Golden Torc - 2 (3 page)

Elizabeth felt as though she were the only mature adult cast away in a world of children, and malicious children at that, who would seek to use her. This must not be permitted. Elizabeth was roused from her reverie of despair by the necessity of rescuing Sukey. This young woman, who also had redactive power, had gone snooping into the mind of unconscious Stein. Discovering his longstanding psychic hurts, Sukey tried inexpertly to drain them. Only Elizabeth's intervention prevented the deeply traumatized Viking from crushing his would-be healer into imbecility. Temporarily postponing noninvolvement, Elizabeth began to teach Sukey proper techniques so that she would not harm herself or the man she was growing to love. Before the trip south concluded, Sukey was able to bring Stein genuine relief from mental dysfunctions that had plagued him from childhood. Stein in turn reached out and pledged himself to her. Their two minds, operating on the most intimate telepathic level of his gray, and her silver, torc, took each other for husband and wife. Such a union, Creyn had warned, was forbidden to silver-torc women on pain of death; but the lovers hid their secret well. No one knew the truth but Elizabeth.

The madcap Aiken Drum's reaction to his new mind-power and the dazzling splendor of the Many-Colored Land was profoundly different. He gloried in both. In Roniah, he was the star of a rowdy debauch and the darling of insatiable Tanu women. Later, he and his new crony, Raimo, assumed the illusory forms of butterflies and took an impromptu tour of the riverside city. This ended with the partial destruction of the Roniah dock as part of a metapsychic practical joke. Creyn programmed what he thought was a firm curb upon the trickster's metafunctions. However, as the journey lengthened, it became evident that Aiken, self-confessed Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, mechanical genius, recidivist delinquent, charmer, wearer of a golden suit with a hundred pockets, was something far out of the ordinary run of latent metapsychic. The mental powers that had been chained in his skull for twentyone years of misspent youth were of incredible potential. Elizabeth saw this clearly, and so, to a more limited extent, did Creyn.

The boat carrying the travelers plunged over a torrential slope, la Glissade Formidable, into the prehistoric Mediterranean Basin. Sailing over shallow lagoons, it approached the Tanu capital, Muriah, which lay at the tip of the Balearic Peninsula. Most of the human passengers were increasingly anxious as the voyage neared its end; but not Aiken Drum. His silver torc, instead of merely freeing his metafunctions, had acted as a trigger to a psychic avalanche. Control circuits that had easily held normal human minds in thrall burned out before Aiken's mental blaze; and his powers, unlike the gentle ones of Elizabeth, were fully oriented toward aggression. Behind the grinning face of the young man in the shining golden suit was a personality that might, in time, seek to dominate not only the exotic races of Pliocene Earth, but humanity as well. Now begin Volume 2, which follows Aiken, Elizabeth, Stein, and Bryan on the sixth day after their passage through the time-gate into the world of Pliocene Earth.

1

THE DRAGONFLY HOVERED, A GOLDEN SPARK, JUST ABOVE THE bare mast of the motionless boat.

As the first breezes broke the water with cat's paw dimpling, the dragonfly darted off. He zoomed powerfully into the sky and hovered once again. The boat below him was now transformed into a lonely speck amid a pastel expanse of shallow lagoons and saltflats, all blurred in pearly mist. Higher! His shape-shifted wings lofted him into the dawn. Keen compound eyes that covered most of his head showed him the continental slope's dark rampart along the northern horizon: the brink of Europe punctuated by a single towering cloud that marked the cascade of the Rhone River, pouring down a vast slope of sediment into the nearly waterless Mediterranean Basin of Pliocene Earth that was called the Empty Sea.

Should he fly toward the mainland? His wings had the strength to carry him more than 100 kilometers per hour for brief sprints. He knew it would be easy for him to retrace the journey the boat had made on the previous day; or he could fly eastward to the upthrust mass of Corsica-Sardinia, where Creyn had said no Tanu lived.

He could go anywhere he liked. He was free now. Gone were the mental restraints programmed upon him by the exotic slavemaster. This morning when he awoke, the silver torc at his throat was cold rather than warm, the neural circuitry of the psychocoercive device overloaded and rendered useless by his mind's new power. The metapsychic latencies that the torc had unlocked remained operant. And were still growing. He reached out with his farsense, listening. He perceived the slow-cycling rhythms of the seven people asleep in the craft beneath him, and farther afield, telepathic murmurs from other boats scattered about the Great Lagoon. In the distant south he concentrated his farsense, clumsily attempting fine focus, was a conglomerate mental shimmer. Fascinating! Could it be coming from the Tanu capital city of Muriah, the goal toward which they had been traveling these past five days? If he gave a hail, would anyone down there answer? Try!

There came a hard bright response, shocking in its eagerness:

O shining boymind who?

Well... Aiken Drum that's who.

Hold still littlemind so far yet so glowing. Ah!

No. Stop that!

Do not pull away Shining One. What can you be?

Let go dammit!

Do not withdraw I think I know you...

Suddenly, he was overcome by an unprecedented fear. That distant unknown was locking onto him, coming at him in some manner down the pathway of his own mind's beam. He pulled away from the grasp and discovered too late that it was going to take almost all of his strength to sever the connection. He tore free. He found himself falling through thin air, his dragonfly shape shifted back to vulnerable humanity. Wind whistled in his ears. He plunged toward the boat, mind and voice screaming, and only managed to regain control and the insect form a scant moment before disaster. Trembling and funked out, he settled to the tip of the mast.

His projected panic had awakened the others. The boat began to rock, generating concentric ripples in the pale lagoon. Elizabeth and Creyn emerged from the covered passenger compartment to stare at him; and Raimo, with an expression of bleary incomprehension on his upturned face; and scowling Stein, with worried little Sukey; and Highjohn, the skipper, who yelled, "I know that's you up there, Aiken Drum! God help you if you've been playing any of your tricks with my boat!"

The boatman's shout brought out the last passenger, the torcless anthropologist, Bryan Grenfell, who was feeling testy and was aware of none of the telepathic querying now being hurled at the dragonfly by the others. "Is it necessary to rock the boat quite so much?"

"Aiken, come down," Creyn said aloud.

"Not bloody likely," the dragonfly replied. Wings abuzz, the insect prepared to flee.

The Tanu raised one slender hand in an ironic gesture. "Fly away, then, you fool. But be sure you understand what you're renouncing. It makes no difference that you've escaped the torc. We were expecting that. Allowances have been made. Special privileges have been arranged for you in Muriah."

A doubting laugh. "I've already had a little hint of that."

"So?" Creyn was unconcerned. "If you'd kept your wits about you, you'd know that you have nothing to fear from Mayvar. On the contrary! But make no mistake, even without the silver torc, she is able to detect you now, wherever you might go. Running away would be the worst mistake you could possibly make. There's nothing for you out there, all alone. Your fulfillment lies with us, in Muriah. Now come down. It's time we resumed our journey. We should arrive in the capital tonight, and you can judge for yourself whether or not I've told the truth."

Abruptly, the tall exotic man withdrew into the passenger compartment. The small group of humans remained on deck, gasping.

"Oh, what the hell," said the dragonfly.

It spiraled down, landed at the skipper's feet, and became a little man clad in a gold-fabric costume all covered with pockets. Selfconfidence completely restored, Aiken Drum grinned his golliwog grin.

"Maybe I will stick around awhile. For as long as it suits me."

That evening, when the throng of Tanu riders came to welcome the boat to the shores of Aven, Bryan could think of only a single thing: that Mercy might be somewhere among the exotic cavalcade. And so he rushed from one side of the boat to the other while a team of twenty stout helladotheria, looking something like giant okapis, were hitched to the craft in preparation for its being hauled up the long rollered way to Muriah. There was a bright gibbous moon. A kilometer or so above the docks, which lay on a saltflat surrounded by weathered masses of striped evaporite, the Tanu capital city glittered on the dark peninsular height like an Earthbound galaxy.

"Mercy!" Bryan called. "Mercy, I'm here!"

There were numbers of human men and women riding together with the tall exotics, dressed, like them, either in faceted and spiked glass armor or richly jeweled gauze robes. The flameless torches that they carried cast beams of many colors. The riders laughed at Bryan and ignored the questions that he tried to shout amidst the tumult of the hitching. So many of the human women perched on the great chalikos seemed to have auburn hair! Again and again Bryan strained to catch a closer glimpse of a likely one. But always when the beautiful rider approached it was not Mercy Lamballe, nor even one who really looked like her.

Aiken Drum stood on one of the boat seats posturing like a gilded puppet, throwing out teasing or challenging quips that provoked exotic hilarity and increased the bedlam. The Finno-Canadian woodsman, Ramio Hakkinen, hung over the pneumatic gunwale of the boat kissing the proffered hands of the ladies and toasting the men with swigs from his silver flask. In contrast, Stein Oleson sat back in the shadows with one huge arm curved protectively around Sukey, both of them apprehensive. Skipper Highjohn came to stand beside Bryan in the bows.

He fingered the gray torc around his neck and laughed out loud.

"We'll be on our way any minute now, Bryan. What a welcome! I've never seen anything like it. Just look at your tricky little gold friend up there! They'll have a hell of a time taming that one, if they ever do!"

Bryan looked at the smiling brown face blankly. "What? I'm-I'm sorry, Johnny. I wasn't even listening. I thought I saw someone. A woman I once knew."

With kind firmness the boatman pressed the anthropologist down onto one of the benches. Teamsters whipped up the hellads and the boat began to roll, accompanied by cheers and a bell-loud clangor from the escort, some of whom were beating their gem-studded shields with glowing swords. From nearly a hundred throats and minds came the Tanu Song, its melody oddly familiar to Bryan, for all that the words were alien:

Li gan nol po'kone niesi,

'Kone o lan li pred near,

U taynel compri la neyn,

Ni blepan algar dedone.

Shompri pone, a gabrinel,

Shal u car metan presi,

Nar metan u bar taynel o pogekone,

Car metan sed gone mori.

Bryan's fingers dug into the boat's splashcover fabric. The fantastic panoply of riders swirled along the towpath as the boat mounted a long slope. There was no vegetation this close to the salty lagoon, but eroded lumps and pillars of mineral loomed in the wavering shadows like the ruins of some elfin palace. The train entered a depression between steep cliffs and bright Muriah disappeared from view. The hellad-drawn boat and its faerie escort seemed to move toward a black tunnel mouth flanked by huge broken cherubim. The Song echoed from overlooming walls.

An old imagery reasserted itself to Bryan. A cave, deep and dark, and a loved thing lost inside. He was a small boy and the time was six million years into the future: in England, in the Mendip Hills where the family had a cottage. And his kitten, Cinders, wandered off, and he searched for three days. And finally he had stumbled upon the entrance to the little cave, barely large enough for his eight year old body to wriggle through. He had stood staring at the fetid black hole for more than an hour, knowing that he should search it but terrified at the thought.

In the end, he had taken a small electric torch and wormed his way in. The passage twisted and angled downward. Scratched by sharp stones and nearly breathless with fear, he had slithered on. The stench from bat droppings was dreadful. All daylight vanished at a turn in the narrowing corridor; and then the crack opened into a deep cavern, too large to be illuminated by his little flashlight. He aimed the beam downward and saw no bottom. "Cinders!" he called, and his boy's voice reverberated in broken wails. There was a horrid rustle and a faint sound of squeaking. From the cave roof high above, a mist of acrid bat urine drifted upon him.

Choking and retching, he had tried to turn around, but the crevice was too narrow. There was nothing for it but to back out on his stomach, tears streaming down his cheeks, knowing that at any moment the bats might fly into his face and sink their teeth into nose and lips and cheeks and ears. He dropped the torch as he hunched along. Maybe the light would frighten the bats. He kept going, centimeter by centimeter backward over rough stones, his knees and elbows getting rawer. The passage would never end! It was already much longer than it had been when he entered! And it was tighter, too, squeezing him beneath unimaginable tons of black rock until he knew it would press away his life...

He came out.

Too weak even to sob, he had lain there until the sun was low. When he was able to get up and stagger home, he found Cinders lapping a saucer of cream in the back garden. The ghastly trip into the cave had been for nothing. "I hate you!" he had screamed, bringing his mother on the run. But by the time she reached him he was cradling the black kitten against his bruised and filthy cheek, stroking it while the sound of its purring helped slow his thudding heart. Cinders had lived for another fifteen years, fat and complacent, while Bryan's boyish devotion to the animal dwindled away into vague fondness. But he would live forever with the horror of the loved thing lost, the fear and the gush of hate at the end because his bravery had been wasted. And now he was entering another chasm...