother him. He had control over himself again. He did not think anyone else would notice he had lost it.
"What would you of me?" Sabium asked.
"Eternal goddess, I thank you for consenting to see me in such irregular fashion and at such an irregular time." He bowed and took a step forward. "I have traveled a great distance because of your glory." He bowed again, amused at actually telling the truth. He came another couple of steps closer to the throne. Soon, now . . .
Sabium was rarely puzzled, but these strangers had a gift for perplexing her. This one, by wearing clothes of his people's style rather than hers, set off further confusion in her, casting her memory back a millennium and a half to the pair whose cure for her illness had left her immortal.
Resolutely, she pushed that secondary confusion aside, for it only distracted her from the greater ambiguity surrounding this stranger: she could not read him. That was not because of his race; Magda and "Stafros" and the rest of them were no harder to gauge than her own people. But this one, this "Hofannis," drank in her examining glance and gave back nothing.
She sensed no violence in him. At first that reassured her and made her doubt the warnings the other two had given her. But the fellow did not seem particularly well-disposed to her, either. He was just—there. Her doubts returned.
"Why did you not come here at the same time as the rest of your countrymen?" she asked him.
"I had duties I could not set aside," he replied, slowly walking forward. "Still, knowing you are unique, I hurried through them so I could see you myself before we departed your land—with your gracious permission, of course."
Was he close enough now? Yes, probably, Hovannis thought. He took one more step, just to be sure. His hand drifted toward his stunner. No need to rush things now and spook Sabium. She would not know what a stunner was—not for long, anyway.
"What's he going to do, knock her out?" Magda whispered; she saw where Hovannis's hand was going. "He really has lost it—"
"It makes no sense," Stavros agreed, "unless that stunner isn't just a—" He stopped, appalled at where his mouth, without much intervention from conscious thought, had led him. He and Magda both opened their mouths to shout.
At last, as the stranger's hand approached the weapon that hung on his belt, Sabium read the tension in him and knew what it had to mean. She made a tiny gesture of her own.
The arrow that pierced the palm of Hovannis's right hand came as such a complete surprise that for a moment he only stared at it foolishly, as if wondering how it had come to lodge there. Then the pain reached him, and with it the realization he had been outguessed after all.
Another arrow struck him, this one in the right shoulder. The impact drove him back, away from Sabium. When he tried to use the arm, he found it was dead.
He snarled and tried to reach across his body with his left arm. But he was a long way from ambidextrous, and now the stunner's grip went away from his hand instead of fitting smoothly into it. That first hasty grab failed to pull the weapon free. He did not get another chance. The plump local who stood to one side of Sabium's throne jumped on him, hurling him to the floor. The native cursed and pummeled him.
The fellow was no warrior; with two good arms, Hovannis would have ruined him in seconds. Even wounded as he was, he took most of the local's punches on the top of his head and in other places that did him little damage. He drove a knee into his foe's soft middle, doubling him up with a grunt of pain. At last his hand closed on the stunner. He jerked it free and gave the local a full charge. The weight on top of him went limp.
Too late! Other natives were rushing up. Something—a foot or a club, Hovannis never knew which—exploded against the side of his head. The world spun into darkness.
When Magda and Stavros would have run forward to help bring down Hovannis, their guards restrained them, as if not trusting them not to take his side. "Let me go, you fools!" Magda shouted. She tried to break free. She failed, for Sabium's priests knew as many fighting tricks as she did.
Stavros, who did not, struggled less. Instead of writhing, then, he was watching as one of the priests bent by the fallen Hovannis to pick up his stunner. "Beware!" Stavros cried, urgently enough to pierce the din and chaos of the audience chamber and make the priest look his way. "Touch it wrongly and it may spit death."
"I think not," the priest said with a condescending smile. "We have made some study of these strange weapons you people carry. How you make them we have not learned, but we know they only cause sleep; they cannot slay."
"You stupid, trusting bastard," Magda yelled at him. She was still trying to get loose, but only by fits and starts. She was beginning to be convinced she couldn't.
Sabium spoke; at the sound of her voice, everyone else in the chamber fell silent. "See to poor Bagadat there beside that villain," she said. "If he but slumbers, you will be proved right. If he is dead, you shall add your thanks to mine, for then we shall both stand indebted to these strangers' warnings."
A few moments later, the priest said in a small voice, "He is dead, goddess." He put the stunner down very carefully, then bowed low to Stavros. "As the goddess says, I am in your debt."
That seemed to persuade the locals still holding Magda and Stavros that they could safely release them. "Goddess, where did the arrows come from?" Magda asked, her disposition improving quickly once she was free. "I thought you were doomed."
Sabium gestured at the filigree panels behind her throne. "Show yourselves," she commanded. Eyes appeared in several openings; arrows poked through others. "I am not unprotected," the goddess said. "I doubt if age or sickness may claim me, but I have never been so certain in the case of arms. The two of you having shown your concern, I took no chances."
Hovannis stirred and groaned, which served to recall the locals' attention to him. "He sought to kill the eternal goddess," one of them said, her eyes wide with horror at the thought. "For that he deserves death." A priest carrying a spear advanced on the downed Terran with deadly purpose.
"No," Sabium said. The priest halted, her spear poised above Hovannis. She obeyed her deity, but rebellion smoldered in her eyes. Then Sabium spoke again, and now her voice was that of the goddess passing sentence. "He wantonly slew my faithful majordomo Bagadat, who tried but to protect me. For that slaying, he deserves death."
The priest drove the spear home.
Magda almost cried out to protest the abrupt, unappealable sentence. Her mind was filled with thoughts of trials, of how Hovannis should be taken back to the Federacy to face justice there. But she could not speak of those things to Sabium, not without doing violence to the rule of noninterference. That rule had seen enough violence on Bilbeis IV. And so she hesitated for the bare instant between condemnation and execution, and then it was too late.
She did not feel very guilty. Hovannis's crime—and his attempted crime—were too blatant for that. Murder was foul enough in any case, but Sabium's death would have been a cataclysm to rock all of Bilbeis IV. And for what? For politics, she thought distastefully.
Stavros never had any impulse to cry out. As the spear went into Hovannis's vitals, he thought the External Affairs Director was getting exactly what he deserved. Then he watched, and listened to, and smelled, the man die. It took a long time and was worse than anything he had imagined. He had to look away. Hovannis's feet drummed and drummed in the ever-widening pool of blood that poured from his belly.
Finally he lay still. Only then did Sabium—who, unlike Stavros, watched to completion what she had ordained—turn her notice back to the two living Terrans in the audience chamber. She said, "I owe you a great debt for warning me this"—she nodded at the corpse—"was a miscreant. Had you not done so, I might have failed to take the precautions that saved me. Because you are who and what you are, I do not know with what gifts I might please you most. Therefore, I say to you, choose your own reward. If I may give it to you, I shall."
Magda and Stavros looked at each other. His mouth soundlessly shaped a word. She nodded; the same thought had been in her own mind. "Goddess," she said, "nothing would please us more than your having our belongings returned to us and our countrymen and letting us go home."
"It shall be done, of course," Sabium replied at once. "But is that all? Ask more of me than such a small thing."
"Goddess," Stavros said quietly, "freedom is never a small thing."
Sabium paused to consider that. "I think you may be right," she said at last.
Topanga's heat and sunshine reminded Magda of the vicious weather in the Margush valley but were less oppressive somehow: probably, she thought, because she could go into the cool indoors whenever she wanted. On Bilbeis IV, buildings were as hot inside as out and sometimes—especially at night—hotter.
Now she was out in the sun and reveling in it. She and Stavros stood outside the Survey Service field office while a swarm of holo cameras hummed and whirred around them. The data card she carried weighed no more than any other, but seemed heavier.
Someone called, "What do you think of what happened on Bilbeis IV?"
She'd answered that question a hundred times in the couple of days since the Hanno had come home. She had it down to half a dozen words now: "We were right the first time."
Stavros was willing to amplify that; media people were arriving on Topanga in a steady stream, and this poor woman might not have had a chance to ask anything before. "Even the scientists handpicked by the Survey Service acknowledge that serious interference, in technology and especially in religion and culture, did take place on Bilbeis IV," he said.
"Hard for them to get around it, when their own captain tried to get rid of the main evidence for that interference with a stunner he'd cooked up somehow into a deadly weapon," Magda agreed.
Peter O'Brien swung open the door to the office. "Here we are, back where it all began," the head of the local branch of the Noninterference Foundation said expansively. "Here the first true report on Bilbeis IV was delivered, and here we deliver the truth again. This time it will not be suppressed."
Magda wished he would shut up; for that matter, she wished he were not there at all. But the Foundation lost no chance to promote itself, and without it, she had to admit, the Service probably never would have felt enough pressure to send out the Hanno. In recognition of that, she decided not to step on O'Brien's foot as she and Stavros walked past him.
With as much good grace as she could muster, she endured more delay while the reporters jockeyed for position inside the small Survey Service office. She looked around. "Where's Pandit?" she demanded. "He's the clerk who took my report every time I sent it in to Central—only right he should do it again."
The coordinator in charge of the office looked embarrassed. The reporters looked delighted—here was something unrehearsed, while these formal events usually were stylized as Noh plays. The coordinator cleared her throat. "Ah," she got out, "intermediate clerk Pandit is in custody, charged with failing to properly transmit your report before. He was, it is alleged, a confederate of Roupen Hovannis."
"But that's absurd!" Magda said. "I saw him send it."
"Are you sure?" Stavros murmured. "Do you know what all the gadgetry back there does?"
She frowned. "It seemed simple enough."
The coordinator stepped forward and presented her better profile to the camera. "In any case, I will be pleased to handle the data transmission personally."
Reluctantly, Magda handed her the data card. She watched carefully as the coordinator fed the card into the machine and hit the transmit button. After a while, a light went from red to green. "The document has been acquired at Survey Service Central," the coordinator declared.
"She did the same damned thing Pandit did," Magda said mulishly.
"Have you an opening statement, Chairman Koch?" asked the reporter who was serving as moderator for the news conference.
"Yes, I do," Paulina Koch replied. A ripple of surprise ran through the Survey Service auditorium. Paulina Koch usually let reporters have at her as they would. Only a few veterans in the seats out there could remember the last time she'd broken that rule.
"Very well, then." The moderator stepped aside.
"I thank you, Mr. Mazyad." Paulina Koch took a deep breath and stepped up to the podium. This was it. If she got through this conference, she could ride out anything. If not . . . She built a wall around that thought. She would get through, because she had to.
She said, "To you, my friends"—if she was going to lie, might as well start early—"and through you to the people of the Federacy, I offer my apologies and pray your pardon. I, and through me you, have been betrayed. In all innocence, I told you that no deception was involved in the Survey Service's handling of the Bilbeis IV affair. It now appears I was in error.
"For reasons of their own, Roupen Hovannis and staff members of the External Affairs Division under his direction did attempt to destroy the report the survey ship Jêng Ho presented on Bilbeis IV. When their efforts began to come to light, they even engaged in acts of violence to hide their prior wrongdoing. Roupen Hovannis's death on Bilbeis IV itself came as a direct result of the last of those violent deeds.
"As Survey Service Chairman, I must of course take ultimate responsibility for the actions of all my subordinates. I stress, however, that I was unaware of Hovannis's machinations and was systematically lied to in my attempts to uncover the truth. The same applies to Dr. Cornelia Toger, whose investigative efforts were systematically hamstrung by Hovannis's henchmen."
Always a good idea to mix in a bit of truth, the Chairman thought. She went on. "Dr. Toger has offered me her resignation. I have not accepted it. She has done nothing wrong. Her next task, like mine, will be to restore effectiveness to the Survey Service and to restore public confidence in it. Now I will take questions."
"Have you offered to resign, Madam Chairman?" a woman called, springing up out of her seat in her eagerness to be recognized.
"No, Ms. Kluhan, I have not. I have confidence in my own innocence, and I feel I am still needed here. If Prime Minister Croce disagrees, I am sure he will make it known to me."
Actually, she was afraid Croce might have accepted a resignation. Requiring him to take the first step made things harder for him. No evidence focused on her. By now, she was sure she had done a good job of scrubbing the data banks.
"What are these mysterious 'reasons of their own,' Madam Chairman?" asked the next reporter at whom Paulina Koch pointed.
"Mr. Basualdo, I would not presume to act as speaker for the dead. Roupen Hovannis's motives, whatever they were, lie with him on Bilbeis IV. I would hope he acted out of a sense, however misguided, that he was serving the long-range best interests of the Survey Service. If so, he proved tragically in error. But let me say again, that is only my hope. We will never know."
That was all Paulina Koch had ever tried to do: serve the long-range best interests of the Survey Service. If she survived this, she might even have succeeded. She wondered for a moment how Sabium would have done, were their positions reversed. Then, brushing aside such a nonessential thought, she fielded another question: "Yes, Mr. Goldberg?"
"What about the eighteen missing days?"
The little man looked smug, thinking he had caught her out. Now she had an answer, though, and one that did not incriminate her. "I must assume, Mr. Goldberg, that when Van Shui Pong"—she prided herself on having the reporter's name ready to bring forth—"accessed the correct arrival date of the Jêng Ho, it called attention to the blunder Hovannis's henchmen had committed in not altering it prior to that point in time. The error was then rectified, but not before the discrepancy had been noted."
Goldberg sat down, deflated. Paulina Koch pointed. "Yes, Ms. Wakuzawa?"
"Damn her, she has all the answers," Magda said, watching the Chairman demolish another questioner.
Stavros made a disgusted noise deep in his throat. "Yes, but do you believe any of them?" When Magda did not answer at once, he looked at her sharply.
"I'd like to," she admitted at last. "I've been with the Service my whole professional life. I'd like to think we're clean at the top."
"What are the odds, though? How could anyone think that the things they've done somehow magically stopped one rung below Paulina Koch on the ladder, and that she never looked down to find out why there was a stink under her feet?"
"I don't suppose I do," Magda sighed. "I'd like to, that's all. And there are plenty of people who will, just because they can't see past their noses."
"Everything worked out so bloody well for her—"
"That's what you get for hanging around with me," Magda interrupted. "You're starting to talk the same way I do."
But Stavros refused to be sidetracked. "She's piling all the blame on Hovannis, and he's not around anymore to give her the lie. It couldn't have worked out better for her if she planned it herself."
"What did you think of the Survey Service Chairman's performance last night?" asked the woman whose desk at Hyperion Newsnet was next to Van Shui Pong's.
"Didn't watch it," he answered shortly. Since leaving—"fleeing," he told himself in harsher moments, was really the proper word—the investigation of the Bilbeis IV affair, he had not paid much attention to it. He wanted to think that sprang from simple prudence. More likely, it was guilt.
Shaking his head in annoyance, he started working his way through the morning mail. A lot of the data cards he got ended up erased so he could reuse them; what some people thought newsworthy never stopped amazing him. Today's run of the stuff that didn't come through regular channels seemed especially bad. Fortunately, telling when something was tripe usually took only a few seconds.
He blanked the card that was in his terminal, took it out, inserted the next one in the stack. A man's face looked out of the screen at him. The fellow seemed vaguely familiar. Whoever he was, he needed a shave.
Then Van's boredom and faint contempt fell away, for the image declared, "I am Roupen Hovannis, External Affairs Director, Survey Service. If you are viewing this, I will be dead. If I were alive, it would be none of your damned snooping business, I promise you that."
Hovannis's laugh was full of scorn. Van Shui Pong felt anger rise in him but made no move to kill the data card. Hovannis had hooked him, sure enough. His eyes narrowed at what he saw, then went wide.
The reports, the screaming headlines and lead stories, kept coming in from all around the Federacy. Paulina Koch declined any comment for as long as she could, and for a bit longer than that. Each morning, more camera crews appeared outside Survey Service Central. Each morning, she strode past them as if they did not exist and went in to do her job.
Roupen Hovannis had buried his bombshells to avenge himself on her if she played him false. She had thought he would and had rooted from the computer several "dead-man" routines designed to spill information on word of his demise. Either she had missed some after all, or Hovannis had given copies to people to throw in the mails. It did not matter much either way.
She even saw the irony of her predicament. The bombshells were going off without proper cause: surely Hovannis had not expected he would die at Sabium's hands instead of hers. That did not matter much any more, either. What mattered was that everything was coming out, from the disposal of Isaac Fogelman to the destruction of the Clark County to the effort to change Magda Kodaly's credit records. And everything pointed straight back to her.
Still, she dared hope one day when she noticed a gap in the ranks of reporters in front of the Survey Service offices: were they getting tired of hounding her? Then she noticed the two men standing there, waiting for her to arrive. They wore the field-gray of the Rehabilitation Service. Not even reporters, the Chairman thought grimly, wanted to get close to rehab men.
She squared her shoulders. No point in hoping now. The only thing left was choosing how she went out. No point in whining either, not in public.
"May I make a statement?" she asked the taller man in gray.
She had the small satisfaction of seeing she had surprised him. She cherished it; she would get no more satisfaction for a very long time. After a moment, he politely dipped his head in assent. In public, rehab men were always polite. He did not even tell her to keep it short.
She turned to face the cameras for the last time. "Citizens of the Federacy," she began, and almost stopped in despair. How could she get across what she had tried to accomplish by doing as she had done? Only the thought that she would never get another chance helped her go on.
"Citizens of the Federacy," she said again, this time more firmly, "for two decades I have had the privilege of serving you as Chairman of the Survey Service. Throughout that time, I have striven to make the Service function as effectively as possible in all areas of its operation. On the whole, I believe I have been successful in that undertaking.
"In administering so large an organization, I have been required to make large numbers of decisions and judgments. In making them, I have tried to follow the principle of seeking only what was best for the Survey Service. Inevitably, I fear, not all decisions and judgments I was called upon to make have proved correct. That appears to have been the case in the matter of Bilbeis IV.
"I regret any injuries that may have occurred as a result of my decisions concerning that matter. I would remind you, however, that those decisions and judgments were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interests of the Survey Service, and to protect it from those who would seek to curtail its activities where no good cause exists.
"I am to be Chairman no longer, but the Survey Service will remain, and will continue to perform its appointed tasks. I call on everyone, those who have supported me and those who did not, to put behind them the bitterness of the recent past and to support the organization I have been proud to lead for so long. That organization and its ideals must go forward, whatever becomes of me."
Her control held to the end. She had not been sure it would. She nodded to the rehab men. They moved in to take places on either side of her, two tall gray figures bracketing one short one, and led her away.
Stavros watched Paulina Koch disappear into the Rehabilitation Service groundcar. Then he ran the tape back to listen again to her parting statement. He shook his head wonderingly. "She's still talking her way around this whole thing. Some of her decisions weren't correct . . . injuries may have occurred. She ordered people dead. That's enough to create a little bitterness, wouldn't you say?"
"Yes," Magda said, but somehow the triumph she felt was muted. In stories, once the villains were gone, everyone proceeded to live happily ever after. Here and now, the trouble they had caused would go on being trouble. "The Purists are going to have just the kind of field day with the Service she started the stinking cover-up to prevent. The more she tried, the deeper she got."
"She should never have tried in the first place." Stavros thought for a moment. "Is 'hubris' a word in Basic, or just Greek?"
"Basic, too." On the screen, the rehab wagon purred away again. A commentator started making predictions about how the Survey Service would fare under the interim administration of Dr. Cornelia Toger. Magda switched him off. She could make her own predictions there. "The Service'll have a hell of a time. Toger's in way over her head. Maybe Sabium could straighten out this mess, but then, she'd have the time to do it."
"So she would." Stavros's eyes got a faraway look. "I wonder what Bilbeis IV will be like the next time the Survey Service checks it out."
"Now there's something to think about," Magda agreed, "but thinking won't take you far enough, I'm afraid. Sabium may still be around when the next survey team arrives, but you and I, my rather dear, won't be."
"Isn't that the truth!" Stavros chuckled. "'My rather dear,' eh? I rather like that." He gestured toward the screen. "Have you seen all you want of this?"
"Yes. We recorded it, so I can watch it again whenever I want."
"You have quite a taste for revenge, you know that? You'd make a good Greek; some of the feuds back in the mountains of New Thessaly got their start on Earth, or so the old men say."
"I like to be right, and when I am, I don't like anybody telling me I'm not. Speaking of which—" Magda went through the file of data cards and tapes she had brought off the Hanno. She ran one into a terminal, put on headphones, and started listening. Every so often, she made a tally mark.
"What are you doing?" Stavros asked. When she paid no attention, he pulled one earpiece away from her head and repeated the question.
She hit the pause button. "What do you think? I'm going to find out who really owed fifty to whom. And if you owe me, by God, I'm going to collect!"
Sabium already had the desert scout's report nearly committed to memory, but she read it again all the same. A troop of scouts had gone north from Mawsil into the waste before the strangers departed the city. They shadowed them at the greatest possible distance, to learn what they could. Two did not return. The goddess had never learned to accept losses in her service easily. She made sure the scouts' families were provided for, but silver could not replace a man.
The rider whose words she was studying had not actually tried to stay close to the strangers at all. Instead, he'd almost killed his mount rushing far to the north, reasoning that the strangers, with their curious abilities, might be able to travel more quickly than they had shown. She made a note to reward him for his initiative.
He was soon proved right. They disappeared from their camp not long before dawn one night, with only briefly blotted stars to suggest something had swooped down from the air and carried them off. Most of the scouts came back then, baffled and afraid.
From a long way away, the one clever scout saw a flying sphere—"a ship, I would call it, not a creature," Sabium read, "for it had no wings—dash itself headlong into the side of a vertical bluff. But it did not tumble in ruins. Instead, it flew into the bluff, as if that were so much air."
Indeed, it might have been so; later, the scout saw people emerging from the rocks and then going back inside, with no sign of passageways or doors to explain how they did so. They did not spot him in turn; his mount was tethered behind an enormous boulder, while he himself moved only on all fours and wore the skin of a skulking desert predator across his back.
He waited the day away in the shade of a large bush. "Without it," he wrote matter-of-factly, "I would have died. But seeing that the strangers concealed the use of their powers under cover of darkness, I thought it best to wait for night to come."
His patience was rewarded, for about halfway through the first evening watch, the mesa he had been studying shimmered and vanished, to be replaced by a dark sphere many times vaster than the one the scout had seen before. Sabium tried to visualize the scene he described:
"By some art I cannot fathom, it rose silently into the air, as the smaller one had flown before. But it climbed straight up into the heavens rather than faring north or south, east or west. As it ascended, it appeared smaller and smaller, or so I judged by the stars it hid from sight. In the end I lost track of it; it must have grown too tiny to cover them any more. You in your wisdom, goddess, may know its destination. As for me, I am but a simple soldier and would not presume to guess."
A disingenuous soldier, Sabium thought as she set down his report. She could only guess where the sky ship was going herself; the strangers who crewed it had been closed-mouthed, most of them. All her guesses, though, were full of marvels.
She wondered how long she would have to wait before the strangers came to call upon her land again. As long as the time between their first two visits? That would try even a goddess's patience.
She looked up to the roof, and in her mind's eye through it, to the dome of the sky above. Once more she tried to see a huge sphere floating upward. She wondered how much her people would have to learn to build such a sphere for themselves.
She made herself a promise and spoke it aloud as if to seal it: "If they wait so long again, I shall go to visit them first."
She summoned her new majordomo and began to work to make the promise real.