Crown of Slaves

Chapter 4

"I feel ridiculous wearing this get-up," grumbled W.E.B. Du Havel, as Cathy Montaigne led him down a wide corridor of her townhouse toward the even wider staircase which swept down to the main floor.

"Don't get pigheaded on me, Web." Cathy gave his portly figure a look that was just barely this side of sarcastic. "You'd look really ridiculous trying to pull off the Mahatma Gandhi routine."

Du Havel chuckled. " 'Minus fours,' didn't he call it? When he showed up in London wearing nothing much more than a glorified loincloth?"

He glanced down at his ample belly, encased in a costume whose expensive fabric seemed wasted, as brightly colored as it was. Red, basically, but with ample splashes of orange and black—all of it set off by a royal blue cummerbund, parallel white and gold diagonal sashes ru

The shoes, needless to say, were gold. And, just to make the ensemble as ludicrous as possible, ended in slightly upturned, pointed tips festooned with royal blue tassels.

"I feel like the court jester," he muttered. "Or a beach ball."

He gave Cathy a skeptical glance. "You're not playing some sort of practical joke on me?"

"How fucking paranoid can you get, anyway?"

"Well, at least your language hasn't changed since Terra. That's something, I suppose."

They were almost at the top of the stairs, entering an area where the left wall of the corridor gave way to an open vista over a balustrade, looking down upon a huge foyer which seemed packed with people. Du Havel's steps began to lag.

Cathy reached back, grabbed his elbow, and hauled him forward. "Relax, will you? Neo-Comedia is all the rage this year. I had that outfit made up special for you, just for this occasion, by the second best tailor in Landing City."

No help for it, then. Du Havel decided to make the best of a bad situation. They began walking slowly down the stairs, Cathy at his side acting as if she were escorting visiting royalty.

Du Havel, his curious mind active as ever, whispered: "Why the second best?"

He was amused to see the smile on Cathy's face. Her be a nice girl at formal occasions smile, that was. Not one she often wore, for sure, but she was as good at it as Cathy was at most anything she put her mind to. She even managed to hiss back a reply without once breaking the smile.

"I'm trying to get along with Elizabeth, these days. She'd be pissed if she thought I was trying to swipe her favorite tailor."

He chewed on that, for the few seconds it took them to parade down the long and sweeping staircase. By the time they neared the bottom, it seemed as if all eyes in the foyer were on him—as well as those of many people spilling into the multitude of adjacent rooms. For all that he'd now been resident for two weeks in the Montaigne townhouse—"pocket Versailles" would be a better word for it—Du Havel was still bewildered by the architecture of the place. For some odd reason, his prodigious intellect had never been more than middling-stupid when it came to spatial reckoning.

"Surely the Queen of Manticore can't be that petty?"

On the next to last riser, Cathy came to a halt; with a subtle hand on his elbow, bringing Du Havel to a halt also. He realized that she was doing it deliberately, to give the entire crowd a moment to admire the evening's special guest.

Still, her formal smile never wavered. "Don't be silly. Elizabeth's not petty at all. It's not the principle of the thing, it's the sport of it. She and I used to swipe things from each other all the time, when we were kids. It was something of a contest."

"Who won?" he whispered.

"I was way ahead on points, when the Queen Mother—she was still the Queen, back then—ba

The majordomo stepped forward. In a bellowing voice:

"Catherine Montaigne, former Countess of the Tor! And her guest, the Right Honorable W.E.B. Du Havel, Ph.D.!"

A voice piped up from the back of the room. A youthful feminine voice which Du Havel recognized. His eyes immediately spotted the tall figure of Anton Zilwicki's daughter Helen.

"You're slacking, Herbert! How many Ph.D.s?"

A quick laugh rippled through the crowd. The majordomo let the laughter subside before booming onward.

"Too many to count, Midshipwoman Zilwicki! My feeble mind is not up to the effort! I can recall only—"

He began reeling off the list of Du Havel's academic degrees and awards—not missing many, Du Havel noted—and ended with the inevitable: "Nobel-Shakhra Prize for Human Aspiration, and the Solarian Medallion! "

"You two hussies orchestrated this," Du Havel muttered. Cathy's smile just widened a bit.

But, despite himself, Du Havel couldn't help but feel genuine pride at hearing the long list recited. Granted, a number of those degrees were honorary. But most of them weren't—and even the ones which were, never would have been bestowed upon him had it not been for his own accomplishments.

Not bad, really, for a man who'd come into the universe in a Manpower Unlimited slave pit, with the birth name of J-16b-79-2/3.

Within a half hour, Du Havel had managed to relax. Fortunately, Cathy proved to have been correct about his preposterous costume. If anything, it was quite a bit more subdued than those worn by many people at the soirée. And while Du Havel was not accustomed to being the official guest of honor at a huge social gathering of a star nation's haute monde , he was by no means a shy wallflower. Like any experienced and accomplished university don, he was a past master at the art of making conversation.

Besides, as he'd realized almost at once, the jocular interplay between the majordomo and Helen Zilwicki had given his introduction to Manticore's high society just the right touch of good humor. He was quite sure Cathy had pla

He was rather impressed, in fact. He'd known for a long time that Cathy had the makings of a superb politician. But, in those long years of her exile on Terra, when he'd first met the woman, she'd never really exercised them. He'd suspected then—and thought the suspicion was confirmed now—that the ultimate reason was her own shock at being expelled from Manticore's aristocracy. No matter how much she might have denied caring about it, few people can easily handle being rejected by the society they'd been raised in. Even if subtly, their self-confidence would take a beating on a level below that of conscious thought.

Watching her now, the ease and grace with which she moved through the crowd, he knew that she'd gotten it all back. Back—and then some, because the years of exile had not been wasted either. This was no headstrong young woman, any longer, sneering at tactics from the lofty mount of principle. This was a woman in her early middle age, entering the prime of her life, with her confidence restored and armed by years of study and political struggle.

Look out, Manticore, he thought with amusement.

He brought his attention back to the conversation he was having with an elderly gentleman and his two female companions. His sisters, if Du Havel remembered their introduction correctly.

He wasn't quite sure. All three of them were prattling half-baked nonsense, and he hadn't paid much heed to most of it. Just enough, with the experience of years at academic social gatherings, to be able to make the necessary sage nods and judicious noises at the proper intervals.

Fortunately, Du Havel had trained himself to be patient at these things. Not easy, that. By nature, he was not given to suffering fools gladly.

He heard the majordomo booming another introduction.

"Captain Michael Oversteegen, MC, CGM, GS, OCN, commanding officer, Her Majesty's Starship Gauntlet!"

A tall, slender man in a Manticoran naval uniform had entered the room. Du Havel didn't pay much attention, until he noticed a definite lessening in the volume of noise produced by the crowd. As if most conversations had either faltered momentarily, or the speakers had lowered their voices.

That included, thankfully, the three siblings. Du Havel spotted Helen Zilwicki not far away, and disengaged himself from the Babbling Trio with a smooth and meaningless polite phrase.

"Who's he?" he murmured into Helen's ear, when he came alongside her. The young woman hadn't noticed him until then, because her own eyes were riveted on the Manticoran officer. Just about everyone's seemed to be—and Du Havel had already spotted Cathy making her way through the crowd toward the newly arrived guest.

"Oh. Hi, Web. That's Oversteegen. The Oversteegen. Cathy invited him, but she never once thought he'd show up. Neither did I."

Du Havel smiled. "Let's start back at the begi

Helen's eyes widened, as a youngster's will when she stumbles across the shocking discovery that not everybody shares her own particular interests.

"He's the captain who won the Battle of Tiberian," she replied, and shook her head at his uncomprehending expression. "The one where his ship took out four other cruisers single-handedly," she added in a tone that was half-protesting, as if leaving unspoken: How can ANYONE not know about it?

"Oh, yes. I recall reading about the incident at the time. A year or so ago, wasn't it? But I got the impression his opponents were merely pirates, not a naval force."

Helen's eyes widened still further. Du Havel had to fight to keep from gri

She managed, however, to keep most of the outrage out of her ensuing reply. She only spluttered twice.

"Those were Gladiator- class cruisers, for Chr—" She suppressed the splutter, and continued in a calmer tone of voice. Much the way a mother restrains her indignation at the folly of a toddler. "Gauntlet 's sensor records proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt."