“My friends, our ’Droom is no more than another smoky village campfire,” Leupould went on, apparently warming to his subject, “surrounded by capering, ululating savages attired in absurd totemic disguises of wood, metal, and straw.”
Sedgeley fingered his masque, a subtle dumas, then quietly took it off. Demondion-Echeverria watched and folded his arms in stubborn refusal to follow suit.
Leupould leaned in, focusing upon the Jendyne. “All about the Monopolity of Hanover, which we now perceive in proper, if uncomfortable perspective, lay a myriad of other presumably respectable imperia-conglomerate. To my newly enlightened sensibilities, they now appeared to be—and remain so today—no more than the grass-hut compounds of the unclothed natives of a barbaric planet. To my horror and chagrin, I discovered that I had become mortally ashamed that any of us—the Monopolity included—had ever made so much of ourselves.”
He looked round, appealing to something he desperately hoped was in them. What he got was an observation from an impatient Tillie Krumm: “Loreanna is right, Leo. This may all seem profoundly philosophic to you, but where in your daughter’s name does it get us? What does it have to do with our poor Bretta?”
Was it a flare of Ceo-like temperament Arran saw quickening in Leupould’s eyes? If so, it died at once. “Madame, I was coming to that, I beg you to bear with me. Where was I? Oh, yes: it would appear that the role all of them serve—the many imperia-conglomerate—is that of nothing more than a market. I was told we live merely to purchase and consume a single product, propagated by a vastly greater—albeit heretofore unknown—civilization. And what might that single product be?” he asked his traveling companions rhetorically.
“Oplytes,” Phoebus replied quietly.
“Give that man a narcohaler!” Leupould shouted with such false joviality that Arran found it almost obscene. “How ironic it is—and no doubt highly profitable—that the same savages who purchase the product (meaning us, in case it had somehow slipped your mind) unwittingly supply the raw material for its manufacture. We breed, they harvest—and sell our own children back to us!”
Loreanna flinched, but otherwise said nothing. She had been deprived of her father by the very process Leupould had just described, and, indirectly, of her mother—for all practical purposes. Nor was the disappearance and probable death of her daughter significantly less connected to the Oplyte Trade.
Arran decided to caution the man, but before he could, Leo resumed. “The most entertainingly ironical aspect of the entire situation is that to this supposedly wise, more sophisticated civilization, the Trade is but a minor enterprise. I would guess that most of its subjects are unaware it exists. Its victims, whose lives are so precious to us—to someone among us—are no more than the equivalent of trade-axes, colored glass beads, and plastic trinkets!”
Sedgeley, who had been quiet through the bitter tirade Leupould had so painfully refrained from indulging himself in for so long, was astonished. And enlightened. “No wonder the Traders never cared to manipulate the politics of the imperia-conglomerate. Just as long as we continue fighting amongst one another—”
“And purchasing short-lived but expensive Oplyte warriors to do the great bulk of our fighting with,” supplied Demondion-Echeverria, chuckling to himself.
“The mundane everyday details,” the Executor-General finished, “of our respective political housekeeping arrangements remain less than unimportant to them.”
“Then Arran,” suggested Loreanna, whose thoughts her husband had wrongly presumed to be elsewhere, “that is, ‘Henry Martyn’—constituted a threat of the most dire order to the Oplyte slavers, not merely because he freed entire captive populations, but because of the philosophy of political and personal autonomy that he not only advocated, but put into vigorous practice everywhere he sailed. If that were ever to spread widely enough, why, in time they might cause peace to break out uncontrollably throughout the galaxy, both Known and Unknown.”
“Madame, you describe the case precisely,” Leupould told her. “It was made clear to me that they consider the politics of the imperia-conglomerate trivial beyond expression, utterly beneath their contempt. It is all the same to them if we continue squabbling over details of how to burden ourselves, and one another, with taxes and regulations. But should we contemplate not doing it at all, thus depriving them of a reliable source of revenue, they will show themselves and compel us to go on doing what we have done, for perhaps, ten thousand years.”
“Come, now,” Phoebus demanded. He looked from left, to right, to left again, from one of his wives to another, and bestowed upon the gathering a mighty shrug of disbelief. “Ye’re sayin’ these buggers’ve been around that long?”
Leupould shook his head. “I cannot say with confidence, Mr. Krumm. To be sure, it would illuminate a considerable portion of history that is irrational and perverse. Is it not a comforting idea that we may not be responsible for all our folly and brutality? For now, permit me to testify that nothing we know can in any way compare with the power that could humiliate me—absolute ruler of fifteen quintillion souls—in so cavalier a manner. As a scholar and former Ceo, I am unaware of any resources anywhere, of any kind, capable of changing that situation within our lifetimes, or those of many generations to come.”
“An’ the power t’humiliate”—the first officer shook his head—“is what scared ye outa yer ’Droom, hoppity-skip with yer tail atweenst yer legs, is it now?”
Leupould roared. “I was not ‘scared’ out of anything, you cretin!” He subsided. “Of anything. I beg your pardon, Mr. Krumm; none of this is your fault. It is simply that—oh, my—for all my life, I have been unwilling to settle for anything less than the biggest and best of whatever it was I happened to be interested in at the time. This was true of my character as a child, it was true of my character as a student, it was true of my character as a professor and a private citizen-subject of the Hanoverian imperium-conglomerate.
He took a deep breath.
“And I assure you it was no less true of my character, once I had been selected to succeed an aging Ceo who was less than satisfied with his natural heirs, and ascended to the highest office that the Monopolity of Hanover has to offer. In my view (and I know that some of you may find this a trifle odd) I would far rather do entirely without—and have often made a point of doing just that—than to accept anything less than the best of whatever it was I desired.”
“Bravo,” Loreanna said sarcastically. “So now, childishly disappointed at having learned your true place in the scheme of things, you shoved what you had been forced to see as your spoiled, second-rate kingdom off on your long-suffering daughter, and cravenly retired from life and the affairs of the ’Droom.”
“I am quite incapable, Madame, believe me, of being insulted any further than I was by the humiliating knowledge that I was not a second-rate power, as you suggest, but a hundredth-rate or a thousandth-rate. I contemplated suicide.”
“Poor baby,” commented Phoebus.
Sedgeley asked, “And your vow of silence?”
“Was no more than a parting gift,” Leupould informed him, “to the proud Hanoverian people I had ruled. I could do nothing to protect them from the predations of the slavers. I could protect them from the knowledge that had destroyed my life. To spare their dignity, I would take it with me to the grave.”
“Leave them unprepared to deal with reality,” Loreanna observed without sympathy.
Leupould turned both palms up and shrugged in a gesture of resignation. Whether this confirmed what Loreanna had accused him of, or was intended to signify that he could argue with her no longer, he offered no particular indication.
“Why,” Arran demanded suspiciously, “have you now decided to break your vow?”
Leupould gave him an odd expression and a noise that was almost a laugh. “Because, my boy—would you prefer to be addressed as Captain Martyn?—to the last cell of my body, I believe that, one by one, or all together, we are about to die.
Thanks to my impetuous daughter, and to Sedgeley and Frantisek, too, we have blithely invaded territory—this sector of the Deep—each cubic siemme of which is held by an enemy unimaginably more powerful than we are!”
Phoebus stood suddenly, alerted by a subtle change in the colors of the §-field surrounding the ship. It appeared that Leupould’s grim prophecy would be fulfilled as soon as it was made. Arran noticed what had happened almost as quickly. Together, without a word to each other or to their companions, they hurried up the six-step ladder to the quarterdeck from which the vessel was commanded. Not for an instant had Arran forgotten his missing daughter or the bizarre tale Leupould had told, but he had more immediate problems to deal with.
Arran looked up from a binnacle-like instrument bolted to the deck that he was consulting as Phoebus stared straight into the naked §-field, judging events directly—thanks to decades of experience—by patterns he discerned there.
“Believe it as you will, Phoebus!” the younger man shouted at his first officer. “They must possess some means of shrouding their own §-fields, for the rapespawn are hard and very hard upon us, and we have had virtually no warning!”
It appeared that the Osprey’s far-reaching §-fields had somehow been detected long before those of the larger vessels now approaching them. Arran wondered: was this part of the superior technology that Leupould had warned them of?
“Call General Quarters!”
Without answering his captain, the first officer shouted orders, firstly to the lesser officers commanding the gundecks, secondly to those upon the maindeck who would convey his desires to the starsailors aloft. For the first time since their “Adventure of the Missing Third Forge,” more than two years ago, Henry Martyn’s famous fighting ship Osprey was preparing herself for war.
From upon the maindeck and aloft, there came a mighty cheer from more than a hundred willing throats whose owners knew well what they had signed on for.
From below, through the very fabric of the starship herself, those upon the maindeck could hear the rumbling of the gunports’ heavy covers being slid aside.
Despite himself, a thrill of inexpressible joy coursed through Arran’s body. “Phoebus, I know the cut of these sails,” he cried. “By descriptions I have heard from rare souls who escaped their clutches, it would appear we are pursued by the very slave-taking curspawn that we ourselves have been looking for!” He peered into the instrument. “I make it six—seven—eight four-deckers!”
“By the Ceo’s black guts, I make it eleven,” Phoebus declared, showing some of the same euphoria Arran was experiencing. “Osprey’s, fallen under a vicious an’ concerted attack by at least eleven projectible-bristlin’ four-decker dreadnoughts—the largest an’ most powerful vessels of war known t’humanity!”
Arran grinned; it was not a pleasant sight. “Bedad, it is surrounded that we are then, with never a chance to obey the Ceo’s command to ‘show our heels’!”
PART FOUR:
ANASTASIA WHEELER
YEARDAY 339, 3O26 A.D.
MAYYE 18, 518 HANOVERIAN
TERTIUS 14, 1596 OLDSKYAN
AND AS HE FELL AND AS HE TURNED
AND AS HE FELL CRIED HE,
“OH GIVE ME YOUR HAND MY PRETTY YOUNG THING,
MY BRIDE FOREVER YOU’LL BE.”
“FRY THERE, FRY THERE, YOU FALSE YOUNG MAN,
FRY THERE INSTEAD OF ME,
SIX PRETTY MAIDS YOU’VE ANNIHILATED HERE.
AND THE SEVENTH’S ANNIHILATED THEE!
“FRY THERE, FRY THERE, YOU FALSE YOUNG MAN,
FRY TIIERE INSTEAD OF ME,
SIX PRETTY MAIDS YOU’VE ANNIHILATED HERE.
GO KEEP THEM COMPANY.”
CHAPTER XXV:
THE NIGHT-BLACK DEEP
Silence, darkness, pain.
Had it occurred to her to wonder about it, she could never have said who she was. She lived, if it could be called that, suspended somewhere between an awareness that was not quite consciousness, and an unconsciousness that was not quite death. Her skull smashed like an egg, bleeding inside and out from a dozen wounds, cruelly used and even more cruelly cast aside, she drifted away from the corvette Osprey onto the velvet breast of the night-black Deep. Over the hours that followed, she came close to drifting away from life itself.
“Daddy?”
It was an ironic mercy that her breathing was infrequent and shallow, for all the air she had was what had been sealed in with her. She slept fitfully, troubled and half-awakened from time to time by pain and an odd, disquieting sensation as the canister fell end over end. She imagined presences, and conversations.
“Mama!”
Then a bump she never felt, and a push to which she was insensible, and her eternity of drifting, whether she was aware of it or not, was over. Her rescuer—unintended, as it happened—had arrived just in time to save her rapidly faltering life. Soon there would be air and light and warmth again. The refuse canister had been salvaged from its aimless tumbling through the Deep.
Her all-unwitting rescuer, merely one of hundreds of thousands of such entities where it had come from, had no way of knowing—or more importantly, of understanding—what a kindness it had accomplished, any more than it was capable of being aware of how closely it resembled one of the manta rays of dead, lamented Earth, or that it plied the absolute cold and bitter vacuum of the Deep in the same way that long-gone mantas swam the ocean. The injured girl’s unknowing savior was a highly intelligent—albeit nonsapient—animal.
Its species (which, but for the strangest and most extremely unfortunate of circumstances, likeliest would never otherwise have been discovered by the decadently incurious imperia-conglomerate) was an astonishingly ancient one, older, indeed, than many of the stars under the cold, pale light of which it lived and bred. It had evolved out of the rich complex of organic molecules always to be found drifting in attenuated clouds throughout the interstellar Deep.
Perhaps the most amazing fact of all, regarding the bizarre creature that now patiently nudged her canister toward the gigantic disk it considered its home—sparkling like a billion diamonds as it wheeled against the velvet blackness of the Deep—was that it was domesticated, and had been so for countless generations. Indeed, for all of that time, it had been particularly trained to perform such homely tasks as this one, for its even more bizarre keepers.
Which was why the creature steered itself, now, toward a specific sparkle among billions in the great disk (how it managed to accomplish the required feats of navigation and astrobatics remained a mystery, even to its masters) understanding only that it would be fed, groomed, and praised for what it had discovered.
In the beginning, naturally, she believed that she was experiencing an endless series of nightmares from which she could not awaken herself and escape.
She lay within an irregularly shaped space, considerably smaller than her bedroom at home—if she could just remember where that had been—totally unable to move, for the most part unable even to feel, and yet wracked now and again by unbearable pains in her head and . . . elsewhere. The air she breathed was warm and laden with peculiar but not unpleasant odors. Time appeared to go by slowly, whole hours seeming to pass between a pair of heartbeats, loud in the utter silence of this chamber. Sometimes, when she awakened upon her own, the space about her was darker than she had ever known a space could be. At other times, she would be fed, sponge-bathed, or turned over by one of some unknown number of grotesquely deformed monsters, no two of which were similarly misshapen.
She was not particularly frightened—it was not much of a nightmare as nightmares go—but she was uncertain whether she never saw the same monster twice, or her memory was damaged and functioning so badly that she could not remember it. After all, she still could not remember what her own name was, where she had come from, or who her people—if she had had any—had been.
But she could hear.
“Hanebuth, I believe she’s truly waking up, this time!” hissed a voice
. “None too late: I didn’t know a person could lay unconscious this long and live!”
“She may not live,” replied another, seeming to be more in charge of things than the first. Her vision was badly blurred—was she going to be blind?—but by the deadened sound of their voices, she realized that they were in a small room with very rough or softly covered walls. “It’s a great pity none of us is a doctor. Why have the mothers never captured a doctor? Fetch her some water, will you? There’s a good fellow. I’ll keep an eye on her.”
She heard a rustle of fabric.
“Then again I may live,” she informed the second voice as the owner of the first departed. She was gratified to find that her voice, while weak and strained, continued to serve her nonetheless. “Just to prove you wrong. How—how long, precisely, did I lie unconscious? Am I going to live? How did I come to be here? Who are you, and where, by the Ceo’s brass astrolabe, is here?”
With these words it all came back to her, her name, her family, her home, their long journey away from it, first to Hanover, then to—its end, for her. Bretta suddenly recalled every vile intimacy that her half uncle Woulf had inflicted upon her, her futile struggles to stop him, every injury that he had given her by way of punishment before she had been compelled to submit to his wishes anyway.
Awash with bitter anguish, black fury, and an overwhelming experience of shame she could not account for, Bretta attempted to sit up, and was terrified to discover that she could not. She then attempted to wipe away whatever it was that was obstructing her vision and was unable even to move her arms—or her hands. Fighting down the mind-shattering panic of feeling trapped within her own body, at last she fell back—at least that was the sensation of it, although what she had actually done was relax and quit trying to rise—and, unable even to turn her head away from her unknown captor, she began to sob uncontrollably.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 25