The Sea Without a Shore (35 page)

Adrenaline—he wasn’t in a panic, but his glands operated on the orders of his lizard brain’s hundreds of millions of years of reflexes—flooded his system. His hands twisted convulsively, snapping the corrosion that had bound the latch.

The access plate of what was intended for a filter compartment swung sideways, taking with it the sponge which was attached to the perforated panel. The creature’s body was so large that Daniel couldn’t open the compartment fully, but he was able to reach in with his right hand and grasp the drawstring bag his fingers found there.

Daniel shoved himself back, popping to the surface well away from the wall of the deep end. He backstroked, kicking furiously this time.

The sponge lashed the water wildly, much as it would have done if a storm tore loose the rock which held it to a shoreline.
If a tentacle grabs me now, it’ll try to use me as an anchor, and I might very well drown
.

Daniel laughed at the thought. The spectators probably thought he was laughing in joy at having survived, but the truth was a little stranger than that. He wouldn’t try to explain it to anyone, though.

Hands gripped Daniel’s upper arms and half-jerked, half-dragged him onto the plaza on his back. Cory had his left and—heavens, Adele!—had his right.

Daniel looked up at her. “You’re stronger than I thought,” he said through wheezes.

“Hysterical strength, I suppose,” Adele said, stepping backward.

Daniel lurched into a sitting position, then rotated to bring his left hand down on the plaza to help him stand. The Kiesches were cheering. Actually, most of the spectators were cheering, even the majority who didn’t have any idea what was going on.

Daniel turned to the Transformationists—who were cheering also. Their faith didn’t prevent them from defending themselves or from feeling enthusiasm about wholly nonreligious matters, apparently.

“Master Cleveland,” Daniel said. “You might see what’s in here. I rather hope it’s what you were looking for.”

He held out the bag. The fabric was an extruded synthetic, but the drawstrings appeared to be purple silk, tied off in a bow.

Cleveland undid the bow, then carefully teased the mouth of the bag open. Instead of pouring the contents into the palm of his hand, he reached in with two fingers and brought out a jewel.

It was a perfect ovoid about the size of a hen’s egg. Though the clear stone was smooth, not faceted, it blazed in the sunlight. Around it was a network of hair-fine metal with a purple cast.

“I’m not an expert, Cleveland,” Daniel said, “but I would guess that you have a diamond. And I wouldn’t be greatly surprised to learn that the filigree is your unbihexium, Brother Graves, because it certainly doesn’t look like any metal that I’m familiar with.”

There were more cheers. Daniel cheered too.

* * *

“I’ll report on the library’s installation when it’s complete,” Brother Graves said as he and Cleveland accompanied Adele down Central Street’s final slope to the harbor. “Is the best way to reach you through your townhouse in Xenos, or should I send the information in care of the navy?”

Adele didn’t answer immediately, because the roar of the ship landing overwhelmed speech. The vessel’s computer tried to hold it in a hover, but its poorly synchronized thrusters started a wobble. It dropped the last ten feet into the water as the best alternative available to the machine intelligence.

Adele’s tiny smile was perhaps colder than usual. The computer was correct, of course, but the crew which had just been badly jounced was probably cursing it rather than their own poor maintenance for causing the controlled crash. Saving stupid, lazy people often required hard measures. In Adele’s experience, they never thanked you for it.

Brotherhood Harbor was much busier now than it had been when Adele saw it first from orbit. She would never have a real spacer’s eye for a ship, but she knew that the vessel was a moderate-sized freighter, an ordinary tramp though larger than most of the ships which called here while fighting was going on.

Daniel—or even Evans—could probably have told her where the ship had been built. Study would accomplish many things, but real skill required a knack as well, a degree of focused interest which Adele would never have for starships.

As the echoes of the splash receded, Adele said, “To Chatsworth Minor, I suppose. But there isn’t really any need to report. I’m pleased that you’ve taken on the task, since it needn’t have been any concern of yours. And that you’ve given refuge to Master Lipschitz as well.”

“Master Lipschitz doesn’t appear to be any kind of burden, milady,” Cleveland said, smiling. “As thin as he is, he won’t be straining the commissary to feed him.”

That’s the first time I’ve heard him joke,
Adele thought.
Perhaps he’s been taking lessons from Tovera
.

More seriously, Cleveland had been calmer and more centered since they had landed on Corcyra and he’d come back into contact with fellow Transformationists. That meant mostly contact with Graves, of course, who was looking better also. Adele wasn’t sure that a philosophy—or religion, whatever term one wished—that punished people who weren’t in the company of other people was a very beneficial one.

Daniel was waiting with Hogg in the plaza where Central met Harborside. There was no longer a platoon of soldiers stationed there, but traders had laid out their wares on blankets—the same sort of food and tawdry whimsies that bumboats hawked to the anchored vessels.

With peace had come buskers. A man was juggling, and a couple—the boy was young and the girl was very young—was singing a dialogue between Lord Randall and his mother. The girl wasn’t very convincing in the part of an old woman, but her voice was clear and pleasant.

Adele stepped ahead of the Transformationist; they slowed deliberately to let her reach Daniel alone. Tovera had been following the three of them. The fact that she didn’t sprint ahead to put herself between her mistress and the two men showed either that she was mellowing or that she trusted Hogg to prevent Cleveland and Graves from attacking Adele successfully.

That Tovera trusted Hogg seemed more likely.

“Daniel,” Adele said, “I regret that I’m late. I wasn’t noticing the time or I would have informed you that it was taking longer than I’d thought to remove the last case of books from the rubble.”

“We weren’t going to leave without you,” Daniel said, smiling. “With an ordinary spacer I might have sent out a squad under a bosun’s mate to check the bars and jail, but I didn’t think that would be of very much use in finding you.”

He gestured the Transformationist forward. “Brothers,” he called. “I’m glad to see you again before we lift. Or have you decided to return to Cinnabar with us? You at least, Master Cleveland?”

The juggler was using four cubes whose faces flashed changing imagery as they spun. His hat lay on the ground in front of him with a few coins in it, but a young boy was also working the spectators, offering to sell similar cubes.

“Thank you, Captain,” Cleveland said. “I’m to go back to Pearl Valley as Brother Graves’ aide. Sister Rennie will be replacing him in the office here. She has the skills, and her, well, other skills don’t appear to be needed to defend the community at present.”

“Will Colonel Rennie be bringing a companion?” Adele said. A few years ago she wouldn’t have spoken, and until she joined Daniel and the family of spacers around him, she wouldn’t even have understood the reason she was asking the question.

“The workload in Brotherhood should drop back to its previous—pre-invasion—level,” Graves said, calmly but with a slight frown. “We need an agent here, but there’s no need for a second person to be removed from the community. Someone will replace Rennie in a few months.”

Adele shrugged. It was none of her business, and she had never seen any point in arguing in support of the obvious.

Daniel looked at her sharply, then said to the Transformationist, “You feel that separation from your community is a hardship. What Lady Mundy and I have noticed is that both of you seem much better off with the other’s companionship than you were while you were separated from
all
your fellows. Speaking as an RCN officer, if the operation were under my command, I would assign at least two personnel to every detached location.”

He grinned and added, “Just as I would to a listening post. Eh, Hogg?”

“It’d help if the folks assigned wasn’t rubes who couldn’t find their asses with both hands,” Hogg said. “But yeah, one guy alone is worse ’n useless.”

Graves and Cleveland didn’t understand the background to the discussion, but they understood there was one—and that they were listening to experts. Adele would have let the Transformationists make their own decision, their own
stupid
decision. Daniel was treating them as ignorant, not stupid; which was kinder and probably more accurate.

Adele smiled faintly.
I will never become Daniel. But that doesn’t matter, so long as I have Daniel around
.

Cleveland looked at Graves. “I’ll stay with Rennie for, for a time,” he said. “You can do a better job of explaining to the community why we think the policy should change.”

“No,” the older man said. “The rest of the troops from Hablinger will arrive this afternoon on their way back to Pearl Valley. I’ll speak with Brother Heimholz. I think he’ll agree to stay with Sister Rennie until they both can be replaced.”

Graves gave Daniel a sort of smile. “I’ll borrow your analogy, Captain,” he said. “Rennie and Heimholz will understand it even better than I do.”

“Thank you, Daniel,” Adele said, using his first name to make clear to the others that she was speaking as a friend rather than as a colleague. “The Transformationists have dug out the library, the books, from the basement of the Gulkander Palace.”

“Not just Rikard and me, Captain,” Graves said, smiling again. “The first half of our Hablinger contingent arrived yesterday on their way back, and I asked them to help excavate as a small return for what you and Lady Mundy have done for us and for the planet.”

Adele didn’t remember having seen the agent smile when the
Kiesche
had first arrived on Corcyra. Time spent in the company of Cleveland had improved his mood even more than she thought at the time she remarked on it.

“Considering that the palace was hit by a pair of missiles …” Adele said. She had been horrified when she first saw the ruins of the building. “It’s a miracle that the library wasn’t crushed by stone blocks. Cory aimed well, the pillars and arches supporting the ground floor had been well constructed, and the collection’s librarian had placed the books carefully where they were as protected as they could be under the conditions. Which brings up another matter.”

She turned to Graves and made a slight bow. To Daniel she continued, “The librarian is a man named Lipschitz. He went to live with a cousin after Colonel Mursiello moved into the Palace. Brother Graves agreed to allow Master Lipschitz to accompany the books to Pearl Valley, where I think they’ll be safer than anywhere else on Corcyra until matters stabilize a little more.”

“We have plenty of room in the
Kiesche
’s hold,” Daniel said, his tone making the words a question. “If you’d like to bring them with you, I can have Woetjans take a party to wherever you’ve got them now and pack them aboard safely. It won’t take an hour.”

Adele realized that though the
Kiesche
’s thrusters were cold, her pumps were running. Their vibration made the water around the ship’s outriggers and hull tremble into tiny pointed waves.

They’ve waited liftoff for me,
Adele realized. She should have sent a message, but she had been so involved with the process of disinterring the books that it hadn’t crossed her mind. At the back of her mind, she had assumed that if Daniel needed her, he would call
her
. Instead, he and the rest of the crew had waited quietly rather than disturbing whatever she was doing.

“I’ve been discourteous,” Adele said without an explicit context. “My mother would be upset to learn that. She felt that courtesy was the most basic rule which set human beings above the beasts.”

“I doubt that your mother and I would have gotten along well,” Daniel said. “More to the point, I suspect your mother would have been useless to the RCN, whereas you are valuable beyond anything I could compare you with. Now, shall we bring the library back with us? And Master Lipschitz won’t be a problem, either, so long as he doesn’t expect the
Kiesche
to have luxurious staterooms.”

“No,” said Adele. “I think the Gulkander Library is part of Corcyra’s cultural heritage, though it may be some while—generations, centuries even—before the planet understands that. Our friends here—”

She nodded to the Transformationists; they smiled briefly in response. They had remained expressionless while Daniel and Adele discussed the situation.

“—will keep the collection together while the process goes on. While Corcyra becomes civilized.”

She decided to smile as though the final comment had been a joke. It wasn’t.

“Master Lipschitz won’t leave the books,” Cleveland said. “He was sneaking into the palace basement at night to make sure that they weren’t being injured, even though he knew that if Mursiello’s thugs caught him they were likely to shoot him right there. I got to talking with him a bit while we were we were moving rubble.”

He gestured to the dusty work shirt and coveralls he was wearing. The right-side pocket of Graves’ similar outfit was ripped half open where something heavy had snagged the fabric and continued on in whatever direction it had been going in the first place.

“I suggested that we do it by hand,” Graves said with a rueful glance down at his own garments. “I was afraid that if we used heavy equipment, we might finish what the missiles had started. That was the right decision, but by the time we were done I was wishing that our other fifty soldiers had come back from Hablinger with the first company.”

“Master Lipschitz is really very welcome,” Cleveland said. “The community has a number of members who will be as pleased to see the books as you were yourself.”