“Here we are then,” he said. “A couple of suspects.”
“That’s right,” Chandra said, then brightened. “Let’s conspire!”
The conspiracy was low-key. Martinez sat at the head of the table, with Chandra on his right. While Alikhan poured wine and delivered plates of nuts and pickled vegetables, they discussed which cadet could best be promoted to take Chandra’s place. While they spoke, Martinez debated whether to tell Chandra how close she had come to being sacrificed to Michi’s search for a killer, and decided against it.
“How are you faring with the 77-12s?” Chandra asked. “Other than scaring the hell out of the department heads, that is.”
“The revised logs were delivered this morning,” Martinez said. “I’ve been going over them ever since. Some are even complete.”
At least the department heads had learned not to yarn the logs: when they didn’t have the information, they admitted it. “Data pending” was the phrase they’d all decided to put in the blank spaces, probably because it looked better than nothing at all.
“Signaler Nyamugali sent a complete log, didn’t she?” Chandra said.
“Yes.” Martinez smiled. “Your former division did well.” He signaled to Alikhan for the first course. “Of course I’ll still have to check the log to confirm it hasn’t been yarned.”
“You won’t find any mistakes,” Chandra said. “I kept the signalers on their toes.”
“Nyamugali had an easier job than most of the others. Francis is going to have to account for every air pump, ventilation fan, and heat exchange system on the ship.”
Chandra was skeptical. “You’re feeling sorry for them now?”
“No, not very.”
Alikhan arrived with a warm, creamy pumpkin soup, fragrant with the scent of cinnamon. Chandra tasted it and said, “Your cook has it all over the wardroom chef, good as he is.”
“I’ll tell him you said so.”
“That was one of the small compensations of being with Fletcher,” Chandra said. “He’d always give me a good meal before boring me to death.”
Martinez considered this as he sampled the soup, and decided that Chandra could at least pretend to be a little more stricken by the death of an ex-lover.
“What did he bore you with?” Martinez asked.
“Other than the sex, you mean?” When Martinez didn’t smile at her joke, she shrugged and went on. “He talked about everything, really. The food we were eating, the wine we were drinking, the exciting personnel reports he’d signed that day. He talked about his art. He had a way of making everything dull.” A mischievous light came into her eyes. “What did you think of what he had hanging in his sleeping cabin? Did it give you sweet dreams?”
“I got rid of it,” Martinez said. “Jukes found some less depressing stuff.” He looked at her. “Why did Fletcher have Narayanguru there? What did he get out of it?”
Chandra gave an elaborate sigh. “You’re not going to make me repeat his theories, are you?”
“Why not?”
“Well,” she said, “he said that if he ever joined any cult, it would be the Narayanists, because they were the only cult that was truly civilized.”
“How so?”
“Let me try to remember. I was trying not to listen by that point.” She pursed her full lips. “I think it was because the Narayanists recognized that all life was suffering. They say that the only real things were perfect and beautiful and eternal and outside our world, and that we could get closer to these real things by contemplating beautiful objects in this world.”
“Suffering,” Martinez repeated. “Gomberg Fletcher, who was filthy rich and born into most privileged caste of Peers, believed that life was suffering. Thathis life was suffering.”
Chandra shook her head. “I didn’t understand that part either. If he ever suffered, he didn’t do it when I was looking.” A curl of disdain touched her lip. “Of course, he felt he was more refined than the rest of us, so he probably thought his suffering was so elevated that the rest of us didn’t understand it.”
“I can see why the Shaa killed Narayanguru, anyway,” Martinez said. “If you maintain that there’s another world, which you can’t prove exists, where things are somehow better and more real thanthis world, which wecan prove exists, you’re going to run afoul of the Praxis for sure, and the Legion of Diligence is going to have you hanging off a tree before you can spit.”
“Oh, there was more to it than the invisible world business. Miracles and so on. The dead tree that Narayanguru was hung on was supposed to have burst into flower after they took him down.”
“I can see where the Legion of Diligence would take a dim view of those stories too.”
That night, sitting on his bed while he drank his cocoa and looked at the picture of the woman, her child, and the cat, Martinez thought about Fletcher sitting in the same place, contemplating the ghastly figure of Narayanguru and thinking about human suffering. He wondered what Fletcher, a prominent member of two of the hundred most prominent Terran families in the empire, had ever suffered, and what comfort he received by looking at the bloody figure strung on the tree.
Dr. Xi had said Fletcher found his position a burden, that he worked dutifully to fulfill what was expected of him. He wasn’t an arrogant snob, according to Xi, he was just playing thepart of an arrogant snob.
Fletcher had been empty, Martinez thought, filling his hours with formal ritual and aesthetic pleasure. He hadn’t created anything; he hadn’t ever made a statue or a painting, he just collected them. He hadn’t done anything new or original with his command, he’d just polished his ship’s personnel and routines the same way he might polish a newly acquired silver figurine.
Yet he had suffered, apparently. Perhaps he had known all along how hollow his life had become.
Fletcher had sat where he was now sitting, and contemplated objects that other people considered holy.
Martinez decided he wasn’t going to figure Fletcher out tonight. He put the cocoa aside, brushed his teeth, and rolled beneath the covers.
FOURTEEN
Resistance, with instructions on building a partisan cell network, was distributed to the citizens of Zanshaa, and was shortly followed by essays on the manufacture of firebombs and plastic explosives, which was easy, and detonators, which were not.
“If you’re going to tell people to mess with stuff like picric acid,” Spence warned, “you’re going to have them blowing their fingers off.”
Sula shrugged. “I’ll tell them to be careful,” she said. It’s not as if she could look over their shoulders and tell them how to do it right.
She just wished she was enough of an engineer to provide diagrams of how to build firearms.
The Naxids had published sketches of the two Terrans observed fleeing from the scene of Lord Makish’s assassination. The pictures were composites generated by witnesses, and Sula suspected the Naxid school supervisor as the prime contributor.
Both images were male. Neither resembled Sula or Macnamara to any degree.
Sula wondered how badly she ought to be insulted. Her figure was slim but hardly boyish. Even in a worker’s overalls it should be clear enough that she was female.
She concluded that the Naxids were no better at telling Terrans apart than the Terrans were at distinguishing individual Naxids.
As she was sending the newsletter out in batches of a few thousand, she heard shouts and a crash on the street outside and stepped to the window. A black-haired Terran man had run through the street vendors in an attempt to evade police, but the police had caught him. They were Terran as well. As the man was marched away, Sula wondered if he was a criminal, a new-made hostage, or a loyalist bound for execution.
Others on the street watched as well, and as they watched with carefully controlled expressions, Sula could see the same question floating behind their hooded eyes. A new tension had entered the world. An arrest had once been something comparatively simple, and now it was fraught with a thousand new, dangerous implications, particularly if the authorities needed hostages in a hurry.
People in Riverside, when they weren’t working or sleeping, lived mostly on the streets because their prefabricated apartments were too cramped for themselves and their families. Their normal life had now become
