“I say, Brougham—ahoy, Brougham! Can you see me and hear me plainly, Brougham?”
“It is most gratifying to speak with you, sir.” Brougham was a trusted family servant and caretaker, a being of the peculiar yensid species. With a small staff of other non-humans, he maintained the place during his master’s long, possibly permanent, absence. “Forgive me, sir, I see you and hear you plainly.”
“Capital!” Both delighted to see one another, each betrayed it in his own way. “Now, Brougham, you are about to receive guests—houseguests, I mean—there at the, er, house. I want you to look after them as you would after me. They are to stay there for as long as they wish. Do I make myself understood?”
As the yensid had evolved in twenty times the gravity of Hanover, the important parts of their anatomy were protected by a thick clutch of tendrils upon which they walked and which was presently below the image Sedgeley spoke to. From this arose, thicker than his thumb, a wandlike extremity a measure and a half high, where the organ of sight, hearing, and other sensibilities was located. More than anything, it resembled a round-ended wooden dowel, adorned with a pair of stringy but robust arms, ending in surprisingly human-looking hands.
“How am I to know them, sir, when they arrive?”
“A polite way of asking who the devil they are. You will find it hard to credit, old stick, but they are none other than your mistress, Jennivere, Master Clive’s widow, and her son, who goes by the unlikely appellation of ‘Woulf.’ Tell me, my good fellow, how quickly can you prepare to receive them?”
“Immediately, of course, sir.” He was incapable of expression, nor was there inflection in his voice, yet he managed to convey his feelings. “And may I take the liberty of saying it will be gratifying, for however brief a time, to feel the light and warmth of human occupation in this house once again, sir?”
His master grinned although, given the character of Owld Jenn and her son, it was improbable it would ever ring again with anything resembling human laughter. “You may indeed, Brougham, and many thanks. We shall speak again soon.”
Switching the device off, he dismissed it from his mind and addressed his host. “I beg your pardon abjectly, Leo, for this unseemly disturbance of the tranquility to which we have become accustomed in recent years. Frantisek and I judged it imperative to seek the counsel of that Initiate whose wisdom, kindliness, and comradeship we hold in highest esteem. We are long used to considering matters of importance in the congenial, if silent, company of our bearlike and jovial Brother Leo, and this scarcely seems a time to alter that habit.”
Out of wisdom, kindliness, comradeship (not to mention congeniality and joviality) Brother Leo forebore to wring Sedgeley’s neck for not coming to the point.
“Together, the two of us have agreed—and with considerable reluctance, I might add—upon what seems, even to us, a desperate but necessary course. As painful as it will doubtless prove to all three of us, we must presently relinquish the comfort and solace of the Immortal School and all of its, er, facilities.”
The alarmed look upon Leo’s face was something Demondion-Echeverria would have given a great sum to have recorded. The man was strong, but there were limits.
“I regret deeply that I must agree with Sedgeley,” he told his friend. “Once again, we must strap stylish but deadly thrustibles about our arms and return to the ’Droom, to the ‘real’ world of masques and masquerades. There we must gather and utilize every morsel of political influence remaining to us. We must request—indeed, we must demand—a private audience for the former Executor-General, with the duly designated Ceo of the Monopolity of Hanover!”
Sedgeley nodded energetically. “This we must accomplish as soon as we can manage, and at whatever cost. We must act despite my crippled political reputation—”
“And, in part,” Demondion-Echeverria interrupted, “in hope of redeeming it.”
Consumed with frustration, Leo seized the wrist of the girl who had come back to clear off what served as dishes in this environment. She squeaked as he thrust a huge hand into the pocket of the abbreviated apron that was all she wore and extracted a tube of lip color. Whirling her like a toy, he laid her across his lap as if she were a child about to be spanked and used the lip color to write upon her naked back, in letters a hand’s width high, a single word:
WHY?
Sedgeley swallowed. “Because of a single, jarring item among the countless, endless hours of Owld Jenn’s rambling, vitriolic narrative.”
“Sedgeley was perspicacious enough,” Demondion-Echeverria volunteered, “to enthille everything the woman had to tell him. This single item received his fullest and undivided professional—which is to say, political—attention.”
As anger began to color his host’s face again, Sedgeley continued. “It appears the woman is intimate with the galaxy’s most guarded information. She knows many of the innermost workings of the secretive interstellar Oplyte Trade.”
Had they been in some environment other than liquid fluorocarbon, the girl, still lying across Leo’s lap, would have fallen to the floor with a thump.
CHAPTER VI:
THE BRAND OF BASTARDY
It had been her predecessor’s favorite retreat.
And now it was hers.
Here, she permitted no realtime telecommunications of any variety, very nearly no guests (not more than three or four in the past decade), no hint of butlering or valeting, and any urgent news that the other servants brought her here had damned well better be world-shattering in character. She did allow one small, striped, butter-hued predator, presently sleeping about a measure away.
The entire room, from the floor beneath her slender, sandal-shod feet to the ceiling somewhere above her head, was carpeted in a night-black velvety material which reflected no light, approximately the same amount of sound, but showed plainly where her little yellow favorite had climbed and shed upon it. Thank goodness, she thought, the animal was thoroughly housebroken, for one’s nose would have discovered a mistake upon its part—an indelible mistake, in her long, affectionate experience of pets—long before one’s eye could have done.
It was impossible even to tell what shape the chamber was: she surmised that it was cylindrical—its floor plan was certainly circular—with a low, domed ceiling and not a right angle anywhere to be seen. She had never discovered precisely how high the ceiling was nor, for that matter, even where it began: upon more than one occasion she had been tempted to appropriate a broom or ladder from the household staff in order to see if she could reach it.
All in all, the room had the oddly contradictory effect of relaxing her, while reminding her at the same time of the awesome responsibilities she had accepted—indeed, that had been all but forced upon her—a dozen or more years ago. All about a circumference of some thirty-odd measures, even where the disappearing door stood, there sprang a narrow waist-high shelf. A few siemmes above it hovered sixty globes—lit from within and the only color in the room—of some of the millions of worlds controlled by Hanover. She had programmed them to display a different assortment of planets every time she entered the room, but she knew that she could never see them all. Fifteen quintillion sapients—human and otherwise—lived upon the worlds they represented.
It was bad enough not to be able to deal with individuals, as such, she reflected for perhaps the ten thousandth time since assuming this position, but not to be able to deal with whole worlds, one at a time, seemed absolutely unbearable.
Two short, low-backed couches occupied the room’s center, left over by a predecessor more inclined than the present occupant to entertain and interview within this room, along with a more than ample recliner, where she sat at the moment.
These articles of furniture, upholstered with the same fabric as the room itself, centered upon a round transparent table over which stood another globe glowing like the others with its own internal light. The planetary surface it had unceasingly displayed, from the first day she had laid claim to this place,
was not that of the megalopolitan capital, as any stranger might have expected, but of a cloud-wrapped, blue-green, mountainous orb of small, cold oceans, vast expanses of gloomy, trackless forest, and sunlit, grassy steppes.
She glanced at the creature on a nearby couch. She’d missed not having a companion there. It was one of the few worlds where—due to an allergic reaction to the spores of fungoids the planet was famous for—they failed to prosper. The locals often kept a peculiar three-legged animal they called a “triskel.”
Primitive: it was an unruled and unruly planet upon which her life had been forever changed by turns, for better and for worse, and this, too, served her as a reminder: of love, of happiness, of despair, of outrage, of death, and of revenge. By rights she ought to have loathed the very sight of it. For one thing, it no longer permitted itself to be numbered among the millions of worlds governed by the Monopolity of Hanover. What she felt, instead, was warm affection, and a degree of yearning she believed she must never admit to anyone.
But all this reminiscing was getting her nowhere, she realized, and the appointments she had put off this morning were a burden she could feel lying heavily across her deceptively frail-looking shoulders. Beside the floating globe and a cup of hot infusion she had brought with her, the one other object upon the table was a self-playing thille she had just received, bearing the electronic signature of a famous man. She should be reviewing the historical facts pertinent to the startling information it contained, information which had driven her, at such an unusual hour, to this place of contemplation and refuge.
The animal yawned in its sleep, exposing a mouthful of tiny, needle-sharp fangs, rolled onto its back without opening its eyes, stretched until its limbs trembled with tension, then rolled back into a ball of unconscious fur.
Very well: the infamous trade in Oplyte slaves, she told herself—as if this were twenty years ago and she were addressing a classroom of bored, overly privileged, and reluctant young students—was a source of unspeakable power and untold wealth. This had been true for as long as anyone in this region of the galaxy could remember, or as long as history itself had been enthilled.
Many imperia-conglomerate—not to mention other polities too small or powerless to warrant the name—flourished throughout the length, breadth, and depth of the Explored Deep. In manners both direct and indirect, what was often melodramatically deplored in the mass media as “the Vile Commerce”—usually by commentators with personal investments in the Trade—enhanced and enriched the rulers and the ruling classes of each and every one of them. No individual, despite the most sincere and vociferous of his protests to the contrary, failed to be touched somehow—or to be tainted—by the Oplyte Trade.
However, to those participating in and profiting by it, the Trade had also been a continuous source of annoyance for the same considerable length of time.
She picked up the delicate cup and saucer, took a sip of sweet, steaming liquid, then placed them in her lap among voluminous folds of heavy velvet (these days a trifle out-of-date and usually covered with fine, yellow animal hair by this time of the morning) and settled back into her recliner. A brief digression—or, at the least, an appropriate analogy—now seemed to be in order.
Throughout the Known Deep, although such technology was presently deemed hopelessly passe, thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction had once been very familiar to a long-bygone, but not entirely forgotten era of human experience. In this respect they were not unlike the ancient chemenergic “firearms”—now largely relegated to the status of heirlooms and quaint artifacts depicted upon family coats of arms—which had been outmoded and replaced by personal thrustibles and ships’ projectibles, due less to any moral evolution among men than to the development of §-fields which had rendered thermonuclear weapons ineffective.
To a degree, Oplyte warrior slaves were the thirty-first-century equivalent of nuclear weapons: no ruler wished to use them if it meant they might be used upon him; yet no ruler would hesitate if he believed he could get away with it.
To another degree, Oplytes were comparable to a homelier, more natural scourge. Legendarily destructive swarms of insects had been described in folk tales of many worlds and figured in human mythology from the half-remembered times of the Hebrews and the Mormons. Like those overwhelming insect armies—“locusts,” she now recalled, was the traditional term—vast swarms of the dreaded, infamous, nearly mindless, and all-but-invincible warrior-slaves had been known to sweep across whole planetary systems, killing, raping, eating, and burning everything in their path. Another traditional expression came to mind: Oplytes were expected to “provide for their own requirements in the field.”
Enough of that, and in a while, the mere threat of using Oplytes against an enemy not similarly provided was often enough to cause worlds to change hands.
In the process of carrying out such incredibly inhuman atrocities upon such an incredibly inhuman scale—her little predator toyed with its prey, to be sure (just as she was wont to do, herself, at the card table) but it was kindly by comparison—Oplytes had carved out for their owners immense additions to already prodigious empires. Thus it came to pass that for centuries untold, they had played a significant part in shaping the history of the Known Deep.
Taking another sip, she discovered with surprise that her beverage had grown quite cold while she was lost in thought. This had happened before, and she was undismayed. Few individuals that she was aware of appeared capable of this degree of concentration, and she considered it almost her only advantage in the dangerous and exhausting game that was interstellar politics. Setting the cup and saucer back upon the virtually invisible table before her, she folded her hands in her lap, intellectually composed herself, and resumed her contemplation.
The principal trouble with the Oplyte Trade was that the various Ceos of the various imperia-conglomerate who benefited most from its existence, did not control its production or distribution, and could only guess at its broad outlines, knowing precious little of the details. Century after century had they wasted prying at its edges, often employing the best intelligence “assets” at hand. Most of the time those “assets” had failed to report back, let alone to return home to their masters with useful information. So it was, that even after all this trouble and expense, the Ceos still knew next to nothing of the Trade.
And yet now she had been offered this singular opportunity—ironically manifesting itself as a quaint, old-fashioned two-dimensional image apparently enthilled employing lasercom equipment at least two centuries obsolete—to learn more in one astonishing afternoon than had ever before been known about the Trade, within or without the far-flung borders of the Monopolity of Hanover.
And so it was that she momentarily turned her thoughts from the message to the messenger, to this single individual among fifteen quintillion whom she had briefly known so long ago in the service of her predecessor. Even before his recent stroke of fortune (time alone would reveal whether it was good or bad) in finding his lost sister-in-law (or in having been found by her), the former Executor-General had been considered by everyone within the ’Droom to be the imperium-conglomerate’s greatest living authority with regard to the Trade.
Although he had been visibly gratified to receive a welcoming word from her—she had immediately and personally returned his message; it had most likely cost him a lifetime of accumulated favors simply to get through to her—Sedgeley Daimler-Wilkinson had not been surprised that the young Ceo had proven interested in what he had to tell her. Her curiosity on the subject was, in fact, most fervent. Before making the grave decisions that lay before her in connection with it, she must hear more, too, of what Owld Jenn had to say.
She glanced, distracted for an instant, at a small movement above the tabletop. A thunderstorm had broken out over the north temperate zone of the planet depicted by the globe. She shivered, irrationally hoping it was not an omen of some kind, for this primitive, unimportant world—or rather certain of its more notable inhabit
ants—were also pivotal to the decisions she must make.
For his part, at the finish of their conversation, Sedgeley had assured her that he looked forward greatly to meeting his Ceo—once again. For her own, she wondered whether he had meant more by that than the words themselves had conveyed. Was it a subtle reminder, she mused, of the distance which had existed then—and which might yet still exist in his mind—between their stations?
As his hyphenated surname implied, he was an old-line aristocrat of the Monopolity. His family claimed uncluttered and unquestionable descent from those who had settled this entire section of the galaxy. One of his names was that of a transportation dynasty native to the myth-enshrouded birth world of humanity. And, according to legend, the other was that of a maker of fabulous weapons.
Her own exacting scholarship threw considerable doubt upon assertions of this sort (and, as an educated man, he must have been as aware as she of the facts).
Yet ironically, their very nature reemphasized the ancient lineage of his family and those like it which, following a practice in vogue at the time, had assumed these highly distinguished names well after their historic milieu and therefore, by her estimate, could be no younger than nine hundred standard years. After such a yawning interval, it hardly mattered whether a Lord Chrysler or a Lady Jello were actually related to those who had first borne those names or not.
Her own surname (unfortunately, it was that of her mother) betrayed a background but a single step removed from rural peasantry. Her father’s was little used, and, despite the supremely exalted position he had eventually come to occupy, was of precisely the same nature. Both had attended the same institution where she herself had been educated. It was where they had met and loved each other for a time. It was where she herself had been conceived, according to her mother, upon an evening supposedly devoted to preparing for examinations.
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