David Brin - The Practice Effect

Actually, it was rather pleasant once he got used to it. Dvarah smelled nice. And over the past few days she had apparently become quite devoted to him. It seemed her duties included considerably more than he had taken advantage of as yet. His politeness toward her, and his reluctance to assert those privileges without considerable further thought, seemed to surprise and please her.

Dvarah was straightening his cravat as a knock came on the door.

“Come in!” Dennis called.

Arth stuck his head in. “Ready, Dennizz? Come on! We gotta get the brandy set up for the party!”

“Okay, Arth. Just a sec.”

Dvarah stepped back and smiled approvingly at her master’s elegance. Dennis gave her a wink and followed Arth out into the hall.

Along with two of the ever-present guards, there waited four burly men with a heavy cask on two rails. As the guards turned to lead the way, the bearers heaved and lifted the cask on their shoulders, following behind.

Dennis had considered inventing something to make their task easier. Then, on thinking about it, he decided to hold off for a while. The wheel was too much of an ace to play just yet.

“I got a message from th’ missus…” Arth whispered to Dennis as they walked down the elegant hallway.

Dennis walked steadily ahead, without missing a step. He asked, softly, “Are the others all right?”

Arth nodded. “Mostly. Guards caught two o’ my men... and Maggin found out what happened to Perth.” He spat the name as if it were something vile.

“Did Mishwa…” Dennis let the question hang.

“Yeah. He took care of the rat, all, right! Just before they conked him. Perth never got a chance to give away th’ exact location o’ the warehouse, so Stivyung an’ Gath were able to—”

Arth shut up as the grand doors to the ballroom swung wide before them. But Dennis got the general idea.

He was relieved his friends were all right. Perhaps in weeks, or months, he would have enough influence over Kremer to intercede for other prisoners. For now, though, he would rather not test it. Gath and Stivyung deserved a chance to make their own escape.

Dennis could only describe the party as a sort of quasi pot latch, with a dash of Louis XIV’s Sun King court thrown in.

The local elite were out in force, in a sea of elegant finery, but there was less dancing and socializing than there would be at a party on Earth. Instead, there appeared to be a whole lot of ceremonious exchanging of gifts. The rituals bemused Dennis. Here, it seemed, there was a complicated way in which status was maintained by giving things away. The more practiced the donated items were, the better.

Dennis was reminded of similar rites he had read of in preatomic New Guinea and in the Pacific Northwest. The gift-giving had little generosity to it but rather an aggressive bragging overtone heavily dependent upon status.

He saw the recipient of a particularly frilly, silky, useless-looking garment briefly blanche and stare in horror at what she had been given, before hurriedly putting on a casual expression and thanking the giver through her teeth.

Yes, it was very much like an ancient Earthly potlatch. But Dennis soon saw that the Practice Effect had twisted the ritual in strange ways.

It cost many man-hours to maintain a tool or an object at its peak of perfection, for instance. So unlike similar social arrangements on Earth, the gifts could be stockpiled in advance only at great cost to the giver. Their number was limited by the overall ability of a magnate’s servants and bondsmen to use things…and just before one of these parties the serfs must be run ragged practicing their masters’ best gifts.

Dennis moved about the grand hall, casually watching the rich people bow and make convoluted compliments to each other. They traded their gifts with elegant gestures of surprise and feigned spontaneity.

Arth had explained it to him. The receiver of gifts was caught in a bind. Covetousness was counterbalanced against caution. A rich man might desire a beautiful, ancient thing but fear the investment of man-hours it would take to maintain it. A gift received had to be displayed later, and any deterioration would bring terrible shame.

It was like watching an elegant pavane. Several more times Dennis saw unmistakable chagrin on the face of a recipient who had made a false move, and received too much.

At the station being manned by Arth, the brandy cask had just been opened. Servants were circulating small goblets of amber-colored fluid. A chain of gasps and coughing exclamations rippled across the crowd, just behind the waiters.

Dennis looked for Linnora. Maybe here, at the party, he would have a chance to explain to her that he was not from a land of monsters. He had to convince her that by playing a waiting game he could become so necessary to Kremer that one L’Toff prisoner would be meaningless to him in comparison. Dennis was certain he could win Linnora’s release within a few months.

But there was no sign of the Princess in the crowd. Perhaps later, he hoped.

The minor nobles and guildmasters—most of them sons and grandsons of men who had helped Kremer’s father seize power—moved about with their wives, followed by personal servants who modeled the gifts their masters had been given. It was like watching a crowd filled with sets of almost identical twins, only the sibling apparently bearing more riches always walked behind the less heavily laden, and the one wearing all the flashy junk never partook of food or drink.

Dennis had managed to beg off being assigned a “tail,” as the accompanying servants were called. It was bad enough knowing that someone, somewhere, was spending hours practicing Dennis’s formal outfits for him. He didn’t want to have to force another fellow to take on such a disgusting role, no matter how well accepted it was here.

Anyway, it helped establish Dennis as an anomaly. By now everyone knew he was a foreign wizard. The more conventions he broke, Dennis figured, the better the precedent and the less likely they’d try to hold him to other tribal stupidities.

Not stupidities, he reminded himself— adaptations ! The patterns of behavior all fit when one thought of combining feudalism with the Practice Effect. One might not like them, but the rituals did make a certain amount of brutal sense.

“Wizard!”

Dennis turned and saw that Kremer himself was motioning him over.

Nearby stood Deacon Hoss’k in his bright red robes, and a crowd of local dignitaries. Dennis approached as he was bid and gave Kremer a calculatedly respectful nod.

“So this is the magician who has shown us how to practice wine into… brandy.” A richly dressed magnate held up his goblet in admiration. “Tell me, Wizard, since you seem to have found a way to practice consumable items, will you now teach us to turn cornmeal into rickel steak?”

The fellow laughed loudly, accompanied by several of those around him. He had obviously already had a fair sampling of Dennis’s first product.

Baron Kremer smiled. “Wizard, let me introduce you to Kappun Thsee, magnate of the stonechoppers’ guild, and Zuslik’s selectman for the Assembly of our Lord, King Hymiel.”

Dennis bowed just a little. “Honored.”

Thsee nodded slightly. He tossed back the brandy in his glass and motioned to a servant for more.

“You did not answer my question, Wizard.”

Dennis didn’t know what to say. These people had a fixed way of looking at things, and any explanation he gave would involve new assumptions the Coylian aristocrats were ill prepared to hear.

Anyway, at that moment he saw Princess Linnora enter the room, accompanied by a servant.

The crowd near the entrance parted for her. When she nodded and spoke to someone, the response was almost always an exaggerated, nervous smile. In her wake people frankly stared. She stood out brilliantly in the sea of flushed, anxious faces, cool and reserved as her mountain people were reputed to be.