The beast Saburo rode to Hansen's home was a dinohyid that looked like a huge pig. The slim god with oriental features sat doll-sized in his saddle on the creature's bristling, two-meter back.
Hansen waved from his crystal enclosure. When Saburo dropped the dinohyid's reins and sprang lightly from its back, the beast snorted and began to browse morosely. The grass that covered much of the rolling plain was of little interest to it.
"Just thought I'd visit and see how you were getting on," Saburo said as he entered the observation room.
The giant hog the young man rode was at variance with the fussy niceness Saburo projected in all other respects. His clothing was in muted taste, layers of translucent robes which were mostly shades of gray. The black-and-orange tiger stripes of the innermost garment were smothered into a suggestion, not a highlight.
The ensemble had been high fashion in Saburo's section of the Consensus of Worlds—before Saburo came to Northworld as part of an exploration unit and found godhead.
"Moving along," said Hansen. "Can't complain."
Hansen gestured to the image on part of the observation room's windows. There was no point in trying to hide the scene from his visitor. If Saburo was interested enough to come here, he had doubtless been following the events already.
To the east of the building, the dinohyid nuzzled soft-bodied flowers from among the grassblades. On the lower side, the view plunged toward the distant arroyo which was dry except when Hansen's whim brought the rains down in thunderclaps and sheets of sky-splitting lightning.
Between the landscapes, instead of a sideslope, an image of Ritter caressed instruments that probed Krita's dragonfly.
"What's he doing now?" Saburo asked.
Hansen shrugged. "I'm not sure," he said. "Just looking it over so far, I suppose."
He grinned at his visitor. Neither man was big, the way the bulky Ritter or North, almost two meters tall, were; but Saburo looked like a sparrow—
While Hansen was a sparrowhawk, blunt-featured and strong and assuredly a predator.
"After all," said Hansen, "if I knew what he was doing, I wouldn't need him to do it, would I?"
Saburo checked the hang of his robes critically, then smoothed the pleat of the fourth layer between his thumb and forefinger. His hands were slender but corded with sinew.
"That's rather the problem, isn't it?" he remarked as he returned his attention to the engineer. "Having the power to accomplish anything we want doesn't mean that we know what we should want."
Hansen had arranged the image to look down on Ritter from a slight angle, with a panorama of the entire engineering complex beyond as though the walls did not exist. A dozen under-engineers worked in separate alcoves or lounged, chatting or staring at the ceiling—which was very possibly work also. From the number of empty cubicles, as many more of Ritter's personnel were out on the shop floor, supervising construction.
Ritter touched his controls. A beam of cyan light vanished into the ultraviolet, then reappeared as pure magenta as it rotated about the surface of one of the dragonfly's legs. A greatly magnified hologram of the leg's internal structure appeared in the air behind the engineer and in a small screen inset into his console.
"You think that one's good, do you?" Saburo asked without looking at Hansen.
Hansen smiled at the indirection. "He is good, Saburo," he said mildly.
"I don't suppose you'll need him after your game with North is finished," his slender visitor said. "Will you?" Saburo pretended to watch intently as Ritter's console hummed and the holographic information dissolved into its central file for analysis.
Hansen's expression did not change, but his face was suddenly harder as all the muscles beneath the skin grew minusculely more taut. "It's not a game, Saburo," he said evenly.
Saburo fluttered a hand and met Hansen's direct gaze. "Not to you, I'm sure," he said.
"Not to North either," Hansen snapped. "And most particularly not to the people in the West Kingdom."
Saburo could not have been either a coward or a fool and still qualify for a place in an exploration unit. He straightened but he did not back away from his host's sudden cold anger. "Yes," he said, "of course, in the Open Lands. . . . But let's not argue, Commissioner. I wish you well, though—" neither his face nor his voice changed "—with our leader on the other side, I don't know how optimistic you can be about success."
Hansen relaxed with a chuckle. "Yeah, well," he said. "There aren't any guarantees in life, are there?"
Hansen continued to smile, but there was a slight edge in his voice as he went on, "Care to tell me what brought you here?"
"You're so very direct, Commissioner," Saburo said with a brittle laugh. "It's a wonder to me that you don't get along better with poor Penny."
He waved a dismissive hand, a flutter of gray robes, as he saw Hansen's face go cold again. "Please forgive me, we all have our ways. I came because I could use a servant who understood how to make things. I was rather hoping—"
Saburo turned aside, having forced himself as far as his personality could go into flat statement and direct eye contact.
Ritter's probe was now chrome yellow. It wriggled in a narrow line across the dragonfly's saddle. The mass of gray patterns in the engineer's hologram could have been a complex parking lot, but it was more probably a map of the vehicle's microcircuitry.
"I was rather hoping," Saburo continued to the image, "that you might give this servant of yours to me. When you're finished with him, of course."
"He's a human being, Saburo," Hansen said. There was just enough steel in his tone to make sure his visitor would listen and understand what he was being told. "I won't give him to anybody."
Robes fluttered.
"But if you want to cut your own deal with Ritter when he and I are through," Hansen continued more mildly, "then I won't have any objections, no."
He grinned and added, "Penny might have ideas of her own, of course. But that's between you two."
"Oh, I'm not worried about our Penny," Saburo said. He gave a high-pitched giggle. "At the rate she goes through men—even if duration mattered to us, I wouldn't be concerned about the wait."
He looked at the engineer and pursed his lips. "One can't really say that Penny has a type, of course. But it still seems a little odd that she'd have any real interest in a dwarf from the Fifth Plane, doesn't it?"
"Maybe she's more interested in what he is than in what body he comes wrapped in," Hansen suggested with no apparent emotional gloss over his words.
"Penny?" said Saburo in amazement.
He stared at Hansen, then giggled again. "Oh, you caught me that time, Commissioner. You see, I can never tell when you're making one of your little jokes."
Saburo looked back at the engineer. Ritter stood and stretched with his fingers locked behind his short, massive neck. His elbow blurred a portion of the hologram which continued to scroll upward in a dense array, meaningless to either Hansen or his visitor.
"The tricky part," said Saburo with a slight narrowing of the eyes, "will be to prevent Penny from disposing of Master Ritter in some final fashion when she gets tired of him. That would be such a waste! He makes things so well."