Chapter 24
Grimes clambered down the ladder to the pebbled roof.
McReady removed his hat in a sweeping salute. The woman curtseyed. Grimes, bareheaded, acknowledged with a stiff bow.
“This is an unexpected honor, Your Excellency,” drawled the man.
“I was passing,” said Grimes, “and thought that I’d drop in.”
The man chuckled and extended his hand. Grimes took it. The grip was firm but unexpectedly cold. And there was coldness, too, behind the pale blue eyes set in the darkly tanned, bluffly handsome features. And McReady’s wife, thought Grimes as he shook hands with her, was cast from the same mold as her husband—handsome enough but a cast-iron bitch.
Su Lin came down, followed by Sanchez.
Grimes made introductions.
“This is Su Lin. my personal attendant . . .” The McReady couple nodded coldly to the girl. “And Captain Sanchez, my pilot . . .” There was more hand-shaking.
“And now, sir, how can we entertain you?” asked McReady.
“With your permission, sir, I’d like to look around your estate,” said Grimes. “I want to get the feel of this world—just as a captain likes to get the feel of a ship to which he has been newly appointed.”
“But why pick on me. Governor?”
“I want to see how outsiders, comparative newcomers, make good on Liberia. After all, this entire planet is a social experiment—and how things are turning out is of great interest to my lords and masters on Earth.”
“You’ve a fancy way with words, sir. And you’ve caught me at a busy time: unless I get dug into my paperwork I’m goin’ to be suffocated under a pile o’ bumfodder. But I can spare you Laura. Laura, honey, will you give the Governor the five credit tour?”
“Surely, honey.” Then, to Grimes, “Do you wish to start right now, or would you like refreshment first?”
“Now, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Grimes.
The “five credit tour” did not include a look over and through the McReady mansion. Grimes and his party were carried by an elevator down to the ground floor and then out to where two trishaws were already waiting. Laura McReady gestured and the driver of the first one dismounted, went through the motions of helping Grimes into the passenger carriage (he did not require such assistance but did not wish to hurt the man’s feelings) and then assisted the woman to take her seat beside him. Su Lin and Sanchez boarded the other vehicle unaided.
“Do you wish to see the village, sir?” asked Laura McReady.
“The village?”
“It’s what we call where the laborers live.”
“That will do for a start, Ms. McReady,” said Grimes.
She turned her head and barked an order. The driver began pedaling. The trishaws made their way along a rather narrow but well-surfaced road along the sides of which tall bushes, blue-foliaged and with huge scarlet flowers, were in luxuriant growth. Gaudy insects, gold and crimson and metallic green, hovered in clouds around each blossom. From somewhere came the monotonous song of something that might have been a bird but that probably was not.
The road wound through outcroppings of bare rock, rounded, weatherworn, that gleamed whitely in the sunlight, then through an orchard grown from seeds of Terran origin. The citrus scent was heavy in the warm, still air.
They came to the village—a long street with buildings on either side, with cross streets that were little more than lanes. Bright banners—red. yellow and blue, decorated with ideographs—depended from poles protruding horizontally from the ornate eaves of the single-storied structures.
“Shops,” said Laura McReady. “Eating houses. And so forth.”
Grimes sniffed the savory aromas that eddied from some of the establishments. “Eating houses? Do you think that we could look inside one?”
“If you wish, sir.” Her voice was cold, disapproving. “I’m afraid that I can’t recommend any of these places. Mr. McReady and I have always preferred to eat the kind of food to which we are accustomed.”
The trishaws stopped. The driver of the leading one dismounted, opened the door of the passenger compartment on Grimes’s side. Grimes jumped out before the man could extend a helping hand. Mrs. McReady, however, made a major production of dismounting from the vehicle like a great lady born to the purple. Even the Baroness Michelle d’Estang would not have put on such airs and graces. By the time that she had set her well-shod, silver-ornamented feet on the ground Grimes had been joined by Sanchez and Su Lin.
He led the way into the eating shop. There were a few customers there, seated around small tables. These, seeing who had come in, got hastily to their feet and bowed deeply. (To him. Grimes wondered, or to their mistress?) A middle-aged woman came out from the kitchen at the rear of the premises. She, too, bowed and murmured, “You have honored my humble establishment. Missy Laura. . . .”
“Your establishment? Surely it is owned by the McReady Estate, is it not?”
“I am the humble cook and manager. Missy Laura.”
“And this gentleman here is the new Governor, Commodore Grimes. He wishes to sample your cooking.”
“Please to take a seat, Missy Laura. This way, please . . .”
She led the party to a table, pulled out four chairs. Su Lin pushed back the one intended for her. Here she was no more than a servant. She accompanied the manageress into the kitchen. Before he took his seat Grimes looked around. The customers were still standing respectfully.
“Sit down, please,” said Grimes to them.
They ignored him.
“Tell them to sit down, Ms. McReady,” said Grimes to her.
“Yes, Your Excellency,” she said sweetly—but her expression was not sweet.
She made a gesture and the customers resumed their seats.
She said to Grimes, “You must remember. Your Excellency, that these are only laborers.”
“But human beings, nonetheless.”
“You are entitled to your opinion, sir.”
Su Lin and the plump manageress returned, bearing dishes of tiny spring rolls, bowls of rice and others of interesting looking pickles, chopsticks, a teapot and cups. Laura McReady condescended to take tea and, without speaking, implied that it was not to her taste. Grimes sampled a spring roll; it was delicious. He tried the pickles and liked them. Sanchez, too, was eating with a good appetite. Between them the two men cleared all the edibles on the table.
More tea was brought and with it a dish of small cookies. Grimes took the one nearest to him. It was still warm, hot almost. It must have been freshly baked. He broke the crust and was surprised to see a small square of folded paper inside. So, he thought, they had fortune cookies even on Liberia.
He unfolded the paper. The writing on it was in minuscule characters but very clear.
Pay heed to the manner in which people nourish others, and watch what they seek out for their own nourishment.
Wasn’t that from the I Ching? He should have Magda with him here, he thought, to throw the coins and consult the Oracle of Change.
He tore the paper into tiny shreds, dropped them into the ashtray.
“What did it say, sir?” asked Raoul. “Mine says that there will be advantage in crossing the great water. I suppose that ‘great water’ is another way of saying ‘deep space’.”
Laura McReady sneered silently.
Their meal finished, the party walked out into the street, escorted to the door by the deeply bowing manageress. The question of payment wasn’t mentioned; presumably the McReady Estate would be footing the bill. (They could well afford it.) Raoul Sanchez and Su Lin lagged behind, talking in low voices. Then the pilot overtook Grimes and Laura McReady, who were walking slowly along the footpath.
“Your Excellency. . . .”
“Yes, Captain Sanchez?”
“Perhaps we should inspect one of the other eating houses.”
“His Excellency has already enjoyed a good lunch,” said the McReady woman.
“We can inspect without eating,” said Grimes. He suspected that there was some good reason for Raoul’s suggestion.
“But when you have seen one you’ve seen them all,” insisted Ms. McReady.
“Not necessarily,” said Grimes.
She glared at him. Did he, he wondered, wield, as Governor, the punitive powers that he had possessed as a Survey Service commanding officer? Could he put this woman in the brig on a charge of Dumb Insolence?
Su Lin turned into one of the narrow cross streets. Sanchez followed her. Grimes and the McReady woman brought up the rear. She was almost literally seething with hostility. The girl paused outside the door of a place that was little more than a shack, waited until the others caught up with her. She lifted the bead curtain to allow Grimes, Sanchez and Laura McReady to enter before her.
The lighting inside was dim, the air musty. There were long tables and benches, most of them occupied. One of the diners saw who had come in, got to his feet, still holding his bowl in one hand, his chopsticks in the other, and bowed. There was a scraping and shuffling as other men and women followed suit. And it was not toward himself, Grimes noticed, that this obeisance was directed.
“Tell them to sit down, please,” he said to Laura McReady.
She did so.
Su Lin went through to the kitchen. She returned carrying a steaming bowl and a pair of cheap, plastic chopsticks. These, with a bow, she handed to Grimes. He looked suspiciously at the mess in the bowl—like gray, slimy noodles it was, specked with green and yellow—and sniffed the sour vapor. It reminded him of the sort of mess on which he had been obliged to live, for far too long a time, during a voyage in a ship’s ,boat, nutriment that was actually reprocessed sewage.
He lifted one strand with his chopsticks, brought it to his mouth and sucked it in. It was even worse than he had been expecting. He swallowed it, then handed the bowl and the eating implements back to the girl.
He said, “So this is how the poor live.”
“Your Excellency.” said Laura McReady. “the food served in this establishment satisfies the highest nutritional standards. If this were not so there would never be a good day’s work done in the fields.”
“Mphm.” Grimes filled and lit his pipe, hoping that the fumes of burning tobacco would clear the taste of that . . . sludge from his mouth. “Once I had to eat stuff like this myself. I functioned quite well on it. But I didn’t have to like it.”
“These people. Your Excellency, are not like you and me. They don’t know anything better.”
“What about the ones in the first place?”
“Foremen and forewomen. Clerks and the like.”
“More highly paid than the laborers in here?”
“Of course. You’re more highly paid than . . . than a common spacehand, aren’t you? But may I suggest. Your Excellency, that we continue this conversation outside?”
“Not in front of the children, eh?”
“You could put it that way,” she said coldly.
They walked through the village, looking into shops in which both luxuries—sweetmeats, spices and pickles to lend savor to the staple diet, cheap jewelry to brighten drab clothing—and necessities were sold. They saw purchases being made and paid for by thumbprints on a screen-pad, recorded by some master computer. They visited a school, in which children, ranging in age from about four to fourteen, were being taught how to be good little field hands. They made the rounds of the barracks, the dormitories for males and females, the married quarters, the hospital. Somehow Su Lin had taken charge—and if Laura McReady’s looks could have killed the girl would not have lived beyond that laborers’ eating house.
Everything was well-maintained, spotlessly clean.
And everything was drab, drab.
For most of the people on the McReady Estate life was just a matter of going to work to earn the credited pay to buy the food to give them the strength to go to work to earn the pay etc.
Grimes found no evidence to indicate that drugs such as dreamsticks were available to the workers—but there were shops selling a limited variety of alcoholic beverages, most of which seemed to be industrial alcohol with the addition of crude flavorings.
He sampled the so-called rum and even he didn’t like it.