The first violin acted as conductor. She glanced toward the doorway and called a direction to her fellows. The orchestra segued from a Franz Lehar waltz into a Szgranian tune in which the double bass rumbled the main melody while the other ten instruments, all strings, wailed in a complex and wholly separate pattern.
The Szgranians froze for a moment. Then Lady Scour strode into the center of the area cleared for dancing. One of her attendants protested by flinging herself to the floor in front of her mistress, but the lady stepped onto her and over with an extra twist of her heel.
It was a case of a little learning being a dangerous thing. The orchestra was playing Szgranian music, all right, but it was from a ritual which required both female and male participants . . . and there were no male Szgranians in the Social Hall. The load of hypno-chunked information which Ran's mind had received but not fully assimilated told him that much. He hadn't any idea what the result was going to be. He wasn't a Szgranian expert either.
Lady Scour began to dance, waving her hands in a stylized pattern while her right leg beat time with the deliberation of a horse counting. She looked about the room, her gaze icy.
What the hell. Ran walked across the floor and joined her.
Lady Scour's eyes were the color of amethysts. The orbits were rounder than a human's, but the effect was exotic rather than freakish . . . to Ran Colville, at any rate.
Their bodies came into synchrony, two meters apart Ran had been following the music, while the Szgranian clan mistress led the notes. She adjusted her timing to match the human norm before he even realized the cause of the initial disjunction.
Ran didn't know the proper motions at a conscious level, but so long as he left matters to the instinctive where the hypnogogue had imprinted the knowledge, he was fine. At any rate, his arms were moving, and he supposed it was proper because Lady Scour looked a great deal more friendly than she had when she began dancing alone.
The piece ended. "Lord have mercy!" Ran muttered, louder than he'd intended to speak.
Spectators all around the room began to clap.
Lord have mercy!
"And you are Junior Lieutenant . . . ?" Lady Scour asked. The pale skin of her forehead was lightly frosted with perspiration. One of the attendants scampered up and used the tail of her sash to dry her mistress. Ran was shocked and amazed when another tiny Szgranian female wiped his forehead.
"Randall Colville, ma'am," he said. Szgranian clan mistresses were supposed to be sharp, but most human passengers wouldn't have been able to identify the rank markings on an officer's uniform. "Third Officer, Staff Side."
Lady Scour waved a hand before her face in a place-holding gesture, a sort of physical throat clearing. Close up, the six-armed torso was odd but not unpleasant to view. Her pale green tunic clung to her bosom. Bosoms.
Her eyes focused back on Ran. "Oh promise me now Clerk Colville," she sang in a high, clear voice, "or 'twill cost ye muckle strife—"
How had she known that old Terran ballad? But Ran knew it, knew it well from the loot his father brought back from the Long Troubles on Hobilo.
"Ride never by the Wells of Slane, if you would live and brook your life."
"Now speak no more my lusty dame," Ran sang back to her, and nobody'd ever claimed he had a singing voice, but you did what you had to do. "Now speak no more of that to me.
"Did I never see a fair woman but I would sin with her body?"
Both of them began laughing with an enthusiasm that must have sounded mad to onlookers; but the onlookers hadn't been in the dance, and the bond from that short ritual—an interlude from the harvest festival—was surprising.
"You knew the song!" Lady Scour said. "I've found that your people never know your own songs."
Ran shrugged. "Well, there's a lot of history," he said, a diplomatic answer. "How did you happen to know it?"
Szgranian civilization had reached its present level long before humans began raising megaliths, much less pyramids. Szgrane hadn't changed since then, however, until contact with human starfarers forced the static society to adapt.
The clan mistress smiled. "The same way you know The Dance of the Grubs Building Their Cocoon," she said. "When I learned one of the officers on the ship that would carry me was named Colville, I learned about Colvilles."
The smile brightened. "Are you like your ancestor, then?" Lady Scour added.
"I don't know about ancestor . . . ." Ran said. One of the Szgranian attendants offered him a tiny tumbler of carved glass, Szgranian workmanship and worth the price of First Class passage on the Empress. Lady Scour drank from another, making the contents last for three minuscule sips.