by David Drake
"Hey, Griggs," laughed the man with the hamper. "Better give him his jacket back. That color don't suit you no better than it does him."
Griggs eased his weight off the fabric and shoved Jesilind away from the bench. "Go away, boy," Griggs said, with contempt rather than anger.
Jesilind focused tightly on Mark as though Biber's chuckling servants didn't exist and said, "Mr. Maxwell, at this time I always meditate alone. Good day, sir. I trust we'll have another chance to converse before we go our separate ways."
The doctor bowed, took a step, and tripped over the Zeniths' hamper. Jesilind scrabbled forward like a large bird lifting off. By the time he'd risen from all fours, he was halfway to the rooms and moving at a dead run. The yellow coat flapped behind him.
"Scarecrow!" Griggs cried, and spun the cushion toward its fleeing owner.
Mark stood also. "I think I'll study for a while myself, Doctor," he said for politeness' sake, not that Jesilind could hear him. "Good day."
He walked to Room 36, being careful about where he put his feet. The servants from Zenith ignored him.
2. Fun and Games
Caravansary rooms didn't have built-in locks. There was a rugged staple and strap on both the inside and the outside of each door. The occupant provided his own padlock to secure the space.
Mark's lock was Terran, sturdy and expensive. It was programmable to a variety of different styles, but he'd set it to open from the pressure of both his thumbs together. He unlocked Room 36, switched on the tiny area light he carried in a pocket, and closed the door behind him. He dropped the padlock's hasp through the staple from the other side, though he didn't bother to lock it.
The room's interior was about as inviting as a crocodile's gullet.
Rooms in the caravansary were six feet by ten, with a half loft overhead reached by a metal ladder. Occupants could use the low benches cast into the back and side walls to sit, sleep, or place their goods out of the slight pool of water in the middle of the floor.
There were no lights, no running water, and no toilet facilities of any kind. At the rear of the caravansary were a common latrine and eight shower heads that ran constantly at full force—Dittersdorf Major had no shortage of fresh water.
The showers were, however, cold water only. Mark had learned that shortly after he arrived.
Mark had prepared for his journey to the frontier with the same degree of organization that had earned him his degree. He'd read—sleep-learned, for the most part—both official and private accounts of life on the frontier, then listed the items he would need.
Mayor Heinrich Biber's twelve large cases might have been enough to hold the proposed gear; then again, they might not. The trouble was that "the frontier" was an expanding region, not a place.
Mark's information about Kilbourn was slight and certainly out of date if the planet really had a boarding school for "delicately brought-up" girls, as Dr. Jesilind had implied. Besides, even if Mark had really been sure of the conditions at his intended destination, there were the intermediate landfalls like Dittersdorf to consider.
The second time through, Mark cut his list to what would fit in one fifty-pound pack. That was the most weight he was sure he could handle by himself in rugged conditions. Everything he carried was rugged, weatherproof, and so far as possible multifunctional. The hypnagogue, for example, could project text as holograms as well as sleep-teaching the contents of a book chip, and it functioned as a database.
Also, Mark brought money. The line of credit from his father had been long enough for him to book passage on a yacht if he needed to (and if there were any yachts around, which there certainly weren't any place Mark had seen since he left Landingplace on Quelhagen). Lucius didn't approve of Mark's choice, but he stuck to the bargain he'd made with his son: a year on the frontier, followed by either apprenticeship as an attorney on Quelhagen or a complete end to monetary support. It was hard to tell what Lucius thought about the details, but he'd never been one to stint with his backing for something he'd agreed to do.
Room 36 would sleep six merchants and their goods in as much comfort as damp concrete could offer. Several of the caravansary's rooms were now occupied by extended families of a dozen or more, squalling and quarreling in search of a new life at the lowest possible cost. Mark didn't want a companion and the room's slight cost wasn't a factor, but he sometimes wondered if a smaller space might not have oppressed him less.
Sighing, Mark took his hypnagogue from its stiffened pouch on the side of his pack. Three landfalls out from Quelhagen he'd picked up a book chip on the geography and history of the Digits. This seemed to be a good time to read it.
He slipped the book into the socket of his hypnagogue. The chip wasn't manufactured on Earth or Quelhagen, so he'd been a little surprised to learn that it fit his viewer. He'd projected the first pages of text as holograms above the viewer when he bought it in a spaceport jumble shop, but he hadn't had a chance to sleep-learn the book.
Mark lay down on his mattress, a thin pad of closed-cell foam, arranged the hypnagogue's induction pads on his temples, and cued "Greenwood" to learn something about Bannock and Jesilind. When the index beeped, he turned the unit on. The hypnagogue matched and smoothed the alpha waves of his brain, then began to transfer the book's contents directly to his cerebral cortex.
Mark wasn't really asleep, let alone unconscious. He was vaguely aware of concrete gleaming around him in his light's harsh illumination, and he could switch off the hypnagogue at any point. His intellect was disconnected unless he made a determined effort of will, however.
The hypnagogue distorted a reader's time sense, but it couldn't have been long before Mark realized there was something wrong with the way his viewer read the chip. Snatches of implanted thought reached the surface layers of Mark's mind:
The Protector of Hestia, a Satanic figure with horns and glowing eyes, scattered settlement grants among swarms of dwarfish, misshapen creatures who poured gold into his palm in return. In another part of the mental image, winged, haloed angels in shining armor from the planet Zenith were in battle with the dark legions of worlds settled by the Asian Sphere. Behind these angels, the dwarfs spread across Greenwood despite anguished looks from the hard-pressed Zeniths.
Mark dabbed his finger at the viewer's switch. The fantasy images stopped, but he couldn't sit up when he first tried to. "Wowee!" he said.
The software was close but not quite the same as Mark's hypnagogue had been designed for. The unit had filled his head with the personified moods and emotions of the book's author rather than the stated facts on which those beliefs were based. The influx was totally disorienting.
"Wowee," Mark repeated softly.
He'd thought he'd be able to pick up better information about the frontier as he got closer to it, but he'd found very few books for sale after he left Quelhagen. Part of the problem was that what book chips there were had been published in quirky local formats, so that you had to have a special viewer to read them.
Mark had shopped for information on every planet where he laid over, but he'd found only one place that had both books and viewers of the same style for sale. That was Heavenly Host, a world settled by a sect which believed rocks had souls and which published tracts explaining its faith on carbon-based chips. Using silicon would have been sacrilege.
Mark hadn't bought any of their material.
When Mark found a geography text published in standard Atlantic Alliance format that his hypnagogue could read, he'd thought it too good to be true. As usual, such apparent windfalls were too good to be true.
The world spun for a moment. When it stopped, Mark was no longer seeing double, though he was a little dizzy. Wowee.
He got up from the bench very carefully. Normally hypnagogue software either worked or it didn't, so this had been a real surprise. There were probably people who'd pay for the experience. A different subject matter would have more appeal, though.
Despite the book not being suitable for sl
eep-learning, Mark could still read about Greenwood. Not in this room, though. He picked up the viewer and went out into the domed court again. It wasn't so much that he wanted company; he just didn't want to be alone with the echoes of heaven and hell fighting in his head.
The four Zeniths had finished their meal and were passing a bottle around. Mark tried to imagine them with wings and haloes. He couldn't, but at least the effort made him smile.
Somebody had left a heavy metal bucket overturned on the other side of the circle of benches. Mark went to it, checked for other claimants, and sat down. He switched on his viewer, this time using it to project text in air-formed holograms instead of as a hypnagogue.
Nearby, two men with linked arms sang, "From this valley they say you are going," lugubriously. Then they sang, "From this valley they say you are going," again. Each man held an empty bottle in his free hand. Their voices weren't bad.
Mark began to read about the settlement of Greenwood. The Alliance administered newly discovered worlds through the protectors of established colonies. There was no point in sending personnel to an unoccupied planet, and it wasn't practical to govern directly from Paris a place weeks or months out in the interstellar boondocks.
Grants of extraterritorial authority to the protectors were generally fuzzy, because nobody on Earth really had a clue about what was going on at the frontier. Inevitably, some protectors exceeded their proper authority. One of the worst examples of this was the long-serving Protector Greenwood of Hestia. He'd sold settlement grants for a planet that was clearly under the jurisdiction of the Protector of Zenith. To add insult to injury, Greenwood had named the planet after himself.
According to the book's author, Greenwood had gotten away with this arrant banditry—besides payments to the Alliance, the grantees paid fees to Protector Greenwood himself—because the protectors of Zenith during the period were lackadaisical. Furthermore, Zenith's chief citizens were wholly occupied in prosecuting the war against proxies of the Eastern Sphere.
Mark snorted and set down the viewer. That wasn't how he'd learned history on Quelhagen. The chief citizens of Zenith had always been concerned first with avoiding risk to their own skins. Their closely second desire was to make money. So long as the Proxy Wars went on, there wasn't enough money in those settlement grants to make them worth arguing about. Greenwood was wide open to Eastern attack, particularly before Alliance forces finally captured the huge Eastern base on Dittersdorf Minor. When the fighting stopped, it was time for Zenith money-grubbers to get interested.
Mark started to read again. His surroundings were a living hum, but he wasn't aware of any single aspect of them.
Somebody kicked the bucket out from under him.
Mark jumped upright, squarely on his feet. The bucket clattered from the bench between the two friends as they moaned, "From this valley . . ."
Mayor Biber's four baggage handlers ringed Mark. The leader, Griggs, looked disgruntled. He'd obviously figured that when he kicked Mark's seat away, Mark would fall on his ass.
That would have been Mark's guess too. It looked like instinct and his gymnastics training had paid off. The Zeniths didn't seem about to applaud, though.
"What you reading, cutie?" one of the men said. He flicked a hand at the hypnagogue. Mark jerked it clear. The Zenith behind him jolted him forward hard; Griggs pushed him back.
The caravansary watchman hunched down in his kiosk to avoid seeing what was going on in the common court. He wasn't armed, so there wasn't a lot he could have done anyway, but Mark would have appreciated even a shout just now.
The Zeniths' breath stank of the liquor they'd been drinking. Based on the smell, Mark suspected that a lab report on the booze would read: YOUR HORSE HAS GONORRHEA.
This was a bad situation, and it was likely to get worse fast. Other travelers moved quietly away from Mark and the Zeniths. Even the two singers stood up and wove across the common court toward the latrine.
"I don't like cute boys, fellows," Griggs said ironically to his companions. "Do you guys like cute boys?"
"Gentlemen, I'm very sorry if I've given you offense," Mark said. He tried to keep eye contact with Griggs while he folded the hypnagogue shut. It was a fairly rugged unit, but it could be broken if somebody tried hard enough.
So could Mark himself.
"Don't have no use a'tall," another Zenith said. He swept a big boot at Mark's ankle to knock his feet out from under him. Mark skipped over the kick. The Zenith swore and punched Mark hard on the shoulder.
There was absolutely no reason for what was happening, except that Mark had been reading. And, of course, that he was available.
Dr. Jesilind opened the door of Room 14 and peered out furtively. He caught Mark's eye for an instant, then ducked back. Jesilind's lock clacked shut audibly.
"Let's see what you got there, cutie," Griggs said. He stepped forward, reaching for the hypnagogue. Mark dodged between Griggs and another Zenith. He walked—just short of ran—toward Room 36. He wished he hadn't locked the door when he came out.
"Hey, where you think you're going?" A Zenith demanded, grabbing Mark's arm. Mark tried to shrug loose. He couldn't. Two of the luggage handlers were a bit bigger than Mark, while Griggs and the fellow holding Mark's arm outweighed him by a good hundred pounds.
"Sir, I must ask you to let go of my sleeve!" Mark said in a voice that snapped with authority. Only moral authority, though, and that wasn't what was called for at the moment.
The Zenith laughed and released Mark. They were ringing him again, tighter now so that he couldn't duck through them.
"Look, I'm going to tell you what, punk," Griggs said. "I don't like cute boys, and I'll bet you don't like real men. So I'm going to let you punch me, just as hard as you can. And then I'm going to punch you. That seem fair?"
Mark slipped the hypnagogue into a side pocket. This isn't really happening. . . . But of course it was.
"Sir, can't I buy you a drink?" Mark said, praying that his voice was steady.
"He had his chance, boss," a Zenith said. "Slug him."
Mark grimaced and with all his strength punched Griggs on the jaw. The shock went all the way to Mark's shoulder. His hand hurt as if he'd slammed it in a car door.
Griggs shook his head. All four Zeniths laughed uproariously.
"Your turn, Griggsie!" a rough said gleefully.
Mark stood stiff, his hands at his sides. His eyes were open, though nothing they saw was penetrating to his brain. All Mark had left was his dignity as a gentleman of Quelhagen. Griggs would take that from him at any moment, but Mark wasn't going to give it up by screaming or flailing uselessly at the Zeniths.
"Let's see what the little guy had for breakfast, hey fellers?" Griggs said. He drew back a big scarred fist to swing at Mark's belly.
"Let's not," Yerby Bannock said from behind Griggs. Mark's eyes focused. Bannock grabbed the two bigger Zeniths by the neck and slammed their heads together.
The impact sounded like a maul hitting a tree trunk. The men dropped. They couldn't have been more limp if Bannock had sucked all the bones from their bodies.
One of the remaining Zeniths put his hand into his jacket pocket. Bannock caught his wrist, then reached into the pocket himself. He came out with a shiny pistol. He dropped it on the floor while the rough punched vainly at him.
For illumination at night, the caravansary mounted light sconces above the doorways of alternate pairs of rooms. Bannock transferred his grip to the scruff of the would-be gunman's neck and carried him toward the nearest sconce.
The fourth Zenith snatched at the fallen pistol. Mark hit him over the head with the metal bucket. It rang echoingly in the big domed room.
Bannock hung the back of his man's jacket over the light sconce, then stepped away. The fellow squalled and kicked violently, seven feet in the air. He could get free easily enough by slipping his arms out of the sleeves, but he'd be very lucky not to land on his head when he dropped.
The man Mark had
hit turned slowly toward him. He held the pistol, but his eyes were glazed. Mark stepped back and with all his strength swung the bucket overhead. It bonged and bounced from the fellow's skull. The Zenith remained standing.
"Better hit him again, kid," Bannock suggested. "They don't give no points for neatness in a brawl."
"No," Mark gasped. He was exhausted. His right hand throbbed so fiercely from punching Griggs that he had to let go of the bucket's vibrating handle. "I can't."
I won't. The Zenith bled from a cut scalp. His face streamed blood. It made Mark sick to look at him.
"Well, it's your choice," Bannock said. He took off his poncho. Bannock didn't look particularly worked up, but he'd popped all the buttons of his leather vest.
The Zenith's eyes rolled up. He dropped the pistol and fell over beside it.
Mark set the bucket on the floor. He had to brace himself on it before he could straighten up. Rage and fear had wrung more of the strength out of him than physical effort had, though he'd swung the bucket with everything he had. The thick metal was dished in as though a vehicle had driven over it.
"Know where this lot bunks, lad?" Bannock said as he lifted Griggs and the other big man by their collars.
"They're in thirty-seven, sir," Mark said. He took a deep breath. "Beside me."
Bannock walked toward Room 37, dragging the unconscious Zeniths. "You've learned a valuable lesson, lad," he said. "Don't you never hit a man with your bare hand unless your feet are nailed to the floor of an empty room."
He looked over his shoulder, smiled, and added, "And particularly don't hit him on the jaw. You can hurt yourself bad that way."
"I think I did," Mark muttered. He could still flex his right hand, though. It hurt like blazes and had already started to swell, but he guessed he hadn't actually broken anything.
Bannock dropped the roughs in front of their door and looked at the lock. "Just the sort of trash you'd figure no-hopers from Zenith to be using," he sneered.