Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn

by Smith, L. Neil

  Arran glanced up sharply, perhaps becoming aware of an error he had made. As if confirming her suspicion, he peered at the spines of the volumes she had brought.

  Phoebus simply nodded. “Nobody drops his own cabelle t’Hanover, medear. Too much traffic, an’ the prospect disturbs the creepie-peepies of Monopolitan Protection. (Of course, they’re a type would like t’have everybody’s brain confiscated, an’ it may well be that they’ve succeeded upon this planet.) Instead, we’ll heave to off this asteroid they’ve put in stationary orbit an’ called ‘the Ceo’s Eye,’ t’serve as a counterweight to the greatest lubberlift cabelle in the Known Galaxy. It’s this we’ll take down to the gloomy world below.”

  Now in the distance, she could just make out some gigantic object coming round the planet. In truth, she knew, it was the Osprey rounding Hanover, under the guidance of the pilot they had been discussing. In general, the faraway object was spherical in shape and covered with artificial structures. It must indeed have been an asteroid, and no less than several klommes in diameter.

  Even so, it took her quite some while to realize that the apparent swarm of gnatlike particles, that cloud of tiny midges she could barely discern all round it, were not thousands of men in maggot-suits, nor even steam launches, but full-sized Deep-sailing vessels of two, three, even four great tiers of starsails.

  “ ‘The Ceo’s Eye,’ ” a thoroughly awestruck Bretta Islay half whispered to herself. She was beginning to get a fresh concept of the actual size, scope, and power of the Monopolity—along with renewed appreciation of her father’s courage. Of course he would have been the first to remind his daughter that he had seen nothing of this intimidating spectacle when first he began his rebellion.

  “And the bad news?” It was true that Arran knew his old first officer well.

  Phoebus sighed. “It’s merely that, all of us having arrived here about this glorified mudball in such remarkably good order, we’ve no choice before us but t’spend a considerable amount of time upon its miserable surface. We are all to be ushered in immediately t’see the Ceo Lia, long may she wave, but then it seems other matters, unspecified details connected with her summons, require more time t’resolve. Ye realize what we’re dealin’ with, don’tcha, melad?”

  Osprey’s captain shuddered, dramatically but with complete sincerity: “Bureaucrats.”

  “Aye, an’ if I was a religionist, I’d be aprayin’ now fer our immortal souls.”

  CHAPTER XVIII:

  CIVILIZED CAPTIVITY

  “Please, Brougham, leave the small case beside the bed.”

  “Very well, Madame, as you wish.”

  The yensid butler picked up the box in question (containing a mate to the thrustible Arran had departed with that morning under his jacket sleeve) and placed it carefully upon the nightstand where Loreanna had indicated. As the alien moved about the room, helping them to unpack, Bretta observed him carefully. So little weight did each of his hundreds of short tentacles bear that they left no trace behind him in the thick nap of the bedroom carpet. She was grateful that she would not be called upon to track him across a forest floor.

  It must have all seemed very strange, both to Brougham and Loreanna. The girl could understand that much, as she watched her mother and the old family servant attend to the careful unpacking of the many trunks and bags they had lately brought down from orbit with them from the Osprey. In theory, Bretta was assisting them, but the last time she had seen any sort of nonhuman, it had been a crew of nacyl, she had been only three or four years old, and she was having to suppress a tendency to gawk. For the moment, the three of them were working in a stately bedroom suite Loreanna had chosen for herself and her husband, rooms that had belonged to her own father and mother a generation earlier.

  “And I suppose,” Loreanna sighed, anticipating prolonged and frequent absences upon her husband’s part, “you had best leave my sewing case at my side.”

  “Very good, Madame.”

  Bretta suspected that the yensid was in fact ecstatic to be of service to the Daimler-Wilkinsons once again, and, with the return of Loreanna, whom he had known and cared for, almost since her birth, was demonstrating—quite literally—an inhuman degree of restraint. No fewer than a dozen members of his peculiar species had maintained this great establishment immaculately for many years, in the complete absence of their human . . . would it be masters or employers?

  Like those of every other room in the monumental edifice they presently occupied, the ceilings in this bedroom suite were not a siemme less than six full measures high, supported by walls wainscoted to above head height in some dark and ancient hardwood not native to Hanover, and covered the remainder of the way, up to the elaborately decorative moldings where they intersected with the ceiling, with a richly textured printed fabric. Upon the walls hung family likenesses going back many generations, and scenes depicting hundreds of planets upon which the Daimler-Wilkinson family had business and political interests. Everywhere, vases and small sculptures stood upon decorative stands.

  The entire establishment was rather eerily—but at the same time rather agreeably—quiet, quieter, in any case, than Bretta (who had grown up among five noisy siblings and dozens of happy and uninhibitedly human servants) had ever known an occupied residential building could be. The whole place smelled, somehow, of generations of unlimited wealth, and of a restrained decorum in all things that it necessitated, bordering upon the superhuman. She wondered briefly and irreverently whether it was an aerosol of some sort that one could purchase.

  These, Bretta thought, had been Clive and Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson’s private chambers. For her, walking through them was like visiting the royal tombs of some ancient, long-lost civilization, and the idea of sleeping here, was unimaginable. She had discovered that she could not make herself think of the wrinkled old crone, Owld Jenn, as the lovely young bride who had shared these rooms with her husband, Loreanna’s father. She suspected that her mother was experiencing much the same difficulty, although her composure remained as it had always been, and she betrayed no outward manifestation of discomfiture. Loreanna had installed her daughter in her own old rooms which, just like everything else in the Daimler-Wilkinson town house, she had not seen for fifteen years.

  “Thank you, Brougham. And now, Robretta Islay, while we still have time to discuss it before luncheon, tell me what it is that is bothering you, young lady.”

  Another recent phenomenon to which Bretta could not accustom herself was the inconsistent manner in which, momentarily surrendering all reserve, her mother had thrown her arms about the upright, inhuman form of the ancient caretaker, exclaiming through an uncharacteristic flood of tears how happy she was to see him, then, having regained control over the outward expression of her feelings, could speak of personal matters with her daughter as if he were absent, while at the same time continuing to direct him as he assisted her to unpack.

  Bretta sighed, resigned to the fact that she did not know, precisely what was troubling her—many things, she knew that much, hopelessly intertwined—and that, even if she did, she could never possibly get all of them out at once.

  “Very well, Mother,” she replied, temporarily settling, more or less at random, upon a single item, very likely not even the most urgent or important. “Why have we not accepted the Ceo’s gracious invitation to reside with her in that great palace of hers while we stay here upon Hanover? I say, it would be ever so entertaining, for it is not at all the more or less humble executive mansion that I had been led by reading to expect. Why, Lia even has her own archery ranges, one indoors and another one outside! Why ever did Father decline?”

  Loreanna took a garment from a suitcase opened upon the bed, casually refolded it to different dimensions, and put it away in the drawer of a nearby bureau.

  “My dear, I thought that we had agreed upon this. In the first place, it would greatly disappoint Brougham and his entire staff. And in the second, as upon earlier occasions, your father senses in hi
s former mentor’s offer a not-so-subtle suggestion that he redeliver both his political and his personal sovereignty to the Monopolity. The entire conceit may simply be Lia’s idea of a joke. Sometimes I believe sincerely that it must be. But at the very least, your father sensibly desires to retain complete control over his own comings and goings, which could quite possibly become awkward were we to stay with the Ceo.”

  “ ‘Awkward’ is hardly the word for it,” Bretta agreed with a degree of bitter enthusiasm, her understanding of political nuances being sophisticated for one of her age. “But staying here is little help for it, as far as I am concerned, having been informed in no uncertain terms that, upon the capital planet, unescorted females do not venture out to explore the city upon their own!”

  Loreanna nodded, having in her own time chafed under the same restriction and understanding her daughter’s resentment very well indeed. “My darling, it pains me inordinately to watch someone I love as much as I do you writhing so uncomfortably in what amounts to a kind of civilized captivity. I recall most vividly how much like torture it felt to me when I was younger. I appreciate that it must be incalculably worse in your case, as you have been accustomed virtually all your life to the complete freedom of field and forest. And yet now, to your dismay (not unlike many another individual before you) you find that you have suddenly become a prisoner to other people’s expectations of you.”

  Bretta could say nothing to Loreanna because she was suddenly forced to bite her lower lip in order to avoid humiliating herself by bursting into tears.

  “All I can add, my dear,” her mother went on, preserving her daughter’s dignity by pretending not to have discerned her severe emotional distress, “is that this is a principal reason that we dwell upon our lovely moonringed Skye—to which we shall return as soon as we are able—instead of upon this world.”

  “But Mother—”

  Loreanna laid a nightgown she had been folding upon the coverlet and set gentle hands upon her daughter’s shoulders, pressing her forehead to Bretta’s. That it was possible only because she was wearing shoes with heels, while her daughter wore slippers without them, did not escape her. Sometime recently, she realized, not without a pang, while a mother’s attention had been directed somewhere else for the briefest of moments, her little Bretta had become a woman.

  “My dear, I am aware that you believe it unfair that these strictures do not apply to men like your father and Phoebus, busy preparing their respective ships and crews for whatever Lia may call upon them to do. I know you feel injured, still wondering at some level, why you cannot be in orbit with your father.”

  Bretta closed her eyes. “Mother, I—”

  “Although you and I will probably find ourselves with absolutely nothing productive—or even particularly interesting—to occupy our time, we have no choice except to wait, grateful that, away from Hanover, with your father in command, we will no longer be excluded from this great adventure. In the meantime, you should understand that waiting in patience—without such hope in sight as a reward—is the one art practiced to perfection by Hanoverian women.”

  “Why,” the girl stood back from her mother and grimaced in a manner known only to fifteen-year-old human females, “do I fail to be much comforted by this information?”

  Loreanna grinned back at her daughter, and shrugged. “I assure you that we shall not be entirely without activities and events to which we may look forward. Although we shall visit with her privately sometime tomorrow, a public audience with the Ceo must be fitted for us into the official schedule of the ’Droom. All interested parties are scurrying even as we speak to rearrange their personal affairs to accommodate this ‘emergency’ conference. Among ourselves, we and the Ceo must decide upon the wisest course of action, and then strive to make it appear that we arrived at it during our public meeting.”

  Bretta did not reply to this, but Loreanna understood by what the girl did with her eyebrows that there was more to her discontent than the family Islay merely having chosen to take up residence at the Daimler-Wilkinson town house, or even the one-sidedly restrictive Hanoverian customs she found being imposed upon her. Sometimes, Loreanna readily appreciated, the only way to disentangle these things from one another and sort them out, was one item at a time.

  “Very well, what is it, dear?”

  Bretta threw her mother a significant glance, indicating the old yensid servant as he easily carried a trunk that must have been five times his weight across the room toward an open closet. Bretta had been informed that he and the rest of his species had evolved upon some faraway, primitive planet possessed of many times the gravity of Hanover, and this was one of the occasions it was obvious.

  “You may speak quite freely before Brougham, my darling, as I always have done.”

  “You may, indeed,” Miss Brougham volunteered, “for I am discreet—and quite deaf.”

  Both females stood for rather a long while in astonished silence, Bretta with a grin widening upon her face, and Loreanna having dropped whatever item of clothing she was handling, simply to gape. Apparently the old servant was absolutely giddy to have his former young mistress back after all this time, and for however brief an interval, along with a younger version of her whom he appeared to like just as well. This uncharacteristically jocular observation, which Bretta always recalled afterward, was the only way he ever chose to show it.

  Bretta cast her eyes downward and scuffed a delicate, slippered toe upon the carpet. “It is just that everyone seems to expect me to be delighted at this cozy arrangement. Should I not be perfectly thrilled, after all, to be sharing accommodations with my long-lost and mysterious grandmother, not to mention a foreboding, equally mysterious half uncle whom I never knew before I had?”

  Loreanna bestowed upon her daughter a most curious look. “Apparently not.”

  The Islay family had arrived at the Daimler-Wilkinson city residence late the previous evening, following a rather prolonged and tedious voyage down the cabelle from the Ceo’s Eye in a multi-storied lubberlift which boasted private compartments, and an even more prolonged and tedious voyage from Hanover’s equator, aboard something reminiscent of their draywherry back home, except that there had been several such conveyances, all hooked together into a long chain. Their initial meeting with Owld Jenn and her son Woulf this morning at breakfast had been mercifully brief, yet long enough to leave an indelible impression.

  Making up her mind (as always) to be straightforward, Bretta cleared her throat. “In my opinion, Mother, and with all due respect to you, neither of them seems friendly to excess, nor even . . .” The girl hesitated here, until Loreanna nodded at her to go on. “Nor even particularly clean.” This was a serious failing in the fastidious young woman’s estimation, and among the worst condemnations she could level. In fact, it had taken less than an hour at the same table with the grim, crazy old woman and her barbaric son for Bretta to begin wishing fervently that her father had accepted Lia’s offer.

  “I see . . .”

  Bretta had been grateful when her newfound relatives had been chauffeured away to some unnamed establishment of Hanoverian officialdom to continue being interrogated. Owld Jenn, it seemed, knew certain things the Ceo’s government desperately wanted to know. But at present, she only knew that she knew them; she did not know what they were. It was a considerable problem. The girl was mature enough to be aware that time and increased familiarity might conceivably modify her initial opinion of the pair, but she rather doubted that they would.

  Her mother went on, “I imagine that I might pretend to be offended by what you have just told me.” Loreanna looked at her daughter. “Jennivere is my mother, after all. But you have been brought up to identify the truth unfailingly, as you see it. And as I see it, myself, I fear. I confess that I am having trouble of my own, reconciling that unpleasant and difficult old woman downstairs with the image of her I have always carried in my mind. And characteristically,” Loreanna added, “it never occurred to you to go
stay with Lia upon your own, although you would almost certainly have been welcomed by her.”

  Now it was Bretta’s turn to gape. “Mother, I could never do that to you and Father!” She giggled, or came as close to it as she ever had. “It would be—I don’t know, unseemly—disloyal, even. It would appear that I am just as much a prisoner to my own expectations, as to those of anyone else!”

  Her mother nodded, highly gratified with her daughter’s judgment. “I’m glad you appreciate the fine points, my dear, resent them though you may. Even were we mistaken with regard to Lia’s ultimate intent, which we may well be, your father is concerned with what might be made of it in the ’Droom, by friend and foe alike, did we appear to be as intimate with her as in fact we are.”

  Bretta wrinkled her nose. “You actually relish this political stuff, don’t you?”

  Loreanna smiled what Bretta thought of as her secret smile. “I’m afraid so, my dear, although I like being your mother and your father’s wife a deal better.”

  “You do?”

  “There is an ancient and extremely very romantic notion that somewhere in the universe there awaits you, whether he knows it or not, that one individual most perfectly suited to you, your ideal mate. I was fortunate to meet mine, and fortunate again to have done so when I was only a year younger than you are now. Thus at his side, I have spent somewhat more than half my life—which is appropriate because he is more than half my life—though I am but twenty-nine years of age. And in the fifteen years we have been wed, I have borne him six splendid children, beginning with you, my dear, so that I would have more of him to love.”

  Happily, it was not long before Loreanna’s promise, that they should not be entirely bereft of events to which they might look forward, began coming true.

  That very afternoon, for the first time in many years, and thanks in part to the Ceo’s encouragement (as a young woman, Lia, too, had been an unwilling captive of Hanoverian civilization) there began a series of what would prove to be many courtesy calls of varying formality paid at the Daimler-Wilkinson residence.