Now Playing on Outworld 5730

by R. T. W. Lipkin

  “I’ve never taken the antidote,” Sophia said again. “Never.”

  “Yet someone has given it to you,” the doctor said. “It is impossible otherwise. Do you know who that might be?”

  “There’s only one person I can think of. But he’s not here. And . . .”

  “Because there are stiff penalties for obtaining it without a permit and even stiffer penalties for administering it to someone else without their knowledge or permission. Extremely stiff. Draconian.” The doctor paused, cocked his head, and said, “And . . . what?”

  “That person—he’s not here. So it is impossible.” There was no way this was Clive’s child, yet the memory of that last time kept arising, terrifying her. But that was more than seven months ago.

  “I shall have to write you up in the medical archives,” the doctor said, grinning again, looking as though he were wearing a comedic mask. “A rare specimen. Unprecedented.”

  “Don’t smile,” Sophia said. “I mean it.”

  “You may mean it, my dear, but the person who gave the antidote to you also meant it. You’d do well to find out who it is and have them prosecuted. And of course, if this child is unwanted . . .”

  “I can’t think of that right now.” Sophia looked away from the doctor, who let go of her hand, reached into his pocket, and drew out a flask, then screwed the lid off and drank from it.

  “Dr. Hoffstead,” Sophia said. “Are you a doctor, a real doctor?” Would a doctor so blatantly drink in front of his patient?

  “Of course, my dear,” he said between swallows. “Why else would I need this?” He held up the flask and made a show of putting the lid back on and placing the flask back in his jacket pocket.

  “Send someone to Brixton when you’ve decided, if you decide,” Hoffstead said. “I’m there for the duration. Longer, actually. And call for me if you have need.” He left the room then, softly closing the door behind him.

  Moments later, Allene came in.

  “Can I get you anything, Your Grace?” she said.

  “Not now, Allene. I’m going to nap for a while.”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” said Sophia’s lady’s maid said as she backed out of the room in her increasingly irritating manner.

  But although the Duchess of Bedford had said she needed to nap, Marguerite Idrest couldn’t.

  She was carrying Nicholas Coburn’s child.

  Hadn’t he said he wanted an heir? Now he’d have one. She wanted to scream in frustration. He’d known all along what he was doing, first teasing her with his unexpectedly late arrival, then driving her wild with his passion and fervor.

  Was this her life now? Was this her punishment for killing her father? Never having any man who truly loved her but only men who wanted her for their own selfish needs? One of them needing her to be his public wife and his private chattel and the other needing her to be the mother of his heir?

  With no one to trust except perhaps Richard Hoffstead, an inebriated doctor she’d only just met, and Pamela Hyland, a peripheral friend from her home outworld, Marguerite’s breaths stopped altogether, returning in short gasps, then stopping again.

  She lay down on the bed and hugged a pillow to her and tried to calm her breathing.

  Could she keep Nicholas’s child after he’d tricked her into becoming pregnant? What if she did? What if this were the only child she’d ever have? And would Nicholas never return?

  How could she go home to Outworld 75, where Clive would surely punish her for what she’d done? Because he’d certainly know. There’d be no disguising it.

  If she didn’t go home, though, Clive’s threats would become actions.

  She hugged the pillow closer as the nausea returned.

  Chapter 63

  “Mr. Calvert. Sir. I’ve never had to, you know, with a dead person’s corpse,” Johnny said as he and Calvert walked across the wet fields to the stables. It was raining yet again, and both men were wearing galoshes and oilskin coats.

  “How will we be able to bury them? The ground’s soggy all the way down, I’m sure,” Johnny said to the silent butler.

  “As far as anyone could dig. And I thought the funeral wasn’t until tomorrow,” Johnny said.

  Calvert said nothing, just continued in his fast pace to the stables.

  “I guess we do have to put them in the coffins, Mr. Calvert. Sir,” Johnny said.

  Lightning jagged through the sky and came tantalizingly close to the roof at Brixton, which was lit up in the flash. Thalia Rivers was having a gala event that evening. As the Brixton group had prepared to leave Hollyhock, talk of the festivities mixed in with the unending arguments about the duel’s outcome and whose bets would be honored.

  “Do we have to build the coffins?” Johnny said as they neared the stables. “Where will we get wood dry enough?”

  “Shut up, Johnny,” Calvert said as he reached for the latch on the slatted wood door. “I have to listen.”

  Inside the stables, it was dryer but still damp. The horses were calm, and Calvert patted one on the muzzle as he walked by the stall.

  “But—” Johnny started as Calvert put his hand up and stared him down into quiet submission. The footman was really intolerable at times, although he did do a good job, which Calvert appreciated. And he was the only one strong enough to help him tear the two warring men apart, if it came to that, which Calvert thought it might.

  Build the coffins. What an imagination Johnny had, yet it hadn’t extended to include the truth, which was that there was no way either Jewel Allman or Eli Calvert would allow two majestic players to murder each other—or anyone else, if they could help it.

  Yet not just the gullible Johnny, but everyone present, some of them very sophisticated and seemingly intelligent, had assumed that Trevelton and Saybrook were actually dead. As though grazing someone in the thigh with a pistol shot could kill him.

  Saybrook’s shot, though, was something else. Dead center in Trevelton’s chest.

  Calvert still didn’t know what the duel was really about and didn’t care. Obviously these two players knew each other in life and were bringing their problems to the majestic with them, intending to have them play out in a remote setting, far away from the eyes of terrestrial justice.

  Because these two were definitely from Earth.

  You could tell when someone was an Earth native. They had a different edge to them, a different bearing. They couldn’t handle the lighter atmosphere as well and there was a serious look in their eyes, something that was often missing from outworld residents. Although that wasn’t the case for the residents of Outworld 217, where tragedy was a near-daily occurrence. Outworld 75, though. That was another matter. Yet, Lady Patience . . .

  That there were places in the galaxy where people were being daily abused and exploited, places where those convicted of crimes they may or may not have committed were tortured and forced to work at jobs no one else could or would do, and other places where people were living lives of unthinkable luxury and ease.

  The thoughts clashed against each other, and Calvert couldn’t reconcile the differences. Especially not here on Outworld 5730, a planet devoted solely to majestics, a pastime of the wealthy. A planet where everyone was an actor in a play so real that your fellow players were convinced they’d just seen a double murder.

  Even Jewel Allman had thought so, and it had taken Calvert twenty minutes behind the closed door of her office to calm her down as he explained over and over that of course he had made sure. Of course the pistols were loaded only with dazies, so called because they did nothing more than knock their victims unconscious. Of course.

  Did she think he was as gigantic a fool as the two posturing lords were? Well, one of them, anyway. He hadn’t told Jewel Allman about his private agreement with Saybrook.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Jewel had said. She was crying by then, but if they were tears of sorrow or gratitude or relief he wasn’t sure.

  “Mr. Calvert, I don’t know what I’d
do without you here,” Jewel had said.

  “No need to concern yourself, Mrs. Allman. I’m looking out for all of us.”

  When Jewel started weeping again and buried her head on her desk, Calvert had left her office. A few hours later he found Johnny, who’d been in the pantry, sweet-talking the nearly useless Harriette, and ordered him to come out to the stables with him. He had no intention of confronting Saybrook and Trevelton without reinforcements handy.

  Chapter 64

  Violet—I don’t rightly know how this is done. We all face the inevitable as you yourself will one day. Although I pray that for you that day will be in a far distant future on a much more honest world than this one.

  My name is Ephraim Croft. I’m a farmer from Northumberland, England. So at least my accent is real, if nothing else. Yet I’ve already lapsed into lies. I was a farmer from Northumberland. Now I’m a soulless carcass.

  Lord Saybrook is my former roommate and onetime dearest friend, Wyatt Conroy. We met many years ago when we both attended the Acres, an institution that neither of us deserved. Especially myself. Don’t think me a snob for having gone there. And understand that my happy memories all turned to sand the day Wyatt took Charlotte from me.

  I loved her. Me, a man who didn’t know how to love and who’s since forgotten.

  Please forgive me, Violet, whoever you really are. Please find someone worthy of you. I beg you, do not return to Booker, although I don’t know who he might be. But he plagued you when you were so ill, and I can’t bear the thought of him.

  If I could love someone again, it would be you. I shall watch over you now and smooth your path if I can.—Ephraim

  Violet read the letter for the thousandth millionth time. She read it first as she sat on the very bench that she’d sat on that night when Trevelton had dragged her around the lake’s perimeter, forcing her to keep up with his long strides. The path and the lake seemed much smaller now, and she wondered how she’d struggled so.

  Now she was in her room, reading the note once more, once more. The rain had started up again and she hadn’t wanted the words to wash away. It was the only thing of Rafe’s she had, and she wanted it even if it circled around and never said the words she’d hoped to hear from him when he was alive.

  Dead. Like Booker. She must be cursed. There must be something about her that caused the men she cared about to die not long after she met them. Did something in her personality make these men want death? Drive them to it? Encourage them in death’s direction?

  Was it possible that Booker had killed himself? Because although Saybrook had killed Trevelton, it seemed to Violet that Trevelton had wanted it that way, since he’d initiated the duel and must have known the great odds against winning. The letter she was holding and was reading yet again was proof that he hadn’t expected to live.

  Perhaps she drove men to suicide, although her method was hidden from her.

  Violet looked down at the words that Ephraim had written in a broad, beautiful script using Regency-era writing equipment. It was so pretty, she kept thinking, as though that thought would wipe out the ugliness of death and the truth that not only did Lord Trevelton no longer exist but neither did Ephraim Croft, a man she’d never really known.

  She hadn’t really known Booker either, as she’d discovered after the charming liar deserted her and paid his passage into the Great Void.

  Charlotte. At least Ephraim told her who she was. The woman he did love—unlike herself, a woman he only could love, yet he didn’t. The letter all but said that he wouldn’t love her, although it stopped short of saying she was unlovable. She’d searched the words for that meaning and hadn’t found it.

  So maybe it was better that he’d died. Violet laughed at that and turned the two pages over, making sure for the thousandth hundredth time that there was nothing more there, nothing on the backs of the pages, nothing he’d suddenly remembered and decided to say but had run out of room for. Nothing that said I love you, Violet or even Wake up from the nightmare you’re having.

  It was dreamlike. Sitting here in this tiny room on the small chair by the table. The chair that Ephraim himself had sat in when she’d been so ill. She thought she’d feel closer to him somehow if she sat there, but it held no trace of his essence or his memory.

  She strained to generate the feel of his long, elegant hands on her, touching her as no man had touched her, yet only the faintest images remained, the sensations dispersed into the thin atmosphere of 5730.

  “Vi, let me in,” said Rosie from the hallway. Violet had locked her door. Rosie rattled the knob.

  “Come on, Vi,” Rosie said. “You can’t stay locked up in there forever. And Lady Patience has been looking for you.”

  Rosie was lying, as everyone at this majestic lies, Violet thought. Lady Patience wasn’t looking for her. She’d know as well as anyone else at Hollyhock that Violet needed to be left alone, that her lover had been killed, and that she was devastated.

  “Vi, I brought something with me,” Rosie said as she alternately rapped on the door and rattled the knob. “Your favorites.”

  I should have stayed on Earth, Violet thought. I could have had a part in Mirage, I’m sure of it. They needed only to see me again. And I never would have met the marquess Rafe Blackstone, Lord Trevelton. Or the farmer Ephraim Croft, who I love despite everything.

  Chapter 65

  “How long do we have to wait here, Mr. Calvert? Sir?” Johnny was jiggling his legs restlessly as he sat on the stool inside the entrance to the stables, the rain lashing down just outside the half-open sliding doorway.

  When Calvert had heard the brutal arguing, the sounds of flesh and bone and sinew smacking into each other, and the groans and shouts of frustration and anger, he’d taken Johnny back to the entrance, found two stools, and sat down.

  “We can’t go in yet,” he’d said.

  “Mr. Calvert. Sir. I reckon they’re not exactly dead,” Johnny’d said. “Or else who could be making those noises? Not ghosts, are they? Sir?”

  “Not ghosts, Johnny,” Calvert had said. “Not nearly.”

  “That’s too bad, Mr. Calvert, sir,” Johnny had said. “Because that would make a good tale.”

  “One that would charm the girls, I’d think,” Calvert had said.

  “You do understand, then, Mr. Calvert, sir,” Johnny’d said. Calvert could practically see the wheel in Johnny’s head as it spun out an enticing story of his encounter with the raucous ghosts of the Hollyhock stables.

  “I do indeed.” Calvert took off his oilskin coat, hung it on a hook by the door, produced two cigars from his breast pocket, offered one to Johnny, who accepted it, then lit them both as he took his seat on the neighboring stool.

  The two of them, sitting on their high perches, were puffing away, the magnificently thick smoke mingling beautifully with the now-misty rain on the other side of the door.

  From where they were seated, they could hear only that there were sounds coming from behind the padlocked door, but not what was being said . . . or struck. Calvert hadn’t wanted Johnny to eavesdrop, as Johnny’s inevitable reports would instantly let everyone at Hollyhock know each word the two duelers had said to each other.

  When the cigars were half-consumed, Calvert realized he hadn’t heard anything—or anything loud—in a while, so he gestured for Johnny to stay put, then walked back to the padlocked door and listened.

  “Are you certain she meant that?” Trevelton’s muffled voice said. “You know how Charlotte could be. How she is. I assume.”

  “For God’s sake, Ephraim, you never could listen. How many times do I have to explain it?” said Lord Saybrook.

  “A thousand,” said Trevelton—or Ephraim, Calvert thought.

  Better to have your real name. Unless it was Monte Rice. Then it was better to be Eli Calvert, a man whose beautiful wife and precious daughter had never been burned to death in a fire that should have consumed you as well. A man who had no nightmares, no gruesome memories, no
clinging regrets.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” said Saybrook.

  Calvert sensed their argument dying down. He hadn’t heard the sound of fists since he’d come back to listen at the door. He turned around and gestured to Johnny. Just in case. He didn’t want to go in there alone.

  “I’m fucking starving,” said Trevelton.

  “Too bad you can’t eat hay, you horse’s ass,” said Saybrook, “since there’s no shortage of that here.”

  Calvert held up his hand to stop Johnny’s progress, then changed his mind, gestured for Johnny to join him, and opened the padlock. It was time these two pretend noblemen stopped going at each other, whether with fists or with words.

  “My lords,” Calvert said as he opened the door.

  “They really are alive,” Johnny said under his breath. He shook his head, then blinked several times. Then put his hands on his hips and smiled.

  “Say, Calvert, be a good chap and bring us some food, would you?” said Saybrook. “Trevelton here is starving and—”

  “Wine,” Trevelton said before Saybrook had a chance to finish. “But not that swill they’ve been serving at dinner. I think this occasion calls for something good.”

  “Yes, my lords,” Calvert said. “Johnny, run ahead and alert Cook.”

  Johnny reluctantly turned and left, then started running.

  “He’ll enjoy being the messenger of shocking news, my lords,” Calvert said, excusing Johnny’s ill manners.

  “Say, Calvert, speaking as a man and not the authoritarian butler you are, we’d like your take on something,” said Saybrook.

  “Of course, my lord,” said Calvert, wondering what was coming next. But he was pleased that his authority was being acknowledged, since it was one of the few things he had left.

  “If the woman you loved and were betrothed to ran off with your plant manager—” started Saybrook, but Trevelton immediately interrupted him, saying, “But only after she’d already been betrothed to your oldest friend and had left him in order to seduce you.”