The Cult of Loving Kindness (31 page)

Light streamed also from the cars of the cog railway, which climbed up toward the gallery from the mine. At the terminus the ten-acre off-loading pit was full of fire, because here also was collected the raw slag from the furnaces. From above Marchpane could see the tenders in their helmets and their insulated suits, standing in a line upon the concrete rim of the containment reservoir, raking off the distilled brandy-glass.

As always, he was astounded by the scale of it. Seven thousand men and women lived and worked in Carbontown. From where he stood he could see how all the pieces moved together—the furnaces, the railway bringing up the raw shards from the pit, the excretion unit, and the final product being loaded in the platforms—as if the mine were just a single mechanism, tended by its miniature crew.

But in another sense the view was insufficient, he thought later, when the elevator had deposited Cathartes and himself at the building’s base. As the metal cage had sunk down through the scaffolding, Marchpane had felt the temperature rise. In the trembling guywires he had felt the churning of the engines. Yet even so he was surprised, as always, by the intensity of the noise and heat which closed around him and enveloped him as the doors slid open and he stepped outside into a world of harsh sensation. He had perceived only light from the window of the exercise room. Infants in a mother’s womb, thought Marchpane. He felt the sweat rush to the surface of his skin.

With them walked a single overseer, armed with a rubber truncheon and a gun. Cathartes was grinning for some reason, and the light was shining off his teeth; as they moved on down the concrete maidan, past the heliport, past the security post, Marchpane felt his clothes grow limp and damp. His saturated collar curled away from his wet neck; they were walking through a fine hot drizzle, which was partially the blowoff from the stamping press and partially a genuine piece of weather. Overhead the clouds were low, and they reflected back some of the fire from the stacks. They reflected back also some of the noise from the press—a hollow booming all around them.

They took the escalator down toward the collection pit. Again, every meter of descent brought with it a corresponding rise in temperature. At the bottom, the heat was stifling, the humidity terrific. Marchpane felt it as a solid force, pressing against his body from all sides. It required all his energy and strength to cleave a passage through. Cathartes was smiling, and Marchpane was amazed to see his hair still dry, his uniform still crisply pressed. Marchpane, as they hurried past the slag pools, felt the sweat pour from his face, and he was squinting, and blotting his eyes with his wet sleeve. The overseer said something that he couldn’t understand above the noise from the crushing bins. But Cathartes heard it and made some response.

 

Professor Marchpane was the managing chief engineer at Carbontown. He was also, as his own bad luck would have it, the only member of the Board of Directors not to have attended the September Conference of Metallurgy in Charn, whose dates had corresponded to the mayor’s celebration. They had gone to protest the new production schedule, which had made conditions so unsafe.

 

Later, people would speculate that if a different man had been left in charge of the facility, perhaps the miners would not have dared to go on strike at such a crucial time. Perhaps the mine would not have fallen to the Cult of Loving Kindness.

Later historians, stretching taut the chain of circumstance that led up to the reconsolidation of Starbridge power in Charn, all would remark on the beginnings of the movement: how it seemed to grow up out of nothing, how except for a few crucial successes it could have dissipated just as rapidly. Three thousand days after these events, Prince Regulum Starbridge himself seemed to acknowledge this, when he took his oath of office in Durbar Square. In his inaugural address he expressed his gratitude not to General Mechlin Starbridge, not to the Reaction Corps, who in the last days of summer had defeated the New People’s Army on the tulip fields of Caladon. Instead he praised the martyrs of the Cult of Loving Kindness, which nevertheless he had by that time ruthlessly suppressed—Longo Gore (called “Starbridge”), Porphyry Demiele, Karan Mang. Then he spoke another less familiar name, and at the time it was considered lucky and conciliatory that a prince of the old blood could even put his tongue around the name of such a humble figure—Nanda Dev, a glass miner from Carbontown.

It was this miner that Marchpane was seeking on the night of the sixty-seventh of September. Another more practiced administrator would have sent for him, would have had him summoned to the company offices. But Marchpane thought it was important to show himself among the miners from time to time, so that they could understand the human face of power.

It was a bad decision. Already for the past week, since the appearance of the article in the
Gazette
, the mine had been alight with rumors of some big mythic discovery. At the same time, Marchpane had taken advantage of the absence of the Board to implement some new reforms. As he and Cathartes climbed down the concrete slope toward the terminus of the cog railway, they came in among a crowd of miners at their leisure, and some had been able to buy alcohol. They were dangerous, exhausted men, their bodies and their faces streaked with sweat and grease and wrapped in rags, their breath bloody with accumulated glass. They turned their bleared and drunken eyes to look at the two men, and then swung back to stare up at the company offices far above. The windows were all dark.

Every miner knew about the changes of the past week. The security battalion had been reassigned. They were piling sandbags by the gate, they were camping in the woods; in consequence there were fewer in the mine itself. Now the overseers walked singly, or in groups of two. And there were rumors everywhere of some new hope, a young girl who had come down from Paradise the last night of the festival to walk on earth for a short time. The keys to Paradise were in her hands.

Oblivious to this, oblivious to the speculation in the faces that surrounded them, Marchpane and Cathartes continued on. At the terminus they took the elevator, though the cage was loaded with children on the seventh shift. They squeezed in among them—shard gatherers and seekers, their bodies and their limbs wrapped in strips of muslin, their little faces covered with black grease to guard against the dust. Some wore sloppy turbans pulled down over their ears, and a few lucky ones had plastic eyeguards and nose filters—too few, thought Marchpane, for the lips and nostrils and the eyelids of the rest were caked with scabs that would not heal. He made a mental note. On the first of every month, each family was reissued the protective gear they lacked, but it was obviously not enough. There was corruption and thievery, he knew. He had read the report—how men would steal a pair of goggles and then sell it back. The children were always the losers. Now they stared up at him with red, accusing eyes—how had it come to this? Conditions had not always been this bad. Not when the plans had first been drawn. Workers had moved here voluntarily; the cottages in Crystal Lip had been written up in
Industry Today
; they had been widely copied. Children had not been allowed to work until their families insisted. There had been a school.

“It stinks in here,” whispered Cathartes.

The elevator slid down straight into the stomach of the mountain. Through the bars of the cage, Marchpane saw among the layers of schist a seam of glass catch at the lamplight, and then another. They were small and few at first, glittering with pyrite and impurities. But as the cage moved down the shaft, the texture of the glass began to change. The seams were smoother, darker, richer. They mixed into one another, and from time to time Marchpane could see the fugitive reflection of his face as he pressed up against the bars.

When the overseer rang the bell at Level 29, the doors opened on a sheer blue tunnel through the glass. This was Marchpane’s favorite section of the mine—the crystal heart of it, the only place where the pure schemes of the Board had not been dirtied by the needs and the desires of men. It was the access tunnel to the Ranbagh Lode: almost a thousand feet straight through into the pit, and Marchpane could hear the gas hammers of the miners as they labored on the face.

Sometimes the noise seemed sharp and piercing, sometimes dull and flat, as it caught resonances deep inside the glass.

The three men moved away from the loading dock. Twelve children had descended also; now they rushed off down the tunnel, slapping their metal lunchpails against the walls. Their laughter reverberated in the vault, glancing from the rough-cut surfaces.

The car rattled out of sight. The three men were alone. “You’ve never been down here?” asked Marchpane. For once Cathartes looked uncomfortable, and he was staring upward with his mouth open, toward where a cloud of glow-flies buzzed around a lamp. It was very hot. The smooth blue walls were slick with condensation. Streams of moisture had worn channels in the glass.

As they moved forward, their footsteps were muffled by the thick sand on the floor. “You’ve never seen the pit?” continued Marchpane, and Cathartes shook his head. The overseer followed them a few feet back.

“It’s worth a look. The man we’re going to meet is working on this face. I’ll show you.”

He turned back toward the overseer. “You know the man I mean. Nanda Dev—he’s in the cutting crew. Tell him we are waiting in the guardhouse.”

The overseer saluted. And when the tunnel divided he went to the left, while Marchpane and Cathartes continued straight.

Now the tunnel broadened out, the walls sloped away, and the noise from the mine was louder and more varied. They descended a few steps and then paused before an alcove that was cut into the wall. Inside, the raw glass floor was covered with candles and small oil lamps, and photographs in frames, and many personal effects—a pair of shoes, of eyeglasses, a hammer, a neatly folded pair of pants. “We’ve had our share of accidents,” said Marchpane.

They continued on. Then finally they reached the guardhouse at the end, a small square chamber cut into the glass, near where the tunnel opened out into the pit. As they waited for the overseer to return, they looked out into the open air. The tunnel ended on a metal platform which was bolted to the rock, and which was joined by ladders and rope elevators to a mass of bamboo scaffolding over to their left. It descended out of sight below them down the sloping surface of the Ranbagh Lode. In the dark, the whole network of scaffolds and rope bridges that covered the inside of the great glass pit at Carbontown was glistening with light. It was like a web covered in dew, and each drop was an oil lantern swinging in the ropes. Elsewhere along the face the surface of the ore was lit with arc lamps and magnesium flares, and Marchpane could see the figures of the miners made gigantic and grotesque by their harsh shadows on the glass. Here the pit at Carbontown was more than half a mile across—an open gulf seething with light from many hundred sources, for every miner carried in his helmet or his turban a small carbide lamp.

They stood there for about a minute with the humid wind in their faces, listening to the crash of the pneumatic hammers and the drills. Cathartes shuddered. He pulled away when Marchpane touched his arm. “There they are,” said the old engineer, pointing toward the scaffolding below them, where two lamps swayed across a long rope bridge.

They went inside. They waited in the guardroom, which was empty, except for a wooden table and some metal folding chairs. The glass that formed the outside wall was only three feet thick. A bluish underwater light pierced through it from the pit, vanishing when Marchpane lit the lantern on the table.

They sat down with the light between them. “Was it necessary to come down here?” Cathartes asked.

Marchpane rubbed his big nose. “The boy requested it.”

After five minutes there was a knock at the door. It was a slab of wood on metal hinges bolted to the rock—they had not closed it. The overseer reached inside to rap it with his knuckles, though they had heard his footsteps coming down the corridor.

He didn’t enter. He stayed outside to guard the door. Marchpane could see his shadow on the floor beyond the threshold, thrown by his lantern. It stretched across the doorway, thick and black. Then it was disturbed by the small young man who stepped over it and stepped inside.

He had a miner’s lamp strapped to his forehead underneath his turban. It was down low: a yellow jet of flame, which seemed to obscure rather than illuminate his features. His eyes were in black wells. His mouth was hidden underneath the shadow of his nose.

His face was smeared with thick protective grease. Flecks of glass, imbedded in it, glistened in the lantern light. He was wearing shorts and sandals, and his legs were muscular and delicate. They too were greased, and speckled with the shining glass.

“This is Nanda Dev,” said Professor Marchpane. “He’s the boy whom I was telling you about. The boy who took those photographs at Nyangongo.”

Nanda Dev bowed his head, and came a few more steps into the room. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “Thank you for coming down. It’s good to show you’re not afraid.”

Marchpane frowned. A drop of sweat was running down the ridgepole of his nose, and he stroked it away with his long fingers. “Yes. Of course.” He touched his lips. “This is Dr. Cathartes, from the Department of Theology. He’s helping me—he’s got a lot of expertise. I have repeated to him some of the things you told me. But he wanted to talk to you directly.”

As he was speaking, Cathartes took out from an inside pocket the envelope of photographs that had lain on the trainer’s desk in the exercise room far above. He put them on the table. “Here,” he said. “Now tell the story in your own words. I also want to clear up some details.”

The young miner took another step forward. He stripped off his canvas gloves. He said: “Mr. Sebastian, from the Board. He’s gone now in Charn. He gave me the camera. I did work for him.”

Marchpane nodded.

“He gave me a weekend pass to Lameru. So I went up there on the last night, on the sixty-third. To Nyangongo. It’s a dozen miles.”