The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (5 page)

"Lan-dree! Lan-dree!"

I have poured myself and discharged myself for you, slaves-eaters-violators. Now let me go.

Small medical carts were scuttling through the passageway toward the arena to bring in the stunned. Felice had to keep firm control of the nervous verrul as she moved toward the Greenhammer ramp. Suddenly there were people all around her, assistants, trainers, verrul grooms, second-string bench-warmers, gofers, and hangers-on. They raised a ragged cheer of greeting and congratulation, tinged with over-familiarity. The heroine among her own.

She gave a tight, regal smile. Someone took the bridle of the verrul and soothed it with a bucket of feed.

"Felice! Felice, baby!" Coach Megowan, hot from the observation booth and still trailing game-plan tapes like a person caught in an old-time ticker tape parade, came pounding down from the upper level of the arena. "You were unbelievable, lovie! Glorious! Pyrotechnic! Kaleidoscope!"

"Here you go, Coach," she said, leaning down from the saddle and passing him the banner. "Our first pennant. But not our last."

The jostling partisans began to shout. "You tell the world. Felice! Say again, sweetie-baby!" The verrul gave a warning growl.

Landry extended a graceful Mack-gauntleted arm toward the coach, Megowan yelled for somebody to bring a dismounting platform. Grooms steadied the animal white the girl allowed the coach to hand her down. Adulation-joy-pam-nausea. The burden. The need.

She slipped off her Grecian helm with its tall green feathers and handed it to a worshipful female trainer. One of her fellow players, a massive reserve guard, was emboldened by the frenzy of victory.

"Give us a big wet smack, Landry" he giggled, gathering her in before she could sidestep.

An instant later he was spread-eagled against the corridor wall. Felice laughed. A beat later, the others joined in. "Some other time, Benny precious!" Her eyes, brown and very large, met those of the other athlete. He felt as though something had taken him by the throat.

The girl, the coach, and most of the crowd passed on, heading for the dressing rooms where the reporters were waiting. Only the importunate guard was left behind, sliding slowly down the wall to sit, panting quietly, feet stuck out and arms limp at his sides. A medic driving a meat wagon found him there a few minutes later and helped him to his feet. "Jeez, guy... and you weren't even in the game!"

With a sheepish scowl, Benny admitted what had happened.

The medical attendant wagged his head in amazement. "You had a lotta nerve making a pass. Sweet-face that she is, that little broad scares me shitless!"

The guard nodded, brooding. "You know? She likes shooting the guys down. I mean, she actually gets her bang from it. Only you can see she'd just as soon the poor sods was dead as snoozing. You grab? She's a freak! A gorgeous, talent-loaded, champion bitch-kitty freak."

The medic made a face. "Why else would a woman play this crazy game? Come on, hero. I'll give you a lift to the infirmary. We've got just the thing for that wonky feeling in your tummy."

The guard climbed onto the cart beside a snoring casualty. "Seventeen years old! Can you imagine what she's gonna be like when she grows up?"

"Jocks like you shouldn't have an imagination. It gets in the way of the game-plan." The medic gunned the cart down the corridor upward the sound of distant laughter and shouting. Outside in the arena, the cheering had stopped.

CHAPTER FIVE

"Try again, Elizabeth."

She concentrated all of her mind's strength on the projective sense, what there was left of it HypervenI'llating and with heart racing, she strained unI'll she seemed to be floating free of the chair.

Project from the plaque in front of you:

SMILE-GREETING. TO YOU KWONG CHUN-MEI THERAPIST FROM ELIZABETH ORME FARSPEAKER. IF I HAD THE WINGS OF AN ANGEL OVER THESE PRISON WALLS I WOULD FLY. ENDS.

"Try again, Elizabeth."

She did. Again and again and again. Send that ironic little message that she had chosen herself. (A sense of humor is evidence of personality integration.) Send it. Send it.

The door to the booth opened and Kwong came in at last "I'm sorry, Elizabeth, but I still don't get a flicker."

"Not even the smile?"

"I'm sorry. Not yet. There are no images at all, only the simple carrier. Look, dear, why don't we wrap it up for today? The vital-signs monitor has you in the yellow. You really need more rest, more time to heal. You're trying too hard."

Elizabeth Orme leaned back and pressed her fingers to her aching temples. "Why do we keep up the pretense, Chun-Mei? We know there is slightly better than zip probability that I'll ever function as a metapsychic again. The tank did a beautiful job of putting me back together after the accident. No scars, no aberrations. I'm a fine, normal, healthy specimen of female humanity. Normal. And that's all, folks."

"Elizabeth..." The therapist's eyes were filled with compassion. "Give yourself a chance. It was almost a complete neo-cortical regeneration. We don't understand why you didn't regain your metafunctions together with your other mental faculties, but given time and work, you may very well recover."

"No one with my sort of injury ever has."

"No," came the reluctant admission. "But there is hope and we must keep trying to get through. You're still one of us, Elizabeth. We want you operant again no matter how long it takes. But you must keep trying."

Keep trying to teach a blind woman to see the three full moons of Denali Keep trying to teach a deaf woman to appreciate Bach, or a tongueless one to sing Bellini. Oh, yes.

"You're a good friend, Chun-Mei, and God knows you've worked hard with me. But it would be healthier if I just accepted the loss. After all, think of the billions of ordinary people who live happy and fulfilling lives without any metapsychic functions at all I simply must adapt to a new perspective."

Give up the memory of the mind's angel wings lost. Be happy inside the prison walls of my own skull. Forget the beautiful Unity, the synergy, the exultant bridging from world to world, the never-afraid warmth of companion souls, the joy of leading child-metas to full operancy. Forget the dear identity of dead Lawrence. Oh, yes.

Kwong hesitated. "Why don't you follow Czarneki's advice and take a good long vacation on some warm peaceful world? Tuamotu. Riviera. Tamiami Even Old Earth! When you return we can begin again with simple pictorials."

"That might be just the thing for me, Chun-Mei" But the slight emphasis wasn't lost on the therapist, whose lips tightened in concern. Kwong did not speak, fearing to cause even deeper pain.

Elizabeth put on her fur-lined cloak and peered through the drapes covering the office window. "Good grief, just look how the storm has picked up! I'd be a fool not to grab at a chance to escape this Denali winter. I hope my poor egg will start. It was the only one in the transport pool this morning and it's very nearly ready for the scrap heap."

Like its driver.

The therapist followed Elizabeth Orme to the door and placed one hand on her shoulder in impulsive empathy. Projecting peace. Projecting hope. "You're not to lose courage. You owe it to yourself and to the entire metacommunity to keep on trying. Your place is with us."

Elizabeth smiled. It was a tranquil face with only a few fine lines about the corners of the eyes, stigmata of deep emotion subsequent to the regeneration that had restored her broken forty-four-year-old body to the perfection of young adulthood. As easily as a crayfish grows new limbs, she had grown new cells to replace smashed arms and rib cage and pelvis, lungs and heart and abdominal organs, shattered bone and gray matter of her skull and forebrain. The regeneration had been virtually perfect, so the doctors had said. Oh, yes.

She gave the therapist's hand a gentle squeeze. "Goodbye, Chun-Mei. UnI'll the next time."

Never, never again.

She went out into the snow, ankle-deep already. The illuminated office windows of the Denali Institute of Metapsychology made squarish golden patterns on the white quadrangle. Frank, the custodian, gave her a wave as he plied a shovel along the walk. The melting system must have broken down again. Good old Denali.

She would not be coming back to the Institute where she had worked for so many years, first as a student, then as counseling farspeaker and redactor, finally as patient. The continuing pain of deprivation was more than her sanity could bear, and Elizabeth was basically a practical woman. It was time for something completely different.

Filled with purpose, clutching the hood of her cloak closely about her head, she headed for the egg park. As was her custom now, she moved her lips as she prayed.

"Blessed Diamond Mask, guide me on my way to Exile."

CHAPTER SIX

Admitting the Human race to the Galactic Milieu in advance of its sociopolitical maturation had been risky. Even after the first metaphysic human threat to Milieu security had been put down by the venerated Jack and Illusio, there persisted stubborn evidence of humanity's original sin.

People such as Aiken Drum.

Aiken was one of those peculiar personalities who drive behavior modification specialists to distraction. He was normally chromosomed. His brain was undamaged, undiseased, and of superior intelligence quotient. It was crammed with latent metafunctions that might, in due time, be coaxed into operancy. His childhood nurturing on the newly founded colony of Dalriada was no different from that of the other thirty thousand nonborns who were engendered from the sperm and ova of carefully selected Scottish forebears.

But Aiken had been different from the rest of the hatch. He was a natural crook.

Despite the love of surrogate parents, the devotion of skilled teachers, and the inevitable corrective courses administered almost continuously throughout his stormy adolescence, Aiken stubbornly dung to his destined path of knavery. He stole. He lied. He cheated when he felt he could get away with it. He took joy in breaking the rules and was contemptuous of peers with normal psychosocial orientation.

"The subject Aiken Drum" summarized his personality inventory, "displays a fundamental dysfunction in the imaginative sense. He is essentially flawed in his ability to perceive the social and personal consequences of his own actions and is self-centered to a deleterious degree. He has proved resistant to all techniques of moral impression."

But Aiken Drum was charming. And Aiken Drum had a roguish sense of humor. And Aiken Drum, for all his rascal ways, was a natural leader. He was clever with his hands and ingenious in dreaming up new ways to outrage the established order, so his contemporaries tended to view him as a shadow hero. Even Dalriada's adults, harried by the awesome task of raising an entire generation of test-tube colonists to populate an empty new world, had to laugh at some of his enormities.

When Aiken Drum was twelve, his Ecology Corps crew was charged with the cleanup of a putrefying cetacean carcass that had washed up on the beach of the planet's fourth-largest settlement Saner heads among the children voted for bulldozing the twenty-ton mess into the sand above high-tide level. But Aiken convinced them to try a more spectacular means of disposal. So they had blown up the dead whale with plastic explosive of Aiken's concoction. Fist-sized gouts of stinking flesh showered the entire town, including a visiting delegation of Milieu dignitaries.

When Aiken Drum was thirteen, he had worked with a crew of civil engineers, diverting the course of a small waterfall so that it would help feed the newly completed Old Man of the Mountain Reservoir. Late one night, Aiken and a gang of young confederates stole quantities of cement and conduit and modified the rocks at the rim of the falls. Dawn on Dalriada revealed a passable simulacrum of gigantic male urogenital organs, taking a leak into the reservoir forty meters below.

When Aiken Drum was fourteen, he stowed his small body away on a luxury liner bound for Caledonia. The passengers were victimized by thefts of jewelry, but monitors showed that no human thief had entered their rooms. A search of the cargo deck revealed the young stowaway and the radio-controlled robot "mouse" he had sent foraging, programmed to sniff out precious metals and gemstones that the boy calmly admitted he planned to fence in New Glasgow.

They sent him home, of course, and the behaviorists had still another shot at redirecting Aiken's errant steps toward the narrow road of virtue. But the conditioning never took.

"He breaks your heart," one psychologist admitted to another. "You can't help but like the kid, and he's got a brilliantly inventive mind in that troll body of his. But what the hell are we going to do with him? The Galactic Milieu just has no niche for I'lll Eulenspiegel!"

They tried redirecting his narcissism into comedic entertainment, but his fellow troupers nearly lynched him when he queered their acts with practical jokes. They tried to harness his mechanical ability, but he used the engineering school facilities to build outlaw black boxes that gave illegal access to half the computerized credit systems in the Sector. They tried metapsychic deep-redact and deprivation conditioning and multiphase electroshock and narcotherapy and old-time religion.

Aiken Drum's wickedness triumphed over all.

And so, when he reached an unrepentant twenty-first birthday, Aiken Drum was confronted with a multiple-choke question, the answer to which would shape his future:

As a confirmed recidivist, counterproductive to the ultimate harmony of the Galactic Milieu, which of these options do you choose?

a Permanent incarceration in Dalriada Correctional Institution

b Psychosurgical implant of a docilizarion unit

c Euthanasia

"None of the above," said Aiken Drum. "I choose Exile."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sister Annamaria Roccaro first met Claude when he brought his dying wife to the Oregon Cascade Hospice.

Both of the old people had been salvage exopaleontologists, Claude Majewski specializing in macrofossils and Genevieve Logan in micros. They had been married for more than ninety years and one rejuvenation, and together they had surveyed the extinct life-forms of more than two score planets colonized by humanity. But Genevieve had grown weary at last and refused a third lifetime, and Claude had concurred in her decision, as he had throughout most of their time together. They stayed in harness as long as possible, then spent a few declining years in their cottage on the Pacific Coast of Old World North America.