Throy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Precursory

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 1, Part I

  Chapter 1, Part II

  Chapter 1, Part III

  Chapter 1, Part IV

  Chapter 1, Part V

  Chapter 1, Part VI

  Chapter 1, Part VII

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 2, Part I

  Chapter 2, Part II

  Chapter 2, Part III

  Chapter 2, Part IV

  Chapter 2, Part V

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 3, Part I

  Chapter 3, Part II

  Chapter 3, Part III

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 4, Part I

  Chapter 4, Part II

  Chapter 4, Part III

  Chapter 4, Part IV

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 5, Part I

  Chapter 5, Part II

  Chapter 5, Part III

  Chapter 5, Part IV

  Chapter 5, Part V

  Chapter 5, Part VI

  Chapter 5, Part VII

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 6, Part I

  Chapter 6, Part II

  Chapter 6, Part III

  Chapter 6, Part IV

  Chapter 6, Part V

  Chapter 6, Part VI

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 7, Part I

  Chapter 7, Part II

  Chapter 7, Part III

  Chapter 7, Part IV

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 8, Part I

  Chapter 8, Part II

  Chapter 8, Part III

  Chapter 8, Part IV

  Chapter 8, Part V

  Chapter 8, Part VI

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 9, Part I

  Chapter 9, Part II

  Chapter 9, Part III

  Glossary A

  Glossary B

  Footnotes

  Precursory Footnotes

  Chapter 1 Footnotes

  Chapter 2 Footnotes

  Chapter 3 Footnotes

  Chapter 4 Footnotes

  Chapter 5 Footnotes

  Chapter 8 Footnotes

  Glossary A Footnotes

  Throy

  The Cadwall Chronicles [3]

  Jack Vance

  Tor Books (1992)

  Rating: ★★★☆☆

  Tags: Science Fiction

  Science Fictionttt

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  In the reaches of Mircea's Whips the convoluted plots and politics that have swirled around the House of Clattuc and the Conservancy of Cadwal are beginning to unravel. But what remains for Glawen Clattuc to discover could bring down a dozen powerful families on as many worlds. Throy concludes the Cadwal Chronicles, which began with Araminta Station and continued in Ecce and Old Earth.

  From Publishers Weekly

  Continuing his tales of Cadwal, governed for generations by the Conservancy, which is dedicated to preserving the planet's natural beauty, Vance posits a scenario in which the Conservancy is now rent by factional conflict between the radical Life, Peace and Freedom Party and the conservative Chartists. LPFers ostensibly champion the cause of the Yips, happy-go-lucky descendants of runaway servants, illegal immigrants and petty criminals who are restricted to a region called Lutwen Atoll except when serving as cheap labor at Araminta Station, which is the administrative center and home to the Chartists, who uphold the original plan to restrict the spread of humanity across Cadwal. When a new, stricter Charter arrives, the inhabitants of Stroma, the only other settlement on the planet and the LPF center, are ordered to move to Araminta Station. Sinister undercurrents presage a full-scale conspiracy involving the Yips and longtime enemies of Cadwal. The popular Vance ( Ecce and Old Earth ) pens an often lively tale with some colorful moments and acerbic observations on politics and mores, although his mannered language and strained descriptions may put off the discriminating reader.

  Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

  From Library Journal

  Vengeance and unrequited love are the motivating factors behind an insidious plot to destroy the Cadwal Conservancy as agents Glawen Clattuc and Eustace Chilke track an elusive enemy across several worlds only to return home at last to find a revolution in the making. Vance's polished and formal style creates an emotional gap that is difficult to bridge; consequently, his characters lack real depth. Still, this follow-up to Araminta Station (Tor, 1989) and Ecce and Old Earth (Underwood/Miller, 1991) demonstrates the author's talent for imagining worlds and environments. Purchase where the author has a following.

  Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

  Precursory

  I. The Purple Rose System

  (Excerpted from: The Worlds of Man, 48th edition.)

  Halfway along the Perseid Arm near the edge of the Gaean Reach, a capricious swirl of galactic gravitation has caught up ten thousand stars and sent them streaming off at a veer, with a curl and a flourish at the tip. This strand of stars is Mircea’s Wisp.

  To the side of the curl, at seeming risk of wandering away into the void, is the Purple Rose System, comprising three stars: Lorca, Sing, and Syrene. Lorca, a white dwarf and Sing, a red giant, orbit close around each other: a portly pink-faced old gentleman waltzing with a dainty little maiden dressed in white. Syrene, a yellow-white star of ordinary size and luminosity, circles the gallivanting pair at a discrete distance.

  Syrene controls three planets, including Cadwal, an Earth-like world seven thousand miles in diameter, with close to Earth-normal gravity.

  (A list and analysis of physical indices is here omitted.)

  II. The Naturalist System

  Cadwal was first explored by the locator R. J. Neirmann, a member of the Naturalist Society of Earth. His report prompted the Society to dispatch an official expedition to Cadwal, which corroborated Neirmann’s lyrical descriptions: Cadwal indeed was a magnificent world, of beautiful landscapes, congenial climate and - not the least - a flora and fauna of fascinating diversity. The Society registered Cadwal in its own name, was awarded a grant-in-perpetuity and immediately declared the wonderful new world a Conservancy, protected forever against wanton depredation, vulgarity, and commercial exploitation.

  A Great Charter defined the administration of the new Conservancy and specified the tolerable limits of interference in the ecology.

  The three continents Ecce, Deucas and Throy, were distinctly different. Araminta Station, the administrative node of the planet, occupied a block of a hundred square miles on the east coast of Deucas, most hospitable of the continents. The Charter additionally authorized a chain of wilderness lodges, disposed at especially scenic or interesting sites, for the convenience of administrative personnel, Naturalist Society members, scientists, and tourists.

  III. The World Cadwal

  The three continents Ecce, Deucas and Throy, were separated one from the other by expanses of empty ocean, unbroken by islands, with three trifling exceptions: Lutwen Atoll, Thurben Island and Ocean Island, all volcanic in origin and all in the Eastern Ocean off the coast of Deucas.

  Ecce, long and narrow, lay along the equator: a flat tract of swamp and jungle, netted by sluggish rivers. Ecce palpitated with heat, stench, color and ravenous vitality. Ferocious creatures everywhere preyed upon one another, and any human being rash enough to venture within reach.

  Three volcanos reared above the flat landscape. Two of these, Rikke and Imfer, were active; Shattorak was dormant.

  The early explorers gave Ecce little serious attention; no more did the later scholars, and Ecce, after the first flurry of biological and topographical surveys, remained a land abandoned and unknown.

  Deucas, five times as large as Ecce, occupied most of the north temperate zone on the opposite side of the planet, with Cap
e Journal, the continent’s southernmost extremity, at the end of a long triangular peninsula which thrust a thousand miles below the equator.

  The fauna of Deucas, while neither as grotesque nor as monstrous as that of Ecce, was yet, in many cases, savage and formidable, and included several semi-intelligent species. The flora tended to resemble that of Old Earth, to such effect that the early agronomists were able to introduce useful terrestrial species at Araminta Station, such as bamboo, coconut palms, wine-grapes and fruit trees without fear of an ecological disaster.1 Throy, to the south of Deucas and about equal in area to Ecce, extended from the polar ice well into the south temperate zone. The terrain of Throy was the most dramatic of Cadwal. Crags leaned over chasms; dark forests roared in the wind. When storms blew across the great ocean, waves a hundred feet, or sometimes two hundred feet, from trough to crest struck into the cliffs of Peter Bullis Land, creating awesome sounds and jarring the landscape.

  IV. Araminta Station

  At Araminta Station a resident staff of (nominally) two hundred and forty persons monitored the Conservancy and enforced the terms of the Charter. Superficially the administrative structure was simple. A Conservator coordinated the work of six bureaus.2

  The original six superintendents were Deamus Wook, Shirry Clattuc, Saul Diffin, Claude Offaw, Marvell Veder, and Condit Laverty. Each had been required to assemble a staff not to exceed forty in number. Nepotism had been the rule rather than the exception; each Bureau Superintendent recruited extensively from his kinship and guild associates. The practice, if nothing else, brought to the early administration a cohesion which otherwise might have been lacking.

  After many centuries, much had changed. The original rude encampment had become a settlement dominated by six palatial edifices, where lived the descendants of the Wooks, Offaws, Clattucs, Diffins, Veders and Lavertys. Each House had developed a distinctive personality, which its residents shared, so that the wise Wooks differed from the flippant Diffins, as did the cautious Offaws from the reckless Clattucs.

  The station early acquired a hotel to house its visitors; also an airport, a hospital, schools and a theater: the ‘Orpheum’.

  When subsidies from society headquarters on Old Earth dwindled and presently stopped altogether, the need for foreign exchange became urgent. Vineyards planted at the back of the enclave began to produce fine wines for export, and tourists were encouraged to visit the wilderness lodges.

  Over the centuries, certain problems became acute. How could so many enterprises be staffed by a complement of only two hundred and forty persons? Elasticity was necessarily the answer. First, collaterals3 were allowed to accept middle-status positions at the station. By a loose reading of the Charter, children, retired persons, domestic servants and ‘temporary labor not in permanent residence’ were exempted from the forty-person-per-house limit. The term ‘temporary labor’ was extended to include farm labor, hotel staff, airport mechanics – indeed, workers of every description - and the Conservator looked the other way so long as the work-force was allowed no permanent residence.

  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.