She bridled. “How do you know what I want to talk about?”
“Aw, come down off that ungainly platform, Aurie. What else’d it be but Emissary?”
Hancock dragged on her cigarette, lowered it, and said: “All right! Dan, you have got to stop spreading those tales about the ship returning. They simply are not true. My staff and I have our hands full as is, without adding unfounded suspicions that the Council itself is lying to the people.”
Brodersen raised his shaggy brows. “Who says I’ve been telling stories out of school? I haven’t made an appearance on any broadcast, or mounted a box and orated in Goddard Park, have I? Four or five weeks ago, I asked if you’d heard about Emissary, and I’ve asked you a couple of times since, and you’ve answered no. That’s all.”
“It isn’t. You’ve been talking-”
“To friends, sure. Since when have your cops been monitoring conversations?”
“Cops? I suppose you mean police detectives. No, Dan, certainly not.
What do you take me for? Why would I want to, even, with only half a million Side 9
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
people in Eopolis and the way they gossip? Word gets to me automatically.”
Brodersen regarded her with fresh respect. She was a political appointee-prominent in the Action Party of the North American Federation, helper and protégé of Ira Quick-but by and large, she hadn’t been doing a bad job on Demeter, mediating between the Union Council and a diverse lot of increasingly disaffected colonists. (A tinge of pity: Her husband had been a high-powered lawyer on Earth, but there was little demand for his services here, and in spite of his putting on a good show, everybody knew he was far gone into alcoholism, without wanting to be cured of it. If anything, though, that made Aurelia Hancock the more formidable.) He’d better play close to his vest.
“I did speak to you first,” he said.
“Yes, and I told you I’d surely have heard if-”
“You never convinced me my evidence was faulty.”
“I tried to. You wouldn’t listen. But think. At its distance, how could your robot possibly tell whether that was Emissary passing through?” Hancock frowned again. “Your deception of the Astronautical Control Board about the true purpose of that vessel could affect the continuance of your licenses, you know.”
Brodersen had awaited that line of attack. “Aurie,” he sighed elaborately, “let me just rehearse for you exactly what happened.”
He struck fire to his pipe and got it under weigh. His glance roved. The room and furniture were to his taste, little of synth about them, mostly handmade of what materials were handy some seventy years ago, when the settlement on Demeter was about a generation old. (That’d be half an Earth century, flitted across his mind. I really have soaked this planet up into me, haven’t I?) Creamy, whorl-grained daphne wainscoting set off a vase of sunbloom on the desk and, on a shelf behind, a stunning hologram of Mount Lorn with both moons full above its snows. On his right, two windows stood open on a garden.
There Terrestrial rosebeds and grass reached to a wrought iron fence; but a huge old thunder oak remained from the vanished forest, its bluish-green leaves breathing forth a slight gingery odor, and slingplant grew jubilantly over the metal. Ordinary traffic moved along the street, pedestrians, cyclists, bubble of a car and snake of a freighter whirring on their air cushions. Across the way, a modem house lifted its pastel trapezoid. Yet overhead the sky arched deeper blue than anywhere on Earth, and Phoebus in afternoon had a mellowness akin to Sol at evening. For a half second he recalled that barometric pressure was lower and so was gravity (eighty percent), but his body was too habituated to feel either any longer.
He drew on the pipe, savored a bite across tongue and nostrils, and continued: “I never kept my opinion secret. Theory says a T machine can scoot you to anywhere in space-time within its range which means space and time.
Emissary was on the track of an alien ship that’d been observed using a gate in this system, obviously to pass between a couple of points we knew nothing about.