dizzying course. They did not say much for a long time, listened to the music
and nursed that round of drinks into a second.
“It would be nice,” Elene said finally, “if you’d come to dinner at the end of
the week… chance my cooking. Have a game of cards. You play cards, surely.”
Talley’s eyes shifted subtly in his direction, as if to ask approval. “It’s a
long-standing card night,” Damon said. “Once a month my brother and his wife
would cross shifts with ours. They were on alterday… transferred to Downbelow
since the crisis. Josh does play,” he said to Elene.
“Good.”
“Not superstitious,” Talley said.
“We won’t bet,” Elene said.
“I’ll come.”
“Fine,” she said; and a moment later Josh’s eyes half-lidded. He was fighting
it, came around in an instant. All the tension was out of him.
“Josh,” Damon said, “you think you can walk out of here?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, distressed.
Damon rose, and Elene did; very carefully Talley pushed back from the table and
navigated between them… not the two drinks, Damon thought, which had been mild,
but the screens and exhaustion. Talley steadied once in the corridor and seemed
to catch his breath in the light and stability out there. A trio of Downers
stared at them round-eyed above the masks.
They both walked him to the lift and rode with him back to the facility in red,
returned him through the glass doors and into the custody of the security desk.
They were into alterday now and the guard on duty was one of the Mullers.
“See he gets settled all right,” Damon said. Beyond the desk, Talley paused,
looked back at them with curious intensity, until the guard came back and drew
him down the corridor.
Damon put his arm about Elene and they started their own walk home. “It was a
good thought to ask him,” he said.
“He’s awkward,” Elene said, “but who wouldn’t be?” She followed him through the
doors into the corridor, walked hand in hand with him down the hall. “The war
has nasty casualties,” she said. “If any Quens could have come through Mariner…
it would be that, just the other side of the mirror, wouldn’t it?—for one of my
own. So, God help us, help him. He could as well be one of ours.”
She had drunk rather more than he… grew morose whenever she did so. He thought
of the baby; but it was not the moment to say anything hard with her. He gave
her hand a squeeze, ruffled her hair, and they headed home.
Chapter Two
« ^ »
Cyteen Station: security area; 9/8/52
Marsh had not yet arrived, not baggage or man. Ayres settled in with the others,
chose his room of the four which opened by sliding partitions onto a central
area, the whole thing an affair of movable panels, white, on silver tracks. The
furniture was on tracks, spare, efficient, not comfortable. It was the fourth
such change of lodging they had suffered in the last ten days, lodging not far
removed from the last, not visibly different from the last, no less guarded by
the young mannequins, ubiquitous, and armed, in the corridors… the same for the
months they had been at this place before the shifting about started.
They did not, in effect, know where they were, whether on some station near the
first or orbiting Cyteen itself. Questions obtained only evasions. Security,
they said of the moves, and: Patience. Ayres maintained calm before his
companion delegates, the same as he did before the various dignitaries and
agencies, both military and civilian—if that had any distinction in Union—which
questioned them, interrogations and discussions both singly and in a group. He
had stated the reasons and the conditions of their appeal for peace until the
inflections of his voice became automatic, until he had memorized the responses
of his companions to the same questions; until the performance became just that,
performance, an end in itself, something which they might do endlessly, to the
limit of the patience of their hosts/interrogators. Had they been negotiating on
Earth, they would have long since given up, declared disgust, applied other