[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

consider stopping, but then didn't. It picked up speed silently and turned
onto the elm-shaded drive toward the mansion.
"Was that that counselor?" Mika asked.
"I guess," Sten said.
"What did he want here? Anyway, he's not allowed."
"Why not? Maybe he is, Isn't it only other people who can't come in? If
he's not exactly people . . ."
"He's not allowed." For some reason, not cold, though her begs were bare
beneath leather shorts, Mika shivered.
The counselor wore an inverness cape because ordinary coats, even if
they could be made to fit him, only emphasized his strangeness. His chauffeur
opened the door of the three-wheeler's tiny passenger compartment and helped
him out; he spoke quietly to the chauffeur for a moment and on tiny feet
started up the broad stairs of the house, helping himself with a stick. The
guards at the door neither stopped him non saluted him, though they did stare.
They had been instructed that it wasn't protocol to salute him; he wasn't,
officially, a member of the Autonomy's government. They didn't stop him
because he was unmistakable, there were no two of him in this world, and that
also was why they stared.
Inside the mansion it was dim, which suited his eyes. He indicated to
the servant who met him that he would retain cape and stick, and he was led
down several halls to the center of the house.
Halls fascinated him. He enjoyed their odors of passage, their furniture
no one ever used, their pictures not meant to be looked at -- in this case,
fox hunting in long-past centuries in all its aspects, at least from the
hunter's point of view. He didn't mind when he was asked, with reserved
apology, to wait for a moment in another hall. He sat on a hard chair and
contemplated a black, sealed jar that stood on a -- what? sideboard? cornmode?
-- and wondered what if anything it was pretending to be for.
The Director's appointments secretary, a woman of a certain lean
nervosity common in powerful subordinates, greeted him without discernible
emotion and bed him through old, glossy double doors that had new metal eyes
in them; past her own high-piled desk; across another metal thing set in the
threshold of an arch; and into the Director's presence.
Hello, Isengrim, Reynard thought. He didn't say it. He made some
conventional compliment, his voice thin and rasping like fine sandpaper drawn
across steel.
"Thank you," the Director said, standing. "I thought it would be better
to meet here, I hope I haven't inconvenienced you."
Janrell Gregorius's voice was still faintly accented; he had learned
English only as a schoolboy, when his father -- whose portrait stood with the
children's on an otherwise impersonally naked desk -- came here with the
international commission that had tried to arbitrate the partition. The
commission had of course failed, though the idea of Autonomies remained,
unlike as they were to the commission's complex suggestions. When the
Malagasian member was kidnapped and executed, and it became obvious that the
Autonomies were becoming, inevitably, disputing nations, the commission had
disbanded, and Lauri Gregorius had gone home to ski, leaving them to their
madness. Jarnell -- Jarl as he had been christened -- stayed. The portrait on
his desk was twenty years old.
"Will you take something? Lunch? A drink?"
"Early for both in my case."
"I'm sorry if we've called you too early."
Reynard sat, though the Director had not. It was among his privileges to
be unbound by politenesses and protocol; people always assumed he couldn't
understand them, didn't grasp the subtleties of human intercourse. They were
wrong. "It's difficult to believe that any nocturnalism would have survived in
me. But there it is. You can't have government solely at night."
"Coffee then."
"If convenient." He nested his red-haired tiny hands on the head of the
stick between his knees. "I passed your children on my way up from the gate."
"Yes?"
"Someone, an adult, with them, with a bird on his wrist."
"A Mr. Casaubon. Their tutor."
"Beautiful children. The famous son resembles you as much as they say.
Wasn't there a film . . ."
"A tape. I'm glad they're here now; the boy, I think, was beginning to
be affected by the publicity. Here he can live a normal life."
"Ah."
"The girl has a different mother. Puerto Rican. She's only come to live
here in the last -- what? -- eighteen months?" He had been pacing steadily in
front of the tall windows seamed with metal that looked out toward raw
concrete bunkers where men in Blue lounged. Gregorius would have looked well [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]