The smoothness continued. The milky light never varied. To one side and the other cold terms like intercept flew on radios; (“It’s down…”) Lives ended. Beyond illusion-forests in city windows missile silos opened like flowers to the sun.
“… Betan knew we were succeeding. That was what tipped the balance. She had help, gods know; all of Shbit’s resources, forged records. She made a foul-up of it even so-a free-ghota might be that careless. But she wasn’t working for Shbit. She meant to foul things up. Kill you if she could. Doublecross Shbit. I know it was a possibility. I took my time settling that affair and it was damn near too much time, while I was working on those tapes.”
“You-”
“While you were out. Daily. Constantly. Never mind that. I’d spread myself too far; I’d hastened things, and my time was occupied; and I was held to law. I traced Betan as far as Shbit. When I learned she’d surfaced again in Shbit’s keeping and stayed alive-then I knew either Shbit himself was ghota or Shbit was being worked by one. I saw the pattern.”
Thorn turned his face from the sun a second time and looked at Duun, at a face rendered faceless by the mask, sun reflecting on plastic eyeshields.
“Betan,” Duun said, distant through the speaker, “may have been aimed all her life for what she did. Guild-service. A special kind of ghota. Gods know what the ghotanin had been feeding Shbit for information out of the department. Shbit was up against the ghota guild and totally outmatched… playing their moves against me and thinking they were his. Even Dallen Company. I can’t say I didn’t expect guild trouble. But there was law, again-I was trying to keep from destroying the council’s autonomy. Dammit, they gave me too much. I let Shbit live because I knew he was a trigger I could pull, one the ghota would respond to. There’s a spy in Ellud’s office I’ve let stay. Sagot’s mine.”
(Something’s still faithful in this world. O Sagot, one bit of truth.)
“… And you did what we’d been waiting for.”
“What did I do? That tape? That damned stupid tape? The numbers and the pictures?”
“You survived it. You survived it, minnow, and you read it. And the meds would know what you knew in one more day-and the instant they knew, that unstopped leak would send the news straight to our enemies; while Ellud wouldn’t want to let you leave the building-I could overrule him, but he could have fought me on it and fouled things up beyond recovery. He’s a good man; and honest; and he always wants more time than the opposition gives him. Some things I couldn’t even tell Tangan himself. Like guild war. Like the fact I’d pulled the trigger.”
“This Shbit sent Betan when he knew we’d left the city.”
“You’re catching onto it. He gave a ghota a courier plane and never suspected she’d been hired by her own guild to be hired by him. He had to give her a ghota crew: no kosan would fly her to us.”
“Why come here for the gods’ sake?” “She couldn’t overtake us. For Shbit-she was supposed to go in and wail and howl and put on a good act. Disgrace you. Keep you out of the guild. Create scandal. For the ghota-she was to walk in there just the way she did and deliver a message from her guild. You read Tangan. He wouldn’t bend. That’s clear to you and me-but ghotanin have a guiding belief that everything can be bought if you set the terms up right; she walked in there and saw she hadn’t the right coin… by her way of looking at it. It was clear when she said keep you out the way she did she wasn’t talking for Shbit. Tangan knew it then. Read what she was and knew what I’d done to him and knew why. And forgave us both.” Duun was silent for a long while.
And men and women died for them, would be dying, now, in planes which darted and fired missiles no one saw except on screens.
(Damn you, Duun. Is even this a maneuver?)