The Many-Coloured Land

CHAPTER ONE

Burnished trumpets sounded a flourish. The ducal party rode gaily out of the Chateau de Riom, horses prancing and curvetting as they had been trained, giving a show of spirit without imperiling the ladies in their chancy sidesaddles. Sunshine sparkled on the jeweled caparisons of the mounts, but it was the gorgeous riders who earned the crowd’s applause.

Greenish-blue reflections from the festive scene on the monitor blackened Mercedes Lamballe’s auburn hair and threw livid lights across her thin face. “The tourists draw lots to be in the procession of nobles,” she explained to Grenfell. “It’s more fun to be common, but try to tell them that. Of course the principals are all pros.”

Jean, Duc de Berry, raised his arm to the cheering throng. He wore a long houppelande in his own heraldic blue, powdered with fleurs de lys. The dagged sleeves were turned back to show a rich lining of yellow brocade. The Duc’s hosen were pure white, embroidered with golden spangles, and he wore golden spurs. At his side rode the Prince, Charles d’Orleans, his robes parti-colored in the royal scarlet, black, and white, his heavy golden baldric fringed with tinkling bells. Other nobles in the train, gaudy as a flock of spring warblers, followed after with the ladies.

“Isn’t there a hazard?” Grenfell asked. “Horses with untrained riders? I should think you’d stick with robot mounts.”

Lamballe said softly, “It has to be real. This is France, you know. The horses are specially bred for intelligence and stability.”

In honor of the maying, the betrothed Princess Bonne and all her retinue were dressed in malachite-green silk. The noble maidens wore the quaint headdresses of the early fifteenth century, fretted gilt-wire confections threaded with jewels, rising up on their braided coiffures like kitten ears. The crepine of the Princess was even more outlandish, extending out from her temples in long golden horns with a white lawn veil draped over the wires.

“Cue the flower girls,” said Gaston, from the other side of the control room.

Mercy Lamballe sat still, gazing at the brilliant picture with rapt intensity. The antennae of her comset made the strange headpiece of the medieval princess out on the chateau grounds look almost ordinary in comparison.

“Merce,” the director repeated with gentle insistence. “The flower girls.”

Slowly she reached out a hand, keying the marshaling channel.

Trumpets sounded again and the peasant crowd of tourists oohed. Dozens of dimpled little maids in short gowns of pink and white came running out of the orchard carrying baskets of apple blossoms. They romped along the road in front of the ducal procession strewing flowers, while flageolets and trombones struck up a lively air. Jugglers, acrobats, and a dancing bear joined the mob. The Princess blew kisses to the crowd, and the Duc distributed an occasional piece of largesse.

“Cue the courtiers,” said Gaston.

The woman at the control console sat motionless. Bryan Grenfell could see drops of moisture on her brow, dampening the straying tendrils of auburn hair. Her mouth was tight.

“Mercy, what is it?” Grenfell whispered. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. Her voice was husky and strained. “Courtiers away, Gaston.”

Three young men, also dressed in green, came galloping from the woods toward the procession of nobility, bearing armfuls of leafy sprigs. With much giggling, the ladies twined these into head-wreaths and crowned the chevaliers of their choice. The men reciprocated with dainty chaplets for the damsels, and they all resumed their ride toward the meadow where the maypole waited. Meanwhile, directed by Mercy’s commands, barefoot girls and grinning youths distributed flowers and greenery to the slightly self-conscious crowd, crying: “Vert! Vert pour le mai!”

Right on cue, the Duc and his party began to sing along with the flutes:

Cest le mai, c’est le mai, Cest le joli mois de mai!

“They’re off pitch again,” Gaston said in an exasperated voice. “Cue in the filler voices, Merce. And let’s have the lark loops and a few yellow butterflies.” He keyed for voice on the marshaling channel and exclaimed, “Eh, Minou! Get that clot out from in front of the Duc’s horse. And watch the kid in red. Looks like he’s twitching bells off the Prince’s baldric.”

Mercedes Lamballe brought up the auxiliary voices as ordered. The entire crowd joined in the song, having slept on it on the way from Charlemagne’s Coronation. Mercy made bird-song fill the blossom-laden orchard and sent out signals that released the butterflies from their secret cages. Unbidden, she conjured up a scented breeze to cool the tourists from Aquitaine and Neustria and Bloi and Foix and all the other “French” planets in the Galactic Milieu who had come, together with Francophiles and medievalists from scores of other worlds, to savor the glories of ancient Auvergne.

“They’ll be getting warm now, Bry,” she remarked to Grenfell. “The breeze will make them happier.”

Bryan relaxed at the more normal tone in her voice. “I guess there are limits to the inconveniences they’ll endure in the name of immersive cultural pageantry.”

“We reproduce the past,” Lamballe said, “as we would have liked it to be. The realities of medieval France are another trip altogether.”

“We have stragglers, Merce.” Gaston’s hands flashed over the control panel in the preliminary choreography of the maypole suite. “I see two or three exotics in the bunch. Probably those comparative ethnologists from the Krondak world we were alerted about. Better bring over a troubadour to keep ’em happy until they catch up with the main group. These visiting firemen are apt to write snotty evaluations if you let ’em get bored.”

“Some of us keep our objectivity,” Grenfell said mildly.

The director snorted. “Well, you’re not out there tramping through horseshit in fancy dress in the hot sun on a world with low subjective oxygen and double subjective gravity!…

Merce? Dammit, kiddo, are you fuguing off again?

Bryan rose from his seat and came to her, grave concern on his face. “Gaston, can’t you see she’s ill?”

“I’m not!” Mercy was sharp. “It’s going to pass off in a minute or two. Troubadour away, Gaston.”

The monitor zoomed in on a singer who bowed to the little knot of laggards, struck a chord on his lute, and began expertly herding the people toward the maypole area while soothing them with song. The piercing sweetness of his tenor filled the control room. He sang first in French, then in the Standard English of the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu for those who weren’t up to the archaic linguistics.

A genuine lark added its own coda to the minstrel’s song. Mercy lowered her head and tears fell onto the console before her. That damn song. And springtime in the Auvergne. And the friggerty larks and retroevolved butterflies and manicured meadows and orchards crammed with gratified folk from faraway planets where the living was tough but the challenge was being met by all but the inevitable misfits who stubbed the beautiful growing tapestry of the Galactic Milieu.

Misfits like Mercy Lamballe.

“Beaucoup regrets, guys,” she said with a rueful smile, mopping her face with a tissue. “Wrong phase of the moon, I guess. Or the old Celtic rising. Bry, you just picked the wrong day to visit this crazy place. Sorry.”

“All you Celts are bonkers.” Gaston excused her with breezy kindness. “There’s a Breton, engineer over in the Sun King Pageant who told me he can only shoot his wad when he’s doing it on a megalith. Come on, babe. Let’s keep this show rolling.”

On the screens, the maypole dancers twined their ribbons and pivoted in intricate patterns. The Duc de Berry and the other actors of his entourage permitted thrilled tourists to admire the indubitably real gems that adorned their costumes. Flutes piped, cornemuses wailed, hawkers peddled comfits and wine, shepherds let people pet their lambs, and the sun smiled down. All was well in la douce France, A.D. 1410, and so it would be for another six hours, through the tournament and culminating feast.

And then the weary tourists, 700 years removed from the medieval world of the Duc de Berry, would be whisked off in comfortable subway tubes to their next cultural immersion at Versailles. And Bryan Grenfell and Mercy Lamballe would go down to the orchard as evening fell to talk of sailing to Ajaccio together and to see how many of the butterflies had survived.

CHAPTER TWO

The alert klaxon hooted through the ready room of Lisboa Power Grid’s central staging.

“Well, hell, I was folding anyhow,” big Georgina remarked. She hoisted the portable air-conditioning unit of her armor and clomped off to the waiting drill-rigs, helmet under her arm.

Stein Oleson slammed his cards down on the table. His beaker of booze went over and sluiced the meager pile of chips in front of him. “And me with a king-high tizz and the first decent pot all day! Damn lucky granny-banging trisomics!” He lurched to his feet, upsetting the reinforced chair, and stood swaying, two meters and fifteen cents’ worth of ugly-handsome berserker. The reddened sclera of his eyeballs contrasted oddly with the bright blue irises. Oleson glared at the other players and bunched up his mailed servo-powered fists.

Hubert gave a deep guffaw. He could laugh, having come out on top. “Tough kitty! Simmer down, Stein. Sopping up all that mouthwash didn’t help your game much.”

The fourth cardplayer chimed in. “I told you to take it easy on the gargle, Steinie. And now lookit! We gotta go down, and you’re halfplotzed again.”

Oleson gave the man a look of murderous contempt. He shed the a/c walkaround, climbed into his own drill-rig, and began plugging himself in. “You keep your trap shut, Jango. Even blind drunk I can zap a truer bore than any scat-eatin’ li’l Portugee sardine stroker.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Hubert. “Will you two quit?”

“You try teaming with an orry-eyed squarehead!” Jango said. He blew his nose in the Iberian fashion, over the neck-rim of his armor, then locked on his helmet. Oleson sneered, “And you call me slob!”

The electronic voice of Georgina, the team leader, gave them the bad news as they went through the systems check, “We’ve lost the Cabo da Roca-Azores mainline bore 793 kloms out and the service tunnel, too. Class Three slippage and over-thrust, but at least the fistula sealed. It looks like a long trick, children.”

Stein Oleson powered up. His 180-ton rig rose thirty cents off the deck, slid out of its bay, and sashayed down the ramp, waving its empennage like a slightly tipsy iron dinosaur.

“Madre de deus,” growled Jango’s voice. His machine came after Stein’s, obeying the taxi regulation scrupulously. “He’s a menace, Georgina. I’ll be damned if I drill tandem with him. I’m telling you, I’ll file a beef with the union! How’d you like to have a drunken numbwit the only thing between your ass and a bleb of red-hot basalt?”

Oleson’s bellowed laughter clanged in all their ears. “Go ahead and file with the union, pussywillow! Then get yourself a job to fit your nerve. Like drilling holes in Swiss cheeses with your…”

“Will you cut that crap?” Georgina said wearily. “Hubey, you partner with Jango this shift and I’ll go tandem with Stein.”

“Now wait a minute, Georgina,” Oleson began.

“It’s settled, Stein.” She cycled the airlock. “You and Big Mama against the world, Blue Eyes. And save your soul for Jesus if you don’t sober up before we hit that break. Let’s haul, children.”

A massive gate, eleven meters high and nearly as thick, swung open to give them entry to the service tunnel that dived under the sea. Georgina had fed the coordinates of the break into the autohelms of their drill-rigs, so all they had to do for a while was relax, wiggle around in their armor, and maybe snuff up a euphoric or two while hurtling along at 500 kph toward a mess under the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Stein Oleson raised the partial pressure of his oxygen and gave himself a jolt of aldetox and stimvim. Then he ordered the armor’s meal unit to deliver a liter of raw egg and smoked herring puree, together with his favorite hair of the dog, akvavit.

There was a low muttering in his helmet receiver. “Damn atavistic cacafogo. Ought to mount a set of ox horns on his helmet and wrap his iron ass in a bearskin jockstrap.”

Stein smiled in spite of himself. In his favorite fantasies he did imagine himself a Viking. Or, since he had both Norse and Swedish genes, perhaps a Varangian marauder slashing his way southward into ancient Russia. How wonderful it would be to answer insults with an axe or a sword, unfettered by the stupid constraints of civilization! To let the red anger flow as it was meant to, powering his great muscles for battle! To take strong blonde women who would first fight him off, then yield with sweet openness! He was born for a life like that.

But unfortunately for Stein Oleson, human cultural savagery was extinct in the Galactic Age, mourned only by a few ethnologists, and the subtleties of the new mental barbarians were beyond Stein’s power to grasp. This exciting and dangerous job of his had been vouchsafed him by a compassionate computer, but his soul-hunger remained unsatisfied. He had never considered emigrating to the stars; on no human colony anywhere in the Galactic Milieu was there a primal Eden. The germ plasm of humanity was too valuable to fritter in neolithic backwaters. Each of the 783 new human worlds was completely civilized, bound by the ethics of the Concilium, and obligated to contribute toward the slowly coalescing Whole. People who hankered after their simpler roots had to be content with visiting the Old World’s painstaking restorations of ancient cultural settings, or with the exquisitely orchestrated Immersive Pageants, almost, but not quite, authentic to the last detail, which let a person actively savor selected portions of his heritage.

Stein, who was born on the Old World, had gone to the Fjordland Saga when he was barely out of adolescence, traveling from Chicago Metro to Scandinavia with other vacationing students. He was ejected from the Longboat Invaders Pageant and heavily fined after leaping into the midst of a mock melee, chopping a hairy Norseman’s arm off, and “rescuing” a kidnapped British maiden from rape. (The wounded actor was philosophical about his three months in the regeneration tank. “Just the hazards of the trade, kid,” he had told his remorseful attacker.)

Some years later, after Stein had matured and found a certain release in his work, he had gone to the Saga-pageants again. This time they seemed pathetic. Stein saw the happy outworld visitors from Trondelag and Thule and Finnmark and all the other “Scandinavian” planets as a pack of silly costumed fools, waders in the shallows, nibblers, masturbators, pathetic chasers after lost identity. “What will you do when you find out who you are, great-grandchildren of test tubes?” he had screamed, fighting drunk at the Valhalla Feast. “Go back where you came from, to the new worlds the monsters gave you!” Then he had climbed up onto the Aesir’s table and peed in the mead bowl.

They ejected and fined him again. And this time his credit card was pipped so that he was automatically turned away by every pageant box office…

The speeding drill-rigs raced beneath the continental slope, their headlights catching glints of pink, green, and white from the granite walls of the tunnel. Then the machines penetrated the dark basalt of the deep-ocean crust below the Tagus Abyssal Plain. Just three kilometers above their service tunnel were the waters of the sea; ten kilometers below lay the molten mantle.

As they drove two abreast through the lithosphere, the members of the team had the illusion of going down a gigantic ramp with sharp drops at regular intervals. The rigs would fly straight and level, then nose down sharply on a new straight path, only to repeat the maneuver a few moments later. The service tunnel was following the curvature of the Earth in a series of straight-line increments; it had to, because of the power-transmittal bore it served, a parallel tunnel with a diameter just great enough to admit a single drill-rig when there was a need for major repairs. In most parts of the complex undersea power system, service tunnels and bores were connected by adits every ten kloms, allowing the maintenance crews easy access; but if they had to, the drill-rigs could zap right through the rough rock walls of the service tunnel and mole their way to the bore from any angle.

Until the time when the alarm had run in Lisboa, the mainline bore between continental Europe and the extensive Azores agriculture farms had been lit with the glare of a photon beam. This ultimate answer to Earth’s ancient energy-hunger originated at this time of day in the sunshine of the Serra da Estrela Tier 39 Collection Center northwest of Lisboa Metro. With its sister centers at Jiuquan, Akebono Platform, and Cedar Bluffs KA, it gathered and distributed solar energy to be used by consumers adjacent to the 39N parallel all around the globe. A complex of spidery stratotowers, secure against the forces of gravity and high above the weather, gathered light rays from the cloudless skies, arranged them into a coherent beam, and sent this to be distributed safely underground via a web of mainline and local feeder bores. A photon from the Portuguese (or Chinese or Pacific or Kansas) daylight would be directed on its way by means of plasma mirrors operating within the bores, and would reach the fog-bound folk in the farms of the North Atlantic before an eye could bunk. The ocean farmers utilized the power for everything from submarine harvesters to electric blankets. Few of the consumers would bother to think where the energy came from.

Like all of Earth’s subterranean power bores, Cabo da Roca-Azores was regularly patrolled by small robot crawlers and muckers. These could make minor repairs when the planetary crust shifted in a common Class One incident, not even interrupting the photon beam. Class Two damage was severe enough to cause an automatic shutdown. Perhaps a tremor would shift a segment of the bore slightly out of alignment, or damage one of the vital mirror stations. Crews from the surface would race to the scene of the disruption via the service tunnels, and the repairs were usually made very quickly.

But on this day, the tectonic adjustment had been rated at Class Three. The Despacho Fracture Zone had shrugged, and a web of minor faults in the suboceanic basalt had waggled in sympathy. Hot rock surounding a three-kilometer section of the paired tunnels suddenly moved north-south, east-west, up-down, crumpling not only the power bore but the much larger service tunnel as well. As the mirror station vaporized in a very small thermonuclear flash, the searing photons of the beam burned undeflected for a microsecond before safety cutoff. The beam punched through the shattered bore wall and continued to burn a straight-arrow path westward through the crust until it broke through’ the sea floor. There was a steam explosion in the liquefied rock just as the beam died, which effectively sealed the fistula. But a large region that had formerly been fairly stable solid rock was now reduced to a shambles of rubble, cooked oceanic ooze, and slowly cooling pockets of molten lava.

A bypass restored power to the Azores within one second after the break. Until the repairs were made, the islands would take most of their energy from the Tier 38 Collection Center north west of Lorca in Spain, via Gibraltar-Madeira. Drill crews from both ends of the damaged bore segment would get to clean up the mess, rebuild the mirror, and spin reinforcement sleeves for the tunnels passing through the new zone of instability.

Then there would be light once again.

“Lisbong leader, this is Ponta Del Three-Alfa coming up on Klom Seven-Niner-Seven, c’mon.”

“Lisbong Sixteen-Echo gotcha, Ponta Del,” said Georgina. “We’re at Seven-Eight-Zip and rolling… Seven-Eight-Five… Seven-Niner-Zip… and at the fall, Seven-Niner-Two. You guys gonna take the fistula?”

“Affirm, Lisbong, with one unit on the bore for linkup. Long time no see, Georgina, but we gotta stop meeting like this! Put your best zapper on the mainline rebore, sweetie. She gonna be a sneaky rascal, c’mon.”

“Have no fear, Ponta Del. See you in a short, Larry lovie. Sixteen-Echo gone.”

Stein Oleson gritted his teeth and gripped the twin joy sticks of his rig. He knew he was the best shot Lisboa had. Nobody could zap a truer bore than he could. Lava busters, magnetic anoms, nothing ever threw him off the true. He got ready to blast.

“Hubert, get on that mainline rebore,” Georgina said.

Humiliation and rage twisted Stein’s guts. A nauseous blend of bile and herring rose in his throat. He swallowed. He breathed. He waited.

“Jango, you follow Hubey with the sleeve-spinning until you hit the mirror. Then get on that. Stein, let’s you and me open up this service tunnel.”

“Right you are, Georgina,” Stein said quietly. He thumbed the stud on his right stick. A greenish-white ray blazed out of the rig’s nose. Slowly, the two big machines began to cut through the fall of steaming black rock while little robot muckers scuttled about hauling the debris away.

CHAPTER THREE

The entire Voorhees clan had taken to deep space almost immediately after the Great Intervention. It was to be expected of the descendants of New Amsterdam skippers and four generations of U.S. Navy airmen; a yearning for far horizons was programmed into the Voorhees genes.

Richard Voorhees and his older sibs Farnum and Evelyn were born on Assawompset, one of the longest-settled “American” worlds, where their parents were based with the Fourteenth Fleet. Far and Evie carried on the family tradition, line officers both, she commanding a diplomatic courier, he the exec on one of the asteroid-sized colonization transports. Both had served with distinction during the brief Metapsychic Rebellion of the ’Eighties, a credit to the family name, to the service, and to humanity at large.

Then there was Richard.

He also went to the stars, but not in government service. The structured military life was repellent to him and he was excessively xenophobic as well. Members of the five exotic races were common visitors at Assawompset Sector Base, and Richard had hated and feared them from the time he was a toddler. Later, in school, be found a rationalization for the dread as he read about the half-century preceding the Intervention on Old Earth, when more and more frequent probes by the eager anthropologists of the Milieu had disturbed and sometimes terrified humanity. The Krondaku had been guilty of particularly tactless experimentation; and crews from certain Simbiari worlds had even descended to mischief-making among the natives when overcome by ennui during long surveillance tours.

The Galactic Concilium had dealt sternly with such transgressions, which were fortunately few. Nevertheless a remnant of the old “alien invasion” psychosis persisted in human folklore even after the Intervention had opened the way to the stars. Mild manifestations of xenophobia were rather common among human colonists; but not many people carried their prejudice as far as Richard Voorhees.

Fanned by feelings of personal inadequacy, the irrational fears of the child matured into full-blown hatred in the grown man. Richard rejected Milieu service and turned instead to a career as a commercial spacer. There he could pick and choose his shipmates and the ports he visited. Farnum and Evelyn tried to be understanding of their brother’s problem; but Richard knew all too well that the Fleet officers secretly looked down upon him. “Our brother the trader,” they would say, and laugh. “Well, it’s not quite as bad as being a pirate!”

Richard had to pretend to be a good sport about the jibing for more than twenty years, while he worked his way up from spacehand to mate to hired skipper to owner-operator. The day came at last when he could stand at the dock at Bedford Starport and admire the quarter-klom sleekness of CSS Wolverton Mountain, rejoicing that she was his own. The ship had been a VIP speedster, equipped with the most powerful superluminal translator as well as oversized inertialess drivers for slower-than-light travel. Voorhees had the passenger accommodations ripped out and converted her to full-auto express cargo, because that was where the real money was.

He let it be known that there was no journey too long or too dangerous for him to dare, no risk he was not prepared to undertake in the delivery of a rare or desperately needed load anywhere in the galaxy. And the clients came. In the years that followed, Richard Voorhees made the appalling Hub run eight times before the precarious colonies there were abandoned. He burned out four sets of updkm energy-field crystals and nearly fused his own nervous system on a record-breaking run to Hercules Ouster. He carried drugs and life-saving equipment and parts to fix vital machinery. He expedited samples of ores and cultures of suspect organisms from outlying human colonies to the vast laboratories of the Old World. He was able to prevent a eugenic catastrophe on Bafut by rushing in replacement sperm. He had given mild gratification to a dying tycoon by speeding one precious bottle of Jack Daniel’s from Earth to the faraway Cumberland System. He had toted just about everything but the serum to Nome and the message to Garcia.

Richard Voorhees became rich and a little famous, underwent rejuvenation, acquired a taste for antique aeroplanes, rare Earth vintages, gourmet goodies, and dancing women, grew a big black mustache, and told his distinguished older brother and sister to go screw themselves.

And then, on a certain day in 2110, Richard sowed the seed of his own ruin.

He was alone as usual on the bridge of Wolverton Mountain, deep in the gray negation of subspace, going balls-up for the isolated Orissa system 1870 light-years south of the Galactic Plane. His cargo was a large and intricate temple of Jagannath, including sacred images and rolling stock, intended to replace a religious complex that had been accidentally destroyed on the Hindu-settled planet. Old World artisans, using tools and ancient patterns now unavailable to their colonial kin, had crafted a perfect replica; but they had taken much too long doing it. Voorhees’ contract specified that he had to get the temple and its statuary to Orissa within seventeen days, before the local celebration of Rath Yatra, when the god’s effigy was scheduled to be transported in solemn procession from the temple to a summer dwelling. If the ship arrived late and the faithful had to commemorate their holy days without the sacred edifice and images, the shipping fee would be halved. And it was a very large fee.

Voorhees had been confident of meeting the deadline. He programmed the tightest hyperspatial catenary, made sure he had extra dope for the pain of breaking through the superficies on short leash, and settled down to play chess with the guidance computer and trade gossip with the ship’s other systems. Wolverton Mountain was completely automated except for her skipper; but Richard had sufficient vestigial social tendencies to program all of the robotics with individual identities and voices, together with input from the scandal sheets of his favorite worlds, jokes, and sycophantic chatter. It helped to pass the time.

“Communications to bridge,” said a winsome contralto, interrupting Richard’s attack on the computer’s queen.

“Voorhees here. What is it, Lily darling?”

“We’ve intercepted a contemporaneous subspace distress signal,” the system said. “A Poltroyan research vessel is dead in the matrix with translator trouble. Navigation is plotting its pseudolocus.”

Damn grinning little dwarfs! Probably poking around in their usual busybody way and all the while letting the u-crystals deteriorate without proper maintenance.

“Navigation to bridge.”

“Yes, Fred?”

“That vessel in distress is damn near our catenary, Captain. They’re lucky. This slice of the hype doesn’t get much traffic.”

Richard’s fist closed around a chess pawn and squeezed. So now he could go nursemaid the little buggers. And kiss half his commission goodbye, like as not. It would probably take several subjective days to make repairs, considering the fumble-fingeredness of the Poltroyans and the fact that Wolverton Mountain carried only three robot excursion engineers. If it was a ship-full of humans in distress, there’d be no question of heaving to. But exotics!

“I’ve acknowledged receipt of the distress signal,” Lily said. “The Poltroyan vessel is in a state of life-system deterioration. They’ve been trapped for some time, Skipper.”

Oh, hell. He was only two days out of Orissa. The Poltroons could certainly hang on for a few days longer. He could catch them on the flip-flop.

“Attention all systems. Carry on original subspace vector. Communications, cease all external transmissions. Lily, I want you to erase from the log that distress signal and all subsequent inter and intraship communications up to the sound of my mark. Ready? Mark.”

Richard Voorhees made his delivery in time and collected the entire fee from the grateful worshippers of Jagannath.

A Lylmik Fleet cruiser rendered assistance to the Poltroyans at about the same time that Voorhees docked on Orissa. The Poltroyans had less than fifteen hours of oxygen remaining in their life-support system when the rescuers arrived.

The Poltroyans turned their recording of Voorhees initial response to the distress signal over to the Sector Magistratum. When Richard returned to Assawompset, he was placed under arrest on suspicion of violating the Galactic Altruism Statutes, Section 24: “Ethical Obligations of Deep-Space Vessels.”

After being convicted of the charge, Richard Voorhees was fined a stupendous sum that wiped out most of his assets. Wolverton Mountain was confiscated and her skipper proscribed from engaging in any aspect of abrogation or interstellar commerce for the rest of his natural lives.

“I think I’ll visit the Old World,” Richard told his solicitor after the whole thing was over.

“They say you can’t beat it as a place to blow your brains out.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Felice Landry sat erect in the saddle on the back of her three-ton verrul, stun-gun cradled in her right arm. She bowed her head in acknowledgment of the cheers. There were nearly fifty thousand fans in the arena for the big game, a splendid turnout for a small planet such as Acadie.

Landry nudged the verrul into a complicated routine of dressage. The hideous beast, resembling a stilt-legged rhino with a ceratopsian neck frill and wicked glowing eyes, minced in and out of the bodies without stepping on a single one. Of an the players on the green-and-white sawdust grid, Landry was the only one still mounted and conscious.

Other verruls in the sideline pens behind the burladero added their trumpeting to the crowd’s applause. With casual skill, Felice had her mount pick up the scarlet ring with its nose horn. Then she sent the animal galloping toward the now undefended Whitewing goal, even though there was no longer any need for speed.

“Lan-dree! Lan-dree!” screamed the spectators. It seemed that the young girl and the beast would crash into the cavernous scoop at the end of the field. But just before they were upon it, Landry gave the verrul a sharp crossrein and an unspoken command. The creature wheeled full about, tossing its monstrous head, which was nearly as long as the girl’s body. The ring went sailing through the air and entered the scoop dead center. The goal signal lit up and blared in triumph. “Lan-DREEE!”

She held her gun high and shouted back at the mob. Shock waves of orgasm surged through her. For a long minute she could not see, nor did she hear the single deep peal from the referee’s bell that marked the end of the game.

As her senses cleared, she condescended to smile at the leaping, gesticulating throng. Celebrate my victory, people-children-lovers. Call my name. But do not press. “Lan-dree! Lan-dree Lan-dree!”

A ref came trotting up with the championship banner hanging at the end of a long lance. She bolstered the stun-gun, took the flag, and raised it up. She and the verrul made a slow circuit of the arena, both of them nodding to the deafening plaudits of Greenhammer and Whitewing fans alike.

There had never been such a season. Never such a championship game. Never before the coming of Felice Landry.

The sports-mad people of “Canadian” Acadie took their ring-hockey very seriously. At first, they had resented Landry for daring to play the dangerous game. Then they had devoured her. Short, slightly built but preternaturally strong of mind and body, with an uncanny ability to control the evil-tempered verrul mounts, Felice had vanquished male players of talent and experience to become a sports idol in her first professional season. She played both offense and defense; her lightning-fast stun coups became a legend; she herself had never fallen.

In this, the last match of the championship series, she had scored eight goals, a new record. With all of her teammates downed in the final period, she had singlehandedly fought off Whitewing’s last-ditch assault on the Greenhammer goal. Four stubborn giants of the Whitewing team had bitten the dust before she triumphed and went on to score that last go-to-hell goal.

Applaud. Adore. Tell me I am your queen-mistress-victim. Only stay back.

She guided the verrul toward the players’ exit, fragile on the back of the monstrous animal. She wore an iridescent green kilt, and green head plumes on the back-tilted helmet. The once buoyant frizz of her platinum hair now straggled in limp ropes against the shiny black leather of her skimpy hoplite-style cuir bodily armor.

“Lan-dree! Lan-dree!”

I have poured myself and discharged myself for you, slaves-eaters-violators. Now let me go.

Small medical carts were scuttling through the passageway toward the arena to bring in the stunned. Felice had to keep firm control of the nervous verrul as she moved toward the Greenhammer ramp. Suddenly there were people all around her, assistants, trainers, verrul grooms, second-string bench-warmers, gofers, and hangers-on. They raised a ragged cheer of greeting and congratulation, tinged with over-familiarity. The heroine among her own.

She gave a tight, regal smile. Someone took the bridle of the verrul and soothed it with a bucket of feed.

“Felice! Felice, baby!” Coach Megowan, hot from the observation booth and still trailing game-plan tapes like a person caught in an old-time ticker tape parade, came pounding down from the upper level of the arena. “You were unbelievable, lovie! Glorious! Pyrotechnic! Kaleidoscope!”

“Here you go, Coach,” she said, leaning down from the saddle and passing him the banner. “Our first pennant. But not our last.”

The jostling partisans began to shout. “You tell the world. Felice! Say again, sweetie-baby!” The verrul gave a warning growl.

Landry extended a graceful black-gauntleted arm toward the coach, Megowan yelled for somebody to bring a dismounting platform. Grooms steadied the animal while the girl allowed the coach to hand her down. Adulation-joy-pain-nausea. The burden. The need.

She slipped off her Grecian helm with its tall green feathers and handed it to a worshipful female trainer. One of her fellow players, a massive reserve guard, was emboldened by the frenzy of victory.

“Give us a big wet smack, Landry” he giggled, gathering her in before she could sidestep.

An instant later he was spread-eagled against the corridor wall. Felice laughed. A beat later, the others joined in. “Some other time, Benny precious!” Her eyes, brown and very large, met those of the other athlete. He felt as though something had taken him by the throat.

The girl, the coach, and most of the crowd passed on, heading for the dressing rooms where the reporters were waiting. Only the importunate guard was left behind, sliding slowly down the wall to sit, panting quietly, feet stuck out and arms limp at his sides. A medic driving a meat wagon found him there a few minutes later and helped him to his feet. “Jeez, guy… and you weren’t even in the game!”

With a sheepish scowl, Benny admitted what had happened.

The medical attendant wagged his head in amazement. “You had a lotta nerve making a pass. Sweet-face that she is, that little broad scares me shitless!”

The guard nodded, brooding. “You know? She likes shooting the guys down. I mean, she actually gets her bang from it. Only you can see she’d just as soon the poor sods was dead as snoozing. You grab? She’s a freak! A gorgeous, talent-loaded, champion bitch-kitty freak.”

The medic made a face. “Why else would a woman play this crazy game? Come on, hero. I’ll give you a lift to the infirmary. We’ve got just the thing for that wonky feeling in your tummy.”

The guard climbed onto the cart beside a snoring casualty. “Seventeen years old! Can you imagine what she’s gonna be like when she grows up?”

“Jocks like you shouldn’t have an imagination. It gets in the way of the game-plan.” The medic gunned the cart down the corridor upward the sound of distant laughter and shouting. Outside in the arena, the cheering had stopped.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Try again, Elizabeth.”

She concentrated all of her mind’s strength on the projective sense, what there was left of it. Hyperventilating and with heart racing, she strained until she seemed to be floating free of the chair.

Project from the plaque in front of you:

SMILE-GREETING. TO YOU KWONG CHUN-MEI THERAPIST FROM ELIZABETH ORME FARSPEAKER. IF I HAD THE WINGS OF AN ANGEL OVER THESE PRISON WALLS I WOULD FLY. ENDS.

“Try again, Elizabeth.”

She did. Again and again and again. Send that ironic little message that she had chosen herself. (A sense of humor is evidence of personality integration.) Send it. Send it.

The door to the booth opened and Kwong came in at last “I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but I still don’t get a flicker.”

“Not even the smile?”

“I’m sorry. Not yet. There are no images at all, only the simple carrier. Look, dear, why don’t we wrap it up for today? The vital-signs monitor has you in the yellow. You really need more rest, more time to heal. You’re trying too hard.”

Elizabeth Orme leaned back and pressed her fingers to her aching temples. “Why do we keep up the pretense, Chun-Mei? We know there is slightly better than zip probability that I’ll ever function as a metapsychic again. The tank did a beautiful job of putting me back together after the accident. No scars, no aberrations. I’m a fine, normal, healthy specimen of female humanity. Normal. And that’s all, folks.”

“Elizabeth…” The therapist’s eyes were filled with compassion. “Give yourself a chance. It was almost a complete neo-cortical regeneration. We don’t understand why you didn’t regain your metafunctions together with your other mental faculties, but given time and work, you may very well recover.”

“No one with my sort of injury ever has.”

“No,” came the reluctant admission. “But there is hope and we must keep trying to get through. You’re still one of us, Elizabeth. We want you operant again no matter how long it takes. But you must keep trying.”

Keep trying to teach a blind woman to see the three full moons of Denali. Keep trying to teach a deaf woman to appreciate Bach, or a tongueless one to sing Bellini. Oh, yes.

“You’re a good friend, Chun-Mei, and God knows you’ve worked hard with me. But it would be healthier if I just accepted the loss. After all, think of the billions of ordinary people who live happy and fulfilling lives without any metapsychic functions at all I simply must adapt to a new perspective.”

Give up the memory of the mind’s angel wings lost. Be happy inside the prison walls of my own skull. Forget the beautiful Unity, the synergy, the exultant bridging from world to world, the never-afraid warmth of companion souls, the joy of leading child-metas to full operancy. Forget the dear identity of dead Lawrence. Oh, yes.

Kwong hesitated. “Why don’t you follow Czarneki’s advice and take a good long vacation on some warm peaceful world? Tuamotu. Riviera. Tamiami. Even Old Earth! When you return we can begin again with simple pictorials.”

“That might be just the thing for me, Chun-Mei.” But the slight emphasis wasn’t lost on the therapist, whose lips tightened in concern. Kwong did not speak, fearing to cause even deeper pain.

Elizabeth put on her fur-lined cloak and peered through the drapes covering the office window. “Good grief, just look how the storm has picked up! I’d be a fool not to grab at a chance to escape this Denali winter. I hope my poor egg will start. It was the only one in the transport pool this morning and it’s very nearly ready for the scrap heap.”

Like its driver.

The therapist followed Elizabeth Orme to the door and placed one hand on her shoulder in impulsive empathy. Projecting peace. Projecting hope. “You’re not to lose courage. You owe it to yourself and to the entire metacommunity to keep on trying. Your place is with us.”

Elizabeth smiled. It was a tranquil face with only a few fine lines about the corners of the eyes, stigmata of deep emotion subsequent to the regeneration that had restored her broken forty-four-year-old body to the perfection of young adulthood. As easily as a crayfish grows new limbs, she had grown new cells to replace smashed arms and rib cage and pelvis, lungs and heart and abdominal organs, shattered bone and gray matter of her skull and forebrain. The regeneration had been virtually perfect, so the doctors had said. Oh, yes.

She gave the therapist’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Goodbye, Chun-Mei. Until the next time.”

Never, never again.

She went out into the snow, ankle-deep already. The illuminated office windows of the Denali Institute of Metapsychology made squarish golden patterns on the white quadrangle. Frank, the custodian, gave her a wave as he plied a shovel along the walk. The melting system must have broken down again. Good old Denali.

She would not be coming back to the Institute where she had worked for so many years, first as a student, then as counseling farspeaker and redactor, finally as patient. The continuing pain of deprivation was more than her sanity could bear, and Elizabeth was basically a practical woman. It was time for something completely different.

Filled with purpose, clutching the hood of her cloak closely about her head, she headed for the egg park. As was her custom now, she moved her lips as she prayed.

“Blessed Diamond Mask, guide me on my way to Exile.”

CHAPTER SIX

Admitting the Human race to the Galactic Milieu in advance of its sociopolitical maturation had been risky. Even after the first metaphysic human threat to Milieu security had been put down by the venerated Jack and Illusio, there persisted stubborn evidence of humanity’s original sin.

People such as Aiken Drum.

Aiken was one of those peculiar personalities who drive behavior modification specialists to distraction. He was normally chromosomed. His brain was undamaged, undiseased, and of superior intelligence quotient. It was crammed with latent metafunctions that might, in due time, be coaxed into operancy. His childhood nurturing on the newly founded colony of Dalriada was no different from that of the other thirty thousand nonborns who were engendered from the sperm and ova of carefully selected Scottish forebears.

But Aiken had been different from the rest of the batch. He was a natural crook.

Despite the love of surrogate parents, the devotion of skilled teachers, and the inevitable corrective courses administered almost continuously throughout his stormy adolescence, Aiken stubbornly dung to his destined path of knavery. He stole. He lied. He cheated when he felt he could get away with it. He took joy in breaking the rules and was contemptuous of peers with normal psychosocial orientation.

“The subject Aiken Drum,” summarized his personality inventory, “displays a fundamental dysfunction in the imaginative sense. He is essentially flawed in his ability to perceive the social and personal consequences of his own actions and is self-centered to a deleterious degree. He has proved resistant to all techniques of moral impression.”

But Aiken Drum was charming. And Aiken Drum had a roguish sense of humor. And Aiken Drum, for all his rascal ways, was a natural leader. He was clever with his hands and ingenious in dreaming up new ways to outrage the established order, so his contemporaries tended to view him as a shadow hero. Even Dalriada’s adults, harried by the awesome task of raising an entire generation of test-tube colonists to populate an empty new world, had to laugh at some of his enormities.

When Aiken Drum was twelve, his Ecology Corps crew was charged with the cleanup of a putrefying cetacean carcass that had washed up on the beach of the planet’s fourth-largest settlement. Saner heads among the children voted for bulldozing the twenty-ton mess into the sand above high-tide level. But Aiken convinced them to try a more spectacular means of disposal. So they had blown up the dead whale with plastic explosive of Aiken’s concoction. Fist-sized gouts of stinking flesh showered the entire town, including a visiting delegation of Milieu dignitaries.

When Aiken Drum was thirteen, he had worked with a crew of civil engineers, diverting the course of a small waterfall so that it would help feed the newly completed Old Man of the Mountain Reservoir. Late one night, Aiken and a gang of young confederates stole quantities of cement and conduit and modified the rocks at the rim of the falls. Dawn on Dalriada revealed a passable simulacrum of gigantic male urogenital organs, taking a leak into the reservoir forty meters below.

When Aiken Drum was fourteen, he stowed his small body away on a luxury liner bound for Caledonia. The passengers were victimized by thefts of jewelry, but monitors showed that no human thief had entered their rooms. A search of the cargo deck revealed the young stowaway and the radio-controlled robot “mouse” he had sent foraging, programmed to sniff out precious metals and gemstones that the boy calmly admitted he planned to fence in New Glasgow.

They sent him home, of course, and the behaviorists had still another shot at redirecting Aiken’s errant steps toward the narrow road of virtue. But the conditioning never took.

“He breaks your heart,” one psychologist admitted to another. “You can’t help but like the kid, and he’s got a brilliantly inventive mind in that troll body of his. But what the hell are we going to do with him? The Galactic Milieu just has no niche for Till Eulenspiegel!”

They tried redirecting his narcissism into comedic entertainment, but his fellow troupers nearly lynched him when he queered their acts with practical jokes. They tried to harness his mechanical ability, but he used the engineering school facilities to build outlaw black boxes that gave illegal access to half the computerized credit systems in the Sector. They tried metapsychic deep-redact and deprivation conditioning and multiphase electroshock and narcotherapy and old-time religion.

Aiken Drum’s wickedness triumphed over all.

And so, when he reached an unrepentant twenty-first birthday, Aiken Drum was confronted with a multiple-choice question, the answer to which would shape his future:

As a confirmed recidivist, counterproductive to the ultimate harmony of the Galactic Milieu, which of these options do you choose?

a. Permanent incarceration in Dalriada Correctional Institution

b. Psychoturgical implant of a docilizarion unit

c. Euthanasia

“None of the above,” said Aiken Drum. “I choose Exile.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sister Annamaria Roccaro first met Claude when he brought his dying wife to the Oregon Cascade Hospice.

Both of the old people had been salvage exopaleontologists, Claude Majewski specializing in macrofossils and Genevieve Logan in micros. They had been married for more than ninety years and one rejuvenation, and together they had surveyed the extinct life-forms of more than two score planets colonized by humanity. But Genevieve had grown weary at last and refused a third lifetime, and Claude had concurred in her decision, as he had throughout most of their time together. They stayed in harness as long as possible, then spent a few declining years in their cottage on the Pacific Coast of Old World North America.

Claude never thought about the inevitable end until it was upon them. He had a vague notion that they would someday drift off quietly together in their sleep. The reality, of course, was less tidy. Claude’s Polish peasant body proved in the end to have a much greater staying power than that of his Afro-American wife. The time came when Genevieve had to go to the Hospice with Claude accompanying her. They were welcomed by Sister Roccaro, a tall and open-faced woman, who took personal charge of the physical and spiritual consolation of the dying scientist and her husband.

Genevieve, riddled with osteoporosis, partly paralyzed and dulled by a series of small strokes, was a long time passing. She may have been aware of her husband’s efforts to comfort her, but she gave very little evidence of it. Suffering no pain, she spent her days sedated in a dreamy reverie or in sleep. Sister Roccaro found that more and more of her professional efforts were devoted to dealing with Claude, who was frustrated and deeply depressed by his wife’s slow drift toward life’s end.

The old man was still physically sturdy at the age of one hundred and thirty-three, so the nun often took him walking in the mountains. They tramped the misty evergreen forests of the Cascade Range and fished for trout in streams running off the Mount Hood glaciers. They checklisted birds and wild-flowers as high summer came on, climbed the flanks of Hood, and spent hot afternoons sitting in the shade on the mountainside without speaking, for Majewski was unable or unwilling to verbalize his grief.

One morning in the early Jury of 2110, Genevieve Logan began to sink quickly. She and Claude could only touch one another now, since she could no longer see or hear or speak. When the sickroom monitor showed that the old woman’s brain had ceased to function, the Sister celebrated the Mass of Departure and gave the last anointing. Claude turned off the machines himself and sat beside the bed holding Genevieve’s skeletal brown hand until the warmth left it.

Sister Roccaro gently pressed the wrinkled coffee-colored lids down over the dead scientist’s eyes. “Would you like to stay with her awhile, Claude?”

The old man smiled absently. “She’s not here, Amerie. Would you walk with me if no one else needs you for a while? It’s still early. I think I’d like to talk.”

So they put on boots and went out again to the mountain, the trip via egg taking only a few minutes. Parking at Cloud Cap, they ascended Cooper Spur by an easy trail and came to a halt below Tie-in Rock, on a ridge at the 2800-meter level. They found a comfortable place to sit and took out canteens and hutches. Just below was Hood’s Eliot Glacier. To the north, beyond the Columbia River Gorge, were Mount Adams and distant Rainier, both snow-crowned like Hood. The symmetrical cone of Mount St. Helens, to the west downriver, sent up a gray plume of smoke and volcanic steam.

Majewski said, “Pretty up here, isn’t it? When Gen and I were kids, St. Helens was cold. They were still logging the forests. Dams blocked the Columbia, so the salmon had to climb upstream on fish ladders. Port Oregon Metro was still called Portland and Fort Vancouver. And there was a little smog, and some overcrowding if you wanted to live where the jobs were. But all in all, life was pretty good out here, even in the bad old days when St. Helens erupted. It was only toward the very end, before the Intervention when the world was running out of energy and the technoeconomy collapsing, that this Pacific North-west country started to share some of the griefs of the rest of the world.”

He pointed eastward, toward the dry canyons and the high-desert scrub of the old lava plateau beyond the Cascades.

“Out there lie the John Day fossil beds. Gen and I did our first collecting there when we were students. Maybe thirty or forty million years ago, that desert was a lush meadowland with forested hills. It had a big population of mammals, rhinos, horses, camels, oreodonts, we call them cookie monsters, and even giant dogs and saber-tooth cats. Then one day the volcanoes began to erupt. They spread a deep blanket of ash and debris all over these eastern plains. The plants were buried and the streams and lakes were poisoned. There were pyroclastic flows, kind of a fiery cloud made of gas and ash and bits of lava, racing along faster than a hundred-fifty kloms an hour.”

He slowly unwrapped a sandwich, bit, and chewed. The nun said nothing. She took off her bandanna head scarf and used it to wipe the sweat from her wide brow.

“No matter how fast or how far those poor animals ran, they couldn’t escape. They were buried in the layers of ash. And then the volcanism stopped. Rain washed away the poisons and the plants came back. After a while, the animals returned, too, and repopulated the land. But the good life didn’t last. The volcanoes erupted again, and there were more showers of ashes. It happened over and over again throughout the next fifteen million years or so. The killing and the repopulating, the shower of death and the return of life. Layer after layer of fossils and ashes were laid down out there. The John Day formation is more than half a klom thick, and there are similar formations above and below it.”

As the old man spoke, the nun sat staring at the tableland to the east. A pair of giant condors circled slowly in a thermal. Below them, a tight formation of nine egg-shaped flying craft wafted slowly along the course of an invisible canyon.

“The ash beds were capped with thick lava. Then, after more millions of years, rivers cut down through the rock and into the ash layers below. Gen and I found fossils along the watercourses, not just bones and teeth, but even leaf-prints and whole flowers pressed into the finer layers of ash. The records of a whole series of vanished worlds. Very poignant. At night, she and I would make love under the desert stars and look at the Milky Way in Sagittarius. We’d wonder how the constellations had looked to all those extinct animals. And how much longer poor old mankind could hang on before it was buried in its own ash bed, waiting for paleontologists from Sagittarius to come dig us up after another thirty million years.”

He chuckled. “Melodrama. One of the hazards of digging fossils in a romantic setting.” He ate the rest of his sandwich and drank from the canteen. Then he said, “Genevieve,” and was quiet for a long time.

“Were you shocked by the Intervention?” Sister Roccaro asked at last. “Some of the older people I’ve counseled seemed almost disappointed that humanity was spared its just ecological deserts.”

“It was tough on the Schadenfreude crowd,” Majewski agreed, grinning. “The ones who viewed humankind as a sort of plague organism spoiling what might otherwise have been a pretty good planet. But paleontologists tend to take a long view of life. Some creatures survive, some become extinct. But no matter how great the ecological disaster, the paradox called life keeps on defying entropy and trying to perfect itself. Hard times just seem to help evolution. The Pleistocene Ice Age and phivials could have killed off all the plant-eating hominids. But instead, the rough climate and the vegetation changes seem to have encouraged some of our ancestors to become meat eaters. And if you eat meat, you don’t have to spend so much time hunting food. You can sit down and learn to think.”

“Once upon a time, hunter-killer was better?”

“Hunter doesn’t equate with murderer. I don’t buy the totally depraved ape-man picture that some ethnologists postulate for human ancestry. There was goodness and altruism in our hominid forebears just as there’s good in most people today.”

“But evil is real,” said the nun. “Call it egocentrism or malignant aggression or original sin or whatever. It’s there. Eden’s gone.”

“Isn’t biblical Eden an ambivalent symbol? It seems to me that the myth simply shows us that self-awareness and intelligence are perilous. And they can be deadly. But consider the alternative to the Tree of Knowledge. Would anyone want innocence at such a price? Not me, Amerie. We really wouldn’t want to give back that bite of apple. Even our aggressive instincts and stubborn pride helped make us rulers of the Earth.”

“And one day maybe of the galaxy?”

Claude gave a short laugh. “God knows we used to argue long enough about the notion when the Gi and the Poltroyans cooperated with us on salvage digs. The consensus seems to be that despite our hubris and pushiness, we humans have incredible potential, which justified the Intervention before we got ourselves too screwed up. On the other hand, the trouble we caused during the metapsychic flap back in the ’Eighties makes you wonder whether we haven’t simply transferred our talent for spoiling to a cosmic stage instead of just a planetary one.”

They ate some oranges and after a time Claude said “Whatever happens, I’m glad that I lived to reach the stars, and I’m glad that Gen and I met and worked with other thinking beings of goodwill. It’s over now, but it was a wonderful adventure.”

“How did Genevieve feel about your travels?”

“She was more strongly tied to Earth, even though she enjoyed the outworld journeyings. She insisted on keeping a home here in the Pacific Northwest, where we had been raised. If we had been able to have children, she might never have agreed to leave. But she was a sickle-cell carrier, and the technique for modifying the genetic codon was developed after Gen had passed optimal child-bearing age. Later on, when we were ready for rejuvenation, our parenting instincts were pretty well atrophied, and there was so much work to do. So we just kept on doing it together. For ninety-four years…”

“Claude.” Sister Roccaro reached out her hand to him. A light breeze stirred her short curly hair. “Do you realize that you’re healed?”

“I knew it would happen. After Gen was dead. It was only her going that was so bad. You see, we’d talked it all out months ago, when she was still in control of her faculties, and did a lot of commiserating and accepting and emotional purging. But she still had to go, and I had to watch and wait while the person I loved more than my own life slipped farther and farther away but was never quite gone. Now that she’s dead, I’m functional again. I just ask myself what in the world I’m going to do?”

“I had to answer the same question,” the nun said carefully.

Majewski gave a start, then studied her face as though he had never seen it before. “Amerie, child. You’ve spent your life consoling needy people, serving the dying and their mourners. And you still have to ask a question like that?”

“I’m not a child, Claude. I’m a thirty-seven-year-old woman and I’ve worked at the Hospice for fifteen of those years. The job… has not been easy I’m burnt out. I had decided that you and Genevieve would be my last clients. My superiors have concurred with my decision to leave the order.”

Shocked beyond words, the old man stared at her. She continued, “I found myself becoming isolated, consumed by the emotions of the people I was trying to help. There’s been a shriveling of faith, too, Claude.” She gave a small shrug “The kind of thing that people in the religious life are all too likely to suffer. A sensible scientific type like you would probably laugh…”

“I’d never laugh at you, Amerie. And if you really think I’m sensible, maybe I can help you.”

She rose up and slapped gritty rock dust off her jeans. “It’s time for us to get off this mountain. It’ll take at least two hours to walk back down to the egg.”

“And on the way,” he insisted, “you’re going to tell me about your problem and your plans for the future.”

Annamaria Roccaro regarded the very old man with amused exasperation. “Doctor Majewslti, you’re a retired bone digger, not a spiritual counselor.”

“You’re going to tell me anyhow. In case you don’t know it, there’s nothing more stubborn in the Galactic Milieu than a Polack who’s set his mind to something. And I’m a lot more stubborn than a lot of other Polacks because I’ve had more time to practice. And besides that,” he added slyly, “you would never have mentioned your problem at all if you hadn’t wanted to talk it over with me. Come on. Let’s get walking.”

He set off slowly down the trail and she followed. They tramped along in silence for at least ten minutes before she began to speak.

“When I was a little girl, my religious heroes weren’t the Galactic Age saints. I could never identify with Pere Teilhard or Saint Jack the Bodiless or Illusio Diamond Mask. I liked the really old-time mystics: Simeon Stylites, Anthony the Hermit, Dame Julian of Norwich. But today, that kind of solitary commitment to penitence is contrary to the Church’s new vision of human energetics. We’re supposed to chart our individual journey toward perfection within a unity of human and divine love.”

Claude grimaced at her over his shoulder. “You lost me, child.”

“Stripped of the jargon, it means that charitable activity is in; solitary mysticism is out Our Galactic Age is too busy for anchoresses or hermits. That way of life is supposed to be selfish, escapist, masochistic, and counter to the Church’s social evolution.”

“But you don’t think so, is that it, Amerie? You want to go off and fast and contemplate in some lonesome spot and suffer and attain enlightenment.”

“Don’t you laugh at me, Claude. I tried to get into a monastery… the Cistercians, Poor Clares, Carmelites. And they took one look at my psychosocial profile and told me to get lost. Counseling, they advised! Not even the Zen-Brigittines would give me a chance! But I finally discovered that there is one place where an old-fashioned solitary mystic wouldn’t be out of place Have you ever heard of Exile?”

“What paleobiologist hasn’t?”

“You may know that there’s been a sort of underground railroad to it for a good many years. But you may not know that use of the time portal was given official Milieu sanction four years ago in response to an increasing demand. All kinds of people have gone into Exile after undergoing a survival regimen. People from every imaginable educational background and profession, from Earth and from the human colonies. All of those time-travelers have one thing in common: They want to go on living, but they can’t function any longer in this complex, structured world of galactic civilization.”

“And this is what you’ve chosen?”

“My application was accepted more than a month ago.”

They came to a tricky scree slope, the remnant of an old avalanche, and concentrated on traversing it safely. When they reached the other side they rested for a moment. The sun beat down hotly. The retroevolved condors were gone.

“Amerie,” the old man said, “it would be very interesting to see fossil bones with flesh on them.”

She elevated an eyebrow. “Isn’t this notion a trifle impulsive?”

“Maybe I’ve nothing better to do. Seeing Pliocene animals alive would be an interesting windup to a long career in paleobiology. And the day-to-day survival aspects wouldn’t pose any problems for me. If there’s one thing you learn out in the field, it’s roughing it in comfort. Maybe I could kind of help you get your hermitage set up. That is, if you wouldn’t think I was too great a temptation to your vows.”

She went into gales of laughter, then stopped and said, “Claude! You’re worried about me. You think I’ll get eaten by a sabertooth tiger or trampled by mastodons.”

“Dammit, Amerie! Do you know what you’re letting yourself in for? Just because you climb a few tame mountains and catch stocked trout in Oregon you think you can be a female Francis of Assisi in a howling wilderness!” He looked away, scowling. “God knows what kind of human dregs are wandering around there. I don’t want to cramp your style, child. I could just keep an eye on things. Bring you food and such. Even those old mystics let the faithful bring ’em offerings, you know. Amerie, don’t you understand? I wouldn’t want anything to spoil your dream.”

Abruptly, she threw her arms around him, then stepped back smiling, and for an instant he saw her not in jeans, plaid shirt, and bandanna, but robed in white homespun with a rope knotted about her waist. “Doctor Majewski, I would be honoured to have you as a protector. You may very well be a temptation. But I’ll be steadfast and resist your allure, even though I love you very much.”

“That’s settled, then. We’d better get on down and arrange for Genevieve’s requiem without delay. We’ll take her ashes with us to France and bury her in the Pliocene. Gen would have liked that.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The widow of Professor Theo Guderian had been astounded when the first time-tripper appeared at the gate of the cottage on the slope of the Monts du Lyonnais.

It happened in the year 2041, early in June. She was working in her rose garden, snipping deadheads from the splendid standards of Mme. A. Meilland and wondering how she would be able to pay the death duties, when a stocky male hiker with a dachshund came striding up the dusty road from Saint-Antoine-des-Vignes. The man knew where he was going. He stopped precisely in front of the gate and waited for her to approach. The little dog sat down one step behind her master’s left heel.

“Good evening, Monsieur,” she said in Standard English, folding her secateurs and slipping them into the pocket of her back salopette.

“Citizen Angélique Montmagny?”

“I prefer the older form of address. But yes, I am she.”

He bowed formally. “Madame Guderian! Permit me to present myself. Richter, Karl Josef. I am by profession a poet and my home has been up to now in Frankfurt. I am here, chère Madame, to discuss with you a business proposal concerning the experimental apparatus of your late husband.”

“I regret that I am no longer able to demonstrate the device.” Madame pursed her lips. The fine beak of her aquiline nose lifted proudly. Her small black eyes sparkled with unshed tears. “Indeed, I am shortly going to have it dismantled so that the more valuable components can be sold.”

“You must not! You must not!” cried Richter, taking hold of the top of the gate.

Madame took a step backward and stared at him in astonishment. He was moon-faced, with pale protuberant eyes and thick reddish brows, now hoisted in dismay. Expensively dressed as for a strenuous walking tour, he wore a large rucksack. To it were lashed a violin case, a lethal-looking dural catapult, and a golfer’s umbrella. The stolid dachshund guarded a large parcel of paged books, carefully wrapped in plass and equipped with straps and a carrying handle.

Gaining control of his emotions, Richter said, “Forgive me, Madame. But you must not destroy this so-wonderful achievement of your late husband! It would be a sacrilege.”

“Nevertheless, there are the death duties,” said Madame. “You spoke of business, Monsieur. But you should know that many journalists have already written about my husband’s work…”

“I,” said Richter with a faint moue of distaste, “am not a journalist. I am a poet! And I hope you will consider my proposal most seriously.” He unzipped a side compartment of the pack and removed a leather card-case, from which he extracted a small blue rectangle. He held this out to Madame. “Evidence of my bona fides.”

The blue card was a sight draft on the Bank of Lyon entitling the bearer to collect an extraordinary amount of money.

Madame Guderian unlatched the gate. “Please enter, M. Richter. One trusts the little dog is well mannered.”

Richter picked up his package of books and smiled thinly. “Schatzi is more civilized than most humans.”

They sat on a stone bench below a bee-loud arch of Soleil d’Or and Richter explained to the widow why he had come. He had learned of Guderian’s time-gate at a publisher’s cocktail party in Frankfurt and decided that very evening to sell everything that he owned and hasten to Lyon.

“It is very simple, Madame. I wish to pass through this time-portal and live permanently amid the prehistoric simplicity of the Pliocene Epoch. The peaceable kingdom! Locus amoenusf. The Forest of Ardent. The sanctuary of innocence! The halcyon land unwatered by human tears!” He paused and tapped the blue card still in her hand. “And I am willing to pay handsomely for my passage.”

A madman! Madame fingered the secateurs deep in her pocket. “The time-gate,” she said carefully, “opens in but a single direction. There is no return. And we have no detailed knowledge of what lies on the other side in the Pliocene land. It was never possible to circumtranslate Tri-D cameras or other types of recording equipment.”

“The fauna of the epoch is well known, Madame, as is the climate. A prudent person need have nothing to fear. And you, gnadige Frau, must suffer no qualms of conscience in permitting me to use the portal. I am self-sufficient and well able to look after myself in a wilderness. I have selected my equipment with care, and for companionship there is my faithful Schatzi. Don’t hesitate, I beg of you! Let me pass through tonight. Now!”

A madman indeed, but perhaps one that Providence had sent!

She remonstrated with him for some time while the sky darkened to indigo and the nightingales began to sing. Richter parried all of her objections. He had no family to miss him. He had told no one of his intentions, so there would be no inquiries made of her. No one had observed him walking on the lonely road from the village. She would be rendering him a blessing, fulfilling for him what had once been an impossible dream of Arcady. He was not committing suicide, he was merely entering a new, more tranquil life. But if she refused him, his Seelenqual would leave him only the grimmest alternative. And there was the money…

“C’est entendu,” Madame said at last “Please accompany me.”

She led him down into the cellar and threw on the lights. There stood the gazebo with its cables, just as poor Theo had left it. The poet gave a joyous cry and rushed to the apparatus, tears running down his round cheeks.

“At last!”

The dachshund trotted sedately after her master. Madame picked up the parcel of books and placed it inside the lattice.

“Quickly, Madame! Quickly!” Richter clasped his hands in a paroxysm of exaltation.

“Listen to me,” she said sharply. “When you have been translated, you must immediately remove yourself from the point of your arrival. Walk three or four meters away and take the dog with you. Is this clear? Otherwise you will be snatched back into the present day as a dead man and crumble to dust.”

“I understand! Vite, Madame, vite! Quickly!”

Trembling, she moved to the simple control panel and activated the time-portal. The mirrored force fields sprang up, and the poet’s voice was silenced as if by a broken teleview connection. The old woman sank down on her knees and recited the Angelic Salutation three times, then got up and switched off the power.

The mirrors vanished. The gazebo was empty.

Madame Guderian let a great sigh escape her lips. Then she thriftily turned out the cellar lights and mounted the stairs, fingering the small slip of blue plass tucked securely in her pocket.

After Karl Josef Richter, there were others.

The very first gratuity allowed Madame to pay the inheritance tax and discharge all of her other debts. Some months later, after her mind had been fully opened to the time-gate’s profit making potential by the coming of other visitors, she let it be known that she was establishing a quiet auberge for walking tourists. She purchased land adjoining her cottage and had a handsome guesthouse built. The rose gardens were expanded and several of her relatives drafted to assist with domestic duties. To the astonishment of skeptical neighbors, the inn prospered.

Not all of the guests who entered chez Guderian were seen to leave. But the point was moot, since Madame invariably required payment in advance.

Some years passed. Madame underwent rejuvenation and displayed an austere chic in her second lifetime. In the valley below the inn, the most ancient urban center in France also underwent graceful transition, as did all of the metropolitan centers of Old Earth in those middle years of the twenty-first century. Every trace of the ugly, ecologically destructive technology was gradually obliterated from the great city at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône. Necessary manufacturing establishments, service and transit systems were relocated in underground infrastructures. As the surplus population of Lyon was siphoned off to the new planets, empty slums, dreary suburbs faded into meadows and forest reserves, dotted here and there with garden villages or efficient habitat complexes. Lyon’s historic structures, representing every century for the more than 2000 years of its lifetime, were refurbished and displayed like jewels in appropriate natural settings. Laboratories, offices, hotels, and commercial enterprises were tucked into recycled buildings or disguised to harmonize with the ambiance of nearby monuments. Plaisances and boulevards replaced the hideous concrete autoroutes. Amusement sites, picturesque alleys of small shops, and cultural foundations multiplied as colonials began returning to the Old World from the far-flung stars, seeking their ethnic heritage.

Other types of seekers also came to Lyon. These found their way to the inn in the western foothills, now called L’Auberge du Portail, where Madame Guderian personally made them welcome.

In those early years, when she still regarded the time-portal as a business venture, Madame set up simple criteria for her clientele. Would-be timefarers had to spend at least two days with her at the auberge while she and her computer checked civil status and psychosocial profile. She would send no one through the gate who was a fugitive from justice, who was seriously deranged, or who had not attained twenty-eight years of age (for the great step demanded full maturity). She would permit no one to carry modern weaponry or coercive devices back to the Pliocene. Only the simplest solar-powered or sealed-pack machines might be taken. Persons obviously unprepared for survival in a primeval wilderness were dismissed and told to return upon acquiring suitable skills.

After thinking deeply on the matter, Madame made a further condition for women candidates. They must renounce their fertility.

“Attendez!” she would snap at the stunned female applicant in her unreconstructed Gallic way. “Consider the inescapable lot of womankind in a primitive world. Her destiny is to bear child after child until her body is worn out, submitting all the time to the whims of her male overlord. It is true that we modern women have complete control of our bodies as well as the ability to defend ourselves from outrage. But what of the daughters who might be born to you in the ancient epoch? You will not possess the technology to transfer your reproductive freedom to them. And with the return of the old biological pattern comes also the return of the old subservient mind-set. When your daughters matured, they would surely be enslaved. Would you consign a loved child to such a fate?”

There was also the matter of paradox.

The notion that time-travelers might disrupt the present world by meddling with the past had seriously troubled Madame Guderian for many weeks after the departure of Karl Josef Richter. She had concluded at last that such paradox must be impossible, since the past is already manifest in the present, with the continuum sustained in the loving hands of le bon Dieu.

On the other hand, one ought not to take chances.

Human beings, even the rejuvenated and highly educated people of the Coadunate Galactic Age, could have little impact on the Pliocene or any subsequent time period if they were restrained from reproducing. Given the social advantage to female travelers, the decision to demand the renouncing of motherhood as a condition of transport was confirmed in Madame’s mind.

She would say to the protesters: “One realizes that it is unfair, that it sacrifices a portion of your feminine nature. Do I not understand?. I, whose two dear children died before reaching adulthood? But you must accept that this world you seek to enter is not one of life. It is a refuge of misfits, a death surrogate, a rejection of normal human destiny. Ainsi, if you pass into this Exile, the consequences must rest upon you alone. If life’s force is still urgent within you, then you should remain here. Only those who are bereaved of all joy in this present world may take refuge in the shadows of the past.”

After hearing this somber speech, the women applicants would ponder and at last agree, or else depart from the auberge, never to return. Male time-travelers came to outnumber the female by nearly four to one. Madame was not greatly surprised.

The existence of the time-gate came to the attention of local authorities some three years after the Auberge du Portail commenced operation, when there was an unfortunate incident involving a refused applicant. But Madame’s high-powered Lyon solicitors were able to prove that the enterprise violated no local or galactic statute: It was licensed as a public accommodation, a common carrier, a psychosocial counseling service, and a travel agency. From time to time thereafter, certain local government bodies made stabs at suppression or regulation. They always failed because there were no precedents… and besides, the time-gate was useful.

“I do a work of mercy,” Madame Guderian told one investigatory panel. “It is a work that would have been incomprehensible scarcely one hundred years ago, but now, in this Galactic Age, it is a blessing. One need only study the dossiers of the pathetic ones themselves to see that they are out of place in the swift-paced modern world. There have always been such persons, psychosocial anachronisms, unsuited to the age in which they were born. Until the time-portal, these had no hope of altering their fate.”

“Are you so confident, Madame,” a commissioner asked, “that this time-portal leads to a better world?”

“It leads to a different and simpler world, at any rate, Citizen Commissioner,” she retorted, “That seems sufficient to my clients.”

The auberge kept careful records of those who passed through the Pliocene gate and these would later be fascinating fodder for statisticians. For example, the travelers tended to be highly literate, intelligent, socially unconventional, and aesthetically sophisticated. Above all they were romantic. They were mostly citizens of the Old World rather than of the colonial planets. Many of the timefarers had earned their living in the professions, in science, technology, or other high disciplines. An ethnic assay of the travelers showed significant numbers of Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Germans, Slavs, Latins, Native Americans, Arabs, Turks and other Central Asiatics, and Japanese. There were few African blacks but numbers of Afro-Americans. Inuit and Polynesian peoples were attracted by the Pliocene world; Chinese and Indo-Dravidians were not. Fewer agnostics than believers chose to abandon the present; but the devout time-travelers were often fanatics or conservatives disillusioned about modern religious trends, particularly the Milieu dicta that proscribed revolutionary socialism, jihads, or any style of theocracy. Many nonreligious, but few orthodox, Jews were tempted to escape to the past; a disproportionate number of Muslims and Catholics wanted to make the trip.

The psychoprofiles of the travelers showed that a significant percentage of the applicants was highly aggressive. Small-time ex-convicts were common clients, but the more formidable reformed evildoers apparently preferred the contemporary scene. There was a small but persistent trickle of broken-hearted lovers, both homophile and heterosexual. As was to be expected, many of the applicants were narcissistic and addicted to fantasy. These people were apt to appear at the auberge in the guise of Tarzan or Crusoe or Pocahontas or Rima, or else costumed as throwbacks to every conceivable Old World era and culture.

Some, like Richter, outfitted themselves for the journey with Spartan pragmatism. Others wanted to bring along “desert island” treasures such as whole libraries of old-fashioned paged books, musical instruments and recordings, elaborate armories, or wardrobes. The more practical gathered together’ livestock, seeds, and tools for homesteading in the style of the Swiss Family Robinson. Collectors and naturalists brought their paraphernalia. Writers came equipped with goose quills and flagons of sepia ink, or the latest in voice writers with reams of durofilm sheets and book-plaque transcribers. The frivolous cherished delicacies of food and drink and psycho-active chemicals.

Madame did her utmost to accommodate the impedimenta, given the physical restriction of the gazebo’s volume, which was roughly six cubic meters. She urged the travelers to consider pooling their resources, and sometimes this was done. (The Gypsies, the Amish, the Russian Old Believers, and the Inuit were particularly shrewd in such matters.) But given the idiosyncratic nature of the timefarers, many preferred to be completely independent of fellow humans, while others ignored practicalities in favour of romantic ideals or precious fetishes.

Madame saw to it that each person had the minimal survival necessities, and extra shipments of medical supplies were regularly sent through the gate. Beyond that, one could only trust in Providence.

For nearly sixty-five years and throughout two rejuvenations, Angélique Guderian personally supervised the psychosocial evaluation of her clients and their eventual dispatch to the Pliocene. As the uneasy cupidity of her early years was finally submerged in compassion for those she served, the fees for passage became highly negotiable and were often waived. The number of prospective travelers increased steadily, and there came to be a long waiting list. By the turn of the twenty-second century, more than ninety thousand fugitives had passed through the time-portal to an unknown fate.

In 2106, Madame Guderian herself entered the Pliocene world called Exile, alone, dressed in her gardening clothes, carrying a simple rucksack and a bundle of cuttings from her favorite roses. Since she had always despised the Standard English of the Milieu as an insult to her French heritage, the note she left said:

“Plus qu’il n’en faut.”

The Human Polity of the Galactic Concilium was not willing to accept this “more than enough” judgement however; the time-portal obviously filled a need as a glory hole for inconvenient aberrants. Organized in a humane and somewhat more efficient manner, it was allowed to continue in operation. There was no advertisement of the service, and referrals were kept discreetly professional.

The ethical dilemma of permitting persons to exile themselves to the Pliocene was tabled. Study confirmed that no time-paradox was possible. As for the fate of the travelers, they were all doomed in one way or another anyhow.

CHAPTER NINE

All the way back to Earth from Brevon-su-Mirikon, Bryan Grenfell planned the way he would do it. He would call Mercy from Unst Starport just as soon as he got through the decon and remind her that she had agreed to go sailing with him. They could meet at Cannes on Friday evening, which would allow him time to drop off the conference data at the CAS in London and pick up some clothes and the boat from his flat. Fair weather was scheduled for the next three days, so they could cruise to Corse or even Sardegna.

In some secluded cove, with moonlight on the Mediterranean and soft music playing, he would nail her.

“This is your Captain speaking. We are five minutes from reentry into normal space above the planet Earth. There will be a momentary discomfort as we pass through the superficies, which may inconvenience sensitive persons. Please do not hesitate to call your flight attendant if you require an anodyne, and remember that your satisfaction is our prime directive. Thank you for traveling United.”

Grenfell leaned toward the com. “Glendessarry and Evian.” When the drink appeared he tossed it off, closed his eyes and thought of Mercy. Those sad sea-colored eyes, ringed by the dark lashes. The hair of cedarwood red framing her pale high-boned cheeks. Her body, almost as thin as a child’s but tall and elegant in a long gown of leaf green with trailing darker ribbons. He could hear her voice, lilting and resonant, as they walked in the apple orchard that evening after the medieval pageant.

“There is no such thing as love at first sight, Bryan. There’s only sex at first sight. And if my scrawny charms inflame you, then let’s lie together, because you’re a sweet man and I’m in need of comfort. But don’t talk about love.”

He had, though. He couldn’t help it. Realizing the illogic of the thing, observing himself from afar with a chagrined detachment but still unable to control the situation, he knew he loved her from the first moment they met. Carefully, he had tried to explain without appearing a complete ass. She had only laughed and pulled him down onto the petal-strewn lawn. Their passion had delighted them both but brought him no true release. He was caught by her. He would have to share her life forever or go in misery apart.

Only one day with her! One day before he had to travel to the important meeting on the Poltroyan planet. She had wanted him to stay, suggesting the sailing holiday, but he, duty-bound, had put her off. Imbecile. She might have needed him. How could he have left her alone?

Only one day…

Bryan’s old friend Gaston Deschamps, encountered fortuitously in a Paris restaurant, had invited him to kill some empty hours observing the Fête d’Auvergne from behind the scenes. Gaston, the pageant director, had called it a droll exercise in applied ethnology. And so it had been, until the introduction.

“Now we will return to those thrilling days d’antan,” Gaston had proclaimed after giving him the fifty-pence tour of the village and the chateau. The director had led the way to a high tower, thrown open the door to the elaborate pageant control room, and she had been sitting there.

“You must meet my fellow wonder-worker, the associate director of the Fête, and the most medieval lady now alive in the Galactic Milieu… Mademoiselle Mercedes Lamballe!”

She had looked up from her console and smiled, piercing him to the heart…

“This is your Captain speaking. We are now reentering normal space above the planet Earth. The procedure will take only two seconds, so please bear with us during the brief period of mild discomfort.”

Zang.

Toothextractionhammeredthumbwhangedfunnybone.

Zung.

“Thank you for your patience, ladies and gentlemen and distinguished passengers of other sexes. We will be landing at Unst Starport in the beautiful Shetland Islands of Earth at exactly 1500 hours Planet Mean Time.”

Grenfell mopped his high brow and ordered another drink. This time, he sipped. Unbidden, an ancient song began unreeling in his mind, and he smiled because the song was so like Mercy.

He would take the tube to Nice and egg on to Cannes. She would be waiting for him at the quay of that peaceful old town, perhaps wearing a green playsuit. Her eyes would have that expression of gentle melancholy and be green or gray, changeable as the sea and as deep. He would stagger up with his duffle-bag and a fitted picnic hamper full of food and drink (champagne, Stilton, gooseliver sausage, sweet butter, long loaves, oranges, black cherries), and he would trip over his feet and she would smile at last.

He would take out the boat and make the small boys at the slip stand back. (There were always small boys now that families had rediscovered the quiet Côte d’Azur.) He would attach the thin tube of the tiny inflator and throw the wadded packet of silver-and-black decamole film into the water. Slowly, slowly as the boys gaped, the eight-meter sloop would grow: bulb keels, hull, decks, furniture fixed below, cabin, cockpit, railings, mast. Then he would produce the separate pieces, rudder and tiller, stabilizer, boom with sails still furled, lines, deck seats, lockers, buckets, bedding and all, born miraculously of taut decamole and compressed air. Dockside dispensers would fill the keels and stabilizer with mercury and ballast the rest of the boat and its fittings with distilled water, adding mass to the rigid microstructure of the decamole. He would rent the auxiliary, the lamps, pump, navigear, the gooseneck, CQR anchor, and other hardware, pay off the harbormaster and bribe the small boys not to spit over the quayside into the cockpit.

She would board. He would cast off. With a fresh breeze, it would be up sail for Ajaccio! And somehow, in the next days, he would get her to agree to many him.

I did but see her passing by…

When the starship landed in the beautiful Shetlands it was six degrees Celsius and blowing a deary northeast gale. Mercedes Lamballe’s teleview number responded with a SUBSCRIBER CANCELED SERVICE notice.

In a panic, Grenfell finally got hold of Gaston Deschamps.

The pageant director was evasive, then angry, then apologetic. The fact is, Bry, the damn woman’s chucked it. Must have been the day after you went offworld two months ago. Left us flat, and the busiest time of the season, too.”

“But where, Gaston? Where’s she gone?”

On the view screen, Deschamps let his gaze slide away. “Through that damn time-portal into Exile. I’m sick about it, Bry. She had everything to live for. A bit off her bonk, of course, but none of us suspected she was that far gone. It’s a damn shame. She had the best feel for the medieval of anyone I’ve ever known.”

“I see. Thanks for telling me. I’m very sorry.”

He broke the connection and sat in the teleview kiosk, a middle-aged anthropologist of some reputation, mild-faced, conservatively dressed, holding a portfolio full of Proceedings of the Fifteenth Galactic Conference on Culture Theory. Two Simbiari who had come in on the same ship with him waited patiently outside for some minutes before tapping on the kiosk door, leaving little green smears on the window.

And yet I love her…

Bryan Grenfell held up one apologetic finger to the Simbiari and turned back to the teleview. He touched the stall.

“Information for what city, please?”

“Lyon,” he said.

…Till I die.

Bryan posted the data to the CAS and picked up his own egg in London. Even though he could have done the research just as easily at home, he took off for France that same afternoon. Installing himself in the Galaxie-Lyon, he ordered a supper of grilled langouste, orange soufflee, and Chablis, and immediately began to search the literature.

The library unit in his room displayed a depressingly long list of books, theses, and articles on the Guderian time-portal. He thought about skipping over those catalogued under Physics and Paleobiology and concentrating on the Psychoanalogy and Psychosociology entries; but this seemed unworthy of her, so he poked his card into the slot and resignedly ordered the entire collection. The machine spat out enough thin plaque-books to pave the large hotel room six times over. He sorted them methodically and began to assimilate, projecting some, reading others, sleep-soaking the most tedious. Three days later he fed the books back into the unit. He checked out of the hotel and requested his egg, then went up to the roof to wait for it. The corpus he had just absorbed sloshed about in his mind without form or structure. He knew he was subconsciously rejecting it and its implications, but the realization was no great help.

Broken hearts healed and memories of vanished love faded away, even of this strange love whose like he had never known before. He realized that this had to be true. Measured judgement, consideration of the scary data he had stuffed himself with, common sense uncharged with emotion told him what he must do. Sensibly do.

Oh, Mercy. Oh, my dear. The uttermost part of the galaxy is nearer than you are, my lady passing by. And yet. And yet.

CHAPTER TEN

Only Georgina had been sorry to hear that Stein was going. They had got gloriously drunk together on his last day in Lisboa and she’d said, “How’d you like to do it in a volcano?” And he had muttered fondly that she was a crazy fat broad, but she assured him that she knew a guy who would, for suitable consideration, look the other way while they took a research deep-driller out of Messina, where there was this adit that led right into the main chamber of Stromboli.

So what the hell, they egged on over and the guy did let them get away with it. So what if it cost six kilobux? It was seismic down there in the surging lava with colored gas bubbles oozing slowly up the observation window like a bunch of jellyfish in a bowl of incandescent tomato soup.

“Oh, Georgina,” he had moaned in the postcoital triste. “Come with me.”

She rolled over on the padded floor of the driller cockpit, white flesh turned to scarlet and black by the glare outside, and gave the weeping giant mother-comfort from her melon-sized breasts.

“Steinie. Lovie. I’ve got three beautiful children and with my genetic quotient I can have three more if I want them. I’m happy as a clam at high tide playing with my kids and torching busted bores and loving up any man who isn’t afraid I’ll eat him alive. Steinie, what do I need with Exile? This is my kind of world. Exploding in three million directions all at once! Earthlings increasing and multiplying in every nook of the galaxy and the race evolving into something fantastic practically before your eyes. You know that one of my kids is coming out meta? It’s happening all over the place now. Human biology is evolving right along with human culture for the first time since the Old Stone Age. I couldn’t miss it, lovie. Not friggerty likely.”

He broke away and knuckled out tears, disgusted with himself. “You better hope I didn’t plant anything in your potato patch then, kid. I don’t think my genes’d meet your standards.”

She took his face in both hands and kissed him. “I know why you have to go, Blue Eyes. But I’ve also seen your PS profile. The squiggles in it have nothing to do with heredity, whatever you may think. Given another nurturing situation, you would have turned out fine, laddie.”

“Animal. He called me a murdering little animal,” Stein whispered.

She rocked him again. “He was hurt terribly when she died, and be couldn’t know you understood what he was saying. Try to forgive him, Steinie. Try to forgive yourself.”

The deep-driller began to lurch violently as massive eruptions of gas rose from Stromboli’s guts. They decided to get the hell out of there before the sigma-field heat shields gave way, and burrowed out of the lava chamber via an extinct underwater vent. When they finally emerged on the floor of the Mediterranean west of the island, the driller’s hull clanged and pinged with the sounds of rocks falling through the water.

They rose to the surface and came into a night of mad melodrama. Stromboli was in eruption, farting red and yellow fire clouds and glowing chunks of lava that arched like skyrockets before quenching themselves in the sea.

“Holy petard,” said Georgina. “Did we do that?”

Stein grinned at her owlishly as the driller rocked on steaming waves. “You wanna try for continental drift?” he asked, reaching for her.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Richard Voorhees took the Express Tube from Unst to Paris to Lyon, then rented a Hertz egg for the last part of his journey. His earlier notion of eating and drinking and screwing his way across Europe and then jumping off an Alp had been modified when a fellow passenger on the liner from Assawompset happened to mention the odd Earth phenomenon of Exile.

That, Richard knew instantly, was just the kind of reprieve he needed. A new start on a primitive world full of human beings with no rules. Nothing to bug you but the occasional prehistoric monster. No green Leakie-Freakies, no dwarf Polli-wogs, no obscene Gi, no glaring Krondaku making you feel like your nightmares just came true, and especially no Lylmik.

He started pulling the strings as soon as he got out of decon and was able to get to a teleview. Most Exile candidates applied months in advance through their local PS counselors and took all the tests before they ever left home. But Voorhees, the old operator, knew that there had to be a way of expediting matters. The magic passkey had come via a big Earthside corporation for which he had done a delicate job less than a year ago. It was to the advantage of both the corporation and the ex-spacer that he exit the here and now as soon as possible; and so with scarcely any arm-twisting at all, the outfit’s XT-Operations agreed to use his good offices to convince the people at the auberge to let Richard take abbreviated tests right there at the starport, then proceed directly to Go.

This evening, however, as he glided out of the Rhône Valley toward the Monts du Lyonnais, he still admitted to a few qualms. He landed at Saint-Antoine-des-Vignes just a few kilometers from the inn and decided to have one last meal on free turf. The August sun had dropped behind the Col de la Lucre and the resolutely quaint village drowsed in leftover heat. The café was small but it was also dim and cool and not, thank God, too cutesy atmospheric for comfort. As he ambled in, he noted approvingly that the Tri-D was off, the musicbox played only a subdued, jangling tune, and the smells of food were incredibly appealing.

A young couple and two older men, locals by the look of their agrigarb, sat at window tables wolfing large plates of sausage and bowls of salad. On a stool at the bar sat a huge blond man in a glossy suit of midnight nebulin. He was eating a whole chicken prepared with some pinkish sauce and washing it down with beer from a two-liter pewter tankard. After hesitating for a moment, Richard went and took another stool.

The big fellow nodded, grunted, and kept feeding his face. From the kitchen came the proprietor, a jolly pot-bellied man with a heroic aquiline nose. He beamed a welcome to Voorhees, spotting him as an offworlder immediately.

“I have heard,” Richard said carefully, “that the food in this part of Earth is never prepared with synthetics.”

The host said, “We’d sooner gastrectomize than insult our bellies with algiprote or biocake or any of the rest of that crap-diddle. Ask any gorf in the place.”

“Say again, Louie!” cackled one of the oldsters at the window, hoisting a dripping hunk of sausage on his fork.

The proprietor leaned on the counter with hands palm down. “This France of ours has seen a lot of change. Our people are scattered over the galaxy. Our French language is dead. Our country is an industrial beehive underground and a history buff’s Disneyland on top. But three things remain unchanged and immortal, our cheeses, our wines, and our cuisine! Now, I can see that you’ve come a long way.” The man’s eyelid drooped in a ponderous wink. “Like this other guest here, maybe you still have a ways to go. So If you’re looking for a really cosmic meal, well, we’re a modest house, but our cooking and our cellar are four-star if you can pay for it.”

Richard sighed. “I trust you. Do it to me.”

“An aperitif, then, which we have chilled and ready! Dom Pérignon 2100. Savor it while I bring you a selection of whimsies to whet your appetite.”

“Is that champagne?” the chicken muncher asked. “In that little bitty bottle?”

Richard nodded. “Where I come from, a split of this will set you back three centibux.”

“No shit? How far out you be, guy?”

“Assawompset. The old Assawomp-hole of the universe, we call it. But don’t you try.”

Stein chortled around his chicken. “I never fight with a guy till I meet him formal.”

The host brought a napkin with two small pastries and a little silver dish full of white steaming lumps. “Brioche de foie gras, croustade de ris de veau a la financière, and quenelles de brochet au beurre d’ecrevisses. Eat! Enjoy!” He swept out.

“Financier, huh?” muttered Richard. “There’s a good epitaph.” He ate the pastries. One was like a cream puff stuffed with delicious spiced liver. The other seemed to be a fluted tart shell filled with bits of meat, mushrooms, and unidentifiable tidbits in Madeira sauce. The dish with white sauce consisted of delicate fish dumplings.

“This is delicious, but what am I eating?” he asked the host, who had emerged to take the credit cards of the local diners.

“The brioche is filled with goose liver pâté. The tart has a slice of truffle, braised veal sweetbread, and a garnish of tiny chicken dumplings, cock’s combs, and kidneys in wine sauce. The pike dumplings are served in creamy crayfish butter.”

“Good God,” said Richard.

“I have an outstanding vintage coming up with the main course. But first, grilled baby lamb filet with little vegetables, and to set it off, a splendid young Fumé from the Chateau du Nozet.”

Richard ate and sipped, sipped and ate. Finally the host returned with a small chicken like that which Stein had lately devoured. “The speciality of the house, Poularde Diva! The most adolescent of young pullets, stuffed with rice, truffles, and foie gras, poached and coated with paprika supreme sauce. To accompany it, a magnificent Chateau Grillet.”

“You’re kidding!” Richard exclaimed.

“It never leaves the planet Earth,” the host assured him solemnly. “It rarely leaves France. Get this behind your uvula guy, and your stomach’ll think you died and went to heaven.” Once again he whirled out.

Stein gaped. “My chicken tasted good,” he ventured. “But I ate it with Tuborg.”

“To each his own,” Richard said. After a long pause for attending to business, he wiped pink sauce off his mustache and said, “You figure somebody on the other side of the gate will know how to brew up some good booze?”

Stein’s eyes narrowed. “How you know I’m goin’ over?”

“Because you couldn’t look less like some colonial gorf visiting the Old Country. You ever thought about where your next bucket of suds is coming from in the Pliocene?”

“Christ!” exclaimed Stein.

“Now me, I’m a wine freak. As much as I could be, dragging my ass all over the Milky Way. I was a spacer. I got busted. I don’t wanta talk about it. You can call me Richard. Not Rick. Not Dick. Richard.”

“I’m Steinie.” The big driller thought for a minute. “The stuff they sent me about this Exile told how they let you sleep-learn any simple technology you think would be useful in the other world. I don’t remember if it was on the list, but I bet I could cram brewing easy. And the hard sauce, you can make that outa just about anything. Only tricky bit would be the condensation column, and you could whip that up outa copper-film decamole and hide it in your hollow tooth if they didn’t wanta let you in with it on the up. You with your wine, though, you might have a problem. Don’t they use special grapes and stuff?”

“Don’t they fuggin’ ever,” said Richard gloomily, squinting through the glass of Grillet. “I suppose the soil would be different back then, too. But you might be able to come up with something halfway decent. Let’s see. Grapevine cuttings of course, and definitely yeast cultures, or you’d end up with moose pee for sure. And you’d have to know how to make some kind of bottles. What did they use before glass and plass?”

“Little brown jugs?” Stein suggested.

“Right. Ceramic. And I think you can make bottles outa leather if you heat and mold it in water, Christ! Will you listen to me? The hung spacer carving out a new career as a grape-squash moonshiner.”

“Could you get a recipe for akvavit?” Stein was wistful. “It’s just neat alcohol with a little caraway seed. I’ll buy all you can make.” He did a double take. “Buy? I mean barter, or something… Shit. You think there’ll be anything civilized waiting for us?”

“They’ve had nearly seventy years to work on it.”

“I guess it all depends,” Stein said hesitantly.

Richard grunted. “I know what you’re thinking. It all depends on what the rest of the fruitcakes have been up to all this time. Have they got a little pioneer paradise going, or do they spend their time scratching fleas and carving each other’s tripes out?”

The host came up with a dirty old bottle, which he cradled like a precious child. “And here… the climax! But it’ll cost you. Chateau d’Yquem ’83, the famous Lost Vintage of the Metapsychic Rebellion year.”

Richard’s face, furrowed with old pain, was suddenly transformed. He studied the tattered label with reverence. “Could it still be alive?”

“As God wills,” shrugged mon hôte. “Four point five kilo-bux the bottle.”

Stein’s mouth dropped. Richard nodded and the host began to draw the cork.

“Jeez, Richard, can I hit you for a little taste? I’ll pay if you want. But I never had anything that cost so much.”

“Landlord, three glasses! We will all drink to my toast.”

The host sniffed the cork hopefully, gave a beatific smile, then poured three half-glasses of golden-brown liquid that sparkled like topaz in the lantern light.

Richard lifted his glass to the other two.

The ex-spacer and the cafe proprietor closed their eyes and sampled the wine. Stein tossed his down in one gulp, grinned, and said, “Hey! It tastes like flowers! But not much sock to it, is there?”

Richard winced. “Bring my buddy here a crock of eau de vie. You’ll like that, Steinie. Sort of akvavit without the seeds… You and I, landlord, will continue to bless our tonsils with the Sauternes.”

So the evening wore on, Voorhees and Oleson told each other edited versions of the sad stories of their lives while the proprietor of the café clucked in sympathy and kept refilling his own glass. A second bottle of Yquem was called for and then a third. After a while, Stein bashfully told them what Georgina’s other farewell presents had been. His new friends demanded that he model them; so he went out into the darkened egg park, got the stuff from the boot, and stalked back into the café resplendent in a wolfskin kilt, a wide leather collar and belt studded with gold and amber, a bronze Vikso helmet, and a big steel-bladed battle-axe.

Richard toasted the Viking with the last of the Chateau d’Yquem, which he chugalugged from the bottle.

Stein said, “The horns on the helmet were really like ceremonial, Georgina said. Vikings didn’t wear ’em in battle. So these are demountable.”

Richard giggled. “You look perfeck, Steinie ole rascal! Jus’ perfeck! Bring on th’mashtodons ’n’ dinosaurs ’n’ whatall. All they hafta do’s look at you and they’ll piss blue.” His face changed. “Why din’ I bring a costume? Everybody goes back in time needs a costume. Why din’ I think? Now I’ll hafta go through the time-gate in fuggin’ civvies. Never did have no class, Voorhees, dumb damn Dutchman. No fuggin’ class never.”

“Aw, don’ be sad, Richard,” begged the caféman. “You don’t wanna spoil yer meal ’n’ lovely wine.” His beady eyes lit with an expression of drunken craft. “Got it! There’s guy in Lyon runs the flickin’ opera. Comes up here ’n’ eats himself shtooperuss. An’ this guy’s au ciel du cochon over one kinda wine, ’n’ I gotta whole case you c’d use t’bribe ’em if y’could stan’ the tab. They got any kinda, costume y’d want at the opera. Merde alors, it’s not even two hunnerd hours yet! Guy might not even be ’n bed! What say?”

Stein whacked his new buddy on the back and Voorhees clutched the edge of the bar. “Come on, Richard! I’ll pop for halvsies!”

“I c’d call the guy up ri’ now,” said the smirking host. “Bet he’d meetcha at the oper’house.”

So they did work it out, and in the end Stein piloted the egg with the half-conscious Richard and a case of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild ’95 down to the Cours Lafayette of sleeping Lyon, where a furtive figure guided them into the parking subway and then through a maze of turned-off walkways to the opera’s backstage rooms and costumery.

“That one,” Richard said at last, pointing.

“So! Der fliegende Hollander!” said the impresario. “Never would have pegged you for that one, guy.”

He helped Richard to put on the seventeenth-century garb, which included a rich black doublet with slashed sleeves and a wide lace collar, black breeches, funnel-top boots that folded over, a short cape, and a wide-brimmed hat with a black plume.

“By damn, that’s more like it!” Stein whacked Richard on the back. “You make a pretty good pirate. So that’s what you’re like deep down inside, huh? A reg’lar fuckin’ Blackbeard?”

“Black Mushtash,” said Voorhees. He collapsed, out cold.

Stein paid off the impresario, flew them back to the darkened cafe to transfer Richard’s luggage from the rented egg, and then hopped it for L’Auberge du Portail. By the time they got there, the ex-spacer had revived.

“Let’s have another drink,” Stein suggested. “Try my oh-dee-vee.”

Richard took a swallow of the raw spirit. “Not mush bouquet… but consider’ble authority!”

The two costumed roisterers went singing through the rose garden and pounded on the oaken door of the inn with the blunt side of Stein’s battle-axe.

The staff responded unperturbed. They were used to having clients arrive in a more or less fuddled condition. Six powerful attendants took charge of the Viking and Black Mustache, and in no time at all they were snoring between lavender-scented sheets.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Felice Landry and the psychosocial counselor strolled into the flagged courtyard of the auberge, down an open passage, and into an office that looked out at the fountain and flowers. The room had been copied from the study of a fifteenth-century abbess. The stone fireplace with its bogus coat of arms had a huge bouquet of scarlet gladioli fanned between dog-headed andirons.

“You’ve come such a long way, Citizen Landry,” said the counselor. “It’s a pity that your application has encountered such difficulties.”

He leaned back in the carved chair, forming a church-and-steeple with his fingers. He had a pointed nose, a perpetual half-smile, and tightly curled black hair with a flashy white blaze in front. His eyes were wary. He had read her profile. Still, she looked docile enough in that gray-blue gown, twisting her poor little fingers in anxiety.

Kindly, he said, “You see, Felice, you’re really very young to be contemplating such a serious step. As you may know, the first custodian of the time-portal”, he nodded to an oil portrait of the sainted Madame that hung above the fireplace, “set a minimum age of twenty-eight years for her clients. Now, we may agree today that Angélique Guderian’s restriction was arbitrary, based upon antiquated Thomistic notions of psychomaturation. But nevertheless, the basic principle does remain quite valid. Fully formed judgement is essential for life-and-death decisions. And you are eighteen. I’m sure you are far more mature than most persons of your age, but nevertheless, it would be prudent to wait a few more years before opting for Exile. There is no return, Felice.”

I am harmless and afraid and small. I am in your power and I need your help so badly and would be so grateful. “You’ve studied my profile, Counselor Shonkwiler. I’m rather a mess.”

“Yes, yes, but that can be treated, Citizen!” He leaned forward and took her cool hand. “We have so many more facilities here on Earth than were available on your home planet Acadie is so remote! It’s hardly to be expected that the counselors out there would have the latest therapy techniques. But you could go to Vienna or New York or Wuhan, and the top people would certainly be able to smooth out your little SM problem and the male-envious hyperaggression. There would be only the smallest bit of personality derangement. You would be quite as good as new when the course of treatment was finished.”

The melting and submissive brown eyes began to brim up. “I’m sure you have only my best interests at heart, Counselor Shonkwiler. But you must try to understand.” Pity, aid, empathize, condescend to help the pathetic little ones “I prefer to remain the way I am. That’s why I’ve refused treatment. The thought of other persons manipulating my mind, changing it, fills me with the most dreadful fear. I just couldn’t permit it!”

I wouldn’t permit it.

The counselor moistened his lips and suddenly realized that he was stroking her hand. He gave a start, dropped it, and said, “Well, your psychosocial problems wouldn’t ordinarily preclude transfer into Exile. But besides your youth, there is the second matter. As you are aware, the Concilium does not permit persons having operant metapsychic powers to pass into Exile. They are too valuable to the Milieu. Now, your tests show that you are possessed of latent metafunctions with coercive, psychokinetic, and psychocreative potentials of extremely high magnitude. No doubt these were partly responsible for your success as a professional athlete.”

She showed a smile of regret, then slowly dropped her head so that the now limp platinum hair curtained her face. “That’s all over now. They wouldn’t have me any longer.”

“Quite so,” said Shonkwiler. “But if your psychosocial problems were successfully dealt with, it might be possible for the people at the MP Institute to bring up your latent abilities to operant status. Think what that would mean! You would become one of the elite of the Milieu, a person of vast influence, a literal world shaker! What a noble career you might have, spending yourself in service to a grateful galaxy. You might even aspire to a role in the Concilium!”

“Oh, I could never think of doing that. It’s frightening to think of all those minds… Besides, I could never give up what I am. There must be a way for me to put through the time-portal, even if I am underage. You must help me find the way, Counselor!”

He hesitated. “The recidivist clause might have been invoked if the unfortunate MacSweeney and Barstow had elected to press charges. There is no age restriction for recidivists.”

“I should have thought of that myself!” Her smile of relief was dazzling. “Then it’s all so simple!”

She rose and came around to Shonkwiler’s side of the desk. Still smiling, she took both his shoulders in her cool little hands, pressed with the thumbs, and snapped his collarbones.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Cicadas buzzed in the branches of the old plane trees that shaded the dining terrace. The scent of mignonette distilled from the gardens in the noontime heat and mingled with the perfume of the roses. Elizabeth Orme toyed with her fruit salad and drank minted iced tea while she marveled over the list that slowly glided over the surface of the plaque-book before her.

“Will you listen to these vocations, Aiken? Architect, Daub-and-Wattle. Architect, Log. Architect, Unmortared Stone. Bamboo Artificer. (I didn’t know bamboo grew in Europe during the Pliocene!) Baker. Balloonist. Basketmaker. Beekeeper. Brewer. Candle and Rushlight Maker. Ceramicist. Charcoal-burner. Cheesemaker. Dompteur (-euse)… What in the world is that, do you suppose?”

Aiken Drum’s black eyes flashed. He leapt to his feet, reddish golliwog hair abristle, and cracked an imaginary whip. “Hah, sabertooth kittycat! Down, sirrah! So you defy the commands of your master? Roll over! Fetch!… Not the ringmaster, you fewkin’ fool!”

Several of the nearby lunchers gawked. Elizabeth laughed. “Or course. Wild-animal tamers would be very useful in the Pliocene. Some of those large antelopes and things would be valuable if they could be domesticated. Still, I wouldn’t want to tackle a mastodon or rhino on the strength of a quickie sleep-course in the art.”

“Oh, the people here will do better than that for you, candy-doll. What happens is, you sleep-soak a very basic education in neolithic technology and general survival. Then you’ll at least have the wits to dig a latrine that won’t swallow you whole, and you’ll know what Pliocene fruits aren’t going to send you pushing up the daisies. After you sop up the basics, you pick one or more of the japes on that little list to specialize in. They give you a detailed sleeper on it, and lab work, and reference plaques for the tricky bits.”

“H’mm,” she mused.

“I imagine they try to steer you into a field that isn’t already overcrowded. I mean, the folks on the other side of the gate would be apt to get testy if you sent ’em eighty-three lutanists and a taffy puller, when what they really wanted was somebody who knew how to make soap.”

“You know, that’s not really so funny, Aiken. If there is any kind of organized society on the other side, they’d be entirely dependent on the gate operators to send suitably trained people. Because the women timefarers are sterile, there’d be no young apprentices to replace workers who died or just wandered away. If your settlement lost its cheesemaker, you’d just have to eat crud and whey until another one popped through the gate.”

Drum finished his iced tea and began to chew the cubes. “Things can’t be too shabby in Exile. People have been going through since 2041. The vocational guidance thing hasn’t been perking for anything like that long, just the last four years or so, but the older inmates of the nut-loft must have got something going.” He thought for a minute. “Figure that most of the ones who went through were macroimmune and maybe even rejuvenated, since that was perfected in the early Forties. Barring the expected attrition from accidents, getting eaten by monsters, emigration to the Pliocene Antipodes, or just plain human bloody-mindedness, there ought to be quite a crowd still knocking around. Eighty, ninety thou easy. And like as not with a barter-style economy operating. Most of the time-travelers were damn intelligent.”

“And crackers,” said Elizabeth Orme, “even as thee and me.”

She made an unobtrusive gesture toward an adjoining table, where a great blond man in a Viking outfit drank beer with a saturnine, well-used wayfarer in floppy seaboots and a ruffled black shirt.

Aiken rolled his eyeballs, looking more gnomish than ever. “Do you think that’s weird? Wait till you see my rig-out, lovie!”

“Don’t tell me. A Highland lad with bagpipe and tartan and a sporran full of exploding joints.”

“Pissy patoot, woman. You certainly were telling the truth when you said your mind-reading powers were washed up. Ah-ah-ah! Don’t plead with me! It’s going to be a big surprise. What I will tell you now is my chosen vocation for the Land of No Return. I am going to be a Jack-of-all-trades. Scottish-style Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court!… And how about you, my beautiful burned-out brain-bender?”

Elizabeth’s smile was dreamy. “I don’t think I’ll take a new persona. I’ll just stay me, maybe in red denim, and wear my farspeaker’s ring with one of Blessed Illusio’s diamonds in remembrance of times past. As for the vocation…” She speeded up the book so that the list of occupations raced past, then turned back to the beginning. Her brow furrowed in concentration. “I’ll need more than one trade. Basketmaker, Charcoalburner, Tanner. Put them all together, add one more that begins with B… and guess my new profession, Aiken Drum.”

“Balls o’brass, woman,” he howled, slapped a hand on the table delightedly. The Viking and the pirate stared in mild surprise. “A balloonist! Oh, you lovely lady. You’ll soar again in one way or another, won’t you, Elizabeth?”

There was a soft chime. A disembodied woman’s voice said, “Candidates in Group Green, we would be most pleased if you would join Counselor Mishima in the Petit Salon, where a most interesting orientation program has been arranged for you… Candidates in Group Yellow…”

“Green. That’s us,” said Aiken. The pair of them drifted into the main building of the inn, all whitewashed stone, dark heavy beams, and priceless objects of art. The Petit Salon was a cozy air-conditioned chamber furnished with brocaded armchairs, fantastically carved armoires, and a faded tapestry of a virgin and her unicorn. This was the first time that the group, which was destined to pass through the time-portal in a body after five days’ training, had come together. Elizabeth studied her fellow misfits and tried to guess what exigencies had driven them to choose Exile.

Waiting for them in the otherwise empty room was a lovely pak-haired child in a simple black cheongsam. Her chair was separated from the others by a couple of meters. One of her slender wrists was fastened to the heavy chair arm by a delicate silver chain.

The pirate and the Viking glanced in, looking bashful and truculent because nobody else was yet in costume. They clomped forward and sat down precisely in the center of the row of seats. Another pair that seemed acquainted entered without speaking, a milkmaid-hale woman with curly brown hair, wearing a white coverall, and a stocky man who appeared to be middle-aged, having a snub nose, Slavic cheekbones, and corded hairy forearms that looked able to throttle an ox. A quasi-academic personage in an antique Harris jacket arrived last of all, carrying a briefcase. He looked so self-possessed that Elizabeth found it impossible to imagine what his problem might be.

Counselor Mishima, tall and sleek, came in beaming and nodding. He expressed his delight at their presence and hoped they would enjoy the introduction to Pliocene geography and ecology that he was pleased to present at this time.

“We have among us a distinguished person far more knowledgeable in paleoecology than I,” the counselor said, bowing low to the Slavic type. “I would appreciate his interrupting me should my little lecture require correction or embellishment.”

Well, that explains him, Elizabeth thought. A retired paleontologist bent on touring the fossil zoo. And the dolly on the leash is a recidivist whacko, a few stripes blacker than poor Aiken, no doubt. The boys in fancy dress are your obvious anachronistic losers. But who is the White Lady? And the Thinking Man who wears tweeds in August?

The room light faded and the tapestry rose to reveal a large holograph screen. There was music. (Lord Jesus, thought Elizabeth. Not Stravinsky!) The screen went from black to living Tri-D color in an orbiter’s view of Pliocene Earth, six million years, give or take a few, backward in time.

In a long shot, it looked pretty familiar. But then the lens zoomed in.

Mishima said, “The continents, you will observe, are in their approximate modern positions. However, their outlines have an unfamiliar aspect, primarily because shallow epicontinental seas still covered some areas, while others, now lying underwater, Were then dry land.”

The globe rotated slowly and stopped when Europe was well positioned. The lens zoomed in closer and closer.

“You will all be furnished with a set of durofilm maps, small-scale for the entire Lower Pliocene Earth, one-to-seven-million of Europe, and one-to-one-million of France. Should you plan an excursion to other parts of the world or simply have an interest in them, we will do our utmost to provide you with suitable maps or marine charts.”

“How accurate will they be?” asked the pirate.

“Extremely so, we believe.” Mishima’s response was smooth. “The Pliocene being one of the most recent geological epochs, our computers have been able to map its topography with an accuracy that must approach eighty-two percent. The areas most speculatively derived include fine details of the littoral, minor watercourses, and certain aspects of the Mediterranean Basin.”

He began to show them close up views of different areas, all in vivid relief and supplemented by an outline overlay of the modern landform.

“The British Isles are fused into a single very large mass, Albion, which is probably joined by a narrow isthmus to Normandy. The Low Country area is submerged by the Anversian Sea, as is northwestern Germany. Fennoscandia is an unbroken unit, as yet unsundered by the Baltic. Poland and Russia are strewn with swamps and lakes, some quite large. Another great body of fresh water lies southwest of the Vosges in France, and there are large Alpine lakes…”

To the east, the land looked almost completely unfamiliar. A brackish lagoon, the Pannonian Basin, covered Hungary and drained through the Iron Gate and the Dacian Strait to a shallow remnant of the once dominant Tethys Sea, also called Lac Mer. This spread swampy lagoons and salt water far into Central Asia and northward to the iceless Boreal Ocean. In years to come, only the Aral and the Caspian Seas would remain as souvenirs of the vanished Tethys.

“Note also that the Euxinic Basin, which will someday become the Black Sea, is also fresh water. It is fed by the towering ranges of Caucasia, Anatolia, and the Helvetides to the west. A vast swamp occupies the area of the modern Sea of Marmara. Below this is Lake Levant, roughly corresponding to the Aegean Sea of today.”

“The Med looks pretty mixed up to me,” the Viking observed. “In my line of work I had to know something about the crazy geology of that region It seems to me you gotta be doing a whole lotta guessing to come up with that layout there.”

Mishima acknowledged the point. “There are problems connected with the chronology of the successive Mediterranean inundations. We believe this configuration is most plausible for the early Pliocene. Please observe that the now vanished peninsula of Balearis juts eastward from Spain. There is a single narrow island in place of modern Corse and Sardegna. Italy during that time has only its Apennine spine above sea level, together with an unstable southern area called Tyrrhenis, which once was much larger but now is sinking.”

He gave them a closer view of western Europe.

“This is the region that should be of immediate interest to you. The Rhône-Saône Trough contains a great river, draining swamps north of Switzerland and the large Lac de Bresse. The lower Rhône Valley of Pliocene times was probably invaded by the Mediterranean. Many of the volcanoes in the Massif Central were active, and there was also vulcanism in Germany, Spain, central Italy, and in the subsiding Tyrrhenian area. Farther north in France, we see that Brittany is an island separated from the mainland by the narrow Strait of Redon. The Atlantic forms a deep embayment southward into Anjou. Part of Gascony is also inundated by the sea.”

“But Bordeaux seems to be all right, thank God,” said the pirate.

Mishima chuckled. “Ah! Another connoisseur! You will be delighted to know, Citizen, that a number of other timefarers expressed a wish to settle in the Bordeaux area. They have carried with them certain portable apparatus and cuttings of many different grapes… Incidentally, Citizens, such information as we have about these earlier time-travelers is available from our computer at your convenience. And if you wish to have other information, for example, data on religious or ethnic groups, or on the kinds of books, art materiel, or other cultural items known to have been translated, please do not hesitate to request it.”

The academic type in the tweed jacket asked, “Will the computer give information on individual persons?”

Aha! thought Elizabeth.

“The usual statistics, similar to those in your dossiers, are available on those persons who have already passed through. It is also possible to obtain information on the items taken as baggage and the traveler’s destination in the Pliocene world, if stated.”

“Thank you.”

“If there are no further questions…?” Mishima nodded to Felice, who had raised a languid hand.

“Is it true that none of these travelers took any weapons with them?”

“No modern weapons were allowed by Madame Guderian, and we have followed her wise dictum. No zappers, no stun-guns, no atomics, no sonic disrupters, no solar-powered blasters, no gases, no gunpowder-based weapons. No psychocoercive drugs or devices. However, many kinds of primitive weaponry from different eras and cultures have been taken into the Pliocene.”

Landry nodded. Her face was void of expression. Elizabeth tried, without realizing what she was doing, to throw a red-active probe into her, but of course it was useless. Nevertheless, the ex-metapsychic was amazed when the young woman turned her head and stared directly at her for a long minute before looking back at the screen.

She couldn’t have felt anything, Elizabeth told herself. There was nothing to feel. And even if the carrier went out, there’s no way she could have known that it was me. Was there?

Counselor Mishima said, “Let us briefly note some of the names that have been given to the geographical features. Then we will survey the plant and animal life of the so-called Pontian Focus of Lower Pliocene times…”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Just as soon as the lecture ended, Grenfell hurried to his room and the computer terminal, which was housed in a renaissance credence of wormy fruitwood. He requested the data in permanent durofilm sheets, not really knowing what to expect. What did emerge was pathetically meager, but it unexpectedly included a full-length color portrait, probably taken just prior to her passing through the gate.

Mercy Lamballe was wearing a cowled cloak of deep reddish brown that concealed most of her auburn hair and made dark pits of her eyes. Her face was white and strained. The dress was long, simply cut, of Nile green with a trimming of gold embroidery about the neck, wrists, and hem. Her narrow waist was held in a girdle of some dark color, from which hung a purse and a small scabbard with unidentifiable instruments in it. She wore gold bracelets and a gold necklace, both with purple stones. A large brocaded valise sat beside her. She carried a covered basket and a leather case that looked as though it held a small harp.

She was accompanied by a huge white dog wearing a spiked collar, and four sheep.

He stared at the picture for some time, memorizing it while his eyes stung. Then he read her tersely summarized dossier:

There was more, the supplements with details of her medical psychiatric history, the library supplements listing her music and books. He skimmed these, then returned to the poignant inventory and the portrait.

Will I find you again, Mercy in your silken gown and golden jewelry, with your harp and your fife and your strawberries and bluebells? Where will you go to tend your pregnant sheep? (Dest: NS.) Will I find you alone, except for loyal Deirdre and her pups, as you’ve always lived? (Attmt: NS.) Will you welcome me and teach me the songs of old Lauguedoc or old Ireland, or will your heartswound still be too deep for me to fill? (MDep-2, .25 dis UT.)

What did you find on the other side of the time-portal when you stepped through on your birthday, beginning your twenty-ninth year of life six million years before you were born? And why am I leaving this bravest of all new worlds for a constricting unknown? What’s in the dark that I’m so afraid of finding/not finding?

Beguiled my heart, I know not why. And yet I love her till I die.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Claude Majewski opened his eyes, wiped the rheum out of them with a tissue, and removed the earplug that had been teaching him while he slept how to mortise wind beams into the rafters of a log cabin. His left arm was full of pins and needles and his feet were cold. Damn crocky old circulation shot to hell. As he kneaded the blood back into the muscles, he reflected that he would miss the luxury of the auberge’s goose-down pillows, liquicelle mattress, and real muslin sheets. He hoped the survival kit they would test today had a decent camp bed.

He padded across the sunny room to the bath. Here the compassion of Madame Guderian was made manifest in black-and-white marble and golden plumbing, in thick towels, perfumed soap and toiletries by Chanel, in sauna and sunlamp and la Masseuse ready to cradle the clients of the inn in soothing elegance after sobering lessons in la vie sauvage.

Some poor timefarers struggling to endure the Pliocene world would remember the last days at the auberge for French cooking, soft beds, and precious works of art. But Majewski knew that his fondest memories would be of the sybaritic John. The warm padded seat that welcomed his spindly shanks! The tissue, like perforated rabbit fur! He harked back to some of the primitive conveniences he and Gen had suffered on boondock planets, portacans with broken heating units; noisome stone and wood tillyhouses full of lurking critters; rough two-holers over flooded trenches; even one ghastly night of storms on Lusatia when he had squatted on a log and then discovered that it harbored little mitey monstrosities.

O blessed sanitary plumbing! If no one else invented a Pliocene water closet, Claude intended to give it an earnest shot.

He had a cool perfumed shower, cleaned his teeth (third set, good as new), made a face at himself in the Louis XIV mirror. Not too decrepit. A casual appraisal might judge his age to be late fiftyish. He was vain about his Polish green eyes and striking thatch of waved silver hair, the result of having the male-pattern baldness codons erased from his genetic heritage on the last rejuv. But thank God he’d depilated the rest of his pelt! Characters like that pirate who prized facial hair might have another song to sing in a primitive world, especially a warm and buggy one like Pontian Europe. The old paleobiologist had noted with grim humor that yesterday’s lectures and clever animated movies on Pliocene ecology had barely mentioned the insects and other invertebrate denizens. It was more dramatic to show vast herds of hipparions and graceful gazelles being harried by scarcely less graceful cheetahs; or machairodont lions sinking their long canines into bellowing hoe-tuskers.

Claude went back into the bedroom and asked room service to send coffee and croissants. Since this second day was to feature simple survival techniques, he put on the clothing he planned to wear through the gate. Experience had made his choice of kit easy: fishnet underwear, old-fashioned bush shirt and pants made of the best Egyptian long-staple cotton, socks of Orcadian wool with the fat left in, indestructible boots from Etruria. He had brought along his old backpack even though the auberge stood ready to furnish all equipment. It contained his poncho of breathable grintlaskin and an Orcadian sweater. And in one zip compartment was a beautiful Zakopane box, all carved and ornamented wood. Gen’s box. It hardly weighed a thing.

As he breakfasted, he studied the program for the day’s activities. Introduction to Survival Unit A-6. Shelter and Fire. Minimizing Environmental Hazards (ho ho). Orienteering. Fishing and Trapping.

He sighed, drank the perfect coffee, and munched a flaky bread roll. It was going to be a long day.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sister Annamaria Roccaro had done a fair bit of camping, but the expensive new decamole equipment contained in Unit A-6 was a delight and a revelation to her.

She and the other members of Group Green had first gone to class, where a hearty woman instructor briefed them; then they had paired up and descended to a cavern carved out of the living rock 200 meters below the cellars of the auberge. They were let loose into a sunny meadow with a winding stream and told to become acquainted with their survival gear.

The simulated sun felt hot, even though the reset of their body thermostats was progressing apace. After she and Felice hiked a short distance, Amerie decided that she would have to forgo the sandals that had been her first choice for Pliocene footgear. They were suitably monastic and airy, but they also admitted twigs and small stones. Short buskins or even modern boots would be better for cross-country travel. She also decided that the white doeskin habit was over-worn, even with detachable sleeves. Homespun would be better. She could have a doeskin scapular, cowl, and cloak to keep off the weather.

“Aren’t you hot in that outfit, Felice?” she asked her companion. Landry was wearing the green-and-black ring-hockey uniform, which was evidently her choice for the Pliocene.

“It suits me,” the girl said. “I’m used to working in it, and my planet was much warmer than Earth. That doeskin looks very high-priestess, Amerie. I like it.”

The nun felt strangely flustered. Felice, looked so incongruous in her warrior’s cuirass and greaves and that Grecian helm with its brave green feathers perched on the back of her head. Stein and Richard had started to tease her when she appeared in the costume that morning; but for some reason, they had broken off almost immediately.

“Shall we camp here?” the nun suggested. A large cork oak grew beside the brook, shading a flat surface that looked like a good place to set up the cabin. The two women shed their packs, and Amerie extracted the fist-sized inflator from hers and studied it. Their instructor had said that the sealed power supply would be good for about twenty years. “Here are two nozzles, one to blow things up and the other to deflate. It says: IMPERATIVE TO SHEATH UNUSED NOZZLE.”

“Try my cabin-pak.” Felice held out a wad about the size of a sandwich. “I can’t believe it’ll grow into a four-by-four house.”

Sister Roccaro fixed the dangling flat tube of the pak to the inflator, then pressed the activating stud. Compressed air began to spurt into the wad, turning it into a large silvery square. The two women positioned the cabin properly, then watched it grow. The floor thickened to about nine centimeters and became quite rigid as air filled the complex micropore structural web between the layers of film. The walls, somewhat thicker for insulation, grew up, complete with transparent zipable windows and interior screen-curtains. A steeply gabled silvery roof that overhung the doorway inflated last of all.

Felice peered inside the doorless entry. “Look. The floor has sprouted fixed furniture.”

There were bunks for two with semidetached pillows, a table, shelves, and at the rear a silvery box with a pipe leading to the roof. Felice read aloud: “BALLAST STOVE WITH SAND OR UNIT WILL COMPRESS UPON COOLING… This material must be nearly impossible to destroy!” She reached behind her left greave and produced a glittering little gold-handled dirk. “Can’t puncture it, either.”

“What a pity they’ve made it to degrade in twenty year. Still, we should be at one with our environment by then.”

Large bucket-shaped hollows in each comer of the cabin had to be ballasted with stones, earth, water, or whatever else was to hand. A very small pocket near the door yielded up a whole handful of pillsized wads that were to be inflated separately, then weighted with sand or with water. The latter could be injected into the interstitial area by means of a simple collapsible bulb siphon. The pills grew into a cabin door, chairs, cooking gear (with the sand-ballast note), filamentous rugs and blankets, and other miscellany. Less than ten minutes after they had begun to set up camp, the women were relaxing in a fully equipped cabin.

“I can hardly believe it,” Sister Roccaro marveled, rapping on the walls. “It feels quite solid. But if there were any wind, the whole cabin would blow away like a bubble unless you weighted it down.”

“Even wood is mostly thin air and water,” said Felice with a shrug. “This decamole just seems to reproduce the structurally reinforced shell of a thing and lets you add mass. Wonder how the stuff compensates for heat and pressure changes? Some kind of valves, I suppose. You’d obviously have to guy this house in a high wind, though, even if you filled most of the wall hollows with water or dirt. But it sure beats a tent. It even has ventilators!”

“Shall we inflate the boat or the mini-shelter or the bridge sections?”

“They were optional. Now that I’ve seen how decamole works, I’ll take the rest of the equipment on faith.” Felice crossed her legs and pulled off her gauntlets slowly. She was seated at the small table. “Faith. That’s your game, isn’t it?”

The nun sat down. “In a way. Technically, I intend to become an anchoress, a kind of religious hermit. It’s a calling that’s completely obsolete in the Milieu, but it used to have its fans in the Dark Ages.”

“What in the world will you be doing? Just praying up a storm all day long?”

Amerie laughed. “Part of the night, too. I intend to bring back the Latin Divine Office. It’s an ancient cycle of daily prayers. Matins starts it off at midnight. Then there’s Lauds at dawn. During the daytime there are prayers for the old First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours. Then Vespers or Evensong at sunset, and Compline before going to bed. The Office is a collection of psalms and scripture readings and hymns and special prayers that reflected centuries of religious tradition. I think it’s a terrible pity that no one prays it any more in the primitive form.”

“And you just keep saying this Office all the time?”

“Good grief, no. The individual hours aren’t that long. I’ll also celebrate the Mass and do penance and deep meditation with a little Zen. And when I’m hoeing weeds or doing other chores there’s the Rosary. It’s almost like a mantra if you do it the old way. Very calming.”

Felice stared at her with well-deep eyes. “It sounds very strange. And lonely, too. Doesn’t it frighten you, planning to live all alone with nobody but your God?”

“Dear old Claude says he’ll maintain me in style, but I’m not too sure I can take him seriously. If he does supply me with some food, I may be able to handcraft some items in my spare time that we can barter.”

“Claude!” Landry was contemptuous. “He’s been around, that old man. He’s not a complete case like those two machos in fancy dress, but I caught him looking at me in a fishy way.”

“You can’t blame people for looking at you. You’re very beautiful. I’ve heard you were a great sports star on your home world.”

The girl’s lip curled in a grim little smile. “Acadie. I was the best ring-hockey player of all time. But they were afraid of me. In the end, the other players, the men, refused to come up against me. They made all kinds of trouble. Finally, I was barred from the game when two players claimed I had deliberately tried to do them serious injury.”

“Had you?”

Felice lowered her gaze. She was twisting the fingers of her gloves and a flush was rising from her neck into her cheeks. “Maybe. I think I did. They were so hateful.” She raised her pointed chin in defiance, the hoplite helmet pushed to the back of her head giving her the look of a miniature Pallas Athene. “They never wanted me as a woman, you know. All they wanted was to hurt me, to spoil me. They were jealous of my strength, and afraid. People have always been afraid of me, even when I was just a child. Can you imagine what that was like?”

“Oh, Felice.” Amerie hesitated. “How, how did you ever begin playing that brutal game?”

“I was good with animals. My parents were soil scientists and they were always moving around on field expeditions. Newly opened lands, still full of wildlife. When the local kids in the area would snub me, I’d just get myself some pets for friends. Small creatures at first, then larger and more dangerous kinds. And there were some beauties on Acadie, I can tell you. Finally, when I was fifteen, I tamed a verrul. It’s something like a very large Earth rhinoceros. A local animal dealer wanted to buy him for ring-hockey training. I’d never paid much attention to the game before, but I did after I sold the beast. I woke up to the fact that there was a big-money business that might be perfect for my special talents.”

“But to break into a professional sport when you were only a young girl…”

“I told my parents I wanted to become an apprentice verrul trainer and groom. They didn’t mind. I had always been excess baggage. They just made me finish school and let me go. They said, ‘Be happy, baby.’ ”

She paused and stared at Amerie without expression. “I was a groom only until the team manager saw how I could control the animals. That’s the secret of playing the game, you see. The verrul has to make the goals and maneuver to keep you from getting stunned by the short-range weapons the players carry. I played in the preseason as a novelty, to give the Green-hammer box office a hype. The team had been in the cellar for three years running. When they saw that I was more than a publicity gimmick they put me onto the first string in the season opener. I whipped the other clowns on the team into such a froth trying to outdo me that we won the bloody game. And all the rest… and the pennant, too.”

“Wonderful!”

“It should have been. But I had no friends. I was too different from the rest of the players. Too freakish. And in the second year… when they really began to hate me and I knew they would force me out, I… I…”

She pounded both fists on the table and her child’s face twisted in anguish. Amerie waited for the tears, but there were none; the briefly revealed hurt was masked almost as soon as it had showed itself. Sitting across the table, Felice relaxed, smiling at the other woman.

“I’m going to be a huntress, you know. On the other side. I could take care of you much better than the old man, Amerie.”

The nun rose up, blood pounding in her temples. She turned away from Felice and walked out of the cabin.

“I think we need each other,” the girl said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

My dear Varya,

We have completed our little games of survival and craftsmanship now, and our bodies are fully acclimated to the tropical world that was Pliocene Earth. There remain only a Last Supper and a good night’s sleep before passage through the time-portal at dawn. The apparatus is inside a quaint cottage in the gardens of the auberge, and you can’t imagine a more incongruous site for the gate into another world. One looks in vain for the sign above the doorway saying, per me siva tea la perduta oente, but the feeling is there all the same.

After five days of working together (more like a holiday camp than basic training, you must understand), the eight of us in Group Green have achieved shaky competence in our chosen fields of primitive technology and a faith in our ability to cope that is probably dangerously inflated. Few of the others seem to appreciate the potential hazard that we might face from our predecessors into Exile. My fellow Greenies are more inclined to worry about being stamped upon by mammoths or bitten by python-sized vipers than to anticipate a hostile human reception committee greedily awaiting the day’s grab bag of well-heeled wayfarers.

You and I know that the time-gate arrival would certainly have been ritualized in some manner by the people on the other side. What the ritual will be is another matter. We can hardly expect to be treated as casual commuters, but whether we shall encounter welcome or exploitation is impossible to fathom. The literature offers certain speculative scenarios that make my flesh crawl. Personnel at the auberge are careful to present a neutral face while at the same time reinforcing our childhood self-defensive training. We will pass through the portal in two groups of four persons, with larger pieces of baggage following. This, I feel, is designed to give us a certain safety in numbers, although the momentary pain and disorientation of ordinary subspace translation will probably affect time-travelers as well, putting us at a tactical disadvantage for the first minute following our arrival in the Pliocene.

Your amused speculations upon my new vocation in the primitive world were much appreciated. However, since the last dinosaurs perished at least 60 million years before the Pliocene Epoch, there will be little can for sweeping up after them! So much for your visions of me as an antediluvian fertilizer tycoon. Prosaically enough, my new job is to be little more than an extension of my erstwhile hobby of sailing. I shall fish for a living and ply the seas on my Quest, and perhaps undertake the odd bit of trade if the occasion presents. The sloop was far too sophisticated a vessel to take to the Pliocene, so I traded her in for a smaller trimaran that can be ballasted with water and sand instead of mercury. If need be, I can whip up a very simple craft from scratch materials as well. We are furnished with toolheads of a gemlike glassy material, vitredur, which stays eyersharp and is virtually indestructible for some 200 years, after which it degrades, like decamole. Besides the shipwright’s kit, I am equipped with the auberge’s survival gear (very impressive) and what they call a Smallholder Unit, tools and decamole appliances for setting up light housekeeping on a subsistence farm, together with a few packets of seeds and a large fleck library with a raft of “how-to” books on every subject from animal husbandry to zymurgy.

The latter, by the way, is the vocation of choice for our Viking. He also confided to me that if there should be a demand for swash-buckling mercenary warriors, he might combine the two trades.

The individual whom I dubbed the Pirate also plans to get involved with alcoholic beverages, wines and brandies, that is. He and the Viking are now the straightest of friends, spending their off-hours tossing down the most expensive spirits that the auberge can supply and speculating on the quality of female consolation that might be available in the By-and-By. (Group Green itself has lean pickings. Besides the Nun, our female members include a sinister Virgin Huntress who seems to have wreaked mayhem or worse on one of the auberge counselors in order to qualify as a recidivist, and an extremely cautious ex-Meta Lady who is, at the moment at least, content to remain just one of the boys.)

Last night we had a fascinating glimpse into the background of the Pirate. His brother and sister turned up unexpectedly to say adieu and turned out to be Fleet line officers of the most impressive stripe. The poor P was very discomfited and the ex-Meta Lady speculates that he must be a cashiered spacer himself. He’s a competent sort if you don’t mind grouches. I worked with him for a few hours in the Small Boat Handling exercise, which he wanted to cram, and he seemed to have a natural flair for messing about in the water.

Most of the others in Group Green seem to be alone in the world. The Nun received a long conference call from her religious sistren in North America bidding her bon voyage. And earlier today she met with a Franciscan Brother in full conventual fig, no doubt hearing her last confession or whatever. (The friar drove one of those souped-up Gambini eggs with the heat dissipation fins, not the patient gray donkey you might have anticipated from memoirs of Il Poverello.) The Nun was a medic and psychological counselor by profession and plans to retire to a hermitage. I hope the poor woman isn’t counting on ministering angels such as the Old Paleontologist overmuch. He’s a fine chap with a penchant for carpentry, but I dare say the ex-Meta is right when she pegs him as a death-wisher.

I concur with your analysis of the little Joker. There must have been some valid square-peg reason for him to be thrown off his home world, but it’s a pity that his wild talents couldn’t be harnessed for the Milieu. Poor little nonborn. He’s endeared himself to the rest of us Greenies, not only for his ghastly sense of humor, but also for his fantastic ability to make something out of nothing. He has assembled a large collection of vitredur toolheads that need only be equipped with shafts or bandies to be operational. You get the feeling that after this boy has been in the Pliocene for a week or two, the Industrial Revolution will be raging! He has a whole forge lashup in decamole for his village blacksmith and rustic mechanician acts, and has acquired a plaqueful of geological survey charts to clue him in on metal ores in the unlikely event that none of the other Exiles has gone in heavily for prospecting.

You may be interested in the peculiar social structure of Group Green. The foundress of the auberge was a practical psychologist of no mean ability and realized quite early on that her clients would need support from fellow travelers in order to maximize survival potential beyond the gate. On the other hand, they would tend to be far too eccentric to stand for any of the more obvious schemes of imposed organization. So Madame Guderian fell back on the old “put ’em through hell together and they’ll end up buddies” shtick, which you must admit is apt to induce feelings of solidarity in all but the most sociopathic. (And it did, too, with the obvious exception.)

During each day’s Group activities we have spent the most strenuous sessions working together, often thrust into outlandish situations where we were forced to cooperate with one another in order to complete a difficult task quickly and well. For example, we bridged a thirty-meter pond full of alligators in one lesson; captured, butchered, and “utilized” an elk in another; and defended ourselves against hostile human stalkers in third. Ironically, the most accomplished primitive in the Group is the Old Paleontologist, who seems to have knocked about the wilder shores of Galactica for more than a century while gleaning fossil bones.

We are known to each other by first names only, and we may divulge such details of our background as we choose or don’t choose. As you may imagine, this leaves a wide margin for parlor psychoanalysis, with the ex-Meta Lady as head gamesmistress. She had me taped as a Questing Lover after the first day, and I’m afraid that she anticipates a melancholy end to my masculine Evangeline-fixe, since she keeps trying to distract me with speculations on idle playing among the auberge clientele, the political implications of Exile, and other anthropological amusements.

Do you think I’m doomed, too, Varya? I don’t, you know.

Late this afternoon I got a call from London, and it was Kaplan and Djibutunji and Hildebrand and Catherwood, bless their bones, telling me goodbye. Aunt Helen sent a note, but she is really nearly gaga now, since declining rejuv.

Your dear letter was in this morning’s post. I don’t have to tell you how much I appreciate your agreeing to carry on with the liaison committee. It’s the one work I really hated to leave unfinished. There is still the ultimate correlation of the pre-Rebellion mazeway material, but I feel that Alicia and Adalberto have that pretty well in hand.

And so I come at last to the farewell, Varya, and I wish I could be eloquent and memorable instead of just my stodgy self. The gaudiness of the act will have to speak for me. Whatever you do, don’t mourn. My only hope of happiness lies on the other side of the Exile gate and I must risk going after it. Remember the years we shared as lovers and colleagues and friends and know that I’m glad they happened. Joy and light to you, my Very Dear.

Forever,

BRY

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When the Last Supper, with its crazy smorgasbord of requested dishes, was finally over, the eight members of Group Green took their drinks out onto the terrace, where they instinctively gathered apart from the other guests. Even though itwas only half after twenty, the sky over Lyon had turned black as the scheduled weekly storm built up in the north. Pink flashes silhouetted approaching thunderheads.

“Feel the static buildup!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Even with my metafunctions out, the ionization before a really big storm always gets to me. Every sense sharpens. I begin to feel so clever I can barely contain myself! Capacitor Earth is charging and so am I, and in just a minute or two I’ll be able to zap mountains!”

She faced into the strengthening wind, long hair streaming and red denim jumpsuit clinging to her body. The first sub-sonics of distant thunder curdled the air.

Felice affected a languid tone. “Were you able to move mountains before?”

“Not really. The larger psychokinetic powers are really very rare among metas, almost as rare as genuine creativity. My PK ability was only good for a few parlor tricks. What I specialized in was farspeaking, the glorified telepathy function. It should really be called farsensing because it includes a species of sight as well as hearing. I was also operant in redaction, which is the therapeutic and analytical power that most lay persons call mind-alteration. My husband had similar faculties. We worked as a team training the minds of very young children in the first difficult steps toward metapsychic Unity.”

“They wanted me to go to a redactor,” Felice said, her voice thrilling with loathing. “I told them I’d rather die. I don’t know how you meta people can stand rummaging around in others’ brains. Or always having some other meta able to read you own secret thoughts. It would be horrible never to be alone. Never to be able to hide. I’d go mad.”

Elizabeth said gently, “It wasn’t like that at all. As far as metas reading each other… there are many different levels to the mind. Modes, we call them. You can farspeak to many people on the declamatory mode, or speak at short range to a group on the conversational mode. Then there’s the intimate mode, that only one person can receive from you. And beneath that are many other conscious and unconscious layers that can be screened off by means of mental techniques that all metapsychics learn when they’re very young. We have our private thoughts, just as you do. Most of our telepathic communication is nothing more than a kind of voiceless speech and image projection. You can compare it to electronic audio-visuals, without the electromagnetic radiation.”

Felice said, “Deep redactors can get into a person’s innermost thoughts.”

“True. But with them, there is almost always a doctor-patient relationship appertaining. The patient gives conscious permission for the scrutiny. Even then, a dysfunction may be so strongly programmed that the therapist is powerless to get behind it, no matter how much the patient may be willing to cooperate.”

“Yeah,” said Stein. He tilted his great mug of beer, holding it before his face.

Felice persisted. “I know that metas can read secret thoughts. Sometimes the coach of our team would bring in redactors to work on guys in slumps. Metas could always spot the ones who’d lost their nerve. You can’t tell me those poor bastards would deliberately let the shrinks find out something that’d get them fired!”

Elizabeth said, “An untrained person, a non-meta, gives away information in subverbal ways without being aware of it. Think of it as mental mumbling. Haven’t you ever stood next to a person who was talking to himself, muttering under his breath? When a person is frightened or angry or trying very hard to work out a problem or even sexually aroused, the thoughts become… loud. Even non-metas can sometimes pick up the vibes, the mind-pictures or subvocal speech or emotional surges. The better the redactor, the better he is at making sense out of the crazy mishmash that human brains broadcast.”

Bryan asked, “Is there any way an ordinary person can shut out a mind reader?”

“Of course. It’s possible to stymie superficial snooping rather easily. Just keep a firm grip on your mental broadcasting. If you think someone is really digging, think of some neutral image like a big black square. Or do some simple exercise when you’re not speaking out loud. Count one-two-three-four, over and over. Or sing some dumb song. That’ll block out all but the best redactor.”

“I’m glad you can’t read my mind now, lovie,” Aiken Drum put in. “You’d fall into a quagmire of sheer funk. I’m so scared about going through this time-gate that my red corpuscles have gone puce! I tried to back out. I even told the counselors I’d reform if they’d let me stay here! But nobody believe me.”

“I can’t think why,” Bryan said.

A reddish bolt of lightning reached from cloud to cloud above the hills; but the sound, when it came, was muffled and unsatisfying, a beat from a dead tympanum.

Aiken asked Elizabeth, “How did the ballooning work out, sweets?”

“I crammed the theory of building one from native materials, tanning fishskins for the envelope and weaving a basket and plaiting cordage from bark fibers. But I did my practicing in one of these.” She took a package the size of two large bricks from her shoulder bag. “It blows up five storeys tan, double-walled and semidirigible. Bright red, like my suit. I have a power source to inject hot air. Of course, the power won’t last for more than a few flight-weeks, so eventually I’ll have to shift to charcoal. Making that’s a mess. But it’s the only ancient fuel that’s suitable, unless I can find some coal.”

“No sweat, doll-eyes,” Aiken said. “Stick with me and my mineral maps.”

Stein laughed contemptuously. “And how you gonna mine the stuff? Draft Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? The nearest coal’s gotta be a hundred kloms north, around Le Cresuot or Montceau, and way to hell and gone underground. Even if you reach the stuff without blasting, how you gonna tote it around to where it’ll do you some good?”

“So I’ll need a week or two to work out the fewkin’ details!” Aiken shot back.

There would be other coal deposits much nearer,” Claude Majewski said. “Those modern maps of yours are deceptive, Aiken. They show the strata and deposits as they exist today, in the twenty-second century, not as they were six million years ago. There used to be little limnic coal basins all over the Massif Central and a really large deposit at Saint-Etienne, but they were all worked out late in the twentieth century. Go back to the Pliocene and you’ll probably find easy pickings just a few kloms south of here. Find some near a volcano, and you might luck out with natural coke!”

“Better hold off establishing Pliocene Mining, Unlimited, until you eyeball the territory,” Richard advised Aiken with a sour grimace. “The local honchos might have their own ideas about us helping ourselves to the natural resources.”

“Entirely possible,” Bryan agreed.

“We could convince them to let us have a piece of the action,” said Felice. She smiled. “In one way or another.”

The nun said, “We could also try to avoid conflict by going to an unsettled area.”

“I don’t think that’s Felice’s style,” Aiken said. “She’s looking forward to a little fun and games, aren’t you, babe?”

Landry’s pale frizzy hair was standing out from her head in a charged cloud. She was wearing the simple cheongsam again. “Whatever I’m looking forward to, I’ll find. Right now all I want is another drink. Anybody coming with me?” She strolled back into the auberge, followed by Stein and Richard.

“Somebody should tell those two they’re wasting their time,” the old man muttered.

“Poor Felice,” Amerie said. “What an ironic name for her, when she’s so dreadfully unhappy. That aggressive pose is just another form of armor, like the hockey uniform.”

“And underneath she’s just crying for love?” Elizabeth inquired, her eyes nearly shut and a faint smile on her lips. “Be careful, Sister. That one’s standing in the need of prayer, all right. But she’s more of a black hole than a black sheep.”

“Those eyes eat you alive,” Aiken said. “Something damned inhuman is moving around in there.”

“Not even normally homophilic,” Majewski said. “But I’ll certainly grant you the damned.”

“That’s a cruel and cynical thing to say, Claude!” exclaimed the nun. “You don’t know anything of the girl’s background, any of the things that have maimed her spirit. You talk as though she were some monster, when all she is, is a pathetic child who has never learned how to love.” She took a deep breath. “I’m a medic as well as a nun. One of my vows is to help the suffering. I don’t know if I can help Felice, but I’m certainly going to try.”

A gust of wind lifted Amerie’s veil and she clutched it impatiently with one strong hand. “Don’t stay up too late, guys. Tomorrow’s creeping up on us.” She hurried off the terrace and disappeared into the darkened garden.

“Could be it’s the nunnie who’ll need the prayers,” Aiken said, giggling.

“You shut up!” barked Claude. Then he said, “Sorry, son. But you want to watch that smartass mouth of yours. We’re going to have enough trouble without your adding to it.” He looked at the sky as a prolonged and powerful bolt of lightning descended over the eastern hills. Ground-strokes rose up to meet it and there was a grumble of thunder. “Here comes the storm. I’m going to bed, too. What I want to know is, who the hell ordered the omens for this outfit?”

The old man stomped away, leaving Elizabeth, Aiken, and Bryan staring after him. Three successive thunderbolts gave him a ridiculous theatrical exit; but none of the people still on the terrace was smiling any more.

“I never told you, Aiken,” Elizabeth ventured at last, “how much I like your costume. You were right. It’s the most spectacular one in the whole auberge.”

The little man began snapping his fingers and clacking his heels like a flamenco dancer, turning and posing. Lightning shone on his loose-fitting garment. What seemed to be cloth of gold was actually a costly fabric woven from the byssus threads of Franconian mollusks, famed throughout the galaxy for beauty and toughness. All up and down the arms and legs of the suit were small flapped and fastened pockets; pockets covered the breast area and the shoulders and hips and there was a very large pocket on the back with an opening on the bottom. Aiken’s golden boots had pockets. His belt had pockets. Even his golden hat, with the brim tipped up jauntily on the right side, had a band full of tiny pockets. And every pocket, large or small, bulged with some tool or instrument or compressed decamole appliance. Aiken Drum was a walking hardware shop incarnate as a golden idol.

“King Arthur would dub you Sir Boss at first sight,” Elizabeth said, explaining to Bryan: “He plans to set himself up as a Pliocene Connecticut Yankee.”

“You wouldn’t have to bother with Twain’s solar eclipse to gain attention,” the anthropologist conceded. “The suit alone is enough to overawe the peasantry. But isn’t it rather conspicuous if you want to spy out the land?”

“This big pocket on my back has a chameleon poncho.”

Bryan laughed. “Merlin won’t have a prayer.”

Aiken watched the Lyon city lights dim and disappear as the approaching storm curtained the valley with rain. “The Connecticut Yankee had to contend against Merlin in the story, didn’t he? Modern technology versus sorcery. Science against the superstition of the Dark Ages. I cant remember too much about the book. Read it when I was about thirteen there on Dalriada and I know I was disappointed with Twain for wasting so much space on half-baked philosophy instead of action. How did it end? You know, I’ve forgotten! Think I’ll go hit the computer for a plaque of the thing for bedtime reading.” He gave Bryan and Elizabeth a wink. “But I may decide to aim higher than Sir Boss!”

He slipped off into the auberge.

“And then there were two,” Bryan said.

Elizabeth was finishing her Remy Martin. She reminded him in many ways of Varya, calm, incisively intelligent, but with the shutters always closed. She projected cool comradeship and not the slightest jot of sex.

“You won’t be staying with Group Green for long, will you, Bry?” she remarked. “The rest of us have built a dependence in these five days. But not you.”

“You don’t miss much. Are you sure your metafunctions are really gone?”

“Not gone,” she said. “But they might as well be. I’ve dropped into what we call the latent state because of brain damage. My functions are still there, but inaccessible, walled up in the right half of my brain. Some persons are born latent, with the walls. Others are born operant, as we say, and their mind-powers are available to them, especially if they receive proper training from infancy. It’s closely analogous to the acquisition of language by babies. My work back on Denali involved a good deal of that kind of training. Very rarely, we were even able to coax latents into operancy. But my own case is different I have just a few teaspoonful of my original cerebrum left. The rest is regenerated. The leavening was enough for a resoul job, and a specialist restored my memories. But for some unknown reason, metapsychic operancy seldom survives a really spectacular brain trauma.”

“What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“My husband and I were caught in a tornado while we were egging on Denali. It’s a sweet little world, with some of the galaxy’s worst weather. Lawrence was killed outright. I was broken to bits but ultimately restored. Except for the MP functions.”

“And is losing them so unbearable…” he began, then cursed and apologized.

But she was calm, as always. “It’s nearly impossible for a non-meta to understand the loss. Think of going deaf, dumb, blind. Think of being paralyzed and numb all over. Think of losing your sex organs, of becoming hideously disfigured. Put all of the anguish together and it’s still not enough, once you’ve known the other thing and then lost it… But you’ve lost something, too, haven’t you, Bry? Maybe you can understand something of the way I feel.”

“Lost something. Perhaps it does make more sense to say it that way. God knows there’s no logic to the way I feel about Mercy.”

“Where will you look for her? If the others in the Pliocene don’t know where she’s gone?”

“All I have is an instinct. I’ll try Armorica first because of her Breton ancestry. And then Albion, the Britain that will be. I’ll need the boat because there’s a question whether the Channel was dry land at the precise period well be living in. Sea level seems to have fluctuated in an odd way at the beginning of the Pliocene. But I’ll find Mercy somehow, no matter where she’s gone. “And what will I find in my beautiful balloon, Elizabeth wandered. And what will it matter? Will the Exile world be anyless empty than this one?

Perhaps if she and Lawrence had wanted children… but that would have compromised the work, and so they had agreed to forgo them, finding love fulfillment in each other, mating for life as almost all metapsychics did, knowing that when one had inevitably gone there would still be the Unity, the billion-fold mind-embrace of the Galactic Milieu.

Or there would have been…

The first large drops of rain made a rataplan on the leaves of the plane trees. Blue-white flashes lit the whole valley and the thunder seemed to shake the mountain roots. Bryan grabbed Elizabeth’s hand and pulled her through the porte-fenêtre into the main salon a few seconds before the real downpour began.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The predawn was chilly, with gray clouds scudding southward as though late for an appointment at the Mediterranean. The Rhône Valley brimmed with mist. A small log fire had been lit in the main salon and it was there that the members of Group Green gathered after breakfasting in their rooms. Each person carried the materials for a new life and dressed for the role chosen. (Their extra baggage had proceeded them to the time-gate staging area: Claude’s case of Wybrowa, Bryan’s Scotch, Richard’s supplies of spices and yeasts and sodium bisulfate, Stein’s keg, Elizabeth’s liqueur chocolates, and Amerie’s large painting of Saint Sebastian.) Richard and Stein whispered together as they stared at the weak flames. Amerie, a half-smile on her lips, fingered the beads of a large wooden rosary that hung from her belt. The others stood apart, waiting.

At precisely five hundred hours, Counselor Mishima came down the broad staircase from the mezzanine and bid them a solemn good-morning.

“Please accompany me.”

They picked up their things and followed in single file out of the salon, across the terrace, and into the sodden garden, where the flagstones were still puddled with rain and the blossoms on the rose-standards hung torn and battered from the storm.

The balconies of the main guesthouse overlooked the garden. Up above, dim faces behind glass doors were watching them, just as they themselves had watched other dawn processions of eight time-travelers led by a single counselor. They had seen Gypsies and Cossacks and desert nomads and voortrekkers, Polynesians with feathered capes and warriors with crossbows, swords, and assegais; there had been Bavarian hikers in leder-hosen, bearded white-robed prophets, shaven-headed Oriental votaries, sunbonneted American pioneers, cowboys, fetishists costumed in pathetic grotesquery, and sensible-looking people wearing levis or tropical gear. The travelers in the early morning parades had moved through the garden to an old cottage shaded by mulberry trees, its white stucco and half-timbering shrouded in climbing vines. Madame Guderian’s lace curtains still hung at the windows and her pink and white geraniums bloomed in earthenware pots beside the large front door. The eight guests and the counselor would enter the cottage and the door would close behind them. After half an hour had elapsed, the counselor alone would emerge.

Bryan Grenfell stood behind Counselor Mishima as he unlocked the Guderian cottage with an old-fashioned brass key. A large ginger cat sat in the dry shelter of the shrubbery, watching the group with a sardonic golden eye. Grenfell nodded to it as he passed inside. You’ve seen a lot of us go this way, haven’t you, Monsieur le Chat? And how many of them by now felt as used and foolish and died as I do, but still too stubborn to turn back? Here I go, in my pragmatic tropical kit with a haversack full of simple necessities and high-protein food, armed with a steel-tipped walking stick and a small throwing knife hidden beneath the sleeve of my left forearm, and Mercy’s dear picture and dossier in my breast pocket. Here I go into the deep cellar…

Stein Oleson had to duck his head passing through the door and walk with caution through the hall lest he brush against Madame’s tall clock with its wagging brass pendulum, or knock some fragile bibelot from its place on the wall, or catch the curling horns of his Viking helmet on the little crystal chandelier. Stein was finding it more and more difficult to keep silent. Something was expanding inside of him that demanded to cry out, to roar, to vent a great gust of laughter that would make all the rest of the group shrink away from him as from the door of a suddenly opened furnace. He felt his manhood coming alive beneath the wolfskin kilt, his feet itching to leap and trample, his arm muscles tensing to swing the battle-axe or brandish the vitredur-tipped spear he had added to his armory. Soon! Soon! The tangle in his guts would come free, the fire in his blood would power him to heroism, and the joy would be so huge that he would damn near die with the swallowing of it…

Richard Voorhees followed Stein carefully down into the cellar. His heavy, folded-over seaboots were awkward on the worn steps. He had a suspicion that he would have to switch to the more comfortable athletic shoes in his backpack once they had passed through the gate and done a first reconnaissance on the other side. Practicalities first, then rôle playing! The secret of success, he told himself, would lie in a swift assessment of the local power structure, covert appeal to the have-nots, and establishment of a suitable base. Once he got the distillery operating (with Stein, and maybe Landry, to keep the locals from muscling in), he’d be on a sound economic footing and ready to jockey for political influence. He smiled in anticipation and carefully adjusted the hipband of the backpack so that it would not wrinkle the skirts of his doublet. Didn’t some of those old sea rovers set themselves up as virtual kings in early America? Jean Lafitte, Bloody Morgan, even old Blackboard himself? And how do you like Richard Voorhees for King of Barataria? He chuckled out loud at the thought, completely forgetting that his costume had not really belonged to an operatic buccaneer, but to a different kind of seafarer altogether…

Felice Landry watched Counselor Mishima manipulate the elaborate lock mechanism of the cellar door. It swung ponderously open and they entered the old wine-keep, dank and musty and with a faint over-scent of ozone. She stared at the gazebo, that unlikely gate to freedom, and clutched her new arbalest to her black-armored bosom. She was trembling, nauseated, exerting all her willpower to keep from disgracing herself in this ultimate moment. For the first time since early childhood, her eyes, within the T-shaped Grecian helmet opening, were sticky-lashed with tears…

“We will translate you in groups of four, as I have already explained,” said Counselor Mishima. “Your extra baggage will follow after an interval of five minutes, so be prepared to retrieve it from the tau-field area. And now, if the first people will position themselves…”

Elizabeth Orme watched without emotion as Bryan, Stein, Richard, and Felice crowded closely into the latticed booth and stood motionless. All of them, she thought, have made their plans except me. They have their goals, touching or comical or mad. But I’ll be content to drift through the Exile world in my scarlet balloon, looking down on all the people and the animals, listening to wind and the cry of birds, smelling pollen, resin from the forest, smoke from wildfire on the grassland. I’ll come to earth only when I feel that the Earth is real again and I am. If we ever can be…

Mirrored walls sprang up as Mishima threw the switch. The four people in the gazebo were on their way. Aiken Drum, his golden suit glittering with a hundred reflections from the cellar lights, stepped forward impulsively.

“Damn! So that’s all there is to it? Not even enough power drain to dim the lamps!” He studied the vinelike cables that seemed to grow out of the packed soil of the floor and disappear somewhere short of the vaulted ceiling. Mishima warned him to touch nothing, and Aiken gave him a reassuring gesture. But he had to get a close look. The glassy framework was shot through with faintly moving patterns hovering at the edge of visibility. The black bodies of the lattice-nodes each enclosed a tiny point of unwinking light that seemed to be shining at a great distance.

“How long does it take for people to get from here to there?” Aiken asked. “Or should I say from now till then?”

“The translation is in theory instantaneous,” replied Mishima. “We maintain the field for some minutes in order to enable a safe exit. And I may say that never once, in the four years that the Human Polity has carried on the work of Madame Guderian, has there been an accident to time-travelers.”

Aiken said, “Counselor, I’d like to take one more thing with me into Exile. Can you give me a description and diagram of this device?”

Without a word, Mishima opened the oaken cabinet and took out a small plaque-book It was obvious that other travelers had made the same request. Aiken kissed the plaque triumphantly and stowed it in a large pocket below the right knee of his shining suit.

Mishima stepped to the control console and switched off the field. The mirror-walls winked out. The gazebo was empty.

“They have passed safely through the portal. Now the rest of you may enter.”

Claude Majewski hefted his twenty-kilo pack and was the first inside. Old Man, you’re crazy, he said to himself, then smiled because he could hear Gen saying it. On a sudden impulse, he opened the pack compartment that held the carved and inlaid box from the Polish mountains and took it out. Is there really a Pliocene world beyond the gate, Black Girl? Or is it a hoax after all, and do we step out of the glass cage into death? Oh, Gen, go with me. Wherever…

Sister Annamaria Roccaro was the last to get into position, smiling in apology as she crowded next to Aiken Drum and felt the hard tools in his pockets pressing through the sleeves and skirts of her habit. Aiken was nearly a head shorter than the sturdy nun, almost as small as Felice but in no way as vulnerable. He’d survive, would Aiken Drum. May the rest of us as well! And now, Mother of God, hear my archaic prayer: Salve Regina, mater misericordiae; vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus, exsules, filii Hevae. Ad te sus-piramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle. Eia ergo, advocato nostra, ilka tuos misericordes oculos ad nos convene. Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exih’um ostende…

Mishima threw the switch.

There was pain of translation and a momentous snap hurtling them into the gray limbo. They hung without breath or heartbeat, each one screaming alone into silence. And then they felt sudden warmth and opened their eyes to a blinding dazzle of green and blue. Hands were pulling them, voices urging them to step forward out of the shimmering area that had been the gazebo, to step down a little, to come out quickly before the field reversed itself, to enter into Exile.