Michel sat, looking as strikingly different from the others as a falcon in a flock of ducks. He was draped with one leg over a little side table, his head a trifle on one side and his teeth showing very whitely in the gentle smile on his swarthy face. He swung his leg slightly, listening. So removed, he seemed, from all the rest, that for a long moment, as he watched, Bart had thought that he might be here more as a spectator than a participant.
But then, unexpectedly, Michel interrupted the standing Hybrid who was speaking, a tall thin young man with straight brown hair on a round skull above a round and somewhat sulky-looking face.
“What was it Marcus Tullus Cicero told us?” Michel broke in on the other’s rather strident tirade. “ There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it—’”
“Descartes said that,” reinterrupted the man who had just been speaking.
“Only about sixteen hundred years after Cicero had, Jorg,” said Michel. “In any case, the point is that you’ve all been chewing the, same old cud. The names we use for ourselves may be ‘Liberal’ or ‘Textualist’—”
“The Lords and Ladies call themselves by those names, too,” Jorg broke in again.
“But not as publicly as we do,” went on Michel patiently, “and with about as much truth. Scratch a Liberal or Textualist— including all of us in this select little company, gathered secretly here while everyone else is getting on their party clothes—and you’ll find a particular self-interest that makes him or her adopt the label. Nothing is ever going to get done by any of us until we face that fact.”
“I don’t know what you’re driving at, Michel,” said one of the women, a slight blond in a large, flowery dress—the only one of her sex who was seated.
“I’m driving, Yna,” he turned to her, “at the fact that we’re like those insects of the upper world, who emerge from their chrysalis to fly one summer’s day, but with no mouth parts because they won’t be around long enough to feed, and who have only one purpose in life—to breed and die. Except that unlike them, unlike slaves, and unlike our Lords and Ladies, we Hybrids can’t even reproduce ourselves. Each one of us is a dead end in a generational sense. Our progeny, if we have them by anyone else than one of the Lords or Ladies, go back down among the slave class. To be quarter-Hybrid is to be nothing. All this being so, what have we got to live for any more than those insects—the one brief day of our own lives? And so to clothe our self-interest in talk of the past and future is meaningless.”
“Speak for yourself, cousin Michel,” said Jorg. “I, and some of the rest of us here, are able to speak in larger terms than the kind of self-interest you talk about.”
Michel yawned politely behind the fingers of one hand.
“Good for you,” he said. “I’m only pointing out the pointlessness of generations of unrelated Hybrids getting together in secret conclave like this, and under considerable danger, to talk, and do nothing. Who knows but what we’re being monitored right now, by a spy in our midst?”
There was an uneasy stir among the gathering. More than one glanced at the person closest to him or her.
“If there was such a one,” said Michel, still smiling and looking at Jorg, “wouldn’t it be to his best interests in protecting himself from discovery, that he advance only foolish ideas, so that no one else there would think him clever enough to be a danger?”
“Michel!” Jorg’s face reddened. “If you mean me, come right out and say it. I’m not afraid of you! I’m willing to meet you any time, with any weapon, or even without, even though I know you’re better than me with almost every one of them!”
“Calm yourself, calm yourself, Cousin Jorg,” said Michel. “No one, and me least of all, doubts your sincerity. I’m only reminding us of one of many dangers in this sort of meeting. And when those dangers are undertaken only to produce a lot of what’s been said many times over before, it becomes ridiculous.”
“How can you call it ridiculous?” said a short, bulky man, who was one of the ones seated, “when al-Kebir’s ready to be activated within weeks? And after that, irretrievably though far off in time, the upper world’s civilization’ll be under three hundred feet of sea water or buried in volcanic ash—and it’ll be too late for anyone to do anything after only a few more days.”
“Yes,” said a tall, thin young man standing behind the last speaker, whose long neck accommodated a remarkably high, upstanding collar, “and the Lords will inherit the Earth—what’s left of it. While we, who could have put it to good use, won’t even be needed anymore. In fact, it’s been we Hybrids who’ve been putting it to good use for centuries, managing the investments and ownerships up there—except the Lords are the ones who get the benefit from them.”
“Exactly,” said Michel. He looked at the stocky man who had spoken first. “I assume when you talk about al-Kebir being activated, you’re referring to the Tectonal, Cousin Paullen, not the ghost of our revered ancestor. Well, if we’ve met here to talk about what to do about that, let’s have at it—instead of rehearsing old grievances.”
“You’re so clever, Michel!” said Jorg. “You tell us what you think we ought to do.”
“No, no. By all means,” said Michel with a courteous wave of his hand. “Let’s have what the rest of you’ve got in mind. I’ll listen.”
“So,” said Jorg contemptuously, “you’re quick enough to make demands, but you haven’t got anything more in the way of a solution than the rest of us.”
“I don’t think so, Jorg,” said Yna. “When Cousin Michel talks like this it’s precisely because he has some idea of his own up his sleeve. Only he enjoys baiting us all with our own lack of a solution first. Aren’t I right, Michel?”
“You may not always be right, Yna,” said Michel, managing a sort of bow to her in spite of his seated position, “but you’re never wrong. Which is to say, in this case, you’re half right. I don’t say I have a solution, only a suggestion. Most of us want the upper world for our playground, undestroyed; and our freedom from our revered uncles and aunts. Very well, let’s start thinking of solutions in proportion to the problem. For example, how about destroying al-Kebir—and I, Cousin Paullen, am speaking about the Tectonal, not the original ghost.”
A complete, dead silence followed his words. Not only that, but Bart noticed no one moved for a few seconds, and when they finally did, it was only to stare wordlessly at each other.
The silence went on to the point where Jorg evidently decided that it was his responsibility to end it.
“Michel—,” he said, and his voice cracked. Michel looked courteously at him. Jorg tried again. “Michel, are you joking—or simply insane? Hundreds of years of work, the Lords’ very reason for existence, and you talk about destroying it?”
“Why, yes,” said Michel calmly. “And as for hundreds of years of work, nonsense! Morton Cadiz may have been a genius—who knows, maybe as much of a genius in his own way as the original al-Kebir was in his—but his work was purely theoretical and he belonged to the eighteenth century. It promised nothing until we—and ‘we’ includes we Hybrids—got to work on it with more modem methods, after this place was created eighty years ago, at the beginning of the present century.”
He shifted comfortably in his undersized chair.
“And what if its destruction would amount to the destruction of a hundreds-of-years-old dream!” he went on. “Al-Kebir’s ancient dream was of personal revenge, but I don’t think even the Lordly class took the idea seriously—until our development of electromagnetic power made it possible for us to actually reach down and play games with the electro-gravitic currents in the magma of this planet. This whole idea is really fairly new, after all.
“Besides, you want to do something to convince the Textualists among the Lords we’re serious about not wanting to destroy human civilization, and want chunks of its wealth and luxuries for our own use above ground, isn’t that right? Or was I mistaken in the reason this meeting was called for—a meeting of those of us c
onsidered to be activists among the Hybrid Liberals?”
And he looked around at the faces staring at him, as if waiting for an answer.
“Michel,” said Yna, “you know better than this. There may be twice the unadmitted Liberals among the Lordly class that there are Textualists there. But the Lordly Textualists believe in a book—the Book of our ancestor—and those who’d rather not wreck the world above don’t dare stand up and say so. What you suggest would force all the Lords to stand together against us. While, as it is, we’re able to talk Liberalism as much as we do only because of that hidden majority, up top.”
Michel shook his head.
“I don’t see that it’d matter if all the Lords combined against us—us and the slaves,” he said. “And the Steeds are a joke, really. Oh, Chandt is dangerous enough. But most of those muscle-bound oafs he commands stand to gain as much as us Hybrids and the rest of the slaves by standing against the Lords as we have. I think that could be pointed out to them—most of them, anyway. In any case, I also don’t agree that the Lords would immediately combine against us. I think that large, hidden majority you talk about, Yna, would most of them heave a sigh of relief—quietly, of course—on hearing the Tectonal had been put out of action.”
“That’s a wild thought!” said Jorg angrily.
“Jorg, Jorg,” said Michel, and for the first time Bart heard a note of impatience in his voice, “everyone always assumes that his or her enemies are monolithic in their attitudes. Actually, what they always have been, and always will be, right down to the moment when battle lines are drawn, are as individually different from each other and everybody else as the one facing them.” “The Tectonal is the promise of the Book of al-Kebir come true!” said Jorg stubbornly. “Without the Book, what’re the Lords? What’s their justification for existence? To prove to themselves what they are, they have to follow their Book!”
“Ah, yes,” said Michel. “But what Book is that? It was the Book of al-Kebir only to al-Kebir himself. The mistake you make, Jorg—and the rest of you, too—,” he added, looking around at them, “is in assuming there’s only one Book; and that’s the Book you know yourself. Have you ever sat down and talked about that book to your closest friend? If you do, you’ll end up finding that he or she seems to have read a volume that’s totally different from the one you read. The more you go on comparing notes, the more you’ll find you two disagree about specific passages and interpretations of those passages—and about what al-Kebir actually meant, when he wrote it.”
“Michel!” said Paullen. “How can you say that?”
“Because it’s fact, you dunderheads!” said Michel. “There’s only one Book for every person alive—the Book we write for ourselves, or would write for ourselves if we sat down with pen and paper, the way old al-Kebir did! And that’s a book we make up out of our own beliefs and fears and experiences—that book which defines for us what we will do and what we won’t, what we’ll die for and what we won’t die for. It’s a book that may be flavored by one or more other books we’ve read, but whatever they were to the writer, to each of us they’ve been bent to fit our individual picture of things; and when the chips are down, we follow our own text—no one else’s. And you’ll find that’ll be true for each Lord and Lady if you ever get the courage up to put an end to the Tectonal! Look into yourself and see how you’d act, if word came the thing had been smashed. Then ask yourself if any other human below here would react in any other way except according to his or her own, inner way of looking at both worlds—the Inner and the surface ones!”
“But you can’t deny,” said Paullen, “that the destruction of the Tectonal would destroy the Lords’ rights to consider themselves Lords.”
“Oh, Cousin!” said Michel. “Do you think that being Lords and Ladies is all that attractive to most of them—aside from the fact that they, too, see the advantage in not destroying a world of which we already own a considerable chunk? Certainly, there’re some of them who revel in their power and authority; or at least rate it highly enough so that it means more to them than anything else. But the great majority of the . . . the surface world nowadays doesn’t enslave and torture the small or deformed, or treat them like living toys. What wealth and power will buy in the upper world for you and me would also buy it for the Lords and Ladies. Here, like us, they work from the cradle to the grave. Just as it is with our Hybrid children, theirs are taken from them and killed, not merely if they aren’t bright enough, but if they’re growing too big to be considered one of their special, little race. And on top of all this, unlike us, they have to conform to dietary laws that help ensure that they and their children are undernourished and so likely to grow up undersized.”
He looked around at them.
“All they really have by way of a reward down here, from the Book and the Tectonal and the ghost of al-Kebir, is their honor and their pride, which they wear like the medieval knight wore his armor or the religious penitent his hair shirt. How many of them, do you think, wouldn’t give a private sigh of relief to be free to come out into the upper world as ordinary, if undersized, people, again?”
Jorg half turned from the circle of people, throwing his hands wide in a gesture of helplessness.
“This is nonsense!” he said. “And it’s getting us no place!”
“The rest of you feel like Jorg?” Michel asked, looking around at them.
For a moment no one answered.
“I don’t know what to think,” said Paullen. “What you suggest—it’s too much all at once, Michel.”
“Well!” said Yna, in brisk, businesslike tones, “whatever anyone else feels, I think there’s no more point in sitting around here. Michel’s either given us an answer to the situation, or put us all in an impossible position. I, for one, want to get away and think it over.”
She got to her feet. Slowly the others who had been seated followed her example. Michel was last up.
“Leave separately—and in the order we came—that’s the rule!” said Jorg hastily.
He glanced at Michel.
“That means you’re last—it’s what you get for always coming late.”
“Not at all.” Michel waved a hand and sat down again. “I’ll be glad to be last out. The rest of you go ahead.”
The others began to leave, at intervals of about two minutes. They took the direct route down the aisles to the stairs, leaving Bart, who was now standing off to the side and behind a double stack, in no danger of discovery.
Jorg, Bart noticed, was one of the first; and an idea which he had not conceived until he had heard that Michel would be the last to leave began to build in him, like tension as a bomb ticks down toward its moment of explosion.
The heavy-bodied Paullen was next to the last to leave. As soon as his boots had ceased to sound on the bare, polished wood floor of the stack level, Bart came forward and through one of the openings that were spaced along each stack to allow passage from one aisle to another. He stepped into the area before the bars protecting the “X” collection, and stood looking down at Michel in his chair.
“So,” said Michel in French, laying the magazine he had been glancing through down on the small table beside him, and smiling up at Bart. “There was a spy after all. I’m afraid it won’t do you any good, though, all your listening. The Emperor and the Regent already know all about my attitudes and beliefs—that’s why I can’t get assignment up to the surface world. But I’m too popular among my cousins for His Majesty to take any action against me; and the work wouldn’t get done if the Hybrids refused to help. So as long as all I do is talk, I’m left alone.”
His smile sobered a little as he examined Bart more closely.
“You’re Pier’s Steed, aren’t you?” he said. “I’m surprised to find you at something like this. Pier’s one of us—in his own Lordly way. I wouldn’t think he’d set his Steed to spy on us, even if he knew—which I’ve been sure he has, for some time—that we hold our little secret meetings here. Or was this a
ll your own idea for some reason? Tell me, slave!”
“I will,” said Bart. “You’re right, this was all my own idea, this listening. It was accidental, but it turned out more important than I expected when I heard you were to leave last. As you’d expect, I was in the Court Room with the other Steeds earlier today and saw your performance; and I think it was more interesting to me than to anyone else in the same room. You see, it’s possible we have the same father.”
Michel got to his feet very quickly. He checked himself just short of hitting out at Bart.
Bart had not moved. He had half expected the blow and thought he should be able to move enough, in time, to let it slip by him. If not—if Michel was too quick for him—he was prepared to take it, rather than move or change the expression of his face; and now Michel’s face was so close to his own that he could feel the warm puffs of the other’s breath against his skin.
“By God, man!” said Michel softly. “I could have sworn there was nothing you could say to me that would make me lose my self-control. But you almost did, then! Tell me quickly—and tell me straight, for your life’s sake—what gave you the notion to say a wild thing like that? Vincent Saberut was a great and noble man. The idea that he’d be the father of someone like you is laughable!” “You aren’t laughing,” said Bart.
Michel smiled.
“I am now,” he answered, “and what’ve you got to say to that, my friend?”
“I say,” said Bart, “that it’s impossible for any living adult man of your weight to walk on six fingers alone.”
“And what,” said Michel with continued softness, “has that to do with my father? What do you know about walking on six fingers—or my weight for that matter—which I don’t believe you could guess correctly if you wanted to?”
“I know about the finger-walking from the same source you learned it,” said Bart. “Our mutual father, whom I’ve seen do it. In fact he taught me the trick and I could do it myself as a youngster; but as I grew up I got heavier and gave up practicing, or possibly I could still do it yet, as you do. Though I doubt it, because I’m heavier than you.”
The Earth Lords Page 27