“. . . cracked Nazir over the skull and tried to grab the Number One flyer . . . if Mr. Betsy hadn’t come by with the stun-gun. . .”
“Who?” Basil asked wearily. He knew who.
“Aldo Manetti. And he had the Baroness along to do the piloting for him.”
Basil threw on a shirt and went out of the tent. Taffy Evans had a hammerlock on the mountaineer, who was still groggy from the stun charge. Baroness Charlotte-Amalie was tense in the grip of Phronsie Gillis. Betsy, efficient in a zippered flight-suit but still wearing the wig, had the prisoners covered with his Husqvarna.
Basil stepped closer to Aldo. “So you weren’t able to settle for numero due after all.”
Aldo’s head lolled and he spat weakly. Saliva dribbled on his dark chin.
Basil turned away, consulting his watch again. “Well, it’s nearly dawn. Time we were breaking camp.” He looked off at the two tall aircraft silhouetted against the graying starry sky and the crater lake. “A pity there are no trees here. But the drop from the belly-hatch should be sufficient.”
“What are you going to do?” screamed the Baroness.
“Tie the two of them to the landing struts of Number One until we’re ready.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Hang you, my dear,” Basil said. Then he went back into his tent to finish dressing.
3
BODURAGOL, CHIEF REDACTOR OF AFALIAH, SAT ON HIS STOOL in the middle of the womb-dark Skin chamber, his eyes closed and his mind given over almost completely to his work. The great innovation had been an unqualified success. Both patients had improved markedly since he had thought of pairing their highly compatible enantiomorphous psychokinetic functions within the light yoking of his own redactive matrix. The atrophied right hemisphere of the male brain, especially, had undergone significant regeneration under the influence of the female’s powerful iatropsychic input. The simultaneous acceleration of the woman’s healing had been purely serendipitous. The scientist in Boduragol was fascinated by the outcome. The sentimentalist was gratified.
The bodies stood side by side in the suspensors, chaste as alabaster statues wrapped in clinging, transparent cauls. On one mental level, the Tanu man and the human woman were actively cooperating with the redactor. On another more intimate mode, behind a firm barrier, they were simply talking.
CLOUD: But, don’t you see that it was almost the same for your generation as it was for ours? Your parents decided your destiny for you in advance. You had nothing to say about it and were forbidden to question their judgment. Neither did we.
KUHAL: How could it be any other way? Our people left the Duat Galaxy in order to be free. Free to follow a life we believe in. Was it not the same for yours?
CLOUD: Our parents said so. And for many years, we believed them.
KUHAL: But now you do not. Well . . . we Tanu also have our heretics.
CLOUD: Analytical criticism is not heresy if one is truly free.
KUHAL: You impute that we are not?
CLOUD: My generation was constrained by ignorance, inertia, even fear. The questioning was painful, dangerous. Ultimately necessary, nonetheless.
KUHAL: I do not understand.
CLOUD: Shall I tell you something of our story?
KUHAL: We have time...yes. Perhaps we Tanu have let ignorance and inertia rule us as well. In our relations with you. We knew only one small segment of your race: the voluntary time-travelers. The nonmetapsychics seemed to be useful servants. The latents we accepted into our family of the mind. Only Nodonn perceived the immense hazard in our developing relationship; but most of us would not listen to his warning. Blindness was more comfortable.
CLOUD: I know.
KUHAL: Do not let me distract you from the tale. Begin at the beginning. Tell me how metapsychic operants arose among you. Tell me how the Rebellion took root.
CLOUD: You know that the people of Elder Earth were slowly developing into natural operancy some millennia before they were contacted by exotic races and inducted into the Milieu.
KUHAL: This has been explained to us by our human Genetics Master.
CLOUD: The operants who lived toward the end of the twentieth century were fast approaching the adept status of coadunate minds. They were very circumspect about revealing their abilities to normal people. Certain ones—especially those with strong coercive or creative talents—used their metafaculties for personal aggrandizement. Others who were more altruistic studied the mental powers, using themselves and other operants as lest subjects. Eventually, these scientists developed the special educational techniques that brought quasi coadunation to numbers of their fellows. They put together a small, imperfect replica of the Milieu’s Coadunate. Mind and broadcast the fact of their existence. This was the “beacon” that virtually forced the Milieu to initiate the Great Intervention of 2013, in spite of the fact that most humans were still ethical primitives . . . higher on the scale of psychosocial maturation than you Tanu, but still barbarians compared to the other five coadunate races.
KUHAL: So you and I are both primitives! The mystery of our compatible heritages becomes somewhat less murky. But do not let me digress.
CLOUD: One of the principal centers for metapsychic research on Earth was at Dartmouth College, a small learning institution in North America. The two people in charge of the department prior to the Intervention were Denis Remillard and Lucille Cartier. They were both significantly operant and came from a similar ethnic background. Shortly after they became colleagues, they married. They were my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. Denis and Lucille had seven children, all powerful operants. The youngest and most talented was my grandfather, Paul, who was born the year after the Intervention and trained in utero by means of exotic procedures that later became standard. Paul became known as the Man Who Sold New Hampshire. Because of his efforts, this small area in North America became the planetary center of metapsychic operations as Earth entered the mainstream of the Milieu.
KUHAL: And your family consolidated its dominance.
CLOUD: It was inevitable. Paul became the first human being elected to the Concilium, the governing body of the Galactic Milieu, which is composed entirely of masterclass metapsychics having profound skill in psychosocial analysis and problem solving. Later, four of his five children also served as magnates. Marc was the oldest. He became a Paramount Grand Master, one of the most powerful minds in the galaxy.
KUHAL: This is your father, the man called Abaddon?
CLOUD: Yes . . .That was the nickname he received during the Rebellion. In our holy book, there is a section telling of the last days of the world, when the forces of good and evil are engaged in a final confrontation. Abaddon is the leader of the demon army. He has other names; the Angel of the Abyss; the Destroyer. My Papa . . .
KUHAL: The war at the end of the world! It’s part of our religious mythos as well. We call it the Nightfall War. When the persecuted Tanu and Firvulag were driven from their home planet to the edge of the Duat Galaxy, they thought that they would fight the Nightfall War themselves. But Brede intervened, and her Ship carried us to this starwhirl. Now Celadeyr and certain of his followers believe that the Night-fall War will be fought in the Many-Colored Land! . . . But you must forgive me, Cloud. Once again I interrupt. Tell me about your father’s Rebellion.
CLOUD: I can’t tell you very much. I was a year old. My brother Hagen was two. Both of our parents were involved in some colossal conspiracy to put the human race in absolute control of the Milieu. There was a grandiose scheme that Papa and Dr. Steinbrenner and some of the others devised that was supposed to eventually transform a group of us children into superbeings, ultrametapsychics. The rebels planned to inaugurate the scheme after the coup. . . but of course, the coup failed. Papa has never talked to us about his plans for us children, and the record of it has been expunged from the computer in Ocala. I’m afraid that something about the plan must have been horrible, because Mama—Mama—
KUHAL: Do
not articulate the thought. I can see. I’m very sorry,
CLOUD: Papa loves us. I can’t believe he would have done anything evil to us. Not knowingly.
KUHAL: Tell me the rest of the story.
CLOUD: The Rebellion took place in 2083. It lasted less than eight months in its overt phase. A large number of human operants were involved, and millions of normals, too. Almost all of the lower-echelon rebels died—and so did numbers of innocent people on rebel-occupied planets. Eventually, Papa was defeated by his own younger brother, and Jon’s wife, Illusio. Jon Rennllard was a mutant. He was fourteen years younger than Marc. By the time he reached adulthood he had no body—only a naked brain that wore any sort of shape that struck its fancy. I know he sounds like a monster, but the Milieu made him a saint when he put down the Rebellion. Jon’s wife was a Paramount, like him, a metaconcert specialist. She had only half a face as a result of some psychocreative mishap and never had it regenerated because the deformity became a kind of symbol of her authority. She wore a diamond mask.
KUHAL: Jack the Bodiless and Diamond Mask. Gomnol spoke of them...
CLOUD: The pair of them died, but Papa lived. And he brought Hagen and me and a hundred or so of his surviving people through the time-gate.
KUHAL: I remember the black day I fought against the invaders in the Battle of the Grotto Wilderness. Our forces were massacred. King Thagdal ordered the incident blotted from our history after the invading humans disappeared across the Western Sea.
CLOUD: Papa took his people to North America. He didn’t want to fight you. Many of his followers were badly wounded and he himself was half-dead from terrible brain-bums. We made a new home on an island off southeastern North America. It’s very beautiful. We call it Ocala. All of the other children were born there.
KUHAL: But you left it. Why?
CLOUD: When we were young, we could imagine nothing other than following our parents’ chosen way. Papa had brought all kinds of equipment to the Pliocene. After he recovered, he set up a farsensing observatory and began to search the stars, looking for another race of metapsychics. He knew that if he found such a race, he could prevail on it to come and rescue us. He hoped to reinstitute his great dream of human dominion in a world six million years younger than the Milieu. A fair number of his original followers believed he’d be able to do it. Papa . . . can make you believe in him. But as the years went on, and thousands upon thousands of stars were searched with no result, many of the older people became despondent. There were suicides—and murders. Some of the old rebels went mad and some psyched out on drugs and some just . . . withdrew. We children watched it all happen while we grew up. Finally, we began to think for ourselves, beyond Papa’s futile dream. Felice was a catalyst. But we had been watching you long before she arrived. We put together a crude farsight combination and spied on you here in Europe as an entertainment.
KUHAL: Ah. The children of ennui while away tedious hours observing lower forms of life! We weren’t real at all, were we, Cloud? Only ants busy in a nest. And one day, you thought you’d see what would happen if you let the water in—!
CLOUD: No!
KUHAL: Why did you help Felice destroy us, then?
CLOUD: We coveted your Many-Colored Land. Not in itself, but as a stepping-stone back to the Milieu.
KUHAL: Back? Back through the time-gate? But that’s impossible!
CLOUD: No, its not. Elaby Gathen, the man who died in Aiken’s fight against Felice, was certain that we would be able to build a duplicate of the original time-warping device that stands in the Milieu. We have a complete set of plans from our computer. And when my brother and the others fled from Ocala, they took all kinds of manufacturing apparatus and mineral resource charts.
KUHAL: And your father? How did he react to this?
CLOUD: He was violently opposed at first. Now . . . I don’t know. We forced him to rethink his own objectives. He knows now that we’ll never go back to Ocala. Perhaps he’s decided to let us follow our own destiny. And after what happened with Felice and Aiken Drum, he may even help us Just as he may help you.
KUHAL: What are you saying?
CLOUD: Hagen and the others marooned down in Africa spent some time studying a mental reprise of the fight with Felice. I’ve conferred with them about it. Since you Tanu are so metapsychically primitive, you probably don’t fully realize just how many questionable things were happening down there on the Genil River! Let’s hope Aiken Drum doesn’t either.
KUHAL: Explain!
CLOUD: All right, consider the metaconcert program that Papa taught Aiken. We children have nothing like Papa’s sophistication in things like that. But it was apparent that Papa planned for both Felice and Aiken to die in that fight.
KUHAL: Great Goddess.
CLOUD: Papa knew very well that as an individual, he couldn’t measure up to Felice. Even using the metaconcert, throwing every available bit of mindpower against her, it would be touch and go. (Of course, if they’d had that photon Spear working, they’d have had the edge.) Now, there are a number of different options for setting up an offensive metaconcert. Some are much more hazardous to the prime executive than others. Papa gave Aiken a program that should have squeezed the last erg of psychoenergy out of the lashup if Aiken used it at full zap—as he’d be likely to do instinctively in a panic situation. And a full zap of that potential tunneled through Aiken should have killed him as well as Felice. But Aiken didn’t throw the whole basketful at her in the first strike. He’d been scared by his test blast up on the mountain and so he mitigated the flow, keeping it sub-lethal. As you may recall, Papa was fooled into thinking that the first strike finished Felice.
KUHAL: Abaddon said that he couldn’t detect her mass or energy. But then—and I admit I did not understand this—he said Felice jumped.
CLOUD: He said she d-jumped. It’s a meta slang term, short for dimensional-jump or translocation. A faculty that’s extremely rare in the Milieu. Sometimes a variation of it is called teleportation.
KUHAL: Brede’s Ship!
CLOUD: What?
KUHAL: The giant organism, her spouse. The Ships were capable of faster-than-light travel via hyperspace, using their mind-power alone. Do you mean to say that Felice—
CLOUD: She might have done it inadvertently, as a defense mechanism. Perhaps just skipping out of range. But Hagen thinks that she followed Papa’s farsense beam—it was in peripheral mode—and scragged him!
KUHAL: But she attacked Aiken—
CLOUD: It could have happened in a split second. When Felice reappeared above Aiken, Papa’s psychocreative input was altered. We reran the memory and proved it. He had been handling the defenses except at the very instant of the first strike, when he flashed briefly into the offensive mode on main channel. After Felice’s jump the whole screen started to go. Owen Blanchard dropped dead. He might have been hit by Papa’s flashover, given the configuration. We think Papa was able to pull himself back together in time to re-weave the disintegrating defense, then participate in the final zap.
KUHAL: You believe that Felice did no significant harm to your father?
CLOUD: On the contrary. And if he was hurt, it would tend to explain his strange withdrawal after the fight, and the fact that he’s remained incommunicado for more than a month now.
KUHAL: But your father continued to function after the d-jump incident.
CLOUD: And he was hooked into a cerebroenergetic rig strong enough to bottle a small H-bomb! He’s a Paramount, and he was operating with God knows how many factors of augmentation. It’s when he shucks the armor plating and the superconductive artificial nervous system that the headache is likely to begin. Hagen knows more about this kind of thing than I do. He suspects that Papa was on the receiving end of a coercive-creative zorch heavy enough to send him to the regen tank—and that’s why the aether between here and Ocala has been so peaceful lately.
KUHAL: How fortuitous for you and your peers.
CLOUD: And perhaps for you.
>
KUHAL: ?
CLOUD: Listen up, and try to understand. I think that you Tanu and my own people and even Papa now share a common nemesis. We may all have to cooperate if we want to survive much longer.
KUHAL: Aiken Drum?
CLOUD: Aiken should have died. He didn’t. It almost seemed as though Felice siphoned the bulk of that psychoenergy away from Aiken herself at the last minute. God knows how or why. She’s dead. But Aiken’s very much alive, and only a little wonky, and by now he’s figured out that Papa was out lo screw him. He’s in a position to do some heavy mindwork himself now, thanks to Papa’s gift of the metaconcert program. It won’t be hard for him to adapt it to safe use. When he dismantles the mental booby traps, he’ll go after your brother Nodonn and his faction—and when your brains are barbecued he’ll turn his attention to Papa.
KUHAL: Or you.
CLOUD: All my people and I want is to go to the Milieu. You’d lose nothing by helping us. And we have a lot to offer you.
KUHAL: You have already given of yourself to me.
CLOUD: Mutual, if you like. I’m nearly healed—and three times faster than a tank could do the job in our Ocala infirmary.
KUHAL: I had thought Boduragol’s suggestion to be futile. The loss of my twin brother seemed an irreparable calamity. Our biotechnology of the Skin holds out scant chance of regenerating an entire brain hemisphere. And yet we see what is happening.
CLOUD: A novel adaptation, certainly. In human medicine, the left brain has very often been successful in teaming to assume right-brain ftinctions, and vice versa.
KUHAL: Perhaps what you have done is teach me to be human.
CLOUD: You need more work. But that can be arranged.
Boduragol opened his eyes and smiled. The duet of PK and redactive force flowing between the two patients was supremely harmonious. He really wasn’t needed any longer. He slipped down off his stool and went to the two motionless bodies, the man torced in gold, the woman crowned with heavy braids of lustrous reddish-yellow hair.