“Count Jainan,” the Auditor said. His voice sounded jarringly like a normal human’s. “Prince Kiem. Please be seated, and we’ll run you through the process.”
“Sounds painful,” Kiem said, then exchanged a glance with Jainan—who didn’t smile—and regretted joking. They followed the Auditor through the curtain. There was a table set up with a gel hand-sensor in the middle and a few chairs that were mercifully free of Resolution weirdness.
The Resolution weirdness was supplied in full measure by the Auditor, who summoned a junior staffer to the table with no apparent signal then took a seat across from Kiem and Jainan and stared at them. Kiem assumed he was staring. It was hard to tell.
“I am role four-seven-five,” the Auditor said, apparently as a polite introduction. “My committees are Renewal—sub-chair; Low-Population Sectors—member; Artifact Nonproliferation—member. I have 0.0052 voting shares, currently suspended for duties.” He gestured to the staffer next to him. “My colleagues on this assignment are unroled.”
The staffer who sat next to the Auditor was more normal: a young, official person with a checklist and an intricately bordered collar that probably had some meaning for Galactics. “I am about to ask you some personal questions,” the staffer said politely, without offering a name. “I apologize for any offense caused.”
“I can’t imagine what offense you’d cause,” Kiem said, nonplussed. “Er. Jainan?”
“I have nothing to hide,” Jainan said, looking straight at the Auditor’s nauseating lack of a face.
It turned out neither of them did. As the staffer worked their way down the list, Kiem and Jainan answered with their full, official titles, their birthplaces and dates, their precise position in the governing hierarchies of their respective planets. The staffer wanted to know about Taam, and Jainan gave his details in a careful, emotionless voice. The checklist dwelled on their right to speak for their planets: Kiem described his meeting with the Emperor, and Jainan gave them a copy of some document from the Thean president. They gave their biometrics—the handprint scanner felt odd and clung to Kiem’s palm in a way he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. The Auditor watched them, unmoving, but the swirling shell clinging to his face moved whenever either of them spoke.
“And your genetic parentage?” the staffer asked.
“This is going to take a while,” Kiem said cheerfully. “Prince Alkie and Sarvi Tegnar were my principals—there’s a statutory minimum from the royal side for inheritance—but I’ve got ten gifters, and you’ll need my genome record for who gave what. My mother even got General Fenrik to donate some pairs,” he said as an aside to Jainan, “that obviously didn’t take. I think he’s still embarrassed about it.”
The staffer entered that on a screen. “And Your Grace…？”
The Auditor spoke, his head angled toward Jainan. “I believe Thea has a cultural taboo against discussing genetic inheritance—you should have the background downloaded.”
“Ah,” the staffer said, after a pause. Their eye-screen flickered. “You can pass us a redacted version.”
Kiem finally looked at Jainan, who was showing some emotion for the first time in this whole meeting: he was visibly mortified. It was starting to dawn on Kiem how much he didn’t know about Thean etiquette. “No,” Jainan said, after clearing his throat. “My parents are core Feria. You may have my full genetic record, but you will have to request it from my clan.”
The staffer nodded and entered something on their checklist. They gestured to the Auditor, who leaned forward.
“Have you ever been involved in the study of remnants?”
“What?” Kiem said. He remembered the glowing shard on the Emperor’s display table. “No. I’m not an archaeologist.”
Jainan shook his head. “My field is deep-space engineering. I believe Thea has given you a list of every remnant discovered since the last renewal.”
Kiem was starting to get a handle on the Auditor’s body language, he found. At least, he could tell when that cosmically unpleasant attention was landing on him rather than Jainan.
“Iskat has found a relative abundance of them this time around,” the Auditor said. “Some remnants were inexplicably missed on the last few contacts you had with the Resolution, but fortunately they have come to light in recent years. Including a notable major remnant, which you seem to have used to construct a therapeutic machine.”
“Have we?” Kiem said.
“The list refers to it as powering a ‘Tau field.’”
“That’s not for therapy,” Kiem said blankly. That was a nasty part of Iskat’s history in the previous century, now something from low-budget war dramas. “It’s—I don’t know, some sort of interrogation field? I thought it had been dismantled. I didn’t know it had a remnant in it.”
The Auditor’s lips flattened in what Kiem realized was a smile, as if Kiem had sidestepped some sort of difficult question. The assistant noted something down.
“Taam—Prince Taam—was your cousin?” the Auditor said, with a slight, almost undetectable emphasis on cousin.
“Yes. Through the Emperor. My grandmother.”
“And you were put in the chain of responsibility via your wedding,” the Auditor said. “Which was when…？”
“Yesterday,” Kiem said. As he said it, it sounded uncomfortably thin. He realized he was tapping his foot and stopped himself. This couldn’t be pleasant for Jainan either.
The junior staffer looked at the Auditor at some signal Kiem didn’t catch. “Thank you,” they said formally. “That concludes the interview.” It did? Kiem felt he should have added more detail, but the staffer was already dismissing them. “If you could wait outside the privacy screen?”
Jainan was on his feet before they’d finished speaking. Kiem didn’t blame him. The privacy screen parted around them again—Kiem couldn’t help shutting his eyes as he stepped through it—and left them in the main room, with a sea of moving visualizations on the walls around them.
“That was fun,” Kiem said. “Sorry about the genetics part. Do you think they’re grading us?”
“I don’t know,” Jainan said. He glanced around the walls with a tense, hunted look. Kiem couldn’t make head or tail of the displays. The Auditor seemed to be collecting data like a magpie—one section had extracts from modern history articles; another, population estimates; this one, some paragraphs from the Foundation laws. Another one was about electromagnetic space fluctuations in the Outer Belt—Jainan’s attention lingered there—and another seemed to be about stage magicians and hypnotists. There was no pattern.
Kiem was diverted by a flicker of movement. “Hey, it’s us,” he said. “Finally.” The web of treaty representatives on one wall shifted to make room for pictures of Kiem and Jainan’s faces, filling the last two gaps.
The tag that flashed up beneath them said UNCONFIRMED.
“Looks like they didn’t like us,” Kiem said. It was meant as a joke—this was probably just a paperwork delay—but Jainan didn’t seem to take it as a joke at all. He had gone still in a way that reminded Kiem of someone standing on the edge of a cliff.