The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (31 page)

Leaving them to their bickering, Bryan and a strangely subdued Aiken Drum went out to the balcony. The promised supper had enough food for a dozen people; but all of it was cold and bore evidences of hasty preparation. Aiken picked up the leg of a roast fowl and took an uninterested bite, meanwhile inspecting the security arrangements of the balcony. It was completely enclosed in a cage of ornamental brass grill-work.

"I won't be flying out of here very quickly, will I? I suppose I could saw through the ban with one of the little vitredur gizmos I have in my pockets. But it hardly seems worthwhile trying to escape. They've got me so curious about the Tanu good life that running away seems stupid."

"I believe that's the attitude you're supposed to form," Bryan said. "You were allowed to taste just enough of your new powers to want a whole lot more. Now they've taken your metafunctions away unI'll you submit to their training regimen down in the capital and they make you into a good little copy of themselves."

"So you think that'll happen, do you?" Aiken's golliwog grin was as wide as ever, but his black button eyes held an ugly glitter. "You don't know a fewkin' thing about me and the way my mind works. As for the metabilities, you're only a normal. You've never tasted the powers and you never will, so don't give me any of your high-ass professor's predictions about the way I'm going to behave!" "They've got you collared and liking it," Bryan said mildly. Aiken touched the silver neck-ring with a dismissive flick. 'This thing! It's only put a clamp on my metafunctions. The clamp is effective now because I haven't figured how to turn it off. But I'm working on it. You think they've got me under control? What Creyn did at the very beginning was program this inhibitory thing on us. There's this little nagger in the skull that hints at horrible things happening to us if we try to escape or do anything to threaten the peace and good order of our wonderful Tanu friends. You know how much that inhibition is worth, influencing me? It isn't worth shit. Little Sukey and dumbo Ray in there are safe, but not Aiken Drum."

"The torcs... have you discovered how the different kinds work?"

"Not the details, but enough. One of the Tanu women at the Roniah party spilled a lot when I put it to her nicely. The gold torcs are the basic article, the mental amplifiers that turn latents into operants. They're stuffed with barium chips all latticed with microscopic amounts of rare earths and bits of other junk that these jokers brought with them from their home galaxy. They handcraft the torcs and have a machine to grow and print the chips. They hardly understand how the machine functions, and most of 'em know even less about the theory behind the torcs themselves, the whole metapsychic thing. The technology of it is handled down in the capital city by some outfit called the Coercer Guild."

"Do the golden torcs have differing powers of, uh, magnification? "

"They're all exactly the same. And all they magnify is what the individual's got. If a guy's got one weakie ability latent, he becomes an operant weakie. If he's loaded with all five metafunctions in wholesale lots, he becomes operant as the Wizard of Oz. Most of the Tanu are fairly strong in just one metafunction and they tend to club up with others of the same type. The folks who have several strong powers are the real aristocrats. Just what you'd expect. It's the same sort of setup that you get in the Milieu, only on a pipsqueak scale, with everyone pretty much out for what he can get. Near as I can tell so far, there are no master class metas here and nothing like the Milieu's psycho-union."

Bryan slowly nodded. "I'd already sensed a lack of hierarchy among these people. I wouldn't be surprised to find them still at the clan level of socialization. Fascinating, and almost unprecedented, given the high-culture trappings."

"They're barbarians," Aiken stated flatly. "That's one of the things I like about 'em! And they're not too proud to let us human latents join right in..."

"With silver torcs."

Aiken gave a short laugh. "Yeah. These silver collars have all the mind-expanding functions of the gold, plus control circuits. The gray torcs and the small collars of the monkeys have nothing but controls, plus a bunch of pleasure-pain circuits and a telepathic communication thing that varies a lot in its range."

Bryan peered over the edge of the balcony. "Can you get any mental clues as to what's going on around here? Quite a few alarums and excursions down there. I'm getting very curious about the Firvulag by now."

"Funny thing about those severed heads the Hunt brought in." Aiken frowned. "They weren't quite dead, some of them! And after a while they started to, how can I say it?, flicker. The Hunters took them away, so we never really got a good look at them. But there was something subliminal about the whole scene. "Sukey and Raimo chose that moment to come out in search of dinner. Aiken asked them, "You guys hear anything? With your minds? I've tried, but this damn lock Creyn put on me screens out all but whispers."

Sukey closed her eyes and put her fingers in her ears. Raimo just stood there with his mouth open, finally saying, "Hell, all I hear is my stomach rumbling. Lemme at that food."

After a few minutes had passed with Aiken and Bryan watching her patiently, Sukey opened her eyes. "I get... eagerness. From a lot of mental sources that seem to be different. Broadcasting on another wavelength from humans. Even different from Tanu. I can tune them in, but it's hard. Do you understand what I mean?"

"We understand, kiddo," Aiken said.

Sukey glanced from him to Bryan anxiously. "What do you suppose it could be?"

"Nothing to bother us, I'm sure," Bryan said.

Sukey murmured something about wanting to sit with Stein and took a plate of fruit and cold meat inside. Bryan was satisfied with a roughly made sandwich and a mug of some cider-like beverage. He stood looking over twilit Darask. In the east, the monstrous rampart of the Maritime Alps still reflected glaring sunset-pink on the highest snowfields. Extraordinary, Bryan thought. The mountains looked to be as high as the spine of the Himalaya or even the Hlithskjalf Massif on Asgard. A cool wind was coming down from the heights, spreading across the everglade flats where the Rhone finally relaxed and spread wide after its precipitate plunge from the region around unborn Lyon.

The day's journey had been something like descending a series of vast canyoned steps. They would sail peacefully for thirty or forty kilometers, then encounter savage rapids that would chute them to the next lower level at jetboat velocity. Despite Skipper Highjohn's reassurances, Bryan felt that he had survived the ordeal of a lifetime. The last stretch of rapids, occurring, as he had suspected, in the gorge area about fifty kloms above the future Pont d'Avignon, had been formidable beyond belief. The prolongation of terror had blunted his senses to the point of stupor. Aiken Drum had begged Creyn not to put him to sleep for that last rough ride, being eager for some taste of the thrills that Bryan had described. When the boat had tumbled end over end down the face of the final great cataract and fetched up in the placid Lac Provencal, Aiken's face had turned to gray-green and his bright eyes were sunken in shock.

"A fewkin' flea ride," he had moaned, "In a fewkin' food blender!"

By the time they reached Darask on the Lower Rhone, they had journeyed nearly 270 kilometers in less than ten hours. The shallowing river twined and split and braided itself into scores of channels divided by rippling grasslands and mudflats inhabited by flocks of long-legged birds and cream-and-blaek checkered crocodiles. Here and here islands rose from the marshy plain. Darask crowned one of them looking for all the world like a tropical Mont-Saint-Michel towering above a sea of grass. Their boat had used its auxiliary engine to move out of the mainstream of the Rhone into a secondary channel leading to the fortified town. Darask had a small quay secured behind a limestone wall more than twelve meters high that butted against unscalable cliffs.

And now, in the town beneath the high-rising palace, ramas were lighting the small night-lamps, clambering up spindly ladders to tend those on brackets along the house roofs, working pulleys to raise long strings of lanterns up the face of the inner fortifications. Human soldiers touched off larger torches on the bastions of the town's perimeter. As Bryan and the others surveyed the scene, the peculiar Tanu-style illumination sprang into operation, outlining the spired palace in dots of red and amber that symbolized the heraldic colors of its psychokinetic lord, Cranovel.

Aiken inspected the Tanu lamps along their own balcony. They were of sturdy faceted glass resting in small niches in the stone, without wires or any other metallic attachments. They were cold.

"Bioluminescence," the little man in gold decided, shaking one. "You want to bet there are microorganisms in here? What did Creyn say, that the lights were energized by surplus meta emanations? That figures. You get some of the lower echelon torc wearers to generate a suitable waveform while they're playing checkers or drinking beer or reading in the bathtub or performing some other semi-automatic..."

Bryan was paying scant attention to Aiken's speculations. Out in the surrounding marshland, the ignes fatui were lighting their own lamps, wispy blobs of methane blue, firefly glimmerings that winked on and off in scattered synchrony, wandering pale flames gliding around the island's misty backwaters like lost elfin boats.

"I suppose those are glowing insects or marsh-gas flames out there," Sukey said, coming up behind Bryan to stare into the darkening landscape.

Raimo said, "Now I hear something. But not with any meta-faculty. You guys catching it?"

They listened. Sukey pursed her lips in exasperation. "Frogs!"

An almost inaudible trill was building up on the breeze, swelling and finally fracturing into a complex treble chord of tinkles and peeps. An invisible batrachian maestro lowered his baton and more voices chimed in, gulps and grunts, rattling snares, pops and clicks, tunking notes as of hollow canes. Additional frog voices contributed their simulations of slowly dripping water, plucked strings, human glottal trill, buzzing drill bits, amplified guitar notes; and underriding it all was the homely jug-o'-rum of the common bullfrog, that durable Earth creature that would, in only six million years, accompany mankind on its colonization of the far-flung stars.

The four people on the balcony looked at one another and burst into laughter.

"We've got a front-row seat," Aiken said, "in case there's any Firvulag invasion. And this blue pitcher is full of something that's cool and definitely alcoholic. Shall we pull up chairs and fortify ourselves just in case the monsters arrive on schedule?"

"All in favor?" Bryan demanded.

"Aye!"

They held out their mugs and the little man in gold filled them, one by one.

Elizabeth pressed the back of her hand to her clammy forehead. Her eyes opened and she exhaled a long, slow breath. Creyn and a haggard Tanu man in a rumpled yellow robe bent anxiously over her chair. Creyn's mind touched hers, supporting, querying.

Yes. I have separated them. Finally. Sorry so weak my skill rusty disuse. They will be born now.

The mind of Lord Cranovel of Darask wept gratitude. And she? Safe oh safe my darling?

Human women tougher than Tanu. She recovers easily now.

He cried aloud, "Estella-Sirone!" and ran to the inner chamber.

In a few moments the querulous wail of a newborn infant came to the two who still waited. Elizabeth smiled at Creyn. The first grayness of dawn lightened the mist outside the palace windows.

Elizabeth said, "I've never handled anything quite like that before. The two unborn minds so intertwined, so mutually antagonistic. Fraternal twins, of course. But it seems incredible that genuine enmity should have been able to..."

A Tanu woman dressed all in red put her head through the curtained doorway and exclaimed, "A lovely girl! The next one is a breech, but we'll get it safely, never fear." She disappeared again.

Elizabeth got up from the chair and walked wearily to the window, letting her mind reach out beyond the birthing rooms for the first time since she had entered so many hours ago. The anomalies were outside, crowding closer and stumbling over one another in horrid eagerness, those twittering little unhuman minds, seemingly operant, changing their soul form even as she tried to grasp them for examination. They eluded her, wove disguises, faded and flared, shrunk to atoms or expanded into looming monsters that postured in the mental-physical fog swirling about the towers of the island palace.

Another baby cried.

Pierced by a terrible realization, Elizabeth's mind met that of Creyn. A slow-distilling drop of regret formed from a complex of the man's emotions. Then he slammed down an impervious screen between them.

Elizabeth ran to the door of the inner chamber and pushed the draperies aside. Several women, both human and Tanu, were attendant upon the new mother, a human wearing a golden torc. Estella-Sirone was smiling; the beautiful baby girl held to her right breast Cranovel knelt beside her, wiping her brow.

The Tanu nurse in red brought the other baby to show to Elizabeth. It was a very small boy, weighing about two kilos, wizened as an old man and with an oversized head thickly covered with wet dark hair. Its eyes were wide open and it screeched thinly from a mouth that had a full set of tiny sharp teeth. Even as Elizabeth watched, the manikin shimmered and became furry all over its body, then shimmered again and turned to a virtual double of its plump blonde sister.

"It is a Firvulag, a shape-changer," the nurse said. "They are the shadow-brethren of the Tanu from the foundation of worlds. Ever with us, ever against us. The twin situation is fortunately rare. Most such die unborn, and the mother with them."

"What will you do with him?" Elizabeth asked. Fascinated, horrified, she sounded the small alien mentality and recognized the anomalous mode, now that it was fully separated from the more complex psychic structure of the Tanu sister.

The tall nurse shrugged "His folk are awaiting him. And so we give him to them, as always. You would like to see it?"