The Earth Lords

by Gordon R. Dickson

  From Bart’s point of view it was downright dull, if not uncomfortable, to listen to his childhood being rehearsed this way. Apparently Pier must have shared some of his feelings, for the old man interrupted his wife after about ten minutes.

  “My love,” he said, “why don’t you take Emma off to do the rest of your conversation in one of the other lounges? I’ve just remembered some business to do with the Library I want to talk over with Bart.”

  “Of course, dear,” said Marta, standing up immediately. Emma rose also. “Just leave your cup there, Emma. I’ll have fresh tea brought us someplace else. Come along.”

  They rose to leave; but at that moment there was a scratching at the door.

  “What?” asked Pier, raising his voice.

  “Your pardon, Lord,” said the voice of the woman who had escorted Bart and Emma to the room. “But Mr. Michel Saberut is calling. He says he has business with you concerning your present visitors.”

  “Hmm?” said Pier. “Marta, my dear, perhaps you and Emma hadn’t better leave us just yet.”

  Marta sat down again in her chair, motioning Emma to her hassock, as Pier raised his voice.

  “Let him in!”

  The door opened immediately and Michel was ushered in, now wearing a suit of beautifully tailored black evening clothes.

  “My Lord, Lady,” said Michel, stopping just inside the entrance. He came forward with outstretched hands. “Uncle Pier, Aunt Marta—it’s good of you to let me drop in without warning like this.”

  “You’re always welcome here, Michel. You know that,” said Pier, as he and Marta each briefly grasped a hand of the younger man. “What’ve you been up to now?”

  “Up to, Uncle? What makes you think I’ve been up to something?”

  “That’s usually what brings you here; or else you’re about to be up to something—oh, find yourself a hassock and sit down, Michel!” said Pier.

  “Seeing you is always reason enough for coming,” said Michel solemnly, dragging up a hassock like the ones Bart and Emma were seated on and sitting down himself. “You’ve always been the closest thing to family I ever had.”

  “We love you, too, Michel,” said Marta, smiling warmly at him. “But what is it this time?”

  “Well, you’d hear all about it tomorrow anyway,” said Michel. “As a matter of fact, Bart and I have an appointment to see the Emperor at 6:00 A.M. tomorrow morning about it. You see, just this afternoon I took Bart to see the Tectonal; and Yna Sicorro caught me at it. She’s probably already passed a message on it to His Majesty.”

  “You did what?” Pier’s head came up sharply and suddenly.

  “I took him in to see the Tectonal,” repeated Michel. “You see, Bart, whom you know as a slave, is actually a Hybrid. The fact is, he’s my half-brother, sired by Vincent Saberut after he went up on a mission to the surface.”

  The words were out. Pier did not at once respond and Bart had braced himself for any conceivable kind of reaction. But while Marta did not even change expression, the response from Pier was one he could never have expected.

  He noticed suddenly a glitter to Pier’s eyes and realized with shock that the old man had tears in them.

  “Of course,” said Pier at last, looking at him. “Of course you are. My boy, we knew it from the first moment we found you!”

  The equivalent of the explosion Bart had expected in the old man now took place in Bart, instead. He stared at Pier.

  “I don’t understand, Lord,” was all he could manage to say. He realized that no matter how shaken he felt inside, to his listeners his words had seemed to come out fully controlled. Bart had realized for a long time that he had a tendency to conceal emotion of any kind. Now he only hoped he hadn’t sounded so flat as to seem cold or hostile.

  “Naturally, you don’t. How could you?” The tears were running down Pier’s cheeks now along the lines that time had engraved there, into his sparse beard. He wiped them away with an edge of his robe and stared at Bart with a misty smile.

  “We Three Who Command,” he said, “enforce the laws evolved from the Book of al-Kebir. But, out of necessity, we also enforce rules on ourselves. And these are rules backed by our own sense of honor—which must never be compromised. My honor has compelled me, even privately, to keep from acknowledging you for who you really wereas I would have otherwise. With the other Two it was agreed that you shouldn’t be told who you were, until and unless you were able to recognize it for yourself.”

  Bart was still tumbling mentally from this bombshell of information. The only thing he could think of to say was a repetition of the words he had just said. He put to one side the fantastic puzzle of what about him had convinced Pier and the other Two he was a Hybrid, before he had even been conscious enough to speak.

  “I still don’t understand, Lord,” Michel said slowly. There was a faint, tight smile to the comers of his lips and a glitter to his eyes, in turn, that was not at all emotional but almost malicious. “If all the Three Who Command were convinced Bart was a Hybrid, why was he made a slave in the first place?”

  “Oh, Michel, Michel—life’s never simple. You’ll learn that more and more as you get older. You know we Three have to be unanimous in our decision on all things; except in an emergency, when there’s no time for consultation. Then the Emperor’s word alone rules over everything else. I agreed with the other Two, although I knew the ruling was unfair; but let me tell you how it all happened.”

  “Thank you, Lord,” said Bart.

  “Oh, call me ‘Grandfather,’ not ‘Lord!’ Your father called me ‘Father’ even though he was no child of mine—neither Marta nor I ever had children . . . but never mind that now. In the privacy of this house, call us Grandfather and Grandmother!”

  “If that’s what you want . . . Grandfather,” said Bart, touched; though the word seemed to fit strangely and awkwardly in his mouth.

  “You see,” said Pier, “the door by which you tried to enter the Inner World from the mine where they had you working—and believe me, I had no idea you were there—no idea you even existed at that time, or I’d never have permitted you to be held there at all—has a bridge which comes into place only if the proper controls in the mine are moved.”

  He half lifted a hand as if to reach out and touch Bart, then dropped the thin, veined fingers back into the lap of his brown robe.

  “Not knowing those controls were there—and how could you have known? Not knowing they were there, you opened the door, went through, and fell into the underground river that forms part of our protection against unauthorized entrance. It’s a fall of some thirty feet; and the river is deep, icy, and very fast-running. It swept you away with it, as it’s swept other intruders before you, until it came to a point where the rock around it closes down completely, and there’s no air space left at all. It’s six minutes before the speed of the current carries anything swept into that water-filled tunnel out the other side, into an area where the overhead rock rises again and there’s air above the surface to breathe. At that point we’ve got a guard post.”

  “Guard Post Two,” put in Michel. “The bridge is Guard Post One.”

  “A Guard Post?” asked Bart.

  “Yes,” said Pier, “it’s where the rock opens out—actually, it opens out naturally and the opening’s been improved by blasting, and cutting out a ledge in the rock along one side of it. At that point we’ve a net strung across the river to catch anything headed downstream. Downstream—since upstream the river is for practical purposes unreachable without a great expense of tunneling, and it’s our fresh water supply. We use the net to keep anything that might foul the water from getting downstream to the point where we pump it out. That includes, of course, the dead bodies of anyone who tried to enter the Inner World from the door in the mine.”

  “And after six minutes underwater they’re pretty sure to be dead, even if being banged about on the rocks hasn’t finished them,” said Michel.

  “That’s right,” said Pi
er, “and they always have been dead— until you came through. Somehow you were still living. Unconscious, but still living.”

  “I swam with the current, hoping to come to some place where there was air,” said Bart.

  “You must be a powerful swimmer,” said Pier. “At any rate, the foreman of the slaves who pulled you out in the net noticed this and got in touch with the Hybrid in charge of that duty shift. The Hybrid woke the Lord whose responsibility was the work of protecting the cleanliness of the water. That Lord—you may meet him one of these days if you haven’t already, his name is Jan Rakar—recognized the possibility that you might have some Hybrid characteristics; and this, together with the fact you’d lived through the six minutes of water tunnel, made you a matter of extraordinary concern.

  “Jan went, as was only proper, to the Emperor; who set up a time for we Three Who Command to examine you in strict privacy, the following morning. Until that time you were to be taken care of, but watched and drugged, so that you didn’t wake to find out where you were. You were transferred to a private room in the Clinic, under a medication to keep you asleep. More was used when you showed signs of regaining consciousness naturally. Meanwhile, the Head of Clinic, the Lord Doctor Abu Galum, personally examined you.”

  His voice hoarsened and he stopped. The glint of tears were again in his eyes. Bart waited patiently for him to go on. After a moment the eyes cleared, and when he spoke again, his voice was as under control as usual.

  “We Three and Dr. Lord Galum saw you in that private—and guarded—room, early the next morning,” he went on, “and one thing had been proven by that time. You definitely had a sufficiency of the physical characteristics that marked the Hybrids among us—traits that could only have been inherited from one of our own Lordly people. But none of us recognized you; and as Librarian I had already searched the records for any mention of you being born to one of our people who was temporarily in the upper world—for of course we knew from the records of the mine, when we looked, what your name was. I testified that I had found no mention of you.”

  Once more his voice had hoarsened, but it cleared again immediately as he went on.

  “The conclusion was obvious. You were beyond all doubt a Hybrid, but one who had grown up in the upper world, knowing nothing of your heritage. The sores and scars from the ankle irons on you showed that much. If you had known what you were, there were any one of a dozen words you could have said that would have made even those ignorant slave-crew foremen start a process of checking up that would have brought you to our attention; and once we knew who you were you would have been freed immediately.”

  Pier shook his head sadly.

  “The question, of course, became what to do with you. The simplest solution, which the Regent suggested right away, was simply to eliminate you. I pointed out that this might not be contrary to law, but it certainly was to custom. If you were indeed a Hybrid, whether you knew it or not you were a nephew to all of us and we owed you a certain consideration.”

  He hesitated.

  “Bart,” he said, “it’s going to take you a little time to understand all this, but there are philosophical, what you might even call political, divisions among us—even us of the Lordly class.”

  “I think Bart realizes that already, Uncle,” said Michel.

  “Yes,” Pier gazed at Bart, “perhaps he does, with you and others to help him. In any case, it exists, Bart, with us as with others. Our people are divided into two groups, Textualists and Liberals. The Textualists tend to believe strongly in the exact words al-Kebir wrote originally in the KITAAB, although he wrote them in a world as it existed six hundred years ago. We Liberals—and you’d guess very quickly, if Michel hasn’t told you so already, that Marta and I are of that thinking—believe in adjusting those original precepts in terms not only of a changed world, but in the light of the growth of our own fortunes in that world . . . but I don’t want to get involved in telling you all that, now.”

  He cleared his throat, and with the effort, his small, wispy beard twitched for a second.

  “The important thing is, both the Emperor and the Regent belong to the Textualists; and this, in addition to the difference between their generation and mine, makes us natural opponents in many ways. When you were found, it quickly developed that the problem of what to do with you, now you’d appeared among us, was one of these. There’s a natural historical swing in the thinking of all populations between generations. When I was still relatively young and first elected Librarian, Lordly thinking was predominantly Liberal. The generation that followed, the one to which the Emperor and the Regent belong, swung back toward Textualism. Now it’s swinging back once more toward Liberalism, if it hasn’t already—in fact I think it may have.”

  He hesitated.

  “I think if a vote was taken today,” he said, “we’d find the majority of my class now favor finding a way of living with the outside world the way it is, rather than destroying it and dominating the handful of humans who survive. But there’s no certainty; and if I was to call for a popular vote on the subject—for which I’d need a reason, but which as one of the Three I’m empowered to do—and the majority wasn’t overwhelmingly in my favor, I could lose most of my authority; because it rests, in practice, on the Emperor’s and the Regent’s assumption that a large number of the Lords are with me on anything I want to do. So if I called for a vote and failed, then the other Two could practically do what they want with the Command.”

  He shook his head as if to clear away from his mind the cobwebs of a dream.

  “But that’s beside the point right now,” he said. “I want to tell you how matters stand with you, so you can understand why you’ve been treated the way you have. When the Three of us got together beside your anesthetized body in the Clinic—it was quite some time after you’d been fished out; and, left to yourself, you’d have regained consciousness and seen where you were—as I said, the Regent’s immediate proposal was to eliminate you. You’d grown up entirely outside the Inner World, you knew nothing of our customs, and could only be a burden and a source of trouble among us, with your essentially human point of view.”

  Pier took a deep breath.

  “The Emperor agreed with him. I disagreed. You have to understand. As a Hybrid, according to the written word of al-Kebir, you’ve no more rights than any other human. But over the centuries—since the Hybrids are, after all, our own children—a certain amount of affection on our part . . . well, the result has been for them to acquire a body of essentially unofficial, but still effective, rights.

  “I told the other Two that, under those rights, you had to be given a chance to survive among us, who were your family; unless there was a specific reason you shouldn’t be given that chance.”

  Pier shrugged.

  “Naturally, from that point on the disagreement progressed along political lines; Liberal versus Textualist thinking. The other two pointed out that by being born and having grown up outside the Inner World, you’d never passed the tests you would normally have had to take at age eleven and seventeen, to prove your right to be here among us. I said that while this was true, there was no reason you should not first be given a chance to learn about us and the Inner World, and then take those tests.”

  Pier smiled.

  “You have to understand,” he said, “that this argument put them between the jaws of a nutcracker. The insistence on anyone with at least fifty per cent of our blood being tested for survival—for fear that our Lordly strain should lose itself and be diluted among the mass of humanity—was one of al-Kebir’s strongest precepts and as such is venerated by the Textualists, like all his precepts. On the other hand, the mere fact that I had opposed them on the question of your being allowed to live made it a matter of face to them that you be destroyed.”

  Bart nodded.

  “‘Let him live, then,’” said the Emperor, “‘but if he’s worthy of being a Hybrid he’ll have to prove himself, without any help at the start f
rom anyone. Let him begin by being a slave; and we’ll see if he even recognizes himself as something more than that or just accepts his lot. If he decides to stay a slave for the rest of what life is allowed him, then it’ll be plain that’s all he’s worthy of.’”

  “Of course I protested,” said Pier. “I argued it was unfair to make anyone of Hybrid blood serve as a slave. I asked how they could expect you could even have the chance to question the fact you were something more, when all our system was set up to leave a slave with no alternative to accepting what he was. Let alone, the regular Clinical drugging and mesmerising to create the illusion in their minds that they had been raised from the dead to be what they were.”

  Pier smiled again.

  “They objected in turn, particularly the Regent, who of course had agreed with the Emperor from the start that the system could not be violated. But they knew they were trapped. You would have to be allowed to bypass the Clinic visits. I pointed out that there were already exceptions, such as certain former politicals and others, like your Emma, here, and her brother, who were excused from them. Such slaves are usually exempted because it might turn out to be useful, once again, to use them above ground. In a nutshell, I was bargaining for what I eventually got, which was a grudging approval from the other Two that I might personally make use of you as my own slave; and, under the restrictions of honor and duty, expose you to the opportunities, only, to discover you were something more than an ordinary human.”

  He stopped and watched Bart.

  “I see,” said Bart thoughtfully. “I’m indebted to you, Lord.”

  “Grandfather.”

  “I’m indebted to you, Grandfather.” Bart was astonished at the deep rush of gratitude in him, in spite of the questions that still were there. He decided to bring the questions out and have done with it. “But you went to a lot of trouble—and probably even some risk—for me. Why should you? Just on your Liberal principles, alone?”

  “Oh no, child,” said Pier. “You remember I told you your own father called Marta and myself ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ in the privacy of this home. Galum, with his Clinicians and the other Two had recognized you as a Hybrid. But secretly, I had already recognized not only that but something more, from the moment I set eyes on you. I’d recognized you as the son of Vincent Saberut. You’re nearly twice his size, you’ve strong indication of the Indian blood in you. But to my eyes, from the start, you were unmistakably his son; like the grandson Marta and I might have had if it had not been for the KITAAB, and Marta’s determination.”