The Earth Lords

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Michel’s smile broadened.

  “I doubt it. Tell me, O sapient slave, how much I weigh?” Bart looked him over.

  “We’re alike enough in height and general build,” he said, “but your frame’s a little lighter than mine. I’d say two hundred and forty pounds, Canadian.”

  The smile was suddenly gone from Michel’s face.

  “So?” he said, on a softly indrawn breath. “You’d make me out that heavy, would you? I’ll admit you guess weights better than I’d have thought. And how much do you weigh yourself, then, my friend?”

  “I lost a lot of weight working in a mine the last year,” said Bart, “and I’m just now getting it back. But two-sixty would be a good weight for me when I’m in shape . . . perhaps up to two-eighty.”

  “Vincent Saberut,” said Michel softly, “weighed—”

  “A little over a hundred and forty pounds,” said Bart swiftly. “He was four feet, ten inches tall; wide-shouldered—you have his shoulders—but otherwise he looked no more than wiry.”

  Michel stood, staring at him. After a long moment, he spoke. “You could have looked that up,” he said.

  “In here?” Bart waved his hand at the shelves about them. “Believe me, I tried. Could you have?”

  Michel did not answer for a long moment.

  “No,” he said at last, “I don’t believe I could have.”

  “It’s curious,” said Bart. “Do you know I was going to claim to be a Hybrid, and I’d built up all sorts of information in my head to make the imposture work; and here it turns out I actually am a Hybrid.”

  The breath went in between Michel’s even, gleaming teeth in a slight hiss.

  “Are you?” he said. “Suppose you tell me a little more about yourself first, before you start counting on the fact. You said it was impossible for anyone to walk on his six fingers alone. Why?”

  “Unless the person’s got no legs, so his weight’s reduced. Or he’s a freak,” said Bart, “with nothing but skin and bones, and hands like shovels having fingers to match. It’s not possible even for massively boned people like you and me, not even possible for our father—”

  “We’ll call him Vincent Saberut until you’ve convinced me you’ve the right to call him something closer, if you don’t mind,” said Michel.

  Bart shrugged.

  “If you want,” he said. “I knew him as Lionel Dybig. What’ll convince you I know what I’m talking about?”

  “You called what I did in the Court Room earlier today a trick,” said Michel. “You still haven’t explained that word, except to say what I did can’t be done. How was it then I did it?”

  “As I say, with a trick,” said Bart. “You only appeared to do it. By the time you were up on the tips of all your fingers in a finger-stand, you had the audience wanting to believe you could do anything. So when you seemed to move forward on the fingers of one hand, no one was watching your other hand—which was carrying most of your weight with the heel of the palm flat on the floor. Even those who might have noticed it, would have ignored it. What you were doing was marvelous enough, anyway. Besides, where are the rules written that say you can’t rest your weight on your right hand while pretending to move forward on the fingers of your left?”

  Michel watched him with those blue eyes of his, saying nothing.

  “What more do you want me to say?” Bart shrugged. “In practice, everyone watching would go away ready to tell other people that you’d not only walked on your fingers alone, but on perhaps two of them from each hand, instead of three. That’d make the story even better. But, as I say, to actually do it only with three fingers on each hand is impossible. My finger joints used to ache for a day or two after I’d stood on them—and that was when I was still young, with a boy’s quickness to get over damage and sickness. My father told me that he was already getting too old to do it and he only did it on special occasions when it was absolutely necessary to impress people who looked down on him because of his size. But he told me once he was already beginning to suffer arthritis in those joints from doing it even that little.”

  It was Bart’s turn to smile at the other man.

  “How about it?” he said. “Aren’t your finger joints aching right now? Don’t they usually ache for several days after you do the act?”

  Michel nodded—the movement of his head was slight and slow, but it was a nod.

  “You know a great deal,” he said, “and you weren’t so greatly wrong about my weight. Most people guess me forty or more pounds less than that. What made you pick the weight you did?”

  “You heard me doing it,” said Bart. “I estimated your weight from mine, knowing we’d share the dense bone structure of our father.”

  “So you’re that sure that we’re half-brothers? How can you be so sure?”

  “Your mother’s name,” said Bart. “It wouldn’t have been Didi, by any chance?”

  Michel stared at him for a long moment.

  “No,” he said tonelessly; then, “it was Diana.”

  Bart blinked—then understood.

  “Perhaps I phrased the question wrongly,” he said. “Perhaps I ought to have asked if Vincent Saberut ever called your mother Didi?”

  “Yes!” The word came out explosively at la$t between Michel’s teeth. “No one but he ever called her that. No one living except me knows he did.”

  “He mentioned her name only at the end, a number of times as he lay dying,” said Bart gently. “He was in delirium most of the time from the infection of the bullet wound that killed him.”

  Michel said nothing.

  “I was convinced when I saw you—and your act—at the Court, that you were my half-brother,” Bart said finally. “What do you need to convince you? As far as I’m concerned it’s not just these things that prove our relationship. There’s a hundred others—small things. I see things about you that’re like the things I saw in him. In some of the ways you move and look. As I say, you’re more like him than I am. I see him in you.”

  Michel breathed out softly. His shoulders sagged and the tightness went out of his body.

  “And you,” he said, “are more of a gentleman than I am. You’re right. I acknowledge the relationship. It’s just the shock of finding family after being alone all my life. My mother died when I was still a boy; and my—our—father had already left for the surface by that time.”

  He extended his hand. Bart took it. Instinctively, they both gripped hard, then both smiled.

  “No, no,” said Michel, “no more tests.”

  They let go.

  “But you’ll forgive me, won’t you,” said Michel, “if I can’t bring myself to call you ‘brother’ right away? I’ve been alone in the world too long.”

  His voice changed.

  “And as I say, I barely knew Vincent,” he said. “I was just old enough to remember what he looked like, when he went out on a mission to the surface world. I was only six years old then; and those six years were as much as I remember of him. You had more of him than I ever did, my friend.”

  “The father I knew would have approved of your present self, I think,” said Bart.

  “Enough!” Michel shook his head. “I’ve admitted you’re the gentleman of the—of the family.”

  He took a step back and looked Bart up and down.

  “We’ve got to get you out of those slave clothes,” he said.

  “I was hoping to do that but not this soon,” said Bart. “You see, I’m supposed to see Pier and Marta tonight . . .”

  He told Michel of Pier’s invitation. Michel’s eyes flashed as Bart finished.

  “But excellent!” Michel said. “I’ll join you on that visit, tonight. That is—you go ahead with it as you planned, you and this, this . . .”

  “Emma Robeson,” said Bart slowly, “and if I’m a gentleman, she’s a lady.”

  Michel nodded.

  “You and this lady—small l, of course—,” he said, “the two of you keep your appointment as ordered. I
’ll invite myself to the Guettrig’s unexpectedly while you’re there.” His teeth showed themselves in a momentary smile. “We’ll arrange to meet at the door; and let me be the one to announce to Pier your relationship. It’ll be more believable, coming from me. Now, let’s both of us get out of here.”

  He started to leave the stacks.

  “Just a minute,” said Bart, following him. “There’s things you need to know.”

  chapter

  twenty

  BART CAUGHT UP with the other and grasped him by one elbow.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me? Before you talk to Pier about me and for me, you’d better understand how I feel about things, myself. I’m not just looking forward to being a Hybrid recovered to the fold. That whole masquerade I had in mind was only a step toward what I really want; and that’s to get out of here, taking Emma Robeson along with me.”

  Michel had halted at the touch of Bart’s fingers on his elbow. Now he turned to meet Bart’s eyes.

  “Ah,” he said, “and this Emma Robeson—another slave, I assume?”

  Bart nodded.

  “She must mean a great deal to you.”

  “Yes,” said Bart. They stood looking at each other, and Michel smiled.

  “Then cheer up, Brother,” he said, pulling his elbow from Bart’s relaxed fingers and clapping the shoulder above them with one hand, “because that’s my goal, too, to get up into the surface world; and I think, with what’s been done to you we can all manage it. But you’ll have to trust me how to go about it, because there’s more at work down here than I could teach you in several months, and we don’t have that sort of time.”

  “You’ve got time to tell me a few things I need to know, though,” said Bart, “and you can answer a couple of quick questions to begin with. Most of the slaves here seem to believe they’ve been raised from the dead; and I’ve been with the Steeds when they reported to something called a Clinic. I don’t believe anyone can be raised from the dead; but I’m ready to believe these Clinic visits have something to do with their believing it. Am I right?”

  “Absolutely,” answered Michel. “Drugs and mesmerism— hypnosis, if you want the proper word,” said Michel. “What’s the other question?”

  “From what I’ve heard even you Hybrids seem to believe that something you have down here can destroy the Earth. That I can’t believe, either, any more than I can believe in people raised from the dead. Don’t tell me that’s true!”

  “That, I’m afraid, is,” said Michel; “though again, it’s a long story. Why don’t you let me tell you about it when we’ve got some time to kill.”

  Bart stopped him again as Michel started once more to turn away.

  “Sorry,” Bart said, “but if there is such a thing, I’ve got to see it for myself. If it’s actually there, Emma’s not going to agree to leave here until we’ve put it out of action; and I won’t go without her.”

  Michel gazed at him.

  “You’d shame the devil himself!” he said softly. “Don’t tell her then. Even if the Tectonal reached Action Point in the next few weeks, it would take scores of years before the geologic changes on the surface actually begin. Meanwhile, those can be good years for us, up in the surface world.”

  In the other’s words Bart heard strange echos of what Paolo had said to him the last time he had seen the dormitory Leader—

  “We could have had a lot of good years down herePaolo had said, sober with sadness in spite of the alcohol in him at the slaves’ Recreational Center, “even with 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. . . .”

  Bart shook off the memory.

  “No,” he answered. “But you’ve already said this thing actually exists and can do what I’ve heard said it can. I’ll have to tell Emma that much, when she asks—and she’s bound to ask. Once she hears she’ll never agree to leave without putting it out of action. And I won’t go without her. Besides, I thought you suggested awhile ago to the other Hybrids, here in the stacks, doing just that?”

  “Yes, but that was with their agreement and a number of them helping,” said Michel. “For you and your Emma, even adding me into it, to try it by ourselves—”

  He broke off.

  “Perhaps you’re more like our father than you look,” he said. “You’d better see the Tectonal for yourself. Want to? I’ll show it to you.”

  “I just said I did,” said Bart. “How?”

  “Well, first we fit you out with some proper Hybrid clothing.”

  He examined Bart from head to foot. “Some of my clothes won’t fit too badly on you. Come on.”

  He led off again, and this time Bart was satisfied to follow.

  Thirty minutes later, dressed in a bottle-green suit outlining one of the shirts with a ruffled collar—all in all more flamboyant than Bart would have chosen himself—he waited impatiently outside a closed but impressively carved, large door, in a corridor down which he had never been before.

  “What do we want here?” he had asked as Michel had left him to go inside alone.

  “Yna Sicorro,” answered Michel. “She’s the only one that can provide credentials for you. You saw her at the meeting, and I think she came back here. If anyone comes along—Hybrid or Lord or Lady—and asks you questions while I’m inside there, you never heard of me. Give them your surface name and tell them you just came down from spending most of your life up above and aren’t allowed to say anything about it—or about yourself, yet.”

  Bart had nodded, and watched the other vanish through the doorway with misgivings. The corridor about him was a well-traveled one. He felt his half-brother could have found a safer place for him to wait than in this exposed and public location. He sweated under the bottle-green jacket every time a Hybrid or Lord passed by; but thankfully, none of them seemed to have the time or curiosity to stop and question him.

  After what seemed an intolerably long period, but was probably less than twenty minutes, Michel suddenly re-emerged, jerked his head at Bart and headed off down the corridor. Bart took several long strides and caught up with him.

  “What—,” Bart began.

  “Wait until we’re around the comer,” said Michel. A moment later, he turned into a small side corridor that was clear of traffic except for a couple of figures going away in the distance. Michel stopped, pulled Bart back against a wall and reached into one of the pockets of his waistcoat. He came out with a three-by-two inch square of bright green cardboard, encased in a frame of light-colored, varnished wood. The name Michel Saberut was printed on the cardboard in this black letters less than an inch in height; and he pinned it to the wide lapel of his own dark gray suit.

  “And now, one for you,” he said, producing a second card and handing it to Bart. “Pin it on.”

  Bart stared at it, for this card also read Michel Saberut. In fact, it was identical to the one Michel had just pinned on himself.

  “But it’s the same!” said Bart.

  “And lucky we are to have it,” said Michel. “Yna can be a handful; but she’s a good person to have on your side. Still, there’re limits. I told her I’d mislaid my own card. According to the rules, there’s not supposed to be a new one issued until a special team has searched everything and either found the original, or has proof it’s been destroyed. Yna stretched a point and gave me a duplicate on my word that I knew I’d just set it down somewhere in my apartments and I’d be able to find it when I had a moment to search—but I needed to get in right now for a piece I’ve got to get finished.”

  Seeing Bart’s blank stare, he explained.

  “I’m an archivist. That’s my job. I told her I was working on a piece about our present moment in history, as we archivists do all the time. Everything was to be noted down and kept track of—one of al-Kebir’s more sensible commandments. The only trouble is, once I’m done with a paper, it vanishes behind the lock and bars of the ‘X’ collection in the Library, and I’
m not even allowed to reread my own work. Of course, like all of us in my department, I keep identical copies for my own files; though that’s technically against the rules. But so is issuing a duplicate badge without first searching for the original.”

  “But if we go past one of those door guards together—,” Bart was beginning.

  “He’ll never notice anything but the shape and color of the badge,” said Michel. “People don’t look, you know, ninety per cent of the time. Of course, some people, and there’s more of those among us and the Lordly class, look more than others. But one of your Steeds? Ha!”

  He led the way back into the busier main corridor they had left a moment before, to put on the badges. Bart caught up with him. Together they went some distance, and made several turns, until they came at last into a corridor empty except for the door with its armed guard at its dead end.

  “I’ll talk to him, when we reach him,” said Michel quietly to Bart, while they were still some yards away. “You pay no attention and simply walk straight in. He won’t have the nerve to call you back, particularly since he’s seen you wearing the proper shape and color of badge. . . .”

  The doorway they approached was not the doorway where Bart had been denied entrance once before, nor was the guard on duty there the one who had denied it to him. Nonetheless, the differences were too small to matter. Only, this time the guard stepped aside and saluted with his odd weapon as they approached.

  “Sirs!” he said, as the door opened before them.

  “Ah, yes,” said Michel, stopping and turning to face the man as he and Bart reached the door. Behind the shield of his back, Bart walked through it and kept going.

  “Your name’s Ebbett, isn’t it?” he heard Michel’s voice diminishing in volume behind him as he moved away from it, “—oh, no? Marquez! Of course, how could I have forgotten? I knew I’d seen you on duty here before; and it’s a relief to know it’s someone like you on guard here. Not that anyone but some demented slave might try . . .”