It was a relief to bury himself in briefing papers. This was work that Airik could understand: analyzing columns of numbers, charts, graphs, reports and figuring out where the lies were. Numbers could and did lie but not the way people did. Any wishful thinking present in a report on safety measures was due to the writer, not the numbers themselves. They didn't claim to be other than what they were. Once you figured out how the numbers were slanted, you could correctly interpret them or discard them all together.
Airik called a halt only when more than one person's stomach rumbled loudly enough to get his attention.
"Upton?"
Upton sprang to attention, relieved that it might be time to quit for a while. His typewriter, a valuable heirloom shipped from Olde Earthe, was state of the art but his fingers still got tired. Transcribing everything Airik said got boring fast but the job demanded careful attention to detail, no matter how mind-numbing it all was.
"We'll break for lunch. Gaston?"
Gaston Shelleen looked up warily. He was the lead member of Shelleen's tiny mining department, decades older than Airik, three degrees of consanguinity away so he didn't know Airik that well other than from work, he resented what he did know, and he'd never been to Panschin before. He'd taken full advantage of the hotel's varied and delightfully stimulating amenities (many more than twelve kinds were available) and had spent the entire morning sweating over how he was going to discreetly pay for them.
Gaston did know Airik well enough to know the daimyo meant what he said. He vividly remembered what happened to Howard Shelleen and had no desire to reenact a similar scene in the stone courtyard in front of the manor house while watched by a mob of contemptuous peasants. There was also the question of his wife back home in Shelleen. He cringed inwardly. She would have plenty to say when she discovered their only daughter's dowry had vanished into the maw of the Twelve Happiness Luxury Hotel along with a list of the services he had indulged in.
"Yes sir?" Gods but it galled to have to call this callow poindexter 'sir'.
"Can the hotel's restaurant seat all of us for lunch on short notice? The break will be good for all of us. We'll return to work afterwards."
"Yes sir, I believe so."
"Good. Let them know we'll be downstairs in half an hour."
Airik eyed Gaston coolly. He had been the leader of the Shelleen contingent until his own arrival and had shown the most distress at his announcement that the hotel bills would be audited. Airik suppressed a sigh. Of everyone in the suite, Gaston should have known how important it was to mine the Red Mercury correctly. It poisoned everything it touched and safe handling was going to be stunningly expensive, using up every bit of Shelleen's spare treasury. Gaston had decades of experience in Shelleen's other mining operations but tin ore and copper were a far sight easier to manage than the Red Mercury would be. Gaston probably would sacrifice peasants to do the dirty work and never once understand that the peasants of Shelleen were its working backbone. They were a resource to be husbanded like any other and couldn't be wasted just because he couldn't control his own appetites.
"Airik? As a reminder, I've scheduled an afternoon meeting with Atto, Davis, Maerski, and Fuziwara. Their daimyos are eager to meet with you."
"Ah." Airik relaxed slightly. Gaston had done something useful. These gentlemen were sure to share some of his own interests in geology. They were, after all, the daimyos of the leading mining demesnes in this quadrant of the Northern Mining Tier. Maerski in particular was a powerhouse in extraction, refining, processing, sales, and shipping of ores. Those were all subjects he needed to learn in a hurry.
"I look forward to it."
*****
The hotel's restaurant staff were extremely attentive; attentive to the point that Airik believed they would have not just cut his own steak up into bits for him so he didn't have to struggle with a knife, but the hovering team of waitresses would have fed the tidbits to him, bite by bite. He also would not have believed that any female member of the Twelve Happiness staff would wear a skimpier uniform than those of the willing young ladies he had met upon his arrival, but yes, the waitresses wore even less. It was distracting. Upton was not alone in not knowing where to look first. Even the Shelleen early arrivals were not immune, despite the time they had to get acclimated.
The food was odd. Strangely spiced, heavily sauced, distractingly textured, largely unfamiliar, and not the plain, identifiable things he preferred. Airik had learned during his travels that he liked knowing what he was eating and here, it was hard to tell. He ate it anyway.
That was the only good part of the meal.
The cheery waitresses bustled around him continuously: refilling glasses of water (triple-filtered for your happiness!) after a single sip, fresh napkins as soon as he touched one, warm wet towels to continuously clean his hands, the replacement of silverware whether it needed it or not, refilling muffin baskets as soon as one was taken, and at every opportunity, bending over the table to display their own tip-generating assets. It was distracting and irritating especially as Airik noticed he was the only person at the table who seemed to want to eat and get back to work.
The waitresses, despite their continual presence and the reinforcement of the maître-de who also couldn't manage to find something else to do, did little to keep away eager supplicants. As on the train, glad-handing entrepreneurs kept coming up to bother Airik with guaranteed plans for success. It was hard to tell how many more pests would have interrupted lunch. Nunzio's hulking presence deterred only the weaker specimens. No one else in the Shelleen contingent was bothered at their meal; just Airik. He was the only one who counted. At least the concierge didn't come out of his lair to pester him further about other 'special services'.
It was a relief to flee up the four flights of marble stairs back to the suite and prepare for the arrival of the daimyos from Atto, Davis, Maerski, and Fuziwara.
*****
Those gentlemen filed in right on time, each accompanied by a number of staffers. Family most likely, Airik surmised since why would you hire outsiders when you had otherwise unemployed relatives to do the work? Atto, Davis, Maerski and Fuziwara were all older men, on par with Gaston Shelleen. Their staffs were younger, and interestingly, more than one staffer in each group was young and pretty and female. The four daimyos, despite not resembling each other, were wearing identical expressions (when they weren't scowling at each other). Apparently, none of the daimyos had anticipated that their peers would have similar goals for the meeting.
Their shared expression was one Airik had come to recognize. It was an expression that said 'I want you to meet your future wife, the next daimyah of Shelleen'. At least this expression was a change from the one he'd seen repeatedly during lunch: 'I've got a sure-fire plan to make us both rich.' These men were already wealthy but they did have the daughters of their families to marry off and marrying up was always better than marrying down. There was no prize like an unmarried daimyo: significant family connections, wealth-generating business deals, and highly placed grandchildren were all inspiring spurs to action.
The four daimyos circled the room, eyeing each other and jostling for position. Each was vying to be the first to present their own candidates to be the new daimyah of Shelleen. Airik didn't bother trying to catch their names as the young women were all the same: talented, well-educated, intelligent, attractive, presumably fertile, young, and supremely well connected. The perfect candidates for his wife in fact, as Auntie Zilpah would tell him. Every one of them, he saw with dismay, viewed him from behind a screen of family obligations and had credit signs dancing in her eyes.
Airik was unable to keep the conversation focused where he wanted it: learning more from these daimyos how they managed extracting resources from their lands without destroying them for all time along with plans for the future when the ores were gone. Eventually, after an agony of trying to make small talk with people who had no genuine interest in what he needed to know, Upton rescued him by pointing out that this hole in his schedule had closed up and it was time for the next appointment.
That meeting was with the owner of Steelio, one of the smaller mining concerns in Panschin. Steelio specialized in copper, something that Shelleen had an abundance of. He, as it turned out, not only had ideas about cooperative ventures that would enrich both himself and Shelleen. He also had an attractive, unmarried niece whom he brought along to meet Airik.
The rest of the day continued in the same vein, culminating in a gala dinner and dancing hosted by the Twelve Happiness Luxury Hotel for all the attendees at the biennial Panschin Mining Conference. All the attendees were eager to meet Airik, promote their own get-rich-quick schemes, and introduce him to suitable young ladies from their own households. These meetings were not enhanced by having to shout over the atonal music provided by the orchestra nor the heat produced by cramming too many overdressed people into a gaudy, mirrored ballroom. The other guests had even less interest in rock collecting than they did in safety procedures.
It was a relief to escape back to the suite. At that point, Airik discovered that opening the windows of the suite did not let in fresh, quiet night air. Instead, opening the windows got all the noise and bright lights of Dome Six as the nightclub scene took off just below on the hotel grounds and all around the building everywhere there was a storefront or sidewalk bar. As the crowd's merriment increased, it turned out that party horns in a variety of inharmonious pitches were the preferred accessory. The cacophony echoed and reverberated between the buildings and off of the dome overhead, gaining in intensity with each bounce. Closing the windows made the room as stuffy as being in a tunnel.
In the morning, after a repeatedly interrupted breakfast, Airik spoke to the concierge about the lack of ventilation.
"My lord Shelleen, the Twelve Happiness Luxury Hotel has a state-of-the-art ventilation system, even finer than that of Dome Six," the concierge said, clutching his gleaming shirt over his lungs for emphasis. "We here at the Twelve Happiness want you to be happy. I can assure you that the air you breathe is as fresh as all outdoors, filtered three times for your benefit. Why, you couldn't get fresher air out on the steppes!"
This was patently untrue but there was no arguing with the concierge of the Twelve Happiness Luxury Hotel.
The day continued in the same manner, broken by a lunch that Airik insisted upon being served in the suite rather than deal with the restaurant. That led to a parade of underdressed staff cooing over him and filling the suite with the odors of strange, off-putting spices, an odor that did not dissipate even when every window in the suite was opened to the noisy dome surrounding them.
Two more days passed, each more irritating than the last. Airik couldn't sleep, couldn't eat in peace, couldn't eat in the suite without making it smell even worse, couldn't focus on work, and every meeting wherever it was held devolved quickly into a plea to meet my daughter, niece, younger sister, granddaughter, or cousin. It was maddening. To add to his consternation, it turned out that the winking and smirking concierge -- who did not miss any opportunity to ask Airik about his intimate preferences -- had been right all along. There were no cancellations anywhere within Panschin that Upton could find. There was no place Airik could escape to, where he could think and work and figure out how to dig out the Red Mercury without poisoning his workers along with the land.
*****
Airik sat at a corner table in the hotel's restaurant hidden behind The Panschin Gazette. It was a poor screen but the best he had been able to come up with, along with keeping his back to the wall. The newspaper was crammed with stories about the Biennial Mining Conference, along with lurid stories about violent crime in the tunnels, lubricious scandals among local celebrities, and corruption running rampant within the government offices. The front-page story managed, via impressive feats of speculation, to involve all four subjects at once. He took his time reading the news as it distracted from the questionable breakfast he was eating and the grumbling from the Shelleen staff over his lack of focus. After finishing every article including skimming those in the baffling sports section (lizard racing was popular as was something called footie), he began leafing through the pages of classified ads to postpone having to face the day.
As Airik turned the pages, he caught sight of a tiny drawing of an elephant at the very bottom of the newspaper, tucked in with a number of other tiny rectangles crammed with too much type and not enough white space. The elephant, quite well drawn too, adorned a small, mostly empty ad space:
The White Elephant Bed and Breakfast
Close to main transtube lines
Hidden Hideaway
Clean, Quiet, Private, Secluded
646 Oleander Lane, Dome Two
Reasonable rates; inquire within for vacancies
He stared at the ad. The words reverberated in his head like the nightly serenade of party horns: clean, quiet, private, secluded. Dome Two, the second oldest dome in Panschin and by far the largest. Upton had checked repeatedly and every hotel in Dome Two was filled, along with Domes Six, Five, Three, and One, but he had not mentioned this place. This was a chance for escape. But the work; how would he manage that? He couldn't move the entire Shelleen party. This bed and breakfast didn't sound that large.
Then it struck him. It was a bed and breakfast, not a hotel. He could sleep there and eat breakfast and then return to the Twelve Happiness for meetings or, really, go anywhere in Panschin for meetings and tours. The city was compact for its population and boasted of its transportation system. He would still be available to his own staff on a regular basis while not being available to anyone else.
The next question was how to do it.
"Sir? Airik?" Upton said, interrupting his train of thought.
"Not now," Airik replied.
Upton frowned. Airik was becoming increasingly unlike his normal coolly reserved and well-mannered self. He often had trouble understanding other people's motives so he hid behind a veneer of polite formality. Standard empty pleasantries gave him time to think over what had been said and left unsaid.