Before Mark could rise to his feet, the man who spoke had squatted beside him. The fellow was tall and solid the way a tree is solid. He had bright red hair and a mustache that flared to either side like a hearth brush. "Yerby Bannock, lad," he said. He held out a hand to Mark. "Is this lot yours, then? Would you like to sell?"
Mark juggled the plate cautiously. The glass was so thin that it could break of its own weight if he held it wrong. There wasn't time to nestle the piece back in the case, so Mark positioned it on edge in his left hand as he shook. Bannock's fingers felt like tree roots, though he was obviously being careful not to crush Mark.
"I'm Mark Lucius-son Maxwell of Quelhagen, sir," Mark said. "Ah-"
He didn't want to insult Bannock, but this dinner service was a work of art and he owed it something.
"-these goods aren't mine, but they're amazingly delicate. Even careless pressure from fingers as weak as mine could shatter the glass."
There was nothing weak about Mark, his fingers or otherwise. He kept in shape with gymnastics, and the three weeks he'd been traveling by starship hadn't left him flabby by normal standards. Comparison with Yerby Bannock, though, was like comparison with a hydraulic jack.
"Pretty as a butterfly, ain't it, lad?" Bannock said, apparently without offense at Mark's warning. He deliberately laced his fingers in front of him as he balanced in a squat. "Doc, don't you think I ought to get these for Amy? Ain't they just the sort of things she'd love?"
The man with Bannock was of Mark's height and build, though softer for lack of exercise. Mark guessed the "doctor" was about thirty-five, some five years older than Bannock.
"Dr. Gabriel Jesilind, sir," the doctor said stiffly, extending his hand. "Of the Marques Jesilinds."
Jesilind wore "town clothes," but of various sorts. His yellow frock coat probably aped Zenith style, while his trousers were a sober gray that wouldn't have been out of place on a shopkeeper in conservative Quelhagen. The doctor's shirt had a ruffed front with pink stripes on sky blue; Mark couldn't imagine where that garment had originated.
For that matter, he'd never heard of Marques, either. If it was a planet rather than a district or a community, Mark wondered if it might not be a world settled by the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere rather than from the Atlantic Alliance. Jesilind's swarthiness might as easily be South Asian as Mediterranean.
Jesilind's offer to shake created an awkward situation, since Mark had started to put the soup plate back in the case. "Very good to meet you, sir," Mark said as he concentrated on the plate, using both hands and all his care. "I'll be with you in a…"
The plate slid home, undamaged for the moment. Other travelers were drifting over, called by the chance of something to punctuate Dittersdorf's rain-soaked boredom. The odds were the service would be a pile of rainbow-hued fragments before the evening was out, but there wasn't much Mark could do now that he'd showed what was in the case.
Jesilind was frowning by the time Mark was able to rise and shake his hand, but if the doctor felt an unintended insult he at least didn't comment on it. His fingers were vaguely damp. He looked Mark up and down and said, "Are you a scholar, Mr. Maxwell?"
"Oh, goodness, no!" Mark blurted, amazed that anyone would think he was a scholar. The three years he'd just spent taking a degree in Human Civilization at Harvard were a good two years more of academic life than he'd wanted. He'd managed to graduate partly out of his own stubbornness and partly because he could too easily imagine Lucius Maxwell's cold silence if his son admitted that he'd quit.
"Doc Jesilind here's a scholar," Bannock said proudly, putting an arm around Jesilind's shoulders. "He took the Harvard Course, he did. In General Knowledge!"
Bannock was moderately tall, at least six feet four, but Mark had met taller men. The frontiersman wasn't heavyset, and his muscles didn't bulge in sharp definition like those of a bodybuilder. Bannock stood out because the intensity he projected made him seem a force of nature rather than a human being, a very concentrated thunderstorm or avalanche.
"Perhaps you've heard of Dean Brickley, Mr. Maxwell?" Jesilind said, buffing his fingernails on the lapel of his yellow coat. "The designer of the course I completed? One of the finest scholars of the Atlantic Alliance!"
"Indeed he was, sir," Mark said, completely taken aback by Jesilind's claims. Brickley had been everything Jesilind said of him-before he died, a good fifty years in the past. There was a statue of the former dean near the entrance to the Widener Library; Mark had sat at the base of it many times.
Dr. Jesilind had obviously taken a hypnagogue course that was far older than the doctor himself. Culture is a matter of what you know, but the real value of an education was learning how to learn. A course like the one Jesilind took wasn't exactly valueless: it fitted the doctor to become a member of the elite culture of two generations ago. But Jesilind's boast put a whole new complexion on what the word "scholar" meant this close to the frontier, and it was too late for Mark to correct his initial answer without embarrassment to all concerned.
"Hey!" the watchman cried as he bustled back to the storage room. "Hey! What did you do? Did you break that open without paying for it?"
The watchman reached down toward the case. Mark couldn't tell whether he meant to close the lid or snatch at the plates.
"A moment, sir!" Mark said sharply. He caught the watchman's arm and held it despite the fellow's wheezing attempt to push past. "I've opened the case properly, but any clumsy groping will turn the contents into sand."
"Who the hell do you think you are, boy?" the watchman snarled, backing and shaking his arm when Mark released it.
"I think I'm not your boy, sir," Mark said with the cold fury of a Quelhagen gentleman insulted.
Yerby Bannock tapped the watchman on the chest with an index finger. "Say, friend," Bannock said. "This is yours to sell, right? Well, it's the lad's to buy if he wants it-and not for any jacked-up price either. Weren't worth a thing till Mr. Maxwell here opened it up for you."
Mark blinked. "I'm traveling with a single bag, sir," he said. "I have no use for the dishes. I only wonder how they came to be here."
"Feller with his wife, some six months back," the watchman said in a tone of grumbling politeness. Bannock's wrists were as thick and muscular as Mark's own calves. "Their honeymoon, I wouldn't wonder. She was on the woman's side. They went out together one night and never come back. Dunno why. Had some clothes too, but they sold first thing."
Mark felt suddenly cold. This was the frontier, a place where people died of unknown diseases or simply vanished. People with cultured taste, on their honeymoon.
"All right, if the lad passes, then the box is mine to give to my sister, right?" Bannock said. "I'd say ten Zenith dollars was fair. Ten for you and ten for Mr. Maxwell."
Bannock threw back one side of his poncho of natural wool. Beneath it he wore a rough-out leather vest, fringed and studded for decoration, over a dingy checked shirt of homespun. His trousers were leather to the knee and homespun below, held up by vividly scarlet suspenders.
"Ten?" cried the watchman. "Why, that's worth a fortune! Worth a hundred, anyhow."
Bannock's belt was of nickel-steel links, supporting a rectangular purse of the same material. He pressed the thumbprint lock. "Fifteen to you and the same to the lad, then," he said. He opened the purse without losing eye contact with the watchman.
"Sir, I couldn't think of taking money for what I did," Mark said. He was shocked at the thought. "I assure you, I have no part in this negotiation."
"Thirty for me an you can have it," the watchman said. "Though it's robbery, you know."
"Twenty-five, then," Bannock said, fishing out a wad of scrip issued by at least a dozen planets, all of them Protected Worlds settled and governed by the Atlantic Alliance. "Otherwise I'll have the lad close the box again and you'll have damn-all for your greed."