Golden Torc - 2 (46 page)

"The Skin does not bring death, but life," the bizarre woman said. "You are needed alive. Sleep now and have no fear. Your gray torcs will be gone when you awake."

And before he could open his mouth in further demur, she had him entangled in the membrane, and then the dream of her faded away along with Peo and Amerie and the dungeon and all the rest of it.

Up until the time that Felice blew up the fjord, Stein had lived his whole Pliocene experience as some misbegotten culture-drama.

It had been wilder and scarier and more vivid than the immersive pageants he had been thrown out of way back in the Milieu of his young manhood; but when you came right down to it, life in Exile was just as stone friggerty unreal. The bloodletting in Castle Gateway, the fever-dream sequence culminating in the deep-redact by Elizabeth and Sukey, the auction banquet and the fight with the animal in the arena and the slaying of the dancing predator and the Delbaeth Quest... unreal! Any day now, any minute even, his participation in the show was going to come to an end and he would turn in his Viking costume and go out the exit and back into the real world of the twenty-second century.

Even at this moment, with his mind convalescent and suspicious, some evaluating segment of the cortex refused to accept the balloon journey as anything but an extension of the dream. Down below lay a pretty fjord entrance of colored lava cliffs. A big cindercone at stage right. Fakey-looking evergreens like overgrown bonsai clinging to the heights. Small wooded islets with flowering shrubs and mangrove thickets dotted here and there on mirror-smooth water. A big flock of pink flamingos over in the shallows, scoffing up lunch.

Unreal! He could see the posters:

SAVOR YOUR ANCIENT FAERIE HERITAGE IN FANTASTIC PLIOCENELAND!

But all of a sudden, while he still floated in reverie, Felice leaned from the gondola and pointed a finger.

Their balloon was enclosed in the metapsychic shielding. But the flash, the concussion beating around them, the clouds of dark dust and fountaining earth and rock-they were not make-believe. He had known this kind of destruction before. He had caused it. The blasting of the fjord and the small volcanic cone next to it shocked him more profoundly than anything else he had lived through since passing the time-gate. He saw with vision new-born the roiling dust and steam, the ruined marshland, the bodies of the birds. His ears, preternaturally acute, heard Sukey's sobs and the mad giggling of Felice. Real.

One of his hands reached out to the balloon controls and increased the output of the heat generator. They began to rise and shortly it was possible to survey the results of Felice's strike. What had been the entrance to the channel was now piled deep in rubble. Stein's earth driller's eye estimated that the landslide from the demolished cindercone bulked at no less than half a million cubic meters.

Felice grinned at him. "Now do you believe, Steinie?"

"Yeah." He turned from the gondola rail. His guts were tied in the old familiar knot. He tasted bile as he knelt to comfort poor cowering Sukey. "I believe, all right."

"We'll fly slowly over to the eastern end of the fjord, then. I'll whomp up quieter slides to block the rest of the passage-but I couldn't resist trying one little zap over here. My first shot! Did I blast rock like a pro?"

"One-little-zap?" Stein muttered.

"Well, actually I was afraid to really let loose this close to Muriah. I mean-only six hundred kloms away! They might have seismographs or something. It wouldn't do to let them know that something unnatural was going on. But a single small zap can pass for an earthquake. Right?"

"Sure, Felice. Sure."

Sukey clung to him, shivering. Ghostly drumrolls, relics of the monstrous explosion, still flailed and echoed among the ashy hills. Real. It was real. Sukey was. And Felice was. After a time, the little blonde athlete extinguished the protective bubble and let the ambient atmosphere in again. She hung partly out of the car, laughing as she triggered rockfalls. Dust floated up on the thermals and settled all over the decamole surfaces. That was what made Stein's eye water, what set his teeth on edge.

"Oh! Sorry about the mess, guys." The bright goddess banished the sifting grit in a flourish of psychokinetic power. "All finished here! Now we'll hurry back to Gibraltar and get down to serious business."

"You see, Steinie?" Sukey whispered to him. "Now do you see?" But he said nothing, only held her very tight. Westward again flew the red balloon, impelled by Felice's wind. Over Alboran and its train of extinct subsidiary cones; beyond the deep dry basin; up the slope that rose to the Gibraltar rampart; across the crest and out over the sea, to stop suspended above the Atlantic, where white scallopings of surf fringed the great beach that stretched unbroken from the margin of the Guadalquivir Gulf in Spain south to Tangier.

"Now come up and stand beside me, Stein," Felice ordered him. "We're far enough out over the ocean to be safe from the fallout. Show me where to begin... Come on, Steinie!"

"Yeah, yeah." Sukey was gripping the front of his tunic with extraordinary strength. He unfastened her fingers.

"No," she begged. "No, Stein, no."

"Stay down," he told her, kissing the white knuckles of her hands. "Don't look."

Felice took hold of the load cables and clambered aloft. She stood barefooted on the rim of the gondola, facing the shore. "Show me! Show me right now!"

He pointed. "Where that deep straight-line ravine comes down north of the little point. Can you-can you see under the ground at all? Through the rocks, like Aiken could?" She gave him a startled look over her shoulder. "I never thought of it! But if he could.. .oh! It's like-funny great piles of lights and shadows! Huge sandwichy chunks leaning every which way. Other darker stuff, some blobby, some too opaque to see through at all. How marvelous!"

His jaw tightened. He was as far away from her as he could get in the small gondola, the instrumentation shelf jabbing into his rump. He did not dare to look at Sukey.

Felice burbled on. "Those are rock formations that I see, aren't they? Under that straight ravine is a great big surface that slants away underground toward the south. A kind of meeting place between two gigantic slabs of rock that are-bent."

"It's one of the faults at the continental-plate boundary. You start by hitting the strata above the slanting interface of the slip. Bust the whole thing up. You'll need a string of strong shots. Start deep under the water if you can, then come ashore underneath, still blasting, and continue right into the hillside."

"I get it. Ready? There-!"

Stein closed his eyes. He was under the sea again himself, riding his drill-rig in armor, in control of emerald fury. When he blasted, great blocks of planetary crust moved or were melted. Muted thunder spent itself harmlessly against the sigma-fields that sheltered him. He torched his way through the lithosphere, the screen of the rig's geodisplay showing the Earth's structure in three dimensions-

"They're cracking, Steinie! Way down there! But not the rocks on top. What's wrong? There are only tremors on top. The isthmus is still solid!"

"Dumb broad. You think this is gonna be easy? Keep hitting it north of the slip. Farther inland!"

"All right-you don't have to get nasty!"

The ground quivered. There were a few minor landslides. A peculiar change came over the pattern of Atlantic waves reflecting from the small pointed promontory.

He said, "That's enough. Now get this damn balloon over onto the east side of the isthmus."

The gondola lurched but Felice clung easily to the web of cables. The balloon seemed to be dragged through the sky by a genie force. It crossed the Gibraltar crest a kilometer high and came to a halt in emptiness above the dry Alboran Basin. "Now look under the rocks again," Stein said. "As deep as you can. Tell me what you see."

"Urn... the shadows make this big bend. A huge U-shape lying between Spain and Africa. The bottom of the U points to the Atlantic. But the cracks are all different here. There are smaller ones branching out of the U's curve. And way, way down is this hot thing-"

"Stay the hell out of that! You're starting to blast at the surface now. But below sea level, on this eastern slope. About where the yellow rock layer is. You grab? Tunnel in. Push the junk out of the way. Hit the caves. Then blow the roof out. Never mind about making the cut wide or straight. Just dig deep and head in the general direction of that other slanting fault you were working on."

She nodded, turned her back to him. There was a fearful blaze of light and unending noise. The balloon's gondola swayed gently as the girl shifted position; but the other two passengers felt none of the shock waves, tasted none of the dust. They floated unscathed while Felice smote the earth and debris boiled up. The easterly wind carried streamers out over the Atlantic. The girl sent bolt after bolt of psychoenergy into the landbridge which was, at sea level, perhaps twenty kilometers wide at the narrowest part. She hacked out a long crevice, never more than fifty meters across except where some great cavern's roof was undermined, creating a sinkhole. Clogging masses of rock exploded into dust for the winds to scatter.

She struck. She struck! Five kilometers in. And ten. Carve and rend! Make a sluiceway for the cleansing waters. Fifteen kilometers in. Blast. Blast! Slower now, through the heart of the rotten isthmus. On to where the Atlantic waits. Strike. Strike. Wearily now, but continue. Find the energy somewhere. In some other space, some other time? Who cares where the power comes from. Only focus. Hit! Hit again. Again. And now so close. And now... now... yes. Through.

Through?

Laugh. See, Felicia Tonans, ignorant child-flinger of mindbolts!

See what you've done, boobing it!

You've let the cut become shallower and shallower as you drove westward, weakening. And now the breakthrough, when it comes, is a ridiculous anticlimax. The penetration is a scant meter below natural sea level. The Atlantic enters diffidently, trickling along the rough hot floor of your incompetent chasm. It has been long millions of years since the waters flowed in this direction, toward the Empty Sea. The way is strange...

"Felice! For God's sake! You gotta do better than that-it's just piddling through! Plane out that friggin' gradient!" She drooped, still clutching the balloon cables. The protective bubble attenuated. Around them, heat rose. With it came a smell of rock dust and molten minerals.

"Tired. So tired, Steinie."

"Get on with it! The rock underneath is busted to hell along the main fault. Keep going! Hit the sucker, I tellya! The rock'll rupture from water pressure if you just get the cut deep enough. Can't you see that with your damn X-ray vision?" She didn't reply, didn't even cuss him out, only swayed a little with her eyes shut and her little bare dirty feet trying to grasp the gondola's padded rail.

He screamed at her. "Do it, you almighty bitch! You can't just stop. You said you could do it! God-you said you could do it!" The car rocked with the vehemence of his rage, his fear, his shame. Oh, shame.

Felice was nodding slowly. Somewhere, the strength she needed might be found.

Call for it, seek it. Search it out among these infantile, asynergic sparks of life-force that are Earth's Pliocene Mind. The two-in-one (now oddly separate) refuse you, as you knew they would. And the many-in-All so much farther out, who had also helped before on the River Rhone, now withhold and try to show you other ways. But you have chosen and it must be, and there is one other source of the energy, so bright, so earlyrising, who will not turn away. Here then is a better Unity for you, here is power to brim your height and depth and breadth at least until the end. So you accept. The energy comes. You harness it with your creative metafunction; mold, compress, convert. And then you hurl it down...

With no metapsychic shield in place, the balloon caught the full force of the shockwave and was thrown far up and away. Stein gave a great shriek and so did another. Bodies inside the gondola flopped as helplessly as dolls, crushed against decamole surfaces, against bruising human flesh and bone.

Deafened, Stein and Sukey struggled together in the tossing basket. Neither could help the other. The tough envelope billowed, struck the hot grid of the generator but rebounded un-scorched, whirled in a vortex. Spiraling upward, the balloon broke free at last from the storm-cell of ionized turbulence.

What had been a distorted, kiting scarlet blob smoothed and reexpanded. It sailed in the high thin air, slowly descending to its altitude of equilibrium.

Stein dared to rise, to look out.

Below, the waterfall of the western ocean flowed. All of the smoke and dust was streaming over the Atlantic, making it easy for him to see what they had done. The gap in the isthmus widened even as he watched. Brown and yellow rocks on either side appeared to melt like sugar in the torrent's press. To the east, the cataract outflow poured into the Empty Sea across a front nearly ten kilometers wide. A blanket of mist, grayish tan from suspended dust that muddied the droplets, hid the Alboran Basin floor.

He heard Sukey's voice. She climbed to her feet and stood beside him. "Where-?" she asked.

He said, "She might have been able to fly. Like Aiken could. Try with your golden torc."

She pressed the warm collar, looking down at the streaks of wrath streaming westward from the sundered isthmus. Unless the surface winds shifted, no one at Muriah would see the smoke.

"There's nothing, Stein. Nothing."

The balloon continued its descent. Seeming not to have heard her, he consulted the instruments. "Three-five-two-eight meters, heading oh-two-three. Another airflow up here. Pretty close to the direction we want to go." He manipulated the heat generator.

"Steinie, I've got to tell Elizabeth!"

"All right. Just her. Nobody else."

The balloon attained equilibrium. The ground-speed display told of their progress, but it seemed to the man and woman that they hung motionless in the clean blue sky.

"She doesn't answer me, Stein. I don't know what's wrong! My farspeech isn't very strong, but Elizabeth should be able to receive it on the human mode-" He gave a sudden start, grabbed her by the upper arms.