Much the same is true where music, other arts, and science are involved. Not much of painting or sculpture did I see, but they’ve a way of making music hang in the air before one’s disbelieving eyes. Technologically, they’re more advanced than the Monopolity of Hanover, but I swear this tells only half the tale, being merely a consequence of the rare political economy we discovered there.
Perhaps the best way is to swear to you that the people of the Arm awaken every morning looking forward to whatever the day may bring. They spend their waking hours at whatever pleases them, confident that nobody will tell them what to do, how to do it, or confiscate the fruits of their labors—nor any part of them—when they have been completed. At night they go to their beds somewhat reluctantly, as if unwilling to concede that another wonderful day is over.
They pay no taxes: “Theft is theft,” I must have been told fifty times my first week there, “no matter who does the stealing or how many wish it done.”
Now, Princess, we had each of us aboard the Lion of Hanover been hand-selected in the first place for the honor of joining the Ceo’s crew. We had been detached from the Monopolitan Navy, in part because none of us had ties—families and the like—that might interfere with our duty, which was to serve the Ceo’s whim whenever and wherever it might strike him. Only our old first officer had a wedded wife at home, and he did not like her much. All of us were able-bodied starsailors, and—believe it or not, this was considered to be as important as any other qualification—we were all of very much the same height, which meant that we looked well, lined up upon the maindeck for inspection.
That last, alone, will tell you what’s become of the Monopolity. We were all somewhat slighter of stature than the average, I suspect, so that the Ceo, who was quite a big man, himself, might look even bigger, by contrast, for the media.
Once we had glimpsed the least of what awaited us upon Earth’s moon, none of us was particularly eager to return to the Monopolity. I don’t believe the Ceo himself could have found it in his heart to blame us—he might even have wished to join our number—although by your expression, I suppose I could be wrong.
Back home, none of us could ever have hoped for anything better than the positions we presently occupied, growing old—did we remain lucky—in the service of the Ceo and his toy boat. In the Coordinated Arm, a man belongs to himself, first and foremost, and then to whatever class he can successfully aspire to. And—much more to the point, I do believe—everyone who finds some way to make himself even the least bit useful within that civilization eventually becomes, by the standards all of us were accustomed to, obscenely wealthy.
What is more, Princess, although you must believe that I am by no means overly anxious to be thought by you a liar, it took me five very long, nervous years simply learning not to whisper the undeniable fact I am about to impart to you, that the Coordinated Arm is, for all practical intents and purposes, stateless.
No, Princess, they are not what we usually mean when we say anarchists, although they frequently and cheerfully refer to themselves by that very word. Their society is spontaneously ordered, they say, and therefore voluntarily productive, prosperous, and free. It is not so much that they don’t believe in stop signs, if you will; it is that those stop signs are all the private property of the intrepid gentlemen adventurers who built, own, and maintain the roads. Should you fail to obey them, you will simply not be invited back again.
By all of this, what you are to understand me to mean, Princess, is that the Coordinated Arm is absolutely devoid of all of the many mandatory customs, statutes, ordinances, or divisions of caste that always seem to be of so much comfort to stuffy Hanoverians of every class who have been educated to believe there is a place for every individual in society, and every individual in his place.
Not so the people of this place.
The mountains of the Moon are unspeakably promethean. Upon the sheerest face of one of them they have carved their only sacred monument, in letters so tall, and graven so deep, that it may be read from three hundred klommes away. It is a “Bill of Rights” from one of the old Earthian nation-states. Even now, Princess, I weep to think about it. What it has to say, in just a handful of brief sentences, is that—as far as rights are concerned—there is no such thing as society, that there are only individuals whose liberty may never be restrained.
These people—you know, Princess, there is no collective name for them—they laugh whenever you call them Coordinated Armians. They have but one law, enforced by everybody, that upon possible pain of death (imposed by the intended victim at the scene and moment of the crime) you are never to start a fight. Everything they consider justice consists for the most part of various procedures, formal and informal, for determining who struck the first blow, as opposed to who retaliated, with whatever degree of severity, in innocent self-defense.
In the Coordinated Arm, self-defense is always innocent; no questions are ever asked, regarding the degree of force chosen and employed to achieve it.
Ah, but I perceive that you grow weary of my sociopolitical dissertation—or perhaps your many and grievous wounds have tired you again—and that, in either event, all you want to know is what eventually became of Anastasia Wheeler and her reluctant Hanoverian crewbeings, perhaps even, dare I hope, yours truly? Well, Princess, be assured that they all lived happily ever after.
Eventually, every member of the Lion of Hanover’s hijacked crew found a place for himself. If you will not object to my discussing the subject, the girls of the Coordinated Arm were tall (I guess that they still must be, for that matter), long of limb, freshfaced, and remarkably beautiful, not unlike yourself, Princess. But, unlike most Hanoverian women, they were very bold—unabashedly straightforward in the open expression of their desires—so much so that I am ashamed now to confess that I remained a bachelor, and, for the most part, rather disappointingly chaste, until it no longer made much of a difference.
As far as I am aware, however, each and every one of my old shipmates—save for me, of course—still dwells upon the Earth’s moon to this very day. Some, I suppose, have ventured off by now to one of her many colonies within the arm of the galaxy from which the culture derives its name. Because I kept in touch with most of them, I know for certain that they have all long since acquired wives and families, businesses, a certain standing that they could never have achieved back home in the Monopolity. In this astonishingly open society called the Coordinated Arm, even the least among us—and I reckon that must have been me, for I was the youngest member of the Ceo’s crew, no different from the rest of my shipmates in any significant respect—began prospering beyond the wildest dreams of traditional lower-class Hanoverian avarice.
I have neglected to describe the embarrassing commotion that the media made over us. I greatly fear that they are no better within the Coordinated Arm than anywhere else I have ever been. To hear them tell about it, it was as if we were all living fossils, painstakingly chipped out from under the ice somewhere. To be sure, at least for some of us, the humiliating interviews and . . . well, something they called “commercial endorsements” offered us an initial stake in the civilization in which we had, by choice or otherwise, enlisted.
For others—and I was one of them—it also brought a possibility of real employment. To obtain her initial stake, Anastasia had sold the Lion of Hanover to the wealthy owners of some famous shipping line or other, quite generously sharing the astonishing price she had bargained for, with her crew. In part because it was the only thing I knew, and in part because I had come to love the old girl, I was the first hand who signed on with the Lion’s new owners.
To my unending regret, they only kept the poor old Lion about as a sort of mascot—a “logo” they called her—merely employing her for her striking likeness in their advertisements (as I said, we had made quite a sensation in the media) and to convey their biggest, most important (or most temperamental) customers upon brief, purposeless excursions round the dead Earth and back. And sh
e, the gallant vessel in which we had dared to traverse half a galactic radius!
I endured that nonsense for as long as I found it necessary, in order to get my bearings within this new civilization. From the Lion of Hanover, I eventually transferred to another ship—they let you do that, you know—starting my life all over again as a seasoned hand aboard the ordinary cargo vessels of the Coordinated Arm. There was a great deal to learn about these ships, and I was determined to prove equal to anything that was required of me.
And now, Princess, for the strangest, and to me, most incredible part of my story: in a relatively short time, simply by learning as much as I might, whenever I found the opportunity, and by working as assiduously as I believed possible, I discovered that I had somehow climbed my way up, rung by rung, to a commission! I need not remind you that this was an achievement that would have been utterly unthinkable, let alone impossible, within the complicatedly stratified Monopolity. I daresay that for a good long while, I was more than a trifle scandalized by the notion of such “social mobility,” as they call it.
But almost despite myself, I eventually became an experienced and widely respected ship’s captain. Scarcely before sufficient time had passed for it to seem possible, I discovered that I was offering employment and shipboard training, first to the sons, then to the grandsons, of many an old comrade from the Lion of Hanover who apparently remembered me in a kindly light. (I had contemplated buying the old girl back, but by then preferred the starships of the Arm.) For years, I contentedly plied the Deep with them and others, amidst an apolitical “empire” but little smaller than that ruled by the Ceo himself.
Think, Princess, for a moment, upon what it signifies that I, who had been nothing more than a common deckhand, was now providing opportunity for so many others. How much prosperity and xprogress are the Monopolity and other imperia-conglomerate throwing away, with both hands, simply by denying this freedom to their own subjects, by means of confiscatory taxation, crippling regulations, and a rigid social hierarchy? Rather than risk the stagnation that invariably results from such a policy, the Arm will countenance none of it.
Our ambitious and capable Captain Anastasia, in the meantime, had become involved in politics. In a way, that was understandable, as she had been born to it. Bitterly opposing anyone who, using the threat of war as an excuse, wished to establish the kind of unanswerable authority under whose absence the Coordinated Arm had so thoroughly prospered, she eventually became its primary political leader—to any extent that they have one—or Coordinator. As far as I know, to this day—without the aid of any unanswerable authority—she conducts a bitter and protracted war with something called the Clusterian Powers. It was they whom Bader’s Raiders took us to be, that first day we arrived.
When at long last I began to meditate upon retirement, I discovered, to my surprise, that somehow—simply by making the same sensible decisions, on a day-by-day basis, that anybody else would have made in my place—I had become the wealthy owner of a handsome and lucrative merchant fleet. Having never married, and remaining still in remarkably good health, I was prepared now to consider doing other things with my life. Again to my surprise—although, thanks to the advanced medical capabilities of the Coordinated Arm, I could reasonably look forward to living vigorously enough for many another decade—all I really wanted was to see my homeworld sometime again before I died.
I suppose I could have taken a big ship and a full crew back with me, on a somewhat more voluntary basis than Anastasia had. It would have been more than satisfying to show the people I had known in the old days—those of them as still lived—what I had made of myself. But I was unwilling to make such a possibly irrevocable decision for a crew of mine that Anastasia had for us.
Besides, this was my voyage home and nobody else’s.
Unfortunately, the jaunty little personal spacecraft by means of which I chose to make that voyage, proved unequal to the task I had demanded of her. My little vessel’s electromechanical break-down was highly unusual and truly an unlucky fluke. But the most embarrassing fact, that she was unarmed, had been my very own—and as it turned out, extremely ill-advised—personal choice.
Thus, while she drifted dark-ported and without headway, so agonizingly close to home, I fully expected to die a starsailor’s death, succumbing slowly to eventual freezing, suffocation, starvation, or even thirst. I had avoided it so many years, so many decades, that it almost seemed proper. I confess, Princess, that I have subsequently wished many times that I had died such a death.
Instead, my little vessel and I were found and seized by minions of the Aggregate.
CHAPTER XXIX:
THE WINDHOVER
Tarrant held the likeness before her face.
It was like nothing Bretta had ever seen before.
She sat up in bed, weeks before she had thought she would be able, a combination of undemanding gravity, good food, healing potions, and devices she had also never seen before, implanted in her bandages, having worked wonders.
Both her arms and her legs were still immobilized. Only her right thumb and forefinger were free of bandages, and they were bruised so black that she was afraid to see what the rest of her looked like. It had not retarded her healing to have found friends in this bizarre place—or for them to have found her—bizarre friends, surely, but friends nevertheless. So numerous were the more terrible fates that might have befallen her that, despite her injuries, she felt fortunate beyond her ability to express, or even comprehend it.
Bretta could hardly wait to visit the creature—she kept wondering what they were called and promptly forgetting to ask—that had rescued her. And she was still touched to the core of her being that, having noticed how much she had enjoyed this special observation chamber of theirs, with its rare and wonderful great window, her hosts had willingly deprived themselves of its use for a not inconsiderable period of time, converting it into a bedroom for her convalescence.
She could see several of the Deep-breathing creatures now, a klomme or so away, playing together like triskel pups or mock-dolphins in Skye’s Great Briny Loch. These must have been young, for they were relatively small as the things went—somewhat less than three measures across—and very nearly transparent.
For all that it was a sanctuary for the desperate, this place was simply full of marvels, the accidental leavings of a thousand heretofore unheard-of civilizations. The thing Tarrant displayed now was quite unlike an autothille and more like a simple card. It was as flexible as heavy paper or plastic and could as readily have been folded. However, within the eye-deceiving depths that it seemed to possess (the edges, held carefully between Tarrant’s fingers, allowed her to estimate that it was in fact no thicker than a few pages from a book) there hung suspended in the night-black Deep an object shown in three dimensions, even more wonderful to behold than the object that was depicting it.
Watching, with an expectant look upon his green-brown wrinkled face, for her reaction, Tarrant turned the card over. Now she saw the depicted object’s other side, again in full perspective, standing sharply against a background that included the curved edge of a blue-green, partly cloud-covered planet and an unfamiliar starfield. Beyond, in the greater distance, hung a gray-white, gangrenous-looking globe that could only have been dead Earth. The first side of the card had shown no planets at all, and a completely different array of constellations.
But look what lay in the foreground, upon both sides!
“This was my little starship,” Tarrant informed her with a bittersweet expression of pride. It was he who perched upon the windowsill this morning, as she remained resting in the bed they had moved there. “As I watched them do it, the monsters tore her to pieces about my ears, simply so that they could get at me. What did they get for their effort? A colossal waste of grace and beauty.
“She was called Windhover.”
He propped the likeness against her crossed wrists that she might study it.
“Why, she is like a child’s to
y,” Bretta observed, “the kind that comes back when you throw it? You are right; she was inexpressibly beautiful. How large was she? Here is a window with somebody looking out—would that be you?”
He shook his head. “The previous owner.”
“As may be. From wingtip to wingtip, I would guess she measured roughly the same as my father’s Osprey does across the diameter of her maindeck from taffrail to taffrail—a matter of some eighty or ninety measures. In any case, she appears to have very little in common with the ships that our civilization builds.”
Conspicuously careful to avoid contact with her, or even proximity that she might find threatening, Tarrant leaned in to reexamine the likeness with her.
“An excellent guess, Princess, you’ve a sharp eye.” The sad little man sighed the sigh of a long-lost love. “The traditional thing to say is that she was ‘yar’—I have not the slightest notion why, or even what it means. The poor darling spanned ninety-three yards from her starboard running lamp to her port, making her a trifle small for her power class. Yards are an Arm standard—a yard is three feet and a foot is twelve inches, extremely practical, as it is almost impossible to mishandle the decimal—about 91 percent of a Hanoverian measure.”
“ ‘Yards, feet, inches,’ ” Bretta repeated. “And ‘yar,’ whatever it means. I believe I have seen the first three in any number of books that I have read, along with miles, pounds, and ounces. Whatever ‘yar’ was, Hanebuth, she was it.”
Indeed, the little craft seemed to consist of nothing more than a pair of long, tapering, smooth wings with rounded tips, as brilliantly white as if she had been covered with a trillion diamonds the size of sandgrains. The wings formed a graceful angle where they met. Although Windhover’s likeness had been taken in harsh light, Bretta could find not a seam anywhere upon her exterior. The leading edges of her wings and her softly pointed bow (where a beautifully curved transparency continued the sensuous lines of her hull) were as fluid and elegant as those of a well-worn streambed pebble. However all her trailing surfaces were upright, perpendicular to the broad planes of her wings.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 30