Local Custom (26 page)

"That's very kind." Luken looked gratified. "It happens the boy and I are promised in the City today, but I'd be delighted to bring him to visit again soon. He might spend the day, if you've no objection, cousin."

"Of course Pat Rin is always welcome," Er Thom said and Anne saw the tense little face relax, just a bit.

"That's fixed then," Luken said comfortably. He turned and bowed, giving Anne the full honor-to-one-providing treatment.

"Scholar Davis. A delight to meet you, ma'am."

"Luken bel'Tarda. I hope to meet you again."

Unprompted, Pat Rin made his bow, and then the two of them were ushered out by Er Thom, who turned his head to smile at her as he was departing.

"Well!" Anne sighed gustily and grinned at her son. "Do you want to open your present, Shannie?"

 
There is nobody who is not dangerous for someone.

—Marquise de Sevigne

THE CHIME RECALLED HIM, blinking, from the world of invoices, profit and cargo-measures. He rose, half-befogged, and keyed the door to open.

"Anne." The fog burned away in the next instant, and he put out a hand to catch hers and urge her within.

"Come in, please," he murmured, seeing his delight reflected in her face. "You must forgive me, you know, for thrusting Luken upon you, all unexpected. I had not known you would be with our son—"

"Nothing to forgive," she said, smiling. "I thought he was delightful." The smile dimmed a fraction. "Though Pat Rin is very—shy . . . "

Trust Anne to see through to the child's hurts, Er Thom thought, leading her past his cluttered worktable, to the double-chair near the fireplace.

"Pat Rin progresses," he murmured, which was only what Luken had told him. "I thought him quite bold in dealing with our rogue."

She laughed a little and allowed him to seat her. He stood before her, availing himself of both her hands, smiling into her face like a mooncalf.

Her fingers exerted pressure on his, and a frown shadowed her bright face. She bent her head; raised it quickly.

"You've taken off your ring." The tone was mild, but the eyes showed concern—perhaps even alarm.

"Well, and so I have," he said, as if it were the merest nothing. He raised the hand that should have borne the ornament, and silked her hair back from her ear, the short strands sliding through his fingers.

"How may I serve you, Anne?"

She moistened her lips, eyes lit with a certain self-mockery. "Keep that up, laddie, and neither of us will get to our work." She turned her head to brush a quick, pulse-stirring kiss along his wrist.

"And that?" he murmured.

She laughed and shook her head so that he reluctantly dropped his hand.

"It happens I'm going to need that car you offered," she said, in a shocking return to practicality; "and probably a driver, too. Drusil tel'Bana can see me this afternoon."

"Ah. Shall I drive you?"

"I'd like that," she said, with a regretful smile. "But I'm liable to be some time. If Doctor yo'Kera's notes are in as bad a way as she's led me to think—" She shook her head. "No use you kicking your heels for hours while a couple of scholars babble nonsense at each other. It's a shame to even force a driver . . . "

"Nonetheless," Er Thom said firmly, laying a daring finger across her lips. "You
will
have a driver. Agreed?"

"Bully." She laughed at him. "I'd like to see what would happen if I
didn't
agree—but as it happens, I do. I'm not at all certain of my directions, and if the work should keep me until after dark . . . "

"It is arranged," he said. "When shall you leave?"

"Is an hour too soon?"

"Not at all," he returned, around a stab of regret. He stepped back, reluctantly releasing her hand.

Anne stood. "Thank you, Er Thom."

"It is no trouble," he murmured and she sighed.

"Yes, you always say that." She touched his cheek lightly and smiled. "But thank you anyway. For everything." She lay a finger against his lips as he had to hers.

"I'll see you later, love," she whispered, then whirled and left him, as if it were too chancy a thing to stay.

"SCHOLAR DAVIS, HOW delightful to meet you at last!" Drusil tel'Bana's greeting was warmth itself, couched in the mode of Comrades.

Anne bowed and smiled. "I regret I was not able to come sooner."

"That you came at all is sufficient to the task," the other scholar assured her. "I had barely dared hope—But, there! When I wrote I had not known you were allied so nearly with Korval. I do not always read
The Gazette
, alas, and with Jin Del's death—" She gestured, sweeping the rest of that sentence away. "At least I did read today's issue! Allow me to offer felicitations."

"Thank you." Anne bowed again. "I will share your felicitations with my son and his father."

Drusil tel'Bana's eyes widened, but she merely murmured, "Yes, certainly," and abruptly turned aside, raising a hand to point.

"Let me show you Jin Del's office. His notes—what are remaining—have been kept just as they were found when—The state of disorder, I confide to you, Scholar, is not at all in his usual way. I thought, at first, you know, that—but it is foolishness, of course! What sense to steal the notes for a work that will perhaps excite the thought of two dozen scholars throughout the galaxy? No. No, it must only have been that he was ill—much more ill, I fear, than any of us had known."

Anne glanced down at the woman beside her, seeing the care-grooved cheeks, the drooping line of her thin shoulders, the jerky walk.

"Doctor yo'Kera's death has affected you deeply," she offered, cautiously feeling her way along the border of what the other would consider proper sympathy and what would be heard as insult. "I understand. When I received your letter, I could barely credit that he was gone—he had seemed so vital, so brilliant. And I had only known him through letters. What one such as yourself, who had the felicity of working with him daily, must feel I may only surmise."

Drusil tel'Bana threw her a look from tear-bright eyes and glanced quickly aside.

"You are kind," she said in a stifled voice. "He was—a jewel. I do not quite see how one shall—but that is for later. For now, there is Jin Del's work to be put into order, his book to be finished. Here—here is his office."

She turned aside, fumbled a moment at the lockplate and stepped back with a bow when the door at last swung open and the interior lights came on.

"Please."

Anne stepped into the room beyond—and smiled.

Overcrowded shelves held tapes, bound books, disks and unbound printouts. Two severe chairs were crowded together at the front of the computer-desk, a battered, rotating work chair sat behind it. A filing cabinet was jammed into one corner, a double row of books at its summit. Next to it was a plain table, bookless, for a wonder, though that lack was more than made up by the profusion of 'scriber sheets, file folders and note cards littering its surface.

The floor sported a dark red rug that had once very possibly been good. The walls were plain, except for a framed certificate which declared Jin Del yo'Kera, Clan Yedon, a Scholar Specialist in the field of Galactic Linguistics, and a flat-pic, also framed, of three tall Terran persons—two women and a man—standing before an island of trees in a sea of grasslands.

"He had gone—outworld—to study, as a young man," Drusil tel'Bana said from the doorway. "Those are Mildred Higgins and Sally Brunner with their husband, Jackson Roy. Terrans of the sort known as 'Aus'. Jin Del had stayed at their—station—one season. They taught him to—to shear sheep." Anne glanced over her shoulder in time to see the other woman give a wavering, unfocused smile.

"He had another picture, of a sheep. He said that they were—not clever."

Anne grinned. "My grandfather kept sheep," she said, "back on New Dublin. He contended that they were smarter than a radish—on a good day."

Drusil tel'Bana smiled and in that instant Anne saw the woman as she had been: Humorous, vivid, intelligent. Then the cloud of grief enfolded her again and she gestured toward the laden table.

"These are his notes. Please, Scholar, of your kindness . . . "

"It's what I came for," Anne said. She spun the desk chair around to the table, reached out a long arm and snagged one of the straight-backed 'student's' chairs.

"Do you have time to sit with me?" she asked Drusil tel'Bana. "In case I should have questions as I go through?"

"My time is yours," the other woman said, sitting primly on the edge of the straight chair.

Anne, perforce, sat in the battered, too-small desk chair, and pulled the first stack of folders toward her.

HOURS LATER, SHE SAT back and scraped the hair from her face, staring blankly at the blank wall before her. Her shoulder and back muscles were cramped and she didn't doubt her legs would stiffen up when she finally tried to stand—but none of that mattered.

Disordered as his notes undoubtedly were, it was plain to one who had corresponded with him and who tended in certain directions of thought herself, that Jin Del yo'Kera had found it. He had found what she herself had been looking for—the proof, the empirical, undeniable evidence of a common mother tongue, which had then given birth to its disparate, triplet children: Liaden, Terran, Yxtrang.

Jin Del had found it—his notations, his careful reasoning, his checks and double checks—all here, needing only to be re-ordered, culled and made ready for presentation.

All here, all ready.

All, except the central, conclusive fact.

Anne looked aside, to where Drusil tel'Bana still sat patiently in her hard chair, face grooved with grief, but otherwise composed, calm.

"Is there," Anne asked slowly. "Forgive me! I do not wish to ask—improperly, but I must know."

Drusil tel'Bana inclined her head. "There is no shame in an honest inquiry, Scholar. You know that is true."

Anne sighed. "Then I ask if there are—people—who would feel their—melant'i at—risk, should a fact be found that linked Terra to Liad?"

"There are many such," the other woman said, with matter-of-fact dreariness. "Even among your own folk, is there not the Terran Party, which would wish to deny Liad the trade routes?"

The Terran Party was a gaggle of cross-burning crackpots, but it
did
exist. And if the Terran Party existed, Anne thought wildly, why shouldn't there be a Liaden Party?

"You feel," Drusil tel'Bana said hesitantly, "that there is something—missing—from Jin Del's work?"

"Yes," Anne told her. "Something very important—the centerpiece of his proof, in fact. Without it, we merely have speculation. And all his notes lead me to believe that what he had was proof!"

Beside her, the other woman sagged, tears overflowing all at once.

"Scholar!" Anne reached out—was restrained by a lifted hand as Drusil tel'Bana shielded her face.

"Please," she gasped. "I ask that you do not regard—I am not generally thus. I shall—seek the Healers, by and by. Only tell me if you are able, Scholar."

Anne blinked. "Able?"

"Able to take on Jin Del's work, to find his proof and finish his lifepiece. I cannot. I lack the spark. But you—you are like him for brilliance. It was your thought that started him on this path. It is only fitting that you are the one to complete what you caused to begin."

And there was, Anne admitted wryly, a certain justice to it. Jin Del yo'Kera had unstintingly given of his time and his knowledge to the young Terran scholar he had graciously addressed as 'colleague'. Together, the two of them had constructed the quest represented by the notes now spread, helter-skelter, before her. That one of the two was untimely called aside did not mean that the quest was done.

She sighed, trying not to think of the years it might take to recapture that one vital fact.

"I will need to take this away with me," she told Drusil tel'Bana, waving a hand at the littered table. "I will require permission to go through his files—the computer. The books."

"Such permissions are on file from the Scholar Chairman of the University. If you find it necessary to take anything else, only ask me, Scholar, and I shall arrange all." The Liaden scholar rose and went to the desk, pulled open a drawer and extracted a carry-case.

"What you have upon the table should fit in here, I think."

 
Love: the delusion that one woman differs from another.

—H.L. Mencken

"SACRIFICE?"

Er Thom sagged to the edge of the desk, staring at Daav out of stunned purple eyes.

"Anne said it would be a
sacrifice
for me to become her lifemate?"

"She stopped short of the actual word," Daav acknowledged, "but I believe the sentence was walking in that direction, yes."

"I—" He glanced aside, moved a slender, ringless hand and rubbed Relchin's ears.

"There—must be an error," he said as the big cat began to purr. "She cannot have understood." He looked back to Daav.

"Anne is not always as—certain—of the High Tongue as—"

"We were speaking Terran," Daav interrupted and Er Thom blinked.

"I—do not understand."

"She said that, also." Daav sighed, relenting somewhat in the face of his brother's bewilderment. "She admits to being in love with you, darling—very frank, your Anne! However, she is sensible that a Terran lover makes you vulnerable, as she would have it, and that a Terran wife must make you doubly so." He smiled, wryly. "An astonishingly accurate summation, given that she does not play."

Er Thom chewed his lip.

"She asked me," he said, all his confusion plain for the other to read. "She asked me to guard her melant'i."

"She did?" Daav blinked. "In—traditional—manner?"

"We were speaking Terran," Er Thom said slowly. "Last evening, when I had gone to escort her to Prime. We were about to leave her apartment and she suddenly paused and looked at me with—with all of her heart in her face. And she said,
Don't let me make a mistake . . . 
"