Throy (2 page)

A source of plentiful, cheap and docile labor had always been needed at Araminta Station. What could be more convenient than the folk who inhabited Lutwen Atoll, three hundred miles to the northeast? These were the Yips, descendants of runaway servants, fugitives, illegal immigrants, petty criminals and others, who at first furtively, then brazenly, had taken up residence on Lutwen Atoll.

The Yips fulfilled a need, and so were allowed at Araminta Station on six-month work permits.

Subsequently this concession had been rescinded, but the Yips were now so numerous as to overflow Lutwen Atoll. They threatened to spill ashore upon Deucas in a great surge and thereby doom the Conservancy.

For all their undistinguished origin, the Yips were by no means unprepossessing. The men were of good stature and supple of physique, with luminous hazel eyes, well-shaped features, hair and skin of the same golden color. The Yip girls were no less comely and known the length of Mircea’s Wisp for their docility and mild dispositions, and also for their absolute chastity unless they were paid an appropriate fee.

Yips and ordinary Gaeans were mutually infertile. After years of speculation, the eminent biologist Daniel Temianka, studying the Yip diet, pinned down a certain mollusc living in the slime beneath Yipton as the contraceptive agent. This discovery also pointed up the fact that Yips indentured to work on other worlds soon regained normal procreative ability.

For the administrators at Araminta Station the most urgent priority had become the dispersal of the Yip population to other worlds.

Already as many as a thousand Yips had been so transferred by Namour, a Clattuc collateral and erstwhile labor coordinator at Araminta Station. His method was legal and not intrinsically baneful. He sold indentures to off-world ranchers in need of workers. The indentures paid for transportation and Namour’s fee, and so earned him a considerable profit. Namour had become a fugitive from justice and no longer pursued his business interests. Furthermore, the market for Yip labor had not expanded, since the Yips seemed not to comprehend the rationale of the indenture system: why should they pay off transportation charges when they had already arrived at their destination? Toil when they gained nothing seemed sheer folly.

V. The Conservator and the Inhabitants of Stroma

In the first few years of the Conservancy, when Society members visited Cadwal, they presented themselves, as a matter of course, to Riverview House, in the expectation of hospitality. Often the Conservator was forced to entertain as many as two dozen guests at the same time, and some of these extended their stays indefinitely, that they might pursue their researches or simply enjoy the novel environment of Cadwal.

One of the Conservators at last rebelled, and insisted that visiting Naturalists live in tents along the beach, and cook their meals over campfires.

At the Society’s annual conclave, a number of plans were put forward to deal with the problem. Most of the programs met the opposition of strict Conservationists, who complained that the Charter was being gnawed to shreds by first one trick, then another. Others replied: “Well and good, but when we visit Cadwal to conduct our legitimate researches, must we live in squalor? After all, we are members of the Society!”

In the end the conclave adopted a crafty plan put forward by one of the most extreme Conservationists. The plan authorized a small new settlement at a specific location, where it could not impinge in any way upon the environment. The location turned out to be the side of a cliff overlooking Stroma Fjord on Throy: an almost comically unsuitable site for habitation, and an obvious ploy to discourage proponents of the plan from taking action.

The challenge, however, was accepted. Stroma came into being: a town of tall narrow houses, crabbed and gaunt, painted all in somber tones, with doors and window-trim painted white, blue or red. Observed from a vantage across the Fjord, the houses of Stroma seemed to cling to the side of the cliff like barnacles.

Many members of the Society, after a temporary stay at Stroma, found the quality of life appealing, and on the pretext of performing lengthy research, became the nucleus of a permanent population which at times numbered as many as twelve hundred persons.

Over the centuries the special conditions of Stroma - isolation, a tradition of scholarship, an etiquette which defined the propriety of every act - created a society in which doctrinaire intellectualism co-existed with a rather quaint old-fashioned simplicity, occasionally enlivened by eccentricity.

Most of Stroma’s income derived from off-world investment; the folk of Stroma travelled off-world as much as possible and liked to think of themselves as ‘cosmopolitan.’

On Earth the Naturalist society fell prey to weak leadership, the peculation of a larcenous secretary and a general lack of purpose. Year by year the membership dwindled, usually by way of the grave.

At Riverview House, a mile south of the Agency, lived the Conservator, the Executive Superintendent of Araminta Station. By the terms of the Charter, he must be an active member of the Naturalist Society; however, with the waning of the Society to little more than a memory, the directive necessarily had been interpreted loosely and - at least for this purpose, where no realistic alternative offered itself - the residents of Stroma were officially known as ‘Naturalists’ and considered equivalent to members of the Society, even though they paid no dues and took no part in Society proceedings.

A faction at Stroma, calling itself the ‘Life, Peace and Freedom Party’ began to champion the cause of the Yips whose condition they declared to be intolerable and a blot on the collective conscience. The situation, so they declared, could be relieved only by allowing the Yips to settle on the Deucas mainland. Another faction, the ‘Chartists,’ acknowledged the problem, but proposed a solution not in violation of the Charter: namely, transferring the entire Yip population off-world. Unrealistic! declared the LPFers, and ever more categorically criticized the Charter. They declared the Conservancy a now archaic idea, non-humanist and out of step with ‘advanced’ thinking. The Charter, so they asserted, was in desperate need of revision, if only that the plight of the Yips might be ameliorated.

The Chartists, in refutal, insisted that both Charter and Conservancy were immutable. They voiced a sardonic suspicion that much of LPF fervor was hypocritical and self-serving; that the LPFers wanted to allow Yip settlement of the Marmion Foreshore in order to set a precedent which would permit a few deserving Naturalists – no doubt defined as the most vigorous and ardent LPF activists – to establish estates for themselves out in the beautiful Deucas countryside, where they would employ Yips servants and farmhands and live like lords. The charge provoked such violent spasms of outrage that the Chartists’ most sardonic suspicions were reinforced. Such vehemence, they stated, only certified the LPFers’ covert plans.

At Araminta Station, ‘advanced,’ ideology was not taken seriously. The Yip problem was recognized as real and immediate, but the LPF solution must be rejected, since any official concessions would formalize the Yip presence on Cadwal, when all efforts should be exerted in the opposite direction, i.e.: transfer of the entire Yip population to a world where their presence would be useful and desirable.

VI. Spanchetta and Simonetta

At Clattuc House Spanchetta and Simonetta Clattuc were sisters, more alike than otherwise, though Spanchetta was the more earthy and Simonetta - ‘Smonny,’ as she was known - the more imaginative and restless. As girls both were boisterous, untidy and overbearing; both grew to be large, big-breasted young women with profuse heaps of curling hair; small glinting heavy-lidded eyes; flat pallid faces between conspicuous cheekbones. Both were passionate, haughty, domineering and vain; both were uninhibited and possessed of boundless energies. During their youth, both Spanny and Smonny became obsessively fixated upon the person of Scharde Clattuc and each shamelessly sought to seduce him, or marry him, or by any other means to possess him for their own. Scharde was uncertain as to which of the two he found the more repulsive, and avoided the advances as politely as possible.

Scharde was sent off-world to an IPCC
⁴
training mission on at Sarsenopolis on Alphecca Nine. Here he met Marya Aragone, a dark-haired young woman of grace, charm, dignity and intelligence with whom he became enamored, and she with him. The two were married at Sarsenopolis and in due course returned to Araminta Station.

Spanchetta and Smonny were outraged. Scharde’s conduct represented an insulting personal rejection, and also - at a deeper level - a lack of submissiveness, which they found intolerable. They were able to rationalize their fury when Smonny failed to matriculate from the Lyceum and, on becoming a collateral, was forced to move out of Clattuc House, coincidentally at about the same time Marya arrived, so that the blame could easily be transferred to Marya and Scharde.

Heavy with bitterness, Smonny departed Araminta Station. For a time she ranged far and wide across the Reach, engaging in a variety of activities. Eventually she married Titus Zigonie, who owned Shadow Valley Ranch, comprising twenty-two thousand square miles on the world Rosalia, as well as a Clayhacker space yacht.

For the labor necessary to work his ranch, Titus Zigonie, at Smonny’s suggestion, began to employ gangs of indentured Yips, brought to Rosalia by none other than Namour, who shared the proceeds of the business with Calyactus, Oomphaw of Yipton.

At Namour’s urging Calyactus paid a visit to the Shadow Valley Ranch on Rosalia, where he was murdered by either Smonny or Namour, or perhaps both.

Titus Zigonie, an inoffensive little man, became ‘Titus Pompo, the Oomphaw,’ though Smonny wielded all authority. Never had she relaxed her hatred of Araminta Station in general and Scharde Clattuc in particular, and her dearest wish was to perform some destructive atrocity upon them both. Meanwhile, Namour, with utmost sang-froid once again took up his duties as paramour to both Spanchetta and Smonny.

Marya meanwhile had borne Scharde a son, Glawen. When Glawen was two years old, Marya drowned in a boating accident under peculiar circumstances. A pair of Yips, Selious and Catterline, were witnesses to the drowning. Scharde questioned Selious and Catterline at length. Each claimed that he could not swim, so how could he save a drowning woman so far from shore: at least a hundred feet. Why had the woman herself not learned to swim before venturing out upon the dangerous water? In any event, the lady’s conduct was no concern of theirs; they were talking and paying no attention to her activities. Scharde, unconvinced, pressed his questions until the Yips became sullen and silent, and he had no choice but to desist and send them back to Yipton.

Had the drowning been something other than accident? Someday, Scharde told himself, he would learn the truth.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1, Part I

The terrace of the Utward Inn at Stroma extended thirty feet out from the cliff into a great region of sunny air, with the cold blue-green waters of the fjord eight hundred feet below. At a table beside the outer rail sat a party of four men. Torq Tump and Farganger were off-worlders; they drank ale from stoneware mugs. Sir Denzel Attabus had been served a gill of herbal spirits in a pewter minikin, while Roby Mavil, the other resident of Stroma, drank green Araminta wine from a goblet. Sir Denzel and Roby Mavil wore garments currently in fashion at Stroma: sedate jackets of rich black serge, flouncing at the hips over narrow dark red trousers. Roby Mavil, younger of the two, was somewhat fleshy, with a round face, softly waving black hair, limpid grey eyes, a black brush of a mustache. He sat slouched back in his chair, glowering down at the wine goblet; events were not going to suit him.

Sir Denzel had only recently arrived at the table. He sat stiff and erect: an elderly gentleman with a ruff of gray hair, a notable nose, narrow blue eyes under shaggy eyebrows. He had thrust his drink of herbal spirits to the side.

The off-worlders were men of totally different stripe. They wore the ordinary garments of the Gaean Reach: loose shirts and trousers of dark blue twill, ankleboots with buckles at the instep. Torq Tump was short, barrel-chested, almost bald, with a heavy hard face. Farganger was gaunt, all bone and dry sinew, with a narrow head, a high-bridged broken nose, a gray mouth like a downward slash across flat cheeks. Both sat impassively but for flickers of contemptuous amusement at the interchanges between Sir Denzel and Roby Mavil.

After a single glance toward the two off-worlders, Sir Denzel dismissed them from his attention, and turned to Roby Mavil. “I am not only dissatisfied, I am shocked and disheartened!”

Roby Mavil attempted a smile of hope and good cheer. “Surely, sir, the picture is not all so grim! In fact, I can only believe -”

Sir Denzel’s gesture cut him short. “Can you not grasp an elemental principle? Our covenant was solemn, and certified by the entire directorate.”

“Exactly so! Nothing has changed except now we are able to support our cause more decisively.”

“Then why was I not consulted?”

Roby Mavil shrugged and looked off across the gulf of air. “I really can’t say.”

“But I can! This is a deviation from the Source Dogma, which is not just a verbalization, but a pattern for day-to-day, minute-by-minute conduct!”

Roby Mavil turned back from his contemplation of the void. “May I ask where you obtained your information? Was it Rufo Kathcar?”

“That is irrelevant.”

“Not altogether. Kathcar, excellent fellow though he may be, is something of a weathervane and is not above malicious exaggeration.”

“How can he exaggerate what I see with my own eyes?”

“That is not all there is to it!”

“There is more?”

Roby Mavil spoke with a flushed face. “I mean that, when the need was recognized, the executive council acted with appropriate flexibility.”