Star Song and Other Stories Part 23

The meal Suzenne had promised, consisting of a buffet of cold meats, cheeses, fish, bread, and fruit, had been laid out in the common area of the suite we'd been booked into. I wolfed down just enough to quiet the rumblings in my stomach and then went in search of my bed. My room was quiet and dark, the bed large and comfortably firm, and I was asleep almost before the blankets settled down around me.

I awoke to sunlight streaming in through a gap in the curtains and a smell of roast chicken in the air that reminded my stomach that the previous night's meal hadn't been much more than a gastronomic promissory note. Throwing on yesterday's clothes, I made a quick trip to the attached bathroom and headed out into the common area.

The remains of another buffet were on the side board where the evening meal had been laid out, with a short stack of used plates on a tray near the door.

Over at the window, sitting across from each other at the long dining table, were Rhonda and Suzenne. A sampling of Rhonda's beadwork was spread out on the table between them.

"About time," Rhonda commented as I stepped into the room. "The rest of us have been up for a couple of hours now."

"I had more sleep to catch up on than the rest of you," I reminded her as I snagged a clean plate and started stacking it with food. "I was the one who spent most of the past two nights sitting up with sick paperwork, remember?"

"Sick paperwork?" Suzenne asked, frowning.

"We had some strange problems at the Angorki s.p.a.ceport," Rhonda explained.

"Lost or fouled-up permits and such. It took a couple of days to get it all straightened out."

"Just as well it did, I suppose," I commented, picking up a set of flatware and taking my breakfast over to the table. "If we hadn't been delayed, Scholar Kulasawa would have had to find some other transport." I gestured out the window. "And then we'd have missed seeing all this."

"Yes," Suzenne murmured, dropping her eyes to the beadwork.

I nodded toward the beads. "Working on a new customer, I see."

"I beg your pardon," Rhonda said, mock-annoyed. "I am not working a new customer; I'm partic.i.p.ating in a cultural exchange."

"We don't have these here," Suzenne said, fingering one of the earrings.

"I've never even seen anything like it, even in our archives."

"I'm sure it's there," Rhonda said. "It's a pretty ancient art form, but its popularity does rise and fall."

"Whatever its heritage, it's beautiful," Suzenne said. "I'm sure you'll be able to sell a lot of these pieces here if you want to. You could probably teach cla.s.ses, too."

"I doubt we'll be here long enough for that," I warned. "Where's everybody else, by the way?"

"They're all outside looking around," Rhonda said. "Jimmy went to find where the music was coming from-"

"Music?" I echoed, frowning.

She nodded. "You can't hear it very well in here, but it's quite audible if you step outside. Beautiful, but very alien."

"We write most of our own music here," Suzenne said. "We play it as a service to-" Her lips compressed briefly. "Well, we can talk about that later."

"Bilko's out, too," Rhonda continued. "He said he was going to hunt down a card game."

I made a face. "Well, good luck to him," I said. "I'll bet the Sergei Rock to his lucky deck he won't find a game that'll take Expansion neumarks."

"No, we're still using the First Citizens' supply of Jovian dollars," Suzenne said. "But he took one of the credit slips with him, and he'll be able to exchange that for the coins."

I felt my jaw drop a few millimeters. "One of the credit slips for our cargo?"

I demanded, looking at Rhonda. "And you let him?"

She returned my glare evenly. "It was his share of the money," she pointed out.

"Besides, he usually makes a profit on these games of his."

"Usually antagonizing the local populace in the process," I pointed out darkly.

"And this is one place you do not want to get run out of town."

"I'm sure he'll be fine," Suzenne soothed me. "And just for the record, we don't run troublemakers out of town. We have a proper prison, though it's fortunately not used very much."

"I see," I said, peering past her out the window. The room faced east, toward the end we'd come in from; and blamed if it didn't look like real mountains over there. "You know, this chamber looks pretty big, but if I remember the numbers you gave us there's still a lot of the asteroid unaccounted for. What do you do with the rest of it?"

"All around the main chamber, beneath our feet, is the bulk of our recycling equipment," Suzenne said. "Of course, that takes up only a fraction of the kilometer or so of stone between us and the outside, so there's still plenty of structural strength and radiation protection. At the aft end of the asteroid are the fusion generators and ion-capture engines, along with the hydrogen-scooping equipment to fuel them. The designers also left a fair amount of s.p.a.ce completely untouched for our future needs. We've dug into some of that to get materials for new buildings and to replace the inevitable losses in the recycling system."

She smiled. "And since we had to dig anyway, we went ahead and fas.h.i.+oned the resulting holes into a series of caves. It provides a little recreation for our resident spelunkers."

"You think of everything, don't you?" I said, shaking my head in admiration.

"I.

wish the leaders of the Expansion were this competent."

Suzenne shrugged. "We're flattered, of course, but you have to realize it's not a fair comparison. With a population still under half a million people, we're more like a small city than we are a nation, let alone an entire world.

Government on this scale is nearly always more efficient."

"You haven't asked about Kulasawa," Rhonda spoke up.

I hadn't asked about Kulasawa because I frankly didn't care where she was.

But there was something in Rhonda's expression... "Okay, I'll bite," I said.

"What about Kulasawa?"

Rhonda gestured to Suzenne. "Why don't you tell him?" she invited.

"It's not all that mysterious," Suzenne shrugged. "She was up early asking permission to set up her recorders around the colony, that's all."

I frowned. "Recorders?"

"Those large flat panels," Suzenne amplified. "They were stacked together inside two of the crates we brought over from your transport."

The equipment Kulasawa had told me was a set of sonic deep-probes. "Ah," I said.

"And what did you tell her?""Actually, we thought it was a good idea," Suzenne said. "We have a lot of unified records from the first few years of the voyage, but nothing very organized after that. She agreed to give us copies we could edit into a true-time doc.u.mentary, and so we let her go."

"They also lent her a driver and a couple of helpers," Rhonda put in. "She's been gone-how long?"

"Not quite three hours," Suzenne said, consulting her watch. "I'm hoping she'll be done before your meeting with King Peter."

"And when is that exactly?" I asked, suddenly aware of my grubby and unshowered state.

"I've set it up for two hours from now," Suzenne said. "Will that give you enough time to prepare?"

"Oh, sure," I said, digging an oddly shaped fork into a sculpted piece of melon.

"I wonder if you could get my carrybag in from the Sergei Rock, though-this uniform is getting a little rank."

"Our luggage has already been delivered," Rhonda told me. That odd look, I noted uneasily, was still on her face. "They're in the closet over there."

"And I'd better get out of your way," Suzenne added, pus.h.i.+ng her chair back and standing up. "If there's anything else you need, there's a phone on the table over there. Just punch the call b.u.t.ton and give my name-Suzenne Enderly-and they'll connect us."

"Thank you," I said.

"I'll be back in a little under two hours to escort you to the Palace," she said, walking toward the door. "Until then, if you get ready early, feel free to look around the city. Just be sure to take the phone with you."

She left, closing the door behind her. "An audience with a real king," I commented, stuffing a bite of chicken in my mouth. "Something I've wanted to do since I was a kid. Too bad his name couldn't have been Arthur."

"Too bad," Rhonda agreed, her voice neutral, her expression gone from odd to flat-out accusing as she stared hard at me. "All right, Jake, let's hear it."

"Let's hear what?"

"The reason you didn't tell her that Kulasawa's gadgets aren't recorders,"

she said. "Or had you forgotten she told us they were sonic deep-probes?"

"Who says they're not recorders, too?" I asked. "They could be both probes and recorders."

"Or they could be something else entirely," she countered. "The point is that she's either lying to Suzenne or else she lied to us. And you didn't blow the whistle on her."

"Neither did you," I shot back. "If you're so worried about it, why didn't you say something?"

"Because I was waiting for your lead," she said. "And because I wanted to see just how strong a hold Kulasawa has on you."

I jabbed my fork viciously into my fruit cup, splattering a few drops of juice onto the plate. "She hasn't got any hold on me," I insisted.

"My mistake," Rhonda said. "It's not her, it's the seventy thousand neumarks."

I glared at her, my hand squeezing the fork hard, wanting to tell her it was none of her d.a.m.n business.

But I couldn't. And she obviously could read that in my face. "This is me you're talking to, Jake," she said quietly. "We've been flying together for over

three.

years now. If something's wrong, isn't it time you told me what it was?"

I closed my eyes, exhaling my anger with a chest-aching sigh. "I'm in something of an awkward situation," I said, the words feeling like ground gla.s.s in my mouth. "Five years ago... well, let's just say it: I stole some money from the Transs.h.i.+pMint Corporation."

Her eyes widened, just enough to make the admission hurt that much more.

"You?"

she asked disbelievingly.

"Yes, me," I growled. "Why, is that so hard to believe?"

"Frankly, yes," she said. "You're the one who's always so bra.s.s-b.u.t.ted about following the rules." She waved a hand as if to erase that. "Sorry-I didn't mean it that way."

"Yes, you did," I said. "I don't suppose it ever occurred to you that there might be a reason why I was always so strict? Like a metric ton of guilt, maybe?"

She grimaced. "I guess that never occurred to me," she conceded. "So what happened?"

I shrugged uncomfortably. "Like I said, I stole some money. Oh, I rationalized it-told myself I need some new equipment for my transport, that if I invested it in this surefire deal I was being offered I could get what I wanted and still pay the company back out of my profits. But the bottom line is, I stole it."

"How much?"

"A lot," I told her. "Two hundred thousand neumarks."

Her eyes went even wider this time. "Oh, Jake."

"Oh Jake and a half," I agreed ruefully. "You can guess the rest: the sure-fire deal went sour and I lost the whole wad."

She winced. "What did they do to you?"

"Strangely enough, they didn't seem to notice the loss," I said. "Or maybe they did but couldn't figure out where it had gone. I thought maybe I'd gotten away with it, at least from a legal standpoint, though I knew I was going to have to pay them back."

"All two hundred thousand?"

"Every last pfennig," I said. "Why do you think you haven't gotten me to spring for new engines yet? Every half-neumark of profit I've made for the past five years has gone into a special account I've got stashed away on Earth. I figured I'd wait until the statute of limitations was up, just in case, and then send them the money along with an explanation and confession. Anonymous, of course."

"So what went wrong?"

I looked out the window at the distant pseudo-mountains. "About a month ago a Transs.h.i.+pMint agent contacted me," I said. "He said they'd figured it out, and were going to press charges unless I could pay back all the money by the end of the month."

"My G.o.d," she breathed. "What did you do?"

"Begged and pleaded another month out of them." I shook my head. "Buteverything else I've tried has come up dry."