But even as he felt this, Paolo was turning back to face him.
“Right,” the head Steed was saying to him, “now you—you come with me.”
He led Bart away from the dormitory and to, not the usual eating and drinking area of the Steeds, but the general slave social center, where they wedged themselves into a corner box consisting of a table and high-backed benches.
“Talk more privately here,” grunted Paolo, once they were seated. “I know, you’d rather be catching some sleep on your bed right now; but I think we better have a talk without any more wasted time.”
A male slave waiter came and took their orders. Paolo’s was for some of the light-alcohol slave beer and a side glass of the raw, almost pure alcohol that was also available here in the social center. Bart, since he guessed the other would be offended if he did not, took the same thing.
He waited for the other to begin the conversation. Here, he hoped, was his chance to begin getting some idea of the place he and Emma now had to escape from. He continued to wait, however, for Paolo to give some indication of how the talk would go.
Paolo, however, said nothing. They sat in silence until the waiter had brought the drinks and left them once more alone. Then the dormitory leader took the small glass of alcohol in one swallow, drank a large portion of the beer in another, and stared hard at Bart. Their faces were so close together across the small table of the corner booth that Bart could see one long black hair curling out from Paolo’s left nostril. Bart stared at it in fascination. It had a curve like the tusk of a boar; and, rather than making the other man look unsightly, gave him a boarlike appearance of innate fierceness.
“Look you, Bart—it’s Bart that’s you name, isn’t it? That’s what they said back in the dormitory—”
“Bart Dybig,” said Bart.
“All right, Bart. You want to be in another dormitory? One where the Leader’ll be easy for you to whip; but a good, solid dormitory, with no real crazy men or wood-heads in it? I can fix it.”
Bart stared at the other, startled, suddenly, so that he found himself coming out of a fog of weariness that he hadn’t fully realized. He knew he had not, indeed, regained the strength the mine had taken from him. But Paolo was a heaven-sent opportunity.
“Why’d I want to be in another dormitory?”
Paolo held up one finger, signaling their waiter, who was standing across the room, watching. The waiter went off and Paolo drank deeply from his tall glass of beer, almost finishing it.
‘Til tell you the truth,” he said, banging the near-empty glass down on the tabletop and wiping his mouth on the back of a thick hand. “I—no, wait.”
The waiter was returning with two new orders of beer and alcohol. Bart hastily emptied his own two glasses, the large and the small, and was suddenly sorry he had not done so earlier. He had no fears of being outdrunk by Paolo, who seemed in a friendly mood, anyway; and the alcohol now inside Bart would act as an anesthetic for the aches and pains from the day’s unusual effort.
Paolo waited until the waiter was again across the room, watching them and ready to serve, but out of earshot.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” said Paolo again, “I can whip you. Particularly the way you are now; and even when you get rested and fleshed up again. I know I can whip you.”
He stopped and drank his second alcohol and some beer.
“But I’m hot like those wood-heads back in the dormitory.” He tapped the right side of his forehead with one thick finger. “I can smell things. My mother was a strega—a witch; and I can smell something on you. Something I smell says not to fight you. A smell like that—it’s never wrong.”
He stopped speaking and stared at Bart as if waiting for an answer. Bart only looked back. Even weary as he was now, and worn down as his time in the mine had left him, he thought he had a good chance of defeating Paolo. Of making him unconscious or even killing him, if necessary.
But he could be wrong, and he would much rather have the dormitory Leader as a friend than a defeated rival. “Same time,” Paolo spoke up again suddenly, after another drink of beer, “there’s something about you I like. But if you stay in our dormitory, I’m going to have to whip you. And I won’t take no chances, because of what I smell in you. That means it’ll be bad for you. You got to understand. It means a lot to me, being Leader. It’s the biggest job I ever had. Even if the Lords end up someday having me killed, I’ve still been Leader. You understand?”
“Yes,” said Bart.
And he did. He heard the words that the other said—and something more as well. Under the harsh voice of Paolo there was a note of appeal.
“You want me to move to someplace else, so we don’t have to fight,” Bart said, half to himself.
“That’s right,” said Paolo. “I can fix it. Some things I can fix. It’ll take time.”
Bart nodded.
“You’ll still have to fight whoever’s Leader there for first place,” Paolo said, “but he won’t try to kill you if he sees he can’t win any other way. I will—and believe me, Bart, after being in the dormitories twelve years, I know how to do it before you can guess what’s coming.”
Bart sat, thinking. But not from fear of Paolo killing him. He hesitated because he wanted to think about the possible advantages of this attitude of Paolo’s. There might be some way it could help him get Emma out of here. Equally, there might be disadvantages. The problem was that he did not know enough yet about this place in which they were trapped to make a decision.
He decided a decision was best put off for the moment.
“I don’t know—he began. But Paolo had already evidently guessed his reaction.
“Think it over, if you want to,” said the Leader. “Or, hell! Ask me anything you want, to help you make up your mind. We’ve got until you’ve got your proper weight back anyway. That’s two, three months, maybe more. And as I say, not counting the fact I’m not going to let you take my Leadership from me, I like you. Drink up; and let’s talk a bit.”
Bart nodded.
“I’ll take you up on that,” he said. “I’ll think about it.” „
“Tell me as soon as you know,” said Paolo. “Remember getting you transferred to another dormitory’ll take arranging; and that’ll take time.”
“I will,” said Bart. “Meanwhile, as you say, let’s talk. I need to know about this place. Has it got a name?”
“It’s got lots of names,” Paolo smiled, and his smile was as savage as the hair curling from his left nostril, “depending on who you talk to and what’s happened to him—or her. But its real name is the Inner World. That’s the name the Lords gave it.”
The expression on his face changed to one of curiosity.
“How’s it you don’t know that?” he said. “Whenever anyone’s reborn from the dead here, they come back knowing all about the Inner World, the Lords and the Hybrids.”
“I don’t,” said Bart.
Now it was Paolo who shook his head.
“Doesn’t make sense, man,” he said. “Let’s take it from the beginning. You remember dying, don’t you?”
“No,” said Bart
Paolo sat for a long second, simply staring at him.
“Here!” he said. “You lying to me?”
“No,” said Bart. “I remember being in the mine. I remember getting loose from the work crew I was chained to, when we were put away to sleep, one night. I’d counted my steps in the tunnels and so I managed to find my way to where I’d seen some of those on the mine staff, and some other people, going. I came to a hidden door, I found my way through it—and I fell. Into some sort of underground river. Where I fell in there was room above the water to breathe; but the river carried me on to where the rock overhead came right down to the water and I had to swim holding my breath, hoping to make it to where there was air above me.”
He paused.
“That’s all I remember until I woke up—” Caution made him hold back the memory of the three Heads standi
ng over him and talking in their strange, but in that moment oddly comprehensible, language, “—woke up in the dormitory.”
“All right,” said Paolo. “There’s nothing crazy in that. You must have drowned in the river. The Lords brought you back to life. You try—you’ll remember what it was like dying.” He shuddered. “No one forgets that!”
“There’s nothing I remember about either dying or being brought back to life,” said Bart. “Maybe I was next to drowning, enough so I was unconscious—but that’s all.”
“You couldn’t have been just unconscious,” said Paolo emphatically. “The Lords’d never let anyone into the Inner World—let any human in, that is—who’s alive.”
“Why not?”
“Why, because of what people—us humans—did to them—” Paolo’s intensely black, busy eyebrows drew together over his eyes. “You really saying you don’t remember that? Everyone here’s reborn knowing that—why the Lords wouldn’t never let a human being come alive, here in their own, personal world.” “Everybody but me,” said Bart patiently.
“All right. I’ll tell you—but if you’re joking me . . . ,” said Paolo, then checked himself. “But you’re not. I can tell. All right, then, you ought to know that the Lords, they aren’t like us. I mean, they’re not real people. They came here from another world.” “A what?” said Bart.
“Another world—a world, just like this here world of ours; but another one, someplace else.”
“Someplace else? Where?”
“So far away . . .” Paolo’s voice failed at trying to make the description. “Look, you know you stand at the foot of a mountain and look up at the moon; then you climb that mountain and look at the moon again—I mean, same time of night, same time of year—right away?”
“Yes,” said Bart.
“Right. Now, the moon—does it look any closer from the top of the mountain—any bigger—than it looked from the bottom?” “No,” said Bart. “Of course not.”
“All right,” said Paolo. “Well, that world the Lords come from, it’s beyond the moon, they say. So of course you can’t see it, it’s so far off.”
“How’d they get here, then?”
Paolo lowered his voice.
“That’s their secret—one of their secrets; and they’ve got lots of them. But they got here; and then what happened?”
“You’re the one who’s telling me what happened.”
“You know what I mean,” said Paolo impatiently. “I was just saying it that way to get you ready for what you’re going to hear. When the Lords landed here, the first humans that saw them took them for some kind of little freaks, all of them. That was thousands of years ago, when they had kings and courts. The kings dressed the Lords up in clown suits and made them do tricks for the court, and used them that way. Hell, you must have seen the carvings on doors and paintings on walls, and such!”
Bart stared at him.
“You see?” Paolo said. “Now you see why they’d never let any one of us in here, alive? Man, they hate us—I mean they hate the humans we were before we died. Since they raised us from the dead, they don’t hate us as much.”
“If that’s so,” said Bart slowly, “how’d they get from those courts to this Inner World?”
“They snuck away from the courts—thousands of years ago, like I said,” Paolo answered. “And they began raising dead humans to work for them and they built this place—thousands of years ago.”
Bart nodded. There were holes in this story you could drive a freight wagon through. Even granted that it must have taken a very great amount of human labor to build this place . . .
A new idea interrupted his train of thought. Come to think of it, the labor would have been a lot less if most of this underground area had been a series of natural caves that merely needed to be connected, cleaned out and finished inside . . . .
But that was beside the point. The one thing that had to be patently false was that the Inner World had been built thousands of years ago. Thousands of years ago the kings and courts of the world knew nothing about North America—let alone about this particular part of it. Even if they had . . . Bart had seen enough already to know that this place was heavily dependent on supplies from the outside world. Supplies which could only come in here by way of the railroads and ocean-going vessels of a modem or near-modem world.
It was not merely their clothes and furniture, the carpets, the lighting, and a thousand other items that were obviously not manufactured here, below ground. It was the edibles; the foods and drinks that had to come from outside. There were no farms, no domestic food animals, and no distilleries under the earth. Such items as food and drink, along with many other things, would have to be shipped in through some nearby port and brought by wagon to the mine for delivery here below ground.
That port could only be the town of New Westminster, which was the capital of the Canadian coastal colony of British Columbia; and which was probably not more than a couple of weeks of wagon-travel time away from the mine.
A thought kindled in his mind. It was that when he finally managed to get Emma and himself free from this place, the port of New Westminster and a ship to somewhere else might well be the destination they should seek.
“Tell me about the Hybrids,” he said to Paolo. “The slave from the Library who guided me back to the dormitory just now said they were the result these little people—”
“Lords!” hissed Paolo, leaning toward him. “Call them Lords, here. We’re out where people can see us and maybe read your lips!”
“All right, ‘Lords’ then,” said Bart. “Tell me about the Hybrids. What’s their part in the scheme of things around here? There was one at the Library who said he was the Assistant Librarian and I saw people wearing fancy eastcoast clothes who were supposed to be other Hybrids. What’s their rank and what jobs do they do? I get the idea they’re something like foremen over the slaves. Or do they just sit around like the Lords and enjoy life?”
“You got a lot to learn,” said Paolo heavily, leaning back in his seat of the booth and signaling the waiter for refills. “You really got a lot to learn.”
The dormitory Leader waited until the waiter had brought freshly filled glasses and gone again before leaning once more toward Bart.
“Sure, you could say they’re like foremen,” Paolo said. “They do some of the in-between jobs, where someone has to give orders to a whole bunch of slaves every day. But most of them do work even the Lords aren’t able to do, in the laboratories—”
“Laboratories?”
“You don’t know about those, either?”
“I carried one of the Lords through some of them, today,” said Bart. “But I don’t know what they’re working on, or anything else about them.”
“Stick to the Hybrids for now. The point is, they work at all kinds of things. And get something else clear—” Paolo paused for a moment as if gathering himself. “Here in the Inner World everybody works, including the Lords. Any of them who isn’t a worker isn’t let grow up.”
Bart frowned. He sat with two full glasses of alcohol and one and a half of beer before him, almost untouched. Paolo seemed to have ceased to pay attention to the fact that Bart was not drinking as heavily as he was himself.
“Isn’t let grow up?” echoed Bart.
“Right! The only children let live down here are Lord or Hybrid young ones; and they get checked when they’re eleven and again when they’re seventeen years old, to see if they’re fit to grow up. If they’re not, even the young Lords, they’re killed.”
“The Lords kill their own children?”
“You believe it!” said Paolo. “It’s true. And it’s not just because they might not want to work hard. They’ve got to be just so smart and just so healthy and so strong, and all that; or else, down they go!”
“Strong?”
Paolo laughed. For the first time the effect of the liquor he had poured down showed on him.
“You think the Lords ride us beca
use they’re too weak to walk?” Paolo spluttered again into his drink. “They may be little—and I don’t say one of them’s a patch on you or me, or any Steed for that matter—or even any good-sized, healthy man in the slave dormitories. But they practice all the time—”
He leaned forward farther, suddenly and urgently.
“Now, don’t go talking about that,” he said in a whisper. “The regular slaves, most of them, don’t know it. Just a few special ones, including us because we get to be part of some of their ceremonies. But we’re not supposed to let the ordinary slaves know. Anyway, you’d be surprised how strong some of those little—” He paused, blinked, and then went on. “—are—even the Lady Lords. By the way, you remember that, too. That’s what you call their womenfolk —not the Hybrids, but the full-blooded ones. ‘Ladies.’ ”
Bart nodded, hiding the grin that the name “Lady Lords” had triggered off inside him.
“I’ll remember. Ladies,” he said.
“That’s right; and you take my advice,” continued Paolo, leaning back and belching almost inaudibly. “You get in the habit of calling them ‘Lords’ all the time. Bad enough when one of the ordinary slaves is caught calling them anything else, let alone one of us. Why’re you so interested in Hybrids, anyway?”
He leaned forward again, peering at Bart curiously.
“You know,” he said, “you could be one of them. You’ve got that sort of look about you. The way your forehead sticks out over your eyes, almost the way a Head’s does.”
chapter
nine
PAOLO’S FACE HAD become hard and his voice was suddenly clear of any trace of drunkenness. For a moment he merely stared at Bart; but then the tension went out of him and his voice returned to having the slightly alcoholic blur it had held a moment before.
“No,” he said, “of course you aren’t. I know every Hybrid in the Inner World who’s anywhere near your age and they don’t let even their own people out into the surface world until they’re a good ten years older than you are. Besides, why would they go to all the trouble of setting up a Hybrid spy among the Steeds just to trap someone like me? Even for the Lords, that doesn’t make sense. I’m not that important.”
The Earth Lords Page 12