The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (13 page)

The latter, by the way, is the vocation of choice for our Viking. He also confided to me that if there should be a demand for swash-budding mercenary warriors, he might combine the two trades.

The individual whom I dubbed the Pirate also plans to get involved with alcoholic beverages, wines and brandies, that is. He and the Viking are now the straightest of friends, spending their off-hours tossing down the most expensive spirits that the auberge can supply and speculating on the quality of female consolation that might be available in the By-and-By. (Group Green itself has lean pickings. Besides the Nun, our female members include a sinister Virgin Huntress who seems to have wreaked mayhem or worse on one of the auberge counselors in order to qualify as a recidivist, and an extremely cautious ex-Meta Lady who is, at the moment at least, content to remain just one of the boys.)

Last night we had a fascinating glimpse into the background of the Pirate. His brother and sister turned up unexpectedly to say adieu and turned out to be Fleet line officers of the most impressive stripe. The poor P was very discomfited and the ex-Meta Lady speculates that he must be a cashiered spacer himself. He's a competent sort if you don't mind grouches. I worked with him for a few hours in the Small Boat Handling exercise, which he wanted to cram, and he seemed to have a natural flair for messing about in the water.

Most of the others in Group Green seem to be alone in the world. The Nun received a long conference call from her religious sistren in North America bidding her bon voyage. And earlier today she met with a Franciscan Brother in full conventual fig, no doubt hearing her last confession or whatever. (The friar drove one of those souped-up Gambini eggs with the heat dissipation fins, not the patient gray donkey you might have anticipated from memoirs of Il Poverello.) The Nun was a medic and psychological counselor by profession and plans to retire to a hermitage. I hope the poor woman Isn't counting on ministering angels such as the Old Paleontologist overmuch. He's a fine chap with a penchant for carpentry, but I dare say the ex-Meta is right when she pegs him as a death-wisher.

I concur with your analysis of the little Joker. There must have been some valid square-peg reason for him to be thrown off his home world, but it's a pity that his wild talents couldn't be harnessed for the Milieu. Poor little nonborn. He's endeared himself to the rest of us Greenies, not only for his ghastly sense of humor, but also for his fantastic ability to make something out of nothing. He has assembled a large collection of vitredur toolheads that need only be equipped with shafts or bandies to be operational. You get the feeling that after this boy has been in the Pliocene for a week or two, the Industrial Revolution will be raging! He has a whole forge lashup in decamole for his village blacksmith and rustic mechanician acts, and has acquired a plaquefal of geological survey charts to due him in on metal ores in the unlikely event that none of the other Exiles has gone in heavily for prospecting.

You may be interested in the peculiar social structure of Group Green. The foundress of the auberge was a practical psychologist of no mean ability and realized quite early on that her clients would need support from fellow travelers in order to maximize survival potential beyond the gate. On the other hand, they would tend to be far too eccentric to stand for any of the more obvious schemes of imposed organization. So Madame Guderian fell back on the old "put 'em through hell together and they'll end up buddies" shtick, which you must admit is apt to induce feelings of solidarity in all but the most sodopathic. (And it did, too, with the obvious exception.)

During each day's Group activities we have spent the most strenuous sessions working together, often thrust into outlandish situations where we were forced to cooperate with one another in order to complete a difficult task quickly and well. For example, we bridged a thirty-meter pond full of alligators in one lesson; captured, butchered, and "uI'llized" an elk in another; and defended ourselves against hosI'lle human stalkers in third, Ironically, the most accomplished primitive in the Group is the Old Paleontologist, who seems to have knocked about the wilder shores of Galactica for more than a century while gleaning fossil bones.

We are known to each other by first names only, and we may divulge such details of our background as we choose or don't choose. As you may imagine, this leaves a wide margin for parlor psychoanalysis, with the ex-Meta Lady as head gamesmistress. She had me taped as a Questing Lover after the first day, and I'm afraid that she anticipates a melancholy end to my masculine Evangeline-fixe, since she keeps trying to distract me with speculations on idle playing among the auberge clientele, the political implications of Exile, and other anthropological amusements.

Do you think I'm doomed, too, Varya? I don't, you know.

Late this afternoon I got a call from London, and it was Kaplan and Djibutunji and Hildebrand and Catherwood, bless their bones, telling me goodbye Aunt Helen sent a note, but she is really nearly gaga now, since declining rejuv.

Your dear letter was in this morning's post. I don't have to tell you how much I appreciate your agreeing to carry on with the liaison committee. It's the one work I really hated to leave unfinished. There is still the ultimate correlation of the pre-Rebellion mazeway material, but I feel that Alicia and Adalberto have that pretty well in hand.

And so I come at last to the farewell, Varya, and I wish I could be eloquent and memorable instead of just my stodgy self. The gaudiness of the act will have to speak for me. Whatever you do, don't mourn. My only hope of happiness lies on the other side of the Exile gate and I must risk going after it. Remember the years we shared as lovers and colleagues and friends and know that I'm glad they happened. Joy and light to you, my Very Dear.

Forever,

BRY

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When the Last Supper, with its crazy smorgasbord of requested dishes, was finally over, the eight members of Group Green took their drinks out onto the terrace, where they instinctively gathered apart from the other guests. Even though it was only half after twenty, the sky over Lyon had turned black as the scheduled weekly storm built up in the north. Pink flashes silhouetted approaching thunderheads.

"Feel the static buildup!" Elizabeth exclaimed. "Even with my metafunctions out, the ionization before a really big storm always gets to me. Every sense sharpens. I begin to fed so clever I can barely contain myself! Capacitor Earth is charging and so am I, and in just a minute or two I'll be able to zap mountains!"

She faced into the strengthening wind, long hair streaming and red denim jumpsuit clinging to her body. The first sub-sonics of distant thunder curdled the air.

Felice affected a languid tone. "Were you able to move mountains before?"

"Not really. The larger psychokinetic powers are really very rare among metas, almost as rare as genuine creativity. My PK ability was only good for a few parlor tricks. What I specialized in was farspeaking, the glorified telepathy function. It should really be called farsensing because it includes a species of sight as well as hearing. I was also operant in redaction, which is the therapeutic and analytical power that most lay persons call mind-alteration. My husband had similar faculties. We worked as a team training the minds of very young children in the first difficult steps toward metapsychic Unity."

"They wanted me to go to a redactor," Felice said, her voice thrilling with loathing. "I told them I'd rather die. I don't know how you meta people can stand rummaging around in others' brains. Or always having some other meta able to read you own secret thoughts. It would be horrible never to be alone. Never to be able to hide. I'd go mad."

Elizabeth said gently, "It wasn't like that at all As far as metas reading each other... there are many different levels to the mind Modes, we call them. You can farspeak to many people on the declamatory mode, or speak at short range to a group on the conversational mode. Then there's the intimate mode, that only one person can receive from you. And beneath that are many other conscious and unconscious layers that can be screened off by means of mental techniques that all metapsychics learn when they're very young. We have our private thoughts, just as you do. Most of our telepathic communication is nothing more than a kind of voiceless speech and image projection. You can compare it to electronic audio-visuals, without the electromagnetic radiation."

Felice said, "Deep redactors can get into a person's innermost thoughts."

"True. But with them, there is almost always a doctor-patient relationship appertaining. The patient gives conscious permission for the scrutiny. Even then, a dysfunction may be so strongly programmed that the therapist is powerless to get behind it, no matter how much the patient may be willing to cooperate."

"Yeah," said Stein. He I'llted his great mug of beer, holding it before his face.

Felice persisted. "I know that metas can read secret thoughts. Sometimes the coach of our team would bring in redactors to work on guys in slumps. Metas could always spot the ones who'd lost their nerve. You can't tell me those poor bastards would deliberately let the shrinks find out something that'd get them fired!"

Elizabeth said, "An untrained person, a non-meta, gives away information in subverbal ways without being aware of it. Think of it as mental mumbling. Haven't you ever stood next to a person who was talking to himself, muttering under his breath? When a person is frightened or angry or trying very hard to work out a problem or even sexually aroused, the thoughts become ... loud. Even non-metas can sometimes pick up the vibes, the mind-pictures or subvocal speech or emotional surges. The better the redactor, the better he is at making sense out of the crazy mishmash that human brains broadcast."

Bryan asked, "Is there any way an ordinary person can shut out a mind reader? "

"Of course. It's possible to stymie superficial snooping rather easily. Just keep a firm grip on your mental broadcasting. If you think someone is really digging, think of some neutral image like a big black square. Or do some simple exercise when you're not speaking out loud. Count one-two-three-four, over and over. Or sing some dumb song. That'll block out all but the best redactor."

"I'm glad you can't read my mind now, lovie," Aiken Drum put in. "You'd fall into a quagmire of sheer funk. Fin so scared about going through this time-gate that my red corpuscles have gone puce! I tried to back out. I even told the counselors I'd reform if they'd let me stay here! But nobody believe me."

"I can't think why," Bryan said.

A reddish bolt of lightning reached from cloud to cloud above the hills; but the sound, when it came, was muffled and unsatisfying, a beat from a dead tympanum.

Aiken asked Elizabeth, "How did the ballooning work out, sweets?"

"I crammed the theory of building one from native materials, tanning fishskins for the envelope and weaving a basket and plaiting cordage from bark fibers. But I did my practicing in one of these." She took a package the size of two large bricks from her shoulder bag. "It blows up five storeys tan, double-walled and semidirigible. Bright red, like my suit I have a power source to inject hot air. Of course, the power won't last for more than a few flight-weeks, so eventually I'll have to shift to charcoal. Making that's a mess. But it's the only ancient fuel that's suitable, unless I can find some coal"

"No sweat, doll-eyes," Aiken said. "Stick with me and my mineral maps."

Stein laughed contemptuously. "And how you gonna mine the stuff? Draft Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? The nearest coal's gotta be a hundred kloms north, around Le Creu-sot or Montceau, and way to hell and gone underground. Even if you reach the stuff without blasting, how you gonna tote it around to where it'll do you some good?"

"So I'll need a week or two to work out the fewkin' details!" Aiken shot back.

There would be other coal deposits much nearer," Claude Majewski said. "Those modern maps of yours are deceptive, Aiken. They show the strata and deposits as they exist today, in the twenty-second century, not as they were six million years ago. There used to be little limnic coal basins all over the Massif Central and a really large deposit at Saint-Etienne, but they were all worked out late in the twentieth century. Go back to the Pliocene and you'll probably find easy pickings just a few kloms south of here. Find some near a volcano, and you might luck out with natural coke! "

"Better hold off establishing Pliocene Mining, Unlimited, unI'll you eyeball the territory," Richard advised Aiken with a sour grimace. "The local honchos might have their own ideas about us helping ourselves to the natural resources."

"Entirely possible," Bryan agreed.

"We could convince them to let us have a piece of the action," said Felice. She smiled. "In one way or another."

The nun said, "We could also try to avoid conflict by going to an unsettled area "

"I don't think that's Felice's style," Aiken said. "She's looking forward to a little fun and games, aren't you, babe?"

Landry's pale frizzy hair was standing out from her head in a charged cloud. She was wearing the simple cheongsam again. "Whatever I'm looking forward to, I'll find. Right now all I want is another drink. Anybody coming with me?" She strolled back into the auberge, followed by Stein and Richard.

"Somebody should tell those two they're wasting their time," the old man muttered.

"Poor Felice," Amerie said. "What an ironic name for her, when she's so dreadfully unhappy. That aggressive pose is just another form of armor, like the hockey uniform."

"And underneath she's just crying for love?" Elizabeth inquired, her eyes nearly shut and a faint smile on her lips. "Be careful, Sister. That one's standing in the need of prayer, all right. But she's more of a black hole than a black sheep."

"Those eyes eat you alive," Aiken said. "Something damned inhuman is moving around in there."

"Not even normally homophilic," Majewski said. "But I'll certainly grant you the damned."