The Ozark trilogy (78 page)

“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— “

“Per
haps
,” 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 33
^rd
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.
Un
less 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 her
self!
”

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.