Even if, in the end, Arran decided to comply with Lia’s sudden “request,” it would be some time before he could make good his arrival upon the capital world, so many parsecs away. At this particular juncture in galactic history (he could still remember his erstwhile tutor, Mistress Lia Woodgate herself, acquainting him with these facts) the speediest method of communication known to any of the imperia-conglomerate also happened to be the speediest method known of physical transportation. This method—so romantically beloved of nearly everyone, despite its many admitted faults—was the tachyon-sailed starship.
Indeed it was this basic scientific fact—a phenomenon sometimes known as “Anderson’s Law” after the ancient philosopher who had first identified it somewhere in the nearly forgotten mists of history—which made shipborne brigandage, and everything that went with it, possible upon the face of the Deep.
Arran himself was well aware of certain alien civilizations in possession of vastly swifter methods of communication, his old allies the nacyl being a particularly unforgettable example. Had it not been for these methods, he and his old friend and first mate Phoebus Krumm would almost certainly have met a most unpleasant and untimely fate, in what they afterward referred to as their “Adventure of the Elementary Huatzin.” And yet since Anderson’s Law preserved his political independence, as well as the safety of the planet Skye, he had avoided telling anyone about them, save his own family. There were additional reasons that this was not a series of associations he wished to reevoke—although it was scarcely the fault of the nacyl (or the “flatsies,” as they were often called elsewhere) that he could no longer even bear the sight of them.
He sipped his tea and shuddered.
Beyond the arched window, his gaze and attention were momentarily caught by a spectacular flurry of a dozen or more shooting stars, diverging slightly from one another as they fell toward a surface they would likely never reach. Within scant seconds, their brief passage could be heard as a kind of faraway thunder.
In any case, and for whatever reason, technological or political, within all known human cultures, the most urgent word—even from the august Ceo of the Monopolity of Hanover—took its own sweet time reaching out as far as moonringed Skye. And, whatever advanced medium it may have been recorded in to begin with, it mustneeds be delivered as in days of old, by voice or by hand.
Upon this occasion, the delivering voice and hand belonged to an official messenger from the most powerful individual in the Known Galaxy—lately a pampered passenger aboard the swiftest Monopolitan vessel available, orbiting at present between the Skyan moonring and the planet of that name which it encircled, half a world away from Arran’s own personal starship. The advanced medium happened to be an autothille, a slender cylinder some eight siemmes in length and a third of a siemme in diameter. Technical progress within the Monopolity was slow, even in these times of exploration and initial contact, but, unlike earlier thilles requiring a separate playing mechanism, this new variety was capable of playing itself to whatever individual it was intended for.
Having finally delivered himself of the Ceo’s memorized official message, the messenger had been authorized and instructed to beg Arran—“entirely off the record,” it was to be understood—not to accept the peremptory language of her summons as anything other than the merest of formalities. An immediate outpouring of uproarious (and, Arran suspected when he gave the matter careful consideration afterward, rather intimidating) frontier laughter had prevented the poor citified fellow, once again, from finishing what he’d started out to say.
Arran sighed, taking yet another drink of tea and, quite unlike himself, wishing for a fleeting moment that it were something of a different, analgesic character. What barbaric ruffians he and all his family must have appeared to a stylish individual obviously never much beyond arm’s reach of his perfume atomizer. Outside, he watched an unusually flat-traveling meteor parallel the ground. He could even see it from the next window before it vanished over the horizon.
When he was able to speak once again, the Ceo’s nervous minion had unbent himself sufficiently to offer Arran even further assurances: somewhere along the way, the young Drector-Hereditary was grandly informed, they would be joined, provided they took a quick enough ship quickly enough, by Arran’s old friend and onetime first officer, Captain Phoebus Krumm, who also had been ordered by the Ceo to present himself at the Monopolitan ’Droom. Otherwise, Krumm might have arrived at Hanover already, by the time Arran and his traveling party got there.
“Of course that’s always assuming . . .” For the moment, Arran decided to ignore the ridiculous implication that he and his family would be expected to travel aboard the small, cramped courier ship—captained by some stranger—that this absurd fop had just arrived upon. Nor would Arran consider taking the fellow back to Hanover aboard his own ship, certainly not at such close quarters for that long a voyage. Instead, Arran went on teasing the terrified messenger: “. . . that the estimable Krumm has not already cooked and eaten his own message-deliverer first! Scarcely for nothing is he called ‘Krumm the Baker’!”
The man had briefly looked to Loreanna for reassurance, and received none.
Now, Arran chuckled at the memory, wondering what ill fate had befallen the highly touted dry sense of Hanoverian humor. (In this, he suspected, Lia had not been particularly beneficial in her influence upon her domain, for she had never displayed much of a taste for jesting.) Upon the other hand, as he appreciated all too well himself, there were limitations even to the charms of jocularity.
By now, he and Loreanna had “read” the autothille from Lia several times through.
“My dearest sister,” it had begun, as messages from Lia often had in the past, “you will wish from the beginning to share what I have to say with your husband, as it will concern him rather more than it likely does either of us.”
Well, that was a lie, Arran thought upon first hearing these words. There was nothing that did not concern the Ceo of the Monopolity of Hanover, and very close to nothing with which she was not known to concern herself, upon a personal basis, besides. Straightaway, Loreanna had recognized the chamber in which the message had been enthilled; she had briefly visited Ceo’s Leupould’s innermost sanctum, the velvet-lined chamber with all the globes—in a loving and heroic attempt to obtain clemency for that ship-robbing villain, Henry Martyn, who had kidnapped and ravished her—when Lia’s father had ruled the Monopolity.
“It would appear,” Lia’s message had continued, “that substantive and reliable information has at long last reached us, here within the Monopolity—precious information—of the nefarious Oplyte warrior-slave trade which, throughout recorded history, has by turns enriched and threatened so many of the imperia-conglomerate. And even more fantastic, my dear Loreanna, these unprecedented data have made themselves manifest here upon the capital world in the person of none other than your natural mother, Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson.”
Far away, Arran felt rather than heard the dull booming of a celestial body that actually reached the surface of the planet. In another, somewhat drier season, a similar strike might readily have started a forest fire; such fires occurred upon moonringed Skye rather more often than those initiated by lightning storms. And yet Skye’s original human inhabitants had prized such “starfalls” as sources of good metal, a commodity otherwise rare upon this world.
Arran pondered.
The once-beautiful and long-missing Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson had been believed dead for decades by everyone within the Monopolity who had ever known or loved her. Death, in fact, was much to be preferred to many another fate her grieving friends and relatives might otherwise have envisioned for her. This, in a generation past that naturally seemed quite remote to the daughter who never knew her, although no doubt it felt like yesterday to Jennivere’s contemporaries, such as her brother-in-law Sedgeley. But according to Lia—Arran had never known his former tutor to soften the blow unduly—Jennivere had returned to Hanover as a w
eird, ancient, unlovable hag. What was more, incredible as it appeared, the old woman had brought with her a grown bastard son.
“I am told he calls himself ‘Woulf.’ But this was not intended as the principal burden of this message. Upon the contrary, it is an attempt to convey to Arran, in the most personal of terms, how anxious I am to confer with him and with his colleague of old, Phoebus Krumm, face-to-face. You will appreciate, I am certain, that I welcome this opportunity to see you, too, once again, while in many ways regretting the circumstances that have made it necessary.”
In this, despite the exigencies of interstellar politics, Arran believed his former tutor, for no one knew better than himself how well and for how long she had loved the family Islay, of which she rightly and deservedly considered herself a member in good standing: not a whit less than all of them loved her.
“Arran, you and Captain Krumm will know more,” she had attested with all the appeal she could bring to bear upon the subject, “of the vile and dreaded Oplyte slave trade, than anyone else I am aware of within the Monopolity of Hanover.”
Arran laughed to himself: with this casual, innocent-sounding phrase of hers, “within the Monopolity of Hanover,” Lia was once again reasserting the imperium-conglomerate’s claim to moonringed Skye. He knew her better than to believe she misunderstood what she was saying. It was (for the most part) a humorous gambit in an innocent (for the most part) game they had played for years.
Lia’s message played through for the hundredth time and began to repeat itself for the hundred first. He twisted the knurled end of the device to silence it, then arose for a moment to peer out the window. Was that a glow he saw upon the horizon? Had that latest meteor strike started a fire, after all?
“An innocent game,” he repeated the thought to himself, aloud. Yet he, too, understood how the usages of power may affect the best of friends and the best of friendships. Someday, under different circumstances, it could all, of a sudden, cease to be a joke. This was but one of many reasons he refused any title grander than Autonomous Drector-Hereditary. Presently he would manage, somewhere within his casual reply to Lia, to reassert Skyan sovereignty on the theory that rights left unasserted are inclined to atrophy much like unused muscles.
“An innocent game.”
Moreover, it had occurred to him long ago, a duly vigorous reassertion of his rights might well preclude a future need to defend them by force. Perhaps this was all that his former teacher had in mind—although he rather doubted it. Not even his eldest brother, who had married her, more or less, had quite appreciated the subtle complexities of her intelligence in the same way Arran had come to do: she seldom had only one thing in mind. Poor Robret had been deprived of an opportunity to appreciate her fully by his untimely, wrongful death—for which more than just the guilty had been eventually compelled to pay.
Meanwhile, the Ceo was correct in at least one of several observations. Arran “the” Islay and Phoebus Krumm were, of an unquestionable certainty, capable of finding out more about the Oplyte Trade than anybody else, “by methods best known,” Lia had enunciated carefully, “to the infamous Henry Martyn.”
Arran laughed all over again, wondering what his old friend Phoebus must be thinking of at this particular moment. Better than anybody, Phoebus knew—or so Arran believed—the unglamorous, unromanticized truth about Henry Martyn. Better than anybody, Phoebus was aware—or so Arran believed—how fifteen years ago, Arran had been nothing more than a small, frightened boy without options, who had only done what he had been compelled by circumstances to do. Better than anybody, Phoebus understood—or so Arran believed—how he had merely been pushed along by historic events larger and more powerful than he was.
By now, the glow upon the faraway horizon had faded and disappeared with the rising of Eigg, a brilliant sphere of granite that was one of the system’s several uninhabited planets. It was this familiar light which Arran had taken for a distant fire. For a moment, he felt ashamed of himself, in the manner of someone who cannot recall a good friend’s name. Then he shrugged and chuckled.
That any number of well-informed individuals—including Phoebus himself—would have differed violently with the younger man’s unheroic assessment of the personalities and events of fifteen years ago was something he never allowed himself to consider. In his view (and in this, he was correct) Krumm knew too well the awful price that had been paid for Henry Martyn’s renown. That there was more to the story was another thing that Arran never contemplated. For him, it went beyond mere belief: his victims’ faces haunted his dreams every night.
The usages of power were invariable, in his own bitter experience, and invariably ran roughshod over the lives of “mere” individuals. And this was the best reason of all why Arran always refused to take up the reins of real power.
Still, the principal question concerned itself with Jennivere—rather, with the information she had brought with her. Would this recent unexpected “starfall” prove a lucky find of metal, or result in a tragic, all-consuming blaze?
CHAPTER XI:
MEMORIES OF WAR
A shadow crossed her face.
“Darling, ‘tis quite true, and you cannot deny it.”
Entirely unperturbed, as a curious three-winged predatory flyer hovered scant siemmes from her eyes—its flight-feathers spread to catch a morning thermal, its long, curved, cruel talons distinctly visible—Loreanna poured them each a second cup of breakfast stimulant, adding shrub-milk and lemon herb.
“For the task Lia requests you to undertake, your qualifications are manifestly greater than those of any other man. This is true of Phoebus, as well.”
“It would more appropriate, I fear me,” he raised his eyebrows, watching the graceful movements of his wife’s clever hands and slender wrists with the unconscious appreciation of a long and happily married man, “to call it a quest.”
The extraordinary room they occupied at present had once been a skylight window, set in a lofty and steeply pitched roof of the Holdings. Even now, Loreanna’s features, fair and flawless unless one were to quarrel over the many freckles which scattered themselves charmingly across her cheeks and upturned nose, were protected from the raptoroid’s claws, as were her large and long-lashed golden-flecked eyes, by a great sheet of the same transparent substance from which the viewing ports of starship lubberlifts are ordinarily fashioned.
“Call it whatever you desire, my dear,” Loreanna replied to her husband, observing him with a certain wifely appreciation of her own of which—like most happily married women—she was more consciously aware. “Both of you are extremely decent individuals, to that I am well able to attest personally. As your wartime deeds and subsequent actions clearly demonstrate, both of you are highly skilled and well practiced at all feats of arms and ship-handling. Both of you are combat-hardened, yet you are uncommonly kindly and remain of an adventurous turn of personality. Both of you are most intelligent and have somehow managed to remain as curious as youths about the universe all round you.”
“I thank you more than I can say, my dear.” Arran accepted his cup along with the compliment, deriving satisfaction, as he always did, that everything within it—shrub-milk, lemon herb, even to the stimulant leaves themselves—had been harvested here at the Islay family Holdings. He was by no means the farmer his eldest brother had been, nor would he ever be, yet the two had certain attributes in common, one of them being a prudent desire for self-sufficiency. “Of course you possess no personal prejudices in the matter, at all.”
Arran’s loving indulgence of one of Loreanna’s rare whimsical wishes had transformed the simple opening in the Holdings’ roof into something altogether remarkable: a room half-embedded in the broad, slate-tiled expanse, lending it the second highest point of view in the whole monumental edifice. In shape it was no more than a pair of cubes four measures in extent, fused side by side: a sunny chamber fashioned wholly out of transparent surfaces, excluding not even the floor upon which they now stood—rather
, upon which stood the elaborately embellished, whitewashed wrought-iron chairs in which they were seated at their elaborately embellished, whitewashed wrought-iron breakfast table.
Loreanna affected an expression of tolerant exasperation which he knew to be counterfeit. “If I had any personal prejudices in the matter, my dearest, t’would be to disqualify you, rather than see you triskelling off again into danger.”
“ ’Triskelling off, is it?” He weighed the turn of phrase. Despite her falsely sour expression, the tone of her voice was light and bantering. Nevertheless, having lived some fifteen years with the woman, having sired six children upon her, he knew better than to accept anything she had to say upon this topic at its immediate surface value. Loreanna meant what she had said.
Watching her lovely mouth, her moist, full lips, her even white teeth and clever tongue move, as he often did with so much interest, he remembered: it had never occurred to Loreanna—not until the first time she had climbed the elaborately embellished, whitewashed wrought-iron spiral staircase which led to this special, sunlit breakfast room of hers—that it was not the sort of environment in which to affect what she understood to be the current feminine attire within the Monopolity. She had discovered this fact, somewhat to her chagrin, when Arran had remarked—albeit in an entirely approving manner—upon the color of her undermost petticoat. Since she would not give up the novelty of her transparent floor, what she had originally intended as a formal morning chamber therefore became the location for considerably more intimate and informal meals, during which somewhat less revealing clothing was to be worn.
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