“I can tell you one bunch, one place they’re not surrounded by commoners,” remarked Jeorfy, with a significant nod. “And that’s the Tribunal.”
“The Covenanters? I didn’t know that.”
“It’s true,” remarked Jeorfy. “I was surprised when I read about it, but that’s how it is. Whoever installed the inventory system down here connected it to the archive machines upstairs. Zebulon didn’t even know that until I came. The nobles, the Lord Paramount, and the Prince and all, even they don’t know that! So, I’ve been digging around, and I came across some Tribunal edicts forbidding common people from going anywhere near the Tribunal.”
“What do you mean, the systems are connected?” Genevieve asked.
“It means from down here we can read anything that’s in the archive machines except what they’ve locked up since they caught me looking. They find out I can still get into those machines, they’d disconnect us in a minute, or kill us.”
Zebulon made a sharp right turn and headed off in the new direction at top speed. They had come to a section of the cavern where the crates stacked on either side were huge, each one towering three and four men high. Genevieve cocked her head to read the lettering on them as they went past. BIOSTASIS, they read, followed by a code number.
“What’s Biostasis?” she asked.
Zeb answered. “That’s what we told you. Pets. Animals. I think the Lord Paramount wanted to have a zoo, so he bought all kinds of animals, but never set the zoo up. The animals are in stasis. You open the box, the insides go to work, and out it comes, alive. I’ll show you.”
He stopped the wagon, and beckoned her to follow him as he wriggled his way into the enormous stack. He stopped before a fogged window and rubbed it clear. “See!”
She looked in, seeing forms, fur, perhaps the edge of a wing? Maybe. Another window showed an unmistakable antler, huge. There were a dozen cases of that particular code number, all from the same shipper. From one case an eye looked at her, unmistakably.
“It’s looking at me,” she murmured to Jeorfy.
“Can’t,” he said. “It’s asleep.”
She felt the look. The thing might be asleep, and in that case it was dreaming her, but it definitely perceived her, one way or the other!
She leaned closer, looking deep. She saw an ear, trembling. Perhaps she did not see it tremble, perhaps she only felt it, the fragile tympanum responding to a sound so deep she could not hear it. “Something’s talking to it,” she said firmly.
“Nonsense,” said Jeorfy, coming to thrust his face in beside hers and peer into the case. “Who could be talking to it?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured. Still, she was sure the thing in the crate knew she was here, and knew something was talking to it, and was fully aware, though perhaps only in dream, of what was going on. She backed off to estimate the size of the crate. Very, very large. The size of an elephant, perhaps, one of the old, now-departed animals of Old Earth.
“Come on,” said Jeorfy, uncomfortably. “It’s the same with the war machines. The Lord Paramount has a lot of them down here, too, and they’re sort of alive. They take up a lot of space.”
“What are war machines for?”
“They’ve been here since the year one. Inventory has ’em listed as protection against invasion. Like from off-world.”
“Does my . . . ah, that is, do the armies know about them?”
“Nobody knows about them. The weapons they know about are simple by comparison, and cheaper. They’re all stored up from here, on the first level under Havenor, where they’re easier to get to.”
She cried, “We’re not a rich world! Why would anyone invade us? And who buys such things?”
Jeorfy shrugged. “The Lord Paramount or the Prince would be my guess. Or some oldie duke.”
“What do you mean exactly, when you say ‘oldie’?” asked Genevieve.
“Someone a hundred fifty, two hundred years old,” snarled Zeb. “Like the Prince and the Lord Paramount and all the Dukes, living off the rest of us, like a vampire.” He made another swift turn and brought the vehicle to a halt at the end of a long line of vehicles, some large, some small.