"Up on the wall!" shouted Danny.
No one asked questions. Those who could followed him, including Ravano. They clambered up the crumbling remains of the pantheon so that they could watch the course of the scoutship.
It was then that a real miracle happened, as far as the Talavat king was concerned. A violet beam of alien energy shot from the sky, just once. It struck the scoutship but did not destroy it. Whatever was up there in outer space, thought Danny, the intelligence that had answered Boozie's cosmoscope must have been linked to the causal fabric of the eternal Now. It came as a part of prophecy.
Ravano, Danny, Jerry and dozens of earthmen and Tallies alike followed the wavering, drunken course of the scoutship as it veered away uncertainly toward the south.
"Chih-na prayava-kutami!" murmured Ravano.
It was true. The bomb-laden ship was headed straight for the smouldering, restless volcanoes.
"Get down!" yelled Danny. "Down below!" When Ravano looked at him questioningly, he shouted "Tarn-ucaha!" It was Talavat for Sun Death.
* * * *
They huddled together next to the wall in the body-strewn basilica. As Danny held Freddie to him, oblivious to the torrent of comment around him, his consciousness was centered on the scoutship, waiting for the nuclear blast that he could see with a timeless inner eye.
There was a painful flash of light. For an almost blinding instant the torn fingers of volcanic clouds above were transfixed, gaunt and silver-lined. Then a deeper red gloom was reflected from them for a moment. Freddie clutched at his arm, waiting, head down against his chest. The report came, at first like a titanic cannon shot, hard, flat and piercing.
It was followed by peal after peal of thunder. An ominous tremor ran through the ground. Ravano straightened up, but Lalille and Jerry got to him, pulling him down, trying to explain. Akala, tending to Noley's head wound, stared at her brother fearfully.
The shockwave swept across the jungle like a hurricane, carrying trees through the sky. The Tallies were mouthing mantra prayers but couldn't be heard. In the midst of the storm, Danny's memory returned him a vision of Ughur, red-faced king of the Raks, as he carried his victim away to an unknown fate. For all of her diabolical choosing, this was one prince of the land Tallullah hadn't counted on. The whore of Babylon had been borne off by the scarlet beast.
When other thunder followed, rumbling up from the bowels of the world, and when the earth began to sway and beams began to fall off the walls, Danny ordered everyone to head for the camp and life-pod. The gods of pravava-kutami spoke out in their wrath. The prophecy was ending. It was time for Maitluccan to return to his home.
What made this possible was one last turn of the wheels of intervention – an event which became a surprise pivotal point in the recorded history of Terra Nova. In the turmoil of last minute evacuation at the temple site, Bjornson and Hapgood discovered Makart and Vinet on a jungle cutter, towing a string of storage flats out of the rubble of Alonso's damaged bunker. What added confusion to the scene was that a detail of Alonso loyalists was offering assistance.
The sky was a dark angry red and the ground trembled intermittently while dozens of evacuees crowded up the onramp of the towering life-pod of the Siruis III. Alarm klaxons sounded across the body-strewn square, and the ship's P.A. kept repeating a call for immediate boarding. On the under belly of the pod a loading hatch stood open, and the freight lift that had already loaded the few surviving roborgs was being lowered again.
"What the hell's going on!?" shouted Hapgood as the two jumped down off the rig. "No time for salvaging, damn it! We're getting out of here – now!"
"Not without this, you're not," retorted Makart. He indicated a half dozen large storage crates which appeared to be heavy because of the number of men required to carry them toward the lift.
"They're lead-lined," added Vinet. "Do you get it?"
"Fuel cores?" bellowed Bjornson.
While survivors continued arriving from the basilica, including the retinues of both Danny and Ravano, the story rapidly developed that royalist crews had been trying to rescue Alonso and his staff from the damaged bunker under the temple, and Flight Corp troops had been in pursuit, but the situation had changed abruptly when two discoveries were made simultaneously. Alonso and his co-conspirators were found crushed under the rubble, their bodies irretrievable, but the secessionist's secret hoard of nuclear fuel was uncovered.
Meanwhile, Danny and Poyntner and Fitz were too occupied with logistics to note what was going on near the lift. They were sorting out evacuation groups to be transported to the mainland in several trips of the life-pod, since Ravano still had almost a hundred elite lancers with him – not to mention their valuable unicorn mounts. But finally Fitz caught sight of the lift action and noted an urgent signal from Hapgood. In a very few moments he and Danny and Poyntner were at the scene and heard the story. While the klaxons continued and the P.A. kept repeating instructions, everybody simply stood there for a moment, silently watching the lift loading operation. Then Fitz muttered something that the prevailing racket rendered inaudible.
"What did you say?" asked Danny, hoping that somebody could find words to express the situation. His mind was reeling at the glaring implications of Holy Sam's promise of "Intervention."
"I said we were going to try the Big Empty out there on a wing and an I.O.U. – but now we're loaded for the main haul!"
"What I want to know," grumbled Bjornson, "is why the Big M didn't mention this stash when she was being so generous."
"She might have gotten around to it," said Poyntner, "if she would have needed to sweeten the stakes in her game."
Then Danny found words. "But it was a last trump card she didn't get to play..."
* * * *
The new land extended almost from the equator to the northern pole of the dawn world, sprawling massively east and west into unmeasured distances. This particular coast was tropical, characterized by tall rain forests and wide, majestic rivers flowing gently to the sea. What was to have become the viceroyalty of New Andragoya now bore the more appropriate Talavat name of Dyana-Chenravaloc (Land of New Life).
It was new life in two directions.
On the one hand the growing thatched-hut city of Tarnubhava (Star of Prophecy) already extended itself a mile or two along the palm-fringed shoreline, giving every sign of transplanted fresh vitality. Smaller communities had chosen havens farther inland by shaded streams among the nut and fruit groves, or on some lush and friendly river bight where docks reached into somnolent bays and shallow-hulled fishing boats nudged the sun-bright banks among drying fiber nets. The earliest immigrants from doomed Lankara had prepared the way for their following companions.
Here and there even a few teams of ox-like ubyahans could be seen tilling plantation fields. The earthmen who had chosen to share the native destiny had transmitted practical gifts of knowledge so that now the simpler arts and crafts of a young civilization were becoming a way of life. Gone was the myth-mystique of nature's germinating transition, the eons-long entrancement of becoming. Here the still dream of ages had turned to wakeful purpose. It was time to go forth and multiply and to populate the world, where tomorrow was today extended forever.
On the other hand, out on the two-mile sandbar trapped by the reefs sat Maitluccan the silver-gleaming Sky Dragon and his lesser brother, the shuttle. The other Star Sons would be going home. Boozie and Bruno had long since returned in the space shuttle, but not to torn and twisted Lankara under its acting doom clouds where rivers of fire seared the toppling jungles and the anguished land slowly yielded to the sea. A two-week phase of departure for the star ship had stretched into several months. After the pressures of decision and crisis, the peaceful contrast of the new land had provided an unexpected attraction for some who had not been able to adjust to the planet previously. A large number of the colonial survivors had elected to interface with Ravano's people rather than face the terrors of the Barrier Wall again. However, Danny and
his new staff of officers and Project leaders had decided to give everyone ample time for second thoughts before making a final commitment. First impressions could wear off for some people, even in Paradise. Their decisions would be irreversible once the star journey began.
Another reason for the prolonged departure was the need for a handover phase, according to Alfred Poyntner who was the new Project Administrator.
"Fontaine and Nolokov are wise," he told the joint staff a few days after the fleet had arrived with the last of the native survivors. "They're more or less the Council here in the new world, or at least they're the top advisers to Ravano. When we offered to bring down a last few items from the cargo pods two remaining air car kits, a last land rover, more guns and ammunition, modern medical supplies and instruments – they refused. They're right, of course. Modern vehicles require an industrial infrastructure to support them, and guns would make people dependent upon a form of hunting and protection that wouldn't last for long. The medical stuff would only be a crutch. Such things belong to another culture that's clear up the other side of the evolutionary arc.
"During the crisis evacuation of Terra Nova, some of our more foolhardy crewmen managed to scavenge some useful items from the storehouses, but machinery items, for the most part, were rejected. So they're choosing the course of natural adaptation and growth, keeping only those items that harmonize with the environment: primitive arts and crafts, simple textile techniques, basic agriculture, and so forth.
"Now, our handover phase will consist of giving them all the encyclopedic data they'll need for future reference. More than this, those members of our expedition who will remain with the Tallies want a record of what we've learned here, especially the experience we had with – well, whoever it was who came through the Gate to educate us in the temple."
"What about the basic art of writing?" Danny had asked. "Are they going to let the Tallies fool with hieroglyphics and clay tablets for the next thousand generations?"
"No. In addition to information on looms for weaving they'll accept whatever we can leave them to help develop parchment, paper, inks, dyes, and so forth."
"That," said Carl Sinding, "is more important than the wheel. There is a quantum jump of at least a million years!"
"A going-away present, you might say."
"It's a cinch they won't have a cosmoscope," smirked Frans Mabuse, "so they'll certainly be on their own here."
"What about that?" Fitz interjected. "Do you think the star ships will ever make it back here?"
"Never!" said Poyntner with a strangely positive conviction. "That's one big lesson we've learned. We were told in the temple that 'no mechanical vehicle, nothing out of the deeper densities, can ever reach the physical stars in its own space-time continuum.' That's nature's chastity belt, the Barrier Wall, and now I understand the scientific principle behind it."
"But wait!" Hapgood exclaimed worriedly. "Then how do we expect to get back to Earth in our own time? We may even be in a parallel universe here."
Danny answered him. "We were told we'd get back. We'll be gated through."
"How?"
Poyntner completed the answer. "The same way we were gated through when we came here. In both cases there was a planned reason. On the outward journey, we had to know what we didn't know. Some of us are returning because we're at least ready to know." He studied the faces around him. "As Sam once said, these things are perceived on different levels, according to our states of development. I think, at our own level of consciousness, we can at least cautiously whisper about the Wisdom of Nature." He smiled sheepishly. "When we can handle our own petty egos better, we'll probably get around to talking about a Universal Intelligence."
Thus, the handover phase was a sober searching of the human purpose on multiple levels, a careful preparation for the parting of two separate cultures. Possibly forever.
* * * *
The giant Hawaiian-style luau was mostly Foxy's idea of a farewell party on the eve of departure. Also, with the help of the natives, Jerry had been able to concoct something milder and tastier than uighyic, which even satisfied Boozie.
"You might have a winner here," commented the Belgian festively as he returned to his improvised bongo drums. He had been adding a beat to the Talavat maita-bhava flutes and duraca sticks.
The timeless tropical twilight was enhanced by a full rising moon, and the cheerful torches along the beaches and through the spacious palm groves were the local equivalent of tiki lights. Ravano's hunters had provided the wild tapir-like vathamanis which were the closest to pigs, and there were also roast sainlakans, very much like pheasants, plus an overabundance of exotic fishfood from the sea, and fruits and nuts and flowers from the bounteous cornucopia of nature.
After happy hours of feasting, dancing, and speechmaking when the tiki lights burned low and the campfires were reduced to glowing embers, some of the Star Sons turned to the sobering thoughts of final commitment. Fully thirty of the would-be jumpers came to Danny and said they had changed their minds. They had decided to go home to Earth.
Danny exchanged glances with Freddie and Poyntner and Mabuse. "But what about the primordial Id and the tiger skins?" he countered with mock solemnity. "You boys seemed to be turning on to all that."
"Yeah, it's been nice," said Burt Henshaw wearily as he removed his wilted flower lei. "This is a great place to visit, but–"
Juhani Kivi, standing next to Billy Vinet and Kenny Makart, scratched his unruly beard plaintively. "You get a little tired of flint and tinder every time you want to turn on a light."
Fitz sighed philosophically. "Ah, back to the age of plug-ins and plastics!"
"Right now," quipped Boozie, "you apes could use an electric shaver, after a power lawnmower job!"
"They're covering up," said Jules Elliott. "They have stars in their eyes. They think we've really got something to bring back home. They might not be able to understand it all, but most of them feel it may be the answer we started out to find."
Danny interrupted as he saw a familiar figure in the nearby village beyond the beach house. "My God, it's the Bishop!" he exclaimed. "I thought–"
"He showed up at the fleet base one day," said Foxy, "leaning on a staff and looking like St. Peter bound for Rome."
As they all watched the cowled, monkish figure amongst a group of Tally children, he added: "We leave him alone."
"I've tried to talk to him," said Nolokov pensively. "Those of us who were there noticed that something strange happened to him when he demanded that the Oracle identify itself. He may come out of it someday, but for now, all he can say to everyone he meets is a single phrase, a question–"
"Speaking of the Oracle," interrupted Juhani Kivi, "that's the damned part that a lot of us are still in the fog about."
Some of the homer delegation were still lingering around the campfire alone with the bewildered-looking Finn Vinet, Henshaw, Makart and a few others. Danny sensed the lonely burden of leader responsibility when he looked at their questioning faces.
Ogden Hapgood spoke for them. "You know, only a few of you witnessed whatever went on in that cave. The rest of us have to take your word for whatever it was."
Frederica looked up at him from her seat between Fitz and Boozie by the fire. "Some of the men have asked me if the whole phenomenon wasn't just a case of everybody psychophasing."
"Yeah," complained Vinet, "where's the Lily right now? She's supposed to be the star of that production."
Danny perceived a possible leverage. "I think Lalille and Jerry have gone to check on their little flock of nymphs and satyrs just now. That in itself should remind you boys of Boozie's immortal axiom – it's an anywhere world. The lid is off!"
"I've talked to Lalille about her experience," said Freddie. "She claims that she remembers nothing about her pronouncements as the Oracle. She insists that she was merely channeling."
"Channeling what?" retorted Henshaw. "Or Who?"
"This whole thing is a kind of cop-ou
t for the rest of us," grumbled Bjornson. "We get what's supposed to be cryptic meanings, from Noley and Poyntner and Jerry, and half of us don't even know what the hell 'cryptic' means!"
In the midst of this livening discussion, they were unaware of a new arrival, until Juhani Kivi cried out, "Hey everybody! Look who's here?"
It was the Bishop. Leaning wearily on an improvised staff, the cowled figure merely stood there staring at the fire's dying embers, as if it had been a natural instinct for him to humbly join their gathering, with or without invitation.
"Well now," said Kenny Makart, "speaking of Oracles, here's the High Priest of the Inquisition!"
"Take it easy," cautioned Elliott. "In his state, he's not a fair target for all you sinners."
"The poor man must be hungry," suggested Freddie.
"He may be out of luck," taunted Vinet. "We're fresh out of crow!"
In low tones, Bishop Saussure spoke. "Were you there?"
"No, by God!" shouted Juhani Kivi. "We were NOT there – and that's the frigging problem!" Freddie tried to interrupt him, but there was no stopping his frustrated outburst. "You were the holier-than-thou scripture pounder, and if a miracle happened in that heathen cave you should have come out of there spouting earth-shaking revelations! I think all that happened was that a super dose of voodoo gave you a case of the flips!"
Danny and other staff members were about to shut him up when everyone was galvanized by an unexpected reaction of the Bishop. The cowled figure suddenly straightened up stiffly, causing the cowl to fall away from his face. The helpless humility was gone, replaced by an entranced expression of blazing-eyed denunciation. Wherewith he threw his staff into the embering fire and proclaimed in his most powerful baritone:
"I am that Alpha and Omega you know not of!"
Then suddenly he slumped and would have fallen if Henshaw and Makart hadn't caught him. After a long speechless moment, in which Freddie and Poyntner led the Bishop gently away, Danny finally broke the silence.
"Well," he said, "I guess that was the message that none of us heard."
Star Quest Page 28