A Passage of Stars (33 page)

“Take this,” he said with an assurance that surprised Lily and pulled a small diskette from his pocket and handed it to the Security officer.

The officer began to reply, a scornful comment, but her companion suddenly silenced her. “Look at the damn seal,” he said. She did. She whistled. “Yeah,” said the man. “We better get the captain.” He looked at Pinto. “All right. You and the woman can come with us.”

They turned and began to weave back through the crowd toward the entrance.

“Don’t worry.” Pinto motioned Lily forward when she hesitated. The people around them stared at them.

“What do you think you’re—” She faltered as she realized that the Security officers were not guarding them but rather leading them, expecting to be followed. “What are you doing?” she whispered. “You know I’ve got—” She stopped. He didn’t know Heredes had given her the diskette. “I can’t be questioned!” she hissed, leaning against him.

“Don’t worry,” repeated Pinto.

“What, you know a damn Senator?”

He smiled, caustic and bitter. “How do you think a damned tattoo got to be a pilot?” he asked.

L
ILY GAZED, INCREDULOUS, NUMB
, out of the spotless windows of the opulently appointed railcar onto an early morning landscape that seemed as much of a dream as Heredes’s arrest. No noise, no crowding, no dirt. No house that ever exceeded two stories. No house within a hundred meters of the next. Flowers bordered the rail tracks, manicured and delicate. Lawns spread into the distance. Trees, entire groves of trees, demarked estate boundaries. Whole apartment blocks, along with the tiny parks allotted them, could fit into some of these estates. Had Robbie seen this place with his own eyes or had he simply the sure instinct of righteousness, the unutterable faith, that knew that such wealth and selfish privilege existed and that it must come, at last, to an end?

At last, puling into a station, Pinto nudged her and she rose with him. “Sure, and here we be,” he said, drawling out the accent for the benefit of the two Security officers who escorted them. Or guarded them.

They came out of the station, a tiny building of some organic substance carved into an intricacy of overlapping shapes, curls, and elaborate forms that caused her eye to linger disquieted on the patterns of Pinto’s tattoos. Was there a similarity, or was that just her fancy?

An avenue, bordered by neat lines of low trees, stretched to a white house of columns and porticos and a glinting, golden roof. Ransome House and all its mines might have fit under this place, she thought as they walked. The sun illuminated flowering bushes and tracts of brilliant flowers; lawn, clipped to plush uniformity, spread in all directions. A fine spray of water shed its soft hiss over the green. Once, in the distance, she caught a glimpse of a charming cottage, white-walled, streaked with green vines. A walkway of cunningly fitted stone branched off the avenue; they followed it, curving into the shadow of a grove of slender trees, out onto a smaller lawn surrounded by a hedge. This lawn was tenanted.

A woman, old by her stooped back, rose from the two young children who sat on a blanket at her feet and turned. Her face, lined by the sun and by some old sorrow, bore a frown as she blinked into the light, but as sudden as a cloud clears the sun, the frown vanished into radiance.

“Jonathan!” she cried. She rushed forward, halted an arm’s length from the young man to survey the two officers with disdain. “I will sign the manifest,” she said.

“Do you duly swear you recognize the citizens in question. …” The Security officer droned his questions, got her palm print, and they left, bored with the entire detail.

“Who has hurt you?” cried the elderly woman, indignation breaking through the joy in her bearing. She enfolded Pinto in a tender but encompassing hug that carefully avoided pressure on his bound left arm. “My dearest child,” she murmured. “How I have missed you.”

“Nanna,” he said, and Lily was shocked by the affection in his voice.

She thrust him back from her, studied him with a long-practiced eye. “How have you been, my darling boy? How have you lived these past years?”

He looked away from her. “Here and there. I got work from companies and captains desperate enough to employ me for as long as they had to. Between those times, I play three-di.”

“And is that how
this
came about?” She was scolding him, but her hand touched his bruised face with such gentle solicitude that Lily felt impelled to look away so that she would not think too painfully of Heredes.

“Nanna! Nanna!” The older of the two children, a girl of about Jenny’s child Gregori’s age, ran up and hung with spoiled impatience at the woman’s skirts. Pinto stared down at the girl, an ethereal, blond wisp of a child, with an expression on his patterned face that Lily could not read. “Nanna, we don’t want no tattoos here.”

“Mind your tongue, Arabinthia!” The frown eased back onto the woman’s face. “Oh, Jonathan, you shouldn’t be here. When I got the call, I had to say yes, but
he
told you never to come back.”

Pinto lifted his gaze with an effort from the pale little girl, glanced at Lily. “We have to see him.”

Nanna also glanced at Lily, briefly measuring. “That’s impossible. You’re free from that trouble now. Can’t you go?”

“Please. Nanna. You must help me.”

That Nanna was not proof against such a plea Lily could see immediately. She disentangled the girl’s hands from her skirt; she frowned; she prepared an argument, gave it up. She could not deny him. “I’ll take you in the back way. Go to his study. He’s always there at eight.”

“I know,” Pinto’s eyes strayed to the exquisite blond child.

“Arabinthia.” Nanna’s voice was commanding now. “Can you sit with your brother for ten minutes without moving?”

“No,” stated the child, staring with fixed hostility at Pinto.

“I didn’t think so,” said Nanna.

“Can so,” the girl reneged.

“Oh, I daresay not.”

“Can.” The girl ran back to the blanket and threw herself on it with stubborn determination. A blond boy, barely able to walk, was holding onto a large animal-shaped toy and gazing at Pinto with great interest. “Sit!” proclaimed the girl to her new charge. The boy sat.

“Come with me,” said Nanna.

Lily tried not to watch them as she trailed behind them through the garden. She was jealous, she knew it, at their intimacy, at the affection this woman gave to Pinto, that he, unlikely as it seemed, returned to her. They came to the house at last and Nanna relinquished her darling boy with such genuine reluctance that Lily felt ashamed of her envy.

With a delicate key the old woman opened a door of wrought glass into an airy, comfortable room that held a large desk, a terminal, two plush chairs, and a wall of shelves displaying a myriad of exquisite curios. Lily sat down in one of the chairs. It was astoundingly comfortable.

“Well?” she asked, contemplating Pinto as he prowled the room like a creature reassuring itself of its territory. “You got me out of that station pretty neatly, I’ll admit. But we don’t have much time. Now what?”

The other door, the one that led into the interior of the house, opened. With her eyes raised to watch Pinto and her back to that door, she had only the young man’s expression to measure this new arrival.

His face opened, a look of such heartbreaking sweetness, such loving vulnerability, that, an instant later, seeing that expression close into wariness, into a guarded tightness, as though he were bracing to receive a blow, she wondered if she had dreamed what she first saw. Under the vivid swirl of tattoos his bruised eye and lip seemed just part of the pattern. Lily stood and turned to face the newcomer as he shut the door with a stiff, deliberate shove that was not welcoming. Of course she recognized him. She could hardly fail to. It was Senator Isaiah.

“Hello, Father,” said Pinto.

“I told you never to come near this house again. It would have been better if you had left Arcadia completely.”

Pinto smiled, caustic. “Certainly, sir, although you neglected to bribe a company to hire a common tattoo to pilot their ships.”

“Don’t come wallowing to me.” Senator Isaiah walked between Lily and Pinto and crossed to stand behind his desk. “You chose the profession. I bought you into Central’s finest Academy.” In person, the sharpness of his thin face was emphasized by a pallor in his skin that had not been evident on the screen. His pale eyes surveyed Lily, snapped back to Pinto. “Who is this woman?”

“My kinnas, Father,
If
you remember what that means.”

“Spare me that superstitious nonsense. Do you owe her credit, is that it? Am I to clear your debt? How much?”

“Just my life. However little that may be worth to you.”

For the first time Senator Isaiah seemed to take in Pinto’s battered face, the bandaged, immobile arm. Pink flushed his high-boned cheeks. “Who did this?” he demanded.

“Some of your military men, who were beating me up for being too proficient at three-di.”

“Is that how you make your living now?”

“I don’t have much choice.”

The Senator pivoted abruptly and strode to the glass door, his gaze locked on some sight out in the garden. “You ask a great deal of me, Jonathan. How can I possibly discharge such a debt?”

On the other side of the desk Lily looked at Pinto and found that he was regarding her steadily. She took one step forward, “Release the man you arrested last night,” she said.

In the silence that followed this remark, she noticed how truly quiet it was here; not the damped-down hum of suppressed activity, as at Zanta, not the filter-laden muffling that permeated Ransome House, but a stillness that could only grow in a place where a handful of people lived in a space so enormous that it could absorb effortlessly the tiny noises of their existence.

Senator Isaiah turned back to face her. “Pero?” he asked.

“He isn’t Pero,” said Lily. “You’ve caught the wrong man.”

Those pale eyes scrutinized her as if she were alien. “If he isn’t Pero,” he said in that reasonable tone she recognized from his broadcasts, “then who is he?”

“He’s my father.”

“I see.” The Senator settled himself carefully in his desk chair, propped his elbows on the dark surface of the desk, his chin on his clasped hands, and regarded Lily thoughtfully. With the fingers of his left hand he drummed a slow, soft, almost mesmerizing pattern on the back of his right hand. “That is a blatant lie. He is far too young.”

“He’s older than he looks.”

“I am older than I look.” The drumming stopped. “I can afford the maximum dose of rejuv. Do you suppose I neglect to take it? I could give that man thirty years. How could he have a daughter your age?”

She was so used to thinking of Heredes as older that it was only as she now looked at Isaiah that she realized the truth of his words. The Senator was probably in his sixties. Rejuv might have kept his hair from graying, might have smoothed the wrinkles on his face, but the lines at his eyes had a deep-set quality to them, and his shoulders bore the burden of aging: that growing, inexorable awareness of death. Void help us, she thought, he’s Kyosti’s age; Heredes must be at least twice as old as him. She remembered how much Jehane had wanted her, thinking her a fugitive from the League. How much would this man want her if he thought she knew such secrets?

“He isn’t Pero,” she repeated.

“That may be true,” replied Senator Isaiah. “That I cannot deny. But our evidence is incontrovertible. Sabotage. Our classified computer banks have been violated; secret information has been passed through an unknown conduit into the hands of whatever Jehanist sects fester on this planet. Do you think we would continue to tolerate this situation?”

“You can’t try him and sentence him as Pero if he isn’t Pero.”

He lowered his clasped hands to lie, reflected in the smooth sheen, on the desktop. “How do you know he isn’t Pero?”

“Because—” She halted.

The Senator smiled, an endearment hard as stone, “If he isn’t Pero, then who is? It’s worth five hundred thousand credits to you.”

Lily looked at Pinto. She could see no resemblance between this hard man and the young Ridani. Pinto’s tattoos disguised his features too well. Perhaps their only likeness was pride.

“Get me Pero,” said the Senator, “and you can have your man and the credits. That is the only offer I will consider.”

Did they even know what Robbie looked like? Did they still think Pero was a committee, rather than an individual? But even as she thought it she knew she could never do it. Not really even for Robbie’s sake, or for her own conscience, but because she knew with painful clarity, with a knowledge that she suddenly wished she did not have, that Heredes would never forgive her for saving him with such a betrayal.
That is a command, Lilyaka.

“I’m sorry, Senator,” she replied in a voice that surprised her with its calmness. “If I could find Pero for you I would, but I can’t.”

“Very well spoken,” he applauded, and he rose. The interview was over.

“Father!” Pinto walked forward and grasped the Senator’s arm. “I know you can free him. Help me. Please, Father. You raised me as your own child, in this house. You educated me. You loved me once.”

She saw the resemblance. It was that surprising sweetness of visage that could soften Pinto’s face for an instant. She saw it now, but not in Pinto, rather in the hard lines of Senator Isaiah’s face, subdued now by another emotion as he lifted a hand to touch with infinite tenderness Pinto’s unbruised cheek.

“My child,” he said.

The door into the interior of the house clicked and, accompanied by a light trill of laughter, opened.

“And you must see my husband’s study. He won’t mind being disturbed.”

A vision entered, ethereal as gauze, exquisite as a rare curio. Halted, wide eyes taking in first Lily and, wider now, Pinto, with every evidence of astonishment. The door, flung wide as well, housed two curious and extremely well-dressed females. The vision herself was young, not more than Lily’s age, and her frail blondness proclaimed her to be the tiny Arabinthia’s mother.