The Adversary - 4 (8 page)

Yosh sat slumped in the saddle. "Well, Ochal-our infrared eyeball system and load of Milieu arms aren't worth a mousefart to Bardy now."

The farsensor leader nodded grim agreement. He addressed the entire column on the command mode: Companions! There is no way we can reach my home city before the Firvulag do. They would surely fall upon us as we attempted to cross the Rhone to the Bardelask docks. I have bespoken the King, pleading with him to allow us to die with my Exalted Grandmother. But for strategic reasons, he has forbidden it"God save Aiken Drum!" muttered Vilkas.

-so we must regroup, then return at once to Sayzorask. Our King has told me that the futuristic equipment we carry must be safeguarded from the Foe at all costs. We will wait in Sayzorask for his orders ...

"And with our luck," came Vilkas' sotto voce snarl, "we'll end up marching on Famorel itself."

Ignoring him, Ochal addressed Yosh. "Have this wagon repaired as quickly as possible while I inspect the rest of the column. There's small chance of the Foe crossing the river to engage us, but we must not present an overly tempting target by lingering. They doubtless know that we're here-and they may suspect what we carry."

Yosh gave the Tanu salute. Ochal the Harper beckoned mentally to the waiting coercer knights, and the glowing purple shape and the three blue ones faded away into the fog. Their departure revealed how much darker it had become. Sunset was less than an hour away and the miasma seemed thicker than ever.

Yosh slipped the Husky back into its sheath. "Well, let's get on with it. Unpack a spotlight, Vilkas, and we'll study the damage."

As the Lithuanian complied, Jim slid cautiously down and soothed the four helladotheria in the team. They stamped their feet and swivelled their tufted ears. When the solar-powered lantern went on, Jim hunkered down and inspected the broken wheel. "Too bad we can't make our armour glow from mindpower, like Lord Ochal an' the other op'rants. Be handy in a sitch-ashun like this."

"You don't glow unless you got the power," said Vilkas.

"The psychoactive microbes sandwiched in the glass armour laminations don't light up for grunts like you and me." He paused, then added pointedly, "Or for golds like Lord Yoshimitsu, who aren't genuine latents."

"But who nevertheless earned their privileges," Yosh said.

"If the King had kept his promise, all of us humans would be wearing gold!" The Lithuanian's voice was bitter.

Jim looked up at Vilkas and winked. "Hey-I like my grey torc just fine. Specially on lonely nights!" To Yosh he said, "Chief, we gone need a PK-head to lift this sumbitch wagon outa the dirt. A human-not some Tanu 'ristocat who'll screw up. And you'd best bespeak ol' Maggers to bring us a spare wheel."

Yosh nodded. "Get the team unhitched. I'll ask Lord Raimo to give us a hand."

He guided his chaliko back behind the wagon a few metres, dismounted, and said, "Matte, Kiku. Good girl." The great animal was like a dappled statue in the vaporous dusk. Standing on tiptoe, Yosh opened a saddlebag and took out the kawanawa, a stout rope joined to a set of wickedly sharp ganghooks.

Returning to the wagon, he summoned Vilkas and indicated the stunned bear-dogs still bunched over the canted bed. "We'll have to drag these brutes away and finish them off. One of those hellads that Jim's uncoupling can do the hauling. But you'll have to crawl under and make fast."

Vilkas groaned. His tans had been fresh that morning and his bronze and green-glass cuirass and greaves freshly polished. For an instant, he hesitated, a mutinous protest on the tip of his tongue. And then he felt the faintest pulse of electricity in the metal at his throat.

"Yes, Yoshi-sama."

"Thank you, Vilkas." Yosh turned away to deal with the hellad while Vilkas dropped to his knees in the bloody dust and crept under the Conestoga with the hook end of the rope. The stunned and badly slashed brutes were all in a tangle. One had voided with the shock of the stun-beam. Retching, Vilkas sank the big barbs into the creature's shoulder.

"Ready?" Yosh sang out.

"Ready." Without the slave-torc's amplification, the Lithuanian's reply would have been inaudible. Fortunately for him, his samurai master was unable to decipher the deeper nuances of the telepathic message.

Vilkas hauled himself out from under the wagon as the rope tightened and the first amphicyon body began to move.

Standing, he cursed with revulsion. Bloody mud and excrement stained his arms and legs.

Jim tried to sympathize. "Wot th' hey, guy-leastways we ain' fightin' for our lives upriver at Bardy-Town. Things could be lots worse."

"They will be. Just wait!"

Yosh reappeared out of the fog leading the draft hellad.

"Monku, monku, monku," he chided, handing the hooks back to Vilkas. "That's enough bitching. Down you go again, my man. I'll program extra goodies for you on the torc tonight to compensate."

"Thank you, Yoshi-sama." Vilkas' manner was completely civil. He ducked back under the wagon, took a firm grip on the kawa-nawa, and drove the daggerlike points into the throat of the next bear-dog.

CHAPTER TWO

The convoy of fourplex modular ATVs, its number reduced to fifteen after the disaster with the freight hauler back in the Rif Mountains, crept along in the brassy African sunset enveloped in dust, ion-defiant midges, and anticipatory elation.

The Mediterranean rim was less than 90 kilometres away.

And the Great Waterfall.

For more than two months, ever since they had dared to leave the camp on the Moroccan shore to which they had been diverted by their elders, the runaway adult children of Ocala Island had fled northeast by north toward that landmark that had somehow become symbolic of their guilt and daring. They had crossed more than 1500 kilometres of Pliocene wilderness-swamps and jungles, waterless desert, and most recently the Rif Range-and now rolled through the sere hills and scrub thickets covering the upper extremity of the broken Gibraltar Isthmus. Logic had told the expedition's leader, Hagen Remillard, to bear farther east on a more direct course to the flooded Mediterranean Basin, which they would have to cross in order to rendezvous with Cloud in Afaliah. But logic faltered before the irresistible glamour of the Waterfall. How could they pass it by? They had shared in its creation when they joined minds with their parents and helped mad Felice admit the western ocean waters into the Empty Sea. To view it was a psychological imperative.

The five youngsters of Ocala's meagre third generation, called the Cubs, were even more eager than their parents. When a towering column of vapour signalling the cascade finally appeared on the horizon, the little ones dissolved into a frenzy of fidgeting. It became evident that none of them would be able to sleep that night without first beholding the marvel; so Hagen decided to forgo the usual sunset bivouac and press on. There, would be plenty of moonlight to illumine the scene.

Hagen regretted his impulse when Phil Overton caved in to the winsome coercion of his four-year-old, Calinda, who had been begging to sit with her father in the leading ATV. Brokenhearted protests from the other Cubs, both vocal and excruciatingly telepathic, were inevitable. In spite of Hagen's objections, nothing would do but that all of the little ones transfer to the command module. Diane Manion traded places with Nial Keogh and swore to Hagen that she would use every erg of her redactive metafunction to keep the Cubs under control, and the complaisant Overton was demoted from navigator to assistant babysitter. But the closer they came to the Waterfall, the more disorderly the children became.

"Daddy, turn on the peep-sweep again!" Calinda pleaded.

"This time, I know we'll be able to scan the falls!"

"The peep-sweep! The peep-sweep!" chanted Joel Strangford and Riki Teichmann, who were four-and-a-half and five. They tussled with each other, trying to get closer to the cockpit's terrain holo display, and shoved little Hope Dalembert to the deck in the process. She began to wail.

"Meatheads!" The indictment of six-year-old Davey Warshaw was pitying. "A TSL can't see a hole in the ground when there are hills in the way."

"It can too! It can too!"

"Only if the refractive angle's right," Davey sneered. "And it's not. You think the Gibraltar Gate's some little bitty thing like a dry wadi or a sandpit that the peep can analog? Hah!"

"Then farsense it for us, Mr. Smarty!" Calinda demanded.

Although incapable of such a feat, Davey used his imagination to conjure a vision that stunned the other Cubs to silence: a planetary orb cleft like a gigantic melon, with a fountain of water gushing into outer space.

Gently, Diana Manion emended the picture. "It's more likely to look like this, dear."

All the Cubs squealed in disappointment.

"But that's just a little waterfall," Riki protested. "Like in my Nana's book about the Old World. Niagara.

Our waterfall's bigger than any in the whole world that ever was!"

Calinda's lip thrust out. "Don't want to see a little waterfall.

Hagen-you said it would be humongous."

"Humongous," repeated little Hope Dalembert, through tears.

"Phil, Phil, turn on the peep-sweep!" Joel cried, and the others chimed in, swarming over the hapless Overton and crowding Hagen at the command console until he fended them off with his PK and uttered a simultaneous mental expostulation: All of you be quiet!

Miraculously, they were.

Aloud, Hagen said, "Now listen, you Cubs. We're almost there. I think I sense something! You might, too, if you just pipe down for a damn minute ... "

The whine of the turbine as the ATV laboured toward the top of a ridge. The crunch and snap of flattened brush. The hum of the faltering environmental conditioner. Outside, an off-key serenade of dwarf hyenas hidden in the dusk-purpled chaparral.

And then, a sound, that was no sound. An atmospheric stirring so profound that it could not be detected by auditory nerves.

'Daddy, there's something in my throat," Calinda whispered.

"I taste a noise."

Phil swept her onto his lap before her apprehension could grow, and Diane was swift to mind-comfort the three smaller children. But Davey Warshaw, mature in wisdom, was jubilant.

"That's it! That's the Great Waterfall! Faster, Hagen-drive faster!"

The son of Abaddon gave a short laugh and advanced the throttle. An obstructing scrub oak threatened, and instead of turning aside, he zapped it. The Cubs shrieked as they charged ahead through swirling resinous steam and flying woodchips.

The solar-powered turbine of the ATV howled at the steepening grade and climbed higher and higher toward the evening sky.

The peculiar subsonic vibration intensified to a singing in the bone. Even the adults felt the large cartilages of their throats thrill to its enormous note. Hope Dalembert whimpered and hid her face in Diane's breast; but the four other Cubs, wideeyed, strained with ineffective juvenile farsight to discover what lay ahead. The vehicle finally crested the ridge, bumped over summit outcroppings, and slowed to a halt on a narrow windswept plateau.

The ATV and the height on which it stood shivered in neverending thunder. The sound was not painful to the ear; the frequency was too low, too nearly palpable. The adults and children sat motionless for a long minute. Then Davey had the hatch open and was clambering out, and Phil Overton took Calinda and Joel while Diane kept tight hold on the hands of Riki and Hope.

Hagen, left alone in the cockpit, took brief note of the stupendous landform being plotted on the graphic display of the terrain scanner. He remarked to the empty aether: "We're finally here, Papa. It's your scene as much as Felice's and ours. Would you like to commander my eyes?"

Nothing.

Hagen laughed. "Did she kill you, then? Did a raw-talent crazy finish off the Milieu's challenger? What a tacky ending that would be. Not at all what my Oedipal fantasy anticipated."

Nothing.

"You won't stop us from reopening the time-gate," he whispered. "You let us get away from Ocala. you could have blasted us, and you didn't. I know you, Papa! You don't dare stop us.

And it's not only the guilt-but the tempting elegance of the wheel come full-circle that you won't be able to resist ... "

Nothing.

Hagen stifled soliloquy and let thunder fill his skull. His hands worked automatically to kill the vehicle systems and then he went outside to join the others.

They were on a land's end beneath an indigo sky. The full moon of late August was well risen above the eastern horizon.

On their left a wide sluiceway stretched toward the Atlantic, and on the right was a monstrous chasm, the new Gulf of Alboran, with its distant floor of starless black water. Joining these two like a silver curtain stretching into infinite night, its hem frothing in the sump of the world, was the grandest waterfall Earth had ever known.

Hagen's instruments had mapped its dimensions: 9.7 kilometres wide and 822 metres high, with a flow ever-increasing as erosion widened and deepened the Gibraltar cut. The Great Waterfall would live for less than a hundred years, for in that time it would fill the entire Pliocene Mediterranean Basin.

One by one the other vehicles of the convoy reached the plateau and came to a standstill. Their occupants alighted and gathered near the cliff edge-twenty-eight men and women and five little children. Normal speech was impossible and mental converse seemed superfluous. It was enough to look, and to memorize.

They might have stayed there for hours but at last the moonlight dimmed and the breeze grew dank. A wall of heavy fog pushed out from Europe and obliterated the spectacle.

Calinda Overton's small mind-voice said: I think it's over.

And Hagen said: Yes. The nice part is.

Many of the adults laughed then, to cover other emotions.

Those who were parents spoke of bedtime. Nial Keogh, ever practical, pointed out the campsite he had taken note of while the rest of them had thought only of racing ahead to see the wonder. Mind-chattering in dull reaction, the children and grandchildren of Rebellion straggled back to the ATVs. Only Hagen stayed alone on the plateau with the command module, after sending Phil and Diane and the Cubs off with the others.