A professional chauffeur drove the hired aircar. Hogg sat with Tovera on the rear-facing seat behind the driver’s compartment, looking glum. He’d rented the limousine and had been looking forward to driving it himself, only to have his hopes dashed when the firm checked his professional credentials—Hogg had none—and put in their own driver as a condition of the lease.
Adele suppressed a smile lest Hogg realize what had amused her. He could have driven the aircar, true enough, but Adele would’ve been holding on with both hands, let alone expecting her data unit to stay on her knees.
“Oh, heavens, I didn’t mean you should do that, Adele,” Daniel said, sliding his goggles onto his forehead again. He looked apologetic. “I just meant, well, the Gardens were only built five years ago and I was surprised to see an adult specimen of so large a tree.”
“But I can learn how they transported it, Daniel,” Adele said. “I’m sure there’s a record, in the construction files if nowhere else. It probably won’t take more than ten minutes.”
Daniel laughed and patted her hand. “I know you could, Adele,” he said, “and at leisure I’d appreciate you doing that. Right now we have a party to attend.”
He leaned back in his seat and looked at her appraisingly, though in the past few months he must have seen her thousands of times. “You know, I keep forgetting that you’re always on,” he said. “I ought to be used to that by now.”
Adele put the data unit away, a trifle awkward because she wasn’t used to keeping it in this purse. “I’ve been accused of being overly literal,” she said dryly. “It appears to me that that wouldn’t be a problem if fewer people were underprecise.”
The car dropped to ground level to enter a parking lot covered by a marquee of frothy plastic. Scores of vehicles were already within, both aircars and ground transportation. Many of the former bore the flashes of houses of importance in the Republic; even the rental cars were, like this one, of a high class. Other guests wearing either civilian finery or dress uniforms were walking through the seashell-shaped entrance. Each was accompanied by a servant.
Despite its name and the marquee’s decor, the Gardens arose not from seafoam but from channels cut across a bend of the Pearl River thirty miles from Xenos. The coast had been in sight as the aircar neared the location, but there was no actual connection.
Adele thought of checking a topographical display on her data unit, but after the business of the pike tree she was vaguely embarrassed to take it out again. Instead she said, “Wouldn’t it have been better to join it to the sea? Surely the developers could afford coastal frontage.”
Daniel paused in the door Hogg was holding open for him and looked surprised. “Well, the salt would kill the vegetation, Adele,” he said. He didn’t sound condescending, just puzzled. “Certainly most native and Terran species, and that of almost any plant that comes from a world that humans could live on.”
“Oh,” Adele said, suppressing an irrational desire to check what Daniel said on a natural-history database. The chance that he’d be wrong was beneath computation, but she still didn’t in her heart of hearts believe anything she hadn’t looked up for herself.
Tovera held the door for her mistress with one hand; her slim attaché case was in the other. Adele hadn’t asked what Tovera had in the case, in part because her “servant” was likely to say, “Equipment,” and refuse to amplify the statement. Barely aloud, Adele muttered, “Then they really ought to change the name of the place to something less confusing, you know.”
Though that was probably another instance of her being overly literal.
The hired car slid off in the direction of long-term parking, leaving Daniel’s group to walk through the gateway. The breeze from its fans was barely noticeable. Adele imagined the plume of dust and flying debris that Hogg would have raised. He was behind her and Daniel, so she allowed herself to smile as broadly as she ever did.
An unctuous man—short, dark, and topped with a head of luxurious chestnut hair that certainly hadn’t appeared without the aid of science—greeted guests as they entered, shaking their hands with his right and gesturing with his left toward a hallway with a very prominent sign: