Land and Overland - Omnibus (6 page)

“Do you think it will be possible?”

“Undoubtedly. I foresee the day when everybody will carry light-sensitive material and will be able to make a picture of
anything
in the blink of an eye.”

“You can still outfly any of us,” Lain said, impressed, feeling he had momentarily been in the presence of the Lord Glo who used to be. “And by flying higher you see farther.”

Glo looked gratified. “Never mind that—give me more … hmm … wine.” He watched his glass closely while it was being refilled, then settled back in his chair. “You will never guess what has happened.”

“You’ve impregnated some innocent young female.”

“Try again.”

“Some innocent young female had impregnated you.”

“This is a serious matter, Lain.” Glo made a damping movement with his hand to show that levity was out of place. “The King and Prince Chakkell have suddenly wakened up to the fact that we are running short of brakka.”

Lain froze in the act of raising his own glass to his lips. “I can’t believe this, as you predicted. How many reports and studies have we sent them in the last ten years?”

“I’ve lost count, but it looks as though they have finally taken some effect. The King has called a meeting of the high … hmm … council.”

“I never thought he’d do it,” Lain said. “Have you just come from the palace?”

“Ah … no. I’ve known about the meeting for some days, but I couldn’t pass the news on to you because the King sent me off to Sorka—of all places!—on another … hmm … matter. I just got back this foreday.”

“I could use an extra holiday.”

“It was no holiday, my boy.” Glo shook his large head and looked solemn. “I was with Tunsfo—and I had to watch one of his surgeons perform an autopsy on a soldier. I don’t mind admitting I have no stomach for that kind of thing.”

“Please! Don’t even talk about it,” Lain said, feeling a gentle upward pressure on his diaphragm at the thought of knives going through pallid skin and disturbing the cold obscenities beneath. “Why did the King want you there?”

Glo tapped himself on the chest. “Lord Philosopher, that’s me. My word still carries a lot of weight with the King. Apparently our soldiers and airmen are becoming … hmm … demoralised over rumours that it isn’t safe to go near ptertha casualties.”

“Not safe? In what way?”

“The story is that several line soldiers contracted pterthacosis through handling victims.”

“But that’s nonsense,” Lain said, taking a first sip of his wine. “What did Tunsfo find?”

“It was pterthacosis, all right. No doubt about it. Spleen like a football. Our official conclusion was that the soldier encountered a globe at dead of night and took the dust without knowing it—or that he was telling … hmm … lies. That happens, you know. Some men can’t face up to it. They even manage to convince
themselves
that they’re all right.”

“I can understand that.” Lain drew in his shoulders as though feeling cold. “The temptation must be there. After all, the slightest air current can make all the difference. Between life and death.”

“I would prefer to talk about our own concerns.” Glo stood up and began to pace the room. “This meeting is very important to us, my boy. A chance for the philosophy order to win the recognition it deserves, to regain its former status. Now, I want you to prepare the graphs in person—make them big and colourful and … hmm … simple—showing how much pikon and halvell Kolcorron can expect to manufacture in the next fifty years. Five year increments might be appropriate—I leave that to you. We also need to show how, as the requirement for natural crystals decreases, our reserves of home-grown brakka will increase until we…”

“My lord, slow down a little,” Lain protested, dismayed to see Glo’s visionary rhetoric waft him so far from the realities of the situation. “I hate to appear pessimistic, but there is no guarantee that we will produce
any
usable crystals in the next fifty years. Our best pikon to date has a purity of only one third, and the halvell is not much better.”

Glo gave an excited laugh. “That’s only because we haven’t had the full backing of the King. With proper resources we can solve all the purification problems in a few years. I’m sure of it! Why the King even permitted me to use his messengers to recall Sisstt and Duthoon. They can give up-to-date reports on their progress at the meeting. Hard facts—that what impress the King. Practicalities. I tell you, my boy, the times are changing. I feel sick.” Glo dropped back into his chair with a thud which disturbed the decorative ceramics on the nearest wall.

Lain knew he should go forward to offer comfort, but he found himself shrinking back. Glo looked as though he could vomit at any moment, and the thought of being close to him when it happened was too distasteful. Even worse, the meandering veins on Glo’s temples seemed in danger of rupturing. What if there actually were a fountaining of red? Lain tried to visualise how he would cope if some of the other man’s blood got on to his own person and again his stomach gave a preliminary heave.

“Shall I go and fetch something?” he said anxiously. “Some water?”

“More wine,” Glo husked, holding out his glass.

“Do you think you should?”

“Don’t be such a prune, my boy—it’s the best tonic there is. If you drank a little more wine it might put some flesh on your … hmm … bones.” Glo studied his glass while it was being refilled, making sure he received full measure, and the colour began returning to his face. “Now, what was I talking about?”

“Wasn’t it something to do with the impending rebirth of our civilisation?”

Glo looked reproachful. “Sarcasm? Is that sarcasm?”

“I’m sorry, my lord,” Lain said. “It’s just that brakka conservation has always been a passion with me—a subject upon which I can easily become intemperate.”

“I remember.” Glo’s gaze travelled the room, noting the use of ceramics and glass for fitments which in almost any other house would have been carved from the black wood. “You don’t think you … hmm … overdo it?”

“It’s the way I feel.” Lain held up his left hand and indicated the black ring he wore on the sixth finger. “The only reason I have this much is that it was a wedding token from Gesalla.”

“Ah yes—Gesalla.” Glo bared his divergent teeth in a parody of lecherousness. “One of these nights,! swear, you’ll have some extra company in bed.”

“My bed is your bed,” Lain said easily, aware that Lord Glo never claimed his nobleman’s right to take any woman in the social group of which he was dynastic head. It was an ancient custom in Kolcorron, still observed in the major families, and Glo’s occasional jests on the subject were merely his way of emphasising the philosophy order’s cultural superiority in having left the practice behind.

“Bearing in mind your extreme views,” Glo went on, returning to his original subject, “couldn’t you bring yourself to adopt a more positive attitude to the meeting? Aren’t you pleased about it?”

“Yes, I’m pleased. It’s a step in the right direction, but it has come so
late
. You know it takes fifty or sixty years for a brakka to reach maturity and enter the pollinating phase. We’d still be facing that time lag even if we had the capability to grow pure crystals right now—and it’s frighteningly large.”

“All the more reason to plan ahead, my boy.”

“True—but the greater the need for a plan the less chance it has of being accepted.”

“That was very profound,” Glo said. “Now tell me what it … hmm … means.”

“There was a time, perhaps fifty years ago, when Kolcorron could have balanced supply and demand by implementing just a few commonsense conservation measures, but even then the princes wouldn’t listen. Now we’re in a situation which calls for really drastic measures. Can you imagine how Leddravohr would react to the proposal that all armament production should be suspended for twenty or thirty years?”

“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” Glo said. “But aren’t you exaggerating the difficulties?”

“Have a look at these graphs.” Lain went to a chest of shallow drawers, took out a large sheet and spread it on his desk where it could be seen by Glo. He explained the various coloured diagrams, avoiding abstruse mathematics as much as possible, analysing how the country’s growing demands for power crystals and brakka were interacting with other factors such an increasing scarcity and transport delays. Once or twice as he spoke it came to him that here, yet again, were problems in the same general class as those he had been thinking about earlier. Then he had been tantalised by the idea that he was about to conceive of an entirely new way of dealing with them, something to do with the mathematical concept of limits, but now material and human considerations were dominating his thoughts.

Among them was the fact that Lord Glo, who would be the principal philosophy spokesman, had become incapable of following complex arguments. And in addition to his natural disability, Glo was now in the habit of fuddling himself with wine every day. He was nodding a great deal and sucking his teeth, trying to exhibit concerned interest, but the fleshy wattles of his eyelids were descending with increasing frequency.

“So that’s the extent of the problem, my lord,” Lain said, speaking with extra fervour to get Glo’s attention. “Would you like to hear my department’s views on the kind of measures needed to keep the crisis within manageable proportions?”

“Stability, yes, stability—that’s the thing.” Glo abruptly raised his head and for a moment he seemed utterly lost, his pale blue eyes scanning Lain’s face as though seeing it for the first time. “Where were we?”

Lain felt depressed and oddly afraid. “Perhaps it would be best if I sent a written summary to you at the Peel, one you could go over at your leisure. When is the council going to meet?”

“On the morning of two-hundred. Yes, the King definitely said two-hundred. What day is this?”

“One-nine-four.”

“There isn’t much time,” Glo said sadly. “I promised the King I’d have a significant … hmm … contribution.”

“You will.”

“That’s not what I…” Glo stood up, swaying a little, and faced Lain with an odd tremulous smile. “Did you really mean what you said?”

Lain blinked at him, unable to place the question in context properly. “My lord?”

“About my … about my flying higher … seeing farther?”

“Of course,” Lain said, beginning to feel embarrassed. “I couldn’t have been more sincere.”

“That’s good. It means so…” Glo straightened up and expanded his plump chest, suddenly recovering his normal joviality. “We’ll show them. We’ll show
all
of them. “He went to the door, then paused with his hand on the porcelain knob. “Let me have a summary as soon as … hmm … possible. Oh, by the way, I have instructed Sisstt to bring your brother home with him.”

“That’s very kind of you, my lord,” Lain said, his pleasure at the prospect of seeing Toller again modified by thoughts of Gesalla’s likely reaction to the news.

“Not at all. I think we were all a trifle hard on him. I mean, a year in a miserable place like Haffanger just for giving Ongmat a tap on the chin.”

“As a result of that tap Ongmat’s jaw was broken in two places.”

“Well, it was a
firm
tap.” Glo gave a wheezing laugh. “And we all felt the benefit of Ongmat being silenced for a while.” Still chuckling, he moved out of sight along the corridor, his sandals slapping on the mosaic floor.

Lain carried his hardly-touched glass of wine to his desk and sat down, swirling the black liquid to create light patterns on its surface. Glo’s humorous endorsement of Toller’s violence was quite typical of him, one of the little ways in which he reminded members of the philosophy order that he was of royal lineage and therefore had the blood of conquerors in his veins. It showed he was feeling better and had recovered his self-esteem, but it did nothing to ease Lain’s worries about the older man’s physical and mental fitness.

In the space of only a few years Glo had turned into a bumbling and absent-minded incompetent. His unsuitability for his post was tolerated by most department heads, some of whom appreciated the extra personal freedom they derived from it, but there was a general sense of demoralisation over the order’s continuing loss of status. The aging King Prad still retained an indulgent fondness for Glo—and, so the whispers went, if philosophy had come to be regarded as a joke it was appropriate that it should be represented by a court jester.

But there was nothing funny about a meeting of the high council, Lain told himself. The person who presented the case for rigorous brakka conservation would need to do it with eloquence and force, marshalling complex arguments and backing them up with an unassailable command of the statistics involved. His stance would be generally unpopular, and would attract special hostility from the ambitious Prince Chakkell and the savage Leddravohr.

If Glo proved unable to master the brief in time for the meeting it was possible he would call on a deputy to speak on his behalf, and the thought of having to challenge Chakkell or Leddravohr—even verbally—produced in Lain a cold panic which threatened to affect his bladder. The wine in his glass was now reflecting a pattern of trembling concentric circles.

Lain set the glass down and began breathing deeply and steadily, waiting for the shaking of his hands to cease.

Toller Maraquine awoke with the knowledge, which was both disturbing and comforting, that he was not alone in bed.

He could feel the body heat of the woman who was lying at his left side, one of her arms resting on his stomach, one of her legs drawn up across his thighs. The sensations were all the more pleasant for being unfamiliar. He lay quite still, staring at the ceiling, as he tried to recall the exact circumstances which had brought female company to his austere apartment in the Square House.

He had celebrated his return to the capital with a round of the busy taverns in the Samlue district. The tour had begun early on the previous day and had been intended to last only until the end of littlenight, but the ale and wine had been persuasive and the acquaintances he met had eventually begun to seem like cherished friends. He had continued drinking right through aftday and well into the night, revelling in his escape from the smell of the pikon pans, and at a late stage had begun to notice the same woman close to him in the throng time after time, much more often than could be accounted for by chance.