Kate Elliott - Jaran

"Damn you. My brother is the Prince of Jeds."

Bakhtiian swore softly. "The Prince of Jeds. By the gods, I have seen him. You do not look alike. Why should I believe you?''

"Oh, for God's sake," she snapped, "because it is true."

"I rather think it is." He let her go. "Forgive me, I do not mean this as an insult, but you are not very skilled at dissembling."

"How can you be so sure?"

"You can't deceive me."

"Can anyone deceive you, Bakhtiian?"

He smiled softly. "I can't know that, can I?" In the distance, the campfire was doused suddenly, its broad glow shrinking to a few separate points of red.

"May I go now?" she asked sarcastically.

"Cousin, you don't need to ask my permission. Now, if you will excuse me." He gave her a curt, mocking bow and strode out into the darkness in the direction of the zhapolaya. For a vicious moment, Tess hoped one of the Chapalii would kill him as an intruder, but Bakhtiian would never be so clumsy as to let himself be seen, much less caught.

Unlike me. She emptied her lungs in a long sigh. A cool wind sprang up, and she shivered and rubbed at her eyes.

God, she was tired. How could the Chapalii have built a transmitter in the middle of this wilderness? Been trading here for at least five years, unnoticed, unseen? Yet on a primitive planet much could go undetected from what limited surveillance Charles could use, by his own regulations. Undoubtedly the unscheduled and illegal shuttle landing that had left her stranded had also been shielded from satellite surveillance. But if Charles was disseminating Newton and Aristotle, why should he shrink from breaking other regulations, as long as no one else knew about it? What if he knew the Chapalii were here, and was playing his own game with them in turn? What if Bakhtiian discovered too much?

"Lord, Tess," she muttered to herself, "there's nothing you can do about it now. Go to bed."***

On a windswept island in the archipelago that lies off the coast from Jeds, a technician sat at her console and monitored a conversation. She was deft. Filter here, delay there, a tweak in the right place, and no one could overhear, not even the Chapalii. Especially not the Chapalii. Luckily, those conversing had agreed with her to dispense with holo. She was not sure she could cover a holo transmission. Over such a vast distance, from a back room in the palace in Jeds to the wide chamber that Charles Soerensen used as his office on Odys, the technician had advised that a simple voice transmission, analog, with its delays and its static, might be so primitive that the Chapalii would not notice it at all. She watched three screens simultaneously, tweaked the volume, and let the conversation flow past her.

"No," a woman was saying-that was Dr. Hierakis, "Tess is not here. I received no message. Nothing. The scheduled shuttle came as usual, though not all the equipment I expected arrived on that flight."

They waited long minutes; then the reply: "Anything else?" That was Soerensen.

From the same pickup as the doctor came Marco Burckhardt's voice. "There was one discrepancy. Karima?"

The technician clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, activating her voice pickup. With her left hand, she pulled up a new screen, data, and a graph. "I ran back every slightest bit of tape from the Oshaki's visit, from the moment it came into orbit until it left again. We do have a trace of the cargo shuttle leaving the Oshaki, and the record of its landing on the island. Considerably more time elapsed from leaving the ship until landing than was necessary for the distance traveled, and there were no atmospheric conditions to warrant the delay.''

A long delay. "Any ideas?"

"No trace." Karima stared at the data from the shuttle's flight. "As well as I could trace the flight pattern, it conformed to the default route, although given where it detached from the Oshaki, one could model any number of north-continent landing points given their usual flight patterns."

"And they are so damned efficient," said Dr. Hierakis. "Always the shortest line between two points. It's the national religion, I think. It must have been deliberate."

Delay. "Karima, any indications of unauthorized landing? Has the station picked up any planetside communications?"

"None. Off here." She clicked off her pickup and concentrated on scrambling.

"Which doesn't say a hell of a lot," said Marco.

"Thank you, Karima. I'll want a model of the most likely interim landing points if the shuttle did indeed make an unauthorized landing. It's true, we've suspected Chapalii incursions in the past but never been able to prove anything. Damned chameleons. Marco, you were talking before about taking ship northward, up the north coast and into the inland sea.''

"Yes. I haven't explored that way yet."

"Make an itinerary that can overlap with points on Karima's model. Then hold tight. I'll be back to you. Cara, wasn't it the Keinaba trading consortium that the medical establishment first worked with on the aging breakthrough?"

"Yes, in fact, it was. Why do you mention that?"

Marco made some noise, but not speech.

"I've got a cat and mouse up here. Echido is clearly acting as emissary for his family, but he's being very circumspect. They want something, something very delicate."

"Not just transport rights to Tau?" Marco asked.

"Something much deeper. Something linked all the way back to Chapal, and possibly to the emperor himself."

"Do you want me to come back?" asked Marco.

"Not yet. Echido speaks Anglais."

Marco whistled.

Dr. Hierakis said, "Damned right they want something badly if he's bothered to learn human talk."

Even Karima paused for an instant in her scrambling, astounded by the thought of a Chapalii not of the serving ranks speaking Anglais.

"Keep searching. No further transmissions until I get word from Suzanne. Soerensen off."

Karima spread a burst of static over the Odys line and shut it down. "What do you think, Marco?" asked Dr. Hierakis, and then Karima shut down the Jeds line as well and went back to the trace of the cargo shuttle, running the pattern again and again.

Crawling out of her tent in the morning, Tess was first distracted by the smell of food cooking, and then by the acute fear that everyone knew about her and Fedya. But she heard no whispered comments. Fedya passed her as she saddled her remount, but he merely smiled quickly and went on. Beyond, the short grass on the sacred hill shone white under the early sun. The standing stone hulked black against the pale blue of the morning sky. If Bakhtiian had seen anything after leaving her the night before, he showed no sign of it now, eating his stew with relish and chatting and laughing with Niko and Josef and Tasha. The Chapalii stewards rolled up and folded their tents under Rakii's supervision. Ishii reclined on the ground while Garii wrote laboriously with a stylus to Ishii's dictation. She was too far away to hear what they were saying, and this morning she could not summon up the stubbornness to break in on their business.

"Good morning, Tess." Yuri led his saddled horse up to her. "Have you eaten already?"

"Yuri." She folded her arms, considering him, as she recalled what Bakhtiian had said the night before. Yuri raised his eyebrows questioningly. ' 'Have you ever repeated things I've said to you to Bakhtiian?"

Yuri flushed, but he did not look away from her. "The welfare of the jaran must be my first consideration. Surely you understand that.''

"But if you told him things I said in confidence, things I might otherwise not have said-"

"Gods! You don't think I've repeated anything… intimate that you said to me? Violated a sister's confidence!" He looked disgusted. "You'd think that of me?"

She laughed, and Yuri laughed with her. His flush faded. "I'm sorry. That was stupid of me. Of course you didn't."