We shuffled down the corridor with me occasionally leaning on his arm. When we reached the cross corridor I knew where I was.

  Rick opened my door for me. I started in. Edwige got up from the chair beside the little desk.

  “Lady Hergestal,” Rick said. “I’ll be leaving now. I figure you can help Lieutenant Harper with whatever else he needs.”

  He closed the door behind him.

  I walked to the bunk and sat down. Halfway through the process, my thigh muscles lost all strength and I flopped down the rest of the way like a sandbag.

  Edwige glanced toward the closed door, then turned back to me and said, “Lord Harper, when you fell into my arms, I thought you’d died.”

  “No, I was just dehydrated,” I said. “I…well, I’m all right now. Except that I’m tired. Really tired.”

  “Lord Harper,” Edwige said. “You—”

  She stepped over to the bunk and sat down beside me. She took my left hand. Her hands felt cool on mine, and I wondered if I had an elevated temperature from whatever the medicomp had been shooting into me.

  “Harry, you risked your life to find my father,” she said. “No one else would help, but you did and you almost died.”

  I met her eyes and said, “We weren’t able to save your father, milady. And there were four of us; not just me. Five if you include Rick, and he was the reason we made it back.”

  “None of the others would have gone except for you,” Edwige said and raised my hand to her lips and kissed it. Her lips felt cool also. “We can bury Father back home because of you. I’ll fly the body to Meridan Spa and put it in the freezer there until I can arrange passage back to Pleasaunce for both of us. My family owes you for that, Harry. I owe you, whatever you want.”

  “Edwige,” I said. “You owe me nothing. I just tried to help you the way I’d have helped anybody. And all I want now is some sleep. A lot of sleep.”

  “Thank you, Lord Harper,” Edwige said. “Thank you for bringing my father back to me.”

  She leaned over and kissed my cheek, then rose and went out the door. I stretched out on the bed and was asleep in less than a minute.

  * * *

  I saw Rick the next afternoon, when he came off watch with a work crew. He’d recovered much more quickly than I had, even though he’d accomplished what I think was a much more difficult task than I’d had. We met on the quay, where I’d gone to wait for him.

  “I don’t see Lady Hergestal’s car…?” he said, making it a question with his raised eyebrow.

  “She’s taking the body back to the resort where she’d been staying when the volcano blew up,” I said. “She thinks they’ll let her keep it in their cold storage until she can get it aboard a starship going back to Pleasaunce.”

  Rick laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she did,” he said. “A very persuasive lady. Look at what she got you to do. And me too, if it comes to that.”

  “I appreciate you arranging for us to be pulled back, Rick,” I said. “That was a lifesaver—maybe literally.”

  “Hey, it’s the least I could do after the way you brought me back on Mindoro,” he said. “Say, did Lady Hergestal give you good value last night for the way you risked your life for her?”

  I smiled, though I don’t think the expression looked very cheerful. “Not like you mean it,” I said. “I guess she would’ve, but I didn’t think it’d be right. Look, Rick—don’t put this around, but I’m pretty sure the body we found was the maître d’ at the Steeling, not Postholder Bothwell. You’d have to do a genetic test to be sure, and I hope to hell that she won’t do that.”

  “Ah,” said Rick. He grinned briefly, then straightened his face. “It’s funny if you look at it the right way. The wrong way, I mean. But look—you made her happy, and you bloody well did risk your life, I saw where your fluids had been when they hooked you up. I wouldn’t be surprised but it might’ve done her some good too. If you were up to it, I mean.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know if I was,” I said. “Anyway, it seemed too much like getting a girl drunk to screw her.”

  Mostly to change the subject I said, “Say, Rick? Were you able to find Rachel Pond?”

  “Yes,” he said; sharply, which I hadn’t expected. “She’s dead. Do you think that’s my fault?”

  “Hell no,” I said. “Just about everybody in St. Martins is, including the maître d’ of the Steeling. It was the Foreign Ministry as sent her here, so I guess blame them—if you’re not satisfied to blame the volcano like any reasonable person.”

  I cleared my throat and said, “I’m sorry, though. Rachel was a nice girl and I liked her.”

  “Me too,” Rick said. We weren’t looking at one another anymore. “More than I realized till Mindoro. I had a lot of time to think there, and I was sorta figuring I might not have any more time ever.”

  He looked at me and forced a grin when I met his eyes. “And then you fixed things. Which is why I was around to carry a line to you.”

  I nodded. Rick was a good friend.

  “Are we still on for Otko next?” I said. That was where we’d been headed when the eruption called us back to Medlum.

  “Captain Bolton says we’ll wrap up anything we can do here by midday tomorrow,” Rick said. “So yeah, on to Otko.”

  “Well,” I said as we walked together to the ship, “the Annotated Charts don’t say anything about volcanoes.”

  OTKO

  The Far Traveller landed with the usual sudden still silence. What supernumeraries like me noticed was that the thrusters ceased roaring and the hull no longer vibrated numbingly.

  I’d have to ask Rick what he noticed. It would doubtless be very different from his viewpoint.

  I released the restraints and brought my couch back into chair position. I’d already prepared the messages for the men whom my contacts on Mindoro had assured me were the most important residents on Otko; I sent them off. I’d follow up in a more personal fashion as soon as I could, but I was giving the local aristocracy a heads-up and an outline of my qualifications immediately.

  My qualifications included my birth and the fact that my father was a member of the Society of Dilettantes.

  Doctor Veil came out of her office. Mahaffy was bringing up his work station while Kent sat at the extra position, waiting to be told what to do.

  Joss was in the office also, probably to have Doctor Veil give her tasks. More probably to approve the tasks Joss had chosen for herself: She’d been doing the job for long enough that she had a good idea of what things were useful and within her skill set. She didn’t need to be supervised to make her work.

  “I have something to say to you all,” Doctor Veil said. She looked angry or at least uncomfortable. I turned my seat to face her and wondered if I should stand.

  “I’ve gone over the briefing material on Otko more carefully than I had when we were on Elkin,” she said. “It’s an extremely dangerous place and I’m not comfortable with you going outside the fenced compound around Ssu-lung, the port where we’re landing. The Otkan natives are not only hostile to strangers, they’re headhunters and cannibals! The fenced region is of almost forty square miles, so I think we’ll be able to get adequate samples without risking ourselves in the forest beyond.”

  “Ma’am,” I said, forcing the frown off my face, “I really think that’s overreacting. Otko isn’t heavily populated, especially where we are on the north end of the main continent, and the fenced area is largely planted with Terran rice and not at all a representative sample.”

  Before Doctor Veil could respond, Joss said, “Ma’am, I talked to spacers on Mindoro who’d been here. The locals may be one step above monkeys”—she spread her terrible smile—“which is what they said about us on Api, where I come from—but like Lieutenant Harper says, they’re thin on the ground except around the cities. For a young buck to get admitted to the council of his tribe, he’s gotta bring a stranger’s head. They keep squirming through the wire and snatching farmers. I don’t figure I’ll have trouble collecting like usual. And”—she smiled again—“if they manage to chop me, I deserved it. Maybe you can hire one of the locals to replace me.”

  Doctor Veil looked from Joss to me. After a moment she said, “Well, I’ll wait to make a final decision until we’ve had an opportunity sort through the situation ourselves. But I request that neither of you go outside the perimeter until I approve it.”

  “As you wish, ma’am,” I said. “I’m hoping to view local collections in Ssu-lung for a few days, though I don’t think Otko has been settled long enough to have anything as interesting as we found on older worlds.”

  Joss nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I’ll set traps inside the fence till you say otherwise.”

  * * *

  I’d sent messages to three of the Landowners—that was the title of aristocracy on Otko. They all replied to me within the hour, saying they were delighted to show Lord Harper their collections immediately. I took them in reverse order of distance from the ship: Easton, Riddle, and Platt. Rick was going out with a pinnace, so Kent drove me around the circuit in the trike.

  On the way I noticed that one of the twenty-odd ships in the harbor had a familiar faceted shape. “That’s from the Shining Empire,” I said to Kent over the ring of the engine.

  He took a quick look and said, “Right, El-Tee. You want to see if I can find what it uses for a dock? But they probably lighter cargo and passengers to it on the surface.”

  “No need,” I said. “But I was just curious.”

  The attendant who let us into Easton’s razor-wired compound carried a slung automatic carbine. He didn’t seem tense, but the gun wasn’t just for show.

  Otko’s native population almost certainly dated back to near the beginning of human star travel, over a thousand years before the Hiatus. The planet had been resettled from Mindoro within the past five hundred years, and the folks we were visiting today were families from that second settlement.

  The original population had sunk back to Stone Age level. The tribes lived as hunter-gatherers and, as Doctor Veil had noted, had some nasty habits. Though the entire settlement of Ssu-lung was fenced and patrolled, the wealthy clearly didn’t trust the general security.

  Easton was overweight and in his forties. Servants and a woman surrounded by children watched as he greeted me on the full-length porch. “Lord Harper!” he said. He shook my hand with enthusiasm while two of the servants recorded the meeting. “This is an honor, sir!”

  He took me through his collection. The servants preceded and followed us, capturing the event for posterity. I hoped they were getting images they thought were useful. I certainly wasn’t, though I recorded a few items for the sake of politeness.

  Easton had hunting and fishing trophies, though nothing Bio Section didn’t have records of already. I would check to be sure when I returned to the Far Traveller, but I didn’t expect a surprise.

  Riddle’s house was much the same, though he didn’t put his wife and children on display. I noticed that Riddle’s servants were all young men.

  His collection was largely of material from the ships by which Otko was resettled from Mindoro. He looked puzzled when I asked if there were artifacts from the initial settlement—though that was personal curiosity rather than of interest to Bio Section’s mission. “Oh!” he said. “You mean the natives! Yes, I suppose they must have come from somewhere else, but it’s hard to think of them in connection with machines, let alone starships.”

  Then to Platt, who was the same age as the first two men but clean shaven and almost totally bald. His house and collection were by far the largest of the three, and the latter included many pieces of Otkan pottery, delicately shaped and fired to black and shades of gray.

  “They don’t have potter’s wheels, you know,” he said. “The pots are built up in strips and then fired in dried manure, if you can believe that. I find them oddly attractive, but I don’t suppose they’re of interest to your study?”

  “Not for Bio Section, no,” I agreed, “but I like the look of them too. Where do you buy them?”

  “Well, you have to know where to look,” Platt said. “Some of them have scratched designs. This one”—he rotated a bowl—“looks to me to be a mother and child, just as though they were humans.”

  “That’s what they seem to be to me also,” I agreed, passing on to a wall of stuffed animals. A carnivore with eight legs, which was the normal number of limbs on Otko, wasn’t familiar to me. These were very short, and I wondered at the creature’s lifestyle.

  “Is this a burrower?” I asked, touching the animal’s long canines. It was at least three feet in head-body length.

  “We call ’em diggers and they mostly live in holes,” Platt said, “but they can climb too. They’ve taken babies out of cribs and carried them off, though mostly they stay in forests where there’s no people. Well, no real people, just natives.”

  “I wonder if I could take enough fur for a genetic sample?” I said. “Or—is there a place we could hunt them ourselves? If it’s possible to do that without being eaten by the natives.”

  “Oh, the natives aren’t a problem if you keep your eyes open,” Platt said. “You don’t want to go into the forest alone, though.”

  He frowned and went on, “You hunt yourself, Lord Harper?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And another member of the Bio Section, Technician Joss, is a very skilled hunter.”

  “Well, I don’t have two seats open,” Platt said, “but I got one in my aircar. I’ve got one of my own, you see. I’m taking two of my buddies for a hunt tomorrow and you can have the last seat if you like. I was going to take another guard besides my driver, but you’ll do fine if you can shoot and you can be ready here at five tomorrow morning?”

  “I can shoot,” I said. “And I’ll be here at five in the morning local time!”

  I was pretty sure that Doctor Veil would be happy with me to go off with three armed locals. If for some reason she wasn’t, Captain Bolton would overrule her. I was willing to invite him to dinner at Greenslade after our return if I needed a bribe to win his agreement.

  * * *

  The guard at Platt’s compound opened the gate as soon as Kent pulled the trike up. We drove through to where an aircar was parked. Platt turned from having set a gun in the cargo compartment between the driver’s cab and the four-person passenger compartment.

  “Good morning, Lord Harper,” Platt said. “You’re just in time to take your pick of seat, though I see Riddle’s car just at the gates. He’s bringing Easton.”

  The passenger compartment was roomy and the bucket seats looked comfortable. Certainly they were more comfortable than the pillion of the trike. I took my specimen box and cased shotgun out of the cargo carrier and brought them over to the car.

  “Any seat would be fine,” I said. “For choice I’d take one of the back pair because they’re forward facing, but I’m grateful for your generosity regardless.”

  Platt’s carbine was already clamped muzzle-up into the gunrack. It was a wooden-stocked weapon with gold inlays on the receiver. It was of military size but was much higher quality. The driver placed a carbine in the clip beside him in the cab, but it was a simple utilitarian weapon.

  Easton and Riddle got out of a ground car driven by one of Riddle’s young men. Both were carrying decorated carbines similar to Platt’s. They were all large bore though their relatively short barrels wouldn’t accelerate slugs to the velocities of a full-sized impeller.

  I knew of no land animals bigger than a lamb on Otko. I wondered if there were feral cattle or the like, because I’d been expecting to use fairly light shot in my own gun. I had a pair of slug loads available if a charging bull seemed a possibility.

  Platt gestured me to the seat in the back and took the one beside me while Easton and Riddle slid in facing us.

  Platt keyed an intercom and said, “We’re in, Abner. You have the plot?”

  “Yessir,” the driver said. “It will take us about forty minutes, sir.”

  “Proceed,” Platt said and switched off the intercom. We took off smoothly and headed south. Ssu-lung was on the north end of the island so I’d taken the direction for a given.

  “Does Otko have positioning satellites?” I said, though I was sure Rick would have told me if the planet did.

  Riddle snorted. “Do you know what that would cost, as small as we are?” he said.

  “What we do,” Platt said, “is use imagery from ships landing. Of course that’s no good for changing conditions. Do you think your captain would agree to us using imagery from your ship?”

  “Almost certainly,” I said, “though I can’t speak for Captain Bolton, of course.”

  A thought struck me and I said, “Say, what are your relations with the Shinings here? I saw one of their ships in the harbor and I know they’ve got quite a presence on Mindoro.”

  Easton opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and stared at Platt; Riddle was already staring at him. I turned toward Platt myself and tried to put on a neutral smile. I was strongly wishing that I hadn’t asked what appeared to be a charged question. My interest was idle curiosity. In a matter of days I would leave Otko and wouldn’t spare a thought for the place ever again. Certainly the planet’s political constitution was no concern of mine.

  “I think you should say that the question of Shining influence on Otko is a disputed one,” Platt said. “The official position of the Shining Empire is that Mindoro exercised suzerainty over Otko, and that having defeated Mindoro the Shining Empire succeeds to Mindoran rights over Otko.

  “The position of the Coordinating Council of Otko is that we on Otko were never governed by Mindoro, that we just had a shared cultural background. Further, that because of the danger of native Otkans, the civilized population is quite well armed, and the planet’s gross domestic product would not justify a military expedition.”

  Platt spread his hands in front of himself, palms down. “So…,” he concluded. “Shinings sometimes visit Otko, as a party are doing now at Ssu-lung. They do not interact with civilized Otkans by mutual choice. And if they want to deal with the natives, they’re welcome to. The natives might find them an interesting change of diet.”