Adele returned the goggles and slid her personal data unit from its pocket. She sniffed in amusement at the qualm she’d felt at bringing it out: she was even more afraid of dropping the computer than she was of falling.
Using the wands that she preferred to the virtual keyboard, she linked to the base unit in the library below and went searching. The bright sun made her think she should have worn a hat, but she wasn’t sure she owned one that would have stayed on in the breeze here on the tiles.
Martial music began to play, its strains severely attenuated by the time they reached Adele’s ears. “The float’s in front of the grandstand now,” Daniel explained with the goggles over his eyes again. He didn’t ask what she was doing. “Eight people have gotten out—they can’t have had much more room than they would’ve in a real starship. Especially a slowboat. One of them’s claiming the planet, I gather.”
“Just as I thought!” Adele said in triumph. All her fear had vanished since she got to work with the data unit. “The first reference to Captain Wang is in a post-Hiatus history of the Swartzenhild clan. That claims that Adria Swartzenhild was Wang’s navigator and responsible for bringing the ship safely to Kostroma when the original calculations would have taken them past the system and into the eternal dark.”
“Huh!” Daniel said, turning his head toward her. She supposed the goggles adjusted for nearby objects otherwise he was staring into one of her nasal pores—but it still made him look like a frog. “So that means there was an early colony after all.”
“No, it means there wasn’t,” Adele said in satisfaction. “If the earliest reference is only three hundred years back and in a self-serving source, there’s no evidence whatever. All the later references repeat the Swartzenhild account with embellishments and sometimes name changes.”
She smiled. “Changes to the name of whoever’s telling the story, that is.”
A frown furrowed Daniel’s forehead as he turned back to the tableau. “Simone Hajas is saving Captain Wang from a mutiny,” he reported as figures shifted in front of the grandstand. “Look—”
He raised his goggles to meet Adele’s eyes. “So you mean the story couldn’t be true because it happened to the person telling it? Her family, I mean.”
“No,” Adele said. “I mean that if there’s no record of the story for sixteen hundred years, and if the person who discovers the information is employed by the Swartzenhilds, who have risen from obscurity to trading wealth in less than a generation—both of which are the case—then the balance of the probabilities are that the story is an invention.”
Her smile was cold. A finger-high plant grew from a joint in the roof tiles where windblown dirt had given it lodgment. Adele twisted off the dry head.
“The probability of it being false,” she continued, “is about the same that this seed will fall if I throw it over the side.”
She leaned over the gutter and dropped the bit of plant. It fluttered away toward the ground.
In sudden embarrassment she added, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—”
Daniel broke into bellowing laughter. He slapped her on the back and cried, “Fair enough! You won’t tell me how to rig a ship for the Matrix and I won’t argue with you about history!”
“Well, it’s not so much history as information,” Adele muttered. “The first question is always whether the person who says something can know the truth. This time the answer was, `Not really.’ ”
Daniel passed her the goggles again. Though the image through the electronic amplifier was sharp, Adele couldn’t hold it steady enough to be of much use. For politeness’s sake she watched the end of the skit before she handed them back.
The actors climbed back into the globular float. It rolled down Fountain Street in a haze of recorded music.
The next event was a group of people in checked robes, led by a lyre-shaped metal standard from which ribbons dangled. The legend stamped on the bars of the lyre couldn’t be read from this angle, but they were obviously some guild or other.