Gravity aboard the Osprey, or a useful facsimile of it, was maintained through a deliberate inefficiency programmed into the §-fields that rendered her inertialess. As long as she had headway, the deck remained solid beneath her crewbeings’ feet. Phoebus nodded. Despite the fact that Bretta was nowhere to be found aboard the ship, the same thought had occurred to him, as well.
“Either that,” Arran’s wife argued reluctantly, “or . . . or Bretta would have had to suffer her . . . her misstep high amidst the vessel’s many spars and complicated rigging. But I . . . but why would she, when it was not her watch aloft?”
It tore at Phoebus’s heart watching Loreanna, whom he remembered as a girl her daughter’s age, handling her loss with a clear mind and no emotional display. Even Hanoverians had characteristics, he had discovered, that were admirable. Had it been his own daughter, he would be howling at the Galactic Core. Given the way he felt about the girl and her parents, it might come to that.
“To be sure,” Loreanna added, “one may for the most part wander freely about the decks during the ship’s nightwatch. That sort of exercise is to be encouraged for many good reasons. But I gather that it is usually not done to go aloft without a specific purpose in mind and authorization from a superior officer.”
“You are quite correct, my dear,” Arran told her. “Even were it so, I cannot conceive of Bretta having lost her footing or her grip in so familiar an environment. Who knows better than I that she is as safe and comfortable aboard a starship as she is in her own bedroom at the Holdings upon moonringed Skye?”
For a long moment, everyone was silent. Then Arran began again. “For that matter, think about what Phoebus has just clearly demonstrated: that §-field annihilation, while instantaneous, is in-variably accompanied by a loud bang and a bright light which could not have been missed by the watch-upon-deck.”
Amongst the company, at that point, in the absence of a solution to the mystery of Bretta’s disappearance, a somewhat hysterical argument commenced over what was wisest to do next. Some took the tragedy as an excuse to return to Hanover. Others saw in it a reason to push on. Krumm’s mention of the canisters belowdecks inspired Demondion-Echeverria to suggest—and then to demand—that they search the nearby Deep in case that was what had happened. Arran pointed out that falling into the top of a garbage canister was an even more athletic—and unlikely—feat than falling over the quarterdeck taffrail.
Krumm agreed with considerable reluctance, adding that they were already a lightyear from where, according to the records of the watch, three disposal canisters had been ejected automatically in the middle of the night. There was simply too much uncertainty about the position, too much volume of the Deep involved, to go back and look. They could search forever, cubic measure by cubic measure, and never find anything. He was not certain the ambassador understood.
“A boy has never wept, or dashed a thousand krim!”
“What?”
Loudest of all was Jennivere—Owld Jenn—that individual among them (as is often so in human affairs, especially politics) with the least sensible contribution to make to their discussion. And yet whenever anybody told her to remain quiet—as her own daughter happened to do upon this occasion—her bastard son Woulf threatened them with a murderous glare, a slap toward the knife upon his hip, and something rather closely resembling an animal growl.
At last the situation had become intolerable.
“Does no one see what is happening, here?” Without warning, the former Ceo astonished everyone by breaking his long-held monkish vow of silence with a mighty roar. “D’you genuinely fail to understand that They have agents, everywhere?”
Surprisingly, Woulf answered first. “What are you talking about, you old—I will be buggered! The old fart spoke! But what did you mean by what you said?”
Leupould regarded the young urban barbarian, with his tattered clothes and primitive weapon, with a visible degree of distaste. “I meant, you poor, ridiculous creature, that, whatever befell the beautiful, and by all accounts exceptionally adroit, daughter of our esteemed captain and his wife . . .” Here, he ground to a halt, paused as if to gather strength, and then continued with an unwontedly stubborn set to his bearded mouth, “it was by no means any accident!”
Arran, desperate and disoriented by the loss of his eldest and favorite child—although he had refrained so far from displaying it—discovered suddenly that he agreed with Leupould. It seemed to snap him into some form of clarity. He strode to the man and seized what served upon a monk’s robe as lapels.
“Brother Leo, let me warn you that I will stop nothing short of physical violence in order to have you explain precisely who and what you meant by ‘They.’ ”
“As you will, Captain Islay—or perhaps in this mood you would prefer ‘Captain Martyn.’ And although I confess freely now that I have been all but paralyzed with fear for more than a decade by what I am about to tell you, and worn down by bearing the burden of it all alone, it is not you, my boy, who inspires such fear. Do whatever you will, I have been ready to die for years.
“But I warn you in turn, boy, after hearing what I have to say, that you will never be able to look upon the universe in quite the same way, ever again.”
CHAPTER XXIV:
BENEATH CONTEMPT
Arran pushed Brother Leo away from himself. “Say on, and be done with it!”
“And be damned to you, as well? Is that what you were going to say, my boy?”
Brother Leo lowered his bulk onto a box he had been sitting upon earlier. “I am well aware that everyone—each of those round us at the moment, for example—has always been curious about the reason I relegated control of the Monopolity of Hanover to my daughter, Lia Woodgate. I will tell all of you that reason now, and whatever you ever imagined it to be, you are in for a surprise.”
He had everyone’s attention now. “The crucial event,” he informed them, despite the visibly manifest emotional distress it was beginning to cost him to do so, “immediately followed your brilliant and stunning military victory, Captain Martyn, over the forces of . . . of the status quo. Brilliant. And stunning.”
Arran shrugged.
“I implore you, sir,” the former Ceo told him. “No false modesty upon your part. We were—I was—humiliated. And yet it was but nothing to what came afterward. It is altogether beyond my capability to convey to you the . . . the degree of personal shame with which I confess that, in the privacy and in the presumed safety of my own innermost quarters, a most unprecedented phenomenon occurred. I, the invincible Leupould IX, Ceo of the Monopolity of Hanover, was—in effect—issued a peremptory summons to appear before the rulers of an interstellar empire neither I nor anybody else had known existed heretofore.”
Phoebus wondered where all of this was leading, but refrained from saying so.
Leupould continued. “I am neither willing nor able to discuss with you the mechanical aspects of this summons. However, when I ceased to be within the privacy and safety of my innermost quarters, and suddenly found myself somewhere else, it became clear to me that this unheard-of political entity, this empire, commanded new and powerful technologies we had not even as yet imagined.”
The big man’s voice had begun to waver, and his knees could be seen to shake beneath the cover of his robe. What had also become clear was that to the core of his being, even after fifteen years, Leupould was still frightened and humiliated.
“I, Leupould Wheeler,” he sobbed, “ninth Chief Executive Officer to bear that ancient name and distinguished title for the Monopolity of Hanover, had been summarily—and literally—called upon the carpet like a negligent pupil before his headmaster, to account for my failure to stop Henry Martyn’s Rebellion!”
This should prove interesting, Woulf thought—although his mind still lay upon events more ancient than Leo could imagine—to hear the events of the last time he had been revived, from a point of view directly opposite his own. And yet, despite himself, he found that he was t
hinking about Earth’s moon.
In the sunlight it had been too hot for human existence, and it was too cold in the shade. Micrometeorites and deadly radiation swept the unprotected surface constantly. Without fresh supplies of air or water, it was anybody’s guess whether the colony could be rendered self-sufficient before they all died.
But before any of that could even begin to happen, even before it became clear that the dust was never going to settle, back on Earth, another issue had to be settled first. People had begun looking around for somebody to blame.
Some scientists, technicians, and workers claimed that the Earth had died because of the existence of so many different governments. Not only were they always fighting with one another, none of them had had any real control over the dangerously unpredictable individual. On Earth, by the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century, most people had been free to think, to say, or to do anything they wanted. That, obviously, was what had made the destruction of humanity’s homeworld possible. If mankind were to survive upon the moon, then a single, absolutely powerful dictatorship needed to be established, immediately.
Others argued that, upon the contrary, it was the existence of government itself which had destroyed the Earth. Governments had always stolen and diverted resources from the individuals who generated them. They had always converted the products of peaceful effort into the assets of war. And now the same sick system was about to be imposed upon the surviving Lunar remnant of humanity.
The latter group, although somewhat smaller in number (as might have been expected) than the former, were (as might also have been expected) better armed and faster upon the draw. They had herded all the members of the former group into the proto-type starship they had been working upon together, sealed the controls, and aimed the ship at a stellar cluster upon the edge of the galaxy.
It was a source of eternal—cosmic—embarrassment to Woulf that mere amateurs had gotten the drop on him. For once in his life he had expressed a political opinion. As a consequence, he had been one of the authoritarian evictees.
He knew well the humble origins of the scattered cultures loftily styling themselves “imperia-conglomerate.” They had learned nothing, but remained true to their nature. Aboard the experimental ship, they had broken into one viciously quarrelling splinter group after another. The preprogrammed ship couldn’t stop, but could put lifeboats off along the way. One by one, each group had been kicked out by the others. By turns, each of them lucky enough to find habitable planets had established settlements throughout the Cluster. Suffering many an epochal rise and fall in the process, they had eventually evolved into the various polities now familiar to dwellers within the Known Void.
Bretta.
As a boy, Arran had lost his mother, his father, two brothers, his best friend, a beloved teacher (for a time), but he was unprepared to accept this death.
A part of him wished simply to give up and die along with his daughter Bretta—Arran had long since stopped feeling guilty over the fact that she was his favorite; how could she not be, being everything she was?—but he reminded himself now that he was the father of four other daughters and a son whom he deeply and genuinely loved, for all that he loved Bretta best, and a husband to Loreanna, who was the only thing in the entire galaxy he loved more.
It was upon their account, he told himself, characteristically allowing himself no credit for a spirit that everyone else understood perfectly well to be unconquerable, that he presently compelled himself to continue listening to the blubbering of this flesh-mountain who had once ruled so much of the Known Deep. It would appear that, having spoken not a single word for many years, Leupould now intended to talk them all to death, before he actually told them anything.
Arran had been paying only half attention, with his other eye upon the ship. In his own comparative youth, the former Ceo had been telling them, “plain old Professor Leo Wheeler” had been a competent and widely respected academic.
Arran squirmed where he sat, anxious to be anywhere but stuck here, with this whimpering ape’s self-pity. Everybody present appeared willing to accept the former ruler’s claim—Phoebus, Tula, and Tillie Krumm, Uncle Sedgeley, Demondion-Echeverria, Woulf, even his crazy old mother—if Leupould would only assume that they all knew he was an unhappy fellow and get along with his story.
“. . . an esteemed, well-published lecturer in the fields of history and galactography,” Leupould went on. “I affected scholarly and esoteric masques, the likenesses of jeffhummel, walterbloch, vonmises, walterwilliams. Heady days, I tell you—acclaim from my superiors and eager-minded students—headier nights, if you take my meaning. Owing to my academic past, as Ceo of the Monopolity, I relished my role as the imperium-conglomerate’s governor—my background, you see, having made me appreciative of the magnitude of my domain.”
Everybody present was willing to accept him, that was, save the captain’s lady. As a girl, Arran knew proudly, for the sake of an erstwhile captor—the freebooter Henry Martyn—she had come to love; Loreanna had confronted this pompous clod upon his own territory at the height of his power. Now, nearly prostrate with grieving over their missing daughter, she surprised even the husband who knew her by lifting her eyes, smoldering with rage, to do it again.
“Tell me, what is the point of all this?” she demanded of the onetime Ceo of the Monopolity, crushing a handkerchief in her fingers to keep from shaking her fist at him. “Where in the name of the—where is it getting us?”
There were nods and murmurs of agreement from every one of Brother Leo’s impatient listeners, including the three Krumms and even—in their urbane and subdued manner—from his friends Sedgeley and Demondion-Echeverria. Only Arran’s wife’s mother sat quietly, still steeping in the first officer’s reproof.
“My ascent to the high seat at the center of the Hanoverian ’Droom,” as if he had not heard Loreanna, Leupould went on, “was an unforgettable—and indescribably pleasurable—experience. I was assuming control over the largest, most powerful civilization in history. I controlled the destinies of something on the order of fifteen quintillion human (and a rather surprising number of alien) lives. And from that unspeakably glorious day, until my abdication, the only masque I ever condescended to wear was a golden likeness of my own face.”
Loreanna began to object again, but Leupould bowed his shaggy head and raised both hands, palms outward. “Madame, I beseech you, permit me to tell this in my own way. It is the only time I ever have, and the only time I ever shall.”
Loreanna blinked with astonishment, causing Arran to smile a bit despite the grimness of recent events. To his wife, who had miraculously remained a young girl in her heart (it was his hope that she would forever) “Madame” had always been someone else—someone much older—who was probably no fun at all.
She nodded at Leupould.
He took a heartfelt breath. “I have meditated on it a great deal over the years. No, the fact is I have dwelt upon it endlessly. Although I was subjected to many other abuses at the time—underlining the point, as it were, that they could do anything their whim dictated—I have come to feel that the worst of the outrages inflicted upon me by this heretofore unknown agency was that they revealed to me a trifle more of reality than I wished to know.”
It was Sedgeley’s turn to blink, in openmouthed shock. “They tortured you?”
He smiled. “They accomplished worse than that, old friend. Has it never occurred to you to catalogue the mortal indignities that may be visited upon a person without damaging the flesh? I shall carry such a catalogue within me to the end of my days. And I have no choice but to peruse its pages every night.”
He shrugged. “That was but a trifle, compared to making me see a simple truth. Perhaps that is all tyranny consists of, compelling us to understand that which we do not wish to understand. My friends, the ‘Known Deep’ proves not to be well-known after all. I was, perforce, made all too well aware of the actual position the ‘Droom—and the ’mighty, dreaded
, and fearsome’ Monopolity it mistakenly believes it controls—occupy in the scheme of things.”
Seen in different light, Arran had possessed that knowledge almost from the day of his birth. The ’Droom and the Monopolity, like every authority that mankind’s natural weakness had ever given breath, were of no importance whatever—not to genuine human beings with genuine lives of their own to live.
That had been the point of what Leupould called Henry Martyn’s Rebellion, and the proof, had anyone demanded it, was the brutal manner in which Leupould had coldly used his own daughter, first as a spy, then to take his place upon a throne he had rejected, whereas Arran would have given anything he possessed—the entire Monopolity of Hanover, for that matter—simply to have his daughter back.
Yet there remained some, perhaps even a majority of every sapient race, who knew no better and had need to ask. In this case it was Demondion-Echeverria who spoke. “And what, precisely, would that actual position be, Leo?”
Leupould looked up at his old colleague and fellow Initiate, the former ambassador. His expression, and his tone, were astonishingly gentle. “Why, a most embarrassing one, my dear Frantisek, precisely the same as that of the Jendyne Empery-Cirot. It was demonstrated to me that I ruled nothing more, in the actinic light of objective reality, than a pretentious, self-important military, technological, social, and cultural backwater. In truth, our much-vaunted Monopolity of Hanover was no less a rude frontier settlement, in its way, than the Islays’ rough-hewn moonringed planet Skye, the difference between them being that the Islays always knew what they had, whereas I had not.”
So disturbed was the man as he told his tale, he failed to realize that he was insulting Arran and Loreanna. To learn more, Arran let it pass without comment, as he most likely would have, anyway. He and Loreanna had lost their daughter. They needed to know why, and Brother Leo was claiming that he knew. Whatever insults had been inflicted upon the Ceo by these unknown malefactors, Arran reflected, in some respects—from every account he had heard of this man who had been his enemy fifteen years ago—they seemed to have improved him considerably.
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