Golden Torc - 2 (45 page)

"Felice, don't!" Sukey pleaded. "Don't!"

"Sukey didn't tell you what happened before her interrogation, though-did she, Stein. She didn't want you to do something foolish and get yourself killed by the Tanu... or by anybody else. Ask Sukey how the Queen found out about the sabotage party."

"Don't listen to her, Stein! She's lying!"

"Am I lying, Sukey? I can see the whole thing, right there in your memory bank. Too bad Stein's torc is off, or I could relay it right to him. You've tried to wall off that memory. But I can read it. Do you know that you've been letting it leak? Something in your sneaky little subconscious let just the smallest bit of the memory seep out for Stein to catch! You wanted him to catch it. And he did, too. Just a suspicion. A need to... blame."

"Please," Sukey whispered. "Don't do this to him."

"Blame?" the Viking's forehead wrinkled. "How could I blame Sukey for betraying the invasion? I never should've told her anything about it. Even Aik warned me not to. I blame myself-blame him, too, for putting-"

"Ass!" Felice hissed. "Not blame for that. For the baby." Sukey hid her face on Stein's chest. His arms dropped away from her body. He seemed to see something deep in the dying campfire. Resin in a burning brand popped. Sukey's sobs were quiet, hopeless.

"King Thagdal," Stein said at last. "In spite of what Aiken and Mayvar and Dionket promised. He had Sukey."

"When she was already pregnant with your child. And some women-they have to be careful in the first weeks. Before the little embryo is latched on tight. So now you know who to blame."

Big arms came up, enfolding the shuddering form. Stein did not look at Felice nor at his Wife. He watched the flames. "We'll have to do a recon from the air. Surface, too, maybe.

Can you make the balloon go any direction you want?"

"Of course."

"Tomorrow, then." He repeated: "Tomorrow. Early."

Elizabeth returned to the room without doors.

There was nowhere else to go unless she was willing to wait passively in Muriah until the Host finally deciphered her personal snuff-sequence and finished her off. Since the escape of the balloon, they had had a dozen top-line farsensors locked onto her, so there was no possibility of her slipping away from Aven by ordinary means. And the Shipspouse had declared, with every evidence of sincere regret, that she was incompetent to teleport her to safety. It was a pity, Brede had lamented, that Elizabeth herself did not possess more PK! For a very short time, Elizabeth had believed the exotic woman's protestations. But then the sly Two-Faced One had given herself away. Her great racial vision-her foresight-if only Elizabeth would help her to make the last clarification! There was a role to be played by one of them, or both... and if they studied in Unity, they would surely discover the truth.

Elizabeth would have fled Brede's room-and Dionket had offered her sanctuary in his conspirators' hideout up in the Mount of Heroes. But she knew that even the natural shielding of the rock was insufficient to shut out the hostile ones. Nodonn now coordinated more than two hundred of them with growing sophistication. If any of them happened to discover that one pattern of assault, and launched it while she was asleep, she would never awaken.

Only in the room without doors was she safe from them. As for Brede... there was a way to be rid of her importunities as well. Away, false Unity. Away, seductive two-in-one with your cheating prolepsis that led only to another using. Elizabeth would accept no comfort if the price was responsibility. Not in a situation so hopelessly barbaric, so alien to her human metapsychic nature. True human beings would always be defeated in this Exile that was controlled by exotic races. And Elizabeth was too weary and heartsick to condemn herself to a wait of six million years.

The mind-voice of Brede kept calling: We need you! All three races do! Only look and see how it might be. Look and take comfort.

I will not look. I will not be used. You tricked me once to attain full operancy, to become adept. And not for the sake of your people, as you said, but to gain access to me. To be able to reach me with your temptation, O well-named Two-Face. But I will not be your savior, exotic. Such a role cannot be coerced. You have no comfort for me. My comfort is six million years distant and this Pliocene theosphere is inhuman and untempered by incarnation. So let me alone. Let me alone... Cocooned in the old fire, Elizabeth drifted away. Brede's calls became fainter and fainter, finally dwindling into silence.

5

"THE STRAIT WAS ONLY ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE KLOMS ACROSS in our time," Stein told Felice. "And that was after six million years of scouring by ocean currents. You won't be able to blast a gap anything like that wide, you know."

The two of them leaned over the rail of the gondola. The red balloon, held motionless by the girl's PK, was poised 300 meters above the crest of the Gibraltar Isthmus. The heights were rounded by erosion. Cedar trees grew in the western downslope valleys. There were dunes and rippling grassy hillocks on the Atlantic side of the land-bridge, but on the Mediterranean flank the isthmus was barren, falling off in an awesome escarpment with sharp buttresses and a tumble of great shattered blocks at the foot, below which were smoother sediments dipping to the Alboran Basin.

Felice said, "The terrain-clearance readout and altimeter put that Gib crest at only two-sixty-eight. If you're right about the isthmus being riddled with caves like a Swiss cheese, I should be able to rupture it. Looks to me like it's overdue to crumble from natural causes. And that eastern dropoff goes way below sea level."

"We could see Gibraltar from my satellite," Sukey said. She smiled into the blue, cloudless sky. "The place where Europe kisses Africa, we called it! We were very sentimental about Earth."

Felice ignored her. "Where would be the best place for my first zap, Steinie? Don't worry about the shockwave hitting the balloon. I'll spin a big bubble-shield around us. How about if I blast that little headland sticking out?"

"Hold it, dummy!" he exclaimed. "You want a real tidal wave? Or just a slow-creeping thing like a friggerty filling bathtub that gives 'em plenty of time to make a getaway?"

"Did you see my satellite up in the night sky when you worked in Lisboa, Steinie?" Sukey asked. "Up above the world so high?"

"Hydraulic pressure!" Stein said, smacking left fist into right palm. "That's what we need, kid! A good head of water. A great big surge that comes crashing through the estuary of the Southern Lagoon to the White Silver Plain and floods the battlefield fast!"

"My thoughts exactly," Felice said. "I'll torch the isthmus in a lot of different places. The gap's bound to widen and let a zillion tons of water in. For crissake, the whole Atlantic's pushing!"

Sukey said, "Most of us on ON-15 spent a lot of time looking at Earth. Especially the people who'd never been there. Fourthgeneration satelliters like me. Odd that we'd want to do that, wasn't it? We had everything we could possibly want in our beautiful satellite."

"Little Miss Smartass! Even if you hit the fault lines, touched off a major subsidence, you'd never get an opening here more than five-six kloms wide to start with. Okay! The sea squirts through and you got the most hellaceous waterfall in history. But Muriah is almost a thousand kloms away from here! And you saw that big bugger of a dry basin between here and Alboran."

"You mean-it would swallow the surge?"

Sukey said, "Our lovely hollow satellite. Wherever you stood on the inside surface of the cylinder, the central axis was up. It spun to simulate gravity. Sometimes the strangeness of it drove Earthsider visitors crazy! But we were used to it. The human brain is an adaptable organism. For almost everything."

"That damn basin would kill our head of water deader 'n Saturday night in Peoria! So don't go zapping this isthmus yet, baby. First we gotta go back and seal up the fjord. Get the picture?"

"Build up another head of water?"

"Checko. With the fjord shut, that old volcanic line between the Costa del Sol and Africa forms a natural dam. A kind of threshold maybe two hundred and fifty kloms north to south, but not very wide, not very high. The marsh is west of it, taking the outflow from that Spanish river. The fjord is-what?-a hundred meters deep? So if we plug it, we got a long, long dam! And not made of tough rock like Gibraltar, either. Just unconsolidated ash and cinders and lava hunks."

"It would be much safer inside Hollow Earth than at Bordeaux, Steinie," Sukey said. "It's still not too late for us to find the way."

"I think I understand," Felice said, nodding. "When we get a good head of water behind this soft dam, then I rip the thing open."

"If you got the gigawatts, kid."

"Wait and see, big boy! You're sure the dam will hold until I'm ready to blow it?"

"Looked like it. And if you're as good as you say you are, you could always shore it up if it started to crack too soon."

"Kaleidoscopic! Let's highball it to the fjord and I'll show you how good I am!" Felice began to manipulate the heat generator. The balloon mounted rapidly into the air. "They might not want to let Felice into Hollow Earth, Steinie." Sukey's face was anxious. "Violence isn't allowed in the peaceful realm of Agharta. Only kindness. But what'll become of her if we don't take her with us? Poor Felice... all alone with the dead ones!"

Stein took his wife's shoulders and gently pressed her down.

"You rest awhile, Sue. Take a nap, maybe. Don't worry about Felice or Hollow Earth. I'll take care of everything from now on."

Sukey's mouth trembled. "I'm sorry you can't go, Felice. Steinie's changed now. He's gentle and good. He'll fit in. But not you... Let's go to Agharta now, Stein. I don't want to wait any longer."

"Soon," he assured her. "Try to sleep." He made her as comfortable as he could on the floor of the gondola. Felice's creative metafunction conjured two air masses of dissimilar pressure. A wind began to blow from the Atlantic, carrying the balloon directly toward the fjord. Felice's eyes shone. "If I pedal real fast, Steinie, we can be there and back before lunch. You're sure this ploy will do the job?"

"When that clinker dam lets go, you'll have one vicious granny-banger of a tidal wave chargin' down that narrow Southern Lagoon. Make old Noah eat his heart out."

Sukey buried her head in her arms. One gleam of hope shone through her nightmare. Elizabeth! With this new golden torc, it might be possible to-

Silly fool! (Sukey's sanity tottered.) Don't you think I've been expecting you to try something like that? (You can't get me-I'm running!) I've got you screened so thick you couldn't even spit without my say-so! (But you'll never catch me where I'm going.) Warn them, would you? You little hypocrite! Deep down inside your stupid virtue you want this just as much as we do! (No, no, no.) Yes, yes, yes!

Escape....

Sukey tried to drag Stein along with her. But his torc was gone. She could no longer pull him like a child. She could only beg, plead with nonmeta rationality, and hope that he would change his mind and follow her as she retreated. Deep down there, the way to Agharta still had to be open.

It was something to keep him busy, and it did not require moving about on his rudely splinted broken legs, and so Basil spent most of his waking hours scraping away at the solid rock wall of their prison cell with a vitredur spoon.

By the seventh day, he had made an indentation approximately fifteen centimeters long, four high, and one deep. Chief Burke, in one of his last fully lucid moments, had told him, "Keep working! When you break through, we'll be able to post a letter: 'Help. I am a prisoner in a dungeon in Middle Earth.'" But that about marked the end of the brave jests and stiffupper-lipping, for Burke became delirious and addressed Basil from then on as "Counsel for the Defense," shouting tirades that apparently reprised his wittier pronunciamentos from the bench. Amerie was less noisy in her ravings, only leaning toward the more bloodthirsty psalms when the agony from her suppurating burns was most intense. By the tenth day of their imprisonment, the nun and the big Native American were helpless and incapable of speech. It was left to Basil, with only one of his fractures compounded, and that not even gangrenous yet, to remove their single daily meal from the turntable doorwicket, exchange the full slop bucket for an empty one, and tend to his dying friends as well as he could in pitch-darkness. When these melancholy chores were done, he would return to his patient scraping at the letter slot.

Sometimes he dozed when the pain permitted it, and dreamed. He became an undergraduate again and punted on the Isis; squabbled with other dons over esoteric fripperies; even climbed mountains (but always with the summits out of reach-alas for the Pliocene Everest!).

He might have dreamed the bizarre woman as well. She was gowned in metallic red and black all adorned with flameshapes and beadwork, and wore the butterfly-shaped padded headdress of the middle fifteenth century. She was not a human being, not a Tanu either, and she seemed to have two faces-one comely and one grotesque. He tried to warn her tactfully about the slop bucket as she came shimmering through the stone wall, but like many an apparition, she only smiled and looked enigmatic.

"Do tell me how I can be of service to you, then," Basil said, resting on his elbows in the muck.

"It's ironic-but I really do need your help," said the woman.

"Yours and that of your friends."

"Oh, hard lines," Basil said. "You see, they're more or less dying. And I think my left leg's finally going off. Getting rather noisome where the fibula ends protrude from the flesh." The woman glowed. She had a kind of haversack, all bejeweled like the rest of her, and she took from it a considerable quantity of very thin transparent membrane, resembling plass. With no ceremony, she knelt down on the floor amidst the garbage and stinking puddles and smears of excrement and began wrapping the unconscious Amerie in this stuff; and when the nun was packaged like a choice cut in a butcher case, she enswathed Chief Burke.

"They're not quite dead, you know," Basil protested. "They'll smother."