Infernal Devices (19 page)

l86

"Excellent!" cried Pennyroyal, and leaped up gratefully to greet his visitor. "Plovery! My dear fellow! How splendid to see you!"

Walter Plovery, an antique dealer from one of the fouler warrens of the Laines, was the mayor's advisor on Old Tech, and he had helped Pennyroyal to make himself a tidy little nest egg by secretly selling off items from the Brighton Museum. He was a small, nervous man with a face that looked as if somebody had molded it out of dough and then forgotten to bake it. He seemed startled by Pennyroyal's exuberant greeting--people weren't usually so glad to see him, but then, people weren't usually being quizzed about lovely aviatrices by Mrs. Pennyroyal when he walked in on them.

"I have been doing some research into that
item
Your Worship showed me," he said, sidling closer to Pennyroyal. His eyes flicked uncertainly toward Boo-Boo. "You remember, Your Worship? The
item?"

"Oh, there's no need for secrecy, Plovery," Pennyroyal told him. "Boo-Boo knows all it about it. Don't you, my little upside-down cake? That metal book affair I swiped off of old Shkin last week. I had Plovery take a look at it, just to see what he thought...."

Boo-Boo smiled faintly and reached for the newspaper, turning to the gossip page. "Do excuse me, Mr. Plovery. I find talk about Old Tech so dull...."

Plovery nodded, bobbed a bow in her general direction, and turned back to Pennyroyal. "You still have the item?"

"It's in the safe in my office," said Pennyroyal. "Why? Reckon it might be worth something?"

"Po-o-ossibly," said Plovery cautiously.

"The Lost Girl who came with it seemed to think it had something to do with submarines."

Mr. Plovery allowed himself a chuckle. "Oh no, Your Worship. She clearly knows nothing about the machine languages of the Ancients."

"A machine language, eh?"

"A code, which would have been used by our ancestors to communicate with one of their computer brains. I can find no example of this particular language anywhere in the historical records. However, it is similar to certain surviving fragments of American military code."

"American, eh?" said Pennyroyal, and then, "Military? That should be worth a bob or two. This war's been dragging on for fourteen years. People are desperate. The R&D departments of the big fighting cities would pay a fortune for a sniff at a super-weapon."

Plovery's face grew ever so slightly pink as he imagined his percentage of a fortune. "Would you like me to try and arrange a sale, Your Worship? I have contacts in the Mobile Free States...."

Pennyroyal shook his head. "No, Plovery, I'll handle this. There's no point doing anything until after Moon Festival. I'll keep the book in my safe until the celebrations are over and then get in touch with a few of my contacts. There's an archaeologist of my aquaintance, a charming young woman named Cruwys Morchard; she often stops in Brighton in the autumn time, and she always seems to be on the lookout for unusual bits of Old Tech. Yes, I think I can arrange a sale without troubling you, Plovery."

He shooed the disgruntled Old Tech dealer away and sat

down to continue his breakfast, only to be confronted with the
Palimpsest,
which his wife was holding up for him to see. There, on the front page of the gossip section, was a full-length photograph of himself entering a casino in the Laines on the arm of Orla Twombley, who was looking even more goddesslike than Pennyroyal remembered.

"Well," he blustered, "she's not really what I'd call
pretty...."

"Poor Boo-Boo!" said Wren, standing unnoticed on a gallery high above the breakfast room beside her new friend Cynthia Twite. Pennyroyal's chat with Plovery had been too quiet for her to overhear, but she had listened to every word of the exchange about Orla Twombley. "I don't know how she puts up with it...."

"Puts up with what?" asked Cynthia innocently.

"Didn't you hear? Boo-Boo thinks he's been having a liaison with Orla Twombley!"

"What's a 'liaison'?" asked Cynthia, frowning. "Is it a sort of cake?"

Wren sighed. Cynthia was very sweet, very pretty, and very dim. She had been a house slave at the Pavilion for several years, and when Wren arrived, Mrs. Pennyroyal had asked her to be Wren's friend and explain the workings of the household to her. Wren was glad of the companionship, but she felt she already understood more about the life of the Pavilion than Cynthia had ever known.

"Boo-Boo thinks that Pennyroyal and Ms. Twombley are having a fling," she explained patiently.

"Oh!" Cynthia looked scandalized. "Oh, poor Mistress! To

think, a man of his age throwing himself at slinky aviatrices!"

"I could tell you some things about Pennyroyal that are a lot worse than that," Wren whispered, and then stopped, remembering that she must not tell Cynthia anything. To everyone on Cloud 9, Wren was just a Lost Girl who knew nothing about Pennyroyal beyond what he'd written in his silly books.

"What?" asked Cynthia, intrigued. "What things?"

"I'll tell you another time," Wren promised, knowing that Cynthia would forget.

To change the subject, she said, "Who is that boy behind Boo-Boo's chair? The one with the fan? I saw him at the pool the other day. He always looks so sad."

"Oh, he's another new arrival, like you," said Cynthia excitedly. "He's been here for only a few weeks. His name's Theo Ngoni, and he used to be a Green Storm aviator! He got captured in a big battle somewhere, and Pennyroyal bought him for Boo-Boo as a birthday present. It's meant to be ever so stylish to have a captured Mossie as a slave, but I think it's scary. I mean, we could all be murdered in our beds, couldn't we! Look at him! Don't he look vicious?"

Wren studied the boy. He did not look vicious to her. He was no older than she was, and far too young to be fighting in battles. How terrible it must have been for him to be defeated and dragged away from his home and sent here to wave a fan at the Pennyroyals all day! No wonder he seemed so miserable. Wren felt sorry for him, and that soon made her feel sorry for herself too, and reminded her that she should be looking for a way to escape from this place.

***

For a few days Pennyroyal had taken a special interest in Wren, calling her "my fan from beneath the sea" and lending her his latest book, a history of the war with the Green Storm. But he quickly forgot her, and she became just another of his wife's many slaves.

Her new life was simple. She rose each day at seven, breakfasted, and went with the other girls of Mrs. Pennyroyal's household to Mrs. Pennyroyal's bedchamber, where they woke Mrs. Pennyroyal and helped her dress and spent an hour working on her hairdo, which was elaborate, expensive, and several feet tall. In the mornings, when the mayor went down to the Town Hall, his wife liked to take a long, relaxing wallow in the swimming pool. Sometimes in the afternoons, when Pennyroyal came home tipsy from something he called a "working lunch," Boo-Boo took the cable car down to Brighton and went visiting, or opened things, but she never took any of her pretty young handmaidens with her, just a couple of slave boys to carry her shopping.

At eight in the evening, dinner was served, usually a big affair with many guests, and Wren and the other girls running in and out with roast swan, shark steaks, sea-pie, and great wobbling desserts. After that, Mrs. Pennyroyal had to be helped to bathe and dress for bed before the girls were finally allowed to go to their own beds, in a dormitory on the ground floor.

It was hard work sometimes, but when she was not busy attending to the mayoress, Wren was allowed to do pretty much what she liked, and what she liked, in those first few weeks, was to wander about the Pavilion and its grounds with Cynthia Twite.

Pennyroyal's palace was a treasure trove of wonders, and Wren loved the gardens, with their shaded walks and summerhouses, the elaborate topiary maze, the groves of blue-green cypresses and shrines to antique gods. Sometimes, as Brighton steamed south into warmer waters and golden autumn sunshine, she would stand at the handrail at the gardens' edge and look down at the white city below her, at the shining sea, at the circling gulls and the airships and the pennants streaming in the wind, and wonder if it hadn't been worth getting kidnapped and enslaved just to see so much beauty.

But more and more, as the weeks wore by, she missed her mum and dad. She knew she had to get away from Cloud 9. But how? No airships were allowed to land on the airborne deck plate, so the only way off was by cable car, and the cable car was closely guarded by Brighton's red-coated militia. And even if she made it down to Brighton, what good would that do her? She wore the brand of the Shkin Corporation, and if she tried to board an outbound ship, she would be taken up as a runaway slave and handed straight back to Shkin.

And all the time, she was being carried farther and farther from her home. Brighton was nosing south down the long coast of the Hunting Ground while dusty two-tiered Traction Towns kept pace with it onshore. Everybody was talking about Moon Festival, Boo-Boo endlessly writing and rewriting the guest list for the mayor's ball, the cooks in the Pavilion kitchens working overtime to turn out moon-shaped cakes and silver moon-sweets. The rising of the first full moon of autumn was an event sacred to all the most popular religions. There would be parties and processions aboard

Brighton, and all over the world the Moon Festival fires would burn in city and static alike. There would even be one lonely bonfire on the Dead Continent, for at Anchorage-in-Vineland, Moon Festival was the biggest social event of the year.

Wren imagined her friends piling up driftwood and broken furniture in the meadow behind the city, and maybe wondering where she was and whether she was safe. How she wished she could be there with them! She couldn't imagine how she had ever thought their lives dull, or why she had argued so with Mummy. Each night, lying in her bed in the slave quarters, she would hug herself and whisper the songs she used to sing when she was little, and pretend that the creaking of the hawsers that attached Cloud 9 to its gasbags was the murmur of waves against the shores of Vineland.

Wren had almost forgotten Nabisco Shkin, and, to be fair, Nabisco Shkin had almost forgotten her. Sometimes, as he went about his busy round of meetings, he glanced up at Cloud 9 and allowed himself to feel a momentary pleasure at the revenge he would take on the girl who had tricked him, but his plans for a slaving expedition to Vineland were at a very early stage, and he had more pressing business to attend to.

Today, for instance, he had received a very interesting note from a man named Plovery.

Descending to the Pepperpot's midlevel, he exited through a side door and strode quickly into the maze of the Laines. These narrow streets, lit only by sputtering argon globes and by shafts of sunlight that poked down through vents and skylights in the deck plates overhead, were the

haunt of beggars, thieves, and ne'er-do-wells, but Shkin was well enough known to walk them without a bodyguard. Even the most witless of Brighton's lowlifes had a pretty good idea of what would happen to anyone who dared lay a finger on Nabisco Shkin. People stepped out of his way, and turned to watch him when he had gone past. Roistering aviators were tugged out of his path by their friends. Unwary drug touts and gutter girls started back as if his glance had burned them. Only one miserable dreadlocked beggar, leading a dog on a length of string, dared to whine, "A few spare dolphins, sir? Just to buy some food?"

"Eat the dog," suggested Shkin, and made a mental note to send a snatch squad to this district once Moon Festival was over. He would be doing his city a favor by sweeping these scum off the streets, and they would all fetch a profit at the autumn markets.

He entered a narrow alleyway behind a fried-fish stall, holding a handkerchief to his nose to ward off the stench of pee and batter. In the windows of a scruffy shop at the alley's end, mounds of junk and Old Tech glimmered. PLOVERY said the faded sign above them, and the jangle of the bell as Shkin opened the door brought the antiques dealer scurrying from a back room.

"You wished to see me?"

"Why, yes, sir, yes...." Plovery bowed and beamed, and twined his thin white fingers into knots. Annoyed at Pennyroyal's decision to find a buyer for the Tin Book without his help, the antiques dealer had decided to take what he knew about it to another wealthy man. His note had dropped into Shkin's in-box just an hour ago, and he was impressed

and a little startled to find Shkin standing here in person quite so soon. Nervously, he told the slave dealer all that he had learned.

"Military, eh?" said Shkin, just as Pennyroyal had a few hours earlier. "An ancient weapon?"

"Just a code, sir," Plovery cautioned. "But perhaps a clever man who understood such things might work backward from the code and reconstruct the machine that it was written for. That could be valuable, sir. And as Pennyroyal told me that he had got the book from you--'I tricked that creep Shkin into handing it over for free' were his exact words, sir, if you'll forgive me--well, I thought you might be interested, sir."

"I have already made arrangements that will repay His Worship for that little episode," said Shkin, annoyed that this wretch knew how Pennyroyal had outwitted him. He was intrigued by Plovery's story all the same. "You made a copy of the book, of course?"

"No, sir. Pennyroyal will not let it out of his sight. It is in his safe at the Pavilion. But if I had a buyer, sir, I might be able to get my hands on it. I am a frequent visitor to the Pavilion, sir."

Shkin twitched an eyebrow. He was interested, but not interested enough yet to lay down the sort of money that he knew Plovery would want. "I deal in slaves, not Old Tech," he said.

"Of course, sir. But what if it does turn out to be some ancient weapon? It might tip the balance. End the war. And the war has been so good for business, sir, has it not?"