But it should be. After centuries of steady work, modern Ceres possesses less than half the mass of the original. Instead of a body of solid rock with minor intrusions of organic material, Ceres is now a sculptured set of concentric spherical shells. One within another, varying in roof height from less than four meters to nearly a kilometer, the internal chambers extend from the center of the planetoid all the way to the surface.
The original body offered less than two million square kilometers of available surface area. The honeycomb of modern Ceres provides a thousand times as much — more than ten times the original land area of Earth. And if Ceres itself does not qualify as a major wonder, then what about its transportation system? It had to be designed to carry people and goods efficiently through the three-dimensional spherical labyrinth of tunnels and chambers. It is a topological nightmare, a complex interlocking set of high-speed railcars, walkways, drop-shafts, escalators, elevators, and pressure chutes. A trip from any point to any other can be made in less than one hour — if you have the help of a computer route guide. And few people would attempt any trip without such assistance. An unguided journey, if it could be done at all, would take days.
After a few sessions of coaching by Kubo Flammarion, Tatty had reached the point where she could handle the route instructions provided by the transit computer. She always went cautiously, checking each interchange that she had to make on the way.
Now it was time to introduce Chan to the system. On their first brief visit, before they went to Horus, she had been obliged to lead him everywhere. This time he took one look at the overall plan, listened impatiently to Flammarion’s lecture on route selection strategy, and disappeared as soon as he was free to leave.
He was gone for many hours. When he came back he seemed to have been all over the planetoid, and he knew the internal layout of Ceres in far more detail than either Tatty or Kubo Flammarion. The next morning, as soon as the training session was over, he was off again.
He seemed to be avoiding Tatty. It was a surprise to her when he came wandering into her living-quarters as she was dressing before going off for dinner with Esro Mondrian.
Chan flopped into a seat in the middle of the room. Tatty looked at him warily. On Horus, before the change in Chan, she had been quite casual. She had thought of him as a child, and allowed him to see her in a nightgown and in random stages of partial undress. Now she closed her bedroom door firmly as she went in and locked it behind her.
She was gone for half an hour. Uncharacteristically, Chan stayed. She could hear him pottering about in the kitchen while she was bathing and dressing, and he was still there when she came out.
Tatty walked to the full-length mirror near the door. Chan came to stand behind her, examining her appearance closely. She was wearing a white dress, sleeveless and off the shoulder, with pale mauve accessories. The purple marks of old Paradox shots were slowly fading from her arms, a curiously apt match to the clothes that she wore.
Chan caught her eye in the mirror as she studied the sweep of her hair. “Very — elegant. Is that the right word to use?”
“It is. Thank you.”
“You look very beautiful. I thought you would rather go to hell than to dinner with Esro Mondrian.”
“All right, Chan.” She turned to look at him directly. “That does it. What do you want? I’ve got enough on my mind without you adding to my worries.”
He shook his head and said nothing. But shortly before Mondrian was due to arrive, Chan left the apartment.
Tatty continued her careful application of makeup. At one minute to seven she went to the apartment door and opened it. She smiled in satisfaction. As she had expected, Mondrian was in the corridor, walking toward the apartment. Whatever his faults, he was precisely punctual. As though they had planned it together, he was dressed in a formal uniform, a plain black that was trimmed with just the same pale mauve that she was wearing.
She studied his face. He looked better, full of suppressed energy. He bowed formally as he came closer, and kissed her hand.
“You look magnificent. The Godiva Bird will be envious.”
Tatty shook her head. “Godiva is never envious of anyone. She never needs to be.”
She stepped outside quickly and closed the door, to make it clear that she did not propose to invite Mondrian into her living-quarters. He stood for another moment looking at her, then took her arm and led her away along the corridor.
“You seem upset, Princess,” he said softly. “I hope this evening will relax you.”
Tatty did not reply at once. She thought she had caught sight of Chan, dodging away along the walkway in front of them.
“What do you think I am, Esro?” she said at last. “Some sort of Artefact, or an extra royal, that you can put into cold storage when you don’t need, and pull out when it can be useful to you?”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that, Princess. You know I never think of you that way.”
“I don’t know it at all. Not when you leave me to rot on Horus, and never visit, and never call, and never even send a message. You say this evening will relax me — when I never know what to expect from you. You treat me worse than somebody put away in cold storage. At least they are unconscious. They don’t sit there watching their lives tick away, wasting months and months just waiting.”
She tried to shake her arm free. Mondrian would not release his hold.
“Wasted months.” He sighed. “Ah, I know. A week on Horus can seem like a year anywhere else. But do you really think the time was wasted? Chan Dalton is a full person now, instead of being a baby. That couldn’t have happened without you. Was it time wasted?”
He stopped walking. He was still holding her arm, so that she had to swing around to face him. She stared angrily into his calm eyes, and refused to answer. After a few seconds he shook his head.
“Princess, if you think that badly of me, you should never have agreed to come to dinner.”
“I thought I might get an explanation of why you deserted me out there — or at least an apology. You’ve no idea what I had to go through.”
“I know exactly what you were going through. It was terrible. But as I told you at the beginning, I couldn’t do it myself, and I needed somebody that I trusted completely — somebody I could rely on even if I couldn’t be there to keep an eye on things. Do you know why I didn’t come to see you on Horus? Because I couldn’t. I wasn’t off somewhere having fun. I was busy — busier than I’ve ever been in my whole life.”
“You found time to go galloping off to Earth. What were you doing there?”
Tatty expected any reply but the one she got. Mondrian merely shook his head.
“I can’t tell you. You’ll have to take my word for it, Princess, it was business, not pleasure. And I didn’t enjoy it one bit.”
She was starting to feel the guilt that only Esro Mondrian could create within her. Was she the unreasonable one, the cruel one, the woman who carped and whined at a desperately busy man when he could not find time to call her? She knew how hard he worked. How many times had she awakened in the early morning, to find Mondrian gone from her side? Too many to count. But he was not being unfaithful to her. He had tiptoed away in the dark into the next room. He was pacing up and down there, writing, dictating, making calls, worrying. Her rival was his work. And she had known that for years.
Mondrian reached out to touch her cheek. “Don’t be sad, Princess. I thought tonight could be a really happy occasion — the chance to see Godiva again, just like old times. Can’t we try to enjoy ourselves — just for a few hours?”
Tatty put her hand on his. They turned and began to walk again, side by side. “I’ll try. But Essy, everything is so strange here. It’s not like Earth, and I’m never relaxed. I couldn’t believe it when I heard that Godiva had left Earth to live out here with Brachis.”