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8. The Lady
SAMIA of Fife was five feet tall, exactly, and all sixty inches of her were in a state of quivering exasperation. She weighed one and a half pounds per inch and, at the moment, each of her ninety pounds represented sixteen ounces of solid anger.
She stepped quickly from end to end of the room, her dark hair piled in high masses, her spiked heels lending a spurious height and her narrow chin, with its pronounced cleft, trembling.
She said, "Oh no. He wouldn't do it to me. He couldn't do it to me. Captain!"
Her voice was sharp and carried the weight of authority. Captain Racety bowed with the storm. "My Lady?"
To any Florinian, of course, Captain Racety would have been a "Squire." Simply that. To any Florinian, all Sarldtes were Squires. But to the Sarkites there were Squires and real Squires. The Captain was simply a Squire. Samia of Fife was a real Squire; or the feminine equivalent of one, which amounted to the same thing.
"My Lady?" he asked.
She said, "I am not to be ordered about. I am of age. I am my own mistress. I choose to remain here."
The Captain said carefully, "Please to understand, my Lady, that no orders of mine are involved. My advice was not asked. I have been told plainly and flatly what I am to do."
He fumbled for the copy of his orders halfheartedly. He had tried to present her with the evidence twice before and she had refused to consider it, as though by not looking she could continue, with a clear conscience, to deny where his duty lay.
She said once again, exactly as before, "I am not interested in your orders."
She turned away with a ringing of her heels and moved rapidly away from him.
He followed and said softly, "The orders include directions to the effect that, if you are not willing to come, I am, if you will excuse my saying so, to have you carried to the ship."
She whirled. "You wouldn't dare do such a thing."
"When I consider," said the Captain, "who it is who has ordered me to do it, I would dare anything."
She tried cajolery. "Surely, Captain, there is no real danger. This is quite ridiculous, entirely mad. The City is peaceful. All that has happened is that one patroller was knocked down yesterday afternoon in the library. Really!"
"Another patroller was killed this dawn, again by Florinian attack."
That rocked her, but her olive skin grew dusky and her black eyes flashed. "What has that to do with me? I am not a patroller."
"My Lady, the ship is being prepared right now. It will leave shortly. You will have to be on it."
"And my work? My research? Do you realize-. No, you wouldn't realize."
The Captain said nothing. She had turned from him. Her gleaming dress of copper kyrt, with its strands of milky silver, set off the extraordinary warm smoothness of her shoulders and upper arms. Captain Racety looked at her with something more than the bald courtesy and humble objectivity a mere Sarkite owed such a great Lady. He wondered why such an entirely desirable bite-size morsel should choose to spend her time in mimicking the scholarly pursuits of a university don.
Samia knew well that her earnest scholarship made her an object of mild derision to people who were accustomed to thinking of the aristocratic Ladies of Sark as devoted entirely to the glitter of polite society and, eventually, acting as incubators for at least, but not more than, two future Squires of Sark. She didn't care.
They would come to her and say, "Are you really writing a book, Samia?" and ask to see it, and giggle.
Those were the women. The men were even worse, with their gentle condescension and obvious conviction that it would only take a glance from themselves or a man's arm about her waist to cure her of her nonsense and turn her mind to things of real importance.
It had begun as far back, almost, as she could remember, because she had always been in love with kyrt, whereas most people took it for granted. Kyrt! The king, emperor, god of fabrics. There was no metaphor strong enough.
Chemically, it was nothing more than a variety of cellulose. The chemists swore to that. Yet with all their instruments and theories they had never yet explained why on Florina, and only on Florina in all the Galaxy, cellulose became kyrt. It was a matter of the physical state; that's what they said. But ask them exactly in what way the physical state varied from that of ordinary cellulose and they were mute.
She had learned ignorance originally from her nurse.
"Why does it shine, Na
"Because it's kyrt, Miakins."
"Why don't other things shine so, Na
"Other things aren't kyrt, Miakins."
There you had it. A two-volume monograph on the subject had been written only three years before. She had read it carefully and it could all have been boiled down to her Na
Of course kyrt didn't really shine of itself but, properly spun, it would gleam metallically in the sun in a variety of colors or in all colors at once. Another form of treatment could impart a diamond sparkle of the thread. It could be made, with little effort, completely impervious to heat up to 6oo degrees Centigrade, and quite inert to almost all chemicals. Its fibers could be spun finer than the most delicate synthetics and those same fibers had a tensile strength no steel alloy known could duplicate.
It had more uses, more versatility than any substance known to man. If it were not so expensive it could be used to replace glass, metal, or plastic in any of infinite industrial applications. As it was, it was the only material used for cross hairs on optical equipment, as molds in the casting of hydrochrons used in hy peratomic motors, and as lightweight, long-lived webbing where metal was too brittle or too heavy or both.
But this was, as said, small-scale use, since use in quantity was prohibitive. Actually the kyrt harvest of Florina went into the manufacture of cloth that was used for the most fabulous garments in Galactic history. Florina clothed the aristocracy of a million worlds, and the kyrt harvest of the one world, Florina, had to be spread thin for that. Twenty women on a world might have outfits in kyrt; two thousand more might have a holiday jacket of the material, or perhaps a pair of gloves. Twenty million more watched from a distance and wished.
The million worlds of the Galaxy shared a slang expression for the snob. It was the only idiom in the language that was easily and exactly understood everywhere. It went: "You'd think she blew her nose in kyrt!"
When Samia was older she went to her father.
"What is kyrt, Daddy?"
"It's your bread and butter, Mia."
"Mine?"
"Not just yours, Mia. It's S ark's bread and butter."
Of course! She learned the reason for that easily enough. Not a world in the Galaxy but had tried to grow kyrt on jts own soil. At first Sark had applied the death penalty to anyone, native or foreign, caught smuggling kyrt seed out of the planet. That had not prevented successful smuggling, and as the centuries passed, and the truth dawned on Sark, that law had been abolished. Men from anywhere were welcome to kyrt seed at the price, of course (weight for weight), of finished kyrt cloth.
They might have it, because it turned out that kyrt grown anywhere in the Galaxy but on Florina was simply cellulose. White, flat, weak and useless. Not even honest cotton.
Was it something in the soil? Something in the characteristics of the radiation of Florina's sun? Something about the bacteria make-up of Florinian life? It had all been tried. Samples of Florinian soil had been taken. Artificial arc lights duplicating the known spectrum of Florina's sun had been constructed. Foreign soil had been infected with Floririian bacteria. And always the kyrt grew white, flat, weak and useless.
There was so much to be said about kyrt that had never been said. Material other than that contained in technical reports or in research papers or even in travel books. For five years Samia had been dreaming of writing a real book about the story of kyrt; of the land it grew on and of the people who grew it.
It was a dream surrounded by mocking laughter, but she held to it. She had insisted on traveling to Florina. She was going to spend a season in the fields and a few months in the mills. She was going to- But what did it matter what she was going to do? She was being ordered back.
With the sudden impulsiveness that marked her every act she made her decision. She would be able to fight this on Sark. Grimly she promised herself she would be back on Florina in a week.
She turned to the Captain and said coolly, "When do we leave, sir?"
Samia remained at the observation port for as long as Florina was a visible globe. It was a green, springlike world, much pleasanter than Sark in climate. She had looked forward to studying the natives. She didn't like the Florinians on Sark, sapless men who dared not look at her but turned away when she passed, in accordance with the law. On their own world, however, the natives, by universal report, were happy and carefree. Irresponsible, of course, and like children, but they had charm.
Captain Racety interrupted her thoughts. He said, "My Lady, would you retire to your room?"
She looked up, a tiny vertical crease between her eyes. "What new orders have you received, Captain? A
"Of course not. Merely a precaution. The space field was unusually empty before the take-off. It seems that another killing had taken place, again by a Florinian, and the field's patroller contingent had joined the rest on a man hunt through the City."
"And the co
"It is only that under the circumstances, which I ought to have reacted to by placing a guard of my own (I do not minimize my own offense), unauthorized persons may have boarded the ship."
"For what reason?"
"I could not say, but scarcely to do our pleasure."
"You are romancing, Captain."
"I am afraid not, my Lady. Our energometrics were, of course, useless within planetary distance of Florina's sun, but that is not the case now and I am afraid there is definite excess heat radiation from Emergency Stores."