“This is just a rest stop,” Zebulon said. “I fixed me up a bunch of them, here and there, like plums in a pudding. So I can stop and be comfortable whenever I want.”
“How do you live? What do you eat?”
Zebulon sniggered, grasped her by the arm and dragged her back onto the cart. This time she sat on the seat next to Jeorfy while Zebulon drove them down dark chasms between huge, dusty piles of merchandise, other shadowed aisles squirming away on either side like wormtracks. Near the bottom of one stack a crate had been opened, and Jeorfy leapt from the machine long enough to pull a container from the open crate and place it on their wagon.
“Zybod ham,” crooned Zebulon. “From the planet Kuflyk. This ham, it’s in perpetual preservation. You’d think it’d taste like dust, but it’s good, oh, very good. It’s why I stay, I think. The food. This ham with goat cheese and fresh bread—well, bread that tastes fresh—is remarkable. Quite remarkable.”
The look he gave her was a hungry one, and he licked his lips in a lecherous way. Genevieve kept her face turned resolutely away from his as they went on. They circumnavigated a continent of carved furniture, beneath tottery mountains of marquetry, past veins of veneer, lodes of inlay, eroded towers of tapestry and trapunto over sheer cliffs of stacked cabinetry, bronze fittings, and mirrored surfaces, all scaled and corrupted by time. They slid beneath a leaning tower of paintings, gilt frames jutting like angled crystals, stretched canvases slit and tattered into dust-stiffened stalactites. They passed cataracts of chandeliers, tumbling gold and prismed glass, shining here and there as a vagrant beam reflected through the gray film. They eased along the bottom of a chasm, crowded on either side by great broken cartons full of crystal and porcelain and lizard nests, the packing material sodden with the excrement of the generations of babies who had hatched there.
Speaking of nesting gave Jeorfy an idea. “We should get this girl a bed,” he announced.
“Next left,” said Zeb, and they swerved around a corner to stop at a topless pile of mattresses, the bottom ones squashed flat as paper beneath the enormous weight of all those vanishing into the gloom above. Zebulon scrambled high onto a plateau, dust billowing around him as he kicked several mattresses from the dusty layers. The first ones plummeted and burst on impact, but the last few, with surfaces almost clean, landed more or less in one piece.
“What’s it all for?” cried Genevieve, when they had loaded the best one aboard the platform. “The Lord Paramount couldn’t use all this in a million years.”
“Not likely,” snarled Zebulon, returning to his lever, “besides which, we’ve got perfectly good mattress-makers in Haven. And chandelier-makers. And furniture-makers.”
“I think I’ve figured it out,” said Jeorfy. “The Lord Paramount has little enough to amuse himself, so he sees something in the off-world catalogs that catches his eye, and he orders it, that’s all. All the planets send their catalogs to the Lord Paramount. I’ve seen ’em, because when he was finished with ’em, they brought ’em to be filed in the archives. Catalogs for food, fabric, machines. Weapons. Gadgets. Evenpets! Zeb says there’s a whole aisle of pets in stasis down here. Animals you’ve never seen!”
Genevieve heard this with a feeling of certainty. Jeorfy was right. She herself had seen the catalogs stacked around the Lord Paramount’s high seat. “What does he trade for all this?” she asked wonderingly. “This is a poor world.”
“Now that’s what I’d like to know,” murmured Zeb, with a leer in her direction. “I suppose Jeorfy’d like to know that, too.”
“I’ve heard it said it’s pearls,” she offered, pretending not to notice the leer.
“No,” said Jeorfy, shaking his head. “I’ve heard that, but it’s not pearls. When I saw all this down here, I wanted to know what we traded, oh, yes, so I looked it up in the archives. Archives was mute, didn’t give a toot.”
Zeb snarled, “Trade goods is something ordinary folk aren’t allowed to know about. Just the nobles know about trade goods.”
“How could that be?” Genevieve asked. “I mean, I’m a noble, and I don’t know anything about anything. And it’s not as if I can do anything that ordinary people don’t know about. I mean, my maid knows when I take a deep breath! She knows more about what’s going on than I do. Nobles are surrounded all the time by ordinary folk.”