said. 'She tutored me through university and has kindly consented to accompany me on my travels before taking up a post as Reader in Pre-Human Civilizations at Skanderbeg University on Manticore.'
A post which only Sir Hakon's influence gained me, Mincio thought as she touched fingertips with father and daughter. For all that I was the most qualified applicant.
Sharra Singh smiled but didn't offer her hand. While she was clearly a person of independence and ability, her idea of a woman's place in society was not that of Manticore or of her own daughter.
'Father, can we have a dance tonight?' Lalita said with kittenish enthusiasm as she hugged Singh's arm close. The girl might well be two T-years younger than Mincio had first judged; she was at that point in physical development where the prolong treatments always made age estimates difficult. 'Please father? They'll have all the most exciting new music, I just know it!'
She looked up at the Manticorans. 'Oh, you will let me invite my friends to meet you, won't you? They'll be ever so excited!'
'I'm sure our guests are exhausted from their journey,' Singh said with a serious expression. 'Dear—'
'Oh, not at all,' Nessler rejoined cheerfully. 'As soon as I've had a bath and a bit of dinner, there's nothing I'd like more than some company that isn't ourselves and a quartet of spacers from Klipspringer. Isn't that so, Mincio?'
'Yes indeed,' Mincio agreed. She wasn't nearly as social a creature as her pupil, but his statement had been basically true for her as well. In any case, it was the only possible answer to make to Lalita's desperate longing.
Rovald and Beresford came out the side door. Beresford held a bun and a glass of amber fluid. Rovald wasn't to the point of being ready to eat and drink yet, but at least her face had color and animation again.
'As for music, though,' Nessler continued with a frown, 'I'm afraid I've brought only a personal auditor with me on my travels. You're more than welcome to listen to the contents, Ms. Singh, but I'm afraid we won't be able to dance to it.'
'They have an amplifier and speakers, Sir,' Rovald said unexpectedly. 'With your permission, I can run the auditor's output through their system.'
'Your equipment will fit ours?' Singh said. 'Really, I don't think… My set is very old and came from Krishnaputra with me, you see.'
'I can couple them, I think,' Rovald said with quiet assurance. 'It'll help if you have a length of light-guide, but I can make do without it.'
'Rovald's the best electronics technician on Manticore,' Nessler said. 'If she says she can do it, consider it done.'
Rovald beamed with pardonable pride as she and Lalita went inside. The technician had been an object of pity through the uncomfortable voyage and after landing; now at last she was able to show herself as something better than a queasy wreck.
'Would our guests care to come in, now?' the older Ms. Singh said, ostensibly to her husband. 'The bath water should be hot.'
'Go ahead, Mincio,' Nessler said. 'I took the last of the warm water on Klipspringer, as I recall.'
'Well, if you don't mind… ?' Mincio said. Regular hot baths were the one luxury that she really missed in these hinterlands of human habitation.
'You know…' Nessler said. Mincio paused, thinking for a moment that he was responding to her immediate question rather than returning to a subject they'd been discussing earlier. 'There isn't any complicated difference between the Royal Manticoran Navy and the Dole Fleet or even the Melungeons. It's just a matter of constant effort by all those concerned, the officers even more than the men. If my sister had inherited as she should have, I would have been one of those officers — and I'm very glad I'm not. I'd much rather do something I was good at.'
Wearing formal dress that — except for the footgear — would have passed muster at a royal levee on Manticore, Nessler and Mincio approached the League Liaison Office. Their boots were a concession to streets whose sandy muck would have swallowed the iridescent slippers which should have completed their outfits.
Singh had given them directions, but relations between League officials and the commercial elite of most worlds in this region were about as bad as they could be. The League personnel were the dregs of a very advanced bureaucracy; the merchants tended to be the most dynamic citizens of the tier of worlds marginally more developed than, say, the systems once controlled by the Teutonic Order.
Singh's native Krishnaputra was a typical example. The planet had a local electronics industry, but half the people didn't have electricity in their homes.
League officials could sneer at the local elites as being unsophisticated products of dirty little worlds: mushrooms springing from dungheaps. The local population in general regarded most of the liaison officers sent to them as dense, grasping failures with an overdeveloped sense of their own importance. From everything Mincio had seen or heard, the League Liaison Officer on Hope, the Honorable Denise Kawalec, fell into the expected category.
The League offices on Hope comprised three rectangular buildings touching at the corners like dominoes spilled on a table. They were flat-roofed modular constructions cast from cold-setting ceramic.
Each slab was a different saturated color. Though the structure was probably a standard bureaucratic design from the generation in which Hope first became a League protectorate, Nessler and Mincio hadn't seen anything like it before on their travels. It wasn't something one would forget. The corner where walls of lime green and royal blue met was particularly eyecatching.
The offices were intended for total climate control. The only original opening on this side was the double main door, though there were probably emergency exits in the rear as well. Plastic panes in frames of native wood now covered window openings crudely hacked through the walls to provide light and ventilation during power failures. Mincio guessed that outages were more probable than not, given Hope's technological level and the quality of the League personnel who'd have to maintain a separate generator.
'Will you show us in to Officer Kawalec, lad?' Nessler said to the urchin sprawled in the building's doorway. He'd been watching them approach with an expectant sneer.
'Why should I?' the boy said without getting up. His clothing was cut down from pieces of Liaison Service and Gendarmerie uniforms.
Nessler flipped him a small coin. The boy jumped to his feet and ran around the building. 'Sucker!' he called over his shoulder. 'Find her yourself!'
'I suppose we'd better do that,' Nessler said without expression, pushing open the door.
The hallway was dim but the room at the east end had a light which pulsed at the cyclic rate of the current feeding it. They turned in that direction. Two men wearing black Gendarmerie uniforms walked out of one room and into another, ignoring the visitors.
The Gendarmes were supposed to uphold League regulations on the less-developed worlds which had a Liaison Officer instead of a League High Commissioner. Every contact with Gendarmes during this tour had convinced Mincio that the service attracted people who did little for the reputation of the League, or for law and order more generally.
'Carabus!' a woman shouted from the lighted room. A paper placard tacked to the half-open door read CLO2 Denise Kawalec. 'Damn you, what have you done with the bottle?'
Mincio entered the room on Nessler's heels. Kawalec glared up from her search in the bottom drawer of a cabinet for filing hardcopy. When she saw strangers rather than whoever she'd expected, her expression quivered between fear and greed. While Kawalec wasn't precisely ugly, Mincio had never met a human being for whom the word 'plain' was a better fit.
'Who are you?' Kawalec demanded, sliding back behind her desk. Its surface was littered with orange peel and fragments of less identifiable food; local scavengers the size of a fingerbone wriggled their single antennae at the newcomers, then went back to their meal.
'Officer Kawalec,' Nessler said, 'we're Manticorian citizens touring Alphane sites. My name is Nessler, and my friend is Ms. Mincio.'
Mincio handed Kawalec the travel authorization from the League's Ministry of Protectorate Affairs both in the form of a read-only chip and a stamped and sealed offprint. The hardcopy had generally proven more useful in Region Twelve, where chip readers — particularly working chip readers — were conspicuous by their absence.
