He shrugged. “The future will be challenging for the Brotherhood,” he said. “Cinnabar competition will hurt us. But if the Shinings continue to expand, they will destroy not only our trade but our very selves. They regard themselves as the only true humans. They believe they’re descended from the Archaic Spacefarers.”

  “The Archaic Spacefarers are real,” I said. “I’m convinced of that. But I’m not sure they’re human. In fact the evidence is that they weren’t.”

  Dolio shrugged. “The Shinings would agree that we and they aren’t the same species,” he said. “They would quarrel with our belief that we are human, though. Regardless, Aseel has industrialized to a degree that nothing else in the region has ever come close to. I think they’ll overstep themselves—they truly don’t understand how much larger the Alliance and Cinnabar are. But until that happens, they make very uncomfortable neighbors.”

  “I can see that,” I said. “I think your colleagues were very shortsighted—but then, I was raised to believe that treachery is always shortsighted.”

  I realized as I spoke that Dolio might think I was sneering at him. I suppose I was.

  Rick said, “We’re lieutenants. If you want to apologize, you need to find somebody with real rank. Mind, they’d likely tell you that Captain von Hase got what he deserved for taking the word of a lying little wog.”

  Dolio’s smile was very tight, but he smiled. “I understand your attitude,” he said. “I suppose I would share it in your situation. In any case, words of apology wouldn’t be real amends for the damage which the Goliath received.”

  He put a small silk bag on the table and slid it over to me. Maddy arrived then with three more beers though Dolio had only drunk half of his. There was a chip in the silk bag.

  I looked at Dolio, who met my eyes over his mug. “It’s a route chip for this region,” he said. “Since your vessel sounds by pinnaces rather than making the transitions herself, there’s no serious risk to you in checking the computations. When you do, I think you’ll find that our courses will save considerable transit time on many routes.”

  I put the chip back into its bag and slid it to Rick. Dolio had apparently thought I was the senior officer, but if this was astrogational data it wasn’t my affair.

  Rick had apparently been paying some attention while he chatted with Maddy, because instead of reopening the bag he merely set his finger on it and looked at Dolio. “Why should we believe you now?”

  “You shouldn’t,” Dolio said. “I’m a lying wog, after all. But since you can check the routes with no risk except to a pinnace, you would be fools not to check.”

  He finished his first beer and stood, then slid the untasted refill over to Rick. “Good evening to you, gentlemen,” he said. “I think the money I left with your server will keep you drinking for a good while longer.”

  He nodded as he made his way out of the bar. Rick turned to me and grimaced as he put the chip in a pocket. He said, “At least it’ll keep us going until Maddy ends her shift.”

  I nodded. I figured I’d be going back to the ship alone tonight.

  * * *

  I’d just gotten a response from Master Blenkins, saying that he would be delighted to show me through his cabinet of curiosities, when the intercom at my workstation peeped.

  “Harper,” I said, knowing it had to be Rick if it were my outlet alone. A call to Bio Section would have come through the central unit to the side of the entrance hatch.

  “Just checking on how you’re doing,” Rick said. “There was honest to hell rioting last night in the avenue outside Maddy’s room and I wasn’t sure when you’d gotten home.”

  “I got back before there was any trouble that I saw,” I said. “I figured you’d still be with the new girlfriend or I’d have checked to see if you wanted to visit another collection with me. You saved us some time IDing that console lens on Quan Loi.”

  “I’m off duty till 1600 hours local,” Rick said. “I’m doing check rides on tech 3s striking for 4 for the next few days. And sure I’d like to see what the locals’ ancestors thought was worth preserving.”

  “Then come on down and keep me company,” I said. “It ought to be an easy walk.”

  “It’ll be easier still with the trike,” Rick said. “I’ll meet you in the transportation bay.”

  * * *

  The Blenkins mansion was smaller than some I’ve seen, probably because it was one of the oldest buildings in Keelung. It was on the water, six blocks west of the Far Traveller’s berth, with its own stone pier. As we pulled up in front of the steel gate, a pair of attendants pulled open one of the leaves so that Rick could drive through. He pulled up just inside instead of driving up the ramp to the porch of house.

  “Can we leave it here?” he asked the guards.

  “Certainly, sir,” one of the men responded. “They’re expecting you inside.”

  The attendants weren’t carrying weapons, but a pair of meter-long batons leaned against the inside of the wall flanking the gate. When we’d started up the steps I asked Rick quietly, “Who was rioting last night?”

  “Backers of the New Party and the Old Party,” Rick said. “One’s the royalists and the other’s the republicans, but Maddy wasn’t a hundred percent sure which was which. Down at her level, politics mostly means getting your head down when you see party heavies out looking for trouble.”

  The broad house door opened as we approached it. A pudgy sixties-ish man wearing an outfit of light-weight cloth with puffy sleeves and trousers greeted us, but there were two attendants in the room as well as the man who’d pulled open the door.

  “Welcome to Blenkins House!” the older man said. “I am Blenkins of Blenkins and you are welcome here.”

  I shook his hand and said, “I am Lord Harper and my companion from the Far Traveller is Lieutenant Grenville.”

  All three male servants were built on the lines of the two on the gate. They were wearing white tops and black trousers, ordinary service garb, but they sure didn’t look as though they’d been hired to carry platters of food.

  I guess I’d let my eyes hang on the servants longer than I’d meant them to, because Blenkins grimaced and said, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, we’ve had some trouble recently in Keelung.”

  He paused and took a deep breath, then continued, “I don’t agree with those who foment violence—I think it’s likely to result in an even more blatant presence of the filth from Aseel. Regardless of my own wishes, there are others who do regularly use violence. Even those who claim to be Old Party like myself are capable of trying to intimidate anyone who doesn’t support them without reservations. I have to be prepared.”

  “Sir,” I said, “I regret the difficult situation you and your compatriots are going through. The Republic has had similar problems in recent memory. Regardless, my companion and I are here to view the Blenkins collection with your very kind permission, not to interfere in local politics.”

  “I appreciate your tact, gentlemen,” Blenkins said with a bow. “Come then, to the third floor.”

  We followed our host up two flights of stairs. The first was stone and the treads had been worn sway-backed by centuries of feet; the second flight was wood and recent enough that I could smell the oil used to finish the wood, though the surface was slickly dry.

  In the hallway at the top of the staircase, Blenkins unlocked one of the rooms and gestured us in. The room was ten by twelve with glass topped tables on one side and open egg-crate cabinets on two others. In the two back corners stood space suits. They looked clumsy and odd to me, but I wasn’t an expert.

  Rick went up to a suit and looked at it closely. He turned to Blenkins, standing in the doorway, and said, “Is this part of the equipment of the colony ship? Because it appears to be over a thousand years old. Certainly Pre-Hiatus.”

  “It is the suit worn by my ancestor, Navigation Officer Edmondo Blenkins,” Blenkins said proudly. “We are truly an ancient family and have been among the first families of Mindoro ever since the settlement—though we’ve never given ourselves such airs as the Pilkeys have.”

  “The Pilkeys are the royal family, then?” I asked out of curiosity rather than any real reason.

  “The Pilkeys are descended from Captain Pilkey,” Blenkins said. “The royal family—the self-styled royal family, I may add—are descended from Commissioner Seba, the head of the civil colony and based in Langsam, a port on the west of the mainland. They lost power on Mindoro when we regained space travel and began to reenter the galactic arena. They are back now, but I doubt whether they would be except for the aid of the Aseelians. The Shinings, as they prefer to call themselves now. I doubt the royals would even be in power in Langsam.”

  “I see,” I said, giving my attention to the open shelves. What I saw was that internal divisions on Mindoro had crippled it in its war with the Shinings. That was a pity, but it was none of my business and didn’t affect the Far Traveller’s mission.

  “There’s a Shining orbital control…,” Rick said as I recorded images from the shelving. “And Shining ships in harbor, at least two of them, are there not?”

  “Yes,” Blenkins agreed curtly. “There are far more at Langsam, but Keelung is still the main harbor and Mindoro’s trade moves through us. The royal vicar is a puppet of his Aseelian ‘advisor,’ Lord Kindoro.”

  He grimaced and spread his hands. “What can we do?” he said. “Certainly rioting in the street as Pilkey is stirring up won’t help. There was a riot last week in which an Aseelian was stabbed. As a result, the vicar has arrested a dozen petty criminals and street thugs, and proposed to torture them to death until someone turns in the real murderers.”

  “Why didn’t he arrest you and Master Pilkey?” I said. “He must know who’s running the Old Party.”

  Blenkins looked at me, I thought in surprise. I said, “I’m not on his side, but it just seems the obvious thing to do. Cut the snake’s head off, I mean.”

  After a moment, Blenkins smiled at me. He said, “You are a very direct man, Lord Harper. The vicar is not—none of the Sebas were, which is why they were forced out of power five hundred years ago. There would be a general uprising—New Party supporters as well as those giving allegiance to Pilkey and me. The king doesn’t have enough force at his disposal without calling on the Shinings, and the Shinings don’t have enough troops on Mindoro or any way to get more troops here soon enough to matter.”

  I went back to the egg-crate shelving. It was full of knickknacks—bits of equipment which I generally couldn’t identify and which weren’t of interest when I could. There were weapons, knives as well as guns. The guns might have been in working order from anything I could see. There were coins and medals, statuettes, and pieces of graphic art.

  Then I came to a crystal rod. “Sir!” I said. “Might I handle this?”

  “Yes, certainly,” Blenkins said. “I suppose it’s glass, though, so don’t drop it.”

  “I won’t drop it,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure it’ll turn out to be silicon carbide and a lot tougher than glass.”

  I set the spindle on a glass-topped table covering documents with attached seals and ribbons, then hooked my handheld meter to it and asked for density and structure. As I expected, I was looking at a moissanite rod of unusual shape.

  “Sir?” I said to Master Blenkins. “Do you have a record of the provenance of this item?”

  “The only records I know of are for items I added myself,” Blenkins said. “I didn’t know that even existed. Do you know what it is?”

  “I suspect,” I said, “that it’s an artifact of the Archaic Spacefarers. Though I have no idea of its purpose.”

  “No fooling?” Blenkins said. “Does that mean it’s valuable?”

  I sighed internally, but all I said aloud was, “In terms of florins, no. Clear silicon carbide can be easily mistaken for diamond but it isn’t, and it’s not valuable for itself. But as a matter of science, any artifact of the Archaics is uniquely important.”

  Blenkins considered momentarily with a fierce expression. Then his face cleared and he said, “Well, you can look it over to your heart’s content. I guess I’ll make a better display of it if it really is a rare thing.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. I got to work copying the artifact from every angle. There wasn’t really much to see beyond the obvious, but I wouldn’t be coming back to Mindoro in this lifetime. I was making as much of the opportunity as I could.

  Rick spoke with Blenkins in a low voice. They left the room together.

  When I finished making images, I put the artifact back on the shelf where I’d found it. As I stepped to the door to look for my host, Rick and Master Blenkins reentered the collection room.

  “There’s another room next door,” Rick said cheerfully. “It’s got a lot of plants and bugs in it, which makes it more your speed, right?”

  “Well, I’ll be delighted to see the rest of your collection, Master Blenkins,” I said, though in truth I didn’t have much hope for the rest of the collection. The first room would have been a waste of time—without the Archaic artifact; but that was a huge find and would thrill Doctor Veil. Ideally, the second room would have the preserved body of an Archaic, but I wasn’t going to bet much on the possibility.

  The second room had waist-height glass-topped chests of drawers around the walls. The creatures in the top layer had external shells; some but not all had come from the sea. I suspected that in life many had been brightly colored, but in the years or even centuries since they were collected they had mostly faded to beige.

  On one cabinet was a flat creature about forty inches long and slightly pointed at both ends. Although this specimen was dried, I was pretty sure that the meat course at dinner the previous night would have come from something similar. I preferred it as a museum exhibit, but perhaps it was an acquired taste.

  “The drawers pull out,” Blenkins said and helpfully extended the second drawer on the right-hand cabinet.

  I dutifully recorded all the items in the cabinets. I didn’t ask to take samples for genetic testing because I didn’t have a portable way to do that, and I was pretty sure that I wasn’t seeing anything that wasn’t already familiar from the Blythe Academy database which Doctor Veil had gotten through friends at the Xenos Science Faculty before the Far Traveller lifted on Cinnabar.

  When I finished recording the contents of the drawers, I straightened and stretched. “Do you have more collections, sir?” I asked Blenkins, who was watching with apparent interest from the doorway.

  “Well, there’s the ones on the walls here,” he said, gesturing.

  I realized that I’d forgotten the invertebrates arranged on the wall above the cabinets in whimsical displays. The designs were of birds, fish, and even what looked like a stylized spaceship.

  I began recording the four displays. They were all the Mindoran equivalent of insects. Each display was pretty much a single species, so I thought of asking Blenkins if I could have a specimen of each for genetic sequencing.

  That would disturb patterns which really showed some artistry, however. Joss was already out collecting specimens and I would be joining her shortly; we could find as many of the insectoids as we wanted. Besides, none of the creatures looked very interesting.

  The fourth display was of a bird largely made from creatures with biting mouth parts and multiple body segments which had allowed the artist to draw the tail feathers in sweeping curves. The head was a different insect. I magnified my image of it, then stared at what I had.

  Good heavens.

  I cleared my throat, then said, “Master Blenkins, will you come closer please? I’d like you to look at this.”

  “Look at what?” our host said. “The bugs?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I was using my handheld to search the Far Traveller’s Biology Database. I gestured. “Take a good look at the item that forms the head of the bird drawing.”

  “Oh, it’s not a bug after all,” Blenkins said, reaching over the cabinet.

  “Don’t!” I said, forgetting for a moment that I was a guest in this man’s home. Blenkins jerked his hand back though.

  “Sir,” I continued, “have you heard of the lourdis tree on Commonwealth? They called it the God Tree before the species was wiped out by an off-planet blight a century ago. The planetary government set a reward of a million Alliance thalers for a surviving plant, now that they have a vaccine for the blight.”

  “A million thalers?” Blenkins said. “A million?”

  “I don’t know that your seed is still viable,” I said. “And the reward may have been cancelled, though it was still open about a year ago, the date of my information. In any case, I think it should be handled carefully. On Commonwealth, the lourdis tree has religious significance as well as popularly being thought to encourage feelings of mental well-being.”

  “A million thalers…,” Blenkins repeated. He looked over at me with a worried expression and said, “If that’s true, what will your share be, Lord Harper?”

  I chuckled. I hadn’t been able to imagine what was bothering Blenkins, but now I saw. “I don’t have a share, Master Blenkins,” I said. “The seed is yours to do with as you please. Eat it, for all I care.”

  “Sir…,” Blenkins repeated. His face scrunched up and he dropped to his knees. “Lord Harper!” he blurted. “Lord Harper, this is unbelievably generous of you! How can I thank you?”

  “You invited me into your home and showed me your family collections,” I said. “The thanks are mine to give. Lieutenant Grenville and I will take our leave now.”

  Rick would be going on duty before long and probably wanted to get lunch before that. I could use a meal myself.

  “Well, wait a moment at least,” Blenkins said. He stood up and strode out of the room. I looked at Rick and said in a low voice, “You’re ready, I assume?”

  “Sure,” Rick murmured, but Blenkins came back in the room before we could leave. He held the moissanite artifact. “Will you at least accept this?” he said. “It’s of no value to me, but at least it means something to you.”