A Gluttony of Plutocrats (The Respite Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  A Gluttony of Plutocrats

  Ella Swift Arbok

  © 2017 Ella Swift Arbok

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1537558072

  ISBN 13: 9781537558073

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Jan Atle Ramsli, Dawn Lloyd, and Al Macey for their constructive comments on Ella Swift Arbok’s original manuscript.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  Foreword

  By means of a technology that I don’t claim to understand, I have been offered responsibility for the production of three novels based on the manuscripts of Ella Swift Arbok, of the planet Respite. This I accepted immediately after I had read the first book.

  They reached me, at two-year intervals, across a great gulf of time and space. Maybe one day I shall learn how this was achieved. All I know is that, on a frosty morning in January 2014, a link in an item of mail titled “SJRichards” directed me to two online files.

  The first file contained A Gluttony of Plutocrats, which I now present for your consideration and amusement. The language was on the whole similar to modern English, but there are places where I had to make decisions based on intelligibility; simplicity; and, as far as I could know it, the author’s aims and intent.

  Where an object or concept had been reinvented on Respite with another name, I used the English word. The one exception to this was Respite’s life partner, which, although interchangeable with husband or wife, has, I believe, an implication of equality that would not in all parts of the world be implied by the English terms.

  The second file contained a brief description of the forthcoming novels, which I shall soon make available through my website, TheRespiteTrilogy.com, and a set of terms for what I took to be a contract. Since I have no means of communicating acceptance of these terms back to Respite, all I can do is to honor them.

  The question remains, why was I blessed with this task? At last, I believe I have an answer to that.

  Three weeks ago, I received, via the same convoluted route as I had received the novels, a copy of the biography of Lemuel Oneway—a book that Ella has clearly used as source material for the novel that follows and for the informal narrative style she has adopted. You will meet Lemuel soon, so I won’t spoil his story, but a postscript to the biography includes the wording from his e-gravestone. On this is a brief quotation credited to me:

  The abuse of power is a denial of our humanity. The use of power is an abuse of our responsibility.

  It is interesting to note that these words do not appear in any published work of mine, although they occur in the final book of this trilogy, where I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing Ms. Arbok’s words.

  Enough from me. Let’s meet our hero.

  —SJRichards, Ella Swift Arbok’s representative on Earth

  Chapter 1

  I may have been groggy from cryonic suspension, but the planet on the screen above me wasn’t Earth. Newton had screwed up big time.

  The geography was wrong—just two continents in the midnorth. No sound except the hum of machinery from my ship. Where were the demands for identification? Where were space stations Delta and Brandenburg, competing for my custom, inviting me to enjoy their hospitality, insisting I have a nice day?

  No scent except the antiseptic vapor wafting from my body. Was coffee too much to expect?

  The cryo-harness withdrew. I grabbed a gown and pushed to the flexi-gym as the gown fastened around me. I moved each limb, testing, a gentle stretch at first, then with more vigor, following a well-practiced routine. My heart responded as the wake-up cocktail of chemicals completed its work.

  A screen hovered into view, keeping pace with my motion. On it, an ancient face, craggled and dark, smiled beneath white curls.

  I pushed harder, tensing arms and legs outward against the gym’s gentle restraint. “Newton, I asked to be woken with a strong coffee by my hand. I also asked you to take me to Earth, not to this unfinished imitation. You have some explaining to do.”

  Newton raised his CGI-brows.

  “So good to see you fully restored, Lemuel.” He turned to one side, facing the blue-green planet that occupied half the screen. Lines formed, breaking its mass into regions—an equator, with tropics and polar circles similar to Earth’s; a line that extended beyond the poles; and another at a slight angle marking the magnetic pole. “As you have observed, this is not Earth. You would not have enjoyed the Earth I attempted to approach.”

  “Impact?”

  “Treachery. Both of the colonies had fallen under the control of despots. We may never know the full story, but Earth is no longer habitable. It might be safe to return in a thousand years, but cryonic suspension over such a period has not, to my knowledge, been tested.”

  I rubbed my chin. “The colonies?”

  “I had your safety in mind. You asked for human company, so I set myself the challenge of second-guessing the ships of the twenty-sixth-century diaspora. It seems I have succeeded, at least with regard to one of those starships.”

  The flexi-gym no longer seemed urgent. I relaxed. “Get me coffee.”

  Newton frowned. “Coffee is not recommended after a lengthy suspension.”

  Lengthy suspension?

  One thing I’ve learned in my time as a space drifter is never to argue with a computer. They had their rules, and they stuck to them.

  My obsession with twentieth-century cinema had started in my childhood, and there was one film I could no longer watch. 2001: A Space Odyssey gave me nightmares every time.

  I gripped a temporary restraining cable and took a deep breath. “Newton, how long have I been chilled? And where the hell are we?”

  Newton reached across the screen toward the planet. Fingertips settled around the line of its Antarctic Circle. With a twist and a chuckle, he set it spinning. Top-of-the-range AI, with a tendency for childishness.

  He touched a polished fingernail against the equator, slowing the image of the world, then turned to me. “According to the low-grade television signals I have monitored during our two days in orbit, the planet’s name is Respite.”

  “How long, Newton?”

  “Lemuel, these people have had no contact with Earth for over eight hundred years. If you choose to join them, take care.”

  I repeated my question.

  Newton sighed. “Two hundred and nine years and a few days. Do you want an exact figure?”

  I shook my head. Two hundred years? What to do?

  I couldn’t go back to Earth. The domes of Mars or of the moon, even if the colonies hadn’t destroyed each other, held little appeal. I could push on through the eternal highway of space for more years of blessed isolation. Or I could do what no space drifter had done before—communicate with intelligent life, if humankind counts as such, on a planet beyond the solar system.

  I had fled one world when life became too difficult to bear, and here was a second, with no yoke of memories to burden me.

&nbs
p; Would I be safe? “Newton, any chance of our being shot down?”

  A crackly monochrome image appeared on the screen. An old man in a wide-brimmed hat and leather outers flicked the reins of a single horse, setting it into motion. “This is how they portray themselves on television. The tone is nostalgic, but I believe this represents a recent era.”

  The image faded, and Newton’s face reappeared. “They use money—coins and notes. There are roads, and mechanized transport is as common as horse-drawn vehicles, but I detect no airplanes. Their technology is hugely more primitive than that of the society which spawned them—puzzling, and more common among castaways than migrants, but comforting also. We are not at risk of attack while in orbit.”

  The mystery of their origin could wait. At least they hadn’t descended into savagery. I need not commit myself at once, but habitable worlds and human populations were few. What choice did I have but to immerse myself, with caution at every step, in this new society?

  After three more days of exercising, synchronizing my sleep pattern, and monitoring television transmissions—banal comedies and official news—with my excitement mounting by the hour, I grew restless. I craved the company of my own kind, which I could never again know on Earth.

  I learned a little from the programs Newton showed. The culture they revealed, with a technology centuries earlier than the date Newton claimed they had left Earth, added to my intrigue.

  Each day, Newton provided me a list of words where Respite’s language differed from Earth Standard. There were many more Earth words not used on Respite, and a few were new to Respite.

  He was thorough. “Lemuel, the little beard has to go. I’ll give you some cream, a year’s supply. And men do not have such short hair here, but I can offer no help in that respect.”

  I ran a hand across my unfashionable half-inch crop.

  Newton had plans of his own. “Our robotics have never been tested on so Earthlike a planet. I’ll use the island Madagascar, if you have no objections.”

  I made no objection.

  As well as the two inhabited continents, there was an island on the other side of the world. I named it Madagascar because of its size and climate. It had escaped human habitation—a possible retreat, should I need one.

  After checking that the landing craft had fuel—enough, Newton assured me, for three lifts—I made my decision.

  So, at dawn of what I would learn was Monday, June 32, 2626, according to the local calendar, in a rocky clearing surrounded by woodland twelve miles from a coastal town, I set my foot on Respite’s surface.

  I wore sturdy leather boots, a hydro-cotton shirt, thick cotton trousers and jacket. Gray had been fashionable when I left Earth, and there was nothing on the monochrome television images to suggest a better choice.

  Apart from medical provisions, my backpack held two of the three gadgets Newton and I had selected. The third—a multifunctional combi that could record thousands of hours of video and audio, transmitting back to the landing craft or to the ship in orbit when in line of sight—I wore around my neck on a hydro-leather thong. Newton had fashioned it into the shape of an oval pendant, on which, in silver inlay, were a pentagram and a goat’s head, in accordance with our minimal understanding of local custom.

  The landing site lay near enough to the town for me to walk there in a day but far enough that our predawn touchdown might have gone unnoticed. I moved from the steps as they withdrew. The portal closed with a sigh.

  Behind me, water rippled. We had chosen a place between a large river and the main road to town. Trees, Earthlike yet unfamiliar, surrounded me on all sides. A smattering of damp moss dappled the rock. Grass poked through from crags where soil had collected. Silhouetted against a hazy sky that still bore a memory of the reds and golds of dawn, three narrow-winged birds flew south toward the ocean.

  I walked around the clearing. No path of human scale. Good. The landing craft might remain undetected for a few days.

  A small creature, mouselike but hairless, scurried through leaf litter. Insects, none I recognized, rested on branch and leaf or fluttered from my inquisitive reach.

  I stretched a hand into the greenery, withdrawing it when it caught against a thorn. A drop of blood oozed from the scratch.

  On the Earth I remembered, there were no wild plants except in wildlife museums or in places so inhospitable that none but research scientists would venture. Even in the museums, there would be no thorn or poison or anything to alarm a paying guest. Danger had been restricted to creatures of the e-zoos.

  A dab of balm from my backpack dried on contact with my finger, sterilizing and sealing.

  Time to move.

  From the backpack, I took another of Newton’s gadgets—to an untrained eye, a length of smooth elm wood. I pressed a fingernail against a mark in its grain. A blade emerged. I lifted the nail once I had a blade as long as my forearm, then raised the knife.

  What kept me? Twenty yards of woodland separated me from the road to town. The blade could get me through in a few minutes, yet I hesitated. What choice? An unwelcoming colony, space, or Respite, with its flora and fauna, its culture and population, unknown to me? Adventure or another retreat?

  I slashed into the vegetation.

  With gold in my pocket, a recording device and weapon disguised as an amulet, the ability to communicate with Newton at least as far as the nearby town, and knowledge of a culture centuries ahead of the one I planned to enter, I had little to fear.

  Despite all of that, my greatest defense would be caution.

  Branches fell to my knife. I flattened them with my boots.

  Nothing seemed familiar, and yet the resemblance to Earth surprised me more than the differences. On brambles, roselike flowers, buzzing with early bees, promised blackberries or something similar in the fall. Conifers and broadleaf trees, sometimes intermingled but more often in discrete stands, could have come from any of the woodland museums of old Europe.

  I pushed on. Open ground showed through, hints of free space greater than anything I had known.

  Through lighter growth, I made out the line of the road itself, twenty yards from me across rough grassland. Leaves rustled in a breeze. A few more cuts, and I was through.

  I had seen Respite from orbit, but here I saw it stretched out before me, wild land and open farmland. Space to move. Space to breathe. Fresh, open air that hadn’t required filtration and purification and been recycled through enclosed systems for decades.

  Primitive. Beautiful. Respite spread before me, unsanitized and wild.

  A swath of rough grassland stretched from north to south beyond the woodland, ranging from a few yards to a hundred yards in width. Beyond it was the road, along which a rickety jalopy, black and square and carrying two people, approached from the west. Past the road lay fields of ripening cereal and other crops growing directly from the soil, as they had on Earth a thousand years before I left.

  It was love at first sight. Would Respite feel the same way about me?

  I glanced inside the car as it passed me on the far side of the road. No passenger. Had I imagined the child?

  I crossed the coarse grass, put one foot on the cobbles, then another. Caution, but no second thoughts.

  At my peak of fitness and with more appropriate shoes, I could have run the twelve miles to town. But so soon after cryo, I chose a steady stroll. A breeze from the east cooled my face. To my left, the woodland followed the road. Rook-like birds fed off the grass, taking seeds or whatever.

  Apart from my own footfall, the main sound was of a rising wind. In the distance, a cock crowed. I had never heard a cockerel on Earth, except in films.

  Another sound, at first intermittent and then more regular, made me turn. Still a hundred yards away and advancing, a stocky horse plodded along the road, cart in tow. I carried on until they were close, then turned again and stepped back from the road.

  At the reins, an old man, dark skinned with gray hair tumbling over the shoulders of a li
ghtweight leather jerkin, pulled the horse to a halt. He looked me up and down and shook his head.

  I nodded. “Long way to town.”

  He returned his gaze to the horse. “Yup.” A flick of the reins, and the horse—its shoulders level with the top of my head—eased into a walk. A fringe of long hair swayed around each hoof.

  The cart’s four spoked wheels turned. Crates of vegetables smelling of soil filled the back.

  Grass felt better than cobbles beneath my boots. I checked my pocket watch, which Newton had designed to reflect the local time. Quarter to five. Earlier than I thought. No wonder the road held so little traffic.

  During the next hour, two cars, museum relics like the first, passed me, both heading west. Maybe a dozen carts, all going my way, passed with their loads of root vegetables and other produce. I received curious looks from one or two of the carters, a friendly nod from one, a shake of the head from another.

  Their clothes were similar to mine, but gray didn’t seem a fashionable shade. I saw no other calf-length boots as intricately patterned as those Newton had constructed in orbit, and no one had hair as tightly cropped as mine.

  I walked unchallenged beside the cobbled way. At first, I kept an eye on the woods to my left. If I needed to run, I could be in cover within a minute, but as the miles passed, my concern for escape lessoned. The indifference or occasional sneers of the carters made it clear my choice of clothing had been hasty, but I wouldn’t turn back for a few sneers.

  What were my needs? Security? A place to stay?

  No. Above all, identity.

  Without identity, without a name known to the authorities of this new land, could I survive? Could I just walk into town and say, “Hello, I’m Lemuel Oneway from the planet Earth. Please feed me”?

  Half a mile ahead, a black car much like the first one I had seen sat motionless beside the road. Could it be the same one? It looked similar, but every car that passed me had been black and had a running board. I hurried on.

  An old man, swarthy, wearing a single gray braid that bobbed as he shook his head, squatted beside the car. He stood as I neared him, and kicked at a flat tire. “Damn thing. Look at it, that’s not a puncture. Damn thing split.”