“Yes, well,” she said aloud. She decided to get up after all; now that she was back in the world outside her own head, she realized that she really ought to move. “I’ve found John Tsetzes in the guest book, that was easy enough.”
She gestured to the leather-bound volume on the table she’d had brought in. Finding the page hadn’t been as easy as she implied—well, it wouldn’t have been easy for somebody else. The ink and the pages—which were some sort of leather, perhaps fish bladder—had turned an identical sepia tone in the sixty-one standard years since they’d been created. She’d scanned the sheets into her data unit, sharpened the contrast, and then let the processor do the sorting, managing the job in a reasonable hour or so.
In place of the original muted lighting, a battery-powered lantern which Hogg had found for her flooded the room with hard illumination. He said it came off the bow of a fishing vessel where it’d been used as a night lure. Pansuela winced, though whether from the glare or the disorder it threw into high relief Adele couldn’t judge.
“He signed using the name Ion Porphyrogenitus, commanding the yacht Nicator,” she explained, “but the timing was right and he gave his homeworld as Novy Sverdlovsk. Since then I’ve been looking for your uncle’s catalogue of the collection, hoping that there’ll be some reference to provenance as well—at least for the accessions within his own lifetime. Your Uncle Manuel would’ve been an adult sixty-one years ago, wouldn’t he?”
Pansuela rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. “What?” he said. “Yes, I suppose so. In his thirties, I believe.”
He scanned the room; it was emptier than it’d probably been in a generation but it was a jumble by any reasonable standards. Pansuela swivelled—he still stood in the doorway—and looked down the hall in both directions and returned his attention to Adele.
“I wonder,” he said unexpectedly, “what might have happened if I’d grown up differently. If I’d gone off-planet, I mean. I almost did, when I was eighteen. A Kostroman merchantman landed. They’d been damaged in a fight with pirates and needed repair. They’d lost some crew as well. The captain stayed with us while they were fitting new antennas. He offered to take me as a trainee officer.”
Adele looked at Pansuela and tried to imagine him as a spacer, as a starship officer. She shook her head unconsciously. He had the intelligence and probably the education, but with the best will in the world she couldn’t pretend he had a backbone. Though perhaps the drugs had leached it out of him. . . .
Pansuela gave her a bitter smile. “Do you ever wonder how things might have been different in your life, mistress?” he said.
How much did he know about her? And of course the answer was, “Nothing whatever.”
“No, I do not,” Adele said, bending backwards to loosen muscles that’d tightened during the past several hours of her hunching forward. “There was one major . . . crux point, I suppose you could call it, in my life. Occasionally I wonder what it would’ve been like had that developed otherwise—”
Had the Mundys and all their close associates not been slaughtered in the Proscriptions which she’d escaped by being off Cinnabar at the time.
“—but I find it’s like trying to look through a brick wall. It’s a completely pointless exercise, so I don’t do it.”
Adele cleared her throat and glanced down at the pile she’d been working through. She said, “Well, I’d better get back—”
Somebody shouted in mad fury, his voice echoing down the hallway like the roar of a balked predator. Metal hammered on wood.
“What on—” Pansuela said.
A heavy electromotive pistol cracked. The slug hit metal with a bell note and the splintering of wood.
“That’s from the guest wing!” Pansuela said. His mouth dropped open. The servants in the hallway had exchanged brief glances and vanished in the opposite direction from the shooting.
Adele stepped to the doorway. Her left hand was in her pocket.
* * *
Daniel had eaten well, drunk very well, and thereafter exercised with an enthusiasm appropriate to a fit young man who took pride in good workmanship. Even so the first shouting brought him to his feet out of a dreamless sleep. He didn’t know what was going on or even where he was, but he knew something was wrong and that made it the business of Lieutenant Daniel Leary.