ELSPETH WAS kept on work detail in the arboretum for several days. Her routine was mind-numbingly simple. She now lived the life of a peasant girl in the middle ages, she decided. Penniless and cold, she rose to harvest the crops at hard labor during the day. And at night, she slept on a bed that might as well have been a palette — though she did have the Order to keep her mind occupied.
“Hey,” James Card called out to her one night.
“Yeah I’m here,” Elspeth said over the racket of the night films. She came to the bars.
“Oh look. It lives!”
“Stop it. You don’t know how hard the work is in the arboretum. Ridiculous.”
“I guess not. They have me in the metal shop now. Pretty easy compared to everywhere else. I’m making barrels. I think.”
“Barrels?”
“Yeah. Big cylinder things. We’re welding them from metal sheets. Could be for wine.”
She laughed. “I doubt it.” Again, she felt the urge to tell him about the Order and even about the wine she’d recently had … but declined to do so. She’d given her word to David.
“Hey. Well anyway I wanted to tell you two things. Ready for the first?”
“Sure. Shoot.”
“Okay … one sec.” He vanished from his bars, and she heard a big band jazz song start up in his cell — she could barely hear it over the din of the movies, but hear it she could. He returned, his face glowing. “Eh? How’s that?”
“What is that?”
“That’s my phonograph! The one I asked for! They actually gave me one!”
Elspeth stared stunned. “They did?”
“Uh-huh!”
“Incredible. I knew you were a good salesman but …”
“Never underestimate my salesmanship, not even in here! I’m always an entrepreneur, no matter where I am!”
She nodded, impressed. “Okay. What’s the second thing?”
“Ah yes, that. Have you heard about this guy ‘the Vizier’?”
“Nope.”
“Well. This Vizier is supposedly Egyptian — and super ill. And getting worse, from the stories. Nobody can even tell what his disease is.”
“So?”
“So you’re a doctor, Doctor Lune. And this guy is not in a normal cell from what everyone says. He’s basically living in a Hilton penthouse suite.”
“And again I say … so?”
“So there’s a reason why. He knows something we don’t. Sure, I can get a phonograph. But I doubt even I could get as set up as this guy. He’s too sick to work, but something tells me that even if he were completely healthy, he’d still be on permanent vacation in here anyway.”
“I’m getting tired of saying ‘so’.”
“So you should get the guards to let you see him. Because you’re a doctor. Get him talking. Find out what he knows.”
“HEY,” Elspeth said to a guard at the end of her shift. “This Vizier guy I keep hearing about. Maybe I can help him. I’m a Doctor.”
The guard ignored her completely.
The next day, she tried the same thing. And the next after that. Each time, the guard was as reactive as a piece of steel.
