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 per versely 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 lie 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 fail in catharsis, the disruptive blast of psychoenergy may be directed outward, in conformity with her fantasy of planetary ruin, and engulf all of Black Crag in a solaristic fireball. On the other hand, if you tipped her over, all of the aggression and violence would be directed inward, toward her own annihilation. This would be a failure 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 witdflowers. Sensitive little warblers fell from their perches, dead. The weaker gold-torced retainers who served the lodge fled screaming down the precipitous track, and even the strong-minded protectors became frantic with the plangent psychic tension, taking refuge in the farthest comers 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 newbom 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.
Cultuket? 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 . . .”
I choose—I choose—
“Wake, Felice. Come back now. Open your eyes.”
They were brown eyes, very large, startling in the bloodless face beneath ashen brows and limp platinum hair. They were eyes full of wonder, darting from Elizabeth’s face to Dionket’s to Creyn’s and back again, misting briefly with tears and then star-bright.
“This is sanity?” Felice asked. She rose trembling on one elbow. Her gaze fell. “Same old body, same mind—but different.” She laughed very softly. The brown eyes flicked up, locked onto Elizabeth. “Why did you wake me up—bring me back before I could finish choosing?”
The Grand Master was silent.
“You want me to choose to be like you. Elizabeth?”
“Make your own choice.” The vocal tone was gentle but the mind’s, grating and apprehensive.
“Be like you.” Two spots of color appeared in the girl’s cheeks. Her hair seemed to come alive. She gave a kind of bounce and was standing on the cot, petite and strong. Her entire body was sheathed in a pearly aura “Me, be like you, Elizabeth?”
Felice threw back her radiant head and laughed a wild and vital peal resounding with barbed vitality. “I choose my self! Look at me. Look in me! Wouldn’t you rather be me than you? Free to choose what I want to do instead of letting others bind me?” Again the laugh, so shattering, so sane.
“Poor Elizabeth.” The goddess extended a luminous hand, touched the Grand Master’s shoulder “But thank you.”
She vanished.
Elizabeth sat unmoving, her gaze still fixed on the empty cot, too drained to weep, too diminished even to despair. The cocoon of fire was there, beckoning, and she studied it with an odd sense of detachment, as though the real choice had already been made and this one was a mere consequent.
“Stay,” urged Dionket.
Creyn was standing over her, red of blood, white of mind light, the constraining golden torc clasped about his throat. His hand with its long fingers and prominent joints adorned with many rings, held out a stoneware cup. “Drink Elizabeth.”
As once before.
She sipped the bitter herbal tea, then lowered the wall so that he could clearly see the waiting flame-coffin, the overwhelming temptation.
“We need you more than ever now,” said Creyn.
But Dionket, wiser, was more comforting in sternness. “You really don’t deserve purgatory. Not until you try to put it right.”
“Yes,” she said, and smiled, and wept.
8
CLOUD PLACED THE BOUQUET ON THE MOUNDED DIRT, THEN stood dry-eyed, seeing all the intricate details of the orchids with her deep-scan at the same time that she shut out the larger image of the graves itself. The bunch of flowers was enormous, containing twenty-five or thirty varieties. She had gathered it in less than five minutes without going out of sight of their moorage on the Río Genil.
“The Tanu call Spain ‘Koneyn,’” she said inconsequentially. “It means ‘Fowerland.’ I overheard one mind tell another that no place in Europe has so many different kinds. I like the azure orchids best, I think. And the pale green ones with the velvet-black edging. Orchids in mourning Poor Jill.”
“We did our best. Steinbrenner warned us about the danger of meningitis.” Elaby concentrated on the rock slab he had propped against the roots of a great plane tree. Portions of the rock glowed palely in the noontide sun as he exerted his creative metafaculty. The pungent stench of molten mineral overwhelmed the subtle orchid fragrance, then dissipated on the light breeze blowing downstream. Satisfied, Elaby lifted the slab with his PK and positioned it in the waiting trough at the head of the mound.
JILLIAN MIRIAM MORGENTHALER
20 SEPTEMBER 23-2 JUNE P27
“WHERE LIES THE LAND TO WHICH THE SHIP WOULD GO?
FAR, FAR AHEAD, IS ALL HER SEAMEN KNOW.”
“Will it last six million years?” Cloud wondered.
“We’re still in the Guadalquivir Basin. This place will be burried in silt. Who can tell?”
Cloud turned her back on the grave and walked listlessly toward the beached dinghy. “Last winter, when we were all wrapped up in planning this thing, I asked Alexis, Manion if there had ever been any trace of the exile population found in Pliocene rocks. He said no. It’s hard to believe that nothing survived.”
She climbed into the little boat. Elaby joined her and shoved them off into the languid water, as brown as strong tea. It was navigable to within 50 kilometers of Mulhacén in the shallow-draft nvercraft that Aiken Drum was bringing.
Elaby said, “If any paleontologist found a fossilized Homo sap skeleton in a Pliocene formation, he’d keep his mouth shut about it unless he wanted to be drummed out of the bonediggers’ club. As for a fossilized Bermudian ketch . . .”
“Dr. Manion said that nothing we do here in this ancient world can affect the future. That the future—already is.”
“Nice reassuring thought. Remind me of it when we have to go concert with Aiken Drum and his bunch and blow the top off Mount Mulhacén.”
The inflatable skimmed up to the accommodation ladder. Cloud made the painter fast and mounted. “Owen’s still sleeping,” she noted, after sending a fleeting redactive touch belowdecks.
“Good. He wore himself out working with you on Jill. Thank heavens he didn’t insist on coming ashore for the burial.” He rummaged in the portable cooler and brought out a flagon of coconut punch and two of their dwindling supply of gamma chicken-salad sandwiches from Ocala. “Funeral baked meats. Relax, babe. Take a break before the King of the Elves shows up.”
They sat in canvas chairs in the cockpit, sheltered from the sun by an awning stretched between the mainmast and backstay. Cloud chewed the sandwich rapturously. “Civilized food! God I’m sick of fish and roast waterfowl and those insipid palm fruits. It’s breakfast time back in Florida—do you realize that? Bacon and scrambled eggs. Grits and honey. Orange juice and sweet iced tea.”
“Heartless broad,” Eiaby accused. He refilled her beaker with the milky-colored rum drink. “Sorry you carne?”
She shook her head. “I had to. All of us did. Even the gang Papa shunted off to Africa aren’t sorry they left home. We’re a little closer to the time-gate, anyhow .We’ve forced Papa to take us and our needs seriously.” She hesitated. “He’ll come to Europe, you know.”
“You’re certain?”
“I know him better than anyone.”
“Will he help or oppose us?”
“He may not have decided. I can’t say.” She set as
ide the remains of the meal. A cloud of sulfur-yellow butterflies fluttered by the port rail, heading toward the Gulf of Guadalquivir. She caged one briefly with her PK, watched it tremble and flail its tiny knobbed antennae, then set it free. It flapped off after the others. “Papa doesn’t want to kill us. I was right about that. He won’t do it unless we force him to. Unless we deliberately put him and his people in jeopardy by our opening of the gate—or if we try to kill him.”
“Some of us wouldn’t scruple at it.”
“I know.” Her expression was tranquil. “Hagen. You.”
“But not you?” The young man swirled the ice cubes in his drink, frowning at them. When Cloud did not answer, he posed another query. “Would you stand in the way of the rest of us, if there seems no other way to handle it?”
“I want us all to be free,” she said. “if we could only work together—both generations—instead of at opposite poles! Building the apparatus and siting it properly in the midst of this barbarian circus will be difficult enough. Maybe impossible.”
“Don’t wash us out too soon, babe. We’ve lost some ground—but we may have gained some as well. Our element of secrecy is gone now that Marc’s guessed our intention, and your hothead brother’s threats have made Marc the teensiest bit skeptical of our loyally. But your father isn’t the only big gun in the fight. Don’t forget the Nonbom King. If things keep going downhill here in the Many-Colored Land, he just might start seeking wider horizons.”
Cloud was dubious “Here, Aiken’s a large fish in a small pond. What would he be in the Milieu, compared to the Coadunate Mind? Besides, Papa seems to have him quite overawed as a result of the metaconcert teaching.”
Elaby gave a quiet chuckle. “Don’t you believe it. This head’s young. Only about twenty-two. Yet he’s managed to take over an establishment that dominated the Pliocene for forty years, using just his own naked brain.”