"Of course," Kulasawa said. "Should we have brought some food from the transport?"
"A meal will be awaiting you," Suzenne promised. "Nothing fancy, I'm afraid, but it should tide you over until the more formal welcoming dinner tomorrow."
"And my research equipment?"
"It will be brought to the guest house tonight," Suzenne said. "Along with the rest of the cargo." She looked around the group. "Are there any other questions before we go?"
"I have one," Jimmy said hesitantly, looking warily at the twin helicopter blades hanging over our heads. "You're sure it's safe to fly in here?"
"We do it all the time," Suzenne assured him with a smile. "Bear in mind that the chamber is over thirteen kilometers long and that it's five kilometers from the ground to the sun tunnel. There really is plenty of room."
"And now," she continued, looking around again, "if there are no other questions, please go ahead and find a seat inside. It's time for us to go." The Royal Palace was indeed not nearly as fancy as its name had implied.
Situated near the center of the city I'd seen from the balcony, it much more resembled an extra-nice government building than it did a medieval castle or even your basic Presidential mansion.
But it had a helipad on the roof, and the guest house Suzenne had mentioned was right across the street, and for me that was what counted. What with the long flight and strain of finding and getting to the Freedom's Peace—plus the two short nights that had gone before—I discovered midway through the helicopter ride that I was unutterably tired.
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 spaceport," 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 participating 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 classes, 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?" 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 space 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 fashioned 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."