Adele started down the spiral stairs at a brisk pace. She slowed when she reached a pair of clerks descending in leisure as they talked. Kostromans were a cheerfully voluble people, who made broad arm gestures in conversation. Adele wasn’t in so great a hurry that she needed to make a point of getting around these two.
She’d almost objected to Woetjans calling her a Cinnabar citizen. On reflection, Woetjans’s assumption was probably true. The Edict of Reconciliation had restored citizenship rights to survivors of those proscribed, and Adele had never been listed by name anyway. As an adult member of the Mundys of Chatsworth she would have been fair game, but no one could honestly claim Adele had any involvement in general politics let alone with the Three Circles Conspiracy.
She went around the clerks at the bottom of the stairs and picked her way through the loungers and passersby in the main entryway. Kostroman tempers were as noisily enthusiastic as their expressions of undying friendship. Neither could be expected to last. Very different from Cinnabar, where emotions were weapons as unyielding as steel.
She’d heard the Kostromans described as flighty, mercurial. True enough, she supposed. Until humans became saints, though, the alternative was cold, murderous ruthlessness of the sort that had wiped the Mundys from the face of Cinnabar.
Woetjans said the Kostromans were good spacers. In that at least they and the folk of Cinnabar had matters in common.
Adele entered the garden. The sunlight was a subconscious surprise. The ranks of shelves, now filling with roughly sorted books, reduced light from the library windows to a fraction of what was needed. To install the new lighting the sailors had run an additional line from the power room in the palace subbasement. Woetjans had explained that though the fusion plant had sufficient capacity, the building’s wiring would fry like bacon.
Citizen of the Republic of Cinnabar . . .
A starship was landing in the harbor. Quite a large one. A transport, she supposed. Daniel Leary would be able to identify the vessel by class and perhaps by name.
A nurse pushed a stroller down the path. Two more children were tied to her waist by leashes; the older of them was no more than four. They tugged in opposite directions, shouting to call the nurse’s attention to individual birds or flowers. A male minder with a metal-shod baton and swirling mustaches swaggered behind the group, puffing out his chest and bowing to every woman he passed.
Adele had never returned to Cinnabar. At first her presence would merely have added another name to the roster of victims. After the Edict of Reconciliation was passed, disgust kept her away.
Besides, it was bad enough to be poor in a foreign land. She had no intention of starving before the eyes of those who would have called her a friend in the days before the Proscriptions. The Senate had confirmed a cousin on her mother’s side as owner of Chatsworth, she’d heard.
Adele entered the hedged enclosure. It was empty. She heard the sound of a man playing a guitar and singing nearby.
“Good morning, mistress,” said Markos’s aide behind her. Adele turned. The pale woman had her usual half-smile; not so much superior, as Adele had first thought, but appraising.
“Here,” Adele said, holding out the data chip in the middle of her right palm. She didn’t care who saw her. She wasn’t a spy; they couldn’t force her to act like one.
Fingertips brushed her hand, lifting away the chip. “Good day, mistress,” the aide said.
The aide walked toward the garden’s rear entrance, passing other strollers without seeming to be moving quickly. She was nondescript even in her bright clothing; a person whose presence and absence were equally unremarkable. A person who didn’t seem to exist as a human being.
Adele Mundy returned to the palace. She wondered whether she herself had any more existence than a data console did.
Daniel Leary, whistling snatches of the contredanse which had ended the Admiral’s Ball, entered the library and stared in pleased astonishment. “Say!” he said. “They are coming along. And the lighting’s up, I see.”
“Yes, or you wouldn’t see,” Adele said, coming from the half of the big room which wasn’t already filled with shelving. She held a pair of loose-leaf binders covered in the hide of something scaly. “Your crew has been indispensable, Daniel. Which is not to denigrate the contribution—”