For the briefest of moments, Sedgeley was tempted to wonder why no Skyan girls, known throughout the Monopolity for their beauty and peasant vitality, seemed ever to be brought to him—then he chuckled to himself at the lethal absurdity of such an idea. Skyan girls were also known for their stiff-necked pride, proclivity to violence, and bitter hatred of all things Hanoverian. Oddly, no special effort was required upon his part this time to regain his self-control.
Arran Islay, the rebellious young Drector-Hereditary in question, had been rather better known a decade and a half ago as the infamous “boy captain” so beloved of admiring (if stultifyingly gullible) souls throughout the great galactic Deep: “Henry Martyn,” interstellar brigand, starship-robber, and starport-raider. Also—and perhaps more to the point in the present context—liberator of slaves, rescuer of worlds, and redistributor of governmental wealth.
For the first time in something like nine hundred years, the Monopolity had lost territory!
In the horrifying aftermath, somebody in high places had been required to take complete responsibility for the Skyan fiasco. Sedgeley Daimler-Wilkinson had been “volunteered.” Forced to resign in public disgrace, he had been banished from the Hanoverian ’Droom. His subsequent “conversion” to the Immortal School had come at the heartfelt insistence of a dear old political enemy.
Where were those girls?
Frantisek Demondion-Echeverria, former Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the ’Droom, was at present also in genteel disgrace—and for precisely the same cause. His commission had been to speak for the bizarre court of Ribauldequin XXIII, Ceo of the sinister Jendyne Empery-Cirot. Heretofore the Monopolity’s principal rival for control of everything in the universe that was known to exist, that imperium-conglomerate had for the nonce joined forces with Hanover against the dangerous precedent this upstart Drector-Hereditary represented. It would never do to let the proletariat govern themselves, in particular if they achieved that capability by force of arms. History demonstrated with a frightful clarity that, in their blind ignorance and vindictive selfishness, the rabble could never be relied upon to take seriously such broad-minded and altruistic concerns as the continued safety and comfort of their former rulers.
Thus, as a consequence of this alliance, and no small thanks due to Henry Martyn, the utter humiliation suffered by the Jendyne Empery-Cirot at the ill-starred “Battle of Skye” had been altogether quite as complete as that borne by the Monopolity of Hanover itself. And, exactly like his counterpart Sedgeley Daimler-Wilkinson, Frantisek Demondion-Echeverria had been the highest-ranking official who could be “found” to take personal responsibility for it. He, too, had resigned in disgrace. But he had also chosen to request sanctuary upon Hanover (the requisite consent having been the onliest favor a departing Executor-General had demanded of his secretly grateful sovereign) as an alternative more desirable than facing the customary thrusting-squad at home.
But these matters of state were the merest trifles. More embarrassing—at least Sedgeley had always felt that it was so—was the fact that he had afterward become known far and wide throughout both imperia-conglomerate as the uncle and former guardian to the beautiful, brave, and clever Loreanna Islay.
Orphaned daughter to Sedgeley’s late younger brother Clive and the lovely Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson, Loreanna had been taken from him in a manner both bold and cruel at the tender and impressionable age of fourteen, and ruined—from her uncle Sedgeley’s traditional Hanoverian point of view—by her captor, who else but the notorious kidnaper and rapist Henry Martyn? Of course, Henry Martyn—young Arran Islay—had himself been but fifteen years of age at the time.
Loreanna had become a prisoner and sexual plaything while in the process of being carted off (the most reluctant of starship passengers even before she had been abducted) in her uncle’s stern disfavor to the coldest, most backward planetary system—what was its blasted name, again, Baffridgestar?—that he could find for her. The “crime” for which she was being punished was among the most “un-Hanoverian” of acts imaginable: in a fit of willful temperament, the ungrateful girl had refused to wed the man her loving uncle had chosen for her!
The very thought of such behavior rankled Sedgeley, even after all these years.
Where were those girls?
CHAPTER II:
INFAMOUS VICTORY
Sedgeley Daimler-Wilkinson’s afternoon diversion was, as he had expected, more than satisfactory, and luncheon itself quite as magnificent as usual. Had it not been for the “discipline” of the Immortal School, he reflected—or to be more candid and precise, for the “miraculous” healing properties of its “waters,” which seemed capable of compensating for even the most egregious of sybaritic excesses—Sedgeley suspected that by now he would have been quite obese.
Or quite dead.
Now, as the daylight he almost never saw began to fail outside the great doors of the Immortal School’s establishment—here in what might have been called the Hanoverian suburbs, except that the municipality enveloped the entire planet of the same name—he looked forward with some enthusiasm to a weekly evening spent breathing air, playing cards, and enjoying intelligent, polite converse with a fellow Initiate of his own age and cultural sophistication. His earlier company had by no means been selected for their repartee.
There would be another sumptuous meal, a cigar (despite being saturated with oxygen, the fluorocarbon would not support combustion, since it carried away heat before anything could burn), and afterward there would be letters to write, a task that he found less onerous, somehow, without a liquid medium surrounding him. Then, content once again, back he would go to the comfort of his own apartments and the warm, quivering, eager concavities of whatever well-trained, decorative, and willing companions of the evening the Immortal School’s computer (and how well it knew his tastes!) had seen fit to assign him.
But first, before any of that was possible, there was a hated ordeal to endure. Sedgeley’s life, like those of all other Initiates of the Immortal School, was bounded by a pair of gross but necessary unpleasantnesses—by a Scylla and Charybdis, as it were—known hereabouts as the First Breath and the Last.
The First Breath—of oxygenated fluorocarbon—demanded some modicum of determination, although the first First Breath (his recollection of it remained extremely vivid, even after fifteen years) had been quite another matter altogether.
Everyone had his own way of coping with the Last Breath. Some, like his friend Frantisek, favored stout lines fastened at the ankles and a winch that wrenched one from the liquid into a high-ceilinged anteroom constructed for the purpose. Others preferred a carpeted incline upon which they lay with their heads lower than their feet; female attendants artfully distracted them from the rigor of the experience, while others massaged their lungs free of the fluorocarbon.
Neither method seemed entirely satisfactory to Sedgeley, because each necessitated rather a deal of coughing—unpleasant enough in itself—and involved an additional gamble which, for his own part, he was unwilling to undertake, that of losing the wonderful meal he had enjoyed only the hour before.
As a pleasanter alternative, he stood now. upside down, upon a wire-mesh platform—having this time donned a dressing gown with floating hem—not far beneath the rippling, mirrored surface of his foyer. From a tube, he breathed air that had been treated to prevent the hated coughing reflex, until that gas displaced every last drop of liquid from his lungs. In only a few moments, he would emerge, like an ordinary swimmer, with far greater dignity and composure than those accustomed to more heroic methods of environmental transition.
His mind, meanwhile, otherwise unoccupied by the singular but undemanding task, still focused upon his beloved but ungrateful niece who, with a degree of animation he found unseemly—and against her own obvious best interests as well as her loving uncle’s most fervent wishes—had, in the end, wed the arrogant young brigand Henry Martyn by whom she had lately been abducted and despoiled.
Their wedding had followed hard upon young May’s infamous ship-victory in the boundless Deep over the best-established military powers in the known universe, represented in the combined fleets of Hanover, the Jendyne Empery-Cirot, and a handful of minor, tributary imperia-conglomerate. The upstart Drector-Hereditary had humiliated the ’Droom further by having enlisted aliens—nonhuman beings—as his allies, among them the seporth and the nacyl, heretofore unsuspected of harboring the least spark of sapience, and commonly known everywhere for their respective body-shapes as “rollerballers” and “flatsies.”
Rather than becoming disillusioned over such unsporting conduct on the part of her erstwhile paramour—as any proper Hanoverian female should have been—Loreanna had displayed the utter cheek to express her delight and pride in Henry Martyn’s ill-won successes. From time to time—half in jest it was to be hoped, but to the unvarying chagrin of her much-abused uncle—she had even been known to affix the signature, “Loreanna Martyn,” to her correspondence.
Nor was that to be the half of it. In the fifteen years that had come and gone since Arran Islay had shattered Sedgeley’s distinguished public career, his wretched niece had borne that incontinent young cockerel some indeterminate but thoroughly barbaric and disgusting number of children—six, he thought their number was, to date—quite as if she were some sort of agricultural breeding creature, seething with animal passions, rather than the distant, refined young Monopolitan aristocrat he had thought he was bringing up.
Human memory being the wanton, guileful thing it happens to be and owing to the stubborn girl’s unsolicited but rather frequent correspondence, he was even capable, as a matter of surprising fact, of enumerating the many children of Arran and Loreanna Islay—strictly as an intellectual exercise.
The first, if he recalled aright, would be Robretta, a stormy, willful maiden of fifteen, wholly Skyan in character and attitude (again the unfortunate phrases “stiff-necked pride, proclivity to violence, and bitter hatred of all things Hanoverian” came to mind), named for Arran’s father and elder brother, deemed heroic by that wild world’s populace. Both had been foully murdered—Sedgeley was disposed to concede that much—amidst atrocities upon Skye that had led, in the end, to Arran’s stunning defeat of Hanover. In a sense, the Mays’ choice of name for their firstborn was tantamount to a declaration of war.
Then there was heartbreaking Phoebe, a sweet, demure girl of eleven, called, with considerable if unintended irony, after Henry Martyn’s best friend, first officer, and lusty companion in harm’s way, the formidable ship-robber Phoebus Krumm.
Lia, he believed, was next, a brilliant scholar and wonder-child at nine, named to perfection—and everyone’s delight—after an accomplished woman known, if for nothing else, as her father Arran’s erudite and handsome boyhood tutor.
Lorrie (Sedgeley’s favorite if truth be told) was just now a little damsel of seven, called—against the latter’s modest but flattered wishes—after Arran Islay’s beautiful and beloved wife. The thought occurred to Sedgeley that he could never fault Arran in that regard: his devotion to Loreanna was as profound and complete as any father, surrogate or otherwise, could wish to see it.
Glynna was but a child of five, although, according to letters that his sometimes exasperated niece sent him, already quite as difficult to handle as her eldest sister. She was named for Arran’s martyred mother, Glynnaughfern Briartonson Islay, a figure of increasingly legendary stature upon the moonringed planet.
Last—at least such was to be hoped—came diminutive Arran, a son for his father at long last, Loreanna had announced with pride, some three years old.
Sedgeley felt that he could never confess to Loreanna how much he always welcomed news of this astonishing litter of rebel-spawned progeny she and her husband had created with their bodies and their love. The children’s great uncle might have acted a bit differently if he could have watched them growing up. But he had been thrown off the planet without ceremony by a furious—he could never quite stretch himself to add, “much-justified”—Henry Martyn immediately after the pitched ship-battle that had set it free from Hanover. And now, although a decade and a half had passed, the once-powerful individual was still too stung and too proud—the degree to which this remained the case never failed to surprise him—to seek out his nephew-by-marriage for reconciliation.
Some understandable reasons existed for Sedgeley’s tenderly solicitous—if in her view, perpetually misguided—emotions with regard to his niece. Loreanna was the only family a poor old man (he told himself) had left in a cold and cruel galaxy. Theirs was a civilization that pivoted tightly—if with some measure of hypocrisy—upon family ties. Now, all he had remaining of her were her letters, and an autothille she had given him at their final parting.
The device depicted her as she had been at the age of fourteen, here upon the capital world, dancing appealingly upon her toes to unheard music in the empty ballroom of the family mansion. She had not returned home since. Indeed, it was altogether possible that she dare not. In some quarters, she had been denounced—more as a political strategem against her once-powerful uncle, Sedgeley suspected, than for any sensible reason—as a traitor and criminal accomplice.
Nevertheless, the Known Galaxy was at all times hungry for new word of Henry Martyn and his war bride, and ever eager to emulate them in all things trivial. She and her husband, as a case in point, were known to scorn the time-honored tradition of wearing formal masques at public functions, and their example in this regard was beginning to be followed, even upon Hanover itself. And what would the celebrated “Congress of Masques” be like without the masques? Perhaps, with any luck, he would be dead by that time, and never know.
Nonetheless it pained him more than he could adequately express to have lost this final, precious linkage with his family. More than a quarter of a century ago, during what was to have been a combined business and pleasure voyage to Brunner D-421, Loreanna’s parents, Jennivere and Clive (she herself, being but a baby at the time, had been left at home upon Hanover with her uncle and a nurse) had been captured in transit by slavers of the interstellar Deep.
It might have been much better if, like many another voyager, the two unfortunates had never been heard from again. Clive was taken to a location, some system somewhere, that the Ceo of many an imperium-conglomerate would have given half of his domain to know. There—once again like many another traveler—he was altered by his detestable captors, through dire secrets of chirurgy and chemenergy, into a short-lived Oplyte warrior-slave. He had died—after a long and terrible search for him—in his brokenhearted brother’s arms.
Like her husband, the lovely Jennivere had been presumed vilely used and mercifully dead for the better part of—but now Sedgeley’s lungs were full of air instead of liquid. He could feel the added buoyancy it gave him as a pressure upon the soles of his feet where they rested against the platform above.
He shut off the air tube he had been breathing from, locked it tidily into a wall clip beside him, “knelt,” and somersaulted up and over, onto the obverse side of the wire-mesh platform, just awash with fluorocarbon, into an upper, air-filled portion of the suite’s foyer. There, the usual irresistibly beautiful attendants awaited him with warmed towels, fresh clothing, and a bracing beverage. As they rubbed him briskly and he sipped the steaming drink—a particular favorite of his, of his own devising, concocted of asparagus, celery, and cantaloupe juices—a liveried servant woman cleared her throat discreetly.
“Yes,” he croaked, his own voice unused, as yet, to the dry air, “what is it?”
She replied in the accent that kept her and others like her in their proper station, “There be one in yon wait-chamber to see y’sair. I was t’give ye this.”
“This” was a ring he recognized at once; the way the woman had pronounced “one”—she was among a few who had stayed beyond her period of indenture to the Immortal School’s Initiates to become a servant of the house, rather than of its individual inmates—m
ade him wonder whether his visitor was even human.
The ring had belonged to his brother, Clive. Seeing it for the first time in thirty years, holding it, sent chills down his spine that had far less to do with the fact that he was still naked than with uncertainty and sheer apprehension.
“Very well,” he told her, “I suppose I’d better—”
“Sedgeley Daimler-Wilkinson!”
A harsh, high female voice grated, echoing off the tiled atrium walls. Sedgeley turned abruptly to a hall door whence this noise had issued. There, barely held back by another couple of girls, struggled a hunched and ancient human figure so repulsive that he could scarcely bring himself to look upon her. Wordlessly this time, she screeched and batted at those who restrained her.
Angry that his monkish solitude could be broken in upon in this manner, and momentarily forgetting his nakedness, Sedgeley began, “What is the meaning of—!”
“What’s the matter, yerself, Sedgeley my own,” the crone interrupted, giving his dampened genitals an appraising leer that utterly disgusted him. She was, he realized, the very childhood image of a witch. “Too busy with your thousand teenaged whores to have a moment’s chat about times past with Owld Jenn?”
CHAPTER III:
REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES
“ ‘Owld Jenn’, d’you say?”
The former ambassador lifted his glass—and a cultured eyebrow—at his friend and confessed wryly, “My dear fellow, I was unaware that ‘owl’ is a verb.”
The man’s companion grimaced at what he felt was an ill-timed witticism. Frantisek Demondion-Echeverria had been away from Hanover some little while, traveling throughout the numerous imperia-conglomerate as a sort of missionary upon behalf of his dearly beloved (and not altogether unprofitable) Immortal School.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 2