The Firvulag royal enclosure was deep in a nimbus of scarlet anguish. Its dense cluster of supporting mentalities pulsed in irregular rhythm, slowing and then quickening, and flaring up here and there in nervous coruscations of vermilion and angry white. The Firvulag astral arm was much larger than that of the Tanu, but its color shone dull carmine.
"The Little People falter," Katlinel observed to her husband. Her face was troubled, in contrast to the jubilant Howler subjects that capered about.
Sugoll said, "It is as we expected. Having lost the initial advantage when Aiken phased in his unexpected subsumed faculties, they are on the verge of panic. The pain unnervesthem and metaconcert is still too unfamiliar a discipline for them to have confidence in their superior potential ... Hark! Can you hear the desperate confabulation taking place on the racial submode? They fear they are done for. But Queen Ayfa proposes a bold plan. She will take half the linkage and transfer to the Tanu bracelet and push, while Sham's force continues to pull."
"Firvulag have ever been dubious about following female generals," Katlinel remarked. "I wonder—"
The spectators screeched. The Firvulag astral arm split suddenly into two. But the Tanu responded with violent, wrenching tugs that had the Firvulag bracelet sliding to withina bare half meter of the golden serpent's shining amethyst fangs. The secondary Firvulag arm groped impotently for the base of the Tanu bracelet.
"The blunderers!" Sugoll cried. "The increase in the pain burden causes them to lose heart. Many of Queen Ayfa's force desert her, rushing to help Sharn pull the black serpent's tail away from the rival's punishing jaws! The Queen's ploy is ruined. She retires in disorder."
The second astral arm commanded by luckless Ayfa petered away into falling sparks and the Queen hastened to reestablish the mind-link with her consort. All over the Firvulag grandstand, gnomish minds were giving up the struggle. Tiny red embers winked out as people climbed to their feet and resigned.
Aiken and his team made a flooding sunburst. With a last mighty movement, the golden arm pulled the tail of the black serpent through the Tanu worm's jaws. The dark-jeweled bracelet disappeared behind glittering purple fangs. A final enormous bow of lightning haloed the twin serpentine bodies. Then the black snake seemed to catch fire, devoured in yellow flames. Its head withdrew into the mountain. Its twisted body writhed, disentangling itself from its victorious antagonist. The burning black snake fell to ashes and only a golden circle was left, poised on the artificial mountain base like some huge, upstanding Tanu tore.
***
"Your people will need some hours to recover their strength," Marc said to Sharn and Ayfa. "We can use it productively. My metaconcert program will not be too difficult for you to assimilate if you both subordinate yourselves to my coercive function and let me force-feed the data."
"Submit to you?" Sharn exclaimed in horror. "I knew it! You intend to enslave us!"
"What good even the Nightfall victory," Ayfa wept, "if in the end, the Adversary rulesover all?"
"Fools," said Abaddon. "Haven't I told you that I have no interest in this miserable world? Once your minds help me to break into Castle Gateway, I'll set you free—and good riddance! No strings attached. You'll have my metaconcert program, the ability to exert firm control over the undisciplined brains of your rabble. And I'll have what I want ... secure on a world fourteen thousand light-years away from you. Now choose!"
The co-monarchs stared numbly at the dark armored mass that lurked at the back of the now-deserted royal enclosure. The thing's inhuman mind opened to them, showing a tantalizing glimpse of complexity, beckoning.
Together, they passed into the abyss.
13
IT WAS past 0400. Only Cloud's redactive faculty now sustained Tony Wayland as he made continuous manual adjustments to the faulty cladding device that spun gossamer-fine niobium-dysprosium wire.
"You're doing fine, Tony," Cloud said. "Only another five hundred meters to go. You can do it—"
The cladder's spec-variance alarm went off. He croaked, "God—not again!"
Respool. Cut off the strand at the slub and clear the aperture. Make microscopic adjustments to the fouled vaporizing chamber. Smear more balsam sealant on the leaking nipple gasket.
"Work, damn you, work!" he shouted. The watchers standing about the messy cubicle in the Castle Gateway cloister had blank faces and barricaded minds. Cloud. The thunder-browed redskin, Chief Burke. Kuhal Earthshaker. The incompetent amateur engineer, Chee-Wu Chan, whose screw-up had produced the faulty batch of wire in the first place. "Work!"
Finger the restart. Set tolerance: ±0.005/11. Feed. Go.'
He moaned, "Now stay there, you perishing fucker." Cloud caressed his fatigue-poisonedsenses. A vision of sweet Rowane seemed to float just beyond the laboring machine, slender scaled arms outstretched, single eye weeping tender tears.
Chee-Wu caught a fresh bobbin as the machine spat it out, and rushed it away to the core-spinning team. Hagen Remillard stuck his head into the cubicle and said to his sister,"Aiken's deep-sight has spotted an anomaly just outside the castle, standing on the old time-gate site. Impermeable, two hundred thirty cents high, mass congruent with Papa's CE rig."
"We can't hurry this," Cloud said. "Go flog the other workers."
"We're going to stack all the small sigmas that the King brought with him around the inner ward," Hagen said, "get everybody under the umbrella up next to the Guderian device and the fix-it benches. We'll activate just as soon as you finish the last spool of wire. With luck, there'll be enough time left to complete the last cable repair."
Tony gave a manic chuckle. "Some hope! You have Jonah himself jinxing your escape, kid! Disaster tracks old Tony Wayland like hyenas trailing a wounded buck. You're not going to get away from your father. None of us have a chance! The black Night's closing in and the demon horde is ready to strike—"
The cladder ejected the final spool of wire.
"Grab Tony!" Hagen told Kuhal Earthshaker. "Everybody out into the courtyard!"
***
"We'll try a psychocreative shield," Aiken told the crowd gathered about the gazebo platform. "It might give us a last-second edge after he cracks the big dome and the improvised sigma-stack. But I can't go the limit defending the time-gate. The war that's coming up has to be my first priority. You understand that, don't you?"
Hagen and Cloud gave simultaneous mental assent. They stood, together with Kuhal Earthshaker and Diane Manion, inside the gazebo of the Guderian device. Every person in the silent assembly knew that once Marc Remillard's children were beyond his reach, the battle would be over. But if Hagen and Cloud failed to escape...
Elizabeth said to them: You have fully assimilated the extremity defense?
Cloud said: Yes. And we'll use it. Papa won't take us alive.
Hagen said: I wish there was some way we could destroy our bodies!
Aiken said: He'll be able to stop that—if it reaches that point. I'm sorry. Elizabeth's snuff sequence is your last bastion.
Kuhal and Diane said: And we are in tandem.
Elizabeth said: Fortunate ones. In the Milieu such consolation would be refused for the greater good of the Unity.
Anatoly said, "And rightly! Poor children. But God understands lovers and forgives. Those who refuse to love are another matter."
Elizabeth cried: How can you hear us? How dare you?
"He hears through my mind's ear," replied the King. And he said to her on the intimatemode: Death is not the children's last defender Elizabeth. You are.
***
Outside the castle the armored shape stood ready in starless dark. Its body was set aside, suspended from life-process in refrigerated stasis. Its brain blazed as the needle electrodes charged it with energies too great for unsupported flesh and blood to bear. It was fully empowered in the aggressive psychocreative faculty. Far away in Nionel, the obedient cells of the Organic Mind, 80,000 strong, awaited its command.
It struck the dome of force capping Cas
tle Gateway. The great sigma-field drained awayinto bedrock via a hundred metapsychic grounding channels. There was a profound roaring noise and the earth heaved. As the low-hanging clouds reflected the blue-white corona of the conquering Adversary, Castle Gateway rocked, broken by the tremors that shook the plateau, and crumbled slowly into piles of rubble. At its heart was a lesser silver hemisphere, steadfast in the midst of destruction.
The incandescent brain laughed as it transposed its energies to the d-jumping functionand teleported into the dusty ruins. Then it struck again, hammering the stacked lesser sigmas and the internal meta-psychic shield generated by the King. The shelter attenuated like frost melting from a windowpane.
The brain perceived the two familiar minds, caught them as they hovered on the brink, forestalling their suicide, claiming them.
Now, it cried. Now!
The armored black form gave way to the body of a living man. Dismissing both his Firvulag minions and the artificial energies of the enhancer, he stood on the platform in front of the Guderian device, looking at his paralyzed son and daughter. One side of his mouth was lifted in a gentle smile. Then he turned to Elizabeth. She knelt on cracked flagstones next to the control console, surrounded on three sides by motionless workers. Aiken lay unconscious in front of her.
"As you see," Marc said, "I've won. You knew I would."
Elizabeth lifted the King's head and smoothed his disheveled hair. "Another ten or fifteen seconds and they would have been gone. The machine is ready. If only Aiken had let me operate the controls." She was very calm. "I should plead with you, Marc."
"Open to me instead."
Her eyes widened. He only nodded. Aiken's heart beat again and the currents in his brain had the steady cycle of dreamless sleep. She kissed his brow and laid him softly on the stones. Then she stood facing Marc. "Very well."
Her mental walls dissolved. There was no fear, no submission, only a passage of free entry and a dropping of a fiery mask.
Marc said only, "Ah." He stepped to the control console over Aiken's body, activated the tau-generator, and sent the four people inside the gazebo through the gray limbo, into Madame Guderian's rose garden in the hills above Lyon, in the France of the Galactic Milieu.
***
Dawn came to the Field of Gold, and the squad of Howler referees staggered as they held up the huge leather ball filled with sand. It was white with black markings, and in thefitful overcast of the lurid sunrise it looked like a misshapen skull all smeared with blood.
The Marshal of Sport intoned: "Grand Tourney contestants! This event, called variouslyhurley or shinty, marks the culmination of this first year's games. As you know, the winner in this contest will also be proclaimed victorious in the Tourney as a whole, and be awarded the Singing Stone. The game will be fought in a single ten-hour match, beginning as the sun lifts above the horizon and concluding as it sets. The playing ground is the entire Field of Gold, sixteen square kilometers. The Firvulag own the north goalposts and the Tanu own the south. Both physical and metapsychic prowess may be employed, but no weapons. The team with the greatest number of goals wins. There are no other rules or restraints ... Now let the team captains salute their noble opponents."
A bedlam of cheering greeted Sharn and Ayfa, marching out to the face-off circle at the head of their phalanx of stalwarts. Then the Tanu Great Ones sallied forth—leaderless.
Heymdol Buccinator proclaimed: "Inasmuch as King Aiken-Lugonn is presently unable to take the field, the Tanu team will be captained by Bleyn the Champion."
Groans arose from the human and Howler spectators and delighted catcalls from the ebonhost of Little People, who now rushed helter-skelter onto the sandy expanse in front of the grandstands like a swarm of glossy black beetles. Suddenly there was a flash of amber light and an earsplitting sonic boom that made the ground tremble. A flyer emblazoned with an open hand hovered above the Rainbow Bridge. From its open belly hatch plummeted a sizzling little golden comet.
Bleyn said: "I gladly yield the captaincy of the Tanu team to King Aiken-Lugonn!" And the mind-shouts of the humans and mutants drowned out the Firvulag's furious hoots.
Landing, Aiken strutted to the face-off circle and raised the visor of his golden helmet. "Morning, Ayfa. Morning, Sharn. Ready for our little bash?"
"You should be dead!" they cried.
The Shining One lifted his bejeweled pauldrons in a rueful gesture. "The Adversary hadother games to play. Are you two ready to get on with this one?"
The ogrish mates grinned then, showing white pointed tusks. Sharn remarked, "So Remillard's gone, eh? Well, he left us a nice souvenir that we'll take great pleasure in demonstrating to you."
"You might call it a winning game plan," Ayfa added. "And you're going to be quite impressed with the postgame festivities, too!"
Aiken held up one plated finger. "Let me make just one little announcement." And his mind-voice rolled and echoed over the Field of Gold, silencing the tumultuous audience andthe impatient teams.
I speak to the humans, Aiken said, and to those other persons of goodwill who seek to live in a world of peace. The time-gate leading to the Galactic Milieu is now open.
Sensation! Sharn and Ayfa gaped at each other, thunderstruck.
All throughout this Fifth Day of the Grand Tourney my aircraft will shuttle back and forth between here and the time-gate site. They will transport any who wishto go. You may take with you only what can be carried in one arm and nothing that belongsto Me. I myself intend to stay and rule this Many-Colored Land as High King after seatingMyself in triumph upon the Singing Stone at the end of today's play. I invite those who love this place to stay also.
"Lowlife!" Sharn raged. "Upstart jackanapes!" screeched Ayfa.
The titanic ball rose into the air, impelled by the psychokinesis of Sugoll, Katlinel,and the Howlers. When it reached an altitude of about forty meters, the Marshal of Sport commanded: "Play ball!"
Crash! The heavy spheroid fell to earth. The opposing teams surged forward, the audience shrieked, and the final contest of the Grand Tourney began.
***
Ten persons per trip, twenty trips per hour.
After the young North Americans had been translated, and those of the Guderian Project who wanted to return to the Milieu, the time-gate exodus settled down into a fairly routine operation, organized and supervised by Chief Burke, Basil, and those of the Bastards who weren't doing pilot shuttle duty. The commandant of the Roniah garrison, a cheerful little Walloon PK-head named LeCocq, helped maintain order with a small force of loyal grays.
Tony Wayland was caught trying to sneak off to Nionel on a returning aircraft. Burke frogmarched him back to the gazebo and gave him into the charge of an armed guard, with orders that Tony was to stay with the skeleton staff of gazebo technicians who had agreed to stand by in case the apparatus broke down again.
"But the King promised I could go to my wife!" Tony protested.
Burke picked him up by the scruff and dangled him nose to nose. "I still remember the Vale of Hyenas, White Eyes, and for two bits I'd give you a round trip in that time-machine and use your ashes to polish my tomahawk! Now sit there with the others and wait, dammit!"
Tony waited.
That first morning, the aircraft coming from Nionel were only half-full, carrying onlythe most homesick of the Pliocene exiles, those who had yearned for years to return to Elder Earth. As long as King Aiken-Lugonn and the Tanu put up a good scrap in the hurley-hurley, there seemed no need to rush into making the big decision.
Then, some time early in the afternoon, Sharn and Ayfa finally sorted out the fine points of Marc Remillard's metaconcert program and began to use it efficiently. Not only didthe Firvulag come up from behind in the scoring, but they began to inflict serious injuryupon members of the Tanu team, singling out stalwarts such as Celadeyr of Afaliah, Lomnovel Brainburner, and Parthol Swiftfoot, who had been especially skilled ball carriers. Thethree were savagely red-dogged and had to be retired to Skin. r />
With the tide of fortune turning toward the Little People, the mood of the human spectators darkened. They recalled the rumors of impending war—no mere brushfire action such as had taken place at Burask and Bardelask, but a conflict that might involve the entire continent. Pondering their somber options, the Lowlives watched rampaging waves of Tanu and Firvulag surge about the devastated turf of the Tourney field like a living maelstrom. Nightmare illusions were everywhere. The aether throbbed with a hellish din. Mind-bolts, nauseating psychic eructations, and quasi-material missiles were flung in all directions. Frenzied ogres sought to tear their outnumbered Tanu opponents to pieces. Herds ofstampeding dwarves stomped fallen forced humans into the bloody dust. Tanu redactors and the scuttling little cadres of Firvulag nurses could scarcely haul away the injured without being mortally endangered themselves.
The tally of Firvulag goals mounted more and more rapidly. By 1400 hours the Little People led 50—33. An hour later their lead had increased to 87-36. The sky grew ever more lowering and oppressive, charged with noxious positive ions, ozone, and a distinct odor of sulfur in addition to the hash of sinister vibes.
Fresh rumors flew about the thinning crowd of spectators: Mont-Dore was erupting! (Butonly in a minor fashion.) Thunderstorms had ignited grassfires on the tinder-dry prairiesto the west! (But the nearest conflagration was twenty kloms away.) The time-warper was running out of steam! (Bullshit. The thing drew most of its energy from telluric currents in the planetary crust itself. Its power-drain would be very low.) King Aiken-Lugonn was ready to throw in the towel! (Oh, yes? Well, there were still forty-five minutes left to play—and anything could happen when the Shining One was part of the fracas!)
***
AIKEN: Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH: Yes, dear.
AIKEN: Gads! I'm surprised to find you still here, babe ... You decided not to waft away after all?
ELIZABETH: Marc and I are discussing things.