The Dark Design (32 page)

“I’ll tell you now. I just changed my mind. You’re signed up—as far as I’m concerned. No, wait a minute! Don’t look so happy. I have to talk to Tom about this. You wait. I’ll be right back.”

He plunged among the dancers, caught Rider by the hand, and dragged him off protesting to one side. Peter watched them talking. Rider looked at him several times but did not seem to be arguing.

Peter was glad that he had not had to play his trump card. If he hadn’t been chosen, he would have told the two that he knew their true identities. What would have happened then, he couldn’t guess. The two had some good reason to go under fake names. Perhaps they would have rushed off, leaving him behind if he had threatened to expose them. Or perhaps they would have taken him along, just to keep his mouth shut, and then thrown him overboard far up The River.

Possibly Farrington had caught on to what he was doing. He must have wondered why a man so familiar with London’s works would not recognize him. In which case, Farrington would have decided that Frigate was playing some kind of game. He would go along with it until they were well up The River and then find out just what he was up to.

However, Peter did not think he was in any danger of being killed. Neither Farrington nor Rider were murderers. Still, if some changed for the better on this world, others changed for the worse. And he had no idea how deep and desperate this game was.

Rider came over, shook his hand, and told him he was welcome aboard. A few minutes later, Farrington stopped the music and announced his choice of the new deckhand. By then, Peter had taken Eve outside and given her the news.

Eve was quiet for a while. Then she said, “Yes, I knew you were trying to get on that ship. It’s not easy to keep a secret here, Peter. I do feel bad, though mostly because you hadn’t told me you were going to go away.”

“I tried to get hold of you,” he said. “But you had gone off without telling me where.”

Eve began to cry. Peter’s eyes were moist. But she wiped the tears, sniffled, and said, “I’m not grieved because you’re leaving me, Pete. I’m full of sorrow because our love died. I once thought that it would last forever. I should have known better, though.”

“I’m still fond of you.”

“But not fond enough, is that it? Of course it is. I’m not blaming you, Peter. I feel the same way. It’s just that… I wish we could have gone on feeling like we first did.”

“You’ll find someone else. At least, we didn’t part with hatred.”

“It would have been better that way. It’s bad enough when you love each other but can’t get along. But to have love just die out, cold! I can’t stand indifference.”

“You’ve stood a lot more than that,” he said. “If we’d still been in love, I would’ve stayed here or I would’ve tried to get them to take us both.”

“And then you would’ve resented me. No, this may not be the best way, but it’s the only way.”

He pulled her to him to kiss her, but she gave him her cheek.

“Goodbye, Peter.”

“I won’t forget you.”

“A lot of good that’ll do us,” she said, and she walked away.

Peter went back under the roof. People crowded around to congratulate him. He didn’t feel happy. Eve had upset him, and he felt uncomfortable when he was the focus of public attention. Then Bullitt was shaking his hand.

“We’ll be sorry to see you go, Frigate,” he said. “You’ve been a model citizen. However, there is one thing.”

He turned to the sergeant-at-arms next to him and said, “Mr. Armstrong, please confiscate Mr. Frigate’s weapons.”

Peter did not protest, since he had sworn to give them up if he quit Ruritania. However, he had not given his word not to steal them back. Early that morning, while it was still dark, he did just that.

He told himself that he had put in too much labor making the weapons to give them up. Besides, he had been wounded once in the service of this state. Ruritania owed him those weapons.

He had not gotten more than a kilometer up The River when he felt like going back and surrendering the weapons. That fit of honesty lasted for a day, and then he was cured.

Or he thought that he was. The recurring dream came back again. This time it progressed past the point where he was standing naked outside the house. He threw pebbles against the window of the bedroom but repeated casts failed to wake Roosevelt. He went around trying the doors and windows, and when he got to the front door, he found it unlocked. He crept in through the front room, into the small kitchen, and he took the two steps needed to get to the door opposite the bathroom. This led up a steep stairway to the attic, a section of which had been made into a tiny bedroom. He would have to go slowly, walking on the ends of the steps. They squeaked abominably if he stepped in their middle.

It was then that he saw that the doors to his parents’ bedroom and the younger children’s were open. Moonlight came in. (Never mind that it had been dawn just as he opened the door. This was a dream.) By its bright light he saw that his parents’ big old-fashioned brass bed was empty. And so was his little sister’s. He looked around the corner and saw that the bunkbeds of Mungo and James, Junior were also deserted.

Nor was Roosevelt in his bed.

In a panic, he looked out the back window. The doghouse in the backyard was empty.

Everybody, even the dog, had gone off without a word.

What nameless crime had he committed?

The training blimp will be completed within a month,” Firebrass said. “Jill Gulbirra is the most experienced aeronaut by far, so she’ll take charge of the training. In fact, I’m making her captain of the trainer. How about that, Jill? If you can’t be commander of the big ship, you will be unchallenged chief honcho of the little one. Don’t ever say I never did anything for you.”

The other men offered her their congratulations, though some did so sourly. Cyrano seemed genuinely delighted, and if he had not been aware of her dislike for being touched, would doubtless have embraced her tightly and kissed her. On impulse, Jill pulled him to her and gave him a quick hug. After all, he was trying to make up for his offensive behavior on the Riverbank.

Twenty minutes later, she, Firebrass, Messnet, Piscator, and ten engineers began working on the blueprints for the big airship. The specifications had been determined during three weeks of hard work, usually twelve to fourteen hours a day. Instead of drawing lines on paper, however, they made blueprints on the cathode-ray tube of a computer. This was much faster, mistakes or alterations were erased quickly, and the computer itself double-checked the proportions. Of course, the computer had to be programmed first, and Jill participated in this. She loved this sort of work. It was creative and gave her a chance to play with mathematical relations.

Nevertheless, it did cause nervous tension. To relieve this and to stay in good physical shape, Jill fenced for two hours almost every day. Sword exercise here was not what it had been on Earth. The light, supple foil was discarded for the heavier, stiffer rapier. Moreover, every point of the body was a target, requiring that the fencers wear padded garments on their legs.

“We are not playing now,” Cyrano told her. “You will be learning to fence for more than just points. The time may come when you will be striving in deadly earnest to keep your opponent from running you through while you try to pierce him from front to back.”

She had been an excellent fencer. A great teacher, an Olympic champion, had told her that she could become a top contender in world competition if she would devote enough time to training. That had been impossible since her job required too much time away from the fencing courts. But when she had a chance to practice, she had taken it. She loved fencing; it was in some respects a very physical form of chess, which she also loved.

It was a joy to take a blade in hand again and to relearn all the long-unused, but not quite forgotten, skill. It was an even greater joy to find that she could beat most of her male opponents. Though she looked awkward, once she had gripped the handle of the rapier, she became all grace and liquid speed.

There were two men she could not master. One was Radaelli, the Italian master, author of
Istruzione per la scherma di spada a di sciabola
, published in 1885. The other, the indisputable champion, was Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac.

Jill was surprised at this. For one thing, fencing in his time had not yet developed into a fine art. It was not until near the end of the eighteenth century that the art neared its apex of technique. Cyrano had died in the middle of the seventeenth century before the foil had been invented, when men fought, often to the death, with techniques somewhat primitive, if spectacular. The Italians had put together the basic structure of modern swordplay by the early seventeenth century, but not until the beginning of the nineteenth century had the techniques reached the ultimate.

Thus Cyrano had established a reputation as the greatest swordsman of all times without having to compete with the more sophisticated fencers of a later age. Jill had believed that his reputation had been wildly exaggerated. After all, no one knew if the famous incident of the Porte de Nesle was true or not. No one except the Frenchman himself, and he would not talk about it.

However, he had learned all later refinements from Radaelli and Borsody. Within four months of starting his education, he was steadily outscoring his mentors. In five months, he was unbeatable. So far, at least.

Though rusty at first, Jill soon gained polish and began to give him a better battle. Never once, however, did she win more than one point of the total five within the six-minute limit of a match. And he always made four points before she got one. This led her to believe that he was giving her the one point to soften the defeat. Once, after a match in which she became furious because of her frustration, she accused him of patronizing her.

“Even if I were in love with you and desired very much to keep from hurting your feelings,” he said, “I would not do
that
! It would be dishonest, and while it is said that all is fair in love and war, it is not so for me. No, you have gotten your points fairly because of your quickness and skill.”

“But if we were playing for keeps,” she said, “with unblunted points, you would have killed me every time. You always strike first.”

He raised his mask and wiped his forehead. “True. But surely you are not thinking about challenging me to a duel? You are still not angry with me are you?”

“About that incident on the bank? No. Not about that.”

“About what, then, if I may be so bold to ask?”

She would say nothing then, and he would raise his eyebrows and shrug his shoulders in a completely Gallic manner.

Cyrano
was
better than she. No matter how much she practiced, no matter how hard her determination to best him, because he was a man, because she did not like to lose to anybody, male or female, she always lost. Once, when she had jeered at his ignorance and superstitions and so had made him furious (she had done it on purpose), he had attacked her with such vigor that he had touched her five times in one and a half minutes. Instead of losing his head, he had become even more a being of cold fire, moving with certitude and swiftness, doing everything exactly right, one hundred percent anticipatory of her every movement.

It was she who was humiliated.

Rightfully so, she told herself, and she apologized, though it was a double humiliation to do so.

“I was terribly wrong to sneer at your lack of knowledge of science and at your mistaken beliefs,” she said. “It is not your fault that you were born in 1619, and I should not have taunted you with that. I did so just to make you so mad I’d get an edge on you. It was a rotten thing to do. I promise not to do it again, and I most abjectly beg your pardon. I did not really mean it.”

“Then you said those nasty, vicious things merely as a trick?” he said. “A verbal device to gain points? There was nothing personal in those so-cutting remarks?”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “I have to be honest. My main purpose was to make you lose your head. But I was not so cool myself. At the moment, I did feel that you
were
an ignorant simpleton, a living fossil. But that was my own anger speaking out in me.

“Actually, you were far ahead of your time. You rejected the superstitions and the barbarisms of your time, as far as anybody is able to reject his culture. You were an exceptional man, and I honor you for being that. And you’ll never hear such words from me again.”

She hesitated again, then said, “But is it true that you repented on your deathbed?”

The Frenchman’s face became red. He grimaced and said, “But yes, Ms. Gulbirra, I did indeed say that I was sorry for my blasphemies and my unbelief and I asked the good God for His pardon. I, who had been a violent atheist since the age of thirteen! I, who hated the fat, smug, oily, stinking, ignorant, hypocritical, parasitical priests! And their unfeeling, merciless, cruel God!

“But you do not know, you who lived in a freer and more permissive age, you do not know the horrors of hellfire, of eternal damnation! You cannot know what it was to have the fear of hell soaking you, drowning you! It was taught us from earliest childhood, ground into our flesh, our bones, our deepest mind!