Perhaps the Procurator understood her ambivalence, for he lurched toward her, grimacing. “Sorry!” He chewed his lip, searching for words, his twisted body conveying more strain than the mere physical. “I perceive the fact of his disappearance does not convey apprehension.”
“His disappearance alone does not make me apprehensive,” Lutha drawled, emulating his stuffy manner. Though it annoyed the Fastigats, who claimed intuition as a province solely theirs, even laymen could play at inferences. “I gather from your obvious distress, however, that his disappearance does not stand alone.”
Seeming not to notice her sarcasm, he gestured toward the wide chairs he had ignored since she entered the room. “Sit down, please, do. Forgive my rudeness. I haven’t had time for niceties lately. Let me order refreshment.”
“If it pleases you.” She was starved, but damned if she’d let him know it.
“I hope it will please us both. Today …today could use some leavening of pleasure, even if it is only a little fragrance, a little savor.”
She seated herself as he murmured rapidly into his collar-link before scrambling into the chair across from her, a spindly lopsided figure, his awkwardness made more evident by the skintight uniform. When in the public gaze, draped in ceremonial robes or tabards or togas or what-have-you, even elderly bureaucrats could look imposing enough, but without the draperies, in official skinnies with their little potbellies or saggy butts fully limned, many of them were a little ridiculous. Even the Fastigats. So she said of him.
He, peering nearsightedly at her, saw wings of white hair at either side of her face, stark against otherwise char-black tresses, a bed-of-coals glow warming the brown matte skin at lip and cheek: forge lights, comforting or burning. He saw her square, possibly stubborn jaw. He looked into her eyes, a dark warm gray, almost taupe, showing more anger and pain than he had expected. No doubt the Procurator saw it all. If he cared about such things, no doubt he thought what I thought: how lovely! Though perhaps he had less reason than I to value loveliness.
So he looked at her but did not speak again until the almost invisible shadows had fetched fragrant teas and numerous small plates of oddments, something to suit every taste. Lutha averted her eyes from the food items that were still moving or all-too-recently dead and concentrated on the tray of small hot tarts set conveniently at her elbow. The aroma and taste were irresistible.
“You have some problem concerning Leelson Famber?” she prompted, brushing crumbs from her lips with one of the folded finan skins provided as napkins, soft and silky to the touch. On its own world, the finan is rare, almost extinct. Using its skins for napkins would be a conceit had the animal not been made for that purpose, as the Firsters aver. They are the hierarchs of homo-norm, of whom there are many, even upon Alliance Central. Besides, the finans’ genetic pattern had been saved in the computers at Prime. So Lutha told me.
Instead of answering, the Procurator asked, “Are you familiar with what is now called the ‘Ularian crisis’?”
Familiar, Lutha thought. Now there was a word. The crisis had been when? Almost a century ago. And on the frontier, to boot. Why in the world would a linguist like herself—a document expert, yes, but withal a mere functionary—be expected to be “familiar” with such distant and ancient history?
She put her mind in neutral and stared at the table, noticing the foods she found most attractive were now closer to her and the disgusting dishes had been removed. How did the shadows know? Was her face that easy to read? Or were the shadows taught to interpret the almost imperceptible twitches and jerks most people made without realizing it. Were they empaths, like Fastigats? Perhaps they actually were Fastigats, turned invisible as penance for some unseemly behavior. Fastigats were great ones for seemliness.
What had the old man been talking of? Of course. “Ularian crisis,” she said. “Around twenty-four hundred of the common era, a standard century ago, give or take a little. Alliance frontier worlds in the Hermes Sector were overrun by a race or force or something called Ularians.” She paused, forehead wrinkled. “Why was it named that?”
“The first human populations that vanished were in a line, a vector, that led toward the Ular Region,” he replied.
She absorbed the fact. “So, this something wiped all human life off a dozen worlds or systems or—”
The Procurator gestured impatiently at this imprecision.
She gave him a half smile, mocking his irritation. “Well, a dozen somethings, Procurator—you asked what I knew and I’m telling you.” She resumed her interrupted account, “Sometime later the Ularians went away. Thereafter, briefly, occurred the Great Debate, during which the Firster godmongers said Ularians didn’t exist because the universe was made for man, and the Infinitarians said Ularians could exist because everything is possible. Both sides wrote volumes explaining Ularians or explaining them away—on little or no evidence, as I recall—and the whole subject became so abstruse that only scholars care one way or the other.”
The Procurator shook his head in wonder. “You speak so casually, so disrespectfully of it.”
She considered the matter ancient history. “I shouldn’t be casual?”
He grimaced. “At the time humans—at least those who knew what was going on—feared for the survival of the race.”
“Was it taken that seriously?” she asked, astonished.
“It was by Alliance Prime, by those who knew what was happening! All that saved us from widespread panic was that the vanished settlements were small and few. Publicly, the disappearances were blamed on environmental causes, even though people vanished from every world in Hermes Sector—that is, every one but Dinadh.”
She shrugged, indicating disinterest in Dinadh. She who was to learn so much about Dinadh knew and cared nothing for it then.
The Procurator went on. “My predecessors here at
