WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(39)

"She's a corvette," Daniel said as he watched the ship. "Quite a nice little vessel, really. Kostroma built, but with most of her electronics bought from Cinnabar and her armament from Pleasaunce."

Plumes of colored smoke streamed from the corvette's outriggers, white on the right and purple from the other. The smoke mixed with the plasma exhaust into glittering, no-colored swirls like mica flakes strewn on mud.

"What I was going to say . . ." Daniel resumed. He offered the goggles; she refused them. "Is that I suppose you've got parties to go to yourself—"

Adele sniffed. He didn't suppose anything of the sort, and he was quite right.

The Princess Cecile began to launch fireworks to either side. Sparks of color purer than anything in nature rained from the airbursts. The boom of the charges was dull and arrived many seconds after the light of the display it ignited.

"Anyway," Daniel said, "if you'd like to see how the navy does it, I'm to bring a guest and—"

He paused in momentary horror. "That is," he resumed with formal caution, "if you'd care to attend the Admiral's Ball as a colleague of mine, Ms. Mundy, I would be very, ah . . ."

Adele chuckled. It wasn't a sound she often made. "I appreciate the offer, Daniel," she said. "But I think . . ."

She in turn paused. What did she think? That shutting herself in her shabby room was a better way to spend the evening?

And there was Markos, the man and his intentions . . . but she really didn't want to think about that.

"I think," she said, "that while I've never been interested in mating rituals in either the abstract or the particular, it might be interesting to attend the ball, yes. As I've found this event—"

She nodded toward the street.

"—interesting as a window on my new environment. Yes, I'll go with you if you'd care to have me."

Daniel grinned in what she judged was both pleasure and relief. "Good, good," he said, bobbing his head as he spoke. "Now, I've got a jitney and there's Hogg to drive. Shall I pick you up at your lodgings at, say, the ninth hour local time?"

His lips pursed in consideration before Adele could speak. "Hogg has the jitney, actually. But he'll drive us."

Adele thought about her apartment and the narrow, trash-strewn street the building stood on. Not that she needed to apologize for them to a lieutenant in debt to his servant, but . . . "No," she said aloud. "Why don't we meet at the back entrance to the palace gardens? At the guardpost."

"My hand on it!" said Daniel Leary.

As they shook, the Princess Cecile loosed another salvo of fireworks. The explosions sounded like a distant battle.



Adele Mundy sat at the library data console. The information she'd accessed shone in holographic letters in the air before her, all the brighter because the sky beyond the windows ranged from deep azure to deep magenta in the northwest. For the moment her eyes were closed.

A cleaning crew worked in the hallway, calling to one another in the high singsong dialect of one of the northern islands. Bottles clinked together under the thrust of brooms. The palace was the site of the Elector's Cotillion, the most prestigious of the scores of Founder's Day events. There was no holiday for the cleaners who had to sweep up the leavings of the crowds who'd been watching the parade from here.

Daniel had gone off to dress. Adele needed to do the same thing very shortly. As for the information on the air-formed display . . .

She'd told Daniel that she preferred her personal unit to the large console. That was true, but in this case she'd deliberately transferred data to the library computer to keep from subconsciously associating the words with her own equipment.

Adele opened her eyes and read the account for the first time in more than a decade. A Terran trade commissioner on Cinnabar at the time of the Three Circles Conspiracy had made a report on the events. The Academic Collections had received it in the normal course of accessions. Adele had stumbled across it by accident.



One of the most touching tragedies was that of a ten-year-old child, Agatha Mundy. She was at the home of a playfellow, a cousin on her mother's side, on the afternoon the proscriptions were announced. Her aunt, the younger sister of Agatha's mother, immediately rushed the child onto the street and told her to run away. The girl's attendant and guards abandoned her, to seek their own safety in flight.

The house from which Agatha was expelled was on the outskirts of Xenos but near a main road. The child appears to have wandered along the road for hours, perhaps as much as a day, before she was picked up by a trucker of bad reputation. This man sold the girl to a tavern and brothel near the main civil spaceport. There she remained for a week.