She nodded toward the street.
“—interesting as a window on my new environment. Yes, I’ll go with you if you’d care to have me.”
Daniel grinned in what she judged was both pleasure and relief. “Good, good,” he said, bobbing his head as he spoke. “Now, I’ve got a jitney and there’s Hogg to drive. Shall I pick you up at your lodgings at, say, the ninth hour local time?”
His lips pursed in consideration before Adele could speak. “Hogg has the jitney, actually. But he’ll drive us.”
Adele thought about her apartment and the narrow, trash-strewn street the building stood on. Not that she needed to apologize for them to a lieutenant in debt to his servant, but . . . “No,” she said aloud. “Why don’t we meet at the back entrance to the palace gardens? At the guardpost.”
“My hand on it!” said Daniel Leary.
As they shook, the Princess Cecile loosed another salvo of fireworks. The explosions sounded like a distant battle.
Adele Mundy sat at the library data console. The information she’d accessed shone in holographic letters in the air before her, all the brighter because the sky beyond the windows ranged from deep azure to deep magenta in the northwest. For the moment her eyes were closed.
A cleaning crew worked in the hallway, calling to one another in the high singsong dialect of one of the northern islands. Bottles clinked together under the thrust of brooms. The palace was the site of the Elector’s Cotillion, the most prestigious of the scores of Founder’s Day events. There was no holiday for the cleaners who had to sweep up the leavings of the crowds who’d been watching the parade from here.
Daniel had gone off to dress. Adele needed to do the same thing very shortly. As for the information on the air-formed display . . .
She’d told Daniel that she preferred her personal unit to the large console. That was true, but in this case she’d deliberately transferred data to the library computer to keep from subconsciously associating the words with her own equipment.
Adele opened her eyes and read the account for the first time in more than a decade. A Terran trade commissioner on Cinnabar at the time of the Three Circles Conspiracy had made a report on the events. The Academic Collections had received it in the normal course of accessions. Adele had stumbled across it by accident.
One of the most touching tragedies was that of a ten-year-old child, Agatha Mundy. She was at the home of a playfellow, a cousin on her mother’s side, on the afternoon the proscriptions were announced. Her aunt, the younger sister of Agatha’s mother, immediately rushed the child onto the street and told her to run away. The girl’s attendant and guards abandoned her, to seek their own safety in flight.
The house from which Agatha was expelled was on the outskirts of Xenos but near a main road. The child appears to have wandered along the road for hours, perhaps as much as a day, before she was picked up by a trucker of bad reputation. This man sold the girl to a tavern and brothel near the main civil spaceport. There she remained for a week.
In misery and desperation the child finally accosted a pair of sergeants in the Land Forces of the Republic who frequented the tavern, explaining who she was. One of the soldiers throttled her and then cut the child’s head off with a knife borrowed from the tavern’s kitchen. The sergeants turned the head in to the Public Safety Office, claiming the bounty. The Office paid only half the usual amount because the child was well below the minimum age set in the Decree of Proscription.
Adele rubbed her temples, then deliberately overwrote the file so that no one on Kostroma would ever be able to read it again. Not that anyone would care. In all the human universe, Adele Mundy might be the only person to whom those were more than words.
She often told herself that she didn’t care. Life would be so much easier if that were true. Caring didn’t change the past, nor did it chart a course for the future. Only a fool could think that she understood all the side effects of her actions.