The Nonborn King

by Julian May

  "Stop it, Grandpa!"

  The old man scowled at her, defiant and half-fearful. "Just a joke. Damn cow, no sense of humor."

  They ate. The dusk was long in coming. Outside, the birds began to sing and Huldah announced she was going to the waterfall to bathe. "And when I come back, I don't want to find you here, Grandpa. Take your things to the cork-oak grove. It'd be nice there. If you try to spy tonight, you'd be sorry."

  Isak watched her go, mouthing impotent curses. He gathered up his sleeping robe and tossed into it fire-making tools, a water bottle, a broken chunk of ash-bread, and his set of three vitredur woodcarving knives. Then he shuffled to the rear of the cave, bundle over his shoulder, and stood over the supine invalid.

  "You're in for it tonight, Lord God. The May madness has our Huldah in thrall!" He laughed until he fed into a fit of coughing, hawked, and spat. The foul gobbet landed only a few centimeters from the God's beautiful face.

  With great effort, he spoke. "Who is Huldah? What ... is she?"

  "Aha! Ha ha ha!" the old man exulted. "Want to know what ground your by-blow's sprouted in, do you? Well, Lord God, her grandmother was one of you! Almost. When I was a new-transported bareneck slavey in the plantations of the Dragon Range on Aven, they sent me to thin the antelope herds. I found a baby exposed there on the mountainside. I didn't know it but it was a changeling. A Firvulag half-blood that some poor human trull of yours had given birth to, the way it happens sometimes. In more civilized parts, I understand the Firvulag babies are turned over to the Little Folks. But on Aven, where no Firvulag live ... Well, I found the mite and took her to my hut. I had a pet antelope with a kid, so there was milk. In the beginning I was just experimenting, you see. The changeling could shift shapes even when it was tiny, and sort of read my mind as well. It knew I was lonesome, and it found I liked its human-looking body best. It grew up fast anxious to please."

  Isak hunkered down beside the motionless figure. The God said, "Huldah?"

  "No, no, not yet. What happened, this changeling was a kind of a pet at first and then a friend and servant and then ... well, the way you Tanu bastards don't give us bareneck men hardly any women, when the changeling was big enough to screw, I screwed it. It liked me. I named it Borghild after a girl I knew back in the Milieu. We were happy out there in the mountains, me doing my stupid herding job and the changeling doing her best to look pretty, just like the other Borghild. Then one day, another guy found out about her and wanted his share. When I beat him up, he told the overseer. But by the time the gray-torc troopers came, me and Borghild were way to hell and gone over the Dragon Range, and we made a skin boat with a little sail and came to Kersic. And then she had a baby, and then she died."

  "Baby Huldah?"

  "Not yet, dammit. I named the baby Karin. She grew up fast, too, and we lived in a Lowlife settlement we found here on the island. Karin was enough of a Firvulag to scare off the other guys in the village. They were afraid of her and afraid of me. We did pretty good in those days. And then Karin had a baby, and this time it was Huldah. One night a Flying Hunt came from Muriah. They used Kersic now and then when the outlaw human population built up. Everybody in the village was slaughtered except me and little Huldah. We got away and found this place. It was a long time ago."

  The God's slow voice said, "And when Huldah grew, you took her."

  Isak started back as if struck, tripping over his bundle and falling to the cave floor. "I didn't! I didn't!" Breathing thickly, he groped in the tangled furs. A sapphire blade gleamed in the meager firelight and approached the God's neck, trembling above the ornate knobbed catch of his golden torc.

  "Alien bastard," the old man hissed. "For years I've dreamed of doing this."

  "Do it," said the God.

  Isak Henning grasped the handle of the knife in both scrawny hands and raised it high. "Hate you, hate you! You wrecked it, our chance for a new world! Now you're finished, too! We're all—" The aged body shook uncontrollably, arched in sudden spasm. Isak dropped the glass knife, covered his face with his hands, and began to sob.

  Huldah came—tall, shining clean, naked, and wreathed with wild orange blossoms. "Silly Grandpa. I told you to go." She smiled at her God. "Grandpa tried to hurt me only once, when I was a little girl. I taught him better. Show the God, Grandpa."

  The old man, still weeping, pulled aside his loincloth to show what an unwilling girl with Firvulag genes could do to one who tried to force her.

  "Now go away. Leave us alone, Grandpa."

  The old man crept off and Huldah went briefly to the back of the cave, then returned to begin dressing her God. She handled him as easily as a doll. Lost in horror, he paid little attention.

  Firvulag! She was Firvulag. He who had aspired so high had violated the greatest taboo between the two races. Firvulag! It explained her great stature and strength, her coarse vitality. And once, that mutilated wreck of a father-grandfather had been a brawny human male.

  "Tonight will be the best full moon of all, since you're finally awake," she said. And after a little while, "You'd kid him for me, won't you? As soon as you're able?"

  He could not reply. He realized now what garments she had put upon him—gambeson and trews of membranous bubbles caught in a mesh web, the padding for his glass armor. And now the pieces themselves being strapped on, encasing legs and arms (except for the missing right gauntlet), thighs and shoulders. She held up the breastplate with its sun-face blazon ad embossed in gold and rose-colored stones, then eased it on. Last came the helmet, with its fierce glittering spikes and heraldic crest of a crouching, unearthly sun-bird. She left the visor open, and tucked wads of fur here and there beneath his head so that the awkward weight would not turn him awry.

  He was in an agony of discomfort in spite of the padding. The harness pressed into his supersensitive body like some fitted bed of nails. Humiliation, guilt, and hatred for her rose in him like a surge of magma.

  The armor began to glow.

  "Oh, wonderful!" she cried. "My wonderful God! God of Light and Beauty and Joy!"

  She knelt, drawing aside the skirt of tassets, and began the act of worship. Her body was a soft mass of peach-colored luminosity and ebony shadows, and in spite of himself, he was coming alive to her.

  "No!" For the first time, he heard his voice echo in the cavern's vault. He strained to lift his arms, to thrust away that adoring face. His muscles were lead. The radiance grew.

  "God of the Sun!" she sang. "O my own God!" She mounted him, easily straddling the armor, a huge compelling softness devouring him. He was lost, and she was crying out in the sweet avalanche of blinding light, quenching the sun, blotting him out.

  She fed away, senseless, and he hung in a scarlet void. I am dead, he thought, and damned.

  He opened his eyes. The blood-colored glow dazzled him. It was coming from his own body. The glass armor flamed with it. An infinitude of tiny pain-impulses assaulted his skin and became a tingling that pulsed in rhythm to his thudding heart.

  His left hand was on his breast. He raised it. And then the right, with even the wood suffused with brilliance and the crudely carved fingers flexing. He rolled away from the body of the woman, braced himself against the cave wad, and rose. The storm-sunrise light of him poured into every cranny of the cave. He saw a slight movement near the dark entrance and strode up to it.

  It was the old man, cowering behind a rock. He had come back to spy after all.

  Nodonn plucked Isak Henning up by the scruff and held him dangling. The laughter of triumphant Apollo was like the hurricane's roar. And then the gaunt shape was flung toward the rear of the cavern and crashed to the rock floor beside Huldah. The old bones snapped and there were piteous screams. The woman stirred, lifted her head, looked with stupid astonishment at the broken huddle—and then at him. She raised an arm to shield her eyes from his aura.

  Nodonn came back to the two of them, his armor chiming with every step. He picked up Isak in his gauntleted left hand and poised the g
laring wooden one, like a flaming claw, before the contorted old face.

  "Now you will die," said the Battlemaster. "Both of you."

  The old man began to laugh.

  The claw affixed itself to the dome of his bald skull and began to twist. The laughter ascended to a shriek. "Kill her! Kill her! But before you do, look inside! Look ..."

  The high-pitched croak merged with other sounds. Nodonn wrung the head from its body and tossed both aside. Wide-eyed, Huldah watched. There was no fear in her.

  Look inside?

  She sprawled in gory dust, a few smashed orange blossoms tangled in her hair. Nodonn exerted his deep farsense. Hidden within that capacious Firvulag abdomen was a twelve-week fetus, half the length of his little finger. Perfect and strong. A male.

  "A son," he breathed. "At last."

  But how? How, beneath this pitiless star's sublethal radiation that had mocked him for eight hundred years? He was the almighty Battlemaster, and yet he had begotten only poor weak things, of which only a few languid daughters still survived.

  He looked up at the shielding rock. He looked down to the placid woman with her forbidden genes. His race had resisted this mating to the brink of the Nightfall War in the remote Duat Galaxy. But Gomnol, promoting his eugenic schemes, had also urged miscegenation ... as a short-cut to operancy.

  Could it be?

  His redactive faculty reached gingerly into the tiny brain. But the fetus was too unformed, and he too clumsy. He would have to wait.

  "You will stay here," he told the woman, "and when my son is born, rear him with the utmost care until I come for him."

  "You will go away now?" Huldah whispered, stricken.

  "Yes."

  Tears sprang from her eyes. She slumped, shivering. Nodonn picked up the rumpled fur coverlet and laid it over her shoulders. She touched the hard, smooth glass of his gauntlet.

  "In the back of the cave," she said dully. "Your weapon."

  His cry was jubdant. It was the Sword and its pack! Inoperable, he discovered by flicking a stud; but he would find a way to repair it He fastened its harness. "And now farewell," he said to the woman. "The child's name will be Thagdal. Remember that."

  "Dagdal," she said, weeping. "Little Dag. O God."

  ***

  He emerged from the cave and exerted his farsight It was ominously dim, but he discerned a high promontory on the western shore that would suit his purpose, and he set out briskly. Before he had gone more than a kilometer or two he slowed, then found himself staggering. His convalescent mind and body were weakening rapidly from the tremendous earlier effort. It was to be expected. He would have to be prudent.

  His creativity, which in former days had called down lightning and moved mountains, now barely sufficed to cut a stout wooden staff for him to lean upon. The mighty PK faculty that once levitated fifty knights and their battle-chargers strained to augment his faltering leg muscles as he climbed the cliff.

  The sun cleared the ridge behind him and seemed to smite him between the shoulder blades. Out of breath, feverish, he thrust the staff into the earth of the steep trail again and again and hauled himself along. Dust from his shuffling feet hung about him in the Still air. The shrubs were pungent with resin. Insects buzzed and the plates of his armor rang discordantly with the clumsy motions of the staff.

  Where am I going? ... Why am I here? ... Yes. To call. To send a telepathic message, telling the others that I live. Climb high, above the thought-obstructing rock. Otherwise the diminished farspeech would have no range...

  He gained the height at last still in the midst of a dense thicket of maquis and twisted juniper. It was easier to walk now, though, and there was a slight breeze. Cad to them ... the survivors of the Host his blood brothers and sisters. Cad and wait for rescue.

  He came to the promontory's tip, to the open spot where the umbrella pines grew and ashes and charcoal from Huldah's last bonfire (the one celebrating his awakening) lay strewn on a burnt circle of sod. And there he had his first view of the New Sea that had drowned his world—vast and blue, not milk-white, as the shallow lagoon had been—extending to a misty termination on the far horizon and north and south to the limit of his mind's feeble eye.

  Nodonn clutched the staff with both the gauntleted hand and the wooden one as he began to fall. On his knees, still transfixed by the scene, he groaned aloud. The memory came back: the gigantic wave overwhelming them, the cries of the drowning ones. And echoing over chaos, laughter as harsh as a raven's croak ...

  He rested under one of the scraggly pines and managed to remove his armor. Almost miraculously, he found tiny strawberries on plants creeping among the rocks and gathered enough to assuage both thirst and hunger. Then he crept to the brink of the headland and summoned his farsight again.

  North: Formerly, Kersic had had salt flats stretching from its northernmost rocks to the continental scarp east of Var-Mesk, a small city whose proximity to soda-ash beds made it a center of glass production. Now all the flats were inundated and Kersic was a true island.

  South: More salt water, all the way to Africa. In that direction had been one of the deepest parts of the old lagoon.

  East: The interior of Kersic, rugged and forested.

  West: Aven ...

  Oh, Goddess, yes. There it lay, dimly perceived. The peninsula shrunken, salt water creeping far up the valleys, and Muriah broken and silent and overgrown with jungle, while waves lapped at the cracked steps of the Thagdal's palace. The plantations deserted, the antelopes unharvested, the chalikos and hellads reverted to the wild, and a timorous remnant of domesticated ramas scuttling about the ruins, waiting in vain for their overlords' commands to reanimate their cold little tores.

  What was left? Who was left? What should he do?

  The questions floated in his brain as crazily as the specks of goldleaf in a stirred goblet of starwater liqueur. A roaring of blood filled his ears and pulsating colored masses swam across his blurred vision.

  Call for help.

  No!

  Why did the precognitive flare of warning admonish him? Why did every instinct shriek that he should take care, make no overt sign until he had recovered more fully—until he learned what had taken place during the six lost months he lay unconscious in the Kersican cave?

  What was there to hide from? Who?

  He slipped into unconsciousness. When his eyes opened again he knew that he must not call to his brothers and sisters, nor to the faint telepathic focuses that marked the mainland cities. There was only one person he dared reveal himself to, one who could be trusted to tell him the truth about the postdiluvian Many-Colored Land. Weak as he was, he could still direct his thought on the intimate mode and eventually reach her. She would have known that he lived. She would still listen for his cad, even though logic insisted he was dead.

  If anyone could come to him, she would.

  Summoning his remaining strength, he fashioned a small bright needle of thought, a farspoken call that arrowed over the New Sea and spanned Europe, to be perceived by one mind alone:

  Mercy.

  2

  THE STAR was K1-226 in his catalog, but as soon as he focused on that oddball three-planet system he knew it had to be Elirion. And second from the sun, six million years younger and in the midst of one of its miniature Ice Ages, was Poltroy. The inhabitants, who would in the Milieu be admired for their urbanity and diplomatic equipoise, were roughly at the pithecanthropine level of mental development. Pudgy little cannibals swathed to their ruby eyes in fish-fur romped over glaciers with nothing on their precoadunate minds but the ambush of their neighbors and the subsequent breaking of their skulls for a eucharistic brain-feast.

  Elirion was the last star in Marc Remillard's search-sequence and clearly useless for his purposes; nevertheless he lingered more than two hours past the allotted scrutiny time, fascinated by the primitive Poltroyans. He told himself that it was intellectual curiosity about this familiar world and its oneday-to-be-famous people. His supe
rego sneered and suggested that he would use any excuse to delay homecoming and the nasty surprise that very likely awaited him.

  The paleolithic Poltroyans hipped and hopped and bipped and bopped, and genuflected politely to their dead victims before starting the ritual trepanning operations. The bloodthirsty chieftain of one little clan was a doppelgänger for Ominen-Ldmpirotiii, Fourth Interlocutor of the Concilium ...

  Marc withdrew his farsight at last. He told the search-director: EXPLICIT . Immediately he was back in his own body, enclosed in the opaque armor that sustained his life during the period of hundredfold cortical overload. He could see someone waiting in the observatory anteroom and for one hopeful instant his heart lifted and he thought the premonition false. But it was not Hagen out there. Patricia Castellane had come, fully mind-blocked, and the intimation of disaster was confirmed.

  DISENGAGE AUXILIARY CEREBROENERGETICS. His brain began to cool. There was a nauseating implosion of pseudosensation somewhere behind his eyeballs.

  REESTABLISH NORMAL METABOLIC FUNCTION . An interval of suspensory coolness, quiet marble solidity after cometary flight.

  SEVER DRIVE LINKAGE, ACTIVATE CARRIAGE DESCENT. KILL SIGMA-FIELD. CLOSE DOME. KILL EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL DEFENSIVE X-LASER ARRAYS. REPORT BODY FUNCTION.

  "Normal parameters all operator body functions," the scanner reassured him. At this point Hagen should have taken over, supervising removal of the brain-probes and freeing his father from the armor after double-checking his vital signs.

  No help came. There would never be any now.

  Aloud and telepathically, he gave his own divestment commands:

  WITHDRAW CEREBRAL ELECTRODES, WITHDRAW CEREBELLUM AND STEM CONTACTS. REMOVE GODDAM FUCKING HELMET.

  Imperturbable, the computer transmitted his orders. Helmet dogs clicked open, clamps latched on, the heavy cerametal casque rotated a quarter turn, and the hoist's vibration reached him through the attached cables. There was warm humid air, indirect light and the familiar digital chronograph reminding him that this was Pliocene Earth: