The Many-Coloured Land sope-1

by Julian May

  He folded her to his breast while the soldier eyed him with interested speculation. Elizabeth said, “They’re sending us to the capital, Muriah. My metafunctions are returning, Claude! I’m going to do my best to get away. If I do, I’ll try to help you all, somehow.”

  “That’s enough now, Lady,” said the soldier. “I don’t care what Lord Creyn told you. You’ve got to get ready to ride.”

  “Goodbye, Claude.” She gave him a real kiss, full on the lips, before she was hurried back across the courtyard and helped onto her mount. One of the soldiers fastened the slender chains about her ankles.

  Claude raised one hand. “Goodbye, Elizabeth.”

  From a covered area beyond the main animal pen came a majestic figure riding a snow-white chaliko with scarlet and silver trappings. The captal saluted. Then he and two soldiers swung into their saddles. A command rang out.

  “All ready! Portcullis up!”

  The file of ten riders went slowly into the arched passage of the barbican. There was a distant excited howling from the bear-dogs. The last prisoner in line turned to wave at Claude before he disappeared into the shadowed opening.

  And goodbye to you, Bryan, thought the old man. I hope you find your Mercy. One way or another.

  He went back into the dormitory to help with Richard, feeling old and weary and not at all pleased with himself any more.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The party of ten formed up to ride two by two as soon as they had quit Castle Gateway. Creyn and his captal led and the two soldiers followed behind the small group of prisoners. The sun was just down and they traveled eastward into the dusk, down the gradual slope of the plateau toward the twilit Rhône-Saône Valley. Elizabeth sat easily in her saddle, eyes closed and hands clasped on the pommel while the reins lay free. It was fortunate that the chaliko did not require guidance from its rider, because Elizabeth was fully occupied in listening.

  Listen… but be unaware of the sounds made by the mounts plodding over soft earth. Do not hear the crickets, the frogs tuning up in the misty swales scattered in the hollows of the tableland. Be deaf to the birds’ evensong, the distant yelping of hyaenid emerging for the night’s hunt, the murmuring voices of companion riders. Listen not with the ears but with the newly recovered metapsychic farsensing faculty.

  Reach out afar, afar. Search for other minds like your own, other speakers, other please-God truepeople. (Shame on you for that, arrogant sickee, but be forgiven just this once.)

  Listen, listen! The reborn ultrasense is not yet fully operant, and yet there are things to be heard. Here in the party: the guarded exotic consciousness of Creyn in converse with his captal, dark-minded Zdenko, the two concealed behind a torc-generated screen easily breached; but forebear, since they would be aware of the penetration. Pass over Aiken and the other silver-torc prisoners, the man Raimo and the woman Sukey, their infantile mental babblings as grating as the efforts of fledgling violinists importuning the ears of a cranky virtuoso. Ignore the gray-torced guards and poor unconscious Stein, and Bryan with his brain still unfettered except by chains of his own forging. Leave them all and journey afar.

  Listen back at the castle where another exotic voice is, yes, singing. Lesser notes of silver and gray respond in dim echoing of the golden tone. Listen ahead, closer to the great river, to a complex alien mutter: exultation, impatience, anticipated dark joy, cruelty. (Drop that horrid thing until later.) Listen farther east, north, northwest, and south. Perceive other concentrations, golden amorphous clots betokening the presence of still more of the artificially enhanced exotic minds, their thoughts too numerous and unfocused for your convalescent mind to sort, their harmonies and occasional peaks of power so strange, yet so achingly familiar in their resemblance to the metapsychic networks of the dear lost Milieu.

  Listen to the anomalies! Soft gibberings and puerile thrusts. Other unhuman minds, unaugmented by torcs, perhaps genuinely operant? What? Who? Where? Data inconclusive, but there are many. Listen to faint traceries of dread-patterns and pain-patterns and resignation-loss-patterns coming from God knew where or what. Shrink back. Press past them and beyond, listening. Listening.

  That! A fleeting contact from the north that winks out in a spasm of apprehension as soon as you touch it. Tanu? Enhanced human far-speaker? Call out, but receive no response. Project friendship and need, but hear no answer… Perhaps you imagined it after all.

  Listen afar, afar. Sound the entire Exile world. Are any of you here, sisters and brothers of the mind? Do any farsense in the uniquely human mode that the exotics cannot know? Answer Elizabeth Orme farspeaker redactor searcher hoper prayer! Answer…

  Planet aureole. Emanations of lower life-forms. Mental whispers from normal humanity. The jabber of the Tanu and their torced minions. An ambiguous murmur from the other side of the world, evanescent as a remembered dream. It is real or reverberate? Imagination or reality? Track it, lose it. Hover despairingly and know that it never was. The Earth is mute.

  Go out beyond the world-halo and perceive the diapason roar of the hidden sun and the thinner arpeggios of stars near and distant, tingling with their own planets and life. No meta-psychic humanity? Then call to the ancient-in-your-day Lylmik race, frail artisans of mental prodigies… but they do not yet exist. Call to the Krondaku, brothers-mental despite their fearsome bodies… but they, too, are a race still in embryo, as are the Gi, the Poltroyans, and the rude Simbiari. The living universe is uncoadunate, mind still chained to matter. The Milieu is in its childhood and Blessed Diamond Mask unborn. There is no one to answer.

  Elizabeth withdrew.

  Her eyes beheld her own hands, the diamond ring symbolic of her profession faintly luminous, mocking. Banal mental images lapped and splattered her. The wide-open subvocalization of the soldier Billy, brooding over the ageing but available charms of a female tavern keeper at a place called Roniah. The other guard, Seung Kyu, preoccupied with a wager he plans to make upon some contest, the outcome of which might now be modified by the participation of Stein. The captal broadcasting pain waves from a boil in his armpit that is aggravated by the bronze breastplate of his light armor. Stein seemingly asleep calmed by his gray torc. Aiken and the woman named Sukey weaving a crude but effective screen over some mental shenanigans. Creyn now deep in verbal conversation with the anthropologist, discussing the evolution of Tanu society since the opening of the time-portal.

  Elizabeth wove a shield behind which she could mourn, impervious as the diamond of her future patron saint. And when it was finished she let the bitter sorrow and rage blaze up. She wept for the irony of having fled from loneliness and bereavement, only to encounter it transformed and fresh. Cocooned, wrapped in the fire of loss, she drifted. Her face was as tranquil as that of a statue in the bright light of the Pliocene stars, her mind as inaccessible as they.

  “…the Ship had no way of knowing that this sun was shortly to enter into a prolonged period of instability, triggered by a nearby supernova. Within a hundred years of our arrival, only one conceptus in thirty survived until term. Of those that were born, only about half were normal. We live long, by human standards, but we faced extinction unless the disaster could somehow be ameliorated.”

  “You couldn’t simply pack up and leave?”

  “Our Ship was a living organism. It died heroically when it brought us to Earth, making an intergalactic leap unprecedented in the history of our race… No, we could not leave. We had to find another solution. The Ship and its Spouse had chosen Earth for us because of a basic compatibility between our plasm and that of the highest native life-form, the ramapithecines. This enabled us to dominate them with our torc technology…”

  “To enslave them, you mean?”

  “Why use such a pejorative term, Bryan? Did your people speak of enslaving chimpanzees or whales? The ramas are scarcely more sentient. Or would you have had us live in a Stone Age culture? We came here voluntarily in order to follow an ancient lifestyle no longer permissible on the worlds of our galaxy
. But we hardly desired to subsist on roots and berries or live in caves.”

  “Perish the thought. So you made the ramas your servants and went your merry way until the sun went spotty. And then your genetic engineers found a new use for the ramas, I presume.”

  “Don’t equate our technology with your own, Bryan. At this late stage of our racial life we are very poor engineers, genetic, or otherwise. All we were able to do was utilize the rama females as planting beds for our fertilized ova. It increased our reproductive rate only slightly and was a lame expedient at best. You can see how the arrival of human time-travelers, genetically compatible and virtually immune to the effects of the radiation, would seem providential to us.”

  “Oh, very. Still, you have to admit that the advantages are mostly one-sided.”

  “Are you so certain of that? Recall what kind of misfit human beings make the decision to come to Exile. We Tanu have a great deal to offer them. Better things than they ever dreamed possible, if they possess latent metafunctions. And we really ask so little in return.”

  Something came jabbing Elizabeth.

  Stop that.

  Jabjabjab.

  Go away.

  Jab. Jabjab. Come out help I’ve screwed it.

  Stop small pecking childmind Aiken.

  JAB!

  Vexing insect swat you Aiken! Bother someone else.

  JabscratchPOUND. Dammit Elizabeth she’s going to bollix up STEIN.

  Slowly, Elizabeth turned in her saddle and stared at the rider next to her. Aiken’s mind nattered on as she brought into focus a woman-form in dark flowing robes. Sukey. A tense face with plump cheeks and a button nose. Indigo eyes set too closely together for beauty, glazed with panic.

  Elizabeth went into her without invitation and grasped the situation in an instant, leaving Aiken and the late-arriving Creyn to watch from outside in helpless impotence. Sukey was in the grip of Stein’s enraged mind, her sanity almost overwhelmed by the mental power of the wounded man. It was plain what had happened. Sukey was a potentially strong latent redactor and her new silver torc had made the metafunction operant. Egged on by Aiken, she had tested her ability by snooping into Stein, intrigued by the apparent helplessness of the sleeping giant. The young woman had slipped in beneath the low-level neural bath generated by the gray torc, which Creyn had set up to soothe the berserker and block out residual pain from his healing injuries. Under this lid, Sukey had seen the pitiful state of Stein’s subconscious mind, the old psychic ulcerations, the newly torn rents in his self-esteem, all gurging about in a maelstrom of suppressed violence.

  The tempter had whispered to Sukey, and her innate compassion had responded. She had begun a hopelessly incompetent redact operation on Stein, confident that she could help him; but the brute resident in the pain-filled Viking soul had reared up and attacked her for her meddling. Now both Sukey and Stein were caught in a fearsome conflict of psychoenergies. If the antagonism were not promptly resolved, the outcome could be total personality disjunction for Stein and imbecility for the woman.

  Elizabeth sent one blazing thought to Creyn. She dove in and folded the great wings of her own redactability about the frenzied pair. The young woman mind was flung unceremoniously out, to be fielded by Creyn, who let Sukey down easily and then watched with a respect tinged by some other emotion as the mischief was undone.

  Elizabeth wove restraints, stopped the psychic whirlpool, calmed the heaving pit of fury. She plucked away the jerry-built mind-alteration structure confected by Sukey, with its naive and impudent drainage channels that were too puny for true catharsis. She bore Stein’s damaged ego up with loving force while melting the edges of the wounds and pressing the torn parts back so that healing could begin. Even the older psychic abcesses swelled and burst and vented some of their poison through her. Humiliation and rejection diminished. The father-monster shrank toward pathetic humanity and the mother-lover lost some of her vesture of fantasy. Stein-Awakened looked into Elizabeth’s mirror of healing and cried out. He rested.

  Elizabeth emerged.

  The party of riders had come to a halt, crowding closely around Elizabeth and her mount. She shivered in the sultry evening air. Creyn took his own soft scarlet-and-white cloak and draped it about her shoulders.

  “It was magnificent, Elizabeth. None of us, not even Lord Dionket, our greatest, could have done better. They are both safe.”

  “It still isn’t complete,” she forced herself to say. “I can’t finalize him. His will is very strong and he resists. This took, all I have now.”

  Creyn touched the circle of gold about his neck. “I can deepen the neural envelope generated by his gray torc. Tonight, when we reach Roniah, we will be able to do more for him. He will recover in a few days.”

  Stein, who had not once moved during the metapsychic imbroglio, uttered a vast sigh. The two soldiers dismounted and came to adjust his saddle cantle so that it became a high supporting backrest.

  “There’s no danger of his falling now,” Creyn said. “We’ll make him more comfortable later. Now we had better ride on.”

  Bryan demanded, “Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?” Lacking a torc, he had missed a great deal of the byplay, which had been telepathic.

  A stocky man with tow-colored hair and a vaguely Oriental cast to his features pointed a finger at Aiken Drum. “Ask that one. He started it.”

  Aiken grinned and twiddled his silver torc. Several white moths appeared suddenly out of the darkness and began orbiting Sukey’s head in a crazy halo. “Just a little do-goodery gone baddery!”

  “Stop that,” Creyn commanded. The moths flew away. The tall Tanu addressed Aiken in a tone of veiled menace. “Sukey was the agent, but it is obvious that you were the instigator. You amused yourself by placing your friend and this inexperienced woman in mortal danger.”

  Aiken’s golliwog face was unrepentant “Ah. She seemed strong enough. Nobody forced her to mess with him.”

  Sukey spoke up. Her voice had a ring of stubborn self-righteousness. “I was only trying to help. He was in desperate need! None of the rest of you seemed to care!”

  Creyn said with asperity, “This was not the time or the place to undertake a difficult redaction. Stein would have been treated in good time.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Bryan. “She tried to alter his mind?”

  “She tried to heal him,” Elizabeth said. “I suppose Aiken urged her to try out her new metabilities, just as he’s been testing his own. But she couldn’t handle it.”

  “Stop talking about me as though I were a child!” Sukey exclaimed. “So I bit off more than I could chew. But I meant well!”

  There was a harsh laugh from the towhead, whose silver torc was nearly concealed by a plaid flannel shirt. He wore heavy twill trousers and woodsman’s boots with lug soles. “You meant well! Some day that’ll be humanity’s epitaph! Even that damned Madame Guderian meant well when she let people pass into this hell-world.”

  Creyn said, “It will be hell for you only if you make it so, Raimo. Now we must ride on. Elizabeth, if you feel able, would you help Sukey to understand something of her new power? At least advise her of the limitations she must accept for now.”

  “I suppose I had better.”

  Aiken rode close to scowling Sukey and patted her shoulder in a brotherly fashion. “There now, sweets. The past mistress of mind-bendery will give you a flash course, and then you can work on me! Iguarantee not to gobble you alive. We’ll have lots of fun while you straighten out the kinks in my poor little evil soul!”

  Elizabeth’s mind reached out and gave Aiken a tweak that made him squawk out loud. “Enough of you, my lad. Go practice working your will on bats or hedgehogs or something.”

  “I’ll give you bats,” Aiken promised darkly. He urged his mount forward along the wide track, and the cavalcade began to move once more.

  Elizabeth opened to Sukey, gentling the woman’s fear and discomfiture. I would like to help you. Littl
e mindsister. Be at ease. Yes? (Bloody-minded stubborn chagrin breaking down slowly.) Oh why not. I did make a terrible hash of it.

  All over now. Relax Let me know you…

  Sue-Gwen Davies, aged twenty-seven, born and raised on the last of the Old World orbital colonies. A former juvenile officer full of sturdy empathy and maternal concern for her wretched young clients. The adolescents of the satellite had mounted an insurrection, rebelling against the unnatural life chosen for them by technocratic idealist grandparents, and the Milieu had belatedly ruled that the colony must be disbanded. Sukey Davies had rejoiced even as her job became redundant. She had no loyalty to the satellite, no philosophical commitment to the experiment that had become obsolete at the very moment that the Great Intervention commenced. All of Sukey’s working hours had been spent trying to cope with children who stubbornly resisted the conditioning necessary for life in an orbiting beehive.

  When the satellite colony was terminated, Sukey came down to Earth, that world seen below for so many aching years. Paradise and peace existed down there. She was sure of it! Earth was Eden. But the real promised land was not to be found on Earth’s manicured, busy continents.

  It was inside the planet.

  Elizabeth came up short. Sukey’s mind was moderately intelligent, strong-willed, kindly, latent in high redactability and moderate farsense. But Sukey Davies was also firmly convinced that the planet Earth was hollow! Old-fashioned microfiche books smuggled onto the satellite by bored eccentrics and cultists had introduced her to the ideas of Bender and Giannini and Palmer and Bernard and Souza. Sukey had been enthralled by the notion of a hollow Earth lit by a small central sun, a land of tranquillity and invincible goodness, peopled by dwarfish gentlefolk possessing all wisdom and delight. Had not the ancients told tales of subterranean Asar, Avalon, the Elysian Fields, Ratmansu, and Ultima Thule? Even Buddhist Agharta was supposed to be connected by tunnels to the lamaseries of Tibet. These dreams seemed not at all outré to Sukey, the in habitant of the inside surface of a twenty-kilometer-long spinning cylinder in space. It was logical that Earth be hollow, too. So Sukey came down to the Old World, where people smiled as she explained what she was looking for. Quite a few helped relieve her of her severance pay as she pursued her quest. There were not, she discovered from expensive personal inspection, mirage-shielded polar apertures leading to the planetary interior, as claimed by some of the old writers; nor was she able to gain entrance to the underworld via the purported caves in Xizang. Finally she had gone to Brazil, where one author said there was a tunnel to Agharta located in the remote Serra do Roncador. An old Murcego Indian, sensing an additional gratuity, told her that the tunnel had indeed once existed; but unfortunately it had been closed by an earthquake “many thousands” of years in the past.