“My dear Mierbeunes,” Banstegeyn said, putting one hand on the other man’s arm. “I hear everything you say. I do. I am as appalled as you are.”
“I doubt that, sir! I doubt that most severely!”
They sat in a tiny bower in the parliament building’s gardens. The Liseiden in their strange floating fish bowls had departed in a huff to their ship in orbit, leaving the humanoid Iwenick, Ambassador Mierbeunes, to speak on their behalf. Banstegeyn had listened as patiently as he could, but he was starting to wonder if the fellow was being paid by the word.
“May we speak in absolute confidence?” Banstegeyn said, sitting still closer to the other man.
Mierbeunes was shaking his head. “What price confidentiality, sir, when trust, when honesty itself, is nowhere to be found?”
“I will have this reversed,” Banstegeyn assured the ambassador, patting him gently again. “You have my word on it. You may rely on that absolutely. Now, Mierbeunes,” he continued, as the ambassador took a breath, opened his mouth, shook himself and generally showed every sign that he was working up to some fresh, or at least subsequent, diatribe, “this was not my fault. Even I cannot be everywhere at all times. I have as much cause to feel betrayed as you and our dear Liseiden friends, in some ways, for I put my trust in others and was let down. They said they would vote one way, then turned and voted another. Unforgivable. Utterly—”
“That wretch, that bastard Quvarond!” the Iwenick said, sounding like he was almost in tears. Banstegeyn had made it very clear who was behind the horrifying vote earlier.
“Yes, unforgivable, I know, but it has happened. I assure you I have looked into ways of undoing this immediately, but there are no grounds. This was most cunningly, cunningly done, believe me. No grounds at all. So, we must fall back for now, regroup. But this is not the end. We will prevail here, dear Mierbeunes, and sense will be seen. But you must understand that I must risk more, to accomplish this, and so I need you to ask one more thing of our friends, when the time comes.”
“Sir!” the ambassador said, almost despairing, “how can I possibly—?”
“Please, please listen, Mierbeunes. My hope, my desire, always — and let us not call it a price, because it is more, far more noble than that — but my desire has always been to have this world, the world of my birth, my cradle, my home, named after one of its most loving and honoured sons.”
“Sir, I—”
“No, please, please do listen. Let me say just this. Let me say just four words. Will you listen, please, dear Mierbeunes? Four words; just four words.”
Mierbeunes sighed heavily, nodded.
Banstegeyn moved still closer, whispering into the ambassador’s ear. “Mierbeunes’ World. Banstegeyn’s Star.”
She should have known. So should QiRia.
Sklom, the sylocule-resembling avatar of the Warm, Considering, played the bodily acoustic Antagonistic Undecagonstring superbly, as though born to it.
The ship had programmed its avatar to do so. It had reviewed all the literature, looked up the specs, watched and analysed every available screen and sound-only recording and then simmed the resulting models exhaustively until the virtual version of the blue-furred avatar could exactly reproduce the performances of all the great virtuosi of the past. The essence of all that had then been downloaded into the avatar.
Sklom sat naturally inside the enormous instrument as though it had been designed around him, grasped both bows as if they’d been made to measure, produced recently grown padded finger substitutes from his paws and extended beautiful music from the very first touch of bow on string.
Cossont listened with an expression of growing horror on her face, even as she found herself close to weeping at the beauty of the music — one of those pieces she knew she knew but could not quite recall the name of out of her own head.
“It’s a bit… rich,” QiRia said, glancing at her.
“What?” she asked.
“The tone,” QiRia said. “Overly full.”
“You think?”
“Air pressure. We’re too low down here.”
“It’s a water world,” she said, not looking at the man as the six-limbed creature inhabiting the elevenstring swayed, limbs sawing, creating beauty. “There’s no dry high.”
“They’re supposed to sound better the higher you go, in the atmosphere of your average oxygen/inert rocky world.” QiRia shrugged. “Up to a point.”
“I don’t know,” Cossont said. “There was at least one music critic who said the elevenstring might keep on sounding better the higher up it was played, and it might sound best of all played above the atmosphere altogether, where you couldn’t hear it at all.”
Still watching Sklom play — perfectly, brilliantly, heartbreakingly — Cossont heard QiRia chuckle.
She had always been bad at losing things. Or very good, if you looked at it a different way. According to her mother it was practically a talent. Cossont had lost count of the number of people who’d suggested that — or at least wondered if — the reason she’d taken up the elevenstring (rather than say, the finger flute) was that the instrument would be so hard to leave behind somewhere.
She duly lost the desire to play the elevenstring; misplaced it for about fifteen years following that performance by the carelessly perfect cobbled-together artificial version of an absurd-looking alien. What was the point of taking the time learning to play anything as well as you could, when a machine could use something it would think of as little better than its hand puppet to play so achingly, immaculately, ravishingly well, exactly as though it was the creature that had spent a lifetime studying, understanding and empathising with the instrument and all that it signified and meant?
“That’s how ships settle scores, lass,” QiRia told her when she opened her heart to him during a last, drunken night spent on Perytch IV, on the great raft Apranipryla.
They sat on deck, sun-awnings rolled back above, just the two of them, neither avatar present. She watched the stars where they showed between the dark, unseen masses of the silently towering cloud masses. He sat with his eyes closed, listening to the slow wind and the slower waves and feeling the gentle lift and fall of the great raft. Even past midnight, the air remained warm and sticky.
“What?” she sniffed, wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
“The Warm, Considering probably felt insulted that the Anything Legal Considered brought you here.”
“Really? But…”
“The Warm, Considering likes to think it is very protective of me.” QiRia drank from his glass. “It is very protective of me. But certain sorts of protection, even care, can shade into a sort of desire for ownership. Certainly into a feeling that what is being protected is an earned exclusivity of access for the protector, not the privacy of the protected.” He looked across at her. His eyes were the colour of the sea, she remembered. Dark now. “Do you understand?”