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Chapter Sixteen
Udara on Kalapriya

"That," Annemari said with a long sigh, "was not quite the most frustrating meeting I've sat through in the last twenty years. But it came close."

After the long and extremely formal diplomatic discussion, they had been ushered to what must be the most luxurious guest quarters in the Bashir's palace. No indoor plumbing, Annemari noted, but lots of tapestries and cushions to soften the raw cedar walls and packed-earth floor, and basins of beaten metal for washing in. The ubiquitous red and gold that the Bashir favored made her eyes hurt after a while, especially the clashing of soft vegetable reds with imported chemical dyes from Valentin. And the gold embroidery made the cushions rather scratchy. Still, it did seem they were being treated with appropriate respect. For what that was worth.

"They're being very polite," Calandra agreed, "and very good at not telling us anything. Do you believe the Bashir's story about where his prohibited weapons came from?"

"A Barentsian fugitive, under sentence of death in Valentin, fleeing inland and buying his safety in Udara with a pack full of tanglers and nerve dazers? And now conveniently dead?" Annemari's laugh cracked a little. "All very convenient, isn't it? I especially liked the part about the Bashir being shocked—shocked! to hear that the weaponry is seriously illegal, being far beyond the technology level approved for Kalapriya."

"Umm." Calandra rolled over on the pile of embroidered cushions that served as both chair and bed, and nibbled the end of one curly frond of hair. "I notice you didn't point out that Lorum van Vechten had to have known the weaponry was pro-tech."

"Why bother? I'm sure their story will be that he had no idea the Bashir was using tanglers; he's the Resident, not an arms master. He'll claim he thought Udara was extending its territory by legitimate means, diplomacy and traditional warfare, and none of his business to interfere. And if we question that, he'll point out that nobody in Valentin questioned the speed of the Udaran conquests either."

"I rather suspect Valentin doesn't know much about what goes on among the hill tribes," Calandra said. "Remember, communications outside the coastal enclaves are limited to native technology. They've got some sort of primitive system of signaling by electric wires in the coastal plain—"

"That's not pro-tech?"

"Hand-cranked generators," Calandra explained, "and it was actually a Kalapriyan who invented the concept. They get wire for the electrographs through the Barents Trading Society, but that was approved because it isn't different in kind from the wire they can hand-draw through a plate, just smoother and a whole lot cheaper."

"It must be nice to have everything there is to know about Kalapriya, including the language, downloaded onto a memory chip inside your head," Annemari said with a trace of envy.

Calandra put one hand to her temple, where the ache came after a download. She didn't know if that was where the chip was located or whether some confusion of nerves made it hurt there instead of in the socket at the back of her neck; she just knew that absorbing a mass of information in seconds usually cost her a few days of headache. If she was lucky. Really heavy downloads meant migraines with flashing lights instead of ordinary headaches; she was lucky that there hadn't been all that much information this time.

Or not, depending on how you looked at it.

"Not everything there is to know," she corrected Annemari, "just everything Rezerval knows. And I have a feeling there's a lot about this world that isn't in Federation databases." She sighed. "It may have been a mistake to let them find out I speak Kalapriyan; we might learn a lot more by eavesdropping than in formal meetings."

"Seeing that our alternative would have been depending on Lorum van Vechten as a translator," Annemari said drily, "I think it's an exceedingly good thing you do speak Kalapriyan." A flicker of movement on the tapestried wall caught her attention; was it just light from the water in a nearby basin reflecting off the golden threads? She was so tired that all her surroundings seemed a mystery of moving lights and shadows.

"Yes, but I might have learned a lot by listening to how he translated you."

"And he almost certainly would not have made it clear to the Bashir how important a Diplo is, and how many people—not just in Valentin, but on Rezerval!—know exactly where we were going, and how much trouble it would make for the Bashir if he had us quietly assassinated," Annemari pointed out. The tapestry was definitely trembling; and there was no wind blowing through the crude windows in the outer wall. "So you would've had to step in and use your Kalapriyan anyway, to make sure he understood that it would be a really, really bad idea to make us disappear. I'm sorry, Calandra, but eavesdropping really never was an option."

She threw herself flat across the layers of carpet and grabbed a handful of stiff brocaded wall hanging, and something else inside the hangings, something firm and yet yielding like flesh, something that squeaked in distress as she yanked with all her force and brought down a whole wall of tapestries over a small human figure.

" . . . for us, anyway," Annemari finished, slightly out of breath. Years of sitting behind a desk and tapping her fingers on a vid screen were no training for wrestling with unseen adversaries. She sat on a portion of the eavesdropper to keep it from getting away while Calandra excavated the rest from the heap of tapestries.

"It's a little girl!" Annemari exclaimed in surprise when the tapestries were finally separated from the red and gold organic fabrics of the child's clothes.

"What are you doing here?" Calandra demanded in harsh Kalapriyan. "Khush? Mal sooree, bai-chha!"

The girl shook her head frantically, long dark plaits whipping back and forth. "La soree! La! Ebh-bashir dhulaishtaiyen . . ."

Calandra listened for a moment to the flood of Kalapriyan, inserted a sharp question and got back more questions in response. Annemari chewed her left thumbnail and muttered, "I will not interrupt, I will not interrupt, what the hell is going on here, I will not interrupt," under her breath until the colloquy was finished.

"Well?" she demanded when both Calandra and their eavesdropper at last seemed to be through talking.

Calandra sighed and pressed one hand to her forehead. Making such heavy use of the language implants always made her temples throb. The medtechs on Rezerval claimed a slight adjustment could fix that little problem . . . but then, they'd also described the initial surgery as "minor."

"The girl's Rohini—oh, we never went into that, did we? The Kalapriyans think they belong to two distinct races, although DNA analyses don't support that belief. Castes, maybe; races, no. The Rohini tend to be smaller, though, and darker-skinned than the Rudhrani, and the farther away from the coast, the more the natives make of the distinction. The Trading Society doesn't recognize any distinction in law, and that seems to be having a good influence on the coastal states, but up here in the hills the Rohini are practically slaves. In Udara, anyway. Rudhrani run the government, command the army, have all the good jobs. There was an independent Rohini state—Thamboon—but the Bashir conquered it recently."

"Please tell me," Annemari said in a voice that could have chipped ice, "that you and this child have not been discussing comparative sociology and the history of Kalapriya for the last ten minutes!"

"Hold on. It's relevant. The thing is, evidently the Bashir and his buddies have been rather overdoing the Rudhrani-superiority thing. That, plus a nasty habit of secretly assassinating political opponents, plus the way he's been taking over neighboring states recently—it's a recipe for revolution, Annemari. And this young woman is one of our revolutionaries."

"In the Bashir's palace? Wearing his colors?"

Calandra sighed. "Annemari, you may not have the Rezerval data on Kalapriya packed into your head, but you did study history, no? Or were you too busy with your computing and engineering classes to pick up even the basics of historic political structures and their consequences? One thing tyrants do—male tyrants, mostly, although there were some odd stories about one of the Russian empresses of Old Earth—they become sexual predators. This girl—her name's Khati—was kidnapped from one of the Rohini slums down the mountain by a Rudhrani palace guard who thought she might be a nice present for the Bashir. Now she's his favorite mistress and the palace guard has become the principal assistant to the Minister for Loyalty, which is the Bashir's secret political police."

"And she wants us to help her escape?"

Calandra rolled her eyes. "Annemari, she could 'escape' anytime just by walking back down the mountain. The Bashir's personal guards would just go out and pick up some more pretty girls for him to play with. She's stayed because her position gives her lots of chances to spy on the Bashir and his council, and she passes on the information she gets to her brother, who just happens to be in the underground resistance movement. For which, I might mention, she will be tortured to death if any of the Rudhrani in the palace catch her. Annemari, she didn't come seeking our help; she came to offer hers. There were a few little misunderstandings to clear up first, but I think we've got it worked out now. For starters, she was expecting us . . . sort of."

"What do you mean, sort of? And how could she be expecting us? I didn't even file a flight plan out of Valentin." As a department head from Rezerval, Annemari had used her authority to commandeer a flitter without explanation or discussion of her travel plans. She and Calandra had decided that with no way to tell which members of the Barents Trading Society were involved in the bacteriomat black market, they would do best to get out of the city before anybody figured out what they were doing there . . . and leaving behind as little information as possible about what they intended to do next.

"Apparently it has been the gossip of the bazaars for some weeks that a Diplo was coming into the hills, escorted by an officer of the Society's private army," Calandra explained. "Now I can't explain how they knew we were coming here before we knew, unless the native fortune-tellers have some technology that they have been keeping from us, but—"

"The other Calandra," Annemari said slowly.

"The who?"

"Remember, I told you in the clinic? When you dropped out of contact, Calandra, I went looking for you."

"Yes, yes, I know. And you found 'Thecla Partheni' traveling from Tasman back to Rezerval, to the Cassilis Clinic."

"That was what the travel records showed," Annemari agreed. "But I had also asked Evert Cornelis to make some private enquiries; he has an aunt, or something, whose husband is fairly high up in the Barents Trading Society. And she told Evert that Calandra Vissi had arrived in Valentin and made quite a social splash—something about a banquet and a ball in her honor. And the ball was after you, as Thecla Partheni, had taken passage from Tasman to Rezerval. At the time I couldn't understand it—and once I found you, and you confirmed that you hadn't set foot on Kalapriya, I thought it must be some silly misunderstanding. Because nobody else could be traveling as you. Could they?"

Calandra shrugged. "They couldn't use my papers or travel chits, because they wouldn't pass the routine retinal and DNA scans . . . but Valentin and the other Society enclaves along the coast try to keep the technology interface with the natives as small as possible, to reduce the chances of accidental cultural contamination. We never left the spaceport area, so you wouldn't have seen what the rest of Valentin is like. But supposedly there are only a few well-guarded Society facilities outside the port that have any nonnative technology at all. The Trading Society families make rather a fetish of living under primitive conditions—you know, no climate control, wearing nothing but organics, using the local beasts to pull wheeled transporters, all that sort of thing. They claim it's to reduce the chances of cultural contamination, but by now I gather it's developed into a sort of inverted snobbery—they feel superior to most Galactics because they can put up with the hardships of life on Kalapriya. So if somebody got outside the spaceport area and then claimed to be me, yes, she might well get away with it; they certainly wouldn't run a retinal scanner over her, anyway . . ." Her voice trailed off and she frowned with concentration.

Annemari touched the neckline of her intellitunic. The fabric softened and draped lower as if she'd been tugging at it from discomfort. "You're telling me that we personally have just introduced more cultural contamination than the entire Barents Trading Society has committed on Kalapriya in the last four generations?"

"We knew that would happen when we took a flitter to get here as fast as possible," Calandra pointed out. "Anyway, you're not responsible for the tanglers and the other pro-tech weaponry the Bashir has been buying. So I wouldn't feel too guilty. Seems to me this world has been well and truly technologically contaminated already. I don't think smart fabrics, or even flitters, are going to mess up the culture more than a hill-country megalomaniac armed with military surplus galactic weaponry. What interests me is . . ."

"Yes?"

"You didn't tell anyone on Rezerval where I was going, did you?"

"No. I wanted to get some information before I made it official." Annemari made a helpless gesture. "Instead, all I'm getting is more and more confusion."

"Then the only people who knew my name and destination," Calandra said, as if thinking aloud, "were the Tasman underworld gang who captured me. So they're the only people who could even have thought to impersonate me on Kalapriya. And the one thing we know for sure about them is that they're smuggling 'mats off Kalapriya. So they're probably smuggling pro-tech weaponry the other way."

"Somebody in the Barents Trading Society has to be involved too," Annemari reminded her. "Probably several people."

"Yes, but nobody in the Society could impersonate me; it's a small clannish group and everybody knows everybody else. Don't you see, Annemari, this fake Diplo has to be one of the Tasman gang! And the officer who's escorting her is either part of the smuggling group, or in danger of his life. Because she has to be coming here to cover or destroy evidence; why else would they risk such an impersonation?"

The girl Khati touched Calandra's hand and whispered something.

"Hai, hai," Calandra said, nodding absently. Then she stopped and paid attention to Khati's increasingly urgent whispers, only saying "Hai" or "Vedya" at intervals.

"Khati thinks we should get out of here," she told Annemari. "Her friend in the Resistance was sent to guide the other 'Calandra' to some place called the Jurgan Caves, in what used to be Thamboon, where she would find evidence of the Bashir's bacteriomat smuggling. Khati says the Bashir shut down everything in Udara when the gossip about the envoys was heard and if we stay here we won't find anything."

"I wouldn't call tanglers exactly 'nothing.' "

"No, but we do want to tie it in with the 'mat smuggling, don't we? And if the others get there first they may destroy the evidence. Why else would one of the Tasman gang team up with a Barents Trading Society officer to trek upcountry? And I think Khati had better come with us. The Bashir is bound to find out she came to our quarters, and once we leave her life won't be worth a Kalapriyan tul." Calandra spoke to Khati again in Kalapriyan. The girl shook her head at first, then as Calandra said something else she bowed low, almost prostrating herself.

"She wanted us to pick up somebody else from her group who's made pilgrimage to these caves, to act as a guide," Calandra explained to Annemari. "I told her it's all right, that I have the location of the caves in my head. Of course I can't explain implants and download chips. So—well, it seems that the caves are holy to some religious sect that's mixed up with the resistance—she seems to think I'm holy by extension." Calandra shook her head. "I've been called a lot of things in my career, but being a minor goddess of the Inner Light Way is definitely a first."

"Let's hope," Annemari said, "her faith in you is sufficient to keep her from going hysterical on her first trip in a flitter, O blessed lady of the Inner Light Way."

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Framed

Back | Next
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Chapter Sixteen
Udara on Kalapriya

"That," Annemari said with a long sigh, "was not quite the most frustrating meeting I've sat through in the last twenty years. But it came close."

After the long and extremely formal diplomatic discussion, they had been ushered to what must be the most luxurious guest quarters in the Bashir's palace. No indoor plumbing, Annemari noted, but lots of tapestries and cushions to soften the raw cedar walls and packed-earth floor, and basins of beaten metal for washing in. The ubiquitous red and gold that the Bashir favored made her eyes hurt after a while, especially the clashing of soft vegetable reds with imported chemical dyes from Valentin. And the gold embroidery made the cushions rather scratchy. Still, it did seem they were being treated with appropriate respect. For what that was worth.

"They're being very polite," Calandra agreed, "and very good at not telling us anything. Do you believe the Bashir's story about where his prohibited weapons came from?"

"A Barentsian fugitive, under sentence of death in Valentin, fleeing inland and buying his safety in Udara with a pack full of tanglers and nerve dazers? And now conveniently dead?" Annemari's laugh cracked a little. "All very convenient, isn't it? I especially liked the part about the Bashir being shocked—shocked! to hear that the weaponry is seriously illegal, being far beyond the technology level approved for Kalapriya."

"Umm." Calandra rolled over on the pile of embroidered cushions that served as both chair and bed, and nibbled the end of one curly frond of hair. "I notice you didn't point out that Lorum van Vechten had to have known the weaponry was pro-tech."

"Why bother? I'm sure their story will be that he had no idea the Bashir was using tanglers; he's the Resident, not an arms master. He'll claim he thought Udara was extending its territory by legitimate means, diplomacy and traditional warfare, and none of his business to interfere. And if we question that, he'll point out that nobody in Valentin questioned the speed of the Udaran conquests either."

"I rather suspect Valentin doesn't know much about what goes on among the hill tribes," Calandra said. "Remember, communications outside the coastal enclaves are limited to native technology. They've got some sort of primitive system of signaling by electric wires in the coastal plain—"

"That's not pro-tech?"

"Hand-cranked generators," Calandra explained, "and it was actually a Kalapriyan who invented the concept. They get wire for the electrographs through the Barents Trading Society, but that was approved because it isn't different in kind from the wire they can hand-draw through a plate, just smoother and a whole lot cheaper."

"It must be nice to have everything there is to know about Kalapriya, including the language, downloaded onto a memory chip inside your head," Annemari said with a trace of envy.

Calandra put one hand to her temple, where the ache came after a download. She didn't know if that was where the chip was located or whether some confusion of nerves made it hurt there instead of in the socket at the back of her neck; she just knew that absorbing a mass of information in seconds usually cost her a few days of headache. If she was lucky. Really heavy downloads meant migraines with flashing lights instead of ordinary headaches; she was lucky that there hadn't been all that much information this time.

Or not, depending on how you looked at it.

"Not everything there is to know," she corrected Annemari, "just everything Rezerval knows. And I have a feeling there's a lot about this world that isn't in Federation databases." She sighed. "It may have been a mistake to let them find out I speak Kalapriyan; we might learn a lot more by eavesdropping than in formal meetings."

"Seeing that our alternative would have been depending on Lorum van Vechten as a translator," Annemari said drily, "I think it's an exceedingly good thing you do speak Kalapriyan." A flicker of movement on the tapestried wall caught her attention; was it just light from the water in a nearby basin reflecting off the golden threads? She was so tired that all her surroundings seemed a mystery of moving lights and shadows.

"Yes, but I might have learned a lot by listening to how he translated you."

"And he almost certainly would not have made it clear to the Bashir how important a Diplo is, and how many people—not just in Valentin, but on Rezerval!—know exactly where we were going, and how much trouble it would make for the Bashir if he had us quietly assassinated," Annemari pointed out. The tapestry was definitely trembling; and there was no wind blowing through the crude windows in the outer wall. "So you would've had to step in and use your Kalapriyan anyway, to make sure he understood that it would be a really, really bad idea to make us disappear. I'm sorry, Calandra, but eavesdropping really never was an option."

She threw herself flat across the layers of carpet and grabbed a handful of stiff brocaded wall hanging, and something else inside the hangings, something firm and yet yielding like flesh, something that squeaked in distress as she yanked with all her force and brought down a whole wall of tapestries over a small human figure.

" . . . for us, anyway," Annemari finished, slightly out of breath. Years of sitting behind a desk and tapping her fingers on a vid screen were no training for wrestling with unseen adversaries. She sat on a portion of the eavesdropper to keep it from getting away while Calandra excavated the rest from the heap of tapestries.

"It's a little girl!" Annemari exclaimed in surprise when the tapestries were finally separated from the red and gold organic fabrics of the child's clothes.

"What are you doing here?" Calandra demanded in harsh Kalapriyan. "Khush? Mal sooree, bai-chha!"

The girl shook her head frantically, long dark plaits whipping back and forth. "La soree! La! Ebh-bashir dhulaishtaiyen . . ."

Calandra listened for a moment to the flood of Kalapriyan, inserted a sharp question and got back more questions in response. Annemari chewed her left thumbnail and muttered, "I will not interrupt, I will not interrupt, what the hell is going on here, I will not interrupt," under her breath until the colloquy was finished.

"Well?" she demanded when both Calandra and their eavesdropper at last seemed to be through talking.

Calandra sighed and pressed one hand to her forehead. Making such heavy use of the language implants always made her temples throb. The medtechs on Rezerval claimed a slight adjustment could fix that little problem . . . but then, they'd also described the initial surgery as "minor."

"The girl's Rohini—oh, we never went into that, did we? The Kalapriyans think they belong to two distinct races, although DNA analyses don't support that belief. Castes, maybe; races, no. The Rohini tend to be smaller, though, and darker-skinned than the Rudhrani, and the farther away from the coast, the more the natives make of the distinction. The Trading Society doesn't recognize any distinction in law, and that seems to be having a good influence on the coastal states, but up here in the hills the Rohini are practically slaves. In Udara, anyway. Rudhrani run the government, command the army, have all the good jobs. There was an independent Rohini state—Thamboon—but the Bashir conquered it recently."

"Please tell me," Annemari said in a voice that could have chipped ice, "that you and this child have not been discussing comparative sociology and the history of Kalapriya for the last ten minutes!"

"Hold on. It's relevant. The thing is, evidently the Bashir and his buddies have been rather overdoing the Rudhrani-superiority thing. That, plus a nasty habit of secretly assassinating political opponents, plus the way he's been taking over neighboring states recently—it's a recipe for revolution, Annemari. And this young woman is one of our revolutionaries."

"In the Bashir's palace? Wearing his colors?"

Calandra sighed. "Annemari, you may not have the Rezerval data on Kalapriya packed into your head, but you did study history, no? Or were you too busy with your computing and engineering classes to pick up even the basics of historic political structures and their consequences? One thing tyrants do—male tyrants, mostly, although there were some odd stories about one of the Russian empresses of Old Earth—they become sexual predators. This girl—her name's Khati—was kidnapped from one of the Rohini slums down the mountain by a Rudhrani palace guard who thought she might be a nice present for the Bashir. Now she's his favorite mistress and the palace guard has become the principal assistant to the Minister for Loyalty, which is the Bashir's secret political police."

"And she wants us to help her escape?"

Calandra rolled her eyes. "Annemari, she could 'escape' anytime just by walking back down the mountain. The Bashir's personal guards would just go out and pick up some more pretty girls for him to play with. She's stayed because her position gives her lots of chances to spy on the Bashir and his council, and she passes on the information she gets to her brother, who just happens to be in the underground resistance movement. For which, I might mention, she will be tortured to death if any of the Rudhrani in the palace catch her. Annemari, she didn't come seeking our help; she came to offer hers. There were a few little misunderstandings to clear up first, but I think we've got it worked out now. For starters, she was expecting us . . . sort of."

"What do you mean, sort of? And how could she be expecting us? I didn't even file a flight plan out of Valentin." As a department head from Rezerval, Annemari had used her authority to commandeer a flitter without explanation or discussion of her travel plans. She and Calandra had decided that with no way to tell which members of the Barents Trading Society were involved in the bacteriomat black market, they would do best to get out of the city before anybody figured out what they were doing there . . . and leaving behind as little information as possible about what they intended to do next.

"Apparently it has been the gossip of the bazaars for some weeks that a Diplo was coming into the hills, escorted by an officer of the Society's private army," Calandra explained. "Now I can't explain how they knew we were coming here before we knew, unless the native fortune-tellers have some technology that they have been keeping from us, but—"

"The other Calandra," Annemari said slowly.

"The who?"

"Remember, I told you in the clinic? When you dropped out of contact, Calandra, I went looking for you."

"Yes, yes, I know. And you found 'Thecla Partheni' traveling from Tasman back to Rezerval, to the Cassilis Clinic."

"That was what the travel records showed," Annemari agreed. "But I had also asked Evert Cornelis to make some private enquiries; he has an aunt, or something, whose husband is fairly high up in the Barents Trading Society. And she told Evert that Calandra Vissi had arrived in Valentin and made quite a social splash—something about a banquet and a ball in her honor. And the ball was after you, as Thecla Partheni, had taken passage from Tasman to Rezerval. At the time I couldn't understand it—and once I found you, and you confirmed that you hadn't set foot on Kalapriya, I thought it must be some silly misunderstanding. Because nobody else could be traveling as you. Could they?"

Calandra shrugged. "They couldn't use my papers or travel chits, because they wouldn't pass the routine retinal and DNA scans . . . but Valentin and the other Society enclaves along the coast try to keep the technology interface with the natives as small as possible, to reduce the chances of accidental cultural contamination. We never left the spaceport area, so you wouldn't have seen what the rest of Valentin is like. But supposedly there are only a few well-guarded Society facilities outside the port that have any nonnative technology at all. The Trading Society families make rather a fetish of living under primitive conditions—you know, no climate control, wearing nothing but organics, using the local beasts to pull wheeled transporters, all that sort of thing. They claim it's to reduce the chances of cultural contamination, but by now I gather it's developed into a sort of inverted snobbery—they feel superior to most Galactics because they can put up with the hardships of life on Kalapriya. So if somebody got outside the spaceport area and then claimed to be me, yes, she might well get away with it; they certainly wouldn't run a retinal scanner over her, anyway . . ." Her voice trailed off and she frowned with concentration.

Annemari touched the neckline of her intellitunic. The fabric softened and draped lower as if she'd been tugging at it from discomfort. "You're telling me that we personally have just introduced more cultural contamination than the entire Barents Trading Society has committed on Kalapriya in the last four generations?"

"We knew that would happen when we took a flitter to get here as fast as possible," Calandra pointed out. "Anyway, you're not responsible for the tanglers and the other pro-tech weaponry the Bashir has been buying. So I wouldn't feel too guilty. Seems to me this world has been well and truly technologically contaminated already. I don't think smart fabrics, or even flitters, are going to mess up the culture more than a hill-country megalomaniac armed with military surplus galactic weaponry. What interests me is . . ."

"Yes?"

"You didn't tell anyone on Rezerval where I was going, did you?"

"No. I wanted to get some information before I made it official." Annemari made a helpless gesture. "Instead, all I'm getting is more and more confusion."

"Then the only people who knew my name and destination," Calandra said, as if thinking aloud, "were the Tasman underworld gang who captured me. So they're the only people who could even have thought to impersonate me on Kalapriya. And the one thing we know for sure about them is that they're smuggling 'mats off Kalapriya. So they're probably smuggling pro-tech weaponry the other way."

"Somebody in the Barents Trading Society has to be involved too," Annemari reminded her. "Probably several people."

"Yes, but nobody in the Society could impersonate me; it's a small clannish group and everybody knows everybody else. Don't you see, Annemari, this fake Diplo has to be one of the Tasman gang! And the officer who's escorting her is either part of the smuggling group, or in danger of his life. Because she has to be coming here to cover or destroy evidence; why else would they risk such an impersonation?"

The girl Khati touched Calandra's hand and whispered something.

"Hai, hai," Calandra said, nodding absently. Then she stopped and paid attention to Khati's increasingly urgent whispers, only saying "Hai" or "Vedya" at intervals.

"Khati thinks we should get out of here," she told Annemari. "Her friend in the Resistance was sent to guide the other 'Calandra' to some place called the Jurgan Caves, in what used to be Thamboon, where she would find evidence of the Bashir's bacteriomat smuggling. Khati says the Bashir shut down everything in Udara when the gossip about the envoys was heard and if we stay here we won't find anything."

"I wouldn't call tanglers exactly 'nothing.' "

"No, but we do want to tie it in with the 'mat smuggling, don't we? And if the others get there first they may destroy the evidence. Why else would one of the Tasman gang team up with a Barents Trading Society officer to trek upcountry? And I think Khati had better come with us. The Bashir is bound to find out she came to our quarters, and once we leave her life won't be worth a Kalapriyan tul." Calandra spoke to Khati again in Kalapriyan. The girl shook her head at first, then as Calandra said something else she bowed low, almost prostrating herself.

"She wanted us to pick up somebody else from her group who's made pilgrimage to these caves, to act as a guide," Calandra explained to Annemari. "I told her it's all right, that I have the location of the caves in my head. Of course I can't explain implants and download chips. So—well, it seems that the caves are holy to some religious sect that's mixed up with the resistance—she seems to think I'm holy by extension." Calandra shook her head. "I've been called a lot of things in my career, but being a minor goddess of the Inner Light Way is definitely a first."

"Let's hope," Annemari said, "her faith in you is sufficient to keep her from going hysterical on her first trip in a flitter, O blessed lady of the Inner Light Way."

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Framed