Farnham's Freehold (20 page)

That got her a smile. Hugh called out, “Duke, try him in Spanish!”

“Okay.
Habla usted Español, Senor?
” No response—

Hugh sighed. “We’ve shot our wad.”

“
M’sieur?
” Joe said. “
Est-ce que vous parlez la langue française?
”

The man turned. “
Tiens?
”

“
Parlez-vous français, monsieur?
”

“
Mais oui! Vous êtes françaises?
”

“
Non, non! Je suis américain. Nous sommes tous américans.
”

“
Vraiment? Impossible!
”

“
C’est vrai, monsieur. Je vous en assure.
” Joe pointed to the empty flagpole. “
Les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique.
”

The conversation became hard to follow as both sides stumbled along in broken French. At last they paused and Joe said, “Hugh, he asked me—ordered me—to come into his tent and talk. I’ve asked him to let you all loose first. He says No. ‘Hell, no!’ it amounts to.”

“Ask him to let the women loose.”

“I’ll try.” Joe spoke at length with the big man. “He says the
enceinte femme
—that’s Barbara—can sit down where she is. The ‘fat one’—Grace he means—is to come with us.”

“Good work, Joe. Get us a deal.”

“I’ll try. I don’t understand him very well.”

The three went into the pavilion. Barbara found that she could sit down, even stretch out. But the invisible web held Hugh as clingingly as ever.

“Dad,” Duke said urgently, “this is our chance, while nobody is around who understands English.”

“Duke,” Hugh answered wearily, “can’t you see they hold trumps? It’s my guess that we are alive as long as he isn’t annoyed—not one minute longer.”

“Aren’t you even going to try to fight? Where’s that crap you used to spout about how you were a free man and planned to stay free?”

Hugh rubbed his hurt hand. “Duke, I won’t argue. You start anything and you’ll get us killed. That’s how I size it up.”

“So it was just crap,” Duke said scornfully. “Well, I’m not making any promises.”

“All right. Drop it.”

“I’m not making promises. Just tell me this, Dad. How does it feel to be shoved around? Instead of shoving?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Neither did I. I’ve never forgotten it. I hope you get your bellyful.”

Barbara said, “Duke, for heaven’s sake, stop talking like a fool!”

Duke looked at her. “I’ll shut up. Just one thing. Where
did
you get that baby in you?”

Barbara did not answer. Hugh said quietly, “Duke, if we get out of this, I promise you a beating.”

“Any time, old man.”

They quit talking. Barbara reached out and patted Hugh’s ankle. Five men gathered around the pile of household objects, looking them over. A man came up and gave them an order; they dispersed. He looked at the chattels himself, then peered into the shelter and went inside.

Hugh heard a sound of water, saw a brown wave rushing down the stream bed. Barbara raised her head. “What’s that?”

“Our dam is gone. It doesn’t matter.”

After a long time, Joe came out of the pavilion alone. He came up to Hugh and said, “Well, here’s the scoop, as nearly as I got it. Not too near, maybe; he speaks a patois and neither of us is fluent. But here it is. We’re trespassers, this is private land. He figured we were escaped prisoners—the word is something else, not French, but that’s the idea. I’ve convinced him—I think I have—that we are innocent people here through no fault of our own.

“Anyhow, he’s not sore, even though we are technically criminals—trespass, and planting things where farms aren’t supposed to be and building a dam and a house and things like that. I think everything is going to be all right—as long as we do as we’re told. He finds us interesting—how we got here and so forth.”

Joe looked at Barbara. “You remember your theory about parallel universes?”

“I guess I was right. No?”

“No. This part is as confused as can be. But one thing is certain. Barbara, Hugh—Duke—get this! This is our own world, right here.”

Duke said, “Joe, that’s preposterous.”

“You argue with him. He knows what I mean by the United States, he knows where France is. And so forth. No question about it.”

“Well…” Duke paused. “As may be. But what about this?
Where’s my mother?
What’s the idea of leaving her with that savage?”

“She’s all right, she’s having lunch with him. And enjoying it. Let it run easy, Duke, and we’re going to be okay, I think. Soon as they finish lunch we’ll be leaving.”

Somewhat later Hugh helped Barbara into one of the odd flying machines, then mounted into one himself, behind the pilot. He found the seat comfortable and, in place of a safety belt, a field of that quicksand enclosed his lower body as he sat down. His pilot, a young Negro who looked remarkably like Joe, glanced back, then took off without noise or fuss and joined the re-forming rectangle in the air. Hugh saw that perhaps half the cars had passengers; they were whites, the pilots were invariably colored, ranging from as light brown as a Javanese to as sooty black as a Fiji Islander.

The car Hugh was in was halfway back in the outside starboard file. He looked around for the others and was only mildly surprised to see Grace riding behind the boss, in the front rank, center position. Joe was behind them, rather buried in cats.

Off to his right, two cars had not joined up. One hovered over the pile of household goods, gathered them up in a nonexistent cargo net, moved away. The second car was over the shelter.

The massive block lifted straight up without disturbing the shack on its roof. The small car and its giant burden took position fifty feet off the starboard side. The formation moved forward and gathered speed but Hugh felt no wind of motion. The car flanking them seemed to have no trouble keeping up. Hugh could not see the other loaded car but assumed that it was on the port side.

The last he saw of their home was a scar where the shelter had rested, a larger scar where Barbara’s farm had been, and a meandering track that used to mark an irrigation ditch.

He rubbed his sore hand, reflecting that the whole thing had been a gross abuse of coincidence. It offended him the way thirteen spades in a putatively honest deal would offend him. He pondered a remark Joe had made before they loaded: “We were incredibly lucky to have encountered a scholar. French is a dead language—
‘une langue perdue,’
he called it.”

Hugh craned his neck, caught Barbara’s eye. She smiled.

Memtok, Chief Palace Domestic to the Lord Protector of the Noonday Region, was busy and happy—happy because he was busy, although he was not aware that he was happy and was given to complaining about how hard he had to work, because, as he put it, although he commanded eighteen hundred servants there were not three who could be trusted to empty a slop jar without supervision.

He had just completed a pleasant interview chewing out the head chef; he had suggested that the chef himself, old and tough as he was, nevertheless would make a better roast than the meat the chef had sent in to Their Charity the evening before. One of the duties that Memtok assumed personally was always to sample what his lord ate, despite risk of poison and despite the fact that Their Charity’s tastes in cuisine were not his own. It was one of the innumerable ways in which Memtok gave attention to details, diligence that had brought him, still in his prime, to his present supreme eminence.

The head chef had grumbled and Memtok had sent him away with a taste of the lesser whip to remind him that cooks were not that hard to find. Then he had turned happily to his paper work.

There were stacks of it, as he had just completed moving the household from the Palace to the Summer Palace—thirty-eight of the Chosen but only four hundred and sixty-three servants; the summer residence was run with a skeleton staff. The twice-yearly move involved a wash of paper work—purchase orders, musters, inventories, vouchers, shipping lists, revisions of duty rosters, dispatches—and he considered advising his patron to have some likely youngster muted and trained as his clerk. But he rejected the idea; Memtok did not trust servants who could read and write and add, it gave them ideas even if they could not talk.

The truth was, Memtok loved his paper work and did not want to share it. His hands flew over the papers, checking figures, signing his symbol, okaying payments. He held his pen in an odd fashion, nested between the first three fingers of his right hand—this because he had no thumbs.

He did not miss them, could barely remember what it had been like to have them. Nor did he need them. He could handle a spoon, a pen, and a whip without them, and he had no need ever to handle anything else.

Far from missing his thumbs, he was proud of their absence; they proved that he had served his lord in both major capacities, at stud when he was younger and now these many years as a tempered domestic. Every male servant over fourteen (with scarce special exceptions) showed one alteration or the other; very few could exhibit both, only a few hundred on the entire Earth. Those few spoke as equals only to each other, they were an élite.

Someone scratched at the door. “Come!” he called out, then growled, “What do
you
want?” The growl was automatic but he really did dislike this servant for the best of reasons; he was not subject to Memtok’s discipline. He was of a different caste, huntsmen, wardens, keepers, and beaters, and was subject to the Majordomo of the Preserve. The Majordomo considered himself to be of the same rank as the Chief Domestic, and nominally was. However, he had thumbs.

Memtok’s greatest objection to the Summer Palace was that it put him in contact with these servants who had the unpardonable fault of not being under his orders. While it would take only a word to Their Charity to crack down on one of them, he disliked to ask, and while he could touch one of them without real fear of reprimand, the louse would be sure to complain to his boss. Memtok did not believe in friction between executive servants. Bad for morale.

“Message from Boss. Rayed to tell you Their Charity on his way back. Says four savages with escort. Says you better tear up to the roof, take care of them. All.”

“‘All’? Damn you, what do you mean ‘All’? Why four savages? And in the Name of Uncle when are they arriving?”

“All,” the servant insisted. “Message came in twenty minutes ago. I been looking all over for you.”

“
Get out!
” The important part of the message was that Their Charity was arriving home instead of staying away overnight. Chef, Receptionist, Musical Director, Housekeeper, Groundskeeper, all heads of departments—he was phoning orders even as he thought. Four savages? Who cared about savages?

But he was on the roof and accepted their custody. He would have been there anyway, with the Lord Protector arriving.

When they arrived, Hugh had no chance to see Barbara. When he was released from the restraint of the “seat belt,” he was confronted by a little baldheaded white man with a waspish face, an abrupt manner, and a whip. He was dressed in a white robe which reminded Hugh of a nightshirt, save that it had on the right shoulder the red and gold patch which Hugh had tentatively identified as the insigne of the big man, the boss. The emblem was repeated in rubies and gold on the chest of the little man as a medallion supported by a heavy gold chain.

The man looked him over with obvious distaste, then turned him and Duke over to another white man in a nightshirt. This man wore no medallion but did carry a small whip. Hugh rubbed his hand and resolved not to test whether this whip was as potent as the ornate one carried by the big boss.

Duke tested it. The angry little man gave instructions to his straw boss, and left. The straw boss gave an order; Hugh interpreted the tone and gesture as: “All right, you guys, get going”—and got going.

Duke didn’t. The straw boss barely touched him on his calf; Duke yelped. He limped the rest of the way—down a ramp, into a very fast lift, then into a windowless, light, white-walled room which whiffed of hospitals.

Duke understood the order to strip without needing to be stimulated; he cursed but complied. Hugh merely complied. He was beginning to understand the system. The whips were used as spurs are used by a good rider, to exact prompt obedience but not to damage.

From there they were herded into a smaller room, where they were hit from all sides by streams of water. The operator was in a gallery above. He shouted at them, then indicated in pantomime that they were to scrub.

They scrubbed. The jets cut off, they were doused in liquid soap. They scrubbed again and were rinsed and were required to scrub still again, all to gestures that left no doubt as to how thorough a bath was expected. The jets got very hot and harsh, changed to cold and still harsher, were replaced by blasts of hot air.

It was too much like an automatic dishwasher, Hugh felt, but they ended up cleaner than they had been in months. An assistant to the bathmaster then plastered strips over their eyebrows, rubbed an emulsion on their scalps, into their scratchy beards (neither had shaved that day), over their backs and chests and arms and legs, and finally into their pubic hair. Duke got another lesson in obedience before he submitted to this last. When, thereafter, they were subjected willy-nilly to enemas, he gritted his teeth and took it. The water closet was a whirlpool set in the floor. Their finger- and toenails were cut short.

After that they were bathed again. The eyebrow patches washed away. So did their hair. When they came out, they were both bald all over, save for eyebrows.

The bathmaster made them gargle, showing them what he wanted and spitting into the whirlpool. They gargled three times—a pleasant, pungent liquid—and when it was over, Hugh found that his teeth seemed cleaner than they had ever been in his life. He felt utterly clean, lively, glowing with well being—but humiliated.

They were taken to another room and examined.

Their examiner wore the conventional white nightshirt and a small insigne on a thin gold chain but he needed no diplomas on the wall to show his profession. His bedside manner would never make him rich, Hugh decided; he had the air of military surgeons Hugh had known—not unkind but impersonal.