Singularity Sky

Diplomatic Behavior

Meanwhile, two thousand years away, a small boy lay curled in darkness, whimpering in the grip of a dream of empire.

Felix moaned and shivered and dragged the tattered blanket closer around his shoulders. The abandoned hayloft was unheated, and the gaps between the log walls admitted a furious draft, but at least it was a roof over his head. It was warmer than the stony ground. Wolves roamed the untamed wilderness, and for a lad to sleep beneath the stars at this time of year was hazardous even in normal times.

Raven roosted on the thick oak beam above Felix’s head, his long black beak tucked under one wing.

Occasionally, he would wake for a moment, shake his feathers out, shuffle from one foot to the other, and glance around. But as long as the door stayed barred, nothing could reach them that he couldn’t deal with; and so he would rejoin his master in sleep.

Rain battered on the roof, occasionally leaking through the sods that covered the rough-cut timber, dripping to the floor in thin cold streams. The smell of half-decayed hay hung heavy in the air. Felix hadn’t dared light a fire after Mr. Rabbit pointed out how dangerous that could be. There were things out there that could see heat, silent things without mouths. Things that liked to eat little boys’ brains.

Felix dreamed of Imperial orders, men in shiny uniforms, and women in silky gowns; of starships and cavalry parades and ceremonies and rituals. But his dreams were invaded by a tired and pervasive cynicism. The nobles and officers were corrupt hangers-on, their women grasping harpies searching for security. The ceremonies and rituals were meaningless and empty, a charade concealing a ghastly system of institutional injustices orchestrated to support the excesses of the rulers. Dreaming of New Prague, he felt himself to be a duke or prince, mired in a dung heap, chained down by responsibility and bureaucracy, unable to move despite the juggernaut of decaying corruption bearing down on him.

When he twitched and cried out in his dream, Mr. Rabbit crawled closer and sprawled against him, damp fur rising and falling with his breath. Presently Felix eased deeper into sleep, and Mr. Rabbit rolled away, curling nose to tail to resume his nightly regurgitation and cud-chewing. If it was hard being a small boy in a time of rapid change, it was a doubly hard burden to be a meter-tall rabbit cursed with human sentience and cunicular instincts.

In the early-morning light, Felix yawned, rubbed his eyes, and stretched stiffly, shivering with cold.

“Rabbit?”

“Caaaw!” Raven flapped down from overhead and hopped closer, head cocked to one side. “Rabbit gone to vill-lage.”

Felix blinked, slowly. “I wish he’d waited.” He shivered, feeling a sense of loneliness very alien to a nine-year-old. He stood up and began to pack his possessions into a battered-looking haversack; a blanket, a small tin can, a half-empty box of matches, and one of the curious metal phones by which the Festival communicated with people. He paused over the phone for a moment, but eventually his sense of urgency won, and he shoved it into the pack. “Let’s play hunt the wabbit,” he said, and opened the door.

It was a cold, bright morning, and the ground in the abandoned farmyard was ankle deep in squelching mud. The blackened ruin of the house squatted on the other side of the quagmire like the stump of a tree struck by lightning, the Holy Father’s fire. Behind it, a patch of dusty gray mud showed the depletion layer where the Festival’s nanosystems had sucked the soil dry of trace elements, building something huge; it was almost certainly connected with the disappearance of the farmer and his family.

The village lay about two kilometers downhill from the farmhouse, around a bend in the narrow dirt track, past a copse of tall pine trees. Felix shrugged on his backpack and, after a brief pause to piss against the fire-blackened wall of the house, slowly headed down the road. He felt like whistling or singing, but kept his voice to himself; there was no telling what lived in the woods hereabouts, and he wasn’t inclined to ignore Mr. Rabbit’s warnings. He was a very serious little boy, very grown-up.

Raven hopped after him, then flapped forward heavily and landed in the ditch some way down the path.

His head ducked repeatedly. “Brrrreak-fast!” he cawed.

“Oh, good!” Felix hurried to catch up, but when he saw what Raven had found to eat he turned away abruptly and pinched the bridge of his nose until the tears came, trying not to gag. Tears came hard; a long time ago, a very long distance away, Nurse had told him, “Big boys don’t cry.” But he knew better now. He’d seen much bigger boys crying, men even, as they were stood up against the bullet-pocked wall. (Some of them didn’t cry, some of them held themselves stiffly upright, but it made no difference in the end.) “Sometimes I hate you, Raven.”

“Caaww?” Raven looked up at him. The thing in the ditch was still wearing a little girl’s dress.

“Hungrrry.”

“You might be — but I we’ve got to find Pyotr. Before the Mimes catch us.” Felix looked over his shoulder nervously. They’d been running scared, one jump ahead of the Mimes, for the past three days. The Mimes moved slowly, frequently fighting an invisible wind or trying to feel their way around intangible buildings, but they were remorseless. Mimes never slept, or blinked, or stopped moving.

A hundred meters closer to the village, the phone woke up. It chirped like a curious kitten until Felix rummaged through his bag and pulled it out. “Leave me alone!” he exclaimed, exasperated.

“Felix? It’s Mr. Rabbit.”

“What?” He looked at the phone, startled. Chrome highlights glinted beneath grubby oil-slick fingerprints.

“It’s me. Your flop-eared friend. I’m in the village. Listen, don’t come any closer.”

“Why not?” He frowned and carried on walking.

“They’re here. My luck ran out; don’t think I can get away. You—” The giant lagomorph’s voice broke into something utterly inhuman for a moment, a rodent squeal of rage and fright. “—Behind you, too! Go cross-country. Run, boy.”

The phone buzzed, disconnected. Felix raised it angrily, meaning to dash it to the ground, then stopped.

Ahead of him. Raven stared at him, beady-eyed and bloody-beaked. “Fly over the village,” Felix ordered the bird. “Tell me what you see.”

“Caaaw!” Raven took a running leap into the air, lumbering heavily over the grass, then climbing up over the treetops. Felix looked at the phone again, mingled rage and grief in his eyes. It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair! All he wanted was to be young and carefree, and to have fun. The companions came later; at first there had been Mrs. Hedgehog as well, but she’d been killed by a random Fringe performance, electrical discharges flashing to ground from an ionosphere raped by induced solar flares. The Fringe was like that; a mindless thing, infinitely dangerous and fickle, as trustworthy as a venomous snake but sometimes capable of producing works of great beauty. (The auroral displays had lasted for weeks.) Felix looked around, nervously. Over the hedgerow, back down the road, something seemed to move.

He held the phone to his cheek. “Somebody talk to me?”

“Will you entertain us?”

“I don’t know how!” he burst out.

“Tell story. Provide entertaining formal proof of correctness. Sing, dance, clap your hands.”

“What will you do for me in return?”

“What do you require?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded tinny, distant, compressed through the bandwidth ligature of a causal channel.

“Bad men are after me. They throw custard pies, turn me into one of them. Can you stop them? Protect me from the Mimes?”

“Tell story.” It wasn’t a statement or a question, it was an order.

Felix took a deep breath. He glanced up and saw Raven circling overhead. He jumped the ditch, then ducked under the first branches and began to weave his way into the woods. He talked as he walked.

“In the beginning there was a duke who lived in a palace, on the banks of the river, overlooking the only city on the world. He wasn’t a very wise duke, but he did what he thought was best for his people. Then one morning, it began to rain telephones, and the world changed. This is the duke’s story.” It was a long and rambling story, and it went on for some time. How the duke’s palace had been besieged by anarchist terrorists, who unleashed chaos and plastic cutlery on the town. All his soldiers deserted after looting the palace and the zoo; he escaped through a secret passage under the Curator’s waiting rooms in the sub-sub-basement. The elderly duke had escaped with three trusty retainers.

Grief-stricken, he had barely been able to understand what had happened to his world. Why had everything changed? A telephone chirped at him, like a curious kitten, from the rubbish in a back alley.

He bent to pick it up and the motion saved his life for two renegade soldiers shot at him with their rifles.

They killed Citizen Von Beck, but not before the Citizen marked them with his slow gun — for the Citizens of the Curator’s Office were allowed to use forbidden weapons in the course of their duties.

(Bullets from a slow gun flew on hummingbird wings, seeking their prey wherever they might flee. Bullets from a slow gun killed by stinging with their neurotoxin barbettes, like wasps with secret police insignia.

They were a terror weapon, to demonstrate the horrors of unrestricted technology.) Felix slipped down a root-woven embankment and crossed a clearing studded with green-sprouting stumps as he continued. The duke talked to the phone in his despair, and it offered him three wishes. He asked to be made young again, thinking it a bitter joke; to his surprise, his youth was magically restored.

Next, he asked for companions; and he was given friends, wonderful friends, who would do anything for him and ask nothing in return. Even the third wish, the little-boy wish made in the first flush of restored youth, had been granted. None of which was exactly what he’d wanted, or would have asked for had he not been in a very disturbed state of mind at the time, but it was better than the wishes some people he’d met subsequently had made. (The kulak whose wish had been a goose that laid golden eggs, for example. It was a wonderful animal, until you held it close to a railway man’s dosimeter and discovered the deluge of ionizing radiation spewing invisibly from the nuclear alchemist’s stone in its gizzard. Which you only thought to do when the bloody stools became too much to bear, and your hair began to fall out in clumps.)

The duke-turned-child had walked across three hundred kilometers in the past month, living from hand to mouth. His friends had looked after him, though. Raven, who could see over and around things, told him of traps or ambushes or deadfalls before he walked into them. Mr. Rabbit hopped along at his side, and with his acute hearing, nose for trouble, and plain, old-fashioned common sense, kept him from starving or freezing to death. Mrs. Hedgehog had helped, too, bustling around, cooking and cleaning and keeping camp, occasionally fending off beggars and indigent trash with her bristles and sharp teeth. That was before the lightning storm took her.

But somewhere along the way, the little duke had begun to regain his sense of purpose — and with it, a great depth of despair. Everywhere he looked, crops rotted in the fields. Once-sober peasants upped stakes and took to the skies in mile-high puffball spheres of spun-sugar glass and diamond. Wise-women aged backward and grew much wiser, unnaturally so — wise until their wisdom leaked out into the neighborhood, animating the objects around them with their force of will. Ultimately, the very wise lost their humanity altogether and fled their crumbling human husks, migrating into the upload afterlife of the Festival. Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.

The little duke had talked to some of the people, tried to get them to understand that this wasn’t going to last forever; sooner or later, the Festival would be over, and there would be a dreadful price to pay. But they laughed at him, calling him names when they discovered who he had been in his previous existence.

And then someone set the Mimes on him.

A crash of branches and a caw of alarm; Raven crunched down onto his shoulder, great claws gripping his arm hard enough to draw blood. “Mimes!” hissed the bird. “Nevermore!”

“Where?” Felix looked around, wide-eyed.

Something crackled in the underbrush behind him. Felix turned, dislodging Raven, who flapped heavily upward, cawing in alarm. A human shape lurched into view on the other side of the clearing. It was male, adult in size, powdery white in color from head to foot. It moved jerkily like damaged clockwork, and there was no mistaking the circular, yellowish object it held in its right hand.

“Pie-ie-ie!” croaked Raven. ‘Time to die!“

Felix turned away from the Mime and put his head down. He ran blindly, branches tearing at his head and shoulders, shrubbery and roots trying to trip him up. Distantly, he heard the screaming and cawing of Raven mobbing the Mime, flapping clear of the deadly flan and pecking for eyes, ears, fingers. Just one sticky strand of orange goo from the pie dish would eat clear through bone, its disassembly nanoware mapping and reintegrating neural paths along its deadly way, to convert what was left of the body into a proxy presence in realspace.

The Mimes were broken, a part of the Fringe that had swung too close to a solar flare and succumbed to bit rot several Festival visits ago. They’d lost their speech pathways, right down to the Nucleus of Chomsky, but somehow managed to piggyback a ride on the Festival starwisps. Maybe this forcible assimilation was their way of communicating, of sharing mindspace with other beings. If so, it was misguided at best, like a toddler’s attempt to communicate with a dog by hitting it; but nothing seemed to deter them from trying.

A wordless scream from behind told him that Raven had certainly distracted that particular Mime. But Mimes traveled in packs. Where were the others? And where was Mr. Rabbit, with his trusty twelve-bore and belt of dried farmer’s scalps?

Noise ahead. Felix staggered to a stop. He was still holding the phone. “Help,” he gasped into it.

“Define help parameters.”

A fuzzy white shape moved among the trees in front of him. It had once been a woman. Now it was powder white, except for blood-red lips and bobble nose: layers of white clothing shrouded its putrefying limbs, held together with a delicate lacework of silvery metallic vines that pulsed and contracted as it moved. It swayed from side to side as it approached, bending coquettishly at the hips, as if the base of its spine had been replaced by a universal joint. It clutched a large pie dish in both bony hands. Collapsed eye sockets lined with black photoreceptive film grinned at him as it bowed and extended the bowl, like a mother offering her spoiled son his favorite dessert.

Felix gagged. The smell was indescribable. “Kill it. Make it go away,” he whimpered. He fell back against a tree. “Please!”

“Acknowledged.” The Festival voice remained dusty and distant, but somehow its tone changed. “ Fringe security at your service. How may we be of assistance?” The Mimes were closing in. “Kill them!” Felix gasped. “Get me out of here!”

“Target acquisition in progress. X-ray laser battery coming online. Be advised current orbital inclination is not favorable for surgical excision. Cover your eyes.” He threw an arm across his face. Bones flashed in red silhouette, followed a split second later by a crash of thunder and a blast of heat, as if someone had opened the oven door of hell right in front of his face.

His skin prickled as if Mrs. Hedgehog was embracing him, only all over. Trees falling in the forest, a flapping of panic-stricken wings. The flash and bang repeated itself a second later, this time behind him; then three or four more times, increasingly distant.

“Incident Control stand down. Threat terminated. Be advised you have received an ionizing radiation dose of approximately four Greys, and that this will be life-threatening without urgent remediation. A medical support package has been dispatched. Remain where you are, and it will arrive in twenty-two minutes. Thank you for your custom, and have a nice day.” Felix lay gasping at the base of his tree. He felt dizzy, a little sick: afterimages of his femur floated in ghostly purple splendor across his eyes. “I want Mr. Rabbit,” he mumbled into the phone, but it didn’t answer him. He cried, tears of frustration and loneliness. Presently, he closed his eyes and slept. He was still asleep when the spider slipped down from the stars and wove him into a cocoon of silvery not-silk to begin the task of dissolving and reforming his radiation-damaged body yet again. This was the third time so far; it was all his own fault for making that third wish. Youth, true friends … and what every little boy wished for in his heart, without quite grasping that an adventure-filled life isn’t much fun when you’re the person who has to live it.

Martin sat on the thin mattress in his cell, and tried to work out how many days he had left before they executed him.

The fleet was six days out from the final jump to Rochard’s World. Before that, they’d probably transfer supplies from the remaining support freighters and put any supernumeraries— conscripts who’d gone mad, contracted crippling diseases, or otherwise become superfluous to requirements — on board.

Maybe they’d move him over and send him back with the basket cases, back to the New Republic to face trial on the capital charge of spying in the dockyard. Somehow, he doubted that his defense (of shipyard necessity) would do him much good; that snot-nosed assistant from the Curator’s Office had it in for him, quite obviously, and would stop at nothing to see him hang.

That was one option. Another was that he’d be kept in the brig aboard ship until it arrived. At which point they’d realize that the cumulative clock-delay he’d bodged into the Lord Vanek’s fourspace guidance system had screwed the pooch, completely buggering their plan to sneak up on the Festival via a spacelike trajectory. In which case, they’d logically assume sabotage, and they’d have the saboteur already in the cells, trussed like a turkey for Thanksgiving.

Somehow, the fact that he’d succeeded, that his mission was accomplished and the threat of a wider causality violation averted, did not fill Martin with happiness. There might, he supposed, be heroes who would go to the airlock with a spring in their step, but he wasn’t one of them; he’d rather be opening Rachel’s bedroom door than opening that other door, learning to breathe in her muff rather than learning to inhale vacuum. It was, he supposed dismally, typical of the pattern of his life to fall in love — the kind of annoying obsession that won’t go away — just before stumbling irremediably into the shit. He’d been around enough to think he had few illusions left; Rachel had edges rough enough to use as a nail file, and in some ways, they had very little in common. But being banged up alone in a tiny cell was a frighteningiy lonely experience, all the lonelier for knowing that his lover was almost certainly less than thirty meters away — and completely unable to help him. Probably under suspicion herself. And however much he needed her, he didn’t, in all honesty, want her in here with him. He wanted to be with her on the outside — preferably somewhere many light-years from the New Republic, acquiring a long history of having absolutely nothing to do with it.

He lay back, rolled over on his stomach, and closed his eyes. Then the toilet began talking to him in a faint, buzzing voice.

“If you can hear me, tap one finger on the deck next to the base of the toilet, Martin. Just one.” I’ve lost it, he thought. They won’t bother executing me; they’ll put me in one of their psychiatric zoos and let the children throw bananas. But he reached out a hand and tapped at the base of the stainless-steel toilet that extruded from the wall of his cell.

“That’s—” he sat up, and the voice went away abruptly.

Martin blinked and looked around. No voices. Nothing else had changed in the cell; it was still too hot, stuffy, with a constant background smell of bad drains and stale cabbage. (The cabbage was inexplicable; the menu had long since shifted to salt beef and ship’s biscuit, a recipe perversely retained by the New Republic’s Navy despite the ready availability of vacuum and extreme cold millimeters beyond the outer pressure hull of the ship). He lay down again.

“—just one. If you can—”

He closed his eyes and, as if at a stance, rapped once, hard, on the base of the toilet.

“Received. Now tap—” The voice paused. “Tap once for each day you’ve been in the tank.” Martin blinked, then rapped out an answer.

“Do you know Morse code?”

Martin racked his brains. It had been quite a long time— “yes,” he tapped out. A mostly obsolete skill, that low-bandwidth serial code set, but one that he did know, for a simple reason: Herman had insisted he learn it. Morse was human-accessible, and a sniff for more sophisticated protocols might easily miss something as mundane as the finger-tapping back channel in a video call.

“If you lie with your head up against the side of the toilet bowl, you will hear me better.” He blinked. Bone conduction? No, something else. The induction wires around his auditory nerves — some high-frequency source must be shorting out against the metal of the toilet, using it as an antenna! Inefficient, but if it wouldn’t carry far …

“Identify yourself,” he signaled.

The reply came in Morse. “AKA Ludmilla. Who watched us over dinner?”

“The boy wonder,” he tapped out. He slumped against the floor, shivering in relief. Only two people could reasonably be on the other side of the pipe, and the Curator’s Office wasn’t likely to authenticate his identity that way. “What’s your relay?”

“Spy drone in sewage system jammed against effluent valve. One of batch accidentally released by idiot subcurator. Told them to find you. Fuel cells in drone very low, drained by conduction telephone. Prefer Morse. Martin, I am trying to get you out. No luck so far.”

“How long till arrival?” he tapped urgently.

‘Ten days to low-orbit arrival. If not released first, expect rescue day of arrival. Attempting to assert diplomatic cover for you.“

Ten days. Rescue — if they didn’t stick him on a freighter under armed guard and ship him back to execution dock, and if Rachel wasn’t whistling in the face of a storm. “Query rescue.”

“Diplomatic life belt big enough for two. Power level approaching shutdown: will try to send another relay later. Love you. Over.”

“I love you, too,” he tapped hopefully, but there was no reply.

A miriad of tiny gears whirred, clucked, and buzzed in a background hum of gray noise beneath a desktop. Optical transducers projected a magic-lantern dance of light on the wall opposite. The operator, gold-leafed collar unbuttoned, leaned back in his chair and dribbled smoke from his nostrils: a pipe dangled limply between his knuckles as he stared at the display.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” he called. The door opened. He blinked: came to his feet. “Ah, and what can I do for you, Procurator?”

“A mmoment of your time if I may, sir?”

“By all means. Always a pleasure to be of service to the Basilisk. Have a seat?” Vassily settled down behind the desk, visibly uncomfortable. The shadow play of lights danced on the wall, thin blue smoke catching the red-and-yellow highlights and coiling lazily in midair. “Would this be the, ah, our state vector?”

For a moment Security Lieutenant Sauer considered hazing the lad; he reluctantly shelved the idea. “Yes.

Not that there’s much to be made of it, unless you’re interested in the topology of five-dimensional manifolds. And it’s only theoretical, until we arrive at the far end and relativistics come out with a pulsar map to confirm it. I’m trying to study it; promotion board ahead you know, once this affair is straightened out.”

“Hmm.” Vassily nodded. Sauer wasn’t the only Navy officer expecting a promotion to come out of this campaign. “Well, I suppose you could look on the bright side; we’re most of the way there now.” Sauer pursed his lips, raised his pipe, and sucked. “I would never say that. Not until we know the enemy’s dead and buried at a crossroads with a mouthful of garlic.”

“I suppose so. But your lads will take care of that, won’t they? Meanwhile it’s my people who have to come in afterward and do the tidying up, keep this sort of thing from happening again.” Sauer looked at the young policeman, maintaining a polite expression despite his mild irritation. “Is there something I can help with?”

“Er, yah, I think so.” The visitor leaned back. He reached into his tunic pocket and withdrew a cigar case. “Mind if I smoke?”

Sauer shrugged. “You’re my guest.”

“Thank you!”

For a minute they were silent, lighters flaring briefly and blue-gray clouds trailing in the airflow to the ceiling vents. Vassily tried to suppress his coughing, still not quite accustomed to the adult habit. “It’s about the engineer in the brig.”

“Indeed.”

“Good.” Puff. “I was beginning to wonder what is going to happen to him. I, er, gather that the last supply ships will be dropping off their cargo and heading home in a couple of days, and I was wondering if …?”

Sauer sat up. He put his pipe down; it had flamed out, and though the bowl was hot to the touch, it held nothing but white-stained black shreds. “You were wondering if I could sign him over to you and put you on the slow boat home with your man in tow.”

Vassily half smiled, embarrassed. “Exactly right, I’m sure. The man’s guilty as hell, anyone can see that; he needs to be sent home for a proper trial and execution — what do you say?” Sauer leaned back in his chair and contemplated the analytical engine. “You have a point,” he admitted.

“But things aren’t quite so clear-cut from where I’m sitting.” He relit his pipe.

“Nice tobacco, sir,” ventured Vassily. “Tastes a bit funny, though. Very relaxing.”

“That’ll be the opium,” said Sauer. “Good stuff, long as you don’t overdo it.” He puffed contentedly for a minute. “Why do you think Springfield’s in the brig in the first place?” Vassily looked puzzled. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? He violated Imperial regulations. In fact, that’s just what I’d been looking for.”

“Executing him isn’t going to make it easy for the Admiralty to convince foreign engineers to come work for us, though, is it?” Sauer sucked on his cigar. “If he was a spacer, lad, he’d have done the frog kick in the airlock already. I’ll tell you what. If you insist on dragging him home on the basis of what you found on him, all that will happen is that the Admiralty will sit on it for a few months, hold an inquiry, conclude that no real harm was done, court-martial him for something minor, and sentence him to time served — on general principles, that is — and leave you looking like an idiot. You don’t want to do that; trust me, putting a blot on your record card at this stage in the game is a bad move.”

“Ah, so what do you suggest, sir?”

“Well.” Sauer stubbed out his cigar and looked at it regretfully. “I think you’re going to have to decide whether or not to have a little flutter on the horses.”

“Horses, sir?”

“Gambling, Mr. Muller, gambling. Double or quits time. You have decided that this engineer is working for the skirt from Earth, no? It seems a justifiable suspicion to me, but there is a lack of firm evidence other than the disgraceful way she plays for him. Which, let us make no mistake, could equally well be innocent — disreputable but innocent of actual criminal intent against the Republic, I say. In any event, she has made no sign of wrongdoing, other than possessing proscribed instruments in her diplomatic bag and generally being detrimental to morale by virtue of her rather unvirtuous conduct. We have no grounds for censure, much less for declaring her persona non grata. And irritating though she may be, her presence on this mission was decreed by His Excellency the Archduke. So I think the time has come for you to either shit or get off the can. Either accept that Mr. Springfield is probably going to waltz free, or shoot for the bigger target and hope you find something big to pin on her so that we can overcome her immunity.”

Vassily turned pale. Perhaps it hadn’t really sunk in until now; he’d overstepped his authority already, rummaging in Rachel’s cabin, and either he must find a justification, or his future was in jeopardy. “I’ll gamble, sir. Do you have any recommendations, though? It seems like an awfully big step; I wouldn’t want to make any mistakes.”

Sauer grinned, not unpleasantly. “Don’t worry, you won’t. There’re others who want her out of the way and are willing to stick their necks out a bit to help. Here’s how we’ll flush her cover …”