New Jersey. Teterboro.
Saturday, 27 September 2008.
Eppie had expected a Gulfstream, because how else would she be inspired to pay [Causality] for an obnoxiously popular song about an obscure private jet?
In her prior world, old money, American money, flew Gulfstreams the way the middle class drove Cadillacs, out of patriotism and class habit, because one didn’t lease planes to be on the wrong end of caviar conversations.
What she found on the tarmac was a plane with a third engine married to the tail like a champagne bottle, a Dassault Falcon 7X.
In hindsight, it made sense.
Henry Lancet was the heir to a French hotel fortune. Naturally, the man flew French, because in his eyes, this was patriotism, even with half his hotels in the US.
She crossed the tarmac, tipped the driver of the golf cart, placed her hands on the rail, then felt nostalgic. She had been in a 7X plenty of times before. Her company had one on lease for the C-suite, though by then, it wasn’t new, like the Lancets’ one, which couldn’t have been more than a year or so old.
Emerging from the interior was Lucia’s bodyguard, looking gruff as usual. Bennet, his name was, and he smiled at her with the same effect as Paco in a good mood.
“Hello, Miss Fontaine. You look lovely today.”
“Thank you, Bennet.” She waved back.
Bennet took her bags to the top of the stairs and informed her he would stow them.
Inside, Lucia Lancet sat in the forward seats in a cashmere wrap and a fur hat, which was Eppie’s first sign that Curon had not been joking.
She stood when Eppie entered.
Indeed, the cabin was the temperature of a florist’s fridge.
“You brought sleeves,” Lucia said approvingly, her smile a little threadbare.
Eppie wore her Loro Pianas, not that her Philosophical Zombie body was particularly affected by hot or cold. The sensation, nonetheless, held true.
“I was warned.” She smiled back.
“My father says to ask the pilot to turn it up.” Lucia sat, then folded her long legs under the wrap. “I don’t think the air con warms up much after all.”
Eppie’s first instinct was confusion. Then she looked at the walnut along the seamless panels, and then she looked at the long, off-white galley, then she realised…
“May I?” Eppie asked.
She didn’t wait for Lucia to answer because Lucia clearly hadn’t gone through the spec sheets, and from the looks of it, neither had her father or their hired attendant, whose employment wasn’t attached to the jet itself, but to the leasing company.
She walked past the smiling attendant arranging lemon slices for their sparkling water, and placed her hands on a veneered flap in the galley wall that matched the panelling so exactly that aesthetics clearly overruled practicality.
Eppie pressed it. It popped open with a happy, slow-motion yawn. Behind it glowed a little screen with three numbers on it, one for each third of the cabin, every one of them set for service mode—which was for testing if the plane could haul penguins.
She set the front two for humans.
“There,” Eppie said, returning to her seat. “Give it ten minutes.”
Lucia was staring at the flap. So was the attendant. So, from across the aisle, was Bennet.
“There’s a thermostat?”
“Three,” Eppie said. “The pilot can’t set the cabin temperature if there’s an override here in the cabin. It’s one or the other.”
“I had to wear a wrap on this aeroplane for a year,” Lucia said, pinching her brows. “A wrap, in the Louisiana summer.”
“I like your wrap.” Eppie stifled a laugh.
They were over Virginia before Lucia took the fur hat off, and over the Carolinas when she finally dropped the wrap, and Eppie saw those slender shoulders that had graced ALL the magazines. Eppie felt genuinely impressed by how much prettiness was in her orbit. Different to Valorie’s sensuality, or Zara’s vivaciousness, or Mio’s striking exoticism, Lucia’s was… like a sculptor’s ideal creation.
Sony’s pop princess was also taller, longer, more svelte, and commanding. She also looked exhausted.
Pondering the pop princess’ purpose, Eppie unconsciously decided that an armrest was a poor place to keep a drink and pressed the switch on the credenza. A table unfolded itself out of the sidewall with a seductive French sigh, like a young woman unfurling an arm.
Lucia watched the table the way the apostles had watched loaves turn to more loaves.
Twenty minutes later, Eppie excused herself to the lavatory at the back and came out wearing something lighter, more revealing, but in a way that put smiles on lips and kept the humidity at bay.
Lucia looked at the halter-neck summer dress. “That was in your suitcase.”
“Yeah?” Eppie cocked her head.
“The suitcases are in the hold,” Lucia said accusingly.
“There’s a door opposite the change room.”
“There’s a what?”
“At the back of the change room. It’s how you get to the bags.” Eppie sat down and pulled her hem down a little more modestly. “Your father’s putter is in there, by the way. I think it shifted from turbulence; looks like it’s been stuck for a while.”
Lucia Lancet put her head back against the leather and closed her eyes.
“How do you know where everything is?”
Eppie coughed. “You heard about Google…? YouTube walkthroughs? They’re very popular now.”
“I am not allowed social media.” Lucia touched a hand to her temple.
That seemed to settle it, or at least to exhaust it. The cabin warmed. Bennet dozed, or pretended to.
And Eppie, who had been wondering how to begin her interrogation, began with the last time she saw Lucia.
“I saw you at Guilliams the other week.” She smirked. “You were ten feet tall and watching over Valorie and me.”
A flush suffused the girl’s long, slender neck, and Eppie’s [Facial Landscape] read genuine embarrassment before Lucia’s professionalism packed away the shame.
“I was fourteen,” Lucia said. “The school asked Grandmother if they could. She said absolutely.”
“Val says you’re their mascot.”
“I am a lot of things.” Lucia looked troubled. Her eyes, which were a rare green with flecks of yellow, were lighter than Eppie recalled. “Euphemia. I don’t know if we’re friends, but nonetheless, may I say something you won’t like?”
“Please.”
“You make me jealous,” Lucia said suddenly, managing her tone. “It’s not that I dislike you—but Umbrella… I think you broke something, intentionally or otherwise. I have four albums, Eppie, multi-millions in sales, and… I don’t know…”
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“Normally, you would have gotten a Grammy by now.” Eppie nodded.
“Well.” Lucia’s voice grew low. “Turns out something you wrote in one night was better than a year of my work, with Sony’s best producers and track engineers.”
“Ahaha…” Eppie felt the cringe in her chest like stabbing needles. “Please don’t say that… Fred reworked everything but the chorus.”
Lucia sighed. “Just wanted to get that off my chest.”
“I am glad you did.” Eppie did her best to maintain her amicability.
Lucia looked at her for a long, green-eyed moment. Then the pop star squared her shoulders and asked another question that had been long fomenting.
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“In the Pines. Dream a Little. The Shanty. That—” She stopped herself before she said Rising Sun.
With absolute earnestness, Eppie pointed at the ceiling.
Lucia followed the finger to a reading light.
“It comes from above,” Eppie said.
“Be serious.”
“I am serious,” Eppie said drily.
She could say [System] and the implication would be the same as saying God.
“If you must know.” Eppie decided she’d spare Lucia’s sanity. “You know Newton? The discovery of gravity? Apple, wig. He wrote a letter to a man he couldn’t stand, and in it he said, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’”
“It’s a famous enough quote,” Lucia said.
“Ah…” Eppie wagged a finger. “It’s not Newton’s quote. He got it from someone else. A guy called Robert Merton wrote a whole thing about it. He traced the quote back five hundred odd years, through a string of writers, to a French schoolmaster in the 1100s. All Newton did was make it… famous.”
Lucia understood, and then she frowned. It was a beautiful frown.
“That isn’t an answer,” the pop star said.
“But you get it,” Eppie said. “Take the Bully Boy Shanty. I made it up, but I sure as hell didn’t make it up alone…”
Lucia was quiet for longer this time.
Below them, America went by in brown and green squares.
“I…” Sony’s best and brightest looked up suddenly, her expression complicated and stern. “I started piano at three. Voice at four, dance at five. I had a tutor for the hands, a tutor for the feet, a tutor for pronunciation, an opera instructor from Vienna.” She held her fingers out over the table as if she was counting callouses. “If my fingers were lazy, they were rapped. If my feet were lazy, there was a switch. I had a laminated timetable.”
“To write on?” Eppie asked.
“Mother says it’s to survive me crying on it,” Lucia suddenly laughed. “Grandmother said I was a very beautiful child. She said it would be a waste if I didn’t break into the industry early and cow my competitors. She taught me herself. Music, and song, and how a song is built. The way she taught my mother.”
“Your mother sings?” Eppie was not surprised.
“My mother sang.” Lucia sipped her water. “Nobody meets Grandmother’s expectations, Eppie. It isn’t that she is unkind. It’s that she grew up on the real thing, a long time ago, and everybody since has been a disappointment. My mother. Me most of all, because I cost the Estate a great deal of money.”
The girl then looked up.
The intent was clear.
It was Eppie’s turn.
The rules of Trauma Trading were explicit.
“I woke up in a hospital,” Eppie said, slowly, biting each word. “No house. No family. No money. It was do or die.”
Lucia waited for the rest.
There wasn’t any.
“That’s all?”
“That’s literally it,” Eppie said. Unless you want to hear how Euphemia died.
The food came.
The pretty attendant set down two plates. It was fish, reheated and dressed to look gourmet, but reheated fish was reheated fish.
They ate. Eppie did it in two bites, like a barbarian.
“I’m sorry,” Lucia said, after masticating the fish carefully.
“For the fish?” Eppie was starving.
“For June.” Lucia’s knife and fork went down side by side. “I was jealous of you. You were kind to me in the studio, and I was a bitch.”
“You slapped my hand.” Eppie shrugged. “Very lightly.”
“I struck you, and then I offered you a coffee.”
“It was damn good coffee,” Eppie said seriously. “Apology accepted; I mean it.”
Eppie looked at the breadsticks. “You gonna eat those?”
Lucia gave her the breadsticks.
Across the aisle, Bennet sat with his breadsticks uneaten and watched the two of them eat until Eppie’s eyes wandered over.
He gave her his breadsticks.
Louisiana.
Sans Souci.
The heat hugged them at the aircraft door like a wet towel.
An hour of a two-lane road later, Bennet turned the car between oaks that closed like skeletal fingers.
Beside Eppie, Lucia sat up straighter.
The car stopped to the crunch of gravel.
A tall African-American man, well-dressed despite the heat, was waiting for them. He was big, unhurried, and silver from his beard to his temples. Their bags were removed, and the two men carried the girls’ luggage while they followed.
“Miss Fontaine. Welcome to Sans Souci.” The man who Lucia introduced as Mathias Clay spoke as they walked, falling a step behind her with deliberation. “Miss Delphine sends her regrets. She keeps early hours and rests early as well. She will see you both in the morning.”
“What time in the morning?” Eppie asked.
“Early, Miss.” He gave her a glass of iced tea with enough sugar in it to stand a spoon. Eppie drank it in one go.
Clay looked to Lucia, who shrugged, then retreated.
The door shut behind them.
The cicadas were shut out.
Inside, the air was cool and smelled of cypress and lemon oil. The main doors were fourteen feet tall. The wallpaper was French and aesthetic. Everything was spotless. Everything was plantation era.
Sans Souci. It meant “without a care”.
Lucia led her down a long gallery, the kind where a wealthy old white dude would put large animal heads, like drop bears and elk and tigers. Instead, there were forty gold records hung in framed plates. She recognised some of the names, and realised, after about ten metres, why the big labels walked on glass around the Richards Estate.
At the end of the row, a forty-first place had been marked out. There was a hook, and under the hook a brass plate, and enough space for a song with a long name.
Eppie stood for a few seconds, then looked to Lucia.
The pop star didn’t have much to add.
On the landing, halfway up the stairs, there was a photograph of a slim, unsmiling woman in a church hat, black on black. Eppie noticed Lucia looking, and so looked herself. There was no detail. No name, no date, no origin.
There was also a clock. It was a tall clock in a walnut case, and it said ten to two. Her [Clockwork Pulse] told her the clock was dead.
“It’s been like that since before I was born,” Lucia said, from the stair above. “There are dozens of them around the house. Old clocks that never got repaired.”
Eppie’s [Script Analysis] handed her a reference. Satis House, it offered. Which meant “enough”. Two houses named for contentment.
What does this portend…
They shared dinner at the long table, under the punkah. Eppie knew about these. It was said in her teacher’s history books that a child would be made to stand in the corner and pull the rope without rest, so that the plantation family could eat with a cool breeze.
It swung over their heads now, back and forth, with a small electric tick, keeping time and keeping the cool, without the need for child labour.
A place was laid at the head of the table for the absent mistress.
Then Mathias began to bring the food, and Eppie forgot Dickens and forgot about Delphine.
There was gumbo, dark as a church pew, with rice. There was catfish fried in cornmeal. There were greens cooked down with a ham hock, and smothered okra, and a skillet of cornbread. There was chicken under gravy, and sweet potatoes drowned in butter, and a bread pudding that Mathias set down on the sideboard.
Eppie had three bowls of the gumbo.
Lucia had taken two spoons of gumbo without the rice.
Eppie cleared out half the plates.
Lucia ate a corner of cornbread and a piece of catfish, sans sauce.
“Where,” Lucia said from across the table, faintly, remarking on Eppie’s torso, “does it all go?”
Eppie pointed at the ceiling. It’s true. Her body… did not obey biological [Causality], because the absence of [Causality] meant she disintegrated.
“I hate you,” Lucia said, with a strange warmth. “As I hate hell, and calories…”
Eppie laughed at the borrowed Tybalt, then cut herself some more bread pudding.
“Is that wise… Miss Fontaine?” Mathias asked. It was a very rich pudding.
“Yes, please, Mr Clay.”
The man served her.
Then, from her opposite, a voice croaked out a parallel demand.
“Give me a serving too… two servings,” Lucia said, her eyes warm and glowing.
Mathias obeyed.
It had been, Eppie sensed, a long time since anybody at that table had asked for seconds.