“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Dejah.
He shrugged. “It would be a distraction from my work.”
I didn’t ask Vernon if he had a family. There seemed little point.
The Pearlmans, Dina and Farley, seemed to have the simplest story. They were introduced to me as a pair of middle managers from Temet, a village based around a tiny research facility on an island off the coast of Midgard. Fourth-generation residents of Xana, they claimed not to have met any Inner Family Bettelhines before. Given their dullness, I would have been surprised if they often ventured out of their own neighborhood, let alone made it offworld. But they’d exceeded their latest project quotas, and been chosen out of all the coworkers on their pay level, to enjoy a celebratory evening with the big bosses, during this luxurious elevator ride from orbit. It was no wonder they turned pale every time any of these rich and powerful rulers of their world spoke to them spoke to them for five minutes. They were people who had lived their lives in a dark box, blinded when they found themselves beneath the light of the midday sun.
Over the next course, some fishy delicacy from Xana’s southern sea that the Pearlmans devoured with gusto and that I quit with after only a few bites, I heard Dina questioning Oscin. “I’ve always wondered, one thing about this Dip Corps. Is that the same thing as the Diplomatic Corps?”
“Yes,” Oscin said.
She struggled for a precedent. “Like Hom.Sap is the same thing as Homo Sapiens.”
“Yes,” he said again.
There was a pause, then she wondered, “Who decides that kind of thing?”
Several seats down, Skye reddened and covered her mouth. But there was no sign of a grin on Oscin’s face. “There’s a committee.”
Monday Brown, who had been absent since his abrupt departure at the end of our conversation before dinner, returned to us a few minutes after the fish course, taking his seat with the lack of self-consciousness that must have come from years of having to interrupt or delay his meals for important business. He nodded at Jelaine, and at the Khaajiir, who immediately clutched his staff as if expecting to be summoned somewhere. “I’m sorry for the delay. I had a few other things to take care of, in addition to contacting Mr. Pescziuwicz, and even then it took a few minutes to reach him, after all the, ah, damage today’s incident did to his schedule. He wants the Khaajiir to know that he’s invited to join the interrogation, once the suspects are capable of being interrogated. He also suggests that you’re likely to find the procedure not only beyond reproach, but also far too boring to sit through.”
Jason raised an eyebrow. “Sounds just like the bastard.”
The Khaajiir chuckled. “I just might surprise him and take him up on that. The ruffians might be sufficiently surprised to see me up close that they’ll blurt out the confession he wants.”
Brown turned to me next. “As for you, Counselor, he says he has no new information at this time, but asked you to contact him anyway.”
I blinked. “Right away?”
“He said, at your leisure. Colette at the bar will help you if you’d like.”
I made my apologies and left the table, therefore rescuing myself from the course Mendez was then serving, something gray and semiliquid that Dina Pearlman had already pronounced spectacular, but which, if it had an organic origin, I did not want to know about. I wondered, not for the first time, about the courage of the unknown historical figures responsible for trying certain foods for the first time.
Colette, whose fibrous hair now strobed streaks of light resembling comets, and who regarded contacting Mr. Pescziuwicz for me as yet another unparalleled highlight of her working day, told me she’d pipe the call to the hytex node in my suite.
The chime alerting me of the connection sounded the second I closed the door behind me. “Cort here. Talk to me.”
His holographic image shimmered into existence, a meter away. As per the Bettelhine policy of providing their guests with the finest, it had none of the static or fuzzy signal that plague hytex projections elsewhere. It wasn’t even translucent. The only way I knew it was not his actual head, floating there, was common sense and the absence of any blood hemorrhaging from the cutoff beneath his chin. “Counselor, this is Antrecz Pescziuwicz. Enjoying the ride?”
The projection followed me as I plopped into one of the suite’s easy chairs. “I’m a little dumbfounded, to tell the truth. Mostly by these two guests, the Pearlmans. Do your bosses always take such excessive pleasure in awing the plebes?”
He smirked. “We’re all plebes to them, Counselor. Except, maybe, I see that Shapiro woman’s name on the passenger manifest. Must be odd for the Family to have a personal guest with the same number of decimal places in her ledger.”
“There were some comments passed at dinner to the effect that your bosses and this particular bigwig have a bumpy past. Would you happen to know anything about that?”
“Sorry. Never came up in the course of my daily work-day.”
Which was not, quite, the same thing as saying he didn’t know. I bit my lip. “Have you been told there’s another Bocaian aboard?”
“Yeah. Mr. Brown told me a few minutes ago. I tanned his eardrums for withholding until he told me the bosses were behind it. He also said I’m not authorized to know this mucker’s name or what his business is, so you should refrain from telling me.”
I said, “Is that a sneaky way of asking me to leak it?”
He rolled his eyes. “No, Counselor, it’s a straightforward way of telling you not to tell me. When the bosses say I’m not authorized to know something, they mean I’m not authorized to know it, not that I should rush right out and contrive to find myself an accommodating big mouth. Honestly, I don’t want to know.” He took on the look of a man fighting a little battle with himself, before he surrendered with a grudging, “But I guess it wouldn’t be out of line to point out that being extra careful is always a fine idea when breaking bread with a representative of a civilization that wants you burned at the stake.”
“Covered. Is that why you wanted me to call?”
“No.” He hesitated again, like a high diver gathering up his nerve before that first step off a clip. “The thing is, I’ve spent the last few hours trying to draw some lines between you and our perpetrators, and I’ve run into some…problems.”
“Like what kind of problems?”
“Like there’s a lot about your personal history that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Old news. I’ve spent my whole life wrestling with the parts that don’t make sense. The massacre on Bocai, for one.”
He grimaced with impatience as he waved that away. “Naaah, I’m not talking about that. See, there’s a difference between something we don’t have enough information to understand, like what happened on Bocai, and something we take for granted that just plain refuses to add up. This thing I’m talking about? Doesn’t add up at all. Maybe you can help.”
I had not been impressed by his job performance so far, or by his lack of curiosity over the Khaajiir, so I didn’t expect much. “Shoot.”
Another pause, as he searched for the right approach. “Look, Counselor, I wouldn’t have worried about it if there wasn’t so much out there about how smart you are. You got a wicked reputation for solving problems by asking the right questions. There’s one report, here, one of the ones that made it as far as the media, about how your bosses sent you someplace owned by the Tchi, to defend one of your diplomats accused of killing one of theirs. You went to your very first meeting with the prosecution and within five minutes of hearing what evidence they had showed them why they had to have the wrong guy. I mean, you knew right away. The entire embassy staff worked on the case for four months, and you show up and poke a hole in the whole thing before you can warm the chair with your butt. So between that and what you did in my office, I know from the very start, that you’re not stupid. So either there’s a factor here I’m not getting, or one you’re not getting. Maybe you’re so close to this thing, having lived with it for so long, that you never even bothered to question it.”