Scogil wouldn’t even be able to tease Eron about it—the boy remained wrapped in a Ganderian ethic which allowed one to banter humorously about one’s legal mate at any level of sexual detail but deemed it taboo to nudge, gossip, ask, or comment about any extramarital liaison. Cross-generational affairs, permitted in the interest of a proper “erotic education” for the young, nevertheless dwelled in a strictly invisible domain. Agander was a very strange place.
He had to grin at the whole situation. Nemia was such an unscrupulous woman! He might have been shocked at the way she had been flirting with Eron—except that it served his purposes. She made a good partner in crime. He was half tempted to thwart his family’s matrimonial plans for him, whatever diabolical form they were taking, with a preemptive marriage to this high-energy vortex... but stealing her from her fianc£ would mean he’d have to deal with Ne-mia’s family as enemies, and her family was a very powerful one indeed; to annoy them was to live under a sword of retribution, perhaps a worse fate than annoying his own extended family, which was suicide. Life offered up sobering alternatives.
Damn that boy! He should be sneaking back into his room by now. Scogil was dying of curiosity to find out from Ne-mia if Eron’s fam was modifiable in any interesting way. Rigone couldn’t wait much longer, and the Oversee would have Scogil’s hide if he didn’t soon turn up for his assignment in Coron’s Wisp. He looked out again but saw nothing on the lake, only the morning glint of a ferry descending from space.
When Glatim’s gruff Assessor sauntered by and invited him for breakfast, he took the invitation. He was hungry. In the empty dining hall, the smells of frying yamums and jam and cinnamon beckoned them both back into the kitchen to the cozy staff table where the cook and his helper, together, concocted a sumptuous meal faster than any cuisinator— good food and small talk with the servants always took one’s mind off serious concerns. Mendor himself joined them before they had finished their second helpings, popping an extra chair out of the floor to face Hiranimus. As usual, he brought up business before he joined the banter.
“You and the boy are looking for a ride to Faraway, right?” Faraway was at least twenty thousand leagues from Neuhadra by pythagorean line, more like thirty thousand leagues along any usable trade route, a greater distance than Scogil could afford.
“You have a berth?”
“It fell into my lap; it seems destiny has been looking at you favorably for the last ten million years, working up to your salvation.” Mendor’s humor tended to be deadpan.
“I’ve been patient,” said Scogil, although, at the moment, he was anything but.
“A contract from Trefia came in last evening—Trefia is a sparse planetary system only four hundred and eleven leagues from Faraway, dynamically very stable and un-chaotic”—Mendor began to chuckle—“with a political elite so clueless about meteoroid impacts that they’ve been trying to contact the Omneity of Planetary Safety to ask about their problem.” The Omneity of Planetary Safety— long ago vanished into the early Interregnum—had once been a powerful department of the First Empire’s bureaucracy. “Some schoolboy had to refer them to ms.” Everyone joined the laughter, even the cook. Mendor went on to explain that Trefia hadn’t been impacted seriously for the last two hundred million years and so evidently wasn’t geared up to deal with such a problem. Their Assembly was in a panic.
“Poor jokers haven’t even had their astronomers on a small-body watch and were only warned by a curious star-ship captain. The villain is an interstellar rogue, a biggy on a bull’s-eye orbit. Probably ejected by some coalescing planetary system billions of years ago. Not an emergency, but it will be a lot cheaper to take care of now than a few years down the orbit. I’ll be sending off an expedition as soon as I can organize one. That might be faster than you can pack your sack. Can’t go myself. The crew will have to stop at Sewinna for supplies and then on to Faraway for some of the more specialized machinery—our meteoroid seems to be just a huge pile of rubble cemented together by a prayer and a little ice, so the extra machinery is to be sure we don’t turn it into buckshot when we do the deflection. The ride will be free for you and Eron, if you want it, compliments of the Trefians who are too scared shitless right now to balk at a few extra expenses like passage for a second-rate mathematician and his apprentice. We have you on the payroll as an orbital mechanic.”
He waited a moment while he assessed how well his friend was taking his needling, then smiled. “I’ve asked for a little under-the-table bribe to be paid directly as a charitable grant to Asinia Pedagogic’s scholarship fund for needy mathematics students—with invisible strings attached to the Osa boy in such a way that no one there will question his qualifications too seriously. How’s that? It’ll take some worries off your shoulder.”
“I was just about ready to hit you for a contribution to Eron’s maintenance fund.”
“Who, me? That’s why I struck first. The Glatims didn’t get rich by giving charity to twelve-year-old paupers. We got rich by being stingy. Speaking of stingy, you’ll be on your own getting back.” That didn’t really sound right to him even if it did fit his cherished family image; Hiranimus was one of his oldest friends. He slapped the table. “Maybe I can charge the poor Trefians your return fare, too, though it’s not liable to be on one of my ships. We don’t make regular runs out that way.” Business done, Mendor turned to food. “What do you recommend: the hen’s eggs or the fish eggs au gratin? Maybe I’m just in the mood for cinnamon toast.”
Scogil scurried up and off to bring back a plate of the marvelous fish-egg recipe, plus the cinnamon toast—whereupon he rattled off an aside to the Assessor, who had been left out of the conversation, loudly enough for Mendor to hear. “Mendor has just paid off the debt he owes me for saving his life innumerable times while he was a wayward youth.” He spoke happily, all the while factoring in the extra time pressure of an early departure.
“Hey, always willing to help out a friend when he’s out of line.”
“Mendor! I’m never out of line. I’m just off the road picking up herbs to liven up our standard evening chow.”
“Don’t try to swab out my ears, you worthless nitwit. You’re always out of line. Why do you think they sent you to
Agander? It was the only secure, out-of-the-way prison they could find.”
“I escaped. Shut up and eat your fish eggs!”
“Say, where’s the kid? He’s usually an early riser with a big appetite, out spying as soon as the sun is up.”
“He’s off doing research for me,” said Scogil glumly. Indeed, Eron wasn’t back until late morning. Scogil watched him, from a distance, silently bring in his runabout, then keep to the shadows while he snuck back inside the mansion. A wait was appropriate. Give the brat time enough to pretend he’d been sleeping. He waited impatiently. He paced. He thought about Nemia. Had she, maybe, taken a shower with the impudent brat? He rapped heavily on Eron’s door, ignoring the delicate chimes, reminding himself to pretend that nothing had happened.
“Time for your math lesson!” he shouted through the suite’s portal. Eron answered, all innocently willing to please. That was good. Scogil, almost forgetting to mock up his mild Murek persona, gave Eron the workout of his life, oral exam, prompting, prodding, challenging, tripping, patiently repeating what Eron did not understand, diagramming around misunderstandings, then demanding that Eron reproduce exactly what had been implied. Eron gave him no lip. That was a wonderful change. The brat worked harder to please than Scogil had ever seen him work. Scogil never let up. He took Eron past suppertime, right up to first sunset. Refusing to break, the boy used fam stimulation to push body and brain well past die exhaustion point. He’d sleep well. No dallying tonight!