“And what you can send down is strong enough to do that?” Bart asked skeptically.
“Of course not!” said Michel. “Not by itself. But for years now, the Tectonal’s been drawing up electromagnetic forces and pumping them back in a patterned manner—in such a way that it’s finally become strong enough to produce . . . . I don’t know quite how to describe it to you. Imagine a sort of whirlpool that keeps growing until it begins to touch and bend around itself the currents it finally reaches, incorporating them, too, into itself. It uses its own strength to just bend, a small amount, the forces already there—and as a result the whole balanced pattern of currents becomes unbalanced.”
“All right. The pattern is unbalanced. Then what?” Bart asked.
“Then the magma begins to push differently against the plates of solid rock floating in it, harder than it pushed before in some places, less hard in others. As a result, the plates begin to move. Somewhere, the boundary between two plates breaks, releasing even more pressure and setting the magma below free to boil up to the surface, through a volcano, or just through a crack in the level plate. Or the pressure is drained away from under a section of a plate, and then that section drops—subsides, in geological terms. For example, the whole central plate of North America between the ranges of the Allegheny and the Rocky Mountains is destined to sink, and the waters of the Gulf will rush in northward to cover what once was dry surface land. Like things will happen at other places around the globe.”
“Fine,” said Bart, squinting overhead at the visible section of the turning shaft. “How do we put it out of action?”
“That’s the problem,” said Michel. “There’s only one way of stopping what’s going to take place. That’s to stop the patterning of the force being returned to the magma, so that randomness will return to the currents. And there’s only one way to do that. It’s by stopping the turning of this shaft, jamming it in its drillhole and breaking it off, so that its upper part will have to be withdrawn and they’ll have to fish out the broken lower part. The time involved in doing that is time out from the continuous feed that’s been kept up for the last eighteen years and, interrupted, it’ll fail to supply the whirlpool of force below until it’s self-supporting, which it should be in a matter of weeks, now.”
“Which will cause what to happen?” asked Bart.
“Which will cause the whirlpool to fall apart, the captured currents will be lost before they’re firmly caught and the project will have to start over again. It could cost them anywhere from twenty to fifty years just to build the Tectonal back to the position it had when the breakage happened.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” said Bart.
“Ha!” Michel’s voice came to him over the earphones, thinly derisive. “You think it can be done—just like that? Have you any idea of what you’re dealing with, or what it’d take to jam the shaft? It’s not just a matter of dropping some explosives down the shaft and triggering them off. Even if everyone in this room—and there’s a shift on duty like this twenty-four hours a day—would just stand around and watch. To begin it, it’d take some days of work to get the cover off the shaft, where it enters the floor. Then, since none of us can get into the X Collection, where the plans are, we’ve got no way of knowing how much space there is to introduce explosives beside the shaft, how much it’d take to break it, how far down to lower them, how to fuse them so that—”
His voice broke off. Bart was not surprised, for at that moment he felt both his ankles grabbed from behind and he was unceremoniously dragged out from under the turning shape of the Tectonal. He saw Michel being pulled out with him.
They were brought out into the bright light of the room, where they scrambled to their feet to face a triumphant Merk, flanked by Yna Sicorro. Michel took off his earphones and Bart followed his example.
“This time,” Yna said to Michel, “you’ve gone too far.”
chapter
twenty-one
SHE TURNED HER gaze on Bart and held out a hand, palm up, bent at that emphatic sharp right angle of the wrist of which women tend to be more capable than men.
“And you, whoever you are,” she said to Bart. “Hand it over—now!”
There could be no doubt what she meant. Almost sheepishly, Bart found himself unpinning his badge and putting it in that slim, demanding palm.
Her fingers closed on it firmly and she turned her glare back on Michel.
“As I say,” she told him, “you’ve finally gone over the limits. You know better than to do something like this. I’ve no choice. I’ll have to tell the Emperor about it.”
“To be sure, dear cousin,” said Michel with one of his bright smiles, “and as far as my companion goes, let me introduce your cousin and my half-brother, Bartholomew Saberut, son of our mutual father, that remarkable Lord Vincent Saberut who went on a mission up to the surface many years ago. Bart grew up there, as a consequence; and we’re just now introducing him to his heritage.”
“That’s not going to help either of you with the Emperor!” said Yna grimly. “Michel, how could you be so stupid as to pull a wild trick like this? Everybody’s always said you’d try one joke too many some day; and it looks like this is it.”
“Oh, as for the Emperor,” said Michel, “have no fear, dear cousin. Bart and I have an appointment to see him first thing tomorrow morning, anyway. I’ll explain it all to him, then.”
“It better be some pretty tall explaining,” said Yna.
“And if it doesn’t satisfy him, then what?” Michel smiled at her again. “Maybe I’ll just disappear and no one will ever see me again—all because you had to tell him!”
“You know better than that,” said Yna. “We’d never stand for his doing anything like that. If he could do that to you and get away with it, as if you were a common slave, then he could do it to any of us. But there’s plenty of other ways he can make your life miserable.”
She watched them out the door. In the corridor outside, Michel turned to his right and set off at a good pace like a man with no time to lose.
“What was all that about disappearing and the fact they wouldn’t stand for it?” asked Bart in a low voice. “And who did she mean by ‘we’? That group I saw you with in the Library stacks?”
“More than that,” answered Michel. This time his ready smile was tight-lipped. “She was talking about the whole Hybrid class. My cousins have an affection for me, god knows why. If I suddenly turned up missing, one of them—probably Yna herself—would request an audience with the Emperor to ask that I be found; and if I was found dead, or couldn’t be turned up at all, our Emperor would have a neat little revolution on his hands. He wouldn’t dare kill off another Lord without powerful reason; and he can’t do away quietly with his loyal nephews and nieces, either.”
“But if you simply weren’t to be found—,” Bart began.
“There’s no such thing in the Inner World. We’re a tight little closed box here, with only two official holes to elsewhere. One is a trash disposal, that’s a crack in the rock going no one knows how far down; but a crew’s on duty there twenty-four hours a day, including at least one Lord, slaves, and—of course—some Hybrids. Then there’s the bridge into the mine—but there’s a twenty-four hour guard and crew on that, too. Of course, there’re a couple of secret bolt-holes, undoubtedly—one at least of which I’ve got high hopes he’ll be telling us all about tomorrow morning. But every Hybrid and Lord knows those exist, even if they don’t know their exact locations. So, a failure by him to produce me alive and healthy would pretty well prove he’d done away with me.”
Bart nodded. Michel was setting a good pace, as they turned into a wider, more traveled corridor.
“When did we get an appointment to see the Emperor tomorrow morning?” Bart asked him in a low voice.
“In about twenty minutes,” said Michel. He flashed Bart a momentary, sideways grin. “There are two classes of people who can get immediate audiences with the Emperor. Thos
e he likes very much, and those he dislikes tremendously. Count me among the latter number, Brother.”
“Now, I’ll tell you what,” he went on, but looking once more ahead of him as he went and speaking in a voice as low as Bart’s, “actually, what I’ve got to see is the Emperor’s private secretary; and I think I know where to find her. But this is something I do better alone. So I’ll leave you here, and meet you at Pier’s front door. What time are you supposed to be there?”
“After he and his wife have dinner,” answered Bart. “I figured on nineteen hundred hours as an arrival time.”
“Good enough. 7:00 P.M. I’ll see you and your Emma, then—and remember, when we’re finally closeted with Pier and Marta, let me do the talking.”
“If you think so,” said Bart, with some misgivings. He stopped, and watched Michel walk rapidly away from him, and then vanish around a comer.
In spite of these misgivings, however, 7:00 P.M. found him, with Emma, moving along a corridor pierced by entrances to living quarters of those of more than ordinary consequence among the Lordly class. Bart was back in his Steed’s clothing.
All along the wide, tapestried, corridor walls there were, at intervals, pairs of doors. One door was always large, ornately carven and impressive; the other just large enough to admit a good-sized male slave, and with a plain, brown, dark wooden surface.
They came close to the doors to the quarters of the Librarian and his wife; and it had been obvious from some distance that there was no one waiting outside them. Wherever Michel might be, he was not here as he had promised.
Bart was trying to decide whether they should wait a few minutes at least for his Hybrid half-brother, or simply go in and trust to his turning up eventually. He had filled Emma in on his relationship with Michel and the events of the afternoon; and as they approached the entrances, she was now doing the talking. As a matter of interest to them both, she had been taking advantage of her job in the accounting department to try and make some estimates of the financial situation of the Inner World, and its owners, the Lordly class.
“. . . . couldn’t do much about getting any solid figures on anything—particularly without seeming to be looking for them,” said Emma as the two of them walked up the long hall to the door of dark, heavy wood that was the slaves’ entrance to the multiple rooms that made up the apartments of Pier and Marta Guettrig, “but maybe there’s no need to know exactly. Just a general look at the sort of figures we’re handling implies something . . . unbelievable. At a guess, the Lords’re so rich the figures hardly make sense. Every one of them has to be a millionaire many, many times over. They could probably give a million to each of the slaves and never know the difference, as far as their general fortunes go.”
She paused as they reached the slaves’ entrance and he scratched on the panel in it provided for carrying the sound to whoever was on duty beyond.
“Of course, most of that worth is tied up in property and investment,” Emma went on, “but it’s exactly the profits on that property and investment that pay for the continuous inflow here of all kinds of goods—”
The door swung open and she stopped talking. A tall, erect, gray-haired, rather angular woman, wearing a slave tunic in dark blue, nodded to Bart and looked more than a little contemptuously at Emma.
“They’ve just finished dinner,” the doorkeeper said, speaking to Bart, “earlier than usual. But the Lord told me to say you weren’t to feel you’ve been negligent in not getting here before this.”
She led the way; and they followed her through a series of corridors, each more thickly carpeted and paneled than the last, until she stopped and stood to one side of a plain, but tall door of polished maple wood.
“They’re having tea here in the dining room’s side lounge,” she said.
Bart stepped forward and scratched at the door.
“Who?” asked the voice of Pier, from somewhere over their heads, in French.
“Bart Dybig, Lord, with a slave companion named Emma Robeson,” answered Bart in the same language.
“Come in, Bart,” said the voice of Pier.
Bart opened the door and the two of them entered a room that was so conventional and like all the sitting rooms in well-to-do homes above ground that it suddenly brought back to Bart an aching memory of that single parent he had known and loved. It was a square room, filled with heavy square furniture, standing on thick carpets; and with the many surfaces of its furniture covered with small bits of lace, or cloth with scenes worked into it.
The only unusual touches were the smallness of the furniture, the heavy tapestries covering the walls, which were so common in the rooms of the Lordly class of the Inner World, and the fact that the lamps lighting the room had under their shades a round ball of glass lit by electromagnetic force.
Pier and Marta sat in dark blue, downscaled wingback chairs, partly facing each other but essentially side by side, with a small, lace-covered table between them on which stood a silver tray and a tea service in white and gold china.
“Come in, Bart,” repeated Pier as the door closed behind Bart and Emma; and they both halted, as was the custom, a pace inside the door. “Come and sit down with us. You’ll find hassocks to sit on, over at the far side of the room.”
Bart went and got the hassocks, round leather creations which, when he and Emma were seated before the two in their chairs, put their eyes on a level with those of Pier and Marta. Close up, in the lamplight, the makeup Marta wore was not visible, so that she looked indeed like Pier’s granddaughter, or even great-granddaughter. Nonetheless, she took immediate charge of the proceedings.
“You’ll have some tea,” she said decidedly.
For the first time Bart noticed that there were four, rather than just two, cups on the silver tray. It was a highly unnatural thing, by Inner World standards—that much Bart had discovered for himself already—for Hybrids, let alone those of the Lordly class, to eat with slaves. In fact it was not done even to eat at the same time that slaves were eating, in the same room. But Pier, as he had said occasionally, made his own rules, particularly in his own home.
“Here you are,” said Marta, handing a steaming cup on its gold and white saucer to Emma, who seemed at the moment only a bit larger than she was.
“Thank you,” said Emma, as politely, but also as calmly as if there was nothing unusual in taking tea with the wife of one of the Three Who Command. She accepted the cup and sipped from it, while Marta handed another cup to Bart. He also sipped at the dark tea in it, but cautiously. All his life he had found that he seemed to be able to bum his tongue on food and drink other people swore were no more than comfortably hot. Emma, on the other hand, could drink tea at practically scalding temperatures.
“Now,” said Marta to Emma, “how long have you known Bart?”
“Oh, we grew up together,” said Emma. “From the time he was about six years old and his father brought him in from the Indian camp where he’d lived until then. His father insisted he go to the little school where we were; though from that time on, I think, Bart learned more from his father than from the teacher, in all sorts of ways. At the same time, though, he came to understand why his father wanted him to unlearn being an Indian and learn how to get along with civilized folk, instead. His father was right.”
“Oh?” Marta smiled encouragingly. “Why do you say that?”
Emma laughed.
“You’d have said it yourself, if you’d seen him, those first few weeks. Standing apart from all the other boys and girls, refusing to play any games and scowling at everybody and everything!”
“I didn’t scowl!” said Bart, startled.
“You most certainly did. All the girls were fascinated; and all the boys wanted to pick a fight with you, but there was a rumor you’d try to kill them, if they got you started.—It was just as well.” Emma turned to the other woman. “Bart was strong for his age and might have actually hurt one of the other boys, or gotten himself hurt. After a few weeks, though,
he stopped scowling and he’d play some of the games with the rest of us at recess; but really he always preferred being by himself.”
“How interesting,” said Marta, putting her cup down carefully. “You and your brother came down here from that revolutionary group we sponsored, didn’t you?”
“Not sponsored, my love,” Pier said. “We funded and encouraged them to a certain extent—through intermediaries, of course—on the theory that if we did so, they’d actively discourage exploration and exploitation of the area all around us. Actually, we rather believed that they would end up getting themselves killed off, and we did not care one way or the other for their political aspirations. But in the meantime they serve us by keeping civilization from spreading to this part of the continent too quickly. And so they have— along with the terrain, the weather, and other hardships, of course.”
“I understand—as well as I understand any of these things—,” said Marta with a brilliant smile at Emma, “that some of those revolutionary friends of your brother didn’t trust him too well, or else the two of you wouldn’t have ended up here with us.”
“Oh, you’re very right,” said Emma. Her own tones were almost an echo of Marta’s and she smiled back. “I never did like what those Scottites stood for; and I didn’t realize that Arthur— that’s my brother—was working for them. In fact, I don’t think he really did much for them—he’s really not very effective. But in any case he wouldn’t have paid any attention to me, of course.”
“Of course,” said Marta.
It was almost sickening, thought Bart, the way they could smile at each other that way, as if they were sharing some sort of secret knowledge. He sat back, waiting for his tea to cool and pretending to take sips from it while Marta cross-examined Emma about her background—and Bart’s. Emma bore the examination not merely with fortitude, but as if it was an actual pleasure to have such a talk.
The Earth Lords Page 30