“Ten standard years went by; then twenty, then thirty. Planets applying for colony rights were sent elsewhere. Then, thirty-three standard years after the crisis, the sentinel buoys picked up a freighter crossing the line from Hermes Sector into Dinadhi space! The holds were stuffed with homo-norm equipment. The crew claimed they had found it abandoned and therefore salvageable, after falling into Hermes Sector accidentally, through a rogue emergence. Later we checked for stellar collapse and found an enormous one about the right time—”
“Stellar collapse?”
“The usual cause of rogue emergences is stellar collapse. The dimensional field twitches, so to speak. Things get sucked in here and spat out there. Well, the crew was brought here, and more questions were asked. It turned out they’d picked up equipment from four worlds in the sector and had noticed nothing at all inimical. We sent volunteer expeditions to investigate. All of them returned shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads. Nothing. No sign of what had happened to the human population thirty-odd years before, and no signs of aliens at all. We assumed the Ularians, whatever they or it had been, had departed.”
“So there were no survivors?” mused Lutha.
He shook his head. “Oh, we looked, believe me! We had no information about Ularians, no description of them, no actual proof that they existed, which gratified the Firster godmongers, you may be sure, for they’d claimed from the beginning there were no such things as Ularians. Since government is always delicately poised vis-a-vis godmongers, we were extremely interested in what survivors might tell us, but we never found a thing in Hermes Sector. Oh, there were some children who turned up on Perdur Alas around twenty years ago, but they were probably emergence castaways also.”
“Unlikely they’d have been there for eighty years. They’d have had to be third or fourth generation.”
“Quite right. All this is mere diversion, however.”
“You started by asking me about Bernesohn Famber,” she said impatiently.
“The relevant fact is that Bernesohn Famber was on one of the ships that went into Hermes Sector right after the vanishments.”
“One of the lost ships.”
“No! One that came back. Bernesohn was erratic and secretive. A genius, no doubt, but odd. Sometimes he didn’t appear outside his quarters for days and days. His colleagues didn’t expect to see him regularly, so they didn’t realize he was gone! When the ship got back here, they didn’t have any idea where or when he’d gone. We couldn’t find him.”
The Procurator leaned back in his chair. “Imagine our discomfiture sometime later when we learned he was living on Dinadh.”
“How did you find that out?” Lutha asked.
“Well, a year or so after Bernesohn disappeared, Tospia, his longtime companion, gave womb-birth to twins. In Fastiga.”
Lutha knew where Fastiga was. It might be called a suburb of Prime. Leelson’s mother lived there.
The Procurator went on. “Tospia’s twins were entered in the Famber lineage roster, but nobody at Prime made the connection.”
She said impatiently, “You intend to make the point, I presume, that the twins were conceived after Bernesohn’s disappearance?”
The Procurator assented. “Years later a sensation sniffer for one of the newslinks did a so-called biography of Tospia—unauthorized, need I say—in which he alleged that Bernesohn Famber could not have fathered the twins. Tospia threw a memorable and widely publicized tantrum and sued the sniffer for misprision of media freedom, asserting that Bernesohn had been living on Dinadh and that she had visited him there.”
The Procurator set down his cup and went on:
“Enormous consternation, as you might imagine! Alliance officers were sent to Dinadh immediately to debrief Bernesohn about the Ularians.”
“And?”
He shrugged, mouth downturned. “And the Dinadh planetary authorities turned them all away, saying that Bernesohn had bought a hundred-year privacy lease, that even though he was no longer at his leasehold, his lease was still in effect and no one could be admitted but family members, thank you very much. His ‘family members’ were notably uncooperative, and since our only reason for questioning Bernesohn was the Ularian threat, which was seemingly over, we couldn’t demonstrate compelling need. In the absence of compelling need, we had no authority to invade a member planet, and that’s what it would have taken.”