A Grand Tour mth-2 Read online

  He wasn't. Singh strode forward and clasped hands with Nessler. "Yes, please," he said. "I am consular agent for Manticore on Hope." Singh grinned. "Also for a dozen other worlds. The duties don't take much time away from my own export business, you understand, and I take pleasure in the company of travelers from more settled regions. I like to believe that I am able to smooth their path on occasions. You will stay with me and my family, I trust?"

  "We would be honored, but you must permit me to pay all the household expenses during the time we're imposing on you," Nessler said. "In particular—"

  He glanced down the street to call attention to the arriving baggage carriers.

  "—I've promised these persons that I'd feed them in exchange for carrying our traps. I'd like to fulfil that promise as soon as possible."

  "Morey," Singh said to the gatekeeper, "go to Larrup's and tell her to ready…" He glanced out the gate to check the count. The gray-clad spacers halted, standing as silently as so many beasts of burden; which indeed they were. ". . . twelve dinners on my account. The parties will be along as soon as they have brought Sir Hakon's goods into the house."

  "I'll direct them, dear," the older woman said. In a tone of crisp command she went on, "Come along, Ms. Royston. I'll show you where to put the parcels and then you can go to Larrup's for a meal."

  She went inside. Beresford trotted in also. The servant began introducing himself to the woman of the house in terms that indicated he'd decided the Singhs were gentry to be flattered instead of common folk he could badger on the strength of his connection to Nessler. Mincio sighed. Sir Hakon's father and grandfather had never forgotten that they were Nesslers of Greatgap, and their wealth and Conservative Association political connections had let them enjoy — and project — an old-fashioned aristocratic arrogance which had long since become passe for most Manticorans. Sir Hakon himself held rather different views, much to the disgust of Baron High Ridge and the other Conservative party elders, but neither he nor Beresford were immune to the conditions under which they had been raised. Mincio knew the servant's insistence on his master's primacy in all things often irritated Sir Hakon, but she also knew the little man wouldn't have been nearly as useful a servant here in the back of beyond if he'd been less pushy.

  "Are they really from the Melungeon Navy?" she asked Singh in a low voice as the last of the spacers disappeared into the house.

  "Yes, indeed," Singh agreed. He gave a faintly rueful shrug. "Maxwell, Lord Orloff, arrived in a warship three weeks ago. He and his cronies as well as most of his crew are at the Six Pylons twenty-five kilometers from here. You've seen the pylons, no doubt?"

  "From a distance," Nessler said. "We hope to visit the site ourselves tomorrow, if transport can be arranged. But why doesn't his crew have food?"

  Singh shrugged again. "You'd have to take that up with Lord Orloff, I'm afraid," he said. "I've had very little contact with him. He pays quite well for the needs of his immediate entourage, but the common spacers appear to be destitute. Kuepersburg isn't a wealthy metropolis—" He and the two Manticorans exchanged tight smiles. "—but we can't very well let fellow human beings starve. We've been providing basic requirements to the poor fellows, and they sometimes find a taker for a bit of their vessel's equipment."

  "They're stripping their own ship to buy food?" Mincio said in surprise. "Surely that costs Melungeon more than it would to pay their crews properly — or at least to provide rations?"

  "Sometimes what officials think are pragmatic decisions seem remarkably short-sighted to others," Singh said. "That was as surely true when I was home on Krishnaputra as it appears to be among the Melungeons. And certainly—"

  Before continuing he glanced both ways down the street, empty except for the playing children again.

  "Certainly it is true of the way the League deals with all the worlds of this region, particularly in the choice of officials the League sends here."

  "There's also the matter that the cost of the policy is generally borne by a department other than the one which makes that policy," Nessler said drily. "The phenomenon isn't unique to the Melungeon Navy."

  His eyes narrowed. Mincio had found her pupil to be a generally cheerful youth, but he had the serious side to be expected in a responsible heir to a great fortune. "Though I must say," Nessler added, "I might wish that we had the Melungeon Navy to fight rather than that of the People's Republic of Haven."

  The Melungeon spacers filed from the house, moving more briskly than Mincio had seen them do previously. Royston was in the lead; she held a chit written on a piece of coarse paper. Singh's wife shepherded them out with a proprietary expression.

  The younger woman remained beside the doorway. She gave Mincio a shy smile when their eyes met. She was clearly Singh's daughter, though the greater delicacy of her similar features made her strikingly attractive.

  "From what the Manticorian captains on Klipspringer and Delight told us," Mincio said, "the ships of the Expansion Navy of the People's Republic aren't a great deal better."

  Nessler nodded, a placeholder that wasn't really an agreement. To Singh he explained, "Once an assembly line's set up it's actually easier to build ships than it is to provide crews for them. The Peeps thought to get around the problem by drafting able-bodied personnel from the Dole list to crew what they call their Expansion Navy. As Mincio says, the result was less than a first-rate combat fleet. But— "

  He turned his glance toward his tutor.

  "You'll recall that the freighter captains who sneered so enthusiastically at the 'Dole Fleet' were nonetheless holding their own vessels in League sovereign space. Expansion Navy ships are quite adequate for commerce raiding, and they provide the Peeps with a presence in far corners from which our very excellent navy lacks the numbers to sweep them."

  "You speak like an expert, Sir," Singh said. The Krishnaputran merchant had to be a sharp man to have created a comfortable life for himself and his family in a location that didn't encourage commercial success.

  "Scarcely that," Nessler said with a deprecating smile. "I spent a year as an ensign of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and a less than brilliant example of that very junior rank. I resigned my commission when my father and elder sister drowned in a boating accident and I became perforce head of the family. While I regret the death of Dad and Anne more than I can say, I'm better qualified as an estate manager than I was as a naval officer."

  He grinned at Mincio. "And I like to think I'm a gentleman scholar."

  "Certainly a scholar to have come so far for knowledge, Sir," Singh said. "And a gentleman, also certainly, for that I see with my own eyes." He looked toward his wife and said, "My dear?"

  "The rooms will be ready in a few minutes," she replied, "and water for the bath is heating. Will you introduce me, Baruch?"

  Singh bowed in apology for forgetting the lack of introductions. "Dear," he said, "this is Sir Hakon Nessler. Sir Hakon, may I present my wife Sharra and our daughter—"

  The younger woman came down from the open porch to stand at her father's side.

  "—Lalita, of whom we're very proud."

  Nessler bowed and took Lalita's fingertips between his. "May I in turn present my friend Edith Mincio?" he said. "She tutored me through university and has kindly consented to accompany me on my travels before taking up a post as Reader in Pre-Human Civilizations at Skanderbeg University on Manticore."

  A post which only Sir Hakon's influence gained me, Mincio thought as she touched fingertips with father and daughter. For all that I was the most qualified applicant.

  Sharra Singh smiled but didn't offer her hand. While she was clearly a person of independence and ability, her idea of a woman's place in society was not that of Manticore or of her own daughter.

  "Father, can we have a dance tonight?" Lalita said with kittenish enthusiasm as she hugged Singh's arm close. The girl might well be two T-years younger than Mincio had first judged; she was at that point in physical development where the prolong treatment
s always made age estimates difficult. "Please father? They'll have all the most exciting new music, I just know it!"

  She looked up at the Manticorans. "Oh, you will let me invite my friends to meet you, won't you? They'll be ever so excited!"

  "I'm sure our guests are exhausted from their journey," Singh said with a serious expression. "Dear—"

  "Oh, not at all," Nessler rejoined cheerfully. "As soon as I've had a bath and a bit of dinner, there's nothing I'd like more than some company that isn't ourselves and a quartet of spacers from Klipspringer. Isn't that so, Mincio?"

  "Yes indeed," Mincio agreed. She wasn't nearly as social a creature as her pupil, but his statement had been basically true for her as well. In any case, it was the only possible answer to make to Lalita's desperate longing.

  Rovald and Beresford came out the side door. Beresford held a bun and a glass of amber fluid. Rovald wasn't to the point of being ready to eat and drink yet, but at least her face had color and animation again.

  "As for music, though," Nessler continued with a frown, "I'm afraid I've brought only a personal auditor with me on my travels. You're more than welcome to listen to the contents, Ms. Singh, but I'm afraid we won't be able to dance to it."

  "They have an amplifier and speakers, Sir," Rovald said unexpectedly. "With your permission, I can run the auditor's output through their system."

  "Your equipment will fit ours?" Singh said. "Really, I don't think… My set is very old and came from Krishnaputra with me, you see."

  "I can couple them, I think," Rovald said with quiet assurance. "It'll help if you have a length of light-guide, but I can make do without it."

  "Rovald's the best electronics technician on Manticore," Nessler said. "If she says she can do it, consider it done."

  Rovald beamed with pardonable pride as she and Lalita went inside. The technician had been an object of pity through the uncomfortable voyage and after landing; now at last she was able to show herself as something better than a queasy wreck.

  "Would our guests care to come in, now?" the older Ms. Singh said, ostensibly to her husband. "The bath water should be hot."

  "Go ahead, Mincio," Nessler said. "I took the last of the warm water on Klipspringer, as I recall."

  "Well, if you don't mind… ?" Mincio said. Regular hot baths were the one luxury that she really missed in these hinterlands of human habitation.

  "You know…" Nessler said. Mincio paused, thinking for a moment that he was responding to her immediate question rather than returning to a subject they'd been discussing earlier. "There isn't any complicated difference between the Royal Manticoran Navy and the Dole Fleet or even the Melungeons. It's just a matter of constant effort by all those concerned, the officers even more than the men. If my sister had inherited as she should have, I would have been one of those officers — and I'm very glad I'm not. I'd much rather do something I was good at."

  * * *

  Wearing formal dress that — except for the footgear — would have passed muster at a royal levee on Manticore, Nessler and Mincio approached the League Liaison Office. Their boots were a concession to streets whose sandy muck would have swallowed the iridescent slippers which should have completed their outfits.

  Singh had given them directions, but relations between League officials and the commercial elite of most worlds in this region were about as bad as they could be. The League personnel were the dregs of a very advanced bureaucracy; the merchants tended to be the most dynamic citizens of the tier of worlds marginally more developed than, say, the systems once controlled by the Teutonic Order.

  Singh's native Krishnaputra was a typical example. The planet had a local electronics industry, but half the people didn't have electricity in their homes.

  League officials could sneer at the local elites as being unsophisticated products of dirty little worlds: mushrooms springing from dungheaps. The local population in general regarded most of the liaison officers sent to them as dense, grasping failures with an overdeveloped sense of their own importance. From everything Mincio had seen or heard, the League Liaison Officer on Hope, the Honorable Denise Kawalec, fell into the expected category.

  The League offices on Hope comprised three rectangular buildings touching at the corners like dominoes spilled on a table. They were flat-roofed modular constructions cast from cold-setting ceramic.

  Each slab was a different saturated color. Though the structure was probably a standard bureaucratic design from the generation in which Hope first became a League protectorate, Nessler and Mincio hadn't seen anything like it before on their travels. It wasn't something one would forget. The corner where walls of lime green and royal blue met was particularly eyecatching.

  The offices were intended for total climate control. The only original opening on this side was the double main door, though there were probably emergency exits in the rear as well. Plastic panes in frames of native wood now covered window openings crudely hacked through the walls to provide light and ventilation during power failures. Mincio guessed that outages were more probable than not, given Hope's technological level and the quality of the League personnel who'd have to maintain a separate generator.

  "Will you show us in to Officer Kawalec, lad?" Nessler said to the urchin sprawled in the building's doorway. He'd been watching them approach with an expectant sneer.

  "Why should I?" the boy said without getting up. His clothing was cut down from pieces of Liaison Service and Gendarmerie uniforms.

  Nessler flipped him a small coin. The boy jumped to his feet and ran around the building. "Sucker!" he called over his shoulder. "Find her yourself!"

  "I suppose we'd better do that," Nessler said without expression, pushing open the door.

  The hallway was dim but the room at the east end had a light which pulsed at the cyclic rate of the current feeding it. They turned in that direction. Two men wearing black Gendarmerie uniforms walked out of one room and into another, ignoring the visitors.

  The Gendarmes were supposed to uphold League regulations on the less-developed worlds which had a Liaison Officer instead of a League High Commissioner. Every contact with Gendarmes during this tour had convinced Mincio that the service attracted people who did little for the reputation of the League, or for law and order more generally.

  "Carabus!" a woman shouted from the lighted room. A paper placard tacked to the half-open door read CLO2 Denise Kawalec. "Damn you, what have you done with the bottle?"

  Mincio entered the room on Nessler's heels. Kawalec glared up from her search in the bottom drawer of a cabinet for filing hardcopy. When she saw strangers rather than whoever she'd expected, her expression quivered between fear and greed. While Kawalec wasn't precisely ugly, Mincio had never met a human being for whom the word "plain" was a better fit.

  "Who are you?" Kawalec demanded, sliding back behind her desk. Its surface was littered with orange peel and fragments of less identifiable food; local scavengers the size of a fingerbone wriggled their single antennae at the newcomers, then went back to their meal.

  "Officer Kawalec," Nessler said, "we're Manticorian citizens touring Alphane sites. My name is Nessler, and my friend is Ms. Mincio."

  Mincio handed Kawalec the travel authorization from the League's Ministry of Protectorate Affairs both in the form of a read-only chip and a stamped and sealed offprint. The hardcopy had generally proven more useful in Region Twelve, where chip readers — particularly working chip readers — were conspicuous by their absence.

  Kawalec flicked the hardcopy and said, "It doesn't cover Hope by name."

  "It covers the whole of Region Twelve—" Mincio began hotly.

  "A moment, Mincio," Nessler said. "May I see that again, Officer?"

  He took the document from Kawalec's hands, folded it over a gold-hued coin he'd palmed from his purse, and handed it back. "I believe you'll find the mention if you check now."

  Mincio stared stone-faced at the wall-hung hologram of the League Palace in Geneve. Bribes were only to
be expected when dealing with officials on undeveloped worlds, but League officials shouldn't be pocketing them. Nessler could easily afford the expense, but when the representatives of developed civilizations were on the take, then the barbarians were truly at the gates.

  "Right, I see it now," Kawalec said with an approving nod. She returned the authorization to Nessler, but her right hand remained firmly closed over the coin. When her eyes narrowed, she looked even more ratlike than before. She continued, "Now of course there'll be fees for any antiquities you discover. Port duties as well if you ship them out."

  "Of course," Nessler said blandly, as though he were unaware that League regulations specifically forbade private traffic in Planetary Treasures — a category covering Alphane artifacts as well as the vestiges of early human settlements. "Payments should be to your office rather than to the government of Hope?"

  "There is no government of Hope except for me!" the liaison officer snapped. "These savages can't wipe their own bums without help!"

  "I was wondering about the arrangements you've made with the Melungeon expedition," Mincio said. "Are they really going to take one of the Six Pylons offworld with them?"

  "That bastard Orloff!" Kawalec said. "He's going to take any damn thing he pleases, it seems like, and not so much as kiss-my-hand to me!"

  "Because he has approval from the Ministry of Protectorate Affairs on Old Earth?" Nessler asked.

  "Because he's got a bloody cruiser in orbit!" snarled the League official. "I'd complain to Geneve, but Orloff'll be long gone by the time a courier gets there and back. And that's if anybody on Earth gives a hoot whether I starve here on this pisspot planet."

  She glared at Nessler with transferred fury. "But you, boyo," she said. "You're going to pay!"

  "I'm sure we will, if we choose to remove any artifacts," Nessler said calmly. He tipped his beret to Kawalec. "Thank you for seeing us, Madam," he said.

  Mincio was out of the office ahead of him. People like Denise Kawalec made her angry in a quite unscholarly fashion, but an insult to the bureaucratic highwayman wouldn't help matters.