These effort were still underway when Mouche paid a visit to House Genevois, where he found both Madame and D’Jevier, pale and shadow-faced, grieving the future loss of their people upon Newholme. Mouche hugged them both and told them to keep up their spirits, use their heads, the game wasn’t over, there might be a card or two to play yet, burying them in so many hope-inducing cliches that they both laughed.
“Are you coming back to House Genevois, Mouche?” Madame asked. “I will understand if you choose not to do so.”
“Questioner has offered to pay off my contract. As for what I will do, I am uncertain at the moment, but I think we would all agree, Madame, that I am an unlikely Consort.” He shook out his shock of green hair, letting it flow like seagrass, grinning at her in a devilishly intimate manner.
“You are unlikely, Mouche. You’re also unusually impertinent.” She gave him a tearful smile.
The smile undid him. He had sworn to himself to say nothing, but these women needed a hint of hope. “Madame, I have set myself the task of changing Questioner’s mind. If I fail, keep in your minds that Kaorugi does not want mankind departed from its world, and Kaorugi is capable of much we do not understand.”
He dropped a kiss on each forehead and took himself off.
“You’ll miss him,” said D’Jevier.
“We both will,” said Madame. “And I’m so glad the Fauxi-dizalonz fixed his face. But think, Jewy, what he said!”
“About Kaorugi?”
“The last few nights, I’ve found myself dreaming about him—not sexually—and in the dream he was pointing into the distance and calling, There, there it is, Madame.’ I was sure he was pointing to the Fauxi-dizalonz. And what he said just now … Do you think Bofusdiaga would let us? Some of us? Even … all of us?”
“If we are to have no mankind future, you mean? Oh, yes, Madame. I’ve thought of that, too. Could we become? As Mouche has become? Do you suppose the Corojum would ask on our behalf?”
They thought about this, with emotions that ranged moment to moment from revulsion and apprehension to wonderment and hope.
Corojum, speaking, so he said, for Bofusdiaga, had suggested that Questioner transport a quantity of previously unknown Newholme botanicals to test the market among the populated worlds. One or another entity of Dosha seemed to be determined to maintain contact with the outside worlds, though whether this was Bofusdiaga or Kaorugi itself or some new, commercial subentity, Questioner wasn’t sure.
Whichever, rather than attempting to deal with the cargo, the captain of The Quest ran true to form by tendering his resignation. “My aunt is the delegate from Caphalonia!” he said. “She wouldn’t have obtained an office for me on a cargo ship!”
“Quite right,” Questioner had said. “Beneath your dignity. There’s a freighter arriving tomorrow. I’ll send you home with my entourage.”
“But,” said the captain.
“Not at all, not at all,” Questioner boomed. “Don’t thank me. Glad to do it.”
The Gablian commander was immediately promoted to captain. Ornery had learned a good deal about cargo in her years as a sailor, and she offered to help the Gablian crew stow the bales and cartons.
Calvy had been so deeply depressed by the Questioner’s decision to sterilize mankind upon Newholme that he went into a funk every time he saw his children. Trying to raise his spirits, his wife suggested a visit to the extraordinary caves west of Naibah, and Ellin and Bao were invited to go along.
Thus for a time everyone was busy and occupied except Questioner and Mouche. Mouche wasted no time in asking Questioner to dine with him. He had an agenda, a very specific agenda, which he and Flowing Green had arrived at.
The two met in the side room of a cafe in Sendoph, where they enjoyed a very good early dinner, sipped a little not bad Newholmian wine, and agreed to spend the early evening playing a few hands of Gablian poker. As Mouche had arranged, the room was empty except for themselves, though the walls were no doubt full of eyes and ears, a hundred tattletales ready to run to Bofusdiaga at a moment’s notice.