He squatted, deftly banked the little fire at the back of the oven, and slid the grate closed over it. Teresza rose and hefted Valerie again. The infant was already fast asleep.
"Okay."
***
Armand dreamed.
He found himself in a hot, dark chamber, a cavern of crimson rock shot with glittering metallic threads of silver, green, and blue. The walls appeared to converge in a definite direction, which corresponded to his sense of down. There was a distinct sense of up and down, but none of north, east, west, or south.
He turned to face upward, and found his sight beclouded by billowing darkness. A sense of threat emanated from what lay above. In that direction lay pain and worse.
He turned reluctantly toward the downward path.
The walls confined him ever more closely as he descended. There was nothing to see. He met no challenges, found no puzzles to solve, confronted no ambiguous choices of onward path. No menace sprang out at him, nor did the heat become greater nor the darkness dimmer. All he felt was an increasing sense of distance from the world of men.
He pressed on.
The threads of metal gathered close around him. They hummed with energy, like unshielded high-tension wires from Earth of old. Flashes of light raced along their surfaces, hot red and actinic blue, both toward and away from the depths into which he was headed.
He thought to extend his psi senses, and decided against it. The tension of the place was too primitive, too elemental. He would learn what he might by continuing on. Perhaps it would be what he needed to know.
But he learned nothing. He sensed a beckoning, a Presence calling him forward, ever deeper into the darkness. Something awaited him below. Its intentions were unknowable, but its call could not be denied. He strove toward it, accompanied only by the quickening pulses of light on the converging metallic threads.
Perhaps it was what he wanted to believe. Or perhaps it was some trick of the heat, the ruddy gloom, and the coruscations that flashed from all around. It didn't matter. He pressed on.
He was still plumbing the depths, devoid of any clue about where he was or what it was that beckoned him onward, when he awakened to the first rays of the late autumn dawn, his wife pulled close against his side, his daughter a comforting weight upon his chest.
***
No other life stirred Morelon House as they descended to the kitchen.
Teresza seated herself at the table, pulled up her blouse, and put Valerie to her breast. She appeared perfectly composed. The infant set to her breakfast with her usual enthusiasm. Armand rummaged about for coffee fixings.
She's just as much at home here as she ever was in Defiance. You'd swear she'd lived here all her life. Is it just one more of her gifts, or did she learn it from our time of hardship?
As he assembled the perking basket and filled it with fresh grounds, his mind filled with an image of a Sacrifice Day dinner in the hearthroom. He, not Alain, sat at the head of the table, with Teresza at his right hand. Teresza, not Elyse, summoned the guests to the table, took her place at his left hand, and announced that the feast had begun. He, not Alain, recounted the Hegira and the Great Sacrifice for the attending throng, and sent them out into the winter chill to watch as the Relic passed overhead. A tall, buxom young woman who sat at his right hand escorted the guests to the door and bade each a unique farewell at the evening's end. He knew the hazel-eyed, auburn-haired beauty offering the ceremonial Partings to be Valerie full grown; the Partings were the duty of the heir to the patriarch. Valerie would be the first child ever to do so who was not a Morelon by blood.
The rush of his tears nearly sent him to his knees.
"Armand...?"
"It's okay, Terry." He thrust the basket into the percolator, filled it with water, set it on the stove and groped for stovewood lengths.
I can't back away. I have to save this, no matter what it takes.
But what if, to save it, I have to subtract myself from it?
He still had no answer.
First things first. I have a mother to revive and a younger sister to reconcile with. And a grandfather to unearth, if I can.
Why would Alain have vanished?
It would have to keep.
The coffee was ready to pour when footfalls sounded in the hall leading to the kitchen. They turned to find Ernest DuBreuill, husband to one of Armand's maternal cousins, slouching through the door in rumpled nightclothes, his eyes barely open and a hand to his mouth to stifle a yawn. He glanced at them and waved negligently, then stopped dead as his eyes sprang open to their widest stops.
"Armand?"
"Good morning, Ernie," Armand said as he rose. "How's Dorothy?"
"She's fine. She's asleep upstairs," DuBreuill whispered. "Armand, is it really you?"
Armand nodded and held out a hand.
DuBreuill did not take it. He turned, raced back down the hall and charged up the stairs to the bedroom level, arms waving wildly overhead and shouting in a voice that might have reached all the way to Sulla.
"Armand's home! Armand is home!"
Morelon House filled with an awakening thunder.
***
Within minutes the kitchen was packed so tightly with bodies that Armand and Teresza were imprisoned by them. The hugs, welcomes, and demands to hear of their adventures lasted throughout the morning. They talked until they were too hoarse to talk further. Dorothy Morelon and Hugh Napier produced an acre of pancakes. Ernest DuBreuill sauteed a mountain of hash and Cecile Morelon scrambled dozens of eggs. Gallons of coffee were made and drunk. It was a celebration to rival any Sacrifice Day feast, with almost as much of the Morelon clan in attendance. Yet from first to last, two persons were conspicuous by their absence: Elyse and Charisse Morelon.
It was near to midday before Armand mustered the courage to ask after them. What had been a raucously joyous revel immediately muted itself.
Hugh Napier said offhandedly, "I should bring Elyse some breakfast."
Heads nodded around the room. Armand said, "Is she..." and fell silent.
Dorothy Morelon set his fifth cup of coffee before him and said, "She's all right physically. It's just been...a little hard for her to adjust."
"What about Charisse?"
"She's been away for a few days. Said she was going to Gallatin. We expect her back today. Any time now."
"I see," Armand said. "Hugh, would you fix a plate for my mother, please?"
Napier swiftly arranged two fresh pancakes and a mound of hash on a plate, poured a generous amount of sweet corn syrup over the pancakes, and started for the stairs. Armand halted him with a raised hand.
"Thanks, Hugh, I'll bring it up to her."
"Armand, mightn't it be --"
He shook his head. Napier handed him the plate and stepped back.
"Armand," Teresza said softly, "would you like me to come, too?"
He regarded his wife somberly and sent her an affectionate thought.
You are my life and my fortune, Teresza, but the first woman I ever loved awaits me upstairs. She took to her bed out of grief over me...and Alain, of course. Just one more thing for me to fix, if I can.
Her eyes closed at the transmission. "No, love," he said aloud. This is my job. "I'll be bringing her down in a moment anyway." I hope.
His relatives flowed aside to let him pass.
Elyse's bedroom door was unlocked. He poked his head around the edge, ready to retreat if he must.
The room was disordered, but not dramatically so. The closet door stood ajar. Clothing sat piled on the dresser and in the corner behind the vanity. The odor of dust and must said that the room was overdue for an airing. But there was no sense of despair.
His mother lay supine in her bed, eyes closed, the unseasonably heavy covers pulled to her chin.
Her forehead had acquired a web of fine wrinkles, the first marks of age he'd ever seen on her flawless face. The skin of her cheeks was slack. There was the suggestion of a wattle beneath her chin
, crow's feet at the corners of her eyes, and an unprecedented tension at her cheekbones and chin. Her hair, once a lustrous black, had become brittle and depthless. Here and there silver threads snaked among the masses of ebony.
Her breathing was shallow and carried a faint rasp. He could tell she was not deeply asleep.
He moved silently to stand beside her bed. Elyse seemed unaware of his presence. He stood looking down at her for a moment, then let his eyes close and sent his viewpoint into her body.
His mother's body was as silent as an empty house. Her vital forces were everywhere banked, slumbering deeply. Her heart beat slowly; her lungs pumped weakly at best. Her blood flow was sluggish. Her ductless glands oozed almost nothing. There seemed nothing wrong with her, but her weakened vital currents put him in mind of a coma victim or a cataleptic, one whose attentions had disengaged from life, possibly never to return.
He inspected the flows along her axial nerves and her spine. There, too, he found a dearth of energy: faint transient pulses, probably purely autonomic, and nothing else. He thought of visiting her brain, pondered whether he could make anything of what he might see there, and decided against it.
However far she's slipped, she's coming back today. Now.
He wrapped ghost fingers around her adrenals and squeezed gently.
Elyse Morelon moaned and writhed as stimulants flooded into her bloodstream. Her limbs twitched, feebly at first, but with increasing vigor. Her eyes rolled beneath their lids as her head thrashed from side to side.
In less than a minute a wave rolled through her body, whipping her legs against the bed with a resounding crash. She cried out, her eyes flew open, and she shot upright with the look of one who has been catapulted into wakefulness from a particularly intense and frightening dream.
"Armand?" she whispered.
He nodded. "Sorry to be away so long, Mom."
She swung her legs out of bed, rose shakily to her feet, and put her fingertips to his face. He did not move.
"Alain's dead," she whispered.
"Are you sure?"
She nodded. "I felt it."
"I didn't know you could..."
"Only a little. Only with Alain, and sometimes...with you."
"Last Sacrifice Day," he faltered, "who...who gave --"
Elyse shook her head. "No one. We didn't...have anything."
All the strength went out of him in an instant.
The great tradition was finally broken. We broke it.
He wrapped his arms around her, and she slumped against him with a long, low sob. He held her, she trembled against him, and they cried.
A long time later, when they descended to the kitchen, his hand tightly clutched in hers, they found Charisse there waiting for them, Teresza at her right hand and Chuck Feigner at her left.
Chapter 45
Dmitri Ianushkevich and Charles Petrus gathered up the remaining chunks of Ethan Mandeville's body and brought them to the recycler, then carried Victoria's limp form to her bed and laid her carefully upon it. After they'd assured themselves that she would not awaken to any ordinary stimulus, they straightened her limbs, smoothed out her clothing as best they could, and let her lie. When they'd cleared as much of the wreckage from the explosion as they could manage unassisted, they checked on the unconscious Goddess once more, and then backed out of the apartment, moving as quietly as mortal men have ever moved.
"We're out of time, Dmitri," Petrus said.
"I know." Ianushkevich jerked a chair away from the monitor pedestal and slumped into it. The monitor screens were utterly still; Terra lay exactly where and as they had left her. The devastation of her apartment foretold a dire fate for its mistress and for the world her carefully nurtured talents preserved. The parapsychologist leaned forward to deposit his head in his hands.
"Are you sure," Petrus said, "that the Morelon girl's...offer couldn't possibly do us any good?"
Ianushkevich nodded without looking up.
"Dmitri?"
"We can't use her, Charles," Ianushkevich murmured. He couldn't summon the strength to lift his head. In six centuries of ceaseless labor, he'd never been so tired. The fatigue that had claimed him was a presentiment of the grave. "Ethan proved that to my satisfaction. To Einar's, too."
Our remaining hope lies in the body of a boy who'd probably rather suicide than help us. If he won't cooperate, and Terra doesn't emerge from her coma, Hope has at most six months to live.
"Who in the
Outer Circle," he forced out, his face still buried behind his hands, "has shown enough discretion and penetration to be admitted to our number at this time?" Petrus was slow to answer.
"I have no candidate. Who did you have in mind?"
Ianushkevich did not reply. To form a sentence seemed an unjustifiable waste of breath.
"Dmitri? Are you thinking of going back to the Hopeless peninsula?"
"What else can we do, Charles?" He dragged his body upright. "There's no time for further screenings, and it's against the odds that we'd find a suitable candidate anyway. There's Armand Morelon, and there's planetary death, and that's all. So either we return to the Hopeless enclave and bring him back here by fair means or foul, or we watch ninety-nine percent of the population of our world die of starvation. I'll refrain from speaking for you, but as for me, I doubt I could persuade myself to outlive them."
Petrus's face was a perfect depiction of the despair Ianushkevich felt. For all his abrasiveness, the agronomist was quite as deeply devoted to the survival and well-being of Hope as Ianushkevich. With Alain Morelon dead, Petrus was the oldest Earth-stock creature in the world, a bare two generations removed from the Hegira itself. By comparison, Ianushkevich's six centuries were a bagatelle. It was impossible not to feel the weight of so many years, especially in light of the knowledge that no other living man had seen them.
Ianushkevich stood. It took all the strength that remained to him.
"We have to go back, Charles. Both of us. We have to be prepared to surprise Armand Morelon, to subdue him by force, and to drag him here against any and all opposition, from him, his wife, or his...community. But we can't leave Terra alone, especially not in the state she's in now. Find Walter Durrell and bring him down here."
"But --"
Ianushkevich groped for what remained of his will and let it blaze from his eyes.
"Now, Charles."
Petrus rose, ciphered open the vault door, and departed hastily.
***
Within Victoria Peterson's skull was chaos unending.
The explosion that killed Ethan Mandeville had rattled her brain within its meningeal envelope. None of her major vessels had ruptured, but a slow leak of cerebrospinal fluid through her arachna mater and into the outer cavity had begun. If it were to go undetected for too long, a pressure imbalance would develop that would collapse her brain as surely as a man's weight would crush a raw egg.
Victoria didn't know about the damage to her body, or the terror her condition had caused those who'd made her care their life's work. Her consciousness, if it can be called that, was of confinement and corrosive rage.
She did not see, or hear, or think as a conscious man would. Yet she seemed to see a vast, featureless chamber around her, opaque to light though its walls were too distant to see. It was lit by a crimson glow, as if illuminated by a bed of lava. Staccato flashes of lightning and bursts of earsplitting thunder assailed her from all sides. A sense of overpowering heat and iron-vapor stink pervaded all.
A creature surrounded by inexplicable pandemonium and unable to think will react in one of two ways: flight or random violence. Victoria could not flee; the roaring, blinding tumult pressed upon her from all sides. In any case, she had no body to flee with.
So she lashed out.
With her superbly trained, chemically augmented telekinetic gift, she rained piston blows of unimaginable power randomly about her. She sought something she could smash...something whose destruction might open a way out o
f the scintillating darkness, reveal a shaft of clear light she could follow out of her nightmare. The flashes and booms continued to roll and swirl about her. Now and then they rippled and quavered, as a rock skimmed through ocean waves might momentarily disorder them, but they did not cease. She could break nothing, change nothing, in that crimson prison.
Rage rose to match her terror. She laid about her ever more wildly, with ever greater power.
Nothing changed.
Nothing.
***
Idem cowered within Its iron fortress.
The Other's psi blasts were more powerful than ever. Even within Idem's redoubt in the core, It was shaken by the mighty blows that rained down from above.
All thought of making contact fled from Its mind as It retracted the tendrils it had extended to the weaker of the Others. Yet that one had begun to respond. Its mind had opened, not without fear, but with a burgeoning desire to know, to seek and to find, when the tendrils brushed against it and wrapped themselves gingerly around it.
Perhaps there would be another opportunity sometime soon. But It could not risk remaining open to the minds above while the stronger one lashed the world with its full power. There was too great a chance of accidentally conducting a fatal bolt of force into Its essence -- a bolt that would otherwise not have been able to penetrate Its protections.
It would have to wait.
It composed Itself as best it could, and waited.
Chapter 46
Armand had thought he knew his sister, and his old roommate. The two creatures who sat before him had their familiar features, but they'd never before worn such stony faces, or such eyes of sharpened steel. Elyse drew close beside him, as if she feared Charisse and her huge companion.
"Hi, roomie," Chuck said. "Long time, no see. Terry says you've been doing a little slumming."
Armand nodded.
"Planning to come back to school?"
"I can't," Armand said. "I have other responsibilities now."
Chuck cocked an eyebrow. "Such as? Running a State, or saving the world?"
Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1) Page 31
