“It’s in the safe in my office,” said Pennyroyal. “Why? Reckon it might be worth something?”
“Po-o-ossibly,” said Plovery cautiously.
“The Lost Girl who came with it seemed to think it had something to do with submarines.”
Mr. Plovery allowed himself a chuckle. “Oh no, Your Worship. She clearly knows nothing about the machine languages of the Ancients.”
“A machine language, eh?”
“A code, which would have been used by our ancestors to communicate with one of their computer brains. I can find no example of this particular language anywhere in the historical records. However, it is similar to certain surviving fragments of American military code.”
“American, eh?” said Pennyroyal, and then, “Military? That should be worth a bob or two. This war’s been dragging on for fourteen years. People are desperate. The R D departments of the big fighting cities would pay a fortune for a sniff at a super-weapon.”
Plovery’s face grew ever so slightly pink as he imagined his percentage of a fortune. “Would you like me to try and arrange a sale, Your Worship? I have contacts in the Mobile Free States…”
Pennyroyal shook his head. “No, Plovery, I’ll handle this. There’s no point doing anything until after Moon Festival. I’ll keep the book in my safe until the celebrations are over and then get in touch with a few of my contacts. There’s an archaeologist of my aquaintance, a charming young woman named Cruwys Morchard; she often stops in Brighton in the autumn time, and she always seems to be on the lookout for unusual bits of Old Tech. Yes, I think I can arrange a sale without troubling you, Plovery.”
He shooed the disgruntled Old Tech dealer away and sat down to continue his breakfast, only to be confronted with the Palimpsest, which his wife was holding up for him to see. There, on the front page of the gossip section, was a full-length photograph of himself entering a casino in the Laines on the arm of Orla Twombley, who was looking even more goddesslike than Pennyroyal remembered.
“Well,” he blustered, “she’s not really what I’d call pretty…”
“Poor Boo-Boo!” said Wren, standing unnoticed on a gallery high above the breakfast room beside her new friend Cynthia Twite. Pennyroyal’s chat with Plovery had been too quiet for her to overhear, but she had listened to every word of the exchange about Orla Twombley. “I don’t know how she puts up with it…”
“Puts up with what?” asked Cynthia innocently.
“Didn’t you hear? Boo-Boo thinks he’s been having a liaison with Orla Twombley!”
“What’s a ‘liaison’?” asked Cynthia, frowning. “Is it a sort of cake?”
Wren sighed. Cynthia was very sweet, very pretty, and very dim. She had been a house slave at the Pavilion for several years, and when Wren arrived, Mrs. Pennyroyal had asked her to be Wren’s friend and explain the workings of the household to her. Wren was glad of the companionship, but she felt she already understood more about the life of the Pavilion than Cynthia had ever known.
“Boo-Boo thinks that Pennyroyal and Ms. Twombley are having a fling,” she explained patiently.
“Oh!” Cynthia looked scandalized. “Oh, poor Mistress! To think, a man of his age throwing himself at slinky aviatrices!”
“I could tell you some things about Pennyroyal that are a lot worse than that,” Wren whispered, and then stopped, remembering that she must not tell Cynthia anything. To everyone on Cloud 9, Wren was just a Lost Girl who knew nothing about Pennyroyal beyond what he’d written in his silly books.
“What?” asked Cynthia, intrigued. “What things?”
“I’ll tell you another time,” Wren promised, knowing that Cynthia would forget.
To change the subject, she said, “Who is that boy behind Boo-Boo’s chair? The one with the fan? I saw him at the pool the other day. He always looks so sad.”
“Oh, he’s another new arrival, like you,” said Cynthia excitedly. “He’s been here for only a few weeks. His name’s Theo Ngoni, and he used to be a Green Storm aviator! He got captured in a big battle somewhere, and Pennyroyal bought him for Boo-Boo as a birthday present. It’s meant to be ever so stylish to have a captured Mossie as a slave, but I think it’s scary. I mean, we could all be murdered in our beds, couldn’t we! Look at him! Don’t he look vicious?”
Wren studied the boy. He did not look vicious to her. He was no older than she was, and far too young to be fighting in battles. How terrible it must have been for him to be defeated and dragged away from his home and sent here to wave a fan at the Pennyroyals all day! No wonder he seemed so miserable. Wren felt sorry for him, and that soon made her feel sorry for herself too, and reminded her that she should be looking for a way to escape from this place.
For a few days Pennyroyal had taken a special interest in Wren, calling her “my fan from beneath the sea” and lending her his latest book, a history of the war with the Green Storm. But he quickly forgot her, and she became just another of his wife’s many slaves.
Her new life was simple. She rose each day at seven, breakfasted, and went with the other girls of Mrs. Pennyroyal’s household to Mrs. Pennyroyal’s bedchamber, where they woke Mrs. Pennyroyal and helped her dress and spent an hour working on her hairdo, which was elaborate, expensive, and several feet tall. In the mornings, when the mayor went down to the Town Hall, his wife liked to take a long, relaxing wallow in the swimming pool. Sometimes in the afternoons, when Pennyroyal came home tipsy from something he called a “working lunch,” Boo-Boo took the cable car down to Brighton and went visiting, or opened things, but she never took any of her pretty young handmaidens with her, just a couple of slave boys to carry her shopping.
At eight in the evening, dinner was served, usually a big affair with many guests, and Wren and the other girls running in and out with roast swan, shark steaks, sea-pie, and great wobbling desserts. After that, Mrs. Pennyroyal had to be helped to bathe and dress for bed before the girls were finally allowed to go to their own beds, in a dormitory on the ground floor.
It was hard work sometimes, but when she was not busy attending to the mayoress, Wren was allowed to do pretty much what she liked, and what she liked, in those first few weeks, was to wander about the Pavilion and its grounds with Cynthia Twite.
Pennyroyal’s palace was a treasure trove of wonders, and Wren loved the gardens, with their shaded walks and summerhouses, the elaborate topiary maze, the groves of blue-green cypresses and shrines to antique gods. Sometimes, as Brighton steamed south into warmer waters and golden autumn sunshine, she would stand at the handrail at the gardens’ edge and look down at the whit e city below her, at the shining sea, at the circling gulls and the airships and the pennants streaming in the wind, and wonder if it hadn’t been worth getting kidnapped and enslaved just to see so much beauty.
But more and more, as the weeks wore by, she missed her mum and dad. She knew she had to get away from Cloud 9. But how? No airships were allowed to land on the airborne deck plate, so the only way off was by cable car, and the cable car was closely guarded by Brighton’s red-coated militia. And even if she made it down to Brighton, what good would that do her? She wore the brand of the Shkin Corporation, and if she tried to board an outbound ship, she would be taken up as a runaway slave and handed straight back to Shkin.
And all the time, she was being carried farther and farther from her home. Brighton was nosing south down the long coast of the Hunting Ground while dusty two-tiered Traction Towns kept pace with it onshore. Everybody was talking about Moon Festival, Boo-Boo endlessly writing and rewriting the guest list for the mayor’s ball, the cooks in the Pavilion kitchens working overtime to turn out moon-shaped cakes and silver moon-sweets. The rising of the first full moon of autumn was an event sacred to all the most popular religions. There would be parties and processions aboard Brighton, and all over the world the Moon Festival fires would burn in city and static alike. There would even be one lonely bonfire on the Dead Continent, for at Anchorage-in-Vineland, Moon Festival was the biggest social event of the year.