He brightened up, remembering that this was an evening when he was to meet Emma, Paolo and Lorena in the slaves’ Recreation Center. They had already met on two occasions, this way. He found the three of them now, as usual, in Paolo’s favorite comer booth.
“Just once,” said Paolo, as Bart slid into the booth beside Emma and across from the other two, “I’d like to get here and find you waiting for the rest of us.”
It was a growl, but a friendly growl. In fact that was the only way Paolo seemed to know how to speak—in a growl. It was the way he talked to the Steeds in his dormitory. He even growled his acknowledgment of commands from the Lordly class, Hybrids and other superiors, like Chandt.
“Sorry,” said Bart. “I was kept late at the Librarian’s.”
“Oh, the Library!” Paolo’s harsh voice disposed of any possibility that anything in the Library could be interesting to anyone but an individual with strange tastes, like Bart. The upper classes naturally all had such tastes, but a slave who liked books was grotesque to the point of being funny to Paolo. He excused this oddity of Bart’s only because he liked him, but he prodded him about it.
“I’ll tell you about it in a minute,” said Bart to Emma, in Cree. She smiled back at him.
“Oh, for hell’s sake!” said Paolo. “Are you going to start that jibber-jabber right off the minute you get here? Have a drink and talk some human French or English for a few minutes first!”
He turned to Lorena beside him.
“Don’t you ever start talking crazy languages around me.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t!” said Lorena, then looked hastily at Bart and Emma, then as hastily looked down at the tabletop between them.
“Don’t let it bother you,. Lorena,” said Emma to the other woman. “It’s natural for anyone not to like sitting and wondering if you’re being discussed in front of your face, in a tongue you can’t understand. I know how you feel. But Bart and I haven’t any choice. The only way we can get together is with you two, according to Paolo here; and we don’t want to make you listen to things from us that’d force you to choose between reporting us to the authorities or getting into trouble for not reporting us. If you don’t understand us, then no one can blame you.”
“They’d lump us in with you anyway—the Hybrids would, anyhow—,” growled Paolo.
“Nonsense!” said Emma. “We can prove you don’t understand us. Chances are there aren’t any Hybrids or Lords or Ladies who could, either. And don’t pick on Lorena, Paolo. She tries too hard to please you, as it is.”
It was typical of Emma, thought Bart, that she was already protecting Lorena. The newcomer had taken the experienced old hand under her wing, instead of the other way around. But given the characters of the two women it could hardly have been otherwise.
Lorena, Emma had told Bart in Cree at one of the earlier meetings, had had a sheltered, if not a pampered, childhood. She had been born into a family in the southern United States; and the Civil War had put an end to the kind of life she had been raised to expect while she was still a teenager.
It had also stripped her of all her close relatives and what little wealth she might otherwise have had. She was an indifferent cook and seamstress, but spoke educated French. She had a sort of pale, fragile, brown-haired beauty and a true singing voice with good range but little power. These were the only tools her upbringing had provided her to survive in the world alone.
That same upbringing and her nature had also imprinted her firmly with the notion that men would behave like gentlemen toward her if only she behaved like a lady toward them. Valiantly, she tried to do so, turning first for help to some distant cousins who, to get her off their hands, pushed her into an affair with a man who lived more by his wits than by any other means. This man had been impressed at first by her manners and her almost desperate desire to please him; but both attractions wore thin for him after a while, since both were foreign to his own selfish way of thinking.
He had pushed her off on a friend. Sold her, as a matter of fact—but she did not learn this until later, when the friend accused her of not being worth the price he had paid for her. From then on she drifted from one man to another in a generally northwesterly direction, as her companions became poorer and cruder and more inclined to try their luck farther west on the frontier regions.
She had been killed, so she believed, by robbers who held up a stagecoach in which she was traveling with her latest gentleman. The holdup man had decided to shoot all those on and in the coach to cover their tracks. She had come back to life here—still the same person with her unshakable belief that somewhere there was a man who would care for her and protect her if only she could figure out the proper way of pleasing him.
Consequently, she had been played with—those were Emma’s words for what had happened to her and Bart thought that they were probably as close to the truth as any could be—by a number of fellow slaves here in the Inner World. She lacked the intellectual capacity to attract the attention of Hybrids or Lords. Not that members from either of the upper classes would necessarily have turned out to be much kinder to her if they had taken an interest in her.
The fact was, she was a waif on anyone’s doorstep; and she loved Paolo simply because Paolo had his own rough standards of right and wrong, and applied them to her as well as to everyone else. The result was that the other men who still took her up from time to time were constrained in their handling of her by the knowledge that a Steed named Paolo wanted Lorena—when he chose to want her—in good physical shape and reasonably happy. Since the dormitory Leader was a formidable person and known as such, she had been well-treated in the past few years by her other gentlemen.
Emma believed that Paolo, without knowing it, was in love with Lorena. Bart privately reserved judgment on that.
In any case, the result was startling. When she and Emma were together in public, it was Lorena who caught the eye; but Emma dominated the attention of anyone who ventured close to the two of them. Even smaller than Lorena, she had an absolute lack of fear and a perfectly clear perception of the fact that not all people were angels, matched with the determination that they could and would behave themselves if they wished to stay anywhere close around her, Emma cowed most of those who otherwise would have taken almost instant advantage of someone like Lorena.
—And just as well, too, thought Bart grimly to himself. If it came down to it, he believed he would be a good deal more capable of defending Emma than Paolo was of Lorena. However, Emma being who she was, the need had so far never arisen.
“I don’t pick on her!” Paolo was protesting.
“You do,” said Emma calmly. “You’re just so used to doing it that you don’t know when you’re about it.”
Paolo stared at her, baffled into silence.
“Sony, Paolo,” said Bart. “Just let us get our jabber out of the way first; and then we can talk any human language you want for the rest of the time we have.”
“Italian,” said Paolo.
“All right,” said Bart, with a glance at Emma and Lorena, neither of which understood a word of Italian as far as he knew. “If you insist, we’ll talk Italian.”
“You only know a couple of words,” said Paolo gruffly, “and no one else here but me knows it at all. Get the hell on with it, will you?”
“All right,” said Bart, “we’ll make it as fast as possible.”
He turned to Emma and began to talk to her in Cree, telling her of what he had found in the side room of the Library stacks and particularly the book apparently written by al-Kebir about himself and the history of the early Lords and Ladies. He was more than a little disappointed that she took the discovery as much less than the remarkable stroke of luck he had been considering it.
“Don’t you realize?” he said to her almost angrily, “what this could lead to? It could lead to a way out of here; and it practically fell into my hands!”
“How could that book lead to you getting us out of here?” she asked.
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“I can use the fact that I know about it to back up my story,” he said.
“What story?”
“I’m going to talk to Pier and claim I’m a lost Hybrid, the son of a Lord who died above ground after fathering me with an Indian woman.”
He did not want to use the recognizable word “Hybrid,” so he rendered the word in Cree as man-with-small-god-for-father. Emma looked sideways and up at him, her round face concerned.
“Why do you think you can get away with anything like that?” she asked.
“It all depends on whether I’ve dug out the right picture of how this place works,” he said. “If I have, then, it’ll be up to them to prove I’m lying; and the only way they can do that is either by proving no Lord was where I came from, at the right time to be my father—and from what I can learn, there’s no way they can do that—or by asking me questions until I trip myself up by contradicting myself. Which I won’t do.”
“Let’s take this one question at a time,” said Emma. “To begin with, what makes you think they can’t look at their records—and they keep very good records, I can testify to that after seeing their bookkeeping here—and find that there was no Lord anywhere around at the place and time you must have been started?”
“Because I’m not going to tell them enough to let them do a close enough job of checking,” said Bart. “All I know, I’ll say, is that I was born into an Indian tribe that was always on the move, and when I got old enough to understand, my mother told me a small, ugly white man had been my father, but that she had heard since that he had died somewhere farther west. Meanwhile, down here I’ve realized that the way she described my father makes it seem certain that he was a Lord.”
“And what if they haven’t had any Lords at all above ground in western Canada?”
“I think they’ve had to have,” said Bart. “It’s like a pack of wolves protecting their territory. They’ll have wanted to steer people away from the whole area where this Inner World is underground; and that job’s too important to leave to Hybrids alone. My estimate is they must have had at least several Lords up on the surface west of Toronto about the time I was born, helping to influence the directions in which settlers—and particularly the railroad—moved west.”
“All right,” she said, “for now, I’ll take that answer. How about the other question? What makes you so sure they can’t trip you up when one of your answers doesn’t match with another you’ve given them?”
“Because all my answers will match. I’m only going to tell them one story from the wind,” he said, using their old childish personal euphemism for the word “lie,” so that even if they were being overheard after all, and by someone who understood Cree to boot, his meaning would be hidden. “I’ll tell them the absolute truth: how I was adopted by another white man who said I was too bright to grow up to do nothing but hunting and fishing. I’ll tell them exactly how it was from then on until I ended up on a chain in Shunthead mine.”
She stared almost grimly at him. He knew that she knew, but would not say anything aloud for fear of the possible unseen listener. Unlike most of the people in the métis territory where they have lived, for whom “adopted” was generally taken to be a polite way of explaining the presence of a natural child by another mother than the one with which the father was living or to whom he was married, she knew that Lionel was Bart’s true parent.
Also, unlike her brother she had visited Bart’s home often, gotten to know his father, and been told by Lionel flatly that Bart was his actual son. In fact, Lionel had asked the little mite that she was then to take care of Bart if anything happened to him. The man had spoken in all seriousness, and since the conversation had taken place in front of Bart, the boy he was then had been both shocked and angry. If anybody was going to take care of anybody, he thought, it would be him caring for Emma, instead of the other way around.
But Lionel had asked in all apparent seriousness, and Emma had answered just as seriously.
That conversation had caused Bart a secret worry that did not fade for a number of years. It was whether Emma really loved him. Now, grown up, he had long since been sure she did. Only her damnable insistence on seeing her brother taken care of first had stood in the way of their being married long since. But back then, as a boy, he had been afraid for some time that she was just, with that implacable will of hers, acting out her promise to be a substitute for his father—even though Lionel was still alive—much as she substituted, later, for her mother on behalf of the rest of her family.
Now, over the lunch table, Bart launched into a picture of the Inner World as the living result of the vision of al-Kebir. He told Emma all about the Kitaab al-Kebir and his hope that it might lead him to the information he needed for his imposture.
He wound up with his image of the Inner World as a creation supported by a worldwide system of investments pyramided since the thirteenth century and overseen by a number of Lords, Ladies and Hybrids sent above ground for that purpose.
Emma listened to him without interrupting until he was through. Then she mentioned the one thing he had avoided talking about.
“You actually believe, then,” she said, “that there’s something here in the Inner World which can destroy the world above and it’s going to be used soon?”
“Not really,” he said. “I can’t believe it. It’s too farfetched. But there’s a large area down here that only members of the Lordly class and Hybrids can get into and out of again alive. Also, all the Hybrids seem to believe in such a weapon and what it can do; and they’re not a stupid bunch.”
Emma looked thoughtful. He took advantage of her moment of silence to do some eating, having been too busy talking to do so until now; and she had finished her own dinner sometime since as she sat there listening to him.
“It’s true that in bookkeeping we’ve been warned to get ready to start an entirely new set of books in the near future,” she said thoughtfully. “But shouldn’t you make absolutely sure that there really is such a machine before you go acting on the premise that the whole upper world might be destroyed?”
“That’s what I’m about to do,” Bart said. “This is what it’s all about, this business of establishing myself as a Hybrid. As a slave, I’d never be able to find out about this weapon, or whatever it is.
But as a Hybrid, I’ll either find my way into the guarded area, or get access to literature that describes what’s there.”
“You’d better not expect too much,” said Emma. “You’ve only read this al-Kebir’s book part-way, and you said that in the beginning he wrote himself that he wouldn’t tell anything that might be useful to people not entitled to know it. It seems to me if he has anything to say that would help us, that book’s going to be very careful not to show it.”
“You don’t understand,” said Bart. “He may not give away anything he thinks of as a valuable secret, but there’s still all sorts of things I can learn from its pages about how this place and its people came to be.”
“How do you know that what he’s written down is true at all?” said Emma.
“I don’t, of course. Maybe it isn’t. But even a string of lies can tell me things once I start to get the pattern of them. Remember, I can check what he says against the real histories of whatever time he’s writing about. He called the island where they’re supposed to have come to Earth ‘Sicily.’ Now, that puts a limit right there as to how far back in time he was writing it. I’ll just have to read the book all the way through and study it—but I’ll bet you I come up with a whole fistful of information that can lead me on to wherever the things I want to know actually are written down.”
“And meanwhile,” said Emma, “you’ll be taking a chance doing something that may get you killed.”
Bart gave up. He had learned years ago that if Emma was determined not to be convinced about something, you could talk to her until you fell over sideways from exhaustion and still find her coming up with solid arguments against it.
&
nbsp; “We’ll see,” he said.
“Which means you’re going to do it anyway,” said Emma. “Bart, I love you, but you’re the most stubborn man I ever knew in all my born days!”
Bart refrained from saying anything about the stubbornness of other people who might be present at the moment.
“But never mind that now,” Emma was saying, still in Cree. “There’s something else I want to talk to you about, Bart. It’s Arthur.”
“Yes?” said Bart warily. Experience had taught him that when Emma started out this way, what she had to talk about was something he would not like.
“You asked me not to tell him you were down here, or say anything about my having seen you since you came through town and stayed with us that night in the store. So I haven’t. But Bart—”
Bart braced himself.
“You couldn’t help feeling sorry for Arthur if you saw him, nowadays,” Emma said. “He’s so cast down. He expected so much from the move down here; and not only did it turn out it was some of the other Scotties’ way of getting rid of him, but he’s a slave, Bart! To someone like Arthur who was brought up to think of himself as being a gentleman and the son of a gentleman, the fact that he’s now called a slave, and treated like one, is almost more than he can bear. And the job he’s in! The others working there in Stores tell him stories of how people who make mistakes get flogged, or put to some horrible kind of death if they make a mistake; and he’s frightened to death.”
“They’re exaggerating,” said Bart. “Office-trained slaves can’t be that easy to come by. I haven’t seen any evidence of brutality.
Not that that guarantees there isn’t any; but it just isn’t all that common, or that easy to trigger off, obviously.”
“But Arthur doesn’t know that; and he worries—you know how he is. He’s worrying himself into a sickbed,” said Emma. “He’s lost weight and you ought to see his face. Bart, it could mean so much to him if he just had some reason to hope; if he only just knew you were down here, too, and working to get us all out!”
The Earth Lords Page 21