What in hell was Tanaka going to say about this, though, when the Fleet Admiral called back looking for Romanova a few hours from now as he was scheduled to do? And if she wasn’t going to return to the ship, how was the Matushka planning to avoid being charged with desertion—an offense for which even the Narsatian senior councilor would have difficulty blocking her extradition—as well as with the simpler capital crime of being an accessory to theft?
The Council of Narsai assembled not in an ornate chamber of an official government building, but in a conference room at the university library. That was in keeping with the colony’s traditions, because just about every structure was made to serve as many purposes as it could. Like keeping vehicles which on any other world would have been privately owned in constant, communal use, refusing to give control over public buildings to one organization or another made it possible for Narsatians to conserve more of their lands for agriculture—and to use all of their planet’s other resources with equal efficiency.
Catherine Romanova sat quietly beside her father, in the circle of chairs that was the meeting’s standard structure. Only today that circle was a large one, because the Council’s members had been joined by the Commissioners who ran Narsatian industry (such as it was) and operated Narsai’s commerce and oversaw its professional guilds.
There had never been a combined meeting like this one before, although it had often been proposed. If there had been time to debate its wisdom beforehand, Katy was sure, it would not have been happening now. But Trabe Kourdakov had acted decisively, and so both Councilors and Commissioners were now assembled together in response to his summons.
On Katy’s other side sat a person who had no business to be present at any official proceeding on Narsai, but she had refused to attend without her husband. Since without her this meeting would be pointless, her father had consented; and no one else in the room seemed particularly surprised to see Lincoln Casey.
But then she knew all the others who were present, and during the years since her second marriage they had had time to become accustomed to seeing her with her Morthan spouse. Her own parents were the only Narsatians of any real status who had refused to have anything to do with her after that marriage. Others here had thought less of her for forming this union, some had even had the nerve to chide her because of it; but gradually they had accepted that union’s reality, and at least (as she had heard one of the commissioners saying in supposed confidence to her mother, just before today’s proceedings had begun) Casey was willing to live with his wife on Narsai.
It was odd, how much respect that had gained for him among the members of both groups combining here.
“Are you all right, love?” She sent that thought to her husband now, without turning to look at him. She herself was weary, but except for a couple of naps during the past full standard day—one in the aircar with Johnnie at its helm, the other on a sofa in the captain’s office aboard the Archangel—she had not slept. And would not be sleeping any time soon, from the way this second day of crisis was shaping up.
“I’m fine, Katy.” And he was. She felt all his familiar strength, physical and emotional, and allowed herself to luxuriate for just a moment in that mental embrace before she turned her attention back to the gathering in which she must play her part.
If he hadn’t had a fellow Morthan providing his medical care last night, he would not have been this fortunate. It was unlikely that Casey could have survived his brush with stasis if Marin had not been there, because a non-telepathic doctor might not have realized what was happening to his patient until the situation became irreversible. Katy knew that she was lucky, so very lucky, to have him beside her today at all.
“You know my daughter,” Trabe Kourdakov was saying, addressing the room without bothering to stand. There was no need, and indeed it would have been impolite for him to put his head above those of the others who were present because on Narsai all citizens were equal. The Senior Chair was a concept necessitated only because someone had to call meetings, someone had to be responsible for seeing that decisions were carried out once reached, and someone had to keep records.
“Right now she’s once again officially an officer in the Star Service,” Kourdakov continued. “That was necessary when she received an official recall order, which was binding on her as a retiree. However, there’s now a window—which may prove to be a brief one!—during which she could tender her resignation, since as of this moment we’re still at peace. She hasn’t done so, not yet, and if she does she’ll be sacrificing all benefits earned during her career. It breaks tradition for a member of the Commonwealth’s military to address this body, but it also breaks tradition for Councilors and Commissioners to share a meeting. So I trust you’ll listen what she has to say. Katy?”
That was typical Narsatian informality; for Kourdakov to style his child “Admiral Romanova” would have been an insult to everyone else in the room. Katy had to remind herself not to rise, as she would have been expected to do when addressing a body with this much power in any other setting, before she began to speak.
“How I handle my choices about serving, or not serving, wouldn’t normally be anyone’s problem but my own,” she said, in the quiet but powerful voice that she had learned to use when she needed to make herself heard but did not want to intimidate the people who were listening to her. “I was debating whether to answer the recall order or to protest it, under the Council’s new policy concerning Service entrance by Narsatian citizens; but then my husband was taken aboard the heavy cruiser that’s now in orbit, and since our law doesn’t shield him I was forced to reclaim my rank in order to gain his release.”
“What was he charged with, Katy?” The concept of parliamentary procedure was barely remembered on Narsai. While no one would have dreamed of trying to take the floor away until she was through speaking, it was entirely acceptable—indeed, it was expected—that anyone could break in and ask her a question, at any time.
Those old ways were coming back to her now, more easily than she had thought they might. She answered, “There weren’t any charges. My former husband, the ambassador from Kesra to Terra, was aboard and the ship had been placed at his disposal. He wanted to guarantee that I wouldn’t answer the recall, so he had my husband kidnapped from our home. And now instead of my husband, Mr. Fralick has our daughter to hold hostage against me.”
She did pause then, to allow the breaths of outrage that she heard drawn all over the room. A woman’s daughter was her heir, and by the reckoning of these Narsatian leaders George Fralick had done something beyond defending in keeping a mother and her girl-child apart.
Katy added, “But then, I would have brought her home with me after she was born if her father hadn’t prevented me from doing that. He wouldn’t let me have her, not even for a visit, because he told the legal arbitrators on Kesra that if she grew up here I’d force her go to a cousin’s bed when she came of age.”
That was a decided sore spot with Narsatians, to be reminded of how other societies sometimes viewed their marriage customs. Things were different now than they had been nearly fifty years earlier, when Katy Romanova had gone to her cousin Ivan on the night of her thirteenth birthday; but any suggestion from an outsider that Katy’s parents had been neglectful of her welfare, that her first lover had been a pervert to take her that young, or that her society had encouraged her to sell her body to seal a land claim, was a suggestion that was calculated to infuriate any one of these people. Even those who had supported dynastic reform most passionately, still would bristle if their elders who had followed those customs were condemned for doing so.