“Can’t you talk to your household staff, honey? Your ladies? What about those two maids you used to get on so well with, aren’t they still here? Trina and Meg, wasn’t it?”
Krystal grimaced. “There were three of them—Trina, Bella, and Meg—but only one still is here and she’s become as big a yes-man as any of my ladies, since you became a goddamned
duke. I think I’d have become insane if dear Wolf hadn’t come up here to hunt a couple of times. It was he who told me of how well you’re doing as a pirate, you know. Your letters never say one damned thing about all your ships and ill-gotten gains. Just how rich are you now, Bass?”
He shrugged. “I’m sure I don’t know, Krys. Sir Ali and Nugai might be able to tell you, though. They both seem to delight in keeping track of things like that.”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Krys.” She postured, mocking his tone and mannerisms. “Bass Foster, you’re becoming as arrogant as any of the born nobility, dammit! Do you ever try to recall just who and what you really are anymore?”
“Krys, my lady-wife,” he said soberly, “what I and you really are, who we are, is the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, Markgraf und Markgrafin von Velegrad, Earl and Countess of Rutland, and Baron and Baroness of Strathtyne; there is and will never be any going back, honey. We’ll live out the rest of our lives in this world, and we’d best learn to live and behave as we are expected to, as our peers do, as our subordinates expect us to; I’ve accepted these truths and I’m striving to adapt. You must too.”
“Oh, I know, I know, Bass,” she answered dispiritedly. “All you’ve said is true, I know that, but that doesn’t make me like it, any of it, any better. Being what I know I’m going to have to be for the rest of my life around most people doesn’t come easily to me, and I get frustrated and angry when I see you adapting faster than me.
“I guess it all boils down to the differences in our backgrounds. From what you’ve told me about your life and your family, you came of what some people in that other world refer to as ‘the Tidewater Aristocracy,’ families who’d been in America for two or three hundred years, owned a lot of land and farms, rode horses, lived on inherited money, and supported the Republican Party, mostly. You were an officer in the army, too. So all this would naturally be easier for you to stomach and become a part of.
“Bass, all of my grandparents were immigrants, from Russia and from Latvia; my father was even born there. He grew up in this country—I mean, in the America of that other world—though, and he lived his democratic and fanatically egalitarian ideals. And he instilled them in me, Bass, to a degree that I hadn’t really known or realized until 1 started trying to act the part of a great lady, here. 1 truly hate what I am becoming, what 1 am expected to become, what I must become; I miss people disagreeing with me, telling me I’m full of shit, sometimes. I just want to be a normal, average human being again, Bass.”
Seeing her dark eyes swimming with tears, Bass Foster slipped from his chair—albeit a bit stiffly, his muscles sore from all the long, hard days in the saddle—to kneel beside her and take both her hands in his own.
“Look here, Krys, why don’t you plan to leave here when 1 do? With my force and some of Sir Geoff s lances to escort us, we should be in no danger taking the old wagon track to York. Hal’s palace is overrun with delegates to this religious thing he’s presiding over just now, but Buddy Webster is just rattling around on Hal’s country estate. You could live there for a while, until the weather warms up, then come down to Norwich.”
“Another cold, drafty, smelly medieval castle, like Rutland?” she demanded.
“It was when first I moved in, still is, in some ways, honey,” he replied, adding, “but it’s being made more modern, more livable, every day, Krys. At least, it would mean we’d be together more.”
She sighed, then nodded. ‘Til think about it, Bass. But, God, how I miss the other world, miss all the simple, beautiful things I and everyone else there took for granted—central heat, flush toilets, hot showers, cars and decent roads to run them on, good lighting, running water, people to talk to, argue with, new books to read whenever you wanted.
“I love you, Bass, and I know that if I hadn’t come . . . been brought here, I’d never ever have had you and our little son, but if only there were a way for us all three to go back together …”
Colonel Dr. Jane Stone strode out of the lift on the level housing the projection laboratory, then went the few paces down the wide corridor to the pair of steel-sheathed doors flanked by well-armed guards. She reflected that basic human nature had not changed much over the years. It had taken the defections of Drs. Kenmore and O’Malley to get her superiors to heed her often-reiterated demands to beef up internal security measures at the facilities here and across the river. Locking the barn door after the horse was stolen. She tried to recall if she ever had seen a horse in the flesh, wondered if they, like so many species of once-plentiful animals, were now extinct.
The guard officer saluted smartly, then opened the door for her. Inside the anteroom, she paced directly over to the desk of the director on duty. The balding, cadaverous-looking man came to his feet at her approach.
“Well, Ackerman,” she snapped, “have your people gotten the location of that stolen console locked in yet?”
His head bobbed up and down on his skinny neck, and she noted that his sunken, dark-rimmed eyes contained the proper amounts of respect and outright fear of her; she noted these things with a sense of satisfaction.
“Has anyone bothered to check out the location of the console? I don’t enjoy the prospect of possibly projecting into three or four meters’ depth of water.”
His almost fleshless lips slightly aquiver, the man nodded again. “Yes, Colonel Doctor, I have just come back from checking out the site. The console is sitting near one wall of a large, high-ceilinged space with a floor of packed earth, stone-walled, windowless, unlit save by the glow of the console. It appears to be possibly the cellar or ground floor of some sizable building.”
“How about doors, Ackerman? How am I to get out of this place? Any signs of life there?” She deliberately injected a note of exasperation she did not really feel just for the pleasure of watching the already abject man cringe still more.
The effect was gratifying. He almost stuttered the reply. “It . . .a stairway . . . there is a stairway angling steeply up two walls and ending at a recessed archway on the next level. The only life I could see was traces of rodents.”
She nodded curtly, without thanks for the report, and strode on into the main room of the laboratory and directly over to the circular silvery plate set in the floor. Deferentially, the senior technician situated her at measured distances from the edge and center of that plate, then stepped back to place his hands on a bank of controls.
“Colonel Doctor, as the receiver plate seems to be some seven and one-quarter centimeters lower than is this projector plate, it might be wise to flex your knees so as to absorb the shock of impact. Please indicate the moment you are ready to be projected.”
“I was ready for projection when I came in,” she half snarled. “Get on with it!”
The man’s hands moved over the bank of knobs and buttons and levers, as she watched. Then he and everything else within her sight became wavery, cloudy, misted, hard to focus upon. For a brief time that seemed to last for an eternity, there was utter, unrelieved darkness—a darkness even darker than darkness, empty formless nothingness, eons old, immortal—then, from out a wavery, mint-green mist, appeared one of the small consoles and, behind it, big blocks of black and gray rectangular stones. A wall reached up beyond the limits of light, all streaky with slime and niter. Slowly, she turned about, then her right hand went to the grip of her heat-stun weapon, her forefinger seeking the activator, while she stepped off the plate, recalling that the field of the projector had been found to deflect some other types of beamings.
“Damn that Ackerman!” she snarled under her breath. “I’ll have that bumbler strapped onto a shock table until his brains, if any, congeal! Nothing but rodents, hey? I wonder what he’d call those.”