The Adversary - 4 (26 page)

Under his feet, the mirror undulated like mercury, became fluid. He sank into it and found himself standing in the middle of a rather ordinary landscape: short grass with a few scattered flowers, the edge of a forest a stone's throw away ...

He stopped to pick up a stone to throw. There was lettering on the smooth white surface: I was not, I came to be.

I was, I am not: That is all.

And who shall say more will lie.

I shall not be.

There was a whole line of the stones, half hidden in the grass.

He picked Up another, but there were no words on it. He hesitated, put both stones back into place, and studied the lineup uneasily. It seemed to mark a boundary, one that it might be extremely dangerous to cross. Staring at the stones and his own feet, he discovered that he was shod in his good old golden boots with the stash compartments, and wearing the suit of many pockets, each one containing some useful item for a prudent wayfarer.

"Why the hell not?" he asked himself saucily, and stepped over the boundary, confident once again.

He was swimming for his life.

Salt water filled his mouth and nose and strangled him. He struggled upward toward a green light that steadily became more golden, and burst onto the surface, coughing and choking, so weak that he knew he would sink again in only a moment.

But something was bobbing nearby, drawing closer. He saw it was a cauldron, a vessel of salvation, and he kicked feebly and beat the water with his hands, and in that way swam a few strokes and reached for one of the handgrips mounted below the kettle rim.

A dragon reared up from inside and struck at him. Its fangs narrowly missed his questing hand. A drop of flying venom struck him in the left eye and he screamed with the burning pain of it and sank back. Immediately the hurt was soothed, and he let himself relax and drift in the warm darkening waters ... the waters that meant death.

No! he cried. Fury electrified him. Pain returned. Again he broke through into the air and found himself floating beside the golden Kral. But this time when Mercy darted at him, openmouthed, he seized her and squeezed the dragon's neck and smashed the fangs against the rim again and again until the reptile was broken and bloody. Then he climbed into the bowl, safe.

Mayvar the Hag leaned over him and kissed the burnt blind eye. It was healed. Then she took him into her lap to nurse him, and the baby nestled down, content at last, and drank and slept.

He was on a plain of sparkling salt, wearing his gold-lustre armour.

The antagonist was nowhere to be seen. The coward! Where was he hiding? Why didn't he come out and fight?

Gripping his photonic Spear, he searched the glaring flatland through slitted eyes. A shadow raced toward him and he looked up, into the sun.

The golden eagle stooped, talons ready, and plummeted straight for his face. His visor was full open and he shrieked as the claws raked his right eye and the bird shrilled in triumph.

He fell heavily onto his back. Blood was welling uncontrollably and the sky was red, as was the relentless sun. He knew he would lie there, half-blind and parched and stricken, until he died. The eagle wheeled high out of reach and he roasted in his armour under aloof and pitiless light, impotent.

But there was still the Spear.

With his last strength he lifted the glass lance, thumbed its highest power setting, and triggered the shot full in the face of the solar disk. Light drowned light. The patriarchal bird tumbled from a sky gone suddenly indigo. When it struck the salt it was a man in dulled glass armour, holding a broken Sword.

In mortal agony, Aiken inched toward the unmoving form of the Battlemaster, feeling his own life ebbing through his torn eyesocket. He stretched a trembling hand to the cracked helmet of his enemy and opened it.

The face inside was that of Stein Oleson.

With his mind spinning, Aiken slumped over the chest of the titanic knight. Beneath the glass cuirass with its sun-face blazon a heart was still beating. Astonished, revitalized, Aiken pulled himself up. He saw that the giant was smiling. His gauntleted hand lifted, proffering the broken Sword in a gesture of fealty.

Aiken took it and felt life surge back into him. His sight cleared.

He leaned over the dying man and kissed him on the mouth.

It was deep night on the mirror.

From out of the quicksilver pool came the three-headed hermaphrodite, pulling itself onto the gleaming shore. The chimaera was no longer a threatening monstrosity. Even though it was still both male and female, the bodily distortions were gone and the limbs well-filled and proportionate. It stood poised in the starlight, graceful and tall. The central lion head was erect and proud; the dragon and the eagle faced it, slightly bowed. The radiance of the Sagittarius Arm gave it a reflection, not a shadow, that extended across the mirror of the quicksilver pool.

Aiken saw that the reflection was himself.

"But what does it mean?" he exclaimed, rather testily.

"You are born," Elizabeth said.

He thought about that for a while. "On Dalriada, they called me a psychopath."

"You were. A suffering soul. Incomplete. Lacking eros. A freak and a cripple, almost inevitably damned. You were intelligent and charming and utterly self-centred. It was impossible for you to love anyone but yourself, even though you gave the illusion of caring when it suited you."

"They were going to lock me away-or kill me!"

"You were a menace, a liability to a structured society. You saved yourself by coming here. Your silver torc rechannelled the aberrant psychic energies. You were reassured and began to change when you saw you were able to exert genuine power."

'"In the Milieu, that would have been impossible."

"There, your ambition didn't fit. But this Many-Coloured Land is a simpler world. You were even able to love here. And you dared to do it unselfishly, twice. You reached a species of mental integration. But that wasn't enough. Not for you! You were drawn toward Mercy, and driven to challenge Nodonn.

You wanted to be more than a powerful, successful person: You wanted to be King. And so, instinctively, you were drawn to two extraordinary minds-and you subsumed their attributes in an attempt to fulfil your ambition. Before the subsumption, you knew you were inadequate."

"But I tricked them into believing that I wasn't!'

"Yes. But you couldn't fool yourself. Look at the illusory bodies you wore: butterfly, dragonfly, nighthawk, golden falcon.

Each one more potent than the last but still winged, elusive, flyaway. You were a counterfeit King, royal without being noble."

"Cock of the rock."

"With the ambition to rule a world ... This is why you committed the act of surpassing chutzpah: in spite of the mortal danger, subsuming those very metafaculties that might support true kingship. You were like a man living in a fine large home who nevertheless craves a palace. So one day your dream is accomplished and all the necessary building materials are delivered-"

"Burying and damn near destroying the original house! I see."

"Most of this redaction you've done yourself. Dionket and Creyn and I helped you-I guided and they sustained-but the psychic insights that now provide a solid foundation are your own. Your palace is by no means complete, but now you have the blueprints for construction and the means to assemble the parts into a harmonious whole."

"How long is it going to take to finish?"

"It may take years, or happen in an instant."

"You better pray for the latter, babe, for all our sakes! ...

One last thing, though, that I still don't understand. Why a lion?"

"You'll have to discover for yourself what it signifies in your own psyche, Aiken. It's obviously a kingly animal-but it has no wings. Sometimes it destroys its own young-and sometimes it defends the pride to the death."

"You mean, I can still blow it."

"You're a human being, dear, and you still have to face up to many choices. You can undoubtedly fail. The Trickster archetype is a strange one, not commonly personified. Perhaps it's just as well! You see, the Trickster is a person we simultaneously admire and fear. We know that he can hit and run-victimize us. But he also has the saving gift of laughter that enables us to abide in the midst of life's pain. He takes our pain onto himself, as a great psychologist once said. And that may help you to understand where the lion image fits. If you accept it as an integral part of your self, you can no longer be fugitive Mercurius, dashing about as the spirit wills. You'll have to relinquish some of the laughter and take pain in defending the pride; perhaps even lay down your life."

"Ha! It's the hyenas that better look out!"

Elizabeth had to laugh. "Oh, my dear. Go get 'em, Hermes Trismegistos-thrice-mighty leader."

"You can count on it," said the King.

II.

The Convergence

CHAPTER ONE

During the first four years of the Rebel's exile, when resolution was still strong and optimism ran so high that some of the Ocala settlers dared to have children, appropriate technology was all the rage. There was really no necessity for roughing it, since the former scientists, military specialists, and planetary administrators had brought a vast collection of Milieu equipment with them. Nevertheless, low-tech achievement flourished as the exiles worked to turn their island into a home. Once they had recovered from their mental and physical wounds, most of the Rebels set about to develop one or more frontier skills.

For Walter Saastamoinen, who had been Deputy Chief Starfleet Operations (Strategy) under Ragnar Gathen, the vocational choice was a foregone conclusion. He took up the trade of his ancestors-shipbuilding. With the help of his former aide, Roy Marchand, and a dozen others (plus the elegantly complete data supplied by the computer library), Walter built a seventymetre four-masted sailing vessel that would become the principal freighter for the colony, transporting everything from minerals to Megahippus horses from the Antilles and the North and South American mainland to Ocala's first settlement at the head of Manchineel Bay.

She was named Kyllikki, after an enchantress in a Finnish epic, and her lines followed those of the old Pacific timber haulers, capacious but trim. She had a clipper bow figureheaded with a blonde witch, a long platformed bowsprit, a sweeping sheer, and a neatly tucked up counter stern. Her masts, the trunks of great longleaf pines from the virgin forests of Georgia, rose thirty-five metres above the black-mahogany deck and had a sportive rake.

When it came time to rig her, Walter's companions, full of romantic fancies about legendary windjammers, wanted to fit her with a full suit of square sails. The master shipbuilder pointed out that square-riggers required large crews, agile and fearless enough to climb the shrouds and swarm about the yards in all kinds of weather-not excluding the violent line squalls and all too frequent hurricanes that infested Floridian waters.

A fore-and-aft rig, while not quite so speedy or spectacular, could be worked from the deck, even by a gang of tyros. Furthermore, it lent itself to the installation of powered winches for hoisting and hauling and fully automatic reefing devices. Practicality and Walter's superior coercive faculty won out, and Kyllikki became a four-poster gaff schooner navigable by a crew of six.

When the charms of simple technology paled and Ocala enjoyed a brief spurt of highly sophisticated manufacturing, Kyllikki acquired a solar powered auxiliary engine that drove a pair of retractable cycloidal impeller rotors, similar to those in the all-terrain vehicles that the Rebels had originally brought with them from the Milieu. The schooner travelled widely to satisfy the need for exotic raw materials; she even served for a time as a floating drill-platform and as a pumping station for the big marine-ion concentrator. But then ambition declined among the castaways as the years became decades and Marc's star-search was perceived as fruitless by more and more of the former Rebels. Kyllikki shared in the creeping malaise, being converted into a party boat for bored degenerates. She chased whales up the Mississippi Embayment, carried nostalgic fun seekers to Pliocene New England, embarked on diving expeditions along the Spanish Main, transported cargos of ferocious fauna to the Zoo Island hunting preserve in the Bermoothes, and took part in the disastrous Costa Rican Volcano-Teasing Operation. Finally, and most memorably, the great schooner carried a large party of Rebels and their adolescent children on an epic tour of the Antarctic Islands. Walter's wife, Solange Forester, had been one of the twenty-odd people who elected to end their lives in the "clean white silence" of the glaciercrowned south.

When Walter returned to Florida, he made his son Veikko a present of Kyllikki and retreated into alcohol. But the young man made scant use of the enormous toy, and when the Children of Rebellion finally decided to flee Ocala, Veikko was secretly relieved when Hagen ordered that the schooner be scuttled.

Veikko took her to Sun Key Hole, fully intending to sink her in eighty fathoms. Then he thought of the cargo of memories she still carried, the loving care that Walter still lavished on her during his rare sober hours, and his maudlin protestations that one day soon he would straighten out and take them all sailing again. Veikko brought the ship back to Ocala and opened her petcocks on the eastern side of Manchineel Bay, so that she lay softly on coral sand in the shallows with her tall masts awash at low tide.

It was from this inadequate grave that Marc Remillard had her raised, refitted, and made ready for the punitive voyage to Europe. Of all the motley sailing craft, sunken or still afloat, that constituted Ocala's small fleet, only Kyllikki had a hold deep enough to admit installation of Marc's cerebroenergetic enhancer. She was a key factor in his plans, as was her master.

Walter, rehabilitated with cruel efficiency by Jeff Steinbrenner, had wept as he piloted the schooner out of Manchineel Bay for the last time, outward bound for the Gulf Stream and the forbidden East Passage. His fellow Rebels were touched by what they thought was a display of sentiment. No one dreamed of intruding upon his mind at such a moment. If they had, they would have heard his heart's cry to the fugitive younger generation on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Walter's telepathic powers were too weak to reach them, but he still had to attempt a warning, coupled with bitter reproach: If only you'd had the courage to kill the ship! If only you had done what I now lack the guts to do! Then your dream might have had a chance of success ... But we're coming after you now in Kyllikki. We'll stop you from opening the gate. Marc says you children can be peaceably restrained, but most of us fear for the worst. Run away, Veikko! Take Irena with you and whoever else will listen. Hide! Beware! Because Kyllikki's coming and she's carrying death.