by Brit Mandelo
Past the foul-smelling shelves and bins of the shop, we found ourselves within one of the more sinister dens of the city of Prosperine. At first it appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary — a selection of well-heeled ladies and gentlemen sat at tables in order to chat, to read from slender volumes, or to embroider while drinking dishes of coffee.
But the flashes of metallic grey, LED green, and holographic purple were hard to ignore. For every gentleman with a book, there were another three swapping data crystals. For every lady with embroidery on her knee, there were several with glowing nano-wands or flat screens.
Even setting foot in an establishment like this was illegal on New Ceres. For an aristocrat such as my mistress, there was a great deal to lose. Only one week earlier, the Count and Countess of Chevre had been arrested in Anglais for hosting a scientifiction salon in a speakeasy such as this one. They were currently awaiting trial for sacrilege and treason, and there was talk that the Lumoscenti were pressuring the Lady Governor to withdraw the Chevre family’s rank and titles back three generations.
“Eyes open, Pepin,” said my mistress as we walked among our fellow criminals. “And don’t drink the coffee. It smells positively rancid.”
I recognized the boy first, though I had only seen him at a distance on state occasions. Conrad Nathaniel DeVries had dyed his hair recently, but his black-splashed locks could not disguise the evident family resemblance, including a particularly pointed nose.
I nudged my mistress, and indicated the table where Conrad sat with a group of similarly raucous and badly dressed young gentlemen. They were playing some kind of offworld game with holographic battleships that shot glowing pellets across a flat glass gameboard, and had reached that stage of drunkenness where simply everything is hilarious.
My mistress moved into position behind Conrad before calling attention to herself by plucking at his sleeve. “Young sir,” she murmured. “A word, if you please?”
He shook her off without looking. “Take your wares elsewhere, wench.”
His friends laughed at that, but one of them caught the look in La Duchesse’s eyes, and the laughter stilled in his throat.
“For your mother’s sake, sir,” my mistress said, with glass in her voice. “A moment of your time.”
Conrad whirled at her, eyes bright with absinthe and rage. “Who are you to use my mother’s name—” There he stopped, for he recognized the woman before him. “What are you doing here?”
La Duchesse smiled a winning smile. “Merely a duty visit, my sweet. I knew him in swaddling clothes,” she confided to his friends, even as she drew the resisting lad into her perfumed bosom. As he struggled in her embrace, she whispered into his ear. She was too discreet for even I to hear the words, but I guessed something of what she had said to him.
Don’t be an ass, Nate. The Lumoscenti are coming. This place is being raided tonight, and you know perfectly well that you can’t be caught here.
Everything moved fast after that. Even as the young rascal made his apologies to withdraw, a low whistle sounded from the spice shop frontage.
“The Golden Priests!” someone cried. Many of the patrons simply slipped their contraband out of sight, but others upturned tables and scrambled for the back door.
“Not there,” La Duchesse said in disgust as the brat made to bolt. “This way, Nate. Follow me.”
“My name is Conrad,” he spat at her in disgust. “You’re not my mother.”
“Saints be praised for that, at least,” she said, and dragged him towards a wall thick with tapestries.
There were yelps and howls from outside. “Priests at the exit?” I said, not in the least surprised.
“La Policia, I expect,” said my mistress. “This isn’t an everyday raid.” She pushed us both behind the tapestries. “Is there a door, Pepin?”
There was, though it was old and unused, with a firm lock upon it. “How did you know?”
“No time for questions!”
Within three months of employment in La Duchesse’s household, I had found it necessary to learn the art of picking locks. A beauty such as this one, however, required time and finesse that I did not have. I drew a fountain pen from my inner pocket, thumbed it to draw a fine laser bead and sliced the lock neatly from the door.
Conrad gulped at the hissing sound of metal parting.
“That’s right, lad,” La Duchesse said grimly. “We’re all criminals here.”
Steps led down to a cellar. Conrad clattered down them, and I followed with La Duchesse after bolting the door from this side.
“There’s a tunnel behind the barrels,” she said, without looking to check. “It leads up and out to the alley near the bookshop.”
“That’s why you had Damon wait there with the phaeton,” I said, admiringly. The bookshop was in another street entirely to both the spice shop’s front and back entrances.
She rolled her eyes. “Really, Pepin, I am no amateur in these matters. Make haste, before they find the door behind the tapestry.”
Conrad hesitated by the barrels. I motioned for him to start moving them, and after a moment, he did. Sure enough, there was a small hole in the wall — wide enough for a man to crawl through. Not a woman in current fashions, though. “You’ll have to leave your skirts,” I told La Duchesse.
“I’m not coming with you. What are you waiting for?’ she barked at Conrad, and he dived into the tunnel as if his life depended on it. In a manner of speaking, of course, it did.
“Leaving you behind was not our plan,” I protested.
“Of course it was, Pepin. I simply did not inform you of that fact.”
“Claudine, you can’t afford to be found here.” I could hear shuffling and shouting in the rooms above. It was only a matter of time before they discovered the cellar.
“For Nate’s sake, I can’t afford not to be,” she said firmly. “The Lumoscenti were tipped off. They’re expecting a ripe sugar-plum out of this raid. If they get me, they might not look too hard for any one else.”
“Your title won’t protect you from the Lumoscenti! The Count and Countess of Chevre….”
She smiled sickly at me. “That’s why we’re here, Pip. Be off with you, and don’t stop until you and the boy are within the gates of his mother’s estate.”
“Did she know you planned to sacrifice yourself?”
A heavy weight thumped against the door above. The bolt held, for now.
La Duchesse pushed me hard in the middle of my chest. “If ever you loved me, my dear, do as I say.”
How’s a fellow supposed to fight a woman who says things like that?
∞
I caught up to Conrad in the tunnel as La Duchesse pulled the last barrel back in front of the mouth, plunging us into blackness. “Faster, lad.”
“I’m not at my best on hands and knees,” he sneered.
I resisted the urge to point my laser pen at his posterior. “A good woman just sacrificed her position and title for you, tadpole. The least you can do is save your own skin.”
We made it out of the tunnel without killing each other, and emerged sweaty and grimy into the alley where La Duchesse had left her phaeton and footman. It took me but a moment to realize that both were now missing.
I cursed anachronistically. The street entrance of the speakeasy was around the corner, but I could hear the hubbub that poured forth from the raid. We could not afford to be caught on these streets, so near to the spice shop. Most of the businesses along this strip were all closed, but light and music came from one private residence across the street, and a few carriages clustered at the entrance.
“That way,” I said, giving Conrad a shove in the small of his back.
I stopped at the first of the carriages and stepped up to the running board, palming a handful of sous in the face of the driver. “This amount twice over to take us to the Garden District?”
“Sorry, guvnor,” he said, startled. “My master wants me ready to go at a moment’s notice.”
From the sound of ill-sung opera music emanating from the upper windows, I didn’t blame his master in the least. “Next one,” I snapped at Conrad.
The occupants of the second carriage along were still disembarking, so I was more covert with my attempts at bribing their footman. He eyed my very young companion with ill-concealed disgust, and pretended that he could not speak French.
Marvellous. They all thought I was kidnapping a nobleman’s son. Well, they weren’t entirely wrong, though I had no intention of having my wicked way with the brat.
“Pepin,” said a startled voice. “What are you doing here?”
I whirled around to lay eyes upon Drusus Savon, the one man in New Ceres who knew my darkest secret. He descended the steps of the residence, dressed in the usual finery of a Prosperine aristocrat — more comfortable in the costume than the last time we met.
I had hoped never to see him again (at least, that is what I told myself I hoped), but desperation makes for strange bedfellows. “Do you have a carriage, sir?”
The tone of my voice alerted him that the matter was urgent, and he ushered us both into the first carriage. He did not ask my companion’s name, though he looked at Conrad with curiosity as we rattled along the streets.
“George is taking us to my hotel as a matter of course,” Savon said, eyes not leaving mine.“The Prosperine Grande. Unless there’s somewhere else you need to go?”
I almost laughed, though it would have been a hollow sound. La Duchesse and I also had rooms at the Grande. We might have run into Savon on the staircase, or over breakfast, at any time during the last week. I had been so close to my danger and had not known it.
The hotel would not do. We could not afford to have Conrad found anywhere associated with La Duchesse, not after her inevitable arrest. I thought of her in the hands of the Lumoscenti, and my mouth went dry. “The Garden District, if you please, M. Savon.”
Savon leaned out the window, and spoke to the footman briefly. “That’s a fair way out,” he said to me.
“If it’s an inconvenience, monsieur, you can drop us at a way station.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Demme, Pepin, you look as if a horde of ghosts were after you.”
Conrad snorted.
“You don’t say a word,” I growled. “Enough people have paid for your foolishness tonight.”
The boy pouted, and I saw fit to ignore his petulance. Even if that meant further conversation with the man who had saved us.
Savon cleared his throat. “Is La Duchesse well?”
Every street we put between ourselves and the Lumoscenti raid made me breathe a little easier. “I have not seen her in days, monsieur. A new lover, I expect.” I prodded Conrad with my foot, to keep him quiet.
Savon appeared oddly cheerful at the happenstance that had reunited us. Had I the presence of mind to consider it, I might have thought it odd. I had not been overly courteous to him the last time we met. “Well, you have saved me, M. Pepin. I had no excuse at all when I escaped the Baron Rudolph’s supper party an hour before politeness dictated — but now I can say in all truthfulness that I was called upon to help a friend in need.”
“I would prefer it, monsieur, if you did not name the friend,” I said quickly.
Savon’s bright eyes sharpened. “You are in trouble. I thought so.” He regarded Conrad, who was glaring at the curtained window as if it personally offended him. “I recognize the boy.”
That, at least, got Conrad’s attention. He stared wild-eyed at us both.
“How?” I asked, trying to keep calm. “You’re not even a local….”
“I have eyes, Phi….” he caught himself. “Pepin. I have been here a half-year now, making contacts for the organisation I represent. Learning the ways of Prosperine. I was a guest at the Lady Governor’s reception three days ago, and I know who this boy’s mother is.”
More information he could use against me, should he choose to do so. “You understand the urgency of the matter, then.”
“I know that a wayward child can be used to make a parent look bad in the eyes of the public.” Savon considered the matter. “There is an important policy decision being made soon, is there not?”
“Three days,” I said. “The Lumoscenti have a petition before the House of Peers, to ban from New Ceres all technological advances made during the latter half of Earth’s Eighteenth Century. They will not be happy, I think, until our world returns to the Dark Ages. Every restriction placed upon our lives further increases their power.”
What I did not say aloud was that the Lumoscenti’s conservatism was meeting with greater sympathy than ever before. The alien massacre of Earth was a raw memory still, and it was a commonly held belief that keeping New Ceres’ technology restricted was the only thing that might protect us from a similar fate. Something akin, I believe, to hiding under a blanket with our fingers in our ears so that no one can find us.
“Such a reversion would affect the fleet?” said Savon, as if we were exchanging polite dinner conversation. “I believe a certain degree of steam technology is currently allowed on New Ceres.”
“It is limited, but essential,” I agreed. “Our agriculture would be devastated by such a change. The early forms of automated flour grinding and threshing would be lost to us. There is even talk that they mean to question the exemptions to the technological restrictions — the terraforming technology that keeps the water and crops clean from the poisons of this planet.”
“Isn’t that a little insane?” asked Savon.
“The Moderates are countering with a bill for further exemptions,” I explained. “To more adequately purify the water, and to allow offworld birthing technology to be utilised in restricted areas.”
“For aristocrats only, you mean,” Savon said in a hard voice.
I rolled my eyes. “It’s a start. You can’t tell me that Mars has a flawless record when it comes to biological freedoms.”
“It’s hardly the same.”
“In any case,” I cut him off, “the Lady Governor must appear to be beyond reproach in presiding over the House of Peers in their deliberation of these bills. It would only take one slip for the Lumoscenti to declare her unfit for that role, and to put a far less moderate leader in her place.”
“If she or a member of her family were caught openly flouting current laws….” Savon said.
“Exactly.”
“You don’t have to keep talking as if I weren’t here,” Conrad said between gritted teeth. “I understand you perfectly.”
Savon and I exchanged glances. “I should hope so,” I said. “Your mother has done too much good work to be removed from office now, when we most need her.”
“I’ve never been caught,” he said in a sullen voice.
“It need only happen once,” I snapped back. “Had you been to that establishment before?”
“Once or twice.”
“And who brought you this time? During the most critical week of your mother’s political career thus far? Who encouraged you to put her in such jeopardy? Whomever they are, Conrad, they are not your friend.”
“Jules would not steer me wrong,” he flung at me.
I paled. “Jules Gambon? Sainted Minerva, you little fool. He is the son of your mother’s Minister of History and Religion. Should she fall from power, Marcel Gambon is one of the top three candidates to take her place, and all know that he is in the pocket of the Lumoscenti!”
“Jules took the same risk,” said Conrad defensively. “His father would be just as affected by the activities of his son.”
“Was Jules there, when the raid happened?”
The lad bit his lip. “He was joining us later.”
I let my frosty silence let him know exactly what I thought of that.
“It was just coffee and games,” Conrad protested. “It would not have cost my mother her position.”
“It has already cost my mistress hers,” I growled at him.
Savon gave me a startle
d look, and I regretted saying so much in front of him. I did not think he was a Lumoscenti spy — they despise offworlders — but in my anger I had been less than discreet.
“Do you really think Jules is working for his father?” Conrad asked after a few moments.
“The coincidence is too great to ignore.”
“Then….” Conrad swallowed valiantly. “There is something you should know about Bianca. Jules arranged for she and some of her friends to be invited to a party hosted by Mme. Dray this evening.”
I swore violently in Martian. La Duchesse and I had committed to saving the Lady Governor’s son from scandal tonight. It had never occurred to us that we would have to do the same for her daughter.
∞
Drusus Savon’s footman was working far longer hours than he might have expected. The carriage clattered to a silence in an alley near the river — a part of the city where one would never expect to find the daughter of an Honourable, let alone the daughter of a Lady Governor.
Mme. Lucilla Dray was one of those aristocrats people think of when they say, “gone to the bad.” Most of the First Families of the planet enjoyed some form of scandalous behavior. Flirtations, adultery and the occasional dip into black market technology were all par for the course. Indeed, one needed a certain frisson of scandal in order to move in certain elegant circles.
But there were those who not only risked degradation and arrest, but openly invited it. Mme. Dray, the husband of a minor nobleman and daughter of a far grander aristocratic family, had been risking her neck in such a manner for twenty years. Her set were renowned for supplying all manner of illicit supplies to their friends and allies, and they had a particular knack for seducing children into their net of decadent activities.
The stories surrounding Mme. Dray were legendary — there was not a person nor creature in existence that was not rumored to have shared her bed at some time.
“Are you sure this is the right place?’ Savon said doubtfully.
“The Baths of Clodius,” confirmed Conrad.
The public baths had been constructed in the great cities of New Ceres back in the day when the settlers were merely attempting an ambience of historical aesthetics, rather than aiming for societal conformation. The Lumoscenti had no issues with them, as they belonged to an earlier rather than later time period than the one our society was attempting to emulate.