“Do you know Lady Sula well?” she asked.
Martinez was surprised. “We speak now and again,” he said. “Of course, she’s a quarter light-hour out.”
“Do you think she would be interested in coming to our party?”
Martinez was even more surprised. “I’ll ask her,” he said, then smiled.
His sisters rarely made such a useful suggestion.
“Introducing me to your family already?” Sula said. “I suppose I should be flattered.” Her face showed weary but genuine pleasure. “Well,” she said, “why not? The needs of the Fleet permitting, I’d be honored to accept.”
Martinez smiled. He felt a warm buoyancy enter his soul, and was willing to accept the possibility that sisters had their uses after all.
He listened to the rest of Sula’s brief message, then checked the time display to see when Lord Commander Enderby could be expected to return. Not yet—he and Gupta were at yet another one of the interminable planning sessions relating to the Great Master’s end, leaving Martinez in charge of communications while they were gone. Since he had time available, he called Lord Pierre. At the moment, he felt as if he could handle a dozen Lord Pierres.
“My sisters have agreed to be introduced to your cousin,” he said.
For a moment Lord Pierre seemed puzzled, as if he didn’t recall what Martinez was talking about, then comprehension entered his eyes. “Shall I bring him to the—” He hesitated. “Where is it that your sisters are staying?”
Martinez affected surprise. Lord Pierre wasn’t about to get away with that. “You can hardly bring PJ to the Shelley Palace for a cold-blooded inspection,” he said. “He’s not a stud horse.”Though of course that’s exactly what he is. “It’s you that will have to play host, I’m afraid. And since I doubt it would be very comfortable for PJ to have my sisters descend on him like the Three Fates, there should be more than the six of us in the party.”
“Six?” Lord Pierre raised an eyebrow. “You’re planning on attending yourself?”
“A chaperone should be present, don’t you think?”
A frown knit between Lord Pierre’s brows. “You’re going to be formal as all that?”
“These are mysisters, ” Martinez said virtuously.
The whole business of chaperonage was something Martinez didn’t quite understand: things were handled otherwise in a Fleet where recreational tubes were installed on every ship. But some of the old families insisted on keeping their bloodlines unblemished, and would only marry those with a certificate of purity.
Lord Pierre conceded with an annoyed flap of one hand. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll check my schedule and get back to you.”
“Thank you, Lord Convocate.” And he smiled as sweetly as he could.
After that he recorded another rambling message to Sula, and sent it along with downloads ofKwa-Zo’s Fifth Book of Mathematical Puzzles andPre-Conquest Earth Porcelains: Asia.
When he returned to his apartment, he found his evening clothes laid out for him, along with a fragrant corsage of eskartori blossoms, and remembered his date with Amanda Taen. The memory came as a mild surprise. He had been so occupied with making plans for meeting Caroline Sula and arranging a sham engagement for Sempronia that he’d pushed Amanda to the back of his mind. An injustice, he thought, and he’d spend the rest of the evening setting it right.
He told Alikhan to lay out a small cold buffet for later and to chill a bottle of sparkling wine. Alikhan, not unaccustomed to these sorts of commands, nodded without speaking. Martinez shaved again, then changed into the civilian suit with the braided collar and cuffs and the elastic stirrup that ran under his glossy shoes at the instep—accessories that saidfashionable without quite sayingglit — then summoned a cab to pick up Amanda at her warrant officers’ quarters. She wore a gown of russet material quietly stuffed with all the by-products of modern materials science: it supported her lush figure in all the right places, while tucking her in elsewhere. In front, the gown modestly covered her to the throat, but there was no back at all. Her chestnut hair had been pinned up by long golden needles topped by walnutsized chunks of artificial ruby—cheap stuff, but deployed massively and to great effect—while rubies and gold also glittered on her fingers and at her throat.
Her smile was brilliant as her jewelry. “It’s not too formal, is it?” she asked.
“Not at all.” He put a hand on her naked back and helped her to the cab.
He took her to the Penumbra Theater for a comedy, a sex farce of the sort that humans loved and that other races found incomprehensible. Amanda laughed in all the places where Martinez could have hoped she might have laughed.
After the show, he took her to a restaurant in the High City for supper—not one of the absolutely first-class places, which tended to be too starched and formal, but a large, noisy restaurant with overhead galleries, smiling, busy waitrons, and with what Martinez had been assured was excellent food. Ari Abacha was drinking in the bar as Martinez entered, and silently raised his glass at the sight of Amanda. Martinez ate modestly, watched Amanda tuck into her bison steak, and thought how pleasing it was to meet a girl with such unconcealed appetites.
Afterward he took her to a club for dancing, then to his apartment, and then to bed. When he drew off her gown, her abundant flesh seemed to leap into his hands. She was as much fun as he expected, a gloriously healthy young female animal who took what she wanted with both generosity and laughter.
The evening would have been perfect if he hadn’t kept picturing Sula, her image and eyes, her voice, and imagining her scent, some fanciful combination of clean skin and lilac and arousal.
Sula, meanwhile, alone in her sour-smelling cockpit, wondered why Martinez hadn’t sent his usual evening message. She had gotten used to hearing his voice two or three times every day, and now that the voice hadn’t come, she realized how much she missed it.
She decided that his commander had him working late. She opened the file on Earth porcelains and spent the hours gazing at one image after another, of vases and bowls and jugs, all ancient and unbelievably rare and precious. In her mind she touched the lovely objects, stroking surfaces glossy or crackled or smooth, her fingertips caressing the unreachable creations of those immeasurably skilled, unknown, long-dead hands.
“He’s old. I hate him.”
Sempronia’s fierce whisper hissed in Martinez’s ear. He looked at his youngest sister with sympathy.
“Sorry, Proney.”
“He keeps following me around the room. What if he wants totouch me?”
“You’ll have to endure it. Think of the family.”
Sempronia narrowed her eyes and glared at him. “Iam thinking of the family. I’m thinking ofyou — because this whole scheme is allyour fault.”
“Ah—here you are.” PJ Ngeni materialized at Sempronia’s elbow, a drink in either hand. “I thought I’d bring you another cocktail.”
Sempronia turned to PJ with a brilliant smile. “Why, thank you! How very thoughtful!” She put down her untouched drink and replaced it with another.
Martinez had to admire her skill under pressure. Sempronia was so good atplaying a vivacious young thing that he sometimes had to remind himself that shewas a vivacious young thing, at least most of the time. He could only tell the difference between a performance and the genuine article by the slight tensing of the muscles around the eyes.
PJ didn’t seem the type to much care about whether Sempronia’s conduct was genuine or not. His own behavior was clearly a performance of some sort, in his case that of an attentive and considerate cavalier. He was a tall, thin, elegant man with arched, amused eyebrows and a little mustache. He lacked the cannonball head and large jaws of most of the Ngenis, and the hair was beginning to recede atop his long skull. Though suspicious, thus far Martinez had found nothing in the man he could object to save the bracelets and lapel braid made of bleached and woven human hair, a typical glit affectation.
PJ looked at Martinez. “Such a shame about Blitsharts,” he said. “Too bad you couldn’t rescue him.”
“I rescued him, all right,” Martinez said. “The pity is that he was dead by then.”
PJ’s tented brows arched even higher and he gave a laugh. “Blitsharts was a good fellow,” he said. “Witty. Like you. I won quite a lot, betting on him in the old days.” He shook his head. “Not so much lately, though. He wasn’t lucky.”
“Are you a gambler, then?” Sempronia asked, her eyes clearly asking,Is this why you need my dowry?
PJ shrugged. “I have a flutter now and again. A fellow has to, you know. It’s expected.”
“What else is a fellow expected to do?” The brilliant smile across Sempronia’s face, Martinez knew, was intended to mask the vengeful glimmer in her eyes.
The question took PJ aback. “Well,” he said. “Dress well, you know. Mix with people. Have nice things.”
Sempronia took his arm. “There must be more to it than that. Please tell me simplyeverything. ”
Martinez watched as Sempronia drew him away with the clear intention of ferreting out his every vicious secret. PJ, he decided, was going to pay dearly for his family’s marital ambitions.
Martinez, for his part, was enjoying himself. Lord Pierre had added the Martinez clan to a dinner party already on his schedule, which meant that he would soon be sitting to supper with the sort of people normally out of his reach, in this case three convocates, a judge of the High Court, the commander of the Legion of Diligence for the Metropolis of Zanshaa, a fleet commander on the retired list, and a captain and a squadron commander who weren’t.