by David Drake
“Yes,” said Adele. From her curt tone, her opinion was as negative as Daniel’s own.
“It looks like a bloody whorehouse,” Hogg said, voicing much the same thought though without the disapproval. “A bloody fancy whorehouse.”
The Sand residence stood in a row of houses much like Chatsworth Minor in age though of relatively modest construction. Two had been knocked together to create Cleveland House, as it now was called. The new common facade lighted the three-story entrance hall with a large, east-facing circular window.
Adele glanced up at the window and said, “That’s called an oriel window. Master Cleveland had a sense of humor.”
She looked around at the twisted pillars of colored marble and panels with gold designs inlaid on panels of polished red stone. The frieze just below the coffered ceiling was made of iridescent tiles in primary colors and gold.
“A pity,” Adele added in a voice dry enough to suck moisture from desert air, “that he didn’t have a sense of taste as well.”
“Master Rikard will see you now in the main hall, sir and lady,” said the servant who had gone into the interior of the house. The doorman remained with them in the hall. “Will your servants…?”
“They’ll wait here,” Daniel decided. The stone benches built against the front wall didn’t look particularly comfortable, but Hogg was used to sitting in a hunting blind during winter storms. Daniel understood very little of Tovera, but he was confident that personal comfort wasn’t one of her priorities either.
“A glass of cider wouldn’t come amiss,” said Hogg. He was deliberately prodding the pansy servants of this knocking shop.
Which meant he hadn’t taken a good look at these servants: fit young men who spoke with cultured accents. They weren’t the sort of staff you would expect in a house like this, but they were the sort that people like Mistress Sand had around them. Hogg’s rural upbringing had played him false.
Before Daniel decided how to respond, Tovera said in a tone of amused disdain, “Take a look at them, Hogg.”
Hogg did. He then spread his hands on top of his thighs, palms down. “Sorry, buddy,” he said to the nearer servant, the doorman.
“I’m sure there’s cider in the cellar, Captain Leary?” said the other man.
“I guess I’ve drunk enough this morning already,” Hogg said, “and I haven’t had a drop.” He looked at Daniel and said, “Sorry, master. Won’t happen again.”
The guide bowed Daniel and Adele into a large hall. He was smiling. Daniel paused, looked at the man more closely, and said, “If your name is Hutton, I was in the Academy with your brother.”
“That would be my cousin Julius, Captain Leary,” the servant said. “When he’s next in Xenos, I’ll tell him I’ve met you. He’ll be envious.”
A slender man stood in front of a vast green fireplace. He walked forward to meet them, extending his right hand. If the entrance hall had been gaudy, this room was that in spades. It too was a full three stories high.
The whole ceiling was a skylight of stained glass. The pilasters which supported it were topped by gargoyles rather than capitals, and the fluted shafts had been gilded. Paintings of men in armor and women in gauzy dresses marched around the walls’ upper range, while mural tiles of a hunting scene set in a forest covered the band at floor level.
The floor level was mirrored. Daniel found the effect disconcerting because it multiplied every movement.
“Captain Leary,” said the young man, shaking Daniel’s hand. He bowed to Adele and said, “Lady Mundy. I’m Rikard Cleveland, and I’m honored to speak with you.”
Cleveland nodded toward the huge fireplace. “I’m told,” he said, “that you could roast a whole ox on that hearth.”
If this whelp thinks he’s going to impress a Leary with that… Aloud Daniel said, “On Bantry we were more given to fish fries. But each to his own taste, of course.”
“I understand perfectly,” Cleveland said. “This hearth, and the way he rebuilt mother’s family home generally, sum up an aspect of my father’s character. I aped his flamboyance, his self-importance, and his need to be seen to be important by other people. Whatever you’ve heard about my behavior before I left for Corcyra is quite true, or at any rate the truth is just as bad.”
“I see…,” Daniel said. His opinion of Cleveland’s character had just risen—and also his opinion of Cleveland’s intelligence. If he’s chosen this absurd room to demonstrate his present self-awareness, then there may be more to the Corcyra business than I’ve assumed.
“I was spared father’s taste for malachite and gilt,” Cleveland added, smiling broadly. He nodded again toward the fireplace of dark green stone with black markings. “Which is a small blessing, I realize, in comparison with the rest.”
Daniel laughed. “Not so very small, I think,” he said. He gestured the nearest of the room’s several square tables; they were of a size for cards.
“Are the chairs around those tables comfortable?” he asked. “If they are, I’ll pick one that doesn’t require me to look at the fireplace.”
Cleveland smiled again and waved them to the table. When his visitors took placed on opposite sides, he settled into the chair between them with his back to the door.
“I felt alone my whole life,” Cleveland said. “My father had no use for me. I mean literally: I was of no use in advancing his ambitions, so he ignored my existence. Mother tried. I think she would have tried harder if I hadn’t determinedly driven her away because I wanted to be a great man like my father. And because I was such a nasty little prick, I didn’t have any friends—which I didn’t realize, because I was surrounded by spongers.”
Adele had taken out her data unit. Cleveland glanced at her, but he didn’t comment or show concern. He probably knew something of Adele, but even so her behavior often disconcerted people who expected her to pay obvious attention to them while they were speaking.
“Now, I’m not offering this as an excuse for my behavior,” Cleveland said. “Which of course it isn’t. But I want you both to understand why the fellowship I found within the Transformationist community had such a powerful effect on me. I won’t be surprised if you continue to think of me as daft, but do accept that I’m quite sincere in my daftness.”
Daniel glanced at Adele. Her control wands moved in subtle fashions, adjusting the information which danced above her personal data unit like dustmotes in colored sunlight. The holograms coalesced only at the angle of the user’s eyes.
She was letting Daniel take the lead in the discussion, though if Cleveland thought Adele wasn’t listening to him, he was badly mistaken. It was quite possible that she was reading the conversation as a text crawl on her display, of course. Daniel knew his friend preferred to observe reality through an interface.
“Master Cleveland…,” Daniel said, leaning forward. “I don’t have any problem with what other people believe, so long as they don’t expect their beliefs to affect my behavior. I gather you believe there’s a treasure on Corcyra. My colleague and I have come here to learn why you believe that.”
“The Upper Cephisis River Valley is a mining region,” said Cleveland. He didn’t appear to be put out by Daniel pressing him. “At the time Pantellaria and its colonies joined the Alliance—”
He paused and smiled. Daniel smiled back.
“—the Transformationist Assembly, which is legally a corporation, refiled its land claim under Alliance law. This was simply a precaution.”
And a very wise one, Daniel thought. The Transformationists might be religious loonies, but they were neither stupid nor politically naive.
“Among the information deposited along with the claim was a certified assay of Pearl Valley showing that neither copper nor any other ore is present in significant amounts. This isn’t required for a claim, of course, but I presume it was done to turn away Alliance bureaucrats who might assume that we—that the Assembly of the day—was sitting on vast mineral wealth.”
“That sort
of thing has been known to happen,” Daniel said. And not only when the new overlords came from Pleasaunce. Greedy administrators were a reality of imperial rule, and the Republic of Cinnabar was a surely an empire as the Alliance was.
“I looked at the file,” Cleveland said. “As well as the assays, it contained a microwave scan of the subsurface rocks. While I was still on Cinnabar, I’d been employed by an engineering firm owned by a friend of my mother.”
He smiled ruefully. “Not employed very long, of course,” he said, “but I picked up some rudiments. There was an object thirty feet down in the rock, small—no larger than a man’s head—but of a very irregular shape. The scan proceeded down the full length of the valley, which allowed the computer to create three-dimensional models. The software couldn’t model this, however.”
Adele didn’t look up, but her wands had paused. Knowing her habits, Daniel suspected she had a realtime image of Cleveland’s face inset on her holographic display, just as she did while talking with others on the bridge of a starship.
“All right,” said Daniel. “You’ve found an anomaly in the ground. Why do you believe it’s a treasure?”
Cleveland nodded, smiling again. He’d gained his first point.
“Do you know anything about the settlement of Corcyra?” he asked.
“I know a little,” Daniel said. And by now Adele probably knew quite a lot, but he didn’t say that aloud. “It was settled from Pantellaria about five hundred years ago, initially as a farming colony. The copper deposits were discovered shortly thereafter. Corcyra became a major mining center—as it remains today.”
“That’s the official story,” Cleveland said, nodding.
“It’s the true story,” Daniel said, frowning. “The records of the discovery, the minutes of the Council of Pantellaria approving the colony, the names of all thirty-seven hundred colonists in the initial migration—they all exist. I’ve seen them, and I believe my colleague can show them to you right now if you’re in doubt.”
“I could,” said Adele without looking up. “But I suspect Master Cleveland is referring to the legend that there was a Pre-Hiatus settlement on Corcyra before the Pantellarians arrived.”
“Yes, Lady Mundy,” Cleveland said, turning his eyes toward Adele for the first time. “Though not Pre-Hiatus—I don’t know of any evidence supporting that belief. But I believe I’ve found evidence that Corcyra was settled from Bay about 800 years ago, long before Pantellaria discovered the planet and sent its colony.”
Adele’s wands danced like the surface of a pond in a rainstorm. She said, “Bay settled Ischia in the Ribbon Stars eight hundred years ago. That was only colony ship which Bay sent out. Before end of the century, Bay had collapsed into civil war from which its civilization never recovered. The factions were using fusion bombs, and they stopped fighting simply because the infrastructure could no longer support weapons more advanced than spear throwers.”
“The colony ship from Bay, the Coalsack 5747, was under Captain Pearl,” Cleveland said. “That’s correct, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Adele said. “The only further data I have on the venture is that there were some thirteen thousand settlers.”
“Cleveland,” said Daniel. He hoped he kept the sudden concern out of his voice. “Did you get this idea of a treasure because of the captain’s name is the same as that of the valley your church is set up in?”
If the boy had done something so silly, the whole business was absurd—and he was probably too deluded to listen to reason. Much as Daniel would like to help the Sands—
“No, Captain Leary,” Cleveland said with a smile of calm amusement. He was, after all, Daniel’s senior by a year or two. “The coincidence of names caused me to look into Ischian history, however. There was a surprising amount of information available on Corcyra since the planets are neighbors and Ischia was a major trading partner of Corcyra and of Pantellaria as well.”
“You have the advantage of me there,” Daniel said. He felt embarrassed even though he hadn’t actually said anything insulting about Cleveland’s intelligence or common sense. “I know nothing of the other stars in the Ribbon Cluster, save Pantellaria.”
“Captain Pearl landed on Ischia as planned and disembarked the colonists,” Cleveland said. “He and the crew were to be colonists also, in the normal fashion of colony ships. Ordinarily the ship, the Coalsack 5747, would have been cannibalized for the colony’s use, but there were two factions within the colonists. Not long after landing on Ischia, Captain Pearl lifted off again with most of the crew and about a thousand of the original colonists. The Coalsack 5747 was never heard of again.”
“Bloody hell,” said Daniel. He shook his head, feeling a little queasy at the implications of what Cleveland had said. “I’m not surprised the ship disappeared. It may not have made it into orbit after liftoff. Colony ships are huge, and they’re not built for repeated liftoffs and landings.”
“Was the division among the colonists due to the religious arguments which led to the civil war that broke out on Bay a generation later?” Adele said. For politeness’ sake, she looked at Cleveland this time as she spoke.
“I don’t know, Lady Mundy,” Cleveland said. “My source here is an Ischian history which I suspect was intended as a school text. What it says is that Captain Pearl and his confederates stole a great treasure.”
“Could that not have been the ship itself?” Adele said. “The cargo had largely been landed when Pearl lifted off again, but the loss of the ship must have been a great handicap to the new colony.”
“The Coalsack may have been the treasure, certainly,” Cleveland agreed. “Nothing else appearing, I might assume that it was. But there’s the buried anomaly in the Pearl Valley.”
“The fact that the ship lifted from Ischia doesn’t prove that it landed on Corcyra,” Daniel said, but his tone was mild. He was becoming intrigued, more or less despite himself. “As I say, it may well have broken up on Ischia.”
“Not in sight of the ground,” Cleveland said. “I’m sure from the tone of the history that it would have been recorded as the just retribution of Providence on the traitors.”
Daniel nodded in understanding. Adele raised her eyes again and said, “I would like to see this history, if I may.”
“The original is waiting at the door with Gillfin,” Cleveland said. He was gaining assurance as the interview went on. “Your reputation preceded you, Lady Mundy. I made a copy, but you may be able to learn things from the original which have escaped me.”
It struck Daniel that the boy must have inherited his mother’s intelligence as well as her strong jaw and broad forehead. His willowy height, however, owed nothing to Mistress Sand’s short, blocky frame.
“What decided me to return to Cinnabar and attempt to mount an expedition,” Cleveland said, “was the port computer at the capital, Brotherhood. It’s the main starport, where the river broadens and forms a pool at the base of the foothills.”
“Yes,” said Daniel, nodding cautiously.
“The computer comes from a starship,” Cleveland said. “I know, that’s common: a computer which can calculate navigation in the Matrix has more capacity than any use in normal space requires.”
“Yes,” said Daniel. “No matter how old it is.”
“This computer—it’s in the Manor, Brotherhood’s government building,” Cleveland went on. “This computer was manufactured on Bay. And nothing so sophisticated has been manufactured on Bay for the past seven hundred years.”
Adele’s wands were in quivering motion. “I’ll want to see the computer,” she said to her display. “Will that be possible?”
“I don’t think it would be difficult if you were in Brotherhood,” Cleveland said. “It certainly wasn’t for me.”
He cleared his throat and added, sounding diffident again, “May I ask a question, please? Does your question mean that you’re thinking of investing in the expedition?”
“You’ve convinced me to provide th
e ship and crew for the expedition at my own expense,” Daniel said. He assumed that was what Adele intended, but it didn’t matter. She had made him lead, so she would back him whatever her personal opinion. “I’ll talk to Mistress Sand. I expect that she can outfit the vessel from her own resources, so there’s no need of outside investors. We’ll need a cargo, you see, and she’s well-placed to provide it.”
He smiled at Cleveland and rose to his feet. “You’ve found the, well—the treasure, we’ll call it for now. For that you’ll keep a third. Your mother will get a third. And I will get the remaining third. Can we shake on a partnership on those terms?”
He offered his hand.
Cleveland stood, looking stunned. “Captain Leary,” he said. “This is very fair, more than fair. But I’ve already discussed arrangements with Captain Sorley of the freighter Madison Merchant. He has been willing to carry me if I indemnified him against loss in a war zone. That’s why I asked mother for financial help.”
“I don’t know Captain Sorley…,” Daniel said, his mind racing through possibilities. “Have you signed a contract yet?”
“Based on his record,” Adele said still seated and scrolling through data, “Captain Sorley has never kept a contract in his life. Of course I have only a few of his aliases. It could be that under other names he’s more honest.”
“What?” said Cleveland. He slowly extended his arm, though he continued to stare at Adele.
Daniel grasped his hand and shook it firmly. “There, partner,” he said. “I’ll keep you informed of developments. I don’t think it will be long before we can lift from here and get to work.”
Adele rose to her feet and slipped her data unit into its pocket.
“Yes,” she said. “And Master Cleveland? I strongly advise you not to discuss the matter further with Captain Sorley. He is a liar, and a thief, and very probably a murderer. You would soil yourself by spitting in his face. Do I make myself clear?”
“Ah…,” Cleveland said. “Lady Mundy, we Transformationists attempt to find good in every human being.”