He shrugged. "Hot and cold running service is half of what first-class travel is all about," he pointed out. "If the rich didn't surround themselves with armies of impoverished unfortunates, how would they know they were well off?"
"Yes, but that's not the point..." Back in Baron Henryk's medieval birdcage she'd at least been able to shunt the servants out of her rooms. Over here, such behavior would draw entirely the wrong kind of attention. She waved a hand in wide circles, spinning an imaginary hamster wheel. "I feel like I'm acting in a play with no script, on a stage in front of an audience I can't see. And if I step out of character-the character they want me to play-the reviewers will start snarking behind my back."
"Welcome to my world." He smiled lopsidedly. "It doesn't get any better after a decade, let me assure you."
"Yes, but-" Miriam stopped dead, a sarcastic response on the tip of her tongue, as the door at the carriage end opened and a bellboy came in, pushing a cart laden with clean towels for the airliner-toilet-sized bathroom. "You see what I mean?" she asked plaintively when he'd gone.
The train inched across the interior at a laborious sixty miles per hour, occasionally slowing as it rattled across cast-iron bridges, hauling its way up the long slope of the mountains. Three or four limes a day it wheezed to a temporary halt while oil and water hoses dropped their loads into the locomotive's bunkers, and passengers stretched their legs on the promenade platform. Once or twice a day it paused in a major station for half an hour. Often Miriam recognized the names, but as provincial capitals or historic towns, not as the grand cities they had become in this strange new world. But sometimes they were just new to her.
On the first full day of the voyage (it was hard to think of anything so protracted as a train journey) she left the train for long enough to buy a stack of newspapers and a couple of travel books from the stand at the end of the platform at Fort Kinnaird. The news was next to impenetrable without enlisting Erasmus as an interpreter, and some of the stuff she came across in the travel books made her skin crawl. Slavery was, it seemed, illegal throughout the empire largely because hereditary indentured servitude was so much more convenient; one particular account of the suppression of an uprising in South America by the Royal Nipponese Ronin Brigade left her staring out of the window in a bleak, reflective trance for almost an hour. She was not surprised by the brutality of the transplanted Japanese soldiers, raised in the samurai tradition and farmed out as mercenaries to the imperial dynasty by their daimyo; but the complacent attitude to their practices exhibited by the travel writer, a middle-aged Anglican parson's wife from Hanoveria, shocked her rigid. Crucifying serfs every twenty feet along the railway line from Manaus to Sao Paulo was simply a necessary reestablishment of the natural order, the correction of an intolerable upset by the ferocious but civilized and kindly police troops of the Brazilian Directorate. (All of whose souls were in any case bound for hell: the serfs because they were misguided papists and the samurai because they were animists and Buddhists, the author felt obliged to note.)
And then there was the
On the second day, she gave in to the inevitable. "What's this book you keep trying to get me to read?" she asked, after breakfast.
Erasmus gave her a long look. "Are you sure?" he asked. "If you're concerned about your privacy-"
"Give." She held out a hand. "You want me to read it, right?"
He looked at her for a while, then nodded and passed her a book that had been sitting on the writing desk in full view, all along. "I think you'll find it stimulating."
"Let's see." She turned to the flyleaf. "Animal husbandry?" She closed it and glared at him. "You're having me on!"
"Why don't you turn to page forty-six?" he asked mildly.
"Huh?" She swallowed acid: breakfast seemed to have disagreed with her. "But that's-"she opened it at the right page"-oh, I see." She shook her head. "What do I do if someone steals it?"
"Don't use a bookmark." He was serious. "And if someone
"Oh." She stared at the real title page, her brow furrowed:
