The Golden Torc

by Julian May

"Why do you say that?"

  "It's my duty to assist you. My honor. And as a half-blood, my skin isn't quite as thin as that of the—uh—isolate fraction."

  "Your mother was a human?"

  Ogmol waved away the rama and leaned back in his chair. "She was a silver. A sculptor from the Wessex world. She passed her latent creativity along to me, but she was too emotionally unstable to last long in the Many-Colored Land. I was her only offspring."

  "Would you say that there was significant prejudice against those of mixed heritage?"

  "It exists." Ogmol frowned, then shook his head. "But—damn words! —the disdain in which we're held by the Old Ones is strongly tinged by other emotions. Our bodies aren't as finely formed as theirs, but we're stronger physically. Most purebloods can't swim, but we have no difficulty in the water. Hybrids are more fertile, in spite of the fact that the full Tanu have a more urgent libido. And we're less likely to engender Firvulag offspring or black-torcs." He repeated the uneasy little laugh. "You see, Bryan, we hybrids are actually an improvement on the original model. That's what's so insupportable."

  "Mm," the anthropologist temporized.

  "As you can see, my body is superficially very similar to that of a pureblood: light hair, fair skin, typical light-sensitive eyes, elongated torso, attenuated limbs. But the ample body hair is a human heritage, and so is my more robust skeletal structure and musculature. Only a minority of the pureblooded men have this type of physique ... the King and the battle-champions. Back in the home galaxy of the Tanu, a heroic body was rather an anachronism. A reminder of the crude origins of the race."

  "But the very heritage," Bryan observed, "that the exiled group was determined to revive. Interesting."

  The rama came running up with a large napkin, which Ogmol used to wipe his brow. It really was a pity, Bryan thought, that he had left the aldetox back at the palace.

  "But don't you see, Bryan, how difficult it is for the Old Ones to accept the fact that human genes optimize their racial survival on Earth? Hybrid vigor is a putdown to them. The Old Ones are very proud. It's illogical—but they seem to be afraid of us mixed-bloods."

  "The mind-set wasn't uncommon even in my own era," Bryan admitted. He swallowed the last crumb of pastry and finished his coffee. "You said we might visit Lord Gomnol's establishment. Shall we go there next?"

  Ogmol grinned and fingered his torc. "You see? Another advantage! Give me a minute."

  The rama waiter stood passively beside the table, a monkey-child with intelligent, sad eyes. As Ogmol made his telepathic call, Bryan fished in one pocket for some of the local coinage he had been given and held out a random assortment. Solemnly, the hominid fingers extracted two pieces of silver. "No tip?" Bryan wondered. He looked around at the other tables. Not a single person without a torc was seated on the terrace. The barenecks had to make do with a self-service bar inside where human clerks took their verbal orders.

  "Good news," said Ogmol. "Gomnol is free and would be delighted to conduct you around his laboratories personally!...I see you've paid. Just let me—"

  The rama gave a little yip of pleasure and everted its lips at Ogmol. "Mental largesse, Bryan."

  "I should have guessed."

  ***

  They took a cab, drawn by a helladotherium, to the large complex on the northern edge of the city that housed the Coercer Guild. On the way down the wide boulevards they passed many small shops and neat attached dwellings. There was none of the quaint "Munchkin Tudor" architecture of the outlying settlements to be found in Muriah. Here the buildings had a classical elegance of line that was almost Doric. The white and pastel masses were softened by lavish plantings, tended by the ever-present ramapithecines. The human inhabitants of Muriah—artisans, shopkeepers, service workers, troops, and functionaries—were universally well-fed and prosperous-looking. The only persons who could be classed as shabaroons were the peddlers in the open market, the caravan drovers, and travelers newly arrived from the hinterlands; even these seemed only temporarily grubby. Bryan saw no evidence of disease, privation, or maltreatment among the torcless element. On the surface, Muriah looked to be an idyllic small city. Ogmol told him that the total permanent population included some four thousand Tanu, a few hundred gold-torc humans, under a thousand silvers, about five thousand gray-torcs, and six or seven thousand torcless. The ramas outnumbered the people by at least three to one.

  "We classify as Tanu any person who looks exotic," the brawny scholar explained. "Officially, there is no discrimination among purebloods and mixed. And, of course, a gold-torc human is the social equal of a Tanu. In theory, anyhow."

  Bryan suppressed a smile. "Another reason for your urging a collar on me? Your association with a bareneck must be a trifle déclassé. I noticed that the vendors were giving me a fishy look back in the market."

  Rather stiffly, Ogmol said, "Any person of consequence knows who you are. The others don't matter." They rode in silence for a while. Bryan considered another possible motive for the King's having commissioned the anthropological study. He was glad that Ogmol was unable to read his thoughts.

  They came to a handsome group of buildings at the very edge of the dropoff to the Catalan Gulf. The white marble of the Coercer Headquarters was inlaid and ornamented with blue and yellow. The forecourt had mosaic pavement with abstract designs. The roofs were sheathed in striking azure tiles with gutters and other fittings that glistened like gold. Squads of well-armed gray-torc guards in half-armor of blue glass and bronze posed stoically in the entry archway and at all of the doors. As the carriage passed and Ogmol emitted some unheard telepathic hail, the men thumped the butts of their vitredur halberds in salute. A detail stood by as Bryan and Ogmol alighted, making sure that the human cabdriver did not linger in Guild precincts.

  "The Coercers seem quite security-conscious," Bryan remarked.

  "The torc works is here. In a certain sense, this place is the very keystone of our High Kingdom."

  They passed into cool corridors, where more guards stood like living statues—any boredom presumably assuaged by their gray torcs. Somewhere a deep-toned bell sounded three times. Bryan and Ogmol ascended a staircase and came to a pair of tall bronze doors. Four guards on station lifted a heavy ornamental bar so that the two researchers could enter the antechamber of the President's office. There behind a console equipped with constructs of glowing crystal sat an exotic woman of singular beauty. Bryan felt something like an icy needle whisk behind his eyes.

  "Tana's mercy, Meva!" said Ogmol irritably. "Would I bring a hostile here? Doctor Grenfell was vetted by Lord Dionket himself!"

  I was? Bryan wondered.

  The woman said, "I only do my duty, Creative Brother." She gestured to the door of the inner sanctum, apparently opened it by psychokinesis, and returned to whatever esoteric work their arrival had interrupted.

  "Come in! Come in!" called a deeply pitched voice.

  They came before Gomnol, Lord Coercer, who inhabited a world all his own. The room was chilly in spite of the tropical climate of Muriah. A few coals smoldered in the grate of a manteled baronial fireplace, above which was a stark canvas that had to be a Georgia O'Keeffe. A Chihuahua dog eyed the newcomers dyspeptically from its cushion in front of the fire. The walls of the room were paneled in dark wood, interrupted by shelves crowded with leatherbound page-books, Tanu crystalline audiovisuals, and plaques of the twenty-second century. A stand held a copy (surely it was a copy?) of Rodin's sinister little Tentation de Saint Antoine. Chairs and settees of tufted, wine-colored leather stood before a huge reproduction of a rococo-revival desk, upon which rested a green-shaded oil lamp, a tarnished silver inkstand with quill pen, a fruitwood humidor, and an onyx ashtray overflowing with cigar butts. A walnut credenza in the same ornate style as the desk, flanked by fern stands, held a dozen cut-glass decanters, a tray of Waterford tumblers, a soda siphon, and a small tin of Cadbury biscuits. (And what time-traveler had surrendered the last treasure to the Lord Coercer's irresistible d
emand?)

  In the midst of a cloud of fragrant smoke sat Eusebio Gomez-Nolan himself, wearing a quilted jacket of gold brocade with lapels and cuffs of midnight-blue satin. While perhaps not the "ugly little runt" deprecated by King Thagdal, he was only of medium stature by the standards of the Old World, with a nose that was not merely aquiline but verging on the bulbous. His eyes, however, were a beautiful luminous blue with dark lashes, and he smiled at his visitors, showing small, perfect teeth.

  "Be seated, colleagues," he said in a casual tone, gesturing with his cigar.

  Bryan asked himself how the devil this ordinary-looking little fellow had managed to install himself as President of the Coercer Guild.

  And Gomnol heard.

  Once in years long past, Bryan had sailed his small yacht into a hurricane that had broken loose from the weathermakers and wandered close to the British Isles. After enduring hours of battering, he had relaxed in a respite—only to see rising before his craft a mountainous green sea with a breaking crest that appeared to be at least thirty meters above him. Deliberately, this huge wave had curled over his yacht, pressing it under with a monster insouciance that he knew must end in annihilation. And so it was now with Gomnol's psychic force impinging upon his own stunned consciousness, pressing him easily toward a final darkness.

  The great storm-surge had unaccountably released his broken but still seaworthy yacht. With a similar mannered fillip, Gomnol let loose of Bryan's mind.

  "That's how," said the President of the Coercer Guild. "Now. How may I assist your researches?"

  Bryan heard Ogmol explain the task that the High King had set and the techniques that they hoped to use to gather data for the culture-impact analysis. Lord Gomnol could help, if he would, not only by explaining the pivotal role of the torcs, but also by sharing his personal reminiscences, uniquely valuable because of his privileged human status. And if the Exalted Lord would prefer to confer with Dr. Grenfell alone...

  Smoke rings drawn around a friendly smile. "I believe that would be best. My congratulations on your delicacy of feeling, Creative Brother. Why not return and join us for dinner—say, in three hours? Splendid. Assure our Awesome Father that I'll take the very best care of the worthy Doctor of Anthropology."

  And then Gomnol and Bryan were alone in the pseudo-Victorian snuggery, and the psychobiologist was clipping the end off a fresh cigar and saying, "Now, then, my friend. What the devil is the likes of you doing in Exile?"

  "May I—have a drink?"

  Gomnol went to the decanters and lifted one containing a nearly colorless liquid. "We have the Glendessarry, but no Evian water, I'm afraid. Or would you care to try some of our homebrews? Five whiskies, a vodka, any number of brandies—the preferred tipple of our Tanu brethren."

  "Straight Scotch is fine," Bryan managed to say. When the whisky had restored his nerve a bit, he said, "I hope you won't regard me as a threat. Really—I'm not at all certain of the motivation behind the King's request myself. I came through the time-portal for the most ordinary of reasons. I was following the woman I loved. I had expected to become a fisherman or a trader in a primitive Pliocene world. The interest in my profession by my Tanu captors was a complete surprise to me. I'm cooperating because I've been told that this is the only way I'll get to see Mercy."

  Gomez-Nolan lowered one black brow in a half-scowl, seeming to scrutinize something floating in the air just in front of Bryan. "That's your Mercy?" he inquired cryptically. "Good God." Not bothering to explain himself, he lit his cigar. "Come along. I'll show you the factory and tell you the Changeling's Tale."

  A slab of the paneling swung aside, revealing a long, well-lit passage. Bryan followed Gomnol in a wake of smoke. They came to a great gateway of bronze bars that folded aside of its own volition as Gomnol strode heedlessly into it.

  "Oh, yes. I have PK, too," the psychobiologist said. "And farspeak and redact. Not as strong as the coercive faculty, of course, but enough to be useful."

  They came into a large room filled with what appeared to be jeweler's benches. Human and Tanu men and women in blue smocks, wearing magnifying eyelenses, were making golden torcs.

  "This is the heart of the place, right here. All handwork for these. Subassemblies—the crystalline chips with the circuitry—have to be grown, then spattered and etched and sent here for installation within the metal shell. The Tanu brought only a single crystal-growing unit and chip etcher with them from their home galaxy, but I was able to build more to permit an increase in production of about tenfold."

  A rama went by, trundling a cart with containers of glittering components. Gomnol waved his cigar, causing a pink wafer to fly out of a box and into his fingers. "This little widget is my own psychoregulator that I developed for the silvers and grays. It puts the wearer at the mental disposal of any gold."

  Bryan could not help but envision Aiken Drum.

  Gomnol brightened. "A fascinating case. I wasn't at the feast, but they told me all about him. Too bad old Mayvar has him locked up over in Farsense House. Both Culluket and I are itching to interrogate him."

  "He worries the establishment?"

  Gomnol laughed. "The more naive elements. He doesn't worry me. The boy sounds like he must be a mental nova. Flash-in-the-pan pseudo-operant. The phenomenon wasn't unknown in the Milieu. Certain latents can be shocked into operancy by some profound trauma. We've had it happen here once or twice before, although none of the cases was quite as memorable as this Aiken Drum seems to be. The temporary operant status of the brain overrides the controls of the silver torc. But the thing can't sustain itself and eventually burns out—googol to gaga, just like that."

  "I've heard about the sad cases who couldn't adapt to the torc. But I understand you've been wearing one for forty years without suffering a mental burnout."

  The man in the smoking jacket only smiled around his cigar.

  They wandered among the benches, watching the painstaking work. It took almost a week for a technician to complete one of the golden neck-rings—even longer for the delicate little torcs worn by Tanu children. These came in four sizes; and when a larger one was put on, the smaller could be safely removed and used on another child.

  "No silver torcs for children?" Bryan asked.

  "Tanu women don't have human offspring—not even when they mate with human males. And human women—whether gold or silver or gray or bareneck—are only permitted to conceive by Tanu males. All of their offspring are exotic as well, but with a much smaller percentage of Firvulag phenotypes in the litter than Tanu women produce. The Tanu hybrids vary greatly in metapsychic faculties, of course. So far, all of them are latent. But in time, the race will produce natural operants, just as humanity has done. The human advent was quite a genetic leg up for the Tanu, as you can imagine. On their own—without any human admixture—they wouldn't have gone operant for millions of years. The human-Tanu matings speed up the evolutionary process drastically. Given the quality of the latent stock coming through the time-gate, Prentice Brown had calculated that the Tanu would go reliably operant in only fifty generations. Of course, now..."

  "Elizabeth?"

  "Exactly. When we got word of her arrival, Prentice Brown and I recalculated the heritability of the different meta genes based upon Elizabeth's presumed genetic assay and the results were astounding. You can get the details from Prentice Brown himself over at Creation House. He's called Lord Greg-Donnet, you know."

  Bryan couldn't help thinking: Crazy Greggy.

  Again Gomnol laughed, teeth tightly clenching the cigar. "Some sooner, some later. Come along through here. The silver torcs are basically similar to the gold. But we've been able to automate a bit in the manufacture of the gray and rama types."

  "How," Bryan asked, "do the Firvulag fit into your genetic enterprise?"

  "They don't, as yet. A great pity from the eugenic viewpoint, as you've already deduced. The Little People are genuine operants, even if their powers tend to be limited. Unfortunately, both races have a hor
rendous taboo against interbreeding—and no Firvulag would touch a human with a barge pole. But some of us are working on the problem. If we could only convince the Tanu to keep their Firvulag children instead of passing them over to the Little People, we might have a chance of changing the mating pattern. It's fraught with possibilities."

  They did a quick run through the area where the gray torcs were made. There was more of a factory atmosphere in this workshop, where several simple stamping machines were turning out torc shells and ramas were performing some of the assembly. Gomnol explained that the gray torcs were a variant of the device originally used on ramas by the pioneering Tanu, which he himself had modified into a psychoregulator suitable for humanity.

  "We still have some problems with the torcs, as you heard. But by and large they're much more effective than the docilization implants that were used on sociopaths in the Milieu. And the pleasure-pain circuitry and the farspeak augmentation are completely innovative." Gomnol's eyes darted sidelong. In a neutral tone, he added, "I designed the original docilization device at Berkeley, you know."

  Bryan's forehead furrowed. "I thought Eisenmann—"

  Gomnol turned away. In a tight voice, he said, "I was a graduate student working under him. A young fool. We had a touching father-son relationship and he was so proud of me. My work was promising, he said, but its potential might remain unrealized because I lacked the cachet necessary to attract Polity funding. However, if I worked under him ... there would be no problem. I was grateful and he was clever and the work was a resounding success. And now the entire Milieu knows Eisenmann the laureate. A few even remember Eusebio Gomez-Nolan, his faithful little assistant."

  "I see."

  The other man whirled around. "Oh, do you?" he flared. "Do you, indeed? Just forty years, and I've shaped an entire culture—turned these exotics from a path of feckless barbarism toward civilization! If the genetic manipulation with Elizabeth comes about, they could become transtechnological, superior to the Unity of our unborn Galactic Milieu! What would Eisenmann and those Stockholm idiots think if they could see all this?"