Gill stared unseeingly at an image of the glittering dome over Maganos Central, with its overarching glass panels and its garlands of greenery, until it shifted to a view of the bakery attached to the cafeteria, where a cook was setting out trays of fresh pastries in preparation for the shift change, then to an overhead shot of the four major mine workings viewed from a camera atop the central dome. The random changes depressed him, reminding him of the inexorable progress of Delszaki Li’s nervous paralysis, and he wondered whether Acorna would return in time to see her benefactor once again. Her image was so clear in his heart that he thought for a moment he was imagining her on one of the screens before him; then his shout surprised Rafik into dropping the laser pointer with which he had been tracing one of the AcaSeckl’s possible routes on the larger star map for Pal and Delszaki Li.
“What in the name of the Djinni Djiboutis -” Rafik began before remembering Judit’s request that he not swear like the descendant of twenty generations of Arab-Armenian rug merchants.
“What are you playing at, Gill? We’re trying to get some work done over here, if you don’t mind!”
“Acorna,” Gill croaked. “I saw her … on one of these screens. She’s not gone, Rafik; she’s right here on Maganos!”
“She can’t be …” Pal said, and then, “… can she?” Here on Maganos, and concealing herself from him? The thought was almost too painful to bear.
“I saw her, I tell you,” Gill insisted. “She was right…” He dropped his hand; the screen he pointed at Was now showing a row of children chanting the Basic alphabet with hand signs for each letter. “Here,” he said, “only it wasn’t the school, it was some damn corridor, and the bloody automatic timer had to shift scenes before I could identify it.”
“There she is!” Judit cried, pointing at a screen in the far upper right section of the wall.
“That’s one of the new workings,” Gill said, “somewhere in III.”
At the same moment Pal said, “But that’s not Acorna.” The picture switched to an image of the docking facility. “Damn that bloody automatic timer, can’t we turn it off?” Gill demanded. “And are you out of your mind. Pal? Just how many six-foot people with golden horns do you think we’ve got around here?”
“More than one, evidently.” Pal folded his arms with the gesture of a man who is not to be shaken from his opinion, no matter how impossible and illogical it may seem to the rest of the world. “I would know Acorna among a thousand of her kind. …”
Gill snorted. “How do you know? You’ve never seen a thousand other kind.”
“I would know her,” Pal insisted quietly, “and that is not my lady.”
Judit had turned away from the screens to look through Delszaki Li’s desk. “Judit!” Gill bellowed. “What are you playing at? Get over here and watch the screens. I need some backup in case she appears again! No, first tell somebody to hustle down to III… no, I don’t know which subsection, there aren’t but six open, surely we’ve got enough security people to cover all of them? Why are you fooling around looking for office supplies, girl? We’ve got an emergency here!”
“Is searching for manual controller,” Delszaki Li put in, his dry and slightly amused whisper cutting through the fog of Gill’s emotional bellowing. “My suggestion. You countermand?”
Gill stared. “It still works?”
“Override,” Li whispered. “Useful if I wish to see something longer than five seconds … but someone else must push pad, now.”
Judit scrabbled through a clutter of carved jade tokens, laser pads, used betting slips, fact-flimsies with access codes scrawled on the back, and unlabeled datacubes, and finally held up the control pad with a cry of triumph.
“Try all the workings off III,” Gill directed her. “You’ll just have to flip through them until we come. …”
“Silly,” Judit said, “we’ve got a lot more than six screens to choose from, let’s look at them all.”
With shaking hands, she tapped out the code for the cameras in IIIA, B, C, D …