I didn’t know what was nagging at me. The man’s situation was far from unusual, after all. Even before we’d left the homeworld, Mankind’s history had always been a long parade of expats and refugees, people who through no fault of their own had become trapped on strange shores and who were forced to make do while keeping an eye on the distant, possibly mythical, pleasures of the homes they’d lost. Hell, if you wanted to go that far, I was one of them. The few tidbits the Porrinyards had fed me about their past as individuals marked them as two others.
But there was something else going on with Mendez. Something that verged on the monstrous.
I found myself pacing furiously, my arms crossed before me, my thoughts racing so fast that they almost drowned out the pounding of my heart. “How did you wind up as head steward of the Royal Carriage? That strikes me as a pretty plum position around here.”
The further we got from his tales of Greeve, the more he seemed to relax. “About fourteen years ago I served two months as personal valet to Mr. Conrad Bettelhine, youngest brother of Kurt, when he spent an extended vacation at one of the resorts where I worked. He was a lonely man who required little of me beyond conversation and companionship. But he was touched by my story, and offered to bring me aboard as junior steward. When the senior retired, I moved up.”
“What’s your work schedule like?”
“I live aboard the carriage, year-round, serving between five and ten complements of passengers per month.”
“How much time off do you get?”
“Thirty days a year.”
“Consecutive or intermittent?”
“Intermittent. Whenever this carriage is unoccupied or down for maintenance.”
“Do you spend all those days enjoying the sun down on Xana?”
“No. Much of the time, when I’m not needed, we’re docked at Layabout.”
“How much of your down time is spent at Layabout?”
“Maybe two days out of three.”
Another piece of the big picture snapped into focus. “So you get maybe ten days a year, intermittent, to spend, if you can, in the sunny island environments you prefer.”
“Yes. Sometimes more.”
“But sometimes less.”
“Yes.”
“Did you understand that those were the terms before you took the position?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you accept?”
His expression, impassive for much of the prior interrogation, even during the discussions of the losses he’d known, now changed for the first time, with a subtle knit of his eyebrows. “I don’t understand the question.”
“Look around you. I don’t see any white beaches or turquoise ocean waters. This is not the past you miss, the present you settled for, or the future you would have liked to have. Why is this your life, and why aren’t you climbing the walls?”
His eyebrows remained knit, but now the cords in his neck had become visible, straining with a tension that he still managed to keep out of his voice. “This is Xana, madam. Here, one’s professional worth is gauged according to one’s proximity to the Bettelhine Inner Family. One does not turn down such opportunities.”
“How is this an opportunity? Will you ever advance any higher than chief steward?”
He stood a little taller. “I might, some day, be privileged to work for the Inner Family, at one of the Bettelhine estates.”
“Like,” I said, making a big show of searching for appropriate names as I circled him like a skimmer, looking from an appropriate place to land, “Mr. Brown and Mr. Wethers.”
His posture was proud, but stiff. “I do not have their management background, but yes.”
Skye had paled, as if suffering jabs of pain from some unknown upset inside her. Paakth-Doy looked just as disturbed, but in a different way; there was actual fear in it, fear that may have had something to do with seeing Mendez as a future version of herself.
I circled Mendez two more times. “What’s the greatest future you can imagine for yourself? After retirement, I mean?”
He did not look at me but stared straight ahead, his posture reflecting a controlled fury. “I suppose I will buy a modest home on one of the islands I spoke about.”
I allowed my voice to become a little dreamy. “A breezy island hideaway, where you can sit cross-legged on the sand, enjoying a cocktail and listening to colorful native music while the scarlet sun sinks beneath an unclouded horizon?”
“I am not a poet, madam.”
I let something occur to me. “But would this be an island on Greeve or an island on Xana?”
“On Xana, of course.”
“Why of course? Even if you haven’t saved enough, after all this time, to return home in style, the Bettelhines must appreciate all your years of service enough to send you where you’ve always wanted to go. For you, they’d consider the expense pocket change.”
That fine sheen on his forehead had become a torrent, leaking rivulets down both cheeks. “Madam, I have done nothing to deserve your mockery.”
“I was not aware that a simple question constituted mockery.”
“I have been privy to some of the most private tactical conversations of some of the wealthiest and most powerful human beings alive. They know they can count on my discretion, but they still cannot afford to have everything I know out of their control, and thus in potential danger of exploitation by their competitors and enemies. When I took this position, I agreed that my future would remain on Xana.”
I showed surprise. “So you work under the same terms that govern Mr. Pescziuwicz?”
“Yes.”
“Are these the same terms that govern anybody who works on classified projects or alongside the Inner Family?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Mendez, I have no doubt that you make more money, or whatever the local economy uses for money, aboard this carriage than you would have made had you continued to work Xana’s resorts. But I need a basis for comparison. Had you remained dirtside, would you have been able to earn passage back to Greeve?”
“Yes.”
“How old would you have been by the time you made it back?”
“I don’t know. Maybe sixty, if I’d wanted to arrive penniless.”
“Not much of an issue, considering that you say that people on Greeve don’t have much use for money. When do you think you’ll retire now?”
“When I’m fifty-five.”
“So you saved yourself at most five years of bowing and scraping for people who consider you a handy household appliance at the price of denying yourself everything else that gave your life meaning. You threw away what you wanted and secured a default future that will be at absolute best an imperfect imitation of the one you would have chosen for yourself if you could. Am I unfair, sir, in considering this dollar wise and pound foolish?”
Mendez said nothing. I somehow knew, without asking, that any repetition of the question would lead to the same stone wall. Either he didn’t know the answer himself, or facing it was more than he could stand.
Either way, I was less interested in his silence than in Paakth-Doy’s. She looked white, her impassive features trembling with enough tension to qualify as pain. It some ways it may have felt like I was questioning her too. Or, at the very least, questioning some potential future version of her. When she looked at Mendez, did she see a man whose happy life had been twisted by circumstances beyond his control, or one who represented the face she might find herself wearing, another twenty years down the road?