Hunting Party

Chapter Three

Heris had had no idea a yacht could be this complicated. It was so small, after all, with so few people aboard . . . but rich civilians did nothing efficiently. As she worked her way through the manuals, the schematics, the overlays, she wished she’d had weeks aboard before the first voyage. Hours were not enough. She wrinkled her nose at the desk screen, muttering. The owner’s quarters separate from the household staff’s quarters, and both separate from crew quarters. Four complete and separate hydroponics systems: crew support, household support, food, and flowers. Flowers? She pushed that aside, to consider later. Ship’s crew, her people, were responsible for all life support, but not for the household food and flowers. Ship’s crew maintained all the physical plant, the wiring, the com connections; in one of the few duties that did overlap, the household kitchen supplied the crew. Not madam’s own cook, of course, but her assistants.

Eventually she went in search of further enlightenment, and chose the most senior employee aboard: Bates. She had stayed out of his path, which seemed to be what he expected, but no captain could command without knowledge.

“Who does this in a planetside house?” asked Heris. Bates folded his lip under. She waited him out. He might be a butler, but she was a captain.

“It . . . varies,” he said finally. “More than it used to; more than it should, some say. Originally, household staff did it all, unless a wall fell in or something. Then as houses became more technically oriented—plumbing inside, gas laid on, electricity—” Heris had never considered that having indoor plumbing meant someone was technically oriented. “Then,” Bates went on, “owners had to resort to outside expertise. Calling in the plumber or the electrician when something went wrong. Some found staff members who could do it, but most of those trades thought themselves too good to be in service. . . .”

“So . . . usually . . . it’s outsiders?”

“Mostly, except in the really big households. Where we’re going, of course, the staff does it all, but they’ve a whole planet of homes to care for.”

“The whole planet is one household?”

“Yes—I thought you understood. Lord Thornbuckle’s estate is the planet.”

She had known it, in an intellectual way, but she had not ever dealt with its implications. Of course the super-rich owned whole planets . . . but not as pleasure-grounds. She had thought of them as owning the land, perhaps—but never as owning everything on the planet—the infrastructure, the houses, the staff to manage it. But it wasn’t that impossible, she reminded herself. The R.S.S. owned several planets as well: one for resources, and one for a training base. This would be like a large military installation. At once her first frantic concerns—where do they buy groceries? Where do they educate the kids?—vanished.

“So Lord . . . er . . . Thornbuckle has all the support staff on hand already,” she said. “Technicians, moles, all the rest?”

“Yes, Captain. In the off-season, the planet’s population is less than two hundred thousand; in the main season, he’ll have at least two thousand guests—which means, of course, another ten to twenty thousand of their ships’ crews, and ships’ staff all rummocking about the Stations or off at Hospitality Bay.”

Hospitality Bay sounded like the sort of place Fleet marines went to gamble, wench, and pillage. From Bates’s explanation, it was designed as a low-cost recreational base for ships’ crews and off-duty house staff . . . in other words, a place to gamble, wench, and pillage. Most of the wealthy guests who arrived in their own yachts left them docked “blind” at one of the Stations (which one depended on the guests’ rank). It had proved cheaper and more pleasant, Bates said, for the crews and staff to vacation planetside than to enlarge the Stations enough to hold and entertain idle servants. A largish island, complete with a variety of accommodations, automated service, recreational facilities, and the chance to meet crew and staff from the other yachts. Clubs, bars, entertainment booths, and halls—everything the vacationing staff might want.

“No riots?” asked Heris, remembering the Fleet marines. “No . . .” What would they call shore patrol? “No—security officers?”

“The militia,” said Bates, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Of course there are always those who take advantage, and someone must keep order. It’s understood that the usual . . . er . . . structure of command does not apply. I am not held responsible, let’s say, if an under-gardener from this ship gets into trouble. Milady would consider that, afterwards, and might say something to me, but not the militia. We each have our own places, you see.”

Enlisted bars, NCO bars, and officer bars, Heris thought. She called up a list of the branches of the captains guild, and found one listed for Hospitality Bay . . . so she, too, would be expected to sit out the hunting season entertaining herself with other captains from yachts. Why was that so much worse than spending leave with other Fleet officers? She knew the answer, but pushed it away. She’d joined the Captains Guild; that was all she could do for now. Someday she would belong again . . . or she wouldn’t. She’d live with it either way.

“I suppose,” she said, looking at Bates carefully, “that if anything . . . arises . . . on the household side that I need to know about, you will inform me?”

“Yes, Captain Serrano.” He smiled at her, evidently pleased. She could not imagine why.

“This is very different from the Regular Space Service,” she said, to see what his reaction would be.

“Yes, it is, Captain.” His smile broadened. “It’s even different from most civilian households. Lady Cecelia likes to do things her own way.”

That, Heris had figured out from the lavender plush. Perhaps servants like Bates took pleasure in their employers’ eccentricities, but she didn’t. Yet.

“I must warn you,” she said, “that I’m planning to run emergency drills just as I would aboard a warship. It’s a matter of safety, you understand. Do the . . . er . . . staff have training sessions aboard?”

“Not normally, no, although we do have assigned places and duties for various emergencies. Captain Olin never found it necessary.” A faint air of distaste, whether for Captain Olin or her proposal, she couldn’t tell.

“Captain Olin, I’m afraid, had eccentricities unsuited to the master of a spacefaring vessel,” Heris said, and then realized how odd that sounded. Eccentricities implied activities engaged in with objects obtained from catalogs with names like Stirrings and Imaginations. The only person she’d ever known thrown out of the Service for “eccentricities” had insisted on sharing his delight in electrical and plumbing lines with those not so inclined. She had sat on the court-martial, and remembered suddenly that he’d also liked having his mouth packed full of feathers. Captain Olin’s eccentricities, she was sure, had been ethical and not sensual.

Bates no longer smiled. “And these drills will be . . . unscheduled?”

“Yes. I’m sorry; I realize it’s inconvenient, but one never knows when a real emergency will occur, and drills must be a surprise. That way we can find out what didn’t work, and prepare for it.” She paused. “However, if you would like to arrange training first, I’ll delay the drills. At the least, every member of staff should have an emergency station where he or she will be safe and out of the way of crew members with assignments. Ideally, staff would help with things like verifying that emergency hatches have locked, that ventilation systems are working according to specs, and so on.”

“What about Lady Cecelia and her guests?”

“They too must have emergency stations where they will be safe. They need to practice evacuation drills just like anyone else. If something should happen—unlikely as that is—we must know where they are to rescue them.”

“I see.” Bates looked surprisingly grim, as if he had never thought about the dangers inherent in space travel before. “Are there standard ways to do this?”

Heris stared at him, then recovered herself. “You—haven’t had any instruction, ever?”

He looked unhappy, but determined. “No, Captain Serrano. To my knowledge, none of Lady Cecelia’s captains have ever had drills that involved the staff, owner, or guests.”

Heris managed not to sigh aloud, but inwardly she fumed at the incompetence of those captains. Did they have no professional pride at all? “I’d better speak to her, then, hadn’t I?” she said gently. “If she doesn’t realize the importance of these drills, she might make it very inconvenient for you. And after that, if you have any time . . . perhaps we could work together to decide on the best staff response.”

He relaxed, and smiled, and seemed perfectly agreeable. Heris took the list of staff positions, and their listed specialties, and went back to her side of the ship, carefully not muttering.

The yacht’s database included, as law required, the complete text of the standard manuals of emergency procedures for crew and passengers. At this point, Heris considered the staff and guests equally passengers. She decided to print out a hard copy—it would be impressively thick, with the Transport Code seal on the cover, and perhaps that would convince Lady Cecelia that it wasn’t her own peculiarity.

The last access date for that file was—she stared, though she felt she should not have been surprised—the date the yacht left the builder’s. All those years . . . her stomach clenched, as she thought of the past possibilities. No, she could not expect Lady Cecelia, or her woefully ignorant staff, to go through disaster drills until they’d had some instruction. She wondered what the correct procedure was—if there was a correct procedure—for informing a wealthy yacht owner that her ship was, and had been, unsafe for years.

The hard copy thunked into the bin, and she picked it out. The Transport Code seal looked less impressive than she’d expected, but the thing was thick enough. She looked into it, wincing at the bureaucratic prose. It was as bad as Fleet directives. Everything unimportant specified in intricate detail, with requirements to document that it was done, and the important things buried in multisyllabic generality. How far above the deck warning signs must be, and how high the letters, and what color, but—she stopped suddenly. Warning signs? What warning signs?

She flipped to the back sections, headed REQUIRED ITEMS OF COMPLIANCE, and PENALTIES FOR NONCOMPLIANCE. Despite the current inspection stickers, the Sweet Delight was out of compliance on at least fifty items—on the first page alone. And the penalties, if subsequent inspection discovered those discrepancies . . . made an astonishing figure. For one thing, a hard copy of that manual—and the ship’s own customized emergency procedures manual—were supposed to be available to passengers. She knew no such hard copy existed.

“I knew,” she muttered, “that that stupid purple plush shouldn’t be there.”

“Captain?” Heris looked around guiltily. Gavin stood near the door, looking apologetic. “I did ask,” he said, “but you didn’t seem to hear.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gavin,” she said, focusing again. “What is it?”

“It’s about those crew evaluations you wanted,” he said. “We never had anything like that when Captain Olin was here. . . . I’m not exactly sure what you want. . . .”

Your head on a platter, Heris felt like saying, but in fact he wasn’t the worst of them. “Mr. Gavin, I need to know how you feel each crew member is doing: do they know their jobs, are they doing their jobs?”

He looked as if he would be sulky if he had the courage. “They’ve always pleased Lady Cecelia before,” he said. “If she don’t have any complaint . . .”

“Mr. Gavin, Lady Cecelia is hardly qualified to judge the skills of a navigator or engineer, is she? That’s my job, but since I’m new, I’m asking you to help. That is your job.”

“But . . . well, you know, Captain, they all have to know I’m doing this.”

“They do?”

“An’ I don’t like saying things that, you know . . . an’ someone new like Sirkin, it’s different. But these others . . . we been together a long time, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, not that there’s anything they’ve done wrong, but you said to rank them. . . .”

Heris allowed herself to glare at him. “Mr. Gavin, you are an officer of this ship; you were second in command to Captain Olin, as you are to me. It is your duty to consider the ship’s welfare first and friendship second. No one need have hurt feelings to be ranked second. . . . There is no disgrace in it, as long as the overall performance is satisfactory. Now, if you don’t feel equal to the requirements of your position—”

“It’s not that,” he said.

“Very well. Then I’ll expect to find your evaluations on my desk within forty-eight hours. It is unfortunate that Captain Olin did not carry out regular evaluations, so that you and the rest would realize how necessary they are, but since he did not, you will simply have to cope.”

“Yes, Captain.” But he did not move away, and simply stood there looking glum.

“Do you have another problem?” Heris asked after a long pause.

“Well . . . it’s about those emergency drills you mentioned. I need to know when you’re planning one so that I can have things ready.”

Heris barely restrained herself from pounding her head on her desk. “Mr. Gavin, the whole point of an emergency drill is that it is not scheduled. Emergencies aren’t scheduled. Do you expect the universe to let you know when it plans to put a rock through the hull?”

“Well . . . no. But that’s not the same thing—”

“It is the same thing, if drills are to mean anything. If you knew when something was about to go wrong, of course you’d be prepared. So would I. So would everyone. Didn’t you see the report on the Flower of Sanity while we were in dock?” Gavin nodded. “Well—remember how the reports said that the crew’s training in emergency procedures was what let them save all those passengers? Even though it happened when most of the crew was off-shift? I’m sure those passengers—and even the crew—didn’t like unscheduled emergency drills, but that’s how they learned to cope with unscheduled emergencies.”

“I can see that, but—but that was a big ship, a commercial ship. This is only a little yacht. It can’t be that—”

Heris interrupted again. “An electrical fire just broke out in the number seventeen box: what is still functioning in this compartment—the captain’s office?”

He stared, eyes wide. “Well—I’d have to ask Finnie—but I think—”

“There’s no time to think, Mr. Gavin. There’s only time to react. Box seventeen supplies the blowers for alternate compartments on this passage, overhead lights for the compartments whose blowers are controlled by box eighteen, and the electrical outlets in the heads—the bathrooms—in all compartments on this passage. And since four boxes are clustered with box seventeen, an electrical fire in that is likely to knock out sixteen, eighteen, and nineteen as well. That means all the blowers in the crew quarters, all the overhead lights, wall sockets, passage lights, and com terminals, since all the compartment desktops take their power from box twenty. It’s dark in here, Mr. Gavin, and there’s a fire somewhere aboard—do you know if the door will unlock?”

“No . . . no, I didn’t . . . I don’t . . .”

“And that’s why we have emergency drills, Mr. Gavin. To find out, before we find that we’re locked in dark, airless boxes while a fire rages somewhere.” Before he could say more—and anything he said now would enrage her—she thrust the hard copy of the manual at him. “Here; start learning this. I’ll make additional hard copies, and I’ll expect you and your section chiefs to have marked necessary modifications within forty-eight hours.” He was too stunned to react; he took the manual and backed out. Heris watched the door slide close behind him, and then shook her head. It was much, much worse than she’d thought, to be the captain of a rich lady’s yacht.

Lady Cecelia had never thought of herself as an old lady. Age had nothing to do with it, nor the number of rejuvenation treatments. As long as she could ride to hounds, as long as she could go where she wanted, and do what she wanted, and cope with whatever life put on her plate, she was not old. True, she didn’t compete in some fields where once she had been at the top, but that she thought of as outgrowing old interests—as developing new ones—as a natural shift from one thing to another. Old people were those who had quit changing, quit growing. Some people quit growing at twenty, most by forty or fifty, and became old within a decade. They would live another thirty to fifty years—longer with rejuv—but they lived those years as old people. Others—her own grandmother Serafina for one—seemed to stay lively and interesting until the last year or so before their deaths.

Staying away from the family kept her from feeling old, too. Nothing like children growing up and turning into difficult adults to make you feel your age. Particularly if they thought you were an old lady, and treated you as one. She did not look at herself as she dressed in her soft velour exercise suit; she did not want to be reminded of her age. If they were in the gym, she’d throw them out. It was her turn.

But the gym was empty, silent, scented with her favorite aromatics. They had not been here; the cushions of the lounger had dried. Cecelia locked the doors and set up her simulator. She would ride this morning, no matter what anyone said.

An hour later, refreshed after a pleasant but demanding ride over a training field, she stowed the simulator and pocketed the cube. This was not a group she wanted riding over her shoulder, so to speak. She didn’t want to hear whatever they might say. She looked at the gym’s status board, and saw that they were all still in the guest suites. Fine. She stripped, showered, and let herself into the pool enclosure, blanking the canopy and turning the waterstream up a little. The pool’s surface heaved, then steadied, as the current increased. She swam against it vigorously, then climbed out, toweled dry, and wrapped herself in her heated robe. Another check of the board; they were moving now. She grabbed her exercise suit and headed for her own suite; she should be safe.

They did not meet at breakfast. Cecelia ate in her own suite, as she often did anyway, and she paid no attention to the young people. She had her own daily routine—checking with Cook, listening to Bates’s report, going over whatever her captain chose to tell her about the ship status. With Olin, that had often been a single bare statement that the ship was proceeding according to plan. She wondered about Serrano. The first day’s report had been two pages long, most of it incomprehensible detail about why she’d chosen to move something from one storage hold to another . . . as if Cecelia cared. As long as staff knew, and could find, whatever she wanted, she herself didn’t want to worry about something as technical as “center of mass” and “potential resonance interference.”

This morning, it was one page, headed with “Emergency Drills.” Cecelia blinked. Why should that concern her? The crew would have emergency drills, she assumed, but yachts, unlike liners, did not have to inconvenience their passengers. She read on, already resisting the idea. This Captain Serrano must think she was still a military commander. Her house staff to be given emergency assignments? She and her guests expected to learn and follow emergency procedures? How absurd! She remembered the fire drills, long ago when she had attended the Sorgery School, and how they had all known the drills were useless. If a fire ever did start, it would not wait around for people to get out of bed, find their assigned partner, and “walk down the stairs quietly, without talking, and without pushing or running.”

Captain Serrano’s reasoning, when she got that far, made somewhat more sense. She had not really thought about the things that could go wrong, barring late meals or illness in a crew member. The vulnerability of a small yacht wandering through interstellar space hadn’t occurred to her; everyone she knew traveled in space, and the rare disappearances and accidents were no more frightening than accidents groundside. Sometimes trains and aircraft and limousines crashed; sometimes yachts disappeared. For a moment she almost felt it, the fragility of the ship, the immensity of the universe, but she pushed that away. It was like thinking about the fragility of her skull and the size of a horse and the fence it was approaching. . . . If you thought about it, you’d sit in a padded cocoon forever, and that was ridiculous.

Still . . . perhaps some emergency drills might be a good idea. Not this many, and certainly not without adequate warning (what if she were in the swimming pool?) but some. She called Bates.

“Yes, madam. Captain Serrano has already spoken to me about this matter—she considers it important to your welfare. She would like to help me give your staff instruction, although that would take time—”

“Before these emergency drills?”

“Yes, madam.”

“I suppose . . . it’s something that should have been done before, though none of the others complained.”

“Captain Serrano seems very competent, madam.” Which meant that Bates approved. Damn. She had better agree, so it could be her idea, because when Bates approved of something, it happened, owner or no owner. She had wished more than once that he was her captain. He had a talent for command.

“Very well, then. You and the captain see to it, but if she gives you too much trouble, Bates, feel free to let me know.”

“I don’t think she will, madam. She’s not like the others.” Whatever that meant. Cecelia didn’t ask. She asked how the young people were doing, with no real interest, and Bates reported that they had appeared to enjoy breakfast, and were now viewing old entertainment cubes in the lounge. Cecelia felt an unreasonable irritation that they were happy. They were her guests; they ought to be concerned about her. She went into her garden to play with the miniature equids. . . . They would always come for sugar.

Ronnie watched Raffaele covertly, and wondered if she had heard about the opera singer. He hadn’t really noticed before, thinking of her as George’s girl, but she had a lovely line of jaw and throat when she lifted her head. Slender without weakness, she seemed hardly aware of her grace. . . . She was chuckling over something Buttons had said. Bubbles, beside him, waved a hand in front of his face.

“Wake up, sweet—you’re staring right through Raffa, and it could make me jealous.” Bubbles exuded sensuality of a very studied sort, from silver nails to tumbled blonde curls, from the deep-plunging neckline of her clinging jersey to the cutouts on the long black tights. Next to the opera singer, he had always thought of Bubbles as the sexiest girl he knew, but at the moment he was finding her tiresome. She had been singing along with the lyrics from the cube, and the opera singer had spoiled him. Now he could hear the breathiness and the slight errors of pitch.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was wondering what we’re going to do all that time at your father’s. Surely not fox hunting.”

“It’s not that bad,” Buttons said, looking up. “I rather like it, sometimes. If we jiggle the weather-sats, so it’s not as cold and wet—”

“Father will find out,” Bubbles said. “He likes authenticity.”

“I don’t see how you can have authenticity when the foxes aren’t even foxes,” Sarah put in. “Didn’t I read somewhere that they’re actually reverse-gengineered from cat genes?” Ronnie doubted her interest in bioengineering; she and Buttons had signed the second-level prenuptials, and this was her first official visit to his family. She would be trying to make points.

“A chimaera,” Buttons said, settling into the lecturing tone that made him less than popular in the regiment. Stuffy, in fact, because he couldn’t just answer a question: he had to explain all the juice out of it. “Nobody bothered to save Old-Earth red fox genes, so what Dad’s people did was go from descriptions, and use what seemed to work. Luckily Hagworth had already done jackals from dogs, and two of the fox species that got publicity. . . . The real problem was getting the color and the bushy tail with a white tip. Our neo-foxes are part kit fox, part jackal, a bit of cat, and raccoon, for the tail.”

“I didn’t know anyone had saved raccoon genes; I thought they were too common.”

“Only to give an outcross for the red panda,” Buttons said. Ronnie would not have expected him to know, but after all his father was an enthusiast on many forms of hunting and preservation. Buttons went on to discuss the genetic possibilities at length. Ronnie let his mind drift . . . to the opera singer, in whose bed he had learned about things that before had been only rumors . . . to the prince, whose jealousy he had been glad to arouse . . . to that night in the mess when he had boasted . . . somehow it didn’t seem quite as clever now as it had then. Perhaps Aunt Cecelia was right, and he had been a cad. No. The prince should have been a better sport.

He reached up and stroked Bubbles’s arm, wondering if anything would come of it. He could not think of anything to say, though, and after a few seconds, she withdrew the arm and stretched herself on the couch across from him. The same couch where she had been so unfortunately sick. . . . He wondered if she remembered. She looked healthy enough now, though her expression of mild sulkiness fit his mood as well as hers.

“I suppose we should get into shape,” George said. “Your aunt has that handy little riding-thing. An hour a day, and none of us would have to worry about saddle sores.”

“Her simulator?” Ronnie asked. “Do what you like, George, but I have no intention of bouncing around on a mechanical horse. It’s bad enough to contemplate bouncing around on a real one. Do you know she had the gall to order me riding attire?”

“Well, you’ll need it.” Buttons had settled into a pose the male equivalent of Bubbles’s sprawl; together they took up both of the couches. Ronnie wondered why he’d thought exile would be more fun with these people than alone. They were looking at him as if he were responsible for entertaining them, when none of it was his fault. Buttons went on. “First of all, my father’s head instructor will check you out, before you’re assigned your mounts—”

“And he’s a terror,” Bubbles said. “So far as I know, there’s not a military unit in the known universe that still uses horses, but he acts like a cartoon drill instructor. You’ll spend at least two hours trotting before he decides what to give you.”

“I’d like to see him test Aunt Cecelia,” Ronnie said.

“Not her,” Buttons said, grinning. “She’s an old guest, and he’s more likely to ask her to test the horses. ‘Pick what you like, milady, not that there’s anything here worth your time,’ is what he’ll tell her.”

“Is she really that good?”

Buttons stared at him, eyes wide. “You haven’t ever seen her ride?”

“No. The family doesn’t think much of her hobby.” His father had said that, often enough, and he’d heard his mother talking to his other aunts about “poor dear Cecelia, what a shame she wasted her life on horses.”

“It was hardly a hobby, Ron. . . . The woman won the All-Union individual cross-country championship five times, and ranked in the top five for fifteen years.” Buttons turned to Bubbles. “Remember when we were just learning to ride, and old Abel was yelling at us, and she stopped him?”

“She got me over my first jump,” Bubbles said, sitting upright now. She looked less like a fluffhead than usual. Could she possibly enjoy hunting? Ronnie had a brief unpleasant view of himself married to a fox-hunting wife. No. It would not do. “I’d forgotten . . . that was that old gray pony, the one that seemed to like dumping us. She didn’t yell at me, just talked me through it.”

“Yes, and then she got on one of the good horses and showed us what we were supposed to be doing. Abel fairly purred.”

Ronnie felt a knot in his head tightening. It wasn’t fair that they knew more about his aunt than he did. That they admired his aunt for things he hadn’t known about, and that his family hadn’t respected. Things were not going the way he’d planned. He’d expected his friends to rally around him, support him, do what he wanted . . . and here they were swapping stories of his old maiden aunt.

“Does everyone hunt together?” he asked Buttons. If he couldn’t avoid the topic of horses, at least he could get the conversation away from his aunt. “How many horses does your father have, anyway?”

“To answer your first question, no. There are three hunts out of the main house, where we’ll be. Each has its own territory. We’ll each be assigned to one of them, depending on riding ability. As for horses . . . many thousands, I suppose, altogether. The main house stables will hold five hundred, though we won’t use that many. Hunters, hacks, young horses in training.” Ronnie tried to imagine five hundred horses in the same place, and failed. The Academy had had ten, for the training of its young officers, and he had no idea what a “hack” was. He was not about to ask.

“We don’t hunt every day,” Bubbles put in. “Some people do, but most ride out on alternate days. Particularly in the lower hunts, where they’re not as good and get really stiff.”

“I’ll get really stiff,” Raffa and Sarah said together, like a chorus.

“Isn’t there anything else but hunting?” Ronnie asked, hoping he didn’t sound as desperate as he felt.

“There are other kinds of hunting,” Buttons said. “Not all of it’s on horseback. You can shoot grouse and pheasant, that sort of thing. It’s the wrong season for fishing in the nearby streams. Indoors—well, the things my father assumes were normal indoor sports of the time: billiards, cards, amateur theatricals.”

“Oh . . . dear.” Worse then he’d imagined. Worse than his mother had imagined, he was sure. Traveling with a wealthy aunt on her private yacht had seemed like a good idea when his mother mentioned it. Perhaps he’d have been better off going to some dull assignment in an out-of—the-way base. At least it wouldn’t have had fox hunting, and his work might have kept him busy part of the time.

“There are other places on the planet,” Bubbles said. “But we can’t possibly get away more than once. We should save that for when you’re really desperate. Poor Ronnie.”

He wanted to snarl at her. Poor Ronnie, indeed. He needed real sympathy, not the mocking look Bubbles had given him. He needed them to understand that it wasn’t his fault—none of it. “I’m not desperate,” he said firmly. “For all you know, I may take to hunting as easily as any other sport. I may be leaping over fences and dashing along at a run—”

“Gallop,” put in Bubbles.

“Whatever. I mean, I’m naturally athletic, perfectly fit: how hard can it be?” He tried to say it with complete confidence; Bubbles, Buttons, and Raffaele burst into laughter. Raffaele? What did she know about riding? He tried to hide his irritation, and forced himself to laugh with them.

“Better try your aunt’s simulator,” Buttons said, still chuckling. “You may find a few muscles that aren’t quite perfectly fit.” Then he sobered. “You should do well, Ronnie, really. You’re right: you are a natural athlete; it’s quite possible that after a few lessons you’ll be up to riding in the field. But it’s not like anything else.”

Ronnie forced himself to smile, and wondered if he could hide in his stateroom all day and night, watching entertainment cubes, until they got to Buttons’s home planet. Probably not. He was going to have to think of something they could do . . . something fun, something to reestablish his leadership of the group. Something mischievous, perhaps. Play a harmless practical joke on the old lady, or the crew.

“You may be right,” he said, without meaning it. “I’ll see what you look like on the simulator first, and then . . . we’ll see.”

“We ought to see about some swimming, I think,” Raffaele said. “C’mon, girls. Let’s go play in the water.” Before he quite knew how it happened, the girls had vanished, and his two bosom friends were watching him, bright-eyed.

“Come on,” said George. “Tell us more about that opera singer. Is it true they have specially developed muscles?”