The Adversary

by Julian May

  Marc's fate was still a mystery. He had not responded to Cloud's attempts at farsensing, nor had any of the other old Rebels back in Ocala. Cloud concluded that her father must have been attacked by Felice in an unusual metapsychic maneuver, the dimensional-jump, or translocation. This was essentially a mind-powered hyperspace trip—the kind of operation performed by Brede's Ship when it had transported the exotics from the Duat galaxy to this one. D-jumping was a rare but recognized metafaculty in the Galactic Milieu. Felice could have tracked Marc along his farsense beam and done considerable harm. Cloud and Hagen suspected that Marc had survived, since he was encased in the armor of the cerebroenergetic equipment that provided artificial augmentation of his mind. But once he left the armor's protection, his injuries would surely require treatment in Ocala's regeneration tank. This would explain why Marc had been incommunicado for nearly three months...

  ***

  Up north in the Howler city of Nionel, Tony Wayland the metallurgist and his friend Dougal once more made plans to join Aiken Drum. Abandoning their devoted goblin brides, the pair set off through the jungle, only to stumble by accident into the Vale of Hyenas, where they were captured by the Lowlives working on the two exotic aircraft. As known deserters from the Iron Villages and possible traitors, Tony and Dougal were to be sent to Hidden Springs under guard, for trial by Chief Burke. En route, the party was fallen upon by Firvulag regulars. Dougal escaped, the escorting Lowlives were killed, and craven Tony saved his life by babbling to the Firvulag about the aircraft.

  Hustled off to High Vrazel, Tony repeated his tale to King Sharn and Queen Ayfa. He was then turned over to an ogress, the Dreadful Skathe, while the Firvulag monarchs pondered on ways to use his intelligence. They were aware that Nodonn was assembling forces down in Afaliah and that he had in his possession the sacred Sword of Sharn, which had once been wielded by the Firvulag King's own ancestor in the Nightfall War and which would have to be in the possession of his successor in any renewal of hostilities. Nodonn was as yet far too weak to attack Aiken in Goriah—even using the Sword. After all, Aiken had the Spear.

  But if Nodonn had the advantage of aircraft...

  Sharn and Ayfa decided to tell Nodonn about the two flyers (which the Firvulag were incapable of using themselves) hidden in the Vale of Hyenas, in exchange for the Sword—if and when Nodonn conquered the usurper. Nodonn would be honor-bound to carry out his part of the bargain, and there undoubtedly were, among Tanu First Comers, a few surviving pilots.

  The proposal was made and accepted. On 24 August, four Tanu and Cloud Remillard invaded the Vale of Hyenas, subduing Basil and his crew. With one aircraft commanded by Thufan Thunderhead, an experienced Tanu pilot, and the other flown by Celadeyr, who had had a bit of flight training, Nodonn led 400 Tanu knights in an air assault on Goriah.

  Mercy knew they were coming. In order to prevent Aiken from using the cache of Milieu arms against Nodonn, she prevailed upon a human psychokinetic specialist, Sullivan-Tonn, whose young wife, Olone, was infatuated with Aiken. Mercy and Sullivan broke into the dungeon storage room, and she used her creative power to disrupt the chamber's insulating lining, embedding all of the equipment in a spongelike mass pervaded with bubbles of poisonous gas.

  Aiken confronted them as they fled from the dungeon. The Nonborn King disposed of Sullivan, then took Mercy to their bed for a final, fatal embrace. As she died, his brain assimilated all the powers that had been hers.

  ***

  In the small hours, Nodonn and his knights attacked the forewarned Aiken. The trickster brought down the aircraft, and one planeload of invading Tanu perished. The 200 led by Nodonn and Celadeyr and Kuhal Earthshaker attained the Castle of Glass and engaged Aiken's forces in a pitched battle. Aiken had been able to muster only a skeleton army of defenders, but most of these were equipped with Milieu weapons such as laser carbines and stun-guns. They gained the upper hand.

  Nodonn came upon Mercy's body, now nothing but a form composed of gray ash, still wearing its golden tore. At the same moment that he told Mercy farewell, Nodonn heard Aiken's voice commanding him to come out of the castle for their final encounter.

  Hovering in midair, the pair took up the duel that had been interrupted by the Flood so many months ago. Nodonn was the principal aggressor, blasting Aiken with the photon weapon as well as with his mind's energies. Aiken seemed barely to defend himself, hiding instead inside a psychocreative bubble. Those in the castle left off their fighting to watch the fantastic conflict.

  When it seemed that Aiken's force-shield was weakening, Nodonn gambled everything on two final strokes that drained the Sword. The little human disappeared in a blinding globe of light ... but when it dissipated, he was still there, unshielded, alive, and ready to put an end to it. The witnesses had seen Nodonn do his utmost. Now it was Aiken's turn.

  Disdainfully, the power of the Nonborn King sent both Sword and Spear hurtling away. Using only his mind, Aiken struck. As Mercy had gone, so went Nodonn—his mind subsumed, his body reduced to ash, his blackened silver hand falling toward the sea, only to be caught up and borne aloft in triumph by Aiken.

  ***

  Across the Atlantic on Ocala Island, Marc Remillard had been watching. Now he was prepared to put his own plans into action.

  It was 25 August. Exactly one year before, Aiken and the other members of Group Green had passed through the time-gate into the Pliocene.

  Now read the fourth and final volume of The Saga of Pliocene Exile, which begins with a flashback to the time of the great fight with Felice at the Rio Genii—and then picks up the main thread of the chronicle immediately after Aiken's victory over Nodonn.

  Prologue

  1

  IT HAD HAPPENED, just as Elizabeth had known it would; and there was no metapsychic prolepsis involved in the foretelling, only logic and inevitability, given those protagonists: Aiken Drum, Felice Landry, and Marc Remillard.

  The last reverberations of the great psychocreative blast had dissipated. The four observers still hung high above Spain, out of range, inside the protective bubble spun by the mind of Minanonn the Heretic.

  "Felice is surely dead," he observed.

  "Her thoughts and her image are snuffed out." Creyn was noncommittal.

  "Which proves nothing," muttered Dionket Lord Healer.

  Elizabeth's ranging farsenses, so much more powerful than those of the three Tanu, could provide no positive reassurance at that high altitude. Felice, if she lived, was buried beneath the enormous landslide. "I think it's safe for us to descend," she said. "We must take the risk. There are casualties needing help..."

  A swift warning passed between Dionket and Minanonn: Maintain your shield at maximum strength Brother!

  The three exotic men and the human woman felt no flow of air as they glided down through smoke-layered twilight. They were isolated from the stench of the burning jungle, the steam rising from the diverted Rio Genii, the dust still roiling up from the rockfall that had pushed the river from its bed and overwhelmed part of Aiken's flotilla.

  "So many dead and wounded at the margin of the landslide," the Heretic mourned. "There lies Artigonn, my late sister's son. And Aluteyn Craftsmaster, may Tana grant him peace! He would not abjure the ancient battle-religion, even though his heart rejected it."

  "I see the King." Dionket's farsight showed a vision of Aiken flung up on a gravel bank downstream, his body in its golden suit stiffened, his heart stopped and mind contracted to a screaming nub.

  "You and Creyn go to him," Elizabeth said. The four touched down upon a great flat rock crusted with burnt vegetation, an island amid foaming dirty water. "You'll be able to keep him alive until I come. There are plenty of uninjured survivors. The majority escaped harm, I think. Organize rescue parties for the wounded. Minanonn and I will join you ... after I find out what happened to Felice." After I search this place where she fell, a meteor self-consummate; and how my mind still shrinks from the memory of her mind's last cry: agony and regret, to be sure
—but triumph?

  "The monster is dead, as Minanonn said. And the Goddess be thanked!" Creyn's face was crimson-lit by flames. "Let us go, Lord Healer." Borne by Dionket's psychokinesis, the two redactors vanished into the murk.

  Elizabeth and Minanonn stood on the charred ruin of the islet, the protective sphere of psychoenergy now extinguished. All around them half-submerged trees thrust from the water, trailing broken lianas in the debris-laden current. A few were still afire. In others, terrified monkeys and other jungle creatures shrieked and hooted piteously.

  Elizabeth's eyes were closed, her mind searching again, exerting itself to the utmost in order to farsense underground. Drifting bits of ash and soot settled onto her hair and jumpsuit. Minanonn towered beside her, a bearded blond giant wearing a tunic with a triskelion badge. Under one arm he carried a cubic container that measured perhaps half a meter along the edge. It was made of a dark exotic substance with fragile patterns on its surface, filaments of red and silver that glowed in the deepening night like wisps of interstellar gas.

  The box held the powerful force-field projector that Brede Shipspouse had called the room without doors.

  Elizabeth searched.

  A body clad in broken glass armor drifted past on the wreck of a pneumatic barge. Somewhere in the rockfall on the right, lost in lurid shadows, a partially buried warrior woman sent out a telepathic plea for aid.

  Soon Sister, the ex-Battlemaster reassured her. And his mind-voice lifted to encourage others: Soon help will come.

  Elizabeth searched.

  Had Felice really been killed? Had she flashed into extinction at the climax of the gigantomachy, taking Culluket with her? Reconstitute the memory; dissect and analyze it. Resolve the paradoxes by focusing on the critical moment of the girl's rematerialization after her split-second leap to North America, her dimensional translation. Aiken Drum, in the extreme of desperation, had called up the full force of his metaconcert. In replay, Elizabeth saw the slow crawl of psychoenergy vouchsafed to the King by the thousands of linked minds—and the diabolical augmentation by Marc just as the mental blast was about to pass through the helpless conduit of Felice's Beloved.

  Yes! Inexperienced though she was in the ways of offensive metafunction, Elizabeth saw how the Angel of the Abyss had planned this from the very beginning: the elimination of two great minds that threatened his schemes, and the coincidental death of the third, beneath contempt.

  But Culluket, the unwilling mental fuse, was the key.

  In memory Elizabeth saw Felice still poised within the synchronicity of the translation threshold, not yet fully emerged from her time-violating d-jump, seeing the mortal danger to her Beloved. Knowing instinctively how to thwart it and what the price would be.

  The girl had inserted herself into the metaconcert structure, invading the hapless conductor before his mind could disrupt. She had taken into herself the soul-bursting volume of energy, freely absorbing the entire quotient of destruction and thereby being transformed into an incandescent new Duality.

  The King, hanging senseless in the flashover, was cut free—his body momentarily dead, his mind wrecked: Both were susceptible of healing. Not so the body of Culluket the Interrogator Beloved, which was gone beyond saving along with the mortal form of Felice. Only their fused minds remained, bound together in a tiny speck of matter transmuted from the psychic energies by an indomitable will.

  Deep under thousands of tons of steaming rock at a shallow ford in the Rio Genii, a tiny thing like a ruby cylinder burned whitely at the core...

  "I've found Felice." Elizabeth opened her eyes, transmitted the image to Minanonn. "And Cull, too."

  Elizabeth! They live?

  You might call it that. Or suspension. Or limbo.

  Such a state beyond understanding.

  Not myunderstanding! I have been. [Fiery cocoon image.]

  Tana—! You humans. But Cull...

  ...is there of his freechoice. Lifeclinging.

  Suffering withoutend!

  Alive nonetheless in pseudoUnity.

  Lovetravesty! Abomination!

  Minanonn they are damned soulmates I tried to save her yes how I tried and thought I had foolishpride but she will be her own Center and centripetency refusing grace determined to burn as are Cull & Marc & O God sometimes I think even I...

  Elizabeth your thoughts are riddles.

  I know. Ignore them.

  How can you compare yourself to others? I am simpleman warrior enlightened unto peace but still child before you & MarcAbaddon. If youtwo share sin it is one beyond myken. But Cull! He was Thagdalson mybrother. I knew his temptation. Unlike poor Aluteyn & somany others he knew truth but mocked it aloof alone outside intheend bored to death afraid of death personifying death.

  Now doomed to crave it. Enclosing her fire.

  I mourn my poor brother.

  As I mourn Felice.

  We can only pray and sing the Song for them.

  Something else I must do with your help. [Image.]

  Goddess! Surely no chance resuscitation?!

  We dare not risk it.

  ...So this why you bring roomwithoutdoors!

  Room programmed to my aura alone by Brede before her death. Once activated it admits me and no other. Not Aiken not even Marc. Understand! None must meddle with this terrible Duality hoping to revive and use it! I must make for it a dark temenos tabernaculum sanctuary inviolate where it will burn unmolested.

  How long?

  God knows.

  It will be ... secure within?

  No energy no matter no mind can break into this forcefield from outside. Room gravomagneticpowered enduring as long as Earth. Or until I myself return to enter and deactivate.

  Then Duality safeimprisoned.

  Not quite.

  ?

  You forget. Those inside room always free exit themselves.

  But—how? Surely it never could! Look at thing Elizabeth. Microscopic weakglowing at extinctionedge!

  But refusing death.

  Then we never free of threat?

  Peace myfriend. I feel (perhaps Shipspouse would say know!) that this thing will never again menace ManyColoredLand.

  Yours the dangerous judgment Lady.

  This time I have no doubts.

  ...If you leave roomwithoutdoors here you deprive yourself of its protection. You will be vulnerable at Black Crag—

  Enough Minanonn. Help me now. Use your psychokinetic power to uncover the Duality for a moment so that I can erect its tomb. Then we must hurry to Aiken—

  Heal him and you heal nemesis.

  Nevertheless I will. I owe him too much. He undertook the job I shirked.

  2

  THE MIDDLE-AGED man with the prominent jaw and the unobtrusive apparatus clamped to his skull tended to his simple gardening chores. Inside the observatory, the other inhabitants of Ocala Island were rallying round their ruined leader in a battle that strained the very planetary aether. It was almost like the good old days!

  They had known better than to invite him to join them.

  "Poor wand'ring one," sang Alexis Manion in a plaintive tone. "Dee-dah-dah d'hum-dum DAH-hah." He swept up a dead palm warbler and deposited it into the wheeled cart that trundled behind him, obedient to his irrepressible PK function. "Oh, yes, I have surely strayed. I am a disgrace to villainy." Humming, wearing the abstractly intoxicated smile of the docilated, he shuffled along the path. The gardens around Marc Remillard's star-search observatory simmered in late afternoon sun but there was heavy shade beneath the macrophyllas. Their blossoms, wide as dinnerplates against whorls of meter-long leaves, gave off a cloying scent that overwhelmed the subtler perfume of the granadilla vines. He tidied up a section of the white coquina walk that was littered with zapped butterflies. (Common heliconians, alas. Nothing suitable for his collection.) Then he tsked in sympathy as he spied another victim of the observatory's robot defenses: a crumpled male golden egret, gorgeous in mating plumage, that had fallen close to the build
ing wall.

  A thought slowly formed in Manion's electronically dulled brain. He squinted up into the sun dazzle at the narrow parapet around the open observatory dome, where the barrels of the X-lasers protruded in a glittering cheval-de-frise. Yes! There was the female egret's body as well, caught in the angle of the pendentive. Poor birdie lovers! Still, if one had to go...

  "And if you remain callous and obdurate, I," he caroled, "Shall perish as they did and you will know why." A mental nudge sent the corpse tumbling down. He consigned it to the bin. "Though I probably shall not exclaim as I die—"

  Alex. Come at once.

  "Oh, willow," he whispered, carefully closing the lid. "Titwillow—"

  Quickly dammit!

  "Titwillow."

  The coercive power of Steinbrenner, clutching at Manion's mind, failed to get a grip on the docilated, preprogrammed mush. There were telepathic epithets.

  Manion smiled his sad idiot smile (so at odds with the set of his jaw) and restored push broom and dustpan to their brackets on the side of the cart. He took up a pair of clippers. Overhead, the laser array lost its sparkle as the power was switched off. A cormorant winged above the slowly closing dome with impunity and soared out over Lake Serene. Manion waved at it, then began to snip spent blooms from a cluster of pink laelias nestled in the crotch of a gumbo-limbo tree. He started a new song:

  My boy, you may take it from me,

  That of all the afflictions accurst

  With which a man's saddled

  And hampered and addled,

  A diffident nature's the worst!

  Now people were rushing from the observatory into the garden. There was a wild mélange of farspoken thought:

  It's that goddam docilator Steinbrenner go fetch him—

  Right. Pat comealong help coldturkey letdown.