He leaned forward, touching her lightly on the knee. “Did Leelson ever speak to you of Bernesohn Famber?”
She was suddenly intrigued. “Oh, yes. Leelson’s great-grandpop. One of the greatest of all Fastigats, to hear Leelson tell it. A genius, a biochemist.”
“Do you remember the name Tospia?”
Lutha smiled. “Bernesohn’s longtime lover. A Fastiga woman, of course.” She frowned. “A diva in solo opera. Leelson played some of her sensurrounds for me. Very nice, though I think the senso-techs were owed as much credit as Tospia herself. To my taste, one person’s performance sensed six times, however differentiated and augmented, does not have the interactive passion of six separate actors. I’ve yet to experience one that has true eroticism.”
The Procurator peered at her over the rim of his cup. “But Leelson never mentioned Bernesohn and the Ularians?”
She gave the question to her subconscious, which came up empty. “I recall no connection.”
He settled himself with a half-muffled groan. “I beg your patience:
“A century ago, there were twelve human populations on planets in Hermes Sector. Eleven of these were only settlements, six of them homo-normed, the other five at the survey stage. The twelfth world, Dinadh, had a planetary population. Dinadh is a small world, an unimportant world, except that it is near us in a spaciotemporal sense, though not in an astrophysical one. Everything into and out of Hermes Sector, including information, routes through Dinadh and did, even then.
“So, it was customary for freighters to land there, whether going or coming, and one did so a century ago, bringing the news that two of the settlements in Hermes Sector had vanished. Prime sent six patrol ships carrying investigative teams; two ships returned with news of further vanishments; the other four did not return. We sent more men to find the lost men—frequently a mistake, as in this case. None of them returned. Dinadh’s government, such as it is, refused to consider even partial evacuation, which would have been the best we could do. Evacuating a populated planet is impossible. There aren’t enough ships to keep up with the birthrate.” He sighed.
“And?” she prompted.
“Dinadh is the only occupied planet of its system, the only one suitable for occupation. The Alliance did the only thing it could think of, englobing the system with unmanned sentinel buoys. We might as well have done nothing, for all the good it did. No one came out of the sector toward Dinadh. Every probe we sent into the sector from Dinadh simply disappeared.
“Ten standard years went by; then twenty, then thirty. Planets applying for colony rights were sent elsewhere. Then, thirty-three standard years after the crisis, the sentinal buoys picked up a freighter crossing the line from Hermes Sector into Dinadhi space! The holds were stuffed with homo-norm equipment. The crew claimed they had found it abandoned and therefore salvageable, after falling into Hermes Sector accidentally, through a rogue emergence. Later we checked for stellar collapse and found an enormous one about the right time—”
“Stellar collapse?”
“The usual cause of rogue emergences is stellar collapse. The dimensional field twitches, so to speak. Things get sucked in here and spat out there. Well, the crew was brought here, and more questions were asked. It turned out they’d picked up equipment from four worlds in the sector and had noticed nothing at all inimical. We sent volunteer expeditions to investigate. All of them returned shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads. Nothing. No sign of what had happened to the human population thirty-odd years before, and no signs of aliens at all. We assumed the Ularians, whatever they or it had been, had departed.”
“So there were no survivors?” mused Lutha.
He shook his head. “Oh, we looked, believe me! We had no information about Ularians, no description of them, no actual proof that they existed, which gratified the Firster godmongers, you may be sure, for they’d claimed from the beginning there were no such things as Ularians. Since government is always delicately poised vis-a-vis godmongers, we were extremely interested in what survivors might tell us, but we never found a thing in Hermes Sector. Oh, there were some children who turned up on Perdur Alas around twenty years ago, but they were probably emergence castaways also.”
“Unlikely they’d have been there for eighty years. They’d have had to be third or fourth generation.”
“Quite right. All this is mere diversion, however.”
“You started by asking me about Bernesohn Famber,” she said impatiently.
“The relevant fact is that Bernesohn Famber was on one of the ships that went into Hermes Sector right after the vanishments.”
“One of the lost ships.”
“No! One that came back. Bernesohn was erratic and secretive. A genius, no doubt, but odd. Sometimes he didn’t appear outside his quarters for days and days. His colleagues didn’t expect to see him regularly, so they didn’t realize he was gone! When the ship got back here, they didn’t have any idea where or when he’d gone. We couldn’t find him.”
The Procurator leaned back in his chair. “Imagine our discomfiture sometime later when we learned he was living on Dinadh.”
“How did you find that out?” Lutha asked.
“Well, a year or so after Bernesohn disappeared, Tospia, his longtime companion, gave womb-birth to twins. In Fastiga.”
Lutha knew where Fastiga was. It might be called a suburb of Prime. Leelson’s mother lived there.
The Procurator went on. “Tospia’s twins were entered in the Famber lineage roster, but nobody at Prime made the connection.”
She said impatiently, “You intend to make the point, I presume, that the twins were conceived after Bernesohn’s disappearance?”
The Procurator assented. “Years later a sensation sniffer for one of the newslinks did a so-called biography of Tospia—unauthorized, need I say—in which he alleged that Bernesohn Famber could not have fathered the twins. Tospia threw a memorable and widely publicized tantrum and sued the sniffer for misprision of media freedom,
