“None whatsoever.”
“So you will be delivering the item to me?”
“Of course,” Jeremiah said. He pulled the remaining pellets of Aunt Mildred’s Organic Iguana Treats from his pocket and handed them over, not concealing the action at all, as if this ostensible drug deal were the most wholesome and natural service any staff could possibly render any guest on the Einstein IV—a transaction as wholesome and natural as Aunt Mildred’s treats themselves.
“What are those?” said Grubel to Jeremiah.
“Iguana treats,” Jeremiah answered. Honesty had never seemed a better policy. “Strong ones,” he warned Jack.
“What?” Grubel said.
“None of your business,” said Jack, “unless you want to keep talking about that invasion of privacy suit?”
Grubel did not.
“You could learn a thing or two from this young man,” Jack said to Grubel. “About customer service—and about respecting privacy—and about doing the right thing in the end. About how the Individual must always come before the System. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just remembered I have something important to take care of.”
“What were those?” Grubel asked Jeremiah after Jack had left.
“What did they look like?”
“Drugs.”
“They were iguana treats.”
“Never mind,” said Grubel, “we have much bigger fish to fry. I was just on my way to the Guest Services Office to talk to you when Jack buttonholed me. Come to my office.”
On the way they passed Upton returning from his coffee.
“Upton,” said Grubel, “were you involved with this?”
Upton gave Jeremiah the kind of look that the latter imagined one astronaut gives another when a delicate space maneuver that the latter has insisted on has just gone awry, in order to say without words “You the latter have just killed both of us, so let me use the last few seconds of my life to make good and sure that you the latter die knowing that I, the former, blame you for everything.”
“I just went for a coffee,” Upton said. “I mean, I didn’t even—”
“Anyway,” said Grubel, “if you were: good work.”
Jeremiah left Upton with the wink of one astronaut saying to another “And that, my dear former, is why I the latter sit in the pilot chair of this little death trap.”
* * *
“You know, Jeremiah,” said Grubel, when they were seated in his office, “I don’t know what to make of you. At first I was sure you’d self-destruct within a day or two. Then I thought ‘He seems to be lucky, he might last a week.’ Then all of a sudden I began to overhear chatter about how helpful you’ve been with the PEDs and Relaxation Stations. Then you’re repairing a musical instrument for Mrs. Mayflower. And now—”
Grubel paused for dramatic effect, adjusting the empty frames of his glasses.
“—now Mrs. Mayflower wants to talk to you in her private quarters. Do you have any idea why she might want to see you?” Grubel asked.
“Yes,” said Jeremiah.
“Is it related to that musical instrument?”
“Yes.”
“Jeremiah, do you know how important Mrs. Mayflower is to Golden Worldlines?”
“Very important?”
“No,” Grubel said. “Critically important. Vitally important.”
Grubel seemed to be groping for a third adjective.
“Uncomfortably important?” Jeremiah offered.
“Exactly. If she is unhappy, she will make me extremely unhappy. And I have the power to make you extremely unhappy if I’m unhappy. And it seems that—by whatever twist of fate—you have the power to make Mrs. Mayflower happy or unhappy. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“Yes,” said Jeremiah. Even without pencil and paper, he was reasonably sure that he could work this chain of happiness out to its unhappy conclusion.
“Here’s where I’m going with this,” Grubel elaborated. “If you make Mrs. Mayflower unhappy, then she will make me unhappy. If she makes me unhappy, then I will make you unhappy. If I make you unhappy, then you will be?”
“Unhappy,” said Jeremiah.
“Exactly. So in a way, all I’m asking you to do is to make yourself happy. Is that too much to ask, Jeremiah?”
Seeing as “unhappy” was a deliriously optimistic goal for what he was going to make Mrs. Mayflower when he delivered her the jury-rigged bandora, Jeremiah briefly considered going out in a blaze of self-righteous glory right then and there by telling Grubel exactly what he thought about people who wore hypermodern suits and glasses without lenses and traced out idiotic logical progressions, the only purpose of which was to demonstrate relative power dynamics in their own favor.
“No,” he said instead.
“Good,” said Grubel. “Then let me explain to you how to find Mrs. Mayflower’s private quarters.”
26
The Belly of the Beast
Still Saturday (1 day until arrival)
Now that he thought about it, Jeremiah felt foolish for not having deduced the existence of Mrs. Mayflower’s private quarters back in his earliest days as a passenger.
He could understand, if not exactly feel proud of, how little thought he had given to the vast service areas of the ship before he had become part of that service himself. He had at least known in some latent manner that such areas must exist, just as the kitchen and dishwashing stations in a restaurant must exist, or the inventory shelves and shipping and receiving docks at the back of a grocery store. He had just never found any occasion to think about them, which was unremarkable given the exertions of Golden Worldlines to keep him and the other passengers from doing so. For this he could have been accused of privilege, or a blindness to classes other than his own, but not idiocy. Never having wondered why he could not walk from one end of the E4 to the other, on the other hand—well, there the case against idiocy was not so clear.
For the Einstein IV was a ring—the inhabitable areas of it, at any rate—and Jeremiah had long since known that it was a ring. Every photo on every advertisement back on Earth had showcased its ring-like shape. The “gravity” that he experienced out here in deep space, where there was no gravity to speak of, was synthesized by the spinning of the Einstein IV’s massive ring around the spindle where the Quantum Caterpillar Drive and the Inertial Dampers and who knew what other engineering marvels worked their magic.
At the same time, Jeremiah had long known from his exploration of the ship that it was impossible to start in, say, the dining room, and walk all the way around the ring of the E4 so that he returned to where he had started. In one direction he would stall out in the furthest wing of the guest quarters, and in the other at the games and recreation room. And this limitation had not vanished when the service areas of the ship had been opened to him.
In sum, for nearly two years now Jeremiah had known both that he lived inside a giant circle, and that it was impossible to take a circular path through his habitat, and he had never once questioned why. Which sounded, when he thought about it, uncomfortably like idiocy.
The reason he had never been able to walk the full extent of the Einstein IV’s ring, Jeremiah understood now, was because Mrs. Mayflower’s quarters occupied a full and contiguous quarter of said ring, extending through all levels. The entrances to her quarters—like the one that Jeremiah had seen Mrs. Mayflower use on Heriberto’s footage, and the other that, at Grubel’s instruction, Jeremiah had just used himself—were secreted behind cunning panels on the walls.
With the benefit of reflection, Jeremiah would not have been sure what he expected to see after stepping through a secret door and walking down an actual secret passage for the first time in his life, but whatever he might have expected, it was not what he found.
“Good morning, sir,” said what Jeremiah found.
The butler was a distinguished man of distinguished age with distinguished white hair and no distinguishing marks, and he stood up straighter than any man
Jeremiah had ever seen, so straight that rulers coming off an assembly line could have been evaluated and the warped ones discarded by comparison with his example; so straight that his Victorian period dress—an impeccably high-cut waistcoat impeccably suitable for this morning hour—looked not just smoothly pressed but as if it had been carved from two different varieties of onyx, jet black for the dress coat and, for the trousers, one striped with deposits of some white mineral.
“Mrs. Mayflower is expecting you in the small drawing room.”
The butler turned and led Jeremiah across what could only be described as a courtyard, paved with checkered marble and complete with a pond stocked to the gills with sprightly koi and ringed by man-tall ficus trees which were, Jeremiah discovered when some leaves brushed his face, not artificial. Above and around the atrium which housed the courtyard, other servants bustled about their business behind marble pillars and arches piled two floors high. There was an atmosphere of old-world efficiency that does not take luxury as an excuse to lapse from duty but as a prod to even greater exertions, and Jeremiah would not have been surprised to find that the white collar the butler wore, for instance, was not laundered in a modern system but scrubbed by hand nightly with some instrument that was half toothbrush and half medieval torture device.
The “small” drawing room that the butler swept Jeremiah exquisitely into was small only in the comparative sense of being, he supposed, smaller than the implied “large” drawing room, which Jeremiah imagined could have held its own with a modest sports stadium. At the far end of the room stood Mrs. Mayflower, contemplating an Italian landscape in faded oils that hung on the wall.
“Mr. Jeremiah Brown,” announced the butler. Mrs. Mayflower took a moment to finish her contemplation before she turned around to swish and sashay in their direction.
She was dressed more grandly than Jeremiah had ever seen her, in a black gown with a train whose length toed the line between making walking impractical and impossible. Each sleeve ended in a profusion of lace so intricate and fresh that it seemed like a rare flower that had been bred and tended to for years and then, just that morning, tenderly harvested at the precise height of its bloom.
The still ancient but more modern clothes she had visited him in, Jeremiah now understood, were nothing more than a reluctant nod to the practical realities of secret passages and trick panels and clandestine trips through the hallways of the Einstein IV. When she required activewear, Mrs. Mayflower dressed like Jackie Kennedy—but when she wished to be comfortable, Mrs. Mayflower dressed as the lady of the manor.
“Where is my bandora, young man?” she said.
“You said you would stop by to pick it up,” said Jeremiah. “That was days ago.”
“You are a difficult individual to visit discreetly, due to the unusual—and, I suspect, unhealthy—number of other individuals who seem to be stalking you. There is the wild-haired hippie who never stops muttering about civil liberties and controlled substances and some system or other.”
“That would be Jack,” said Jeremiah.
“Then the broodingly intense young man who cannot stop talking to himself about your shortcomings, or the charms and disappointments of some young woman named—Pemberly, was it?”
“And I see you’ve met Bradley.”
“Finally there is the gentlemen who—while not necessarily a stalker—seems to have an uncanny knack for synchronizing his visits with mine.”
“Henry Chapin,” Jeremiah said. “He’s a good man.”
“Their names and qualities are unimportant. My point is that they have prevented me from visiting you discreetly so that I might collect my bandora. Therefore I have called you here to deliver it to me.”
“Mr. Grubel just told me to report here straightaway. He didn’t mention anything about picking up the bandora beforehand. So I don’t have it.”
Mrs. Mayflower frowned and sat down on the edge of a chair with Chippendale feet.
“Roosevelt,” she said to her butler, who still adorned the doorway like a statue, “do we have any fresh squeezed orange juice?”
“No, milady.”
“Bring me some.”
“Yes, milady.”
With a curt bow, he was gone.
“That is the nature of service, young man,” Mrs. Mayflower said to Jeremiah. “The disregarding of obstacles, the disdain for exact instructions and those who require them. Roosevelt is the perfect servant, by which statement I do not denigrate, but elevate him. His station is inferior to mine, but he is not inferior to me. If anything, his able discharge of the duties pertaining to his station puts mine to shame. We serve different functions, Roosevelt and I, but each without the other is nothing. You smile, but I am speaking with perfect candor.”
“Then let me reply with perfect candor,” said Jeremiah. “What is your function, exactly?”
Mrs. Mayflower frowned and adjusted herself on the edge of her chair.
“The line between candor and impertinence is exceedingly fine,” she said. “See that you do not cross it. But it seems to me that perhaps you are the kind of person who can learn something. So I will answer your question, young man. Come with me.”
She led him out the door at the back of the small drawing room and through a hall hung with other oil paintings. A few of them looked familiar to Jeremiah, as if he had seen them before on his PED or hanging in reproductions on the walls of friends with a finer appreciation than his of the plastic arts. Mrs. Mayflower spoke as she strolled ahead of him.
“No doubt you consider me a mere consumer of the luxury that is created by the labor of others. You see how I live, how I dress, how many servants I employ, and feel quite clever at having reached that conclusion. But you have only demonstrated your own lack of imagination. I too serve, Jeremiah. I serve the past.”
She made this pronouncement grandly, with a narrowing of her eyes as if recalling old vows that were renewed simply by her mentioning them. She paused as if she expected Jeremiah to say something in response.
“Oh,” he said.
“Welcome,” Mrs. Mayflower said, throwing open an old wooden door, “to the small music room.”
She stepped through, and Jeremiah followed.
“I have spent my youth journeying all over the world,” said Mrs. Mayflower, “plucking each of these ancient instruments, one by one, from the jaws of time. A mizwad I spotted in a street fair in Tunisia. A chelys and auletris I bought from a criminal archaeologist in Greece, who had gambling debts to pay. A huqin of great antiquity, which I discovered hanging over a Chinese bar. This banjo, which once belonged to a 20th-century minstrel named Uncle Dave Bacon.”
“Macon,” said Jeremiah. Suddenly he was hardly able to breathe, and he had started trembling slightly.
“What?”
“It’s Uncle Dave Macon, not Bacon.”
Mrs. Mayflower smiled tolerantly.
“I know the story of each of these instruments as if they were my children, young man. And there,” she said, pointing at an empty spot on the wall, “is where you would normally find the pearl of my collection—my bandora, which you have failed once again to deliver to me, and which you will now collect and return as soon as we have finished this conversation.”
Jeremiah’s legs felt like jelly, but nevertheless they were carrying him towards the wall of musical instruments—towards one instrument in particular. His arms were rising at his sides, ready to reach out like those of a zombie stumbling through a horror wave, and he seemed to have no say in the matter.
“Though the musical instruments are my greatest passion,” continued Mrs. Mayflower, “they represent only a fraction of my collection. Other rooms are filled with pristine exemplars of furnishings from eras your great-grandparents would have known only through museums and period dramas. Then there are halls of artwork and pottery, ancient calligraphy, even—”
Her eyes shone and she raised her hand and passed it with great care in front of her, as if touching a memory.
> “—a long hallway paneled with cave paintings, the sheets of rock meticulously cut from a site in Indonesia which they were about to level in order to construct new high-density apartment buildings. Through the magic of relativistic-speed cruises I am bringing them all to the future, Jeremiah—husbanding them through hundreds of years while they endure only tens. And when the time is right, this will all go to a museum, sustained by a substantial endowment—the entirety of my fortune. There will be stringent conditions, of course, that nothing—not the slightest detail—ever be changed. Young man, just what do you think you are doing?”
What Jeremiah was doing, though in his state he was not completely aware of it himself, was taking the banjo down from the wall and hanging its slender leather strap over his shoulder. The instrument was in miraculous condition for its age. The frets were not originals, or the head of course, but the replacement materials had been painstakingly matched to the period. Jeremiah plucked a few notes—the strings were fresh but properly stretched. It seemed Mrs. Mayflower even kept the instruments in tune. He tried a little roll, and all that was missing was the pop and hiss of an ancient recording to make it sound just like Uncle Dave himself warming up.
At the touch of the strings, whatever spirit had taken control of Jeremiah’s grosser appendages now turned its attention to his fingers. It wanted them to play.
Mrs. Mayflower was still talking—presumably telling him to put the priceless instrument back where it belonged immediately and threatening all sorts of dire consequences if he did not—but at first her voice was distant and indistinct, and then buried entirely under the shower of notes that came flowing out of the banjo.
Only after he’d been playing for a few bars did Jeremiah recognize the tune—“Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” He played through it once, and then it began to change. At first just a note here and there. Then a run that went down instead of up, a substitute chord or two.
As he continued to play, the tune diverged more and more from the original, and to the same degree Jeremiah became less and less aware of what he was playing. The music seemed to be coming not out of him, but through him—as if all the moods and experiences and nuances of his entire life were being strained through this moment, letting only the essential slip through—the farce and tragedy of his being on this boat in the middle of a great nothing, the iguanas, dying Henry Chapin, Katherine, the moment among the stars, a broken bandora, even poor Boyle. These and more were all in the music, strands woven and twisted together into a long tightrope that Jeremiah walked without a net, neither to anywhere nor from anywhere, not for any purpose except to walk and not to fall.
World Enough (And Time) Page 29
