With the Lightnings Read online

  Candace pursed his lips. Daniel suspected the Kostroman had forgotten just how much a fishing lodge this really was, though the reality was more than sufficient for Daniel himself.

  “I’ll tell you what, Leary,” Candace said. “If you go down the steps to the landing, there’s a path off to the left that leads to a cave. Since you’re the naturalist …?”

  “I’ll show him,” Bet said unexpectedly. “I’ve been here, you know.”

  Her expression was perfectly innocent. Only a cynic would speculate that her comment—her admission—had something to do with watching Margrethe flirt with Daniel during the flight.

  Daniel kept one of the mattresses; Bet had a bottle and a glass. He didn’t need a guide once they’d forced their way through the feathery undergrowth to the steps at the cliff’s edge. Land animals on Kostroma tended to be small, so the vegetation hadn’t developed the spikes and knife-edged leaves that made the jungles of many planets hell for humans who had to pass through them.

  The steps had been formed by drilling a line of vertical holes to the desired depth, then cracking the overburden away. The treads themselves hadn’t been leveled, but passing feet had worn them smooth. Given that this islet must always have been remote from major traffic, Candace was right about the construction being very old.

  Bet paused at the head of the stairway, turned her face up unexpectedly to kiss Daniel, and skipped down the steps giggling. The glasses winked in the sunlight.

  Daniel followed at a more leisurely pace. In part that was the caution of a man who rigged antennae in sponge space, where a misstep could mean not only death but separation from the sidereal universe. In addition he was intrigued by thimble-sized cones of lichen growing out from the rock. They showed narrow bands of bright color, one laid over the other all the way from peak to base. He’d never seen anything like them before.

  Bet stuck her head back around the curve of the cliff. “Are you coming, Daniel?” she called. She hadn’t used his first name before. Daniel stepped more quickly.

  The steps wound clockwise down the cliff face. Midway they crossed a counterclockwise path. It was a ramp and had been melted, not cut, into the rock. Above the intersection the second path had been blasted away when the staircase was created. What remained, weathered but not especially worn, was a left-hand branch to the steps below the junction.

  The remnant of the older path was almost level; at no time had it continued down to sea level. Unless sea level had dropped ten feet since the path was made …

  “See?” Bet called, standing on the other side of a giant version of the lichens Daniel had been noticing. The cones were more frequent here than nearer the top, but this one was almost a meter high. “It’s just this way.”

  Then she added, “Ooh!” and batted at the insect that had hopped onto her thigh. It was only the size of a fingernail, but its black and blue stripes were in sharp contrast with the fire-hot fabric of her dress.

  “Coming, love,” Daniel said absently. “But we don’t want to lose this, do we?”

  He waggled the rolled mattress. There were quite a lot of similar insects here. They were flightless and appeared to browse the lichen.

  “We could make do,” Bet called with a giggle.

  Daniel stepped over the giant cone. Bet vanished into the cliff face just ahead. A tunnel had been burned into the rock. The surface was vitrified like that of the ramp. Daniel walked inside and pulled down his goggles to get a better view of the interior.

  Bet had gone to the end, thirty feet or so from the opening. There were niches about five feet long and a foot or so deep burned into the sidewalls all the way to the back. He, Bet, and a slight scattering of dead leaves from the vegetation above were the only other contents of the tunnel.

  Bet had set the wine on the end niche. She swayed her dress from side to side, lifting it slowly. “Come on, Daniel,” she said insistently. As he’d suspected, she wore nothing whatever beneath the clinging folds.

  “Just savoring the moment, love,” Daniel lied. He pulled the inflation mechanism of the pad, then lifted off his cap and goggles.

  He had quite a lot of questions about this location, but first things first. The questions could wait.

  If he was right, they’d waited for a very long time already.

  * * *

  Adele rose from the data console and noticed the bustle of construction around her for the first time in several hours. The Cinnabar sailors used adhesive guns which spit glue with a high whine that Adele found more irritating than the bang of a hammer—when she was aware of it. She wasn’t aware of that or much of anything else when she was working.

  Compiling the rosters had taken longer than she expected. The people in charge of the palace guard seemed to have entered only fragments of the data necessary to see that their personnel were fed and paid on time. By cross-checking Adele had become certain that about thirty percent of even what was in the various databases was wrong.

  The fault was hers. She should have allowed for the guard officers being semiliterate incompetents. God knew they weren’t alone in that, on Kostroma or in the wider universe either.

  “Looking pretty well, don’t you think?” somebody said behind her. Adele whirled.

  Bosun’s Mate Woetjans’s smile became neutral when she saw Adele’s expression. “Coming along, at any rate,” the sailor said. “In my opinion.”

  “It’s looking wonderful, Woetjans,” Adele said with real enthusiasm. She was embarrassed at her seeming harsh response to the petty officer’s friendly sally. “If there was one other part of my life that was looking as good, I’d be the Elector of Kostroma.”

  Woetjans’s smile returned. “I guess a citizen of Cinnabar is better than any wog from around here, mistress,” she said, apparently oblivious of the library assistants who might be in earshot. “Even the chief wog. Mind, they’re fine as spacers. But I’m glad my crew’s a bright spot, yeah.”

  Adele started to speak, then froze with her mouth open because she didn’t know which of her two objections to begin with. She closed her mouth again because she realized she’d be wrong to address either of them. “Yes,” she said instead. “A very bright spot.”

  She leaned over the console and ejected the chip onto which she’d copied the data. It had taken hours of work, sifting and correlating files on distant machines whose software was quirky, ancient, and glacially slow. She could have sent Markos the first list she’d found, ignoring the fact that it covered only two of the palace’s seven entrances. She didn’t like Markos and the task was one that she didn’t dare consider very deeply. Even under these circumstances she couldn’t let herself do a bad job.

  “Hafard!” Woetjans bellowed toward a high scaffold. “Polin! You two keep fucking around and you won’t like the duty roster after we lift planet, I promise you!”

  She gave Adele a sheepish glance. “I better get back to keeping an eye on these lot, sir,” she said.

  Adele nodded crisply. “I need to get to work also,” she said. “Vanness? I’ll be gone for about fifteen minutes. If there are any inquiries for me, I’ll answer them when I return.”

  She strode from the library. She’d been offended when Woetjans referred to the Kostromans as wogs. If the petty officer were a pupil of hers at the Academy, she’d have torn a strip off her the first time it happened and dismissed her in ignominy on a repetition.

  But Woetjans wasn’t a pupil. She was a naval bosun’s mate raised to different standards. Woetjans’s standards were wrong, of that Adele was sure; but nobody’d appointed Adele Mundy as Lord Corrector of the Universe, either.

  She’d had colleagues at the Academy, even after she became deputy director of the Collections in all but name, who took it upon themselves to educate Adele on the ways in which her dress failed the test of fashion. She didn’t expect Woetjans would greet a lecture on demeaning language with any more patience—or reason for patience—than Adele had shown for that well-meant advice on her clothes.
r />   Adele started down the spiral stairs at a brisk pace. She slowed when she reached a pair of clerks descending in leisure as they talked. Kostromans were a cheerfully voluble people, who made broad arm gestures in conversation. Adele wasn’t in so great a hurry that she needed to make a point of getting around these two.

  She’d almost objected to Woetjans calling her a Cinnabar citizen. On reflection, Woetjans’s assumption was probably true. The Edict of Reconciliation had restored citizenship rights to survivors of those proscribed, and Adele had never been listed by name anyway. As an adult member of the Mundys of Chatsworth she would have been fair game, but no one could honestly claim Adele had any involvement in general politics let alone with the Three Circles Conspiracy.

  She went around the clerks at the bottom of the stairs and picked her way through the loungers and passersby in the main entryway. Kostroman tempers were as noisily enthusiastic as their expressions of undying friendship. Neither could be expected to last. Very different from Cinnabar, where emotions were weapons as unyielding as steel.

  She’d heard the Kostromans described as flighty, mercurial. True enough, she supposed. Until humans became saints, though, the alternative was cold, murderous ruthlessness of the sort that had wiped the Mundys from the face of Cinnabar.

  Woetjans said the Kostromans were good spacers. In that at least they and the folk of Cinnabar had matters in common.

  Adele entered the garden. The sunlight was a subconscious surprise. The ranks of shelves, now filling with roughly sorted books, reduced light from the library windows to a fraction of what was needed. To install the new lighting the sailors had run an additional line from the power room in the palace subbasement. Woetjans had explained that though the fusion plant had sufficient capacity, the building’s wiring would fry like bacon.

  Citizen of the Republic of Cinnabar …

  A starship was landing in the harbor. Quite a large one. A transport, she supposed. Daniel Leary would be able to identify the vessel by class and perhaps by name.

  A nurse pushed a stroller down the path. Two more children were tied to her waist by leashes; the older of them was no more than four. They tugged in opposite directions, shouting to call the nurse’s attention to individual birds or flowers. A male minder with a metal-shod baton and swirling mustaches swaggered behind the group, puffing out his chest and bowing to every woman he passed.

  Adele had never returned to Cinnabar. At first her presence would merely have added another name to the roster of victims. After the Edict of Reconciliation was passed, disgust kept her away.

  Besides, it was bad enough to be poor in a foreign land. She had no intention of starving before the eyes of those who would have called her a friend in the days before the Proscriptions. The Senate had confirmed a cousin on her mother’s side as owner of Chatsworth, she’d heard.

  Adele entered the hedged enclosure. It was empty. She heard the sound of a man playing a guitar and singing nearby.

  “Good morning, mistress,” said Markos’s aide behind her. Adele turned. The pale woman had her usual half-smile; not so much superior, as Adele had first thought, but appraising.

  “Here,” Adele said, holding out the data chip in the middle of her right palm. She didn’t care who saw her. She wasn’t a spy; they couldn’t force her to act like one.

  Fingertips brushed her hand, lifting away the chip. “Good day, mistress,” the aide said.

  The aide walked toward the garden’s rear entrance, passing other strollers without seeming to be moving quickly. She was nondescript even in her bright clothing; a person whose presence and absence were equally unremarkable. A person who didn’t seem to exist as a human being.

  Adele Mundy returned to the palace. She wondered whether she herself had any more existence than a data console did.

  * * *

  Daniel Leary, whistling snatches of the contredanse which had ended the Admiral’s Ball, entered the library and stared in pleased astonishment. “Say!” he said. “They are coming along. And the lighting’s up, I see.”

  “Yes, or you wouldn’t see,” Adele said, coming from the half of the big room which wasn’t already filled with shelving. She held a pair of loose-leaf binders covered in the hide of something scaly. “Your crew has been indispensable, Daniel. Which is not to denigrate the contribution—”

  She turned and nodded to a young man wearing a green cummerbund and holding a tape measure, one of the several Kostromans who’d come forward with her when Daniel arrived.

  “—which Master Carpenter Bozeman and the journeymen of her staff have been making toward the project’s aesthetics.”

  “We’re veneering the edges of the shelving and supports,” the fellow with the measure said. “When we’re done, you won’t be able to tell the result from prime cabinetry. Even the plastic!”

  He frowned and added, “When there’s books on them, that is. We can’t do much about it otherwise.”

  Daniel, swinging a knotted handkerchief in his left hand, walked along the end of the stacks and peered into a bay. The racks rose nearly to the room’s high ceiling. There were no books or bound papers above head height, and the shelves in use were only partially full. Wooden blocks formed bookends to keep the end volumes from falling over.

  “Are the higher ones …?” Daniel said, nodding toward the bare ranks of shelves above him.

  “They may be useful at a later date,” said Adele who’d fallen into stride with him. The three Kostromans watched with a respect that had been notably missing the day Daniel first visited the library. “Woetjans says she’ll rig rolling ladders on each stack. I’m inclined to leave that part of the job for the time at which it’s needed. An intermediate floor might be preferable for staff members who aren’t—”

  She smiled.

  “—starship riggers. On the other hand, the future won’t have Woetjans and her crew as a part of it. I’m undecided.”

  “Ah, how are these …?” Daniel asked. “That is, the arrangement.”

  He waggled his handkerchief toward the shelves. One of those nearest him was a rank of cookbooks. Standard volumes on astrogation—including many obvious duplicates—filled the two shelves immediately below.

  Adele smiled wryly. “By number,” she said. “I open the boxes of material and assign a number to each volume I find. Mostly I scribble it on a scrap of paper. These—”

  She flicked open the leather covers of the binders in her hand, one and then the other.

  “—would be one-forty-seven, both of them. They’re profit and loss statements from Teichnor Clan trading ventures of the past century.”

  Daniel nodded. The accounts were nothing that would ever interest him, but he knew how valuable they’d be to someone who understood the context in which they were created.

  He’d read Uncle Stacey’s logs. They were merely dry listings like, “Antenna Forty-one sheared under acceleration. Stepped replacement and entered Matrix as calculated.” That would mean nothing except to someone who’d listened avidly to Commander Bergen talk to the friends from the old days who’d come to Bantry to see him.

  “I’ll take them, mistress!” said one of the Kostromans brightly.

  If you knew the language—which meant more than grammar and vocabulary—there was no useless information.

  “Thank you, Vanness,” Adele said, handing the binders over with a smile visible only to Daniel. She continued, “My assistants take the item to the numbered shelf while I dig out the next one. Vanness and Prester agreed to stay late tonight because I need to clear more floorspace for the next stack. Before the morning.”

  “Amazing!” Daniel said honestly. He’d have guessed it would take the better part of a lifetime to convert the chaos he’d first seen here into order. A couple weeks would be sufficient. Though—

  “I don’t quite understand the numbering system though, mis—that is, Adele,” he went on. “These …”

  He indicated the cookbooks and stellar directions cheek by jowl.
r />   “Yes, sections sixteen and seventeen,” Adele said. Her grave expression dissolved into a smile. “The sixteenth item I pulled from the crate with which I started was Easy Recipes for Frontier Worlds by Cyprian. You’ll not be surprised to learn that the volume underneath it was the Star Sector 30 Pilot.”

  “Oh,” said Daniel. It sounded like an absolutely terrible system, scarcely better than putting the books up at random. “Well, with a proper index …” he added.

  The librarian smiled broadly—broadly for her, at least. “Right up here,” she said, tapping her temple with an index finger. She laughed aloud at his expression. “Daniel, this is a rough sort. I’ll arrange the holdings according to the standards of the Academic Collections as soon as I’ve got them out of boxes. Until then you’ve got to depend on me to find anything.”

  “Oh,” he said in relief. At least he hadn’t said anything aloud.

  “Ms. Mundy is a genius,” Vanness said with a belligerence that was unnecessary, given Daniel’s complete agreement. “She’s better than any system.”

  “Thank you for the thought, Vanness,” she said dryly. “I’m confident that I’m not immortal, however. Certainly the rest of my family wasn’t. I hope to leave my successor a monument to my skill, not my arrogance.”

  “Ah,” said Daniel. He hadn’t missed the reference to the Proscriptions. “As a matter of fact, I had Candace drop me here rather than back at my lodgings because I had another question for you.”

  He waggled the handkerchief. “But if you’re busy …?”

  “Prester, Vanness,” Adele said. “Take a break. As a matter of fact, why don’t you both go on home. I think we’ve cleared enough room, at least with a little judicious restacking of the piles.”

  “I’ll wait, mistress,” Vanness said.

  “I’ll wait too,” said the other assistant, a young woman whom Daniel would have described as plain if he’d had any reason to describe her. “It’s not as though I need to get home, after all.”