It was a small room.  Owing to its shape and the odd manner in which it'd been decorated, its dimensions were difficult for her to determine.  Approximating a circle with a low, domed ceiling, all of its surfaces had been carpeted (if that was the word; "upholstered" came to mind) in light-absorbing black, floor, ceiling, and walls flowing into each other indistinguishably.

Aside from two reclining chairs, low-backed in defiance of the current mode, and a knee-high glass-topped table, the only other feature was a waist-high shelf, carpeted like the walls, running about the room's circumference, including a door which all but disappeared when it was closed.  Upon the shelf, with barely a line between them, stood file-readers fashioned by the hands of more than 100 planets.  Above each, hovering against faultless blackness, hung an image, a scene from the surface of one of the millions of planets that comprised the Cosmopolity.

"Come, Mistress  Trezleniya-Silvertou," a deep-voiced man spoke, each syllable flat and final in the anechoic chamber, responding to a look of disapproval lying upon her pretty face.  "Having endured uncountable troubles and delays, having outwitted stolid guards, influence-peddling secretaries, all eunuchs of varying degrees of literally, to return without your uncle's knowledge, in contravention of his wishes---as well as against my specific orders----you didn't expect to find me a closet egalitarian.  You didn't expect me to retire from what our ancestors more frankly termed the 'Bore-Droom,' to some humble, cluttered office somewhere, to slip out of my finery with a sigh of relief and assume the attire of someone below my station.  Or perhaps loll about au natural?  I'm the Premier, wench.  I enjoy being what I was brought up to be since birth."

After the effort which had brought her, she found she was not able to speak a coherent word, let alone as she had planned.   He chuckled, drawing her to a chair, taking the other himself.  "You want something, that's clear enough.  To you, the power and wealth at my disposal appear infinite, though no one knows better than I their too real limits.  I don't blame you, you could hardly feel otherwise, or for wanting something from the fellow possessing them.  Everyone does. I've grown used to it and make allowances."

"Sir, I..."

"You realize, of course, that nothing comes for free.  I'll want something from you in return---oh, dear me, child, no!  Not that."

She let out her breath, relieved, but knowing she would have paid that price or another to obtain what she wanted.  Having waited too long to decide for the man she loved, it might now be too late to interfere in the trap being laid for him.  Having reached her decision, she was discovering herself as unstoppable in its execution as the implacable Yvan Dragomilov.

The Premier shook his head.  "What do you think I am---don't answer that!  Instead, think for a moment:  I'm  Arkivitius X, Premier of the grandest imperium-conglomerate in galactic history, in effect, the total ruler of something like a million systems, with subjects numbering in the quintillions."  He lifted a hand and let it drop to the arm of his chair.  "You're an exquisitely beautiful child, no doubt.  And I'm a man with a man's tastes, increasingly rare upon this planet.  But if I accepted a billionth of the fleshy offers coming my way, I should be a wrinkled old prune like my esteemed colleague, Vladimisayanskfei!"

Not knowing what reply to offer, Tris, in her wisdom, offered none.  She was curious to know how those who plotted, like her uncle, to sway or distract men of power with the lure of sex would take hearing that they---at least Arkivitius---regarded it as an occupational hazard, foremost a threat to their physical well-being.  Having arrived on the capital planet, she was reminded all over again, by observing contrasts between shipboard life and the audience she had just quitted, how such eloquently spoken, overly dressed, cleverly masked, and horribly good-mannered cultures had planned to use her with what amounted to far greater brutality than ever Yvan Dragomilov had.

"No, my dear, what I want from you, I've got already.  My luxury, my satisfaction, lies in something which you, lacking my disadvantages, have never had to value.  What I hunger after is reliable knowledge.  I struggle after it every day, as my poorest subject struggles for bread."

"Sir?"

"Do you not understand?  I know what you want and why you want it!" A single antique reader stood on the glass table between them.  He activated a file within it.  Into life sprang another planetary scene, a flower-dotted meadow and blue forest against a backdrop of mountain peaks.  Behind them, a misty ribbon of silver arched across the great vault of heaven.  "Somewhat outdated, I'm sorry to say.  They've built a shanty settlement in yon pasture."

Despite this news, Tris cheered up.  "I understand," she responded.  "You have no hidden agendas to worry about on my part?"

The Premier bobbled his great head with enthusiasm.  "Let me tell you it's a relief, a precious moment in which I feel free to relax a trifle.  If I didn't---if I weren't---you and I shouldn't be here, most of my time and effort, you see, being spent in an attempt, not wholly successful, to determine those very throngs of people I've no choice but to deal with."

Tris nodded, feeling something like sympathy for this great man who was never sure he was hearing the truth---or words of authentic friendship.  Thus she was able to tell him, in as brief and simple a matter as she found possible, all which had befallen her and what she'd learned concerning Aidos Zaytsteva, Genrich, and Yvan Dragomilov.  Finishing, she glanced up from her lap to discover Arkivitius peering at her.

"Mistress Tris, you're about to find, likely to your consternation, given the time and effort you yourself have recently expended, that you hadn't much to tell your Premier of your circumstances or those of Yvan Dragomilov or his planet----Genrich, is it?---that he didn't already know."  Again Tris nodded, meekly.  Arkivitius shocked her by tossing back his head and bursting into laughter.  "You really hope that what I claim is true, don't you?  Blade me, I'm disposed to help you with that!  But you must forgive me.  I was compelled to give in, just one more time, to a lifelong habit of double-checking to see what guilty look a casual remark might provoke."

"I---I am most sorry, sir..."

The Premier laughed again.  "See here:  one confidence, however involuntary upon your part, deserves another.  I fear my hesitancy over the name of Yvan Dragomilov's planet was another deception.  I am familiar with its situation for the best of reasons.  Unknown to anyone else on Genrich, or Romanova for that matter, an individual there has long served as my personal eyes and ears."

"That must be----Mistress Maria Petrovka!" It was the Premier's turn for shock.  The words burst out against her will and better judgment.

"Great Expulsion,  how do you reckon that?"

She had to clear her throat before explaining.  "A cultured Romanovan girl with more comfortable prospects here, off on the raw frontier ostensibly tutoring the sons of a countrified Oligarch you yourself created, one hated, albeit unknowingly, by one of the Cosmopolity's most powerful figures?"

Arkivitius blew a considerable volume of air through his nostrils.  

"Who else," she nodded at the table, "could have enfiled that scene?"

"Well," Arkivitius answered, "one hopes that it isn't that obvious to others.  It helps, in that regard, that her sympathies are genuinely and entirely with the Genrichians.  Mistrustful of the reports of "disinterested" observers, I make appropriate allowances to balance any bias she might manifest."

"You find that easier," Tris ventured her understanding, "than constantly wondering where her real desires and loyalties might lie?"

The Premier inclined his head.  "I trust that this arrangement meets with your unalloyed approval?"  Tris blushed.  "What you have no way of knowing---it is hoped---is that Maria's also my daughter, upon the wrong side of the blanket as they say, and entirely ignorant of her parentage.  The confidence I place in you is something you might not appreciate until you're older.  She's not the only such child I own t5o, but the only one I care for.  I tell you so you'll understand my personal concern for what happens on Genrich."

"Sir, I do not know what to say."

"Say nothing, not a whisper, of what you've heard today.  The point is that Maria, fully as indomitable as the Premier she serves, kept reporting secretly to me through all her personal tribulations.  Until recently.  Despairing of greater satisfaction than revenge, it was her hope that, despite the part she believed I played in the Usurpation, Zaytsteva's excesses would not go unpunished."

"Yvan Dragomilov believed you did approve of the Usurpation and told me so."

"Say rather, Lia, that Arkivitius of Romanova is not the incompetent fool his Dzendayn counterpart, Vladimisayanskf, appears to be.  I often suspect even he merely finds it advantageous to cultivate such an impression.  He may, in fact, be among the shrewdest power-managers in the galaxy.  Say, rather, that I am one who, never being sure whom to trust, allows his underlings any chances to betray their true sympathies and motivations."  

"At the cost of how many innocent lives?"

"Among how many quintillions?"

"I have heard this argument before, sir.  It's my conviction that each intelligent life is unique---the product of unrepeatable combinations and permutations of heredity, experience, and free will---and therefore not properly subject to the Law of Marginal Utility."

Arkivitius smiled.  "Now you know, my sweet, why I regard your uncle with respect and affection.  He's unafraid to argue with me, either."

Tris was taken aback.  "Argue?  I was arguing with the....."

Laughter:  "It runs in the family.  Now, since I've no need for more detail of what's happened on Genrich, and since you are uncommonly reticent regarding the time you spent with the notorious Yvan Dragomilov, what further observations have you to offer, pertinent to the circumstances?"

Tris gave it thought.  "Only that this arrangement between you and your---Mistress Petrovka, more than any skill or passion on my part...."

"I promise you, those qualities were far from ineffective in your cause."

"Thank you, sir---I think.  I was about to say that it explains my relatively easy access to an otherwise notoriously inaccessible...."

"Not altogether, my dear."  A section of the carpeted wall, not that through which they had come, swung aside.

"Uncle!"

"Do forgive me," he told her, "for eavesdropping.  My reasons for doing so were two in number.  The first is that the Premier and I have a problem.  Our protege, Zatseya, is becoming something of a liability, being responsible, among other sins, for having sparked the legend of Yvan Dragomilov.  You have only confirmed what he had deduced in that regard."

"That may be the noblest of Zaytsteva's deeds," the Premier nodded.  "I admire bandits and banditry."  Trezleniya-Silvertou gave his sovereign a look complaining that the man could well afford to fancy them, having others to clean up the messes they made.  The Premier laughed.

"And the second?" Tris asked her uncle.

"The second---oh!"  A look of infinite sadness crossed his features.  "Why, yes.  It would seem, in light of the Law of Marginal Utility, that I have dealt an inexpressible injustice to the 'onliest' individual I care for.  I had to see how well she had survived the consequence, whether any chance exists that she might someday find it in her heart...." Tris opened her mouth.  "Be silent," her uncle interrupted, "until I have found a way to make amends, I shall start by paying an older debt, telling you the truth, however painful it may be, regarding the fates of your mother and father."

Tris turned to look at Arkivitius. "Aboard a starship?"

"Why, yes, my dear," her uncle answered for his sovereign, "a punitive squadron the Premier is about to dispatch to troubled Genrich.

"How were you able to make your way down here undetected?"

It was a weary young captain who, when battle and storm were ended, had seen to repair of the Scopa using spars and cabelles salvaged from four other drifting and disabled vessels.  Mixing his own crewbeings among theirs, as was his habit, with orders to return the prizes to Tzitzeron and Ovidu as best they could, in due course he reached Genrich.  Passing himself as a construction foreman, with the name of Captain Omarov as a reference, he transferred to a merchant-vessel standing in synchronous orbit, and with a gang of common laborers, repulsorlifted surfaceward.  Travel from the equator northward had been similarly contrived.  He peered up from the dirty, drink-ringed surface of the table at which he sat, through a layer of smoke,  hanging at eye level, which dimmed the already burdened atmosphere within The Wasted Starwolf.  

"Strange greeting, after more than two years, Adam."

A man with thinning hair, wearing expensive clothing in the latest style of Romanova, stood backlighted against the fuzzy globes hanging from the rafters.  "Forgive me, Zakh. It was a shock learning otherwise when I had thought you dead all this time." He gave him a crooked half-smile.  "And other preoccupations prey on my mind."

He sat without asking, continuing conversation just after a dirty-aproned wench had departed with their order.  Amidst mindless noise and a dense forest of human forms, still for the most part farmers and herdsmen, although the place never gave up its pretense of being a spaceman's bar, soldiers and officers of the Holdings guard enjoyed the fleshpots, rendered equal in rank and identity to the bleary, smoke-filled illumination.  Prey to his own preoccupations, the younger brother nodded understanding as the elder spoke.

"It would be good seeing you, Zakh, were it not so dangerous.  You do not want to hear you have grown a line and become a man in the process."

Zakh looked at him at the drifting wreckage of humanity crowding them shoulder to shoulder, animated, to appearances, only by the force of their own raucous laughter, amidst stenches of excreta, decaying garbage,  unwashed bodies, and enfiled blaring someone had mistaken for music.   "Growing up is not the most delightful of things, but one can be proud of having survived it.  You seem to have survived.  And prospered."

Adam shrugged.  "For one supposed to be no more than a prisoner, learning all he might from the enemy?  I promise you, Zakh, any privilege I have earned I regard as a trophy, a measure of my effectiveness as a spy. And any damage my reputation suffers upon that account is not just a needed sacrifice on our behalf, but a species of protection."

Zakh grinned unpleasantly.  "I see.  What have you managed to learn?"

Again Adam shrugged.  "Everyday matters of tactical import, movements, shipments, which I used to pass to Eugene and which I now share with Maria, who has astonished everyone by becoming our unquestioned leader.   And Lida Khabalova, who represents her in the field." He edged closer to Zakh, lowering his voice.  "The one strategic fact I  have concerns an alien philosopher----and a device he has offered Zaytsteva, capable of subjugating an entire planet."

He took pains to explain in detail, to Zakh's evident growing alarm, underlying the threat they represented, not just to Genrichians but maybe the whole Cosmopolity.  He described the false rendezvous with the alien which had resulted in Eugene's capture, with certain convenient emendations.

"The Black Usurper has lately received the actual instrumentality, Zakh.  He required considerable practice to become proficient but is about to make use o fit now.  It is his most closely cherished secret I have managed to eke out.  Now, are you going to tell me how you got here?"

Zakh looked at him across the rim of his caffcup.  "Is it important?"

"No one among the Romanovans, not even their vaunted equipment, detected your arrival, Zakh.  I did not know of it until you sent word through the gardener.  We have great need of the ability to come and go undetected. "

The younger man raised his eyebrows.  "Who is 'we'?"

Adam nodded.  "Us---the resistance."

Zakh chuckled.  "I see.  What if you should be captured and tortured.  Would the method not then be rendered useless?"

His brother's face reddened and his voice turned into a hiss.  "It is useless now if we remain ignorant of it!  You are being stupid, Zakh!"

"I am being cautious. But what difference does it make if a man cannot trust his own brother?  I hove to in polar orbit, which Genrichian defenses are not well suited to detect.  It is somewhat like that natural tendency on which certain predators depend of their prey to be wary of every direction but up. I had the repulsorlift modified and lowered halfway into the atmosphere, whereupon it released an unpowered aerostat which I piloted the rest of the way.  Are you satisfied?"

Adam nodded, licking his lips.  "More than satisfied, Zakh."  As Zaytsteva would be,  he thought, once informed of this weakness in his defense.  Nor had the possible implications that Zakh was alone on Genrich escaped him.  "Is it a large fleet you have brought with you?"

"My, aren't you full of questions, dear brother."

"And you of suspicion and evasion.  I merely wished to know how soon we might toss ourselves against the Usurper.  Forget I asked."

Evincing planet-weary retreat that frankness, even between kinsmen, had become so hard, Zakh shook his head and placed a hand over his brother's.  "No, it is only right that you be informed.  It will be necessary to wait a while.  I have been long out of touch and will need to learn much before I act.  I only brought one starship, my starwolf Scopa, which I afterward sent away into the Deep to await prearranged rendezvous."

Adam smiled.  "How gratifying that my baby brother, thrown on his own resources, has in so short a time become not a mere captain or fleet commander, but famous throughout the Cosmopolity."  He stood.  "I hope Terrible Yvan appreciates the honor, as I hope you appreciate the attention you are about to receive on account of it.  Guard!  Arrest this man at once!  Look to your weapons, his is the infamous starship-robber Yvan Dragomilov!"

Adam whirled.  "Oligarch-ProTempe?"

It was indeed the Black Usurper who stood behind him, free of his wheeled chair, flanked by Cossacks and a pair of human officers, quickblades at the ready.  Before Yvan Dragomilov could lift his arm from beneath the table, Zaytsteva raised an odd object, consisting of two upright, translucent cylinders seething with light deep at their middles, fist-sized, connected at one end by a handle and at their other by an arc of heavy wire which bore at its middle a small parabolic dish.  The air pulsed between Yvan Dragomilov and the device as the light within the cylinders boiled with increased fury.  He sat unmoving, body rigid, face contorted with agony.  Zaytsteva relaxed his grip and his victim's shoulders dropped. Yvan Dragomilov sighed, his eyes unlit by expression or intelligence.  The room had descended into silence, a few prudent figures near its edges using the distraction to slip away unnoticed.  

"You will arise and go with my soldiers, Zakh Sorokin, doing everything bidden." Zaytsteva turned to one of his officers.  "Confiscate his weapons."

Yvan Dragomilov's chair made a scraping noise in the disconcerting quiet.  Offering no resistance, he permitted himself to be disarmed.

"Alert my techs.  Tell them to sharpen their wits and their probes.  I wish this to last many days."  He turned to Adam, holding up the device.  "Not that there is anything we cannot now learn by more sophisticated means.  You have done well, young man.  I apologize for surprising you.  I wanted to try this with the most recalcitrant subject I could imagine.  You have earned a reward.  Would you care to be present beside me in the dungeon?

A smile split Adam's face.  "I have looked forward to it a long time, sir.  I mean to enjoy every minute!"