The Noborn King

by Julian May

  Silence.

  “Well? You wanta have a bash or not? You don’t have much to lose . . . aside from making me a present of a mighty useful metapsychic program.”

  It would be safer if I handled the focus. And we would be sure of finishing Felice.

  “No soap. I’m the King here, Ironass, not one of your leftover rebels. If you won’t play, I’ll revert lo my old risky scheme. I should be able to find Felice’s cave now, even without the help of your trio in Spain.”

  Very well. I will work with you and your redactor, Aiken Drum.

  The trickster grin flashed across the intervening ocean. “I thought you’d see it my way. Folks often do! What would you like me to call you? Some of the humans in my outfit might get nervous if I use your real name. And they’ll have to put some handle on you.”

  I have been called Abaddon. [Ironic image.] “Very appropriate One week to the Río Genil, then, Abaddon.”

  Assemble your most powerful metapsychics. You’ll need them . . . King Aiken-Lugonn.

  The aether was abruptly clear, the alien emanations gone as if they had never existed. He heard the night birds, the surf, a soft moan from Mercy asleep in the bedroom.

  He tiptoed in and shed his robe. She lay half-covered with one arm flung up in a posture of sweet vulnerability, dreaming. In his excitement and triumph, he found the temptation to probe her irresistible. He looked at her dream, and discovered that its subject was as he had suspected. Nodonn Battlemaster was alive, hidden but no threat at the present time. He would keep.

  In her sleep, Mercy smiled. Aiken gently removed the probe, bent to kiss her, then tucked the satin around her shoulders.

  “Why did I have to love you?” he asked softly, before leaving the room to sleep alone.

  5

  THE THREE YOUNG MEN WERE TOGETHER ON THE COMMAND deck of the ATV modular combine, with Hagen at the helm. The sky was brilliant cobalt without a cloud, and the air almost dead calm; but the vessel was making a steady six knots, its solar-powered impeller augmented by metapsychic thrust from the PK specialists on watch.

  “I haven’t said anything to the others,” Phil Overton remarked. “They’ve got enough to worry about, coping with the babies and the sickos and the PK load. But something’s brewing in the atmosphere a couple of thousand kloms southeast of us that’s got me worried.”

  The image of a suspect weather system hung in their minds, as clear as a Tri-D picture. “See how sharp the cloud bands are? How well defined? Compare it to this other low-pressure dimple south of the Bight of Benin—normal for this time of the year. I’ve had my eye on the little mid-ocean sucker for three days now, and it’s firmed up and deepened in an unnatural way.”

  Hagen’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the wheel harder. “You think my father and the rest of them are psyching it?”

  “God!” Nial Keogh expostulated. “No! when we’re so close to making the westerlies!”

  Phil shrugged. “It’s the wrong time of the year for hurricanes, and the track of this storm is definitely anomalous. Meteorological conditions are favorable for its continued growth, whether anybody’s helping it along or not.”

  “Can we avoid it!” Hagen asked grimly.

  Phil made the projection. “Here’s our vector—and here comes the storm, sneaking up beneath us. We’re right in its track if we maintain present course. The kiss-point is 36-45 North. 16-20 West three days from now. We slow down, we get slammed by the winds in the northwest quadrant and pushed way south. We speed up, there’s a slim probability of having it skim by our ass, or even bung us north into the zone of prevailing westerlies.”

  “That’s assuming the storm track is constant,” Nial put in. “If Marc’s in the driver’s seat, it sure as hell won’t be.”

  “What can we do?” Hagen’s face was a mask of sick despair. “Is there any chance of escaping the thing, short of increasing our speeds? Sweet Christ, Phil—we’re pushing ourselves to the utmost now! You saw what happened to poor Barry, and Diane’s weakening, too.”

  Phil considered. “It depends upon what Marc’s objective is.”

  “He’s not out to sink us,” Nial declared. “If he wanted us dead, he could have zapped us ten days ago. We won that gamble.”

  “Could he blow us back to Florida?” Hagen asked.

  “Hell, no,” Phil said. “The low would poop out long before that. He’d need a whole set of storms to pull that one off. If he’d tried this stunt earlier in the game, there might have been a chance.” His mind reviewed the atmospheric patterns of the past week. “But, see? The potential just wasn’t there. This low is the first hot prospect he’s had. Let me think a minute.”

  Hagen said, “He can’t blow us home and he’s not looking to deepsix us. All that’s left is diversion. That fix you mentioned, north of Madeira. If he manages to push us off to the southeast, we end up in Africa instead of Europe.”

  Phil nodded agreement. Another meteorological diagram appeared in his mind. “The storm winds rotate counterclockwise. All he has to do is keep us poised roughly between six and nine o’clock inside the system and we’re off on the road to Morocco. Even the fuckin’ current’s in his favor! The only joker that might save us hinges on the energy he’s able to pour into the storm. If he can’t keep it stoked up, we’ll break free before he maneuvers us close enough to land to marshal a direct PK-creative shove.”

  “What if we erect the big sigma-field?” Hagen said. “Lower our friction quotient so the winds stream around us?”

  “No good,” Nial said. “You get a prohibitive power drain, using the generator on salt water instead of dry land. Maybe four, five hours max output.”

  “Shit He’s got us in the nutcracker for sure.” Hagen’s mouth curved in a mirthless, one-sided smile, momentarily giving him an uncanny resemblance to his father. “We might as well change course for Africa right now! At least then the little kids will be spared riding out a hurricane.”

  “You’re the captain,” said Phil. “Of course, this is all conjecture about Marc being behind the storm. We have no proof yet . . .

  “Three days from now, we will,” Hagen said. “It’s him, all right. You can bet your life on it!” He engaged the autopilot, turned to the binnacle computer, and called up a new heading. Slowly, the bow of the combine swung to starboard.

  “Course correction completed,” said the autopilot. “Steady on one-one-five degrees.”

  Hagen yanked the door open and stumbled out onto the flying bridge. “Is that good enough for you?” he screamed at the sky. “You win again! Congratulations! And damn you to hell, Papa!”

  There was no response. He hadn’t expected one. Empty-minded, he groped his way to the companionway stair and disappeared below.

  Phil and Nial reflected upon the inevitability. At last, young Keogh sighed. “I’ll take the con for the rest of the watch, boyo. You get along and tell the PK heads to hang it up. There’s no hurry now.”

  Moreyn Glasscrafter, city-lord of Var-Mesk, urged his chaliko and the riderless second mount along the moonlit beach with irritable telepathic nudges. How he hated to travel with these animals! Chalikos had an ingrained antipathy toward him and tended to evade his commands more often than not. The problem was negligible when there were other riders along who could augment his weak coercive faculty. But the mysterious farspoken message had insisted that he come alone, and enjoined the strictest secrecy through fearsome Psychokinetic Guild oaths. So he clumped along the ghostly gypsum-sand beach, keeping a sharp lookout for quickmires whenever he crossed one of the freshwater streams that ran down from the high continental escarpment. Faintly luminous wavelets lapped the shore and there was a thin line of wrack staining the formerly sterile whiteness. Diminishing salinity was making the erstwhile Empty Sea into a Sea of Life . . .

  He was more than 40 kilometers from the city, traversing a deserted region that would, in six million years, lie just off the Côte d’Azur. Did he dare utter a short-range declamatory hail? He scanne
d the shore ahead and saw only dunes and isolated lumps of evaporite. The mysterious Psychokinetic Brother was well hidden.

  Moreyn here!

  . . .Aha! On the other side of that pyramidal mass of salt; the faintest of rosy-gold auras. Another poor devil, marooned all these months on some Tana-forsaken shore, had finally made his way back to the Many-Colored Land.

  Mind-smiling, holding up a hand in welcome, Moreyn came riding around the saline monolith on the landward side, saw the raft, and finally recognized the guild-brother with the shielded mind who had summoned him.

  “Lord Battlemaster!” he gasped, dumfounded. The chalikos slipped out of his uncertain coercive grip and began to shy from the glowing body that lay on the while sand. “Steady, damn you!” Moreyn shrilled.

  Nodonn opened his eyes. The two animals seemed to turn to stone. Moreyn struggled down out of the tall saddle and knelt beside the supine form.

  “Let me cover you with my cloak! are you thirsty? Here— my flask! Goddess—what happened to your hand?”

  “It’s . . . a long tale, Psychokinetic Brother. Thanks for coming. I’m nearly used up.” He took a long pull from the water flask and sank back upon the sand. Moreyn fussed about, tucking his cloak under the Battlemaster’s legs and torso. Nodonn wore his suit of armor padding, now salt-stained and torn. His exposed skin was badly sunburnt.

  “We thought you were dead! This is wonderful!” Moreyn’s face fell. “I mean—it’s terrible! The Lowlife usurper, Aiken Drum, has forced us to accept him as King. He went from one city to another with his army, threatening us. No one could stand up to him and survive. In Var-Mesk, I blush to admit that we were all craven before the Shining One save Miakonn Healerson alone. Oh, how proud you would have been to see his defiance, Battlemaster! It was hopeless of course, but magnificently true to the traditions of the battle-company. Miakonn waited until the usurper was far gone in drink, and then called him to account! It was a bold ploy and might have succeeded had not the treacherous Interrogator—” The Glasscrafter broke off.

  “Peace, Brother,” Nodonn reassured him. “I am well aware that Culluket has betrayed the Host. I know what he did to Miakonn, and why you are now city-lord in his place.”

  Moreyn bit his lower lip, his mind veiled in shamed misery.

  Nodonn reached out. “Never mind, Brother. You have always been an excellent glass technician.” He nodded toward the raft with its crude sail of stitched skins. There was a bundle lashed to one of the crossbraces. “See there? It’s the armor you fashioned for me three hundred long years ago. I’ve managed to lose one gauntlet. You’ll have to make me another before I take to the field.”

  “You’ll defy the usurper?” Moreyn was transfigured.

  “Today, I’m a sorry excuse for a Battlemaster. But I’ll mend. For more than six months I was cast away on Kersic, bereft of my senses and beyond reach of any farsightful knowledge. Now only two Tanu know of my existence: Lady Mercy-Rosmar and you.”

  “She is married to the Lowlife King,” Moreyn lamented, “and crowned his Queen.”

  “Peace,” said Nodonn again, easing the city-lord’s mental turmoil. “Mercy bides with the usurper because I have instructed her to make no move until the time is ripe. She remains faithful to me in her secret heart and eventually we will be reunited. I plan to reclaim all that is mine. Will you assist me to that end, Moreyn?”

  “I would give my life for you, Battlemaster—poor thing that it is. But you know how pitiful my aggressive faculties are. Aiken Drum would not even have me accompany his Quest to Koneyn . . .

  “I know he’s after the Spear. And fresh gold torcs to decorate his puny-minded rabble-in-arms—much good may they do him!”

  Moreyn’s glance kept straying to the wooden hand, which he regarded with singular apprehension. “We don’t have a healer in Var-Mesk qualified to tend your wound, Battlemaster. So many redactors perished in the Flood. The nearest practitioner with the competence—the nearest trustworthy Skin artisan—is Boduragol of Afaliah.”

  “He who has charge of my Host Brother, Kuhal. Yes, I know of him.” Nodonn flexed the fingers of the prosthesis, smiling slightly. “But don’t worry, Moreyn. This makeshift works well enough. If I go into Skin, I’ll be nine months growing another. Too long to lie idle when my metapsychic powers are fast returning and destiny calls. I think that my hand’s full healing may have to be postponed until I settle the hash of that Lord of Misrule over in Goriah!”

  Moreyn’s mouth dropped open. He projected sheer calamity “Oh, no, Battlemaster’ You mustn’t delay the healing! Why—no one would rally to you!“

  “You think not?” The Battlemaster was puzzled.

  “My Lord, perhaps you have forgotten . . .”

  “Pull yourself together, man,” Nodonn snapped. “Explain—or at least open your damn mind so I can see for myself what you cavil at.”

  The timid screening lifted and Nodonn read plainly the tenet of the battle-religion that had not been invoked for thousands of years on lost Duat—and never since the Tanu had come to the Many-Colored Land: No one who was not perfect in shape might aspire to the kingship.

  Nodonn laughed “This is your objection?” This piece of antiquated flummery?’ When our throne is profaned by a Low-life upstart?”

  “It is the law,” whispered Moreyn, with the stubbornness of the meek. “Aiken-Lugonn is lawfully elected by the plenary session of vassals, and he was the chosen of Mayvar King-maker—exotic though his blood may be. And as to that, it has been said that he was not of human woman born, but engendered through some miracle of Elder Earth.”

  “A test-tube baby nurtured in an artificial womb,” scoffed the Battlemaster. “No miracle. There are many such among the humans.”

  But Moreyn pushed on. “My Lady Glanluil, who attended the Grand Loving in my place when I was taken ill, says that even stranger things were hinted at by the Interrogator at the wedding feast. He said—he said that both the King—I mean, Aiken-Lugonn—and Queen Mercy-Rosmar have true Tanu genes in their germ plasm!”

  “Aiken Drum, kin to us? Chaliko flop!” But the Battlemaster felt his spine freeze. He knew for a fact that Mercy’s heritage was more Tanu than human. The prodigy had been proven by Greg-Donnet Genetics Master long before the latter’s defection.

  “The Interrogator is a life-scientist,” Moreyn said, “and he has gained great knowledge of these arcane matters after consultation with human specialists. He said that recent genetic assays have shown that virtually all of the humans here in the Many-Colored Land who possess metapsychic traits also have a preponderance of Tanu or Firvulag genes. There is some mysterious power at work, linking our race with that of the Low lives.”

  “Impossible! Humanity’s direct evolutionary ancestor is the small ramapithecine ape that we use as a servant. Would we foul our blood by mating with animals? Never! And these lowly hominids will not even begin to approach rationality for more than five million years. Long before that, we will have vanished from this melancholy planet.”

  “Can you be certain?” asked Moreyn.

  Struck silent, Nodonn beheld in memory a pathetic pair of elderly humans—the rebel general Angélique Guderian and her consort, Claude, held captive in the moments before he permitted them to pass back through the time-gale to death. The old man had dared to defy him. Upon hearing the Battlemaster’s command, “Go back where you came from.” Claude had uttered a baffling reply that now hung vivid and shorn of paradox:

  You fool. We came from here.

  “Madness!” said Nodonn angrily.

  Moreyn went on. “These humans have legends. Myths about races of Old Ones who existed on Earth for long aeons before mankind arose—and who persisted as a pitiful and despised remnant even into the years immediately preceding the Galactic Milieu. Humans gave many names to these Old Ones: demons, faeries, gods, giants, elves. But all over the precoadunate Earth, primitive humans were convinced that the Old Ones existed. And that they mated, from time to time, with humanit
y.”

  “Madness!” Nodonn repeated. “I forbid you to speak of it further.” He climbed unsteadily to his feet, kicking aside Moreyn’s cloak. “Lead the spare chaliko to that lump of salt so that I may use it as a mounting block.”

  Moreyn hastened to bring up the animal; but he was constrained to finish his speech. “I think that all of this is an unlikely tale, Battlemaster. But other Tanu do not, and most especially, neither do the hybrids. The legend, the rationale of our kinship with humanity, makes the bitter pill of Lowlife ascendency easier to swallow.

  “I’ll give them another kind of medicine,” Nodonn declared. “Get that armor bundle and lash it to my saddle. Do you know what’s inside? The holy Sword! The weapon I wielded in my first confrontation with the usurper—and intend to wield again, victoriously! Then we’ll see who dares prate of lost hands and Nonborn Kings and bastard descendants of the Tanu returning through the length of time to mate with their own forebears!”

  The hapless Moreyn cringed. Nodonn’s body glowed a raging solar gold, its brilliance on the threshold of pain. “Oh, take care lest the Foe detect you, Battlemaster! Take care!”

  The aura was instantly extinguished. “You’re right, old friend. My vehemence is rash. Stupid. Mercy warned me that the usurper’s spies are everywhere. From now on, I’ll guard myself well. I would not put you in jeopardy.”

  “Oh, who cares about me?” the Glasscrafter moaned. “My life means nothing. Yours means everything!” He fumbled ineffectively with the stirrup of his own chaliko, tried to mount as the beast danced, then gave up and wafted himself ignominiously into the saddle with his PK and made haste to fasten the dicky strap. Nodonn was careful not to smile.

  “You are my charge, Battlemaster,” Moreyn said. “I have a sacred obligation to shelter you until Lord Celadeyr and Queen Mercy-Rosmar can come for you and take you to safety in Afaliah.” He sent a plea for forbearance toward the flawed titan, whose face was now lost in the moonlight’s shadow. “I have prepared a secret hiding place for you where I can minister to your needs myself. I’m afraid that you’ll find your confinement tedious, for the chamber is small, in a deep subbasement of the glassworks. But if you can restrain your battle ardor for a little longer, be patient—”