Part 82 (1/2)

Hagen pushed off his hood and looked at his wrist chronometer. It was only a little after one in the morning. ”My G.o.d, it took that Tanu, Minanonn, nearly four hours to carry us to Black Crag. The King's flown us back in less than ninety minutes!”

”With a detour to Roniah,” said a deep exotic voice from the shadows.

Cloud was on her feet, straining her fa.r.s.ense. ”Kuhal,” she whispered.

The Second Lord Psychokinetic stepped out onto the silver lawn. There was a human woman with him.

Bewildered, Hagen managed to say, ”Is that you, Diane?”

”The King sent us both,” said the daughter of Alexis Manion.

”He said-and I quote-'It's been a long time since any of you had a fun-break. Go downtown and play. Tomorrow you can come back to the castle and we'll discuss the future.' ”

”Did-he tell you where we'd been?” Hagen asked.

Kuhal said, ”He told us everything. He said he had his reasons.”

Cloud nodded and spoke as if to herself. ”We're not to be allowed to keep it a secret.”

A breeze blew up from the Gyre of Commerce, carrying the eerie skirling of an electronic bagpipe. Kuhal drew Cloud aside.

”The King may not have realized, when he arranged this meeting, but you and I had agreed to set a wall between us. He knew we still farspoke one another over the leagues and shared our heart's troubles. He saw that we were friends-”

”And mistook it for love,” she said.

”It had always remained so, on my part.”

Cloud moved away from his touch. ”And so you have been brought here to influence my decision. And Diane to sway Hagen.”

”I think you misjudge Aiken deeply. His motive was kindness, not machination.”

”Perhaps you're right.”

They walked along the shrub-bordered path, leaving the other couple behind at the lily pond. Mushroom-shaped gla.s.s lamps lit the way to an obscure gate in the garden wall that opened into the town greenbelt. Cloud kept her mind veiled. She still had the storm-suit hood covering her hair and the taut skin made her slender figure almost s.e.xless, a glimmer of white moving along beside a demiG.o.d in barbaric High Table vesture.

”Through all the turmoil of the last month,” he said, ”you farspoke me from this very garden.”

”Papa watched us,” she said. ”He says he didn't listen.”

”What matter if he did? The guilt owing to the Flood is his as well as yours. He might have gained insight, as you did.”

Cloud laughed, a sad, quiet sound. ”Papa has enough guilt of his own to make the Flood deaths seem irrelevant. I doubt that he thinks of the event from a moral standpoint at all. We children asked his help in an expediency, and he condescended.

But the crime was ours.”

”You are sorry,” Kuhal said.

”Most of us are,” she admitted, ”now. Now that we perceive you as real people instead of inconvenient abstractions standing in the way of our great undertaking. Yes, we're sorry ... but remorse isn't really enough, is it? Sterile brooding over the wrongs we've committed doesn't help.

Not when the wrongdoing was so appalling.”