“In the beginning,” Boldt said, “one hundred.”
“Your father knew how to do this, too?”
“The Lydecker Foundation,” the Celtic prince replied. “Some knowledge was borrowed.”
“Then these people started having children of their own?”
“No,” Boldt said. “It was forbidden by my father’s edicts. He wanted each individual in this community to be placed as carefully as a seedling, each to perform its function and design.”
Mildred watched the parents huddled around the children so protectively as they drove past.
“The people, though,” Boldt said with rancor, “weren’t able to view the children as a harvesting. They becameattached. And when I placed some of them in charge of the human seedlings, they carefully concealed the fact that some of the people in the thorpe were having children of their own.”
Mildred was stunned.
Boldt nodded. “I see you’re surprised. So was I. Some of Merlin’s programming managed to deduce what was happening. Our food surplus, our seeds, all these things are carefully measured. I was alerted to what was going on. It took months to figure out who was behind it. When I did, I killed the responsible parties.”
Mildred refused to let herself say a word. Nothing she could have said would have been what the madman sitting in front of her would have wanted to hear.
“I couldn’t believe the betrayals,” Boldt said. “These people were given a taste of heaven, unfettered by what was going on in the outer world. In turn they tried to foul everything they’d been given.”
“What of the children?”
“Those I had killed, as well. The ones I could find. But some of them must have been carefully hidden.”
The cart stopped at the foot of the mountain overlooking the ville.
Boldt got out and ascended the stairs. “My father had visions of a new world, one filled with perfection, a pedigreed selection of the finest the old world had to offer. These people, they’ve spit on his dream and introduced hybrids. Some of those hybrids have manifested esper powers. The ones with obvious physical deformities were destroyed. I myself examined every child.”
“And killed the ones that didn’t measure up.”
“Yes. When you’re growing a garden, you don’t allow weeds in,” Boldt said. “They have a tendency to try to take over and choke the life from everything else. You can think of me what you will, but my father’s way is the only path to the salvation of this world.”
Mildred followed the man back into the mouth of yawning root, through the corridors, walking through new twists and turns that she was sure took her farther and farther into the depths of the mountain. “That’s your plan?” she asked.
“The salvation of this world?” Boldt asked as he led her into a vast chamber hollowed out in a space thirty feet in height and easily three times that in length. Computer hardware lined the cavern, seemingly on the verge of being absorbed into the root walls, the fibrous bark highly polished and reflecting the lights and the sheen of the machines. “My father’s plan would have allowed nothing less.”
“Do you have any idea what is waiting out there?” Mildred asked. She couldn’t help herself, couldn’t rein in the disbelief.
“Yes.” Boldt walked to the end of the room, his staff in his hand as he sat in the sculpted wood throne at the head of a conference table. “I’ve sent seed heralds out into the world. Past New London, past the chunnel, where some gaps yet remain that a man might make it from here to the European mainland under the sea. The way is arduous, of course, but it can be made. I’ve even allowed some exploration through the mat-trans unit.”
Unconsciously Mildred scanned the room. She spotted the familiar lines of the mat-trans unit in the softened shadows against one of the far walls. “Where have they been?”
“Over most of what remains of the British Islands,” Boldt replied, waving her to a chair.
Mildred sat, steeling herself to appear relaxed.
“To Europe and even as far as the Russian climes. Through the mat-trans we’ve been to what’s left of the United States. Deathlands, as you people seem so fond of calling it.”