A Wizard In Absentia

by Christopher Stasheff

  Allouene nodded. "During the last, dark days of the I.D.E., the rabble-rousing Electors of the LORDS party rammed through legislation forcing the Tax haven barons to pay their back taxes. The move gained them a lot of support from the masses, but the Taxhaven families had just finished selling off all their holdings. They retired to the 'home planet' en masse—except for those family members who were also in the LORDS party, making sure that no matter which way fortune fell, the Taxhaven families would prosper. These members were instrumental in the coup d'etat that finally buried the I.D.E. and set up the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra, which cut off contact with the outer, and unprofitable, planets—including Taxhaven."

  "Alas!" Siflot wiped away an imaginary tear. "That must have broken all their clinking hearts!" No one laughed, but everyone's lips quirked in amusement. Allouene smiled broadly and nodded. "It couldn't have worked out better for them."

  "Meaning it was their offspring who set it up," Ragnar interpreted.

  "Certainly they supported the idea. After all, it was in perfect accord with the wishes of the Taxhaven artistocracy, as they termed themselves—they had officially cut off communication with Terra from their end, anyway. So the families relaxed and lolled back among their local riches, and devoted themselves to every pleasure they could think of, while their younger members saw to it that they still received their dividends from all the Terran-sphere companies in which they owned stock."

  Lancorn frowned. "I thought you said they had been cut off from Terra."

  "Only officially," Siflot said.

  "Very good," Allouene said. "Yes, there was still a tiny but constant stream of communication with Terra and its richer colonies—unofficial, clandestine, technically illegal, but carefully protected by wealth and privilege at both ends of the line. It sent not only money, but also every luxury the Terran planets could boast, and every new one that was invented. This even included a few items of state-of-the-art technology, but not many."

  "I thought they wanted every luxury they could think of," Ragnar said.

  "Perhaps," Magnus murmured, "but they did not want to have to look at the technology that produced it."

  Allouene looked up sharply. "You sound as though you know, Gar."

  Magnus felt the tension, so he shrugged very casually. "I've seen people like that."

  "Well, you're right." Allouene was eyeing him in a new light. "The founding families had decided that the most graceful and elegant age of Terra's history had been the late Seventeenth Century, the age of Charles the Second and Louis the Fourteenth, of the Drury Lane Theater and the Three Musketeers, and had devoted themselves to living with all the luxuries of that age but none of the inconveniences. They dressed in their own versions of 1670's clothing, took the waters at spas, attended reproductions of Restoration theaters, rode horses and drove in carriages, flocked to each other's balls, and paraded in their own court masques."

  "Very pretty," Magnus murmured. "I understand the real seventeenth century had its share of filth and sickness, though."

  "Let us not be too historically accurate," Siflot said softly.

  Allouene laughed with them, then nodded. "Yes, they wanted limits—renovation, not restoration. Modern medicine banished the specter of disease that had so ravished the real Seventeenth Century, and modern building materials prevented a recreation of the Great Fire of London. Their carriages rode on hidden anti-gravity units that cushioned the jarring of springless iron wheels, and modern weapons guaranteed their safety."

  "Safety?" Magnus frowned. "From whom? Are there ferocious animals you have not told us about?" Allouene shook her head, and her golden mane swirled prettily, almost making Magnus miss the next few words. "Anything that looked like a dangerous predator had been annihilated when they first arrived, except for a few specimens kept in zoo-parks as curiosities."

  "What else was there to fear?" Lancorn demanded, but she looked as though she didn't want to know. "What else?" Allouene repeated, with a grim smile. "What was the Restoration without Nell Gwyn? Who was going to perform in their theaters? Who would warm their beds when they wished to be naughty, who would shift the scenes . . . ?"

  "Who would grow the food?" Magnus murmured. "Robots could do that," Ragnar protested.

  "Of course," Lancorn agreed, "but who would cook it?"

  "Again, robots!"

  Allouene nodded. "Robots could have done it—but it was so much more satisifactory to have a living cook to scold and threaten. In fact, when you really get right down to it, one of the greatest pleasures of the aristocracy has always been having peasants to lord it over and kick around, and wait upon you hand and foot."

  Magnus sat immobile. He couldn't quite claim innocence, but he had always been angry with lords who mistreated their people. He'd even done something about it, once or twice—personally.

  "The ladies needed maids to help them dress and undress, after all," Allouene went on, "and the men needed valets. The land needed tenants to care for it, and living human beings were so much more aesthetic than soulless robots."

  "So they brought slaves," Lancorn growled. "Serfs," Allouene corrected. "They're tied to the soil—even if the land changes hands, they don't. They stay on the estate. The one good thing about it is that they can't be bought and sold."

  "The only good thing," Lancorn snorted. "Where did they get them?" Ragnar growled. "The original would-be aristocrats each recruited a hundred ordinary people who badly needed money," Allouene told them. "Some were horribly in debt to the founders, some were chronic gamblers, some were alcoholics and drug addicts, some were poor, some wanted enough money to have families. All were seduced by the offer of a lifetime's income in return for five years' service on a new world, the salary to be held in a Terran bank for them, earning interest until their return. A hundred recruits for each plutocrat, a hundred who gladly agreed to come along—or sometimes reluctantly, not that it mattered."

  "A hundred thousand serfs in the making," Lancorn said, paling.

  Magnus sat frozen. Was this how the peasants of his own world of Gramarye had been recruited—with lies and coercion? But no—he remembered; Father Marco Ricci had left records, and Magnus's parents had gone back in time and talked with people who had been there. The ancestors of Gramarye's people had volunteered, and gladly—they had been trying to escape the depersonalized society that had evolved with high technology. No doubt they hadn't realized how their descendants would live—but people seldom thought things through to the end. Including himself?

  For the first time, Magnus wondered what he was getting himself into.

  "Why didn't they leave when their five years were up?" Siflot asked, but from the tone of his voice, he had already guessed.

  "Because they couldn't," Ragnar snorted.

  "They never came back, of course," Lancorn agreed. "How could they, if their lords didn't want them to? Who owned the spaceships, who controlled the police?" She looked to Allouene for confirmation.

  The lieutenant nodded. "The hundred thousand were immediately locked into serfdom, and never came out of it. Moreover, the lords demanded that they have families, and there weren't very many of them who had the strength to risk the punishments waiting for anyone who disobeyed. The few who held out were tortured, and caved in quickly—especially since the very few who refused to give in in spite of the pain, died in the process."

  "So the lords were sure they wouldn't run out of servants," Lancorn said, her face stony.

  "The next generation was guaranteed," Allouene said, "and the first batch of rebellious genes had been weeded out. The second generation of serfs grew up with the habit of obedience, and learned how to swallow their anger—and outrage and rebellion."

  "Weren't there any who couldn't quench the fires?" Siflot asked softly.

  "Of course," Allouene said. "In every generation a few rebelled—and were hanged, or drawn and quartered, or killed in battle. No matter which way, over the generations, their genes were weeded out."

&
nbsp; "But other genes were reinforced."

  Ragnar frowned, puzzled; Lancorn cocked her head to the side, finger to her cheek; but Magnus just sat rigidly, and Siflot stared in horror. "Of course!" he cried. "Only a hundred thousand! Inbreeding!"

  Allouene nodded. "A hundred thousand isn't a very large gene pool, after all, and after a few generations, no matter who you married, he or she was probably related to you, one way or another. By the tenth generation, they definitely were, no 'probably' about it—and recessive gene reinforced recessive gene. The consequences of inbreeding began to appear: loss of intelligence, dwarfism, giantism, hemophilia—and mental illness. Coupled with genius sometimes, other times with idiocy, sometimes all by itself—but madness nonetheless."

  "They had to have known," Ragnar growled. "The original lords must have known what they were doing to the future generations."

  But Magnus shook his head. "Why should they have thought it through? They didn't care."

  "But they should have cared about their own descendants!" Lancorn turned to Allouene. "It hit them too, didn't it?"

  Allouene nodded. "Not as fast as among the serfs, nor as badly—they always had a steady stream of new blood trickling in from Terra, after all—but they did have occasional outbreaks. Far more often, it showed up among the gentry."

  "Gentry?" Ragnar asked. "Did they coerce some bourgeois into coming along, too?"

  "No," Allouene said. "They made them locally." Ragnar shook his head, missing the reference. "Where did they come from?"

  "Oh, Ragnar!" Lancorn snapped. "Don't be any more dense than you have to be!"

  Ragnar glowered at her. "Maybe I'm just too naive. Spell it out for me, O wise one."

  "Well," she answered, "what do you think is going to happen when a lord brings in a buxom serf wench to warm his bed?"

  Ragnar froze.

  "There will be a child who looks remarkably like that lord," Siflot said softly.

  Allouene nodded, her face hard. "Occasionally, a bastard might result from a lady's inviting some strapping, handsome young serf in for the night, but far less frequently than the lords' by-blows—it was a rare noblewoman who wanted to go through nine months of pregnancy ending in labor, for a peasant man. Far more often, the ladies, like the lords, only wanted pleasure, not more children. The lords could have used birth control medications of their own with their peasant wenches, of course, but they wanted to increase the population. Why not? The more there were, the more servants they had."

  "After all," Magnus murmured, "a lord's valet should be a gentleman, not a serf, should he not?" Allouene frowned, even as she nodded. "You sound as if you know, Gar. But you're right—and the steward of the estate should be better-born than the average laborer, and there was a need for lawyers, and for clerks to handle the drudgery of the trickle of trade, and to oversee the building of new houses and the laying out of new gardens, and to act in the theaters . . . "

  "So a class of petty aristocracy came into being," Ragnar interpreted.

  Allouene shook her head. "Gentry aren't noble, Ragnar—the lords make a very big point of that. They're a middle class, between the serfs and the nobility. In Europe, they came from the knights and the squires, and from the merchants; on Taxhaven, they've been given the same jobs, if not the titles. But they've developed their own pedigrees and mores anyway. They've never owned land legally, but when the same family of gentry has been in charge of the same hundred acres for three generations, it creates the illusion of ownership, and certainly a tie to the land. They're allowed to earn money and save it in their own right, and are comfortably well-off, even sometimes wealthy in a small way. They resent their neglectful parent class, of course, but nonetheless, they side with the lords against the serfs, more or less automatically—they have something to lose, after all. Of course, there are always new gentlemen coming into being, not of the established families, and they're scorned and looked down upon, and only allowed to marry one of the new gentlewomen—but their children are accepted, so the class keeps increasing in number. They're the middle-rank officers in the army, the mid-level managers on the estates, the tax collectors and magistrates and squires. They're resented by the serfs, and resent the lords in their own turn—but each class knows its place, and knows the painful, even lethal, penalties for stepping out of that place, so the society endures, though not happily."

  So they were bound for a planet governed by grown-up spoiled brats who intended to stay that way, lording it over a population of serfs dressed in medieval simplicity and filth, with an intermediary class of gentry to take care of the day-to-day administration and the direct contact with the serfs.

  Magnus could see why Allouene had decided they needed changing.

  CHAPTER 7

  The free-lance asked, "Can you move quietly, in the wood?"

  Ian tried to smile. "I can try."

  "Well, then, let's away." The soldier turned to go, then stopped and looked back over his shoulder. "I cannot go on calling you 'boy,' " he said. "It's too clumsy. What's your name?"

  More danger—but Ian was in the thick of it now. He might as well pray for the best and tell the truth. "Ian," he said. "Son of Tobin."

  "And I am Gar Pike." The free-lance smiled. "Well, then, Ian Tobinson—let's away."

  They went onward under the trees, between the trunks, Gar as silent as the wind and almost as silent as the dwarves in his soft boots. Ian plucked up his courage and followed.

  They threaded their way through the back trails, so faint that Ian could barely make them out. Every now and then, Gar would stop, cock his head, and listen. Then he would nod and lead Ian forth. Several times, though, when he stopped to listen, he turned quickly into the nearest thicket, parting the bushes before him and stepping into their center, holding the bushes back for Ian to follow, then pressing them back together and crouching down, motioning for Ian to do likewise and pressing a finger to his lips for silence. When this happened, Ian would do as Gar bade him and stay very still, breathing through his mouth. Then, after a while, he would hear the crashing and the crunching of the soldiers as they moved nearer. Several times they came almost to the thickets where Gar and Ian were hiding and Ian would hear them talking. They were afraid the lord would punish them for not having found the runaway youth. Each time this happened, Ian's body knotted with fear. Not so much as he had felt before—he did not panic; Gar would protect him, he knew, if it came to a fight. Ian saw his own hands tighten on his quarterstaff, though, and remembered very well that Gar was, after all, only one man. If he had to fight trained soldiers, perhaps he would not be able to prevail. If that happened, Ian resolved to guard his back for him. Though he was only a boy against fullgrown men, he knew his quarterstaff-play well, and might be able to delay a second soldier long enough for Gar to finish with the first.

  They travelled through the forest all night in this fashion, and the near brushes with the soldiers became less frequent. But near dawn, when they were about to hide for the day, Gar suddenly turned aside from the trail. "Take cover, and quickly!"

  Ian leaped after him, pushing through some underbrush into the center of a thicket. There they crouched on the bare earth, for all the world like deer. "Down," Gar murmured, though he himself only sat, "and be very still."

  There was more tension in him than usual. Ian huddled under the leaves, wondering what was so much more dangerous this time.

  Then he heard three voices. One of them was a cutting nasal whine—and Ian's heart raced, for he recognized it. "If we do not find him, serfs, the hide on your back will be scored!"

  "But, my lord . . . " The soldier sounded exhausted. "We have searched all night, we have searched all over the wood. Surely one of the other bands will have found him by now."

  "Impossible," the other soldier snapped. Then, in a placating tone, "It is our duty to our Lord Murthren to search for the boy until we drop in our tracks, if need be."

  My lord Murthren! It was well the soldiers did not find them then, for Ian
could not have moved a hand or a foot. He was frozen, frozen with fear.

  Gar cocked his head to the side, listening, interested.

  "Well said, though fawning," the nasal voice sneered. "Now get on and do your job, and search for him!"

  Ian trembled, recognizing Lord Murthren's voice. The lord snapped, "You would be wiser to die searching for him, than to suffer my displeasure. He has violated one of the Sacred Places of the Old Ones! If we do not find and slay him, a curse, a murrain, shall fall upon all my land, my domains!"

  Ian's eyes widened with fear. A murrain, a dread disease, spreading over all the whole duchy! Cattle wasting away and dropping dead in the fields—perhaps people, too! He bowed his head, and squeezed his eyes shut against tears as the feeling of guilt within him grew, gaining strength. "One of the Sacred Places of the Old Ones"—was that the strange "Safety Base" into which he had strayed? And how, then, did Milord Murthren know of it?

  But the voices faded away. When Ian could no longer hear them, he started to get up—but Gar's hand fell on his shoulder, holding him in place. Ian froze, then looked questioningly at Gar. The freelance laid a finger across his lips again, head cocked to listen.

  Perhaps ten minutes longer they stayed in their places. Then Gar rose slowly, and Ian, with a sigh of thanks, rose with him. His legs tingled as the blood flowed back into them. He stretched sore, stiff muscles, then looked up to find Gar gazing down at him quizzically. "So that was your crime! 'One of the Sacred Places of the Old Ones'! That great stone egg in the center of the meadow—was that it?"

  Ian nodded, unable to speak.

  Gar chuckled, shaking his head. "What superstitious fools, to fear such places!" he said. "Though I'm sure the lords cultivate the rumor. I know someone who sheltered in an Old Ones' place himself once, when his side lost the battle and the enemy was searching for him. He told me that the guardian spirits the Old Ones left are gentle to those who claim their protection—and if they laid a curse upon him, it was a strange one, for he lived well, and longer than many soldiers I have known."