Bart sat, trying to think of how best to answer her, so that he could be convincing without giving away the fact he thought Arthur’s feelings were of little importance concerned with the chance of all three of them escaping. But to give away that would directly attack Emma’s sense of protection for her brother.
Emma stopped talking. There was a pause that showed its uncomfortableness so plainly, that Paolo and Lorena, even without understanding, were obviously disturbed.
“Emma, I can’t,” said Bart at last. “You know Arthur. What he knows he’s likely to tell someone—somewhere, sometime. And I can’t take the risk of him talking about me to the wrong person. It’s not just that he might tell them I was looking for a way out of here.
It’s the fact he knows too much about me, from when we were children.”
“You mean, what you can do?” said Emma.
She was talking about his capabilities. No one but Emma knew how he was stronger than he looked and how sharply his mind worked when he felt himself cornered. Last of all, she knew how he wished that he would never have to use these abilities, which secretly he feared to display. Attacked, he became a different sort of person with different limits; and it was what those limits might allow him to do that frightened him. He did not know what they were. He had never really been driven to the sort of extremes that would have forced him to find out.
Arthur did not have Emma’s sensitive perception of him. But Arthur did remember him from when they had all been children together, before Bart had begun to realize that to get along with 3 other people and not be thought some sort of freak, he would have to shadow the capabilities of his mind and body.
“It’s not only that,” he told her now, “but Arthur knows about my father and what sort of man he was and how he gave me special training in many ways. I want to keep that information to myself until I see the best moment to use it…
For a moment he was tempted to tell her how dangerous his plan was—but what he was planning was the sort of gamble that could only cause her to worry about what might happen to him, if she truly realized that danger. What Arthur had been hearing from his fellow-workers had only echoed what people like Paolo had told Bart himself. There might not be much more of the sort of thing than made a good horror story to tell a new slave; but there was undoubtedly some of it; if the situation required it in the eyes of the Hybrids and the Lords.
“Just awhile longer,” he said to her. “Please, don’t tell him, don’t tell anyone you ever knew me before you came here—”
A question he had been meaning to ask her came back to him suddenly.
“Tell me,” he said, “do either you or Arthur think you died before you came down here—that you were brought back to life by the Lords?”
“Of course not,” said Emma. “Nothing like that ever happened to us. Though the Scotties warned Arthur, and Arthur told me, that most of the people down here would believe some such thing about themselves and we’d be best off if we pretended we believed it, too.”
So, thought Bart, the illusion of being raised from the dead to serve the Lords was not universal among the slave class, after all; though it certainly seemed to be among the Steeds. He had yet to meet a Steed who did not believe it; and even Chandt, himself . . .
“All right, then,” Emma was saying sadly. “If you really think it’s not safe to tell him, I won’t. It’s just so terrible to see him the way he is.”
“I promise you, Emma,” said Bart, “the minute it’s possible for him to know, I’ll tell you and you can pass the word to him.”
“All right,” said Emma; and, to the relief of Paolo and Lorena, they went back to talking in English.
chapter
fifteen
THE USUAL SIX in the morning buzz of talk about the orders, just posted for the day on the dormitory door, woke Bart. He lay there for a moment, listening. There were to be a couple of formations. The latter one was listed simply as “court” with a 2:00 P.M. assembly in the main gym of all dormitories. It was probably some formal affair in which the Steeds would be part of the decorations —Bart dismissed it from his mind. But the earlier one was the one being talking about by those at the door; and the more Bart heard, the less he liked the sound of what he was hearing.
This earlier formation was simply listed as “Clinic.” What had brought Bart sharply awake and set him to listening closely to what was being said by those around the door was not so much the words he heard but a definite uneasiness in the voices uttering them.
Curiously, it was an uneasiness that the Steeds radiating it seemed to wish to pretend was not there. It was this desire to gloss over their reaction that convinced Bart most strongly that the wise thing for him to do would be to skip this particular formation himself until he had time to learn more about it.
It was something of a shock, consequently, to hear Paolo’s answer, when he told the dormitory Leader he had an early duty for the Librarian and would not be going with the others to this “Clinic.”
Paolo had grinned. He was wearing a livery tunic at the moment, for reasons Bart did not know; but it, in face of the shirtlessness that was normal duty attire for Steeds, had the effect of putting a little formal distance between him and Bart. Alone, or with Emma and Lenora, Paolo was one kind of person; now he seemed someone different.
“This one you don’t miss, Bart,” he said. “There’s no excuse lets you out of Clinic. The Lords know that, and if they forget and schedule a Steed to a duty at that time, and he doesn’t show up, it’s not his fault.”
Bart felt the caution kindled in him by the atmosphere around the door become a hard decision that he must get out of this somehow.
“You know, Paolo,” he said slowly, trying to adopt the same formality of manner without being offensive, “my Lord’s one of the Three Who Command. I think you or somebody—Chandt, if it has to be—had better check with him before I’m kept from the duty my Lord had in mind for me.”
Paolo grinned again—a little uneasily, it seemed to Bart—and shook his head. “Not necessary this time. The rules are clear and there’s no time to check.”
He slapped Bart on the shoulder.
“Don’t let it get you down, Bart,” he said. “It’s not all that bad! Anyway, the rules are clear and there’s no time to check.”
He went off, leaving Bart wondering.
There were times when argument was of value—and times when it was useless. Bart could read in Paolo’s voice and attitude that this time was one of the latter. He found that Steeds were not allowed to eat or drink before Clinic; and there was only a short wait before he fell in line with the rest of the Steeds in his dormitory, as far toward the tail of the formation as he thought he could safely fit in without drawing too much attention to the fact that he was delaying his involvement with the Clinic as long as possible.
They were conducted in a long line—“marched” would have been too noble a word for their straggling progress—down various corridors and around several turns to the entrance of a large room with several attendants. These were males, to judge by the depth of their voices, and of ordinary adult size; but whether slaves or Hybrids it was impossible to say, for they were completely cloaked and hooded in white with tinted glasslike face plates in the hood to see out of, but which prevented anyone from seeing in.
The Steeds were ordered to strip. Naked, they filed into the next room which seemed a sort of shower room, its ceiling equipped with spray heads that rained down water on the Steeds. The water smelled of something like eucalyptus, a medicinal smell. Then the shower heads ceased spouting; and, four at a time, the Steeds were admitted through a farther door to some room beyond.
Bart had meanwhile been exercising his wits for a reason to get away from the formation. He snarled at himself internally now for being foolish enough to take off his clothes along with the rest. Their clothes, their shoes and everything else they had been carrying had been immediately gathered up by hooded figures and carried away out of
the disrobing room. Now, without clothes, he could hardly fail to attract attention even if he could find an excuse to leave.
He was still struggling with the problem when one of the hooded figures in the shower room, his apparently waterproof white gown glistening with moisture as if it had been embroidered with diamonds, gathered Bart in with three others. They were chosen apparently at random, and herded together through the farther door.
The room they entered was little more than an anteroom. Entrances in its opposite wall gave glimpses of a separate room, each with what looked like a couple of white-sheeted, padded tables. The hooded man who had brought them this far left them and went back to the shower room. For a moment they were alone, the four of them.
“What happens here?” Bart took advantage of the temporary privacy to ask one of the other Steeds, named Staggers.
“Nothing,” answered Staggers.
He was a heavy-bodied, brown-haired young man with an oval I face that looked like it needed a shave only twice a week. But either he had gotten a heavier dousing from the sprinkler heads than the rest of them, or he was sweating; and his face was pale. “They just put you half asleep and check you over to see if there’s anything a I doctor’s got to do to you. It hurts a little, some of it; but not much because you’re half asleep. It’s something like being drunk. You don’t feel things so much.”
“Then why does everyone here act like they’re not going to like it, if that’s all it is?” asked Bart.
“Well, hell!” said Staggers. “Nobody likes people poking around their insides—even if the worst parts’re something you don’t remember too well, because of being half asleep that way.”
“You’re sure you’re only half asleep—,” Bart was beginning to ask when he was interrupted by another hooded figure coming up to ‘ them with a board in his hand, to the top surface of which a piece of paper had been attached. Bart caught a glimpse of what looked like a list of names written on the paper, and the look was confirmed a moment later by the hooded man himself.
“Names?” he demanded. Staggers and the other two gave their names without hesitation. Bart was last. After a moment’s hesitation, in which he had been tempted to refuse to give his name but invoke the authority of Pier, to back up a demand he be exempted from everything that seemed to be going on here, he complied.
The man with the list did not seem to notice the hesitation. He was busy checking off the names of the other three, repeating them aloud as he came to them on his sheet of paper and directing whoever he had just mentioned to one of the farther entrances.
Having done this, however, he fell silent, scanning through the entire list. He went through it a second time, also without saying anything aloud. Then he looked up at Bart accusingly.
“What’d you say your name was?” he said.
“Bart Dybig.”
“Spell it!”
Bart spelled it; and the man went through the list one more time. Then he turned and called to one of the other hooded figures in the room.
“Jules!”
The other figure turned a face plate toward him.
“What is it, Will?” The voice of the man named Jules was deeper than that of the man with the list, deeper and more musical.
“This one’s not here.”
“What do you mean, not here?” said Jules, coming up. “I can see him, right there, standing in front of you.”
There was a chuckle in his deep voice. Will did not seem amused.
“He’s not on the list. Nowhere on the list.”
“Are you sure?” Jules’s voice was curious now.
“I’ve been through it five times.”
A slight exaggeration, thought Bart, but Jules did not question it.
“Some mistake,” he said lightly.
“You’re sure?”
“Bound to be.”
“And what if it isn’t?” said Will. “What if there’s some reason he’s not supposed to be here?”
“Talk sense,” said Jules easily. “How could a Steed not be supposed to be here, on a Clinic day for his dormitory?”
“I don’t know,” said Will. “But maybe there’s a reason you and I aren’t supposed to know.”
“He was in the formation,” said Jules.
Bart was tempted to speak up in that moment, to make his demand that he be exempted from whatever was to be, on the basis that he was a special slave of one of the Three Who Command and had a duty elsewhere. An instinct told him to wait. If it should be decided to put him through the procedure here, after all, he could still come up with his argument later. Meanwhile, the conversation between Will and Jules might take a turn that would offer an even better moment for invoking the name of the Librarian.
“That could be a mistake,” said Will.
“Ask one of the physicians.”
“And I do,” said Will, “then if he’s supposed to be here, I’ll get told off for bothering the physician when I ought to be able to decide things like this for myself. But if he’s not supposed to be here, then I’ll get blamed for letting him get this far when his name wasn’t even on the list for today.”
Jules laughed.
“I don’t see you’ve got any choice,” said Jules. “If you don’t want to send him on through you can’t just turn him loose on your own authority.”
“Here,” said Will, shoving the board with its paper at the other hooded figure. “How’d you like to do it?”
Jules turned and went off.
“Got to get back to my own job,” his voice floated back as he went.
Will swore after him and turned. He went away from Bart and the other three, through the entrance to one of the farther rooms with operating tables, all but one of them occupied by the recumbent body of a Steed. Through that same entrance Bart could see him talking to another figure, white-gowned and hooded just as all the personnel here seemed to be, but with an air of deference that suggested the other was someone in authority—possibly one of the “physicians” Will had spoken of to Jules.
The discussion was being held beside the one empty operating table visible in any of the rooms. As it continued, the occupant of the other table in that particular room was helped to sit up. He stepped down onto his feet and one of the gowned figures led him away, walking a little unsteadily. First one and then another of the white-clad figures also in the room gathered together with Will and the one he was talking to, and the conversation became general.
Sight alone only allowed Bart to guess at how the conversation was going. But it was an almost certain guess that the conversation was about his name not being on the list, and this gave him hope.
After several minutes, Will returned with one of the gowned figures. The two stopped in front of Bart and the other gowned figure held up a small white cube Bart had not noticed he was carrying. Unexpectedly Bart’s head was enveloped by a cloud of sickeningly sweet-smelling spray. He tried to hold his breath, but it was already too late.
Almost instantly, his mind seemed to blur. He felt vaguely uncomfortable but at the same time overpowered by a lassitude that made it too much trouble to concern himself about how he was feeling. He felt his hand taken by Will and without resistance let himself be led forward into the operating room with the two now-empty tables. He was led to the nearest one and ordered to climb up on it and lie down on his back.
He did so. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the feeling that there was something he should be saying to all these white-dressed people around him; but it was too much trouble to remember what that was. He was in a curious state, at once relaxed and at the same time apprehensive—of what he had no idea. But then there was an interruption. One more gowned figure, with what must be a very tall and thin man in the anonymous garment, shouldered his way into the crowd around the table upon which Bart lay.
“Take him back!” said the newcomer.
The words were spoken in the Latin of the Lordly class and the tones of the voice were the tones of ultimate auth
ority. Bart was pulled off the table onto his feet, by Will, and led in his near dream-state off through a door he had not passed through before, into a room filled with fresh-smelling stacks of Steed trousers.
With the assistance of Will and another man apparently stationed in this room, he was gotten into trousers and shoes. They were just like the ones he had taken off, but apparently brand new. The help was needed, for whenever he was not in the process of obeying a direct order, his mind wandered off and he merely stood there. It ended with Will taking him back to the dormitory and making him lie down on his own bed. The other Steeds were not there.
“Now, you’re to stay here,” Will told him. “You understand? Say ‘yes,’ if you understand me!”
“Yes,” said Bart.
“You’ll begin to feel just like you always do in about half an hour,” Will went on. “Until then, don’t try to do anything, or go any place. I mean that! Don’t move from here, no matter what happens. You have to piss, you piss in your bed. You understand me?”
“Yes,” answered Bart, with great effort. It was hard to keep concentrating on what the other man was saying. “I stay here half an hour.”
“That’s right. Every time you start to think of getting up, remember you’re supposed to stay here until you feel better. I’m going now, but you remember that. You’ll remember?”
“I’ll remember,” said Bart.
He watched the cloaked and hooded figure of Will leave the dormitory. He lay there alone in the empty room, and a curiosity came to him to look at himself in a mirror and see if he looked any different, since he felt so different. Particularly he would like to see his face and eyes for some reason he could not pin down just at the moment. He was beginning to get up and go to the wall-wide mirror that was above the washstands in the latrine in the adjoining room when he remembered he was not supposed to leave his bed.
The Earth Lords Page 22