My lovely Heinrich, she thought. I'd fuck you even if you were my birth-brother. An exaggeration, but he was a dear, and of course incest taboos didn't apply to adoptee-kin. And this time when you ask me to marry you, I'm going to say yes.
The implications of the documents in her attache case were clear, if you could read between the paragraphs. It was time to do her eugenic duty to the Chosen; even with servants, infants took up a lot of time and effort. Best do it while there was time.
In a couple of years, they were all going to be very, very busy.
CHAPTER THREE
1233 A.F.
317 Y.O.
Looks different from a Protege's point of view, John Hosten thought, carefully slumping his shoulders.
He was walking the streets of Oathtaking in the drab cotton coat and breeches of some middling Protege worker. He could have been a warehouse clerk, or a store-checker; his hair had been dyed brown, but the best protection was sheer swarming numbers and the fact that nobody looked at an average Proti.
He'd forgotten how hot the damned place was, too. Hot, the air thick and wet and saturated with coal smoke and smells. Bigger than he remembered from his childhood; the villas went further up the slopes of the volcanoes, the factories were larger and the smokestacks higher, there were more overhead power lines, workers hanging out the sides of the overburdened trolley cars. And many, many more powered vehicles on the streets. Most of them were in army gray, steam-powered trucks and haulers built to half a dozen standard models. A fair number of luxury cars, too, some of them imported models from the Republic. Half a dozen Proteges went by on a gang-bicycle, which was a very clever invention, when you thought about it.
Too heavy for one to pedal-it takes six. Factory workers can use them to commute, but they don't get personal mobility.
Cleverness wasn't a wholly positive quality. .
He ducked into the brothel's front door; it wasn't hard to find, having BROTHEL #22A7-B, PROTEGE, CLASS 6-B printed on the front door, with a graphic symbol for illiterates. Inside was a depressingly bare waiting room with a brick floor and girls sitting around the walls on wood-slat benches, naked save for cotton briefs, folded towels beside them, and a number on the wall above each head below a lightbulb. They didn't look as run-down as you'd expect, but then few of them were professionals. Temporary service in a place like this was a standard penalty for minor infractions of workplace regulations. A staircase led to cubicles above, and a clerk sat behind an iron grille just inside the door; the place smelled of sweat, harsh disinfectant, and spilled beer.
A hulk stood nearby, an iron-bound club thonged to his massive wrist, picking at his teeth with the thumbnail of his other hand. Probably a retired policeman; he looked John over once, and tapped the head of the club warningly against the stucco. John cringed realistically, turning and ducking his head.
"Prices are posted," the clerk said in a monotone; she was in her fifties, flabby with a starchy diet and lack of exercise. "You want I should read 'em? Booze is extra."
John pushed iron counters across the table and through the scoop trough beneath the iron grille. Fingers arranged them in a pattern; they were from Zeizin Shipbuilding AG, one of the bigger firms.
recognition, Center said. Pointers dropped across the clerk's pasty face indicating pupil dilation and temperature differentials. 97 %, ±2.
That was about as definite as it got; now the question was whether this was his real contact, or whether the Fourth Bureau had penetrated the ring and was waiting for him. His palms were damp, and he swallowed sour bile, eyes flickering to the doors. He wasn't carrying a weapon; it would have been insanely risky, here-a Protege caught armed would be lucky to be executed on the spot. And when they found his geburtsnumero. .
subject is contact, Center reassured him. anxiety levels are compatible. 73 %, ±5.
A whole hell of a lot less certain than the first projection, but still reassuring. A little.
The clerk nodded and pressed a button on her side of the counter. A light went on with a tick over the girl closest to the stair; she stood with a mechanical smile and picked up her towel.
The upper corridor was fairly quiet, in midafternoon; a row of cubicles stood on either side, with curtains hung before them on rings and a shower at one end. John's guide pulled aside a numbered curtain and ducked through.
He followed. Within was a single cot, a washstand and tap, and a jar of antiseptic soap. . and crouched in a corner, the burly form of Angelo Pesalozi. He stood, bear-burly, more gray than John remembered.
"Young Master Johan," he rumbled.
John extended his hand. "No man's master now, Angelo," he said, smiling.
The hand of Karl Hosten's driver and personal factotum closed on his with controlled strength. John matched it, and Angelo grinned.
"You have not grown soft," he said. "Come, we should do our business quickly."
The girl put her foot on the cot and began to push on it, irregularly at first and then rhythmically; with vocal accompaniment, it was a remarkably convincing chorus of squeaks and groans.
"A minute," John said. "My life is at risk here, too, and will be again, and I must understand. Karl Hosten is a good master, and your own daughter is one of the Chosen. Why are you ready to work against them?"
Brown eyes met his somberly. "He is a good master, but I would have no master at all, and be my own man. I have four children; because one is a lord, should the others be slaves, and my grandchildren? There are more bad masters than good."
He jerked his head towards the girl. "She dropped a tray of insulator parts, and so she must whore here for a month-is this justice? If a man speaks against the masters when they send his wife to another plantation, or take his children for soldiers, his brother for the mines, he is hung in an iron cage at the crossroads to die-is this justice? No, the rule of the Chosen is an offense against God. It must cease, even if I die for it."
John met his eyes for a long moment. subject is sincere; probability-He silenced the computer with a thought. I know.
And Angelo had always been kind to a boy with a crippled foot. .
"Yes," John said. "That is so, Angelo."
The Protege nodded and produced folded papers from inside his jacket; they were damp with sweat, but legible.
"These I took from the wastebasket, before the daily burning," he said. "Here is an order, concerning five airships-"
* * *
"I worry about that boy," Sally Farr said.
"I don't," Maurice Farr replied.
They were sitting on the terrace of the naval commandants quarters, overlooking Charsson and its port. This was the northernmost part of the Republic of Santander, hence the hottest; the shores of the Gut were warmer still, protected from continental breezes by mountains on both sides. The hot, dry summer had just begun; flowers gleamed about the big whitewashed house, and the tessellated brick pavement of the terrace was dappled by the shade of the royal palms and evergreen oak planted around it. The road ran down the mountainside in dramatic switchbacks; there were villas on either side, officers' quarters and middle-class suburbs up out of the heat of the old city around the J-shaped harbor.
The roofs down there were mostly low-pitched and of reddish clay tile; it looked more like an Imperial city from the lands just north of the Gut than like the rest of Santander. Much of the population was Imperial, too-there had been a steady drift of migrant laborers in the past couple of generations, looking for better-paid work in the growing mines and factories and irrigation farms.