stirred in the predawn stillness, she kissed him right there in the open. 'I'd better go.' She hurried off.
So it begins. He paused at the outcropping. The land was a sheet of darkness below, black except for a lambent glow flickering and building: Sakhalin had fired the city.
ACT THREE
'He, who the sword of heaven will bear should be as holy as severe'
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
David ben Unbutu sat and stared at blank white wall. He sat cross-legged, with the demimodeler placed squarely in front of him, its corners paralleling the corners of the plain white room. He shivered because it was cold. The scan unit was on, but all the image showed him was the dimensions of the rectangular room, white, featureless, blank.
A footstep scuffed the ground behind him. 'Anything?' Maggie asked.
He shook his head. The beads bound into his name braids made a snackling sound that was audible because of the deep stillness surrounding them. 'Our scan can't penetrate these walls, and neither can we. It's got to be here. It has to be, but we can't find the entrance.'
'Or the entrance won't open for us.' She sank down on her haunches beside him. The heat of her body drifted out to him, and he shifted closer to her, as to a flame.
'Thirty-two days it took me, Mags, to survey this damned place and the grounds. Every way I turn it, the only space I can't account for is right there.' He did not point. They all knew where it was, behind the far wall whose blankness seemed more and more like a mockery of their efforts. 'That's got to be the control room, the computer banks.'
'The place Tess got the cylinder. This matches the description she gave Charles. So what's he going to do?'
David blew on his hands to warm them. Maggie laid a hand on his. Just as the white wall emphasized the rich coffee brown of his skin, it lent hers more pallor, so that the contrast seemed heightened, dark and pale. 'We're not Chapalii. Tess didn't find her way in by herself. She had a Chapalii guide. If Rajiv can't crack the entrance, then there's no human who can.'
'Well.' She released his hand and unwound from her crouch, standing up. 'You may as well come eat. It's almost dusk.' She offered him a hand and he took it and rose as well, bending back down to switch off the modeler and tuck it under his arm before he straightened to stand beside her. She grinned down at him. 'I hear you're the current favorite of the spitfire.'
'Damn you.' David laughed. 'You're trying to embarrass me. I think she just wanted to see how far the melanin extends.'
'I hope her curiosity was suitably satisfied.'
'Why don't you ask her?'
'Oh, don't worry. I did, and it was.' She laughed in her turn. 'You're blushing. You're such an easy target, David.'
'I would have thought there wouldn't be any challenge in it, then. You're a heartless woman, Mags.'
They crossed to the door and slid the panel aside to let themselves out. Immediately, warmth enveloped them although it stayed cooler inside the palace in contrast to the hot summer days passing outside. The ebony floors of this chamber gleamed, and networks of light pulsed in their depths, as if the flooring concealed a delicate web of machinery. Maggie broke away from David and paced out the meter-wide counter that stood in the room. It extended in an unbroken, hollow rectangle within the larger rectanglar chamber; she slid up onto it and climbed over to the smaller counter, a half meter wide but also unbroken, that stood within it, and then hopped that one as well to stand in the very center of the room. The two counters separated her from David. She looked at him, and he at her.
'What the hell do these represent?' she asked. 'I don't see anything on here, no storage places, no controls, no patterns, no heat, nothing but the smooth surface.'
David gestured back toward the door they had just come through. On either side of the door stood two tall megaliths. 'Rajiv is pretty certain that those are transmitters of some kind. Maybe this is a power source.'
'Damned chameleons,' said Maggie cheerfully. She hopped back over the counters to return to David. They went on.
They no longer exclaimed over the palace. They had been here forty-three days and were as used to it as they ever would be. But still, for sheer size and the elegance and profusion of its detailing, it was magnificent. And it was theirs, the only Chapalii palace where humans had ever run free, unobstructed by protocol officers, by stewards, by the simple presence of any Chapalii at all. That it was thousands of years old did not lessen their victory. For all they knew, and from what little they had been permitted to see in Chapalii precincts now, Chapaliian architecture had scarcely changed at all in the last millennium.
Jo Singh had taken samples from every surface she could get a molecular flake off of, and Maggie had covered the same ground David had in his survey, recording every detail in three media for Earth's databanks. Charles walked the palace incessantly, as if by becoming intimately familiar with it he could somehow divine the intricacies of the Chapalii mind. After all, why should they have ennobled him? Why should they have rewarded him for his failed rebellion against them rather than simply killing him for the trouble he caused them?
'It's damned impressive,' said Maggie. David started, feeling that she echoed his thoughts.
'Do you ever think,' he said slowly, 'that we might just be better off as subjects in their Empire?''
'They don't bear grudges, you know, or at least, not that I've ever noticed. Not that I'm much among them, of course.'
'Not that any of us are,' David said.
'Sometimes I think they're better than us. Less prone to emotional decisions. More concerned about peace, and peaceable living. About stability. They must think we're savages, the way we go on.'
David grinned. 'Yes, rather like we look at the natives of Rhui and pride ourselves on being better than them, because we've grown out of their primitive state. We live well. All of us, I mean, all humans, not just you and I and the rest of Charles's retinue.'
Maggie paused as they went through an archway. She lifted a hand to trace a translucent spire of a glasslike substance that bordered the opening, lending its shadow to the pattern of tiles on the floor. At its core, fainter patterns mirrored the walls. 'But it's a moot point, isn't it? Charles has already decided for all of us.'
'Now, Mags, you know very well that the League Parliament voted full confidence in him. That is to say, that they'd follow wherever he led, knowing that he's got his eye on freeing us from the Empire somewhere down the line.'
'Look. Here comes an escort.'
Down the dimly lit hall came a white-robed priest-the ancient woman called Mother Avdotya-and a figure now intimately familiar to David. He hesitated and then walked forward beside Maggie, one hand tapping the modeler nervously. It looked like a plain black tablet of polished ebony, and he always carried parchment and quill pen and ink in the pouch at his belt, so that he might be thought to be using such instruments to conduct his survey and the tablet merely as a surface to write on, but it still made him anxious to meet any of the jaran when it was visible. Nadine, especially. Nadine always wanted to see the maps and architectural drawings he made. She had a clear grasp of maps and distances; she had just last night drawn him an astonishingly accurate-for its type-map of the coastline from Jeds up to the inland sea to the port of Abala. She had a fierce, impatient personality, overwhelming
