Atlantis Endgame

by Andre Norton

  Moral suasion, then. The seer wouldn't tell Linnea to go, but it was clear that she, and all of them, except the sleeping Stella, expected her to go. Linnea looked at the expectant faces, the innocent trust there, and bit her lip hard.

  She heard the step of the Baldy behind her.

  She filed out behind the alien, knowing that she could do nothing else, as the seer stood looking down at the woman who slept peacefully for the first time since she'd broken her arm.

  CHAPTER 26

  HERE IT IS, Linnea thought, trying to walk steadily on legs that trembled. She gripped her hands beneath her robe, sidling her eyes here and there. Should I run? But then they will know I'm a ringer before anything else happens. The others did not run. And besides, her knees were so watery she was afraid she wouldn't make it five steps.

  Well, she thought, trying to steel herself, then I must think only in the old language, and bea priestess from Kemt, just as Gordon told me to be.

  That conversation on the road to the oracle now seems a hundred years ago,she thought sadly as she followed the silent Baldy up a rough rock corridor.

  At least the walk was not long, just around a rough stone corridor into another room, a small one, with plain local furnishings and a jumble of unrecognizable objects on a central table made of olive wood.

  Behind the table waited several Baldies, one holding an armful of shimmering blue-green cloth. "Baldies." Now that she was face to face with them, the old nickname seemed more inappropriate than ever. Not that they weren't bald; they were, indeed, hairless, at least in terms of what was visible, and the absence of eyebrows and even eyelashes made their faces very hard to read.

  Yet she made out individual characteristics as one held out the cloth, shook it slightly, and then cast it over her head. One whose light-colored eyes were wider spaced than the others, another with a narrower jaw, one whose ears protruded, just a bit.

  A hole had been slit into the fabric, through which her head emerged. As the cool weight settled on her shoulders, she held her breath, trying hard to think in complete sentences in Egyptian, but when the telepathic augmentation opened a sense she had never known she possessed, she gasped, staring around.

  Wonder and delight and fear flashed like silver eels amid the stream of tumbled images and words that, she realized with an internal wail, were all in English.

  Mentally she reached, trying to snatch it all back, but of course her thoughts were gone, as thoughts do vanish, only this time she felt the stream wash over her listeners, for their reactions in turn splashed back on her.

  No anger, no leaps to kill, no growls of vengeance—that much was clear but little else. Outside of surprise, their reactions were too complex for her to comprehend.

  A whisper of communication, too quick for her to catch, zapped among all the Baldies.

  They, in turn, caught the word Baldies from her. Again, she knew this from their reaction and from the riffle of humor that streamed through her mind and vanished, but afterward she sensed recognition, the assembling of clues, and the name Ross Murdoch. To which she, inadvertently, responded with a vivid mental image.

  Another exchange between the Baldies, even faster than the previous; all she perceived this time was relief, a sense of "at last!" and then resolve, as if an order had been given and received somewhere else.

  And then one "spoke"—if shaping words into sentences and sending them by thought can be termed speaking. In English, of course.

  You are another from the hidden Time.

  The mental images with the words were fast flickers, well controlled: a very young Ross, wearing a dirty blue-green outfit, launching across a fire at someone; what looked like a laser battle around a great globe ship; men speaking Russian; and some other images that she could not identify, but which she guessed were other Time Agents, encountered in prehistory.

  Linnea perceived the statement not as a question but as an interrogative, and she braced herself. They already had her identity, and probably her purpose, and of course they held her life: what had she to lose?

  She frowned, trying to shape her emotions into clear sentences, when quick and facile as a swift in the sky came the thought: Say it aloud, if you like.

  "Why are you forcing your way into my mind? Why not just talk to me, since I'm already here as a prisoner?"

  It is that your words and the motivations and meanings behind them so often contradict. And with those words came the unsettling sense of being made dizzy, as if trying to listen to two conversations at once, or to watch two scenes at once.

  "All right, then. As for my own time, let me say this, too, and you'll 'hear' it as truth: I resent being kept a prisoner," she stated. "On my own planet. I, and the others, came back to this time to save our civilization. Our actions are those of rescue, not destruction. Can you possibly say the same?"

  Yes, said the Baldy with the narrow jaw. He (she realized she chose "he" as a default, though there were no signs of gender that he could perceive, other than the slender shoulders being somewhat broader than slender hips; again, she felt a riffle of humor, but no information, from them) spoke aloud.

  We must protect the galaxy's diversity of life. Only that way can it attain the full consciousness that is its goal and its flowering. With the words came images, many of them incomprehensible to Linnea. But from them she identified a problem that was very real in her own time: the extinction of hundreds or thousands of species by a technological race.

  What you do on your own world is not for us to decide. But we will not permit you to do it to other worlds.

  Linnea was discovering that their mind voices were individual, too.

  Another Baldy, somewhat taller than the others, mind-spoke in cooler terms:We seek the minimum interference that will prevent you from developing space flight until you are mature enough not to want it, or not to misuse it, the alien said.We do not destroy worlds. As ours was.

  And with the words came images of possibilities, what the Baldies could have done, such as destroying Australopithecus with a tailored plague, or sending asteroids to detonate in Earth's atmosphere.

  But beneath the explanation—and they waited for her to perceive it—lay the specific memories of these specific individuals: arriving in their own time, not distant from the now of Kalliste and its volcano, to find that their own sun had been detonated.

  She saw, and felt, their reaction of shock, disbelief, terror, grief, anger, all emotions human enough to strike deeply into her heart.

  "Who?" she shaped the thought, and the reply was an echo from them all:

  The Kayu.

  ——————————

  "HERE," GORDON ASHE said, pointing.

  Eveleen paused, wiped her stinging eyes, and surveyed the scene. It looked more alien than the alien landscapes she had visited in her travels away from Earth: rubble, fragments of jars painted with stylized seed pods, stacked reed-matting beds, and all around landslides, lit by the glowing-coal smolder from the north.

  It was the glimpse of dancing monkeys that snapped the puzzle pieces together, altering the scene from unfamiliar to familiar, just as Kosta said, "I remembered those monkeys. It was about here last night that I felt the need to turn away, turn back, and I heard you being attacked." He pointed at Ashe. "And so I ran down that way." He indicated the darkness to the south, toward the harbor.

  "I know where this is," Eveleen breathed. "It's that square we told you about. The one with the weird compulsion."

  Ross, who had been slowly circling the rubble, looking high and low, paused, hands on his hips, looking back. "I feel it," he said in a short voice.

  They all stepped toward the rubble-surrounded walls of the square house. At once Eveleen felt that inner tightening of danger, and she could see, even in the ruddy dim light, that the others were tensing up.

  Ross stepped up next to Ashe. His voice was low, but his wife, attuned to his moods, to the softest utterances of his voice, heard him breathe: "Remember what I said."
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  Ashe did not react. He motioned to the others. "Here's what we do."

  ——————————

  LINNEA GASPED. "THE Kayu? Who are they? Some kind of futuristic super-villains?" Though the Baldies had said those words about conflicting meaning and statement earlier on, she wondered if it was the seeming-truth of the master liar: if she were being manipulated not just through words, but mentally.

  "They believe in noninterference."

  "Blowing up a sun is not noninterference," Linnea answered back, before the Baldies could organize and send to her the mental images that they wished to accompany their words.

  You must wait, one responded mentally. You cannot communicate with our speed in this way, and you are forming false understandings.

  Linnea paused and received a series of images: the Kayu with their furry appearances and their warm robes, creatures of a very cold world, an old world. Not all thought alike, as one would expect from a race that did not share a common mental plane, but they did believe in leaving life to progress as it would toward eventual reunification in Telos.

  Telos? Linnea thought, fighting for comprehension. That simply meant "goal" in Greek, but underlying the word were feelings or images of light and energy and awesome power. Were they talking about the Big Bang? Or the Big Crunch at the end of time? Everything was coming far too fast, though she could feel the Baldies' efforts to slow down, to keep their images simple.

  "When they discovered that we had learned how to travel across time as well as distance, they began to follow. They are here now, having perceived across several centuries our efforts on this island."

  Linnea struggled now not to comprehend the what, but the when. Of all the tenses in English, the future perfect progressive is the most clumsy: "by [future date] we will have been making..." Now she realized that the Baldies could not possibly share their language, that they had several modes and conditionals within that single tense that she couldn't understand any more than she understood quantum physics.

  "Most of our people are gone, except those who were on missions," the Baldy stated. "Many do not know yet what has occurred at home. We are here to complete our mission because it would guarantee a peaceful world here. And when you do reach space, you will not go as a plague."

  "We are also here to find Kayu and eradicate them, that our time might restore our world," another said.

  But we do not know which of their individuals carried out that mission; many of the others are also travelers like you, and have been forbidden to interfere except by truthful exchange of information.

  Linnea struggled, and struggled, and finally burst out, "When is your time? Is it now? Is it in my time? Is it beyond my time? Because if it's not beyond my time, how do you know that our world takes destruction to the stars? And if it is . . ." She faltered in a welter of conditional verbs.

  "The time-line we give to you with our interference here does not kill a whole people," the Baldy stated. It gives your world a future of peace.

  "But it also takes me out of it, or if I were stuck here, it takes my children out of it," Linnea said, fighting against tears. But they clogged her throat anyway, making her voice quiver like an old woman's and her eyes sting and blur, so that the Baldies became mere forms standing before her. "My children have a right to their existence. Everyone who is born has a right to existence, everyone, including you. I am sorry for your world, but don't destroy mine. My children want to make a better world, as do all the people I know and value—"

  It was right then that the sizzling crackle of laser fire sheered into the doorway.

  The Baldies turned as one, their mouths open in consternation. Swiftly they withdrew in the other direction, leaving Linnea standing there.

  She heard a shout. "Linnea! Are you in there?"

  It was Ashe.

  She moved to rip the cloth from over her head, but paused. The Baldies were disappearing, some of them taking some oddments she realized hazily must be part of their technology.

  Dark figures entered, bringing a sharp smell of smoke and sweat and hot, burning metal. Lasers lanced out again, not at anything living, but at the few bits of Baldy tech left in the room.

  She slapped her hands over her eyes, bewildered, confused, but above all desperate for answers. She flung out the mental cry: You talked about my time and time now but not our future time. Which future is it?

  No answer.

  Are you us?

  No answer.

  Then someone pulled the cloth from her head and flung it away, and the world slammed round her again, imprisoning her thoughts inside her skull.

  She was still standing there, her hands over her face, and tears smearing down her palms, when she heard Eveleen's soothing voice: "It's okay. We're here now. The Baldies hightailed. They can't do anything to you."

  CHAPTER 27

  "IT'S GOING TO blow!"

  Who shouted that? Eveleen couldn't tell; the roar of groaning, cracking rock was louder than the biggest thunderstorm she had ever experienced.

  The violent red glow all across the northern horizon had visibly increased during the short time they'd stormed the Baldy hideout.

  Eveleen watched Ross gape at it and then force his eyes away. She knew what he was thinking: he would deal with what it meant later. Right now, that spectacular lava fountain cast enough light for them to see by.

  They began picking their way down the landslide. Ross and Eveleen had just reached a wall and were about to vault it when Stav let out a shout and raised his weapon.

  All of them stopped, ready. Down the trail from them was a cluster of figures. But the figures turned, none of them yelling or fighting, and in the weird red light they recognized that they were all women.

  Linnea Edel gave a gasp. "The priestesses! They have let them go."

  "We've got to get them off the island," Ashe stated.

  Yes, but how? Eveleen had an unpleasant inward vision of their ship crowded with women who belonged in a world three thousand years in the past, but then Kosta smacked his hands together. "The scavengers' ship."

  Ashe grinned. His teeth glinted in the bloody light.

  "We might have to scuffle for it," Ross warned.

  "Then all four of us can go," Ashe said. "The scavengers can see to themselves. These women deserve a chance to get away from the blow, but if they don't do it soon, they might not make it." He turned to Eveleen. "You get them some supplies off our ship. Stuff they'll understand," he added. And to Linnea, "I take it you know how to communicate with them?"

  She nodded.

  "Then explain that they need to get going, now, fast, either south to Crete, or if they're afraid of missing the island, then northwest to Greece. Anywhere but east."

  She nodded again, and started speaking to the women.

  Eveleen, after the first few sentences, stopped listening. Linnea was talking in Kallistan terms, making it all simple. Eveleen realized that the preparations for food would be entirely up to her; time was running out, and she'd better hurry.

  When Linnea paused, Eveleen whispered, "I'm going to run ahead and row myself to our ship. Take them to the beach and wait. We have radio," she added. "Here. Take mine. If I need to, I'll contact you with a spare from the ship. If the guys beep a signal, beep back four quick ones, which is the emergency code." She sighed. "At this point, I suspect Gordon will break silence and come on in the clear and talk to you."

  The older woman looked tired and worn in the terrible red light. Her eyes were puffy, but her gaze was alert and focused. "All right," she said in a soft voice. "I will meet you on the beach, then."

  Eveleen ran the rest of the way down, or rather slid, skipped, hopped, and once rolled. Even with the roll—a painful one, over what seemed to be every pointy stone on the island—she was glad to be going down, not up. The air was hotter than ever and filled with smoke that smelled of hot rock.

  She found the rowboat, cast off the covering, and was about to jump in it when two figures emer
ged from the shadows under an outcropping of rock.

  A guttural-sounding roar from one gave her enough advance warning that this was no friend and to pull out her weapon. She aimed at his feet and fired.

  Hot, smoking sand blasted up.

  "Ow!"

  A gargling howl of anger from the other presaged a berserker attack. She jerked up the weapon, realized she still couldn't bring herself to fire, and reversed it, dodging the flying fist that came at her head, and pistoled the man across the mastoid bone. He went down like a felled tree, stinking of years-old sweat, stale wine, and uncured goat skin.

  Gagging, she turned around to deal with the second one, to see him running westward down the beach, his pumping legs flinging sand up behind him.

  Using her breathing techniques, she tried to calm her jangled nerves and forced her watery legs to function as she shoved the rowboat down to the water.

  Having learned the hard way about rowing, she wrapped some old seaweed around her palms before picking up the oars. A few good, hard pulls, and she launched into choppy waves. The water looked as black as ink, except for the oily reflections of the distant lava shining an unpleasant red in spilled ripples of color.

  She reached the boat, guided by a faintly glowing buoy bobbing around in the water, tied the rowboat to the stern, and clambered aboard.

  There, she hesitated. For the past few days they'd moved the boat right into the harbor at sunset, trusting to darkness to hide it, and then they'd returned to their little cove, sheltered by crumbling cliffs, at dawn.

  But Linnea had clear orders, and she couldn't see to execute them without lights.

  Maybe the danger is over, she thought, and went ahead and turned on the lights. Not the ones she knew would light the deck, if needed, just the ones below.

  Then, trusting to the murk outside to hide any cracks of light, she got busy.

  ——————————