“There, there, now . . .” A hand had suddenly been laid upon her. Bretta flinched, and would have slapped it away. And then she realized that this was merely the owner of the second voice, apparently attempting only to comfort and console her. “Please . . . I won’t touch you again. Please don’t injure yourself further, Mistress. Don’t worry about your vision, or try to see me, for I’m quite ugly, and the sight of me surely wouldn’t be conducive to your healing.”
Bretta heard the fellow chuckle in a wry, self-deprecating manner that failed to disguise the depth of his genuine feelings regarding his appearance.
“Why, you are speaking Hanoverian,” she informed him, sniffing back her tears. Abruptly, a violent shudder coursed through her broken body as she experienced another brief flash of hated remembrance. She must learn to control this, weakness, she decided, and turn it into strength, if she were ever to have her revenge.
And she would have revenge. Woulf had made a mistake, allowing her to live.
“Truth is, Mistress, I’m speaking the Coordinator’s English. But you’ve no reason to understand that just now. To answer some of your questions (if you’ll just lie quietly for a while, for you’ve been very badly misused, which I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you) I’m Hanebuth Tarrant, esquire, at your service.”
Somehow she knew that he was bowing.
Bretta took a long, deep breath, experimentally, and although she felt some considerable pain through her rib cage, she was pleased that it did not tremble through her as she let it out again, the way a breath will, sometimes, when one has been crying. “A good, solid Hanoverian name, Hanebuth Tarrant, if I do not mistake myself. ‘The Coordinator’s Anglitch,’ is it?” She had suddenly become aware that she was hungry. “Why can I not see clearly? How extensive are my injuries? When may I eat? Where are we? And where are my weapons?”
“I say, Mistress, I have never before encountered anyone—excepting for myself, perhaps—who asked quite so many questions. This place, it’s—” Here, the voice hesitated, its owner attempting to sort out all her questions. “Well, this is where we are, Mistress, hidden deep within the twisted, rocky fissures—extensively resculpted, I might add, by countless patient hands over many centuries—of a tiny worldlet, one of many millions, belonging to a uniquely planetless one-star system, composed almost entirely of such tiny worldlets.”
“And—”
“And you have been here, Mistress, let me see, now . . . six, seven, eight, nine weeks—your many and very grievous injuries having been attended to as competently as we were equipped to do it—being otherwise nursed gradually back to as near a semblance of robust good health as we have been able to contrive!”
Bretta could almost hear the blink and nod of relieved satisfaction that accompanied those words. Despite herself she giggled, partly from her severe emotional and physical weakness, partly from the sprightly and amusing manner of Tarrant’s speech. His accent—although it had clearly been altered by some later circumstance—was completely typical of the urban lower classes of Hanover, who took a certain pride in the elaborate and colorful way they spoke.
“As to the balance of your questions, you can’t see because I don’t wish you to, this being, as I indicated, a matter of courtesy and modesty upon my part.”
She began to speak.
“Pray do not interrupt me, for I’ve been dreading this, and you should demonstrate a modicum of consideration. You have a very well fractured skull, Mistress. I am enormously surprised that you survived it—which, despite my careless earlier words to an associate, I believe you have. You cannot move, because you have been restrained for fear that you will unset one or more of the many broken bones you arrived here with: both humeri, both radii and ulni, one clavicle, several ribs (I didn’t count ’em), one femur in three places, the tibia and fibula of the opposite leg, most of the fingers of both hands. Whoever did this, Mistress, you put up quite a battle and should feel unashamed. You have a number of unspeakable soft-tissue injuries I don’t know how—”
Bretta interrupted him. “Will they heal?”
“I think so, Mistress. Thanks to many an oversight upon the part of our malefactors, we’ve some good equipment here. Still, I’m a ship’s officer, not a—”
“Then pray stop all this ‘Mistress’ nonsense. I find that I dislike it quite as much as my mother dislikes being called ‘Madame.’ And undo whatever you have done to my eyes, sir. My name is Robretta Islay, eldest daughter of Arran ‘the’ Islay, Autonomous Drector-Hereditary of Skye and of his wedded wife, the former Loreanna Daimler-Wilkinson. My friends—and Mr. Tarrant, for your many troubles and kindnesses upon my account, I reckon that you must be at least a dozen of those, all by yourself—my friends call me Bretta. And I believe I have a better character than you credit me with. I would thank the person who saved my life, whatever his appearance, face-to-face.”
Suddenly exhausted by the effort of speaking, and despite her ravenous hunger and the myriad of questions that remained to be answered, she fell asleep.
When Bretta next awoke she was alone, her chamber cheerfully illuminated by a simple, old-fashioned antenna-lamp such as her father had once given her, irradiating several sizable sheets of structural polymer attached to the walls.
The walls themselves were very rough, and although they had been painted with a clean white sealant of some kind, were filled with bubble holes of all sizes, much like the big blocks of reddish and blackish lava, from the lovely and violent Tamara range of volcanoes in the Skyan southern hemisphere, that her mother kept in a decorative garden to one side of the Holdings Hall. The little bedroom could boast of no particular shape; it was, perhaps, roughly that of a potato. And it was only about twice as capacious as the garbage disposal canister into which her half uncle Woulf had callously stuffed her body.
She experienced another lurid, unbearable flash of anger, and a churning hunger for vengeance more physically overwhelming than any emotion Bretta had ever experienced before. Then, just as abruptly, a pang of sympathy, love, and regret coursed through her body at the remembrance of her poor mother and father—what must they be thinking and feeling of her just now, that she was dead?—which was almost canceled out by a sudden realization that she could see!
“Hello?” She was uncertain how her voice would carry or that anyone was listening.
A door of a kind, with a curtain of a kind, could be seen beyond the foot of whatever it was that was serving her as a bed. Whatever it was, it seemed to be soft. There were what appeared to be silken bedcovers across her legs—queerly luxurious, she thought, remembering what Tarrant had told her, for cave dwellers living inside an asteroid—but she could see that both of her arms were wrapped tightly in some sort of light, coarsely woven fabric, from the base of her neck to the tips of her fingers. Her peripheral vision and returning tactile senses informed her that her head was heavily bandaged, as well.
“Hello?”
“Hello!” A voice replied from behind the curtain. “I see you’re feeling better this morning. You fell asleep, right in the middle of our talk last night.”
“You can see me.” She smiled and, running her tongue about inside her mouth consciously for the first time since she had awakened in this place of blessed refuge, wondered that she was not missing teeth, along with every other injury that had been inflicted upon her. And how in the Ceo’s name had she escaped without a broken nose? “But I cannot see you. I apologize most abjectly for last night. I did so want to learn more—and I was hungry, and still am, for that matter. But pray, will you not let me see you, Hanebuth Tarrant?”
“She remembers our name, does she?” Tarrant murmured. “She remembers our name, indeed. And I did bring you a bit of breakfast, which I had planned to place beside you as you slept. Although upon reflection, I suppose you would have had some trouble feeding yourself, all swathed up in bandages as you are. Ah, well, never mind all that now. I will indeed come in, do you but desire it. But I warn you, Princess Bre
tta, brace yourself. For I am not a pretty sight.”
A metal tray with a steaming bowl upon it preceded him through the parted curtain. She could not see his hands because they were hidden beneath the tray. How very odd, she thought: judging from the height of the tray, there must have been two or three steps down to whatever served them as a corridor outside.
And then she realized that she was wrong.
“As you may perceive, I am not tall.” Indeed, the entity speaking to her could have been no more than sixty or seventy siemmes in height—only two-thirds of a measure. The top of his head would not have reached to the middle of her thigh. Every one of Bretta’s little sisters was taller than Hanebuth Tarrant. “To be absolutely truthful, Princess, I was never particularly tall to begin with, but I do believe you will agree that this is carrying a good thing to extremes.”
“At first it was ‘Mistress’—of which I had believed I disabused you.” It was extremely painful to laugh with her ribs as tightly bandaged as this. In truth, her exasperation with him was wholly fictitious. “Why do you insist upon calling me ‘Princess,’ when I am only the eldest daughter of an Autonomous Drector-Hereditary, and nothing more? And what did you mean by, ‘to begin with’?”
“I call you Princess, Princess, because—as any fool can see—that is exactly what you are.” He set the tray upon a sort of stool beside the bed. “And by, ‘to begin with,’ Princess, I mean that I was not always as you see me now.”
What Bretta saw was a tiny caricature of a human being, only a little over knee-high, but with the hands and feet—and, most hideously, the head—of a normal-sized man. His fingers appeared abnormally long, with large joints, and ended in talons. His knees and elbows, too, seemed oversized in comparison with his stick-thin limbs. Hanebuth Tarrant was almost hairless—a mere half dozen coarse strands stood away from his shiny scalp—his skin had almost a scaly appearance, and he was the green-brown color of a soldier’s uniform.
However what Bretta noticed first about Hanebuth Tarrant were his ears, which were extraordinarily large and pointed, just like those of a storybook elf, and his eyes, which were also very large, brown, and filled with wisdom, suffering, and an endless reserve of humor. She wondered whether she was going to have eyes like that, now, considering what she had suffered. Somehow she rather doubted it. Soulfulness failed to go properly with their brilliant color.
He blinked. “I believe I heard you say that you’re still hungry?”
“Ravenous, if you would know the truth. I think that I had dreams about eating.”
“Well, I hope this does them justice.”
Tarrant helped her sit up first—those frail-looking limbs of his were singularly strong and gentle—then set the tray across her lap, and began to feed her with a flat-bottomed plastic spoon. What he gave her was more like a rich, spiced gravy than anything else. Bretta did not wish to know where it had come from or what it had been made of; she only knew she wanted more of it than he had brought. She wanted bread, as well. And, after a few spoonsful of the hot, salty broth, with its wild, dark, earthy flavors—could those be shrooms she felt and tasted?—she also wanted something sweet and cold to drink.
But she was too polite to ask.
“Let us be as swift and merciful about this, then, as possible,” he told Bretta as he went on feeding her. “Indeed, Princess, despite my wonderfully hideous appearance, I am actually a human being. That is to say, I was human, until some or all of these obscene and unspeakably painful transformations had been performed upon me in a vain attempt to turn me into an Oplyte warrior-slave.”
“You are an Oplyte?”
“Not quite—look at me, Princess. Consider me a half-baked Oplyte and leave it at that. I can tell you that the Oplyte transformation process is less complicated and lies upon a higher technological plane than most people would believe. Most people have always envisioned vast darkened plains under leaden skies, upon which helpless victims were lowered in their manacles into bubbling vats of thickened, vile concoctions. Not unlike this soup, perhaps. Or they have imagined repeated injections and complicated bloody surgeries that transmuted innocent human captives into the mindless monsters we know too well.”
Bretta was startled when another hand—this one was thick and powerful-looking, with only three clawed fingers and a thumb—thrust itself through the curtain to deliver a metal plate upon which sat a small loaf of coarse bread and a wide-bottomed cup. Her host, her nurse—whatever he was—gave her a sip from the cup. Fruit juice of some kind, and cold as the very Deep itself; could these strange people read her mind? The bread, too, was exactly to her liking. She returned to the soup with a refreshed palate and greater delight.
“In truth,” Tarrant continued, “were the procedure all that complicated and expensive, it would have been rejected many centuries ago. Instead, the process involves nothing more than a single injection in the carotid artery. From there, an inconceivably miniscule machine—what is elsewhere known as a ‘nanotechnological device’—travels through the bloodstream directly to the brain. There, it anchors itself and begins to alter the pituitary and other glands.”
“How d’you know this?” she asked round a mouthful of dark, coarse bread. Tarrant was probably surprised—his eyes told her that he was—that his story did not deter her appetite. But then, she felt nothing but contempt for the females in Hanoverian dramathilles who fainted constantly, and upon the slightest stimulus. Her appetite had always been a vigorous one, and anybody who could gut, skin, and quarter her own game was unlikely to have a weak stomach.
“Because they told us, Princess. They’re boastful of it. Most of them relish seeing the terror in their victims’ eyes as the horrifying realization dawns upon them of what is about to become of them. Once the evil device has been implanted, every captive is installed—tidily stashed away—inside a coffin-shaped cage of wire mesh, convenient to hand, yet out from underfoot. From time to time, within the warehouse-caverns they fill in this nightmarish manner, the piteous shrieking of two hundred thousand prisoners at a time—stacked dozens deep so that they must urinate and defecate and vomit upon one another, and hundreds claustrophobically across—is very little short of deafening.”
Bretta shook her head to stop the feeding momentarily. Even her strong young constitution had its limits, and she was close to reaching them, now. But at the same time, she was absolutely determined to hear more—to hear it all.
“Upon other occasions, the silence is profound and unutterably more terrifying.” Lost in the tale he told, Tarrant had not noticed the effect that he was having upon her, in large measure because she would not let it show.
“They hose us off with a combination nutrient and cleansing solution, but do not otherwise feed or attend us. Bright floodlights are never turned out. The helpless victim watches himself become an Oplyte. Over the next weeks, his intelligence and personality are obliterated by the thing inside his head. Struggle as he may—and there is nothing to struggle with or against—he gradually loses his mentality, his very identity. Meanwhile, he also acquires enhanced muscular strength, an animal ferocity, and a perverse willingnes to obey.”
The silence within Bretta’s rough bedchamber was also profound by now, and a bit terrifying. Her own wounds, she thought, however grievous, would heal in time, and, whatever else happened, now or in the future, her life would go on. But what must it be like to carry memories like those around in one’s head? Hanebuth Tarrant’s wounds, inside and out, would never heal, and the fact that his life would go on, like hers, must not have been much comfort to him.
“Now you would know,” he said, anticipating her, “what went wrong. Why did I not become an Oplyte? Why did I become what I am today? How did I make my escape and come here? I do not know the answer to the first two questions, Princess. In individual instances, the process apparently fails in one way or another.”
“And your escape?”
“I escaped because we were never closely guarded, and my cage lay
at the outside of a layer near the top. It was not particularly difficult. The vast majority of captives are somehow paralyzed by the transformation process. I was not. That, in my case, is one of several things that went wrong with the process. When I grew strong enough—I tested my strength many times a day—I wrenched my cage open, clambered down the side of the stacks, and crept away.”
Bretta’s mind was filled with bleak and terrible images, her heart with pity.
“Not knowing at the time that there were many others more or less like me—more or less like each of my fellow unfortunates waiting impatiently to meet you—I subsequently contrived to escape my careless captors altogether. We failures of the system comprise what amounts to—and what has, in fact, amounted to for many centuries—a widely scattered ‘civilization’ of such fugitives.”
She opened her mouth, but could not think of anything to say.
“You have arrived, Princess, at the hidden system of the Oplyte slavers, where evil transformations have been performed by the billions for a thousand years!”
CHAPTER XXVI:
BASIS FOR SELECTION
Bretta slept a long while after her first conscious meal. She reckoned later it had more to do with all that she had learned than with anything else.
It seemed to her that she had awakened, at least to some degree, several times when she had been turned or otherwise attended. She tried to accept the necessity, without emotion, that strangers must assist her to complete certain bodily functions that had otherwise been entirely private to her since she was three.
When she awoke the next time, she was alone. She believed it to be an hour that her hosts considered nighttime. It was unsurprising that they would keep the same watches as upon shipboard. But it was not as dark as it had been upon previous occasions. Had she said something to Tarrant about it, or only imagined she had? For that matter, could she have imagined Tarrant, as well?
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 26