“A hundred years, Bart,” said Emma, looking up from the open suitcase, beside which she was still kneeling. “A hundred years for I the world to save itself.”
“You can’t do that!” shouted Arthur, lunging for the loop of thread leading from the explosive package to the first spindle. “Don’t you realize what you’re doing? They might let us go, otherwise—but they’ll hunt us all down like wild animals if we do something like this!”
Michel’s arm shot out, knocking the lighter man back and almost off his feet.
“You interfere with this, and they won’t have to hunt you down,” growled Michel, reminding Bart eerily of Paolo. “I’ll wring your neck like a chicken’s, myself!”
He turned to Bart.
“Watch him, Bart,” he said. “I know how to do this and you don’t—so it’s going to have to be up to you to keep him away from us while I let the explosive down and set the charge.”
Bart avoided looking at Emma. On her part, Emma said nothing.
“Don’t worry,” Bart said. “I’ll see he doesn’t interfere.”
He stood up and turned to face Arthur. But Arthur made no effort to move from where Michel’s shove had sent him. He only stared at Bart with a malevolent hatred.
“You’re killing us all,” Arthur said, “and it’s you who pretend to love my sister!”
Bart did not answer. He kept his eyes steadily on Arthur, hearing behind him the rustle of paper and occasional muttered bits of conversation between Emma and Michel. The minutes slipped slowly by.
“All ready,” announced Michel’s voice at last. “I’ve set it to blow in thirty minutes. That should give us time to get down to the lake and the canoe, and still let us be near when the explosive goes off. We don’t want to leave until we know that the job’s been done. That agree with your thinking, Bart? If you’ve some objection, I can still change the timing on that box.”
“No,” said Bart. “Thirty minutes’ll be fine. For one thing, I can take us back directly instead of making the dogleg we made on the way up by going to that tree-trunk first. Let’s go.”
They went, leaving the open suitcase, and the propped-up ring still around the turning shaft. They climbed the stairs and stepped out into the midaftemoon sunlight. Bart carefully swung the fake boulder back into place. Unbidden, the thought came to him that the motion of setting it up was the same motion with which a gravestone might have been raised into place. But he said nothing of this to the others.
They had the canoe back in the water and were reloading it when they felt the reaction of the Tectonal’s breakup.
It was not the sound of the explosion itself that reached them, for that relatively small shock would have been contained by the miles of vertical shaft-tube and the closed room above its top end. What they were made conscious of was the actual breakage of the great shaft itself.
The first signal came without warning, like a sharp, momentary rap on the soles of their feet—as if they were mice scurrying about the rafters on the upper side of a giant’s ceiling, and the giant himself, annoyed by the sounds of their movements, had reached up to bang with his massive fist on the ceiling’s underside.
This was followed by a vibration too small to produce any visible tremor in the surface about them, or even in their legs. A vibration that they sensed in their eardrums more than felt, but which was undeniably there as it rose in amplitude for perhaps a minute and a half, and then finally fell away to silence again.
“That’ll be the shaft breaking and binding against the tube, all along its length,” said Michel with satisfaction.
They climbed into the canoe and pushed off.
“Look!” said Emma.
They looked back to see something like a wisp of whitish-gray cloud, or part of a plume of smoke, ascending over the treetops farther up the slope. It did not grow, or continue, however, but drifted away on the slight breeze above the treetops, thinning out as it went until it was no more than a streak of haze, quickly disappearing.
“Let’s go,” said Bart again.
The others, who had stopped to watch the cloud, turned back to settling themselves in the boat again; Bart, in the stem of the canoe, swirled his paddle in the water, turning them so that they moved parallel to the land, headed past the opening of the underground river down which they had come. He intended to push on into the main expanse of the lake before heading out at a sharp angle toward the other shore, northward and away from the direct route to Fort. Shadwell.
“No,” said Michel, plying his paddle in the prow to turn the canoe back into the current from the entrance to the underground river.
Bart dug his own paddle in strongly; and the canoe, caught between two conflicting impulses, lost headway and began to drift outward into the lake on the slow current from underground.
“What’s all this?” demanded Bart harshly. Michel looked back; over his shoulder at the others.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, “but I’m going to have to go back. I’m not going with you. Forgive me for taking you back into danger a second time; but I didn’t trust you to get by alone with Cousin Lehrer at the trading post. He’d met me; he knew me. That saved a lot of questions.”
They stared at him in silence.
“It had to be this way,” said Michel. There was a different note in his voice. “I’ll try not to put the rest of you to any risk, if I can. If there’re people—people come to check on Chandt and his Steeds—already at the ledge by the time we get close, we’ll hear their voices well before we come around the curve into sight under their lights. If that’s the case, I’ll slip overboard and swim the rest of the way back. The current’s not that strong; and once I get there, I can hide in the water between the boats until they’ve taken the bodies off; and there’s a chance for me to slip out and go back the way we came.”
“Hold it,” said Bart, backing his paddle against the current to hold the craft where she was. “I’m sorry, Michel, but you’ve got to give me a better reason than that, why we should risk taking you back.”
“I’ve said I’m sorry.” Michel’s face was unhappy. “It’s just that I can’t go with you. I didn’t realize it earlier, but I never could have. I’ve got to go back. As I say, I hate putting the rest of you at risk to do it. But it’s too far for me to swim in water that cold; and if I’d taken a canoe from the dock, no matter how good a reason I gave him then, Lehrer’d have guessed the truth later on when he heard I was back below. Two days after that, the whole Inner World would have known—not just the Emperor and the Guettrigs—that you were outside on your own, knowing all about us down there.” “That’s not the answer I need,” said Bart, still holding the canoe in place. “I want to know why you think you have to go back. Did you plan this from the start?”
“My God, no!” said Michel emphatically. “You wouldn’t think that of me? Pier found himself a family in you and Emma; and so did I. You have to understand. Our father left for the surface before I was old enough to really get to know him, and my mother died in less than six months after that. So it seemed to me I was alone in the world; and I built a sort of shell, which was me, the way everybody knew me, and lived alone in it, until that moment when you proved to me I wasn’t alone.”
“What is all this?” demanded Arthur.
“Be quiet, Arthur,” said his sister.
He gaped at her. His face twisted in anger and his mouth opened. Then he closed it again and sat silent. Michel, ignoring him and Emma, was staring hard past them at Bart.
“You can’t imagine what it meant to me to find out I had a brother-even a half-brother,” he said. “Your being there made my father real to me. It made me someone with a family, just like everyone else in the world. That’s why what Pier said to us last night suddenly reached me and made sense to me. Just as he said, I had my own self-made Book inside me. But I’d been refusing to look at any part of it that pretended I was like other people. When I did I saw that it was Pier I agreed with—not our father, for all I�
�d worshiped the idea of him all these years. The Inner World has to straighten itself out, or be straightened out by people on its inside.” He paused. Bart felt the need to say something, but could not think of the words he wanted.
“It’s all right for you,” Michel said. “You were born up here. You belong here. But I belong down there; and my duty’s down there, just as Pier’s is. I’ve got to go back. It was Pier’s talk that made me see it. I’d heard it before, but now it’s real. And the only possible thing for any of us is to follow his own Book; and most of us do. Tell me, Bart, why did Paolo do what he did?”
Bart floundered.
“Paolo?” he said. He could not dodge the question after what his half-brother had just said to him, but it was hard to put what he felt into words. What was worse, it triggered off a strong feeling of guilt in him for not having recognized what was in Paolo, earlier.
He would never forget what Paolo had done; and he could not be sure—that was the hell of it—that in Paolo’s place he would have done as much for Paolo. Then he suddenly realized that it was not necessarily a reciprocal matter. It was a case of the inner Book Pier had talked about, all over again; and he was ashamed that Michel should have recognized it before he did, himself. The feeling of guilt lifted from him and the words he needed came.
“Michel,” he said slowly, “I think—I’ll never be sure, but I think—Paolo did what he did because he was the sort of person who ought to have lived a few hundred years ago, when the world would have fitted him better. Laws and regulations—they didn’t mean a thing to Paolo. There’d always been laws and regulations, there always would be. Someone would make them, arbitrary rules that he had to obey in order to stay alive. But that’s all they were—arbitrary rules. They didn’t have any meaning of themselves for him.”
He stopped to look into Michel’s eyes.
“Am I making sense to you?”
“Very good sense,” answered Michel. “Go on.”
“All right, the rules meant nothing, except that under certain conditions he had to obey them,” said Bart. “What did mean something to him was his own code, his own Book—and that was very simple. Anything went; but if someone was a friend to you, you were a friend to him. That’s all there was to it—”
“It was enough to make Lorena fall in love with him,” skid Emma softly.
“And it was enough to make him go up against Chandt, the one man he was really afraid of—and that cost him his life,” said Bart harshly.
“But he held to his Book,” said Michel from the bow of the canoe as they floated on the gently swirling water, kept in place by the movements of Bart’s paddle. “And if he had a Book and the Emperor has one and other people—like Pier—each have their own—you can’t expect me not to have one, can you, Brother?”
Bart looked at him; and in fact Michel’s face seemed changed, enough so that he seemed to be looking at a man he had never seen before.
“I’m sorry, Bart,” said Michel. “Our father believed what he did, and you probably believe he was right. Pier doesn’t. Pier believes that people like the Emperor have to be fought inside the Inner World, and I’m afraid, after all, it’s Pier I agree with. I didn’t realize that until I saw Paolo die for the way he saw the world. But I do now. That’s why I have to go back.”
Bart felt he should argue with this, but somehow he could think of nothing to say that fitted at this moment.
“I just didn’t realize how deeply I agreed with Pier, with what he said at his home, just before we said goodbye to him and Marta,” went on Michel. “It wasn’t until I saw what Paolo was willing to do that I realized I didn’t have any choice with my own way of looking at the worlds, both outer and Inner. Bart, Pier needs me back there. All the Liberals need me back there.”
“The Emperor’ll kill you the minute he finds out you’re back,” said Bart.
“You’re wrong,” answered Michel. “The one place I’m completely safe from him is openly living back in the Inner World. He admitted this himself, remember? He can’t even take the chance of trumping up some kind of false charges against me so he can act, because even true charges wouldn’t be believed by the majority— Hybrids and Lordly class alike. No, there, in the lion’s mouth, I’m safe; and there I can do the most damage to what he wants.”
There was a moment of silence in which everyone waited for Bart to react. He ended it, finally, with a sigh; then dug his paddle in deeply and sent the canoe’s nose forward toward the opening of the underground river. They moved into shadow, into darkness; and as they came into the curve, a lamp switched on on the wall of the cave, lighting their way around the curve.
“We’ll hear anybody up ahead on the ledge long before they see this, what with the bright lights there,” Michel told them.
After that, there was very little said. They reached the landing and there was no one there but the dead. Nothing had changed. No one had come yet. Michel get out onto the rock. He shook hands with Bart and Emma lifted her arms to him. He reached down, picked her up out of the canoe, and they hugged each other for a moment, wordlessly.
Then he lifted her back down into her place in the center of the canoe.
“Goodbye,” said Michel.
“Goodbye,” said Bart, as he backed the canoe once more into the current of the river that immediately began to carry them away again downstream.
“Goodbye,” said the others, even including Arthur.
They went away; and the ledge with Michel standing on it looking after them grew smaller in the distance; then was cut off from sight entirely as the curving of the river put a rock wall between them and the ledge. Arthur, without being given orders, had moved up to the front of the canoe to take up the paddle. Somewhat to Bart’s surprise, he was of some use with it. The automatic lights on the rock walls once more lit their way out into the sunlight.
Once out on the open lake Bart turned the canoe and, behind the screen of the island, headed away on a slant across open water in a move that would have worried Lehrer, who had thought of them all as amateurs at north woods travel. The change of direction swung them generally more and more west until they had passed that point of the compass and were headed north.
“This isn’t the way to Fort Shadwell,” said Arthur as they began to approach the lake’s farther shore.
“No,” said Bart economically from the stem of the boat. He used his paddle to swing the canoe parallel to the shore, but Arthur dug in his own paddle and turned the bow back toward a nearby possible landing spot.
“I thought as much,” Arthur said. He produced one of the revolvers they had gotten from Lehrer Green. He held it casually, but it was pointed generally past Emma, in Bart’s direction. At some time he had gotten it from among the other gear in the boat. There was a note in his voice Bart had never heard before.
“Then here’s where we part company. I want a rifle, my pack, and enough food and gear to get me on foot to Fort Shadwelk It only ought to take me a week or so longer to get there that way than it would’ve by boat. I’ll also take a third of that money Michel got from what’s-his-name—Lehrer—if you don’t mind.”
“Arthur,” said Emma, “you’re being foolish.”
“That’s exactly what I’m not being, sister dear,” said Arthur.
“What was foolish of me was to spend all these years taking care of you when I could have been making something of myself out on my own. Well, now you’ve got this chunk of bone and muscle to take care of you; and I give him to you freely. As Michel said back there, we’ve all got our Book; and I suddenly realized what mine is.”
He gestured with the revolver at Bart.
“You paddle into shore,” he said. “Just to make sure everything goes smoothly, I’m going to step out first and keep this gun on you while you split up our possessions.”
“You damn fool!” said Bart. “It was Emma who took care of you all those years—mainly because you didn’t have enough sense to take care of yourself. What are you going t
o do with the money? Try to make yourself a fortune as a flash gambler?”
“Just paddle,” said Arthur.
“Do what he says, Bart,” said Emma. “If Arthur’s determined to go, we can’t keep him.”
“You’re right about that,” said Arthur, rising and stepping onto the muddy shelf of land upon which the canoe had pushed its prow. He held the revolver steady on Bart, as Bart used his paddle to swing the canoe side-on to the shore. “Now, get busy laying out my stuff.”
Bart did so, regarding Emma with more than a touch of surprise. She seemed unusually calm about letting Arthur leave them after all these years of watching out for him and making a home for him.
“It’s all right, Bart,” she said suddenly, apparently reading his thoughts. “Arthur had to make up his mind to leave us someday.”
Good Lord, thought Bart, she must have been seeing this change coming in Arthur for some time. Well, the man had been altered by his time as a slave in the Inner World, and maybe even, as he said, by what Michel had said. In no way had it made him any more likeable; but maybe it had given him a little more common sense and backbone. Bart finished dividing up the food and gear and making the pack ready for Arthur. He laid the rifle and ammunition, both for a long gun and for the revolver, on the ground beside the pack and straightened up.
“There you are,” he said to Arthur, and—disregarding the revolver—turned his back on the man to get back into the canoe and take his place in its stem. It was only then he saw that Emma had moved up into the bow and taken up a paddle.
“Emma, you can’t do that!” he said.
“Certainly I can. Just as well as Arthur,” she replied and pushed off from the land. She looked back at her brother. “Goodbye, Arthur. God keep you safe.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Arthur, who was already putting on the shoulder straps of the pack. “Just try to stay alive yourself with the kind of company you keep.”
Bart put his paddle in the water and helped turn the canoe back on its original course, parallel to this shore, which ran only about another two hundred yards before ending in a bend which opened on a wider stretch of lake. Arthur was left, unseen behind them.
The Earth Lords Page 38