Bretta had retained only the dimmest recollection of having arrived here, and wondered whether half of what she remembered was not delirium. “What is it?”
Tarrant shrugged his tiny shoulders. “How can I answer that? I suppose that, in repose, it looks something like a huge bird, or some kind of great, flat fish. It lives and breeds and dies out there by the millions, protected in some way by these asteroids, just as we are, breathing the vacuum round them as if it were air. I am informed that it is quite a remarkable specimen of evolution.”
“I should hope to shout that from the rooftop! Is—can it think, Hanebuth?” How had such a creature come to rescue her? She had been inside a garbage canister. How had it ever guessed that she was inside and wanted rescuing?
He shook his head. “It isn’t intelligent—I mean, it couldn’t have had this conversation with you—but it can be trained. We keep a . . . well, call it a ‘stable’ of several dozen of the creatures here because they help us to salvage useful items—such as yourself—from out there. I expect that, kept by all the people like us within this system, there are several thousand creatures like it. And many millions more, of course, that have never been tamed.”
She nodded, deciding she must learn more of these animals as soon as she could. Something told her that they could prove important. “But we have been distracted.”
“So we have, Princess.”
They had been discussing the supposed impossibility of escape. She felt her blood rise a trifle at the memory and decided to make the most of it, as she had seen her father do now and again. “What would you have me do, then, Hanebuth, remain here like fifty generations of poltroons who gave up on being alive?”
“Upon the contrary, Princess.” Tarrant raised both hands, palms outward, although it was obvious from his unsuccessful attempt to hide a grin that he had seen through her counterfeit tantrum. Perhaps she needed practice. “Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful when you’re angry? I thought not. The truth is your face turns red and gets all screwed up—not a pretty sight. All I wished was to tell you how the land lies. And persuade you to stay whatever plans you’re making—temporarily—until you know more of our situation.”
“Well—”
Bretta would have folded her arms and sulked except that it was not in her nature, her arms were already folded, and Tarrant was unlikely to have noticed. She began to laugh, instead. Before long, Tarrant was laughing, as well.
“It is not as if I planned to go tomorrow. I assume these bandages are coming off someday? Until then, you are right, I need to learn more. Let us begin with you, if it is not too personal or painful, what brought you to this system?”
He rubbed outsized hands together. “I asked for that. It’s a story you were bound to hear anyway, and it has pleasant moments. Bid me stop if I bore you.”
“In one sense,” she replied with arched eyebrows, “helpless as you see me now, I am indeed bound to hear the story. Is this what is meant by a captive audience? Still, I have every confidence that you will not bore me, Hanebuth.”
“You flatter me beyond my ability to endure it, Princess. As it happens, I was taken and brought to this system while making a vain attempt to return to home and family in the Monopolity of Hanover after decades of ‘exile’ in a fabulous, faraway system that many today believe exists only in mythology and legend.”
She settled more comfortably into her window seat. His “exile,” he said, had followed the theft of a starship aboard which he had worked as an ordinary crewbeing.
“The most amazing thing about the whole adventure”—he grinned at Bretta, relishing the anticipation of what he was about to tell her—”is that the ship in question, the voluptuous Lion of Hanover, was the official conveyance of Leupould IX, Ceo of Hanover. Even better, she was hijacked at lenspoint by Anastasia Wheeler, the rebellious elder sister of none other than Leupould himself!”
Bretta smiled, not so much at Tarrant’s revelation as with a remembrance of home. Like many a child with good hearing and a better memory, she had managed to overhear her parents more than once, discussing what little was known of the so-called “Anastasia Incident.” The hijacking of that Ceo’s yacht by his own sister had been the scandal of the generation just prior to that which had enjoyed being scandalized by the more notorious exploits of Henry Martyn. The full, shocking details were still known only among the highest Hanoverian echelons.
She said so to Tarrant, who laughed and nodded. As one of Lion’s crew who had survived more than a year’s epic journey, he knew “the rest of the story.”
“The whole thing started,” he said, “when Anastasia—you two would have gotten along famously—refused a suitor whom her brother, in absence of their dead parents, had selected for her. Somebody wealthy or powerful or both, be assured. Anastasia was of an age considered by many to be that of an ‘old maid.’ ”
Bretta was aware that her mother, Loreanna, had been sent off to a faraway, frigid colony world for having done much the same thing. In a way, she ought to have hated her great-uncle Sedgeley for his villainy, but in another—it had been upon that journey that Loreanna had been captured by Henry Martyn.
“How old was Anastasia?”
“I cannot say, Princess; he had been Ceo only a year or so. Unlike yours, her hair was black, cut in a style known as a ‘valiant,’ her eyes enormous, dark and haunting. She was a tiny thing—I, myself, was taller then—standing no higher than your shoulder, and wielding a ‘haler longer than her forearm.’ ”
He cleared his throat.
“You may know that arranged marriages are common between unfortunate daughters of ambitious families and repulsive but financially attractive bridegrooms.”
“Yes, Hanebuth, and politically attractive ones, as well. We marry for love upon the frontier—at least upon moonringed Skye—we woodsrunners do. I am alive today because my mother avoided exactly such an arranged marriage.”
“You don’t say! Well, the story goes that Leupould, newly ascended to the seat of power upon the basis of merit alone, and lacking the advantage of a powerful family, was anxious to acquire it at any cost, especially if it would be paid by his sister. Anastasia, however, expressed in no uncertain terms her absolute unwillingness to submit to the customary Hanoverian marital arrangement.”
“Good for her!” Bretta would have clapped her hands had they been free to move. Given Anastasia’s circumstances, she hoped she would have acted as well.
“Instead,” Tarrant continued, “Anastasia ‘allowed herself to be seduced into adventure’—those being the words her brother chose to describe it at the time—by nothing more than a nearly forgotten trunk of musty family records.”
Bretta laughed. She had heard that much the same had happened to her father, and, having at an early age thoroughly explored the extensive cellars of the Islay family Holdings herself, she could well believe it so. Perhaps, instead of banning weapons, they should have tried outlawing attics and basements.
“Somehow, in the heart of a capital city dedicated to preventing it, she learned to wield a personal thrustible with a respectable degree of skill. Somehow, she even arranged for clandestine lessons in starship handling and interstellar navigation. And with Leupould’s unwitting assistance, she came to know key people at the Ceo’s private landing pentagram. When the time was right, it was nothing for her to board and commander her brother’s personal starship.”
Bretta was coming to like this Anastasia Wheeler more and more. Why—she had most likely demanded in her brother’s name—should men be the only ones to have all the fun? Especially given society’s attitude toward her, the ready availability of a ship, and a chest full of nine-hundred-year-old navigational charts? Bretta thought that the woman might be in her late fifties or sixties by now. Maybe someday, when this was over and another adventure had begun, they would meet.
“Having easily overcome the Lion of Hanover’s crew, more by force of personality than by force of arms, Anastasia navigated
her stolen prize out of the capital system, out of the Monopolity itself, out of the great stellar cluster in which the Monopolity is but a tiny floating particle, and into the vaster Milky Way that the cluster slowly circles, toward what she had come to believe from family annals, was the birthworld of humanity, a planet at the edge of the galaxy proper, rendered uninhabitable in ancient times by hideous weaponry.”
“I have heard that story,” Bretta said, trying to recall who had told it to her.
“So have we all, Princess, at our mothers’ knees. And indeed, the human beings who dwell upon the single large, natural satellite that those Wheeler family annals had instructed her to look for, still call their dead planet ‘Earth.’ ”
CHAPTER XXVIII:
BALANCE OF TERRA
“Princess,” Tarrant told Bretta, “I swear to you upon all that I revere, that I myself have seen the shrouded world where humanity is supposed to have evolved.”
Although she had begun to feel a trifle weary, she nodded encouragement, eager to have him continue. For a moment she could at least forget where she was and what had happened to her. She had grown up with Skyan yarns of “Lost Yarth” and had become conversant, later, with the more erudite Hanoverian theories (no likelier to be correct than folklore, in her mother’s scholarly opinion) regarding mankind’s planetary origins. She had even managed to read more in her great-uncle Sedgeley’s library at the Daimler-Wilkinson establishment upon the capital world. This was exactly the sort of subject that interested her most.
“But—” Tarrant advised the girl, clearly still awestruck, even after many decades, by his unique experience, “it was only from a very considerable distance. We could guess from the weird colors our own §-field was taking on that the planet is a veritable fountainhead of deadly ionizing particles, and on that account remains as inaccessible as every ancient legend would have us believe. It hangs there upon the velvety black Deep, pearly white, as empty of life and expression as a blinded eye, its atmosphere and its soil rendered lethal to all life-forms in some long-forgotten war, by instrumentalities which are, at least within the imperia-conglomerate—gratefully—equally long-forgotten.”
Bretta knew, because her father had told her, that this common belief of the lower classes with regard to ancient doomsday weaponry was untrue. Their ancestors had possessed nothing very unusual, simply too large and far too numerous.
Nor were they quite forgotten. Arran himself had resorted to one against a pursuing enemy corsair at the very beginning of his war upon the Monopolity. They were often carried as self-destruct devices aboard freebooters’ vessels, as a means of avoiding capture. (And if more starship captains were to follow such a prudent custom, Bretta thought, the Aggregate would soon be out of the Oplyte business.) Imperia-conglomerate generally refrained from using them upon one another, out of fear the same sort of weapon would be used upon them in retaliation. This agreement-by-default had first been tried upon mankind’s homeworld, so the tale went, and for that reason was called the “Balance of Terra.”
Someday she would ask someone why the thrusted planet had so many names! But she was too tired to ask now, very hesitant to interrupt, and Tarrant was going on . . .
“And yet Anastasia and her reluctant Hanoverian crewbeings—yours truly among them—soon discovered something more astonishing even than that. Over the near millennium since our particular ancestors had abandoned that unlucky system and its brutally murdered homeworld, the descendants of the surviving individuals who remained behind had ‘hanoverformed’ the now-lifeless planet’s only moon. Hard as it may be to believe, over a stretch of several centuries, and at an unspeakable cost in lives and precious resources, the smaller of the two worlds, that which had never before known any life of its own, had been rendered not simply habitable, but downright hospitable to unprotected human beings.”
Involuntarily, she yawned.
“Do you wish to retire,” he asked solicitously. “May I get something for you?”
“I wish you would not, Hanebuth,” she answered. “Pray continue, if you will.”
Then let me confess to you, Princess (Tarrant went on), that the enormous technological prowess—not to mention the sheer, unrelenting stubbornness—that must have been required by that achievement was such that, even those of us sufficiently sophisticated to comprehend and appreciate the unspeakable effort, for example, represented by construction of our own mighty ’Droom, or the orbital insertion of the Ceo’s Eye about Hanover, stood openmouthed in admiration.
Sadly, Anastasia conceded to her crew, as we openly approached the living world—and gave the widest possible berth to the dead one—that the many skills and steely determination that were demanded by even the least of these undertakings were no longer to be found within the decaying Monopolity of Hanover.
As a wag among the Lion’s crew put it, Hanover’s future was all in her past.
But in an instant—even as we hung slack-jawed in the Lion’s rigging, admiring a mighty thunderstorm, brilliantly illuminated from underneath by sheets of lightning, sweeping across vast golden prairies and verdant forests that our obsolescent charts would have had us all believe were merely barren oceans of frozen lava—we were surrounded by a belligerent swarm of tiny fighting vessels we first took for steam launches, circling about us and thrusting explosive bursts of some kind into our path, obviously warning us to heave to.
We were taken by surprise and considerably abashed to be so, especially our captain. But naturally, we were happy to do as they demanded, and lucky as it proved, for the only ships remotely like the Lion of Hanover that they had ever seen before were of the warfleets of their deadliest enemy. Being a generous and kindly folk, however, willing to exercise restraint even at the possible cost of losses upon their own side, they had held their thrust until they were able to determine why we appeared peculiar to them. You see, Princess, they were also a circumspect people, and we were not precisely like their foe.
They looked like anybody to us—anybody human, so to speak, as we had encountered no alien species that day, although, as it turned out, they happen to abound within this culture. Their accoutrement did strike us as rather comical, consisting as it did of close-fitting one-piece outfits, soft leather helmets with huge goggles which they never used, and long white silken scarves trailing almost to the deck. But of course that sort of eccentricity was to be expected of foreigners. Certainly we must have looked as silly to them in our striped shirts, beribboned caps, bare feet, and ankle-length white kefflar trousers.
What was not expected was that they would speak perfectly intelligible Hanoverian—with surprisingly few differences, even of pronunciation or of accent—insisting all the while that, in reality, it was their own language, English.
The individuals who had threatened and then welcomed us, named themselves “interceptors,” their particular unit being the “Bader’s Raiders.” They were not, as it happened, a part of any government. As a division of some entirely private organization called the “Sea of Tranquility Militia,” they had been taking their regular turn among other such groups at orbital patrol when they caught sight of our sails which, for reasons I will discourse upon later—reasons, Princess, you may not wish to credit—they thought a considerable novelty.
They had hailed us, they asserted upon being welcomed aboard the Lion of Hanover by her upstart captain, by means of a contrivance they called “radio” and also with some other device which (although none of us believed it at the time) they insisted was capable of sending messages more swiftly even than a starship sails. Not being equipped to do so, of course, we had not heard them hailing us, but had at last responded to flashes of coherent light from their little one-passenger vessels, first in traditional Hanoverian ship-to-ship code (which, like our language, they called a different name—“Morse”—and claimed to have been using for centuries), then by means of voice-modulated laser.
The origins of that particular device, I’m afraid, have long since been lost in t
he obscuring mist of history. Some believe it once to have been a weapon.
After all that time upon the Deep, stopping rarely at uninhabited worlds to replenish our stores of food and water, we did not have much refreshment to offer. They took tea with the officers and afterward were shown round our ship, which they admired greatly. Each of them—a dozen men and, believe it or not, half a dozen women—wished to know every detail of her working and showed no reluctance to give us similar information regarding their fighterinterceptors.
Conferring with someone on the ground using devices within their helmets, they told us the Lion would be towed—if it did not displease us—to a position where she would not obstruct commercial traffic. We had unknowingly arrived at a bustling port where orbiting vessels appeared few and far between only because they actually put down upon the surface. Each of us would then be taken—only if we wished to be—to visit that surface and its people. Earth’s long-dead moon had become an unlikely but energetic center of a revitalized interstellar civilization which called itself the “Coordinated Arm.”
Princess, how can I begin to describe for you the civilization Anastasia and her band of adventurers—yours truly again included—discovered upon the resurrected moon of ancient Earth? It was for me the most fascinating of exercises, simply examining their strange culture and comparing it with our own.
Their history of our species from the beginning of time until the death of the Earth varies considerably from what schoolchildren are taught within the Monopolity and diverges altogether, naturally, after that point. Yet like the imperia-conglomerate, they retain the immortal works of Shakespeare, Conan Doyle, Steele, Roddenberry, and Snodgrass. They lack the literary efforts of such creative giants as Laurel Stover or Elizabeth Eastdale, who flourished among us well after our ancestors left Earth’s system. But they have still other storytellers—Heinlein, Anderson, Wilson, Piper, Boardman—whose monumental corpi were apparently lost, or perhaps even suppressed, by our civilization.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 29