“Excuse me”, before swinging away into the crowd of people with surprising litheness and grace. At the same time Dr. Sulbazghi swayed a little and, frowning, inspected the contents of his glass. His eyes looked a little odd. “Don’t know what they’re putting in this stuff these days. Think I’ll sit down, if you… excuse me.” He sidled off too, heading for some seats.
“There we are,” Himerance said smoothly. He had kept his eyes focused on her while both the Zei and Dr. S had made their excuses and left. She was alone with him now.
The truth dawned. “You just
“Well done,” Himerance said with an appreciative smile. “A concocted semi-urgent message on the bodyguard’s comms and a temporary feeling of dizziness afflicting the good doctor. Neither will detain them for long, however it allows me the chance to beg a favour of you.” Himerance smiled again. “I would like to talk to you privately, Ms. Y’breq. May I?”
“Now?” she asked. She glanced about. It would be a short conversation; you were — well, she was — never left alone for more than a minute or so at gatherings like this.
“Later,” Himerance said. “Tonight. In your chamber at Mr. Veppers’ town house in Ubruater City.”
She almost laughed. “Think you’ll get invited?” She knew there was nothing planned that evening beyond a meal out with the whole entourage somewhere and then — for her — music and deportment lessons. Then to bed, after getting to watch half an hour of screen, if she was lucky. She wasn’t allowed out without bodyguards and escorts and the idea that she’d be allowed to entertain a man in her private bedroom, ancient and alien or not, was frankly hilarious.
Himerance smiled his easy smile. “No,” he said. “I can arrange my own access; however I wouldn’t want you to be alarmed, so I thought it best to ask permission first.”
She regained some control. “What is this about, Mr. Himerance?” she asked, voice polite and measured again.
“I have a modest proposition to make. It will cause you no inconvenience or harm. It would take nothing from you that you’d miss.”
She changed tack again, trying to unsettle this weird old guy, dropping the too-polite tone and asking sharply, “And what’s in it for me?”
“Perhaps some satisfaction, once I’ve explained what it is I am looking for. Though some other payment could certainly be arranged.” Still without taking his gaze away from her eyes, he said, “I’m afraid I must hurry you for an answer; one of Mr. Veppers’ bodyguards is making his way towards us rather smartly, having realised we have been left alone.”
She felt excited, slightly scared. Her life was too controlled. “When’s good for you?” she asked.
She’d fallen asleep. She hadn’t meant to and she would never have thought she’d be able to anyway, just too fired up by the vague, illicit thrill of it all. Then when she awoke she knew he was there.
Her room was on the second-top floor of the tall town house, which was better guarded than most military bases. She had a big room with a dressing room and bathroom en-suite; its two large windows looked out over the gently lit parterres and formal sculptings of the garden. By the windows, part illuminated in the spill of cloud- reflected city light the shutters admitted, there was a sitting area with a low table, a couch and two seats.
She levered herself up from her pillows with her elbows.
He was sitting in one of the seats. She saw his head turn.
“Ms. Y’breq,” he said softly. “Hello again.”
She shook her head, put a finger to her lips, pointed round the room.
There was just enough light for her to see him smile. “No,” he said gently. “The various surveillance devices will not trouble us.”
Okay, she thought. So the alarm probably wouldn’t work either. She’d kind of been relying on that as her last line of defence if things got iffy. Well, second-last line of defence; she could always just scream. Though if the guy could interfere with the Zei’s comms, make Dr. S feel suddenly dizzy and somehow get himself into Veppers’ town house without being detected, maybe even screaming wouldn’t be on the agenda if he set his mind against it. She started to get a little frightened again.
A light came slowly on near the seat he sat in, revealing him to be dressed just as he had been at the reception earlier in the day. “Please,” he said, gesturing to the other seat. “Join me.”
She put a robe over her nightgown, turning away from him so that he wouldn’t see her hands shake. She sat by him. He looked different: still the same man, but not quite so old; less skeletal about the face, body no longer stooped.
“Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to talk with you in private,” he said formally.
“That’s okay,” she said, drawing her feet up beneath her and hugging her knees. “So. What is it all about?”
“I would like to take an image of you.”
“An image?” She felt vaguely disappointed. Was that all? Though probably he meant a full-body image, a photograph of her in the nude. So he was just an old perv after all. Funny how things that started out exciting and maybe even romantic-seeming degenerated into the crude mundanity of lust.
“It would be an image of your entire body, not just both inside and out but of its every single cell, indeed its every atom, and taken, in effect, from outside the three dimensions one normally deals with.”
She stared at him. “Like, from hyper-space?” she asked. Lededje had generally paid attention in science lessons.
Himerance smiled broadly. “Precisely.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “For my own private collection of images which I find pleasing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“For whatever it might be worth, Ms. Y’breq, I can assure you that my motivation is absolutely not sexual.”
“Right.”
Himerance sighed. “You are a remarkable work, if I may say so, Ms. Y’breq,” he told her. “I realise that you are a person, and a very intelligent, pleasant and — to those of your own kind, of course — an attractive one. However, I shan’t pretend that my interest in you is anything other than purely due to the intagliation you have suffered.”
“Suffered?”
“Undergone? I did think about the exact word to employ.”
“No, you were right the first time. I suffered it,” she said. “Not something I got to have any choice about, anyway.”
“Quite.”
“What do you do with these images?”
“I contemplate them. They are works of art, to me.”
“Got any other ones you can show me?”
Himerance sat forward. “Would you really like to see some?” He appeared genuinely keen.
“Do we have the time?”
“We do!”
“So show me.”
A bright, 3D image appeared in the air in front of her. It showed… well, she wasn’t sure. It was an insane swirl of lines, black against yellow-orange, bewilderingly complex, levels of implied detail disappearing into enfolded spaces it was not quite possible to see.
“This is just the three-dimensional view one would have of a stellar field-liner entity,” he told her. “Though with the horizontal scale reduced to make it look roughly spherical. Really they look more like this.” The image suddenly stretched, teasing out until the assemblage of dark lines she’d been looking at became a single line, maybe a metre long and less than a millimetre across. A tiny symbol, looking like a sort of microscopic shoe box with the edges chamfered off, was probably meant to indicate scale, though as she had no idea what it was meant to represent it didn’t really help. The vanishingly thin line was shown silhouetted against what looked like a detail
