Tessa bit her lip. At last, not meeting his shielded gaze, she said, “I’m nay wise of any such plots, Captain. I won’t speak ‘loud ‘gainst your Empire-my thoughts are my own, but it’s true we’ve nay suffered much more than a resident and some taxes—”
“Which were doubtless higher when every nation maintained its own defenses,” said Flandry. “Yes, we settle for a single man on worlds like this. We’d actually like to have more, because enough police could smell out trouble before it’s grown too big, and could stop the grosser barbarities left over from independent days—”
Again she bristled. He said in a hurry: “No, please, for once that’s not meant to irritate. By and large, Nyanza looks as if it’s always been quite a humane place. If you don’t use all the latest technological gimcrackery, it’s because it’s nonfunctional in this culture, not because you’ve forgotten what your ancestors knew. I’m just enough of a jackleg engineer to see that these weird-looking sails of yours are aerodynamic marvels; I’m certain that paraboloidal jib uses the Venturi effect with malice aforethought. Your language is grammatically archaic but semantically efficient. I can envision some of the bucolic poets at court going into raptures over your way of life. And getting seasick if they tried it, but that’s another story… Therefore,” he finished soberly, “I’m afraid I’m a little more sympathetic to Hurri Chundra Bannerji, who fussed about and established extrasystemic employment contacts for your more ambitious young men and built breakwaters and ordered vaccines and was never admitted to your clubs, than I am sorry for you.”
She looked over the side, into curling white and purple water, and said very low, “The Empire was nay asked here.”
“Neither was anyone else. The Terran Empire established itself in this region first. The Merseian Empire would be a rather more demanding master-if only because it’s still vigorous, expansive, virtuous, and generally uncorrupted, while Terra is the easygoing opposite.” That brought her up sharply in astonishment, as he had expected. “Since the Empire must protect its frontiers, lest Terra herself be clobbered out of the sky, we’re going to stay. It would not be advisable for some young Nyanzan firebrains to try harpooning space dreadnaughts. Anyone who provokes such gallant idiocy is an enemy of yours as well as mine.”
Her eyes were moody upon his. After a long time she asked him, “Captain, have you ever swum undersea?”
“I’ve done a little skindiving for fun,” he said, taken aback. He had spoken half honestly and half meretriciously, never quite sure which sentence was one or another, and thought he had touched the proper keys. But this surprised him.
“Nay more? And you stand all ‘lone on a world that’s aloof of you where it doesn’t, perchance, scheme murder? Captain, I repent me what I said ‘bout your folk being Lubbers.”
The relief was like a wave of weakness. Flandry sucked in his cheeks around his cigarette and answered lightly: “They cannot do worse than shoot me, which would distress only my tailor and my vintner. Have you ever heard that the coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once?”
“Aye.”
“Well, after the 857th death I got bored with it.”
She laughed and he continued a line of banter, so habitual by now that most of him thought on other affairs. Not that he seriously expected the Lightmistress of Little Skua to become bodily accessible to him; he had gathered an impression of a chaste folk. But the several days’ voyage to Jairnovaunt could be made very pleasant by a small shipboard flirtation, and he would learn a great deal more than if his fellow voyagers were hostile. For instance, whether the imported wine he had noticed in the galley was preferable to native sea-berry gin. He had not been truthful in claiming indifference whether he lived or died: not while a supple young woman stood clad in sunlight, and blooded horses stamped on the ringing plains of Ilion, and smoke curled fragrant about coffee and cognac on Terra. But half the pleasure came from these things being staked against darkness.
IV
A tide was flowing when they reached Jairnovaunt, and all the rocks, and the housings upon them, were meters under the surface. The Hoorn ship steered a way between pennant-gay buoys to one of the anchored floating docks. There swarmed the sea people, snorting like porpoises among moored hulls or up like squirrels in tall masts. Fish were being unloaded and sails repaired and engines overhauled, somewhere a flute and a drum underlay a hundred deep voices chanting Way-o as bare feet stamped out a rigadoon. Flandry noticed how silence spread ripple-fashion from the sight of him. But he followed Tessa overboard as soon as her vessel was secured.
No Nyanzan was ever far from his aqualung. They seemed to have developed a more advanced model here than any Flandry had seen elsewhere: a transparent helmet and a small capacitance-battery device worn on the back, which electrolyzed oxygen directly from the water and added enough helium from a high-compression tank to dilute. By regulating the partial pressures of the gases, one could go quite deep.
This was only a short swim, as casual as a Terran’s stroll across the bridgeway. Slanting through clear greenish coolth, Flandry saw that Jairnovaunt was large-sunken domes and towers gleamed farther than his vision reached. Work went on: a cargo submarine, with a score of human midges flitting about it, discharged kelpite bales into a warehouse tube. But there were also children darting among the eerie spires and grottos of a coraloid park, an old man scattered seeds for a school of brilliant-striped little fish, a boy and a girl swam hand in hand through voiceless wonder.
When he reached the long white hall of the Commander, Jairnovaunt’s hereditary chief executive, Flandry was still so bemused by the waving, fronded formal gardens that he scarcely noticed how graceful the portico was. Even the airlock which admitted him blended into the overall pattern, a curiously disturbing one to the Terran mind, for it contrasted delicate traceries and brutal masses as if it were the ocean itself.
When the water had been pumped out, an airblast dried them, Flandry’s shimmerite clothes as well as Tessa’s sleek skin. They stepped into a hallway muraled with heroic abstractions.
Beyond two guards bearing the ubiquitous harpoon rifles, and beyond an emergency bulkhead, the passage opened on a great circular chamber lined with malachite pillars under a clear dome. Some twoscore Nyanzans stood about. Their ages seemed to range upward from 20 or so; some wore only a ‘lung, others a light-colored shirt and kilt; all bore dignity like a mantle. Quite a few were women, gowned and plumed if they were clothed at all, but otherwise as free and proud as their men.
Tessa stepped forward and saluted crisply. “The Lightmistress of Little Skua, returning from The Kraal as ordered, sir.”
Commander Inyanduma III was a powerfully built, heavy-faced man with graying woolly hair: his medallion of rank was tattooed, a golden Pole Star bright on his brows. “Be welcome,” he said, “and likewise your guest. He is now ours. I call his name holy.”
The Terran flourished a bow. “An honor, sir. I am Captain Dominic Flandry, Imperial Navy. Lightmistress Hoorn was gracious enough to conduct me here.”
He met the Commander’s eyes steadily, but placed himself so he could watch Tessa on his edge of vision. Inyanduma tipped an almost imperceptible inquiring gesture toward her. She nodded, ever so faintly, and made a short-lived O with thumb and forefinger. I’d already wormed out that she went to The Kraal on official business, remembered Flandry, but she wouldn’t say what and only now will she even admit it succeeded. Too secret to mention on her ship’s radiophone! As human beings, we enjoyed each other’s company, traveling here. But as agents of our kings—?