Up in the royal box, Lord Greg-Donnet hung over the rail cheering and scattering crumbs of egg yolk. "Good boy! Good lad! Well done!" He turned to the Craftsmaster, who watched the ceremony below with stony restraint. "Now we know that the lad is brave as well as talented in the metafunctions. Perhaps Mayvar wasn't quite so out of line as we feared, eh, Aluteyn?"
"Stop talking like an ass, Greggy. There's the Shape of Fire. The kid hasn't a chance of taking him."
Greg-Donnet chortled. "You think not? The bookies are giving three hundred to one on him. Or they were, before he polished off the dragon. Can I interest you in a side bet at those odds?"
Down in the arena, Mayvar was embracing her protégé. The King and the Battlemaster mounted the stairs to the box, looking unaccountably grim.
"A bet?" Aluteyn Craftsmaster was startled, then thoughtful. "Oh, no, Greggy. I don't think so. In no way."
"I was afraid of that," sighed the madman. He reached for another egg.
11
THE TRIMARAN flew westward beneath the outthrusting arm of Aven, skimming the shallow salt lagoon by virtue of the metapsychic gale Mercy had whistled up when Bryan protested that the day was too calm for sailing.
For what seemed like hours they took turns at the helm. She sang the oddly familiar Tanu Song, and the red-and-white sail bellied before them, hiding the distant mainland and the snow-crowned eastern end of the Betic Cordillera.
So strange, he thought, exulting in the nearness of her and the speed and the sunshine. So strange to realize that this was Earth. The Dragon Range of Aven, which would one day become the heights of Mallorca, had its lower slopes dark with tame forests and meadows where hipparions and antelopes and mastodons ranged in royal preserves. Those tawny hills, half-shrouded now in haze to starboard, would in six million years be islands named Ibiza and Formentera. (But never again would he race a yacht through azure waves off Punta Roya, for the Pliocene waters were pale as milk, and so her wild sea-reflecting eyes.) So strange.
The peninsular mass of Balearis rose from thick deposition beds of salt and gypsum and other sediments that had been laid down during the numerous regressions and inundations of the Mediterranean Basin. Streams flowing southward from Aven carved the minerals into canyons and buttes, spires and hoodoos, striped with pastel colors and sparkling in faerie splendor ... and all of it would be gone without a trace by the time of the Galactic Milieu, drowned under unimaginable tons of water that would press the very bed of the sea two kilometers deeper and more, making abysses where now the Pliocene shallows glinted in the trimaran's wake. So strange.
After a long time the flats closed in around them and then folded into blinding gypsum dunes shimmering with mirages, among which weathered turrets of igneous rock poked up. There were hills and cliffs. The boat sailed up an eerie long fjord where whiteness gave way to purple and gray-blue, eroded slopes of ancient ash and volcanic scoria, broken cindercones lightly clothed in coniferous forest. The fjord was deep, the water now flowing from some western source. But Mercy's tame wind let them press on, breasting the current, until they emerged at last into an open expanse of saltmarsh, a green and living everglade that seemed to stretch on forever into the misted west.
"This is the Great Brackish Marsh," she told him. "A Spanish river pours in fresh water off the Betics, the high peaks we'll call the Sierra Nevada."
The diminished salinity of the marsh produced an environment much less inimical to life than the shores of the Mediterranean lagoons. Here grasses and sedges and mangroves throve in the shallows and there were many scattered islets with shrubs and hardwoods and swags of flowering vines. Gulls and gaudy pigeons wheeled overhead. Pink-and-black flamingos left off straining crustaceans from the pools and fled with honking cries when the invading trimaran glided by.
"We'll stop here," Mercy said. Her psychokinetic wind died away to the lightest of breezes. They hauled in the spinnaker and steered to a beautiful anchorage where a tall limestone outcropping crowned with laurel and tamarisk gave them shade from the sun.
"The Southern Lagoon proper ended when we came into the Long Fjord," she said. "This marsh stretches westward for another hundred and fifty kilometers or so, and beyond it are dry lakes and sand and alkali deserts all the way to the Gibraltar Isthmus. It's all far below sea level except for Alboran Volcano and a few smaller cones. Nothing lives in there but lizards and insects."
She coiled lines neatly. Leaving him to cope with the other sails, she went into the little cabin to get the basket with the lunch he had packed: a bottle of genuine Krug '03 from Muriah's black market, a wedge of the local cheddar equivalent, goose-liver sausage, sweet butter, a long loaf, and oranges. It had been too late in the season for black cherries.
"If only you'd waited for me back in the future," Bryan said, "we'd have eaten this off Ajaccio. I had it all planned. The cruise, the supper under the Corsican moon..."
"The obligatory lovemaking. Dear Bryan!" Her wild eyes had become opalescent.
"I wanted to marry you, Mercy. I loved you from the first time I saw you. I still love you. That's why I had to follow, even though it meant coming this far."
One of her hands reached toward him, touching his cheek. The breeze moved the heavy fall of auburn hair that was tied back with a narrow bandeau. She was not wearing exotic clothing but rather a simple sunsuit of green and white, cut in the style of their own era. Only the torc, gleaming in the V-neck of the halter, recalled to him the gulf that now separated Mercy from Rosmar.
What did that matter? What matter any of the changes—the intrigues of the exotics, the cynical entrusting of her to him by the Tanu lover as he departed on his preposterous Quest. Mercy was here with him and real. All the rest was a fantasy to be forgotten ... or at least postponed.
But change the earth or change the sky, yet will I love her—
"Have they made you happy?" he asked.
She cut bread with a glass knife and sliced the cheese. "Can't you tell, Bryan?"
"You're different. More alive. You never sang in our world."
"How did you know?"
He only smiled. "I'm glad you can sing here, Mercy."
"I never fit into the world we were born into. Don't laugh! There are more of us changelings than you might think! Misbegotten ones. Atavisms. No amount of counseling or brain chemical fiddling or deep-redact ever helped me to feel contented or satisfied. No man—forgive me if this hurts you!—no man ever gave me more than momentary comfort. I never knew a human being I could truly love."
He was pouring champagne. The words she spoke had no meaning and so they brought no pain. She was here with him. Nothing else mattered.
"It was the latencies, Bryan. I know that now. The people here have helped me to understand. All those strong metapsychic tensions locked away unused and unrealized. But pulling me—do you see? The operant metapsychics of the Milieu have their Unity, but there was none of that for me back on the Elder Earth. I belonged nowhere. Rested nowhere. Found peace nowhere ... I found a little solace in drugs, a little more in music, in my work with the medieval pageants in Ireland and in France. But it was really no good. I felt I was an outsider, a misfit. Just a bit of nonviable scum on our famous human gene pool."
"Mercy—" I would love you any way. Every way.
"None of that, now!" She laughed lightly and took the glass of bubbling wine from him. "You know quite well that I was a hopeless mess, banging about like a moth around a streetlight. I played my games at the château and found other lost ones to share my bed, and suffocated quite a bit of the pain in a fog of sinsemilla. An old-fashioned vice. You smoke it as a euphoric. I brought some cuttings with me to grow—never dreaming that here I'd have no need of it ever again. This place, these people, all of this is what I yearned for without knowing."
"All I wanted," he said, "was you. If you can't love me, all I want is your happiness." She put her fingers against his lips, then lifted her own champagne glass for him to drink from.
"My dear
. You are a rare man, darling Bryan. In your own way, perhaps as uncanny as I."
"I won't intrude on you if you're happy with him—"
"Hush! You don't understand how it is here. It's all new. A new world with new ways. A new life for you as well as for me. Who can say what might happen?"
He raised his eyes from the wineglass and met her wild glance, still not knowing what she was saying.
"Do you know what they've freed in me?" she cried. "What this golden torc has done? I've become a creator!...Not the kind who spins illusions or invents things or fashions works of art. A better kind! The highest of the Tanu creative ones are able to gather energy and channelize it. I can do that. Throw lightning, project beams of light, make things go hot or cold. But I can do other things as well—things no Tanu is capable of! I can take air and moisture and drifting dust and any old kind of rubbishy matter you can imagine and knead it and stir it and transform it into something all new! Look—just look!"
She sprang up, setting the boat to rocking, and reached toward the sky, a goddess summoning wind and mud and marshwater and cellulose and sugars and acids and esters from the grass. A flash of flame, an explosive report—
She held cherries.
Laughing, almost giddy, she let the black-red fruit dangle from her fingers. "I saw them in your mind! Your favorite fruit that you wanted to lavish on your true love! Well—here they are, to complete the picnic that we've had to postpone for so long. We'll have them together with the golden apples of the Hesperides!"
It was not real, he told himself. Only she was real in all this world. And so he was calm and smiling as she dropped the cherries onto a large napkin they had spread on the chart table. The fruit was cold; drops of condensation beaded the juicy heart shapes.
"I'm still learning to use the power, of course. And there's no guarantee I'll pass it along full-blown to the children, because these high faculties are unpredictable. But who knows? Perhaps some day I'll be able to manipulate the genes themselves! Nodonn thinks it's possible, although Gomnol and Greggy don't. But even without that, I'll do marvelous things. Miraculous things!"
"You always were a miracle," he said. (Alas the child whose child?)
"Ah, silly!" she exclaimed, pretending anger. "The Thagdal's, of course, as the first must always be. You know about our jus primae noctis. And does it matter to you?"
"All that matters is that I love you. I'll always love you, no matter what you are."
"And what do you think I am?" She looked into his mind and the anger that blazed out now was real. "I'm not Nodonn's concubine! I'm his wife. He's taken me and no other."
And sixteen Tanu women and four hundred human latents of high talent before you..."I don't care, Mercy. Stop reading me! I can't help the way the thoughts come. They have nothing to do with my love for you."
She turned away from him and looked out over the marsh. "He'll be king one day when the Thagdal's finished. When he feels he has the full support of the battle-company, he'll challenge the old man in spite of Mayvar and win in the Heroic Encounter. And I'll be his queen. None of his other women had metafunctions to match mine. The exotics were barren except for five who had daughters and died. The humans ... were beautiful and fertile but none of their talents are as fine as mine. They've all been discarded. I won't be. After I've borne this child for the Thagdal I'll have Nodonn's. Even if I can't manipulate the genes, I can learn to split the zygote with my psychokinesis and have twins, triplets even, just as easily as a single child. With the help of the Skin I'll have them safely and painlessly again and again and again. I could have hundreds! And live for thousands of years. What do you say to that?"
"If you want it, I wish it for you."
Her indignation melted as she saw how forlorn and hopeless he had become before the prospect of her apotheosis. He stood there, moving slightly to keep his balance as the boat rocked, and she came to him and put bare arms around his neck and let her softness rest against him.
"Bryan, Bryan, don't be sad. Didn't I tell you it was a new world? I can't promise to be yours alone, my dear, but you needn't fear I'll drive you away. Not if you'll be gentle and discreet. Not if you'll ... help me."
"Mercy!"
She closed his lips with her own. The warmth and brightness of her flooded suddenly over him, carrying far away the doubts and fearful promptings of logic. He kissed and shut her wild eyes and his own vision of the real world faded before her opening blaze. As their minds merged, so did their bodies, easily and perfectly as though angels were coupling instead of man and woman. He lifted and exalted her and she in accepting drew him even higher until each had consumed the other in a sunburst of joy.
"That's the way it is with us," she told him. "When mind and body are in sweet harmony it happens like this between lovers. And you're spoiled for the other kind forever."
"Yes," he agreed. "Yes."
"And you will help me?"
"Always. In any way."
"Remember your promise when you wake up, my dear. If you really love me. If you really want me to be happy. I have enemies, my dear. There are people who can hurt me, who can see to it that I never reach the thing I've been promised. You must help me. I'll show you how. I need you."
He heard himself say, "Only let me stay."
"Of course." Now the sun-flood gentled, became soft and dark as he was carried into the depths. "You'll stay with me and love me. As long as you can."
12
THE BODY in its translucent shroud lay in state upon a plinth of black glass in the great hall of Redact House.
These were the Great Ones of the High Table who came to pay homage: Queen Nontusvel, Eadone Sciencemaster, Dionket the Healer, Mayvar Kingmaker, Aluteyn Craftsmaster, Sebi-Gomnol the Lord Coercer, and Kuhal Earthshaker, a son of the Queen who was deputy to Nodonn and second among the psychokinetics. And others of the High Table included Imidol the Deputy Coercer; Riganone, second among farsensors; Culluket the King's Interrogator; and Anéar the Loving—all children of Nontusvel; and Katlinel the Darkeyed, half-human daughter of the deposed Lord Coercer Leyr. And those Great Ones absent on the Delbaeth Quest were Thagdal the High King, Nodonn Battlemaster, Tagan Lord of Swords, Bunone War-teacher, Fian Skybreaker, Alberonn Mindeater, and Bleyn the Champion.
The rulers of the Many-Colored Land looked upon the dead Anastasya Astaurova, linked minds, and sang the Song.
The caul clung tightly to her wide-open eyes, the arched nostrils, the clenched teeth visible through parted lips, the graceful neck with its golden torc. White as the salt and as cold were her splendid breasts and torso all beaded with tiny round bells, the belled legs and belled arms and ingenious surgeon's hands.
Mental speech, flickering and nuance-filled, passed among the assembled mourners with electric swiftness.
NONTUSVEL: Tasha-Bybar, farewell. So lovely to die, alas, thou strangest of Earth's gifts to us, never understood and never sated, in torment even after thy refashioning, dancing to find release in grotesque death.
DIONKET: A variation of her sabre dance with an unforeseen climax. Or was it?
GOMNOL: She was a genius! She should have been saved!
DIONKET: Teams of my redactors strove for three weeks to restore her within the Skin, but her mind was never able to cooperate. There were too many adverse factors: the massive trauma of the impalement, her longstanding unsanity—burned out as she was from our loving—the subconscious desire for obliteration. Even at best she was an insecure vessel of life-force, maladapted, unhelped by her transsexual conversion.
ALUTEYN: None other had her skill with the operation.
GOMNOL: No Tanu surgeon could equal her. No other human surgeon could/would do the great work she did.
EADONE: She was the opener of human wombs, the guarantor of our Tanu survival. Before her coming, our race dwelt precariously beneath this ferocious sun, multiplying slowly, so slowly. But she showed us a way to conquer our biological limitations, to burst forth in an explosion of life that has given
us mastery of the planet. Praise to the departed Tasha-Bybar for having saved us!
ALUTEYN + GOMNOL: Praise.
MAYVAR: Given time, we could have saved ourselves.
EADONE: With the rama surrogates? Hardly!
ALUTEYN: Even now, Venerable Sister, the Firvulag outnumber us four to one.
MAYVAR: Nevertheless, what I say is true.
NONTUSVEL: Listen to Mayvar. She tells the truth, although her vision of it may differ from that of my Host. Oh, yes ... we can and will survive of ourselves. As to how, I point in humility to the fruit of my own womb, the children of the Thagdal and Nontusvel: strong men and women, of the pure Tanu strain without human admixture, sitting at our High Table, leaders within our Guilds. They are the true salvation of our race! These children—my Host—and their own offspring are living proof of Tanu viability here on Earth, our guarantee of racial continuity. I will not deprecate the good work of Bybar nor the contributions of our other human benefactors. But let it be noted that the Tanu are survival-fit even without the mingling of human genes! The Host of Nontusvel, two hundred and forty-two strong, has proved fully adapted to life on this planet.
KUHAL + IMIDOL + RIGANONE + CULLUKET + ANÉAR: Let the Queen-Dam's words be noted. It is in our Host that true survival resides!
EADONE: Your offspring's reproductive rate is still far below the optimum, Queen and Sister. But we may concede that your strain is the strongest among fullbreeds.
GOMNOL: You still can't deny that human genes saved the Tanu genetic bacon! In the sixty or so years of interspecific mating the Tanu population growth rate has increased tenfold. And the hybrids include most of your best fighters, your top creative people, and a majority of the coercers.
CULLUKET: Nevertheless, we now question the wisdom of continued dilution of our heritage.
IMIDOL: And above all, Coercive Brother, we question your scheme concerning the human operant, Elizabeth.