Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One Read online

  Chief Steward Webbard was still smouldering, but now a display of anger was beneath his dignity. Disdaining magnetic shoes, he pulled himself to the entrance, motioned to Jean. “Bring your baggage.”

  Jean went to her neat little trunk, jerked it into the air, found herself floundering helpless in the middle of the cargo space. Webbard impatiently returned with magnetic clips for her shoes, and helped her float the trunk into the station.

  She was breathing different, rich, air. The barge had smelled of ozone, grease, hemp sacking, but the station…Without consciously trying to identify the odor, Jean thought of waffles with butter and syrup mixed with talcum powder.

  Webbard floated in front of her, an imposing spectacle. His fat no longer hung on him in folds; it ballooned out in an even perimeter. His face was smooth as a watermelon, and it seemed as if his features were incised, carved, rather than molded. He focused his eyes at a point above her dark head. “We had better come to an understanding, young lady.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Webbard.”

  “As a favor to my friend, Mr. Fotheringay, I have brought you here to work. Beyond this original and singular act, I am no longer responsible. I am not your sponsor. Mr. Fotheringay recommended you highly, so see that you give satisfaction. Your immediate superior will be Mrs. Blaiskell, and you must obey her implicitly. We have very strict rules here at Abercrombie—fair treatment and good pay—but you must earn it. Your work must speak for itself, and you can expect no special favors.” He coughed. “Indeed, if I may say so, you are fortunate in finding employment here; usually we hire people more of our own sort, it makes for harmonious conditions.”

  Jean waited with demurely bowed head. Webbard spoke on. Jean nodded dutifully. There was no point antagonizing pompous old Webbard. And Webbard thought that here was a respectful young lady, thin and very young and with a peculiar frenetic gleam in her eye, but sufficiently impressed by his importance…Good coloring too. Pleasant features. If she only could manage two hundred more pounds of flesh on her bones, she might have appealed to his grosser nature.

  “This way then,” said Webbard.

  He floated ahead, and by some magnificent innate power continued to radiate the impression of inexorable dignity even while plunging head-first along the corridor.

  Jean came more sedately, walking on her magnetic clips, pushing the trunk ahead as easily as if it had been a paper bag.

  They reached the central core, and Webbard, after looking back over his bulging shoulders, launched himself up the shaft.

  Panes in the wall of the core permitted a view of the various halls, lounges, refectories, salons. Jean stopped by a room decorated with red plush drapes and marble statuary. She stared, first in wonder, then in amusement.

  Webbard called impatiently, “Come along now, miss, come along.”

  Jean pulled herself away from the pane. “I was watching the guests. They looked like—” she broke into a sudden giggle.

  Webbard frowned, pursed his lips. Jean thought he was about to demand the grounds for her merriment, but evidently he felt it beneath his dignity. He called, “Come along now, I can spare you only a moment.”

  She turned one last glance into the hall, and now she laughed aloud.

  Fat women, like bladder-fish in an aquarium tank. Fat women, round and tender as yellow peaches. Fat women, miraculously easy and agile in the absence of gravity. The occasion seemed to be an afternoon musicale. The hall was crowded and heavy with balls of pink flesh draped in blouses and pantaloons of white, pale blue and yellow.

  The current Abercrombie fashion seemed designed to accent the round bodies. Flat bands like Sam Browne belts molded the breasts down and out, under the arms. The hair was parted down the middle, skinned smoothly back to a small roll at the nape of the neck. Flesh, bulbs of tender flesh, smooth shiny balloons. Tiny twitching features, dancing fingers and toes, eyes and lips roguishly painted. On Earth any one of these women would have sat immobile, a pile of sagging sweating tissue. At Abercrombie Station—the so-called ‘Adipose Alley’—they moved with the ease of dandelion puffs, and their faces and bodies were smooth as butter-balls.

  “Come, come, come!” barked Webbard. “There’s no loitering at Abercrombie!”

  Jean restrained the impulse to slide her trunk up the core against Webbard’s rotund buttocks, a tempting target.

  He waited for her at the far end of the corridor.

  “Mr. Webbard,” she asked thoughtfully, “how much does Earl Abercrombie weigh?”

  Webbard tilted his head back, glared reprovingly down his nose. “Such intimacies, miss, are not considered polite conversation here.”

  Jean said, “I merely wondered if he were as—well, imposing as you are.”

  Webbard sniffed. “I couldn’t answer you. Mr. Abercrombie is a person of great competence. His—presence is a matter you must learn not to discuss. It’s not proper, not done.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Webbard,” said Jean meekly.

  Webbard said, “You’ll catch on. You’ll make a good girl yet. Now, through the tube, and I’ll take you to Mrs. Blaiskell.”

  Mrs. Blaiskell was short and squat as a kumquat. Her hair was steel-gray, and skinned back modishly to the roll behind her neck. She wore tight black rompers, the uniform of the Abercrombie servants, so Jean was to learn.

  Jean suspected that she made a poor impression on Mrs. Blaiskell. She felt the snapping gray eyes search her from head to foot, and kept her own modestly down-cast.

  Webbard explained that Jean was to be trained as a maid, and suggested that Mrs. Blaiskell use her in the Pleasaunce and the bedrooms.

  Mrs. Blaiskell nodded. “Good idea. The young master is peculiar, as everyone knows, but he’s been pestering the girls lately and interrupting their duties; wise to have one in there such as her—no offense, miss, I just mean it’s the gravity that does it—who won’t be so apt to catch his eye.”

  Webbard signed to her, and they floated off a little distance, conversing in low whispers.

  Jean’s wide mouth quivered at the corners. Old fools!

  Five minutes passed. Jean began to fidget. Why didn’t they do something? Take her somewhere. She suppressed her restlessness. Life! How good, how zestful! She wondered, will I feel this same joy when I’m twenty? When I’m thirty, forty? She drew back the corners of her mouth. Of course I will. I’ll never let myself change…But life must be used to its best. Every flicker of ardor and excitement must be wrung free and tasted. She grinned. Here she floated, breathing the over-ripe air of Abercrombie Station. In a way it was adventure. It paid well—two million dollars, and only for seducing an eighteen-year-old boy. Seducing him, marrying him—what difference? Of course he was Earl Abercrombie, and if he were as imposing as Mr. Webbard…She considered Webbard’s great body in wry speculation. Oh well, two million was two million. If things got too bad, the price might go up. Ten million, perhaps. Not too large a cut out of a billion.

  Webbard departed without a word, twitching himself easily back down the core.

  “Come,” said Mrs. Blaiskell. “I’ll show you your room. You can rest and tomorrow I’ll take you around.”

  IV

  Mrs. Blaiskell stood by while Jean fitted herself into black rompers, frankly critical. “Lord have mercy, but you mustn’t pinch in the waist so! You’re rachity and thin to starvation now, poor child; you mustn’t point it up so! Perhaps we can find a few air-floats to fill you out; not that it’s essential, Lord knows, since you’re but a dust-maid; still it always improves a household to have a staff of pretty women, and young Earl, I will say this for him and all his oddness, he does appreciate a handsome woman…Now then, your bosom, we must do something there; why you’re nearly flat! You see, there’s no scope to allow a fine drape down under the arms, see?” She pointed to her own voluminous rolls of adipose. “Suppose we just roll up a bit of cushion and—”

  “No,” said Jean tremulously. Was it possible that they thought her so ugly? “I won’t wear paddi
ng.”

  Mrs. Blaiskell sniffed. “It’s your own self that’s to benefit, my dear. I’m sure it’s not me that’s the wizened one.”

  Jean bent over her black slippers. “No, you’re very sleek.”

  Mrs. Blaiskell nodded proudly. “I keep myself well shaped out, and all the better for it. It wasn’t so when I was your age, miss, I’ll tell you; I was on Earth then—”

  “Oh, you weren’t born here?”

  “No, miss, I was one of the poor souls pressed and ridden by gravity, and I burned up my body with the effort of mere conveyance. No, I was born in Sydney, Australia, of decent kind folk, but they were too poor to buy me a place on Abercrombie. I was lucky enough to secure just such a position as you have, and that was while Mr. Justus and old Mrs. Eva, his mother—that’s Earl’s grandmother—was still with us. I’ve never been down to Earth since. I’ll never set foot on the surface again.”

  “Don’t you miss the festivals and great buildings and all the lovely countryside?”

  “Pah!” Mrs. Blaiskell spat the word. “And be pressed into hideous folds and wrinkles? And ride in a cart, and be stared at and snickered at by the home people? Thin as sticks they are with their constant worry and fight against the pull of the soil! No, miss, we have our own sceneries and fetes; there’s a pavane for tomorrow night, a Grand Masque Pantomime, a Pageant of Beautiful Women, all in the month ahead. And best, I’m among my own people, the round ones, and I’ve never a wrinkle on my face. I’m fine and full-blown, and I wouldn’t trade with any of them below.”

  Jean shrugged. “If you’re happy, that’s all that matters.” She looked at herself in the mirror with satisfaction. Even if fat Mrs. Blaiskell thought otherwise, the black rompers looked well on her, now that she’d fitted them snug to her hips and waist. Her legs—slender, round and shining ivory—were good, this she knew. Even if weird Mr. Webbard and odd Mrs. Blaiskell thought otherwise. Wait till she tried them on young Earl. He preferred gravity girls; Fotheringay had told her so. And yet—Webbard and Mrs. Blaiskell had hinted otherwise. Maybe he liked both kinds?…Jean smiled, a little tremulously. If Earl liked both kinds, then he would like almost anything that was warm, moved and breathed. And that certainly included herself.

  If she asked Mrs. Blaiskell outright, she’d be startled and shocked. Good proper Mrs. Blaiskell. A motherly soul, not like the matrons in the various asylums and waifs’ homes of her experience. Strapping big women those had been—practical and quick with their hands…But Mrs. Blaiskell was nice; she would never have deserted her child on a pool table. Mrs. Blaiskell would have struggled and starved herself to keep her child and raise her nicely…Jean idly speculated how it would seem with Mrs. Blaiskell for a mother. And Mr. Mycroft for a father. It gave her a queer prickly feeling, and also somehow called up from deep inside a dark dull resentment tinged with anger.

  Jean moved uneasily, fretfully. Never mind the nonsense! You’re playing a lone hand. What would you want with relatives? What an ungodly nuisance! She would never have been allowed this adventure up to Abercrombie Station…On the other hand, with relatives there would be many fewer problems on how to spend two million dollars.

  Jean sighed. Her own mother wasn’t kind and comfortable like Mrs. Blaiskell. She couldn’t have been, and the whole matter became an academic question. Forget it, put it clean out of your mind.

  Mrs. Blaiskell brought forward service shoes, worn to some extent by everyone at the station: slippers with magnetic coils in the soles. Wires led to a power bank at the belt. By adjusting a rheostat, any degree of magnetism could be achieved.

  “When a person works, she needs a footing,” Mrs. Blaiskell explained. “Of course there’s not much to do, once you get on to it. Cleaning is easy, with our good filters; still there’s sometimes a stir of dust and always a little film of oil that settles from the air.”

  Jean straightened up. “Okay Mrs. B, I’m ready. Where do we start?”

  Mrs. Blaiskell raised her eyebrows at the familiarity, but was not seriously displeased. In the main, the girl seemed to be respectful, willing and intelligent. And—significantly—not the sort to create a disturbance with Mr. Earl.

  Twitching a toe against a wall, she propelled herself down the corridor, halted by a white door, slid back the panel.

  They entered the room as if from the ceiling. Jean felt an instant of vertigo, pushing herself head-first at what appeared to be a floor.

  Mrs. Blaiskell deftly seized a chair, swung her body around, put her feet to the nominal floor. Jean joined her. They stood in a large round room, apparently a section across the building. Windows opened on space, stars shone in from all sides; the entire zodiac was visible with a sweep of the eyes.

  Sunlight came up from below, shining on the ceiling, and off to one quarter hung the half moon, hard and sharp as a new coin. The room was rather too opulent for Jean’s taste. She was conscious of an overwhelming surfeit of mustard-saffron carpet, white panelling with gold arabesques, a round table clamped to the floor, surrounded by chairs footed with magnetic casters. A crystal chandelier thrust rigidly down; rotund cherubs peered at intervals from the angle between wall and ceiling.

  “The Pleasaunce,” said Mrs. Blaiskell. “You’ll clean in here every morning first thing.” She described Jean’s duties in detail.

  “Next we go to—” she nudged Jean. “Here’s old Mrs. Clara, Earl’s mother. Bow your head, just as I do.”

  A woman dressed in rose-purple floated into the room. She wore an expression of absent-minded arrogance, as if in all the universe there were no doubt, uncertainty or equivocation. She was almost perfectly globular, as wide as she was tall. Her hair was silver-white, her face a bubble of smooth flesh, daubed apparently at random with rouge. She wore stones spread six inches down over her bulging bosom and shoulders.

  Mrs. Blaiskell bowed her head unctuously. “Mrs. Clara, dear, allow me to introduce the new parlor maid; she’s new up from Earth and very handy.”

  Mrs. Clara Abercrombie darted Jean a quick look. “Emaciated creature.”

  “Oh, she’ll healthen up,” cooed Mrs. Blaiskell. “Plenty of good food and hard work will do wonders for her; after all, she’s only a child.”

  “Mmmph. Hardly. It’s blood, Blaiskell, and well you know it.”

  “Well, yes of course, Mrs. Clara.”

  Mrs. Clara continued in a brassy voice, darting glances around the room. “Either it’s good blood you have or vinegar. This girl here, she’ll never be really comfortable, I can see it. It’s not in her blood.”

  “No, ma’am, you’re correct in what you say.”

  “It’s not in Earl’s blood either. He’s the one I’m worried for. Hugo was the rich one, but his brother Lionel after him, poor dear Lionel, and—”

  “What about Lionel?” said a husky voice. Jean twisted. This was Earl. “Who’s heard from Lionel?”

  “No one, my dear. He’s gone, he’ll never be back. I was but commenting that neither one of you ever reached your growth, showing all bone as you do.”

  Earl scowled past his mother, past Mrs. Blaiskell, and his gaze fell on Jean. “What’s this? Another servant? We don’t need her. Send her away. Always ideas for more expense.”

  “She’s for your rooms, Earl, my dear,” said his mother.

  “Where’s Jessy? What was wrong with Jessy?”

  Mrs. Clara and Mrs. Blaiskell exchanged indulgent glances. Jean turned Earl a slow arch look. He blinked, then frowned. Jean dropped her eyes, traced a pattern on the rug with her toe, an operation which she knew sent interesting movements along her leg. Earning the two million dollars wouldn’t be as irksome as she had feared. Because Earl was not at all fat. He was stocky, solid, with bull shoulders and a bull neck. He had a close crop of tight blond curls, a florid complexion, a big waxy nose, a ponderous jaw. His mouth was good, drooping sullenly at the moment.

  He was something less than attractive, thought Jean. On Earth she would have ignored him, or if he persisted, stung h
im to fury with a series of insults. But she had been expecting far worse: a bulbous creature like Webbard, a human balloon…Of course there was no real reason for Earl to be fat; the children of fat people were as likely as not to be of normal size.

  Mrs. Clara was instructing Mrs. Blaiskell for the day, Mrs. Blaiskell nodding precisely on each sixth word and ticking off points on her stubby little fingers.

  Mrs. Clara finished, Mrs. Blaiskell nodded to Jean. “Come, miss, there’s work to be done.”

  Earl called after them, “Mind now, no one in my study!”

  Jean asked curiously, “Why doesn’t he want anyone in his study?”

  “That’s where he keeps all his collections. He won’t have a thing disturbed. Very strange sometimes, Earl. You’ll just have to make allowances, and be on your good behavior. In some ways he’s harder to serve than Mrs. Clara.”

  “Earl was born here?”

  Mrs. Blaiskell nodded. “He’s never been down to Earth. Says it’s a place of crazy people, and the Lord knows, he’s more than half right.”

  “Who are Hugo and Lionel?”

  “They’re the two oldest. Hugo is dead, Lord rest him, and Lionel is off on his travels. Then under Earl there’s Harper and Dauphin and Millicent and Clarice. That’s all Mrs. Clara’s children, all very proud and portly. Earl is the skinny lad of the lot, and very lucky too, because when Hugo died, Lionel was off gadding and so Earl inherited…Now here’s his suite, and what a mess.”

  As they worked Mrs. Blaiskell commented on various aspects of the room. “That bed now! Earl wasn’t satisfied with sleeping under a saddleband like the rest of us, no! He wears pajamas of magnetized cloth, and that weights him against the cushion almost as if he lived on Earth…And this reading and studying, my word, there’s nothing the lad won’t think of! And his telescope! He’ll sit in the cupola and focus on Earth by the hour.”

  “Maybe he’d like to visit Earth?”