The Nonborn King

by Julian May

  He watched them parade by while the sun soared higher, bringing a sheen of sweat to his deeply tanned skin. He wore only a pair of stagged dungarees, bleached by age and salt water. His self-rejuvenating body was as powerful and firmly muscled as ever; but his face showed, as on a chart of flesh and bone, the pain-etched odyssey of the failed idealist. Only when one particularly large specimen of tarpon glided past, its jaw-plates scarred from an encounter several seasons past, did the fisherman's mouth curve in a reminiscent, one-sided smile of peculiar sweetness.

  Not you, he told the huge fish. You've had your turn on the hook. Another. A greater.

  Engrossed as he was in the study of the tarpon, he was instantly aware of the featherlight scrutiny: the farsense of the children, spying on him again, even though all of the inhabitants of Ocala knew that it was strictly forbidden to disturb him when the tarpon were running. None of the surviving senior rebels would dream of it, remembering only too well the capabilities of the one who had led them in their challenge of the galaxy. But the second generation, now grown to restless young adulthood, was less inclined to reverence. Even his own children, Hagen and Cloud (never having been told of his aborted plans for them had the Rebellion succeeded), believed that his mental powers were diminished by time—and by his thus-far futile scrutiny of some 36,000 Pliocene solar systems in an attempt to locate other coadunate minds.

  The disdain of the youngsters had been shaken only once: last fall, when Felice Landry in her extremity besought help from what she believed were dark forces. So powerful had been the girl's projection of need that the operant metapsychics of Ocala, there on the other side of the world, had clearly farsensed what she was trying to accomplish at Gibraltar. He had smiled at her temerarious rage in that whimsical manner of his, and said: "Why shouldn't the Angel of the Abyss take care of his own?" And forthwith he had combined and focused the psychoenergies of the forty-three surviving conspirators of the Metapsychic Rebellion, plus the uncoadunate but immense creativity of their thirty-two mature children, and vouchsafed the totality to the madwoman. And the Empty Sea filled.

  This had been a mere hint, a shadow of his potential. But it was enough to make the more imaginative of the youngsters reassess their derogation of the lonely star-searcher.

  Sitting there in the skiff, he felt them sweep him again, ever so discreetly. He knew what they were up to. They were bored with their exile on Ocala, bored with the murderous intrigues and harsh restrictions of their elders, and above all bored by their own lack of coadunate mental Unity (for none of the fleeing rebels had possessed the specialized training required of metapsychic preceptors). Now that Europe, the mysterious and alluring Many-Colored Land, was known to be in a state of chaos, the more ambitious members of the second generation were hatching callow schemes of conquest. Not for them the patient search of planet after planet for kindred minds, the dream of a rescue from exile. The children had hopes of achieving power and Unity right here on Pliocene Earth. And the bolder ones entertained an even greater ambition. An unthinkable one.

  Out in the channel, the enormous fish cavorted in the sun.

  He lifted his rod from its case, opened the tackle box, inspected the reel mechanism with his deep-vision, mounted it, and began to thread the line. The flyrod was laminated bamboo, crafted by himself more than twenty years ago. He had made the reel as well. But that fishing line was the product of a world six million years removed from the Pliocene Suwanee estuary. Tapered, balanced, and irreplaceable, subtly armored in the trace against the tarpon's steely jaws, it merged to a vulnerable 6.75-kilo test tippet that gave the fish an almost overwhelming sporting advantage over the angler. To catch even the least of those splendid brutes on a flyrod with such a gossamer thread (and without using any metapsychic force—that went without saying!) was a supreme achievement. But this season, he intended to aim beyond supremacy toward the ultimate. He was going to take one of the Old Ones, the glittering leviathans of the tarpon clan that approached four meters in length and nearly three hundred kilos in weight. He was going to bring in one of those fish on the frail line, with his homemade fly rod.

  I can do it, he told himself, smiling the attractive one-sided smile. One old monster against another.

  The farsense of the children slid over him again.

  Closing his mind to every other input, Marc Remillard settled down in the skiff in the sunshine, waiting for his prey.

  3

  IN GORIAH, after midnight when the moon was down, the cloud cover broke along the Brittany shore and the meteors of March appeared in all their splendor. In a fit of playfulness, Aiken Drum ordered the lights in the city to be extinguished and had Mercy roused from sleep and brought to where he waited on a narrow parapet surmounting the highest spire of the Castle of Glass.

  She stepped out into the amazing night and cried, "Ah!"

  Spraying among the western constellations were countless arching white sparks, and larger meteors with lucent silver tails, and occasional orange fireballs slashing the sky with bold strokes of afterglow. All of them rushed outward from a tight central focus like spokes in a starry wheel, or petals unfurling endlessly from some astral chrysanthemum. The meteors flew over the heads of Aiken and Mercy and dived behind the mass of Breton Island across the strait. Some of them quenched themselves in the black sea. The night was filled with a faint rustling sound, like ethereal whispering.

  "For you!" Aiken exclaimed magniloquently, compassing the spectacle with a possessive sweep of his hand. "One of my more modest productions, but still worthy of a Tanu queen!"

  Laughing, she came to him. "Not yet a queen, my shining braggart, in spite of all your saucy promises. But the star-shower is lovely—not that I believe for a moment that you caused it."

  "Doubting me again, woman?" The small man in the gleaming suit all covered with pockets lifted both arms. A dozen of the meteors seemed to plummet straight down at him, emitting a scorching hiss, and shrink to form a coronet of white lights that scintillated insanely. He held it out to her with a triumphant grin. "I crown you Queen of the Many-Colored Land!"

  "Illusions!" she cried. "That for your shifty love-gift, Lord Lugonn Aiken Drum!" She snapped her fingers at the starry diadem and it died to embers, sifting through Aiken's hands like dwindling coals through a grate. But as his face fell she suddenly smiled at him there in the blazing darkness, making his heart heel half-seas over.

  "But I do love the real meteors, and you're a dear trickster to have called me out to see them."

  She kissed him full and long, with her wild eyes wide open, and while he was disarmed and his mind-shields awry, she caught him unprepared with a redactive probe.

  "You do love me!" she exclaimed.

  "The hell I do!" He mustered his defenses, reasserting self-control, trying to escape her mental scrutiny without hurting her. The great metapsychic faculties that had continued to grow throughout the winter months—those powers that had evoked admiring subservience or sullen awe from the surviving Tanu Great Ones—failed before Mercy-Rosmar. "I don't love you!" his mind and voice protested. "It isn't necessary."

  Her merriment bubbled up. "Necessary? But you'll take my pleasuregifts, wouldn't you—love or not, you archdeceiver! And you want them now. Admit it! Well, then..."

  The fading redactive lancet softened to a sweet searing burst that coursed along his nerves and sent him falling, aflame like the meteors in helpless sexual transport. "Enchantress," he groaned, flat on the glass floor of the turret with his feet tangled in the skirts of her flowing peignoir. Then, as he recovered, he began to laugh to cover the other emotion.

  Mercy knelt beside him, cradling his head and kissing his eyelids. "Don't be afraid," she said. "It will all work as you planned."

  "I'm not afraid of anything!" he protested. "Together, we'll lick 'em all, Lady Wildfire."

  "I don't mean that, you schemer." She looked down at him, relaxed in her lap with his head against her swollen belly. "But you do almost make me believe you can
bring the glory back."

  "I can! Trust me. I've got everything worked out. How to handle the Firvulag, the way to win the loyalty of the Tanu diehards, the restoration of the economy—all of it. I'll be king and you'll be queen, and our winter dreams will all come true."

  His face with its golliwog grin was bright with jacky-lanthorn radiance. He felt Mercy's mind start with an abrupt sense of déjà vu that was so intense that it made even the sleeping fetus stir.

  "I've seen your face before," she said wonderingly. "Back in the Old World. I'm sure of it. It was in Italy ... in Firenze."

  "Not bloody likely. The only time I came to Old Earth was on my trip to the auberge, and I went right to France with no detours. That was after you'd already gone through the time-gate."

  "I saw you," she insisted. "Or was it a picture of you? Perhaps in the Palazzo Vecchio? But whose portrait?"

  "Not an Italian gene in my bod," he murmured, reaching up to stroke her hair. Meteors sketched a surreal halo behind her head. "Dalriada, where I grew up, was a Scottish world. And all of us testtube brats had certified tartan chromosomes."

  He levitated until their lips met. She melted into him again, as he knew she would, triggering the neural conflagration that he could not help craving in spite of his fear. When he regained his senses, still lying in her lap, the baby was kicking him in the ear and the damn meteors exploding in pyrotechnic mockery.

  "Shame on you for disturbing my darling Agraynel," Mercy said.

  Aiken felt her maternal thought-song soothe the unborn girl. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, his eyes filled with tears. Mortified, he whirled his most impregnable mental barrier into place so that Mercy would not know how much he envied the baby. He said, "Only one more month until it's born. And then I'm going to have you, my Lady Wildfire! Find out how you knock me out of orbit—and give you some of your own back with interest!"

  "Not until May," she chided him. "At the Grand Loving, as we agreed."

  "Oh, no! That's just the official wedding. You aren't going to hold me off that long!...And come to think of it—why shouldn't I take you metapsychically right now, just the way you've been mind-screwing me?" His arms closed around her shoulders, pulling her strongly down. His coercive power began to bore into her softness. "Show me how you do your magic sex! Show me—or I'll just find out by experimenting!"

  "You may not!" she cried, countering him with a psychocreative riposte that all but blinded him. "It would make a fearful womb-quake in addition to the neural surge. That's the way we women are made. It would be bad for the baby."

  He released her. The damned fear came again, and so did the tears. "To hell with the baby."

  Her face came close to his. Her expression of indignation changed into tenderness. "Ah, poor little one. I see. I see."

  Her lips descended to drink his tears.

  He thrashed wildly to escape her physical embrace, sprawling onto the floor. His mouth tightened to a thin slot and his eyes were wide and black. "I don't want that from you! Ever."

  "Ah, well." She shrugged. "But you needn't fear it, really. It's quite natural for the two womanly functions to combine in the loving."

  "You don't love me, and I don't love you. So why pretend? And I don't need your pity, dammit!" He cast about desperately, to put her in the wrong. "Why haven't you ever let me pleasure you? Not once! Always ready to blast me into a coma—but never letting me touch you. Am I so disgusting?"

  "Don't be silly. It's the baby, I tell you."

  "When Nodonn was with you, the two of you fucked up a bloody hurricane—and no worry about the baby, then. And that poor bastard of an anthropologist had all the sweet houghmagandy he wanted from you. The whole damn capital knew what you two were up to!"

  Her smile was easy. "Agraynel didn't mind then, in the second trimester. But now she's all close-crowded and impatient to be born."

  "Don't give me that." He got to his feet, his face no longer alight and his voice metallic. "You won't let me get into you because you're still mourning for Nodonn."

  "How could I not?" she admitted coolly. She levitated and stood before him. The pale chiffon of her gown seemed to ripple in the sidereal concussions.

  He shouted in fury. "Mayvar told me all about your precious Sun-Face! A fine king he would've made! The Tanu ruler is supposed to pass on his superior genes to the people—but do you know that your wonderful Nodonn was damn near sterile? The great Battlemaster! He lived eight hundred years and had only a handful of children. And not a first-class power in the lot! Mayvar Kingmaker rejected him. He was only declared crown prince because the Host of Nontusvel forced him on the Thagdal. Why do you think Mayvar was so glad to see me come along? Why do you think she named me Lugonn, after the real crown prince?"

  Mercy clasped his waving hands. They stood face to face in bare feet and she was several centimeters the taller.

  Softly, she said, "It's true that you are the chosen of the Kingmaker. And perhaps you would have won your duel with the Battlemaster on the White Silver Plain ... and perhaps not. Nodonn is dead. Drowned. But you're alive, Lord Aiken-Lugonn, and master of Goriah in Nodonn's place. Who would have thought that would happen, when we met all drenched and puking like puppies, adrift in a golden cauldron in the midst of the Great Flood! Less than five months we've been together—and yet I feel I've known you an age, you Lord of Misrule. You'll be king! Don't doubt it I see—I know! There isn't a Tanu or a human gold in the Many-Colored Land with mental prowess to equal your own. No other could have picked up the pieces of this shattered world as you did and begun the rebuilding. That's why I'll stay with you, work with you. And after I bear the Thagdal's daughter I'll marry you and be your queen. In May, at the Grand Loving, as we agreed. As for your own children, we'll see what the good Goddess sends."

  The rage rushed out of him, leaving only a wayward thought: But if only you loved me, I'd be safe.

  Her mind smiled back, changeable as the western sea. All during their time together they had played this game; and until now, he had believed himself the winner, immune to the enchantment that had bound the others to her.

  She said, "You fear me, and you hope to gain control through love. But are you willing to love me in return, giving and sharing? Or would you only rule?"

  The deep barriers that hid the truth crumbled within him. "You know I already love you."

  "Enough to demand nothing of me in return? Unselfishly?"

  "I don't know."

  Her voice and mind-tone became fey and heedless. "And what if I won't return your love, you Hermes Chrysorapis? What will you do with me then?"

  He folded her in his arms, burying his face in the fragrant hair cascading over her shoulder, sensing the ironic triumph behind her question. She knew. She knew.

  He broke away and stood alone. The sky was graying with false dawn. The meteors diminished. He said, "I didn't really cause the star-shower. The meteors come every spring at this time. They mark the end of the rainy season. But I wanted to surprise you with them."

  "What will you do with me if I won't love you?" she repeated.

  "I think you know."

  He gave her his hand and they entered the lightless tower, leaving the last of the meteors exploding in cool darkness.

  4

  JUST ONE MORE DAY, and Tony Wayland would have made his escape. Just one more day, and he could have gone out normally with the caravan to Fort Rusty—then made his getaway with nobody the wiser.

  But the Howlers had attacked the Iron Maiden Mine before the caravan left. And now Tony knew he was going to die...

  As that Pliocene rara avis, a metallurgical engineer and fully sane exsilver (his psychocreative faculty was modest at best; he owed his high status under the Tanu to an improved refining technique introduced at the Finiah barium mine), Tony was under strictest orders from his new bosses in the Lowlife Steering Committee to avoid life-threatening situations. He usually undertook troubleshooting tours among the Iron Villages only during daylight, when ho
stile exotics were seldom abroad. Sir Dougal, the stalwart bodyguard assigned to him by Old Man Kawai, shadowed him everywhere. Dougal's pseudomedieval eccentricities were more than counterbalanced by a fanatical devotion to duty and by expertise with the compound bow. And, truth to tell, Tony was also gratified to have at least one person left who still addressed him as "Lord." The majority of the Lowlife ironworking community were offensively egalitarian, if not downright contemptuous of a déclassé silver such as himself. He had cooperated with the Tanu—and done it willingly. Thus he was a traitor to the human race.

  Not that anyone dared snub Tony to his face! Far from it, since his talents were invaluable. If the free humans of the Vosges wilderness—Lowlives and Finiah refugees, now united—were to avoid Tanu enslavement, the Howler menace, and possible Firvulag treachery, iron production was a strategic necessity. The "blood-metal" was poisonous to all branches of the extragalactic race that shared Pliocene Europe with embattled humankind, and the use of iron weapons had been a key factor in the destruction of Tanu Finiah by a coalition of Lowlives and Firvulag. Tony Wayland had been one of the top prizes in that human triumph. Most of the other noncombatant silvers had been flown safely to Tanu territory when Lord Velteyn evacuated his doomed city. But Tony had been unlucky.

  A sneering band of Lowlife invaders had caught him flagrante delicto in the Finiah Pleasure Dome, too besotted after an interlude with a Tanu charmer to distinguish the skyrockets going off in his head from the noise of the city's Götterdämmerung. So they frogmarched him off, hauled him before a Lowlife tribunal, and gave him the choice faced by every other torced human following the fall of Finiah: Live free or die. Tony, a total pragmatist, had submitted to the abscission of his silver tore and the ensuing weeks of agonizing psychic adjustment. But he hadn't forgotten—or forgiven. He would have run away to the Tanu in a trice, except for the still greater disaster that had destroyed the exotics' capital of Muriah and snuffed out most of the ruling nobility. The Great Flood had bred such havoc that he was at a loss to sort out the main chance. Fort Onion River and the other gray-torc guard stations along the track to Castle Gateway were long abandoned. The stronghold itself, useless now that the time-gate had closed, was reputed to have been taken over by the Firvulag. The Little People had also seized the small citadel of Burask on the dangerous western trail leading to Armorica and Goriah.