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was going to have a choice as to where he went.
He realized that Gabrielle didn't understand the situation at all. Perhaps she thought, no, she
must think, that the Empress's death meant he would be recalled to some form of power. No wonder
she had been so eager to meet him here tonight.
Music came wafting into the booth from somewhere, and faint laughter from the next booth. He sat
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there looking closely at Gabrielle, who gazed back at him from within her cloud of red hair, still
appearing unreasonably pleased. Gods of all space, but she was beautiful.
Greta Thamar asked him, unexpectedly: "What do you do, Prince? Where do you spend your time?"
"I'm an exile here, you see. Not a tourist."
"I know that." Her tone said he was a fool to think he had to explain that to her; it was a rather
sharp tone for even a celebrity to use to a Prince. Age in some ways had more privileges than mere
rank. Greta Thamar repeated: "But what do you do?"
"I spend a fair amount of time doing historical, archaeological research. Mostly out in the outer
corridors."
The woman fell silent, nodding slightly, gazing into space, as if that answer had struck her as
something that had to be considered seriously.
Gabrielle had been playing with the optics again, and the Prince did not recognize Colonel Phocion
among the giant apes now moving in the aisles past the booth, until the man with drink in hand
stopped in the open entrance.
The colonel, flushed and tending toward chubbiness, raised his glass in a light salute to
Harivarman. "Cheers, Harry." He had been much less free with that informal name when he was still
officially the Prince's jailer. "How are you and the Iron Lady getting on? I hear you took her
sightseeing the other day." Phocion accompanied the statement with a wink. He was graying, getting
along in years and in fact nearly ready for retirement, though still nowhere near as aged as Greta
Thamar.
"There was nothing very exciting about our outing, I'm afraid," said Harivarman.
"What you always say in the early stages, old boy, as I recall. Well, if true, too bad. Maybe I'll
call on the lady m'self. No reason why you should have all the crop attending you." And Phocion
made a bow, his version of gallantry, to the two ladies.
"Have a drink with us?" Gabrielle inviting him confirmed that she was really happy about
something. "You won't be on the Fortress that much longer, I suppose," she commented.
"Nor perhaps& " Phocion gave the Prince a look with a mixture of sharp things in it, and drowned
the rest of what he had been going to say in his glass. He was waiting to get a ship that would
take him away, either to an early retirement that Harivarman knew he did not want, or some
uncongenial assignment that would amount to a demotion. The SG had evidently not been pleased with
Colonel Phocion's performance of late.
"Nor am I going to be here much longer," said the Prince as cheerfully as he could. "And there's
not much perhaps about it. You're right." He raised his own glass, returning the salute, and
drank.
The colonel looked at the ladies, apparently assessing them in his quietly arrogant way; he'd
already met Gabrielle, naturally, and now he looked at Greta Thamar as if he knew her too. But he
still spoke only to the Prince. Now he would do his best to be bracing. "I suppose there's an
excellent chance that you'll be recalled now."
"To power? Hardly." Harivarman spread his big hands. "Arrested is infinitely more likely."
Phocion's return look said that he had realized that all along, but had wanted to hold out hope.
There was a faint sound from Gabrielle across the table. The Prince looked at her, and saw
incipient shock. He'd been right; it appeared that until this moment she really hadn't understood.
Maybe he should have tried to break it gently.
Then she rallied suddenly. "Harry, for a moment I thought that you were serious."
Around them the interior of the Contrat Rouge was slowly filling up. The passage of falsified
figures, costumed, bestial, or mechanical, past the booth was becoming almost a steady parade. Now
a little knot of tourists passed, their appearance altered again in mid-transit by some perhaps
automatic readjustment of the optics. Then some military people going by the other way created a
brief distraction.
One of the tourists could be heard stage-whispering to another on the subject of how one should
address a real Prince.
Phocion saluted Harry sadly and moved on, from all indications going in pursuit of one of the
tourist women.
Gabrielle glanced at the woman beside her, who appeared to be far off somewhere in her own
thoughts. Then she leaned across the table. "Harry, what did you mean, really? Arrested?"
Harivarman reached absently to give the set of optic controls on his side of the booth a random
shuffling. Now the people passing were suddenly all nude, and certainly the booth made handsomer
nudists of them than nature. The optics computers were biased toward subtle flattery in one mode,
in another toward total exaggeration, enough for comedy. That mode did not come into play so
often.
The Prince said gently to Gabrielle: "I meant arrested. I take it you've heard about the Empress?"
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"Of course. But I don't see what that has to do with-you."
"Being arrested these days is nothing," said Greta Thamar suddenly, and Harivarman looked at her;
she was looking past him. "Not like it was in the old days," she said, and suddenly peered at him
closely.
"What do you really do, out there in the outer corridors? That's where Georgicus Sabel met the
berserker."
Harivarman could feel his nerves draw taut. He told her: "I stockpile heavy weapons, oxygen, food
supplies. So that when my friends land in a rescue expedition I'll be ready. I rather wish that
they'd hurry up."
Greta was gazing past him. "I'm going to dance," she said.
He was about to say goodbye, and wish her luck on the resumption of her career, when he realized
that Greta was not getting up, that her gaze was directed at the large holostage in the center of
the room. The optics in the booth walls had been trained to let the holostage images come through
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