Coordinated Arm 01: Henry Martyn Page 3

  Lia sighed. She knotted off a stitch, wielded the fiberaser without which no human fingers could have severed the tenacious thread, pocketed the implement, and folded her work round its hoop. "You are the best of men, my darling. I cannot help myself but to love you most immoderately—"

  A faint, ironic cough interrupted her. Robret's brother, seated across the room at the secretary which had become his sovereign domain, was of lesser stature and lighter build than Robret. His hair was thin, sandy-colored, his eyes a paler shade than normal to the family Islay. In his bridegroom-father's absence—as, in truth, was more and more the case even in the elder warrior's presence—he was attending the estate's complex accounts. Running the index finger of his free hand along the bands of barquode in the ledger, he paused, adding this brisk notation, correcting that careless computation, turning his flat-tipped ulsic smartbrush one way and then the other, making each precise, vertical stroke the proper width to be read by man or machine. Hav-

  ing heard Lia, he looked up, favoring Robret with a wry glance.

  In Robret's expression were mixed embarrassment and pride at Lia's confession before a witness. He grinned back, foolish, at his brother, addressing his reply to her. "Pray, Mistress Woodgate, how could you resist?*'

  The scowl upon her face was only mockery in part. "If you please, sir, forbear to interrupt. I love you well. Else, after three dreary years in which to sample it, I would never have contemplated dwelling the rest of my life upon this damp and gloomy world you Islays all adore so."

  She set her cleverwork aside upon the woven lid of a native basket, rose, and, brushing at imagined wrinkles in her skirt, joined Robret at the window. Donol kept his head bent over the ledgers spread before him, but was, without insincere pretense to the contrary, giving them an attentive ear.

  " 'We Islays,' perhaps I ought to begin saying," she continued, taking Robret's hand. "Yet, for all of that, and more besides, you are most charming in your naivete—"

  "Wait now, my girl!" The warrior's son brought himself to full height and shook her hand off.

  "Sir," she insisted, catching his hand again, "if you will not take offense at your tutor saying so out of a humble sense of her bounden duty."

  "Well, it is true enough and true again," he shrugged. He laughed, seizing her small, soft hand in both his larger, rougher ones. "Although I might with justification claim my naive appearance to be sophisticated dissimulation. Old Henry says they have no masques upon Skye, and must fashion their disguises out of words. The truth is, I had never a head for history, for politics, for economies of any kind. Like my father, I am^"

  "A warrior?"

  "Not I. A farmer when you boil the froth down, albeit with a fancy title. Would you undertake, despite the obvious difficulty of the task, the unsuitability of the material at hand, as it were, to educate me?"

  She laughed. "Is this not the thing which I was brought here to accomplish in the first place?"

  He nodded, smiling as sweet memories welled up in his

  22 HENRY MARTYN

  mind of having fallen in love, unexpected by none but himself, with the "old maid" hired from the capital to be teacher to his brothers and himself. "Aye, and I confess that you have educated me in ways I had never before anticipated."

  "Robret!" Lia blushed a darker color than her freckles and was compelled to turn aside for a grace-saving moment, although a pleased smile touched the comers of her lips. Donol conspicuously ignored the pair, finding deeper interest in his accounts than had been the case the previous moment. After a time Lia cleared her throat and assumed a tutorial tone. "For that, darling farmer-when-you-boil-it-down, you shall pay forfeit, and, naivete being a curable condition, permit me to earn my keep as teacher a final time ..."

  Robret, knowing her well, shrugged in resignation to the inevitable.

  "In the matter," she began, "of cultural benefit and precolonial resistance, few individuals at present appreciate the extent to which ours is an unprecedented period of historic contrasts, of wide-ranging exploration, remarkable invention, intellectual innovation—"

  "Amounting," Robret interrupted, disdain sincere and heavy in his voice, "to no more than the filching and in-smuggling of 'foreign' ideas."

  Lia shook her head. "You are the country squire, are you not? Have it your way, for the nonce we shall reverse the polarity of evaluation. Set against all I have described, a dreadful philosophical stagnation threatens our vaunted civilization, political corruption too base to speak of in decency, a general moral decay which besets long-established institutions—"

  "Take care, lass," Robret aped a sternness of address learned from his father which, in that individual, was no more genuine, "lest you speak treason toward the interstellar Monopolity to which the family Islay pledges fealty, and whence derive our power, prestige, and privileges."

  She ignored him. "—and the territories, spatial, geographical, and otherwise, they have controlled for centuries." Of a sudden, Lia brought herself closer to Robret, as if beseeching warmth against the weather outside, which

  could not touch them in this cosy room, or perhaps from weather of a diflferent kind, further away and colder. "It is a time, my love, of reason and brutality, of heroism and villainy, of virtue and depravity.*'

  "In this," he asked, "does it differ from any other time?"

  "Agreed," she answered with a sigh, "it is not unique in that regard. What sets it apart, I think, is the degree to which conflicting qualities are found among us, perhaps in the fact that they are less to be discovered in conflict with one another than in combination within the same individual."

  "Sentimental moralistic nonsense!" Donol sealed his smartbrush with a fastidious flourish, closed his ledger, and turned in his seat to face them. His expression was one of disgust. "Personalities have nothing at all to do with history. Nor, I warrant, do they—"

  He was interrupted by a gentle knock at the room's double doors. Without awaiting an answer, a girl entered with a tray, set it upon a table intended for the purpose, and departed, closing the doors behind her. Lia poured three cups of the steaming drink, known hereabouts as "lawn tea," brewed from the same stimulant herbs which the croppers gathered in the meadow outside the window. She offered one to Robret who took it in both hands, another to Donol who accepted it without rising, and took one for herself.

  "Donol," Robret asked after he had emptied half his cup, "you were warranting something?"

  Donol's momentary blank look vanished as memory overcame the effect of interruption. "That I was: the human personality is constant. It never changes over the eons, and cannot, upon that account, represent a significant factor in the path history takes. The human personality understands only wallowing self-gratification and the brute force of authority necessary to temper it—to print a phrase—into constructive mettle. Thus your savages have no right to resist that which is its own justification."

  Warming to a subject they had previously disputed, he cleared his throat. "Let us eschew sentimentality and be analytical. As is well understood, civilization is characterized by the source whence it derives its energy. In previous ages, animals and slaves, steam and the combustion engine,

  24 HENRY MARTYN

  fission and fusion, powered the fundamental machinery, and thus determined all else of politics and economics, even of personality. So, in our twenty-seventh-century civilization is everything desirable accomplished by means of '§-phys-ics —

  " *A technique,'" Robret jumped into the recitation, " *of discriminating between fundamental properties of matter— mass, weight, inertia, potential and kinetic energy—and exploiting their separate characters.' Broward and Kearney's Matrices of the Civilities, Chapter Three, if memory serves. I know the catechism as well as you, younger brother, Lia taught it to us. And your logic leaves somewhat to be desired, as well. Do not lecture."

  Wise in the ways of brotherly disputation, Lia uttered not a word.

  "Save your advice," retorted Donol, "for those
who have need of it. If Lia taught us, by the Ceo, she should know the lesson better herself."

  Robret opened his mouth to respond, but never got a word out. The doors flew wide. In the hallway entrance stood, beside the girl who had admitted him, a cropper, wet from rain and dripping upon the carpet.

  "Beggin' pardon, yoong mahster," the cropper touched his forelock, self-conscious of his clothes and accent, "Toddy McCabe's poot tail af glass-lizard through foot. We've needa Old Henry 'fore poison's after spreadin'."

  "By all means." Robret's answer was brisk. In truth, he was relieved to be given an excuse to leave this pointless argument. He did not appreciate Donol's not-so-subtle chaperon-age. The Hanoverian custom—that what he and Lia had pursued with the greatest joy and vigor earlier was now, with the announcement of their engagement, denied them until their wedding night—was an increasing burden and annoyance to him.

  He nodded at the servant girl. "Find Old Henry Martyn and send him straightaway." To his brother and fiancee, he added, "I am going myself, to see if I can be of assistance."

  Chapter III: The Holdings of Islay

  Boxes, bales, bundles, and bushels.

  Dust, decay, dehydration, and death.

  All round Arran, the block-constructed walls, draped in clinging webs and the cloying miasma of abandonment, shone in his lampwand—which gave no visible light of its own, nor cast a shadow, but made the plastic about him glow from within—exuding moisture of disquieting color and viscosity,

  Arran's pet triskel, Waenzi, bumbled underfoot, following in front of him, weaving between Arran's ankles, collecting cobwebs and dust bindles in his short, stiff fur, never venturing outside the safe locus of the soft light excited by the lampwand. Almost, the boy regretted bringing him. Never before this had he been able to persuade the triskel to accompany him upon such an exploratory foray. Perhaps his recent illness had made a difference in the animal's attachment to him.

  Legos: the architectural style was still referred to by its legendary name. Much the commonest method it had been, of building in precolonial times, with their primitive machines and less-sophisticated spreighformers. In hindsight it made perfect sense, yet what a surprise it had been to early explorers, who should have known better, that petroleum was everywhere abundant, even upon those planets which had never known life, formed, as it was, in the process of each world's condensation from a disk of primordial gas rich in carbon molecules. It was a method of construction still in universal employ because it was so cheap and simple, and because it worked.

  The great translucent blocks had been extruded, fresh and new, from spreighformers the estate still used, where they had been assembled in vacuo a molecule at a time. Each block, a measure upon a side, had been moulded with deep locking

  26 HENRY MARTYN

  grooves and matching ridges. Each had been slid into place and welded, using ultrasound, to its neighbors, forming a solid mass, indestructible by time or the elements. Never had Arran been able to scratch or mar one such, nor separate it from adjoining blocks. But here, deep within the Holdings' foundations, their once-polished surfaces were dulled, their once-sharp edges softened—"rounded" would have exaggerated it—by the weight of centuries and the punishing load they bore. Arran noticed that the faces of the blocks bulged outward. Those which made up the walls of his tower bedroom, many stories above, otherwise identical in every respect, were concave, carrying, as they did, a lighter burden.

  He had wandered these passageways before, where dust and mildew alternated, chamber to chamber; where small, multilegged things—some not so small, from the sound— scurried at his approach. All three of Waenzi's eyes bulged with comic tension, trying to look everywhere at once as unsavory creatures of an even more unsavory darkness fled the alien influence of his master's lampwand. Some were native to Skye, others man-brought by inadvertence or intention, altered in subtle detail by the stressful voyage or by subsequent exigencies, and which nature—or his imagination—now endowed with poison fangs or tail-barbs, glowing eyes of variable size, number, and arrangement, slime-tracks smeared behind them upon the floor, or other attributes and habits even more despicable.

  Each time he passed beneath a low-curved dripping arch, brushing legger-weavings from his face, he dreaded that something finger-sized and brittle-bodied, with countless needle-pointed appendages, would drop down his unprotected collar. Yet Arran was drawn, despite vague terrors of the place, by a comforting certainty that no adult he knew of had come here since he had been bom. Therefore, he would not be bothered, nagged, or interrupted in his explorations. He felt a certain gratitude toward Toddy McCabe, whose recent injury made him the estate's new "sick-boy" to be fussed over and watched, leaving Arran free to pursue important boyish business.

  Today it seemed he had never before seen what these ill-lit tunnels stored. He had taken, he thought, the dust-covered crates and barrels which surrounded him, in many cham-

  bers piled to the low-groined ceilings, to be one with the walls and beams of what he enjoyed believing was a dungeon.

  Twice each day the past week, upon walks Old Henry had intended to help the recovering boy get exercise—walks which at first, had Arran been willing to admit it to the elderly Skyan or himself, had been exhausting—his self-chosen mentor had pointed with mixed pride and sorrow to coats-of-arms which decorated the Islay family Holdings. Over fireplaces, propped in niches, strewn about the great hall where Arran's father had been wed, ancient—now useless— weapons, once the property of defeated enemies, could be seen upon the walls: steyraugs, remwins, arpeegies, smith-wessons.

  Dauntless pioneers those first men upon Skye must have been, the old man had often whispered to the boy, boiling up, as they had, off a used-up mother planet, the now half-mythical "Earth," seeking fresh opportunity and new adventure. Nor—Old Henry always peered about them to see he was not overheard—when men began to ply the star-lanes, were their liberties at first circumscribed by the whims and vagaries of the imperia-conglomerate.

  Many a great war had it taken to achieve that in a time of legend long before Arran*s father had been rewarded for his prowess upon behalf of Hanover with elevation to the Drectorate. Long before a previous Drector-Hereditary, bitterly stalemated with Skyan rebels, had died without distinction or heirs. Long before these ancient Holdings had lain vacant for a century of neglect by the faraway and, at the time, preoccupied Monopolity. Long before, despite the stalemate they had won (or as its price), Skyans had been reduced to a state of ignorant and fearful serfdom or the brutish existence of Holdouts running wild through woods and mountains, robbing travelers and raiding villages during the harsh Skyan winters. Even long before the sons and daughters of those dauntless pioneers Old Henry spoke of had been surprised and nearly overwhelmed by those they considered looting second-comers.

  And, to appearances, it had taken something more than war. The trappings of the torture chamber were all about him. Chains rusted in reptilian coils upon the gritty flags.

  28 HENRY MARTYN

  More hung stapled to thick plastic walls, bleeding red-orange oxide into the interstices. Or pigments, perhaps, more sinister. Iron-plaited archways leered as he passed, age-tarnished interwoven bars whispering of lifetime after hopeless lifetime of imprisonment and obscene abuse. Welded square-stock gratings swung to his reluctant touch upon shrill hinges, everywhere partitioning room from room and hall from haU.

  Or perhaps this was nothing more than his imagination, fired by Old Henry's stories and by dramathilles. So unfamiliar was young Arran with the clumsy, complicated precolonial machinery about him that what he took in pleasant, grisly fancy for a bone-breaker or stretching-rack could, he admitted to himself, have been a lady's hobby-loom, a printing-press, some arcane contrivance for producing wine. Metal baskets hung with the remains, corroded to near-anonymity, of what mi^t once have been tongs and irons designed for the wringing-out of confessions. Yet they may with equal ease have been implements of (to Arran) far humbler and far less
romantic utility. Even at his age, he was sophisticated and introspective enough to detect within himself a tendency to see what his imagination would have him see. This facility within him thirsted for adventure, for escape from what seemed—as home does to every boy—a drab, mundane existence. In a manner which would have surprised most of the adults who thought they knew him, he made appropriate allowances without abandoning his fancies. Nor was he entirely conscious of the complex process by which he kept his impressions balanced.

  Now, however, Arran ignored the rooms themselves, along with their dubious furnishings. He had a purpose. His mind fastened upon their contents, the discarded bag and baggage of an earlier era, stored in these dim hallways, for the first time separating it from the walls which supported it in towering piles, sorting it into various categories of possibility.

  Anything might be found here. All this mouldy rejecta, tonnes of it, was already here when his father had taken formal possession of the Holdings or had afterward been hauled down, Arran appreciated with wry humor, against some hypothetical day when some hypothetical some-

  one should discover time and inclination to dirty his hands, get rid of the unquestionable trash, and restore what might be useful—or simply interesting—to the upper floors, daylight, and fresh air. Like all such resolutions concerning cluttered basements, memento-choked attics, bulging storerooms, and crowded outbuildings, the day of redemption was never likely to arrive.

  Nonetheless, these mountains of offcast trivia, the impedimenta of another century (to Arran their mystique would have been quite as strong had they been but the leavings of another decade), presented to the bright and curious boy a vast and promising frontier. He might never fathom its fullness. Its inexhaustibility being an attraction in itself, it might never cease providing him with something interesting to see and do.