New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers (4 page)

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O
F ALL THE IRRELEVANT QUALITIES THAT MEN HAVE CHOSEN
to cherish, immensity is perhaps the least worthy. The Nashuite Empire is easily the largest political entity of all the many misbegotten accidents under which men have lived.

On the face of it, the Empire is ungovernable. Communication and travel are of equal speed; both are slow, and the Empire is vast. Common law and common language are strained by distance. How long either will survive is a question. Moulton’s classic,
The Dynamic Equilibrium of Unstable Systems
, which describes the happenstance by which such a precarious proposition manages to reel along and hold together by its reeling, is worth the attention of every serious student.

And those bureaucratic boobs on Nashua actually spend the bulk of their time planning how the Empire may be extended! Every single one of them pictures himself as a spider sitting at the center of an immense web, every muscle movement having its effects at the ends of the universe. In actual fact, they tend to cancel each other out, though the idiotic little wars the Empire fights from time to time with the little confederacies, free planets, and shadows that line its borders may be laid at their door. Dumb, dumb, dumb. But they don’t know any better. How could they? They never even heard of Moulton, any of them.

The farther one travels from Nashua, the more of a chimera the Empire becomes. There are planets where it has no place in waking thought—the word, like a phrase of song forgotten for twenty years, floats elusively at the edges of dreams and disappears altogether in the face of solid morning realities.

* * *

In the
Orion
, bound for Star Well, two of the girls on their way to Miss McBurney’s Justly Famous Seminary were making secret plans in their cramped little cabin. The one in the lower bunk lay on her back looking upward. The one above was flopped on her elbows, thumbing a book.

The one below was named Alice Tutuila. Young she was, and darkly pretty. Her parents had carefully explained to her the point in going to Miss McBurney’s. With schooling in being a lady, the cachet of an education on Nashua, her own attractions and her parents’ able help, she would make a good marriage and live happily ever after. She was not so very romantic a girl that she failed to see the desirability of living happily ever after. Therefore she was willing to endure Mrs. Bogue, discomfort, homesickness, and the traveler’s disease with the thought that minor tribulation is always the lot of heroines.

The girl in the upper bunk was of far less certain origin, though the documents submitted in her behalf had been sound enough to satisfy the eye of Miss McBurney, who was unfailing in the requirements she demanded of prospective pupils. These were a sound enough pedigree for the school to maintain its social standing, and money. If faced with sufficient quantities of the second requirement, she would compromise just a teensy little bit on the first—but this time she was fooled.

But that was all right, because the girl in the upper bunk didn’t want to go to Miss McBurney’s Justly Famous Seminary and Finishing School on Nashua. She wanted all the good things that her parents wished her to postpone in favor of an education. She wanted to cheat, and con, and double-cross, and swindle, and defraud, and bamboozle, with just a bit of flimflamming on the side, after the manner of her fathers.

She was not overly pretty, not the sort of girl whose looks would hold your eye, not the sort of girl you would pick out in a room to fall in love with. She had sparkle and a lived-in face, both qualities that beautiful women can lack. Basically, however, she was just a girl—and that was perfect for someone with her ambitions.

She was planning to skip at first opportunity, and Alice Tutuila was romantically willing to help her, at least to the extent of making plans. For aid in settling on a jumping-off point, reference works—guidebooks borrowed from behind the theology discussion in the main cabin—were the thing.

“So what do you have there?” Alice asked.

“ ‘Star Well: 2 lndg prts, rms 315 (9th–1r), dng var. (Grand Hall 4A), gmg, th & a, a*, d*, p-(A), sh-(A), no ta, sked 3 wk + unsked. Circumstances make this one. Star Well is a tiny rock, but because of location, hub of the Flammarion Rift. Primarily an entrepôt, and secondarily known for its gaming tables. Extremely dull, we’re afraid, unless you gamble.’ Then there’s an owner-operator list. But that’s all it says.”

“What does the first part mean? All the abbreviations?”

“Let me find the table. Oh, yes. There are two landing ports, and 315 rooms, ranging from nine thalers up to one royal a day.”

“They charge that much for a room? Wow.”

“That is an awful lot. There’s a variety of dining accommodations and a special note for the Grand Hall. It’s—let me see—excellent and extremely expensive. Gaming, but they said that afterwards. Theater and amusements. Alcohol. Drugs. Perversions—limited and expensive. Shopping—also limited and expensive. No tourist attractions. Three ships a week plus unscheduled.”

“That doesn’t sound very good, Louisa. It sounds kind of small. There’s nowhere to
flee
to. You can’t run away if you can’t
flee
anywhere. Hey. Say, how about this: You hide in the closet of a royal-a-day room until the ship departs without you. A gorgeous gentleman discovers you there and is smitten with your charms. He offers on the spot to make you his mistress and carries you away to a life of sin and mad, mad passion. Oh, I love it.” Alice hugged her pillow and closed her eyes.

“I’m not sure that would work. He might not like me that much. Or maybe he wouldn’t be gorgeous. Anyway, I’ll have to see the place.” She thumbed ahead in the book. “Let me see what the next stop is like. Oh, this is much better.”

* * *

“What’s this about losing money to young Villiers?” Shirabi asked. He was wearing his gloves and disposable suit, and he was up to his elbows in chemical glop designed to make the plants he worked among grow up big, and straight, and strong, and healthy. After all too many years of nervousness and ill-health, the result of living under constant pressure in small rooms and dealing only with symbols and symbols of symbols, he had adopted a hobby designed to put him back in touch.

“Plant a seed, watch it grow, baby it along—it’s a real satisfaction,” he liked to say.

He didn’t care particularly what he grew, though he knew each plant as a friend. But flowers and food were irrelevancies. He just liked to see plants and know he had a hand in raising them. He liked to discover what food a plant liked best and supply it. He liked the feeling of fatherhood.

“I’ve won money, Shirabi,” said Godwin.

“I expect that. I don’t expect the other. I don’t pay you to lose money.”

“You don’t pay me at all!” Godwin said sharply. “Let’s not forget that.”

“No. But as long as you’re here, you might as well do something for your keep. And I don’t include losing my money. You know I’m saving every minim. You know ways to avoid losing.”

“My money, too,” Godwin said. He was sitting gingerly on a stool he had covered first, and was regarding his surroundings with distaste.

There was an essential difference between Shirabi and Godwin: If they were both drinking cider and eating summer sausage, which I hope you will agree they both might do, and each dropped his piece of sausage between the cushions of his chair, both would fish for it among the trash. But they would assume different attitudes for their search, and they would search for different reasons.

Shirabi turned around, straightening. “How did you lose?”

“Why don’t you get rid of these weeds? I hate them.”

“How did you lose?”

“Or hold these meetings of yours elsewhere.”

“How did you lose?”

“He knew what I was doing and called me on it. No challenge. Just let me know he knew what I was doing. He knows Josiah’s Flambeau table is rigged, too. I had to stop, and he won after that.”

Shirabi laughed. “No challenge? His type isn’t like that. No, you must have ducked, my fine gentleman.”

“Don’t
say
that! I tell you that he didn’t press the point.”

“Oh, didn’t he? Your reputation overwhelm him, did it?”

“I can handle him if I need to. I told him so, in a roundabout fashion.”

“I’m sure he was impressed.”

Shirabi was startled as Godwin came abruptly off the stool and across the room. Before he could drop the formula mixing bottle he was holding and bring his hands up, Godwin had him by the throat and was bending him painfully back over the hard edge of the tank. A green frond batted him lightly across the nose.

Tightly, exactly, word by word, Godwin said, “He did not challenge me.”

With equal tightness, the result not of emotion but of a constricted throat, Shirabi said, “Look at your suit.”

With sudden apprehension, Godwin loosed the darker man and stepped back, looking down at himself. He could feel the wetness even before he saw it. His entire front was darkening rapidly with the formula poured on it by Shirabi. His lip began to tremble and his face to darken with anger.

The instant he was released, Shirabi ducked down, went under the tank and came up on the other side. With one clean motion be dipped his mixing bucket into the chemical sludge and brought it up at the ready.

“You ruined my suit!”

“That I did. I’m not one of your six a year, or whatever the count is. If I killed you, I wouldn’t even bother to remember it.
Gentleman!
”

Godwin made a movement toward the front of his suit.

“Don’t bother,” Shirabi said. “You might kill me, but you’d get a bucket of chemicals in the face, and I guarantee you’d swallow half of it if I had to sit on your head and pour it down your throat.”

After the briefest of hesitations, Godwin looked down at his suit again and the moment was over. That sort of fight needs momentum to turn deadly, and the momentum was gone.

“If I ever got into a fight with you, I’d kill you,” Godwin said.

However, Godwin was not certain of this. Though Shirabi might not share his pretensions and might even resent them, he was no less dangerous for his common clothes.

Shirabi simply said, “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Godwin had gone to considerable trouble to leave all commonness behind him, and it had never seemed fair that Shirabi should have more power here than a man of greater polish. Their dislike was mutual. Being the men they were, one day one might decide to kill the other. This time, however, Godwin simply nodded sharply and took his soiled suit away to be changed before it fell apart.

After Godwin had gone, Shirabi puttered around his plants thoughtfully. Once he took off his left glove and scratched his ear. Finally, he went to the service in the corner. The signal showed contact when the call was completed, but Godwin left his end of the conversation dark. An inconvenient moment, perhaps.

“Gentleman, I’ve been thinking and I’m starting to wonder about this Mr. Villiers of ours. If he didn’t challenge you, he isn’t the man I was taking him for. And I found him wandering down here this morning. Accidentally lost, he said.”

“In the basements?”

“Yes. He’s altogether too sharp for my taste. And he told me he was leaving tomorrow for Luvashe. That’s where he came from. Why would he just travel out here and then turn around? Makes it sound like he was coming here
for
something. I only know one thing that could be.”

“That’s your problem, not mine,” Godwin said. “From now on, I’m just keeping track of the split and my own job.”

“What good will the split or your job be if we’re caught with a basement full of thumbs, and pick-up a day away?”

“It’s still your problem. You boor of a peasant! I should do you favors?”

“Zvegintzov.”

Godwin thought that over for a few moments, and then said, “All right. You said he was leaving for Luvashe tomorrow. If Villiers did suspect something, he wouldn’t be able to do much about it on his way to Luvashe, now would he?”

“If he leaves tomorrow, he’s clear, and it was all an accident. I’ll stop worrying. But have him watched every minute. And search his baggage.”

* * *

The object of this speculation set out for dinner in the Grand Hall that evening. Just outside the plush purple entrance, he encountered Norman Adams. Adams was no longer in his sneaking clothes. He had apparently found his way home again and there changed into equally somber, but rather more socially acceptable apparel. This was just as well. It was unlikely that he could have entered the Grand Hall in his black skintights and not drawn rather more attention to himself than a gentleman of taste could like.

“Hello, Mr. Adams,” Villiers said.

“Servant, sir.”

“Will you join me for dinner?”

“I’m sorry, no. I dropped a royal last night, and the Grand Hall is rather above my touch now.” There was an attempt on Adams’ part to ape his usual buoyancy, but beneath it there was a tone of sullenness. It was much like a small boy who has been taught that good manners should mask unpleasant emotions, but who still wants you to know that his unpleasant emotions are being masked by good manners. The result, if the boy isn’t so small that his natural feelings overwhelm him (“Well, I
tried
to be nice.”), is a peculiar sort of well-bred sulkiness. It’s a tense and difficult effect to achieve properly, and mark it to Adams’ credit that he was successful.

“Well, stand as my guest, then.”

“No, sir. I think I’ve accepted too much hospitality from you already.”

“But I insist.”

“I have already eaten. If you will excuse me?” Adams turned and abruptly moved away.

Villiers raised his eyebrows and looked after Adams, and then instead of lowering his eyebrows and turning in to dinner, he raised them even higher. Yes, it was definitely the sound of crying behind him.

He turned and saw no one immediately, and then realized that it was in a purple alcove set in the purple wall that the tears were being shed. He investigated and found that it was the delightful young miss of his breakfast love affair. Her crying swelled in volume as he came into sight, at the same time the young lady apparently was redoubling her efforts to staunch the flow. There was an odd sort of relationship there that Villiers was not prepared to attempt to explain. Tonight the girl’s hair was red and shoulder-length. It clashed horribly with her setting, but Villiers felt that it might distress the girl to tell her so.