"Vindication," Morven murmured a monologue, his daughter being incapable of replying, "I swore to win so long ago at the expense of the presumptuous Islay and his peasant brood, is all but complete. You, my dear, are my angel of revenge. The token I imposed upon myself, of my determination in this affair, is no longer necessary. I, whom it amuses others to call 'Usurper'—they dare not call me 'cripple'—am free to be a man again!" Repositioning himself, he muttered unintelligibilities at the beautiful Alysabeth, who, judging from the noises she elicited, performed to his entire satis-
faction. "It will please you to learn that I have begun treatment which will abolish my confinement and extend my life by an indefinite measure."
Donol felt bitterness stir within him. Enough to witness Alysabeth's abject, incestuous compliance with Morven's obscene demands, with what even Donol considered the man's gross appetites (although he shared a full measure of them, himself). Jealousy and disappointment filled him with unbearable pain. That he had been swindled, would not inherit the power and position which were his birthright from an elderly invalid who had rejected life and all it had to ojflfer and would soon be dead—that was infinitely worse.
Morven threw his head back and cried out, hands flattening the curls at the nape of his daughter's neck, crushing her to him as she gathered the fabric of his trousers into shaking, tight-clenched fists. Donol had seen enough. He turned upon his heel and strode from the office, making plans which would give him revenge upon everyone. This, and his angry footsteps, took him to the stairway leading to the tower where vengeance would begin.
Placing a finger in a depression of the new lockplate, Donol fretted as its ulsic mechanism assayed traces of perspiration for immunity factors. From one hand a bundle swung heavy at his knee. The lock clicked; the door, built as it was from massive timbers, swung at his touch. As always hoping that Lia would cower into a comer from fear, he entered. The room, however, possessed a decided lack of comers, nor did she retreat. As much as she may have liked to, it had never been within the compass of her character.
Something clinked at her feet. Having had the freedom of Arran's old room, she was, at Morven's order, being punished for her escape (in a sense she was fortunate, the death of the guard having been attributed to rebels), restrained by a collar fastened by a long chain to the wall. The sight of the metal band round her throat stirred him. Battered as she was, with dark circles under her eyes, she stood unbroken in the tattered gown she had once again assumed, at the limit of the chain. He shut the door behind him.
"They think I fail to see," he was abrupt, "that you were given me as a distraction, a consolation prize, taking pres-
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sure off Alysabeth who makes countless promises, implicit and explicit, keeping none." Across the room, beyond her reach, stood a cabinet. Here he placed his bundle—it clinked, not unlike her chain—items salvaged from the dungeons which he had earlier retrieved, certain he would discover uses for them. He had intended moving the cabinet to the landing outside. Now, given her collar, being unable to reach them, it pleased him to think she could look upon these items in his absence, anticipating his return. "You, because you despise me and make no pretense, because you fancy that you belong to my brother, believe I shall tire of you." He strode toward her. "Both parties to this deception make a dreadful mistake, Lia, as you are about to learn to your discomfort and humiliation once again. As you will learn as often in future as necessary. As they will learn to their ruin and dismay when the time comes!"
He stood close. She had learned better than to resist; at the first sign he would call guards—he relished Oplytes for the task—to wrestle her into a compliant posture. Taking her by her wrists, he pulled the gown from her shoulders, exposing a breast which he seized, rolling the nipple cruelly between forefinger and thumb where dark ovals, evidence of previous such treatment, were visible. She bit her lip, accepting his abuse in silence, although a single glistening tear, whether of pain or chagrin even she could not have sworn, squeezed from beneath the fronding of her eyelashes and rolled down her cheek.
Donol grinned. Releasing her wrists, he draped an arm over her shoulder, letting his hand trail down her back. He crushed his mouth to her breast, sucking, biting until he discerned a trace of blood. Leaning her back until he almost lifted her, he reached for her skirt hem, crumpling the fabric into rude folds until his free hand burrowed beneath it. The invading hand traveled up smooth flesh, fondling and pinching, levering her thighs apart. Despite herself, Lia whimpered, stiffening as he cupped the mound between her legs, thrusting his fingers into its moist, fragrant warmth.
Holding her thus, he released her shoulder and stretched for a pair of heavy bracelets from the bundle he had left upon the cabinet, beyond her reach but just within his own. Locking her hands behind her, he released his intimate hold
Upon her, turned and shoved her, face down, onto the unblanketed bed. Pushing her skirt up round her waist, he fumbled at the fastenings of his trousers, threw himself upon her, and seized her by both breasts. His weight bore upon her, bracelets cutting into her flesh, as, without warning, he thrust himself into her as if she were a boy.
This being his favorite way with her, for no reason other than that it caused her greatest suffering, pain, as much from previous such invasions as this, seared her. Lia wept with demolished pride, neither for the first time nor the last. Robret was dead. Worse, she had discovered a compelling reason to endure this, if she could.
/
Part Five: Loreanna
Yearday 9, 301 1 A.D.
Febbe 39, 510 Hanoverian
octavus 13, 1569 0ldskyan
"Hallo, hallo," cried Henry Martyn,
"What makes you starsail so high?"
"i'm a rich murchan-starship bound for the frontier,
The frontier.
The frontier, Attack at your peril, star-bandit of Skye."
Chapter XXXI: A Fate Worse than Exile
Mistress Loreanna Daimler-Wilkinson stood upon a polished floor inlaid with exotic hardwoods, within a shaft of sunlight which fell upon her hair and naked shoulders from a pair of tall windows behind her.
For the moment she was relaxed without altogether realizing it, resigned to what was bound to happen to her—in truth relieved that it would not be worse—possessed of that complete unself-consciousness which can only arise in utter certainty that one is alone and unwatched.
In one small hand she held a fold of her voluminous skirt, as she had done so many times before in this spacious, familiar chamber where she had been taught to dance—and to listen to the music—eyes half closed, lips half parted. Her other hand made gentle, preliminary motions to the melody and rhythm beginning to issue from a nearby thille player. This—as with all she had said or done the past fortnight— would be the last time. The thought stirred within her, as it never failed to do, sensations of anguish and futile outrage, which of late (she found this infuriating in itself) had begun to be displaced, or, at least, mixed up, with a certain curious anticipation by which she felt self-betrayed.
Before her, a floor-to-ceiling mirror set between the windows conveyed a view of herself as she turned with an unhurried, flowing motion upon her tiny feet, rising to her toes and down again, coming round to face the image she did not recognize as that of a lovely young girl. She was both fair and freckled, the latter a golden smattering. Her hair, arranged in the elaborate-simple fashion of the Hanoverian elite, was a warm brown-auburn. Although diminutive of stature, she was well proportioned, so that individuals seeing her in surroundings which lent no indication of scale invariably, and incorrectly, thought her taller.
She was delicate of face and form, gifted with a touching natural grace she was unaware existed or was visible to others. Upon the contrary, at this instant in her life, one fraught with change imposed upon her by others, she wondered, and rather doubted, whether she might ever be, to any man she could regard as worthy of respect, the woman whom he might love al
l his life.
"Will that be all. Miss?" Loreanna started in that manner possible only when one's certainty she is alone proves to have been false. A lifetime's education in restraint kept her from showing any sign of it.
"Thank you. Brougham. I believe so, for the time being."
Brougham inclined his upper extremity. "Very good. Miss."
Loreanna let her eyes see what her mind had emended from the image, of the chamber, not of herself, in the mirror. Two broad double doors, standing opposite the windows (in one of which Brougham stood), led from this place. In addition to serving as a studio for dance practice, it was at other times employed as ballroom, recital hall, and grand dining room. Along an expanse of decorated wall between the doors, dozens of ugly mesh containers had been filled, and with Brougham's always uncomplaining assistance, stacked, unstacked, emptied, rearranged, refilled, and stacked again, during the ten days or so she had been preparing for her hated—and somewhat looked-forward-to—voyage. To one side stood the object Loreanna believed she would miss most, since taking it was out of the question. Her mother's old-fashioned synthechord, covered with protective cloth, was next to the only physical reminder she had left of her dead parents. She had taken lessons, and, in the end, mastered the instrument, only after her guardian had been at considerable expense to find a teacher. She still played almost every day.
Loreanna also found herself seeing Brougham clearly for the first time in years. Looked at as if she had never seen him before—or in this case, as if she might never see him again—he was rather an odd sight. At just over a measure and a half—no taller than Loreanna herself—Brougham and the rest of his species, the yensid, had evolved upon a small but massive planet with a gravitic pull twenty times that of
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Hanover. This lent them an agility and strength which, upon human-occupied worlds, made them ideal servants.
Just as everything of importance about a human being might be described as dwelling above his shoulders, so everything important about Brougham dwelt below his "hips.'* Here he made contact with the ground through hundreds of stiff, buff-colored locomotory organs, each a couple of dozen siemmes long, no larger than the wire from which metalloid mesh was fashioned. Here also his nervous system centered. Rising above the twenty-siemme width of his lower body, a wandlike "trunk," shades darker than the rest of him, elevated his sensory organs. It was sensitive to light over a broader spectrum than the human eye (less so to sound—to Brougham, Loreanna's fascination with music remained unfathomable), and to a variety of other energies, some of which humans appreciate only by means of scientific instruments. A third of the way from the rounded tip of Brougham's uppermost extremity, a pair of long, thille-thin arms always looked to her as if they were attached as an afterthought. Despite their silly appearance, they were stronger than human arms, and terminated in deft, powerful three-fingered hands.
Perhaps most significant, in terms of their being ideal servants from a human point of view, was the fact that Brougham's people were, to a remarkable degree, unambitious and noncompetitive. Like intelligent species everywhere, the yensid were their world's most aggressive predators. All things being relative, however, and life upon the yensid planet being relatively quieter and slower-paced than elsewhere, by a standard more universally applicable, they were disinclined to violent behavior, and adapted well to being told what to do—a quality of mind which no one, especially her guardian uncle, Sedgeley Daimler-Wilkinson, would ever have accused Loreanna of manifesting.
As an alternative offered to what had first been planned for her, she had, without an instant's hesitation, chosen Baffridgestar, a handful of icy, barren lumps circling a dim red clinker in the furthest-flung locale where her family claimed an interest—and thus, it was hoped, beyond reach of political memory or retribution. Of somewhat greater impor-
tance, the system was convenient (only in a comparative sense) to the neighboring imperium-conglomerate of Good Yrich, should exile alone not suffice in the Ceo's view and the furies of the 'Droom pursue her even to this ragged end of everything.
The unfortunate inhabitants of Baffridgestar (it crossed her mind that, given troglodytic habits imposed by climate, a more apposite, if denigrating, expression might be "denizens") were dedicated, for lack of better occupation, to the cultivation of ice algae, a commodity useful, but far from critically important, to Hanoverian pharmaceuticals. Their chief recreations appeared to consist of gambling and drug addiction—for which she could scarcely find it in her heart to blame them—manic-depressive suicide, and occasional mad slaughter which left whole families dismembered in smoking pools of their own blood. Otherwise, with reference to the remainder of the galaxy, nothing of interest or importance had ever happened in the Baffridgestar System, and it was an excellent guess that nothing ever would. Try as she might, Loreanna had been unable to find anything within the wealthy household she and her uncle shared, or offered by any shop or salon she frequented, which had originated there or which had been produced employing any product or process unique to the place. Few Hanoverians were aware it existed. Among those who were—those like her uncle, who derived a portion of his income from it—the first response seemed to be a shudder at its mere description, and the second an attempt to forget it again as soon as they had been reminded.
It was dark there. The system, it was generally agreed, lay steeped in amber twilight so depressing that the starker black of the interstellar Deep was considered a relief. One reference had the cold so terrible that evolution itself had ground to a halt or been slowed so greatly that biological development lagged billions of years behind the rest of the galaxy. Loreanna was uncertain that evolution operated in such a manner. In the first place, it was a random phenomenon for which no universal agenda could be claimed to exist. In the second, it seemed to her that stresses inherent to an environment so extreme ought to hasten the process, rather than retard it. She had noticed that the argument had been
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made not by a scientist, but rather in an article written by a sociology professor.
Nonetheless, native life forms were held by all informants to lie dormant all but four or five days out of an impossibly long year. Most unspeakable about Baffridgestar was that she would be lying dormant as well. Her income was provided for, modest by Hanoverian standards; lavish by those of where she was going; sufficient so that she would never have to lift a finger to maintain her existence; inadequate, even if she scrimped (which might prove rather easy, since almost nothing existed there to purchase), for passage home across the empty lightyears. Her fate thus arranged fulfilled every coDcq>t she entertained of damnation. But Loreanna, as a little gill reading from mythology, had always considered Limbo a worse consignation than Hell.
This thought caused her to shake her auburn curls in violent dismissal. Seeking control of her emotions, as well as reestablished concentration upon more immediate, practical matters, she stepped toward the wall, with its high-stacked crates, attempting again to determine which of her beloved possessions must be left behind, perhaps never to be reclaimed. Nestled in one open-topped crate, among a dozen stufifed animal figures, lay the flofilm microscope her uncle had given her upon her eighth birthday, an example of perhaps the subtlest application made of §-physics. This she would take, since it weighed next to nothing, occupied scant volume, and represented a diverting manner in which to occupy the many empty hours she anticipated lay ahead.
She hesitated over a container of datathilles she had studied not only to satisfy her uncle, but in hope of gaining some greater understanding of herself and of the dark and complicated universe she lived in than might have been claimed by the ordinary run of young Hanoverian women in whom a good general education was regarded as among the least important of qualifications for success in life. Her eye happened to fall upon a particular favorite, Lynn and Zike's epochal Galactic Political Economy. She hushed the thille she had left playing and replaced it with the text, acce
ssing a passage at random.
. . . established in the imperia-conglomerate and other polities, known as "charter capitalism," a system of production and distribution consisting of an interwoven partnership between producers and rulers. In previous times and circumstances, this partnership was variously known as "murchantilism," "state capitalism," "corporate socialism," or "fascism," depending upon minor details in the arrangements between partners, or, more importantly, upon which of them predominated.
Loreanna shook her head again. How synchronous, she thought, that she had turned to this lesson at this particular moment. Yet, upon consideration, it was not synchronous at all. She had all but memorized this thille. Here, she realized, were the roots of all her personal difficulties, laid out in remote and dessicated tones, complete with index, scroUnotes, thilliography, and the neat, if tendentious, schoolgirl marginalia she herself enthilled:
Within the Hanoverian Imperium-Conglomerate, it is Ceo and Monopolity, the political partner, predominant, whereas the flagellum wags the euglena in the Jendyne Empery-Cirot.
Loreanna smiled at this remembrance of a younger self. It was like this throughout. Here, where the authors had written—
. . . reserving to itself a monopoly upon the production, distribution, and retirement of the principal medium of exchange. The official currency of the Monopolity is the "clavis." Within the Jendyne Empery-Cirot, it is the "gavelle," at present approximately equal to three clavises.
—she had added:
. . . neither supported by anything of value except the willingness of each respective polity, within its territory, to coerce those subject to its authority into employing it.
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Coordinated Arm 01: Henry Martyn Page 31