chapter
twenty-two
IT WAS THE last three words that caught at Bart’s mind and held it. The implications in it were strong enough so that he risked a question even though it might threaten the personal relationship Pier had just set up between them.
“Did you say ‘Marta’s determination,’ Grandfather?” he asked.
“Yes, Grandson,” said Pier. “Your Grandmother is a woman of powerful will.”
He smiled a little.
“It might even have been interesting, if they’d been members of the same generation, to see her and al-Kebir himself in opposition on some point. But, in any case, much as she’s loved me all these years and supported me—so that otherwise I don’t know how I’d be alive today, particularly with the present Emperor and Regent—she’s always refused to have a child. A child by me or any concubine—not that she’s ever taken concubines—”
He turned his smile fondly for a moment on Marta and her smile answered him. For a moment the two of them were alone in the room.
“—Though that was her right as much as mine. But, we have ways of preventing conception that are absolutely certain; and Marta’s made certain that not even she and I produced children.”
Bart looked at him curiously.
“If I may ask—have you ever taken concubines, Grandfather?”
“I? No,” said Pier. “I have to admit that there were a few times, when I was younger, I was tempted. But the temptation was only transient; and those who tempted me fell so far short in any comparison with Marta, that I soon came to realize they’d only be a source of disappointment to me in the end. Besides, as I say, Marta had made up her mind to go childless; and that in itself created a bond between us that shut out any real desire for concubines in me.”
He stopped talking and seemed lost in his own thoughts—or memories. Bart gently stirred the conversation back to life.
“I think,” he said, “you were about to tell me why Grandmother refused to have any children.”
Pier’s gaze came back to him from whatever place it had wandered to.
“Yes, I was,” he said. “Because I think it’s something you ought to know and understand, Bart; in order to understand what your father was like, and how you came, evidently, to be born as you were, to a native human mother. Marta told me from the very beginning of our love that she knew the failings of her own strength.”
Bart glanced at Marta. She was seated with her hands clasped in her lap, her face utterly calm, watching her husband.
“As a youngster,” Pier went on, returning his wife’s steady gaze with an affectionate look, “she’d always wanted children and expected to have them. But as she grew up she came to understand she’d never be able to endure having and loving a child, when there was the slightest danger she might have to give it up. That she might have to hand it over to the Executioners—if for some reason it failed in either of the examinations required of us and the Hybrids at ages eleven and seventeen.”
Momentarily, his mouth became a thin, straight line. “In spite of the fact that the Executioners would only be doing their duty,” he went on, “and in the gentlest way possible. For we kill these failed children of ours as painlessly, and without their realizing what is happening, as we can. Because we love them, Bart. In spite of this, as I say, she realized she’d never be able to allow such a thing to happen to a child of hers.”
He looked suddenly and harshly at Bart.
“Before giving up her child, Marta would see the whole Inner World destroyed; or leave it, and me, to take her child with her into the upper world. Of course, if she had so left, we’d have had to send Executioners out after them both. For al-Kebir’s writing is uncompromising on that subject: ‘. . . any who shall not qualify, or any who aid them to qualify when they are actually unable, must die.’ ”
He paused again, still looking at Bart.
“And she knew,” he went on, “that, since I was already one of the Three Who Command when we married—we’d married later in life than most—honor would not let me either leave that post to go with her, or refuse to concur in the orders to send the Executioners after them. I would have been one of those who killed our own child—and her. For, find her, they almost certainly would. Kill her and the child eventually, they possibly would: for we’d keep sending them out until some of them succeeded. But there’s no one like Marta; and she just might have been able to get away safely with our child. Still, it was for the pain she knew it could end in giving me, as well as the pain it would give us both, if we ever realized a child of ours could not pass the tests, that made her decide to never have children.”
He sighed.
“And so,” prompted Bart again after a long pause, “you’ve been childless all your lives.
Pier smiled gently at him.
“Not childless,” he said. “We ended by having your father as a surrogate son; and now you and Emma, as grandson and granddaughter. Also, we’ve had Michel and others back to and before your father—though none of them were ever so close to us as Vincent was. When he made his decision and went up to the surface, he left us desolate.”
Bart tried to imagine his father, who had always seemed to him so old and wise, as a young man named Vincent seated at the feet of the smaller and much older figure before him. But his mind found the image hard to form until he remembered his father’s love of learning; and the picture became conceivable, but just barely so.
“You see, we had a disagreement, your father and I,” said Pier slowly. “A long-standing argument. I believe that the duty of all of us is to work for the Liberal point of view here, in the Inner World. He believed that the Textualists of the succeeding generations would never be converted. That they would die rather than change their beliefs. . . .”
Pier shook his head.
“Over the years, many other Liberals have tried as well, to bring me to your father’s view; including Michel, here.” He smiled for a second on Michel, who answered with his sudden flash of his own white, even teeth. “But I found none of them could really change my mind. To this day I can’t believe that there isn’t an innate common sense in everyone; and the problem is only that of reaching through to it. I couldn’t believe anything else, if I wanted to.”
“The belief does you credit, Uncle,” said Michel, “but generation after generation we’ve had people like the Emperor to deal with.”
“We also have those who, while calling themselves Liberal,” said Pier, “are as ready to find their solutions in destructive ways as any Textualist. Over the years I’ve defused more than one plan to wreck our Inner World in the name of saving the surface one. As if two wrongs would make a right! In fact, I think I still have around here one elaborate explosive device that its builders could hardly wait to use; until I talked them out of that—and it. But aren’t we getting away from this business of the appointment you and Bart have with the Emperor tomorrow? What you said sounded ominous, Michel. I hope you haven’t got Bart into any trouble.” “Not him,” said Michel, “he’s my half-brother after all, and after being without a family all my life, I’m not going to lose the one I’ve found. Actually, it’s the Emperor who’s in trouble.” “Michel, Michel!” said Pier. “What sort of wild thing are you planning?”
“Lord—began Michel, only to be interrupted by Pier. “Lord?” The old man’s eyes were sharp once more on him. “What happened to ‘Uncle’?”
“What I’ve got to tell you will, I’m afraid, carry us into areas where your official responsibilities lie.”
“Oh, Michel!” said Marta unexpectedly. “No!”
“I’m sorry, Aunt,” said Michel, looking at her apologetically. “But it has to be.”
He turned back to face Pier.
“Lord,” he said, “as you know I’ve always been of the opinion of my father—and Bart’s. You’ve known for some time I wanted to leave the Inner World for the surface, but the Emperor was hardly likely to send me up on mission. He’d like nothin
g better than my escaping to the surface, if that were possible, so then he could send the Executioners after me. But simply to turn me loose up there might be more dangerous to his plans than keeping me here where he can watch what I’m up to.”
“I know all this,” said Pier. “And you know how I’d feel about losing you. No one has the influence with the Hybrids that you have. I’d hoped to have your help in bringing our whole Inner World to the point of view I’ve always worked for, I take it you’ve concocted some scheme to be sent above? How does it involve Bart?”
“Bart wants to go back to the surface, along with Emma and that brother of hers, who’s also a slave down here. I was planning to take them with me when I go.”
Pier stared at Bart. He was conscious, also, of Marta’s gaze on him, but refused to turn his eyes to her to acknowledge it.
“Is this what you really want?” Pier asked Bart. “Have you thought of what it might be like for you down here as a Hybrid, with Marta and I to assist you?”
“I’m sorry—” Bart had been about to follow Michel’s lead and address Pier formally as ‘Lord,’ but a sudden realization of the pain this would give the old man made him stay with the newer form of address. “—Grandfather, but the Book of al-Kebir isn’t in me, as it is in the rest of you. I have to go back; and I have to take Emma back. She doesn’t belong here.”
There was a long pause, and then Pier breathed in deeply.
“You must do what you feel you should,” he said unhappily. “I can hardly have followed that rule all my life and deny it to—to anyone else. But we had hoped, Marta and I, that we could even bring you both into this household of ours, into jobs here that permitted it; and then, when and if children were born to you, we would have great-grandchildren, after all—”
He broke off.
“Forgive me,” he said in a flat voice. “Age has made me weak enough to whine. I’m ashamed of myself. Of course, if you wish to go, and there’s a means, I’ll not only not stand in your way, but help, if I can.”
“The help we’ll need is something beyond just getting away,” said Michel, “but I’ll remind you you said that—after I’ve told you what I plan to say to the Emperor tomorrow morning.”
“Yes.” Pier turned his attention to the black-clad Hybrid. “What’ve you planned to say to the Emperor that’ll make him let you go?”
“Something, I’m afraid, that’ll put you and me on opposite sides of the table, Lord,” said Michel, “much as I love you and Marta. But I can’t hold the Emperor guilty without, in fact, holding all the Three Who Command guilty.”
“Guilty?” Pier frowned, but as much in astonishment as affront. “How can the Emperor or the Three be guilty of anything? The law doesn’t allow it.”
“It’s not law we’ll be dealing with in this case,” answered Michel, “but custom, justice, and practicality. Above all, practicality, for with all his other faults, the Emperor’s a very practical man.”
“Michel,” said Pier, “give me a straight answer. What is this you’re planning to confront the Emperor with, that strikes at all of us Three, including myself?”
“You, Lord,” said Michel, “are guiltless. But I know you. You’ll act according to the dictates of your office; that’s the only reason you’re included in this. In a word, I intend to confront the Emperor with the fact that he had no right to make a slave out of someone he knew to be a Hybrid, as he did with Bart.”
“No right!” Pier’s frown had become dangerous.
“No right under the unwritten agreement by which we Hybrids labor all our lives for ends which are the Lords’ alone,” said Michel. “He violated that unwritten agreement—the Three violated that agreement—but it was his will that made them do so; and unless he makes amends, he’ll have to face the consequences.” “What consequences?”
“My telling all the Hybrids what happened to Bart,” answered Michel, “and leaving it up to them to consider that if such a thing could happen to someone like Bart, something like it could happen to any one of them.”
Pier let out the breath which evidently he had been holding all this time. His face was angry now.
“Michel,” he said. “You’re threatening the Emperor—all of us—with revolution. I warn you, think before you say any such thing. You may believe you and your fellow Hybrids know the full arsenal of our powers. Let me tell you, you don’t. Threaten a revolution, try a revolution, even if the slaves would join you in it, and we could still destroy you all.”
“You could—if all the other Lords were really ready to join you in killing their Hybrid sons and daughters. But then?” said Michel. “Then, who’d you use to get done the work that still has to be done, here in the Inner World?”
Pier sat, saying nothing.
“The Emperor,” went on Michel, before that pause could become painful, “is, as I say, a very practical man. I think he’ll see the wisdom of letting the four of us—myself, Bart, Emma and her brother—go free into the upper world rather than have me-say anything to my cousins. Of course, the moment we’re gone, he may find some pretext to send the Executioners after us all, or even simply do that secretly without pretext. But we’ll take our chances with whoever comes for us, if anyone does.”
There was a long silence in the room. Finally, Pier spoke. “You’re right, Michel,” he said. “This does indeed put us on the opposite sides of the table—not only from you but from Bart and Emma, here. But as I couldn’t in honor stand in your father’s way when he wished to go above, I can’t stand in yours. You’ll have to do what you’ve decided to do; and if called upon by the other Two I may have to vote in any measures that are planned against you as a result of that.”
He dropped his head against the back of his chair for a second and closed his eyes; then opened them and sat up, putting his arms on the arms of the chair.
“And now,” he said, “I think that’s enough for this one night. Marta and I will excuse you now, so we can get our rest.”
“One moment more, please, Lord,” said Michel. “That explosive device you said you still had around the home, here, and which I’ve heard you mention having before. Would you give it to us and explain how it was to be used? You see, all of us feel we have to at least give the world some breathing space in which people like yourself down here, and we, above ground, can try to bring the Textualists to their senses, or else warn the surface peoples about the disaster that’ll otherwise face them, eventually.”
“No,” said Pier.
“But Lord—,” Michel began.
“I was against its use in the first place. I’m against it still,” said Pier. “My duty is to protect our community, not destroy it.”
“I doubt we could actually destroy the Tectonal, with whatever you’ve got,” said Michel. “Aren’t I correct? But to damage it enough to put it out of order for a few months, say by breaking the main shaft and causing it to jam in the drill-hole so that it’d have to be fished out and replaced—that’d give time for the currents already gathered by it in the magma below to disperse, and more time for them to be gathered back up again by a reworking Tectonal. We could gain ten or twenty years, perhaps even thirty; and in that time you and those who came after you could marshal the Lords who are against destroying the surface world and enlist them with the Hybrids in a position to put an end to al-Kebir’s ridiculous dream of revenge. Knowing that we’re up there and the secret of the Inner World can’t be kept much longer, you could lead the way for everyone down here to finally rejoin the real world above.”
“No,” said Pier.
“Isn’t that what you want? What you’ve always preached should be our goal—reunion with the rest of the human race? I know you don’t believe that nonsense in the Book about the Lords being a separate race from somewhere beyond the moon.”
“No, I don’t. Nor, I think does any intelligent mind, even those who pretend to believe,” said Pier. “But you remind me of some of the Textualists at the time I gave in to the public pressur
e to advance myself as a candidate for Librarian, one of the Three. I was asked in open debate by one of those Textualists how I’d be able to reconcile my taking of the oath I’d have to take as Librarian with my views as I had announced them for years about the intentions of al-Kebir. How, in short, could I defend the precepts of the Kitaab when my own principles disagreed with it?”
“And how can you?” Michel’s voice held a tone of unusual interest. He stared at the old man.
“I told my questioner,” said Pier, “that there was not just one Book of al-Kebir, there were as many different books as there were different people who’d read it. For the experience of life and all our teachings combine in each of us to make our own personal Book—that bundle of beliefs by which we live; and the Book that was al-Kebir’s in each case had to conform to the individual Book inside each reader if it was to be accepted by that reader. I did not doubt that the Book of al-Kebir in him would make it hard, if not impossible, for him to reconcile what he believed he read with what he believed I believed. But in me, there was no conflict between my own and al-Kebir’s Book that would prevent me from doing my duty if I was elected.”
“Ah,” said Michel softly, “somewhere I must have heard those words repeated. . . .”
He stopped, and Pier looked steadily into his eyes.
“And that,” the old man said, “is why I will not give you the means to destroy the Tectonal, even though my heart might be with you in many ways. I am one of the Three and must defend the Tectonal on my honor against the kind of destruction you’d bring on it. Al-Kebir may have been half or more a madman, with his desire to destroy the world; but the end result of what he started has been the development here of the finest scientific work place in the world, and the people to use it. No, I will not give you the means to damage what we have worked for generations to build.”
The Earth Lords Page 32