At the start of the voyage, when the ketch had wallowed in a smart chop in the Gulf Stream, Owen had been deathly seasick. He rallied once they entered the region of calms, but still preferred to spend most of his time below, playing portentous selections by Mahler and Stravinsky on his implanted microinductor. He was cool to the four youngsters and they in turn maintained a diplomatic aloofness from him. It was impossible for them to believe that this frail aesthete had once directed a rebel armada in a near-successful strike against the Galactic Milieu. Marc was only too aware of the undercurrents circulating among the young people. In spite of their pledge to follow Owen's leadership, they would insist that Marc's deputy prove himself once they reached Spain. If Owen moved too cautiously, there was a strong probability that the others would dispose of him, knowing they were temporarily out of Marc's reach. And then some disastrous error would doubtless be perpetrated, and Felice would blast the entire foolhardy crew to ions...
Marc withdrew his farsight and came to himself. Brows knit in a furious scowl, he gulped down the remnants of his drink and flung the glass into the dark garden. Patricia's light had gone out.
Damn them all! Damn Owen Blanchard for surrendering to old age. Damn the younger generation for their half-baked impatience. Damn cloud for not trusting. Damn Hagen for being weak.
Damn the universe and all its empty stars.
"Hagen!" he roared. Hagen!
I'm inside. With Diane.
Get rid of her! We're going to the observatory!
***
At the time of the Galactic Milieu, only five solar systems (not counting that of Earth) had managed to engender intelligent beings who survived the perils of high technology and passed into metapsychic coadunation, that state of mental Unity that admits of the peaceful, noncompetitive colonization of compatible planets.
Marc Remillard's computer in the observatory on Ocala told him that there was an infinitesimal probability that a single coadunate world existed in the Pliocene Milky Way Galaxy. He had mapped exactly 634,468,321 main-sequence stars of spectral types F2 to K1 those adjudged most likely to have worlds harboring sentient life. Over the past 25 years of exile, he had mentally probed 36,443 of them in search of a coadunate race and a new base for the dream that had failed.
In that search and that dream was life for him, and purpose. He should have rested for another two weeks before resuming, but he would not. No action or advice of his would affect the events in Spain. (What outcome his subconscious wished for he did not dare to investigate too closely.) No ... the star-search was his work. He would not let the young distract him from it any longer.
Together, he and Hagen selected the one hundred stellar candidates that would occupy his attention for the next twenty days. They ranged in distance from 4000 to 12,000 light years; but for a metapsychic of Marc's caliber, range was almost a negligible factor, provided that the mind could be focused upon the remote object of scrutiny with the necessary precision, and this maintained for a critical interval. In the absence of an alerted "receiver," direction was accomplished with delicate auxiliary equipment temporarily fused to the operator's brain and supercharging it with energy. Other equipment, heroically life-supportive, enabled the star-searcher to survive the experience.
Hagen helped Marc settle into the body-molding metal-and-ceramic casing, programmed the vitals, adjusted the blood-circulation shunt, and set the timer for the 20-day period. The search would be carried on only at night. During the sunlit hours, the searcher would sleep in oblivion-stasis.
"Ready?" The young man had the massive, completely opaque helmet suspended from its traveling hoist. His face was white and his mind leaked apprehension—but not for his father's sake. Formerly, Marc had prepared for the star-search alone; Hagen's assistance was redundant ... except as training.
"What are you waiting for?" Marc's voice was already tired. "Put it on me."
The thing came down. Fourteen tiny photonic beams drilled Marc's skull and fourteen electrodes slipped into his cerebral cortex, sprouting invasive superconductive filaments. Two more needle probes linked to the refrigeration and pressurization systems pierced his cerebellum and stem. The pain was excruciating and brief.
INITIATE METABOLIC REPROGRAMMING.
Fluid filled the casing. Marc stopped breathing. The liquid circulating in his body was no longer blood; nor, strictly speaking, was he still a human being, but rather a living machine, protected both internally and externally from his own brain's hyperactivity.
ENGAGE AUXILIARY CEREBROENERGETICS.
Each telepathic command came to Hagen via the computer's audible voice, and simultaneously on the VDT screen. His father was gone. The devilish mechanism was in complete control, waiting with cold patience while Hagen reiterated and verified each operation, then proceeded to the next thing on the checkoff list.
ACTIVATE INSERTION.
Hagen's hand on the command mouthpiece was slippery. He said, "Insert operator," and the armored mass rolled to a small platform atop a hydraulic lift.
ACTIVATE ASCENSOR.
"Take him up." The encapsulated body on its recliner carriage rose toward the observatory dome. Automatically, without a sound, a segment of the roof rolled away. The lift slowed and halted. The stars of Pliocene April waited for Marc Remillard just as they would wait in some month to come, for Marc's son.
ACTIVATE DRIVE.
"Close final linkage and drive," Hagen commanded. Coordinates for the first study were fed into the focusing docent. The visual display of the computer went blank, leaving only small blinking SLIs. The searcher had begun his work and there would be no more communication until he "returned." The interior illumination of the observatory was shut off. All of the systems were locked and impregnable, totally shielded, defended by a hidden array of X-lasers (as Hagen and every other inhabitant of Ocala Island knew only too well). No one, no thing could interfere.
Hagen replaced the command mike on its bracket. He stood for a moment, looking up, seeing the slowly revolving carriage at the top of the lift cylinder occult the spangled sky.
"Not me!" he shouted, his voice thick with hatred. "Not me!"
He fled, and the doors locked automatically behind him.
8
WE'RE LOST!" Tony Wayland decided. 'This damn river can't be the Laar. It's flowing north, not northwest."
"I fear you're right, milord." Dougal squinted at the purpling landscape. It was well past sunset. "We'd best make for shore, and after a good night's sleep try the fair adventure of tomorrow. Mayhap the mighty Asian will come to us in dreams, and set our feet aright for far Cair Paravel."
He hauled on the sweep and guided the raft toward the right shore. They grounded on mud in a grove of enormous liriodendron trees whose gnarled branches were hung with swags of moss.
"'Ware crocodiles," Dougal said casually, shouldering their packs of supplies. "We must seek higher ground."
Leaving the raft, they slogged downstream for a few hundred meters and found a steep-sided hummock, which had evidently been a small islet during the late rainy season. It supported a few cinnamon trees and currant bushes and had an area of open grass. "This looks good," Tony said. "At least the critters will have to work climbing up, and there's driftwood for a fire."
For once, setting up camp was relatively painless. After a frugal supper of bulrush tubers and grilled beaver, they slumped contentedly beside the fire.
"Our path of flight has been a rough one, milord." Dougal was combing his ginger beard. Leftover bits of beaver fell onto the golden lion emblem on his knightly surtout and skipped away from the sod-repellant fabric. "Do you repent of having taken French leave from Vulcan's stithy?"
"Don't be an ass, Dougie. We'd find the way to Goriah. We'd try one more day on this river, and if it doesn't start a westerly trend, we'd take off overland. Damn ... I wish I was a better orienteer. I goofed off shamelessly during that phase of our training at the auberge."
"It was a tedious exercise, I trow. At
any rate, our pursuers seem to have packed it in."
"Let's hope so. That great black lout of a Denny Johnson is likely as not to hang us for traitors if he catches up with us." Tony began fiddling with their compass, a magnetized needle that had to be floated on a bit of chaff in a cup of water. "That can't be right," he muttered. "Move your bloody great sheer, will you?"
Amiably, Dougal shifted his mild-steel Bowie knife.
"That's better. You know, I thought we were home free when we reached this river. It was just as that fellow from the Paris Basin told us back at Fort Rusty: the second major watercourse west of the Moselle. But was the first river we crossed ready major? And this one did seem to appear rather sooner than I anticipated." Tony put the compass away and stared dispiritedly into the fire. "I might have known things were going too well."
"The path is smooth that leadeth on to danger," Dougal observed. He was cleaning his nails with the knife. "I follow as your obedient servant, milord—but what will become of us if this Aiken Drum denies sanctuary?"
"He won't. He'd covet a metallurgical engineer even more keenly than the Hidden Springs Lowlife contingent. I'm a prize, Dougie! There's going to be war between Drum and the Firvulag, you know, and iron weapons could make all the difference—"
From the jungle came an unearthly blatting, like a much-magnified and bungled flourish of brasses.
"Hoe-tusker elephants?" Tony suggested, drawing closer to the fire.
Dougal's eyes glittered beneath bushy red brows. "Or the evil presences of this enchanted wood! I sense them all about us ... the cruels and hags and incubuses, wraiths, horrors, efreets, sprites, orknies, wooses, and ettins!"
Tony broke out in a muck sweat. "Damn you, Dougie! It's just some beast, I tell you!"
The trumpeting was joined by an ensemble of roars and whoops and obscure, evil chittering.
"Ghouls and boggles," the knight intoned. "Ogres and minotaurs! The spectres and the people of the toadstools!"
With a rustle of titanium chainmail he climbed to his feet, drew his great two-handed sword, and struck a noble attitude in the dying firelight "Stiffen the sinews! Summon up the blood! Screw your courage to the sticking place, and we'll not fail!"
"For God's sake pipe down!" Tony expostulated.
Gaze riveted to the sword, Dougal declaimed:
Wrong will be right when Asian comes in sight.
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more.
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
He grinned, sheathed the sword, yawned, and said, "That'll do it Sack out in peace, old son." He curled up and was snoring within two minutes.
Cursing, Tony put more wood on the fire. The jungle noises got louder.
***
In the morning, the islet was bedecked with dewdrops and the night's fearsome bedlam gave way to melodious birdsong. Tony woke stiff and puffy-faced. Dougal, as always, was splendidly dauntless.
"Looks like a beautiful day, milord! Proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim, hath put a spirit of youth in everything!"
Tony groaned. He went to take a leak in the bushes. Watching him from a crystal-beaded web was a spider bigger than his hand. Somewhere in the misty woods back of the huge tulip trees, wild chalikos were whickering. At least Tony hoped they were wild.
They launched the raft again and sailed on. Their river merged with another coming from the east and the countryside became more open.
"This just can't be the River Laar," Tony said. "It's supposed to flow through thick jungle for a couple of hundred kilometers, until it reaches the Tainted Swamp."
"Something moving on the left bank," Dougal noted.
"Bloody hell!" Tony was looking through his monocular. "Mounted men! Or—no, by Christ some kind of exotics! Steer right Dougie. Quick, man, before they spot us!"
The riders, numbering a dozen or so, were at some distance out in the midst of a blooming steppe, apparently intent on coming upwind of a large herd of grazing hipparions.
The right shore of the river was heavily forested. The raft drew in behind sheltering willows and its occupants scrambled onto the bank. Tony used the monocular again and spat an obscenity. "That's torn it. One of the hunting party has veered off toward the river. He must have seen us."
"What is it—Tanu or spook?"
Tony was puzzled. "Unless it's wearing an illusory body..."
"Give us a squint," Dougal ordered, taking the little telescope. He gave a low whistle. "Son of a bitch. I'm afraid it really is Howlers this time, not just regular Firvulag masquerading."
The rider on the opposite bank seemed to be staring right at them through the screen of branches.
"Do Howlers have farsight like regular Little People?" Tony asked.
"Betcher sweet ass," the knight replied. "He knows we're here, all right. Still, the river's pretty deep at this point for a chaliko to swim."
The exotic observer finally turned his mount and trotted slowly back to his fellows. Tony gave a gusty sigh of relief.
"By the Mane of Asian," Dougal swore, "that was close."
Tony was near panic. "We've gone wrong. I knew it. We came down the wrong river, and God knows which. Some tributary of the Nonol, maybe." His eyes darted from side to side. "We'll have to go back upstream. Hike. It'll be hell beating through the jungle unless we find a trail—"
Dougal was looking through the spyglass again. "Something to the north. On that plateau beyond the river-bend." He started. "A fair citadel, methinks! But not Cair Paravel." His voice fell to an awed whisper. "El Dorado!"
"Oh, for God's sake," exclaimed Tony. "Give me the friggerty glass." As he swept the skyline, he felt his heart sink. It was some kind of an exotic city, all right. But which one? It was on the wrong side of the river for Burask—and it didn't look ruined. But there weren't any other Tanu settlements this far north. "Whatever it is, it's bound to be bad news for us. We're hitting the trail."
They packed up the supplies and began to hack their way through the riverine thicket toward higher ground. After about fifteen minutes of sweaty work, they came upon a game track roughly paralleling the water.
"Keep your eyes open for animals," Tony warned. They set off south at a brisk pace, Dougal bearing his unsheathed sword and Tony carrying his machete. The sun climbed. The bugs came out. Leeches dropped from the broadleaved undergrowth and fastened to Tony's flesh. (He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, worst luck. He envied Dougal the chainmail.) They paused by a creek for lunch, and when they got up to retrieve their packs, they found some species of small viper had taken refuge under them. It struck at Tony, narrowly missing his arm. Dougal smote it in two with his sword.
About midafternoon, when Tony estimated they might have covered eight or nine kloms, their litde track abrupdy widened to a veritable jungle boulevard. Smack in the middle of it was a pile of turds the size of footballs.
The two men came to an abrupt standstill. A light breeze blew from behind them. There was a hint of thunder in the air and the ground beneath their feet almost seemed to vibrate.
Tony looked up, shading his eyes. "Can't see any clouds. On the other hand—"
"Look ahead," said Dougal, very softly.
It was, amazingly, almost invisible against the harsh pattern of lights and shadows, standing completely motionless a short distance up the trail. They saw a stupendous triangular head with widespread ears like tattered fans, poised nearly five meters above the ground. The trunk was curled up, the distended nostrils scenting them. From the chin grew two downcurving tusks sleeved in skin for half their two-meter length. The beast was long-legged, dun-colored, with an air of affronted majesty. It might have weighed twelve tons.
The deinotherium hoe-tusker studied the pair of humans, classified them as trespassing vermin, blared out a challenge like the trump of doom, and charged.
Tony catapulted off the trail to the left and Dougal went right. Since Tony
was screaming, the elephant followed him. Spindly trees splintered and snapped. The hoe-tusker wagged its great head and the ivory hooks uprooted larger trunks, which the beast tossed aside with its curling proboscis. Tony jinked and slithered, still yelling at the top of his lungs, wlule the beast crashed after him like some ambulatory mountain, trumpeting in rage.
Tony stumbled back onto the wide trail and ran flat-out, saving his breath. The hoe-tusker burst from the trees and came rumbling after him. The earth shook. Tony's legs pumped faster, but the elephant was gaining on him, never ceasing its hellish noisemaking.
A spasm stabbed Tony's side. His vision reddened and his heart seemed about to burst. He tripped over a pile of dried droppings and went down, resigned to being trampled to death.
From somewhere ahead of him there came a sizzling snap. Tony both heard and felt a thunderous impact, and then dust fountained up, completely enveloping him. The voice of the deinotherium was stilled and the shocked jungle seemed to be holding its breath ad around.
"Don't you love it?" caroled a blithe, squeaky voice. "Isn't it absolutely dumfounding?"
The dust wafted away. Tony raised his eyes. Standing over him was a richly caparisoned chaliko. On its back perched a little old human with the look of a puckish marmoset. He wore the classic riding habit of the English gentleman hunter, remarkable only in that the tailcoat was turquoise instead of pink. Under one arm he cradled a heavy-duty twenty-second-century stun-gun.