“Fortin,” said a voice from the veil of splendor at the end of the room, “you will explain to Hansen his task. As for the others of you—you’ve seen that I have the situation in hand. Leave it with me, then.”
Hansen had heard that voice—that sort of voice, he meant, but it went beyond that—before. The fellow outlining the mission, with all the weight of power and certainty behind him, telling others what they would do and what they would not.
Hansen always thought he’d be that sort of man when he had the rank, but he’d been wrong. Commissioner Hansen, and people jumping when he spoke—but he’d never been certain of anything except himself, and he couldn’t give a man an order and make it sound like he expected to be obeyed.
Obeyed or else, if it came to that; but it was the or else Nils Hansen believed in, and that wasn’t the same thing at all. . . .
The iridescent curtains were moving, shifting toward the doorway; moving faster than a man could move over the distance . . . if the distance were as great as if seemed, which instinct suggested it was not.
“Penny?” said the voice of insouciant command. “You’ve recovered your necklace, I believe?”
“What if I have?” whined a girl’s voice, almost close enough for Hansen to touch the speaker though the nearest of the auroral veils was/seemed a hundred meters away. Then the same voice, sulky, “Yeah, Fortin found it for me. Why . . . ?”
“To borrow, as you know. Because of Diamond. Because it’s necessary to achieve balance.”
For all the assurance with which the male officer spoke, Hansen could read the slightest doubt underlying the words. This I ask, the doubt admitted, and though I would like to command it, I cannot. . . .
The tone of a man who knows he must depend on others, but hopes they won’t realize the fact.
Hansen began to smile.
The rainbow veils swept out of the hall like sun-struck sea mist scattered by a breeze. From the mass of them came a male figure, huge, walking toward Hansen with something winking from the fingers of his right hand. As he came closer, he shrank until he stood before the ex-Commissioner as a person no taller than Hansen himself. . . .
But that was not the surprise.
“Solbarth,” Hansen said. “What are you doing here?”
The pigmentless, beautiful android lost his look of superior disdain for an instant. He glanced toward the single shield of light remaining, the one at the end of the hall from which the commanding voice rang.
“What?” the android said. “I’m not Solbarth. Any Solbarth.”
“You’re Solbarth,” Hansen said. His assurance was suddenly no more than a ploy, a tool luck had offered him to get more information. “You’re a criminal, and I captured you on Annunciation.”
He grinned. “You haven’t forgotten me.”
The android blinked. “My name is Fortin,” he said. “As for being a criminal—I’m a god.”
Fortin’s laugh barked harshly, falsely. “It may be that you knew a batch sibling of my mother,” he said with empty dismissal. “I’m half android, you see.”
Laughter boomed from behind the veil of light.
Fortin shook his head to clear away discomfort and settled the mantle of disdain about his visage again.
“No matter,” he said. “We’ve brought you here to restore balance in—”
“I brought him here,” interrupted the commanding voice.
Fortin smiled. Enunciating as clearly as the notes of a jade bell, he resumed, “My father brought you here to restore balance in the Matrix. You will be inserted into Ruby, a portion of phased spacetime. You’ll be disguised—”
Fortin hefted the necklace in his left hand. Hansen had a sudden vision of himself in drag, dripping with jewelry and his hair done up with ruby-studded combs.
“—but they’ll be awaiting you. And they’ll probably have warning of an impending attack.”
The hidden speaker said, “Their threat warning system is very good. On Ruby, everything to do with war is almost ideally good. Wouldn’t you say so, Fortin?”
The minuscule fluttering of the android’s—half android’s—nostrils was the only sign he’d heard the interjection.