I closed the book, using my registration card as a place mark, and pushed it away. “Who are you?”
She shook her head. Light glinted from a pair of eyeglasses. An aquiline nose and sharp chin, with the same swarthy skin that predominated Respite, showed through the hood. “Why do they interest you? Why do you care?” She raised a hand to her hood and pulled it back a little, enough that she could see me. “You were in Silversmith Square this morning. Did I misunderstand? You helped a child then.”
What had she seen? Me give money to the children? “I know how they survive. Why are they allowed to suffer?”
The woman tugged at her hood, half covering her face. She reached out and put her hand on mine. “There are those who say—who sincerely believe—the service those children provide makes the streets safer for decent folk. This is argued at the highest levels, even to the senate.” She removed her hand.
So the children’s plight is tolerated for the protection of a more important class? “People say that? Even if true, it doesn’t justify anything.”
She stood to leave and half turned to me, enough that I could see her smile. “I felt you would understand. Take this.” She pulled back the lapel of her coat and took a pin, one of several, from it. “Wear this, if you will. Discreetly. A sign of solidarity.”
I took the pin and pushed it into my lapel so that only its blue head, no bigger than a grain of barley, remained visible. “Let me see your face.”
“Why? It’s a very ordinary face.”
I kept my eyes on her and settled back in the chair.
After a moment, she pulled the hood aside, enough for me to glimpse her features.
The face I saw was far from ordinary—fortyish, with thin lips, a narrow jaw, and the sharp nose I had glimpsed earlier. Possibly pretty. But the dark, sunken eyes, without emotion, suggested great suffering of mind or body.
I smiled, though I suspect my own eyes showed little emotion in the act. “You escaped the streets? How?”
She let the hood fall back, picked up the library book, and put it in front of me. “Some do. I was lucky.”
She turned the book to me, opened it, and picked up my registration card. “Lemuel Oneway? Strange names. I’ll remember them.”
Chapter 4
The mornings soon fell into a pattern.
A run and shower before breakfast. A trip to the police station on my way to the labor office.
At noon on the second Wednesday, Ms. Winterthorn beckoned to me as I entered the building. “Sit, Lemuel. You might be interested in this. It’s got your name on it.”
I smiled to hear an expression I had only heard before with reference to a bullet in a B movie. I sat where she indicated.
She examined the job card in her hand. “The runner brought it in this morning. Draco Trading are looking for trainee programmers. You are far out of their age range, but what really matters, or so they inform us, is an aptitude test.” She threw the card on the desk for me. “Read it yourself.”
I picked it up and read. It contained nothing more than what she had told me, apart from a few contacts and, handwritten in the top-right-hand corner, the words Lemuel Oneway might be interested. It did have my name on it.
In ten minutes, she had contacted Draco’s head office in Silversmith Square. We could have walked there in half the time. The communication device in her hand had a cable attached.
In another ten minutes, she had arranged an interview for the following day.
She handed me a letter of introduction and, after checking there was nothing else suitable, smiled toward the door.
A stormy night gave way by midmorning to bright sunshine.
I entered the square, wearing new leather shoes, a sky-blue business suit, and a blue-headed lapel pin. Steam rose from the cobbles. White clouds scurried across the sky.
Granite steps rose from the sidewalk, leading to Draco Trading’s main entrance. The lobby, occupying most of its first floor, led to a broad, curved stairway. To one side was the front desk. I headed for it.
Two women sat behind a semicircular desk. The younger glanced up from her magazine, sized me up with a head-to-toe, and returned her attention to the more important reading. “Your turn, Gliss.”
Gliss, plump and dour, in a dress that would have provided excellent camouflage in a wildflower meadow, put down her knitting. She frowned. “Yes?”
I held out a note from the labor office. “I’m to report to Computing, eleven o’clock.”
Gliss checked a clock on her desk. “So why are you here at ten twenty-one?”
“I’m keen.”
Gliss pursed her lips. “If I phone them now, they’ll think you’re weird. Take a seat.”
I sat. A few leaflets lay scattered on a low glass-topped table nearby. I chose one, The History of Draco Trading. When I had read it three times, I checked my watch. Five minutes to eleven. I wandered back to the desk.
Gliss looked up. Something in her expression suggested she might have recognized me, but she disillusioned me with a word. “Well?” Some people were not suited to front desk work.
“Time for my interview.”
Gliss cleared a cardigan pattern off the Appointments journal and opened the book. “Name?”
“Lemuel Oneway.”
She ran a finger down the page. “Ah. Letter?”
“I gave it to you earlier. There, under your knitting.”
By 10:59, Gliss had phoned Computing and grunted the news of my arrival.
I sat, on Gliss’s instruction, and waited with feigned patience.
Gliss tapped on the desk. I looked up. She nodded toward the stairs.
A young woman, slim and tall, jogged down the last few steps, a short ponytail bouncing behind her. She strode toward the desk, looking first at Gliss, then at me. She smiled.
I stood.
She held out a hand.
Cryonic suspension can have a deleterious effect on the male libido, sometimes severe but rarely long lasting. As I took hold of the slender hand she offered and gazed into her dark eyes, I calculated, as a much-needed distraction, how long it had affected me.
She frowned, a gesture accentuated by her swept-back hair. Her thick, black eyebrows met. “You must be Lemuel.”
“Yes, I must. I mean, yes, I will. I am.”
She glanced at the letter Gliss handed her then looked me over. “Not as pale as I expected. Or as tall. And I would encourage you to think before you answer.”
Why would she have expectations about my appearance?
She stepped back. “Turn around.”
I turned.
“You’ll do. You might like to let the hair grow, but the sky-blue suit hits the right note. And hide the pin. Elevator or stairs?”
I relocated the pin behind my lapel.
She had come down the stairs. I was happy to follow her preference. Had I known Computing was on the fourth floor, I might have chosen differently. I let the woman do all the talking as I struggled to keep pace.
“I’m Ensayada Heyho, Booby Giltstein’s secretary until Friday. People call me Sy.” She paused in her speech but not in her ascent. “Well done, you didn’t say, ‘Such a relief.’ Funny the first few times.”
I would have, but I was a little short of breath.
She jogged on. “The main thing is the aptitude test, but you won’t get that far if you don’t speak with confidence. A good communicator, that’s what he’s looking for. But above all, it’s the test.”
She was fit. Not beautiful perhaps. But stunning, elegant, confident, strong. Bold features, thick eyebrows, more common on Respite than they had been on Earth. Strong calves below the gray uniform skirt that flapped as we climbed.
Computing shared an open-plan office with Payroll, maybe twenty desks and as many wooden filing cabinets. Sy wove through their ramshackle lanes to a side office.
She knocked and we entered. “Mr. Giltstein, this is Lemuel Oneway, here for the programmer job. Coffee?”
She glanced at me, at my eyes, frowned, and left his office.
Giltstein, midtwenties, a couple of inches taller than me at six foot, with bifocals and deep laughter lines, looked me up and down. “So, a real, live Earthman, eh? What’s not to believe about that? Take a seat.”
The interview, my first for a quarter millennium and my first ever face-to-face, consisted mostly of questions about Earth. Giltstein laughed often. When it was over, he shook my hand. “I love your humor. I love the way you improvise. If you pass the test, you’re in.”
When he was satisfied, he led me to Sy’s desk. “Book him for the next test, two weeks’ time.”
Sy held up a sheaf of papers. “Why not put him in this afternoon’s test? The new photocopier warms up in minutes.”
Giltstein reached a hand toward her shoulder, retracting it when she stiffened. He put the rejected hand into his pocket. “Do that, please. I’ll be sorry to lose you, Sy. But my loss is Trading’s gain. Come, Lemuel. I’ll show you out.”
Two hours to the test, with Dempster’s map in my pocket, I set off toward the docks. Once I left Cragglemouth town center, the pounding of the ocean was enough to guide me. I bought a substantial sandwich from a roadside cart that catered for dockworkers, sat on a concrete wall above a sandy beach, and took a deep breath.
How long had it been since I dared look out over open water?
A summer’s stroll in a Dusseldorf park, with Melissa and our daughter, Lillibeth. Lillibeth ran ahead, and Melissa chased her. When I reached Melissa again, she was dead, and Lillibeth missing. My body monitor raised an alarm, triggered by the change to my pulse and blood pressure, but PanMedic and PanSecure had already been alerted by Melissa’s monitor.
She died from a single blow to the back of her head. She knew nothing about it.
Lillibeth drowned. Her body, discovered three months later on a palm-studded beach near the hyper-luxury resort of New Hawaii, had water in the lungs. Traces of chlorine suggested it wasn’t seawater. Rigor mortis hadn’t yet set in.
For two years, I battled. But the verdict of Death by Misadventure couldn’t be reversed. I sought comfort in the solitude of space.
Water rippled against the bayside. I forced myself to look around.
To the north, around a man-made bay, horse-powered cranes dipped over cargo ships. Loud men grunted with their loads. Crates of goods, the raw products of commerce, lay on the dockside amid a bustle of stevedores.
I tried not to think about the afternoon’s test. Had I traveled so far to work on primitive machines with less intelligence than a child’s shoes on Earth? The question ignored the reality of my situation. I had a chance to do what no one else from Earth had ever done—to live among people of another planet and another culture. Maybe one day I would go back to see what had become of the planet. Maybe I wouldn’t. But at least while I lived I would have that choice.
I concentrated on the waves in front of me, hypnotic, soothing. I ate.
Someone spoke to me. I turned and saw two children. Perhaps something in my startled expression frightened them. They hurried off toward the dock.
I checked my watch. Half an hour to go.
A child’s voice cried out from near the dock. A group of workers confronted the two children. One swung a kick, connecting with the smaller child. The child fell. Raucous laughter followed.
What could I do alone? Nothing. I could do nothing. And yet I couldn’t leave two children to such abuse without showing them I cared. I took a few steps toward the group of men. When they turned their attention to me, I stopped. Twenty yards lay between us.
These were dockers, strong but not fast. I could run. They moved toward me. One had a crowbar in his hand. Another held arm-length rope cutters.
The larger child helped the other to his or her feet. I waited until they had scrambled to safety, then I turned and fled back to town, reaching Draco with twenty minutes to spare.
Ten minutes later, Gliss telephoned the news of my arrival, and soon I was led through the maze surrounding the lobby to a training room with potted palms and a dark wooden table.
A young man, artificially blond with shoulder-length curls and a nervous smile, leaped to his feet. “Hi.” He stuck out a hand. “Beau Mergle. Ready and eager.”
I shook his hand. When the introductions were completed and Beau had recovered from the shock of discovering I was taking rather than giving the test, he relaxed.
He sat. “I’m not from Cragglemouth.” He glanced around the room then leaned forward. “In Barford—I’m from Barford, did I say? In Barford, word is that Cragglemouth girls are more adventurous, more…you know what I mean? A little easier? Is it true?”
I confessed I knew less about Cragglemouth girls than he, and our conversation petered out.
Other candidates arrived, two young men, followed by a woman, all around Beau’s age.
Sy entered. She took up her position at the end of the table, elegant in a gray pleated skirt and Draco-maroon short-sleeve blouse. Well-muscled arms. Strong eyes and a steady, rather stern gaze.
She looked from face to face. “Right. You all know why you’re here. The test lasts an hour and a half. Fail this, nothing else matters. And I don’t want anyone sitting next to or opposite anyone else.”
When we were distributed to her satisfaction, she placed a set of papers, face downward, in front of each of us and scattered pencils along the center of the table. “Turn over just the top page. Read it. It’s an exercise only. Take a pencil if you haven’t brought one.”
I read.
The instruction “Add A to B” will leave the sum of A plus B in Box B and leave Box A unchanged. In the following example, how would you get 7 into Box J?
Box J contained 4, Box K contained 3. Childishly simple.
“Any questions?”
There were none.
I picked up a pencil and tested it on the paper.
Sy frowned. “Lemuel Oneway, this is a demonstration. But if you do that on the test, you will be disqualified.”
What had I done? Written before Ms. Heyho said to start? “Just figuring the technology.”
Sy’s frown gave way to a bemused smile. She pulled out the chair on my right. “Which hand do you write with?”
Sometimes, the differences between our two worlds exceeded the similarities. “I’ve never had the need.”
She sat next to me. The musk of her perfume, or of her body, mattered more to me than four plus three. I leaned closer.
She turned and wrinkled her nose. “Lemuel, you’re a little wiffy.”
What was the local expression? In for a cent, in for a cupro. “I’ve been running. I’m sure you sweat when you run.”
Beau Mergle, at the other end of table, pushed his test paper away from him and glared at me. “Everyone on this planet has seen Ms. Heyho sweat. Can we get on with the test? I’ve got an audition after this.” He picked up his papers.
Sy took a pencil. “Watch.” She held it, using a thumb and the two nearer fingers. “Like this. Take one. Try.” When she was satisfied that I’d mastered the holding of a pencil, she returned to her seat.
Prim and aloof, she had our attention. “Turn over the remaining pages as a pack. Read the first instruction. Your time starts in thirty seconds.”
The hour and a half passed with great speed. Lulled by the simplicity of the early tasks, I soon realized that they were introductions to the method. More logic forms became active every few questions—Ifs and Whens, Loops and Counts.
Sunlight gleamed from Sy’s sleek black hair.
When she called time, I was only halfway through my third check.
Sy stood. “Make sure your name is on page one.” She waited. One by one, the other examinees dropped their papers on the table in front of her. She checked the top of each front page before nodding the examinees out.
Last to leave by choice, I held out my papers. “I didn’t get a chance to thank you earlier, copying the test for me.”
She
smiled. “It’s what I’m paid for.”
She took my papers, looked over each page, and nodded here and there. When she had finished, she added them to her pile. “You haven’t put your name. Don’t worry; I’ll do it. I don’t want to strain your skills too much.”
I turned to leave.
She called me back. “Wait. You need friends in a new place, and there are people you might like to meet, if you’re not in a hurry.”
No ifs or whens involved. An easy decision. “I’m in whatever the opposite of a hurry is.”
Again, she smiled, her brow furrowed. “Humor?” She put the papers into a briefcase. “I’ll mark these later. Let me run them up to Giltstein. You can come too, or will you find your own way to the lobby?”
I chose to make my own way, convinced she meant the word run literally.
Chapter 5
After a couple of false turns, I found my way to the lobby. Sy was already there. She waved. We met by the main doors. A hint of perspiration mingled with the musk of her perfume—reality and fantasy intertwined.
She led me to the Silversmith Café, opposite the labor office and close enough to Silversmith Square to justify its name. “It’s full of Draco people on a Friday evening. Today, there should be a few.”
Sy chose one of the dozen pierced-bronze tables that ran along the window side.
I checked the menu then checked my pocket.
I had already passed my caffeine quota for the day, but the waiter wasn’t amused by my request for decaf coffee. “No, sir. And our wine is not de-alc, and our bill is not de-cash. The menu we work from is the one in your hand, not the one in your wonderfully imaginative mind.”
Sy raised her eyebrows. “Jefferson, my companion isn’t from Cragglemouth. No offense intended, I’m sure.”
“As you wish, Ms. Heyho.” He leaned toward Sy. “I thought you might be here, so I asked the kitchen to save a couple of cherry muffins.”
Sy smiled at me. “On the small side, but they are wonderful. Shall we have two each?”
A Gluttony of Plutocrats (The Respite Trilogy Book 1) Page 4
