“Yes, all right,” Adele said. She couldn’t lift the folio down herself without a ladder, but she wasn’t likely to need to. Vanness could reach it. . . .
Leary walked to the piled boxes, stepping over and around other stacks with an ease that Adele envied. Part of being in the navy, she supposed. Certainly the starships on which she’d travelled, even the luxury liner that took her from Cinnabar to Blythe, had been cramped. Warships were probably worse.
Leary raised the folio over his head, holding it at the balance. He put the book squarely on top of the pile without rubbing the cover on the wood as she’d feared.
“The reason I asked if you’d heard of my uncle,” he said as he concentrated on his task, “is that you’ve a Cinnabar accent yourself. Uncle Stacey had a dozen species named after him by the academics who described specimens he brought back home.”
Adele felt her lips tighten. She’d known there was a Cinnabar naval delegation on Kostroma. One of Mistress Bozeman’s excuses for delay was her need to refit the wardrobes in the suite assigned to the guests.
In an even tone Adele said, “I was born on Cinnabar, but I haven’t lived there in a very long time. I prefer to think of myself as a citizen of the galaxy.”
Leary nodded pleasantly and stepped back from the boxes. “That was my Uncle Stacey too,” he said. “Not that he isn’t a patriot, and no one ever mistook him for a coward either. He didn’t push to get a combat posting, even though he knew as well as anybody that a few battle stars are the surest route to promotion.”
He shook his head and laughed. “If I’m ever half the astrogator my uncle is, I’ll be proud,” he continued. “But this—”
He pinched the breast of his gray uniform, beneath the single drab medal ribbon.
“—is the Republic of Cinnabar Navy, after all. I guess I’m as fit to fight my country’s enemies as the next fellow, and if I get promoted for it—”
His smile lit the room.
“—well, that’s fine with me too.”
Adele didn’t laugh with Leary, but she felt her lips twisting in a grin. He seemed very young. The chances were his attitude would seem young to a person like Adele Mundy even if he were fifty years her senior. Leary’s enthusiasm was infectious, though, and he knew something about books.
She squirmed to the logbooks Vanness had unpacked earlier in the morning. “You might be interested in these,” she said, lifting the top one and opening the metal cover. The sheets within were handwritten and for the most part limited to dates and numbers. “They’re hardcopy logs of pre-Hiatus vessels. So far as I know—”
And no one but Mistress Boileau herself might know better.
“—no electronic media as old as them survive. Because this ship’s officers backed up their computer logs with old-fashioned holograph, we still have a record of the voyages.”
Leary took the log with a reverence due its age—though in fact the nickel-steel case by which he handled it was about as sturdy as the palace’s walls. He turned the first page at an angle to the light and read, “San Juan de Ulloa, out of Montevideo. A vessel from Earth herself, mistress, and here we hold it in our hands.”
His grin broadened. “Space will teach you something about not trusting equipment no matter how often you’ve checked it, that’s the truth,” he added. “If you survive, that is.”
“I apologize for the condition of the collection,” Adele said bitterly as Leary scanned sheets one at a time. They’d been filled out loose, then clamped between the covers. “I only arrived three weeks ago, but frankly unless I find a way to get real workmen instead of artists too good to throw up simple shelves, I don’t see that the situation will have changed in three years.”
A sort of smile—not a pleasant sort—quirked the corner of Adele’s tight mouth. “Though of course I won’t be here myself,” she said. “I’ll probably have been executed for murdering a master carpenter, or whatever they do to murderers here.”