He got to his feet. Marta rose also; and Bart, along with Emma and Michel, found himself also rising.
“We will say goodnight,” said Pier formally—then the formality crumbled. He looked almost beseechingly at Bart. “You and Emma will come by at least one last time before you leave, if leaving is what you end up doing? Can we count on seeing you that one last time?”
“You’ll see us,” said Bart. “As far as I know, my father never broke a promise and I never have either. I promise you. We’ll see you before we go.”
chapter
twenty-three
THE OFFICE IN which the Emperor received Michel and Bart—Emma had come with them but had been separated from them just inside the main entrance and been taken to some separate waiting room from which she had not been called in with them—was large and businesslike. It was also almost devoid of furniture. A thick brown rug was underfoot. The walls and ceiling were panelled wood that was pierced by several massive, closed doors, and Bart realized that he had gotten used to walls hung with tapestries. The desk behind which the most important of the Three Who Command sat was large. It held only an inkwell, a pen, and a single piece of heavy, gray-toned paper, which had been pushed to one side.
Aside from the desk and its chair, the room contained only a handful of padded armchairs built to the physical dimensions of the Lordly race. Clearly visitors of any other rank were expected to stand. Michel led the way to just before the desk and bowed. Bart made himself do likewise, although he was aware that his dislike for doing so made it an awkward gesture on his part.
In any case, the Emperor paid no attention to him, concentrating his gaze instead on Michel.
“Well, Nephew,” he said in French, “it seems you’ve been up to something a little worse than your ordinary tricks?”
“Worse, Majesty?” said Michel innocently.
“Come now,” said the Emperor, gesturing at the paper on his desk, “it seems you used illegal means to commit the further illegality of introducing a slave to the room of the Tectonal, without authority. What’ve you got to say?”
“Why, I hardly know what to say, Majesty,” answered Michel. “I don’t want to accuse whoever reported this to you of being in error, but I did no such thing.”
The Emperor’s thin, arching black eyebrows went up in sardonic disbelief.
“You deny this?” he said.
“Why yes,” answered Michel. “When was it supposed to have happened, Majesty?”
“Yesterday, as you know very well,” said the Emperor. He smiled, and it was a pleasant, if brief, smile; but Bart did not like it, on the handsome, narrow face before him. “Come now, Michel, I hardly thought even you would try to get out of this with a direct lie.”
“I assure Your Majesty I would never lie to him,” said Michel, “any more than I would ever take a slave into the Tectonal room, unless duly authorized and ordered to do so. In fact, I can’t imagine why I would want to do such a thing. I was, indeed, in the Tectonal room yesterday; but only briefly, to give my half-brother and fellow Hybrid, here, Bart Saberut, a glimpse of the Tectonal. Since he grew up on the surface, he’d never had a chance to see such a thing. He was filled with wonder at the sight of it, Majesty.”
The Emperor still ignored Bart.
“Now,” he said, “what sort of a story is this?”
“Oh, it’s the absolute truth, Majesty,” said Michel. “A number of Hybrids saw us there, including Yna Sicorro—”
“This report is from Yna Sicorro,” said the Emperor, again indicating the paper on his desk, “fully admitting her own fault in letting herself be tricked by you into giving you a copy of your badge, so that the slave could get by the guard.”
“What slave, Your Majesty?”
The Emperor stared at him for a long moment, then got to his feet behind his desk.
“Stay!” he commanded. He went out one of the interior doors, closing it firmly behind him.
They waited. Bart had time to worry about Emma. How was she taking all this waiting, he wondered? As he had expected, last night after they had left the Guettrigs’, ushered out separately from Michel so that they had had no further chance to talk with Bart’s half-brother, Emma had asked him about the Tectonal.
So, he had finally told her. As he had suspected, she had been firm about doing something to stop it. But curiously she had not seemed as concerned as he, himself, about how they could do this, now that Pier had refused to help them.
“The thing is,” he had felt he must tell her, “I don’t see how we can do anything, now that Pier’s set himself against helping us in any way—”
“Don’t worry.” Unexpectedly she had patted his arm. “We’ve got some time yet.”
Her calmness had puzzled him; but he knew her too well to press her for an answer she was not ready to give. Sooner or later, she would tell him whatever was behind her surprising reaction to something he had known she would feel very strongly about. When she was ready she would tell him.
The Emperor came back in, found another piece of paper magically from below the top of his desk and wrote on it scratchily for a moment, then passed it to Michel. “The date and time are in the upper right hand comer,” he said.
Frankly leaning over to read what his half-brother had been given, Bart saw:
“We give our imperial word that all recorders have been turned off and all conversation from this moment in this room are held in complete privacy.”
It was signed “Zoltaan—EMPEROR.”
Michel folded the paper and put it slowly into a pocket of his suit.
“Thank you, Majesty,” he said.
“Your thanks are beside the point,” said the Emperor. “Now, can we get down to what’s actually going on, with no more nonsensical answers from you? If you’re not here to plead your side of the incident, yesterday, why are you here at all?”
“I’d like Your Majesty’s kind orders to send me on mission to the surface, taking along my half-brother, and the slaves Emma and Arthur Robeson.”
The Emperor nodded slowly, tilting back in his chair which, to Bart’s surprise, obediently changed the angle of its back and arms from the vertical to accommodate him.
“You know, Saberut,” he said, “every so often I think about sending you up to the surface instead of keeping you here; up to where you’d be out of sight and hopefully out of the minds of the less reliable of your cousins. I weigh the trouble you can cause me down here with the trouble you might be able to cause me, out of my sight up above, among your cousins there; possibly setting up some procedure for strangling our line of supply from the surface. Each time the answer comes up that I’m safer with you down here where I can watch you. You’re aware of all this, no doubt?”
“Why, yes, since Your Majesty asks me,” answered Michel mildly. “I’d concluded as much.”
“So you’re also aware that I’m not likely to send you up on mission under any circumstances. Yet here you show up, not only with a request for mission, but to be allowed to take along someone who presumably knows other ordinary humans up there who’ll believe what he’s seen, who has deliberately been given a view of the Tectonal itself. The question arises—why? What makes you think that I’d be likely, particularly in view of what you did yesterday, to suddenly let you have what I long ago decided you’d never have?”
“I’m not surprised Your Majesty’s mind finds this question bothersome,” said Michel.
“Good,” said the Emperor. “Then you’ll put it at ease by answering it for me, won’t you?”
“I’ll be happy to, Majesty,” said Michel. “I make this request of you now because it’s just occurred to me that you might prefer me up on the surface rather than talking further to my cousins down here—particularly about the case of a Hybrid who, against all custom, was put to duty as a slave instead of being given the rank and position his inheritance entitled him to.”
“Entitled!” exploded the Emperor, suddenly sitting straight up in his obedie
nt chair. But then he caught himself and leaned back again, speaking in the same easy voice he had been speaking in a moment before. “You certainly must understand, Saberut, there can be only one judge of what anyone in the Inner World is entitled to; and that’s the single concerted decision of the Three Who Command—whom I lead and direct.”
“Of course, Majesty,” said Michel, “just as there can be only one judge of the fear that if a Hybrid has been made into a slave, the same thing might happen to any of them . . . for any reason, or by the decision you spoke of; and the judge of that fear is the concerted opinion of those who do the great majority of skilled and professional work here in the Inner World. We Hybrids, ourselves.”
The silence in the office after Michel finished speaking was so complete it seemed to press down on Bart with a weight of its own. For what seemed several actual minutes, the Emperor neither moved, nor changed expression. Finally, he spoke.
“So,” he said quietly, “there we have it at last. You’d blackmail me into letting you go?”
“It was Your Majesty, not I,” said Michel, equally quietly, “who used the word ‘blackmail.’ ”
“Don’t split hairs with me, Saberut,” said the Emperor, still in his own quiet voice. “We both know what it is.”
He sat up in his chair and got to his feet. It was remarkable, Bart thought. The ruler of the Inner World was a full head shorter than either Michel or himself; but for all that, in this moment with his wide shoulders, his slender-faced, bony good looks and burning dark eyes, he seemed to loom as large as either of them. He turned half away from them and, putting his hands together behind his back, began to pace back and forth across the width of the room behind his desk. It was a few seconds before Bart realized that as he walked he was talking to himself, in the same French in which they had been holding their conversation, his voice gradually rising until it became understandable to both his listeners.
“. . . . damnable thing!” he was saying, and at that point to Bart’s astonishment he began to swear. Bart had not consciously taken note of it until now, but he suddenly realized he had never before heard any of the Lordly class use any religious, profane or obscene word. He realized now that unconsciously he had assumed that with the Book of al-Kebir as their bible, they were neither Muslims nor Christians, in spite of al-Kebir’s original conversion to the Muslim faith, which, as he remembered from the KITAAB, had been made solely for reasons of personal advantage. It occurred to him now—though it was unimportant at this moment—that others of those who were later to form the Lordly class could have been nominal Christians for the same reason.
He had assumed, in fact, that the Lords and Ladies had, for practical purposes, no religion at all; and somehow associated their lack of expletives with that assumption.
But the Emperor was swearing now, in a rising voice, in a language that gave him scope for highly imaginative profanities and obscenities. It came to Bart abruptly that what he was swearing at, while it was primarily Michel, Bart and everything connected with them, was actually at the Inner and surface worlds as a whole, and anything else that might threaten to frustrate him.
Abruptly he ceased swearing, ceased pacing, and swung about behind his desk to stand facing them; and all at once he was talking directly to them.
“Saberut!” he almost shouted at Michel. “You were the brightest light among your generation of Hybrids, just as no other Lord could touch me for intelligence. You should have been at my side, all along, making yourself useful. Instead, you’ve fought me every inch of the way, every inch of the way! With all you had, you were a fool like the rest of them. Stupid! Stupid! These things called humans are no more than animals! You, and our kindly old Guettrig, weeping oceans of tears over the fate of a tribe that’s spent its history in murder and in despoiling the world that was given them!”
He gave Michel no chance to answer, and obviously wanted none.
“Murder, wars and dirt—and still, the Liberals cry over them, generation after generation, and pardon them all their crimes and foulnesses. Yes, I know what you think of al-Kebir’s claim that we’re from a superior place from off this planet—and I don’t believe it any more than you do. Tell it in public that I said that and I’ll deny it. But I know, and al-Kebir knew, damn well he knew, some such story was needed to hang his plans on.”
He gasped, a long, indrawn breath.
“But the plans were necessary, the plans were good. Can’t you see that, you soft-minded fool? With that story the others like him swallowed his practical teachings—stay apart, take advantage, accumulate wealth . . . and above all learn, learn more and faster than the ordinary human animals and let only the elite live! That was what he sold them, to one great end—that in the end there would be only the elite, on a world they’d built themselves.”
He did pause now, as if waiting for an answer, glaring at Michel and Bart both, now. But Michel clearly had the sense to stay silent, and Bart saw no reason to speak.
“What have they done, from the beginning, but kill and maim each other? Steal from each other, torture and enslave each other, inhumanely—treat each other like the lower animals around them, that they also killed, tortured and maimed? They crowded together in cities and bred filth and disease. They sowed plagues and the greatest names in their histories were the greatest excuse for slaughter of their fellow man. In all the years since al-Kebir began what’s now the Inner World, have we ever had wars among ourselves? Have we prized stupidity, or sickness, or let disease run unchecked among us? Never! And meanwhile they’ve been up there on the surface, killing each other by the millions, turning the rivers into sewers, clearing the natural growth from the face of the world—the trees, the grasses, the animals—even poisoning the sea itself.”
“And while all this has been going on, what have we been doing? Learning! Studying! Finding out how to control even the massive center of this world—as we’ll learn to control the hurricanes and droughts and floods they aren’t able to do anything about but die under! And with all this, there are those like you who’d save them by destroying us!”
He stopped. His stare was all on Michel once more, and the glass went out of it.
“Now, Saberut,” he said, calm again, “you’ve heard more from me about me than any other living soul has. Well? No protests? No argument?”
“No, Majesty,” said Michel, in a completely expressionless voice. “The Book that is in you is the Book that is in you.”
“I didn’t think you would have,” said the Emperor contemptuously, ignoring Michel’s later words. “Let me tell you one thing more, then, to carry off with you. I always knew what I was and what I could do. Long before I was elected Emperor, in fact when I was a child, I made up my mind that whatever it should turn out to be, I’d give my life to doing the greatest thing there was to be done. And I found that greatest thing. It was to deliver this world into the hands of those who could put it to the best use. That I will do; and here in the Inner World, or up on the surface, neither you nor anyone else is going to get in my way!”
He stopped talking, went back to sit once more at his desk, producing another piece of paper on which he wrote.
“Names of the slaves?” he asked, still writing.
“Emma and Arthur Robeson,” answered Michel.
“You’ve left out one.” The Emperor raised his head and looked directly at Bart. “This one?”
“Bartholomew Saberut,” answered Michel.
The Emperor’s pen hesitated for a moment, and he wrote again.
“Very well, let it be Saberut,” he said.
“A Hybrid.”
“Yes, and we’ll call him a Hybrid, too, if that’s what you want,” said the Emperor.
He wrote again and stopped. He handed the paper across to Michel.
“You’ll have to make some preparations, I suppose,” he said. “But I want you gone as soon as possible.” He looked at the timepiece on his wrist.
“It’s not yet seven hundred hours. At
nine hundred, be in storeroom seven of warehouse twenty-nine. I’ve noted on that paper, there, that your orders are verbal; and our people above are commanded to accommodate you according to what you tell them. So you can draw on our offices for funds or go to hell in your own way.”
“Thank you, Majesty,” said Michel.
“Get out!” said the Emperor.
Bart, coached ahead of time by Michel, backed away beside his half-brother until they reached the door; then, hearing it open behind them, they backed on through it and watched it close between themselves and the man behind the desk.
“Now,” said Michel, jerking his head to indicate the way out, “we get out, as he said.”
But before they went, they had to ask that Emma be produced; and there was a small delay during which it seemed that she could not be found. Then it was discovered that she had been sent off by the Emperor the moment he had been told she was there.
“I hope she went to the Guettrigs’,” said Bart, concerned; and they headed for Pier and Marta’s home themselves.
But it turned out when they got there that, not only had Emma sensibly come here rather than reporting for her usual work or some other unpredictible destination; but she was in fact having breakfast with Pier and Marta, again an unheard-of thing. As usual, Pier was setting his own rules in his own household. Since neither Michel nor Bart had eaten, they were invited to join the breakfast party—an invitation Bart hungrily accepted but Michel declined.
“We’ve only got a little over two hours before we’re due in that storehouse the Emperor directed us to,” he said. “I’ve got to go get some things from my quarters to take with me—it won’t take long. I ought to be back in half to three-quarters of an hour. It’s safe enough for me, in any case, here in the Inner World; but Emma’s a slave, and Bart’s still technically one. I’d appreciate it, Uncle, if you’d keep them under your roof until I get back. The Emperor’s in no good temper and what he might do to them is anyone’s guess. Particularly if he could catch them wandering around loose.”
The Earth Lords Page 33