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not see her face. But when she looked up, she was smiling.
    “I’ll recommend to the All-World Forum that your hostage permit be granted, Director. I will return in two months to make an official check on the holy hostage.”
    Brill, Lambert saw, didn’t quite stop himself in time from frowning. “Two months? But with the entire solar system of hostages to supervise—”
    “Two months, Director,” Her Holiness said. “The week before the All-World Forum convenes to vote on revenue and taxation.”
    “I—”
    “Now I would like to inspect the three holy hostages you already hold for the altruistic prevention of war.”
    Later, Culhane said to Lambert, “He did not explain it very well. It could have been made so much more urgent…it is urgent. Those bodies rotting in Cornwall…” He shuddered.
    Lambert looked at him. “You care. You genuinely do.”
    He looked back at her in astonishment. “And you don’t? You must, to work on this project!”
    “I care,” Lambert said. “But not like that.”
    “Like what?”
    She tried to clarify it for him, for herself. “The bodies rotting…I see them. But it’s not our own history—”
    “What does that matter? They’re still human!”
    He was so earnest. Intensity burned on him like skin tinglers. Did Culhane even use skin tinglers? Fellow researchers spoke of him as an ascetic, giving all his energy, all his time to the project. A woman in his domicile had told Lambert he even lived chaste, doing a voluntary celibacy mission for the entire length of his research grant. Lambert had never met anyone who actually did that. It was intriguing.
    She said, “Are you thinking of the priesthood once the project is over, Culhane?”
    He flushed. Color mounted from the dyed cheeks, light blue since he had been promoted to project head, to pink on the fine skin of his shaved temples.
    “I’m thinking of it.”
    “And doing a celibacy mission now?”
    “Yes. Why?” His tone was belligerent: A celibacy mission was slightly old-fashioned. Lambert studied his body: tall, well-made, strong. Augments? Muscular, maybe. He had beautiful muscles.
    “No reason,” she said, bending back to her console until she heard him walk away.
     

     
    The demon advanced. Anne, lying feeble on her curtained bed, tried to call out. But her voice would not come, and who would hear her anyway? The bedclothes were thick, muffling sound; her ladies would all have retired for the night, alone or otherwise; the guards would be drinking the ale Henry had provided all of London to celebrate Elizabeth’s christening. And Henry…he was not beside her. She had failed him of his son.
    “Be gone,” she said weakly to the demon. It moved closer.
    They had called her a witch. Because of her little sixth finger, because of the dog named Urian, because she had kept Henry under her spell so long without bedding him. But if I were really a witch, she thought, I could send this demon away. More: I could hold Henry, could keep him from watching that whey-faced Jane Seymour, could keep him in my bed…She was not a witch.
    Therefore, it followed that there was nothing she could do about this demon. If it was come for her, it was come. If Satan, Master of Lies, was decided to have her, to punish her for taking the husband of another woman, and for…How much could demons know?
    “This was all none of my wishing,” she said aloud to the demon. “I wanted to marry someone else.” The demon continued to advance.
    Very well, then, let it take her. She would not scream. She never had—she prided herself on it. Not when they had told her she could not marry Harry Percy. Not when she had been sent home from the court, peremptorily and without explanation. Not when she had discovered the explanation: Henry wished to have her out of London so he could bed his latest mistress away from Katherine’s eyes. She had not screamed when a crowd of whores had burst into the palace where she was supping, demanding Nan