There was a very interesting article on superstring theory by a Russian named Sergi Lermontov. After a few minutes, Ralph put down his drink, turned off the music and began to take notes. They were in his personal code, and they’d have to go into the concealed file, but it was just the sort of mental effort he needed to work off some tension.
CHAPTER TEN
The smell of coffee brewing woke Tom Christiansen, and the sound of voices. This time there was no bewilderment; he remembered exactly where he was. It was the day after their arrival; he and Tully had been laid out most of Saturday with shock and leftover symptoms from the puke gas. Adrienne had tactfully found business elsewhere until the evening, returning with an excellent pizza and retiring early.
He lay for a while, savoring the sensation of physical well-being and of waking up without a chemical hangover, and with a lot less of that glassy sense of dislocation. He put his hands behind his head and grinned at the plaster.
Here I am, on a whole new world, he thought. A whole, fresh, non-mucked-up new world to see. Hell with a vacation in Yosemite or even Glacier National Park!
Well, it was probably relatively non-mucked-up. Socrates had complained that Attica was eroded and barren due to overuse back in… well, it had been a couple of hundred years B.C., at least. I should have studied more history; I only know that bit about Socrates because it was in a textbook on environmental studies.
“Of course, Ms. Rolfe thinks I’m here for good. We may have to agree to differ on that,” he continued out loud.
She’d used a fairly cunning dirty trick to cover her tracks, but if he got out of here he could probably get enough proof to expose the disinformation. And in the meantime, he was here.
“Christ, what an… hell, an adventure!”
Adventure usually meant someone else, in deep shit, very far away. This could turn out like that, but the scenery would be some compensation.
Suitcases stood at the foot of his bed. He looked at them, blinked, looked again. They were his suitcases—and his old army duffel bag, as well. He heaved one up on the bed and snapped open the catches; it was filled with his clothes, as well.
“Well, that settles the question of what to wear,” he said, caught between fury and amusement. “Ever thoughtful, our hostess.”
The bathroom was a little daunting; it gave out on a veranda that looked downslope. Objectively he knew it was perfectly private—the closest thing in sight was another small block of flats, a hundred yards downslope. Then he forgot everything for a moment as his eyes lifted to the fog-streaked grandeur of the bay, lit by the morning sun. Right below him roofs were emerging as the silver-white vapor retreated, and the tops of trees….
And for the first time in my life, I don’t have to mentally edit out the works of humankind, he thought after a moment.
By the time he’d showered and shaved, the scent of the coffee had driven even that sight from his mind. The kitchen and bedrooms were on the same level; he walked in to find Adrienne at the stove, dressed in a thigh-length bathrobe with her hair hanging in a loose, damp fall down her back. The urge to run his fingers through it was almost irresistible.
But will be firmly resisted, he thought. Once burned, twice vulnerable—and there’s business to attend to.
Tully was sprawled at his ease, the remains of his breakfast before him on a table of some satiny reddish-brown wood. He was in one of his Banana Republic safari suits, a mug of coffee in his hand, grinning ear to ear as Adrienne threw some remark over her shoulder. The kitchen was a rectangle set along the same veranda that fronted the bathroom; the floor was tile, the countertops smooth granite, and the appliances upscale-familiar, with a flat-surface cooker.
“Coffee’s fresh,” Adrienne said, nodding to him. “There’s scrambled eggs, bacon, flapjacks, fruit and cream.”
“You don’t have a cook?” Tom asked.
“Not here,” she replied, turning back to the stove and flipping a pancake. “This is just where I hang my hat in town, when I’ve got business and don’t have time to go back home to Seven Oaks. I could stay at the Rolfe townhouse, but Dad and I get along a lot better when we’re not at close quarters outside business hours.”
“You can cook for me anytime,” Tully said enthusiastically, mopping his plate with a piece of toast.
Tom frowned at him behind her back. His partner scowled back, briefly extending the middle finger of his free hand and mouthing a word.
The taller man cleared his throat. “I’ll have the eggs and bacon, and some of the pancakes, thank you,” he said coolly, and poured himself a cup of the coffee. The milk came in a glass bottle, which was something he’d heard about but never seen; the cream on top had separated.
Well, he thought, they would have checked all the cattle they imported for infection. No need to be as finicky as we are.
His first sip of coffee brought his brows up. “Where do you get this stuff?” he said, despite himself. Rich, nutty, mellow, strong but not a trace of bitterness…
“Hawaii,” Adrienne said. “The Big Island, to be precise—it’s Kona Gold. One of the few forms of farming in the Commonwealth that actually makes money. The sugar comes from the islands as well.”
He nodded noncommittally and tucked into the breakfast.
“Roy was right,” he said after a moment. “You can cook. Let me guess: all organic ingredients?”
The eggs were done with cream and diced scallions and a little tangy paprika, and they had a smooth intensity of flavor that perfectly complemented the smoky richness of Canadian-style bacon smoked with apple wood.
“Not exactly,” she said. “But it all comes fresh from close by Rolfeston. Farming’s an artisan-scale industry here. There’s no point in anything capital-intensive, and we don’t have to squeeze out the last bushel. The Old Man likes it that way; he also likes ‘food that tastes like food,’ as he puts it.”
“Mmmph,” he said, mouth full of the boysenberry pancakes. “I’ll have to find a gym,” he said, when he could. If I’m here any length of time, he did not continue aloud.
The orange juice had tiny bits of pulp floating in it, and a wild, sweet flavor he’d never met before. He suppressed an appreciative noise and went on: “Otherwise your Gate will be absolutely safe—I wouldn’t fit through after a couple of months.”
“Well,” she said, chuckling as she brought her own plate to the table, “Roy and I were talking about something related to that.”
Tom gave his partner a brief glance that he meant to be quelling; apparently he was getting entirely too friendly with her. She was the opposition; at best, an ally against someone worse, and that wasn’t proven yet.
The way Adrienne was sitting and Tully was leaning back from the table, she couldn’t see his face. That let Tully mouth words; long practice made them easily comprehensible: Fuck you, Kemosabe.
“You said you needed to see the Commonwealth,” Adrienne said. “Roy suggested that he take a look around Rolfeston, use the archives and library and meet people. You could come up to Seven Oaks with me, and get a feel for how the countryside functions. Rolfeston’s the only city here; most people live in smaller settlements or on farms or the estates of Family members.”