House of Suns Read Online Free Page B

from my eyes. ‘Ateshga - who’s he?’
    ‘Merely a warning, shatterling - it’s up to you whether you heed it.’ He brushed his hands against the breast of his pinstripe suit. ‘Well, I am sorry we could not close a deal, but it won’t stop us parting as friends. We are very happy that you visited our world, and I trust your stay here has been rewarding.’
    ‘It has,’ Purslane said. ‘You’ve been excellent hosts, Mister Nebuly; I’ll be sure to put in a good word for you with the rest of the Line.’
    ‘That is very kind of you.’ He turned around to greet the approaching avatar, bowing slightly from the point where his human torso joined his horse body. ‘You finished your swim very quickly, Doctor: I trust all was satisfactory?’
    ‘No,’ the avatar said in his high-pitched, piping voice. ‘The swim was . very far from satisfactory, which is why I aborted it at the earliest opportunity. There were things in the water - dark, moving things that my sonar could not easily resolve - and the temperature and salinity were not at all to my tastes.’ The paper face bent in my direction. ‘I was given to understand that you had communicated my needs to the relevant authorities, Campion.’
    I shifted on my seat. I had told the Centaurs what the doctor needed, and I had no doubt that they had done their best to meet his requirements. Nothing was ever good enough for Doctor Meninx, though; no effort ever sufficient.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I must have mixed up the figures. All my fault, I’m afraid.’
    ‘I shall lay the blame where I choose to lay it,’ the avatar said. ‘And I was so looking forward to my swim. But what’s done is done; shortly I shall take my leave of this dreary world and continue my odyssey to the Vigilance. Perhaps they will know the fit way to treat a guest.’
    ‘I’m sure Mister Nebuly did his best,’ I said.
    ‘Yes, he probably did,’ the avatar said, as if our host was not present.
    The moment, the one I had been dreading since Mister Nebuly had delivered his verdict on my trove, was now upon me. I could postpone it no longer, though at that instant there was nothing I would rather have done than walk into the sea and swim all the way to that twinkling horizon, where, depending on the effectiveness of its setting, the impasse would have dissuaded, rebuffed, stunned, wounded or simply annihilated me.
    ‘Doctor Meninx,’ I said, after drawing a deep, invigorating breath, ‘there’s something we need to discuss.’

CHAPTER TWO
    It would be a mistake to say that Campion was lazy, laziness being a trait that Abigail went out of her way to scrub from our personalities. But Campion was certainly a masterful prevaricator. He did not just put things off until tomorrow; he put them off for tens of kilo-years, until his delays and evasions consumed significant chunks of an entire circuit. His motto might have been Why do today what you can still do in a quarter of a million years?
    He had got away with it for thirty-one circuits, too. But now this business with Doctor Meninx was going to make up for that glorious streak of good luck. Campion joked about censure and excommunication, as if to immunise himself from those outcomes. But the Line’s tolerance of his antics had been wearing perilously thin for several circuits, which is why he had been saddled with Doctor Meninx in the first place. He should have discharged that obligation as urgently as possible, instead of dilly-dallying from star to star with the doctor still aboard.
    It was a short hop from the Centaurs’ system to Nelumbium - barely ninety years of flight by planetary time - but it was still necessary to enter some form of abeyance. Campion preferred stasis; I - much to his incomprehension - preferred to be frozen and thawed. As soon as the cryophagus released me, I called up the information from Silver Wings’ sensors, and apart from a whisper of residual energies - which might mean only that a ship had