It was a cause, not to mention a way of life, that he never wearied of advocating.
Upon his return to the capital planet, he had been somewhat late hearing about the unprecedented intrusion upon his old friend’s fervently cherished privacy by this unpleasant and obnoxious . . . person. It was with Demondion-Echeverria that Sedgeley had planned to dine, smoke, and converse. Now they were doing all three, to be sure, but Sedgeley found that he took but little comfort from the fact. He wrinkled his nose at the cigar smoldering noxiously between his fingers and smashed it out with a grimly felt relish in a platinum tray.
Their immediate surroundings were, of course, palatial. Beneath their slipper-shod feet, the polished stone blocks with which the floor had been finished—each as ebon and nonreflective as the Deep itself, and a full measure square—had been obtained from a giant sunless “rogue” planet, found entirely by accident hurtling through the night-black Deep, with several times the surface gravity of Hanover. Their quarrying, carried out under the most unimaginably arduous of physical circumstances—utter darkness, unremitting cold, lack of any breathable atmosphere, and bone-crushing weight—had cost approximately one human life per block. Upon the other hand, the lives of the convicts who had done the quarrying had already been forfeit, so the loss was minimal.
Sedgeley tossed back the last of his snifter, shaking his head at what the world—his world, anyway—was coming to. “If only we could have her bathed!”
Exotic plants imported from a myriad of different Monopolitan planets—some hung suspended overhead, others stood in large, elaborately decorated vases—softened the stark effect of the hard black stone underfoot, as did the great floor-to-ceiling windows, constructed out of many crystalline panes beveled at their edges, that overlooked a vast three-hundred-year-old lawn that seemed to stretch away from the building into eternity, under the mellow outdoor radiance of hanging fabric lamps. (Ironically, Hanover, mistress of a million worlds, possessed no moon of her own of which to boast.) Lights of the great worldwide city twinkled in the distance. Inside, the prism-angled edges of the windowpanes glittered, along with tableware and place settings, in the flickering light of holographic candles set in sconces, and upon the table itself.
“Softly, my dear fellow,” Demondion-Echeverria admonished, endeavoring not to appear overly amused. For three hours, along with a late-arriving male companion, the old woman had been held in a long-unused chamber reserved for visitors, so that this pair of Initiates, fortified by a splendid meal, a good cigar, and the chance to confer with one another and prepare themselves, might finally confront her together. “When we consecrated ourselves to the Immortal School, we renounced the popular practice of recreational torture. I rather fear me that forced bathing may fall within that somewhat broadly written prohibition.”
A tiny, multicolored birdlike reptile twittered in a cage swinging among the plants.
“Very well.” Sedgeley frowned and slowly shook his head. He glanced up at a narrow-waisted, bare-breasted servitrix standing by. The sight of her smooth, unblemished skin, scrupulously cleansed, subtly oiled, and faintly scented, failed to arouse him in the slightest. Through the pocket of his silken dressing gown, he fingered the object—his brother’s ring—that had been proffered by his uninvited visitor as a credential. Feeling that he had lost control of his quiet, well-planned life, he groaned to himself before he was aware of it. “Let her in, but for the Ceo’s sake, bring me another drink, first!”
The girl complied with Sedgeley’s wishes—it was, after all, what she had been brought to the Immortal School to do—setting the replenished glass upon the table before him, then turning to swing the chamber’s double doors aside.
With the old woman this time, there had arrived a muscular, dire-looking young man, rather darkly complected, with wild, shoulder blade-length hair. He appeared to be in his early twenties. Attired, like his elderly companion, in what amounted to rags, he affected at his waist a lengthy and massive flat black slab of machined steel, sheathed in the thick hide of some animal. In this place and time of overly developed technology, such an artifact tended to go unnoticed, the effete subjects of Hanover’s automated culture having long since forgotten that primitive objects like it can be effectively employed as weapons.
By Demondion-Echeverria’s wary command, a matched pair of husky girls—there being no male servants in the house—clothed in the same manner as the table servant, stood guard at either side of the young man as he leaned, arms folded, legs crossed casually, against the inner, unwindowed wall. By special dispensation rarely allowed the lower classes upon the surface of this planet, each of the girls wore a kinergic thrustible strapped upon her right forearm, spanning the distance from her elbow to the first knuckles upon the back of her hand. The slightest pressure upon the end of a curved yoke lying across her palm would generate a column of recoilless kinetic energy that could be collimated from a broad push capable of knocking a man down and shattering his sternum, to a narrow beam which could pierce through human flesh from chest to spine.
The young man eyed his attractive keepers with an unperturbed and quirky half smile.
From somewhere within her voluminous, evil-smelling rags, the old crone extracted a singular device. To Sedgeley, it resembled a miniature three-legged stool, its “seat” approximately the size of her palm. Attempting—unsuccessfully—to make it appear that it pulled both her hands along with it in elaborate, swooping circles, she pushed the object all about the smooth marble top of the dining table until her outstretched fingers pointed directly at Sedgeley.
“Your Sun ascendeth in the Trumpeter, my fine gentleman,” she warned him, trying to make her shrill, whiny voice sound ominous, “and you are the Hang-ed Man!”
For her sake as much as for his own, Sedgeley felt upon his face a flush of embarrassment over the dim-witted awkwardness of the old woman’s pitiable act, not to mention the belligerently stated claims that she had asserted upon first entering his presence, to possess mysterious, even alien abilities as a clairvoyant.
For all of her claimed prescience, she had appeared genuinely surprised—and considerably dismayed—at what he himself was inclined to view as his reduced circumstances. Her ignorance of events of significance that had occurred over the past dozen or more years within the Monopolitan ’Droom and off the capital planet of Hanover had likewise appeared genuine. For example, she still believed that the old Ceo Leupould was in power. Sedgeley had been informed that she had even spent several days waiting to see him outside the Daimler-Wilkinson family residence in the city, before finally seeking him here.
He and his colleague Frantisek had observed immediately that she employed nothing more than an impoverished handful of simple, amateurish parlor tricks and a jargon transparently derived from astrology, the Tarot, and the Ouija board.
She glared at Demondion-Echeverria. “And you, sir, are entering upon a cusp!”
Salon chicanery of this sort had enjoyed a vogue within the Monopolity for uncounted generations. Exactly like garrison troops, married females of the Hanoverian aristocracy were given to all of the devices—and vices—of boredom. Some upper-class spouses entertained one clandestine affair after another. Others became addicted to various chemical or electronic intoxicants available to the Monopolity’s rich and powerful. Those among the elevated but essentially powerless ranks who chose neither self-destructive course often hit instead upon self-deceptive mysticism to fill their otherwise unproductive lives.
As if to bear out his judgment, her caustic, lower-class accent sounded falsely to his well-trained ear. Underneath it, somewhere, he fancied that he could detect the cultivated, broader, and more crisply enunciated tones of the upper class.
Sedgeley had always found the whole thing rather pathetic and disgusting. Yet to credit the malodorous creature who imposed herself upon his hospitality, it was the way in which she had eked out her existence for some considerable number of years. She earned her clothing, such as it was, her
food, lodging—and in the more recent past, her transportation across the great Deep—by telling fortunes, she had informed him, at the same time claiming to possess paranormal faculties which protected her, she maintained, from every manner of harm.
“And perhaps they have,” Sedgeley’s friend observed offhandedly, as if the old woman were not present. While the two friends conversed, she muttered what may have been intended as incantations. Across the mom, her companion watched, unmoving. “In some forlorn corner of the universe,” continued Demondion-Echeverria, “where populations remain backward enough to believe in them.”
Sedgeley nodded agreement.
“That being so,” Owld Jenn looked up at them slyly, “have him explain how I come to know of the serried scar upon the roof of his mouth, which he received in a boyhood misadventure—a long fall from a slerrab tree, I think me!”
Sedgeley started violently before he could control himself. Despite the wretched childishness of her act, the ridiculous old crone had clearly made an impression—even upon the unsurprisable Demondion-Echeverria—and she knew it.
“Or ask him after his great aunt Eulalie Husqvarna-Puch,” she tittered, “who abandoned her husband and children to run off with a Frenkelian portrait programmer!”
Sedgeley leaned forward, convulsed with amazement and shame. “This is monstrous! Infamous! How in the name of—!” The family scandal to which she referred had been successfully suppressed for more than seven decades. How many other embarrassing personal details and long-buried secrets would the woman prove able to reveal, concerning himself, his long-departed relatives, and their forebears? And if to Sedgeley and his friend, then to what others, besides?
“None but a genuine seer,” she asserted with the most evil leer he had ever seen, defying him to prove her wrong, “could know these things, could they?”
“Or perhaps another Daimler-Wilkinson,” Demondion-Echeverria blurted, uncharacteristically, before he realized what he had implied. He winced, and Sedgeley could almost see the man observing with chagrin that his much-vaunted diplomatic capabilities had suffered from their long disuse. It was, however, clear from Owld Jenn’s reaction that his friend had hit upon a truth of some kind, for she was quite as taken aback as he had been by revelations she had made.
A stark and terrifying realization began slowly to dawn upon Sedgeley. He clutched at the ring, with its family crest, lying in his pocket. This wizened, ugly, babbling figure before him could be none other than his once-beautiful and clever sister-in-law, now half-mad, apparently, and aged beyond her years.
“You two!” Sedgeley commanded, suddenly himself again. He indicated the pair of females flanking the young man Owld Jenn had brought with her. “Turn and point your weapons at this fellow; see that he moves not more than a siemme.”
To the table servant: “Summon the medical attendant; tell her to bring what she needs to confirm identity.” The woman nodded and vanished from the room.
He turned to Demondion-Echeverria. “If I may prevail upon you, as well, would you be so kind as to dust off the house laser-corn, establish a connection with the Monopolitan Bureau of Identity, and then bring me the portable terminal?”
“Consider it accomplished, my dear fellow.”
The old woman had been gawking at him, openmouthed.
“You are my sister-in-law, are you not?” He took the ring from his pocket and held it up in the synthetic candlelight. “Are you not Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson?”
Although she jumped a trifle at the name and regarded the ring with a wild, rolling eye, she remained silent, as if she, too, were stunned by this information.
“You are confusing her!”
The voice was male and had come to him from across the room. Sedgeley looked up just in time to see the two guardswomen tense and press the lenses of their thrustibles against the young man’s ribs. “She is, indeed, the very woman you accuse her of being. She came here, at an unspeakable cost, to tell you that. But she is very old, injured, and nebulous of mind, and you are not helping.”
“Injured?” Sedgeley repeated, sensing that he was losing control once again.
“By life—and upon your life, sir, have a care, for she is also my mother!”
The old woman lifted her head, tilting her ravaged face in an attitude of proud defiance. “This is Woulf,” she told her stricken brother-in-law, “my son.”
Woulf grinned at Sedgeley. “Which I believe makes me your nephew, Uncle.”
CHAPTER IV:
DAMAGED GOODS
“It is as I thought.”
The Immortal School’s medician collected her equipment and prepared to leave the room. She had drawn blood from the old woman, analyzed it in a small ulsic device meant for the purpose, and sent the resulting information to the Monopolitan office in question, which had identified the donor after only a moment’s wait. Sedgeley watched the attendant take her leave without truly seeing her. Instead, he addressed his newly found sister-in-law and her son.
“There are a great many questions to ask and to have answered, upon both our parts, my dear sister-in-law, but I believe it would be appropriate first to enthille a message to your daughter. As Frantisek, here, can well attest, having only this afternoon descended from where he left her standing in orbit about Hanover, the Immortal School maintains the swiftest of courier sloops to carry it for us. But even so, I fear me that it will be some several weeks before—”
“Daughter?” Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson blinked and cast about herself in momentary confusion. For the briefest of instants, blood analysis or not, Sedgeley entertained a residual doubt with regard to her identity. Then: “I have a—Lor . . . Loreanna! I have a daughter Loreanna! Woulf, you have a sister—”
The young man lifted a hand, answering her patiently. “Yes, Mother, I know.” Apparently it was not the first time that something like this had happened.
Owld Jenn shook her head, as if attempting to make herself understood to one who could not quite hear or comprehend her. “She is only a baby, you know—”
“She is twenty-nine years old, I’m afraid,” Sedgeley told her, wondering whether it was the right thing to do, “and lives far away from Hanover, upon Skye. She is the mother of six children of her own, believe it as you will, which makes you—”
“Six . . . children . . . d’you say?” Jennivere’s puckered mouth dropped open to reveal uneven rows of gray, broken teeth. Sedgeley had to struggle not to avert his eyes rudely. Such a number of children had been even more outrageous in her own day than it remained in this. “Is . . . tell me, she is wedded?”
Before Sedgeley answered, his companion spoke, “Would it were otherwise, madam, for she has wed none other than that most notorious ship-robber Henry Martyn—”
“Ship-robber!” the woman shrieked. “My baby’s wed a ship-robber!” She screamed and rolled sideways from her chair, hitting the stone floor with a dead sound that gave Sedgeley a brief, sympathetic pain. Upon the floor, she babbled, throwing herself this way and that, striking a table leg, and then a chair.
“She must not be allowed to swallow her tongue!” Woulf shouted, leaping to her side, kneeling to restrain her shoulders. Demondion-Echeverria stood well out of the way. Sedgeley, kneeling upon her other side, seized a utensil from the table, but Woulf waved him away. “She will recover, now the moment’s over.”
Nevertheless, Sedgeley, a pair of servants, and even Demondion-Echeverria were required, in the end, to lend the woman’s sinister companion their aid before she had been calmed and returned to as great a semblance of rationality as she had demonstrated heretofore. Together they lifted her onto a chair and ministered to her, with an olfactory irritant and ardent spirits, until she proved willing and able to continue the conversation which her collapse had interrupted.
“My niece was but an infant,” Sedgeley informed Woulf as they waited for Owld Jenn to recompose herself, “when Jennivere and her husband—my late brother Clive—were taken as they sailed from one fro
ntier stellar system to another. Your mother must have dwelt upon her daughter often over the many ensuing years. Little wonder, then, having of a sudden learned that the girl has grown up and wed a Deep-rover of the sort who ruined all their lives, that she . . .”
“I can still hear perfectly well, you know, Sedgeley,” his sister-in-law abruptly told him in an accent elevated several social levels higher than that which she had employed upon her arrival at the Immortal School. “There is scarcely any need at all to speak of me in the third person, as if I were a servant or an article of furniture.” She sniffed haughtily. “And before it occurs to you to ask,” she declared with an open expression of defiance, her chin lifted and her shoulders suddenly straight, “I am not altogether certain by whom I have borne this son you see before you, my own little Woulf. Nor would any of the candidates for the honor likely be prepared to acknowledge it.”
For a moment, she seemed to be something more than just a haggard crone. For a moment, despite all that she had been through, she appeared undefeated by life. For a moment, she was the aristocratic Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson once again, sprung of the same admirable stock—if only by marriage—that had once, in the Ceo’s name, held and ruled the ’Droom of the Monopolity of Hanover.
“My dear Jennivere, I had not thought to ask—”
“Perhaps not, my dear brother-in-law, but sooner or later, you would have done.” With these words she seemed to shrink in upon herself again and fell silent.
“You are undoubtedly correct,” he answered her frankly, but in a gentle tone, “undoubtedly correct.” And yet it was the indomitable spirit that he had perceived flaring up within the woman for however brief a time—more than anything else in particular that she had managed to convey to him thus far—which had at last convinced Sedgeley to lend her his full sympathy and credence.
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