Exceptions had to be made for cases like this one, where they had to work with the five other members of the Seven. Some, but not all, of these might have made their way onto Remembrance’s list. He had tried to select people such as Kath Two whom he enjoyed talking to, but the others were strangers to him. Ariane Casablancova showed amusing pretention in sitting next to him whenever she could, acting as a gatekeeper between Doc and the remaining four. She took at face value Remembrance’s cover story. Had Remembrance not been a Camite, she might have taken it wrong, seeing it as an usurpation of her prerogatives. But that plus the fact that she had lifetime tenure—a sort of platonic marriage to Doc—made Ariane’s behavior at most a source of dry amusement.
The system worked beautifully at times such as this one, when a delegation of senior TerReFormers had gathered outside the door of Doc’s glider to belabor him with a welcome. It wasn’t that they were insincere, just that their quite genuine desire to greet him was all mixed up with other hopes and needs. One might want to get a photograph with him, but be bashful and tediously indirect about making the request. Another might feel that her life work had been unfairly slighted by her peers and would desire some sign of affirmation from Doc. Yet another might be embroiled in some internal political drama of TerReForm and would hope to gain some currency by being seen on Doc’s arm. None of it was wrong or unreasonable, but all of it was a waste of time where he was concerned, just further examples of that tax he didn’t want to pay anymore. Knowing this without being told, Remembrance exited the glider first. Doc watched out the window as the delegation huddled around her, leaning in close to hear her quiet voice, and furrowed their brows and made exaggerated nods as she explained to them just how exhausted Doc was. At some point she gestured back toward the glider and all of them looked up in unison and saw Doc’s face framed in the window. He made the faintest of waves and they all showed their teeth and saluted him in the various styles of their races: mostly Ivyn and Moiran. Once that was seen to, Doc “sprang to his feet” with a tug on the handle of his grabb, made his way to the door, stood framed there for a few moments so that they could take their pictures, and then made a great show of descending the stair that had folded down from the vehicle’s fuselage. The delegation tracked him across the apron of the airstrip, surrounding him in a great loose cloud but not subjecting him to the tiresome demands of polite social interaction. Ariane was right behind and the remaining four trailed at a distance, completely ignored. Ariane had gotten that right, at least: to the kinds of people who lived here, Doc’s arrival on Magdalena was such a sensation that even a Neoander went unnoticed.
After Remembrance had turned aside all invitations and offers of hospitality, he dined in his room with Ariane, who reveled in the attention. Tomorrow things would be different and she would have to begin adjusting. In the darkest part of that adjustment—which for a Julian could get very dark indeed—she would look back on this meal and understand it for what it really was: a gesture of respect from Doc that could not be gainsaid by any of the voices muttering away between her ears.
Doc asked her about her upbringing on Astrakhan, which was a smallish, almost pure Julian habitat at forty-eight degrees six minutes east, near the center of the Dinan part of the ring. This anomaly had come about as the result of a vision—in both the literal and figurative senses of that word—of a Julian man named Tomac, who had raised funds and established it as a quasi-religious outpost very early in the history of the ring. In those days, being three degrees and six minutes away from a capital such as Baghdad made it seem like a remote frontier outpost. Since then, of course, the Dinan segment had filled in around it, crowding it between much larger and more modern habitats. But Astrakhan, with a few modern improvements, continued to support some tens of thousands of souls, and was often alluded to by Julians as evidence that their race, though lacking in numbers, was as well established in Blue as any of the Four. It was frequently visited by scholars in the field of Amistics: the study of the choices made by different cultures as to which technologies they would embrace or spurn. This was because Tomac, who’d had peculiar ideas about everything, had made some unusual and instructive choices as far as that went. The isolation of Astrakhan made it a useful test case. For her part Ariane laughed off many of the quasi-religious aspects of the culture in which she had been raised, but Doc sensed that she was doing so because it was expected of her.