Declan Giloglie’s blue eyes blazed with a triumphant light that renewed all her suspicions. Karina consciously breathed deeply and thought of Peace and Love. “Well, in that case,” she said, “I suppose I may as well go on. I certainly don’t want to waste my time looking for somebody who’s not even here!” The tinkling laugh was a little flat, and her voice trembled slightly, but that might be put down to disappointment rather than to the sheer fury that possessed her.
(She’s absolutely furious now, but I can’t tell what about. The silly twit doesn’t think, she just stirs the brain-bits around like a nut-and-root stew, you never know what’s going to bob up next.)
(Is she in trouble? Where is she?)
(How should I know? She doesn’t look, either. You can’t transmit images of your surroundings if you never look at them properly. All I can see in her mind right now is blue.)
Karina widened her own eyes and looked straight into Gill’s until he released her hands and stepped back. “Well … that’s that then,” he said. “Sorry for your disappointment.”
Karina visualized herself floating in a cool blue cloud that absorbed and masked her utter fury.
(Shit! Now I’ve lost her completely!)
As the door to Delszaki Li’s private suite closed behind him, the secretary looked at Karinawith a touch of pity.
“You’re not the only one with a sob story, you know,” he advised her, not unkindly. “Take more than that to get in to see Acorna … that is, it would if she were here,” he added, remembering Gill’s story. Not being privy to Acorna’s unheralded departure, he took it for granted Gill was lying to protect her privacy. “You’ve struck out-better go home. They’ll call Security if you hang out here, you know.”
“I haven’t the -” Karina stopped herself before she could disclose her dilemma. The fact was that she didn’t have her fare back to Kezdet, much less to her home planet. Everything she owned and as much as she could borrow had been barely sufficient to pay her way this far.
But she did, she reflected, have private transport … of a sort. And she did owe it to the Linyaari to go back and tell them … well, perhaps not exactly what had happened … they wouldn’t understand the nuances; she would be false to the underlying spiritual truth if she told them the bald literal truth, wouldn’t she?
“You are quite right,” she said instead. “I shall return to my personal ship at once.”
On the way back, she concentrated on her breathing until she had attained a state of spiritual tranquillity in which she was no longer deceived by the superficial appearance of events and felt quite able to convey the basic truths of the situation to her Linyaari friends.
She’d thought of exactly how to phrase it, too. “She’s being kept prisoner!” Karina announced on her return to the ship. She was breathless not only from the climb but from the irritation occasioned by having to push her way through a growing crowd of curious onlookers who were fascinated by the gilt scrollwork and trompe 1’oeil scarlet-and-emerald ribbons painted as if they -were flowing across the body of the ship.
“Have you seen our ‘Khornya?” Neeva asked, pronouncing the newly learned words slowly and carefully.
“Acorna, not Kornya.” Karina sank back onto one of the couches in the main cabin. “No, I told you, they’re keeping her prisoner. There’s an absolute brute of a man guarding the rooms, he won’t let anybody in, and a red-bearded Viking giant who tells the most terrible lies you ever heard. Would you believe it, he actually tried to convince me that Acorna wasn’t there at all! And the other two gave quite contradictory stories.”
Neeva frowned in concentration as she tried to follow this burst of speech. “But you said she was expecting you … had invited you to visit her. Why would she go away? “
“That’s just it.” Karina sat up. “I don’t for a minute believe she has gone away. One of the others said she was sick, and another said she was busy. Obviously they are all lying. I don’t know why, but they are determined to prevent Acorna from speaking with anybody outside their little group. Why, for all I know”-she cried, too indignant for caution-“she may never even have seen my first fifty-six messages!”