Now Playing on Outworld 5730

by R. T. W. Lipkin

  “I’m not sure I understand, my lord,” said Calvert. The story was more complex than he’d imagined. “Are you saying that Lord Trevelton’s fiancée left him for you, Lord Saybrook? And then she left you for your plant manager?”

  “I am indeed saying that, Calvert. I told you he could settle this, Ephraim,” Saybrook said.

  “Sit down, Calvert,” Trevelton said. “After you’ve been dead for a few hours, you’ll see how dull these masks are.”

  Chapter 66

  “Ephraim Croft,” Trevelton said, holding out his hand. Calvert shook it.

  “And the scoundrel over there on the lesser stack of hay is my ex-roommate, Wyatt Conroy.”

  Wyatt and Calvert shook hands.

  “I don’t suppose you have a real name, Calvert. Do you?”

  “Eli Calvert,” he said. Monte Rice was dead, buried in the ashes on Outworld 217.

  “I heard that Jewel Allman lets some of the staff retain their own names,” Wyatt said. “Must be easier.”

  “It is, my lord,” Calvert said.

  “Drop the my lord,” Trevelton said. “And for pity’s sake, sit down. You’re among friends.”

  “I prefer to stand, my lords,” Calvert said. Someone had to maintain decorum or the fragile peace between the former friends, former enemies, could disappear.

  “We’re waiting for your opinion, Calvert,” said Saybrook.

  “On what, my lords?”

  “Wyatt never could get to the point,” Ephraim said. “Her name’s Charlotte Churchill, by the way. Might as well be armed with as much information as possible.” Ephraim pointed to the third stack of hay in the room and gestured for Calvert to sit down, but he remained standing.

  “The question is—and damn you, man, sit down—if your fiancée, Charlotte Churchill, seduced your best friend and subsequently left him to marry his factory’s most valued employee on what was supposed to’ve been the very wedding day of this best friend and Charlotte . . . and please keep in mind that Charlotte was supposed to have married you weeks earlier.”

  “What Ephraim’s trying to say is—what do you think of Charlotte? Was she in the wrong? Or were we?”

  “Especially, was he”—Ephraim nodded in Wyatt’s direction—“in the wrong for having allowed her to seduce him in the first place? Without which allowing none of the rest of this mess would’ve ever occurred, and Charlotte and I would now be happily married, I’d be back in Northumberland, and we wouldn’t be sitting here in this damp barn talking to each other. Or to you.”

  Calvert noticed that Ephraim’s hair was wet and then saw the empty pail. He’d put it in the room in case they’d woken up and needed water before he got there.

  “Say what you really think, Calvert,” Wyatt said. He looked more like a Wyatt than a Lord Saybrook, Calvert thought. And for the first time he noticed the slight New Zealand edge to the man’s words.

  Calvert cleared his throat, nodded at both men, and said, “I would be grateful to be rid of such a problem as Charlotte Churchill.”

  Both of the seated men stared at Calvert.

  “And you, my lord,” Calvert said, addressing Ephraim, “should consider yourself quite lucky that your good friend saved you from having the misfortune of marrying her, because you and Charlotte Churchill would most certainly not be happily married right now.”

  “Have you known a woman like this, Calvert?” Ephraim said.

  “No, my lord, but I have been observing people my entire life, and I’m able to understand something about Charlotte Churchill that is opaque to both of you, since I myself am not and never was in love with her.”

  “Hurry up, Johnny!” came the call from down the corridor. “They must be famished!”

  A moment later, Rosie, Johnny, and Cook herself appeared at the doorway to the small room at the back of the stables. They were holding trays of food, leftovers from the picnic on the lawn and parts of the dinner that hadn’t yet been served, and Johnny was carrying two heavy baskets and had a bottle of the manor’s finest wine underneath his arm.

  “God help me, you two really are alive,” Cook said. “I had to see it for myself. My lords.” She curtsied to them most inexpertly and looked around for a place to set down her large tray.

  Calvert moved a hay bale over and helped Cook with her burden, then placed Rosie’s tray on the floor, since there was nowhere else for it.

  Johnny handed wineglasses to the two duelers, then uncorked the bottle and poured.

  The marquess and the earl saluted each other, emptied their glasses, and Johnny refilled them as the men smiled.

  “If there’ll be nothing further, my lords,” Calvert said, giving Johnny, Rosie, and Cook a signal to depart as he bowed a very slight bow.

  Trevelton was making a sandwich out of two giant slabs of bread and anything that would fit between them while Saybrook was devouring a piece of cold pheasant pie and sighing in appreciation.

  “Thank you, Calvert,” said Trevelton. “I shall think about what you said.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Calvert said.

  “Rosie, wait!” Johnny called after his sister, but she’d already flown past him and was back outside in the heavy rain, running toward the manor house at top speed.

  Chapter 67

  Clive was naked, half-asleep out on the slab, which he preferred to the large bed in his bedroom, since it reminded him of both Marguerite’s absence and his only shortcoming. It was warm out, as it usually was on 75, and the gentle lap of the red-gold waves was soothing.

  No one had yet to devise a method to make the extensive ocean system of 75 potable or useful in any way at all other than as an aesthetic pleasure, but he had a group working on this task and had added to the staff the day it’d become clear that the drought wouldn’t end anytime soon.

  It hadn’t rained in nearly a year now and there was no indication it ever would again.

  If that were truly the future, one without precipitation—a circumstance that had happened on the now-deserted Outworld 10—then everyone would have to relocate, even Clive himself, who’d been one of the early arrivals on 75 and considered it his ancestral home, even though no ancestor of his did or could possibly have lived here.

  He heard the sound of careful footsteps and sat up but didn’t turn around. It didn’t matter who it was as long as they were bringing the news he was expecting. The news he wanted.

  “Mr. Idrest,” said a silky female voice. “There’s a communication for you that’s flashing.”

  Clive finally turned around and saw an unusually tall woman in an old-fashioned business suit, a style that had unfortunately become rampant on 75, a product of the drought, Clive thought. If there was no water, then there’d be no sex either. For some.

  “Shall I bring it out to you?” she said, staring down at him from her Amazonian height.

  Clive got up—she was taller than even he, a tall man, was—and walked past her into the house. He shut and locked the door behind him, even though the woman had probably come through the house in order to get to the slab. Now she’d have to walk around the perimeter. But he didn’t care.

  There was a flashing communication, and it had to be the one he’d been waiting for.

  After he put on a pair of pants and fresh shirt, Clive went into his office, which was directly across the house from his bedroom, and closed and secured his office door.

  He looked at the time. Alexander was due for a meeting shortly. Clive congratulated himself on having arranged things so well. Everything was working out as he’d planned, as he’d imagined. Sometimes he could actually feel the substance of his thoughts as he turned them into reality, and this was one of those times.

  But when he opened the communication, his self-congratulation came to a stark end. Because Beau Ogden wasn’t dead, as Alexander had assured him he must be, but he’d been rescued from the rubble and was very much alive and well.

  Furthermore, there was no word from Allene Dickens. If Beau Ogden was alive, then may
be Marguerite wasn’t pregnant. The two circumstances were connected through the sickening Nicholas Coburn, and Clive couldn’t shake off the premonition.

  Clive pulled his shirt out of his pants. He couldn’t bear the way anything felt against his skin. As though it were attacking him, accusing him, pointing out his inadequacies.

  As he always did when he felt frustrated or thwarted, Clive turned to the glass wall and stared out into the ocean. The only rooms of the house that didn’t have such a grand view were the ones where the servants worked. Workers didn’t need a view of anything but their handsome remunerations and the work in front of them.

  The red-gold waves rolled gently back and forth, never once giving a hint at the froth they’d start kicking up if rain were due. But Clive refused to think about Beau Ogden being alive, about Allene Dickens not contacting him, or about the drought.

  Instead he thought about one of his finest moments. Thoughts that were a sure remedy to these, or any, problems.

  He’d been at one of the only two majestics he’d attended—this one in the twenty-seventh, the popular plague century. This was the majestic he’d gone to not completely for the pleasure of watching the intricately staged play of death and suffering around him, although that was stimulating, gratifying, and satisfying, even more so than he’d suspected it would be.

  If he were to attend another majestic, he’d go back to the twenty-seventh yet again, as many others with the same leanings did. The food and accommodations were first-rate, and the grotesque displays were brilliant and energizing.

  But he’d gone to this majestic in order to kill Eliana Havens.

  Chapter 68

  Clive took off his shirt, then his pants. He remembered everything more clearly when he was unprotected from the world around him, and the only person he was expecting was Alexander.

  He thought of the look on Eliana’s face when she’d recognized him the third day of that majestic. A sublime expression, one of hatred mixed with the most ancient, most enticing emotion—fear. Yet he’d easily worked his way into a friendship with her, assuring her that the past was over and forgotten.

  After all, they’d been good friends once, hadn’t they? There was no reason why they couldn’t be again. And it was so long ago. She’d agreed, trusting him. Or maybe she was just poised to overtake another of his businesses as she’d done a decade earlier and was using him as she’d done then.

  He’d bedded her—the sex at the plague majestics was rumored to be the best of any era, even better than the enticing bordellos of the thirty-fifth—and the sex there had been plentiful if not imaginative enough—and he hadn’t been disappointed in this regard. Eliana had been wild and insatiable, spurring him on to feats he’d never before attempted.

  Afterwards, as she lay there and he fed her the rare delicacy he’d brought with him, watching her face as it froze first in horror and then from the paralysis, he’d had a different sort of orgasm, one that took his displeasure with Eliana, his hatred for her and what she’d done, and shook it so thoroughly that it was forever vanquished.

  An hour later he’d gone to Claude Sims and told him that he’d just woken up and the woman he’d taken to bed seemed to have died while he was asleep. Did she have the plague? Was that possible? Her face was swollen, so perhaps she did.

  Although of course the cause of death was never determined.

  Alexander knocked. Clive was holding himself, tumescent with the memory of Eliana Havens’s death, and he opened the door, letting Alexander in and relocking the door behind him.

  Alexander saw Clive’s arousal and pulled his own shirt off.

  Another flashing communication. This one Clive read over Alexander’s shoulder while also watching Alexander strip.

  Finally. The news he’d been waiting for. Marguerite was pregnant.

  A son. Verified by a doctor.

  And confirmation that Coburn was still on Earth.

  His premonition had been wrong. At least Allene Dickens hadn’t let him down. And even his felonious wife was cooperating.

  Alexander was naked now, displaying his near-perfect form for Clive to admire. But no matter how pleasing or enticing it was to see Alexander’s arousal and anticipate his unmatched passion, Beau Ogden was alive. Alexander would have to be punished.

  Clive turned to the task, thrilling at the prospect, suddenly understanding Alexander’s errors in a new light. They were a gift to Clive from the gods. A gift he’d savor.

  He’d have to employ a different method this time, since the last time Alexander had seemed to enjoy it. This time, though, Clive would make sure Alexander understood.

  And when Alexander begged Clive again and again to stop, Clive knew he’d chosen correctly.

  Chapter 69

  Vernie Dalston, her dark curls loose around her face, was mounted atop Lord Fitzmore, whose hands were loosely on Vernie’s hips, ignoring her small breasts as he was, in fact, completely ignoring her.

  While Vernie inspected the impressive array of gilded cherubs that adorned the viscount’s grand bedstead, Fitzmore was having a conversation with Baron North, who was perched on the window seat, watching the unusual activity that was taking place outside in the downpour.

  “Stroke of luck, that, wasn’t it?” North said. “Unexpected.”

  “Vernie, move down a bit. That’s a good dear,” Fitzmore said as he shifted his hips and gave his legs a stretch.

  “Imagine our good fortune, Trent. Goodest. Never would’ve expected it. The way they just killed each other.” Lord Fitzmore smiled the same way he’d smiled when he’d seen Saybrook go down—a weak, fleeting expression.

  Baron North turned completely toward the window, twisting his torso around to get a better view. What was going on out there? It looked like Cook herself was carrying a gigantic tray. And that footman and servant girl were as well. Where could they all be going? In this deluge?

  Vernie tried pulling Fitzmore’s hands up to her breasts, but he was having none of it. He wasn’t even looking at her as she grinded away on him, her sweat falling in drops on his concave abdomen.

  “Fitz, you’re not even trying,” Vernie said in her most whiny voice.

  “Ah, that’s good, Vernie. Just what I like.” Fitzmore closed his eyes and his hands dropped to the embroidered silk coverlet.

  “Do I have to take care of myself?” Vernie said.

  “Quiet!” Baron North said. “Do you want the whole house to hear you?” He was still looking out the window. He’d seen Vernie and Fitz together dozens of times. Nothing ever changed. Why would Vernie think it would now?

  “Say, Trent,” Fitzmore said. He opened his eyes, put his hands behind his head, and turned his gaze toward the window seat. “What could you possibly be looking at? Haven’t you seen enough rain?”

  “Oh, Fitz,” Vernie said as she started stroking herself, one hand on her left breast and her other hand on her sex. “I love fucking you.”

  Baron North got up from the window seat and went over to the next window, where he could stand right up against it and get a better view. He opened the drapes fully and stared down.

  “Something’s going on,” North said. “A crew from the kitchen just hauled a feast out into the storm. Who could that be for?”

  “You’re just hungry, old man,” Fitzmore said. “Pull the cord and get something brought up. Vernie should be hungry in a moment as well.” Fitzmore groaned in pleasure then and closed his eyes as Vernie clenched her thighs around his hips and started moving much faster.

  “I just want to know what’s happening,” North said, “although, come to think of it, I am rather hungry.”

  North walked over to the bed and pulled the tasseled cord while Vernie yelled out her release. The passive Fitzmore muttered, “Ah yes, that’s good” as his rippling orgasm concluded.

  North answered the almost immediate knock on the door, stepping out into the corridor and pulling the door behind him.

  “Some refreshments, please,” he s
aid to the maid. She was just the kind of woman he’d been interested in back in the day when he’d been interested. Now it wasn’t even that interesting to watch.

  “Yes, my lord,” Nell said. “Will a cold platter be to your liking?”

  “Tea as well,” North said.

  “Of course, my lord,” Nell said as Vernie yelled out, “Fitz!”

  “For three, then?” Nell said, suppressing a giggle.

  “Oh. Yes,” North said. “What’s going on downstairs?”

  “Whatever could you mean, my lord?” Nell was trying to look in through the slight crack in the doorway, and North let the door open just a bit more to see what her reaction would be.

  “I’m sure I saw Cook herself trouncing about in the rain with a huge tray.” North stared at Nell, yet the old sensations refused to surface.

  “I don’t know, my lord. Shall I find out for you?”

  “Yes. And bring the refreshments immediately. We’re famished.”

  But a full quarter hour later when Nell returned with the tea and a sorry spread of lackluster biscuits and leftover meats, breads, and cakes, she had no news to report.

  “Nothing?” North said to Nell. Vernie, her silk robe falling open in the front, was pouring the tea while Fitzmore was doing something in the bathroom.

  “I can’t find out, my lord,” Nell said. “There’s too much happening and no one has time to talk with the likes of me.”

  North shooed her away and went to look out the window again, this time accompanied by a cup of tasteless tea and a stale cracker.

  Fitz emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed, and North gestured for him to come over to the window.

  “Who’s that?” North pointed down at the small figure scampering toward the house.

  “One of the maids,” Fitzmore said. “No one.”

  “I wonder what all the fuss is about?” said North.

  “Oh, Fitz, that was divine,” said Vernie, sighing as she lifted her teacup.