The Dark Lady

try to make contact with Heath. To that end, I went to the baggage reclamation area, retrieved my luggage, and registered my voiceprint with a representative of the Oceana Police Department.
    As I walked out the exit and stood in the bright Charlemagne sunlight, I found myself facing a seemingly endless line of vehicles. The nearest of them pulled directly in front of me, and its back door sprung open.
    “Welcome to Oceana,” said the driver, a stocky, balding human with an ingratiating smile. “Where are you headed?”
    “I wish to be taken to the Excelsior Hotel, my good man,” I said in the Dialect of Honored Guests.
    “Have you got a reservation?” he asked.
    “Most certainly,” I responded, entering the vehicle and taking my luggage with me. “Why do you ask?”
    He shrugged, and the vehicle began moving. “Just that they usually operate at capacity. I thought I'd save you a trip if you hadn't booked ahead.”
    “That is most considerate of you.”
    “It's my job,” he said. “Is this your first visit to Charlemagne?”
    “Yes, it is,” I said.
    “I hope you enjoy your stay.”
    “I have every confidence that I shall,” I said, looking out the window at a vast expanse of brown dried grass. “May I ask you a question, my good fellow?”
    “Go right ahead.”
    “Your fair city is called Oceana,” I noted. “Where is the ocean?”
    He laughed. “Wrong time of year.”
    “I do not understand.”
    “We're just a couple of hundred miles south of the equator, so instead of summer and winter we get dry and rainy seasons. Do you see that plain?” he asked, gesturing out the window.
    “Yes.”
    “Well, when the rainy season comes, it becomes a lake almost two hundred miles wide and about eighteen inches deep. The first man to set up shop here came right after the rains and thought it was an ocean, so he named the place Oceana. By the time he found out what a blunder he'd made, the name had already been approved by the Pioneer Corps and registered by the Cartography Department back on Caliban, and it would have been just too damned much trouble to change it.” He paused. “That's the reason the spaceport is so far from the city. If it were any closer, it'd be under water for half the year.”
    “How very interesting,” I said.
    “It's more embarrassing than interesting,” replied the driver with another laugh. “We still get an occasional tourist here who books his vacation just based on the name.”
    We reached the outskirts of Oceana, a metropolis of shining steel buildings and angular glass towers, of broad thoroughfares cleaving through tastefully arranged commercial and residential areas. Finally the clusters of buildings pressed closer and closer together, seeming almost to touch the frail, wispy, low-hanging clouds, and the vehicle came to a stop.
    “Here we are,” announced the driver.
    I completed the transaction, then emerged from the vehicle and approached one of the six liveried doormen, who in turn took my luggage and escorted me inside to a relatively small reception area which was surrounded by a plethora of very exclusive shops and boutiques. I became increasingly aware of the fact that there was only one other non-human within sight, a tripodal being wearing the hotel's gold and magenta colors and a maintenance insignia, but no one else seemed to take notice of it, and I was shortly ascending to the sixty-fourth floor via an express elevator.
    Once there, I walked down a short, brightly lit corridor until I came to a door at the end of it. I spoke my name, waited until my voiceprint registered, and then walked into my suite as the door receded.
    I found myself in an oversized sitting room that contained four chairs, a large couch covered by white Tumigan leather, a small, well-stocked bar made of Doradusian hardwoods, a stone fireplace, and a large window that overlooked the city.
    Standing at the bar, a half-filled glass in his hand, was a tall, elegantly groomed, expensively tailored man with hair the color of the sun-scorched Oceana grasslands and oblique green eyes that had just a touch of gray in them. I instantly recognized him as Valentine Heath.
    “Come in and make yourself comfortable,” he said easily. “Sorry I couldn't get out to the spaceport, but I wouldn't have spotted you anyway. They told me you were a Bjornn.”
    “I am,” I replied.
    He looked surprised. “I've met a couple of Bjornns in the past,” he said, “and they certainly didn't look