The Golden Torc

by Julian May

  "Did you see my satellite up in the night sky when you worked in Lisboa, Steinie?" Sukey asked. "Up above the world so high?"

  "Hydraulic pressure!" Stein said, smacking left fist into right palm. "That's what we need, kid! A good head of water. A great big surge that comes crashing through the estuary of the Southern Lagoon to the White Silver Plain and floods the battlefield fast!"

  "My thoughts exactly," Felice said. "I'll torch the isthmus in a lot of different places. The gap's bound to widen and let a zillion tons of water in. For crissake, the whole Atlantic's pushing!"

  Sukey said, "Most of us on ON-15 spent a lot of time looking at Earth. Especially the people who'd never been there. Fourth-generation satellites like me. Odd that we'd want to do that, wasn't it? We had everything we could possibly want in our beautiful satellite."

  "Little Miss Smartass! Even if you hit the fault lines, touched off a major subsidence, you'd never get an opening here more than five-six kloms wide to start with. Okay! The sea squirts through and you got the most hellaceous waterfall in history. But Muriah is almost a thousand kloms away from here! And you saw that big bugger of a dry basin between here and Alboran."

  "You mean—it would swallow the surge?"

  Sukey said, "Our lovely hollow satellite. Wherever you stood on the inside surface of the cylinder, the central axis was up. It spun to simulate gravity. Sometimes the strangeness of it drove Earthsider visitors crazy! But we were used to it. The human brain is an adaptable organism. For almost everything."

  "That damn basin would kill our head of water deader 'n Saturday night in Peoria! So don't go zapping this isthmus yet, baby. First we gotta go back and seal up the fjord. Get the picture?"

  "Build up another head of water?"

  "Checko. With the fjord shut, that old volcanic line between the Costa del Sol and Africa forms a natural dam. A kind of threshold maybe two hundred and fifty kloms north to south—but not very wide, not very high. The marsh is west of it, taking the outflow from that Spanish river. The fjord is—what?—a hundred meters deep? So if we plug it, we got a long, long dam! And not made of tough rock like Gibraltar, either. Just unconsolidated ash and cinders and lava hunks."

  "It would be much safer inside Hollow Earth than at Bordeaux, Steinie," Sukey said. "It's still not too late for us to find the way."

  "I think I understand," Felice said, nodding. "When we get a good head of water behind this soft dam, then I rip the thing open."

  "If you got the gigawatts, kid."

  "Wait and see, big boy! You're sure the dam will hold until I'm ready to blow it?"

  "Looked like it. And if you're as good as you say you are, you could always shore it up if it started to crack too soon."

  "Kaleidoscopic! Let's highball it to the fjord and I'll show you how good I am!" Felice began to manipulate the heat generator. The balloon mounted rapidly into the air.

  "They might not want to let Felice into Hollow Earth, Steinie." Sukey's face was anxious. "Violence isn't allowed in the peaceful realm of Agharta. Only kindness. But what'll become of her if we don't take her with us? Poor Felice ... all alone with the dead ones!"

  Stein took his wife's shoulders and gently pressed her down. "You rest awhile, Sue. Take a nap, maybe. Don't worry about Felice or Hollow Earth. I'll take care of everything from now on."

  Sukey's mouth trembled. "I'm sorry you can't go, Felice. Steinie's changed now. He's gentle and good. He'll fit in. But not you ... Let's go to Agharta now, Stein. I don't want to wait any longer."

  "Soon," he assured her. "Try to sleep." He made her as comfortable as he could on the floor of the gondola.

  Felice's creative metafunction conjured two air masses of dissimilar pressure. A wind began to blow from the Atlantic, carrying the balloon directly toward the fjord. Felice's eyes shone. "If I pedal real fast, Steinie, we can be there and back before lunch. You're sure this ploy will do the job?"

  "When that clinker dam lets go, you'll have one vicious grannybanger of a tidal wave chargin' down that narrow Southern Lagoon. Make old Noah eat his heart out."

  Sukey buried her head in her arms. One gleam of hope shone through her nightmare. Elizabeth! With this new golden torc, it might be possible to—

  Silly fool! (Sukey's sanity tottered.) Don't you think I've been expecting you to try something like that? (You can't get me—I'm running!) I've got you screened so thick you couldn't even spit without my say-so! (But you'll never catch me where I'm going.) Warn them, would you? You little hypocrite! Deep down inside your stupid virtue you want this just as much as we do! (No, no, no.) Yes, yes, yes!

  Escape...

  Sukey tried to drag Stein along with her. But his torc was gone. She could no longer pull him like a child. She could only beg, plead with nonmeta rationality, and hope that he would change his mind and follow her as she retreated.

  Deep down there, the way to Agharta still had to be open.

  ***

  It was something to keep him busy, and it did not require moving about on his rudely splinted broken legs, and so Basil spent most of his waking hours scraping away at the solid rock wall of their prison cell with a vitredur spoon.

  By the seventh day, he had made an indentation approximately fifteen centimeters long, four high, and one deep. Chief Burke, in one of his last fully lucid moments, had told him, "Keep working! When you break through, we'll be able to post a letter: 'Help. I am a prisoner in a dungeon in Middle Earth.' "

  But that about marked the end of the brave jests and stiff-upperlipping, for Burke became delirious and addressed Basil from then on as '"Counsel for the Defense," shouting tirades that apparently reprised his wittier pronunciamentos from the bench. Amerie was less noisy in her ravings, only leaning toward the more bloodthirsty psalms when the agony from her suppurating burns was most intense. By the tenth day of their imprisonment, the nun and the big Native American were helpless and incapable of speech. It was left to Basil, with only one of his fractures compounded, and that not even gangrenous yet, to remove their single daily meal from the turntable door-wicket, exchange the full slop bucket for an empty one, and tend to his dying friends as well as he could in pitch-darkness.

  When these melancholy chores were done, he would return to his patient scraping at the letter slot.

  Sometimes he dozed when the pain permitted it, and dreamed. He became an undergraduate again and punted on the Isis; squabbled with other dons over esoteric fripperies; even climbed mountains (but always with the summits out of reach—alas for the Pliocene Everest!).

  He might have dreamed the bizarre woman as well.

  She was gowned in metallic red and black all adorned with flame-shapes and beadwork, and wore the butterfly-shaped padded headdress of the middle fifteenth century. She was not a human being, not a Tanu either, and she seemed to have two faces—one comely and one grotesque. He tried to warn her tactfully about the slop bucket as she came shimmering through the stone wall, but like many an apparition, she only smiled and looked enigmatic.

  "Do tell me how I can be of service to you, then," Basil said, resting on his elbows in the muck.

  "It's ironic—but I really do need your help," said the woman. "Yours and that of your friends."

  "Oh, hard lines," Basil said. "You see, they're more or less dying. And I think my left leg's finally going off. Getting rather noisome where the fibula ends protrude from the flesh."

  The woman glowed. She had a kind of haversack, all bejeweled like the rest of her, and she took from it a considerable quantity of very thin transparent membrane, resembling plass. With no ceremony, she knelt down on the floor amidst the garbage and stinking puddles and smears of excrement and began wrapping the unconscious Amerie in this stuff; and when the nun was packaged like a choice cut in a butcher case, she enswathed Chief Burke.

  "They're not quite dead, you know," Basil protested. "They'll smother."

  "The Skin does not bring death, but life," the bizarre woman said. "You are needed alive. Sleep now and have n
o fear. Your gray torcs will be gone when you awake."

  And before he could open his mouth in further demur, she had him entangled in the membrane, and then the dream of her faded away along with Peo and Amerie and the dungeon and all the rest of it.

  ***

  Up until the time that Felice blew up the fjord, Stein had lived his whole Pliocene experience as some misbegotten culture-drama.

  It had been wilder and scarier and more vivid than the immersive pageants he had been thrown out of way back in the Milieu of his young manhood; but when you came right down to it, life in Exile was just as stone friggerty unreal. The bloodletting in Castle Gateway, the fever-dream sequence culminating in the deep-redact by Elizabeth and Sukey, the auction banquet and the fight with the animal in the arena and the slaying of the dancing predator and the Delbaeth Quest ... unreal! Any day now, any minute even, his participation in the show was going to come to an end and he would turn in his Viking costume and go out the exit and back into the real world of the twenty-second century.

  Even at this moment, with his mind convalescent and suspicious, some evaluating segment of the cortex refused to accept the balloon journey as anything but an extension of the dream. Down below lay a pretty fjord entrance of colored lava cliffs. A big cindercone at stage right. Fakey-looking evergreens like overgrown bonsai clinging to the heights. Small wooded islets with flowering shrubs and mangrove thickets dotted here and there on mirror-smooth water. A big flock of pink flamingos over in the shallows, scoffing up lunch.

  Unreal! He could see the posters:

  SAVOR YOUR ANCIENT FAERIE HERITAGE

  IN FANTASTIC PLIOCENELAND!

  But all of a sudden, while he still floated in reverie, Felice leaned from the gondola and pointed a finger.

  Their balloon was enclosed in the metapsychic shielding. But the flash, the concussion beating around them, the clouds of dark dust and fountaining earth and rock—they were not make-believe. He had known this kind of destruction before. He had caused it. The blasting of the fjord and the small volcanic cone next to it shocked him more profoundly than anything else he had lived through since passing the time-gate. He saw with vision new-born the roiling dust and steam, the ruined marshland, the bodies of the birds. His ears, preternaturally acute, heard Sukey's sobs and the mad giggling of Felice.

  Real.

  One of his hands reached out to the balloon controls and increased the output of the heat generator. They began to rise and shortly it was possible to survey the results of Felice's strike. What had been the entrance to the channel was now piled deep in rubble. Stein's earth driller's eye estimated that the landslide from the demolished cindercone bulked at no less than half a million cubic meters.

  Felice grinned at him. "Now do you believe, Steinie?"

  "Yeah." He turned from the gondola rail. His guts were tied in the old familiar knot. He tasted bile as he knelt to comfort poor cowering Sukey. "I believe, all right."

  "We'll fly slowly over to the eastern end of the fjord, then. I'll whomp up quieter slides to block the rest of the passage—but I couldn't resist trying one little zap over here. My first shot! Did I blast rock like a pro?"

  "One—little—zap?" Stein muttered.

  "Well, actually I was afraid to really let loose this close to Muriah. I mean—only six hundred kloms away! They might have seismographs or something. It wouldn't do to let them know that something unnatural was going on. But a single small zap can pass for an earthquake. Right?"

  "Sure, Felice. Sure."

  Sukey clung to him, shivering. Ghostly drumrolls, relics of the monstrous explosion, still flailed and echoed among the ashy hills. Real. It was real. Sukey was. And Felice was.

  After a time, the little blonde athlete extinguished the protective bubble and let the ambient atmosphere in again. She hung partly out of the car, laughing as she triggered rockfalls. Dust floated up on the thermals and settled all over the decamole surfaces. That was what made Stein's eyes water, what set his teeth on edge.

  "Oh! Sorry about the mess, guys." The bright goddess banished the sifting grit in a flourish of psychokinetic power. "All finished here! Now we'll hurry back to Gilbraltar and get down to serious business."

  "You see, Steinie?" Sukey whispered to him. "Now do you see?" But he said nothing, only held her very tight.

  Westward again flew the red balloon, impelled by Felice's wind. Over Alboran and its train of extinct subsidiary cones; beyond the deep dry basin; up the slope that rose to the Gibraltar rampart; across the crest and out over the sea, to stop suspended above the Atlantic, where white scallopings of surf fringed the great beach that stretched unbroken from the margin of the Guadalquivir Gulf in Spain south to Tangier.

  "Now come up and stand beside me, Stein," Felice ordered him. "We're far enough out over the ocean to be safe from the fallout. Show me where to begin ... Come on, Steinie!"

  "Yeah, yeah." Sukey was gripping the front of his tunic with extraordinary strength. He unfastened her fingers.

  "No," she begged. "No, Stein, no."

  "Stay down," he told her, kissing the white knuckles of her hands. "Don't look."

  Felice took hold of the load cables and clambered aloft. She stood barefooted on the rim of the gondola, facing the shore. "Show me! Show me right now!"

  He pointed. "Where that deep straight-line ravine comes down north of the little point. Can you—can you see under the ground at all? Through the rocks, like Aiken could?"

  She gave him a startled look over her shoulder. "I never thought of it! But if he could... oh! It's like—funny great piles of lights and shadows! Huge sandwichy chunks leaning every which way. Other darker stuff, some blobby, some too opaque to see through at all. How marvelous!"

  His jaw tightened. He was as far away from her as he could get in the small gondola, the instrumentation shelf jabbing into his rump. He did not dare to look at Sukey.

  Felice burbled on. "Those are rock formations that I see, aren't they? Under that straight ravine is a great big surface that slants away underground toward the south. A kind of meeting place between two gigantic slabs of rock that are—bent."

  "It's one of the faults at the continental-plate boundary. You start by hitting the strata above the slanting interface of the slip. Bust the whole thing up. You'll need a string of strong shots. Start deep under the water if you can, then come ashore underneath, still blasting, and continue right into the hillside."

  "I get it. Ready? There—!"

  Stein closed his eyes. He was under the sea again himself, riding his drill-rig in armor, in control of emerald fury. When he blasted, great blocks of planetary crust moved or were melted. Muted thunder spent itself harmlessly against the sigma-fields that sheltered him. He torched his way through the lithosphere, the screen of the rig's geodis-play showing the Earth's structure in three dimensions—

  "They're cracking, Steinie! Way down there! But not the rocks on top. What's wrong? There are only tremors on top. The isthmus is still solid!"

  "Dumb broad. You think this is gonna be easy? Keep hitting it north of the slip. Farther inland!"

  "All right—you don't have to get nasty!"

  The ground quivered. There were a few minor landslides. A peculiar change came over the pattern of Atlantic waves reflecting from the small pointed promontory.

  He said, "That's enough. Now get this damn balloon over onto the east side of the isthmus."

  The gondola lurched but Felice clung easily to the web of cables. The balloon seemed to be dragged through the sky by a genie force. It crossed the Gibraltar crest a kilometer high and came to a halt in emptiness above the dry Alboran Basin.

  "Now look under the rocks again," Stein said. "As deep as you can. Tell me what you see."

  "Um ... the shadows make this big bend. A huge U-shape lying between Spain and Africa. The bottom of the U points to the Atlantic. But the cracks are all different here. There are smaller ones branching out of the U's curve. And way, way down is this hot thing—"


  "Stay the hell out of that! You're starting to blast at the surface now. But below sea level, on this eastern slope. About where the yellow rock layer is. You grab? Tunnel in. Push the junk out of the way. Hit the caves. Then blow the roof out. Never mind about making the cut wide or straight. Just dig deep and head in the general direction of that other slanting fault you were working on."

  She nodded, turned her back to him. There was a fearful blaze of light and unending noise. The balloon's gondola swayed gently as the girl shifted position; but the other two passengers felt none of the shock waves, tasted none of the dust. They floated unscathed while Felice smote the earth and debris boiled up. The easterly wind carried streamers out over the Atlantic. The girl sent bolt after bolt of psychoenergy into the landbridge which was, at sea level, perhaps twenty kilometers wide at the narrowest part. She hacked out a long crevice, never more than fifty meters across except where some great cavern's roof was undermined, creating a sinkhole. Clogging masses of rock exploded into dust for the winds to scatter.

  She struck. She struck! Five kilometers in. And ten. Carve and rend! Make a sluiceway for the cleansing waters. Fifteen kilometers in. Blast. Blast! Slower now, through the heart of the rotten isthmus. On to where the Atlantic waits. Strike. Strike. Wearily now, but continue. Find the energy somewhere. In some other space, some other time? Who cares where the power comes from. Only focus. Hit! Hit again. Again. And now so close. And now ... now ... yes. Through.

  Through?

  Laugh. See, Felicia Tonans, ignorant child-flinger of mindbolts! See what you've done, boobing it!

  You've let the cut become shallower and shallower as you drove westward, weakening. And now the breakthrough, when it comes, is a ridiculous anticlimax. The penetration is a scant meter below natural sea level. The Atlantic enters diffidently, trickling along the rough hot floor of your incompetent chasm. It has been long millions of years since the waters flowed in this direction, toward the Empty Sea. The way is strange...