“We didn’t have time to explain all Lady Cecelia’s signal system to you,” the attendant said, before Heris could even greet her employer.
“Lady Cecelia,” Heris said pointedly, “Always good to see you.”
“Bev . . . will . . . help . . . you,” Cecelia said.
“Fine; I’ll be glad to learn whatever I can. Are you interested in what’s been happening with your ship?” Cecelia’s shoulder jerked. Was that a response?
“That is Lady Cecelia’s easiest way to say ‘yes,’ ” the attendant explained. “Lady Cecelia, show her ‘no.’ ” That was the other shoulder. Heris realized that what she had taken for uncontrollable twitching in the shuttle on the way up had been Cecelia “talking.”
“Right shoulder for ‘yes’ and left shoulder for ‘no’?” Heris asked. Cecelia gave a quick jerk of her right shoulder. “I got that. What next?”
What next took longer to learn, but an hour later, Heris was a good bit more comfortable with twitches, jerks, hand clenches, and the timbre of the synthesized voice. Cecelia had even allowed her to hear her own voice—distorted, uneven in volume and pitch, but her biological voice.
“I’m amazed,” Heris said. “I confess I hadn’t imagined anything like this. It’s so different from—” From the inert helplessness she’d been told of, or the full recovery of a feisty, healthy woman that she’d hoped for.
“We didn’t dare try a regen tank,” the attendant said. “Use of regen tanks with neurological problems is tricky at best. You sometimes get good responses, but more often the deficit ‘hardens,’ as it were. Much safer not to try it until neurochemical repair’s been done. Then it’s fine for dealing with residual physical deficits.”
“I . . . see.” Heris remembered that she had more information on the techniques the Guerni Republic doctors had suggested. “I’m going to download everything I got in the Guerni Republic to your deskcomp . . . or . . . ?”
Yes. A firm response. Heris wondered if the visual prosthesis allowed her to read displays, or could be hooked to a computer output, but she didn’t like to ask. The attendant seemed to recognize her discomfort.
“I can read it to Lady Cecelia; her visual capacity is fairly blunt at this time.”
“Mr. Smith . . . is . . . prince?” Cecelia interrupted. Heris was surprised.
“No . . . he’s the prince’s double. Didn’t I say that? I’m not sure where the prince is.”
“Not . . . double. He . . . is . . . prince.”
“Lady Cecelia . . .” Even though several dozens of people now knew about the clones, Heris was reluctant to discuss them in front of an attendant she didn’t know. She picked her words with care. “Even though I admit he looks like the prince, and sounds like the prince, I have been informed by . . . er . . . reliable sources that he is not the prince.”
“C.l.o.n.e.?” That came out spelled, letter by letter, in the synthesized voice; evidently no one had thought she needed the whole word.
“Er . . . milady, clone doubles are, as I’m sure you know, illegal.”
“Not . . . my . . . question . . .” Whatever her employer had lost, none of it had been intelligence points. Or the determination to find out what she wanted to find out. Heris mentally threw up her hands and answered.
“Yes, milady, he’s a clone. Moreover there are several clone doubles.” Quickly, as clearly as she could, she explained the king’s mission, her problem with the clones on Naverrn, and the discovery that Livadhi’s ship had yet another one. “And we don’t know which, if any, is the prime—the prince. They call him their prime. They all have the same memories: they’re given deep-conditioning tapes after each separation, so that they’re up to date.”
“If . . . all . . . alike . . . doesn’t . . . matter.” Heris had privately thought this for some time; why not just declare one of the capable clones the prince, and quietly retire the damaged prince? The answer, of course, was that someone might have planned just that, and the apparently capable clone could be someone’s pawn. So might the prince.
“We left two of them at Guerni, and brought one along as a decoy, for the safety of those in the medical center. If Sirkin hasn’t botched our course, we’ll have them all back together and then let the doctors sort it out. If they can.”
Cecelia scowled, as difficult an operation as her smile. “That . . . nice . . . Sirkin? What . . . is . . . wrong?”
“I don’t know. You remember her lover was killed—well, I made allowances for that. She seemed to be coming out of it, doing better, until after we’d left Naverrn. Then she started making careless mistakes, doing sloppy work.” Heris paused. She still couldn’t reconcile the Sirkin who did the calculations for those emergency jumps with someone who would forget to make necessary log entries, leave switches on the wrong settings and so forth. She took a deep breath. “I’m cancelling her contract when we get to Guerin. I won’t risk your life—or mine, for that matter—on someone like that.”
No. No mistaking that answer.
“Lady Cecelia, I must. I liked her too; you know I did. But a navigator’s error can kill the whole crew. I’ve talked to her, Oblo’s talked to her—we’ve all tried to help her. She made another serious mistake after we left Rotterdam. I can’t take the chance.”
No. “Wrong . . . you . . . are . . . wrong.” Lady Cecelia’s synthesizer had little expression, but there was no way to miss the strong emphasis of that shoulder jerk.
“I wish I were,” Heris said. She debated telling Cecelia of her other suspicions about Sirkin and decided against it. If the girl merely had personal problems, she would not want to have planted other ideas. Time would tell. Besides, Cecelia was a fine one to give warnings—she had ignored Heris’s warnings, and look what happened. She glanced at the wall display. “I’m sorry, but I need to get back to the bridge. We can discuss Sirkin later. We’re coming into a series of critical jumps to circumnavigate Compassionate Hand territory.”
When she returned to the bridge, Skoterin smiled at her from the secondary Nav board, and Sirkin was nowhere to be seen. Fine. If Issi and Oblo felt more comfortable with an old crewmate there instead of an unstable civilian, she’d accept that.
The first three jumps went without incident. Here the Benignity had thrust a long arm into former Familias space, but since there were no habitable worlds in the area no response had been made. It was easy enough to jump over the Compassionate Hand corridor; in fact, it set up a nice series of jumps to avoid the rest of the Benignity. The only tricky bit was a rotating gravitational anomaly in the neighborhood of the fourth jump point. After bouncing through the first three jumps, it was necessary to drop into normal space and time the next jump to avoid the rapid G changes of the anomaly’s active arm. Current charts—such as those Skoterin had picked up from Rotterdam Station—gave ships the best chance to get through that fourth jump with the least wasted time. A mistake in timing could send a ship directly into the Benignity—and the Benignity was known to take advantage of any such lapses.
Heris reviewed the charts several times before that critical fourth jump to make sure their course would not take them too close to the Benignity. Even if it did, they should be safe: they were small, fast, and it would be sheer bad luck if anyone were patrolling the area where they might emerge. She had Oblo check and recheck the course too, both against the charts and against older references.
“The new one’s a bit closer, but the border shifts over there, with the anomaly and all. I’d say this was fine.”
“Very well.” They dropped back into normal space on the mark; Oblo pulled up scan data at once, and began cursing. Heris didn’t have to ask. Something—and she wouldn’t wager it was sheer bad luck—had gone wrong.