He laid out his stubby, heavy fists on the table, side by side. “We could have had a lot of good years down here,” he went on, “even the way this place is; and you’d’ve had your Emma and I got Lorena. But you’re bound to bust it all up. You’re bound to try doing something that can’t be done and get yourself killed. Maybe get me and others killed with you. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“I won’t get you killed,” said Bart, feeling guilty in spite of the fact his mind told him he was guilty of nothing. “I promise you—”
“Don’t make me no promises,” said Paolo. “I tell you I can smell it. I know. Chandt’s been talking to you about me, hasn’t he? He say I was afraid to fight you?”
Bart would willingly have lied to make the situation better, but with Paolo staring at him as he was and speaking in such a voice, he could not.
“Yes,” he said.
“It ain’t true,” said Paolo, still in that low voice that was so unusual for him. “I’m not afraid to fight any man there is. I’m not even afraid of him, Chandt, in spite of knowing he’ll kill me. I can smell that, too. The day I go up against him, he’ll kill me. Bare hands against bare hands, he’ll kill me. But still I ain’t afraid of him. He knows that. But he can’t let himself think I’m not afraid because of that Mongol way of looking at things he has. He’s got to feel there’s no one in the surface world or in the Inner World who wouldn’t be afraid of him. Else he couldn’t live with himself. He thinks he’s the last Mongol there is; so he’s got to be what all the Mongols were to everybody else.”
“You don’t like him,” said Bart.
“No,” said Paolo. “I don’t like him. He likes you, though. He’d like you for a paisano, just the way I do, but I can have you for one and he can’t; because being the only one of his kind the way he is, he ain’t allowed no friends.”
Paolo looked across the table at Bart, strangely.
“That’s why he’ll kill you, too, at last, just like he’ll kill me. Because you don’t fit the world the way he has to have it.”
Paolo reached out for his glass almost blindly, lifted it, and drank from it—a full swallow this time. He set the glass back down on the table and sat staring at it.
“I done my best to save you,” he said, his eyes still on the glass. He stayed as he was, staring at the glass. It was almost as if he had forgotten Bart was there. Bart pushed back his chair and got to his feet; but still Paolo did not look up.
“I promise you,” Bart said to him, “neither you nor Lorena, nor Emma nor anyone else is going to be hurt because of what I do.” He put a hand on one of the thick shoulders, but it was like touching a stone statue. Bart left him.
He went back to the dormitory. He had a name now—al-Kebir or el-Kabir. It sounded Arabic; and somewhere in the Library, thanks to Pier and the freedom he had given Bart, he ought to be able to run down something on that.
chapter
fourteen
THE OUTER ROOM of the Library was lit and open twenty-four hours a day. Bart had picked an evening several days after his encounter with the Emperor, here, to begin his search of the Library itself. Though there were still people about, they were fewer than during the days.
A stack slave slept in a chair behind the desk, but the rest of the room was empty of life. At the moment Bart stepped onto the interior carpet, he heard footfalls approaching through the stacks, with their uncarpeted floors; and a moment later there came into view three Hybrids.
Two of them were unremarkable, dark-suited men in their thirties, one with thinning brown hair, one with a mop of faded blond above a round face. But the third, walking between the other two, was a narrow-waisted, broad-shouldered man with a swarthy skin, a sharp nose and astonishingly bright blue eyes.
Bart had never seen this particular Hybrid before, to his knowledge; but something about him riveted Bart’s attention. In spite of the fact Bart did not know him, there was something familiar about him. It was as if Bart felt he should recognize him. As if he had known him, even though Bart knew he had not.
At the same time Bart became conscious that he had halted directly in front of the doorway, toward which the three were headed.
Hastily, he stepped aside. The two Hybrids on either side of the one who had attracted Bart’s attention merely glanced at Bart as they approached and passed. But Bart became suddenly aware that the third man’s bright blue eyes were concentrating on him with an intensity that made him uncomfortable. Here was not a man, like Chandt, who was responding as someone with an authority to maintain. The feeling that reached Bart was merely one of curiosity. But it was a curiosity as blinding as a mirror with the full sun reflected in it, and as sharp as the end of a needle.
Then the three passed him, and the one with the blue eyes took his gaze off Bart and looked ahead, putting a hand on one shoulder of each of his companions. He herded them before him, out the door. Bart felt a strange desire to follow, to find out more about him. Then he remembered what he was here to do, put the feeling from him, and continued on past the circular desk area with its sleeping slave, on into the stacks.
In the time that had passed since Pier had given him the freedom of the Library, Bart had been using some of his free time to explore it. He had had vague notions of trying to find information that might help him to escape from this Inner World, but had really had little idea of exactly what to look for. But now, a few days ago, Paolo had given him a name. That, combined with the dead end he had seemingly come up against in his physical exploration of the corridors, had led him back here. It might be that it would be his mind rather than his body that got them out of here.
What he needed was something that would tell him of the history of the Lords, and of the Inner World itself. The name of this legendary al-Kebir might be the key his researches needed.
At first he had been baffled, for while the Library held a considerable section of histories of the world and its various peoples, in various languages, all of these were perfectly straightforward accounts of the past as he had learned about it from his father and his own reading. The Lords seemed to work hard at bringing copies of as many of the world’s books as they could reach to their own Library, but none of them seemed to reference the Lords or their World. Still, he scanned the pages of those histories he had never read before, in search of some reference, however slight, to any people like the Lords, or to a vessel that might have brought them here from somewhere “beyond the moon,” but found nothing.
He could not believe it. It was not possible that a race or group like the Lords, who were so capable, rich and well-organized that they could produce something like this Inner World, would not have some sort of written history, or books that at least referred to that history. If nothing else, there would have been records for as vast an undertaking as the building of the Inner World. Not to speak of all the devices that they had come up with, using electromagnetic forces or whatever—he checked himself in midthought.
Of course. Records. Somewhere here in the Library there had to be records of work done, money spent, and probably as well of people born and buried during the time of this Inner World. Records that would at least put him on the track of how this place with its three classes had come to be, unknown to the outside world and buried underground off in a part of the world which most of the world’s peoples took to be howling wilderness.
In fact—and his hopes shot skyward for a moment—it was even possible that in finding such records he would find architectural plans of the Inner World itself, complete with some lightly guarded secret exit.
He checked the wishful thinking. A find like that would be almost too good to be true. He would be content to get any kind of a handle on the mystery that surrounded him, any kind of lead to the understanding that would point him to where he could learn more.
So he had begun his search for the records section of the Library. He could, of course, have asked someone there, from Pier on down to one of the stack slaves whose duty was fetching
books for those who did not go back after them. But it could be dangerous to let anyone else know that he was interested in such a section, even if such a question turned out to be harmless.
Which it could hardly be, he had thought, remembering that none of the Hybrids or Lords he had listened to or followed had asked for that particular section in all the time he had been here.
So it had been a matter of his starting at the lowest floor of the Library at its farthest back comer, and simply searching each level completely as he moved up through them, until he might come to the section where such records were kept.
It had been a slow job so far, made slower by the temptation to stop and look into interesting books or papers as he went—books and papers which plainly were not what he was looking for, but which might tell him things he might need to know. Moreover, he had been infected by the pleasure of reading early in life, and he found it difficult to shake that off now.
His father had been a constant supplier of books. Lionel had made a habit of asking anyone with whom he made friends to buy books for him, whenever that person got to a place where books were sold. The result for young Bart had been that it seemed that every day brought some newcomer to their door to deliver one or more books that Lionel had asked him to get.
The result was that Bart had come to mirror his father’s appetite for the written word. It was an odd addiction for a woods-born, mixed-blood man to have, on the wild western frontier of Canada in the middle years of the nineteenth century; it was not that people did not like to read, but that few of them ever learned how, and those who did learn had only infrequent access to reading materials.
Moreover, Bart had seen first-hand the effect his father’s habit of burying himself away with his books had had on the man’s reputation; and so he had tried to draw as little attention as possible to his own reading. That fit, anyway, with his desires not to stand out from the crowd.
Pier had been kinder to him than the old Lord had realized, in giving him the run of the stacks.
So he had persevered in his search with occasional hesitations, as he gave in to the temptation to look into some book with a particularly interesting-sounding title. In spite of these interruptions, however, he had continued to make his way up the levels of the stacks, until now he was on the main level of the Library where the main desk and Pier’s office was. This night he began about halfway back through the stacks on that level, and he had only been searching for about an hour and a half when he finally found the section he had been seeking all along.
It was in a side room off the main area of that floor’s stacks, a side room he had never before known existed. The nearer shelves were stacked with piles of books and papers almost haphazardly; and his first assumption was that these were Library materials stored temporarily, pending collation and assignment to their proper position on the shelves.
He began by examining the papers near the entrance. They were, as he had half suspected from the look of them, loose records of all kinds—memos, orders, supply lists. All kinds and sorts of different paperwork, tied with string into bundles about four inches thick. When he went farther in, however, the bundles of paper gave way to bound volumes; and, opening these, he found that they were merely collections of the same sort of business papers that made up the bundles he had just passed, but of an earlier date.
He could see the end of the side room, now, only a dozen feet from him, putting a limit to the shelves and their contents. All bound books, almost undoubtedly more bound records. There might be information here he could use, but it would take days of searching through the papers to find it. He could start that search tonight; but it was getting to the time for him to head back to the dormitory if he wanted anything like a full night’s sleep. Probably there was no point in looking any farther into the matter for now.
So he told himself; but a small devil of persistence that had been part of him as long as he could remember prodded him on to the very end of the room; and this time it paid off. For he came upon the last six feet of shelves, which, from floor to ceiling, were filled with what seemed to be identical copies of a single title. He was looking at several hundred of them. They were bound in soft, dark leather, with covers so oversize that their open ends almost flopped together in spite of the thickness of the volume they enclosed. On each front cover where a title might ordinarily be, there was only a strange sort of scrawl in gold that baffled him for a minute before he recognized it as Arabic script:
Bart’s father had been interested, among other things, in the writings of the twelfth century Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides and had secured a copy of Maimonides’ Book of Commandments, written in the original Arabic. As a young boy, fresh from the Cree camp, Bart had been fascinated by the Arabic script and his father had taken the time to show him how to spell out a few short, common words. The Library, Bart knew, had a large supply of foreign dictionaries, but the temptation to puzzle this out on his own made him search his memory until he began to make sense of it.
The first part read “Kinaab”—no, it was “Kitaab”—which meant, in English, simply “Book.” The second part was even easier—it began with the article “el,” or “al”—which was joined to the beginning of the noun it modified. That noun . . . for a moment it frustrated him; and then he had it, feeling fortunate that it contained two of the same letters as the first word he had spelled out—that made it easier to recognize. It was a common word, which was why he could recognize it at all. It read Kebir, which meant “Large” or perhaps, “the Large One.” Or “the Great.”
So the whole thing read “Book The Large One.” And he knew well enough how foreign grammars could differ from that of English or French—he must be missing something, some rule of the language, that would tell him how to add something more to the phrase, to make more sense of it. He could guess that a more proper translation would read, “THE LARGE BOOK”—or, wait—“The Book of The Large One” was also a possible reading.
But for the moment it was not the exercise in translation that transfixed him, but the fact that “al-Kebir” had been the name Paolo had whispered to him, that evening not long ago.
He took one of the copies from a middle shelf and opened it to its first page—it began with its text immediately, without flyleaves or title pages, and despite the Arabic text on the cover, it was written—apparently handwritten—in clean, clear script of a late medieval Latin.
“De origine et via qua adhunc mundum advenimus nihil dicabo . . . the first sentence began.
“Of our origin and the means by which we came to this world, as well as the fate of many of us in the moment of our arrival,” his mind translated into English, “I will say nothing, lest the information turn out to be of use to those who should not know such things.
“Suffice it to say that a number of us were left scattered and helpless upon a part of this earth called Sicily, where we one and all fell into the hands of various local inhabitants of the lowest origin, brutish by nature and lacking in all but the simplest intelligence. Inhabitants, moreover, who were incapable of recognizing in us the superior beings we were, but instead took us under their control and treated each of us as if we were little better than the beasts they fed on or forced to work their fields; for without exception they were peasants of the lowest order . . .”
Bart forced himself to tear his eyes from the text and close the book. It was plainly an autobiography written by that same unbelievable character Paolo had whispered about as being in the great guarded central room of the Inner World—the man supposed to be in charge there and thousands of years old.
Well, the book was written in medieval Latin, which, if it was the original language in which the story was told, effectively disposed of the idea that al-Kebir was thousands of years old. Bart frowned briefly in thought. Since al-Kebir seemed to be the name of this person, and this was his autobiography, it followed that the Arabic title was best translated as “ Al-Kebir’s Book,” or perhaps “The Book of Al-Keb
ir.”
Thoughtfully Bart took the book back to Pier’s office, not forgetting to watch lest someone notice him with it, and unlocked the door. The lights within went on automatically as the door opened to his key. The signal light had told him that Pier was not here.
He went into his alcove, sat down, opened the book again and started reading. . . .
It was some hours later that he roused himself with a start from the book, his reading of it still unfinished. He got up and stepped out of the alcove to check the clock on the wall of Pier’s office.
It was almost four in the morning; and Bart suddenly realized that he was almost snow-blind from staring at the pages, and dead tired.
The full story of he who had called himself al-Kebir was yet to be read by Bart; but the time in which he had at least begun his existence was now certain. It had been in the thirteenth century; and he had lived mainly at the Sicilian court of Frederick the Second, Holy Roman Emperor. More than that, he had been four feet two, or thereabouts, a dwarf with a misshapen head, a genius and very possibly also a madman; with a black and boiling hatred in him for the Emperor who owned him and for everyone else in the human race who was not undersized like himself.
Also, there was no doubt that he was among the first of the Lords, if not himself the first, on Earth.
But the final words of what he had to say about himself would have to wait for some later time. Bart had two hours in which to try and get some sleep before the dormitory was roused. He returned the book to its place on the shelf from which he had taken it and took himself off to bed.
The next morning he was barely roused by the voices around the schedule pinned to the door. He rolled over and went back to sleep so successfully that he did not wake again until nearly noon. He sat up in alarm, then sank back in relief as he remembered that, luckily, the day before, Pier had told him that he planned to work at home today. He did, however, have to come to Pier’s home in the afternoon, if only to wait on his pleasure.
The Earth Lords Page 20