Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn

by Smith, L. Neil

  “Knock . . . knock . . . knock,” a voice informed her slowly. It was not one that she knew. “May . . . I . . . please . . . come . . . in . . . Mistress . . . Tarrant . . . has . . . other . . . business. . . . I . . . am . . . here . . . to . . . provide . . . you . . . food . . . and . . . look . . . to . . . your . . . dressings. . . . He . . . informed . . . me . . . that . . . you . . . are . . . not . . . afraid . . . to . . . look . . . upon . . . us.”

  She smiled, but the faintest thrill of fear passed through her. What would the appearance be of someone speaking in such a peculiar manner? “Well, I was not afraid of him, as it turned out. What would you be like, if I may ask?”

  “Of . . . course . . . you . . . may . . . Mistress. . . . I . . . am . . . like . . . this.”

  The curtain parted and half a man entered. The other half, of necessity, remained kneeling outside, for the proprietor of both halves, as well as of the slow, careful voice she had heard, could have stood not a siemme less than three full measures tall, and perhaps half as wide. He also had but a single eye—of a startlingly brilliant sapphire hue (although it was also a trifle bloodshot)—set precisely in the middle of his broad, corrugated forehead, above a great hooked nose that sported but a single nostril. A Cyclops, then. For a moment Bretta entertained the notion, once again, that she was dead, or at least engaged in the hallucinogenic business of expiring from a fractured skull.

  “I . . . know . . . that . . . I . . . speak . . . dreadfully . . . slowly . . . Mistress . . .”

  And indeed, the fellow did. It demanded monumental patience of her to wait through his sentences. Bretta decided that the best way was not to listen consciously until he had completed one of them, then go back and reconstruct it in her mind, in the manner of a child who has been asked, “Have you been listening to me?” In that way, it was almost like hearing a normal individual speak.

  “It is merely a part of what They did to me, all of which Tarrant says he has explained to you. And I appear outlandish, Mistress, even to myself. But you will discover that I am hardly unintelligent. I was a §-physics engineer before this happened—and you will remember what they say of us engineers—now I can literally look through a keyhole, with all of the eyes that I possess!”

  Bretta laughed, as she was meant to, suspecting that Tarrant had taught him this good-natured way of dealing with his infirmities, and that she would soon be seeing the same sort of thing in others hereabouts, although she had been given, as yet, no idea of how many of them there were. The witticism the cycloptic giant had mentioned was among her father’s favorites: “An engineer is a man with a mind so narrow that he can look through a keyhole with both eyes.”

  But the one-eyed giant was speaking again. The girl was able to catch up immediately with what he had been saying to her. “I am called Vokhiwa Kanvor, Mistress, originally of the Gesellschaft, although I am not a Gesellschaftian subject. Both of my parents were itinerant Garcian missionaries, you see, and I happened to be born to them when they were there. Forgive me for going on so.”

  She almost laughed, although not in a cruel way. “Not at all, Vokhiwa Kanvor.”

  Bretta finally thought to return Kanvor’s laboriously prolonged greeting as warmly as she was able. She and Woulf—of hated memory—had watched a gaggle of Garcians capering through the thoroughfares of Hanover wearing the colorful, loose-fitting habits they were known for, playing and singing some ancient hymn of theirs about going somewhere in a bucket. Although why anyone would wish to bother writing a song about a lubberlift was entirely beyond her comprehension.

  And Phoebus Krumm, if she remembered correctly, had originally hailed from the Gesellschaft, one of the many smaller imperia-conglomerate within the Known Deep, although he had been apprenticed outworld at a comparatively early age—or sold, depending upon how one looked at it, and who one happened to be—to a Hanoverian baker just across an interstellar border from his native world.

  Both of his wives were Gesellschaftian, as well.

  “I would shake your hand if I were able. I am Robretta Islay, daughter of—”

  The giant held up a shockingly pink palm. The remainder of him, where he was not covered with a coarse brown kefflaroid sacking, was an exquisite pale green, exactly like one of those sharply flavored apples she adored that broke like glass when she bit into them, and were filled with a rich, sweetly sour juice. What she could see of his complexion was smooth and shiny, almost waxen.

  He blinked his eye. Watching him do it was beginning to give Bretta a headache. “Do not bother, Mistress. Tarrant told us all about you. You are Robretta Islay, eldest daughter of Autonomous Drector-Hereditary Arran ‘the’ Islay of Skye and his wedded wife the former Loreanna Daimler-Wilkinson. This afternoon we drew cards to see which of us might attend you in his absence, and—”

  “You lost.” She laughed again. “My sincerest condolence, friend Kanvor. I offer you my solemn promise that I shall endeavor not to be a burden to you.”

  His single eyebrow threatened to scurry away, right over the top of his head. “No, no, Mistress, I won! It is an honor, merely to hear your voice! You do understand, do you not, that most of us (and we are hundreds in this drift alone, thousands throughout the asteroid) have not seen a woman for many years? The cruelest part of my curse is that, with this slow metabolism, I am exceedingly long-lived, and so for me, it has been something more than two centuries.”

  “You are,” Bretta answered, almost as slowly as Kanvor, and for the first time since she awoke here, beginning to feel a bit afraid, “every one of you, male?”

  Kanvor shyly averted his eye. “Each and every one of us, Mistress—or at least,” he amended sadly, “most of us were to begin with. Sometimes the process . . .”

  “I believe that I understand,” Bretta interrupted in as kindly a manner as she could manage, before the shy and gentle giant could embarrass himself any further. And she believed that she did understand, knowing all too well of her grandmother’s life-shattering experiences. The Oplyte slavers’ female captives were disposed of elsewhere, in a very different and considerably more ancient kind of marketplace. Which meant that each successive “generation” among these pathetically twisted refugees consisted of nothing more than those freshly arrived newcomers who had managed to escape from one decade to the next.

  And now she had come to share that life.

  She shuddered, but attempted to conceal it for his sake. “How many are there of you, altogether, friend Kanvor, throughout this system? Do you know?”

  “Well, Mistress,” Kanvor answered in his ponderous and inexorable manner. “Our friend Pwee Nguyen keeps such facts and figures as we happen to possess, inside his head. He would be the one to ask for accurate estimates. You will be introduced to him in good time—Tarrant will see to that—but just now he is sleeping. He is an idiot savant, you see, and he sleeps most of the time.”

  “ ‘Pwee Nguyen,’ ” she rolled the curious name round her tongue as Kanvor inspected her bandages and dabbed with a warm, dampened cloth at her face and feet, the only portions of her not concealed by dressings. She must remember, in the future, not to break so many bones at once. “Can you give me a guess, just to think about before I have an opportunity to consult this sleepy friend of yours?”

  “Well, Mistress,” Kanvor answered with an infuriating deliberation, “the Oplyte Trade, so I have been reliably informed by those among my friends and colleagues able to overcome their aversion and study the phenomenon—though I was myself unwilling to credit what they claimed for it at first—is said to amount to billions of individuals stolen from their lives each standard year.”

  “ ‘Stolen from their lives’—an adroit turn of phrase, friend Kanvor. But surely you meant to say ‘millions.’ ” She, too, reflexively doubted such numbers.

  “You are exactly the same as I was,” he chuckled. It was an eerie, slow-motion sound, as of somebody chopping wood with a handaxe. “No, Mistress, ‘billions’ is what I said, and ‘billions’ is
what I meant. Had I meant to say ‘millions,’ I would have said ‘millions,’ but what I said was ‘billions,’ because—”

  She laughed at what she thought of as his glacial loquaciousness. “Very well, friend Kanvor, I understand. But what would you have told me after you told me that—had I displayed sufficient intelligence to leave well enough alone?”

  He smiled, presenting Bretta with perhaps the strangest sight, so far, of all, for what should have been the poor fellow’s upper two front incisors had become fused together—even now she could make out a faint trace of the seam—giving her something of an idea of how he might have ended up with but a single eye. The process must have been indescribably bizarre—and extremely painful.

  “I would have requested that you consider the fact that the Monopolity of Hanover alone claims to have fifteen quintillion subjects. That being the case, then who, I ask you, except for the families of the victims, is likely to miss—or raise much of a fuss over—a mere seven-millionths of one percent of that?”

  “I see,” she replied. “I had never thought to look upon it like that, statistically.”

  “Nor do most individuals, I greatly fear me. What is even more astonishing, Mistress, is that we have reason to believe the Trade has been going on for centuries—possibly as long as a thousand years. Unbelievable as it may seem, that would bring the possible number of its victims into the trillions.”

  “I believe that I understand,” she mused, mostly to herself, beginning to think every bit as strategically as her father ever had, although she was completely unaware of it. “And so the rate of failed Oplyte transformations could be comparatively low—and the percentage of them who manage to make good their escape utterly insignificant, in comparison to the numerical vastness of the galaxywide slavery operation—and yet individuals like you and Tarrant could still exist in extraordinary numbers throughout this entire system.”

  “Ceo’s name, Mistress.” The giant blinked his eye. “Did I say all of that?”

  “You told me, whether you realized it or not. Most likely it is simply uneconomical for the slavers even to take the necessary precautions to stop escapees, let alone hunt them down afterward. And if you have all hidden in warrens like this one, I doubt that you can be discovered as readily by your former kidnappers as they can take fresh captives from the open Deep. Tell me, have they manifested much of an interest in reclaiming their embarrassing failures?”

  Kanvor shook his massive head. “No, Mistress. Did Tarrant not tell you that this system consists, uniquely, of nothing but a clutter of millions of asteroids?”

  “Somehow I knew that,” she answered, wishing that she had some method of scratching the many itches that had begun making themselves apparent here and there. She felt as if she had been cast—like a leaf or a collected insect—in some sort of thermosetting resin. And perhaps, beneath her bandages, that was precisely what had been done. “But I don’t remember his telling me, no.”

  “The great majority are of a densely metallic composition, rendering any instrumental search all but impossible—and, no doubt more important to the slavers, prohibitively expensive. What a very peculiar thought that is, that economics might influence their vile calculations in such a manner. I think me that it may betray a useful vulnerability. Mistress, before now I was only conscious of the evil done to me. Now you have taught me to see it in a new way.”

  “ ‘Follow the money,’ ” she quoted the ancient adage. “Excellent, friend Kanvor, I am delighted that you understand me. The point, my mother always says, is not that one may happen to be miserable or afraid—that can happen to anyone at one time or another—the point is to be constructive about it and not to wallow in it. Personally, I do not intend staying here for the remainder of my life. And, friend Kanvor, I believe I am beginning to have a plan.”

  “It was named by its discoverers the ‘Vouhat-Letsomo System,’ one of the last to be found in an initial wave of exploration of the Known Deep, roughly nine hundred years ago. It is home to a culture that calls itself the Aggregate, the oldest continuous civilization, quite paradoxically enough, which . . . I have ever . . .”

  The speaker, Pwee Nguyen, the “idiot savant” Kanvor had earlier described for Bretta, threatened to fall asleep again in the middle of a sentence, until one of his comrades nudged him, none too gently, and his grotesque eyes popped open. It was one of the oddest sights Bretta had ever seen, but she tried not to show it; she was becoming quite an accomplished practitioner of that sort of polite deception. Apparently, among Pwee Nguyen’s other talents, he had never forgotten a single historical fact—even the most obscure and trivial datum—he had ever heard, although he appeared to have difficulty staying awake.

  “. . . which I have ever heard of. As usual, I implore you to excuse me, one and all, for I have slept only sixteen hours today, instead of my accustomed twenty.”

  At Bretta’s insistence, they had moved her from her makeshift bedchamber to a larger cave to facilitate this gathering. This had not been accomplished without some degree of pain upon her part. In particular, her shattered left collarbone seemed capable of generating the most exquisite agony she had ever known.

  Tarrant, back from whatever errand had taken him from her side, fussed over her endlessly, making ominous, not-quite-subvocal comments with regard to her several fractured ribs and the possibility of punctured lungs and internal bleeding.

  Bretta looked closely at Pwee Nguyen once again, scarcely able to believe what she saw, even after having listened to the fellow for over an hour. His eyes were dark and enormous, each perhaps the size of two fists held together, set in the sides of his head like those of a barnyard fowl. She remembered an old children’s tale: the lids, at least, that covered those great eyes were, indeed, the size of saucers. And like a fowl’s embryo within its shell, the rest of Pwee Nguyen’s facial features appeared minuscule and only crudely formed.

  His head seemed to narrow to a point at the top, although that may have been an illusion propagated by his hair, which was bright orange, cut skin-close at the sides, and stuck straight upward at the top. His shoulders were impossibly narrow, as was his chest. He grew outward gradually, tapering as it were, until his stomach and fundament were quite fully rounded. Like many of those Bretta was meeting here today, his limbs were quite thin and almost seemed stuck on as an afterthought. Pwee Nguyen’s skin was a bright lemony yellow.

  “But you were speaking of the Aggregate, my friend,” Tarrant prompted him gently.

  “Ah, yes,” Pwee Nguyen sighed, “So I was, was I not? Very well, the Aggregate is apportioned into many so-called Alliances,’ the densely crowded populations of which occupy a single asteroid per Alliance in our planetless Vouhat-Letsomo System. We free spirits, of course, live within the shadows of its edges, upon and within small rocks that even they reject as suitable for habitation.”

  There was general laughter at that remark.

  “Overall, their massively overpopulated culture is a dictatorship of a brutally consistent ruthlessness unknown elsewhere in the Deep, even within the worst of the imperia-conglomerate. Its ultimate rulers are almost unknown to the teeming billions who happen to be unfortunate enough to be governed by them.”

  In addition to Pwee Nguyen, Bretta, Kanvor, and Tarrant, they had been joined by a number of their fellow involuntary troglodytes, to whom she had been earlier introduced. Nibwelt Glint-Ritchbengen was even taller than the cyclops, but he was almost impossibly thin and seemed to have no pigmentation of any kind. And where Pwee Nguyen was supposed to have been an idiot, but was proving not to be, the albino stilt-man did not impress her as being very bright.

  It was more difficult to tell with the armor-scaled and powerful Swader Hornyak, who, despite his rather intimidating aspect—the fellow had a zigzagged reptilian crest upon his skull—was exceedingly cheerful and good-natured.

  Perhaps he was simply happy not to be like his friend Shong Cowl, who had grown an extra pair of arms, or poor Ragan Stengaar
d, whom Phoebus would have described, in his straightforward way, as a basket case with a trunk. Indeed, the unfortunate fellow had a long, flexible, muscular proboscis with which he handled objects, and upon which he moved himself through the twisting passages of the asteroid, thanks to its almost nonexistent gravity. He and all of his comrades had once been human, and many appeared to be Gesellschaftian, like Kanvor.

  “Every person within the culture is continuously supervised by a ‘Cell Leader’ who has been given an absolute life-and-death responsibility for the productivity and behavior of five other human beings. This responsibility is exercised upon a ‘better safe than sorry’ principle. If one steps out of line even a bit, he can—he will—be killed outright, death being administered ‘prophylactically,’ by his Cell Leader at the very scene and moment of the ‘crime.’ ”

  “Tarrant,” Bretta asked, intensely curious, “how does he come to know all this?”

  “Hundreds of cautious, patient years, Princess. The normal-looking among us sneak about, asking questions. Members of this culture are trained—bred—to obey, so they believe they must answer us or die. Pray continue, Pwee Nguyen.”

  The so-called idiot savant nodded. “Cell Leaders report on a regular basis—every hour or so—to their ‘Brood Mothers.’ Do not be deceived; a generous proportion of Brood Mothers, perhaps even a majority, is male. It is from their ranks, generally, that the crews of their Deep-raiders are made up. Brood Mothers wield the same life-and-death ‘prophylactic’ authority over Cell Leaders.”

  She glanced at Tarrant, remembering how he had referred before to “the mothers.”

  “Brood Mothers, in turn, are required to report every few hours to their ‘Perrish Elders,’ who, of course, may be the youngest members of the group. Note that their records spell it ‘E doubleR,’ a somewhat pointed ambiguity. Perrish Elders report with only slightly lesser frequency to ‘Burrow Mayors’; Burrow Mayors report to leaders of the Alliances, viewed as the fundamental sub-division of this society. These one-asteroid Alliances are organized into ‘Localities’—in general separated by the system’s Cassini divisions, an astrophysical term, of which there happen to be twelve, if I recall correctly—and Localities, finally, form the entire Aggregate, of which I spoke at the beginning.”