As Reported

Nell came back through the third door with the feel of the Princess's forearm still in her right hand. She placed the call home before she had thought about what she would say. Beyond the parlor's long window, the garden was going gold. Through the frontage wall, the water channel ran faint and steady, the sound the whole hall made when nobody in it was talking.

Her mother answered from Corbin in the middle of something.

"You're six days early," her mother said. "Who died?"

"Nobody died. Ma. Listen. I met one of us."

A pause with her mother's whole attention in it.

"You said there were none of us there. Three months you've been saying you're the first of ours allowed on their planet. You put it in a letter."

"I met one of us in the garden. The Rioghan's garden, she was standing at a bed like she, no. Listen. I'm telling it wrong." Nell took the breath she had not taken in the hall. "She's wearing one of their suits, Ma. A human. She's wearing one, and she's done their Rites, and she put her hand out and gave me her name, and it's a roll-name. Cunningham."

Her mother spoke to somebody in the room. A door closed, and the line came back twice as close. "Sit down and tell it in order."

Nell told it in order, badly.

The grey plant and the band of shade. The woman who knew she was coming before she turned. The voice arriving level and formal, the Empire's own speech in a human mouth. San Francisco, on no roll she'd ever read. The fog, the bridge, the horns. The olive.

"You showed her the olive," her mother said.

"She knew it already. She didn't say so. She knew it the way you know a thing you're not saying. I've taken enough statements to know the difference, anyway. She knew it."

"And you took her arm."

"I took her arm."

"Above the wrist. Like at a homecoming."

"She took mine back," Nell said. "Ma. She took mine back, and she held it right, and she didn't laugh. Nobody taught her that on their side."

"Hm," her mother said.

"I know."

"You broke protocol in the sovereign's own hall and put your hands on a member of her court."

"I know."

"They'll send you home in a box."

"I said that. In the hall. Out loud, to her." Nell put her free hand flat on the desk. "She didn't have me removed, Ma. She told me about the fog."

"What does she look like?" her mother said. "Send me something. You have her name and you have twelve years at the Corbin Registry behind you. You can find one woman standing in the same building as you."

The mission terminal sat under the window, a grey slab the Empire had installed and never once come back to look at. Nell woke it and asked it for Ivy Cunningham.

The answer came back before her hand had left the key, and the first thing it gave her was the portrait.

A formal likeness, full length, facing out of the record. The suit was matte charcoal from the high collar down, bronze at the shoulders, forearms, knees, shins, and boots, thin amber lines running the seams, three short amber marks at the breastbone like a rank nobody had explained to her. Red hair, cut plain. Freckles. The face looked straight out of the frame the way people look at a registry photographer, done holding still before the image was ever taken.

It was her. The feel of her forearm was an hour old in Nell's hand, and here she stood in the record for anyone who asked.

"Sending it," Nell said, and sent it.

The picture took a moment to cross. Nell heard her mother's breathing and nothing else.

"Oh," her mother said. "Oh, Nell."

"I know."

"She's real. Half of me thought you'd been in the sun too long."

"Read the rest with me." Nell read the entry aloud. "Ivy Cunningham. Princess of the Stars." Under the title, a line for the Rites, all four named, and a date in the Empire's own reckoning. Nell converted the date without trying. "She passed their Rites inside the last ten years, Ma. That's recent. That's inside one posting."

"Species," her mother said, as if the word were improper.

"Human. It says it. It says it the way it says everything, one word and on to the next."

"And where's she from?"

"Origin." Nell stopped.

The entry said: Earth.

She read it twice. A proper name from no tongue she had, carried over whole, the way San Francisco had come across in the hall.

"Earth," she said.

"Ert," her mother said. "What is that?"

"I don't know." Nell tried the name in the terminal. The gazetteers of the Commonwealth's successor states gave her nothing. She tried the port index she had spent twelve years inside, though she already knew her own shelves in the dark. Nothing there either. "It's intake language, Ma. Origin as reported. A child comes in with nothing and a word for home, and the clerk writes the word down, because the word is what there is. I've read a thousand of these." Lines got lost. Places too. The entry fit the woman from the garden. Nell felt the small click of a file agreeing with itself and moved on. "That's the entry. Title, Rites, species, origin. Four lines and a portrait."

"That's all?"

"That's what the register gives."

"Twelve years at Corbin," her mother said, "and you bring me four lines."

"Ma."

"The Empire writes everything down. Everyone says it, they've said it my whole life. Somewhere in that building is the ship that carried her and the house that raised her and the line she came off of, and my daughter is standing in the building." Her mother had already decided. "Find her line, Nell. A woman like that has people on the rolls somewhere, and if the port's lost, the port's lost. Lines have been rejoined from less. And then you'll write it up for the ancestry association. Properly, with your sources marked."

"I'm the mission's second, Ma. I can't just."

"Who else? You're the only one of us there. One of ours is standing in their garden, wearing their suit, carrying their title, and nobody has written it down for us. Not once. Not since 31C. Somebody has to write it down properly. It happens to be my daughter."

Not since her people had been taken from the ancestral world. Sharv-31C in the old Ashlan survey: inhabited system thirty-one, its third planet marked C. Generations had worn the registry entry down to 31C.

"All right," Nell said.

But a line needs more than a register entry, and the register had said everything it was going to say. Nell did what she had done at Corbin when a name came up thin: stopped asking who the woman was and worked the particulars instead, one facet at a time, the way you walk a shelf.

Family, she typed. Then line. Then household.

Nothing came back. No seal and no refusal. Each question ended in the same empty field.

Schooling, she typed.

The terminal gave her a school.

The school was standing and current, here at the capital, and the Princess was its listed teacher. Nell read the listing twice and laughed once, short. Ask the Empire where a woman was educated, and it hands you the education she gives. Nothing older came with it. No academy, no fostering, nobody on record ever teaching the Princess anything before the title. The blank lay where a childhood should have been. It fit the woman from the garden too. Nell kept going.

"What have you found?"

"A school. She teaches, Ma. Hold on."

Under the listing came years of pictures, taken by students and tagged with her name. The network had put the best-loved ones first.

Nell knew the setting: a fighting floor under hard white lights, a barrier around it, watchers beyond. The first shared entry held two pictures.

In the first, the Princess lay half-raised from the floor in a black suit edged with bronze. A gold-haired Syliri in deep blue knelt over her with one foot planted and her weight forward, both of them caught in the instant after the hold had settled. Ivy was looking up at her. The Syliri was looking down.

Nell knew the face at a glance.

The whole mission knew it from the credential papers they had memorized on the way out. Nell had seen her during her own first week, from three paces back while the mission's letters were presented in the hall with the water running through it. The Rioghan of the Morlencir Empire.

On top of the Princess.

The second picture was the next moment. Ivy lay flat now, one arm around the Rioghan. The Rioghan had come down over her. Their eyes were closed, and they were kissing.

Beneath the pair, the student's description appeared in the network's tidy translated voice.

Ivy, defeated by her wife, graciously receives a kiss.

Her mother was still talking. Fostering records. The ancestry association's forms. Sources marked. The words reached Nell one at a time and would not join.

"Nell?"

Nell selected both pictures. "I'm sending you these."

She sent them at full size with the caption attached.

The first picture crossed.

Her mother stopped talking.

"That's the Rioghan."

"I know."

"She's got her down."

"I know."

The second picture arrived.

Nell heard her mother's breath catch.

"Wife," her mother said.

Nell looked at the same word under the pictures.

"Nell. You took hold of the Rioghan's wife."

"I know."

"In her own hall."

"I know. Ma, I have to go."

"Has anyone come for you?"

Nell looked at the third door.

"Not yet. I'll call you back."

She closed the line.

The two pictures remained open beside the register portrait.

She put both palms on the desk. They were wet. She wiped them on her trousers and braced them on the desk again.

Through the frontage wall, the water channel ran faint and steady. The skylight's band of shade had left the beds and stood partway up the wall. Past the glass, the garden had gone the deep gold of late afternoon.

Nobody knocked.

She had taken the arm of the Rioghan's wife. Uninvited, at a run, with a gardener two beds over. Above the wrist, thumb on the amber. She had held on. The woman had taken hers back.

She took mine back. She held it right. She didn't laugh.

Nell had said all of that to her mother as though it helped.

The Princess might have gone straight from the olive to the Rioghan. She might be with her now. She might be telling her now.

If the mission recalled Nell, no Port Ansel ship could come for her. The Empire would carry her out itself, all the long way home, with perfect courtesy.

The box stopped being funny.

The first picture stayed open beside the register portrait. Nell looked at it again. A human woman on the floor, looking up into the face of the sovereign. The sovereign looking back. Then the kiss. Then wife, written under it as plainly as a name under a family picture.

Then it's possible.

At the bottom of the screen, the relay held two receipts.

Delivered.

Delivered.

Nell looked from one receipt to the other and back to the portrait.

Human. Earth. Princess of the Stars. Wife.

The register had kept the first three in separate fields. The fourth sat beneath two school pictures in a student's cheerful sentence. Nell read them in different orders. They got worse every way.

Recall she understood. Recall ended on Corbin, with the posting closed and her report entered and somebody else standing second in the mission parlor. She had expected it to be years before the water through the wall stopped sounding impossible. She had meant to watch the garden change seasons, if Sylir had seasons she could recognize. Now she might leave Sylir under escort and spend the whole passage trying to decide whether she had been expelled for the arm or for the pictures. A recall was a record, and her people kept records.

Corbin was home. She wanted home, and she wanted the garden.

The water kept running.

Three months of letters home sat in the mission's outbound log. She had written the channel into them, and the plants she had no names for. Every one of them said she was the first of their people allowed on this world. The Princess had been coming to the same garden the whole time.

She checked the receipts again. Delivered did not have a second reading.

The third door remained closed. Nell listened anyway.

She looked at the origin field.

Earth.

Whatever Earth was, a child still came from people. San Francisco was a city, with weather Ivy remembered in the order it arrived and a bridge she corrected from red to rust to orange. The blank before her Imperial title might hold more than a dead household and a ship whose papers had failed to follow it.

Nell put Earth, human population into the terminal.

Nothing came back.

She tried Earth, settlements. Then San Francisco, Earth.

The same empty field.

No seal. No refusal. Nothing she could put a source mark beside.

She went to the long window. The gold had gone off the beds, and the paths she could see were empty. Nobody was coming for her yet.

The terminal signaled a call from Corbin.

Nell let it signal twice before she opened the line.

"Has anyone come?" her mother said.

"No."

"Are you sitting down?"

Nell pulled the chair under herself. "I am now."

"Good." Her mother took a breath. "The Rioghan married a human."

"I was here for that part."

"Then say it back to me."

"Ma."

"Say it."

Nell looked at the second picture. "The Rioghan married Ivy Cunningham."

"And Ivy Cunningham is what?"

"Human."

"The other thing."

"Princess of the Stars."

"Which means?"

"You know what it means."

"I want to hear that you know."

"She sits in their Assembly. She has a vote."

"In her own right."

"Yes."

"And she is the Rioghan's wife."

"Marriage isn't an office here."

"She already has the title."

"One vote among millions."

"Nell. Name a human with more power."

Nell opened her mouth.

Human members sat on the councils of the successor states. None she knew led one. Captains held a ship while they had a crew willing to follow them. The Hearthline Association could place a claim before a government and wait for an answer.

She looked at Ivy Cunningham standing in charcoal and bronze, three amber marks at her breastbone.

"Nobody," Nell said.

Her mother was quiet for a moment.

"How many humans live inside the Empire?" she asked.

"One. Her."

"An hour ago you said there were none on Sylir."

"I didn't know about her."

"How many more don't you know about?"

Nell looked at the word in the origin field.

"I don't know," she said.