The Adversary - 4 (52 page)

The windows were flung open, admitting a howling blast of wind-driven water. Aiken and the young Remillards were abruptly hooded, unrecognizable, ready to fly. The King asked, "Will you wait here at Black Crag for the answer?"

Marc said, "If I'm not here, Elizabeth will know how to find me." His mind reached toward his masked son and daughter. I know that what I've told you has been shocking. Frightening, even. But all that will be taken care of in time. You'll understand everything ... in time. Don't let Aiken stampede or coerce you.

You carry a priceless potential, an enormous responsibility. Let me help you fulfil it. Don't turn away from me. Forgive me for the mistakes, for hurting you. I only meant it for the best, I do love both of you. Believe me ...

The golden figure and the two white ones vanished into the storm. The window-doors slammed shut.

Marc and Elizabeth had completely forgotten Brother Anatoly. He hauled himself up from his isolated seat with a wheezy sigh and came sloshing through the puddles on the floor.

At the fireside table he busied himself ladling out three cups of the still-steaming mulled wine. He gave one to Marc and one to Elizabeth, then stood muttering under his breath for a moment. He said, "You're going to need all the help you can get. Take it and drink it. You know what it is. For your good and everybody's."

Elizabeth's eyes went wide with shock. "I can't! What do you think you're doing?"

"Of course you can," said Anatoly comfortably. "Look at him. Are you that much worse?"

Very carefully, Elizabeth set the cup of wine down on the table. "Amerie must have been out of her mind to send you," she said, and then she rushed out of the room.

Marc raised a bemused brow over the rim of his cup.

Anatoly drank his, then took Elizabeth's. "I do believe she's scandalized. She has terrible scruples, you know. And despair.

It's difficult to deal with. In her way, she's even prouder than you. And unfortunately, damnation will always be a matter of choice."

"I still don't concede guilt."

"You're an arrogant, invincibly ignorant bastard, and your subconscious does concede, and ego te absolve." He finished Elizabeth's wine and set down the empty cup. "This new thing, on the other hand, is a different kettle of borscht. It's wrong and you know it. No psychological bullshit about it, Remillard.

You force those kids or mutilate them again and you make your own hell. For keeps, this time."

"I know," Marc said. "I'm trying to decide if it's worth it."

CHAPTER FOUR

The storm engulfed them, but before Hagen and Cloud could articulate a single thought, the King's mind spoke irresistibly: Sleep.

Put it all aside now. All fear all anxiety all decision.

There is only the dark and the water and the wind. The world sleeps invisible below and you on high are secure and guarded.

Sleep ...

They awoke totally refreshed, seated side by side on a glass bench in a starlit garden. The faint tinkle of tiny bells in the trees and a partial glimpse of a tower delineated in yellow and violet sparks told them that they were back in Goriah, in the castle grounds.

Hagen pushed off his hood and looked at his wrist chronometer. It was only a little after one in the morning. "My God, it took that Tanu, Minanonn, nearly four hours to carry us to Black Crag. The King's flown us back in less than ninety minutes!"

"With a detour to Roniah," said a deep exotic voice from the shadows.

Cloud was on her feet, straining her farsense. "Kuhal," she whispered.

The Second Lord Psychokinetic stepped out onto the silver lawn. There was a human woman with him.

Bewildered, Hagen managed to say, "Is that you, Diane?"

"The King sent us both," said the daughter of Alexis Manion.

"He said-and I quote-'It's been a long time since any of you had a fun-break. Go downtown and play. Tomorrow you can come back to the castle and we'll discuss the future.' "

"Did-he tell you where we'd been?" Hagen asked.

Kuhal said, "He told us everything. He said he had his reasons."

Cloud nodded and spoke as if to herself. "We're not to be allowed to keep it a secret."

A breeze blew up from the Gyre of Commerce, carrying the eerie skirling of an electronic bagpipe. Kuhal drew Cloud aside.

"The King may not have realized, when he arranged this meeting, but you and I had agreed to set a wall between us. He knew we still farspoke one another over the leagues and shared our heart's troubles. He saw that we were friends-"

"And mistook it for love," she said.

"It had always remained so, on my part."

Cloud moved away from his touch. "And so you have been brought here to influence my decision. And Diane to sway Hagen."

"I think you misjudge Aiken deeply. His motive was kindness, not machination."

"Perhaps you're right."

They walked along the shrub-bordered path, leaving the other couple behind at the lily pond. Mushroom-shaped glass lamps lit the way to an obscure gate in the garden wall that opened into the town greenbelt. Cloud kept her mind veiled. She still had the storm-suit hood covering her hair and the taut skin made her slender figure almost sexless, a glimmer of white moving along beside a demigod in barbaric High Table vesture.

"Through all the turmoil of the last month," he said, "you farspoke me from this very garden."

"Papa watched us," she said. "He says he didn't listen."

"What matter if he did? The guilt owing to the Flood is his as well as yours. He might have gained insight, as you did."

Cloud laughed, a sad, quiet sound. "Papa has enough guilt of his own to make the Flood deaths seem irrelevant. I doubt that he thinks of the event from a moral standpoint at all. We children asked his help in an expediency, and he condescended.

But the crime was ours."

"You are sorry," Kuhal said.

"Most of us are," she admitted, "now. Now that we perceive you as real people instead of inconvenient abstractions standing in the way of our great undertaking. Yes, we're sorry ... but remorse isn't really enough, is it? Sterile brooding over the wrongs we've committed doesn't help.

Not when the wrongdoing was so appalling."

His mind reached out in empathy, only to impinge on the mental shield.

She said, "As we flew down to Black Crag, I mind-spoke at some length with Minanonn the Heretic, asking him how he had found peace after realizing the futility of the battle-religion. He told me that a change of heart isn't really sufficient recompense for a great sin. It has to be affirmed by some kind of repentant action or the mind can't purge guilt, and if we try to deny this, then the soul finds its own penance, as Papa's has tried to do.

But in his case, where he consciously rejects atonement, there will never be any true peace ... Hagen and I and the others don't reject the idea of recompense, as Papa has. But we don't know how to atone for what we did to your people."

"Your father has offered you one possible course of action,"

Kuhal said. "Mental Man could be a force for wisdom and goodness in this galaxy."

Her mind-veil parted briefly, letting irony escape. "It could-if Papa and Hagen weren't part of the scheme. But I know my father better than anyone. He says that Hagen and I would be the administrators-but he'd never let us be. Not while he lived. And if my brother killed him-as he would, inevitably-Mental Man would carry the mark of Cain, just like all the rest of the human race."

"And mine," Kuhal said.

Her mind flashed a smile. "You do understand."

"We understand each other, Cloud. And I think you speak of this now only to bolster your courage, for you know very well what you must do, what decision you must make-and convince your brother to share."

"Hagen's going to be terribly afraid, Kuhal. Back on Ocala, when Alexis Manion first began to talk to us about the Unity as an alternative to Papa's plan, Hagen was almost paralysed at the very notion of defiance. As much as he feared Papa and wanted to escape, the thought of confronting a Galactic Mind in the Milieu-becoming a part of it-frightened him still more.

We're a self-centred lot, we Remillards. Jealous of our individuality."

"Don't I know that!" The yearning insufficiency reached out to her. The need. "And love does mean a surrender of some part of the heart's sovereignty. But not subordination, Cloud.

Not in real love. And not in this Unity we must all join, either, if it is as Elizabeth's mind shows it. Your father's rejection of the Unity was part of his greater rejection of love in favour of power."

"You're wrong! Papa does love us. And he loved Mama to the point of unreason. He's passionately concerned with the welfare of the human race-"

"In the abstract, perhaps. But not the untidy, bloody-minded verity of real people."

She refused to respond to this.

Kuhal said, "I understand very well why your father was called the Angel of the Abyss. The Goddess leads and teaches her children, trying to bring them to maturity, and weeps over their obtuseness. But Abaddon would force his offspring into perfection."

Cloud's mind smiled. "You don't know how lucky you Tanu are to have perceived deity as a goddess. Mothers are much more inclined to let their children grow up at their own pace."

They came to the garden gate. The lights of the city twinkled through the open woodland and they heard crowd noises. The sound of music was much louder, the pipes wailing some restless chase tune.

"Do you think you'll have much trouble convincing Hagen?"

Kuhal asked.

"I'll have most of the others on my side, with the principal exception of Nial Keogh, who's a vicious little power seeker.

Some of them, like Diane Manion, are simply timid about going to the Milieu and more inclined to accept the devil we know rather than the one we don't. But I think I'll be able to handle things. You'll help, won't you? Thanks to your advice, I was able to do a pretty good job smoothing over the mess after that stupid attack on the King's life at the iron foundry. No doubt you'll be able to suggest some ploys for dealing with this situation as well."

"Politicking," he said whimsically. "Why shouldn't I know the game? I've been at it for more than four hundred years."

She started, then laughed. "Yes. You have, haven't you? You Tanu live so long. How long do you live, Kuhal?"

"It's been said that we seldom see three millennia out, the perils of the battle-company being what they are, and the shortage of Skin practitioners. I was most fortunate to have you as my redactor."

"You began to love me even then," she accused him. "That's what made your healing so effective. Boduragol said so."

"It was mutual."

"It wasn't! We simply have mental affinity. We're very close, but that's not the same as love."

"It's a beginning," he suggested.

"You'll always be my dearest friend. But-"

"You don't wish me to follow you through the time-gate? My presence would be an embarrassment to you? .. Very well. I will stay here."

"No!" she cried. For the first time she let her barriers down.

"I don't really love you-but what would I do without you?"

His mind responded with a formless outcry, human in its joy born of desolation. He held both her hands and she felt the electric warmth of his life-force flow through their clasped fingers and set every nerve ending in her body ablaze. Joined in a single aura, the stately robed figure and the small white-clad one filled the dark corner of the garden with rosy gold light. It lasted only an instant. Then they walked hand in hand through the gate.

"But it solves everything, darling-don't you see?" Diane Manion was desperately eager. "This way, there'd be no worry about the Milieu treating us as criminals, no fear of being punished or possibly ostracized because of who we are ... You say Marc lied to you. But only about inconsequential things! The really important matter-that all of us children should share in the creation of a grand new race of ultrametapsychics-was true! It's what Marc has said all along. What we learned from Falemoana and Dr. Curtis and Trudi when we were little children. But now your father's dream isn't far off in the future, or dependent upon some altruistic race coming to fetch us off this godforsaken planet. It's now!

We can leave here and begin the work! You and I can have an army of super-Cubs of our own, Hagen! I wouldn't mind the other. I mean, it would be all test tubes and artificial nurture, just like the nonborns in the Milieu colonies, so I couldn't possibly be jealous. I'd be proud!

Darlingyou are the key to this whole glorious idea-not Cloud! If what you say is true, then your sister has only a single ovary. Perhaps one hundred thousand gametes if they all proved viable, which they wouldn't. But you-"

"Lucky me." Hagen laughed softly. "I'm a male, and I could sire millions and millions. With banked sperm and a little tissue culture, Mental Man could propagate for aeons even if I should die. Accidentally."

He was standing at the shore of the garden pond, not looking at her. The night-blooming water lilies gave off a pineapple fragrance. Diane had been almost totally unaware of his mood, so thick had been his mental screening. He had simply confirmed the report that Aiken had given Diane about the meeting with Marc, then asked her for her reaction. Now he had it.

"It's not as though we wouldn't have children of our own," she protested.

"And how will you feel when it comes time to take the babies' bodies away?"

"Bodies ... away?"

Hagen whirled about, seizing her by the arms, crushing them through the light fabric of her Tanu gown. "That's pan of it, you little fool! Not just for the artificially engendered children-for all of them! They're to be bodiless, like my sainted Uncle Jack, to force them to utilize their full mental potential.

Naked brains that conjure up psychocreative disguises to hide their inhumanity! But better than Jack-oh, I'll hand Marc that!

They'll be immortal, and able to hook themselves into cerebroenergetic enhancers whenever they please, without being inconvenienced by primitive appendages such as arms or legs or hearts or guts. Brains without faces! Without lips to kiss or hands to touch each other. Neat, efficient brains with needle-electrodes in them, glowing white-hot with great thoughts! What will they think about, Diane? Will they dream? Will they find things to laugh at? Will they love each other? Will they love us and thank us for making them that way? Will they, Diane?"