Airik plunged into the Jandinaire specifications report, able, at last, to concentrate. As he had expected, they had glossed over certain maintenance issues he already knew about while highlighting only the successes of their patented processes. The report was very carefully written so that anyone without prior experience would assume that their safety equipment would perform flawlessly, be easy to maintain, and thus worth the high cost. He, however, knew better. He had read their reports in the past along with analyses supplied by their competitors.
"Upton?"
His secretary sprang to attention. "Yes, sir?"
"Take notes. The Jandinaire equipment has the following flaws so Shelleen requires the subsequent improvements and price reductions if they expect a deal," Airik said and reiterated them in detail.
As he took dictation, Upton felt himself relaxing. The daimyo was back on track at last. It might have been worth it to hide in this dump in Dome Two.
They spent the next few hours working their way through the most important proposals. During that period, Elliot supplied sandwiches from a restaurant that Miss Bradwell recommended called the Dappled Yak. Airik appreciated that they were simple, well-made, and quite good. Somehow, the Dappled Yak managed to avoid the metallic pong he kept noticing in the greens he had eaten at the Twelve Happiness.
His only other interruption came about an hour after Miss Bradwell left Airik to work in peace. Nunzio decided it was time to take a stroll through the White Elephant, looking for possible security issues. On his return, he told Airik of his findings.
"Sir? As Miss Bradwell said, there's five people living here. One old lady plus the four young ladies. The old lady gets a room to herself in the other wing, the other ladies share, two to a room. None of them look to be those kind of women, like what the hotel kept offering. If they are, they don't bring their work home. The other three bedrooms in the other wing are empty."
"Empty of people?" Airik asked. Had Miss Bradwell lied about other staff or servants? It was very odd that a building of this size would have only five people living in it and all of them female. There were twelve bedrooms alone and that didn't include servants' quarters wherever those were hidden and then there was that ballroom. What was going on? And why did he care?
"Barebones empty, sir," Nunzio replied. "Those rooms didn't have so much as a broken chair in them. Swept clean regularly from the look of them, but nobody lives there. Upstairs there's a rooftop terrace that covers the whole house. It's mostly empty too. Got a few chairs and a table at one end and a small painting setup at the other. Nice view of the area from up top if you don't mind knowing there's all that glassteel overhead."
"And downstairs? Miss Bradwell implied there were belowground levels to the house."
Airik knew, from his preparations for the trip to Panschin, that much of the city lay beneath the domes in repurposed mining tunnels. The vast majority of the working-class population lived in the tunnels, many of those miners and their families rarely coming aboveground into the domes. Even fewer ever went outside the domes.
"Haven't checked yet, sir. Downstairs aboveground is a nuthouse. All these people getting in each other's ways trying to hang more ugly pictures. Miss Bradwell's riding herd on them and not getting any place."
"I see," Airik said. He paused. "Does she require assistance?"
Upton stared at his boss's profile and exchanged surprised shrugs with Elliot, who looked equally baffled. Nunzio had better control but he was also standing in front of Airik.
He said, carefully, "I don't believe so, sir. Main trouble, from what I could see from the landing, was that she wanted them to work and they won't. So her and her sister and those two cousins are doing most of the job unpacking and rearranging. The others down there, all from the Collective I guess, are mostly standing around when they're not getting in the way. She said something about some professor showing up and he wouldn't be pleased."
Airik spent some minutes evaluating what Nunzio said about the events downstairs and his reaction, oblivious to his baffled, waiting staff. Why did he want to assist Miss Bradwell? She had rented him a set of rooms but once he'd paid her fee, he had no obligations to her and she had been quite clear about her own obligations to him. Her expectations from him were those of any paying guest: paying promptly, behaving like a gentleman, and not making too much of a mess. He had a mountain of work waiting for him and he did not need to add to it by taking on Miss Bradwell's problems.
Moreover, and more importantly, he was safely anonymous as long as he remained within those rooms. Going downstairs meant being surrounded by the members of the Collective and it was possible one of those students might recognize him. Certainly, this professor, whoever he was, would grasp the importance of the daimyo of Shelleen. Since his arrival, Airik had seen his sketched image in every newspaper in Panschin along with grossly exaggerated stories of Shelleen's wealth. It was better to remain where he was, focused on the business at hand.
Still, it bothered him that Miss Bradwell might need some help and it bothered him more that he cared. He finally shrugged off those disquieting emotions and returned to the proposal from Maerski laying before him on the table. They wanted to participate in the initial excavation of the Red Mercury Lode, exchanging their expertise for future favors to be determined by them at a later date. They must think he was an ignorant yokel, Airik decided, and began dictating a letter refusing their proposition. Instead, he proposed an alliance that would benefit Shelleen while still throwing some money, albeit a much smaller amount than Maerski expected, their way.
As he spoke and Upton wrote, Airik caught himself being distracted by sounds from downstairs. Perhaps later, he resolved, he would visit the show and see if the paintings had miraculously improved or if the artists could explain their aesthetic choices to his satisfaction. If he stayed in the background, wearing standard issue coveralls, he could remain unnoticed as he used to be, before he became the daimyo of Shelleen. Who, after all, would expect to meet such a person here? Besides, most of those drawings of him in the newspapers had not been accurate, giving him another potential layer of protection. His decision made, he was able to concentrate fully on the report at hand.
*****
Veronica did not race downstairs to stop Lulu from throttling some student who probably deserved it. Instead, she checked on Shelby's whereabouts. She expected to find her little sister sobbing or hiding, attended by auntie Neza wielding sympathetic cups of tea. To her surprise, her sister was not burying herself in their shared room. It was empty, as was Neza's room and Lulu and Florence's shared bedroom. She thought for a moment. Could Shelby be hiding from the Collective, those snobby sods, up on the rooftop terrace? There was the risk that some student from PanU would go up there to gape at the skyline within the dome so probably not. There were also the subbasement levels, but accessing them meant going down the grand central staircase where Shelby was sure to be spotted by someone from the Collective and questioned. But if Shelby did venture into the subbasement catacombs, she'd never be found until she wanted to be.
Veronica chewed on her lip, thinking. Would Shelby be upset enough to hide down there, in those spooky, echoing, poorly lit rooms? She rarely went belowground without a compelling reason and when she did, she hated going past the area lit by the rooftop opening. She always wanted a rushlight to light her way and once downstairs, tried to stay near the light-shafts. Shelby didn't even like going into the metro stations to use the transtubes. Which of those things would be the lesser of two evils? The subbasement levels or the PanU Artist's Collective?
From downstairs, Lulu yelled at a student, her creative swearing echoing up the atrium. Veronica groaned. Maybe Shelby was already there in the ballroom, helping out. It could happen. She headed downstairs and to the great relief of the Collective she took over, sending Lulu off to set up tables in the dining room.
Unfortunately, she quickly realized that Lulu had gotten more work out of them than she would. The members of the Collective had decided that her wishes could be ignored. It had to be because the students were afraid of Lulu since she, unlike Veronica, radiated menace. Lulu didn't have anything to lose by roughing up an upper-caste student as she could disappear down into the tunnels where she'd never be found and they could tell. As least, that's how it seemed to Veronica after a very frustrating half-hour. She had to resort to taking Professor Vitebskin's name in vain and, to her horror, wishing impatiently he would appear and take charge.
She'd never had so much trouble getting members of the Collective to follow orders before. What had changed since yesterday? And where was Shelby?
Veronica took a quick pass through the ballroom, hoping to find her sister, and there she was, grimly unpacking another painting and ignoring everyone gossiping around her. She trotted over to her sister, glaring at lazy students that she passed. One of them was actually leaning up against an easel and putting it in danger of falling over.
"Shelby," Veronica whispered, when she reached her sister. "You okay?"
"Yes," her sister muttered. "This is the last time, right? For ever and ever?"
"Yep," Veronica said, looking coldly around them at the beautiful, high-ceilinged room filled with mud smeared canvases. "Never again. Any ideas why the Collective is being more useless than usual?"
Shelby straightened up her back with a groan, picked up the painting from its display easel and turned it upside down, frowned at it, then rotated it again another quarter-turn. It did not look better to Veronica but Shelby seemed happier with its new orientation. Only then was she willing to speak to her older sister.
"Every single person here knows the story about dear old dad. As a result, they've decided they don't have to work for a pile of tailings like us. We should work but they don't have to. We're not good enough to tell any of them what to do," she said bitterly.
Veronica clenched her fists as fury shot through her. She forced out, "Shelby, if I didn't need the money from this show, I'd throw those damned sods out right now. I'm so sorry to put you through this."
"Don't be," her sister replied. "You have to do this, I have to do this, and afterwards, well, we don't have to do this anymore."
The sisters' eyes met and, for once, they were in perfect accord.
"I am, for the very first time, looking forward to Vitebskin's arrival," Veronica said. "He'll have a fit when he sees these clods standing around."
Shelby grinned at her sister, her face lighting up with angry joy. "He will be furious. I can't wait."
Veronica and Shelby didn't have to wait long. The gate shrieked its warning, something they noticed but no one else seemed to do. Veronica smirked at the sound. She decided, on the spot, not to answer the door since Neza had told her Professor Vitebskin could be expected to waltz right in. Why alert the Collective that their master had arrived and forestall the explosion of invective they so richly deserved?
And explode he did. He opened the door himself without bothering to knock, ensuring no one was alerted. He took one look around at the lack of preparation in the atrium and ripped into the Collective members standing idly around. Veronica had moved to a position in the hallway and watched with enjoyment as Professor Vitebskin lambasted those students who had been the most disparaging to her earlier. He didn't know or care about their behavior toward the Bradwells, he was exceedingly unlikely to care how the Bradwells felt about it, but Professor Vitebskin could be counted on to care very much about the image he presented to the art world of Panschin. The Collective had let him down and nothing could matter more than that.
He then stormed, fuming and furious, into the ballroom and screamed in outrage at seeing the untidy heap of still-cocooned paintings. These newly arrived paintings were from his most favored protégés, former students who were talented enough that their art would indeed grace the mansions and museums of Panschin and, maybe, possibly, travel further still, into the lofty and rarified reaches of Barsoom itself, thus burnishing his own image still more.
His language was vivid enough to impress Lulu. She wandered in from the dining room to watch the show. Veronica had never heard such a diatribe before. She, unlike Lulu, did not take notes. She spent that blue five minutes praying her paying guests upstairs wouldn't overhear the good professor and wonder what kind of bed and breakfast they were staying in. Fortunately, the professor was in the ballroom and the draperies, along with the canvases, muffled much of the sound keeping it from the atrium and upstairs. And upstairs the doors were, she hoped, closed against the flood.
*****
Professor Vitebskin finally wound down and he watched in stony, furious silence as his former favorite students, hand-picked by himself, wilted into slimy heaps of algae fresh from the tanks. He did not feel one particle of compassion for any of them. They were useless wastes of space and it was clear that this crop of students was indeed wasting his time at Panschin University while wasting their parents' money. Most infuriating of all, his humiliation was observed by that talentless hack, Shelby Bradwell, and her not properly respectful sister, Veronica.