Rock of Ages

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Major Song is ranked very high by the cognoscenti,” Hunac said. “She stands a very good chance of winning.”

  “I hope to attend the Olympiad myself,” Maijstral said. “I wish you the very best of luck in the competition.”

  “Thank you. If you’ll excuse me?” Major Song made her congé, swirled her cape, and left. Hunac frowned. “How odd.”

  “Sir?” Maijstral said.

  “She obviously intended to order a drink. But now she’s left without one.”

  Maijstral flicked his ears. “Perhaps she forgot. Or remembered an errand.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I see the riding lights of a new submarine arriving at the port—red, white, green, I’m afraid I don’t know it offhand. Still, whoever’s inside, I should offer my greetings—Maijstral, I hope you will have a pleasant stay.”

  Hunac made his way toward the airlock. Maijstral resisted the impulse to gulp his drink—the reminder of his trouble with Joseph Bob had not been pleasant—and then drifted through the reception area, looking for someone, he knew. A lot of the faces looked familiar, and he knew he’d seen them on video, but he couldn’t remember precisely where, and he couldn’t remember their names.

  There was one young man, unfamiliar to Maijstral and dressed rather dramatically in black, who was looking at him as if he were undecided whether to approach and introduce himself. Maijstral assumed he was some sort of burglary fan, and, as he didn’t feel like talking to fans at the moment, he turned away and wandered on, and then recognized someone and approached to sniff her ears.

  “Hello, Alice. Congratulations on obtaining your freedom.”

  Each gave the other two fingers: they were professional acquaintances, but not intimates.

  Alice Manderley was a woman of middle years, dark-haired and slender. She was also one of the best burglars in the galaxy, a consistent high performer who had always outpointed Maijstral in the ratings. She had been rated third, and was a contender to succeed Geoff Fu George as first in the ratings until she encountered ill luck while attempting to steal the famous Zenith Blue.

  “I hope prison was not too bad,” Maijstral said.

  “It was prison,” Alice said. “Of course it was bad. Even the nicest conceivable prison is bad.” Her brow furrowed and her voice grew harsh. “And to think I was put there by an amateur. She was on her way to school, saw the shimmer of my darksuit, and hit me with a briefcase full of study materials. Knocked me unconscious. I can’t believe my luck.” She scowled. “They gave her the Qwarism Order of Public Service (Second Class). Second class! What kind of insult was that, I ask you!”

  Alice seemed likely to continue in this vein for some time, and Maijstral thought it a good idea to change the subject. “It is a surprise to see you here among the actors,” he said, “though of course a delightful one.”

  “I’m with Kenny. There’s a producer here he wants to talk to.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  Kenny Chang was Alice’s husband, a notably unsuccessful actor whose personal charm seemed unable to translate properly to video or the stage.

  Maijstral was nearly as disinclined to talk about Kenny’s career as he was to chat about the features of Alice’s prison.

  “Are you going to get your ticket renewed?” he asked.

  Alice sighed. “I already have. I must admit that burglary has lost much of its appeal, but while I was in stir Kenny took a flier on Forthright bonds, and now I need to get us out of debt.”

  Maijstral had been offered the same bonds less than a year ago, and had walked away with a loathly shudder. The Forthright Company had been such an obvious swindle (the company’s chairman, Xovalkh, was ranked near the top of the Imperial Sporting Commission’s ratings for confidence men) that the only investors likely to actually turn over their funds were either the brain-damaged or those who purchased bonds solely for their entertainment value—Xovalkh was quite a performer, for those who appreciated that sort of thing.

  Maijstral suspected that Kenny did not, however, belong to this latter category of investor.

  “Well,” he said, “if you have any plans for the near future, I could offer you logistical support. I’m on vacation, and I don’t want my crew to get rusty.”

  Alice looked at him with a peculiar expression. “That’s kind of you, Maijstral,” she said.

  “Drexler in particular has been complaining I don’t give him enough to do.”

  “I have my people already picked out. But thank you.”

  “Ah well. If I can give help of that sort, let me know.”

  “Thanks.” She looked over Maijstral’s shoulder. “There’s a young man who keeps staring at us.”

  “Dressed in black? I noticed him earlier.”

  “He looks familiar, but I can’t place him.”

  “I hope he is not a connoisseur of burglary statistics.”

  Alice made a face. “I will make a point of avoiding him.”

  Maijstral glanced to his right, and was surprised to see Aunt Batty making her way toward him. He sniffed her lace-covered ears and touched his tongue to his lips in a subdued Khosali smile.

  “That was your submarine that just arrived?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Is her grace with you?”

  “No, I’m afraid she’s still in negotiation with the Bubber. It’s just me and your father.”

  “Your father is here?” Alice asked. “Didn’t I hear he’d died?”

  “Yes, on both counts,” Maijstral said. “We’re having a sort of a family conference. Alice Manderley, may I present—” He looked at Aunt Batty and blinked. “I’m afraid I only know you as Bathsheba.”

  Batty took Alice’s hand and sniffed, her ears. “I’m the Honorable Bathsheba sar Altunin,” she said, the name indicating the fact of her adoption by the Altunin family, “but you can call me Batty.”

  “How do you do?”

  “I am sorry to have saddled you with my father,” Maijstral said. “But I’m afraid my life has been more disorganized than usual—”

  “No need to apologize. Gustav and I have been having a perfectly fine time, just chatting away.”

  Maijstral’s ears pricked forward in surprise. “Indeed? And what do you chat about?”

  “You, mostly.”

  “Ah. For your work.”

  Batty lapped daintily at her drink. “Yes. I think the third volume is shaping up in a most interesting fashion.”

  When all this was over, Maijstral thought, he would steal those manuscripts.

  “I’m not certain I would trust this particular source overmuch,” Maijstral said, “given the state of his memory. He keeps forgetting he’s dead, for one thing.”

  Aunt Batty’s tongue lolled in a smile. “I have noticed that, dear, yes. But I do try in my best historian’s fashion to confirm everything with another source.”

  “Very good.”

  “For example, was your stuffed bear’s name really Peter Pajamas?”

  Maijstral blinked. “Do you know, I believe it was. This is the first time I’ve thought of that in—well, decades, I suppose.”

  Alice had been watching this dialogue with little indication of interest, but smiled at this last. “I perceive my own stuffed bear approaching,” she said. “Batty, may I present my husband, Kenny.”

  “Hi,” Kenny said.

  He was a handsome man with long, fashionably careless hair. He had, to a discerning eye, rather overdone the fashionable carelessness, with his falling bands partially undone, his collar turned up, his day’s growth of beard, and his hands in his pockets, but perhaps this was a matter of taste.

  Maijstral, considering for a moment Kenny as stuffed bear, concluded that Peter Pajamas had a decided advantage in brains.

  “I talked to Winky,” Kenny informed Alice, “and he said I’d fit the part hand in glove, but it’s not up to him, it’s up to the people with the money, so who knows? He says he’ll call.”

  “Perhaps he will,�
� Alice said.

  Probably, Maijstral thought, he wouldn’t, even though Kenny seemed to be on nickname terms with him five minutes after acquaintance.

  He really didn’t know anyone who’d call Kenny voluntarily.

  “There’s such a lot of deal-making going on here,” Kenny said. “I’ve really got to stay on the jump. Have you met that Elvis? Major Song?”

  Alice’s ears flattened. “Yes,” she said shortly.

  “Loathsome little weasel, but there’s money there. Maybe if I just sing the praises of the Security and Sedition Act, and pretend to hate the rats long enough—”

  Alice put a hand on his arm. “Stay away from her, dear. She’s not an association that would do you any good. Not in the long run.”

  Kenny considered this, scratching his day’s beard. “Well, if you say so. Plenty of other mammals in this terrarium.” He grinned. “Hey, that was pretty good, wasn’t it? ’Cause we’re in a kind of a reverse fishbowl here, right? And it’s the fish that are looking in. Get it?”

  “Very good, Ken,” Alice said.

  “Well, I’m off to corner myself a—” He started to leave, then seemed to notice Maijstral for the first time! “Say, Drake,” he said, “you know Nichole’s going to be here?”

  “So I understand,” Maijstral said.

  “You and she are still friends, right? I mean, no hard feelings or anything.”

  “No.”

  “Not after she took up with you on that what’s-its-name planet, Peleng, and then dumped you for that fellow she’s living with now.”

  “It didn’t happen,” Maijstral said.

  “Hm?” Kenny looked surprised. “No, really. She’s living with him. It was in the news and everything. He’s her set designer or something.”

  “I mean,” Maijstral said patiently, “that Nichole and I were not involved on Peleng, and, insofar as we weren’t involved, she didn’t jettison me when she took up with Lieutenant Navarre.”

  “Oh.” Kenny took a moment to process this—the thought that something reported in the media might be a falsehood was obviously a difficult one for him—and then he brightened. “Well, good; You’re still friends, then. You wouldn’t mind introducing me to her, would you? I’d love a chance to work with Nichole if I could. Associating with the Diadem never hurts a fellow’s career.”

  Poor Nichole, Maijstral thought. Still, celebrity was something she had chosen, along with all the little annoyances that went with it. Annoyances with names like Kenny or Winky or Vang-Thokk.

  “Should the opportunity present itself,” Maijstral said, “I will make the introduction, yes.”

  Kenny looked over Maijstral’s shoulder and frowned. “There’s a fellow in black keeps staring at me. He probably wants an autograph or something, the vermin. I’ll just roll away, then, and keep out of his way.”

  “Bye,” Maijstral said.

  When he’d been living with Nicole, he’d had many conversations just like this one.

  “I believe I’ll accompany Kenny,” Alice said, and made her congé.

  Batty and Maijstral looked at one another.

  “What a . . . forceful young man,” Batty said.

  “It could be worse,” Maijstral said. “He could drink.”

  “Your father,” said Batty, “has been put in my room.”

  “That’s exceedingly good of you,” Maijstral said. “We can move him to my suite later, and I can engage someone to look after him.”

  “As you like, dear, but that really won’t be necessary, I’m growing accustomed to him, and as it was our family that brought him here in the first place, I have no objections to looking after him until you get over your trouble with Joseph Bob.”

  At the expense, Maijstral considered, of having Batty dig farther into his life history. Still and all, his father didn’t really know anything likely to prove too embarrassing—since he’d reached the age: of reason, Maijstral had kept his family strictly away from anything important—and so all the little gems Batty was likely to discover would be of the Peter Pajamas variety, domestic and perhaps even endearing.

  Besides, sharing digs with a dead man, even a father, was hardly to his taste.

  “If you truly don’t mind,” Maijstral said.

  “That young man is still staring at us,” Batty observed.

  A silver sphere descended from somewhere near the ceiling and swooped closer to Maijstral. Following it, on foot, came a young woman with an unusually sculptured hair arrangement and a peculiar bell-shaped skirt.

  “Mr. Maijstral?” she said, in Human Standard. “I’m Mangula Arish from the Talon News Service.”

  The appearance of such a person was inevitable, of course. Maijstral’s lazy-lidded eyes half closed as they regarded the journalist.

  “How do you do?” Replying in the same language.

  A second media globe joined the first, recording the subject from another angle. “Has your journey to Earth been productive?” Mangula asked.

  “No,” Maijstral said, “but then I had not intended to produce anything while I was here.”

  “I meant,” patiently, “will we see the disappearance of any of Earth’s finer artworks or gemstones while you are on-planet?”

  Maijstral sighed and once again told the truth, perfectly aware that no one would ever believe him. “I am here on vacation, and to attend the wedding of some acquaintances. If anything disappears, it won’t be my fault.”

  “Is this restraint motivated by any regard for Earth’s great history and its priceless collection of treasures?”

  Maijstral’s eyes narrowed to slits. “It is motivated by the fact I am on vacation.”

  “Do you intend to offer an apology to the people of Earth while you are here?”

  Maijstral’s eyes opened in surprise. “Apologize?” he said. “What have I to apologize for?”

  “It was on Earth that your grandfather, the Imperial official better known as Robert the Butcher, committed the great majority of his crimes against his own people.”

  Maijstral’s ears cocked forward as he feigned puzzlement. “And therefore?”

  “And therefore,” the journalist went on, “you, as his descendent, might be expected to apologize for his behavior.”

  “I was not even alive at the time, miss,” Maijstral said, “and had nothing whatever to do with my grandfather’s decisions, the actions that resulted from them, or any of the consequent suffering. But if anyone can receive comfort by an apology from someone who had nothing to do with the acts being apologized for, then I will happily offer mine, for whatever good it will do.”

  He was tempted to apologize as well for the acts of other bad eggs such as Jesse James and Mad Julius, considering that he had about equally to do with those, but some lingering sense of diplomacy kept his mouth shut.

  As for Mangula, it took her a. moment or two to disentangle the grammatical complexities of Maijstral’s last statement. She blinked. “So you do apologize?” she asked.

  “I thought I already had.”

  Mangula blinked again. The whole apology question had been one she’d raised herself on the assumption that, however Maijstral answered, she’d be able to turn it into something provocative, but it hadn’t turned out quite the way she’d wished, and so she plunged ahead, hoping to be able to provoke a bit of sensation out of the jumble.

  “Do you disavow the Cause for which your grandfather fought?”

  Maijstral thoughtfully fingered the semilife patch along his jawline.

  “Miss Arish, I believe history has disavowed my grandfather’s cause more than I ever could. I wish everyone well, and I desire peace for all, regardless of their politics, and really, what more can I say?”

  It would require a fair degree of context removal—”editing,” in the journalistic sense—to make anything remotely sensational out of this, and Mangula decided to end the interview and let her news director decide what to do with the results.

  As a consequence, she completely forgot to
inquire as to the significance of Maijstral’s semilife patch, which by now had become rather prominent in view of the swelling its rooted tendrils were sopping up—and that inquiry would have given her a scoop indeed.

  “Thank you, Mr. Maijstral,” she said, and made her exit, silver globes swooping after her.

  “Does that sort of thing happen all the time?” Batty asked.

  “Oh yes,” Maijstral said. “More now than ever.”

  “What a strange life you must lead, I’m sure.”

  “One must be sure to always make one’s answers to the media as complex and laden of context as possible. They can never make a simple, sensational story out of it that way. Not without a good deal of effort, anyway.”

  Batty’s eyes shifted over Maijstral’s shoulder again. “That young man in black is approaching. And he’s got a friend with him.”

  Maijstral sighed—the last two people who spoke to him had been rather a trial, and there was no guarantee that this one would be any different. Still, he turned to face the newcomers with as civil a face as possible.

  The young man in black had long hair styled similarly to Maijstral’s, and Maijstral observed he wore a large diamond on one finger—the same finger as Maijstral’s own diamond, and a very similar diamond at that. The man’s friend wore a bottle green coat and gold jewelry.

  “Maijstral,” the man in black said, offering Maijstral three fingers in the handclasp to Maijstral’s one, “I’m Laurence.”

  Maijstral sniffed the actor’s ears. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m told you do me rather well.”

  The actor stepped back with a look of surprise. “It sounds as if you haven’t seen me.”

  Maijstral probably should have assured the young man that he’d seen him scads of times, and thought him very good, not that his opinion really counted, but fortunately it was shared by all the very best critics, and Laurence must surely be pleased—after which Laurence would have gone off a happy man. But events had thrown off Maijstral’s social timing, and he’d already had to deal with one actor today and his patience was probably shorter than usual, and so he did the worst thing possible, which was (once again) to tell the truth.