The Adversary - 4 (64 page)

"Is Minanonn participating in the tug-of-war metaconcert this afternoon, then?"

"I think it's a foregone conclusion," said the King. He helped Medor into a fresh suit of padding and new armour. "But cheer up, old son. In the tug, it's strictly minds, not muscles, that'll cut the mustard. And there's still only thirteen thousand of them-and eighty thousand of us."

Both Elizabeth and Marc saw the flagship land on a hastily roped-off area just behind the Tanu grandstand. Not long afterward the King came to the royal enclosure seeking Elizabeth. He was accompanied by Creyn, Basil Wimborne, Peopeo Moxmox Burke, and Brother Anatoly.

"I'm afraid you'll have to miss the rest of the games, lass,"

Aiken told her. "We're taking you for a little ride."

She jumped up from her seat. "It's-it's ready?"

The King only said, "Come along."

Marc lounged back with an unconcerned smile. He was wearing, with considerable style, the smart plum-and-ochre dress uniform of the King's Own Elite Guard, complete with golden torc and commander's insignia. He said, "The time-gate is not yet operative, Elizabeth. The King is merely anticipating.

Or possibly thinking wishfully. If the Guderian device were in working order, the entire Many-Coloured Land would know it."

Aiken only repeated darkly, "Come along."

"You'll hurry back, I hope," Marc said. "Your heroes missed you during the Heroic Manifestations."

"But won all the same," Aiken snapped. "And now we're leading in the point scoring."

"It wouldn't do for you to miss the tug-of-war, though. Not even for ... strategic reasons. Your subjects would never stand for it. I'm really looking forward to seeing how your metaconcert technique stacks up against Sharn and Ayfa's."

"Planning to enter the tussle on the Firvulag side again?"

Aiken inquired sweetly.

"I wouldn't dream of it. You taught me my lesson very effectively."

The King herded Elizabeth and the others to the exit. He said over his shoulder, "Nothing personal, Marc-but when I get back I'd better find you gone. We've about come to the end of the line in this friendly enemies routine. Fair warning."

Marc nodded. "En garde, then, Little King." And to Elizabeth: "Au revoir."

The true disparity between the Tanu and Firvulag numbers became evident as preparations for the mental tug-of-war neared completion. Emptied of all nonmetafunctional humans, the Tanu grandstand had ominous expanses of empty seats, but the accommodation of the Firvulag was jammed to overflowing.

Greggy and Rowane had been banished from the royal enclosure of the Little People along with the rest of the nonparticipant Howlers. But rather than joining Sugoll and Katlinel on the sidelines, they sneaked down to the booth between the stands that housed the control room of the Staging and Properties staff.

"Rank do hath its privileges," the Genetics Master crowed to his awed protegee. "And down here, we'll see not only the dragons but also the monitoring panels showing which minds are faltering and ready to drop out of the metaconcert."

"Ooo!" said Rowane.

Out on the Field of Gold an astonishing contrivance had been erected in place of the morning's fiery fountain. Its base was an artificial hill as wide as the paired grandstands and fifteen metres high, it was roughly conical in shape, with large cavelike apertures on the right and left flanks and a summit crater.

The sham mountain harboured monstrous twin serpents.

The one on the righthand Firvulag side was glistening black with fangs and eyes as red as carbuncles. Its opposite number had golden scales, and eyes and teeth of bright amethyst. The heads of the snakes protruded from their respective lairs with jaws agape. It seemed that somewhere in the depths of the mountain their bodies met, entwined, then reared upward from the central crater mouth to form a great knot high in the air.

From this sky-knot the tails of the serpents curved down in identical arcs, the black tail apparently being swallowed by the golden serpent and the golden tail by the black. The overall effect given by the huge stage prop was that of an enormous wheel, half golden and half black, mounted in an upright position and partially embedded in the base of imitation rock.

"I call it the double Ourobouros," the senior of the two human technicians in charge of the spectacle informed Greggy and Rowane. "But old Lars, over there at the grandstand grounding monitors, likes Siamese Mithgarthsormr better."

"Will you explain its functioning, Master Baghdanian?"

Rowane requested. "You must pardon my simplicity, but I am not quite able to grasp how such a device is to be used in a metapsychic tug-of-war."

"I'm all at sea, too!" Greggy giggled. "My golden torc's honorary, you know. But I must say, the gadget is madly impressive."

"Wait till you see the electrostatics in action," Lars offered with a grim smile. "I just wish the voltage was high enough to fry these exotic sonsabitches insteada just making their brains twinge."

Baghdanian gave his colleague a resigned look. "Just ignore Lars' xenophobia, folks, and observe instead the displays in front of him that monitor the Tanu and Firvulag grandstands.

Red lights for Little People, amber for the Tanu and human torcers. Intensity of light roughly proportional to cerebral wattage."

"The twinkling yellow jobbie on the Tanu display is our Shining Hope, Aiken-Lugonn himself," Lars said.

The senior man listened to some message coming through his comset headpiece. He thumbed a few switchpads, checked out something or other, and said, "We'd better make this quick, folks. We're almost ready to start. Okay ... all the people in both grandstands are incorporated into the game's electrical circuitry just as long as they keep their seats. They stand up, that means they resign the game. Got that?"

"Mm," said Greggy, suppressing a snicker. "Fundamental antagonism!"

"You know about mindpower, metafunction having electromagnetic components?" the technician asked rather dubiously.

Greggy sighed. "In my less irrational moments I am a doctor of medicine, of genetic science, of philosophy, and of humane letters (honorary)."

"Right," said Baghdanian. "Now just take a careful look at the snake setup out there. What we've really got is a gigantic ring, standing up like a skinny ferris wheel. The tails of the snakes going into the mouths make a complete circle through the inside of the mountain and also through the knot up top.

The central twisty-twiney part just disguises the frame that supports this big scaly ring made of electroconductive material."

"The whole ring's not conductive," Lars interrupted.

Baghdanian gave him another look. "As I was about to say, the conductivity of the ring is broken by insulating material-glass-in two places: up inside the knot where you can't see it, and just inside the jaws of the two snakeheads. The entire arc section through the central mountain is nonconductive at the moment.

But!

If the ring rotates-say, to our right-it'll look like the black Firvulag serpent has let the golden tail of the Tanu serpent slip out of its mouth. At the same time, of course, the Firvulag serpent's bod would go deeper and deeper into the gold snake's mouth."

"But really into the mountain." Greggy nodded sagely.

The technician's eyes had an odd glint. "Inside the hill, we have multiple arrays of Van de Graafs-electrostatic generators similar to the ones in the old Frankenstein movies. If your snake's tail gets gulped just a little, you'll feel a small mental shock. But the farther that tail goes down the enemy gullet, the more intense the mind-zap."

"Merciful heavens!" Greggy exclaimed.

Baghdanian said, "Notice the large jewelled cuffs that clasp the tail of each snake about three metres away from the enemy teeth. We call those bracelets. Those are the places where the minds have the grip-and pull. The more powerfully your team hauls away on the tail bracelet of your snake, the deeper the tail of the other team will be swallowed."

"And the more agonizing it is for the opponent to hold on,"

Lars added.

Greggy shuddered. "What a perfectly beastly piece of ingenuity!"

Baghdanian gave a modest shrug. "Twenty-two years in the special-effects department of Industrial Light and Magic."

"How is the winner known?" Rowane asked.

"The guys who get their bracelet devoured," Lars said, "not only lose, but end up with skulls full of half-fried neurons."

Baghdanian wore an abstracted look as he listened to his comset, watched a digital clock, and monitored the occasionally flickering patterns on the Tanu and Firvulag grandstand monitors. "Two minutes."

"Start praying," Lars told Greggy and Rowane. "If the Firvulag lose big, maybe they'll call off the Nightfall War. Then us humans will be free to go home through the time-gate and forget we ever saw this crazy place!"

"Not all humans want to leave," Rowane protested uneasily.

"Some hate the future world and have loving ties to this one."

"Don't you believe it," Lars scoffed. "Show any sane human being a time-gate leading back to the Milieu, he'd take a running jump. Even King Golden Britches himself! Stands to reason." He pointed rudely at Greggy. "Wouldn't you go?"

"Well-er-" the geneticist mumbled.

"My Tonee wouldn't go!" Rowane cried. "He wouldn't!"

The chief technician said, "ESGs on full. FX crew stand by with pyrotechnic intro. Music track go! Tanu metaconcert established. Firvulag ditto. On your mark ... get a grip ... heave ho!"

Out on the Field of Gold, the colossal twin serpents seemed to coil amid a thicket of bramble-branched lightnings. The maws of the fabulous reptiles belched luminous clouds of green smoke that rose up into the low-hanging overcast that now made an eerie roof over the tournament ground. Another ten centimetres of black tail went down the golden weasand.

"Hold, Tanu, hold!" yelled the sidelines crowd, humans and Howlers together. The mutants no longer bothered to pretend that they were on the side of their Firvulag cousins.

Up in the enclosure of King Aiken-Lugonn, the combined aura of the triumphing Great Ones was a solar flare, the subordinate minds sleeving it in a golden swarm of blazing bees. This astral arm appeared to grip the bracelet of the Tanu serpent and haul firmly upwards.

The Firvulag royal enclosure was deep in a nimbus of scarlet anguish. Its dense cluster of supporting mentalities pulsed in irregular rhythm, slowing and then quickening, and flaring up here and there in nervous coruscations of vermilion and angry white. The Firvulag astral arm was much larger than that of the Tanu, but its colour shone dull carmine.

"The Little People falter," Katlinel observed to her husband.

Her face was troubled, in contrast to the jubilant Howler subjects that capered about.

Sugoll said, "It is as we expected. Having lost the initial advantage when Aiken phased in his unexpected subsumed faculties, they are on the verge of panic. The pain unnerves them and metaconcert is still too unfamiliar a discipline for them to have confidence in their superior potential ... Hark! Can you hear the desperate confabulation taking place on the racial submode? They fear they are done for. But Queen Ayfa proposes a bold plan. She will take half the linkage and transfer to the Tanu bracelet and push, while Sharn's force continues to pull."

"Firvulag have ever been dubious about following female generals," Katlinel remarked. "I wonder-"

The spectators screeched. The Firvulag astral arm split suddenly into two. But the Tanu responded with violent, wrenching tugs that had the Firvulag bracelet sliding to within a bare half metre of the golden serpent's amethyst fangs. The secondary Firvulag arm groped impotently for the base of the Tanu bracelet.

"The blunderers!" Sugoll cried. "The increase in the pain burden causes them to lose heart. Many of Queen Ayfa's force desert her, rushing to help Sharn pull the black serpent's tail away from the rival's punishing jaws! The Queen's ploy is ruined. She retires in disorder."

The second astral arm commanded by luckless Ayfa petered away into falling sparks and the Queen hastened to reestablish the mind-link with her consort. All over the Firvulag grandstand, gnomish minds were giving up the struggle. Tiny red embers winked out as people climbed to their feet and resigned.

Aiken and his team made a flooding sunburst. With a last mighty movement, the golden arm pulled the tail of the black serpent through the Tanu worm's jaws. The dark-jewelled bracelet disappeared behind glittering purple fangs. A final enormous bow of lightning haloed the twin serpentine bodies. Then the black snake seemed to catch fire, devoured in yellow flames.

Its head withdrew into the mountain. Its twisted body writhed, disentangling itself from its victorious antagonist. The burning black snake fell to ashes and only a golden circle was left, poised on the artificial mountain base like some huge, upstanding Tanu torc.

"Your people will need some hours to recover their strength,"

Marc said to Sharn and Ayfa. "We can use it productively. My metaconcert program will not be too difficult for you to assimilate if you both subordinate yourselves to my coercive function and let me force-feed the data."

"Submit to you?" Sharn exclaimed in horror. "I knew it! You intend to enslave us!"

"What good even the Nightfall victory," Ayfa wept, "if in the end, the Adversary rules over all?"

"Fools," said Abaddon. "Haven't I told you that I have no interest in this miserable world? Once your minds help me to break into Castle Gateway, I'll set you free-and good riddance!

No strings attached. You'll have my metaconcert program, the ability to exert firm control over the undisciplined brains of your rabble. And I'll have what I want ... secure on a world fourteen thousand light-years away from you. Now choose!"

The co-monarchs stared numbly at the dark armoured mass that lurked at the back of the now-deserted royal enclosure.

The thing's inhuman mind opened to them, showing a tantalizing glimpse of complexity, beckoning.

Together, they passed into the abyss.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN