Eleven
“Auer. Lovely to see you. Radiant as ever. And Fuleow; this gorgeous creature still putting up with you?”
“So far, Veppers. Got your eye on her yourself, have you?”
“Never taken it off, you know that, Fuleow.” Veppers clapped the other man’s stout shoulder and winked at his slender wife.
“Oh, your poor nose!” Auer said, pushing back locks of soot-black hair to display glittering earrings.
“Poor? Nonsense; never richer.” Veppers flicked one finger against the new cover over his nose, which was still slowly growing back underneath. “This is pure gold!” He smiled, turned away. “Sapultride! Good to see you; glad you could make it.”
“What’s it look like, under there?” Sapultride asked, nodding at Veppers’ nose. He pulled down his sunglasses, revealing small green eyes above his own thin, expensively sculpted nose. “I was studying medicine before I was lassoed back into the family firm,” he said. “I could take a look. Wouldn’t be shocked.”
“My dear Sapultride, it looks
“Jasken,” Sapultride’s wife Jeussere said to the man standing behind Veppers, one arm in a cast and a sling, “did you
“I regret to say so, ma’am,” Jasken said, bowing gently to the slim, exquisitely dressed and manicured woman. He pushed his slung arm out a little. “Mr. Veppers more than had his revenge though. What a blow he —!”
“His revenge?” Jeussere said, a tiny frown spoiling her otherwise quite perfect face. “The story I heard was that he struck first.”
“He did, ma’am,” Jasken said, aware that Veppers was watching him. “It was only his shock at having hit me so sharply, and his natural urge to stop, putting up his sword and inquiring to make sure that he had not injured me too severely, that allowed me the opportunity to deliver my own blow, the one that — more by luck than skill — so assaulted Mr. Veppers’ nose.”
Jeussere smiled conspiratorially. “You are too modest, Jasken.”
“Not so, ma’am.”
“What, you weren’t wearing masks?” Sapultride asked.
Veppers snorted. “Masks are for weaklings, aren’t they, Jasken?”
“Perhaps, sir. Or for those of us who have such a lack of looks that we can’t afford to lose even a little of them. Unlike your good self.”
Veppers smiled.
“My, Veppers,” Jeussere said slyly, “do you have all your servants flatter you so?”
“Absolutely not. I work to prevent it,” Veppers told her. “But the truth will out.”
Jeussere laughed delicately. “You’re lucky he didn’t run you through, Jasken,” she told him, her eyes wide. She slipped her arm through her husband’s. “Sappy here beat Joiler at some sport at school and he near throttled him, didn’t he, dear?”
“Ha! He tried,” Sapultride said, running a finger round his collar.
“Nonsense,” Veppers said, turning to somebody else. “Raunt! You ancient withered old rogue! That committee still hasn’t jailed you yet? Who’ve you had to bribe?”
“Nobody that you haven’t already got to, Veppers.”
“And Hilfe; still an accessory?”
“More of a bauble, Joiler.” The woman, much younger than her husband, though still in expensively well- preserved middle-age, coolly regarded his nose. “Well now, dear me. Think you’ll still be able to sniff out trouble?”
“Better than ever,” he told her.
“I’m sure. Anyway, good to see you back in the land of the sociable.” She held one hand out to be kissed. “Can’t have you hiding away; what shall we all do for fun?”
“You tell him. He spends too much time away on business trips,” Jeussere contributed, leaning in.
“My only aim is to keep your good selves entertained,” Veppers told the two women. “Ah, Peschl, we’ll have a word later, yes?”
“Certainly, Joiler.”
Jasken put one finger to an ear bud. “The boats are ready, sir.”
“They are? Good.” He looked round the other people in the slim barge. He clapped his hands, stopping most of the other conversations in the open vessel. “Let’s enjoy the fun, shall we?”
He raised his hands above his head, clapped them again, loudly. “Listen!” he hollered, attracting the attention of people in the other two barges behind. “Your attention please! Place your bets, choose your favourites! Our game begins!”
There was some cheering. He took his place in the seat — raised just a little higher than the rest — in the bows of the slim craft.
Astil, Veppers’ butler, saw to his master’s needs while other servants moved down the central aisles of the barges, dispensing drinks. Above the seated VIPs, sun canopies rippled in the breeze. In the distance, over tree- dotted pastureland, the serried neatness of the kitchen orchards and the formal gardens of the estate, the turrets and ornamental battlements of the mansion house of Espersium were visible.
Some birds flew up from the network of small lakes, ponds and channels beneath.
The great torus-shaped mansion of Espersium sat near the centre of the estate of the same name. Espersium was easily the largest private estate in the world. Had it been a country its land area would have ranked it as the fifty-fourth largest out of the sixty-five states that still had some administrative significance in the unified world that was Sichult.
It was the centre of, and central to, the Veppers family fortune in more than merely symbolic ways. The original source of the family’s vast wealth had been computer and screen games, followed by increasingly immersive and convincing Virtual Reality experiences, sims, games, proactive fictions and multiply-shared adventures, as well as further games of every sort and every level of intricacy, from those given away as free samples on smart-paper food wrappers, through those playable on devices as small as watches or jewellery, all the way to those which demanded either total bodily immersion in semi-liquid processor goo or the more simple — but even more radical — soft-to-hard-wiring of biological brain to computational substrate.
The house had long been ringed with comms domes, kept just out of sight of the house itself but linking it — and the buried masses of computer substrate it sat on — via satellites and system-edge relay-stations to further distant processor cores and servers all over the hundreds of planets that made up Enablement space and even beyond, to similar — if as a rule not quite so developed — civilisations that, with surprisingly little translation and alteration, found the games of the Veprine Corporation just as enjoyable and fascinating as Sichultians themselves had.
Still zealously guarding their original code, many of those games effectively reported back, eventually — via all those intervening arrays, servers, processors and substrates — to the still potent seat of power that was Espersium. From the estate house itself whole worlds and systems could be rewarded or punished according to how assiduously the local law-enforcement agencies applied anti-piracy legislation, billions of users could be granted access to the latest upgrades, tweaks and bonus levels, and lucrative personal on-line and in-game behaviour, preference and predilection data could be either used by the Veprine Corporation itself or sold on to other interested parties, either of a governmental or commercial nature.
Word had it that this sort of micro-managed operationality was no longer quite so centrally controlled, and the house had ceased to be the place that all versions of all games came to to get their latest updates — certainly there were fewer obvious satellite domes and programming geeks about the place than in the old days — but it was still much more than just a fancy country house.
The birds disturbed from the network of waterways beneath the barges wheeled in the sky, calling plaintively.
The little convoy of barges moved along a network of aqueducts poised above the watery landscape below.
