She is highly intelligent, possesses an extensive cybemet, and has at her call a variety of agents. About many of these we have only intimations, no knowledge of identity, location, or function.
Lately our watch program over her communications detected a message to a spacer in the asteroids, bidding him come to her immediately. (Not knowing precisely where he was, she could not beam it quantum encrypted. Nor would he likely have had equipment to decode it.) She may not be aware that we are monitoring. If she is, she doubtless means to pass this off as involving some service he can do her which is no affair of the government’s.
But the matter is almost certainly not trivial. This lan Kenmuir is an Earthman in the service of the Venture. His one distinction is that he has been her guest in Zamok Vysoki, and probably her lover. (That was not publicized in any way. Although Lunarians seldom like being in the public eye, they also seldom make any effort to conceal such doings, being indifferent to gossip or contemptuous of it.) His very obscurity may well recommend him to her for her purposes.
Or he may have knowledge, or access to knowledge, that she wants. Those researches of hers are aimed at deep space. Very deep space.
I propose to visit her.
I have a pretext prepared. The odds are that she does not know that we know of her quiet inquiries. The order to monitor her came from high in the cybercosm— perhaps from the Teramind itself, when it observed those questions being asked and foresaw where the answers would lead.
She must know that agents of the Peace Authority have called on associates of hers. It would appear strange if none talked also with her. I do not expect to discover much, if anything. Yet … I am a synnoiont.
GO, THEN, the system of which he was a part told him.
That oneness died away. The huntsman removed himself from the net.
For a while he lay quiescent. Nothing felt real. The facts and the decision were in him but he could not remember them other than as fading wisps of a dream. The physical world seemed flat and grotesque, his body a foreigner.
The sense of loss passed, and he was human again. Hunger and thirst nudged him to his feet. “Put me in touch with the lady Lilisaire,” he directed the sophotect, and went to get his nutrition.
It was minimal. He could savor good food and drink, if the amounts were moderate, but not when on the trail.
Afterward he relaxed at the vivifer. The show he summoned was a comedy set in the New Delhi of Nehru. He did not set the speech converter, Indi was among his languages. The story was shallow and not especially believable—although he admitted to himself he had scant rapport with low-tech societies, today or in the past—but sight, sound, scent, tactility were well done. To have a more lifelike experience, he would have had to get into a quivira.
A bell tone pulled him from it. So soon? He had been resigned to waiting hours before the system located Lilisaire and persuaded her to give audience to a constable.
He hastened to the eidophone. Her image met him, vivid as fire. He saw, above a long neck, a face nearly classic save for the high cheekbones, peculiar ears with blinking stardrops in the lobes, gold-flecked sea-green of the big oblique eyes, flared nostrils, wide mouth where smiles and snarls might follow each other like sun and hailwind. Startling against blue-veined white skin was the hair, auburn threaded with flame-red, swept up from her brow and falling halfway down her back. He knew from recordings that she was as tall as he, slender, long-legged, firm in the breasts and rounded in the hips. He saw a lustrous cheong-sam, a headband patterned on the DNA molecule, and hardly a trace of her fifty-odd years. Medical programs accounted for only a part of that, he knew. With Lunarian chromosomes, she might reach a fourth again of his projected 120.
If they both survived.