She made a note on her pad, put down her slide rule, and picked up a
pearl snap with which she fastened together the shoulder panels of her
white dress. The maid said, "Ma'am, shall I do your hair now?"
"One second," Clea said. She turned to page 328 of her integral tables,
checked the increment of sub-cosine A plus B over the _n_th root of A to
the _n_th plus B to the _n_th, and transferred it to her notebook.
"Ma'am?" asked the maid. She was a thin woman, about thirty. The little
finger of her left hand was gone.
"You can start now." Clea leaned back in the beauty-hammock and lifted
the dark mass of her hair from her neck. The maid caught the ebony
wealth with one hand and reached for the end of the four yards of silver
chain strung with alternate pearls and diamonds each inch and a half.
"Ma'am?" asked the maid again. "What are you figuring on?"
"I'm trying to determine the inverse sub-trigonometric functions. Dalen
Golga, he was my mathematics professor at the university, discovered the
regular ones, but nobody's come up with the inverses yet."
"Oh," said the maid. She ceased weaving the jeweled chain a moment,
took a comb, and whipped it through a cascade of hair that fell back on
Clea's shoulder. "Eh ... what are you going to do with them, once you
find them?"
"Actually," said Clea. "Ouch ..."
"Oh, pardon me, I'm sorry, please ..."
"Actually," went on Clea, "they'll be perfectly useless. At least as far
as anyone knows now. They exist, so to speak, in a world that has little
to do with ours. Like the world of imaginary numbers, the square root of
minus one. Eventually we may find use for them, perhaps in the same way
we use imaginary numbers to find the roots of equations of a higher
order than two, because cosine theta plus _I_ sine theta equals _e_ to
the _I_ sine theta, which lets us ..."
"Ma'am?"
"Well, that is to say they haven't been able to do anything like that
with the sub-trigonometric functions yet. But they're fun."
"Bend your head a little to the left, ma'am," was the maid's comment.
Clea bent.
"You're going to look beautiful." Four and five fingers wove deftly in
her hair. "Just beautiful."
"I hope that Tomar can get here. It's not going to be any fun without
him."
"But isn't the King coming?" asked the maid. "I saw his acceptance note
myself. You know it was on very simple paper. Very elegant."
"My father will enjoy that a good deal more than I will. My brother went
to school with the King before ... before his Majesty's coronation."
"That's amazing," said the maid. "Were they friends? Just think of it?
Do you know whether they were friends or not?"
Clea shrugged.
"And, oh," said the maid, continuing, "have you seen the ballroom? All
the hors d'oeuvres are real, imported fish. You can tell, because
they're smaller than the ones your father grows."
"I know," smiled Clea. "I don't think I've ever eaten any of Dad's fish
in my life, which is sort of terrible, actually. They're supposed to be
very good."
"Oh, they are, ma'am. They are. Your father is a fine man to grow such
great, good fishes. But you must admit, there's something special about
the ones that come from the coast. I tasted one on my way up through the
pantry. So I know."
"What exactly is it?" Clea asked, turning around.
The maid frowned, and then smiled and nodded wisely. "Oh, I know. I
know. You can tell the difference."
* * * * *
At that moment, Jon Koshar was saying, "Well, so far you've been right."
He appeared to be more or less standing (the room was dim, so his head
and hands were invisible), more or less alone ("Yeah, I trust you. I
don't have much choice," he added.) in the pantry of his father's
mansion.
Suddenly his voice took a different tone. "Look, I _will_ trust you;
with part of me, anyway. I've been caged up for nearly five years, for
something stupid I did, and for something that no matter how hard I try,
I can't convince myself was all my fault. I don't mean that Uske should
be blamed. But chance, and all the rest ... well, all I mean is it makes
me want out that much more. I want to be _free_. I nearly got myself
killed trying to escape from the mines. And a couple of people did get
killed helping me. All right, you got me out of that stainless steel
graveyard I wandered into back at the radiation barrier, and for that,
thanks. I mean it. But I'm not free yet. And I still want out, more than
anything in the world.
"Sure, I know that you want me to do something, but I don't understand
it yet. You say you'll tell me soon. Okay. But you're riding around in
my head like this, so I'm not free yet. If that's what I have to do to
get free, than I'll do it. But I'm warning you. If I see another crack
in the wall, another spot of light getting in, I'll claw my hands off
trying to break through and to hell with what you want. Because while
you're there, I can't be free."
Suddenly the light in the pantry flipped on. His sudden face went from
the tautness of his last speech to fear. He had been standing by the
side of a seven-foot porcelain storage cabinet. He jumped back to the
wall. Whoever had come in, a butler or caterer, was out of sight on the
other side. A hand came around the edge of the cabinet, reaching for the
handle. The hand was broad, wiry with black hair, and sported a cheap,
wide, brass ring set with an irregular shape of blue glass. As the door
opened, the hand swung out of sight. There was a clatter of dishes on
the shelves, the slide of crockery slipping over plastic racks, and a
voice. "All right there. You carry this one." Then a grunt, and the
_ker-flop_ of the latch as the door slammed to.
A moment later, the light, and John Koshar's hands and head, went out.
When Jon stepped forward again, he looked at the pantry, at the doors,
the cabinets. The familiarity hurt. There was a door that opened into
the main kitchen. (Once he had snagged a kharba fruit from the cook's
table and ran, as behind him a wooden salad bowl crashed to the floor.
The sound made him whirl, in time to catch the cook's howl and to see
the pale shreds of lettuce strewn across the black tile floor. The bowl
was still spinning. He had been nine.)
He started slowly for the door to the hallway that led to the dining
room. In the hall was a red wood table on which sat a free form
sculpture of aluminum rods and heavy glass spheres. That was unfamiliar.
Not the table, the sculpture.
A slight highlight along the curve of crystal brought back to him for a
moment the blue ceramic vase that had been there in his memory. It was
coated with glaze that was shot through with myriad cracks. It was
cylindrical, straight, then suddenly veering to a small mouth, slightly
off center. The burnished red wood behind the vivid, turquoise blue was
a combination that was almost too rich, too sensual. He had broken the
vase. He had broken it in surprise, when his sister had come in on him
suddenly, the little girl with hair black as his own, only more of it,
saying, "What are you doing, Jon?" and he had jumped, turned, and then
the vase was lying in fragments on the floor, like a lot of bright,
brittle leaves made out of stone. He remembered his first reaction had
been, oddly, surprise at finding that the glaze covered the inside as
well as the outside of the vase. He was fourteen.
He walked to the family dining room and stepped inside. With the
ballroom in use, no one would come here. Stepping into the room was like
stepping into a cricket's den, the subtle _tsk-tsk_ of a thousand clocks
repeated and repeated, overlapping and melting, with no clear,
discernible rhythm. The wall by the door was lined with shelves and they
were filled with his father's collection of chronometers. He looked at
the clocks on the shelf level with his eye. The last time he had been in
this room, it had been the shelf below. The light from the door made a
row of crescents on the curved faces, some the size of his little finger
nail, others the diameter of his head. Their hands were invisible, their
settings were dim. (In his memory they went from simple gold to ornately
carved silver, and one was set in an undersea bower with jeweled shells
and coral branches.) There must be many new clocks after five years, he
thought. If he turned on the light, how many would he recognize?
(When he was eighteen, he had stood in this room and examined the thin,
double prong of a fire-blade. The light in the room was off, and as he
flicked the button on the hilt, and the white sparks leaped out and up
the length of the blade, the crescents flamed on the edges of the clock
faces, all along the wall. Later, at the royal palace, with that same
blade, there had been the same, sudden, clumsy fear at discovery, fear
clotting into panic, the panic turning to confusion, and the confusion
metastasizing into fear again, only fear all through him, dragging him
down, so that when he tried to run down the vaulted hall, his feet were
too heavy, so that when he tripped against the statue in the alcove,
whirled upon the pursuing guard, and swung the white needle of energy
down and the guard's flesh hissed and fell away--a moment of blood
spurring under pale flame--almost immediately he was exhausted. They
took him easily after that.)
Clumsy, he thought. Not with his fingers, (He had fixed many of these
clocks when his father had acquired them in various states of
disrepair.), but with his mind. His emotions were not fine and drawn,
but rather great shafts of anger or fear fell about him without focus or
apparent source. Disgust, or even love, when he had felt it was vague,
liable to metamorphasize from one to the other. (School was great; his
history teacher was very good.... School was noisy; the kids were pushy
and didn't care about anything. His blue parakeet was delicate and
beautiful; he had taught it to whistle ... there were always crumbs on
the bottom of the cage; changing the paper was a nuisance.)
Then there had been five years of prison. And the first sharp feeling
pierced his mind, as sharp as the uncoiled hair-spring of a clock, as
sharp as jewels in a poison ring. It was a wish, a pain, an agony for
freedom. The plans for escape had been intricate, yet sharp as the
cracks in blue ceramic glaze. The hunger for escape was a hand against
his stomach, and as the three of them had, at last, waited in the rain
by the steps, it had tightened unbearably. Then ...
Then with all the sharpness, what had made him lose the others? Why had
he wandered in the wrong direction? Clumsy! And he wanted to be free of
that! And wonder if that was what he had wanted to be free of all along
while he had sputtered at the prison guards, choked on the food, and
could not communicate his outrage. Then, at the horizon, was the purple
glow of something paler than sunrise, deadlier than the sea, a
flickering, luminous purple gauze behind the hills. Near him were the
skeletons of broken, century-ancient trees, leafless, nearly petrified.
The crumbly dirt looked as if it had been scattered over the land in
handfuls, loosely, bearing neither shrubs or footprints. By one boulder
a trickle of black water ran beneath a fallen log, catching dim light in
the ripples on either side. He looked up.
On the horizon, against the lines of light, as though cut--no,
torn--from carbon paper was the silhouette of a city. Tower behind tower
rose against the pearly haze. A net of roadways wound among the spires.
Then he made out one minuscule thread of metal that ran from the city,
in his general direction but veering to the right. It passed him half a
mile away and at last disappeared into the edge of the jungle that he
could see, now, behind him. _Telphar!_ The word came to his mind as
though on a sign attached with springs to his consciousness. The
radiation! That was the second thing he thought of. Once more the name
of the city shivered in his brain: _Telphar!_ The certain, very certain
death he had wandered into caught the center of his gut like a fist. It
was almost as if the name were sounding out loud in his skull. Then he
stopped. Because he realized he had heard something. A ... a voice! Very
definitely he heard it--
Music had started. He could hear it coming from the ballroom now. The
party must be under way. He looked out into the hall. A fellow in a
white apron, holding an empty tray on which were crumbs from small
cakes, was coming toward him.
"Excuse me, sir," the man in the apron said. "Guests aren't supposed to
be in this part of the house."
"I was trying to find the-eh-er ..." Jon coughed.
The man in the apron smiled. "Oh. Of course. Go back into the ballroom
and take the hall to your left down three doors."
"Thank you," Jon smiled back and hurried up the hallway. He entered the
ballroom by way of a high, arched alcove in which were small white meat,
red meat, dark meat of fish ground into patties, cut into stars, strips
of fillet wound into imitation sea shells, tiny braised shrimp, and
stuffed baby smelts.
A ten-piece orchestra--three bass radiolins, a theremin, and six blown
shells of various sizes--was making a slow, windy music from the dais.
The scattering of guests seemed lost in the great room. Jon wandered
across the floor.
Here and there were stainless steel fountains in which blue or pink
liquid fanned over mounds of crushed ice. Each fountain was rimmed with
a little shelf on which was a ring of glasses. He picked a glass up, let
a spout of pink fill it, and walked on, sipping slowly.
Suddenly, the loudspeaker announced the arrival of Mr. Quelor Da and
party. Heads turned, and a moment later a complex of glitter, green
silk, blue net, and diamonds at the top of the six wide marble steps
across the room resolved into four ladies and their escorts.
Jon glanced up at the balcony than ran around the second story of the
room. A short gentleman in a severe, unornamented blue suit was coming
toward the head of the steps which expanded down toward the ballroom
floor with the grace and approximate shape of a swan's wing. The
gentleman hurried down the pale cascade.
Jon sipped his drink. It was sweet with the combined flavors of a dozen
fruits, with the whisper of alcohol bitter at the back of his tongue.
The gentleman hurried across the floor, passing within yards of him.
Father! The impact was the same as the recognition of Telphar. The hair
was thinner than it had been five years ago. He was much heavier.
His--father--was at the other side of the room already, checking with
the waiters. Jon pulled his shoulders in, and let his breath out. It was
the familiarity, not the change, that hurt.
It took some time before the room filled. There was a lot of space. One
guest Jon noted was a young man in military uniform. He was powerful,
squat in a taurine way usually associated with older men. There was a
major's insignia on his shoulder. Jon watched him a while, empathizing
with his occasional looks that told how out of place he felt. He took
neither food nor drink, but prowled a ten-foot area by the side of the
balcony steps. Waiting, Jon thought.
A half an hour later, the floor was respectably populated. Jon had
exchanged a few words at last with the soldier. (Jon: "A beautiful
party, don't you think?" Soldier, with embarrassment: "Yes, sir." Jon:
"I guess the war is worrying all of us." Soldier: "The war? Yes." Then
he looked away, not inclined to talk more.) Jon was now near the door.
Suddenly the loudspeaker announced: "The Party of His Royal Majesty, the
King."
Gowns rustled, the talk rose, people turned, and fell back from the
entrance. The King's party, headed by himself and a tall,
electric-looking red-headed woman, his senior by a handful of years,
appeared at the top of the six marble steps. As they came down, right
and left, people bowed. Jon dropped his head, but not before he realized
that the King's escort had given him a very direct look. He glanced up
again, but now her emerald train was sweeping down the aisle the people
had left open. Her insignia, he remembered, told him she was a duchess.
Coming up the aisle in the other direction now between the bowing crowds
was old Koshar. He bowed very low, and the pale blond young man raised
him and they shook hands, and Koshar spoke. "Your Majesty," he began
warmly.
"Sir," answered the King, smiling.
"I haven't seen you since you were a boy at school."
The King smiled again, this time rather wanly. Koshar hurried on.
"But I would like to introduce my daughter to you, for it's her party.
Clea--." The old man turned to the balcony stairs, and the crowd's eyes
turned with him.
She was standing on the top step, in a white dress made of panel over
silken panel, held with pearl clasps. Her black hair cascaded across one
shoulder, webbed and re-webbed with a chain of silver strung with
pearls. Her hands at her sides, she came down the stairs. People stepped
back; she smiled, and walked forward. Jon watched while at last his
sister reached his father's side.
"My daughter Clea," said old Koshar to the King.
"Charmed."
Koshar raised his left hand, and the musicians began the introduction to
the changing partners dance. Jon watched the King take Clea in his arms,
and also saw the soldier move toward them, and then stop. A woman in a
smoky gray dress suddenly blocked his view, smiled at him, and said,
"Will you dance?" He smiled back, to avoid another expression, and she
was in his arms. Apparently the soldier had had a similar experience,
for at the first turn of the music, Jon saw the soldier was dancing too.
A few couples away, Clea and the King turned round and round, white and
white, brunette and blond. The steps came back to Jon like a poem
remembered, the turn, the dip, separate, and join again. When a girl
does the strange little outward step, and the boy bows, so that for a
moment she is out of sight, her gown always swishes just so. Yes, like
that! This whole day had been filled with the sudden remembrances of
tiny facts like that, forgotten for five years, at once relearned with
startling vividness that shocked him. The music signaled for partners to
change. Gowns whirled into momentary flowers, and he was dancing with
the brown-haired woman the soldier had been dancing with a moment
before. Looking to his left, he saw that the soldier had somehow
contrived to get Clea for a partner. Moving closer, he overheard.
"I didn't think you were going to get here at all. I'm so glad," from
Clea.
"I could have even come earlier," Tomar said. "But you'd have been
busy."
"You could have come up."
"And once I got here, I didn't think we'd get a chance to talk, either."
"Well, you've got one now. Better make it quick. We change partners in a
moment. What happened to the scouting planes?"
"All crippled. Didn't sight a thing. They got back to base almost before
I did this morning. The report was nothing. What about the picnic,
Clea?"
"We can have it on ..."
A burst of music signaled the change. Jon did not hear the day, but
expected his sister to whirl into his arms. But instead (he saw her
white dress flare and turn by him) an emerald iridescence caught in his
eye, then rich mahogany flame. He was dancing with the Duchess. She was
nearly his height, and watched him with a smile hung in the subtle area
between friendship and knowing cynicism. She moved easily, and he had
just remembered that he ought to smile back to be polite when the music
sounded the change. The instant before she whirled away, he heard her
say, very distinctly, "Good luck, Jon Koshar."
His name brought him to a halt, and he stared after her. When he did
turn back to his new partner, surprise still on his face, his eyes were
filled with sudden whiteness. It was Clea. He should have been dancing,
but he was standing still. When she looked at his face to discover why,
she suddenly drew a breath. At first he thought his head had disappeared
again. Then, as shock and surprise became suddenly as real as her wide
eyes, her open mouth, he whispered, "Clea!" And her hand went to her
mouth.
_Clumsy!_ he thought, and the word was a sudden ache in his hands and
chest. Reach for her. Dance. As his hands went out, the music stopped,
and the languid voice of the King came over the loudspeaker.
"Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of Toromon, I have just received a
message from the council that necessitates an announcement to you as my
friends and loyal subjects. I have been requested by the council to make
their declaration of war official by my consent. An emergency meeting
over sudden developments has made it imperative that we begin immediate
action against our most hostile enemies on the mainland. Therefore,
before you all, I declare the Empire of Toromon to be at war."
In the silence, Jon looked for his sister, but she was gone. Someone
near the microphone cried out, "Long live the King." Then the cry echoed
again. The musicians started the music once more, partners found one
another, and the talking and laughing grew in his ears like waves, like
crumbling rock, like the cutter teeth clawing into the rock face of the
ore deposits....
Jon shook his head. But he was in his own house, yes. His room was on
the second floor and he could go up and lie down. And by his bed would
be the copper night table, and the copy of _Delcord the Whaler_ which he
had been reading the night before.
He'd left the ballroom and gotten halfway down the hall before he
remembered that his room was probably not his room any longer. And that
he certainly couldn't go up to it and lie down. He was standing in front
of the door of one of the sitting rooms that opened off the hall. The
door was ajar, and from it he heard a woman's voice.
"Well, can't you do something about his index of refraction? If he's
going to be doing any work at night, you can't have him popping on and
off like a cigarette lighter." There was silence. Then: "Well, at least
don't you think he should be told more than he knows now? Fine. So do I,
especially since the war has been officially declared."
Jon took a breath and stepped in.
Her emerald train whirled across the duller green of the carpet as she
turned. The bright hair, untonsured save by two coral combs, fell behind
her shoulders. Her smile showed faint surprise. Very faint. "Who were
you talking to?" Jon Koshar asked.
"Mutual friends," the Duchess said. They were alone in the room.
After a moment, Jon said, "What do they want us to do? It's treason,
isn't it?"
The Duchess' eyes went thin. "Are you serious?" she asked. "You call
that treason, keeping these idiots from destroying themselves, eating
themselves up in a war with a nameless enemy, something so powerful that
if there were any consideration of real fighting, we could be destroyed
with a thought. Do you remember who the enemy is? You've heard his name.
There are only three people in Toromon who have, Jon Koshar. Everyone
else is ignorant. So we're the only ones who can say we're fully
responsible. That responsibility is to Toromon. Have you any idea what
state the economy is in? Your own father is responsible for a good bit
of it; but if he closed down his aquariums now, the panic he would cause
would equal the destruction their being open already causes. The empire
is snowballing toward its own destruction, and it's going to take it out
in the war. You call trying to prevent it treason?"
"Whatever we call it, we don't have much choice, do we?"
"With people like you around, I'm not sure it isn't a bad idea."
"Look," said Jon. "I was cooped up in a prison mine way out beyond
nowhere for five years. All I wanted was out, see. All I wanted was to
get free. Well, I'm back in Toron and I'm still not free."
"First of all," said the Duchess, "if it wasn't for them, you wouldn't
be as free as you are now. After a day of clean clothes and walking in
fresh air, if you're not well on the road to what you want, then I'd
better change some ideas of my own. I want something too, Jon Koshar.
When I was seventeen, I worked for a summer in your father's aquarium.
My nine hours a day were spent with a metal spoon about the size of your
head scraping the bottoms of the used tank tube of the stuff that even
the glass filters were too touchy to take out. Afterwards I was too
tired to do much more than read. So I read. Most of it was about
Toromon's history. I read a lot about the mainland expeditions. Then, in
my first winter out of school, I lived in a fishing village at the edge
of the forest, studying what I could of the customs of the forest
people. I made sketches of their temples, tried to map their nomadic
movements. I even wrote an article on the architecture of their
temporary shelters that was published in the university journal.
"Well, what I want is for Toromon to be free, free of its own ridiculous
self-entanglements. Perhaps coming from the royal family, I had a easier
path toward a sense of Toromon's history. At its best, that's all an
aristocracy is good for anyway. But I wanted more than a sense, I wanted
to know what it was worth. So I went out and looked, and I found out it
was worth a whole lot. Somehow Toromon is going to have to pick itself
up by the back of the neck and give itself a shaking. If I have to be
the part that does the shaking, then I will. That's what I want, Jon
Koshar, and I want it as badly as you want to be free."
Jon was quiet a moment. Then he said, "Anyway, to get what we want, I
guess we more or less have to do the same thing. All right, I'll go
along. But you're going to have to explain some things to me. There's a
lot I still don't understand."
"A lot we both don't," the Duchess said. "But we know this: they're not
from Earth, they're not human, and they come from very far away.
Inconceivably far."
"What about the rest?"
"They'll help us help Toromon if we help them. How, I still don't
understand for sure. Already I've arranged to have Price Let kidnaped."
"Kidnaped? But why?"
"Because if we get through this, Toromon is going to need a strong king.
And I think you'll agree that Uske will never quite make that. Also,
he's ill, and under any great strain, might die in a moment, not to
mention the underground groups that are bound to spring up to undermine
whatever the government decides to do, once the war gets going. Let is
going where he can become a strong man, with the proper training, so
that if anything happens to Uske, he can return and there'll be someone
to guide the government through its crises. After that, how we're to
help them, I'm not sure."
"I see," said Jon. "How did they get hold of you, anyway? For that
matter, how did they get me?"
"You? They contacted you just outside of Telphar, didn't they? They had
to rearrange the molecular structure of some of your more delicate
proteins and do a general overhaul on your sub-crystalline structure so
the radiation wouldn't kill you. That, unfortunately had the unpleasant
side effect of booting down your index of refraction a couple of points,
which is why you keep fading in dim light. In fact, I got a blow-by-blow
description of your entire escape from them. It kept me on the edge of
my seat all night. How was I contacted? The same way you were, suddenly,
and with those words: _Lord of the Flames_. Now, your first direct
assignment will be ..."
* * * * *
In another room, Clea was sitting on a blue velvet hassock with her
hands tight in her lap. Then suddenly they flew apart like springs,
shook beside her head, and then clasped again. "Tomar," she said.
"Please, excuse me, but I'm upset. It was so strange. When I was dancing
with the King, he told me how he had dreamed of my brother this morning.
I didn't think anything of it. I thought it was just small talk. Then,
just after I changed partners for the third time, there I was, staring
into a face that I could have sworn was Jon's. And the man wasn't
dancing, either. He was just looking at me, very funny, and then he said
my name. Tomar, it was the same voice Jon used to use when I'd hurt
myself and he wanted to help. Oh, it couldn't have been him, because he
was too tall, and too gaunt, and the voice was just a little too deep.
But it was so much like what he might have been. That was when the King
made his announcement. I just turned and ran. The whole thing seemed
supernatural. Oh, don't worry, I'm not superstitious, but it unnerved
me. And that plus what you said this morning."
"What I said?" asked Tomar. He stood beside the hassock in the
blue-draped sitting room, his hands in his pockets, listening with
animal patience.
"About their drafting all the degree students into the war effort. Maybe
the war is good, but Tomar, I'm working on another project, and all at
once, the thing I want most in the world is to be left alone to work on
it. And I want you, and I want to have a picnic. I'm nearly at the
solution now, and to have to stop and work on bomb sightings and missile
trajectories ... Tomar, there's a beauty in abstract mathematics that
shouldn't have to be dulled with that sort of thing. Also, maybe you'll
go away, or I'll go away. That doesn't seem fair either. Tomar, have you
ever had things you wanted, had them in your hands, and suddenly have a
situation come up that made it look like they might fly out of your grip
forever?"
Tomar rubbed his hand across his brush-cut red hair and shook his head.
"There was a time once, when I wanted things. Like food, work, and a bed
where all four legs touched the ground. So I came to Toron. And I got
them. And I got you, and so I guess there isn't anything else to want,
or want that bad." He grinned, and the grin made her smile.
"I guess," she started, "... I guess it was just that he looked so much
like my brother."
"Clea," Tomar said. "About your brother. I wasn't going to tell you this
until later. Maybe I shouldn't say it now. But you were asking whether
or not they were going to draft prisoners into the army; and whether at
the end of their service, they'd be freed. Well, I did some checking.
They are going to, and I sent through a recommendation that they take
your brother among the first bunch. In three hours I got a memorandum
from the penal commissioner. Your brother's dead."
She looked at him hard, trying to hold her eyes open and to prevent the
little snarl of sound that was a sob from loosening in the back of her
throat.
"In fact it happened last night," Tomar went on. "He and two others
attempted an escape. Two of their bodies were found. And there's no
chance that the third one could have escaped alive."
The snarl collapsed into a sound she would not make. She sat for a
moment. Then she said, "Let's go back to the party." She stood up, and
they walked across the white rug to the door. Once she shook her head
and opened her mouth. Then she closed it again and went on. "Yes. I'm
glad you said it. I don't know. Maybe it was a sign ... a sign that he
was dead. Maybe it was a sign ..." She stopped. "No. It wasn't. It
wasn't anything, was it? No." They went down the steps to the ballroom
once more. The music was very, very happy.