The Many-Coloured Land sope-1

by Julian May

  Felice peered inside the doorless entry. “Look. The floor has sprouted fixed furniture.”

  There were bunks for two with semidetached pillows, a table, shelves, and at the rear a silvery box with a pipe leading to the roof. Felice read aloud: “BALLAST STOVE WITH SAND OR UNIT WILL COMPRESS UPON COOLING… This material must be nearly impossible to destroy!” She reached behind her left greave and produced a glittering little gold-handled dirk. “Can’t puncture it, either.”

  “What a pity they’ve made it to degrade in twenty year. Still, we should be at one with our environment by then.”

  Large bucket-shaped hollows in each comer of the cabin had to be ballasted with stones, earth, water, or whatever else was to hand. A very small pocket near the door yielded up a whole handful of pillsized wads that were to be inflated separately, then weighted with sand or with water. The latter could be injected into the interstitial area by means of a simple collapsible bulb siphon. The pills grew into a cabin door, chairs, cooking gear (with the sand-ballast note), filamentous rugs and blankets, and other miscellany. Less than ten minutes after they had begun to set up camp, the women were relaxing in a fully equipped cabin.

  “I can hardly believe it,” Sister Roccaro marveled, rapping on the walls. “It feels quite solid. But if there were any wind, the whole cabin would blow away like a bubble unless you weighted it down.”

  “Even wood is mostly thin air and water,” said Felice with a shrug. “This decamole just seems to reproduce the structurally reinforced shell of a thing and lets you add mass. Wonder how the stuff compensates for heat and pressure changes? Some kind of valves, I suppose. You’d obviously have to guy this house in a high wind, though, even if you filled most of the wall hollows with water or dirt. But it sure beats a tent. It even has ventilators!”

  “Shall we inflate the boat or the mini-shelter or the bridge sections?”

  “They were optional. Now that I’ve seen how decamole works, I’ll take the rest of the equipment on faith.” Felice crossed her legs and pulled off her gauntlets slowly. She was seated at the small table. “Faith. That’s your game, isn’t it?”

  The nun sat down. “In a way. Technically, I intend to become an anchoress, a kind of religious hermit. It’s a calling that’s completely obsolete in the Milieu, but it used to have its fans in the Dark Ages.”

  “What in the world will you be doing? Just praying up a storm all day long?”

  Amerie laughed. “Part of the night, too. I intend to bring back the Latin Divine Office. It’s an ancient cycle of daily prayers. Matins starts it off at midnight. Then there’s Lauds at dawn. During the daytime there are prayers for the old First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours. Then Vespers or Evensong at sunset, and Compline before going to bed. The Office is a collection of psalms and scripture readings and hymns and special prayers that reflected centuries of religious tradition. I think it’s a terrible pity that no one prays it any more in the primitive form.”

  “And you just keep saying this Office all the time?”

  “Good grief, no. The individual hours aren’t that long. I’ll also celebrate the Mass and do penance and deep meditation with a little Zen. And when I’m hoeing weeds or doing other chores there’s the Rosary. It’s almost like a mantra if you do it the old way. Very calming.”

  Felice stared at her with well-deep eyes. “It sounds very strange. And lonely, too. Doesn’t it frighten you, planning to live all alone with nobody but your God?”

  “Dear old Claude says he’ll maintain me in style, but I’m not too sure I can take him seriously. If he does supply me with some food, I may be able to handcraft some items in my spare time that we can barter.”

  “Claude!” Landry was contemptuous. “He’s been around, that old man. He’s not a complete case like those two machos in fancy dress, but I caught him looking at me in a fishy way.”

  “You can’t blame people for looking at you. You’re very beautiful. I’ve heard you were a great sports star on your home world.”

  The girl’s lip curled in a grim little smile. “Acadie. I was the best ring-hockey player of all time. But they were afraid of me. In the end, the other players, the men, refused to come up against me. They made all kinds of trouble. Finally, I was barred from the game when two players claimed I had deliberately tried to do them serious injury.”

  “Had you?”

  Felice lowered her gaze. She was twisting the fingers of her gloves and a flush was rising from her neck into her cheeks. “Maybe. I think I did. They were so hateful.” She raised her pointed chin in defiance, the hoplite helmet pushed to the back of her head giving her the look of a miniature Pallas Athene. “They never wanted me as a woman, you know. All they wanted was to hurt me, to spoil me. They were jealous of my strength, and afraid. People have always been afraid of me, even when I was just a child. Can you imagine what that was like?”

  “Oh, Felice.” Amerie hesitated. “How, how did you ever begin playing that brutal game?”

  “I was good with animals. My parents were soil scientists and they were always moving around on field expeditions. Newly opened lands, still full of wildlife. When the local kids in the area would snub me, I’d just get myself some pets for friends. Small creatures at first, then larger and more dangerous kinds. And there were some beauties on Acadie, I can tell you. Finally, when I was fifteen, I tamed a verrul. It’s something like a very large Earth rhinoceros. A local animal dealer wanted to buy him for ring-hockey training. I’d never paid much attention to the game before, but I did after I sold the beast. I woke up to the fact that there was a big-money business that might be perfect for my special talents.”

  “But to break into a professional sport when you were only a young girl…”

  “I told my parents I wanted to become an apprentice verrul trainer and groom. They didn’t mind. I had always been excess baggage. They just made me finish school and let me go. They said, ‘Be happy, baby.’ ”

  She paused and stared at Amerie without expression. “I was a groom only until the team manager saw how I could control the animals. That’s the secret of playing the game, you see. The verrul has to make the goals and maneuver to keep you from getting stunned by the short-range weapons the players carry. I played in the preseason as a novelty, to give the Green-hammer box office a hype. The team had been in the cellar for three years running. When they saw that I was more than a publicity gimmick they put me onto the first string in the season opener. I whipped the other clowns on the team into such a froth trying to outdo me that we won the bloody game. And all the rest… and the pennant, too.”

  “Wonderful!”

  “It should have been. But I had no friends. I was too different from the rest of the players. Too freakish. And in the second year… when they really began to hate me and I knew they would force me out, I… I…”

  She pounded both fists on the table and her child’s face twisted in anguish. Amerie waited for the tears, but there were none; the briefly revealed hurt was masked almost as soon as it had showed itself. Sitting across the table, Felice relaxed, smiling at the other woman.

  “I’m going to be a huntress, you know. On the other side. I could take care of you much better than the old man, Amerie.”

  The nun rose up, blood pounding in her temples. She turned away from Felice and walked out of the cabin.

  “I think we need each other,” the girl said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Auberge du Portail, FrEu, Earth 24 August 2110

  My dear Varya,

  We have completed our little games of survival and craftsmanship now, and our bodies are fully acclimated to the tropical world that was Pliocene Earth. There remain only a Last Supper and a good night’s sleep before passage through the time-portal at dawn. The apparatus is inside a quaint cottage in the gardens of the auberge, and you can’t imagine a more incongruous site for the gate into another world. One looks in vain for the sign above the doorway saying, per me siva tea la perduta oente, but the fee
ling is there all the same.

  After five days of working together (more like a holiday camp than basic training, you must understand), the eight of us in Group Green have achieved shaky competence in our chosen fields of primitive technology and a faith in our ability to cope that is probably dangerously inflated. Few of the others seem to appreciate the potential hazard that we might face from our predecessors into Exile. My fellow Greenies are more inclined to worry about being stamped upon by mammoths or bitten by python-sized vipers than to anticipate a hostile human reception committee greedily awaiting the day’s grab bag of well-heeled wayfarers.

  You and I know that the time-gate arrival would certainly have been ritualized in some manner by the people on the other side. What the ritual will be is another matter. We can hardly expect to be treated as casual commuters, but whether we shall encounter welcome or exploitation is impossible to fathom. The literature offers certain speculative scenarios that make my flesh crawl. Personnel at the auberge are careful to present a neutral face while at the same time reinforcing our childhood self-defensive training. We will pass through the portal in two groups of four persons, with larger pieces of baggage following. This, I feel, is designed to give us a certain safety in numbers, although the momentary pain and disorientation of ordinary subspace translation will probably affect time-travelers as well, putting us at a tactical disadvantage for the first minute following our arrival in the Pliocene.

  Your amused speculations upon my new vocation in the primitive world were much appreciated. However, since the last dinosaurs perished at least 60 million years before the Pliocene Epoch, there will be little can for sweeping up after them! So much for your visions of me as an antediluvian fertilizer tycoon. Prosaically enough, my new job is to be little more than an extension of my erstwhile hobby of sailing. I shall fish for a living and ply the seas on my Quest, and perhaps undertake the odd bit of trade if the occasion presents. The sloop was far too sophisticated a vessel to take to the Pliocene, so I traded her in for a smaller trimaran that can be ballasted with water and sand instead of mercury. If need be, I can whip up a very simple craft from scratch materials as well. We are furnished with toolheads of a gemlike glassy material, vitredur, which stays eyersharp and is virtually indestructible for some 200 years, after which it degrades, like decamole. Besides the shipwright’s kit, I am equipped with the auberge’s survival gear (very impressive) and what they call a Smallholder Unit, tools and decamole appliances for setting up light housekeeping on a subsistence farm, together with a few packets of seeds and a large fleck library with a raft of “how-to” books on every subject from animal husbandry to zymurgy.

  The latter, by the way, is the vocation of choice for our Viking. He also confided to me that if there should be a demand for swash-buckling mercenary warriors, he might combine the two trades.

  The individual whom I dubbed the Pirate also plans to get involved with alcoholic beverages, wines and brandies, that is. He and the Viking are now the straightest of friends, spending their off-hours tossing down the most expensive spirits that the auberge can supply and speculating on the quality of female consolation that might be available in the By-and-By. (Group Green itself has lean pickings. Besides the Nun, our female members include a sinister Virgin Huntress who seems to have wreaked mayhem or worse on one of the auberge counselors in order to qualify as a recidivist, and an extremely cautious ex-Meta Lady who is, at the moment at least, content to remain just one of the boys.)

  Last night we had a fascinating glimpse into the background of the Pirate. His brother and sister turned up unexpectedly to say adieu and turned out to be Fleet line officers of the most impressive stripe. The poor P was very discomfited and the ex-Meta Lady speculates that he must be a cashiered spacer himself. He’s a competent sort if you don’t mind grouches. I worked with him for a few hours in the Small Boat Handling exercise, which he wanted to cram, and he seemed to have a natural flair for messing about in the water.

  Most of the others in Group Green seem to be alone in the world. The Nun received a long conference call from her religious sistren in North America bidding her bon voyage. And earlier today she met with a Franciscan Brother in full conventual fig, no doubt hearing her last confession or whatever. (The friar drove one of those souped-up Gambini eggs with the heat dissipation fins, not the patient gray donkey you might have anticipated from memoirs of Il Poverello.) The Nun was a medic and psychological counselor by profession and plans to retire to a hermitage. I hope the poor woman isn’t counting on ministering angels such as the Old Paleontologist overmuch. He’s a fine chap with a penchant for carpentry, but I dare say the ex-Meta is right when she pegs him as a death-wisher.

  I concur with your analysis of the little Joker. There must have been some valid square-peg reason for him to be thrown off his home world, but it’s a pity that his wild talents couldn’t be harnessed for the Milieu. Poor little nonborn. He’s endeared himself to the rest of us Greenies, not only for his ghastly sense of humor, but also for his fantastic ability to make something out of nothing. He has assembled a large collection of vitredur toolheads that need only be equipped with shafts or bandies to be operational. You get the feeling that after this boy has been in the Pliocene for a week or two, the Industrial Revolution will be raging! He has a whole forge lashup in decamole for his village blacksmith and rustic mechanician acts, and has acquired a plaqueful of geological survey charts to clue him in on metal ores in the unlikely event that none of the other Exiles has gone in heavily for prospecting.

  You may be interested in the peculiar social structure of Group Green. The foundress of the auberge was a practical psychologist of no mean ability and realized quite early on that her clients would need support from fellow travelers in order to maximize survival potential beyond the gate. On the other hand, they would tend to be far too eccentric to stand for any of the more obvious schemes of imposed organization. So Madame Guderian fell back on the old “put ’em through hell together and they’ll end up buddies” shtick, which you must admit is apt to induce feelings of solidarity in all but the most sociopathic. (And it did, too, with the obvious exception.)

  During each day’s Group activities we have spent the most strenuous sessions working together, often thrust into outlandish situations where we were forced to cooperate with one another in order to complete a difficult task quickly and well. For example, we bridged a thirty-meter pond full of alligators in one lesson; captured, butchered, and “utilized” an elk in another; and defended ourselves against hostile human stalkers in third. Ironically, the most accomplished primitive in the Group is the Old Paleontologist, who seems to have knocked about the wilder shores of Galactica for more than a century while gleaning fossil bones.

  We are known to each other by first names only, and we may divulge such details of our background as we choose or don’t choose. As you may imagine, this leaves a wide margin for parlor psychoanalysis, with the ex-Meta Lady as head gamesmistress. She had me taped as a Questing Lover after the first day, and I’m afraid that she anticipates a melancholy end to my masculine Evangeline-fixe, since she keeps trying to distract me with speculations on idle playing among the auberge clientele, the political implications of Exile, and other anthropological amusements.

  Do you think I’m doomed, too, Varya? I don’t, you know.

  Late this afternoon I got a call from London, and it was Kaplan and Djibutunji and Hildebrand and Catherwood, bless their bones, telling me goodbye. Aunt Helen sent a note, but she is really nearly gaga now, since declining rejuv.

  Your dear letter was in this morning’s post. I don’t have to tell you how much I appreciate your agreeing to carry on with the liaison committee. It’s the one work I really hated to leave unfinished. There is still the ultimate correlation of the pre-Rebellion mazeway material, but I feel that Alicia and Adalberto have that pretty well in hand.

  And so I come at last to the farewell, Varya, and I wish I could be eloquent and memorable instead of just my
stodgy self. The gaudiness of the act will have to speak for me. Whatever you do, don’t mourn. My only hope of happiness lies on the other side of the Exile gate and I must risk going after it. Remember the years we shared as lovers and colleagues and friends and know that I’m glad they happened. Joy and light to you, my Very Dear.

  Forever,

  BRY

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  When the Last Supper, with its crazy smorgasbord of requested dishes, was finally over, the eight members of Group Green took their drinks out onto the terrace, where they instinctively gathered apart from the other guests. Even though itwas only half after twenty, the sky over Lyon had turned black as the scheduled weekly storm built up in the north. Pink flashes silhouetted approaching thunderheads.

  “Feel the static buildup!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Even with my metafunctions out, the ionization before a really big storm always gets to me. Every sense sharpens. I begin to feel so clever I can barely contain myself! Capacitor Earth is charging and so am I, and in just a minute or two I’ll be able to zap mountains!”

  She faced into the strengthening wind, long hair streaming and red denim jumpsuit clinging to her body. The first sub-sonics of distant thunder curdled the air.

  Felice affected a languid tone. “Were you able to move mountains before?”

  “Not really. The larger psychokinetic powers are really very rare among metas, almost as rare as genuine creativity. My PK ability was only good for a few parlor tricks. What I specialized in was farspeaking, the glorified telepathy function. It should really be called farsensing because it includes a species of sight as well as hearing. I was also operant in redaction, which is the therapeutic and analytical power that most lay persons call mind-alteration. My husband had similar faculties. We worked as a team training the minds of very young children in the first difficult steps toward metapsychic Unity.”