The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (3 page)

Mercedes Lamballe brought up the auxiliary voices as ordered. The entire crowd joined in the song, having slept on it on the way from Charlemagne's Coronation. Mercy made bird-song fill the blossom-laden orchard and sent out signals that released the butterflies from their secret cages. Unbidden, she conjured up a scented breeze to cool the tourists from Aquitaine and Neustria and Bloi and Foix and all the other "French" planets in the Galactic Milieu who had come, together with Francophiles and medievalists from scores of other worlds, to savor the glories of ancient Auvergne.

"They'll be getting warm now, Bry," she remarked to Grenfell. "The breeze will make them happier."

Bryan relaxed at the more normal tone in her voice. "I guess there are limits to the inconveniences they'll endure in the name of immersive cultural pageantry."

"We reproduce the past," Lamballe said, "as we would have liked it to be. The realities of medieval France are another trip altogether."

"We have stragglers, Merce." Gaston's hands flashed over the control panel in the preliminary choreography of the maypole suite. "I see two or three exotics in the bunch. Probably those comparative ethnologists from the Krondak world we were alerted about Better bring over a troubadour to keep 'em happy unI'll they catch up with the main group. These visiting firemen are apt to write snotty evaluations if you let 'em get bored."

"Some of us keep our objectivity," Grenfell said mildly.

The director snorted. "Well, you're not out there tramping through horseshit in fancy dress in the hot sun on a world with low subjective oxygen and double subjective gravityl . . .

Merce? Dammit, kiddo, are you fuguing off again?

Bryan rose from his seat and came to her, grave concern on his face. "Gaston, can't you see she's ill?"

"I'm not!" Mercy was sharp. "It's going to pass off in a minute or two. Troubadour away, Gaston."

The monitor zoomed in on a singer who bowed to the little knot of laggards, struck a chord on his lute, and began expertly herding the people toward the maypole area while soothing them with song. The piercing sweetness of his tenor filled the control room. He sang first in French, then in the Standard English of the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu for those who weren't up to the archaic linguistics.

Le temps a laissé son manteau De vent, de froidure et de pluie, Et s'est vestu de broderie De soleil luisant, cler et beau.

Now time has put off its dark cloak

Of gales and of frosts and of rain,

And garbs itself in woven light,

Bright sunshine of spring once again.

A genuine lark added its own coda to the minstrel's song. Mercy lowered her head and tears fell onto the console before her. That damn song. And springtime in the Auvergne. And the friggerty larks and retroevolved butterflies and manicured meadows and orchards crammed with gratified folk from faraway planets where the living was tough but the challenge was being met by all but the inevitable misfits who stubbed the beautiful growing tapestry of the Galactic Milieu.

Misfits like Mercy Lamballe.

"Beaucoup regrets, guys," she said with a rueful smile, mopping her face with a tissue. "Wrong phase of the moon, I guess. Or the old Celtic rising. Bry, you just picked the wrong day to visit this crazy place. Sorry."

"All you Celts are bonkers." Gaston excused her with breezy kindness. "There's a Breton., engineer over in the Sun King Pageant who told me he can only shoot his wad when he's doing it on a megalith. Come on, babe. Let's keep this show rolling."

On the screens, the maypole dancers twined their ribbons and pivoted in intricate patterns. The Due de Berry and the other actors of his entourage permitted thrilled tourists to admire the indubitably real gems that adorned their costumes. Flutes piped, cornemuses wailed, hawkers peddled comfits and wine, shepherds let people pet their lambs, and the sun smiled down. All was well in la douce France, A.D. 1410, and so it would be for another six hours, through the tournament and culminating feast.

And then the weary tourists, 700 years removed from the medieval world of the Due de Berry, would be whisked off in comfortable subway tubes to their next cultural immersion at Versailles. And Bryan Grenfell and Mercy Lamballe would go down to the orchard as evening fell to talk of sailing to Ajaccio together and to see how many of the butterflies had survived.

CHAPTER TWO

The alert klaxon hooted through the ready room of Lisboa Power Grid's central staging.

"Well, hell, I was folding anyhow," big Georgina remarked. She hoisted the portable air-conditioning unit of her armor and clomped off to the waiting drill-rigs, helmet under her arm.

Stein Oleson slammed his cards down on the table. His beaker of booze went over and sluiced the meager pile of chips in front of him. "And me with a king-high tizz and the first decent pot all day! Damn lucky granny-banging trisomics!" He lurched to his feet, upsetting the reinforced chair, and stood swaying, two meters and fifteen cents' worth of ugly-handsome berserker. The reddened sclera of his eyeballs contrasted oddly with the bright blue irises. Oleson glared at the other players and bunched up his mailed servo-powered fists.

Hubert gave a deep guffaw. He could laugh, having come out on top. "Tough kitty! Simmer down, Stein. Sopping up all that mouthwash didn't help your game much."

The fourth cardplayer chimed in. "I told you to take it easy on the gargle, Steinie. And now lookit! We gotta go down, and you're halfplotzed again."

Oleson gave the man a look of murderous contempt. He shed the a/c walkaround, climbed into his own drill-rig, and began plugging himself in. "You keep your trap shut, Jango. Even bund drunk I can zap a truer bore than any scat-eatin' li'l Portugee sardine stroker."

"Oh, for God's sake," said Hubert. "Will you two quit?" "You try teaming with an orry-eyed squarehead!" Jango said. He blew his nose in the Iberian fashion, over the neck-rim of his armor, then locked on his helmet. Oleson sneered, "And you call me slob! "

The electronic voice of Georgina, the team leader, gave them the bad news as they went through the systems check, "We've lost the Cabo da Roca-Azores mainline bore 793 kloms out and the service tunnel, too. Class Three slippage and over-thrust, but at least the fistula sealed. It looks like a long trick, children."

Stein Oleson powered up. His 180-ton rig rose thirty cents off the deck, slid out of its bay, and sashayed down the ramp, waving its empennage like a slightly tipsy iron dinosaur.

"Madre de deus," growled Jango's voice. His machine came after Stein's, obeying the taxi regulation scrupulously. "He's a menace, Georgina. I'll be damned if I drill tandem with him. I'm telling you, I'll file a beef with the union! How'd you like to have a drunken numbwit the only thing between your ass and a bleb of red-hot basalt? "

Oleson's bellowed laughter clanged in all their ears. "Go ahead and file with the union, pussywillow! Then get yourself a job to fit your nerve. Like drilling holes in Swiss cheeses with your..."

"Will you cut that crap?" Georgina said wearily. "Hubey, you partner with Jango this shift and I'll go tandem with Stein." ' "Now wait a minute, Georgina," Oleson began. "It's settled, Stein." She cycled the airlock. "You and Big Mama against the world, Blue Byes. And save your soul for :Jesus if you don't sober up before we hit that break. Let's haul, children." A massive gate, eleven meters high and nearly as thick, swung open to give them entry to the service tunnel that dived under the sea. Georgina had fed the coordinates of the break into the autohelms of their drill-rigs, so all they had to do for a while was relax, wiggle around in their armor, and maybe snuff up a euphoric or two while hurtling along at 500 kph toward a mess under the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Stein Oleson raised the partial pressure of his oxygen and gave himself a jolt of aldetox and stimvim. Then he ordered the armor's meal unit to deliver a liter of raw egg and smoked herring puree, together with his favorite hair of the dog, akvavit.

There was a low muttering in his helmet receiver. "Damn atavistic cacafogo. Ought to mount a set of ox horns on his helmet and wrap his iron ass in a bearskin jockstrap."

Stein smiled in spite of himself. In his favorite fantasies he did imagine himself a Viking. Or, since he had both Norse and Swedish genes, perhaps a Varangian marauder slashing his way southward into ancient Russia. How wonderful it would be to answer insults with an axe or a sword, unfettered by the stupid constraints of civilization! To let the red anger flow as it was meant to, powering his great muscles for battle! To take strong blonde women who would first fight him off, then yield with sweet openness! He was born for a life like that.

But unfortunately for Stein Oleson, human cultural savagery was extinct in the Galactic Age, mourned only by a few ethnologists, and the subtleties of the new mental barbarians were beyond Stein's power to grasp. This exciting and dangerous job of his had been vouchsafed him by a compassionate computer, but his soul-hunger remained unsatisfied. He had never considered emigrating to the stars; on no human colony anywhere in the Galactic Milieu was there a primal Eden. The germ plasm of humanity was too valuable to fritter in neolithic backwaters. Each of the 783 new human worlds was completely civilized, bound by the ethics of the Concilium, and obligated to contribute toward the slowly coalescing Whole. People who hankered after their simpler roots had to be content with visiting the Old World's painstaking restorations of ancient cultural settings, or with the exquisitely orchestrated Immersive Pageants, almost, but not quite, authentic to the last detail, which let a person actively savor selected portions of his heritage.

Stein, who was born on the Old World, had gone to the Fjordland Saga when he was barely out of adolescence, traveling from Chicago Metro to Scandinavia with other vacationing students. He was ejected from the Longboat Invaders Pageant and heavily fined after leaping into the midst of a mock melee, chopping a hairy Norseman's arm off, and "rescuing" a kidnapped British maiden from rape. (The wounded actor was philosophical about his three months in the regeneration tank. "Just the hazards of the trade, kid," he had told his remorseful attacker.)

Some years later, after Stein had matured and found a certain release in his work, he had gone to the Saga-pageants again. This time they seemed pathetic. Stein saw the happy outworld visitors from Trondelag and Thule and Finnmark and all the other "Scandinavian" planets as a pack of silly costumed fools, waders in the shallows, nibblers, masturbators, pathetic chasers after lost identity. ! "What will you do when you find out who you are, great- j grandchildren of test tubes?" he had screamed, fighting drunk at the Valhalla Feast. "Go back where you came from, to the new worlds the monsters gave you!" Then he had climbed up onto the Aesir's table and peed in the mead bowl.

They ejected and fined him again. And this time his credit card was pipped so that he was automatically turned away by every pageant box office ...

The speeding drill-rigs raced beneath the continental slope, their headlights catching glints of pink, green, and white from the granite walls of the tunnel. Then the machines penetrated the dark basalt of the deep-ocean crust below the Tagus Abyssal Plain. Just three kilometers above their service tunnel were the waters of the sea; ten kilometers below lay the molten mantle.

As they drove two abreast through the lithosphere, the members of the team had the illusion of going down a gigantic ramp with sharp drops at regular intervals. The rigs would fly straight and level, then nose down sharply on a new straight path, only to repeat the maneuver a few moments later. The service tunnel was following the curvature of the Earth in a series of straight-line increments; it had to, because of the power-transmittal bore it served, a parallel tunnel with a diameter just great enough to admit a single drill-rig when there was a need for major repairs. In most parts of the complex undersea power system, service tunnels and bores were connected by adits every ten kloms, allowing the maintenance crews easy access; but if they had to, the drill-rigs could zap right through the rough rock walls of the service tunnel and mole their way to the bore from any angle.

UnI'll the time when the alarm had run in Lisboa, the mainline bore between continental Europe and the extensive Azores agriculture farms had been lit with the glare of a photon beam. This ultimate answer to Earth's ancient energy-hunger originated at this time of day in the sunshine of the Serra da Estrela Tier 39 Collection Center northwest of Lisboa Metro. With its sister centers at Jiuquan, Akebono Platform, and Cedar Bluffs KA, it gathered and distributed solar energy to be used by consumers adjacent to the 39N parallel all around the globe. A complex of spidery stratotowers, secure against the forces of gravity and high above the weather, gathered light rays from the cloudless skies, arranged them into a coherent beam, and sent this to be distributed safely underground via a web of mainline and local feeder bores. A photon from the Portuguese (or Chinese? or Pacific or Kansas) daylight would be directed on its way by means of plasma mirrors operating within the bores, and would reach the fog-bound folk in the farms of the North Atlantic before an eye could bunk. The ocean farmers uI'llized the power for everything from submarine harvesters to electric blankets. Few of the consumers would bother to think where the energy came from.

Like all of Earth's subterranean power bores, Cabo da Roca-Azores was regularly patrolled by small robot crawlers and muckers. These could make minor repairs when the planetary crust shifted in a common Class One incident, not even interrupting the photon beam. Class Two damage was severe enough to cause an automatic shutdown. Perhaps a tremor would shift a segment of the bore slightly out of alignment, or damage one of the vital mirror stations. Crews from the surface would race to the scene of the disruption via the service tunnels, and the repairs were usually made very quickly.

But on this day, the tectonic adjustment had been rated at Class Three. The Despacho Fracture Zone had shrugged, and a web of minor faults in the suboceanic basalt had waggled in sympathy. Hot rock surounding a three-kilometer section of the paired tunnels suddenly moved north-south, east-west, up-down, crumpling not only the power bore but the much larger service tunnel as well. As the mirror station vaporized in a very small thermonuclear flash, the searing photons of the beam burned undeflected for a microsecond before safety cutoff. The beam punched through the shattered bore wall and continued to burn a straight-arrow path westward through the crust unI'll it broke through' the sea floor. There was a steam explosion in the liquefied rock just as the beam died, which effectively sealed the fistula. But a large region that had formerly been fairly stable solid rock was now reduced to a shambles of rubble, cooked oceanic ooze, and slowly cooling pockets of molten lava.