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  Mark twisted the patterns with his thumbs. The lid rose smoothly under its own power. Inside were two formal place settings of handblown glass. Each piece was nested in a lining of dense foam. Mark removed a soup plate and held it against the light above the kiosk to admire its peacock-tinted beauty.

  "Hey, look at that, will you, Doc!" said the man Mark had seen enter with the packing case and the bright smile. "Say, have you ever seen anything so pretty in your life?"

  Before Mark could rise to his feet, the man who spoke had squatted beside him. The fellow was tall and solid the way a tree is solid. He had bright red hair and a mustache that flared to either side like a hearth brush. "Yerby Bannock, lad," he said. He held out a hand to Mark. "Is this lot yours, then? Would you like to sell?"

  Mark juggled the plate cautiously. The glass was so thin that it could break of its own weight if he held it wrong. There wasn't time to nestle the piece back in the case, so Mark positioned it on edge in his left hand as he shook. Bannock's fingers felt like tree roots, though he was obviously being careful not to crush Mark.

  "I'm Mark Lucius—son Maxwell of Quelhagen, sir," Mark said. "Ah—"

  He didn't want to insult Bannock, but this dinner service was a work of art and he owed it something.

  "—these goods aren't mine, but they're amazingly delicate. Even careless pressure from fingers as weak as mine could shatter the glass."

  There was nothing weak about Mark, his fingers or otherwise. He kept in shape with gymnastics, and the three weeks he'd been traveling by starship hadn't left him flabby by normal standards. Comparison with Yerby Bannock, though, was like comparison with a hydraulic jack.

  "Pretty as a butterfly, ain't it, lad?" Bannock said, apparently without offense at Mark's warning. He deliberately laced his fingers in front of him as he balanced in a squat. "Doc, don't you think I ought to get these for Amy? Ain't they just the sort of things she'd love?"

  The man with Bannock was of Mark's height and build, though softer for lack of exercise. Mark guessed the "doctor" was about thirty-five, some five years older than Bannock.

  "Dr. Gabriel Jesilind, sir," the doctor said stiffly, extending his hand. "Of the Marques Jesilinds."

  Jesilind wore "town clothes," but of various sorts. His yellow frock coat probably aped Zenith style, while his trousers were a sober gray that wouldn't have been out of place on a shopkeeper in conservative Quelhagen. The doctor's shirt had a ruffed front with pink stripes on sky blue; Mark couldn't imagine where that garment had originated.

  For that matter, he'd never heard of Marques, either. If it was a planet rather than a district or a community, Mark wondered if it might not be a world settled by the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere rather than from the Atlantic Alliance. Jesilind's swarthiness might as easily be South Asian as Mediterranean.

  Jesilind's offer to shake created an awkward situation, since Mark had started to put the soup plate back in the case. "Very good to meet you, sir," Mark said as he concentrated on the plate, using both hands and all his care. "I'll be with you in a . . ."

  The plate slid home, undamaged for the moment. Other travelers were drifting over, called by the chance of something to punctuate Dittersdorf's rain-soaked boredom. The odds were the service would be a pile of rainbow-hued fragments before the evening was out, but there wasn't much Mark could do now that he'd showed what was in the case.

  Jesilind was frowning by the time Mark was able to rise and shake his hand, but if the doctor felt an unintended insult he at least didn't comment on it. His fingers were vaguely damp. He looked Mark up and down and said, "Are you a scholar, Mr. Maxwell?"

  "Oh, goodness, no!" Mark blurted, amazed that anyone would think he was a scholar. The three years he'd just spent taking a degree in Human Civilization at Harvard were a good two years more of academic life than he'd wanted. He'd managed to graduate partly out of his own stubbornness and partly because he could too easily imagine Lucius Maxwell's cold silence if his son admitted that he'd quit.

  "Doc Jesilind here's a scholar," Bannock said proudly, putting an arm around Jesilind's shoulders. "He took the Harvard Course, he did. In General Knowledge!"

  Bannock was moderately tall, at least six feet four, but Mark had met taller men. The frontiersman wasn't heavyset, and his muscles didn't bulge in sharp definition like those of a bodybuilder. Bannock stood out because the intensity he projected made him seem a force of nature rather than a human being, a very concentrated thunderstorm or avalanche.

  "Perhaps you've heard of Dean Brickley, Mr. Maxwell?" Jesilind said, buffing his fingernails on the lapel of his yellow coat. "The designer of the course I completed? One of the finest scholars of the Atlantic Alliance!"

  "Indeed he was, sir," Mark said, completely taken aback by Jesilind's claims. Brickley had been everything Jesilind said of him—before he died, a good fifty years in the past. There was a statue of the former dean near the entrance to the Widener Library; Mark had sat at the base of it many times.

  Dr. Jesilind had obviously taken a hypnagogue course that was far older than the doctor himself. Culture is a matter of what you know, but the real value of an education was learning how to learn. A course like the one Jesilind took wasn't exactly valueless: it fitted the doctor to become a member of the elite culture of two generations ago. But Jesilind's boast put a whole new complexion on what the word "scholar" meant this close to the frontier, and it was too late for Mark to correct his initial answer without embarrassment to all concerned.

  "Hey!" the watchman cried as he bustled back to the storage room. "Hey! What did you do? Did you break that open without paying for it?"

  The watchman reached down toward the case. Mark couldn't tell whether he meant to close the lid or snatch at the plates.

  "A moment, sir!" Mark said sharply. He caught the watchman's arm and held it despite the fellow's wheezing attempt to push past. "I've opened the case properly, but any clumsy groping will turn the contents into sand."

  "Who the hell do you think you are, boy?" the watchman snarled, backing and shaking his arm when Mark released it.

  "I think I'm not your boy, sir," Mark said with the cold fury of a Quelhagen gentleman insulted.

  Yerby Bannock tapped the watchman on the chest with an index finger. "Say, friend," Bannock said. "This is yours to sell, right? Well, it's the lad's to buy if he wants it—and not for any jacked-up price either. Weren't worth a thing till Mr. Maxwell here opened it up for you."

  Mark blinked. "I'm traveling with a single bag, sir," he said. "I have no use for the dishes. I only wonder how they came to be here."

  "Feller with his wife, some six months back," the watchman said in a tone of grumbling politeness. Bannock's wrists were as thick and muscular as Mark's own calves. "Their honeymoon, I wouldn't wonder. She was on the woman's side. They went out together one night and never come back. Dunno why. Had some clothes too, but they sold first thing."

  Mark felt suddenly cold. This was the frontier, a place where people died of unknown diseases or simply vanished. People with cultured taste, on their honeymoon.

  "All right, if the lad passes, then the box is mine to give to my sister, right?" Bannock said. "I'd say ten Zenith dollars was fair. Ten for you and ten for Mr. Maxwell."

  Bannock threw back one side of his poncho of natural wool. Beneath it he wore a rough-out leather vest, fringed and studded for decoration, over a dingy checked shirt of homespun. His trousers were leather to the knee and homespun below, held up by vividly scarlet suspenders.

  "Ten?" cried the watchman. "Why, that's worth a fortune! Worth a hundred, anyhow."

  Bannock's belt was of nickel-steel links, supporting a rectangular purse of the same material. He pressed the thumbprint lock. "Fifteen to you and the same to the lad, then," he said. He opened the purse without losing eye contact with the watchman.

  "Sir, I couldn't think of taking money for what I did," Mark said. He was shocked at the thought. "I assure you, I have no part in this negotiation.
"

  "Thirty for me an you can have it," the watchman said. "Though it's robbery, you know."

  "Twenty-five, then," Bannock said, fishing out a wad of scrip issued by at least a dozen planets, all of them Protected Worlds settled and governed by the Atlantic Alliance. "Otherwise I'll have the lad close the box again and you'll have damn-all for your greed."

  "Done," the watchman said, "but all of it Zenith money, mind you. You're not fobbing me off with no Kilbourn paper!"

  Bannock snorted. "You'll take what I give you, so long as the exchange rate's fair," he said, but Mark noticed that he stripped off three bills marked PROTECTED BANK OF ZENITH, two tens and a five.

  Zenith dollars, like Quelhagen francs, were through-printed on durable plastic; the back was a mirror image of the face. On the issuing planets themselves the scrip was withdrawn when it began to show age, but as Mark traveled toward the frontier he'd encountered notes worn so thin you could read a book through the center of them.

  One of the tens Bannock offered the watchman was in almost that condition, but the other two were reasonably bright and clean. The five showed the first Earth ship landing at what was now New Paris, Zenith's capital; the ten was a panorama of New Paris a century ago, when it was a frontier village with a population of only a thousand.

  Human settlement of planets beyond the Sol system had begun in a small way one hundred fifty years before, at the end of the twenty-first century. Colonies grew quickly as interstellar travel became easier. Getting between planets was still expensive, uncomfortable, and to a lesser degree dangerous, though nowadays diseases spreading among travelers packed for weeks like sardines were a greater risk than shipwreck. The fortunes and new lives to be won among the stars drew settlers on.

  Some settlements failed, but more prospered and attracted vast ships filled with immigrants who wanted to leave Earth but who didn't have the taste for breaking ground on a virgin world. Successful colonies themselves colonized more distant stars; many of the folk who'd grown up on an empty world felt uncomfortable knowing there was a community of ten thousand within a day's travel of them.

  The main brake on colonization was the Proxy Wars that festered between the two main power blocs of Earth: the Atlantic Alliance and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Alliance and the Sphere were too cautious to risk total destruction. They fought their battles, sometimes on Earth beyond the borders of either side, but generally on colonial worlds.

  The war ended in 2226, not long before Mark was born. There'd been no need to fight over land when there were a practically infinite number of human-habitable planets in the universe, but Mark hadn't needed a Harvard degree to know that the real causes of wars aren't often what the politicians claim is at stake. New Paris itself had been founded by Malays who called it Nikisastro on Palambang, eight years before an Alliance task force claimed the world and renamed it Zenith.

  Peace when it came was as welcome as it would have been any time in the previous ninety years of war. Interstellar settlement increased rapidly—especially on worlds placed in regions that both combatants could threaten but neither could control. Recently both Terran power blocs had begun forcible emigration for their excess population.

  "Sure I can't offer you something, lad?" Bannock said as he lifted the case he'd purchased. The lid was still up.

  "Thank you, no," Mark repeated. "Ah—if you turn the white crystals so that they're pointed the way they are now and press them at the same time, the case opens. It would be safer to carry it closed, though."

  Mark shut the lid firmly. He was as nervous about those blasted plates as he would have been with a kitten in the hands of a child too young to understand what "dead" meant.

  "Much obliged," Bannock said with satisfaction, tucking the case under his left arm. "I'll take them over to the women's side right now when I see Amy."

  His brow furrowed. "Say, lad, you'll still be around in an hour or so if there's, you know, if there's a problem with the box not opening, won't you?"

  "I've booked passage on a ship lifting for Kilbourn in three days," Mark explained. "But all you need to do is press the two crystals just as they are now."

  Bannock walked out of the caravansary, whistling "Lillibulero." It was raining hard again, but he didn't seem to notice it.

  "Anything more out of here you'd like to see, sir?" the watchman said. Twenty-five dollars for something that minutes before had been valueless junk had made the fat man more expansive. He added hopefully, "Maybe there's something you could open or maybe fix?"

  Mark glanced over the storage room again. He supposed there might be another treasure hiding there, but for the moment it looked like wreckage heaped up after a crash. From the way the watchman talked, that was more or less what it was: wrecks of lives, wrecks of hope, jumbled together in a bleak concrete room.

  "No, I don't think so," Mark said. "Perhaps I'll look again before I leave, if that's all right with you."

  "Any time, sir, any time," the watchman said as he closed and padlocked the door. "Ah—you might take care that you check when I'm on duty, not one of the others. I'll see that you get a better price for your help, you see."

  What Mark saw was that the twenty-five-dollar windfall wasn't going to be recorded as anything like so much for division with the rest of the caravansary staff. Well, that was none of his affair.

  "A larcenous oaf," Jesilind said quietly to Mark as the watchman waddled back to his kiosk. "I've half a mind to report him for dishonesty."

  Mark looked at the doctor. Jesilind hadn't gone out with Bannock; the yellow coat, not in the best of shape as it was, would soak up water like a sponge. "To tell the truth," Mark said, "I don't know how much they'd have to pay me to do that man's job. More than an occasional tip, certainly."

  "I tend to think educated men have a duty to direct other members of society, sir," Jesilind said. "But as you note, 'What society?' I'll let it pass."

  He gestured toward the circle of benches in the middle of the common room. There was space for fifty or sixty people around the circuit. The caravansary had an eye of clear material in the center of the dome. Despite the overcast and the rainwater streaming across the outer surface, a surprising amount of light penetrated the interior.

  "Will you join me for a discussion of intellectual matters, Mr. Maxwell?" Jesilind said. "You can appreciate how rare it is to meet another man of culture on these byways of trade."

  Mark had taken the watchman's invitation to look over the dead storage room because he didn't have anything better to do. Mark had thought traveling to the frontiers would be exciting. In fact, the three weeks since he left Quelhagen had been increasingly uncomfortable and boring. The spaceport on Dittersdorf Major was a new low in both respects.

  Dittersdorf formed the wrist and the usual stopover for vessels traveling among the Three Digits, the strands of colonized worlds which included Kilbourn, Mark's planned destination. The gazetteer chip he'd bought on Earth said it rained at the spaceport every day, for nine hours out of ten. Thus far Mark had no reason to doubt the information, and seeing the dreary result was a lot different from planning an itinerary on a sunny day in his father's Quelhagen garden.

  Dr. Jesilind was a pompous twit. Well, out of charity, Mark decided to substitute "eccentric" in his mind. On the other hand, Jesilind was a distraction in a place that was rubbing Mark's spirits to the gray hue of the concrete walls.

  "I'd be pleased to sit with you," Mark said. It occurred to Mark that Quelhagen formality made him sound like a pompous twit in this setting.

  Like all the other parts of the caravansary, the benches were concrete. More than fifty of the building's residents sat on them—talking, eating, and smoking various herbs in rolls or pipes. Some had brought over buckets or packing crates as additional seating so that members of a party could face each other as they socialized and played cards. The caravansary's windowless rooms were secure, but the jails of a civilized planet had more amenities.

  Ma
rk avoided a patch where the bench's surface had flaked away to the wire-net reinforcement. He didn't worry about dampness, because his coveralls were waterproof. Anyway, everything on this planet was wet or about to become wet.

  Jesilind tutted and unrolled a cushion, which he spread without inflating. "It leaks," Jesilind admitted when he noticed Mark's surprise that he didn't blow the cushion up. "But I'm a philosopher, sir, and I believe hardship is good for the soul."

  Dittersdorf's gray misery made Mark think of throwing himself off a high building, not of the soul's nobility, but no two people were the same. And some people lied, of course.

  "You're a, ah, teacher, sir?" Mark asked.

  "I like to say that all wisdom is my subject," Jesilind said, buffing his nails again as he smiled, "but my profession as such is medicine. I serve a varied clientele on Greenwood. I accompanied Mr. Bannock to Kilbourn in order to purchase pharmaceuticals and of course, to see what books might have penetrated to such a distance from Earth."

  "You went to Kilbourn for that?" Mark said. According to his gazetteer, Kilbourn was the rawest edge of the frontier.

  "Yes, I ignore inconvenience when the welfare of my patients is at stake," Jesilind said. "Besides, if I treat with local herbs, the yokels don't like to pay what my services are worth."

  A look of lacquered cunning flickered across Jesilind's face. He added, "And I thought a person of my accomplishments should be present to accompany Miss Bannock from Kilbourn to Greenwood. Yerby's a fine man in his way, salt of the earth. But not, as I'm sure you appreciate, the sort of person who should be sole escort to a girl like his sister. She was delicately brought up on Kilbourn, and she's only now leaving boarding school there."

  "Hey, look at the scarecrow!" called a man, one of Mayor Biber's servants. They'd apparently gotten the baggage arranged to their satisfaction in Room 37 and were reemerging with a hamper of food.

  "Go stand in a field, pretty boy," the leader of the group said. He planted himself on the bench so close that his hip jostled the doctor aside. Jesilind jumped up. He bounced back down again because the stranger was sitting on the tail of his frock coat.