After an hour or so, Beled Tomov turned up and sat in her general vicinity but made no move to interrupt her reading. When she came to a good stopping place, she looked up and happened to notice Ariane Casablancova sitting on the opposite side of the atrium, working on a tablet.
So they had five of the Seven: Doc, Memmie, Ariane, Beled, and Kath Two. The only two missing were the Dinan and, somewhat more problematically, the Aïdan.
Kath Two and Beled ran into Doc and Memmie later when they wordlessly agreed to go to the least expensive of the eateries and get some food. Somewhat uncharacteristically, Doc was not surrounded by students, scholars, and TerReForm bigwigs. He was just sitting at one end of the room carefully eating soup. Memmie was at his elbow, reaching in frequently to tuck his napkin back into his collar. Neither of them reacted when Kath Two and Beled took seats at the same table, but after a few minutes Doc said, “Lieutenant Tomov, it is good to see you again. Greetings,” and the two of them exchanged salutes in their respective racial styles.
Lieutenant, obviously, was a military and not a Survey rank, and so this confirmed the unsurprising fact that Beled’s relationship to Survey was, at best, ambiguous. Much more interesting was the fact that he and Doc had already met.
“I hope that this assignment will not prove an inconvenience,” Doc continued.
“All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty.”
“I was thinking more of the advancement of your career, Lieutenant. In your future dossier, this will stand out as a highly anomalous episode. Depending on who is reading that dossier, it might help you or hurt you.”
“I don’t concern myself with such matters,” Beled returned.
“Some would call that unwise, but I tend not to favor the company of such. You, on the other hand, will do nicely.”
“May I ask why I was so honored?”
Doc’s eyes moved briefly to Kath Two. “Kath here will be worried that it’s because she shared an indiscretion with you. Drew you into it. Or perhaps she is a little bit exasperated with you for having passed it on in your report.”
Kath Two shook her head no, but did not wish to interrupt Doc. Beled, however, seemed to take it in.
Doc continued. “None of that really counted. You are a known quantity, now, not only to me but also to Kath Two and to Ariane, which is somewhat useful. But even without all of that, you would have been a fine choice. Not everything must be for a reason. Never mind what our Julian friends say.”
He had noticed Ariane Casablancova approaching them, somewhat tentatively, with a tray of food. He made an almost subliminal gesture with his eyes toward Memmie, who stood up and fetched an extra chair from an adjoining table. Ariane joined them. Kath Two felt vaguely uncomfortable. A day earlier this woman had held and wielded power over her, had known things about her that would normally have been private matters. What was she to Kath Two now? Presumably an equal member of the Seven.
Ariane had, of course, worked this all out ahead of time, and prepared for it. “Kath Two and Beled,” she said, “our first meetings were in a formal bureaucratic setting that now leads to some awkward feelings. I look forward to reacquainting myself with both of you as a colleague.”
“Noted,” said Beled.
“Thank you,” said Kath Two. But if anything she felt even more awkward now. Ariane’s little speech had not been delivered warmly. More like she was ticking her way down a checklist. In that vein, she now turned her searchlight eyes toward the other two. “Dr. Hu. Remembrance.”
“Doc,” Doc said, “and Memmie.”
“It is good to make your acquaintances in person.”
These formal and somewhat chilly conversational gambits led nowhere, and so after an awkward silence Ariane tucked into her meal.
“Doc,” Kath Two said, “may we know what the hell we are doing? What is this Seven for?”
“It looks like a Five to me,” Doc said puckishly, somewhat breaking the tension. For Memmie, Ariane, and Beled had all aimed sharp looks at Kath Two, startled by the informal way in which she had just spoken to her old professor. Doc, who clearly didn’t care, continued: “When we are Seven — which will be in a few days, on Cradle — then I will explain it once, to everyone, at the same time.”
“Fair enough,” Kath Two said. “What should we be doing in the meantime?”
“All of the things you will look back on fondly later when you have not been able to do them for a long time.”
It was a lovely thought. Kath Two tried to be duly appreciative of the generous sentiment behind it during the remainder of the journey. But nothing of the sort really happened. She read more than she had intended to of the books she had acquired on the Great Chain. At meals, and in the recreation center, she placed herself in Beled’s eye line, just in case he was in the mood. But things were different now. Their time together in the Q had been an ideal setup for a relationship of a casual and temporary nature. It had never gone beyond sleeping in the same bed, but it might have. The knowledge that they would probably never see each other again had made it easy to shack up for a couple of nights and enjoy each other’s company in a way that would have posed too many complications had they been working together.
Now they were working together. Beled had wisely pulled back. She understood, and considered a certain amount of sexual frustration an acceptable price to pay for being prudent.
She had two meals with Ariane, and in her spare time she made desultory attempts to learn more about the Julian from network searches. Kath Two assumed that all such search activity was being monitored and logged by someone — possibly someone who was in touch with Ariane through whatever agency Ariane worked for. As time went by, Kath Two was less and less certain that that was actually Quarantine. Or perhaps another way of saying it was that Quarantine’s public face — the people who talked to you when you were traveling between space habitats — was only one avatar of something that had to be much bigger and more complicated. In the same way that Survey and military were different things, and yet drawing a sharp line between them could be difficult, so it was with police and Quarantine. And once you broadened the scope to include police, you were talking about other things besides routine law and order work. At some level, intelligence and counterintelligence were under that umbrella. Kath Two had no way of guessing where Ariane fit into that system. Searching the network too avidly for personal details about Ariane Casablancova would have been noticed, and would have been a bad idea. Not searching at all would almost have been more suspicious. So Kath Two searched a little, and found less. Low-level Q officers might be mentioned on the network from time to time, as the result of a police report or a public relations initiative, but there was nothing of the sort for Ariane — assuming that this was even her real name.
A compulsion for privacy was hardly unusual for a Julian living and working in Blue. The Julian part of the ring, centered on the Tokomaru habitat, was the least populous of the eight segments. Ninety-five percent of it lay on the Red side of the turnpike. Only a tiny sprinkling of habitats projected east of Kiribati into the Blue zone, and in those the Julians had been diluted by the more numerous and aggressive Teklans, whose segment lay just on the far side of the Hawaii boneyard. Thus the Julians had maintained enough of a presence in Blue that they could live and work in it without being seen as aliens, or immigrants. Many of them were “dukhos,” playing approximately the same role in modern society as priests had done pre-Zero.