I shook my head.
Byrne licked her dry lips. “Let me just tell you one thing—”
“Kaer said no,” said da. “That finishes it.”
“Just hear me out, please. Here on Linnea, right here, right now, we’ve gone beyond the boundaries of our charter. No law exists here. No rights. No protections. You saw. Jorge wants to know where they’ve taken our people. He will have an answer tonight. And he knows how to get it. So if the drugs don’t work . . . well, he’ll use torture if he has to. And Smiller won’t stop him. But you can—if you walk in and look the Magistrate in the eye and ask him, then maybe, just maybe, we can stop this madness here.”
Da grabbed Byrne by the shoulder. “You can’t put that kind of burden on this child. Not anymore. Enough! When do you people stop! Never? Well, I say stop. No more! No more!”
“No, da—please. No more hurting Linnea. If we can stop it here, let me do it! Please!”
Byrne said, “Thank you, Kaer—!” She looked grateful and relieved.
Da threw his hands up helplessly. “Kaer—!”
“I know, da. But let me do the job I came to do. Let me do the job I want to do.”
“All right, all right.” Da rolled his eyes heavenward. “Let’s do it—but after this, no more, Kaer! No more!”
I didn’t say anything to that, because I already knew he didn’t mean it. We’d do whatever we had to if it meant we would get our Scouts back. We’d already shown that.
The Late Show
It didn’t take that long. This time I put on the body-stocking, the robe, and the beads. Byrne did a very simple makeup job, just a little color and some sparkles, nothing more. Da lowered the tiara and the hair onto my head and Byrne helped pin it into place. The whole time, the ground beneath us continued to vibrate, but nowhere near as close as before. There was a wall of burning flesh between us and the bulk of the onrushing herd. They were veering away from it now. But the stench of burning flesh was seeping into the boulder and there was little we could do about it.
“How long will the stampede continue?” I asked.
“Can’t say.” Byrne shrugged. She was touching up my eye makeup. “Hold still, Kaer.” She added, “Maybe another hour or two. Once you start a stampede you have to wait for it to run itself out. And none of those monsters wants to be the first to slow down. . . .” She took a step back. “All right. Done. Do you know what you have to do?”
I nodded.
She activated her comm-set. “Can you hear me now?” Her voice came through the earpieces hidden under the wig.
“Yes, I hear you fine.”
“You ready?”
“Let’s do it.” I reached for da’s hand and we followed Byrne back to the stage. The black curtains had been drawn all the way around the platform and a bank of overhead lights was pointing straight down into the stage. They were cycling through a series of heavenly colors—pink, gold, ochre, magenta, and back to pink again. Speakers focused Gregorian chants into the center. For a hastily assembled “heavenly experience,” the tech crew had done very well.
A row of monitors showed the man inside from various angles. He was big and as brawny as most of the Linneans I’d seen; but where the muscles of others had been firm with use, this man’s arms and legs had softened with authority and age. Where others were as shaggy as boffili, this man’s hair was neatly curled and trimmed, with hammered silver ornaments woven into his beard and along the top of his forehead. I studied him while Byrne talked, looking for a reason not to be scared of him.
“Magistrate Darron,” said Byrne. “Not a nice man. Knows how to work a crowd, says the right things, but very ambitious. Hungry for power and money. He’ll take anything you don’t nail down. Hit the ceiling a few years back, couldn’t rise any further in the church, so he went west and built a power base there. Went back to Mordren, tried to throw his weight around, didn’t work—you can’t bluff the folks at the Enclave. They sent him out here on this mission hoping to discredit him—he sees it as an opportunity to drive a wedge into the church and gain a lot more power for himself. He has contacts with the Mother Land, which means he has strong connections to the Hale-Stones. If anyone knows where our Scouts have gone, he will.”
“Can’t we just talk to him? Why do we need to do this charade?”
“Because we can’t just talk to him. It won’t work.” Byrne turned me to face her. “Kaer, listen to me. I wish we could do it your way, but we know we can’t. You saw what happened out there. The Hale-Stones warned these people about us—about Oerth-people. They probably told them to beware of false angels. We don’t know what they said—but we failed out there, and now we have to scramble to see what else we can do.
“Now, we know this man—we know his history. Do you know the term impacted cerebral fecaliths? It means fossilized shit-for-brains. Look it up in the dictionary, you’ll see Magistrate Darron’s picture. If he hears bad news, he sends out his troops. If he thinks he might hear bad news, he sends out his troops. Even if he doesn’t hear bad news, he sends out his troops to make sure everyone knows he won’t tolerate bad news. He punishes everyone who doesn’t give him what he wants. So this is not a man who listens well to others, and he does not let others bully him, bluff him, or overwhelm him. The man has convinced himself that he cannot make a mistake. He believes so much in his own rightness that any punishment we might threaten would only serve to strengthen his paranoid belief in his own wonderfulness. This man will die rather than admit to an error of any kind. The error always belongs to someone else.”
“He sounds like Jim Doberson. Even looks a little like him.”
“Good comparison. Then you understand. We have to do it this way, because we don’t have time to do it any other way. We’ll do it the same way we did the business on the tracks. I’ll watch on the monitors and I’ll coach you through the comm-link. We’ll take it slow and careful, very deliberate. All you have to do is look at him as if you have to decide what to do with him. It might work.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we’ll give him to Jorge after all. And if we have to do that, then you mustn’t think that you failed. Because you didn’t. You gave him the chance. Whatever we have to do here, we have justice on our side. You remember that.”
“Yes, Byrne. May I ask one question?”
“What?”
“How far do we have to go before we no longer have justice on our side?”
“Good question. When you find out the answer, let me know. You ready to go?”
Byrne showed me where to stand in front of a black drop. She and Alex held the sides of the curtains I would step through on my cue. I noticed Jorge standing to one side, arms folded, glowering skeptically. Smiller came over to stand beside him, looking worried. I gave them a thumbs-up gesture, but neither responded in kind. Smiller lifted a hand in a half-wave and that was it.
“All right, Kaer. Let’s do it.”
I climbed the stairs leading to the stage. Inside the curtains, all the lights flashed as bright as they could. A musical fanfare sounded, Alex and Byrne parted the curtains for me, and I stepped through.
The man was bigger than I expected him to be. On the monitors outside, he’d looked big. Here in the room, he was immense. I felt small. The platform had been raised higher, so I was looking down on him. This was supposed to give me the psychological advantage. But he was so huge, maybe 150 kilos, that the effect was pretty much wasted. He was standing alone, in a circle described by an overhead laser. Byrne had told me that if he took a step in any direction he would receive a mild shock. And each time he tried, the intensity of the shock would be increased. According to Byrne, Magistrate Darron had had to be shocked seven times before he learned to stay within the circle.
“All right, Kaer. Take your time. Look him up and down. Do that thing again, where you cock your head and narrow your eyes. Good. Perfect. Look at his feet, his legs, his belly. . . . Work your way up to his chest, his neck. . . . Look at his
nose. His forehead. Good. Stay focused on his forehead. He’ll think you’re looking in the eye. He’ll make it a staring contest. He doesn’t lose staring contests, so he’ll expect you to break first. If you look at his forehead or his nose, not his eyes, he can’t intimidate you—”
It was an eerie feeling, being a robot for Byrne. But it made it easier too. I wouldn’t have known what to say by myself. It was kind of like being in a play where you didn’t know the lines, with an invisible prompter was walking you through it.
The Magistrate glowered up at me. He wore a long white daygown that hung as far as his ankles. It had a high collar and elbow length sleeves. Over it, he wore a bright red robe of some heavy woven material. It was clearly a ceremonial costume, sleeveless with gold piping. Silver ornaments trimmed the neck and arm openings. More ornaments hung down the front. I knew they had religious significance, but we’d never spent much time on what they might mean in our own church services.
But as impressive as he looked in his robe, the effect was spoiled by the dirt and caked mud all over the front. The white team had found him lying face down in the muck and they hadn’t spent much time cleaning him up.
He had pig-like features and an ugly expression. I decided I didn’t like him. That made this deception a lot easier. He deserved it.
“All right, Kaer. Listen carefully. We’ve got a microphone trained on you and we’re going to echo and amplify your voice, so don’t be startled. I want you to start out by saying, ‘Magistrate Darron.’ You don’t have permission to use his name. He hasn’t freely given it to us, so when you address him by name, he should react very strongly to the insult. We’ve got bio-scanners on him. We want to calibrate his reactions, so let’s take it slowly. Choose your moment. . . .”
I focused my gaze on the man and said, “Magistrate Darron. . . .” My voice sounded different, as if coming from a distance.
The Magistrate blinked. He waited. He studied me. Despite the deliberate insult, he was still in total control of himself.
Byrne said, “Got it. All right, here we go. ‘Look up. See the world I come from.’” I repeated the line.
The Magistrate looked up. A screen lowered into position behind me. A projector on the other side began focusing images. There was a smaller monitor next to the projector, so I could see the same pictures.
First, there was an image of the Earth from space, the sun just creeping over the eastern edge. The camera view moved in steadily, one long swooping dive arcing sideways and around to swoop toward the western coast. We came in over the sea and there was a great golden bridge spanning a bay.
I looked to the Magistrate’s face. His eyes had widened. He was watching. He was interested. Whether it was the sheer novelty of seeing a moving picture, or whether it was the content of the pictures, I couldn’t tell. The camera circled San Francisco, then came in lower to show an aircraft carrier steaming out to sea. Another angle showed three planes leaping off its decks, one after the other. We followed the planes across the water and over the land. A train raced through the hills. Brightly colored automobiles sped around the graceful curves of a highway. The camera came back to the city, dropping to the city streets. Cars and crowds and towering buildings.
The Magistrate’s expression had changed. He looked uncertain. None of this could possibly make any sense to him.
“‘You see only the smallest part of my world, Magistrate Darron. All of the stories that you have heard of Oerth—they do not do justice to the truth. We have powers and abilities that your people have not imagined yet.’” Byrne fed me the line slowly. I repeated it a phrase at a time.
Now, a new set of images filled the screen. Elephants with men riding them. A trainer playing with a huge white tiger. A young woman playing catch with a gorilla too big to be real. Two men and a woman looking at a towering apatosaur. A great white whale breaching from the sea. A giant insect in a cage, attacking a cow. And more.
Magistrate Darron’s expression had gone unreadable. Byrne whispered in my ear. “They must have told him not to believe anything he saw. Never mind. We’ll keep going.”
“‘You cannot imagine the powers of destruction that we command.’ Say it firmly.” I did so.
And the images on the screen showed airplanes dropping napalm in a jungle, tanks shooting down buildings, explosions flattening buildings, and finally, of course—the blinding flash of a nuclear weapon and the flattening of a city. And then the screen went dark.
“Whatever stories you have heard, whoever has told you of our powers, they have not told you one-tenth of what we can do. Yes, we have the power to destroy your cities. We could destroy your world, if we chose to. We could unleash plagues that would leave your cities empty of life. Bodies would rot where they fell. We could turn unleash insects and pestilence that will turn your beautiful sea of grass into Hell. Or we could spread clouds of silent death that would leave your lands uninhabitable until your ochre sun burns out. And if the people who have told you of us, have told you of those powers too, they did not lie. Yes, we can hurl lightning and boil the seas and turn the skies dark with ash. Yes, we can start a fire in the sea of grass that will never burn out—”
I hesitated. I had repeated it all faithfully. But where was Byrne going with this?
“Stay with me, Kaer—” She fed me the next line.
“What we know of destruction, we learned as the smallest part of a much greater lesson. You’ve seen more of Oerth now, than any other person from Linnea. You’ve seen that we live as gods. We live in the air and under the sea, on mountains and in deserts, under the ice and in the forests. We have mastered the forces that your people cower against.
“Yes, we can destroy Linnea. And no, we will not destroy Linnea. We did not come ten thousand years across the darkness to bring harm to Linnea. No, Magistrate Darron. We came ten thousand years to share our wealth and our gifts with the children of the Mother. . . .” Ahhh.
“This is the tricky part, Kaer. Take it slow and careful.”
I forgot myself and nodded. But the Magistrate didn’t see it as an odd gesture. He was standing and staring at me, arms akimbo, looking aghast.
“We seek good men and women. People we can trust. We seek those who want to share the wealth of knowledge, who will turn around and share the vision with others. We bring possibilities to Linnea.”
Magistrate Darron looked skeptical. He hadn’t said a word and I somehow didn’t expect him to. He put his arms behind his back and shifted his weight. He looked me up and down. He looked arrogant again.
“Hold your position, Kaer. His body language says he wants to negotiate from strength. Wait a minute—” She went away for a moment to confer with someone off-channel. She was back quickly. “All right, say this—”
“Magistrate Darron. You imprisoned four of our people. Good people who meant you no harm. They meant no harm to anyone on Linnea. Our people came here to learn your ways, so we could bring you gifts. And your people committed the sin of inhospitality. You imprisoned our colleagues. You beat them. You mocked them. You suspended them in cages and let the rabble abuse them. You—Magistrate Darron—you have allowed a sin against the people of Oerth. How shall you repair the damage that has occurred here?”
“Open your hands, Kaer. Wait for his answer.”
I did so.
He held his position.
“See that pose, Kaer? We call that passive-aggressive. All right, say this—”
“Magistrate Darron. Tonight, you have seen what force we will bring to bear to rescue our people from any more savageries. We will use this force wherever we have to until we find our people. We would prefer not to. You and you alone have the power to save many lives. Tonight, you can return to your world as a hero. Or, you can return humbled and shamed. You choose.”
He raised an eyebrow at me. He didn’t believe.
“It looks like he wants to do it the hard way,” said Byrne. “All right. Last chance—”
“Magistrate,” I said. �
��Tell me where I can find my friends. If you do that, I will reward you. If you will not do that, I will not protect you.” Pause. “I will not ask you again.”
Magistrate Darron spat at my feet.
“‘On your own head then—the consequences will fall!’ Say it angry and point your finger at him!”
“On your own head then—the consequences will fall!” And as I said, it a godawful chord blasted from the speakers. The lights went up to blinding bright. The black drapes were yanked away—and Jorge and several other men in bright red jumpsuits appeared on either side of me. And Magistrate Darron stiffened as a great shock went through his body. I thought for a moment I actually saw flickers of lighting on the silver ornaments he wore.
Byrne came up behind me, pulled me back away as Jorge and the others rushed in. She turned me away and guided me forcefully down the stairs, passing me into da’s grip. “You don’t want to see this, Kaer!”
But I did. I turned around and caught a quick glimpse of the struggling magistrate being strapped to a table—and then da rushed me away and into the bus-tractor just as the screams began.
“It just keeps getting worse—doesn’t it, da?”
He just held me close and rocked me.
At least, I think he rocked me. The boulder still vibrated with the sounds of the herd—
Sefan
Magistrate Darron died two hours later.
But they revived him.
Then Byrne and Smiller and Jorge had a monstrous argument which none of them won. They slammed into Bus-Tractor One and argued back and forth, and even though we couldn’t hear their specific words, the meaning was pretty clear anyway. I’d never seen adults argue like that. Someone said it would probably go on all night. And there was no place to go to get away from it because the boulder had fallen strangely silent. After all those hours of steady drumming, the absence of it was strangely disturbing.
Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two Page 29