Adele nodded with her usual neutral expression. Tovera, as pale as something poisonous from under a rock, stood just behind and to the side of her mistress. Daniel had a fleeting vision of the scene when an undertaker’s functionary tried to shunt Adele to the gallery as a person of no account; he grinned broadly.
“Daniel,” Adele said, “Lieutenant Mon’s back with the Princess Cecile and seems in a desperate rush to see you. He’ll be here for the service as soon as he changes into his dress uniform.”
“Ah?” Daniel said, letting his left hand drop to his side. He met Adele’s gaze calmly. She didn’t show emotion as a general rule, but they were good enough friends that he could see when the emotion was present regardless. “I’ll be glad to see him, of course—but what’s wrong?”
Adele cleared her throat. “He says the Sissie is to be sold as excess to RCN requirements,” she said. “I gather it will happen very soon. In a matter of days.”
“Ah,” Daniel said, nodding his understanding. “They must have a buyer, then. I regret the matter, though of course I understand the advantages to the Republic.”
“Of course,” Adele agreed. “I’ll see you after the service, then. Back at the house, I suppose?”
Daniel nodded, though he wasn’t really listening. All he could think of for the moment was the light of the firmament blazing about him as he stood on the deck of his first command—the RCS Princess Cecile.
“Come along, mistress,” Hogg said. “I’ll sit you down in front.”
“I hardly think—” said the chief usher, a severe figure imbued with a mincing, sexless aura of disapproval.
“That’s right, boyo,” Hogg snapped, “you hardly do. Put a sock in it while I take the master’s friend down t’ the best seat in the house!”
Hogg and Mundy disappeared into the nave of the chapel; the chief usher fulminated at an underling.
“Good morning, Captain Churchill,” Daniel said to the next in line, an old man wobbling in the grip of a worried younger relative. Churchill had been a midshipman with Uncle Stacey.
The fabric of the universe distorting around the gleaming prow of the Princess Cecile, under the command of Lieutenant Daniel Leary. . . .
CHAPTER 2
Between wheezes for breath, the undertaker snarled at the troupe of actors wearing death masks of Stacey Bergen’s famous ancestors in the rear yard of the chapel. Adele considered taking out her data unit to determine whether the large, elderly man—tall but definitely overweight besides—was Master Williams proper or the Son. The urge was wholly irrational so she suppressed it, but it would’ve taken her mind off the past and the future; and off death, at least for the moment, which is what it seemed to Adele that the past and future always came down to.
She smiled. She knew other people viewed life differently, though she’d always suspected that they hadn’t analyzed the subject as rigorously as she had.
The undertaker had finally sorted the actors to his satisfaction. The clowns in the initial group started off down the boulevard singing, “Stacey came from the land where they understand . . .”
The females wore caricatures of RCN uniforms and the males were in grotesque drag. Mind, some of the prostitutes Adele had seen plying their trade successfully outside Harbor Three were scarcely less unattractive. The RCN had high standards in many respects, but she’d come to the conclusion it was any port in a storm when it came to sexual relief after a long voyage.
” . . . what it means to fornicate!” sang the clowns to the music of the flutes some of their members played.
The actor playing Commander Bergen was next in the procession, walking ahead of the discreetly motorized bier which a member of the undertaker’s staff guided. Torchbearers, statuesque women in flowing garments, flanked him.
Adele had listened without comment to the discussions Daniel and the widow held as to what age the actor was to portray his uncle. They’d finally decided on the man in his prime forty years ago when he’d just returned from the first of his long exploring voyages in the Beacon. The actor wore mottled gray fatigues with senior lieutenant’s pips on his collar; he walked with a slight limp, miming the result of a fall on a heavy-gravity planet and the spinal injuries which eventually left Stacey confined to a wheelchair.