by Julian May
The black man took the bag to the table, slid open the drawstrings, and whistled. "Three Huskies! Holy shit, man—how'd they get through the time-gate?"
"Smuggled, I should say. Together with a considerable quantity of other armament. Do you know that Aiken Drum has equipped his human elite guard with twenty-second-century weapons?"
"Yes." Denny's eyes narrowed. "You steal these pieces off him?"
"No, they were a gift from Lord Sugoll ... who got them from Sharn."
"Oh, my God."
"Exactly." Basil set out three mugs, horn spoons, and honey.
Burke pushed through the curtain. "Kalipin's settled." His eyes took in the half-opened bag of stun-guns. "Inspecting our presents, I see. Basil will take two on the Ship's Grave trek, and we'll keep one here. It'll be some help. But we're in for a rough summer, Dennis."
"The Firvulag are attacking the Iron Villages openly?" Basil asked.
Denny's ebony forehead wrinkled and he shook his head quizzically. "Not quite. There's never been any declaration of war, and that pegleg ambassador from High Vrazel still comes around regularly, all buddy-buddy and 'Long live the Armistice.' We bitch about the raids, but Sharn and Ayfa keep brazening it out blaming the attacks on Howlers and telling us to refer all complaints to Nionel."
"If we get a couple of those exotic aircraft aloft, the Firvulag will sing another tune," Burke said. "And so will that little gold mamzer in Goriah."
"When we first heard the rumors about modern weapons," Denny said, "we offered to trade Aiken Drum pig iron for some."
"Response?" inquired Burke.
"None worth diddly-squat. He'd try to take over our mines himself if they weren't so close to High Vrazel. As it is, he hopes the Firvulag will wipe us out before we can infect too much of Pliocene humanity with the freedom virus. Oh—he sends good-will envoys to us, pledging peace and co-prosperity and liberty and justice for ad. But what he's ready interested in is luring away our metallurgical technicians. There are beds of iron ore in Brittany that shrimpy little motherfucker's itching to exploit"
"Just how bad have the Firvulag attacks on our mines been?" Basil asked.
"We may have to abandon Iron Maiden and Haut-Fourneauville. Damn—I'd give my right eye and my left nut for a few dozen Matsu laser carbines with nightsights."
"I'm thinking over the matter," said Burke enigmatically. "Once we get Basil and his Bastards fairly launched, I'd try to work something out."
"We march the day after tomorrow," Basil said.
"Hey, no, you just got here!" Denny protested. "You gotta rest up. And we haven't even started to get to know your people. I mean—that big mama named Sophronisba Gillis is one bad lady."
"If you plan to—er—make a move on her," said Basil diffidently, "I'd counsel caution. She used to be third engineer on a tramp freighter out in the Fourth Sector. When we were herding that crowd of sex-starved delinquents to Nionel, Phronsie was the one woman in our group who never feared for her own safety."
"I'll wear her down," said Denny confidently. But then he scowled. "Sure you can't stay longer?"
Basil shook his head. "Sorry to cramp your style, old chap. But we leave on schedule—the delectable Sophronisba and all."
"Other people will be getting ideas about grabbing those aircraft," said Burke.
"Right now, Aiken has his hands full with other matters." Basil touched the golden tore at his throat "Elizabeth has assured us that he doesn't yet know about our expedition. But the purpose of Basil's Bastards must now be quite obvious to ad who shared in the welcoming celebration today ..." He traded away tactfully.
Denny shrugged, resigned. "And the word's bound to leak to the Iron Villages, and all we need is one defecting turkey with a big mouth skipping out to Goriah and the shit flies."
"Scouts from High Vrazel are also sure to spot us once we cross the Rhine," Basil added.
"You think Sharn will tell Aiken?" Denny was unbelieving.
"He might," said Burke, "if he weighs threats to his own security and we come out heaviest."
The coffee pot finished perking and Basil poured. They drank in silence for a few minutes.
"I've wondered why the Little People didn't go after the aircraft themselves," Denny said. "God knows they've been innovating like mad in other directions these past months. Sharn and Ayfa seem to've thrown the old traditions right out the window."
"Not all of them," Basil corrected. "The Grave site is still sacred to both Firvulag and Tanu. One of their strongest taboos has to do with concealing the final resting place of the dead. They try to wipe out even the memory of it"
"However," Burke said, "once the aircraft are transferred to another locale, we can expect quite a different attitude to prevail. Which is why hiding those salvaged ships is so critically important"
"Well, I found a place for two of them, just like you wanted," Denny said. "A place called the Vale of Hyenas, where the Firvulag never go. If you saw the bone crackers that hang out in there, you'd understand why. There are lots of giant redwoods and other trees in the valley, good cover in case of Flying Hunts. The place is about two hundred kloms northwest of here, near the headwaters of the Proto-Seine. Handy to Nionel."
"Sounds good," said Burke.
"Maxl knows the spot" Denny added. "If you go ahead and take him with you and leave the Bastard with the broken hand here, you'll have no trouble at all finding it" He gave a wry smile. "Getting out of the valley alive after you stash the birds—now that might be a problem!"
Basil sipped his coffee with equanimity. "We'll muddle through."
The big fighter persisted. "And what do you plan to do with the rest of the aircraft there at the Grave? You can't leave 'em for Aiken to find, and it'd be criminal to trash 'em."
Burke said, "We can't tell you, Denny. Nothing personal. Not even Basil's Bastards will know until the expedition reaches the crater lake."
"Hey, okay. No big thing. Only I noticed that there are twelve pilots in your gang—"
"Fourteen," Basil amended. "Dr. Thongsa is also qualified in orbiters, and Mr. Betsy has flight experience in addition to his engineering abilities."
"That drag queen wacko?" Denny snorted, smacking one palm on the table. "Lord, I figured he must have something going or you wouldn't've taken him on. But—Mr. Betsy!"
"His chosen persona is Queen Elizabeth I," said Basil primly, "hence the pearl-studded red wig and—er—costume. In the Milieu, his name was Merton Hudspeth. He was a senior research engineer with Boeing Aerospace Company's Commercial Rhocraft Division."
"No shit?" Denny was chastened.
"Betsy takes some getting used to," Burke admitted. "But don't we ad?" He stood up, yawned hugely, then eyed the husky fighter with sly humor. "There's old Basil, who'd rather be miserable climbing mountains than teach literature in a nice Limey university. And Mr. Justice Burke with the feathers in his hair and the breechclouted tushie, sort of a Geronimo manqué. To say nothing of you, my fine Covent Garden baritone! Tell me, nigger—do you still sing 'Toreador' at the top of your lungs while you chop exotic raiders to dogmeat?"
"You better believe it, redskin! Say—remind me to cad for freeleader elections tomorrow. I'm gonna nominate you to the hotseat again personally."
"Thanks ad to hell, yellow-eyes."
"You're friggin' welcome, baldy-balls."
The rough-hewn face of the Native American went sober again. "God knows, I'd like to roost here and play elder statesman. But there's another possibility. After I think about it for a while, I'm going to discuss it with Elizabeth. See what she thinks." He set his cup down, lifted the bag with the stun-guns, and pulled the drawstring tight "Iron spears and arrows looked like the ultimate weapon for a few weeks after the Finiah war. God knows they've helped us, and they'll continue to be useful against the exotics. But we'll look pretty silly shooting arrows out of gravomagnetic aircraft, my friends. And Aiken Drum's elite guard is no more poisoned by the blood-metal than thee or me."
"
You figure on getting us some real weapons," Denny stated. "How? Raid Share's armory?"
"We'd never get within ten kloms of High Vrazel alive. No. There's another possibility. Share got his cache from a secret hoard when the Firvulag devastated Burask. Aiken Drum is supposed to have got his guns from a magazine in the dungeons of Goriah. So there were at least two city-lords who defied King Thagdal's edict against retaining Milieu weapons. And I think there may have been others as well."
"Finiah had zip," Denny reminded him. "But hey—how about Roniah? That's the town I busted out of, man. Old Lord Bormol was a real scientific type. A coercer. You know how paranoid that clan is about defending their turf. He could have had a secret stash! And the place is within striking distance of Hidden Springs. Hell, we could drift down the river, infiltrate from the docks—no wall to climb there—"
Burke said, "There may not be any weapons. And every Lowlife fighter could be needed here in the Vosges, defending the mines. The pros and cons will have to be weighed with exquisite care. Thank God the final decision will be Elizabeth's, not mine."
Denny was indignant, incredulous. "You'd let that—that female mystic dictate our strategy?"
"Oh, yes," said Basil easily. "She has all along, you know. She's the most important person in the world."
"Poor thing," added Peopeo Moxmox Burke.
7
ONCE AGAIN, Elizabeth prepared to descend.
The entrance to the abyss was miserly, constricted, yet perversely eager to open and spew a final cataract of destruction as the ego threatened to rupture and its aggression sought ultimate discharge in death.
Dionket and Creyn, linked in the penstock configuration, braced themselves against the fiendish pressure, steadfast and agonized. They shared the guilt as well as the hope, for they knew that the heritage of malignant violence incarnate in this soon cresting flood had sourced in their own racial Mind.
The peril to the healers was now extreme. Felice's fund of submission was nearly exhausted. The closer Elizabeth had approached to the core of dysfunction, the greater the patient's fear had become. Felice's human cathexis, weak at best, was tottering at the imminent prospect of irremediable change. Rather than face that, she toyed with implosive or explosive termination.
Each time that Elizabeth had passed between Dionket and Creyn and entered that pit of aureate, whirling foulness, the two exotic redactors found it impossible to believe that she could return. If even the superficial layers of the girl's madness put such mortal strain upon their own metareinforced minds, what horror must he in the incandescent depths waiting for the Grand Master—especially now, with the consummation so close?
"Felice is almost at the fifth stage of dysfunction," Dionket had warned. "She hovers on the brink. If you fad in catharsis, the disruptive blast of psychoenergy may be directed outward, in conformity with her fantasy of planetary ruin, and engulf ad of Black Crag in a solaristic firebad. On the other hand, if you tipped her over, ad of the aggression and violence would be directed inward, toward her own annihilation. This would be a fadure on your part—but one that equated with objective success. The monster would be gone."
"I cannot deliberately harm a rational being," Elizabeth had reminded him. But more than the old stricture, there was pride. "And I believe more than ever that I can save her. I'm almost on top of the fountainhead! I think I've finally tracked down the neuronal source of the dereistic behavior pattern."
She had shown them the correlation between the limbic system circuits and certain anomalies afflicting the secondary levels of Felice's rhinencephalon; but the two exotics had been unable to grasp her point because of their lack of training in developmental psychobiology. The Tanu redactive technique had degenerated into more art than science by the time of the race's exile.
"Let her die, Elizabeth," Creyn had pleaded. "If you persist, and if she doesn't disrupt totally, she may consume you. You would be trapped in an obscene psychocreative splicing, forever participant in her pain-projections, an accomplice to her enormities."
"But if Felice were sane—" And Elizabeth revealed the potential apotheosis, the marvelous things that the pale little goddess might accomplish under a Grand Master's tutelage. "There would be no more wars in the Many-Colored Land. No more threat from the exiled rebels in North America. With Felice as the coercive catalyst, her irresistible soul-weight on the right side of the scales, we could instigate a kind of miniature Unity amongst Tanu and Firvulag and torced and operant humanity!"
Dionket and Creyn had looked at Elizabeth with sorrow and dread, rejecting the vision. "It has become more and more clear as your redaction of Felice proceeded: She yearns for death."
"She'd choose life if she were sane! And nonaggression."
Dionket Lord Healer smiled—not with cynicism but with ancient wisdom. "Then you metapsychics of the Galactic Milieu abolished sin?"
"Of course not," the Grand Master retorted angrily, and then was silent behind walls.
The two continued to remonstrate, mutely. At length she said, "I've never undertaken any work as terrible as this. The lifting of Brede to operancy and adept status was nothing compared to it. And we're so close to success! I can't abandon Felice now, in spite of the danger. I can't let her die. A mind like hers is so inconceivably valuable! She must possess coercive and creative faculties approaching the six-hundredth order of magnitude, and the PK function is not too far below that. There was no single entity in the Galactic Milieu with such power."
"She can never attain the state you call coadunation," Dionket said. "She is a monstrosity, hopelessly warped. Her parents—" He shook his head. "We have no experience with a case like Felice's. Tana knows that our race is faulty, but no parents among us would ever use a child as this poor girl was used. And out of sheer ennui, devoid even of malice!"
"Felice is no monster," Elizabeth said. "Not any more. I've uncovered the residue of humanity, given it air. Each time I go into her for the draining and the redirection, she shows more soul."
"Then why," Dionket asked, "is she still so afraid? Why is she weakening in her resolution to permit the final catharsis?"
"Because of the danger, of course. She walks the brink, just as you said, and she continues to suffer."
"She's bound to turn on you," the Lord Healer said, "and if she strikes out with her full power, you will be lost."
"She's worth the risk, I tell you!"
Creyn said somberly, "It is you, Elizabeth, who have been designated by the Shipspouse. Not Felice."
"The Shipspouse had no right to play God."
"Do you?" Creyn asked.
"Why do you keep pressing me?" she cried. "You agreed to help. You knew the magnitude of Felice's dysfunction ..."
Dionket's mental overlay was compassionate. "But not, perhaps, certain limitations of the healer."
"I'll make her sane. With or without your help." Adrenalin-fired determination seared the two Tanu.
"We will help you," said Dionket, "even to the point of death."
***
Elizabeth descended into Avernus, and stayed for six hours.
The walls of the room dissolved. The three healers, gathered around the cot where the etiolated girl lay, were buffeted and drenched with fluid agony, dark and clinging and abominable. Lacerated by the shards of Felice's memories, choking upon her stifling rage and infantile helplessness, sharing her humiliation and deafened by her ceaseless screams, they endured.
In spite of the psychoelectronic barrier of the room without doors, some portion of the ravening discharge was not grounded into the rocks of Black Crag but overflowed to escape into the atmosphere. A noisome adiabatic cloud formed above the mountain, and lightnings, scarlet in dust clouds, played around the chalet roof. Hot ion winds crisped the needles of nearby evergreens and withered the alpine wildflowers. Sensitive little warblers fed from their perches, dead. The weaker gold-torccd retainers who served the lodge fled screaming down the precipitous track, and even the strong-minded protectors beca
me frantic with the plangent psychic tension, taking refuge in the farthest corners of the cellar, lying half-conscious on the polished graphitic shale.
Elizabeth said, "Come, Felice."
It fought, erupted, shrank, flared. It ripped at the cradling redactive wings, ever intent now on escape but held fast by its own paradoxical love-fetters. The normal pleasure-paths of the brain, so long atrophied, sang in shrill newborn anguish and delight The darker channels, their electric venom beginning to pool and stagnate, still clamored for a fresh influx, a last reprieve into the old familiar pain, the deserved embrace of the death-father (is it you, Beloved?), the foul joy coming after, with death-mother's devouring and the thanks and the stinking kisses.
"Come, Felice."
Come away, let go, cast off. Forget that body and take a new. Forget those casual wicked ones who begot you and played with their poor sentient toy and then tossed you away in heedless cruelty. Be nonborn. Be selfborn! Heal yourself. See yourself as lovable. See the faithful animal friends' irrational devotion. See Sister Amerie's unstained love for you. See mine as I become your life-mother and that of these two life-brothers who also embrace you. (But Amerie refused ...)
"Come, Felice."
See, admire, love the shining new self. You are beautiful, child, and your body is strong. And now your mind ... oh, child, look upon its glory! Yes, born of the agony and the filth it is, as the physical form; but like it capable of transfiguration. (He did it! The Beloved. I have him to thank for freeing my latencies, for cutting their bonds with his double-edged bright lancet. Culluket!)
"Not him, Felice."
Culluket!
Don't turn that way now. Not when you're so close, little one, so clean and strong, so nearly good ...
Amerie?
Look the other way. Look up toward light and reality, toward peace, toward union with other minds who can truly love you.
Culluket? Amerie?
See the errant energies calmed, the wordless baying stilled, emotions reined, will strong and directed. Now: Choose unselfish love! Choose to be good and noble and giving ...