Then, as a guilty afterthought, she ducked back into the main room of the spreighformery to draw her knife and scabbard from her belt, relieved that her father had not seen her leave it this late. She had used the weapon once or twice today in the forest, and then eaten with it at the Toomeys’. The knife would never rust, and its scabbard was of a waterproof material that could be washed clean with soap and water. But Arran had taught his daughter to keep the blade virtually sterile, a sensible precaution that could someday save her life.
She set her knife aside upon the ledge of a large, glass-bricked window which could not be seen through, but which provided the shower with plentiful light, unwrapped a freshly manufactured bar of soap she had just taken from the spreighformery, and began lathering her tightly muscled and smooth young body. She used the soap upon her hair, as well (her mother would have yelped to see that) this being one reason she preferred to wear it short. Bretta was not entirely without the virtues that make a mother proud, however, being as fastidious about the condition of her nails—which she also wore short—as she was about her knife. She had never shown up at table with dirt beneath them.
In this, she followed Arran’s example.
Thinking of her father brought her back to her earlier line of thought. Children, she had observed (still being one herself in many more respects than she was enthusiastic about acknowledging) are invariably more attentive to the after-bedtime whispering among adults than adults ever seem to remember they are. (Bretta had promised herself long ago that she would remember this when the time came, and maintain her privacy better than her parents had theirs.) The girl already suspected that, whatever her father’s secret torment happened to be, it must have something to do with a terrible naval accident of some kind.
As far as Bretta was aware, her father had always avoided talking about whatever it was that troubled him, with anyone at all—even with her mother. This, in spite of the complete openness he had otherwise invariably shown his family and close friends with regard to so many other aspects of his unique life—it appeared all but impossible to embarrass the man or to shame him—including, ironically, most of his other boyhood experiences in the Hanoverian War.
On very little evidence, and rather too much speculation, Bretta had long ago calculated that “it” must be something that had occurred precisely upon the heels of Henry Martyn’s final, triumphant, and celebrated clash in his long, bitter struggle against the Monopolity of Hanover and its evil accomplices. Whatever “it” was, she had observed, it appeared to have robbed her father of any lasting satisfaction that he might otherwise have taken in his wonderful—and wonderfully historic—victory, or in much of anything else, for that matter.
Having washed and rinsed her hair, she noticed in a nearby mirror that her freckled, upturned nose and the equally freckled upper surfaces of her shoulders were turning pinkish and beginning to peel slightly. A genuine sunburn was relatively rare upon damp and densely wooded Skye, but there had apparently been less cover at the top of that hill than she had counted upon. No matter, the damage was slight, and her mother would have something to put on it. Her vest had protected the rest of her, although she was starting to develop a tanned “V” where her cleavage . . . well, would someday appear, she fondly hoped.
From where it lay beside her knife upon the redbrick windowsill, Bretta picked up an enormous yellow bathing sponge, the spreighformer programme for which she had written herself, as a schoolgirl exercise. Such a capability was virtually unique at present, even within the Monopolity itself (she was somewhat smugly aware), and even among its dominant male population. This particular civilization had enjoyed much better days, her father had often told her, and it would enjoy better yet if young people could be persuaded to relearn the skills which had once maintained it and made it great. For that reason, and in that hope, he had doubled the size of the Holdings’ library, always seeking ancient books, and those that had been translated from alien languages.
She bent to lather her long, smooth legs.
With a grim persistence that others often had good reason to regret, the girl’s thoughts returned stubbornly to the path they had wandered from only momentarily.
It was in the Holdings’ huge library that she had first received some inkling of her father’s secret shame. There, she had overheard a visiting Phoebus Krumm speak reminiscently to her mother about some four hundred Jendyne naval cadets who had been press-ganged aboard alien starships which had somehow later proven lethal to them. This was confusing, not only because the two spoke in the lowest tones they possibly could, but because the Jendyne Empery-Cirot, in Bretta’s understanding, had counted itself among Arran’s enemies at the Battle of Skye. So who gave a spreighformed damn what had happened to four hundred of their cadets?
She had been about eight at the time, as she remembered, and had sneaked down to the library after bedtime for something to read beneath her bedcovers, employing a peculiar sort of hand torch that her father had just given to her. He had informed her that it had been his as a boy, so she had doubly cherished it, and still counted it among her greatest treasures. What had made it truly wonderful was that, rather than shedding any light of its own, within reach of its strange influence, it had caused something washed into the bedclothes to glow.
But first she must make good her escape with her literary booty, and she had been cut off by the unexpected entry of Phoebus and Loreanna. As Bretta huddled under the enormous polished hard-wood desk that had belonged to his father, Arran—it was one of only a few instances in which she had seen him genuinely outraged—had accidentally walked in upon the conversation between his best friend and his wife, interrupting them angrily, with bitter words to the effect that they—presumably the four hundred Jendyne cadets—had given up what he had called their “unlived lives,” against their wills, merely that he, a useless parasitical aristocrat, might retain the title Drector-Hereditary of Skye.
It could not have been much worse, Bretta had often reflected later with an understanding bestowed upon her by the passage of another several years, if her father had stumbled upon the two of them making love. Arran had stamped out of the library, the guilt and shame he felt having momentarily exhausted his vocabulary, shortly followed by the other two, and by the next morning’s breakfast, it was as if the frightening and peculiar episode between them had never happened—although Bretta never heard anyone speak of Jendyne cadets again.
Just now, she resoaped her sponge, unsheathed her knife, and scrubbed its broad blade carefully—a considerable degree of briskness was called for, but one slip could easily cost her a finger—until no hint remained of its having been used this morning. With an almost equal care, she cleansed its synthetic scabbard, for she had violated a tenet of survival by sheathing the tool dirty. Later, she would dry both pieces and touch up the knife’s razor edge with a pair of smooth, white, triangular-sectioned stones she had “created” here in the spreighformery, struck at an angle to one another in a polymer base. Setting the weapon aside momentarily, she rinsed herself all over, turned off both showerheads, and stepped dripping from her bath, reaching for a nearby towel.
Just as Bretta loved and appreciated her father, the relationship between her and her mother was remarkably well-founded and loving, lacking even a hint of the primitive struggle for power (oddly enough, often symbolically manifest through a painful and bitter rivalry over control of the daughter’s hair) that sometimes rages unconsciously—or not so unconsciously—between mother and daughter. Having desired nothing so much as complete sovereignty over her own life, Bretta knew, Loreanna had granted her daughter the same sovereignty—or as much as she could bring herself to risk at any given stage of the girl’s development and still feel she was a responsible parent—as early as she could.
Not that she and her husband had ever failed to make mistakes. They had simply determined in advance to make them—against the trend of thousands of years of human history and millions of years of parentage—upon th
e side of liberty.
And yet for some reason, it had never so much as occurred to Bretta to discuss this situation of her father’s secret torment over the four hundred cadets at the Battle of Skye with Loreanna. The girl was afraid—it was one of her few real fears—to press the matter further than she had with either of them.
Nor could Bretta turn, as she had so frequently done with other childhood problems, to Phoebus Krumm. In the first place, he was not reliably present upon Skye. And in the second, she had been brought up properly, with manners, which principally meant, above all things, an absolute respect for the privacy of others which she would literally rather have died than violate. Yet her dearest wish was that her father would someday, somehow find a way to speak of his problem with her, with her mother, with almost anybody else. Her staunch belief was that by doing so, whatever pain it might cost him in the beginning, he would at last be able to set himself free from whatever it was that haunted him.
Then she herself would be free to integrate the disparate images in her mind of her father, Arran Islay, and of the wonderful and dreaded pillager, Henry Martyn. This was most important to her, for in many respects—not all of them negative, by any means—Bretta lived a rather solitary life. She truly loved both of her parents and even her younger siblings, treating them in a wholly proper manner. But even when she was surrounded by their warmth and noise, it often seemed to her as if she were alone. Those who knew her best often remarked that it was as if she were an only child. One or two rare, disapproving scolds were always quick to add “and an orphan, into the bargain.”
Bretta wrapped a towel about her head in a characteristic manner many a husband comes to believe must be programmed into the female genes. Gathering her hunting knife, scabbard, suede vest, slippers, and her kefflar trousers, she quit the washroom leaving damp toeprints on the bricks. In the main room of the spreighformery, she set her things upon the bench beside her crossbow and quiver, unwrapped the towel, and essayed a final few drying motions with it.
Outside, a flash of motion caught her eye for just a moment, but through the dirty windows it was indistinct, and she dismissed it, returning to her thoughts.
Few individuals of Bretta’s acquaintance (save for her mother and father) being as well educated, intelligent, or strong-willed as she (for all of the egalitarian goodwill in the galaxy, she could hardly discourse upon starship handling, for example, §-physics, or astrogation with the illiterate son of an ignorant shroom farmer), Bretta’s independence had always existed entirely upon its own terms. It was nothing that she had arrived at in any deliberate fashion; it was more of a condition into which she had been born. Nor, in the terms of another century, was she following some popular trend or traveling in some politically acceptable direction. Had she been familiar with the phrase involved, she would have asserted herself to be a “Bretta-ist,” rather than a feminist.
The same rare, disapproving scolds favored expressions like “selfish” and “snotty.”
Upon the other hand, from the likes of young Hugh Toomey she had learned many useful things and, understanding the quandaries of this sort that life would place her in, her parents—Arran principally—had brought her up as free of any consciousness of social class as was possible for one of her times and station. As a consequence, she was well loved—even “adored” would not have been too strong a term—by the humble people of Skye, and her love for them was fully as sincere. But as another consequence, she had always tended to amuse herself and to keep her own counsel at all times. Her parents often found it exasperating, but it was precisely the result they had been striving for.
Nowhere was any of this more evident than in Bretta’s relationships—rather, in the dearth of them—with her contemporaries. To begin with, she was possessed of certain skills—knife-fighting for one, unarmed combat for another, not to mention her prowess with crossbow and thrustible—that boys of any era would have found impossibly daunting to discover in a female. In addition, Bretta habitually displayed a basic strength of mind and character, and a seriousness of purpose, which placed her vastly beyond those of her own age. And those few local boys who were not afraid of her were afraid of her father.
Owing to this, and for a good many other reasons as well, at fifteen, Bretta remained a virgin. In itself, this was somewhat unusual upon moonringed Skye. It invariably tantalized and frustrated Hanoverian scholars—as well as those of other imperia-conglomerate—that the planet of her birth somehow managed to retain the rough-edged frontier character it had possessed over the past millennium. (Naturally, it never occurred to any of these theoreticians actually to visit the world they pontificated over.) Its forthright and unaffected inhabitants practiced much simpler, more “natural” customs (it was not acceptable, for example, for a Skyan girl to marry until she had “proved herself” by becoming pregnant) than those of their “sophisticated” erst-while rulers.
It would have amused native Skyans to hear their culture described as a “passionate” one. For the most part, they tended to think of themselves as Stoics. But it was largely true, nonetheless. By the starkest of contrasts, the Monopolity of Hanover’s was a stifling moral atmosphere of severe cruelty, repression, hypocrisy, and exploitation. Girls whose families could not find advantageous matches for them, in business or the ’Droom, frequently remained unloved and untouched all their lives. And because of such coldly contrived marital relationships, they usually remained unloved even after having been “touched.”
But upon moonringed Skye, Bretta’s virginity made her something of an old maid, adding, if she but knew of it or cared, greatly to the Islay family mystique. Being her own father’s daughter (and her mother’s daughter, too, if the truth be told) she had a highly sanguine underlying nature. Moreover, her curiosity in this connection was just as great as that of any bright, healthy adolescent.
Nevertheless the independent-minded girl was more than satisfied, at present, with her lot. Had any among her acquaintances ever had the courage to brace her about this directly, which they had not, she had long planned to say, “Any man I give myself to had damned well better be a better man than I am!”
And then she planned to add, “And at least half as good a man as my father!”
Of a sudden, the motion outside, which she had dismissed, became a shadow sliding across the window. It paused, peering through the dirty pane, trying for a moment to scrub at the accumulated dust which was on the other side of the transparency. The shadow had acquired a little color, by now, and some detail.
It was not a shadow she recognized.
Forgetting everything else and laying the towel aside, Bretta slid her knife from its scabbard just as a hand tried the knob and, finding the door still closed, began to lean upon it and push it repeatedly with his shoulder. Knowing the building and her habits, no one in the family would have done that.
Bretta stood beside the door, knife in hand, and flipped the bolt. The figure upon the other side tumbled through and fell hard upon the bricks of the floor. In an instant, Bretta was upon him, the point of her knife at his throat.
“Oh dear, I have been done unto again, have I not?” It was the Ceo’s messenger.
Bretta kept her bladetip at his jugular. “What upon moonringed Skye d’you mean?”
“Two of your thithterth,” the fellow told her, trying to see the steel that threatened his life, “the nektht eldeht, I believe, thent me to fetch you to thupper. I wondered why they theemed to be thupprething giggleth. Thethe ablutionth in the thpreighformery, they are a reliable habit of yourth, I take it?”
“They are.”
Bretta was suddenly aware that she was naked, and straddling the chest of a strange man. She felt a flush of deep embarrassment heat her skin all over.
“And so will someone else—take it, I mean—once I get hands upon them!”
PART THREE:
JENNIVERE DAIMLER-WILKINSON
YEARDAY 232,3026 A.D.
MARRE 29, 518 HANOVERIAN
&
nbsp; OCTAVUS 22, 1595 OLDSKYAN
“YES, I’LL TAKE OFF MY KEFFLAR SO FINE,
LIKEWISE MY STAYS,” ANSWERED SHE.
“BUT BEFORE THAT I DO, YOU FALSE YOUNG MAN,
YOU MUST TURN YOUR BACK ON ME.
“TURN AROUND, TURN AROUND, YOU FALSE YOUNG MAN,
TURN AROUND, TURN AROUND,” SAID SHE;
“FOR IT IS NOT MEET THAT SUCH A YOUTH
A NAKED WOMAN SHOULD SEE.”
SO ’ROUND HE TURNED, THAT FALSE YOUNG MAN,
AROUND ABOUT HE WHEELED,
AND SEIZING HIM BOLDLY IN BOTH HER ARMS,
SHE CAST HIM INTO THE FIELD.
CHAPTER XVI:
DICTATES OF FASHION
“Mother!”
Bretta was already uncomfortable in her heavy, too-feminine Hanoverian finery, having for the most part successfully avoided wearing it over the past sixty-seven days. Yet for a moment, that was almost unimportant as she breathlessly rushed to the mullioned windows of the captain’s quarters, which, slanting over the round hull of the Osprey as they did, allowed her to see outboard and aftward.
She had noticed, from an abrupt shift in the color radiating through the equally elaborate skylight overhead, that the §-field had been reduced to that minimum which would maintain the vessel’s attitude in orbit about Hanover and retain an atmosphere upon her maindeck and about her mast and spars. When she was underway, the §-field rendered her father’s starship inertialess, and therefore capable of being hurled—by unthinkably vast and powerful tachyon currents streaming through the Deep—at velocities greatly exceeding that of light.
The Osprey, like every other interstellar vessel of her time and place, was, in her general appearance, rather like a tree, planted in a bucket. The “bucket,” some eighty measures in diameter at its top and not much more than that from top to bottom, was the starship’s hull, from which sprang the “tree”—her great mast—standing more than a klomme above the maindeck covering the bucket’s mouth. The “branches” of the tree were the Osprey’s nine huge radial spars, set staggered in three levels along the mast, mizzentier, maintier, and foretier.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 14