The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (14 page)

"That's a cruel and cynical thing to say, Claude!" exclaimed the nun. "You don't know anything of the girl's background, any of the things that have maimed her spirit You talk as though she were some monster, when all she is, is a pathetic child who has never learned how to love." She took a deep breath. "I'm a medic as well as a nun. One of my vows is to help the suffering. I don't know if I can help Felice, but I'm certainly going to try."

A gust of wind lifted Amerie's veil and she clutched it impatiently with one strong hand. "Don't stay up too late, guys. Tomorrow's creeping up on us." She hurried off the terrace and disappeared into the darkened garden.

"Could be it's the nunnie who'll need the prayers," Aiken said, giggling.

"You shut up!" barked Claude. Then he said, "Sorry, son. But you want to watch that smartass mouth of yours. We're going to have enough trouble without your adding to it" He looked at the sky as a prolonged and powerful bolt of lightning descended over the eastern hills. Ground-strokes rose up to meet it and there was a grumble of thunder. "Here comes the storm. I'm going to bed, too. What I want to know is, who the hell ordered the omens for this outfit?"

The old man stomped away, leaving Elizabeth, Aiken, and Bryan staring after him. Three successive thunderbolts gave him a ridiculous theatrical exit; but none of the people still on the terrace was smiling any more.

"I never told you, Aiken," Elizabeth ventured at last, "how much I like your costume. You were right It's the most spectacular one in the whole auberge."

The little man began snapping his fingers and clacking his heels like a flamenco dancer, turning and posing. Lightning shone on his loose-fitting garment. What seemed to be cloth of gold was actually a costly fabric woven from the byssus threads of Franconian mollusks, famed throughout the galaxy for beauty and toughness. All up and down the arms and legs of the suit were small flapped and fastened pockets; pockets covered the breast area and the shoulders and hips and there was a very large pocket on the back with an opening on the bottom. Aiken's golden boots had pockets. His belt had pockets. Even his golden hat, with the brim tipped up jaunI'lly on the right side, had a band full of tiny pockets. And every pocket, large or small, bulged with some tool or instrument or compressed decamole appliance. Aiken Drum was a walking hardware shop incarnate as a golden idol.

"King Arthur would dub you Sir Boss at first sight," Elizabeth said, explaining to Bryan: "He plans to set himself up as a Pliocene Connecticut Yankee."

"You wouldn't have to bother with Twain's solar eclipse to gain attention," the anthropologist conceded. "The suit alone is enough to overawe the peasantry. But isn't it rather conspicuous if you want to spy out the land?"

"This big pocket on my back has a chameleon poncho."

Bryan laughed. "Merlin won't have a prayer."

Aiken watched the Lyon city lights dim and disappear as the approaching storm curtained the valley with rain. "The Connecticut Yankee had to contend against Merlin in the story, didn't he? Modern technology versus sorcery. Science against the superstition of the Dark Ages. I cant remember too much about the book. Read it when I was about thirteen there on Dalriada and I know I was disappointed with Twain for wasting so much space on half-baked philosophy instead of action. How did it end? You know, I've forgotten! Think m go hit the computer for a plaque of the thing for bedtime reading." He gave Bryan and Elizabeth a wink. "But I may decide to aim higher than Sir Boss!"

He slipped off into the auberge.

"And then there were two," Bryan said.

Elizabeth was finishing her Remy Martin. She reminded him in many ways of Varya, calm, incisively intelligent, but with the shutters always dosed. She projected cool comradeship and not the slightest jot of sex.

"You won't be staying with Group Green for long, will you, Bry?" she remarked. "The rest of us have built a dependence in these five days. But not you."

"You don't miss much. Are you sore your metafunctions are really gone?"

"Not gone," she said. "But they might as well be. I've dropped into what we call the latent state because of brain damage. My functions are still there, but inaccessible, walled up in the right half of my brain. Some persons are born latent, with the walls. Others are born operant, as we say, and their mind-powers are available to them, especially if they receive proper training from infancy. It's closely analogous to the acquisition of language by babies. My work back on Denali involved a good deal of that kind of training. Very rarely, we were even able to coax latents into operancy. But my own case is different I have just a few teaspoonful of my original cerebrum left. The rest is regenerated. The leavening was enough for a resoul job, and a specialist restored my memories. But for some unknown reason, metapsychic operancy seldom survives a really spectacular brain trauma."

"What happened, if you don't mind my asking?"

"My husband and I were caught in a tornado while we were egging on Denali It's a sweet little world, with some of the galaxy's worst weather. Lawrence was killed outright I was broken to bits but ultimately restored. Except for the MP functions."

"And is losing them so unbearable..."he began, then cursed and apologized.

But she was calm, as always. "It's nearly impossible for a non-meta to understand the loss. Think of going deaf, dumb, bund. Think of being paralyzed and numb all over. Think of losing your sex organs, of becoming hideously disfigured. Put all of the anguish together and it's still not enough, once you've known the other thing and then lost it... But you've lost something, too, haven't you, Bry? Maybe you can understand something of the way I feel."

'Lost something. Perhaps it does make more sense to say it that way. God knows there's no logic to the way I feel about Mercy."

"Where will you look for her? If the others in the Pliocene don't know where she's gone?"

"All I have is an instinct. I'll try Armorica first because of her Breton ancestry. And then Albion, the Britain that will be. I'll need the boat because there's a question whether the Channel was dry land at the precise period well be living in. Sea level seems to have fluctuated in an odd way at the beginning of the Pliocene. But I'll find Mercy somehow, no matter where she's gone."And what will I find in my beautiful balloon, Elizabeth wandered. And what will it matter? Will the Exile world be any less empty than this one?

Perhaps if she and Lawrence had wanted children ... but that would have compromised the wort, and so they had agreed to forgo them, finding love fulfillment in each other, mating for life as almost all metapsychics did, knowing that when one had inevitably gone there would still be the Unity, the billion-fold mind-embrace of the Galactic Milieu.

Or there would have been...

The first large drops of rain made a rataplan on the leaves of the plane trees. Blue-white flashes lit the whole valley and the thunder seemed to shake the mountain roots. Bryan grabbed Elizabeth's hand and putted her through the porte-feneire into the main salon a few seconds before the real downpour began.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The predawn was chilly, with gray clouds scudding south want as though late for an appointment at the Mediterranean. The Rhone Valley brimmed with mist. A small log fire had been lit in the main salon and it was there that the members of Group Green gathered after breakfasting in their rooms. Each person carried the materials for a new life and dressed for the role chosen. (Their extra baggage had proceeded them to the time-gate staging area: Claude's case of Wybrowa, Bryan's Scotch, Richard's supplies of spices and yeasts and sodium bisulfate, Stein's keg, Elizabeth's liqueur chocolates, and Amerie's large painting of Saint Sebastian.) Richard and Stein whispered together as they stared at the weak flames. Amerie, a half-smile on her lips, fingered the beads of a large wooden rosary that hung from her belt. The others stood apart, waiting.

At precisely five hundred hours, Counselor Mishima came down the broad staircase from the mezzanine and bid them a solemn good-morning.

"Please accompany me."

They picked up their things and followed in single file out of the salon, across the terrace, and into the sodden garden, where the flagstones were still puddled with rain and the blossoms on the rose-standards hung torn and battered from the storm.

The balconies of the main guesthouse overlooked the garden. Up above, dim faces behind glass doors were watching them, just as they themselves had watched other dawn processions of eight time-travelers led by a single counselor. They had seen Gypsies and Cossacks and desert nomads and voortrekkers, Polynesians with feathered capes and warriors with crossbows, swords, and assegais; there had been Bavarian hikers in leder-hosen, bearded white-robed prophets, shaven-headed Oriental votaries, sunbonneted American pioneers, cowboys, fetishists costumed in pathetic grotesquery, and sensible-looking people wearing levis or tropical gear. The travelers in the early morning parades had moved through the garden to an old cottage shaded by mulberry trees, its white stucco and half-timbering shrouded in climbing vines. Madame Guderian's lace curtains still hung at the windows and her pink and white geraniums bloomed in earthenware pots beside the large front door. The eight guests and the counselor would enter the cottage and the door would close behind them. After half an hour had elapsed, the counselor alone would emerge.

Bryan Grenfell stood behind Counselor Mishima as he unlocked the Guderian cottage with an old-fashioned brass key. A large ginger cat sat in the dry shelter of the shrubbery, watching the group with a sardonic golden eye. Grenfell nodded to it as he passed inside. You've seen a lot of us go this way, haven't you, Monsieur le Chat? And how many of them by now felt as used and foolish and died as I do, but still too stubborn to turn back? Here I go, in my pragmatic tropical kit with a haversack full of simple necessities and high-protein food, armed with a steel-tipped walking stick and a small throwing knife hidden beneath the sleeve of my left forearm, and Mercy's dear picture and dossier in my breast pocket Here I go into the deep cellar...

Stein Oleson had to duck his head passing through the door and walk with caution through the hall lest he brush against Madame's tall clock with its wagging brass pendulum, or knock some fragile bibelot from its place on the wall, or catch the curling horns of his Viking helmet on the little crystal chandelier. Stein was finding it more and more difficult to keep silent. Something was expanding inside of him that demanded to cry out, to roar, to vent a great gust of laughter that would make all the rest of the group shrink away from him as from the door of a suddenly opened furnace. He felt his manhood coming alive beneath the wolfskin kilt, his feet itching to leap and trample, his arm muscles tensing to swing the battle-axe or brandish the vitredur-tipped spear he had added to his armory. Soon! Soon! The tangle in his guts would come free, the fire in his blood would power him to heroism, and the joy would be so huge that he would damn near die with the swallowing of it...

Richard Voorhees followed Stein carefully down into the cellar. His heavy, folded-over seaboots were awkward on the worn steps. He had a suspicion that he would have to switch to the more comfortable athletic shoes in his backpack once they had passed through the gate and done a first reconnaissance on the other side. Practicalities first, then rôle playing! The secret of success, he told himself, would lie in a swift assessment of the local power structure, covert appeal to the have-nots, and establishment of a suitable base. Once he got the distillery operating (with Stein, and maybe Landry, to keep the locals from muscling in), he'd be on a sound economic footing and ready to jockey for political influence. He smiled in anticipation and carefully adjusted the hipband of the backpack so that it would not wrinkle the skirts of his doublet. Didn't some of those old sea rovers set themselves up as virtual kings in early America? Jean Lafitte, Bloody Morgan, even old Blackboard himself? And how do yon like Richard Voorhees for King of Barataria? He chuckled out loud at the thought, completely forgetting that his costume had not really belonged to an operatic buccaneer, but to a different kind of seafarer altogether...

Felice Landry watched Counselor Mishima manipulate the elaborate lock mechanism of the cellar door. It swung ponderously open and they entered the old wine-keep, dank and musty and with a faint over-scent of ozone. She stared at the gazebo, that unlikely gate to freedom, and clutched her new arbalest to her black-armored bosom. She was trembling, nauseated, exerting all her willpower to keep from disgracing herself in this ultimate moment. For the first time since early childhood, her eyes, within the T-shaped Grecian helmet opening, were sticky-lashed with tears...

"We will translate you in groups of four, as I have already explained," said Counselor Mishima. "Your extra baggage will follow after an interval of five minutes, so be prepared to retrieve it from the tau-field area. And now, if the first people will position themselves..."

Elizabeth Orme watched without emotion as Bryan, Stein, Richard, and Felice crowded closely into the latticed booth and stood motionless. All of them, she thought, have made their plans except me. They have their goals, touching or comical or mad. But FU be content to drift through the Exile world in my scarlet balloon, looking down on all the people and the animals, listening to wind and the cry of birds, smelling pollen, resin from the forest, smoke from wildfire on the grassland. I'll come to earth only when I feel that the Earth is real again and I am. If we ever can be ...

Mirrored walls sprang up as Mishima threw the switch. The four people in the gazebo were on their way. Aiken Drum, his golden suit glittering with a hundred reflections from the cellar lights, stepped forward impulsively.

"Damn! So that's all there is to it? Not even enough power drain to dim the lamps! " He studied the vinelike cables that seemed to grow out of the packed soil of the floor and disappear somewhere short of the vaulted ceiling. Mishima warned him to touch nothing, and Aiken gave him a reassuring gesture. But he had to get a close look. The glassy framework was shot through with faintly moving patterns hovering at the edge of visibility. The black bodies of the lattice-nodes each enclosed a tiny point of unwinking light that seemed to be shining at a great distance.