A Gluttony of Plutocrats (The Respite Trilogy Book 1)

by Ella Swift Arbok

  For an hour, I circulated, letting my combi do its work, being drawn from time to time into brief conversations with men of industry, entertainment, organized crime, any sphere of influence.

  Around me, interest in food began to wane, while interest in the servers grew—a grope, an intimate fondle, a lewd remark, always received with a smile and a “Thank you, sir.”

  I had taken no wine since my meeting with Bandstorm, but as I witnessed the humiliation of those young humans, and their ostensible gratitude, the need for some quieting influence hit me. I picked a glass of red wine from a nearby table and drank.

  A server, a preteen male, hurried over. He lifted a bottle and topped my glass up. “Sir, the warm-up will begin soon. May I be your choice?”

  Did I seem less fearful than other men present? I smiled. “Where does the action take place?”

  He raised his plucked eyebrows. “Sir, most prefer the chambers of the first basement.”

  “The first basement?”

  “Of course, sir. The second is for tomorrow.” He shuddered, shook his head, and took a deep breath. “Or your room. Your choice. Whatever your wish. Some like to be watched. They use the tables here, once we have cleared them.”

  I had no doubt the basement chambers had mirrors set into the walls, as my room had, and little doubt that everyone present knew their purpose. This exercise in male bonding needed to be communal and visible to be effective. As a single organism, they raped and ruled the planet, and I had allowed myself to become entwined in its web.

  What now? One thing was clear; I didn’t want the boy. “I don’t know your name, but no, thank you.”

  He placed the bottle back on the table. “Sir, we are all Bernard. The girls are Janet.”

  For a few more minutes, I picked at the food and fondled my combi. By the time Bandstorm’s stentorian voice called for attention, I had a record of everyone present.

  Bandstorm held up a hand. The serving staff hurried to form a circle in the middle of the hall, facing outward. When they were organized, Bandstorm boomed. “Gentlemen, take your pleasures.”

  Chapter 18

  A click of fingers echoed from the painted dome.

  I glanced up and met Satan’s eyes.

  Near me, a thick arm shot forward, finger extended. “You.” A slight server girl, no more than eight, stepped toward the man, trembling but not resisting. The arm moved. “And you, boy. To the stairs.”

  The owner of the arm strode past me and harried his victims onward.

  A few other men made swift selections, but many, to my relief, were content to spend more time with the food.

  I took another glass of wine and wandered around the Great Hall, picking at food here and there. The time I dreaded had arrived. I’d told Bandstorm I would take things at my own pace, but my pace wouldn’t placate him.

  All I could think about was survival. Any noble thoughts I once held, the arrogant certainty that I wouldn’t take part in Bandstorm’s perverse games to save myself, seemed hollow, even nonsensical.

  What must I do? I had to get away.

  Fewer than a quarter of the guests remained in the hall. Servers scurried around, moving dishes and trays, clearing space on the sturdy trestle tables.

  The horror of my situation hit me. Those men who remained had no interest in food. They cared more for a public display of control, a shared confession of brutality over innocence, with Bandstorm’s trained slaves no more than dehumanized objects to be consumed and spat out once they had served their purpose.

  A young Janet stood beside me. “Sir, your pleasure?”

  I emptied my glass.

  Janet refilled it.

  Around the hall, tables began to creak. I turned once as my combi did its work. What now? Out of the hall, but up or down?

  “Janet, I’m going downstairs.”

  The child smiled. “Yes, sir. Shall l bring a bottle?”

  “No. I mean alone.” How would that look, if I were seen on the stairs? “No. Come with me. And no, no bottle.”

  Broad stone steps spiraled downward, an occasional oil lamp providing light that wouldn’t have passed Respite’s nominal health-and-safety laws. We entered the gloomy first basement.

  It covered a similar area to the Great Hall but without such glorious height. A haze of tobacco smoke followed a draft out through the open double doors. A distant whimper and a slap broke across a murmur of grunts. Early in the proceedings as we were, the predominant odor, after tobacco, was that of red wine.

  To one side of the circular room, doors had been set at ten-foot intervals into a lightweight arc of what looked like temporary booths. Most had their doors closed. I took Janet to one that stood open.

  Inside, there stood a bed and other padded items at differing heights. Under other circumstances, I would no doubt have laughed to see Respite’s earliest example of ergonomic design set to such an evil purpose.

  I ushered the girl in, noting without surprise small mirrors on two walls. “Janet, I’ve forgotten something. Wait here. If anyone needs the booth, wait outside.”

  I hurried to the steps.

  The second basement—the steps continued beyond it—had just two lit lamps at opposite sides of its stone-block walls. They were enough to reveal a ring of electric lamps above. The only sounds were of small creatures scurrying across stone.

  I stepped forward. My hands shook. As if walking through a midnight, moonlit e-forest, as I had once done on Earth, I let my hands guide me as much as my ill-fed eyes. Racks, wooden. Some angled. Some moveable. Some cruciform, to take an outstretched child.

  My hands struck on metal. A bath. I rapped the side with my knuckles, recoiling at the echoes. I reached inside. Empty. So far.

  Lillibeth, my daughter, screamed. Across the great wasteland of space—beyond many more decades than she had known in her unready, innocent childhood—that scream, which I had never heard in life, reached me in a subbasement halfway to hell.

  Had there been more light, I would have turned and fled. I inched my way back to the stairs and climbed a few.

  “Janet, take me to my room.” I took one more glass of wine.

  When I told Janet I didn’t want her to come in, she stared at the floor and muttered, “Another failure, sir?”

  “Hurry downstairs. I can’t help you.”

  I had no desire to sleep that night. What if a child entered the room while I slept? What evidence could they fabricate against me?

  I’d gotten deeper into Respite’s horror than I intended. The actions I witnessed hadn’t plumbed the depths of human evil. A warm-up, Bandstorm called it. Worse would follow on the second evening. There would be no trained and compliant slaves. I wouldn’t survive Bandstorm’s disapproval, and I couldn’t earn his approval.

  I sipped, half a glassful. My mind was made up. Finish the drink, then go find my good friend Hector and explain. Damn, the door won’t open.

  My eyes throbbed after more alcohol than I had ever drunk in one day. I shivered. A cold draft from a slit window ran around my shoulders. I took a blanket from the bed, pushed a chair against the door, sat, and closed my eyes to concentrate.

  A rap on the door woke me.

  A male voice called. “Mr. Oneway. Shall I bring breakfast? Service closes in an hour.”

  Breakfast? But that doesn’t close until…what was the time? When my watch came into focus, it showed ten. I had slept for six hours.

  I washed and changed into the casual clothes demanded for morning wear.

  A young man waited outside my door. “Sir, let me lead you.” He reached for my hand.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Just show me the way.”

  We arrived at the Great Hall, coffee scented and lit by the low sun. Around its scattering of tables, knots of men huddled in intimate conversation.

  A girl, dressed in gray shorts and shirt, with studded shoes that clanked on the tiles, like all the serving staff that morning, hurried over to me. “Sir, let me help you.”

/>   “Yes. Food.” A menu chalked on a blackboard refused to stay in focus. “You choose. Was it you, last night?”

  The girl lowered her eyes. “Sir, I have no past, I have no future.”

  “I see. Well, food, on the light side. Nothing greasy. And coffee, please.”

  When she had gone, I stepped to the window.

  Snow covered the ground. More fell, steady but light. Dark clouds underlit by sunlight reflecting off the snow gave an eerie glow.

  Someone called my name. I turned. Dayton Heyho clicked a finger and pointed to a seat across a table from him. “Come. Janet will find you.”

  He lifted his walking stick from the table and rested it against a chair. Then, he removed a notebook from his pocket and opened it. He leaned forward so that his eyes were a few inches from the paper. Then he wrote at the top of the page “Patents, Oneway.”

  I sat where he indicated. “So, you know about my applications.”

  Heyho laughed, coughed, and laughed again. “There are no secrets among friends.”

  He raised a hand and rubbed it against his damaged cheek, which, according to graffiti I had seen on the wall of a tavern urinal, had been broken in bar brawl a few yards from where I had stood, feet apart. He scratched the scar, the ostentatious cross-stitches of which, according to another graffito in rhyming couplets on the same wall, resulted from the Rumpard’s—his nickname at the time—insistence on stitching the wound himself, with alcohol as the only analgesic.

  Janet returned carrying a silver lattice tray. She set my food and coffee on the table, together with a glass of wine.

  I touched the glass. “Water, please.”

  Heyho shook his head. “Lose that habit. It upsets some hosts, although Hector’s not the worst.”

  There were stricter hosts than Bandstorm? What had I done that might offend? “You mean asking for water?”

  “Saying please to the servers. Sets the wrong tone. Now, you eat. I’ll talk.”

  He started with a warning. Bandstorm was already mad at me. “I’ve put in a word. But take care.”

  Heyho droned on, his staccato sentences drifting across my numb brain. Trouble from Bandstorm? He must already know about my lack of participation at the warm-up. Could I use drunkenness as an excuse? Probably not, but it was the best I had.

  I put both hands around my head, fingers interlocked. With my stubble of hair still on the short side of fashionable, was it destined to reach a length suitable to braid? If I couldn’t persuade Bandstorm I had an interest in his games, I might not live another day.

  What could I do? Take a child to my room and cover the mirrors? Let Bandstorm be persuaded by what he didn’t see? And what about recorded sound?

  He wasn’t a fool. It wouldn’t work.

  Heyho’s voice rattled on—percentages, marketing. Servers hovered nearby.

  Too late for recrimination. Even my friends, if I had any present, would be my enemies out of fear. And all because I, with my superior knowledge of science and my thirty-fifth-century ethics, believed myself invulnerable to their primitive society.

  Heyho tapped on the table. “You can’t go alone. Ten percent? May not be much, but take it. Or a hundred percent of nothing.”

  I nodded.

  A clatter of metal made me turn to the elevator, but even in the dim light I could see it was empty. I turned around.

  Janet lay on the floor. Broken glass spread around her. Red wine and water spattered her gray attire.

  I began to stand, but Heyho reached out a hand. “Idiot. Their pain doesn’t matter.”

  How much can five words reveal about a person’s character and about the overarching ethos of the society he inhabits? How much pain do you have to inflict to numb your own humanity?

  Janet brushed glass aside with the back of her hand, then turned to her hands and knees. She started to rise, but a boot reached out to her hip and nudged her to the tiles once more. Laughter greeted that fine piece of wit.

  She rolled from the boot, ending near our table. She stood, pulled a sliver of glass from her thigh, and began to pick up debris from the floor.

  A male server hurried over with a brush.

  Janet stood, her face impassive. She curtseyed to me. “Sir, I’ll bring water again.”

  Heyho called to her: “Wine for me. Strong and red. Now.”

  By the time she returned with our drinks, a plan had formed unbidden in my head. “Dayton, I’m taking Janet to my room.”

  He grinned. “I think you should.” He smacked the child on the rear as we left.

  She thanked him and held a hand toward me.

  I ignored it.

  She turned to the stairs.

  “We’ll use the elevator, Janet.”

  She blinked hard a couple of times and gritted her teeth.

  Would she know how to operate the mechanism? I needn’t have worried. We stepped inside the grid cage. Janet slammed the doors across and threw a hook from one to the other. She braced her feet by the crank and began to turn its handle. Blood seeped from the wound on her leg where she had removed glass.

  Inch by creaky inch, the elevator rose.

  The wood-paneled top couldn’t conceal a camera, unless I misjudged the technology of the day. The sides were metal grid, the base, no more than a couple of inches thick. Could I be absolutely certain no recording device had access to the inside of the cage? No, but I had no better hope.

  We were six feet from the ground floor, a quarter of the way to my room.

  Janet ground the crank. Sweat glimmered on her forehead. She turned and changed hands.

  I offered to help.

  She grimaced. “No, sir.”

  Sweat gathered in her hair and thick eyebrows. Her clothes were soaked, like Sy’s after a run. Even her face bore a resemblance. Had I chosen her for that reason?

  The elevator ground on. We entered a level between floors, a small light in a granite block pillar providing the only illumination.

  “Janet, stop the elevator.”

  She slotted the crank handle into the restraining ring. “Sir, if you wish to hurt me, it has to be in public. The master’s rules.”

  “Janet, I won’t hurt you. I won’t do anything to you, but is it necessary everyone knows that?”

  She stood erect, staring ahead. “Sir, I dare not lie to them if they ask.”

  My future depended on Bandstorm’s imagination filling in the gaps from his own mind and not taking the trouble to check.

  When enough time had passed, I asked Janet to take us down.

  She reached for the crank, then lowered her hand. She turned her back to me, lifted the shirt around her waist, and pulled the top of her shorts down enough to reveal a tattoo: in characters two inches high, the number 773.

  Once we were back in the Great Hall, Janet hurried off.

  A Bernard approached. “The master requests you wait here. Do you require anything, sir?”

  Something to steady my nerves. “Yes, wine, strong but not large.” I sat by a window. Snow swirled across the driveway.

  Had I done enough to ensure Bandstorm’s forgiveness, or at least tolerance? I knew I couldn’t survive the evening’s entertainment. There would be no trained and mind-numbed Janets or Bernards, except to serve. The disposables had given themselves that name for a reason. And no children fled safe homes as winter approached its height. They were stolen away.

  Bernard arrived with my drink.

  I took it, drank it all, and set the glass on a table.

  Two white limousines pulled up, one either side of the main doorway. Chauffeurs stepped out and opened the rear doors, letting snow fall on their shoulders.

  I fingered the combi around my neck, angling it toward the new arrivals.

  Ralph Everest, premier of Eden, emerged first.

  The other I couldn’t name, although I had seen his face often.

  Bandstorm joined them. Little of their conversation was audible from where I sat, but Newton would be able to reconstruct
it later from minimal traces of sound reaching the combi and the movements of the men’s lips—that is, if there were to be a later for me.

  Bernard returned. I hadn’t noticed him leave. He brought another drink and the overcoat I had left in my room. “Sir, the master will see you outside. Shall I carry the glass?”

  “No, thank you.” I put on my coat, took the drink, and walked to the main door.

  Bernard followed. He showed me to a stone bench set into three sides of an alcove by the doorway.

  The alcove had been cleared of snow but offered little protection from the bitter wind.

  Bernard stood in a short-sleeved shirt, exposed to the weather.

  “Bernard, you don’t have to wait.”

  He stared ahead. “I do, sir.”

  Bandstorm came after half an hour, accompanied by two guards. They took up position on either side of the alcove. Bernard left without haste.

  When Bandstorm had taken a seat facing me, he took out a cigar, which the guards competed to light. He gazed at me for a moment. “You’re a puzzle, Lemuel, and I don’t like puzzles. You upset me yesterday with your superior ways, and yet today you help yourself to a piece of fruit that you told me wasn’t to your taste.”

  He drew on the cigar, letting the smoke out of the side of his mouth and into the wind. “You chose the elevator. Why?”

  Bandstorm must have issued the order for our meeting long before I took Janet from the hall. I had acted with moments to spare. “I like elevators. Something about the way they move, the intimate space.”

  “Your room would have been more comfortable.”

  “Maybe so, Hector, but cameras make me nervous.”

  He glared. Was it my knowledge of the cameras or my use of his first name that had startled him? He shuffled on his seat. “So, you enjoyed your time with Janet.”

  I hesitated. If I left Bandstorm in any doubt, I wouldn’t leave alive. But we had spoken before, and he wasn’t an idiot. “Hector, I need to take one step at a time, but I enjoyed the first step.”