So far, we have only found two others like ourselves, apart from the unfriendly Mrs. Churchill. Mrs. Smith of Allenham Hall, in Derbyshire, is a widow with a heart condition like mine, who cannot travel much. But we go visit her, when the door allows. Mr. Wentworth is a vicar in Shropshire. I said to him once, “It seems, Mr. Wentworth, that you disprove Mary's conjecture. You have a profession. You are married and have children. Surely you are not one of those to whom nothing happens.”
“It is true, Miss de Bourgh, that I have more to occupy myself than you do, which precludes me from joining you as often as I would like. But consider, my brother is an admiral in His Majesty's navy. I, too, once longed to become a sailor, but my father destined me for the church. Compared to his, my life is dull indeed.”
“Perhaps,” said Eliza later, when the three of us were alone, except for Pug, “that is the difference between men and women. Mr. Wentworth's life would be considered full, for a woman. And yet he considers it dull.”
“I feel for him,” I said. “But I confess, I feel more for Mrs. Smith, lying on her sofa all day long.”
The first time we walked through the door into her room, kept as dark as mine in the days of Dr. Bransby, she said, “Good dog! You've brought some friends. Sit down, girls, sit down. Stay and talk with me for a while.”
* * * *
This is what Miss Jenkinson tells the tourists as they walk through Rosings. I have heard it so often I could almost recite it myself: Roman foundations, a Saxon fort, given to Sir George de Bourgh by William the Conqueror.
“In the days of Sir Roger de Bourgh, the cellars contained so much port it was said you could sail on it to China. The requirements of the present Lady de Bourgh are considerably more modest.” Laughter.
“Under Lady Anne de Bourgh, a portion of the house burned and had to be rebuilt. As we walk through the house, I will point out the various architectural styles. This hall, as you see, is Elizabethan, although after the fire it required extensive restoration. Only one of the walls is original. It was said that Lady Anne set the fire herself after her lover, William d'Arcy, rejected her for the Virgin Queen. At present, Rosings has forty-two bedrooms, a number considered propitious by Sir Roger de Bourgh, who was believed by some to be a mathematician, and by others to be an alchemist. His wife, Arabella d'Arcy, was accused of assisting in his alchemical experiments. Her grandmother, Isabel d'Arcy, who was the mistress of Henry VI, was afterward tried as a witch. There are twelve bathrooms, of which eight have modern plumbing, put in at a cost of over a thousand pounds.” Gasps.
“The de Bourghs hold extensive lands in Kent, including this manor and of course the village of Hunsford. In his capacity as magistrate, the late Sir George de Bourgh was responsible for hanging fourteen poachers in one year. Madam, if you could stop your child from kicking that chair. It was presented to Lady Catherine by Queen Charlotte herself. Observe the painting of Sir Edward de Bourgh as a child, which was saved during the Civil War by being buried under a local pigsty.”
“Tell us about the Wicked Lord!”
“Edward de Bourgh, the Wicked Lord, as he was called at court, was beheaded for his unwanted attentions to King Charles’ mistress, Nell Gwyn . . .”
Pug and I escape to the garden. When we were children, Fitz was made to learn this tale of folly and bloodshed. No wonder he reads German philosophy. The de Bourghs and the d'Arcys: alchemists, rapists, thieves. Let him have his happy ending.
In the garden, I sit on the edge of the fountain, feeding the fish. These are the living fish, imported from China: orange and white, with an exquisite beauty that their stone cousins cannot match. They rise to nibble the bread that I drop for them. Pug puts his front paws on the edge of the fountain, looks at them, and barks.
A woman and a boy come into the garden.
“What a bad boy you are, Tom,” she says, sighing and sitting down on one of the benches. “Why did you have to kick the furniture? I can't take you anywhere.”
“I'm bored,” he says, quite reasonably, in my opinion. “I want to see the secret passage. You said there would be a secret passage.”
“Well, there isn't a secret passage. That Jenkins woman said so. Now will you behave yourself?”
I have no more bread. The fish rise to nibble my fingers. Pug barks and barks, and turns to me, panting, for approval. He looks as though he is laughing.
Madam, I want to say, there is a secret passage. Miss Jenkinson cannot show it to you. But there is, there is.
Copyright © 2011 Theodora Goss
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* * *
Short Story: DUNYON
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
This spring has been a great time for Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Her latest Diving Universe novel, City of Ruins, came out from Pyr, and Sourcebooks published her latest Kristine Grayson paranormal romance novel, Wickedly Charming. In her latest tale for us, Kris turns her attention to the plight of refugees on their desperate way to . . .
It started in the far reaches of the sector—ships firing on each other, some destroyed. Keeping track became hard—communications turned sporadic, and who really followed which government was in charge of what anyway?
Rumors started, rumors impossible to confirm as communications throughout the system grew intermittent. Entire ships, destroyed. Cities, gone. A planet, blown up.
But most people saw no evidence of any of it. One would think, if a planet had been destroyed, there would be some kind of repercussion, but most people knew of none. Most people saw nothing.
Until one day the ships appeared overhead.
Most people barely had time to gather the family and the money, barely had time to get away, to find refugee ships.
But “refugee ships” makes it sound organized, like an effort conducted by some charity organization or a benevolent and surviving government.
The ships weren't organized or tied to each other or even very similar. Some were old-fashioned generation ships. Some were commandeered space yachts. Some were stolen trading vessels.
They made it only so far. Some refugees died in the blackness of space, the ships powerless, spinning slowly, the only thing surviving an emergency signal that would go forever unheeded.
Other refugees made it to the outer reaches of the sector. To supply stations and military outposts.
And the rest—well, the rest ended up here.
The new arrivals always ask me where here is, and I tell them one of three things, depending on my mood.
I say, I used to know but I don't any more.
Or, It's the end of the line.
Or, Here? This isn't a place. It's an emotion.
But too many asked me what that emotion was.
Desperation, I'd say. Desperation, pure and simple.
* * * *
In truth, “here” was once an outpost, so far on the edge of the sector that we weren't even sure which government claimed us. Mostly we claimed ourselves. Eventually, we became a destination space station, a haven for the rich. We built fantasy resorts spiraling off the main part of the station—all virtual reality and holographic technology like nothing else in the sector. If you wanted to be pampered, you came here. If you wanted to redefine yourself, you came here. If you wanted to hide from the public, you came here.
It would cost you more money that most people ever saw, but you came here.
I came here without money twenty years ago. Most women, when they arrived, either dripped money or had unvarnished beauty. I had neither.
I was a former soldier looking for a respite, scarred inside and out. I started as a bartender, and built a reputation as the person who solved everyone else's problems quickly, silently, and efficiently.
I did nothing but work and save and meddle (unemotionally) in other people's lives. So as the station expanded, built its first exclusive wing, I had enough money to build my own bar with my own apartment attached.
I could run things the way that I wanted to, k
eep the hours that I wanted, let in the clients I wanted.
By being exclusive, I became popular.
And rich.
Nowadays, the bar is still exclusive. We are the only place that still charges a cover. We have entertainment in the back room—usually a band, sometimes a comedian, once in a while an acting troupe—all of them famous, all of them refugees. I pay well. People want to run their show in my place because they like my place.
I have human employees not because I can afford them (of course I can) but because I'm trying to create jobs so that fewer people remain stuck in the refugee areas, the places we called the pens. So far, I've created twenty-five jobs, and I'm thinking of expanding.
I've already expanded more than I initially planned. In addition to my entertainment room, I have a high stakes poker room. No one gets in without a fifty thousand minimum. I raised the stakes when I learned the truly desperate were taking the last of their savings and trying to double their money on my tables.
I didn't want to get rich by making desperate people poor.
In the main room, we serve dinner at eight sharp. When the five courses are over, we clear the tables and serve drinks until four am.
At four, I shut down everything except the high stakes poker (some games can go on for days) and wander the halls, looking at the decay. The hotels that once catered to the dilettantes are now filled to capacity with the rich and desperate. The restaurants serve food to the people who pay up front. But their doors are all closed when I wander. I see the signs for specials or warning the people from the pens to stay out. Sometimes I see evidence of a scuffle—broken chairs, smashed tables, a hastily made “closed for the week” sign.
The only places still open when I close the bar are the information kiosks. They have no employees, so people can use them at any time. Even at four in the morning, I will pass lines in front of the kiosks, lines that extend through dozens of corridors.
Information. That's where the premium is. People want to know if their home is still there, if members of their family are still alive, when (if ever) they can return. Most never let go of the past, unable to accept they're in a new future, one they don't recognize.
I barely recognize it, and I have little to hang onto. But I see patterns. For example, you can always tell which part of the sector is closed or ruined or under attack because the information stops flowing from there. What replaces information is rumor.
Rumor. This place thrives on rumor. You can hear it as you walk through the corridors, going from the old resort section (now part of the pens) to the condo wing to my little neighborhood of exclusivity. You hear it in the lowered voices, see it in the furtive looks. You know that someone is lying to someone else, maybe not intentionally, but always harmfully.
For the rumors are almost always harmful. They give hope where there is none.
And I think that's the most destructive of all.
* * * *
Last month, I finally became a victim of rumors. The whispers, the looks, all came toward me, and I had no idea what was causing them.
My bartender brought me the first hint. He used the silent call built into the back bar to bring me down from my office on the second floor.
The bar in the main room is spectacular. I designed it for looks as well as ease for the bartender. I insist on a human bartender, not some robotic mixer or automated machine. There's an art to mixing cocktails—the right amount of this touched with a splash of that—that machines can never get right.
The bar circles around a blue screen that shows flat images of anywhere in the sector. Usually I set the imagery, and I try to keep current: any place that's considered safe shows up on the image screen, and any place that might have exploded out of existence gets removed from the rotation.
In front of the imagery stand bottles of real alcohol, most of them imported. The bulk of my real alcohol is stored in a safe room off-premises. Only I know where that safe room is because now, much of the real alcohol is more valuable than jewelry or credits or any other commodity except food. Some of those liquors aren't ever going to be made any more, and the fifteen bottles in my storeroom are the fifteen last known bottles in the sector, maybe even the universe.
I price accordingly.
Between the bar and the back bar is a floor so springy that you can stand on it all day and your legs don't ache. Customers sit on high stools that gradually tilt if the bartender decides the customer is sucking too much air. Obnoxious people leave quickly. Pleasant ones stay so long, they often fall asleep with their heads on my well-polished bar.
The bartender, Jack Kunitz, had moved to the very edge of the bar when he saw me. He was a burly man with a history as checkered as mine. He dreamed of opening his own bar one day—or he used to, before all of this.
He was polishing glasses with a special bar rag, even though we had a machine for that.
“See that woman?” he asked softly, nodding at the other side of the bar.
I could barely see her. The bar was shaped like a giant C, and she was in the middle of the opposite curve. Slender, older, rich. Rich was easy to tell because her clothes fit, she looked well nourished, and she still wore expensive rings on her long, thin fingers.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“She wants to know how much passage is,” he said.
“Passage?” I asked. “To where?”
“Dunyon,” he said.
“Dunyon?” I repeated. I had never heard of it. I thought I had heard of every damn place. “Where the hell is that?”
He shrugged. “I asked her. She said it was somewhere far from here. Somewhere safe.”
“Why is she asking us for passage?” I asked.
“Dunno,” he said. “I asked her. She said I should know. So I called you.”
Sometimes I had special information. Or a ticket someone lost at a high stakes game for an expensive berth on a ship leaving from here, usually somewhere far away. Maybe not somewhere safer, but somewhere different.
After you've been here for a while, after you've finally accepted that your home is gone, you have no family left, and nothing is ever going to be as it was, you go somewhere else, figuring you'll start new, figuring you have at least a fighting chance of rebuilding some kind of life.
At least, that's what these people tell me when they spend thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—for the chance to get the hell out of here.
“I don't know a thing about Dunyon,” I said. “Apologize and tell her to check her source.”
He did, and she left, and I gave it no more thought until the next night when three more people—obviously wealthy—offered a small fortune to buy their way to Dunyon. And the following night, six offered. By the next night, twenty-five.
The amount of money was staggering. The number of people willing to pay it was growing by the hour.
I needed to find out what Dunyon was, and I needed to find out fast.
* * * *
Believe it or not, bartenders—bar owners—don't always have the latest information. I don't believe rumor and innuendo, and while I have a few trusted sources, I only trust them on matters pertaining to the station and my operator's license. Anything else is suspect.
So at times like this, I have to use an information kiosk like everyone else. Before everything went to hell, I could access information from my apartment. But that avenue got shut off as the pens grew larger and larger. First people hacked into our personal systems, and then the information got corrupted. That made the kiosks the only safe place for news.
The kiosks were tapped into the station's space monitoring system. Information from ships approaching and leaving, from other systems, and from various networks filtered through the monitoring system. If its information were wrong, the station would soon cease to exist.
The kiosks were designed so that no one could tap into that system, and anyone who tried to modify the kiosks’ security was arrested and often never heard from again.
I paid o
ne of the cocktail waitresses to stand in line for me. Poor thing, she waited for eight hours before she contacted me. She was three people from the kiosk door. I still didn't hurry down. Three people, at a minimum, would take twenty minutes to finish their business.
I made it to the kiosk in fifteen. Still two people away. The waitress looked exhausted.
“Next time,” she said. “Get someone else to stand for you. I'd rather be moving than standing still.”
I nodded, thanked her, and waited another fifteen minutes before getting into the kiosk myself.
The kiosks were ten feet tall and seven feet wide. They were oblong, with doors on two sides. The person accessing information went in one door while the person who had just finished with the kiosk went out the other.
As the doors slid, the kiosk wiped its memory, so that the newcomer would face a blank screen.
At least, that was the theory. More than once, I'd seen what the person before me had been searching for. Mostly, those searches didn't concern me—a name I had never heard before, a place I was only vaguely conscious of—but the searches almost always ended with a red no-longer-viable notice.
My searches were few and far between. Mostly they pertained to specialized booze or a particular type of glassware. This was the first search I would ever make for a place.
The kiosk doors slid closed simultaneously and the side lighting came on, faint but illuminating. The flat screen in front of me had its own back light. If I wanted a holographic avatar that would talk me through various programs, I had to turn around and deal with the other screen.
I interacted with people more than enough. I didn't need a fake person to walk me through programming.
So I asked the screen in front of me about Dunyon and got this response back:
Asimov's SF, July 2011 Page 7