“They sound like colonial insectoids,” Bretta said spontaneously. “And I would guess that there are no true individuals remaining within their culture, nor probably does there remain the faintest trace of individualism in its gene pool.”
“How . . . do . . . you . . . reckon . . . that . . . Mistress?”
“Because, friend Kanvor, it is the only result possible after something like nine hundred years of stringent . . . let us call it, ’unnatural selection.’ What did you say, Pwee—bother, he has gone to sleep again. Did he not say that Cell Leaders are encouraged to kill those they supervise—how did he state it, ‘if a person steps out of line even a little’? And what is stepping out of line if not a manifestation of individualism? I called it ‘unnatural selection.’ The basis of selection, of course, is a person’s utter compliance with the least whim of their society. I could almost feel sorry for them—almost.”
“Why?” It was the first she had heard from Stengaard. He was entitled to ask.
“Because,” she told the trunk-man, “dealing with them is going to be too easy.”
Shong Cowl objected, spreading wide all four of his arms and taking up what little room was left within the chamber. “What do you mean by ‘dealing with them,’ Mistress? Do you mean that we ought to fight them? Just how? And with what? If that were possible, do you not imagine that over nine hundred years, we—”
“How? Why, as ardently as we are able to. And with what? With the only truly dangerous weapon in the galaxy.” She would have tapped her head had it been possible. “The trouble is, just as you have no doctors in this place, none among you are fighters. I am a warrior by inheritance, by choice, and by trade.” Well, she thought, that was at least partially true. Potentially, anyway. “And yes, I believe I can get us out of this nine-hundred-year mess. But . . . you were a sailor and shipowner, Hanebuth. Kanvor, an engineer. You, Pwee Nguyen—”
Pwee Nguyen awoke at the mention of his name. “An idiot savant, just as I am now, Mistress. I have only been altered physically, as far as I know.” She laughed.
“My friend, could you have told me that before you were altered?” All of them laughed with her; they knew their comrade better than Bretta.
“Probably not, Mistress, I . . . you have given me something new to think about.” The strange-eyed bird-man blushed deeply. “Perhaps now, I am only a savant.”
Tarrant was holding his sides, and there were tears starting in his eyes. “Bedad, Princess, we’ve been trying to tell him exactly that for ten bloody years!”
“And happy I am to prove useful,” Bretta replied. “My point is that, in addition to whatever else you were, you should have been brought up learning to defend yourselves. To neglect one’s offspring this way amounts to child abuse.”
“Have we not authorities to protect us?” Hornyak inquired with feigned innocence.
“Very funny. Self-defense means just that: self-defense. It is not just another occupational specialization, like sailing or engineering, but an individual bodily function which, like breathing, eating, sleeping, or making love, cannot be delegated. Look around you. See what happens to you when you try.”
The reptile-man winked at her. “But all the imperia-conglomerate forbid it.” She was beginning to perceive that, like schoolboys, her companions were long accustomed to such discussions. They had little enough else to do with themselves.
“True. Such a capability, and the self-sufficient mentality that goes with it, spreading throughout a populace, threaten the state. That is why it is so viciously suppressed. But as I said, look around; see what happens as a result. Our enemy is one example, which is why I said I almost feel sorry for them.
“I fear me they will be all too easy pickings for the daughter of Henry Martyn!”
CHAPTER XXVII:
HIJACKED AT LENSPOINT
The view had proved worth the effort.
“We are uncertain, but believe that the vessel was alien. The seats within were of an outlandish shape and too small, even for me. The backs were bifurcated, with too much space between the halves to keep a man from falling through. Something odd sat in those chairs, let me tell you. And before you ask, Princess, we do not know what the Aggregate does with its non-human captives. Just imagine a flatsy or a yens id made into the equivalent of an Oplyte!”
Although she doubted the ability even of the Aggregate to take a nacyl vessel that did not wish to be taken, and knew better than anyone that the yensid had never built ships of their own (although, she thought, they were often passengers along with those they served), Bretta nodded. It was all she could do, and the spectacle beyond the huge, curved window (it was that window of which Tarrant had been speaking) defied any words she might have thought to use.
Tarrant had been explaining to her how he and his friends had found the crystal-domed transparency in a ship hulk drifting through their asteroidal neighborhood. It was a common enough occurrence of its kind. Desirous only of raw material—human beings—for manufacturing slaves, the Aggregate was otherwise profligately wasteful of its combat prizes. But it was exactly the sort of common occurrence that was responsible, to a considerable degree, for the escapees’ ability to survive here. They had salvaged this transparency, carefully shaped a surface penetration to match it in a rock-bubble lying just beneath the asteroid’s surface, and set it in place in order to create this view.
This cave was a most popular place among the asteroid’s population. Aside for an odd bull’s-eye or peephole—both terms of Tarrant’s choosing—usually set in an airlock door, Tarrant had told her, it was their only view to the outside.
“Why, thank you, Hanebuth.” Bretta answered Tarrant at last, referring the chillingly repellent vision of an Oplyticized nacyl or yensid that he had put into her mind—and intending precisely the opposite of the sentiment that she had expressed. “I greatly fear me that I can imagine it all too well.”
To her it seemed appalling, rather than amusing, to mentally transpose the horrifying changes wrought upon human beings to non-human entities like old Brougham and his kind. Perhaps Tarrant and his friends here believed it funny because, in some ways, what had been inflicted upon them was so much worse. Nonetheless, she found it difficult to appreciate the joke. She would rather gaze out through this transparency she sat in, bulging a full measure up, or outward, above the asteroid’s surface. Thought of as an opening through a wall—however rough and pockmarked—it was much like sitting in a window seat.
Gathering the full measure of whatever dignity circumstance had left to him, Tarrant arose to his total of threescore and six or seven siemmes. “If I have somehow given you offense, Princess, I most humbly and abjectly beg your pardon.” Somehow, the little man made it feel more like an accusation than an apology.
She smiled at him. “My father says that people laugh at whatever it is that happens to frighten them the most; whenever they decide that there are certain things too serious to laugh at, they begin an inexorable slide into despair and madness. I think it likely that this elucidates a great deal of rather unpleasant history. Pray be seated, Hanebuth; you have not offended me. You simply happen to have lived in different circumstances than I and, as a consequence, different things strike you as funny. Who knows, should I linger here a year or a decade, I could easily wind up with very similar proclivities.”
“You are wise, Princess,” Tarrant told her, “and forbearing beyond your years.”
“Thanks, Hanebuth, for all that your words of praise run with sarcasm.” She attempted to shake her head. “My father is wise; I have merely paid attention.”
The truth was, that she did not wish to argue with Tarrant just now; she only wished to look. It was difficult believing that she had somehow managed to survive out there, where the liquid within one’s eyes would boil, explode, and freeze, all in the space of only a minute or two. And yet, what Bretta saw beyond the marvelous curved transparency was one of the most breathtaking sights that she had ever beheld—although, initial
ly, she had been rather disappointed.
Her first words upon approaching the window had been, “Where are they?” Except for the many faraway stars, there was nothing else in sight. The Deep-black sky completely failed to be filled with hundreds of thousands of great, rough, many-cratered boulders, tumbling about end over end, crashing into one another.
The Vouhat-Letsomo System was wholly composed, she had been told, except for its rather unremarkable yellow primary and the occasional comet soaring crosswise through the local ecliptic upon wings of frost and vapor, of bodies too small properly to be called planets. Upon the other hand, her home system possessed no asteroid belt of its own, and the ring for which the planet Skye had become moderately famous was composed of fragments—most of them about the size of her thumb—too small properly to be called asteroids. All that Bretta really knew of asteroids she had seen in a number of action-adventure autothilles.
Tarrant had laughed.
Bretta had taken no offense at this, for whenever Tarrant laughed like that, he looked very much to her like a picture-book elf or one of the “little green men” of ancient flying-saucer legends. All that the fellow lacked, she thought, were colorful slippers with their pointed toes curled upward, perhaps a little hat with bells dangling from its corners, and a forest shroom to sit upon.
Or a helmet with antennae sticking out.
“They are there, Princess,” the little man told her, happily unaware of the unflattering manner in which he was being imagined, “with just about a thousand klommes between them, upon the average. I know what you believe they ought to look like, but they do not, I’m afraid, and never have. From here, they look just like the stars, and one is compelled to watch them very closely—or to record and compare their likenesses—before one can discern any difference.” He lifted a long, thin, preventive index finger when she began to look unhappy. “But there is another way, and that is simply to wait patiently for a few more minutes.”
Bretta had but little choice in the matter anyway, since, bandaged up as helplessly she happened to be at present, she could not move until Tarrant had ordered her moved by his colleagues. This, in spite of the manner in which it conflicted with her physical, self-reliant nature, she was willing to accept with a certain amount of philosophical resignation, having considered all the most likely alternatives. When Tarrant’s requested few minutes had elapsed, however, she was rewarded with the astonishing, heart-stopping sight that she saw now.
Viewed from within, casting the eye upward, downward, or outward from the system, the Vouhat-Letsomo asteroids appeared to be nothing more than empty space. Observed, however, almost from the outside—from just above the plane of the ecliptic, where millions of such bodies could be looked upon at once—which Bretta and Tarrant were able to do once the asteroid they occupied had rotated a few degrees, Vouhat-Letsomo presented quite another appearance.
From that perspective, the system formed an unimaginably grand, silvery, sparkling disk, stretching from one edge of the bubble-window to the other, as far as the eye could see, filled with minuscule glittering lights that changed every instant that she watched them. At the center of the disk, the system’s primary was suspended within a golden mist, befogged by the innermost layer of asteroids.
“Silence always speaks of the most sincere appreciation.” The little man nodded with satisfaction. Bretta’s earlier vision of him outfitted with the trappings of a jester now made her feel ashamed of herself. She never failed to be astonished at the amount of dignity that Hanebuth Tarrant carried with him at all times. “I asked them to bring you up here, Princess, as a token of my sincere gratitude. What I desired to thank you for was the manner in which you lectured the others tonight. I, myself, have been here far too long, but I have never given up—as something like fifty generations of the rest of us seem to have done all too easily—upon getting out of this place and going home.”
“Going home.” Bretta wished—not for the first time nor for the last—that she were not wrapped up in bandages and plastic bracing. She found it grew increasingly uncomfortable—hot and itchy—and even worse, that she was beginning to feel like a white, glistening pupa of one of those insectoid species she had mentioned earlier, coddled and carried from chamber to chamber of the colonial burrow by worker bugs. “You are most welcome, Hanebuth, but that is not the actual reason you had me brought up here so laboriously, is it?”
She glanced back at the window—the girl’s eyes were virtually the only thing that she could move—and as she did, she thought she saw some large, dark object cross it for an instant. But because Tarrant said nothing, she dismissed it as the kind of thing that happens—shadows flitting past the corner of one’s awareness—when one becomes fatigued. And she was fatigued. It had been a long day for her—all four or five hours of it so far—and she was as weary as if she had run each and every measure of it at her best speed.
Upon the other hand, they had not hurt her quite as much this time, she believed, bringing her up here, as they had earlier in the day. Perhaps that only indicated that she was becoming accustomed to the pain. A bleak thought, that. Pain was certainly not the sort of thing she had ever wished to become accustomed to. A wave of acidic hatred for Woulf swept through her. There followed a considerable silence, during which Tarrant seemed to be working up his courage.
“I confess that it was not the reason. Princess—my new friend Bretta Islay—I have not made anything at all of your apparent age, which I would estimate to be an unusually poised and accomplished seventeen or eighteen. Nor do I intend to, at least in front of the others. But out of my own bitter experience, I wished to offer you a warning—in private—so that you would not be quite so disappointed, as I have often been, myself, with your fellow human beings. For you will soon discover, I fear, that there is opposition to the plan you purpose.”
She recoiled with surprise. “Opposition? Why?”
He shrugged. “For one thing, people are natural conservatives, Princess, and tend to resist change for its own sake, for no better reason than that it is change, without regard to whether it happens to be change for the better or the worse. They are inclined to forget how miserable their circumstances have become—I suppose, in a way, that this is the obverse side of the coin of human adaptability. In any case, they appear to prefer whatever suffering they endure today, to which they have grown accustomed, to any paradise that unknown circumstances may drag them into—kicking and screaming—day after tomorrow.”
There it was again, the same fleeting impression she had earlier had of a great expanse of something passing between her and the light outside. She glanced at Tarrant; his head was turned, back the way they had come getting up to this chamber. He appeared to be contemplating the nature of his fellow escapees.
“But that is . . . insane.” Bretta could not think of any other word for preferring to stay here, a prisoner of the Aggregate (admittedly upon a long tether) to winning free into the open Deep, with the prospect of returning home.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Tarrant argued mildly. “I’ll gladly concede that it’s all too human. And perhaps to do them a little more justice than I have, the overwhelming majority of my associates here, and upon other nearby asteroids, as well, sincerely believe that they can never escape this strange system, even if they had the ships to do it in—which they certainly do not—because almost the very moment they attempted it, they would be killed.”
Before she thought of it, she turned her head—and was highly gratified to discover that she could do so, even the slightest bit. Nor had the equally gratifying fact escaped her that Tarrant had estimated her to be two or three years older than she actually was. She had torn her attention away from the glorious window, to look the little man in the eye. “Why, pray, might that be?”
“That they would all be instantaneously killed, or merely that so many of them believe so?” Tarrant directed Bretta’s attention to the view outside the window once again. “I suppose it doesn’t
matter. For some among them—for the weaker of heart or mind or resolution who seem always in the majority—it simply means they will never have to attempt it, and that, in itself, is enough.”
Bretta nodded, understanding well. How many times had her father warned her: it is moral weakness, rather than villainy, that accounts for most of the evil in the universe—and feeble-hearted allies, far rather than your most powerful enemies, who are likeliest to do you an injury you cannot recover from?
“But there is also this: within this unique system we are camouflaged, so to speak, both optically and electronically, by millions of ever-tumbling, metallic asteroids. Look out there, Princess: who can find a single given sparkle among a myriad of them? It’s a great wonder that their ships can ever find their way home. Breaking out into the open Deep surrounding the system, however, we would be detected in an instant by the Aggregate—they possess the superior technology with which to do it—and be as instantly destroyed by their many patrol squadrons, if for no better reason than to keep the many imperia-conglomerate from ever learning of the system’s significance and location.”
Now there could be no mistaking it. Something large and very swift had crossed the window outside, just as she had blinked her eyes. But she had seen its shadow upon the opposite wall. She looked a question at Tarrant; he nodded.
“Indeed, Princess, you were not mistaken. What you just saw is quite real. It is a living creature of the Deep, such as that which brought you to us, here. That minute that you’re able to walk again, I’ll take you to see them.”
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 28