Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks (18 page)

“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.

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 6
^th
, 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.

On Tinaseeh there was no need for anybody to ride out into the countryside to search out people beyond the range of the comsets. The Castle stood grim and dark at the central point of the three squares marked off by the logs of ironwood, set upright side by side and lasered to wicked points; this was Roebuck, capital city and only settlement of Tinaseeh, and it had ample room within it for the six hundred and three persons still alive in Traveller Kingdom.

Except for the members of the Family and the Magicians of Rank, except for the College of Deacons and the Tutors—and except of course for Granny Leeward—the people of Tinaseeh were frail and ill. Measles and croup and hunger took the young; pneumonia and cancer and hunger took the old; and at the Castle the Magicians of Rank themselves took turns guarding the secret stores of extra food and the priceless herbs. They could trust nobody else with that duty.

When the comset alarms went off, piercing the stillness that covered Roebuck like a visible miasma, broken only by the exhortations of Jeremiah Thomas Traveller the 26
^th
and his Deacons—no child had laughed on Tinaseeh in many days, and now they were past crying as well—they were like red-hot irons through the ears of the silent people. And Jeremiah Thomas, knowing the high tone at once for what it had to be, cursed in a way that brought the members of his household upright in shock. They had never heard a single broad word cross his lips before, not one; and there he stood shaking his fist at the wall where the red comset light was blinking, and shouting fit to turn the air blue for miles around.

Granny Leeward was the first to recover, and the first to realize how little time they had.

“He’s right,” she said urgently, “though I’ll not defend the filth he’s used to express himself ... I do believe his mind’s turned, and no wonder. But we should never of left the comsets in the houses! They ought to have been ripped out, made truly useless, the day we got back here from the accursed Grand Jubilee, aye, if not long before. Leaving them, that was a grave mistake, and Jeremiah Thomas is right thrice over! But listen—it will be a while, might could be quite a while—before the people remember what that sound is. Might could be they won’t remember, for that matter; I don’t recall they’ve ever heard it.
If
we hurry!
If
we get out and call them out of their houses before they notice the lights—those, now, they’ll remember. All of you, you go fast, you go from house to house and silence the wicked things, cut the wires or whatever it is as makes them go, and we might could get out of this yet! If we hurry, mind!”