Lynesse Fourth Daughter and Esha Free Mark seem to take the attention I’m getting as only right and proper. There are people they will talk to in the town, they say, or at least Esha will, and Lynesse will stay with me at some sort of hostelry. In the Landing Site territory, lodgings are not solely to be had by money or exchange of goods, or so I understand. One must have a right to sleep the night beneath a roof in this country and most neighbouring states, which right is granted vicariously by the hereditary government. I’d assumed that her royal pedigree would suffice for that, but instead it was Esha showing papers to the proprietor, a thin-faced, hollowed-out-looking man. Esha’s status is interesting, and I should take the time to compile some notes, to satisfy . . . some notional future visit by anyone who cares. But with the DCS up, I care, or at least feel that it is something that should be done. Except the judgment calls the DCS is supporting are themselves fundamentally irrational, holdovers from a time when there was a wider academic institution I could report to. I think about this, and my readouts say my emotional state drops immediately, my cheer gone. By then I have put the shield back up, and so the whole business just loops about in my head like a bee trying to escape, and then we are at the hostelry.
The host, some manner of minor civil servant within the highly complex hierarchy of the Landing Site state, stares at me more than anyone, and at my horns especially. He is frightened, but also wants to touch me, or at least his hands make little clutching motions when he looks at me. This is, frankly, a poor and filthy place, and I’m glad I have been thoroughly inoculated to the cocktail of microorganisms that make Sophos 4 their home—the native forms and the Earth forms and the runaway hybrids resulting from incautious engineering by the initial colonists. People on this world get sick so often that I was amazed any of them survived to their majority, during my first observations, and while they have basic procedures regarding washing and handling food, their reasons for so doing owe little to microbiology. This hostelry, which Esha calls the Armoury Gate, seems even filthier than it has any need to be, but I am doubtless imposing the standards of a higher technology unfairly. After all, Lynesse is a child of queens. This is presumably the most luxurious accommodation this town grants.
Once Esha has gone, we sit in the common room with the gawkers. I compose reports and make notes to my internal record. Lynesse fidgets and tries to avoid notice, not hard when all eyes are on me. Eventually I try to make conversation.
“When I travelled with your ancestor, it was not like this. There was an army and servants and all manner of ceremony, musicians, acrobats, tents with golden ships on them.”
“I’m sorry. These are different times.”
She mutters the words and I add quickly, “It doesn’t matter to me. I am a scholar. I do not need armies or servants.”
She looks up sharply, suspecting mendacity I think, but my face is in its neutral aspect, and she looks away abruptly. Something unkinks within her, though, and I feel I have scored a point for social anthropology. A lot of their codes here revolve around obligation, both to and from power. I have released her from feeling that she owes me something she was not providing. Hence, the moment of social awkwardness has passed, well done me. Except after that, there is just another sort of awkwardness, and I realise that I have been seeing her with my eyes, but seeing long-dead Astresse with my mind. It is not the drink I have, the toxins of which are neutralised even as I imbibe, but bleed-over from my DCS. I will have to turn the whole system off and suffer a bleakly miserable night of doubt and recrimination, I think, so that I can face tomorrow with a brittle, clear head. That is my half of the awkwardness accounted for, anyway. Her own is not so much to do with me, but the people around us and the task ahead.
“The demon who has taken the forest kingdoms and driven out their people,” she says, in a low voice. “It is not like Ulmoth. No one person has come forth as the master of the monsters that steal people’s will and despoil the orchards and the ponds. It is a terrible sorcery that comes on the wind and blights whatever it touches. But, because it does not come with swords or threats, all who hear of it are slow to believe it.” She leaves that last word hanging, but the implication is plain.
“You are not here with the formal writ of your mother,” I say. She flinches as though I had touched her and shakes her head.
“I am a scientist,” I tell her, or the best fit I can using her words. “I did agree to help your family against threats like Ulmoth, because they are threats that do not arise naturally from your world or culture, and so are the business of scientists. It does not matter that we are not riding in at the head of your mother’s army.”
I suspect that I have phrased the whole concept poorly, but in that moment I don’t care because she gives me such a smile, and I realise that she had been dreading breaking this to me. Assuming perhaps that I would just go back to the outpost for her lack of credentials. Which is ironic, because back home that would be exactly the sort of thing that people would do, given how in love we were with our qualifications and proper procedures. But I am amongst the barbarians here. I feel I don’t need to stand on ceremony. And making Lynesse happy, even inadvertently, is pleasing. Quite beside the anthropological point, say my rational instincts, but at the same time perhaps I will sleep easier tonight with that thrown into the emotional mix.
*
I awake immediately after my watch system detects that I am being attacked. This is a complex experience made up of (1) a large amount of mostly negative emotional effluvia from my sleep-state transforming into instant adrenaline and panic; (2) a series of top-priority requests from my defensive subsystems requesting me to sign off on various levels of action—up to and including the Terminal Non-Contamination Routines that would be fatal for myself and everyone else within the community.
I actually give the go-ahead to this last, because I have just awoken and have no idea what is going on. Thankfully, there is no satellite overhead to immediately enact the appropriate devastation, and, in the next second, I send the countermand and catastrophe is averted.
I also manage not to say yes to lethal force, but because three people are pinning me down to the bed and one is in possession of a sharp implement, I OK the rest of the requests and the garments I am sleeping in release a burst of heat, electricity and radiation that send all three shrieking away from me, their skin blistering and their jaws and limbs dancing with galvanic response.
I sit up and stare at them blankly. One of them is the lean proprietor and the other two are large friends of his. On the floor between them is some manner of sawing implement. Even as they run screaming from the room with burned hands and scorched clothes, I reconstruct the moment I awoke into.
They were about to try to saw off my horns. I am truly astonished. I had no idea there was any subculture here that might find a market for such curios. In fact, their loss, were it not that it would require some heavy analgesic support and might interfere with my communications link to the satellites, might even let me blend a little with the locals. Although perhaps that is a fond dream.