“We thought they’d help each other,” Kevil Mahoney said. Raffa held her tongue. No use arguing with a lawyer of that class. “It may have been a mistake,” he admitted, after a short silence.
“We thought of asking another of their friends—someone from the Royal Aerospace Service—but things are rather . . . delicate at the moment.”
“Delicate?”
The two men looked at each other. Raffa felt like screaming, but didn’t. What good would it do?
“They’ve disappeared,” Lord Thornbuckle said. “And we don’t know whom we can trust, in the old administration. We don’t know if the reason they’ve disappeared has something to do with their mission, with something else entirely, or with communications failures. There’ve been problems recently, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
Everyone was. The interruption of commercial transfers, even for so brief a period, had panicked the public.
“At the moment, we’re dealing with a crisis—more than one, in fact, though you don’t need to know all of them. We can’t go. We need the information we sent them to get, and we need to know what happened to them. If we send more young men, especially those who’ve been in the military, it will be noticed in the wrong way.”
“You want me to go.” Neither of them met her eyes at first. Raffa felt her temper rising. This was ridiculous; they didn’t live back on Old Earth, in prehistoric times. “You want me to find Ronnie or George, and you think whoever’s up to mischief will believe I’m chasing after Ronnie because of romance.”
“That was the idea,” said Lord Thornbuckle.
“It’s ridiculous,” Raffa said. She let herself glare at him. “It’s out of a storycube or something. Lovesick girl goes haring after handsome young man in need of rescue. What do you want me to do, wear a silver bodysuit and carry some impressive-looking weapon?” Even as she said it, she realized she would look stunning in a silver bodysuit, and she imagined herself carrying one of the rifles from the island. No. It was still ridiculous.
“People do,” Kevil Mahoney said, peering at his fingertips as if they had microprint on them. “People do do ridiculous illogical things. Even for love.”
Raffa felt herself going red. “Not me,” she said. “I’m the sensible one.” It sounded priggish, said like that in this quiet room. She opened her mouth to tell Lord Thornbuckle about the times she’d saved Brun from official retribution, and shut it again. That was the past, and didn’t matter. “Where?” she asked, surprising herself.
“The Guerni Republic,” Lord Thornbuckle said. “Some planet called Music.”
“It would be,” Raffa said. She felt trapped, on the one hand, and on the other there was a suspiciously happy flutter in her chest. Trapped? No . . . out from under Mother at last, and with a good cause. She was not going out there to be silly with Ronnie, of course not, but . . . “I’ll go,” she said, as ungraciously as possible, but also quickly. Before she thought about it. Because, underneath it all, she wanted to go. She wanted a chance to get away from her mother, away from everyone, and think. And she wanted to see Ronnie alone, very far away, and make up her own mind.
Traveling alone on a major liner was not an adventure, she told herself firmly. It was nothing like Brun’s mad dash across space, working in the depths of livestock freighters and what all. She didn’t want that, anyway. She ate exquisitely prepared meals in the first-class dining room, worked out in the first-class gymnasium, flirted appropriately with the younger stewards, and pushed away the occasional desire to measure herself against Brun.
She pored over the tourist information on the Guerni Republic. Her Aunt Marta’s holdings included small interests in several Guernesi corporations, inherited through marriage a couple of generations back. Raffa was surprised to find that one of them had its corporate headquarters on Music—handy, but odd. She’d thought it manufactured something used in agriculture—and Lord Thornbuckle had said that planet specialized in medicine. But the headquarters were on the tourist cube as “an example of post-modern business architecture, vaguely reminiscent of the Jal-Oplin style favored in the Cartlandt System two millennia ago.” The visual showed an elaborate fountain surrounded by vast staircases that seemed to exist just to create interesting shadows.
Raffa peered at it several ways, and gave up. It didn’t really matter what it looked like. She could reasonably visit, as the near relative of a stockholder from the Familias. She composed a short message, and put it in the mail queue. Then she called up the language tutor for another session of Guernesi. She had always enjoyed learning new languages, and Guernesi seemed fairly close to one she’d studied before, the “native” language of Casopayne.
Raffa settled into her rooms at the hotel her travel agent had recommended. She found the Guernesi accent captivating rather than confusing, and her shipboard study had made her comfortable with many routine phrases. She had no idea where Ronnie and George would be staying, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out. The Travelers’ Directory listed visitors by homeworld.
The Familias Regnant section had more names than she had expected—and for a moment she let herself wonder what Venezia Glendower-Morreline se Vahtigos was doing there; that redoubtable old lady should have been driving her numerous family crazy at the annual plastic arts festival on Goucault, where she insisted on exhibiting her own creations. Raffa had been at school with one of her nieces, who had had to display a particularly hideous vase and a mask that looked like dripping wax in order to pacify the family artiste. She hadn’t thought about Ottala Morreline for a couple of years, at least—she’d wondered at the time if living with her aunt’s artwork had warped her mind. But never mind—where was Ronnie?
She found his name, finally, listed as “traveling” rather than at a fixed address. Communications could be left with the Travelers’ Directory, the listing said. Great. Ronnie and George had run off somewhere for a little unauthorized fun, and she had no idea when they’d be back. She felt angry, and was annoyed with herself. They didn’t know she was coming; it wasn’t deliberate. Perhaps a good meal would help. She called up the hotel directory, and decided on the smallest of the dining rooms, described as “quiet, intimate, and refined, yet casual.”
The Guernesi definition of quiet, intimate, refined, and casual had tables set into mirrored alcoves. Each alcove was divided from the main room by an arch of greenery from which graceful sprays of fragrant orchids swayed. Once ensconced in her alcove, Raffa discovered that the mirrors reflected only the greenery and the delicate curves of the chandelier . . . not the diners. She glanced casually into other alcoves, just to check—and wondered briefly how the mirrors worked.
She had worked her way through most of her meal, when someone passed in a flamboyant trail of scarlet ruffles that caught her eye. A tall, black-haired woman whose walk expressed absolute confidence in her ability to attract attention. The red dress left the elegant line of her back to no one’s imagination, and a drip of diamonds down her spine only emphasized its perfection. Two men in formal dress followed her, one tall, with a mane of red hair, and the other short and stout. Raffa leaned forward, excited despite herself. It had to be Madame Maran, who had toured in the Familias Regnant, though she lived here. Raffa fiddled with the table controls, cut off the sound damping for her alcove so that she could hear the open center of the room.
“Madame—” she heard someone—probably the waiter—say.
Then “Esarah, I still think—” and the privacy screen of the other alcove covered the rest. No matter. She had seen the famous diva hardly an arm’s length away. She would check the entertainment listings. Perhaps there would be a performance while she was here. She hoped it would be Gertrude and Lida, but she would happily listen to Maran sing a grocery list.