“Future workers will profit from your pioneering effort,” declared the Poltroyan. The others hurried to add appropriate felicitations.
“Enough, dear colleagues,” Guderian laughed. “You have been most kind to visit an old man. And now we must go up to Madame, who awaits with refreshment I bequeath to sharper minds the practical application of my peculiar little experiment.”
He winked at the outworld humans and tipped the contents of the dustpan into the wastebasket. The ashes of the hipparion floated in little blobby islands on the green alien slime.
PART I — The Leavetaking
CHAPTER ONE
Burnished trumpets sounded a flourish. The ducal party rode gaily out of the Chateau de Riom, horses prancing and curvetting as they had been trained, giving a show of spirit without imperiling the ladies in their chancy sidesaddles. Sunshine sparkled on the jeweled caparisons of the mounts, but it was the gorgeous riders who earned the crowd’s applause.
Greenish-blue reflections from the festive scene on the monitor blackened Mercedes Lamballe’s auburn hair and threw livid lights across her thin face. “The tourists draw lots to be in the procession of nobles,” she explained to Grenfell. “It’s more fun to be common, but try to tell them that. Of course the principals are all pros.”
Jean, Duc de Berry, raised his arm to the cheering throng. He wore a long houppelande in his own heraldic blue, powdered with fleurs de lys. The dagged sleeves were turned back to show a rich lining of yellow brocade. The Duc’s hosen were pure white, embroidered with golden spangles, and he wore golden spurs. At his side rode the Prince, Charles d’Orleans, his robes parti-colored in the royal scarlet, black, and white, his heavy golden baldric fringed with tinkling bells. Other nobles in the train, gaudy as a flock of spring warblers, followed after with the ladies.
“Isn’t there a hazard?” Grenfell asked. “Horses with untrained riders? I should think you’d stick with robot mounts.”
Lamballe said softly, “It has to be real. This is France, you know. The horses are specially bred for intelligence and stability.”
In honor of the maying, the betrothed Princess Bonne and all her retinue were dressed in malachite-green silk. The noble maidens wore the quaint headdresses of the early fifteenth century, fretted gilt-wire confections threaded with jewels, rising up on their braided coiffures like kitten ears. The crepine of the Princess was even more outlandish, extending out from her temples in long golden horns with a white lawn veil draped over the wires.
“Cue the flower girls,” said Gaston, from the other side of the control room.
Mercy Lamballe sat still, gazing at the brilliant picture with rapt intensity. The antennae of her comset made the strange headpiece of the medieval princess out on the chateau grounds look almost ordinary in comparison.
“Merce,” the director repeated with gentle insistence. “The flower girls.”
Slowly she reached out a hand, keying the marshaling channel.
Trumpets sounded again and the peasant crowd of tourists oohed. Dozens of dimpled little maids in short gowns of pink and white came running out of the orchard carrying baskets of apple blossoms. They romped along the road in front of the ducal procession strewing flowers, while flageolets and trombones struck up a lively air. Jugglers, acrobats, and a dancing bear joined the mob. The Princess blew kisses to the crowd, and the Duc distributed an occasional piece of largesse.
“Cue the courtiers,” said Gaston.
The woman at the control console sat motionless. Bryan Grenfell could see drops of moisture on her brow, dampening the straying tendrils of auburn hair. Her mouth was tight.
“Mercy, what is it?” Grenfell whispered. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. Her voice was husky and strained. “Courtiers away, Gaston.”
Three young men, also dressed in green, came galloping from the woods toward the procession of nobility, bearing armfuls of leafy sprigs. With much giggling, the ladies twined these into head-wreaths and crowned the chevaliers of their choice. The men reciprocated with dainty chaplets for the damsels, and they all resumed their ride toward the meadow where the maypole waited. Meanwhile, directed by Mercy’s commands, barefoot girls and grinning youths distributed flowers and greenery to the slightly self-conscious crowd, crying: “Vert! Vert pour le mai!”
Right on cue, the Duc and his party began to sing along with the flutes:
Cest le mai, c’est le mai, Cest le joli mois de mai!
“They’re off pitch again,” Gaston said in an exasperated voice. “Cue in the filler voices, Merce. And let’s have the lark loops and a few yellow butterflies.” He keyed for voice on the marshaling channel and exclaimed, “Eh, Minou! Get that clot out from in front of the Duc’s horse. And watch the kid in red. Looks like he’s twitching bells off the Prince’s baldric.”
Mercedes Lamballe brought up the auxiliary voices as ordered. The entire crowd joined in the song, having slept on it on the way from Charlemagne’s Coronation. Mercy made bird-song fill the blossom-laden orchard and sent out signals that released the butterflies from their secret cages. Unbidden, she conjured up a scented breeze to cool the tourists from Aquitaine and Neustria and Bloi and Foix and all the other “French” planets in the Galactic Milieu who had come, together with Francophiles and medievalists from scores of other worlds, to savor the glories of ancient Auvergne.
“They’ll be getting warm now, Bry,” she remarked to Grenfell. “The breeze will make them happier.”
Bryan relaxed at the more normal tone in her voice. “I guess there are limits to the inconveniences they’ll endure in the name of immersive cultural pageantry.”
“We reproduce the past,” Lamballe said, “as we would have liked it to be. The realities of medieval France are another trip altogether.”
“We have stragglers, Merce.” Gaston’s hands flashed over the control panel in the preliminary choreography of the maypole suite. “I see two or three exotics in the bunch. Probably those comparative ethnologists from the Krondak world we were alerted about. Better bring over a troubadour to keep ’em happy until they catch up with the main group. These visiting firemen are apt to write snotty evaluations if you let ’em get bored.”
“Some of us keep our objectivity,” Grenfell said mildly.
The director snorted. “Well, you’re not out there tramping through horseshit in fancy dress in the hot sun on a world with low subjective oxygen and double subjective gravity!…
Merce? Dammit, kiddo, are you fuguing off again?
Bryan rose from his seat and came to her, grave concern on his face. “Gaston, can’t you see she’s ill?”
“I’m not!” Mercy was sharp. “It’s going to pass off in a minute or two. Troubadour away, Gaston.”
The monitor zoomed in on a singer who bowed to the little knot of laggards, struck a chord on his lute, and began expertly herding the people toward the maypole area while soothing them with song. The piercing sweetness of his tenor filled the control room. He sang first in French, then in the Standard English of the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu for those who weren’t up to the archaic linguistics.
A genuine lark added its own coda to the minstrel’s song. Mercy lowered her head and tears fell onto the console before her. That damn song. And springtime in the Auvergne. And the friggerty larks and retroevolved butterflies and manicured meadows and orchards crammed with gratified folk from faraway planets where the living was tough but the challenge was being met by all but the inevitable misfits who stubbed the beautiful growing tapestry of the Galactic Milieu.