“What?” asked one of the witnesses, confused.
“You’re blocking the view for the recorders,” said Iolanthe in a choked voice. “Stand back.”
She didn’t want them to stand back, she wanted them to rip that alien thing off Adrian’s neck, but she couldn’t stop herself from explaining to them. He’d so clearly wanted it done.
The thing inched back along the skin to his forehead, where it fastened, this time immovable. One end of it trailed down like the ties left from a knot; it trailed to the back of his neck where the two tendons stood out, and plugged itself happily into the soft pocket of flesh between them.
Adrian screamed. It came without any warning and they were all shocked. People moved back and forth helplessly, and a keening sound rose in the chamber. Fischer had thrown out Adrian’s orders and was trying to pry the thing out with his nails.
Coronation Day: On G level, Mrs. Hastings lost hold of her precious teapot and collapsed on the flowered carpet, having forgotten how to stand. Mrs. Cathcart, on her way to visit her old friend, stopped short in the middle of Mercati Boulevard. She would have been run down by a man with a recycling cart, but he’d halted his pedaling and his feet dangled in the air. In the home of Howard Talmadge and Dominick Potiyevsky, Dominick had pushed his wheelchair next to Howard’s tattered armchair and was shaking him desperately. “Howard! What’s wrong! Howard! Jesus, Howard, answer me!”
On the City of Diamond, over nine-tenths of the population found themselves a lot more intimate with the Protector than they’d ever planned on being. Not telepathically, not even in a clear enough way to know what was happening or who was involved. But emotionally, emphatically—it was a shift in viewpoint, a shift that came like an earthquake.
It lasted all of four seconds. Nobody who’d been through it was ever able to explain it satisfactorily to anybody who hadn’t. Mrs. Cathcart became aware of her presence on the Boulevard and the proximity of the recycling cart. She dived to the pedestrian walk with a reflex she’d never learned. The cart handler, who was paid by the mile and never stopped if he could help it, halted and jumped down. “Are you all right?” A call went out for a doctor, but Mrs. Cathcart stood up, smoothed her dress, and assured the crowd, in a rather distracted voice, that it wasn’t necessary. Howard Talmadge came to himself and touched Dominick’s cheek. “You’re crying, Dom. I’m okay. I just had the strangest— I don’t know what it was.”
Brandon Fischer’s eyes were wet, too. He’d failed to pull this awful thing off Adrian, and then he’d been thoroughly shook up by—this whatever it was. He looked to the Protector now and saw that the Crown had come off; it was lying in Adrian’s lap. Fischer reached over.
“Don’t touch it,” said Adrian. “I don’t think it’s safe.” He nodded to one of the others and said, “Bring me the cold-box.”
“Adrian—I just—” The man he’d addressed stuttered.
“I know,” said Adrian. “But get the box.”
The man brought it over. Adrian put it open-side-down on his lap and tilted his legs to let the Crown spill into it. Then he closed the box, leaned back in the chair, and let out a long breath.
“You’re bleeding from the back,” said Iolanthe. She’d come up next to him and now she took out a handkerchief and applied it to the back of his neck.
He craned up at her and took the hand on his shoulder. “Sweetheart, did you—”
“Yes. It was interesting, but let’s not do it again very soon, all right?” Her voice was unsteady.
Brandon Fischer stumbled as he walked across the chamber. Adrian noticed that nobody commented or thought it odd; they all walked the same way. What happened hadn’t been painful or horrifying in itself, but they all were reacting physically like people who’d just been through some great disaster.
“Doctors are going to be busy,” said Adrian. “I think there’ll be some people in trouble over this.”
Fischer turned slowly. “You don’t think,” he began, and then went on, “you don’t think it reached out of this room!”
“Yes,” said Adrian. “I think it reached out of this room.”
And they began the calls and the reports and the analyzing that would lead them to the figuring of just what had happened.
On a hill half a day’s walk south of Everun lay the ruins of a house belonging to the Hansard family, the oldest human family on Baret Two. They had been war chiefs during the time before the Empire, and before the general settlement of the planet they had been farmers. Several of the later Hansards had dragged their enemies in chains through the city that preceded Everun before hanging them from the fort tower by the sea for birds to dispose of. That was all very long ago, though, by human standards. In the year the Three Cities came to Baret, the only living Hansard was a man called Hyram, who had changed his surname so as to be allowed to marry into the governor’s family. He had not even visited the ruins of their old great house, except once on a childhood picnic.
An overgrown door on the side of the hill led to the Hansard tomb. There the mightiest of the Hansard dead were stacked in stone drawers, laid out in a more peaceful aspect than many of them had assumed while alive. Carved faces on the outsides of the drawers glared down at any observers. Rob this tomb, if you dare. In the farthest interior reaches of this large mausoleum the hillside came down again, as though pushed by a fist, and a human would have to bend very far to see into the end. There they would find a drawer by itself, of green and ( black swirling marble, with a Curosa symbol on the front. Underneath, in English, letters read: “This was placed by
