The Adversary - 4 (20 page)

CHAPTER NINE

No breath of air stirred in the nursery, for even though the sun had set, stagnant summer air still pressed upon the chalet like a fat sweaty hand. Elizabeth, standing at the open window and rapt in farsensing, was oblivious, her bare arms stiffly extended, pale and sheened with moisture. As if to armour herself for the ordeal, she had dressed in a beltless Tanu gown of black peau de cygne with a yoke and pendant ribands of jewel-encrusted scarlet: Brede's colours.

The waiting lengthened. Minanonn endured imperturbably, lost in his own thoughts; but Brother Anatoly's indignation grew along with his physical discomfort as the suffering baby wailed.

Finally Mary-Dedra lifted the child from his waterbed basket and held him against her shoulder, rocking, torc to torc, sharing the pain she could not diminish.

Anatoly could bear it no longer. He sprang up from his stool in the corner of the room and went to Minanonn. "This is monstrous," he whispered. "You're a coercer. Help that poor woman and her child! At least take the baby down out of his pain-"

"He must be fully alert for the procedure. Dedra understands."

"Then get on with it!" the priest blurted. "What's Elizabeth playing at, for heaven's sake? Call her back here!"

"She would not have responded to the farspoken summons if it had not been important," Minanonn said. "Calm yourself and remember your own duty."

Stung, Anatoly turned away from the exotic and hurried to Mary-Dedra. It was she who had requested his presence at the operation, not the aloof Grand Master, who had barely acknowledged his existence since he had taken up residence in the chalet eight days earlier. The former Maribeth Kelly-Dakin, who had been a gold-torc protegee of Mayvar Kingmaker, now served as executive housekeeper of Black Crag. As Anatoly laid a hand on her hybrid baby's head, she managed to smile.

"I'm glad of the delay, Brother. It'll be even worse for poor Brendan when Elizabeth and Minanonn start. That's why I asked you to be here. For my sake."

Anatoly withdrew his hand from the child convulsively, as if he had been burned. "But if he's a black-torc-" he started to say, and then caught himself and expostulated, "Elizabeth and the redactors should be doing their best to ease his pain-not aggravate it with some hellish experiment! Dedra, how can you let them do this?"

The woman closed her eyes and tears started from beneath the lids. The child wailed in grating monotony, clinging to his mother. He was beautiful, blond, and long-limbed; only the unnatural flush about his extremities and the hot blisters beneath his miniature golden torc betraying his impending fate.

Dedra said, "You don't understand, Brother. Brendan presents a unique opportunity for Elizabeth. Perhaps it's providential-or at least synchronicitous!-that he should have failed to adapt to the torc. The syndrome afflicts other babies, too, you know. But all of the others except Brendan are pureblooded Tanu." Her eyes opened and held those of the old priest. "You've been here in the Pliocene for a long time. Surely you know about the problem."

"If they didn't torc the children in the first place, there'd be no maladaptation!"

"And no metapsychic powers." Dedra's tear-streaked face was amazingly ironic. "I never realized what the metas had when I lived in the Milieu. When I came here, and the Tanu tests showed I had strong latencies, and they said they were giving me a torc-I was afraid. Now, I would rather die than give it up."

"And this is the price," Anatoly said, nodding at the child.

"Was it worth it, Dedra?"

She lifted her chin. "Somewhere, millions of light-years away, there's a whole galaxy full of torced people who think it's worth it. Why don't you judge them, Brother?"

"I'm sorry I was so crude." He shrugged. "I was never much of a theologian-just a poor fool of an apparatchik from Yakutsk who decided in a rash moment to make the Pliocene my parish ... But tell me why you think little Brendan's case is a unique opportunity."

"Hybrid children aren't supposed to go black-torc. Neither are offspring of the Thagdal. Brendan's both"-her arms tightened about the whimpering infant-"and you can see that he's got the damned syndrome in spades. We don't know why. Elizabeth tried to help Tanu black-torc babies when she lived in Muriah, but she had no success. Her failure was as much due to the exotic circuitry of their minds as to the complexity of the problem. But my Brendan, with his hybrid mind, is more familiar territory. Elizabeth has been mullocking about in him ever since he came down with the sickness a month ago, trying things."

Dedra's eyes shut again and fresh tears came. Brother Anatoly looked at his sandalled feet and waited for her to compose herself. Finally she said, "Poor Brendan is special in another way. Most black-torc children die of the thing within two or three weeks. My baby's tougher. Hybrids often are."

"Then there is hope?"

The baby wailed more loudly and Dedra swayed, rocking him.

She had turned toward Elizabeth, who stood still at the window, facing the distant Pyrenees, pink with alpenglow above the hazeblurred landscape of Haut Languedoc.

"My Brendan was so strong, so perfect," Dedra crooned.

"Never sick a day, all through the exodus from Aven when we were cold and wet and half-starved and bedevilled by mosquitoes and biting midges and Lord Celadeyr's heartless brutes. He was a marvel, my Brendan! Walking at seven months, farspeaking me no matter what part of the lodge I was in. If any baby can survive black-torc, he will-and then perhaps others like him."

She kissed the blond curls nestling at her shoulder. The child's crying had diminished to hiccoughing sobs. "If Brendan dies, then at least we will have tried. The knowledge we gain will have repaid his pain and mine."

"But, Dedra, he's too young to choose,"

Anatoly protested.

"I choose for him." She lay the child back on his waterbed, took a soft cloth, and wiped his face. "It's my right. I know what's best for my own child."

The priest shrank from the sudden cold sensation that clutched his vitals. How many times, as an executive assistant in the Siberian Primacy, had he heard this same argument put forth by fellow clerics who sided with the elitists advocating forced evolution, with the elder Remillards and the others who maintained that virtually any means-even potentially fatal or crippling experimentation with immature minds-was justified if it promoted the supereminence of metapsychic humanity. In those days, human moralists had been divided on the question; but there had been no doubts at all among the disapproving exotic ethical arbiters of the Milieu. Three years after Anatoly set off on his mission through the time-gate, he learned that the controversy had culminated in the Metapsychic Rebellion.

Minanonn came out of the shadows and stood over the baby's bed, stern and majestic in cerulean robes. He said to MaryDedra, "What Brother Anatoly is saying to you echoes the philosophy of my own Peace Faction. Difficult though it may be, we must surrender ourselves to the divine will. The only peace is that of Tana."

Dedra was scathing.

"You don't believe I should simply let Brendan die in peace! If you did, you wouldn't be helping Elizabeth in this new procedure!"

"She asked me to help," said the former Battlemaster, "and I do so willingly at this point, in the hope that the child may be cured. But I would not abet you in continuing treatments that would prolong his pain if there were not a good chance of ultimate success. It is unjust to force an innocent to suffer so terribly-even for his own good, or for the greater good of his fellows."

"You should have been a Jesuit!" said Dedra to Minanonn.

And to Anatoly, "As for you, Brother, I asked you here to pray for us, not to preach. So if you're going to, get busy!" The baby, startled by her vehemence, began to cry again.

Anatoly heroically held his temper, lowered his head, and muttered, "Lord God, bless this mother and her child and relieve their suffering. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

"Find a better prayer," Elizabeth said coldly, coming up behind him. "You're too late with that one-both for Dedra and for me." As the priest shrank back, white-faced, Elizabeth's mind added covertly to Minanonn: And perhaps too late for the Many-Coloured Land as well.

Minanonn said: Elizabeth ... will you tell me what portends?

Elizabeth said: I've talked to Basil and the King and done some heavy scanning to confirm what they said. Aiken and the young North Americans have agreed to work together in an attempt to reopen the time-gate from the Pliocene side. Marc Remillard is en route to Europe with his confederates determined to do his utmost to prevent it.

Minanonn said: Tana have mercy it could lead to Nightfall.

The old Franciscan priest was gaping at Elizabeth. She seemed as beautiful and as inaccessible as an image of Athena, in her flowing black silk dress and ruby-studded yoke. Her long hair, unbound, had formed into loose curls in the high humidity.

Smiling slightly, she said aloud, "You came to pray for us, Brother. Do so now. Show us how we should put our trust in divine grace instead of ourselves."

And the priest thought: You ice-hearted bitch! No wonder poor Amerie gave up on you ...

He was about to stomp out of the room, abandoning them to their inhuman machinations, when he felt a peculiar soothing touch invading his mind. Torcless, he nevertheless knew that it could only be Minanonn's own strength entering him, irresistible as the tide, bearing him up and promising cooperation.

Somehow (the exotic seemed to say) we are akin. Both of us are destined to influence this awful woman in a crucial way ...

Well, so be it. And ne bzdi, Anatoly Severinovich!

He said, "There's an old prayer from the Sunday Missal that's become a favourite of mine. It seems almost to have been written with us Pliocene exiles in mind: Eternal Father, reaching from end to end of the universe and ordering all things with your mighty arm, for you, time is the unfolding of truth that already is, the unveiling of beauty that is yet to be.

Your Son, our Omega, has saved us in history so that, transcending time, he might free us from death.

May his presence among us lead to the vision of limitless truth and reveal to us the beauty of your love.

And now I'm going to leave you here to do what you think you have to do. I think I'll wander down to the spring before it gets too dark. It might be cooler there, and I think mushrooms may be coming up. Can't resist those 'shrooms. It's the Siberian in me."

He laid his hand on the baby's head and blessed him. MaryDedra said, "May I come with you, Brother?"

"Suit yourself," said Anatoly, "but don't expect me to share."

He held the nursery door open and the two of them went out.

Elizabeth and Minanonn, linked, seemed to be suspended within a vast glowing fabric, a vinelike tangle that penetrated as well as surrounded them. The analog of the infant mind was multidimensional, surreally coloured, athrob with sickly vitality.

Bursts of hectic energy zipped along the conjoined strands in apparently random paths, like meteoric mice hurtling to and fro in a maze of crystalline tubes.

Now press this way, Elizabeth directed Minanonn. Now that.

Good! And as I open here, where I must cauterize, dam back the surge that will arise, lest it trigger an epileptic seizure, aggravating the dysfunction ...

And so the two manipulators worked, reaming and weaving, forming fresh junctures and bypassing others, refashioning the neural tapestry so that the errant mental energies might function in harmony with other aspects of the baby's mind, rather than ramping and warring to the death.

Strength. That had been the breakthrough. When Elizabeth had previously attempted this procedure together with Dionket and Creyn, fellow redactors, she had been hopelessly balked by the intractability of the immature will. The baby "refused" to learn the thought-revisions that might save him, his young mind incapable of responding to subtlety. Nevertheless, Elizabeth had remained confident that her redactive salvage program would work, if only it could be imposed. And so she had gambled, designing a new configuration that included a powerful coercer-Minanonn-and sacrificing finesse for the cruder but practicable technique utilizing main strength.

Together, they pounded and bored, spliced and cut. And it worked. But it was taking too long.

She signalled a pause, for they had finally completed a section of rechannelization in the cerebral commissures, the fibres connecting the right and left hemispheres. It was an operation that Elizabeth had adjudged critical, and if it succeeded it would at least vindicate the basic design of the salvage program.

The two of them seemed to hover within a webwork shot with speeding lights. Elizabeth directed Minanonn to hold off from his damming function so that the new channels could be tested; and then with her redaction precisely tuned, she stimulated a certain region of the right cortex.

The entire mental hologram responded, swelling into a lattice of glorious, consonant light. For one brief moment, the baby owned a normal mind ... and more.

Then it was as before.

Elizabeth withdrew, dragging Minanonn with her.

"Did you see!" she gasped out loud.

"Almighty Tana-it was magnificent. But what was it?" He had been lying on a couch with his head close to the baby's basket while Elizabeth sat in a chair beside them. Now he pulled himself up, trembling and so drenched in perspiration that the blue silk of his robe clung to almost every contour of his herculean frame.

"My program," Elizabeth whispered. She reached out to the baby, who whimpered fretfully and plucked at his torc with swollen little fingers. At her touch he subsided and breathed easily.

"It's working, then?" Minanonn asked. "We'll be able to cure him?"

Elizabeth seemed frozen except for her hand, which caressed the front fastening knob of the infant's torc. Minanonn repeated his questions and she said, "I don't know if we'll be able to cure him. We're working so slowly ... it's taking a tremendous toll of your coercive strength. But the program itself-" She lifted her head and met his gaze. "Minanonn, just for an instant, the baby went operant."