He nodded to himself, then resumed in a thoughtful voice: “Of course, we drew what inferences we could. We assumed Bernesohn had gone there because he expected to find something on Dinadh, but if he’d come up with anything useful, he hadn’t told Prime about it.”
“You said he was no longer at his leasehold?”
He sighed, turning his cup in his hands. “All Dinadh said about the matter was that they ‘had welcomed him as an outlander ghost.’ “
“Which means?”
“We presume it means he died. And there the matter has rested until now … ” His voice trailed off disconsolately.
“But?”
“But, now they’re back.”
Lutha stared at him, disbelieving. “The Ularians?”
He nodded, swallowed, shredded the finan-skin napkin between his fingers. “Almost a hundred standard years! Why not fifty years ago? It was then Prime decided it was safe to open up Hermes to colonization once more. There are three populated worlds and several colonies in there; there are homo-norm teams on half a dozen other worlds, and survey teams everywhere worthy of survey.”
“And?”
“And two of the colonies are gone. Like last time.”
Lutha turned away from his distress, giving herself time to think, holding her cup over the table and feeling it grow heavier as it was filled with tea by an almost invisible shadow.
“What has all this to do with Leelson?” she asked.
“Now we’re desperate to know whatever Bernesohn Famber knew. As long as Bernesohn’s privacy lease has any time to run, however, the only people Dinadh will allow to poke about among Bernesohn’s belongings are family members. Family is a very big thing on Dinadh. Since Leelson is descended from Bernesohn, Leelson is Bernesohn’s ‘family,’ so far as the Dinadhi are concerned.”
Now Lutha understood what they were asking of her. “You need Leelson, but Leelson has disappeared.” She tapped her fingers, thinking. “Did you think I might know where Leelson is? Or did you have some idea the Dinadhi would accept me as Leelson’s ‘family’?”
“I don’t think you know where Leelson is, no. I know the Dinadhi will accept you as family. You are Leelson’s wife as they define wife.”
When Lutha told me this, I laughed. It was true, in a way. She was Leelson’s wife as we on Dinadh define wife. Some of the time.
“Because we were lovers?” she asked him.
“Because you bore his child,” the Procurator said.
She felt the blood leave her face, felt it drain away to disclose a familiar sorrow, an endless ache. “My son is a private matter.”
He sighed. “Believe me, Lutha Tallstaff, under other circumstances I would not challenge your privacy. The Ularians give us no choice. Do you remember Mallia Stentas? From Keleborn?”
Lutha answered distractedly, “We were at upper school together. She became a manager for some agricultural consortium … ”
“You may mourn her now—she and her lifemates and all their many children—gone from Tapil’s World. And the people on Up-dyke-Chel. They are not merely dead, but dust in the wind, vanished and gone, no stone to mark the place they were. Whatever the Ularians may be, when they come upon a world, they leave behind no monuments … ”
He stood, walked across the room to the wall retriever, and flicked it into life. “Tapil’s World,” he murmured. “Beamed by our recorders.”
An empty town materialized before them. Everywhere evidence of interruption. A doll lying abandoned by a fence. A child’s wagon, half-full of harvested vegetables, standing at the side of a fenced garden. A sun hat caught in a thorny shrub. A fuzzy native animal—either useful for something or a neutered pet, as it would not have escaped homo-norming otherwise—hopping slowly along a hedge, crying plaintively. Kitchens with food half-prepared, rooms with tables still littered, desks still piled. The probe came down over one desk, focusing on a holo that stood there. Herself. Mallia and herself, young scholars, arms around one another, grinning into eternity.
“Damn you,” Lutha said without heat.
“I want you to feel it,” he admitted. “It could be your house. It could be you, and your son. It could be all humanity.”
During our time together, Lutha described his voice, full of a sonorous beauty, like the tolling of a funeral bell. He was working Fastigat stuff on her, wringing her emotions like a wet towel, making her all drippy. Leelson had done that from time to time, worked Fastigat stuff on her, though he had done it for their mutual pleasure.