didn't like tea. She found a scone she'd wrapped in plastic and foil and hidden under the potatoes, put a bag of English Breakfast tea in a cup, and filled it with hot water.
While waiting for the tea to steep, Megan unwrapped her scone, cut it in half and toasted it lightly, got out the butter, and found an untouched jar of imported marmalade. The butter melted on the hot, crumbly scone. She could hardly wait to cover it with orange preserves-manna from heaven.
Now the tea was ready. Megan spooned in some tur- binado sugar, then went to the refrigerator for milk. There was only a single container there, which contained a tiny dribble of liquid, barely enough to change the color of the tea. Brothers!
Wellt I'm a bit more awake now, she thought, able to enjoy my annoyance to the fullest.
Megan sat at the counter, doing her best to enjoy the scone and ignore the not-quite-right taste of the tea. Then she cleaned her dishes, stacked away the soup cans, and added several items to the family shopping list. Finally she headed back to her room.
Might as well warm up the computer, she thought. See what-I missed when I conked out so early yesterday evening.
No sooner did she synch in, however, than she was confronted by a virtmail message, blinking the word urgent at her. A little concerned, she called up the holo- text.
Exciting new discoveries have been made overnight in Latvinia, she read. I hope you'll be linking in as soon as possible-
Another one of Alan's not-so-subtle attempts to get the kids to come out and play, she thought.
Megan was in the middle of erasing the text when her system announced an incoming call. At this hour? she thought, quickly moving to intercept the message before the system started waking up the household.
Alan Slaney's image appeared in the air before her. His hair was slightly mussed, and Megan could detect bags under his eyes.
'Did you get any sleep last night?' she asked.
He glanced away from the pickup-apparently at a clock. 'Oh, man, I was just working. Didn't realize what time it was-sorry for calling at such an hour. When I saw that you were reading your virtmail-'
'You sent virtmail with strings on it?' Megan interrupted. It was technically feasible to send someone a message with a subapplication tacked on so that you'd know when the mail was being read. But it wasn't considered good Net manners-more the type of thing pushy salespeople and control freaks would do.
'I just thought you ought to know as soon as possible,' Alan said apologetically. 'One of Colonel Vojak's scouts came back. Princess Gwenda has been located.'
'Where?' Megan asked, interested in spite of herself.
'She's in an old watchtower, converted into a hunting lodge,' Alan replied. 'Vojak and von Esbach are holding themselves in readiness. If you and your friend P. J. can link in, you can start making plans-'
Megan shook her head decisively. 'Not now, and not for a while,' she said. 'If I go through another day like yesterday, I'll be of no use at fencing class tonight. You've seen me like that-I don't like it.'
'It's just the planning,' Alan cajoled. 'You won't have to do anything-yet.'
'Alan-,' Megan rolled her eyes in exasperation.
'Not right now. No way am I going to roust P. J. out of bed at this hour for a planning session. Besides, I have things to do.'
She glanced over at the shopping list. Like getting a couple of quarts of milk in the house before my parents get up and then get cranky.
'Maybe later, when you've finished?' Alan pressed.
Megan sighed. 'Sure,' she finally said.
Splashing water in his face, Leif looked in the bathroom mirror and grimaced at his bleary-eyed reflection. He stuck his tongue out at the image-
Yuck! It was coated with something!
No wonder his fencing connections-all early-rising, health-conscious types-had been giving him such concerned looks as he called them this morning.
They were all up with the lark, ready to go running, or do some other torturous conditioning exercises.
Leif, on the other hand, had gotten about two hours' worth of sleep. He'd synched in to the Net early in the evening, trying to talk to some of his less reputable friends up in New York. The result had been a virtual tour of some of the city's wilder night spots. But that's what he had to do to chase down some of these party animals. They played hard, ran wild-and simply loved gossip, the weirder the better.
The stories he'd collected from both sets of sources were… interesting, to say the least. They wouldn't appear in the news databases or police records his Net agents had scoured during his initial search for information.
But one thing was sure-the tales Leif had heard painted a very different picture of Alan Slaney from what he had seen.
Leif still had to verify these reports-he had enough personal experience to know that gossip rarely shrinks in the retelling. But his fencing connections had confirmed some of the stories. Even better, some of those friends had even given him numbers for people in the Association for Historical Fencing.
He took another look in the mirror and groaned. Maybe a shower and some cold compresses would be in order before he started cold-calling complete strangers.
Running a hand through his still-damp hair and clicking his now-clean tongue against his teeth, Leif cued-up his computer and began the calling process.
The first person he got hold of had been a student in the same salle where Alan had first gotten into historical fencing. She was a petite young woman with a slight foreign accent.
'Alain?' she said, giving his name the French pronunciation. 'He was… brilliant. To watch him in the salle-he picked up every move as soon as Maitre Duchamps demonstrated it. And he listened, too. When the Maitre suggested a book, Alain went out to get it immediately.'
She shook her head, short black hair flying around her like a halo. 'Somehow, he even managed to get copies of rare fencing treatises from the seventeenth century.' She smiled self-consciously. 'He must have had lots of money.'
'I sense a major but coming up,' Leif said.
The young woman nodded. 'He was very… impatient. Among historical fencers, you know, the more advanced students are expected to take the ones with less experience under their wing. Alain-he was so sarcastic-'
She bit her lip. 'He mocked my fencing. And that was gentle, compared to what he did with some of the other, more clumsy ones. It was simply unacceptable. Finally Maitre Duchamps had to bar him from the salle.'
Another call, and Leif got a young, muscular guy who looked more like a halfback than a fencer. 'Slaney? Brilliant fencer. Knew his stuff, both academically and physically. Too bad the guy had a personality that made Atilla the Hun look like the king of mellow.'
He shook his head at some sort of memory. 'I got on his bad side-for what reason, I don't even remember. Anderson-you're the guy who won that junior championship? Yeah, saber.'
Leif nodded.
'I compete, too,' the guy said. 'And you know how it is when you're bouting with someone you don't like? You put out a little extra effort to beat them. In saber, that means beating them up.'
He ran his hands down the sides of his ribs. 'Whenever I worked out with Slaney, I would be all black and blue. He would whale away at me, and I'd try to return the favor-but he had the edge on me. We ended up going corps-a-corps all the time. It was more like wrestling than fencing.'
'What happened?' Leif wanted to know.
'Hey, I wasn't the only one getting the rough edge of Slaney's tongue-or blade,' the beefy guy said. 'In the end they canned him from the salle.'
'I heard that,' Leif said. 'Maitre Duchamps-'
'Who?' the other guy said. 'I'm talking about San- torelli's up on the West Side.'
'Oooooo-kay,' Leif replied. 'Guess I got that wrong.' * * *
Leif succeeded in catching a couple of other historical fencers before they set off for work. They also came from different salles, but they were unanimous about Alan Slaney-he was a primo S. O. B.-talented, but so nasty and overbearing that in the end the fencing masters in charge had to tell him he was no longer welcome.
