by David Drake
“Thank you, Farent, carry on,” Trina said. “Cut link.”
The carriage locked onto an auto that would land it next to Trina’s private entrance to their complex. The villa autos would guide all other demesne traffic out of the way to ensure a speedy arrival.
The Continuum decolorized as the carriage phased into reality. Allenson leaned out to observe Pentire. From the sky he obtained a panoramic view that displayed the estate to a single sweep of the eye, allowing him to properly appreciate its balanced proportions. The carriage phased in slowly. Phasing could be near instantaneous but the sharper the change the more disconcerting it could be to human physiology. Farent prided himself that his passengers got as smooth a ride as technology could provide.
Pentire appeared like a monochrome blur from an old memory. The image hardened, sharpened and saturated with primary color before decohering into the subtle shades of nature. Allenson stiffened. For a moment he thought he could see an unnatural line running through the red-lime bushes planted on the reverse slope of a hill. He quickly waved his datapad over the edge of the carriage. The line disappeared when the full complexity of the real world was revealed.
He considered ordering Farent to phase in and out again so that he could check the observation. A glance at Trina dissuaded him. She was tired and deserved to get home without him mucking about. She wouldn’t protest or complain at any delay. That only made it more necessary that he anticipate her needs to give them proper priority. Nevertheless the memory of that line irritated like an attention-seeking child plucking at its mother’s skirts. The thought of the line spoiled the enjoyment he normally found in his demesne.
A rectangular three story house formed the heart of Pentire Villa. Communication equipment and three point-defense lasers filled the flat roof. He chose to have three lasers because one was sometimes hors de combat while they waited for spares to be shipped in from Brasilia. All too often a tube failed after a short burst. Of course each laser had three independent tubes firing in sequence but . . .
The potent defense system was generally considered to be another example of his eccentricity. Manzanita hadn’t seen an enemy in living memory. Allenson was inclined to agree that the lasers would probably never be fired in anger but he had seen war. He had inhaled the choking smoke, heard the screams and smelled the burning flesh. The merest, slightest whiff of an outside chance that this might happen to his household was all the incentive he needed to dig deep into his pockets.
Allenson had added two-story wings at right angles to the house. A high back wall enclosed a wilderness garden in the center. The children he planned to have with Trina could have safely played and explored there. Another thought best tucked away and forgotten.
Traditional red brick hid the villa’s syncrete walls. Similarly, a veneer of natural wood covered the exterior surfaces of the window frames and doors. Allenson reproduced the texture exactly when he expanded the structure, including artificial weathering. The villa sat at one end of a small village of cottages where the estate servants and employees lived. He provided a club, school, health clinic and meeting hall for their social and other needs.
His neighbors shook their heads at such wasteful extravagance. Indeed, some took the view that Allenson risked undermining society and the natural order by indulging the lower orders so generously. He tried explaining how a content workforce was a productive workforce. Monies invested in a comfortable life for the demesne staff repaid themselves many times over.
Mere facts were as raindrops against the armor of fixed opinion. Why this should be so was a mystery to Allenson. He tended to change his mind if new data suggested he was wrong. Apparently, this was another mark of his eccentricity.
The protective hedges around the Pentire living quarters kept unwanted visitors out, not the servants in. An indentured servant had not run from the complex for many years. The last case had a love affair at root. Allenson solved the problem by buying the contract of the other party in the affair, finding them both a position on the estate. It was not unusual for servants to request to stay on at Pentire as employees when they had worked off or bought out their contracts.
Beyond stood the utilitarian warehouses and barns required by a working agricultural demesne. The Fleek paddocks occupied an isolated position, located suitably upwind to the prevailing weather.
Only one entrance pierced the gunja plants forming the hedge around the buildings. An angled and narrow approach restricted and slowed access. The reinforced gate stood open to allow estate vehicles in and out. It could quickly be shut, sealing off the compound. Two men in the green and white livery of Pentire Demesne stood each side of the gate, lasercarbines slung on straps from one shoulder. Allenson was pleased to see them upright and hence reasonably alert.
Two similar armed guards stood by the low wall running around the roof of the main house. All four watched the carriage descend into the formal garden. Farent hopped out and opened a carriage door so Trina could alight. Trina’s maid hovered at the entrance to the east wing where his wife had her apartment, alerted to her arrival by the automatics. The new wings were more comfortable than the old building and the rooms cozier if less impressive.
“If you’ll excuse me, my dear, I need to pop up to my office to check something.”
“You go ahead,” Trina said. “Eight convenient for dinner?”
“Eight, right,” Allenson replied. That didn’t give him long as it was already late afternoon, Pentire local time. He went into the old building and ran up the back stairs two at a time to the first floor where he had an office. Shrugging off the uncomfortable formal jacket and loosening his necktie, he tossed the datapad onto his desk and turned it on.
In the room the pad could draw on the greater analytical capability of his desk. He put up a solid hologram that showed the view of the estate from the air as the carriage phased in. He ran the video backwards and forwards, changing the mix of frequencies from ultraviolet to microwave until a linear shadow across the red-lime bushes clearly showed up.
One had to be a little careful of overanalyzing pictures. One could easily create artifacts but unfortunately he had no doubt this was real. He overlaid a schematic of the new drainage system fitted last year to this part of the estate. One of the pipes ran directly under the shadow.
Allenson swore softly under his breath. The damn pipe was leaking something that affected the plants. It might not be particularly toxic to red-lime but that wasn’t the point. He had paid premium price for inert long-life ceramic pipes imported from Brasilia. The blasted things were breaking down in the Manzanita soil after only a year: so much for the manufacturer’s guarantees.
It might just be an unfortunate and unforeseeable chemical interaction but it was more likely that his Brasilian supplier had dumped second-grade stock on him at first-grade prices. In theory, he could sue but—all the way across the Bight—in a Brasilian commercial court?
Fat chance!
He thought he might as well check through his letters and skim through the various reports accumulating in his in-tray. As usual, there was more than he had anticipated. Well not anticipated, make that more than he hoped for.
Time passed.
A cough from the doorway caught his attention. Allenson groaned inwardly at the sight of Bentley, Trina’s majordomo. Bentley was bald and middle aged. He had probably been born middle aged but that was no excuse for being bald. Appropriate genosurgery was hardly expensive and, God knows, Trina paid the man enough.
“The mistress asked me to remind sar that dinner is at eight,” Bentley said.
“What time is it now?” Allenson asked.
“Seven, sar.”
“Then I’ve plenty of time so go away.”
Bentley failed to disappear.
“Was there something else?” Allenson asked.
Bentley coughed again.
“I’ve run sar’s bath and laid out suitable evening clothes,” Bentley said. “The mistress was most insistent that I should remind sa
r of dinner in good time so sar did not have to rush sar’s toilette.”
“Tell me Bentley, do I smell?”
“No, sar.”
“Then I do not need a bath, rushed or otherwise.”
“If you say so, sar,” Bentley said with a carefully blank expression.
The majordomo left, shutting the door behind him.
The blank expression worried Allenson. He could live with Bentley’s disapproval but a blank expression raised alarm signals.
“Bentley!”
Allenson crossed the room in two strides. He flung open the door, to find himself nose to nose with the servant. Clearly Bentley expected him to have second thoughts.
“What is it you know that I don’t?” Allenson asked.
“I really couldn’t say, sar, since I don’t know what sar doesn’t know,” Bentley replied.
“Bentley, stop pissing me around. You only put on that blank expression when you think I’m about to make some dreadful social cock up. So what don’t I know?”
Allenson spelled out each word of the last sentence slowly.
Bentley unbent.
“Possibly sar has forgotten that sar’s sister-in-law is dining here tonight.”
“What, Linsye?”
“Lady Destry, yes sar.”
“Dining with us?”
“Yes, sar.”
“She’s here?”
“Obviously, sar, or she could not dine with sar,” Bentley said patiently, as if explaining teetotalism to a drunk.
“Why did no one tell me?” Allenson asked.
“I put it in sar’s social diary some two weeks ago myself,” Bentley replied.
“Ah,” Allenson said.
He had erased the social diary from his desk after it had interrupted his work with a reminder about something of such monumental unimportance that he just could not recall what it had been about. It was not impossible that it had been about Linsye’s visit.
“Possibly I should dress for dinner,” Allenson said.
“Yes, sar,” Bentley replied.
“And you’ve put something out?” Allenson asked.
Bentley’s eyes gleamed.
“On the mistress’s instructions, sar, your blue dinner suit with lilac ribbons and accessories including your lemon ruffed shirt and stack-heeled two-toned boots.”
“Oh dear God!”
“I look like the doorman of a second rate brothel with upmarket pretensions,” Allenson muttered.
He examined himself in the mirror with something akin to horror. This year’s fashionable colors in Manzanita society were, if anything, even more garish than usual. The suit tied across the top with a complicated white silk loop. Allenson experimented in fixing it in various ways, settling eventually for a granny knot at the base of his throat. At least he would be fashionably clothed for his funeral if he choked on the damn thing.
A discreet cough sounded at his elbow.
“Did you cough, Bentley?”
“Yes, sar, if I may assist.”
Without waiting for a reply, the majordomo retied the ribbon in a complex flat bow and positioned it over Allenson’s right breast. Actually it did look better. Now he could pass as the doorman to a first rate brothel.
“And your campaign medals, sar?”
“I think not.”
Allenson shuddered. Medals reminded him of war and of people more heroic than him who had failed to return to wear any. Bentley looked crestfallen.
“I suppose you spent half the afternoon polishing them?” Allenson asked.
“Not quite half the afternoon,” Bentley replied carefully.
“Very well, just this once,” Allenson said.
Bentley brightened up immediately and carefully arranged the medals to hang over Allenson’s left breast. They were such innocuous looking little ceramic and crystal rods in the Manzanita colors of purple and gray shot with gold threads, recreating symbols of Old Earth. Each one represented blood, pain and sacrifice. The medals held no more glory than the battles they represented.
He made his way along the corridor to Trina’s dressing room. She stared thoughtfully at herself in a full-length mirror, turning to left and right to check the folds in her rose-colored dress. A necklace of polished chromite and serpentine crystals from one of the Hinterland worlds set it off. Her maid fussed with her hair but she already looked wonderful. Trina had taste. She knew what to wear and how to wear it. She knew how to blend colors for best effect. By the standards of Streamer gentility, she dressed with understated elegance.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“Perfect, as always,” he replied truthfully.
“You look very distinguished as well,” she said, lying politely. Or perhaps love really was blind.
He held out his hand and escorted her out of her apartment and into the formal dining room main building. They stopped in the atrium to wait for their guest. Bentley served wine fortified by plum brandy in small crystal glasses.
Linsye arrived in the atrium at exactly the prescribed four minutes after her hosts. A tall, rather gaunt woman, she was striking rather than beautiful. Her clothes were expensively tailored, probably Brasilian imports, but chosen for convenience rather than fashion. People like Linsye set the fashion rather than follow it. When she could be bothered, that is.
Bentley bowed deeply as he held the door for her, far deeper than he would for Allenson, who only paid his wages. The majordomo raised snobbery to a fine art and Linsye was a full Destry-by-blood. Allenson and Trina represented mere colonial gentry only related by marriage to true Brasilian nobility. Hence Bentley’s determination that Allenson should be at his best. It came to something, Allenson reflected, when your clothes were chosen to please a servant’s sense of propriety.
Linsye kissed Allenson lightly on the mouth, the appropriate greeting for an in-law of the opposite sex.
“How are you Allen? My you look dashing tonight.”
Allenson replied appropriately
Linsye continued. “May I introduce my son, Todd? He arrived home in the same ship that Royman and Sarai left on.”
Todd stood to one side, arm outstretched. Allenson hadn’t seen his nephew since he had been sent away to be educated in Brasilia at his Uncle Royman’s old prep school and college. He would have been what, twelve?
Allenson looked at Todd in shock. The boy was named after his father, Allenson’s older brother. Subconsciously Allenson expected a younger version of Todd senior or at least an Allenson. But Todd junior was a Destry. No. More than that; he was the spitting image of the young Royman Destry when Allenson first met him on his arrival at Port Clearwater. History seemed to be repeating itself.
Todd bowed deeply and looked at Allenson, waiting for his host to say something. Allenson gaped like a rube at the country fair.
He pulled himself together. “Welcome indeed, Nephew. You are quite the young man now.”
Todd replied with a smile. “Age tends to do that to one, Uncle Allen.”
“Ah, yes, I suppose it does,” Allenson said. “Shall we go in?”
The dinner ritual normally demanded fifteen minutes of drinks and small talk in the atrium. However, Allenson needed a moment to order his thoughts and the walk into the dining room would allow that. He indicated to Bentley that they would go straight in. Protocol demanded he escort Linsye while Todd offered his arm to Trina.
Left to Bentley the four would dine on a full table so far apart that they would have to converse by datapad. Allenson laid it clearly on the line how far he was prepared to go even when dining with his aristocratic in-laws. He demanded that most of the grand dining room be shut off by a folding wooden screen. The demesne carpenter had crafted it from highly polished alternating strips of amber and vermilion-colored wood logged from a forest on a Hinterland world that had not yet been named.
The material imparted warmth, reinforcing the mellow atmosphere that Allenson preferred. Many of his guests commented favorably on the effect. Allenson con
sidered experimenting with a crop of the trees on the estate.
He sat Linsye on his right in the lady of honor’s place. Todd looked after Trina. Bentley positioned himself behind Todd’s chair where Allenson could catch his eye. The man was in his element. He devoted his life to perfecting a series of complicated rituals that Allenson thought as tedious as they were pointless
To be fair, Bentley was invaluable when Allenson hosted political dinners. The skills of a majordomo went unnoticed by the more sophisticated guests from the Manzanita Upper House. They would nonetheless have noticed their absence fast enough. Bentley’s talents usefully impressed members of the Lower House. In Allenson’s experience, the more a politician claimed to be a “man of the people” the less they wanted to be treated as one. One of life’s depressing little truisms.
Allenson nodded and Bentley touched his thumb and forefinger together, triggering a communication switch concealed in his white gloves. A new maid with an apprehensive expression entered via the kitchen door with a tray of appetizer. She glanced in Bentley’s direction before presenting the tray to Linsye, who selected a couple of items without looking at her.
Social convention insisted that Trina and Todd were served next with Allenson last. Trina murmured a polite thank you and Todd gave the maid a wink that elicited a pretty blush. He had Royman’s easy manner, so different from the Allenson dourness.
When the maid left Bentley went round the table with a bottle of a light blue alcoholic liquid. He started with Allenson who duly tasted it although he never quite knew what he was supposed to be checking for. Allenson nodded approval and Bentley proceeded anticlockwise.
Linsye held her glass up to the central light over the table, swirling it to examine the contents before carefully inhaling the vapor.
“I suppose this is one of your experiments,” she finally said.
Allenson smiled. “In a way. We grow the juniper fruit here on the estate and I have an industrial chemist in Port Clearwater interested in the fermentation process.”
“I see,” Linsye said.
Allenson had a policy of serving Streamer produce at his dinners, preferably from his own estate. His neighbors considered this one of his more harmless eccentricities. Brasilian grape strains could not be successfully cultivated on any of the Stream worlds. At least not well enough to produce anything drinkable.