Now Playing on Outworld 5730

by R. T. W. Lipkin

  These are the ways of death, Ephraim thought. Unknown to the living. Guessed at, but the guesses were all unprovable and mostly wrong.

  At least he was freed from playing the part of a ridiculous nobleman, trouncing about as though it were the nineteenth century and you had to wear a cravat, a manservant waited on you as though you were incapable of getting dressed by yourself, and you couldn’t contact someone a few feet, much less a few light-years, distant without writing a note by hand.

  He was moments away from forgetting the majestic altogether. Forgetting Violet, who’d be reading his inadequate note. The majestic was already a blurred impression, slipping from its former place as a real event. Because in death you remembered only the significant parts of your life, if those.

  Ephraim was sure he’d read about that in some long-forgotten class at the Acres.

  Wasn’t everything wiped clean so you could enter your next life without fixed memories? Make the same mistakes all over again until one lucky lifetime you woke up to some hidden, cosmic truth and stopped the cycle of nonsense?

  That enlightened existence surely wouldn’t be his next lifetime or the next five thousand lifetimes. Ephraim had more karmic debts than he could enumerate. They piled on top of one another into a mountainous barrier to a distant, unreachable ease.

  He didn’t open his eyes. Did he still have eyes? He fell back into unknowing, where a stilted series of indistinct pictures showed him Violet, opening the envelope but not taking out his letter. Better she didn’t read it. Or that he’d never written it. He’d been mad with fear when he had.

  “Damn me to hell,” said a terribly familiar voice. “If I’d known the afterlife had you in it, I never would’ve died.”

  Wyatt would say something like that, thought Ephraim. His hand fell onto something that felt much like the damp hay he was smelling.

  “Say something, for God’s sake,” Wyatt, or someone who sounded precisely like him, said.

  Ephraim moaned. Isn’t that what ghosts did?

  Then he felt a hand pushing against his shoulder. Not the sort of thing that a decent soul would do to a ghost. Ghosts wanted to be left alone. Didn’t they?

  “Stop pretending,” the Wyatt-esque voice said. “There’s no one here but the two of us, and I’m sick of being Lord Saybrook, whoever that’s supposed to be.”

  Ephraim moaned again. Death was too complicated for him to take it all in. He needed to rest first, recover from his wounds, get used to the unaccustomed way of things. Then maybe in a century or two, he’d be capable of a conversation.

  “I warned you,” Wyatt, Saybrook, someone said.

  The icy water that doused him finally roused Ephraim out of his reverie.

  “What?” Ephraim sat up, ran his hands back through his soaked hair, and opened his eyes. He was in the stables, in a small room—a stall?—with Wyatt Conroy.

  “That’s more like it,” Wyatt said.

  “I never thought death would be so active,” Ephraim said.

  “That’s because we’re not dead, you thoroughgoing oaf,” Wyatt said.

  “Ah,” Ephraim said. “That would explain a few things. But—and please excuse me for bringing this up—I shot you.”

  “I shot you as well, damn you, and my aim is much better than yours. Can’t really hope to kill a man by shooting him in the thigh. But the heart—that’s another matter.”

  “Well, you’ve already shot me in the heart, Wyatt Conroy. That’s your specialty.”

  Chapter 60

  “Calvert assured me all was in order. I should have inspected the pistols myself. But I left it to him. He seems so sort of solid and dependable. A perfectionist, you might say.” Wyatt paced back and forth a couple of times, tried the door, which was immovable, and resumed pacing, which there was hardly room to do in the small space.

  “I seem to recall you had the same sort of problem at the Acres,” Ephraim said, sneering. “Leaving things for others to take care of and then being let down by the lackluster results. Never a good plan. Must do everything yourself. That’s my motto.”

  Ephraim could barely tolerate looking at Wyatt, so he stared at the floor instead and kicked at the strands of hay under his feet.

  “You have no motto, Ephraim Croft, unless it’s to hold a useless grudge despite everything against it.” Wyatt sat back down on the stacked hay where his corpse had been laid out an hour earlier.

  “Calvert never intended to let us kill each other, did he?” said Wyatt, who’d discussed everything with Calvert at length well beforehand.

  “I expect not. Would’ve created quite a problem for Jewel Allman. Two deaths. One she might’ve been able to deal with. Not two. I knew we should have used swords.” Ephraim sighed. Not the ubiquitous Outworld 5730 sigh, but a deeper, more disgusted sigh.

  “Because you wanted to win,” Wyatt said.

  “Yes,” Ephraim said. “I did. I’d intended to.”

  “There was no reason to duel me.” Wyatt stretched out his long legs in front of him and leaned back into the wall.

  “You think not? Think harder, Wyatt. If you’re capable of it. You never were a master at cognition. How you ever got into the Acres is quite beyond me.”

  “I got in the same way you did, idiot. I talk a good game.”

  “I’m sure Charlotte thought so.” Ephraim’s hands were both in fists and he started pounding them into the hay bale underneath him.

  “Before I strangle you, perhaps you might let me in on why you had to duel me. I seem to recall we were once friends.” Wyatt stood up and arranged himself in a convincingly menacing stance.

  “I seem to recall you seduced the only woman I ever loved.” Ephraim’s hands opened and reached down into the hay, which cut into his palms and scraped against his knuckles. He looked up at Wyatt, incredulous. How could Wyatt not know the reason for the duel?

  Out in the stables, on the other side of the padlocked door, a horse whinnied and stomped.

  “I have to object to your point,” Wyatt said. He sat back down on his former funerary slab.

  “Are you doubting that I loved Charlotte?” Ephraim shouted. “We were going to be married, you scoundrel. You knew that. You were the best man.”

  “It’s that I’ve noticed you’re in love with someone else entirely right at this very moment,” Wyatt said as he rested his elbows on his knees, assuming his slumped posture, which he favored both sitting and standing.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The lady’s maid. You know. Violet. The green-eyed beauty.”

  “That’s quite a different thing,” Ephraim said. “Completely.”

  “How so?”

  It was as though they were back at the Acres, having one of their famous arguments, prodding each other, testing each other, keeping their corner of the corridor up all night while they shouted and cursed at each other. Although there was a sorry lack of alcohol during the current proceedings.

  “I’m not here to discuss my love life—what you’re calling my love life—with the likes of you.” Ephraim ran his hands back through his wet hair again and gave Wyatt the same look that’d been so effective when they’d been roommates. The look that ended the argument with Ephraim the victor, if only because he’d managed to somehow put a stop to their back-and-forth even without having won a single point.

  “You really are mad, Ephraim Croft,” Wyatt said. “To think that I seduced Charlotte. To think that I would have. In your home!”

  “I see. Your practically screwing her right in front of me wasn’t so much seduction as it was some sort of quaint biological experiment?”

  “If you’d spent one moment listening instead of jumping to conclusions and making assumptions . . .”

  “You’re a weak arguer, Wyatt. Always were.”

  “If I bang on the door hard enough, someone will surely open it,” Wyatt said, and got up to prove his theory.

  “If I hit you hard enough . . .”

  Ephraim pushed the hay bale
out from under him and slugged Wyatt in the face. Wyatt kicked Ephraim in the shin and drove his fist up into his jaw.

  “She seduced me, you blasted moron,” Wyatt said as he threw a right hook into Ephraim’s side.

  “I’ll kill you this time,” Ephraim said. His face was furiously red, and he spit at Wyatt as he kneed him in the groin.

  “Didn’t you live with me for seven years? I never once took a girl from you.” Wyatt ducked and put his arm up as Ephraim swung for his cheek but hit the wall behind him instead.

  “I didn’t see you running in the other direction,” Ephraim said in a growl. He punched Wyatt in the chest.

  “She told me you were through and that you’d lied to her repeatedly,” Wyatt said between gasps. “That she needed someone to rescue her from your treachery. I saw how you’d treated your last girlfriend at the Acres—”

  “Becky wasn’t my girlfriend! And you believed Charlotte Churchill? You’re the moron,” Ephraim said as he pushed Wyatt back into the wall and got ready to hit him in the face again. Wyatt’s left eye was swollen, oozing blood, and already turning dark.

  Wyatt kicked out suddenly and Ephraim, surprised, lost his balance, falling backward onto the scattered hay bales.

  “Don’t you see, Ephraim? She did the same thing to both of us.” Wyatt clutched at his right shoulder and rotated it in its socket.

  “Damn you, man. I loved her!”

  Chapter 61

  “How are you feeling, Your Grace?” Allene said to the duchess, who was lying on the chaise longue in her sitting room.

  Allene had brought up a tray with tea and some plain biscuits. The duchess had one hand on her lower abdomen and the other on her throat. It was obvious that she’d taken off her stays. And the small bulge below her waist was equally obvious.

  “I’m afraid I’m having another bad day, Allene,” Sophia said. The nausea, seemingly permanently and blissfully disappeared this morning, had returned and was worse than before.

  “Should I send for a doctor? There’s one resident at Brixton, I’ve been told, Your Grace.” Allene was always so proper. She helped hold up the illusion that they really were in Regency England. An illusion Sophia was forgetting more and more often.

  But if they had been there, in the nineteenth century, in some real Hollyhock Manor, Edgar would’ve come home already. He wouldn’t be on another planet, tending to his real business, not his pretend duke duties. And he’d be Edgar Thomas Samuelson, Duke of Bedford, her husband, not Nicholas Coburn, her illicit lover.

  There’d be no Clive Idrest. No murder. No threats. No need to be tied to a man who held her very life in his hands.

  Sophia had never felt so vulnerable, not even when she was hiding in the storage bin on the transport, subsisting on the package of crackers and the small jug of water she’d brought with her. Not knowing where the ship was headed or when they’d get to that unknown location.

  Afraid to be found out and equally afraid to be forgotten about. The ship was massive, and if the voyage went on for weeks or months or years she might starve to death.

  “Perhaps that’s not a bad idea, Allene. Thank you for suggesting it.” A new wave of nausea stopped her from saying anything further.

  Maybe she should see a doctor. What could it mean to be nauseated all the time? Could she have caught some outworld sickness that the inoculations hadn’t protected against? Or was this just the result of constant anxiety, which she’d lived with for years but now it seemed much more severe than the usual dull ache of cold fear.

  “Drink some tea, Your Grace. It will settle your stomach.”

  “Thank you, Allene. Perhaps you could see to the doctor now?”

  Allene backed out of the room and curtsied before she closed the door.

  Two hours later, she returned, accompanied by the doctor.

  “Your Grace,” the doctor said. He was a man in his midsixties who might’ve once seemed distinguished but now was merely disheveled and possibly drunk. “Richard Hoffstead, doctor, at your service.”

  Hoffstead was carrying a strange-looking case with him. Sophia recoiled, a reflex, as she imagined the instruments of torture the case might contain. This was supposedly the nineteenth century, and medicine had been mostly superstition and speculation back then. Would they really allow that sort of thing at a majestic? Just to keep with the theme?

  Would he open up her skull or attach slimy worms to her skin or perhaps make incisions in her flesh and watch the blood drizzle out of her? Sophia shivered as she sat up in the chaise and swung her feet around to the floor.

  “Allene, thank you.” Sophia wanted to speak with the doctor in private, and Allene had given no indication that she was going to leave the room.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” Allene said as she backed out of the door. There was something unnerving about the subservient way she did it, as though she thought of herself as an insect, which then made you think of her as an insect as well. Sophia shivered again.

  “Are you feverish, Your Grace?” the doctor said as he leaned down and put his hand on Sophia’s forehead.

  “Maybe just sick of pretending?” the doctor added, withdrawing his hand.

  Did the doctor know her secret? Sophia remained silent, afraid to give herself away. She felt on the edge of something cataclysmic and was fearful she’d reveal herself to this doctor. Or was he just playing the role of a doctor? And how could he have known?

  “Are you?” she asked him.

  “Every day,” said the doctor. “I had no idea what I was signing up for. But don’t worry. I brought my equipment with me.”

  Sophia’s momentary relief that the doctor was referring to the majestic and not to her past crime was displaced by the word equipment, and she moved away from him.

  But when Richard Hoffstead opened his odd case, which was held together by large clips of some sort, Sophia’s fears vanished immediately. He’d brought modern—or at least semimodern—equipment with him. The sort of thing a field doctor on an expedition would have. Not completely up-to-date, but hardly nineteenth century.

  Yet, just like it was the nineteenth century, he insisted on taking her pulse, which made him frown, and palpating her in embarrassing places, although she let him.

  After he’d swabbed her skin and checked on all the test results displayed on his med kit, he sat down on the edge of the chaise, as far away from Sophia as possible.

  “Well, my dear,” he said, dropping all pretense of Regency England. “You’ve got a very old-fashioned condition. Incurable.”

  Sophia panicked, stood up, ran to the bathroom, and heaved yet again. She’d thrown up so many times already that day that she’d lost count.

  It was true, then. She had one of the incurable diseases. There were still so many, and new diseases arose all the time. It was rumored that too much intergalactic travel could trigger the as-yet-undiscovered mechanism that unleashed these ailments. And she herself had made many trips.

  She went back into her sitting room, where the doctor was gathering his equipment and stowing it into his intimidating black case.

  “Thank you for coming, Doctor,” Sophia said. She took a deep breath and exhaled. “You might as well tell me what it is. If I’m going to die, I should know of what, don’t you think?”

  Chapter 62

  “You will certainly die one day.” The doctor closed the loud clips on his equipment bag, picked it up, and headed for the door.

  “Just tell me,” she said as he put his hand on the door handle, which was carved into the form of a reclining lion, the symbol of the supposed Duke of Bedford. The doctor’s hand was on the lion’s tail.

  “But I thought you already knew,” Hoffstead said, turning around. “You’d have to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sophia’s mind scrambled to make sense of what he was saying. Was one of the symptoms of her disease that it telegraphed its inevitable end to its victims? If so, why hadn’t she noticed this? Because she’d been too pre
occupied with everything else? What other important signs had she missed?

  The doctor stopped at the door and turned around.

  “You really don’t know?” he said, adding, “Your Grace” for the benefit of anyone who might be passing by in the hallway, Sophia guessed.

  “I do not.” She felt her jaw tighten against the inevitable news. Yet it could be no worse than finding out that Nicholas would never return, which she felt more certain of every day.

  The doctor set his bag down by the door and came back into the room, stopping only inches away from the duchess.

  “My dear, you’re going to have a son.” The doctor was smiling, as though he’d just told her a great joke.

  “Of course not,” Sophia said. “That’s impossible.”

  “Surely not,” the doctor said.

  “Please don’t toy with me,” Sophia said. She hated that kind of teasing humor. The kind that took a serious concern, a passionate yearning, and turned it into a laughingstock purely for the other person’s sick pleasure. Clive was expert at just that kind of thing.

  “Are you not desirous of the child?” The doctor was speaking in such low tones that Sophia barely heard his words.

  “How many months?” she said, her heart racing as if it could tear itself away from her with a little more effort. The last time Clive had touched her had been unbearably nightmarish.

  “Just a few weeks,” he said.

  “No,” Sophia said. “They didn’t say anything about the water here. They should put that in the literature. After all, I’m not the only person—”

  “The water here—it’s the same as everywhere.” The doctor gave her a stern doctorly look, one that said No point lying to me. Doctors know how the body works.

  “I’ve never taken the antidote,” Sophia said. The nausea had mysteriously disappeared again. Had she really been nauseated? Could she possibly be pregnant?

  “Sit down, please,” the doctor said, and he sat down beside her on the chaise longue and took one of her hands between his.

  “I’m your doctor. Forget about this silly majestic and being the duchess of so-and-so. Forget about whatever nonsense it is you’re acting out, being a noblewoman in a century no one knows one fact about anymore. Or could possibly do so. Talk to me.”