“It is,” Salap said.
Rustin began to stammer a few words about resigning. Salap laid one hand lightly on his shoulder and said, “We have no time for social games.”
“I have earned this position, and I have always relied on the confidence of Able Lenk!” Rustin cried out, tears rolling down his flat, red cheeks.
“We can all be useful,” Salap concluded after a moment of painful silence. Rustin wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, blinking rapidly.
“I would be honored to have Ser Salap tell me what's happening here,” Lenk said.
“Clearly, Brion reveals part of the truth,” Salap said. “Some form of collaboration has occurred.”
“Are they capable of doing more?” Fassid asked.
“What do you fear them doing?”
“You mentioned Martha's Island making human-shaped scions.”
Salap shook his head. “That may mean nothing here. What Brion has done could be much more dangerous. Brion may be right—it could be both triumph and mistake.”
“He's not an easy man to understand,” Fassid said.
“I understand him well enough,” Lenk said.
“What else did Brion confess to?” I asked before I gave the words much thought.
Fassid looked at me as if I were some sort of noisy insect.
“Ser Olmy witnessed the death of a village, not too many months ago,” Randall said, neatly giving me a reason for speaking up, stepping out of my place. All but Lenk and Fassid nodded sympathetically. There were many undercurrents in this room, and I could not track them all.
Lenk turned back to the window.
“It's a good question,” Keo said. “Brion has given military and even most civilian authority to General Beys. Beys has been making most of the major policy decisions for at least two years. He began sending ships out to gather supplies—that is, raid villages—last year. This year, he accompanied the raiders personally, planning to force Able Lenk to concede authority. He raided all around Elizabeth, and he stole children. He built sail barges along the coast and sent the stolen equipment and food and children back to Naderville. They're alive, Brion says, and are being well-cared for.”
“Their parents are dead,” Fassid said bitterly. “I despise the man.”
“Why did Beys take the children?” I asked. Lenk looked directly at me, as if to reevaluate what he had seen earlier. Randall and Salap regarded me with a fixed intensity that might have been fascination, or a warning.
“They lost over half of their children in the famine,” Keo said. “It was that bad.”
“He did not come to me,” Lenk said. “If we had known, we would have shared what little we had.”
“He didn't want your help because it would have made him look weak,” Fassid said. “Beys may not have acted on his direct orders, but he knew what Brion wanted. A future, a people to rule.”
Randall said, “Children were kept in the compound where we spent the night.”
“Yes. Some of the children are here,” Lenk said. His throat bobbed and his eyes narrowed. “Makes things very complicated. Hostages now.”
The children could not be considered hostages unless Lenk was being pressured to do something, to agree to something—or unless he planned to exert pressure himself, and felt Brion might refuse.
“I don't see that this talk gets us anywhere,” Rustin said. “We're here to discuss the ecos and what Brion has accomplished.”
“So we are,” Salap said, eyes languid.
Lenk's face became lax, almost dead-looking. I saw again the features of the soldier on the prow of the flatboat. In the grip of overwhelming history. Not all the truth was being told; perhaps very little.
I had hoped to admire Lenk in some way, for his leadership and presence, as a force of divaricate society. Instead, he made me uneasy. I felt his power, could not help but respect his presence, but it seemed only half the man was truly with us. The other half was hidden and would never be shown.
“We have no further meetings scheduled.” Fassid said. “Brion canceled tomorrow's meeting with Able Lenk. He's suggested we discuss certain issues with General Beys—”
“I will not meet with that man,” Lenk said.
“No, we've agreed that Brion is who we must talk with,” Keo said with a regretful sigh. “He is an enigmatic and difficult man, and this Chung woman is another enigma.”
“She escorted you here,” Fassid explained. “Caitla Chung, Brion's wife, was her sister. I think she's also Brion's mistress, though that's hard to judge—he could have so many of them.”
Lenk's face underwent a sudden and very brief transformation. In what had, until now, been flat weariness, I saw pass a shudder of deep anger. In a blink, the weariness returned.
21
I awoke in darkness and did not immediately know where I was or where I had been. I remembered being in brightness going down a long hallway, perhaps into another room. That was a dream. Finally the dreaming had begun.
I did not welcome the returning memory of where I was: still in Brion's nightmare. I felt strongly that another gate would open soon and I would be taken to the presiding minister for debriefing. It would be a grim story but not so grim as the fear I had felt in the dream at the thought of going into that other room. I rolled over in the bunk and pinched my earlobe until it hurt, struggling to sharpen my thoughts.
An electric light came on in the darkness.
I sat up. The room seemed even more drab and impersonal than it had the night before. Salap, Randall, and I had each been given private quarters near the compound, away from the palace of stones and the vivarium. There were no windows; it was little different from a prison cell, but for the furnishings, which were at least comfortable, though worn.
The electric light on the ceiling sang faintly. Through the door, a woman's voice said, “Ser Olmy, you are expected.” It was Hyssha Chung.
“By whom?”
“Ser Brion and General Beys.”
I swung my legs out of the bed. “I'm getting dressed,” I said. “What time is it?”
“Early morning.”
Chung regarded me with some interest this time, as I came through the door. “Your shirt is out in the back,” she said. From her, that seemed a statement of great affection. It almost made her charming.
I tucked my shirt in and followed her out of the building onto a dirt path between high brick walls. Beyond, the tall, dense thicket began, and we entered a tunnel through the densely woven growth. The walls of the tunnel rustled slightly as we passed through, dark intertwined branches moving less than a centimeter as the great mass of the thicket above our heads made minor adjustments.
“Do these tunnels ever fill in, or grow back?” I asked Chung.
“No,” she said.
We met up with Salap and Randall at a juncture of four tunnels. They were accompanied by two male guards. Each guard wore a holstered pistol. Electric lights hung from the roofs of the branching tunnels, suspended from dry, hard vines as thick as a man's leg. Chung took the left-swinging branch—I believed it headed south, but could not be sure—and we followed, the guards close behind.
Fifty meters down the tunnel, we came to a bend, and around the bend we saw daylight. The tunnel ended, and we emerged at the bottom of a bowl-shaped crater, perhaps a kilometer across. We stood in a gap where the crater wall had collapsed and the gap had been filled in with thicket.
The air within the crater was warm and still. The thicket above and behind rustled like waves on a distant beach.
In the center of the crater, a mass of shiny black hemispheres, studded with spikes and surmounted by arches, resembled a pile of huge, dead spiders. A path led down the rocky bottom of the crater to the pile. Chung proceeded down the path, and again we followed. I wondered if she relished the role of silent guide.
The crater appeared barren. It reminded me of Martha's Island, but here and there, steam and drifts of sulfurous gas still rose from vents around the bowl
.
“Do you come here often?” Randall asked.
“Too often,” Hyssha Chung said.
The path skirted the base of a shiny arch, curved between two black hemispheres as perfect as blown glass bubbles, and we stood before a small, low white stone building that had been hidden until now.
“This part we made,” Chung said. She opened a double door of thicket-xyla, cleverly fitted and interwoven, and we entered a cool, dark room that smelled strongly of cut grass. A radiance of long gaps in the ceiling allowed sun to draw bright lines on the lava gravel floor.
I looked up from the sunlines to see two men standing in shadow by a table at the center of the whitewashed block-walled room. We crossed the room, feet crunching in the lava gravel, dazzled by the brilliant shafts of sun.
This room contained shelves lined with large bottles of liquid, most of them green or dark brown in color. The smooth concrete floor sloped to a drain at the center. The floor was covered with green and brown stains, despite its appearance of having been recently scrubbed. Damp spots and a rivulet of water darkened the concrete.
The air smelled overpoweringly of vegetation. Three electric lights in the ceiling came on, and I saw the two men clearly for the first time, in the center of the room.
A small sinewy man stood to the right of the table, his face thin, pushed-up nose and high, hollow cheeks giving him an exaggerated boyish appearance, verging on the simian. He seemed at first glance to be my height, but he stood a few centimeters shorter. Lank brown hair hung past his ears. His eyes were large and liquid, dark green, and his skin was sallow. He seemed ready to smile with any provocation: glad to see us, as if we were friends long absent. He wore a simple silver-gray coat and pants, the coat laced at the front, half open to reveal a collarless white shirt, and his hands were covered by dingy brown gloves. In one hand he carried a piece of string, which he wound and rewound around the finger of his other hand.
“Ser Brion, General Beys, these are Sers Salap, Randall, and Olmy.” Brion looked me over shrewdly, rubbing his shoulder with one hand as if it pained him, then tapped his fingers in a silent tattoo on his biceps. He approached and looked me over as if he were deciding whether or not to buy me. He smiled. “General?”
Beys wore a gray tailored suit. Little taller than Brion, he was thickset and broad shouldered, a small bull, powerful, with thick, ruddy hands. His eyes seemed almost merry, set deep in a milky countenance above reddish cheeks. Beys shrugged. “I can seldom judge men by their appearance. We hide ourselves so well.”
Randall stood stiffly, hands clasped behind his back, eyes focusing on the others in the room, one at a time, mechanically. I could sense by his posture and the tight, white-jointed tangle of his fingers his passion against Beys and Brion.
Brion lifted his eyes and stared directly at me, his smile genuine, his eyes gleaming with intense interest. “All right. Show me something. Kill me now rather than wait. I'm sure you've been filled with hatred by Lenk's people.”
I think he half expected me to lift a finger and blast him to ashes. He seemed happy with the thought, and a little disappointed when I did nothing. His eyes dulled and his smile weakened.
“You don't want to kill me?”
“No.”
“Could you kill me if you wanted to?”
“I don't have any weapons,” I said.
He examined me again, as if the first time had not been sufficient. “Inside or out?”
“No weapons,” I said.
He focused suddenly on Salap. “You are Mansur Salap. I know your name, of course. Your assistant, Shatro, seems to think he's been useful to me. Actually, I've been aware of Ser Olmy's presence on Lamarckia for some time now.”
He turned his gaze on me again and his smile grew, as if he were reading my thoughts. “Usually I hear about poseurs and unfortunates. In your case, my contacts may have stumbled on the real thing.” Brion's smile broadened. “How long have you been here?” he asked.
“One hundred and forty-three days.”
“Does Lenk know who you are?”
“I don't know.”
Brion stepped back but still stared at me. “I expected the Hexamon would send an army to punish us and take us back to Thistledown.”
“I never expected that,” Beys said mildly.
“Well, I hoped for one,” Brion said. He motioned for us all to sit on the thicket-xyla chairs. We formed a circle around the table in the center of the square room. “Ser Shatro thought he would gain some advantage or revenge by turning you in. He doesn't like you. He doesn't like anybody much now. He's a very disappointed man.”
“Not my best student,” Salap said.
“It's interesting, the first time I have a chance to meet with Lenk, and he brings people far more interesting than himself ... Among them, key scientists rescued from a shipwreck. A ship captained by Keyser-Bach. I'd have enjoyed meeting that man. I regret his death. I'm honored to meet you, Ser Randall, and you, Ser Salap. I've received copies of all your journals and publications.”
Salap nodded, but said nothing. My admission had thrown this meeting into confusion. Only Brion seemed to have a sense of direction.
He turned to me, hands on his knees, and asked, “Are you here to judge us?”
“I'm here to see if humans have damaged Lamarckia.”
“It's taken them a long time to get around to us,” Brion said. “Time enough for a new generation to be born—and for a lot of us to die. Is the Hexamon going to descend on us and reclaim our planet?”
“I'm not in communication with them.”
“Do you have a clavicle?”
“No.”
“No way to communicate with Thistledown?”
“No,” I said.
“Did Lenk bring his clavicle on the ship?” Brion asked Beys.
“Yes,” the general answered, lifting his chin and scratching his neck. His fingers left pale marks on the reddish, stubbled skin there. His eyes seemed small in such a broad face, one eye brown, one eye pale green.
“It doesn't work anymore,” Brion confided. “He still carries it with him, but he broke it in anger years ago. That's supposed to be a secret.” Brion sniffed and flicked his gaze back to me with birdlike speed. “So, if nobody comes for you, you can't return to the Way. You're one of us now.”
Beys shook his head. “He can never be one of us. Shatro tells us you witnessed the destruction at a village on the Terra Nova River.”
“I did,” I said. “The village of Moonrise.”
“Are you here to judge us for that, and pass word back to the Hexamon that we're criminals?”
I did not answer.
Beys shook his head again, slowly. “Something's gone wrong, hasn't it?” he asked. “They don't think it's worthwhile to send an army.”
“Maybe they can't open a gate long enough,” Brion said.
“I was fifteen years old when my parents brought me here,” Beys said. “I suffered starvation and illness. I watched my sister and my mother die in childbirth. Lenk did this to us all. If the Hexamon comes, I am prepared to be judged. We have done what we must to survive.” He turned away. “He's an agent,” he concluded, looking down at the floor. “He has the look. None of the others did. We probably should kill them all.”
Brion seemed mildly alarmed by that suggestion. “I don't think they're a threat to us.”
The news—or rumor—about Lenk's clavicle was slowly sinking in. If it was broken, and nobody else had arrived on Lamarckia by now, there was little chance I'd ever finish my mission.
Or rather, my mission had become my life.
That disturbed me more than I wanted to deal with now. I had to keep calm before this boyish, simian-faced man and the cheerful, stocky Beys, with his merry cheeks and deadly words.
“Still, you have some interest,” Brion said. “I've respected Ser Salap for many years. Some of his works have given me the clues I've needed to make my biggest discoveries. General Beys shares much of the re
sponsibility, as well. He's given me the time to concentrate.”
“I hope we have time, later, for a long conversation,” Beys said. “I regret I won't be able to stay much longer. I'd enjoy hearing about what's happened on Thistledown and in the Way.”
“There's diplomacy to be taken care of, more discussions with Lenk,” Brion said. “If they can be called that. The Able Man doesn't do much listening. So many things to plan, arrangements to be made. We all have to be watchful. Ser Salap, why did you come to Lamarckia?”
“I believed in Lenk,” Salap said.
“Do you believe what you see here—the vivarium, all our work?”
“Yes.”
“A collaboration, communication?”
Salap nodded.
“Ser Randall?”
“It seems real,” Randall said.
Brion chuckled. “All of this—the crater, the stone chambers—used to be the home of a seed-mother. Thousands of years ago, the seed-mother moved to another location, up the canal. That's where we'll go. I want to show you some of what we've done. My wife and I. I haven't been up the canal for months. But with such learned gentlemen here, and Ser Olmy, a very special visitor, I think the negotiations can wait.” He nodded decisively. “It's more important that you all see what we've managed to do.”
Brion leaned toward me, as if addressing a child. “I can't tell what you're thinking. You have some character and discipline, Ser Olmy. That makes you different from most of us. We were brought here by a fool, on a promise that was broken as soon as we arrived. We've been sinking ever since.
“Come with me up the canal tomorrow and I'll show you how much further we have to go before we reach bottom.”
General Beys regarded me with his small deep-set eyes and crinkled his pink cheeks in a friendly smile. He nodded as if saying farewell to a fellow soldier.
This time, the guards put us together into a single room along another tunnel, presumably closer to the lake. I did not sleep much that night. I lay in my narrow, hard bunk and wondered what other agents would have done, sent to Lamarckia. Would they have revealed themselves to so little purpose?