by Julian May
Well ... reparations then.
Roniah.
?
Roniah soddinghypocrite. Call it off.
??
Abort your planned strike against Roniah with HighVrazelregulars scheduled lastweek September.
As Te is my Witness—
OKAY THE HUNT FLIES TONIGHT.
No wait I'll check perhaps Medor or Betularn or Fafnor conspired circumvent authority—
Save yourdamnface anywhichway but hands off Roniah!
Checko. You just rest easy.
[Pained laughter.]
??? (!) Aiken we can be friends. ManyColoredLand big-enough for all. And about the Sword ... You know it's sacred to mypeople. It belonged myown sainted greatgreat-grandsire SharnAtrocious. Give it back to us Aiken. We'll keep the peace. I swear.
No finaldecision until postTourney. Consider Sword security goodbehavior.
Agreed! I knew you'd be reasonable lad! I'll use yourpromise Swordgift keep hotheads inline let 'em save energy for Tourney! Great idea! Wait till you see wonderful Singing-Stone—
[Weariness.] Good night Sham.
Good night Aiken.
***
Good night...
For the first time in nearly a week, Aiken came to the royal apartments.
The golden doors were back on their hinges and there remained no traces of the damage done by the invaders. He had commanded that all things that had belonged to Queen Mercy-Rosmar should be removed. And now as he passed through the silent sitting room with its balcony overlooking the moonlit sea, he noted that certain paintings and pieces of sculpture and potted plants were gone, and the loom where she had woven soft shawls from the wool of the sheep she herself had brought to the Pliocene, and the water dish of her great white dog, and the carved cabinet with the stoppered flasks of special herbs, and a certain blue rug, and the embroidered cushions from the rattan lounge seats. In her dressing room the closets gaped open and empty. The vases held no flowers. Her jewel cases were gone, and the cosmetics, and even the scent of her perfume. Her chaise with its Milieu-style reading lamp had been removed, and the cases with her page-books and plaques and the audiovisual recordings of the medieval pageants and the operas and the plays and the travelogs of Old Earth that she had shared with him, a callow boy from a colonial planet, on the nights last winter when the rains lashed the Castle of Glass and they planned together how he would seize the throne...
She was gone. She remained. And the other as well.
Standing there in the empty dressing room he seemed surrounded by leftover laughter. He burned. His brain and his body seemed hideously swollen, straining the seams of the golden storm-suit he had insisted on wearing even when the Summer Fog was long gone. He found himself saying: If only you'd loved me! Or if I hadn't! And remembering: "When I'm gone, you'll find no other. Fatal Fool! How will you do it, Amadán-na-Briona?"
He had done it as his instincts drove him, taking both of them in a rage of fear and envy and terrible love, gorging himself on the coveted power, the vitality.
It was the only way, his mind screamed.
He found himself standing in the royal bath, reflected in the mirrored walls, a manikin in shining gold leather, reduplicated to infinity. He put both hands to his ears, pressing the storm-suit's hood tightly against his skull with all his superhuman strength. Thecoarser agony swamped anguish. He cried, "You belong to Me!"
And it was all right.
One little man staring at himself in a jeweled mirror. The familiar onyx-and-gold bathroom, with the small fountain playing in the cool end of the great sunken tub and the warm end steaming invitingly. Baskets of heavy-scented yellow orchids. A lumpish moon spyingon him through the glazed skylight. Piles of purple towels and his yellow silk dressing gown and amethyst-studded espadrilles. A pitcher of iced mead and a crystal tumbler, just as his telepathic orders to the silver domestics had specified.
It was all right.
He studied his reflected face, pale and woeful in the crested hood. The lips were tight-shut in reaction to his involuntary shout, the nose cruelly sharpened. He had thought that the fever would manifest itself physically. He had worn the tough gilded hide of the storm-suit to conceal his condition from the others: the gross swelling, the incandescence. He knew that when he took the suit off, the consequences of his gluttony and lust would be shamefully manifest.
But it seemed to be all right.
He unfastened the hood, pulled it away. His head was sweat-plastered, the dark auburn hair almost as black as his eyes. He kicked off the boots, opened the wrists and ankles, threw away the belt, finally unzipped the suit from throat to crotch and stepped out of it. His body was wiry, corded with muscle, scantily haired. There were faint pressure marks from the seams of the tight suit, but otherwise he was ordinary, and quiescent. What he had been so afraid of finding was gone. If it had ever existed.
He gave a great shout of laughter and dived into the steaming pool.
It was all right.
***
Later, as he sat on the balcony drinking mead and watching the owls, Olone came. She was as tall as a young tree, with blonde hair floating loose in the sea breeze, and she sent tentative coercive emanations stealing into his mind, feather-touching the erotic triggers.
"No," he told her.
"I'm sorry, my King." She was wearing a translucent gown without a sash that fell from her shoulders like silvery water. "I only thought to help you in your need."
"And what else?" he inquired softly. His own coercive-redactive probe went into her so subtly that she was without suspicion, intent on her artless maneuvering.
"I wanted to tell you how glad I am. That you won. That both of the traitors are dead—and Tonn with them! I am yours forever if you want me."
Aiken laughed very gently.
She stood proud before him, one hand resting on her abdomen. "And I have conceived your child."
"So have sixty-seven other Tanu women. I'm the King."
"I thought you'd be pleased!" she cried.
He sipped his drink, gaze veiled, mind inspecting her proud young ego. "I know what you thought, Oly. What you think. When I believed that Mercy was dead, when I was drained and weakened after the fight with Felice, you gave me great comfort and helped heal me. I'm grateful for that, and I'm happy that you carry one of my sons. But don't ever think you can manipulate Me, Coercive Sister."
Frantic mental walls crashed into place. She backed toward the balcony door. "My King, forgive me—"
"Poor Oly. Your ambition is a futile one, and mortally dangerous. I've had enough of queens for now."
"I—I was foolish and presumptuous. Don't hurt me!"
He was reassuring. "Not if you accept that I've changed."
She hesitated. Her fear dissipated and her aspect softened as she realized that he was not angry but amused, and sad. "Shall I leave Goriah, then?"
"Of course not. And just because we don't share a bed, don't think that I've lost my fondness for you. You're a marvelous randy Tanu lass, and we'll share sweet houghmagandy anon. But not now. You can give us a wee kiss, though!"
She burst out laughing and flew to him, and kissed him first with caution and then with full passion. And he held her lightly as she surrendered to ecstatic relief, and her mind confessed, and he forgave. Later, she sat on the floor at his feet and said, "Is it true? That you've swallowed the minds of Nodonn and the Queen in the manner of the legendary heroes of our lost Duat world? And if you bedded me now, with the conquering fire still investing your mind, then I'd be taken, too?"
He tried to explain. "Elizabeth says that what I did—and you must believe that it was done without my conscious volition—was to sub sume the metapsyehie attributes of Mercy and Nodonn. I know nothing about your Duat legends. I certainly didn't eat two people alive, and I didn't drain their souls and imprison them inside my head—"
"—even though you were afraid that you had," Olone whispered.
"Dear Oly. You're nobody's
fool. Is my royal indisposition the talk of the castle?"
"We know that you do not sleep. That you are deeply troubled."
"Don't you think I have reason to be? You know how the Firvulag have broken the peace accords."
"Will there be war?" She had both hands clenched tightly against her belly.
"If there's a war, I'll win it."
Her eagerness was desperate. "Has—has the subsumption made you very strong, then? So strong that Sham and Ayfa will not dare to come against us?"
Had it? Would the stolen powers be his to use?
Aye, there was the rub! Not yet, that was certain. The subsumption had been an appalling trauma; he had not dared to reveal the full extent of his dysfunction to anyone except Elizabeth. Only she knew that he was able to perform only the simplest metapsyehie operations with reliable competence—that he was barely able to fly, that he could not begin to generate the psychokinetic power needed to lift his 400 mounted Hunt knights, that he could no longer conjure up mighty bolts of mental energy or create a laser-deflecting mindscreen. The new powers he had taken over from Nodonn and Mercy were there inside him, crowding and disrupting his own metafunctions. But he was unable to energize them efficiently. The existing neural pathways were inadequate. He would have to form new ones capable of bearing the increased load, just as he had modified other aspects of his cortical operation after the Felice affair, incorporating the metaconcert program and the novel techniques for aggression vouchsafed him by Abaddon. That had taken time. So would the fullness of the subsumption—if he did not go mad in the process, as Elizabeth had warned he might. In the meantime, he would have to bluff and stall and cajole and bamboozle. And hold fast to the Milieu armaments and seize those ancient flying machines that Basil Wimborne and his crew had hidden away in the Alps—
"I will never reveal your secret, my King. Rely on me."
"What?" Lost in his reverie, he had forgotten Olone and her question, secure (he thought) behind the mental defenses that still retained most of their old effectiveness. But she had risen and stood now before him, respiring compassion.
"I will never tell."
She had guessed. Sensitive and anxious for their unborn child, clever and self-serving and fearful and thoroughly in love with him, Olone knew.
"Aiken, it's all right. You'll find a way. You must. You're our King."
"Yes," he said desolately, and leaned back in the chair, and closed his eyes and his mind, and waited until she went away.
***
Still later, he paced along the parapet, moving from block to block of the castle, up the towers and across the flying bridges and in and out of the partially repaired bastions—dark now, with the periodic lights-out in effect. He greeted the night watch as he prowled, and they reassured him that all was well. With the inner demons coming alive in the predawn hours, he went up into the great broken spire where the beacon had shone, where he and Mercy had watched the meteors, in order to check the rebuilding job. The workers had reached the penultimate landing and would be topping off within another day or two. He stood on the new floor of dusty glass blocks with the wind whipping his silk robe and humming through the narrow embrasures. A large chunk of the western wall was still out and he had a stunning view over the Strait of Redon.
What was he up to these days?
Had he set sail yet?
"And can I farsense you?" Aiken inquired softly. He could mind-speak well enough over several hundred kilometers, and this morning he had viewed the devastation of Bardelask quite clearly. Farsensing, unlike the "muscle" metafaculties, was more a matter of adroitness than strength. It even had its own auxiliary neural circuitry integrating it with the physical senses, and this was much less vulnerable than the faculties that functioned holographically.
Why not give it a shot? It was night, the optimal time for a long-distance effort, and he sure as hell knew the mental signature!
He would simply observe. Not attempt communication.
Leaning against the half-finished wall, he put his head into an embrasure that would provide the proper inclination. Then he relaxed, let his mental vision range out, following the curvature of Pliocene Earth, skimming lightly over the unobstructive Atlantic waters on wide beam. Lightly ... lightly ... diffused and soft, minimally powered, skating above incipient pain ... range ... range ... range.
Ha. North America.
Now, very charily, close her up. Narrow the beam. Sweep southward along the teeming lagoons of Georgia, cross Apalachee Channel, and find Ocala Island. See its dots of human life-aura. And the one...
Pain. But concentrate the beam anyhow, scanning the south end of the island and the big bay that Cloud Remillard had said was shielded from the worst of the hurricane winds by the scattered atolls of the Still-Vexed Bermoothes. There they would moor the boat.
Severe pain. The big four-masted schooner Kyllikki, trig and handy and utilitarian. Deep in the water. Loaded. Elizabeth had said that they put a sigma-field umbrella over her at quayside, but there was none now. She rode at anchor in forty meters of salt water, and no portable sigma could overcome such a power drain.
Excruciating pain. Now seek him out. All the ex-Rebels were on that ship, waiting for dawn. He was sitting alone on the afterdeck under the midnight sky, wearing stagged white dungarees and a black singlet.
Marc Remillard smiled at Aiken Drum. The vision of him was dim, minuscule. But his voice sounded as though he was there on the windy tower in Goriah.
"As you can see, we're ready to sail. It's quite a wrench, after more than twenty-seven years. Some of us were very reluctant to leave here."
Then why?
"Ah, I quite forgot!" The smile widened. "You don't really have the full picture, do you? What our errant children told you ... well, we must make allowances. But it's time you knew the truth, King Aiken-Lugonn. My son Hagen and daughter Cloud and the rest of their contemporaries have come to Europe with only one objective. To reopen the time-gate. From the Pliocene side."
Not possible!
Marc's laugh was rueful. "From my point of view, I could hope you were right. But I'm afraid that it's quite possible—given the construction of a very intricate piece of apparatus. Our rebellious young took with them complete schematics for the Guderian device, together with certain manufacturing equipment and what specialized components they could find here. They hope to prevail on you to provide Milieu-trained technicians and raw materials, as well as access to the time-gate site. For my part, I would suggest that you hold off giving them your whole-hearted cooperation until you consider the consequences most carefully."
Open ... gate ... RETURN...
"The children hope, as they quaintly put it, to 'return home' to the Milieu. You can imagine my own thoughts on this subject."
The sun was hovering just below the eastern hills of Armorica. Its plasma-generated roar filled the aether, making farsensed concentration hideously painful to Aiken's mind. The gulf was widening, the vision fading beyond recall. He heard the voice clearly until the end, however:
"Think about it, Aiken. An open time-gate leading back to the Galactic Milieu—and, of course, its concomitant: the reopening of the original gate leading from the Milieuto the Pliocene. Do you want that, King Aiken-Lugonn? Do you want to go home again?"
The wind whistled about the broken tower. Aiken's head throbbed as though it would burst. Blinded, he slid to his knees and pressed his forehead against the cool glass blocks.
When the sun was full up and he heard the voices of the approaching workers on the staircase below, he pulled himself together. A saving cloak of invisibility was still withinhis powers. He conjured the illusion and slipped back into his own apartments. There he went to the closet where his old suit of many pockets hung. He opened the compartment below the right knee and took out a book-plaque that he had stowed away in there one year and one week ago. It was entitled
THE GUDERIAN TAU-FIELD GENERATOR
Theory and Practical Application
> "Do I want to go home?" he asked himself.
He sat down on the edge of the big round bed in the morning sun and began reading pageone.
7
IT WAS NOT so much the giant spiders themselves as their feedinghabits that finally caused Mr. Betsy to crack.
On the ninth day of their incarceration in the communal cell, he awoke to the all too familiar tickle of one of the things running over his hand. He mewled in revulsion and pulled himself up in his straw nest, patting his wig back into place—and then spottedthe odious creature still lurking not half a meter away, close by the snoring medievalist, Dougal. The spider saw Betsy, too, for it reared up, twiddled its pedipalps with conspicuous insolence, and emitted a crackling purr. It was coal-black and hairy and had a bodythe size of a peach.
"Disgusting brute!" Betsy hissed. He adjusted his crumpled ruff. Dawnlight from the slot-window overlooking the gorge weakly illuminated the dungeon's squalor. All about lay the hunched or sprawled forms of that little band of technicians, pilots, and adventurers known as Basil's Bastards, betrayed into the hands of Nodonn Battlemaster by a mysteriousoperant woman, robbed of the aircraft that were to have insured the freedomof Lowlife humanity. Basil himself had been removed from the cell days ago, presumably tobe sent to the torturers.
Keeping a wary eye on the spider, Betsy bent to untie the scarf that bound his farthingale skirts tightly about his ankles. He had learnt to sleep that way early on, since thecell was alive with mice, the legitimate prey of the giant spiders. Betsy was well aware—as had been generations of full-skirted women before him—of the havoc the little mammals could wreak if they ran up your legs. Perhaps he should have welcomed the presence of the spiders, for the mice bit and the spiders didn't; but instead he loathed them. They were too calculating, too agile in pursuit of their victims, and the mice screeched in such a heart-rending fashion when they were caught and whisked away to the lairs up in the dungeon ceiling. After the predators had drunk their fill of rodent bodily fluids, they dropped sad little web-wrapped carcasses on the prisoners below.