“I’ve explained to you often enough,” he said. “Lot rather’ve gone to Mboto’s or Bhatnagar’s myself. But my ship leaves in three days. Last chance to conduct a bit of absolutely essential business.”
“So you say.”
He reached a decision. Tonight had not seemed to him to represent any large sacrifice on her part. During the months of his absence, she’d find ample consolation with her lovers. (How else can a high-born lady who has no special talents pass her time on Terra?) But if she did grow embittered she could destroy him. It is vital to keep closed that faceplate which is pretense. Never mind what lies behind. But in front of the faceplate waits open ridicule, as dangerous to a man in power as emptiness and radiation to a spacefarer.
Odd, reflected the detached part of him, for all our millennia of recorded history, for all our sociodynamic theory and data, how the basis of power remains essentially magical. If I am laughed at, I may as well retire to my estates. And Terra needs me.
“Darlin’,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you anything before. Too many ears, live and electronic, don’t y’ know. If the opposition got wind of what I’m about, they’d head me off. Not because they necessarily disagree, but because they don’t want me to bring home a jumpin’ success. That’d put me in line for the Policy Board, and everybody hopes to sit there. By arrangin’ a fait accompli, though—d’ you see?”
She rested a hard gaze on him. He was a tall, slender, blond man. His features were a little too sharp; but in green tunic and decorations, gauze cloak, gold breeches and beefleather halfboots, he was more handsome than was right. “Your career,” she gibed.
“Indeed,” he nodded. “But also peace. Would you like to see Terra under attack? Could happen.”
“Mark!” Abruptly she was changed. Her fingers, closing on his wrist beneath the lace, felt cold. “It can’t be that serious?”
“Nuclear,” he said. “This thing out on Starkad isn’t any common frontier squabble. Been touted as such, and quite a few people honestly believe it is. But they’ve only seen reports filtered through a hundred offices, each one bound to gloss over facts that don’t make its own job look so fiery important. I’ve collected raw data and had my own computations run. Conservative extrapolation gives a forty per cent chance of war with Merseia inside five years. And I mean war, the kind which could get total. You don’t bet those odds, do you, now?”
“No,” she whispered.
“I’m s’posed to go there on a fact-findin’ mission and report back to the Emperor. Then the bureaucracy may start grindin’ through the preliminaries to negotiation. Or it may not; some powerful interests’d like to see the conflict go on. But at best, things’ll escalate meanwhile. A settlement’ll get harder and harder to reach, maybe impossible.
“What I want to do is bypass the whole wretched process. I want plenipotentiary authority to go direct from Starkad to Merseia and try negotiatin’ the protocol of an agreement. I think it can be done. They’re rational bein’s too, y’ know. S’pose many of ’em’re lookin’ for some way out of the quicksand. I can offer one.” He straightened. “At least I can try.”
She sat quiet. “I understand,” she said at length. “Of course I’ll cooperate.”
“Good girl.”
She leaned a little toward him. “Mark—”
“What?” His goal stood silhouetted against a crimson sheet.
“Oh, never mind.” She sat back, smoothed her gown, and stared out at the ocean.
The Coral Palace was built on an atoll, which it engulfed even as its towers made their crooked leap skyward. Cars flittered about like fireflies. Hauksberg’s set down on a flange as per GCA, let him and Alicia out, and took off for a parking raft. They walked past bowing slaves and saluting guardsmen, into an antechamber of tall waterspout columns where guests made a shifting rainbow, and so to the ballroom entrance.
“Lord Markus Hauksberg, Viscount of Ny Kalmar, Second Minister of Extra-Imperial Affairs, and Lady Hauksberg!” cried the stentor.
The ballroom was open to the sky, beneath a clear dome. Its sole interior lighting was ultraviolet. Floor, furnishings, orchestral instruments, tableware, food shone with the deep pure colors of fluorescence. So did the clothing of the guests, their protective skinpaint and eyelenses. The spectacle was intense, rippling ruby, topaz, emerald, sapphire, surmounted by glowing masks and tresses, against night. Music lilted through the air with the scent of roses.