“My lady—I am afraid.”
The words came from an unusual source; Jessica of Lewis, Teacher Jessica these past seven months, was in the usual run of things a tower of strength. She was a true Three: brilliant, creative, high-spirited, and one for whom everything seemed to come easily. She had slipped into the Teaching Order as a hand slips into a glove made to its measure. None of the usual kicking at the traces for Jessica of Lewis. Not a flicker when her beloved books— “Real books!” the others had whispered. “Not micros, real books. And three of them!” —had been taken from her and added to the community library in Castle Wommack’s north wing. When all the rest were down, it was Teacher Jessica they relied on, to bring their spirits up and to remind them once again that for those that are vowed to poverty that experience of poverty is no hardship.
Now she sat in Faculty Meeting, fifth down from Teacher Jewel of Wommack, so fast had she ascended through the ranks, and said: “My lady, I am afraid.”
“We are all afraid,” Teacher Jewel responded. “Not to be afraid would show a lack of common sense, or an unhealthy detachment from reality. There is a group consensus; nowhere in that consensus is there space for the crystal suspended above this Castle. How could we not be afraid?”
“That bodacious great rock hanging over our heads and ready for to drip down blood, it looks like ... Law! Teacher Jessica, I should hope we’re afraid!”
“If it is a rock,” said Jewel of Wommack carefully, giving the new Teacher Candidate a measuring look, “what is holding it where it is, Cousin Naomi? Rocks do not float, neither do they fly. And there is no more magic.”
Naomi of Wommack met her kinswoman’s eyes without flinching; a good sign, thought Jewel. Naomi’s speech was rougher than any Candidate’s they had accepted yet; one would have thought she was trying for the formspeech used by the Grannys, except that even the Grannys no longer said “for to” before their verbs ... perhaps in a moment of great excitement one might, but Jewel could not recall an example. Naomi had come out of a pocket on the far side of the Wilderness Lands of Kintucky, from a cluster of six households so isolated they had not had comsets even before Responsible of Brightwater was struck down. The rest of Kintucky had not even known they were there, and given the possibilities of marriage open to them they would not have lasted long—it was good fortune a Teacher, canvassing the Wilderness on her Mule, had stumbled across them.
“There will be again,” said Naomi, confident as a child. “As there do be star and sun and tree. Somehow it’s got a hitch in it, it’s a kind of drought as comes in a bad year for the rains, but no reason for to doubt. I don’t doubt.”
Jewel of Wommack believed her; she was as transparent as thin new ice on a puddle. And—always provided they all lived through whatever this crisis was—Naomi’s ways might require more polishing than the other Candidates’ had. Maybe. Jewel had discussed it when Naomi of Wommack joined them, and there had been disagreement among the senior faculty.
“She will be going back to Teach in the Wilderness Lands and along their borders,” Jewel had reminded them. “Might could be that if her speech and her manners are greatly changed they won’t trust her there, and trust is the foundation of Teaching. Think of my brother—when he took up the speechmode of the Magicians of Rank, purely to spite them, and then kept it up purely to spite the rest of us—think how it changed the way people behaved around him. He has a good deal more difficulty coaxing the young women into the haymows than he had when he spoke like anybody else ... and a very good thing that is, I might add.”
“But how, my lady,” the others had protested, letting the matter of Lewis Motley drop, “how can she be respected if she speaks like she does, and drinks her coffee out of her saucer?”
Jewel’s eyes, always dark blue, had gone even darker, and she had rebuked them sharply, reminding them for what seemed to her the ten thousandth time that it was presence that inspired respect, not fine manners and flowery speech.
“Do you ever look at your Teachers’ Manuals?” she had asked them, exasperated. “It’s set down there for you clearly enough, if you’d only look!”
It was among the Rules Major.
The essence of inspiring belief is to achieve congruence, so that the channel of the voice and the channel of the body are in every smallest feature in true harmony.
And the codicil:
And it would be well if the channel of the heart could be harmonious as well, providing always for the protection of the innocent.
That is ... if you knew too much, keep it to yourself, and never mind the congruence of the heart, which was why it went in a codicil.
Candidate Naomi of Wommack met that congruence requirement to perfection. Her words were rough, her features were rough, her manners were rough, her movements were rough. She strode when she walked, she leaped up when she stood, she collapsed in a heap when she sat ...
“It is congruence.” Teacher Jewel had said, ending the discussion. “It may be of great value. I know no requirement that Teachers must be like dolls, all matched the way the Grannys are. I may in fact go back to an easier way of speaking my own self; I was more comfortable that way.”
A voice in the back of her head had said sadly: No, you will not. And she had known it was true. Senior Teacher of the Order, and not yet sixteen, she needed every mark of authority she could get, including the elegant speechmode—not quite his own, but elegant nonetheless—in which Lewis Motley Wommack had drilled her till she wept. He had been quite right.
“My lady?”
Jewel was wrenched from her reverie, and embarrassed that she’d been able to fall into it, considering the circumstances.
“I apologize,” she said distractedly. “My mind was somewhere ... in a pleasanter time.”
“We are wondering,” said the speaker, a young Teacher whose voice had the granite edge fright gives when held back on tight rein, “if we should go on with the lessons today. We are afraid ... the children are even more so.”
“And what are the children doing at this moment, Teacher Cristabel?” Jewel asked her. “Do you know?”
“Huddled around their parents, sitting in their laps and being rocked if they’re little enough, cowering under beds and porches ... anything to get out of sight of that ... thing. Whatever it is.”
“In that case,” said Jewel of Wommack resolutely, “we will of course go on with lessons. And the quicker the better. The most helpful thing we could do would be to present those children with that idea that there is order in their days despite that unholy object, and that it hasn’t the power to make the grownups set aside the usual daily routine.”
One of her faculty had a thought that had been thick on the far side of the world, in Airy Kingdom.
‘They are all about to die,” she said. “Better they die together than apart.”
Jewel felt a rage that would be no help here, and she put it aside to be dealt with another time, and set her questions.
“Teacher Cecilia,” she asked, “how is it that you know they, or any of us, are about to die?”
“My lady!”
“Well? If you have information, speak up; and if you have none, hold your peace. Has that crystal done any one of us, or any thing, injury?”
“Not yet, my lady.”
“Not yet! But it will, eh? It does not fit the group consensus, will not be poked or shoved into the model we have built and labeled HERE SITS THE REAL WORLD ... and therefore, it has to be a source of death.”
“But my lady— “
“Perhaps,” said Jewel icily, “might could be the time has come for a change in that model. Had you thought of that? It is unknown; one fears the unknown. No doubt the first rainbow ever to be seen in the sky had people running and squalling, too.”
Teacher Candidate Naomi was fascinated. Jewel could tell, and before she could call out something disgraceful, the Senior Teacher moved smoothly on into her next sentence.
“Until such time as we have evidence that that thing is a danger, we will behave normally,” she instructed them. “That is our duty.”
The Teachers and the Candidates nodded, though some did it reluctantly. They could see the rightness of what she said, and hoped those Teachers out riding their circuits or in residence in small towns beyond reach of the Castle would see it as well. The sight of the Teachers at their posts presenting history and grammar and mathematics and ecology and music theory to the children, as they did on any other day, would go a long way toward calming any panic. Business as usual, that was what was needed.
Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd must have thought so, too. He came into the room in a fury, demanding to know why they weren’t already on their way to their classes.
Jewel’s voice sliced the air like a whip: “When I say that they are to go to their classes, they will go—and not until!”
The other women dropped their eyes and folded their hands; except for Naomi, who would not for anything have missed a single detail of the confrontation between brother and sister.
“Jewel, I do not mean to interfere— “ the young man began.
“Then don’t. Go on about your business ... if you have any business ... and leave us to ours. You have nothing to contribute here, and we have no time to coddle you.”
I will never stop paying, thought Lewis Motley; never. She wanted a home, and a man’s body beside hers at night, and babes in her arms, and tadlings playing round her that looked just like that man; that’s all she ever wanted. And I gave her this instead.
It had been necessary, he was still convinced of that. Without the comsets, cut off from the rest of the continents, the people of Kintucky would have been condemned to ignorance and superstition; the Teachers had been absolutely necessary. But she was not going to forgive him.
And there’d been the matter of Responsible of Brightwater ... that had not been necessary.
He gave her a stiff and formal nod, longing for the days when she’d worshiped the ground he walked on and the air he breathed. He wondered sometimes if he would ever love anything or anyone as he loved his little sister. He hoped not.
“I beg your pardon,” said the former Guardian of Castle Wommack, and closed the door quietly behind him as he made his exit.
“Now then,” said Jewel—and they all understood; the incident had not happened— “the only question is what you are to tell the children. And we must decide quickly, because you should be in your classrooms in ten minutes, and well prepared. Suggestions, please.”
Teacher Sharon of Airy, second in rank to Jewel herself, spoke first.
“Do we know anything?”
“Nothing,” said Jewel. “It was not there; it appeared out of nowhere and it was there; it remains there. It grows darker in color, and the Castle throbs with the vibration it is emitting. That is all.”
“We cannot tell the children that!”
“Why not? It is the truth.”
The protests came from every one of the seventeen who sat around the table, except Naomi of Wommack.
“Dozens,” said Naomi. “What point is there making up tales and pretty lies? Reckon any tadling smart enough to do his three-times is going to see we’re lying—they do, you know. You can’t lie to tadlings. Best they see we know what they know and howsomever, pointy rock or no pointy rock, we’re there for to teach same as always. Unless one of youall has an explanation to offer ‘em as will pass for truth.”
“Well? Have you?” Jewel asked the silent women.
“It seems harsh,” said Teacher Sharon, considering.
“It is quite clear,” Jewel of Wommack told her hesitant faculty, “that whatever that is up there, it was not brought us by the Good Fairies for our delight. What is harsh is letting those children cower and shiver and cry all the day long while we sit here and console one another. You will go to your classes—as usual. If the children ask what that is in the air, you will say you don’t know, and you will go on with your lessons—as usual. If they do not bring it up, you will not bring it up. As for me, I will get the fastest Mule we have in the stables and ride out to try to reach the Teachers in the country schools, as many as I can, and I will be telling them what I have told you. As usual. Do youall understand?”
“Yes, my lady.”
Fifteen grudging yes-my-ladys, and one willing one from Naomi of Wommack; Naomi would of been willing, Jewel suspected, if ordered to lay herself full length in a fire.
“Let’s get on with it, then,” said Teacher Jewel, and she took up the small bell at her right hand to give the three rings of dismissal.
So it was that Jewel of Wommack was not in Booneville when the emergency alarms shrilled from every comset in the Castle and the town. She was out on Gamaliel, a Mule short in temper but long on endurance, making her way around a thicket of tangled briars toward the thirty-one families of Capertown, six miles beyond the borders of the capital.
There was a delay while the people realized what the sound was, it had been so long. For a few moments they thought it was something new from the horror in the sky, and the Teachers were hard put to it to keep their charges calm as they waited for word to come explaining it to them. They kept their voices steady and went on with the measured presentation of principles and concepts, and if their hands trembled they clasped them firmly behind their backs. The astonishing noise went on and on and on. And then, almost everywhere at once, people remembered.
“It’s the comset alarm!” It came from a hundred places. People stared at one another, and shouted:
“What does it mean?”
The comsets had been silent on Kintucky two years at least; and even when they’d been an ever present part of daily life, the alarm had been rare. It was no wonder they were confused. But when they turned to look at the comset screens set in their housewalls they saw that it was true; they were functioning again. The red call light in the upper right-hand corner of each screen was blinking steadily on and off, and the alarm shrilled on. Those that had hung a picture or a weaving over the screen to escape its dead gray eye always staring at them rushed to take away the barrier and get to the ON stud.
“Ah, the Holy One be praised, the Holy One be praised!” cried Granny Copperdell at Castle Wommack. “Will you look? It’s herself, oh glory be, it’s herself! It’s Responsible of Brightwater herself!”
First a miracle of terror, now a miracle of some other kind ... life was confusing. But even in the classrooms everything else stopped, while the people of Ozark listened to Responsible’s voice.
She began by explaining, for those Castles that might not yet know, what the crystals were and where they came from. She spoke hurriedly and promised them details later, when there was more time.
“But for now,” she said, “the details don’t matter. For now, youall must listen to me, and pay close attention to what I say, and waste no more time in carry-ons. Listen, now!
“The peoples of the Garnet Ring are not savages—they have laws. By their laws they may move to conquer only planets and systems of planets that are governed, as they are, by magic rather than by science. And of those planets they are constrained to conquer only in two situations: first, when the planet they’re hankering after has gone to anarchy and has no government of its own to be displaced; second, if the planet they fancy is dying anyway, of natural disasters or of war. Ozark—this planet—comes near meeting both those conditions at this very minute, if what I’m told is true; and I’ve no reason to doubt it. And that is why the Garnet Ring has set those crystals in our skies.
“I do not know what the crystals will do if they aren’t stopped,” she told them. “I haven’t the least idea. I do know, however, that they have power enough to destroy us twelve times over, no matter how it is they go about it. And I know how to stop them! If youall will help me, and waste not one second.”
Responsible paused and gave them time to take all that in, and beside her, beyond the range of the cameras, Troublesome squeezed her sister’s left hand, and Silverweb of McDaniels held tightly to her right hand, and the Grannys sat with their hands pressed to their lips. As for Veritas Truebreed Motley, he paced. There was no way of knowing if the comsets were working on the other continents where they’d been disused all this time. There was no way of knowing if there was anybody left alive on some of those continents to hear the alarm and turn on the comsets if they did still work. And there was no way, for sure there was no way, to predict whether, even if everything was working and all the Ozarkers were hanging on Responsible’s every word, she would be able to persuade them. The suspense was almost as hard on him as his humiliation. How had Responsible of Brightwater been brought out of pseudocoma, without the help of the Magicians of Rank? Nobody would tell him; Responsible had just smiled, a maddening gleeful smile, when he tried to find out. Veritas Truebreed smacked his fist in his palm, and he paced.
Meanwhile, Responsible went on talking, keeping her voice in the mode that carried the message: THERE IS NO QUESTION BUT THAT I WILL BE OBEYED. “At every Castle,” she said, “you will call a Family Meeting, and elect—at once! —a Delegate to the New Confederation of Continents of Ozark. The Magicians of Rank will SNAP the Delegates here to Brightwater as quickly as you choose them ... if you have no Magician of Rank in residence, be ready; one will be with you within the next half hour, and will not be pleased if you have no Delegate ready to return with him when he arrives, I warn you. Confederation Hall is at this very minute being made ready for the Delegates— “
Troublesome whistled softly, long and low, and Silverweb smiled at the lie, and the two of them—followed by the Grannys at as much speed as the old women could muster—headed out of Castle Brightwater for Confederation Hall, with Troublesome waving the keys above her head to show she still had them.
“Once the Delegates are here,” Responsible went on, “they will offer a motion that a New Confederation be formed, second it, and pass it by unanimous vote—they will have ample time and more than ample time to write a new Constitution and work out all the trimmings and doodads they care to, when the crystals have been withdrawn. But that will not be enough.
“It will be necessary,” she told them solemnly, “to call the roll.”
That had never been done within the memory of anyone living, nor the memory of their parents, nor their grandparents. Very early, before the Ozarkers had moved out from Marktwain and their number had been small, it had been done. But now?
“The Garnet Ring wants this planet very badly,” said Responsible. “Whatever you have done to it as I slept, and I understand that you have not been idle in your destruction, it is still rich in ores and forests and land and seawater ... everything that a crowded system like the Garnet Ring needs and does not have. They have set no controls on their population and no controls on their greed—they will not give us up for a gesture. It will be done, one vote at a time, for every citizen over the age of twelve years. Kingdom by Kingdom. Stay at your comsets, and when the Chair says to begin, you will answer one at a time, in an orderly fashion. You will say, for example: ‘I, So-and-So of Clark, hereby cast my vote for the New Confederation, and I say Aye; let it be so recorded.’ It is of course your privilege to vote against the New Confederation; if enough of you do so, we will learn what the Garnet Ring proposes to do with us.”
And she let them think about that a while. As a democratic method of persuasion, it had its shortcomings, and she was conscious of them. On the other hand, death or slavery weren’t overly democratic either, and they appeared to be the other alternatives. If the means turned out not to be justified by the ends, she would have some paying to do. She’d worry about that when it happened. Right now, she had a world to convince.
A comcrew tech stuck his head in at the door, then, and raised both fists above his head and shook them at her. That meant the data was back to the computers; that meant the comsets had been turned on everywhere—even on Tinaseeh. That meant they were working, and it meant there were Ozarkers to watch them. Responsible would have jumped up and down for joy except that it would of introduced an element of confusion into her presentation.
She nodded at the man and then began again, since there might of been those coming in just then from the woods or the fields, or only just finding a house that still had a comset in working order. And she went through it all one more time. And when she got to the end of that, she began again.
By the time she had reached the third recitation of the manner of calling the roll of every Ozarker over the age of twelve, the first Delegate had landed in the yard of Confederation Hall, his arms clasped round the waist of Shawn Merryweather Lewis the 6th, Magician of Rank in residence at Castle Motley, the two of them seated on a bedraggled and scrawny Mule without so much as a saddle blanket. Never mind, though; it had been able and willing—it had in fact been eager—to fly.
They were landing everywhere, and the Grannys of Brightwater threw open the doors of Confederation Hall and shouted them a welcome, while Troublesome sneaked out me back door and went home, and Silverweb stood and smiled. Now they would show those cursed Garnet Ringers, whatsoever they might be! They would show them what a people united could do, how swift and sure a freedom-loving people could move to set up a new and a strong government, how quick such a government could move to take care of such petty matters as weather and hunger and disease and disaster and war!
The Grannys were as near ecstasy as a Granny could get, and in the excitement of the moment they had not even noticed that the arthritis that had been crippling them was gone. They stood on the steps of Confederation Hall, holding the doors wide, the tears pouring down their faces, cheering as each new Delegate arrived, and as each Mule and Magician of Rank SNAPPED out of sight to go after the next one.
They paid no mind to the fact that Silverweb of McDaniels, amusement in her eyes and cobwebs on her dress, was headed back toward Castle Brightwater to see what she could do now to help Responsible. Nor did it occur to them that Troublesome was long gone.
It was a brand-new day.