She interrupted him with an outthrust arm, rigid and furious.
“Let’s not discuss it,” he suggested. “We won’t agree, Lutha. We can’t. Let’s agree to accept each other’s position. If you had to bring him, you had to bring him. I’ll accept that you believed it was necessary.”
She moved into the room and out of my sight. I sneaked into the dark hallway and stood where I could watch them. She was facing the closed shutters, her arms crossed, her hands clutching her shoulders, hugging herself, perhaps cautioning herself. He had gone back to the table and was sorting through the record chips Bernesohn Famber had left strewn about. My mother had gathered them up and put them in boxes, but some of them had already been nibbled by corn-rats. Corn-rats can survive only because we have made hives safe for ourselves, making havens for them in the process.
“Bernesohn didn’t believe in labels,” Leelson murmured. “I’ve been going through chips for the last three days, and I’ve yet to find anything that’s identified. He also didn’t believe in filing categories. Some of these chips have a dozen different things on them.”
Lutha wasn’t willing to give up the former topic. “The people here in Cochin-Mahn knew you were here, didn’t they? Chahdzi knew you were here. Hell, probably the people in the Edge knew you were here!”
“Of course. Chahdzi brought me here, just as he did you, and I came through the Edge, just as you did. I was surprised that the housekeeper did not tell me you were coming.”
“Why didn’t they tell us? I could have been partway home by now!”
“Well, it’s the same question I asked Saluez, isn’t it? You didn’t ask them if I was here. I didn’t ask them if someone else was coming.” He shook his head at her. “If they’d volunteered the information, you’d have left without paying for the hover you no doubt rented, and the guides, and the supplies. Dinadhi don’t do anything that discourages custom. They need hard currency too much.”
He inserted a file chip into the retriever and pressed it firmly home.
A woman stood in the center of the room, her voice making a fountain of sound, lovely as falling water in an arid land. Then another woman stood beside her, singing, a voice joined to itself, a duet of pure wonder. The scent of something flowery and spicy filled my nose. I tasted wine. My body ached with wanting …
It was only a fragment, over in a moment. Sensurround, they call it. Magic. Oh, to think of that being here all these years! If I had only known!
“Tospia,” breathed Lutha. She took a deep breath, then another. She was trembling. I could see it from where I stood. But then, so was I.
“You played that one for me a long time ago,” she said, her voice yearning.
He did not answer for a moment, but when he did, the words came crisply, without emotion. “Since there are no labels, I never know whether I’ll find an aria, a shopping list, a lubricious monologue, or something significant.”
He removed the song chip from the retriever and began clicking other chips into it, one by one. Voices muttered. Vagrant scents came and went. I tasted herbs, mud, smoke.
“You’ve found nothing so far?” she asked. She had gained control of herself and her voice was as impersonal as his own.
“One fragmentary memorandum. I marked it. It’s here somewhere. I’ll run across it in a moment.”
I got out of sight as she wandered back into the bedroom where Leely lay sprawled, running her fingers along the walls, along the small, barred air-vent openings. At the storage cubicles, she began a meticulous search. Top to bottom, left to right, missing none, scamping none.
In the third compartment of the second row, she found a set of holograms and a display stand. I knew what they showed. Herself. Herself and Leelson. Different places. Different times. None of them with Leely.
In the next compartment below, she came upon clothing she evidently recognized, for she held it up, smiling, shaking her head. A rainbow-beaded vest. A belt of iridescent leather. Shirts and trousers and a long, warm coat of rare earthsheep’s wool. At least Leelson had said it was earthsheep, though none of them existed on earth—Alliance Central—anymore.