23:07:33................ 16.5. + 27
The body armor fell apart in two halves and the carriage tilted to allow him egress. He did a few isometrics in place, absently touched one of the tiny wounds on his forehead left by the psychoelectronic crown of thorns, and noted that the blood had already clotted. Below the neck he was clad in a black, skintight pressure-envelope coverall, studded with receptacles for the circulatory shunts. The coverall was sopping wet and stinking of the dermal lavage he had floated in for the past twenty days. He told himself that he really ought to reformulate the gunk with a more pleasing scent.
Marc. May I come in?
The gut-clutch that had been only temporarily sidetracked by the divestment routine got in its licks. Time for the ready bad news.
He climbed out of the armor and sent it off to the equipment bay. The dome-room door opened and there was Patricia, carrying two tall iced drinks garnished with lime. She wore a backless formal dress of pale blue shot with golden threads. She looked much younger and her hair, unbound, had become the color of the maple-sugar candy Marc remembered from his New Hampshire youth.
He accepted her kiss, as briefly melting as a snowflake's touch, then took the drink and let the alcohol-laced citrus soothe his throat. He asked, "How many others went with Hagen?"
"Twenty-eight. All of the children and the five grandbabies as well. They took ad of the ATVs and smashed every boat on the island over six meters length overall."
"Equipment?"
"Five tons of assorted weaponry, the portable sigma generator, all of the mechanical mind-screens, a very odd selection of manufacturing and processing units, miscellaneous supplies. They left four days ago. We went after them in the small boats, but Hagen and Phd Overton and young Keogh generated a squad that nearly wiped us out. And without you, our attempt at long-range coercive synthesis failed."
"Four days." The dark-circled eyes were more haunted than ever. "They planned it well. By now, they're out of my coercive range."
"But not beyond a massed creative thrust, if you furnish primary impetus. There's no place on Earth they can escape a psychozap ... if you choose to use it. They're gambling that you won't, of course." Patricia's mental aspect was neutral. But then, she had no offspring among the fugitives.
"I've got to think." Marc ran a hand through his damp wiry curls. The chemical smell of the coverad seemed irrationally offensive to him; and as always after a star-search, he was famished. "I'm going to shower and change. Have you had supper?"
"I waited for you. You're late."
The characteristic one-sided smile flashed as they came into the dressing room. "I dawdled over the last star system, postponing the inevitable."
"You expected this?" Her expression showed the dismay that her mind-shield had kept hidden from him.
"I'm beginning to think that I deliberately provoked it."
He stripped off the coverad and entered the old-fashioned shower cubicle, luxuriating in its preprogrammed small comforts: pulsing needlejets of warm fresh water and liquid Canoe soap, salt spray, and the final icy deluge. As she handed him the toga-towel, Patricia let her eyes roam over his body in a frank appraisal that was only half jesting.
"What a pity the star-search makes you lose your tan. Otherwise ... the same old frosty-haired Adonis with the Mephisto eyebrows. God, how I hate a self-rejuvenating man." And covet your membrum virile!
"Sorry, luv. Another casualty of the search. For now, at any rate." Until I get mad enough to start the life-juices flowing again.
She sighed. 'Two wasted weeks in the regen tank to perk up my faded allure. Why do I bother?"
"You're magnificent. I like the new hair. Just have patience." And she would—ever considerate, ever faithful, and never ruining it by loving him. Patricia Castellane, who had directed the obliteration of her own home-planet in support of his Rebellion, was the only woman to share his bed since the death of Cyndia, back in the apocalypse on Elder Earth.
"Shall I summon the others?" she asked.
He pulled on a ruffled shirt. "We might as well get on with it Call Steinbrenner, Kramer, Dalembert, Ragnar Gathen, Warshaw. Van Wyk if he's sober. Strangford whether she is or not. And the Keoghs." He wound a scarlet cummerbund around his waist.
"Alexis Manion?"
"To hell with him. I'm surprised he didn't take off with the kids! Encouraging that damn Felice scheme—" He broke off. The interrogatory thought flared.
One part of Patricia's mind responded to Marc as another sent out the telepathic summons. "Felice killed Vaughn Jarrow in their first encounter with her. Cloud and Elaby and Owen are all right but the mission is in disarray." A reprise of Owen's reports from Spain passed instantly from Patricia's memory to Marc's own. He knew about Felice and Elizabeth, and about the coronation and marriage of Aiken Drum. "With Felice out of the picture for the moment" Patricia concluded, "Elaby and Cloud are concentrating on saving Jill. They still profess loyalty to you in spite of the defection of the other children, and say that they expect to follow your directives."
Marc allowed himself a bark of cynical laughter. He ran a comb through his hair, then offered Patricia his arm. They left the observatory and walked along the shore of Lake Serene toward his house. The young moon had gone down and the semitropical sky blazed with diamond stars. None of the constellations had the twenty-second-century pattern, of course, but the exiled rebels had named new ones. Mars hung low in the west a baleful cockade on Napoleon's Hat.
"Elaby and Cloud will have given up on Felice, now that she's gone to Elizabeth," Marc observed. "I think we're safe in assuming that the new target will be Aiken Drum."
"A direct assault on him when the other children reach Europe?"
"Not unless Elaby and Cloud have lost their minds."
"A proposal to join forces, then?"
Marc paused, looking over the lake. There were boats on the glimmering water carrying his old co-conspirators toward his dock, the men and women who had been magnates of the Concilium until they linked their fates with his dream of human ascendancy in the Galactic Milieu. Debarring Manion, there were only eleven principals left alive—counting Patricia and Owen—and thirty-one subordinates.
He said, 'The most likely course for the children to follow would be some kind of peaceful overture to Aiken Drum. We still don't have any clear idea of his full potential or his vulnerabilities. Given the children's lack of experience, their judgment of King Aiken-Lugonn is going to be even more flawed than our own."
"The Firvulag royalty tried a crudely concerted attack on him during the Grand Loving festivities. They faded. We weren't able to analyze the reason for the failure because of the distance, but Jeff Steinbrenner thinks Aiken might have been wearing a stem-shield generator."
"Perhaps. On the other hand, this nonborn kingling may simply have grown in power. He's capable of it. A most interesting young man! His metapsychic faculties are only part of his arsenal, you know. He seems to be an instinctive politician as well."
There was fear close below the surface of Patricia's mind. "If Aiken Drum should respond favorably to the plan to reopen the time-gate—" She left the rest unsaid. With a two-way passage between the Pliocene and the Milieu, agents of the Magistratum would see that justice was visited upon the surviving rebels, even after twenty-seven years.
Marc looked up at the countless stars and was silent for several minutes. Then he said, "Just a single world with a coadúnate racial mind. That's all I need to find, Pat. The altruism of the Unity would compel them to come for us if we asked for refuge ... and they wouldn't comprehend the truth about poor flawed humanity until it was too late. We'd have a fresh start, but this time there would be no mistakes. We'd spin our takeover bid across decades. Infiltrate while we engender an enormous new generation artificiady. We could do it—even the handful of us who remain. If I could only find the star ..."
"Marc, what are we to do now?" she cried.
He took her hand and placed it on his arm again. They
resumed their walk to the house, where the dock lights had come on and at least six boats had already arrived.
"Come along and share my supper," he told her, "and then we'll talk about it with the others." His redaction pressed gently against her still-firm mental screen. "Don't be afraid to open to me, Pat. I've known for a long time that you and the others feel that my star-search is futile. Perhaps my own subconscious does, too. If that's the case—and I'll know the truth before we finish tonight—I may decide that it's time for a completely new plan of action."
***
"I'm not afraid to say it, if the rest of you are!"
Gerrit Van Wyk's eyes were bulging and bright. With his wide mouth slightly open, scalp shining in the verandah lamplight, and trembling little hands clutching a drained glass with rattling ice cubes, he looked more than ever like a truculent frog. He took a deep breath.
"We've had plenty of hints that something like this might happen. The Felice affair was a clear indication of the way the children's minds were working. And can we blame them? Face it, Marc! Your notion of finding another coadunate world is a long shot at best, and you've had twenty-five years to bring it home. More than thirty-six thousand systems scanned, and only twelve with rational beings—none even approaching coadunation of the racial Mind."
Marc still sat with Patricia at the small dining table while the nine others stood about awkwardly or occupied the scattered wicker furniture. Patricia opened the waiter and removed two plates with mangos for dessert. Marc skewered his and began to peel it with a silver knife, catching the drippings by psychokinesis.
"This time out," he said, "I found Poltroy."
Eight of the nine gave vent to excited mental and vocal comments. But Cordelia Warshaw, the cultural anthropologist and psychotactician, knew better. "How far up the ladder were they?"
"Roughly erectus."
Her head bobbed confirmation. "It figures, given their slower evolutionary pace. What a pity you didn't find the Lylmik instead."
Marc ate neat slices of the fiendishly juicy fruit while his mind displayed a reprise of the search-sequence, reminding them all that he had begun the hunt by examining the rare star-group containing the Lylmik home-sun. He had found no trace of the galaxy's most ancient rational race.
"They're out there somewhere." He touched his lips with a napkin. "But God knows where."
"The vague little masterminds did something to their sun," Kramer said bitterly. "Marc and I went over the matter years ago. There's no telling what spectroscopic signature it has here in the Pliocene. Some astrophysicists among the Krondaku speculate that they might have goosed the dying star back onto the main sequence a million years or so before the first coadunate fusion. If that's true ..." He shrugged.
"I can't waste time examining incipient red giants," Marc said. "Our chances are slim enough if I stick with the likely prospects."
"Our chances are nd, now that the kids are gone," Van Wyk exclaimed. He struggled out of his chair and reached for the vodka decanter, then tugged frantically at the bottle that seemed welded to its tray.
Helayne Strangford's laugh was strident. "If I can't have mine, neither can you, Gerry! Watch the end coming, cold straight sober! Or do we postpone it, Marc? Do we? Are you going to ask us to help you kid them? Our own children? So that we'd be safe?"
She had come to the table and stood over Marc with a contorted face and fists pressed into her thighs, taut as an overtuned string in spite of Steinbrenner's heroic redaction job of an hour previous. From his own depths the Angel of the Abyss considered her threat and reacted mercifully. Helayne collapsed into Steinbrenner's waiting arms, overcome by a simple motor paralysis and simultaneous muting of her speech; but her understanding was left intact. The physician lowered her onto a couch. Dalembert and Warshaw propped her up with cushions.
"It will be a hard decision for ad of us, Helayne," Marc said. "You love Leda and Chris and little Joel, and Ragnar loves Elaby, and the Keoghs love Nial, and Peter and Jordy and Cordelia love their children and grandchildren."
And you, the silenced mind accused him.
"And me," Marc acknowledged. He pushed back his chair and rose. One of the screened jalousie casements was slightly ajar and moths were coming in and orbiting the lamps. He pulled the latch to, casually exterminated the insects, and stood leaning against a porch pillar with his hands thrust in his pockets.
"Cloud and Hagen are all that I have left of Cyndia. It was necessary that I bring them here, to share my exile. Wrong, but necessary." His gaze swept the others. "Just as it was wrong, but human and understandable, for the rest of you to reproduce here in the Pliocene. We hoped we could revitalize our dream, transmit it to the young ones. All of us faded in that—and I faded doubly, in not finding a world that would come to our rescue."
"There is still time," Patricia said. "Centuries, if we choose to use them! If we have the courage."
"We took our risk in the Rebellion!" snapped Jordan Kramer. "My first family died on Okanagon, in case you've forgotten, and Dalembert's son was in the Twelfth Fleet. Don't lecture us on courage, Castellane. As for love, we all know you're incapable—"
"Jordy," said Marc. One winged brow lifted. No mind-thrust was needed to cut off the physicist's tirade. Sick-faced, Kramer turned his back on the rest of them and stared into the night.
Ragnar Gathen's slow voice came from a shadowy corner. "The star-search was a wonderful idea, one that gave us hope, made this exile more bearable. But the children ... they never knew you as we do, Marc. So now, when they see a possibility of release from this prison that we chose for them, they must seize it"
"When the time-gate reopens," Van Wyk stated, "we die. Or have our personalities obliterated after the humiliation of a public trial."
Gathen said, "Elaby promised me that the children would destroy the time-gate after passing through."
"Hagen would do otherwise," said Marc. "Not consciously, perhaps. But somehow the gate would remain open, and the agents would come."
Sweet-faced little Dr. Warshaw nodded. "Marc's right. And his child isn't the only one harboring retributive sets. The only safe course open to us is killing them all." She stroked one of Helayne's hands. The paralyzed woman's eyes were shut pouring tears.
"It does seem to be the logical solution," said Patricia. "If even a few of the children survive to show Aiken Drum that data on reconstructing Guderian's apparatus, sooner or later he'll undertake the job himself—with or without the help of the manufacturing equipment that the children stole. I've analyzed the probability."
"We endorse Castellane's conclusion," said Diarmid Keogh. The mind of his sister Deirdre projected the remorseless image of the concerted psychoenergetic blast they would all have to synthesize to bring the resolution.
The leader of the Metapsychic Rebellion was looking blindly toward the wall of the house. Looking eastward. "There is another possibility. A risky one."
Wrenching silence.
"I see them," Marc said. "The ATV modular combine is moving very slowly through the region of calms and light winds called the horse latitudes. Their sails are useless, since they've channeled all of their PK into the main impeller. It would be rather easy to blast them out of the water. It would be much more difficult to heat up a large air mass somewhere southeast of their position and maneuver it to blow them back home to us."
"Is it possible?" cried Peter Dalembert, his mind a garboil of conflict.
"How about it, Jordy?" asked Marc.
"They're pretty far out." Kramer was dubious as he did the calculations. "Damn near two thousand kilometers, thanks to their initial push. And we can't simply heat air from scratch, you know. We have to locate a suitable tropical low that will respond to our hype-up, then move it in. One like this." He showed Marc an image. "Anything like that north of the equator?"
"No," Marc said.
Kramer shrugged. "There you are. We could wait a week, even two, before one showed up. They could be across by then—or into th
e zone of prevailing westerlies, where we wouldn't have a dimbuck's chance of forcing them back."
"There's this," said Marc, presenting another meteorological image to the physicist. "Off the African coast."
"H'mm. Not too shabby, if we could boot it back west. It also has the potential of pushing them onto the Moroccan shore if we find that we can't raise enough wind to bring them home."
"Dammit Jordy," Steinbrenner growled, "we've got enough watts to divert hurricanes from Ocala—so why is it so bloody tricky to conjure up a useful wind?"
"Diverting an air mass is a whole 'nother thing from hyping one up, Jeff. Or moving it counter to the planetary winds that prevail this time of the year. We have forty-two minds left to work with, but six or seven are virtuady worthless for a PK-creative job. Whatever we try, it's going to be hellaceous tough on the operators."
"And the children will fight back, count on it," Diarmid Keogh reminded them. Deirdre projected the memory of the vicious squad that the fugitives had engendered on their first day out, and Diarmid appended, "You'd see that it was our own dear Nial leading the push to drown his lovin' da and mumsy—and working mighty handily with Phd Overton and your Hagen, Marc, for ad that the lads are noncoadunate. Yes, we must assume that every mind among the children will resist."
"They have photon weapons, too," Van Wyk said tremulously.
"Don't talk hke an idiot Gerry," said Patricia. "Marc's here now. None of those portable zappers can touch us. They'd be inside Marc's coercive range before the zappers had line-of-sight on Ocala."
"They'll use everything they've got" Van Wyk persisted.
"Perhaps fight to the death," Warshaw added softly.
Marc had gone back to contemplation of his earlier farseen vision. "We might try to save the children. Above all, gain time to increase the number of options. Don't forget Cloud and Elaby and Owen in Europe, with Felice temporarily absent from her lair and Aiken Drum susceptible to manipulation. I must have time to think, to study the situation."