by Julian May
Hagen regretted his impulse when Phil Overton caved in to the winsome coercion of his four-year-old, Calinda, who had been begging to sit with her father in the leading ATV. Brokenhearted protests from the other Cubs, both vocal and excruciatingly telepathic, were inevitable. In spite of Hagen's objections, nothing would do but that all of the little ones transfer to the command module. Diane Manion traded places with Nial Keogh and swore to Hagen that she would use every erg of her redactive metafunction to keep the Cubs under control, and the complaisant Overton was demoted from navigator to assistant babysitter. But the closer they came to the Waterfall, the more disorderly the children became.
"Daddy, turn on the peep-sweep again!" Calinda pleaded. "This time, I know we'll be able to scan the falls!"
"The peep-sweep! The peep-sweep!" chanted Joel Strangford and Riki Teichmann, who were four-and-a-half and five. They tussled with each other, trying to get closer to the cockpit's terrain holo display, and shoved little Hope Dalembert to the deck in the process. She began to wail.
"Meatheads!" The indictment of six-year-old Davey Warshaw was pitying. "A TSL can't see a hole in the ground when there are hills in the way."
"It can too! It can too!"
"Only if the refractive angle's right," Davey sneered. "And it's not. You think the Gibraltar Gate's some little bitty thing like a dry wadi or a sandpit that the peep can analog? Hah!"
"Then farsense it for us, Mr. Smarty!" Calinda demanded.
Although incapable of such a feat, Davey used his imagination to conjure a vision that stunned the other Cubs to silence: a planetary orb cleft like a gigantic melon, with a fountain of water gushing into outer space.
Gently, Diane Manion emended the picture. "It's more likely to look like this, dear."
All the Cubs squealed in disappointment.
"But that's just a little waterfall," Riki protested. "Like in my Nana's book about the Old World. Niagara. Our waterfall's bigger than any in the whole world that ever was!"
Calinda's lip thrust out. "Don't want to see a little waterfall. Hagen—you said it would be humongous."
"Humongous," repeated little Hope Dalembert, through tears.
"Phil, Phil, turn on the peep-sweep!" Joel cried, and the others chimed in, swarming over the hapless Overton and crowding Hagen at the command console until he fended them off with his PK and uttered a simultaneous mental expostulation:
All of you be quiet!
Miraculously, they were.
Aloud, Hagen said, "Now listen, you Cubs. We're almost there. I think I sense something! You might, too, if you just pipe down for a damn minute..."
The whine of the turbine as the ATV labored toward the top of a ridge. The crunch and snap of flattened brush. The hum of the faltering environmental conditioner. Outside, an off-key serenade of dwarf hyenas hidden in the dusk-purpled chaparral.
And then, a sound that was no sound. An atmospheric stirring so profound that it could not be detected by auditory nerves.
"Daddy, there's something in my throat," Calinda whispered. "I taste a noise."
Phil swept her onto his lap before her apprehension could grow, and Diane was swift to mind-comfort the three smaller children. But Davey Warshaw, mature in wisdom, was jubilant.
"That's it! That's the Great Waterfall! Faster, Hagen—drive faster!"
The son of Abaddon gave a short laugh and advanced the throttle. An obstructing scrub oak threatened, and instead of turning aside, he zapped it. The Cubs shrieked as they charged ahead through swirling resinous steam and flying woodchips. The solar-powered turbine of the ATV howled at the steepening grade and climbed higher and higher toward the evening sky.
The peculiar subsonic vibration intensified to a singing in the bone. Even the adults felt the large cartilages of their throats thrill to its enormous note. Hope Dalembert whimpered and hid her face in Diane's breast; but the four other Cubs, wide-eyed, strained with ineffective juvenile farsight to discover what lay ahead. The vehicle finally crested the ridge, bumped over summit outcroppings, and slowed to a halt on a narrow windswept plateau.
The ATV and the height on which it stood shivered in never-ending thunder. The sound was not painful to the ear; the frequency was too low, too nearly palpable. The adults and children sat motionless for a long minute. Then Davey had the hatch open and was clambering out, and Phil Overton took Calinda and Joel while Diane kept tight hold on the hands of Riki and Hope.
Hagen, left alone in the cockpit, took brief note of the stupendous landform being plotted on the graphic display of the terrain scanner. He remarked to the empty aether: "We're finally here, Papa. It's your scene as much as Felice's and ours. Would you like to commandeer my eyes?"
Nothing.
Hagen laughed. "Did she kill you, then? Did a raw-talent crazy finish off the Milieu's challenger? What a tacky ending that would be. Not at all what my Oedipal fantasy anticipated."
Nothing.
"You won't stop us from reopening the time-gate," he whispered. "You let us get away from Ocala. You could have blasted us, and you didn't. I know you, Papa! You don't dare stop us. And it's not only the guilt—but the tempting elegance of the wheel come full-circle that you won't be able to resist..."
Nothing.
Hagen stifled soliloquy and let thunder fill his skull. His hands worked automatically to kill the vehicle systems and then he went outside to join the others.
They were on a land's end beneath an indigo sky. The full moon of late August was well risen above the eastern horizon. On their left a wide sluiceway stretched toward the Atlantic, and on the right was a monstrous chasm, the new Gulf of Alborán, with its distant floor of starless black water. Joining these two like a silver curtain stretching into infinite night, its hem frothing in the sump of the world, was the grandest waterfall Earth had ever known.
Hagen's instruments had mapped its dimensions: 9.7 kilometers wide and 822 meters high, with a flow ever-increasing as erosion widened and deepened the Gibraltar cut. The Great Waterfall would live for less than a hundred years, for in that time it would fill the entire Pliocene Mediterranean Basin.
One by one the other vehicles of the convoy reached the plateau and came to a standstill. Their occupants alighted and gathered near the cliff edge—twenty-eight men and women and five little children. Normal speech was impossible and mental converse seemed superfluous. It was enough to look, and to memorize.
They might have stayed there for hours, but at last the moonlight dimmed and the breeze grew dank. A wall of heavy fog pushed out from Europe and obliterated the spectacle.
Calinda Overton's small mind-voice said: I think it's over.
And Hagen said: Yes. The nice part is.
Many of the adults laughed then, to cover other emotions. Those who were parents spoke of bedtime. Nial Keogh, ever practical, pointed out the campsite he had taken note of while the rest of them had thought only of racing ahead to see the wonder. Mind-chattering in dull reaction, the children and grandchildren of Rebellion straggled back to the ATVs. Only Hagen stayed alone on the plateau with the command module, after sending Phil and Diane and the Cubs off with the others.
He waited in the thickening fog until midnight, when farsensing conditions were optimal, then groped cautiously northeastward beyond the Betic Cordillera to the Tanu citadel of Afaliah. When he was certain he had identified its concentration of life-aura, he refined his thought-beam to the slenderest possible needle, tuned it to the intimate mode of his sister, and called.
HAGEN: Do you hear?
CLOUD: Yes. Where are you.
HAGEN: [Image.]
CLOUD: !! So that's It! No wonder the Flood destroyed Muriah. It seems incredible that mindpower alone was responsible. Felice—
HAGEN:—and her devils!
CLOUD: Hagen, we had to.
HAGEN: You rationalize after the fact, Marcdaughter.
CLOUD: I thought you were going to have Diane work on that damn Hamletesquerie. You're becoming a great bore.
/> HAGEN: You and Papa combined couldn't shrink me. Why expect better of her?
CLOUD: She loves you, stupid. It helps immeasurably in redaction.
HAGEN: Ah, yes. I should have remembered you and your Tanu darling—
CLOUD: Damn you and your can of cranial worms, brother.
HAGEN: Shall we postpone the pleasantries? What happened in Goriah?
CLOUD: [Cinematic event replay.]
HAGEN: Total fiasco. So much for our projected alliance with Nodonn! Nice for you that your lad Kuhal survived ... I guess we revert to our original Aiken Drum scenario, then. He won't be as easy to manipulate as Nodonn would have been, but we'll probably muddle through. Who knows? The kid might be having his own doubts by now about his future as King of the Elves. He may just decide that our plan to return to the Milieu has a subtle appeal—
CLOUD: Hagen, Papa's coming.
HAGEN: Oh, shit. When?
CLOUD: He was vague. He farspoke me this morning, after Aiken won his duel with Nodonn. He had been watching.
HAGEN: He would.
CLOUD: He said he'd come to Europe just as soon as modifications of the cerebroenergetic enhancer were completed. He's bringing it—andthe master computer, and the X-laser array from the observatory.
HAGEN: Good God— how?
CLOUD: They raised Walter Saastamoinen's four-masted schooner. That seventy-meter brute is big enough to carry half the apparatus on Ocala.
HAGEN: Damn—I told Veikko he should have scuttled her in deeper water or blown her up! Sentimental ass. Let me think ... she'd take atleast a month to get here loaded.
CLOUD: Papa's furious that you started the overlandtrek.
HAGEN: Did he threaten any long-distance mind-blast?
CLOUD: No. He was very restrained. He just told me to warn you not to attempt any contact with Aiken Drum—or else face dire consequences.
HAGEN.- ?? Strange that he didn't farspeak me himself...
CLOUD: The CE rig is down for reinstallation on theboat—
HAGEN: Hell, babe, he has plenty of watts to bespeak me in broad daylight, with nothing but the ol' naked gray. Or—? !!! [Image.]
CLOUD: We were right about Felice's d-jump. She rode down his peripheral and scragged him horribly. Fire-flayed him from the neck down—
HAGEN: [Hastily suppressed image.]
CLOUD: [Pain.] He's been floating in the regeneration tank since June.
HAGEN: Cloudie, what if Felice did more than broil his bod? What if she cooked his brain, too? What if he pasted himself together again as well as he could—healed his worst body injuries, but didn't dare stay in the soup long enough for a complete neural refit? Hell—that could take eight, nine months easy!
CLOUD: If his metafaculties are crippled, it would explain—
HAGEN: You bet your sweet life it would. He'd speak you rather than me on i-mode because you're more farsensitive. Chances are, he can't crank up anything approaching his normal armamentarium! And if he's unable to handle a full-zorch creative metaconcert, then there's no more danger of his nailing us with a long-distance psychozap! Oh, Cloudie, baby—this could be our big break! He's going to have to fight fair! Get really close to us if he hopes to coerce or mind-blast. Let him try, with Aiken Drum and his mob of exotics on our side—
CLOUD: When Papa farspoke me he said ... he said he would do his best to work things out for us. If we could only trust him!
HAGEN: [Expletive.]
CLOUD: He should know that we wouldn't let the Milieu authorities come back to the Pliocene for him.
HAGEN: Wouldn't we?...
CLOUD: You—you— he loves us!
HAGEN: His bloody inhuman brand of love—! He loved Mama, and we know what he did to her. Didn't you ever wonder why?
CLOUD: This is all—
HAGEN: In the Ocala library. Ever notice that the computer entries on the Metapsychic Rebellion are all baldfaced and frank about most aspects of the conflict—except for the bottom line, the goal of the whole damn thing! Why did they have to fight, for God's sake? The Rebel objective: "The fostering of Mental Man and the assurance that he will take his rightful place in the Coadunate Milieu." What the hell kind of war motivation is that?
CLOUD: Papa and his people wanted the Human Polity to dominate—
HAGEN: Not that simple! There was something else. You have to pick it up from hints in the other data entries. Subliminal boojum hints as skittish as those things you almost, but not quite, see out of the corner of your eye! Papa's Rebellion had something to do with us. With human children. He planned to do something so terrible that his own wife felt justified in trying to murder him—and the Milieu declared war on him after a hundred thousand years of unbroken peace.
CLOUD: It's over. Finished long ago.
HAGEN: Sister dear, it hasn't happened yet.
CLOUD: Stop it Hagen stop it! The important thing—the only thing—is for us to get away! Away from him, away from this miserable primitive world where our minds are all alone and hopeless. We can't lose sight of that goal for any reason.
HAGEN:...Well?
CLOUD: We must take a chance and contact Aiken Drum. You must come to Afaliah with all speed. It shouldn't take long, now that you've reached the Mediterranean. Sail to the neck of the Balearic Peninsula. There's a very good track called the Aven Road that leads directly to Afaliah. Once you arrive, we can arrange a meeting. Kuhal says ... he suggested to me a certain bargaining factor thatmight assure Aiken's cooperating with us. We farspoke together just after Aiken defeated Nodonn. Kuhal didn't want me to lose hope.
HAGEN: Well, what's his idea?
CLOUD: [Image.]
HAGEN: ! I'll be damned. Right there in Afaliah?
CLOUD: They're in the dungeon. There's no one left here to contest my authority over them, so I've been squeezing all day with the help of the local chief redactor. We've almost got it.
HAGEN: Aiken Drum'll kiss our asses to get hold of this!
CLOUD: Don't talk like a fool. Even with this information as a trade-off, we'll have to be extremely careful dealing with him. Aiken's dangerous, Hagen. Perhaps more dangerous now than Papa.
HAGEN: Bullshit.
CLOUD: In the Goriah duel, Aiken stood up to everything that Nodonn could throw at him—including that photon-cannon Spear. But there was something else. As he killed Nodonn and Queen Mercy, he subsumed their metapsychic complexus.
HAGEN: Say what?
CLOUD: [Image.] A very obscure phenomenon. I remember that the Poltroyan entry in the computer mentioned it in connection with some ancestor-worship thing. It's very abstruse. Never fully documented among humans. But it seems Aiken did it. The whole Castle of Glass in Goriah is buzzing with the news. How useful the powers will be to him remains to be seen. Kuhal says some Tanu believe the subsumption maykill Aiken.
HAGEN: Wishful thinking ... Listen, Cloud, we'll have to get his cooperation somehow. We can't fight him for the time-gate site, and building the Guderian device will mean batting about from one end of Europe to the other gathering raw materials. To say nothing of conscripting Milieu-trained technicians to work out the trickier bits in building the thing. Our only hope of success depends upon cultivatingthe goodwill of this brain-gobbling little Dracula. Or coercing him into helping us.
CLOUD: More than that dependson Aiken.
HAGEN: ?
CLOUD: Kuhal. He and the surviving invaders were taken. They're imprisoned in Goriah now, incommunicado under a sigma-field, charged with high treason. The penalty for that is death.
3
"YOU ARE SUMMONED to judgment," Commander Congreve announced.
The 129 survivors of Nodonn's defeated little army came together and formed a silent double file with Kuhal Earthshaker and Celadeyr of Afaliah at the head. Having been warned by the smirking human lackeys who brought them supper, the Tanu knights were wearing their glass armor, cleaned up as well as they could manage. They glowed in splendid defiance—creator cyan and coercer sapphire and psychokinet
ic rose-gold, with the few combatant farsensors in the company resembling statues carved from shining amethyst.
A squad of Congreve's human troopers marched in carrying covered baskets. At a mental command they passed down the lines of prisoners, distributing sets of crystal chains. Each insurgent freely bound himself or herself with the symbol of submission to Tana, manacles about gauntleted wrists, the central snap-link fastened to the golden tore.
"We are ready," said Kuhal. Magnificent in halide radiance, he towered over the human commandant of the Goriah garrison. He eyed the twenty-second-century weapon Congreve carried, incongruous against his exotic parade armor. "And you will not require that."
"The sacred chains bind us in honor," growled old Celadeyr.
Congreve's mental aspect was glacial. "So did your oath of fealty to King Aiken-Lugonn, which you swore at the Grand Loving! Follow me." He turned, lifting the Matsushita laser carbine to a ceremonial port arms, and led the way from the detention barracks into the outer ward of the Castle of Glass.