Land and Overland Omnibus

CHAPTER 3



Lain Maraquine’s domicile—known as the Square House—was positioned on Greenmount, a rounded hill in a northern suburb of Ro-Atabri, the Kolcorronian capital.

From the window of his study he had a panoramic view of the city’s various districts—residential, commercial, industrial, administrative—as they sifted down to the Borann River and on the far bank gave way to the parklands surrounding the five palaces. The families headed by the Lord Philosopher had been granted a cluster of dwellings and other buildings on this choice site many centuries earlier, during the reign of Bytran IV, when their work was held in much higher regard.

The Lord Philosopher himself lived in a sprawling structure known as Greenmount Peel, and it was a sign of his former importance that all the houses in his bailiwick had been placed in line-of-sight with the Great Palace, thus facilitating communication by sunwriter. Now, however, such prestigious features only added to the jealousy and resentment felt by the heads of other orders. Lain Maraquine knew that the industrial supremo, Prince Chakkell, particularly wanted Greenmount as an adornment to his own empire and was doing everything in his power to have the philosophers deposed and moved to humbler accommodation.

It was the beginning of aftday, the region having just emerged from the shadow of Overland, and the city was looking beautiful as it returned to life after its two-hour sleep. The yellow, orange and red coloration of trees which were shedding their leaves contrasted with the pale and darker greens of trees with different cycles which were coming into bud or were in full foliage. Here and there the brightly glowing envelopes of airships created pastel circles and ellipses, and on the river could be seen the white sails of ocean-going ships which were bringing a thousand commodities from distant parts of Land.

Seated at his desk by the window, Lain was oblivious to the spectacular view. All that day he had been aware of a curious excitement and a sense of expectancy deep within himself. There was no way in which he could be certain, but his premonition was that the mental agitation was leading to something of rare importance.

For some time he had been intrigued by an underlying similarity he had observed in problems fed into his department from a variety of sources. The problems were as routine and mundane as a vintner wanting to know the most economical shape of jar in which to market a fixed quantity of wine, or a farmer trying to decide the best mix of crops for a certain area of land at different times of the year.

It was all a far cry from the days when his forebears had been charged with tasks like estimating the size of the cosmos, and yet Lain had begun to suspect that somewhere at the heart of the commonplace commercial riddles there lurked a concept whose implications were more universal than the enigmas of astronomy. In every case there was a quantity whose value was governed by changes in another quantity, and the problem was that of finding an optimum balance. Traditional solutions involved making numerous approximations or plotting vertices on a graph, but a tiny voice had begun to whisper to Lain and its message was the icily thrilling one that there might be a way of arriving at a precise solution algebraically, with a few strokes of the pen. It was something to do with the mathematical notion of limits, with the idea that…

“You’ll have to help with the guest list,” Gesalla said as she swept into the panelled study. “I can’t do any serious planning when I don’t even know how many people we are going to have.”

A glimmering in the depths of Lain’s mind was abruptly extinguished, leaving him with a sense of loss which quickly faded as he looked up at his black-haired solewife. The illness of early pregnancy had narrowed the oval of her face and given her a dark-eyed pallor which somehow emphasised her intelligence and strength of character. She had never looked more beautiful in Lain’s eyes, but he still wished she had not insisted on starting the baby. That slender, slim-hipped body did not look to him as though it had been designed for motherhood and he had private fears about the outcome.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Lain,” she said, her face showing concern. “Did I interrupt something important?”

He smiled and shook his head, once again impressed by her talent for divining other people’s thoughts. “Isn’t it early to be planning for Yearsend?”

“Yes.” She met his gaze coolly—her way of challenging him to find anything wrong with being efficient. “Now, about your guests…”

“I promise to write out a list before the day is over. I suppose it will be much the same as usual, though I’m not sure if Toller will be home this year.”

“I hope he isn’t,” Gesalla said, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t want him. It would be so pleasant to have a party without any arguments or fighting.”

“He is my brother,” Lain protested amiably.

“Half-brother would be more like it.”

Lain’s good humour was threatened. “I’m glad my mother isn’t alive to hear that comment.”

Gesalla came to him immediately, sat on his lap and kissed him on the mouth, moulding his cheeks with both her hands to coax him into an ardent response. It was a familiar trick of hers, but nonetheless effective. Still feeling privileged even after two years of marriage, he slid his hand inside her blue camisole and caressed her small breasts. After a moment she sat upright and gave him a solemn stare.

“I didn’t mean any disrespect to your mother,” she said. “It’s just that Toller looks more like a soldier than a member of this family.”

“Genetic flukes sometimes happen.”

“And there’s the way he can’t even read.”

“We’ve been through all this before,” Lain said patiently. “When you get to know Toller better you’ll see that he is as intelligent as any other member of the family. He can read, but he isn’t fluent because of some problem with the way he perceives printed words. In any case, most of the military are literate—so your observation is lacking in relevance.”

“Well…” Gesalla looked dissatisfied. “Well, why does he have to cause trouble everywhere he goes?”

“Lots of people have that habit—including one whose left nipple is tickling my palm at this moment.”

“Don’t try to turn my mind to other things—especially at this time of day.”

“All right, but why does Toller bother you so much? I mean, we are pretty well surrounded by individualists and near-eccentrics on Greenmount.”

“Would you like it better if I were one of those faceless females who have no opinions about anything?” Gesalla was galvanised into springing to her feet, her light body scarcely reacting against his thighs, and an expression of dismay appeared on her face as she looked down into the walled precinct in front of the house. “Were you expecting Lord Glo?”

“No.”

“Bad luck—you’ve got him.” Gesalla hurried to the door of the study. “I’m going to vanish before he arrives. I can’t afford to spend half the day listening to all that endless humming and hawing—not to mention the smutty innuendoes.” She gathered her ankle-length skirts and ran silently towards the rear stairs.

Lain took off his reading glasses and gazed after her, wishing she would not keep reviving the subject of his brother’s parentage. Aytha Maraquine, his mother, had died in giving birth to Toller, so if there had been an adulterous liaison she had more than paid for it. Why could Gesalla not leave the matter at that? Lain had been attracted to her for her intellectual independence as well as her beauty and physical grace, but he had not bargained for the antagonism towards his brother. He hoped it was not going to lead to years of domestic friction.

The sound of a carriage door slamming in the precinct drew his attention to the outside world. Lord Glo had just stepped down from the aging but resplendent phaeton which he always used for short journeys in the city. Its driver, holding the two bluehorns in check, nodded and fidgeted as he received a lengthy series of instructions from Glo. Lain guessed that the Lord Philosopher was using a hundred words where ten would have sufficed and he began to pray that the visit would not be too much of an endurance test. He went to the sideboard, poured out two glasses of black wine and waited by the study door until Glo appeared.

“You’re very kind,” Glo said, taking his glass as he entered and going straight to the nearest chair. Although in his late fifties, he looked much older thanks to his rotund figure and the fact that his teeth had been reduced to a few brownish pegs splayed behind his lower lip. He was breathing noisily after climbing the stairs, his stomach ballooning and collapsing under his informal grey-and-white robe.

“It’s always a pleasure to see you, my lord,” Lain said, wondering if there was a special reason for the visit and knowing there was little point in his trying to elicit the information too soon.

Glo drank half his wine in one gulp. “Mutual, my boy. Oh! I’ve got something … hmm … at least, I think I’ve got something to show you. You’re going to like this.” He set his glass aside, groped in the folds of his clothing and eventually produced a square of paper which he handed to Lain. It was slightly sticky and mid-brown in colour except for a circular patch of mottled tan in the centre.

“Farland.” Lain identified the circle as being a light picture of the only other major planet in the local system, orbiting the sun at some twice the distance of the Land-Overland pair. “The images are getting better.”

“Yes, but we still can’t make them permanent. That one has faded … hmm … noticeably since last night. You can hardly see the polar caps now, but last night they were very clear. Pity. Pity.” Glo took the picture back and studied it closely, all the while shaking his head and sucking his teeth.

“The polar caps were as clear as daylight. Clear as daylight, I tell you. Young Enteth got a very good confirmation of the angle of … ah … inclination. Lain, have you ever tried to visualise what it would be like to live on a world whose axis was tilted? There would be a hot period of the year, with long days and short nights, and a cold … hmm … period, with long days … I mean short days … and long nights … all depending on where the planet was in its orbit. The colour changes on Farland show that all the vegetation is geared to a single … hmm … superimposed cycle.”

Lain concealed his impatience and boredom as Glo launched himself upon one of his most familiar set pieces. It was a cruel irony that the Lord Philosopher was becoming prematurely senile, and Lain—who had a genuine regard for the older man—saw it as a duty to give him maximum support, personally and professionally. He replenished his visitor’s drink and made appropriate comments as Glo meandered on from elementary astronomy to botany and the differences between the ecology of a tilted world and that of Land.

On Land, where there were no seasons, the very first fanners must have had the task of separating the natural jumble of edible grasses into synchronous batches which matured at chosen times. Six harvests a year was the norm in most parts of the world. Thereafter it had simply been a matter of planting and reaping six adjacent strips to maintain supplies of grain, with no long-term storage problems. In modern times the advanced countries had found it more efficacious to devote whole farms to single-cycle crops and to work in six-farm combines or multiples thereof, but the principle was the same.

As a boy, Lain Maraquine had enjoyed speculating about life on distant planets—assuming they existed in other parts of the universe and were peopled by intelligent beings—but he had quickly found that mathematics offered him greater scope for intellectual adventure. Now all he could wish for was that Lord Glo would either go away and let him get on with his work or proceed to explain his visit. Tuning his thoughts back into the rambling discourse he found that Glo had switched back to the experiments with photography and the difficulties of producing emulsions of light-sensitive vegetable cells which would hold an image for more than a few days.

“Why is it so important to you?” Lain put in. “Anybody in your observatory staff could draw a much better picture by hand.”

“Astronomy is only a tiny bit of it, my boy—the aim is to be able to produce totally … hmm … accurate pictures of buildings, landscapes, people.”

“Yes, but we already have draughtsmen and artists who can do that.”

Glo shook his head and smiled, showing the ruins of his teeth, and spoke with unusual fluency. “Artists only paint what they or their patrons believe to be important. We lose so much. The times slip through our fingers. I want every man to be his own artist—then we’ll discover our history.”

“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.