The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (22 page)

"It was magnificent, Elizabeth. None of us, not even Lord Dionket, our greatest, could have done better. They are both safe."

"It Still isn't complete," she forced herself to say. "I can't finalize him. His will is very strong and he resists. This took, all I have now."

Creyn touched the circle of gold about his neck. "I can deepen the neural envelope generated by his gray torc. Tonight, when we reach Roniah, we will be able to do more for him. He will recover in a few days."

Stein, who had not once moved during the metapsychic imbroglio, uttered a vast sigh. The two soldiers dismounted and came to adjust his saddle cantle so that it became a high supporting backrest.

"There's no danger of his falling now," Creyn said. "We'll make him more comfortable later. Now we had better ride on."

Bryan demanded, "Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?" Lacking a torc, he had missed a great deal of the byplay, which had been telepathic.

A stocky man with tow-colored hair and a vaguely Oriental cast to his features pointed a finger at Aiken Drum. "Ask that one. He started it."

Aiken grinned and twiddled his silver torc. Several white moths appeared suddenly out of the darkness and began orbiting Sukey's head in a crazy halo. "Just a little do-goodery gone baddery!"

"Stop that," Creyn commanded. The moths flew away. The tall Tanu addressed Aiken in a tone of veiled menace. "Sukey was the agent, but it is obvious that you were the instigator. You amused yourself by placing your friend and this inexperienced woman in mortal danger."

Aiken's golliwog face was unrepentant "Ah. She seemed strong enough. Nobody forced her to mess with him."

Sukey spoke up. Her voice had a ring of stubborn self-righteousness. "I was only trying to help. He was in desperate need! None of the rest of you seemed to care!"

Creyn said with asperity, 'This was not the time or the place to undertake a difficult redaction. Stein would have been treated in good time."

"Let me get this straight," said Bryan. "She tried to alter his mind?"

"She tried to heal him," Elizabeth said. "I suppose Aiken urged her to try out her new metabilities, just as he's been testing his own. But she couldn't handle it"

"Stop talking about me as though I were a child!" Sukey exclaimed. "So I bit off more than I could chew. But I meant well!"

There was a harsh laugh from the towhead, whose silver torc was nearly concealed by a plaid flannel shirt. He wore heavy twill trousers and woodsman's boots with lug soles. "You meant well! Some day that'll be humanity's epitaph! Even that damned Madame Guderian meant well when she let people pass into this hell-world."

Creyn said, "It will be hell for you only if you make it so, Raimo. Now we must ride on. Elizabeth, if you feel able, would you help Sukey to understand something of her new power? At least advise her of the limitations she must accept for now."

"I suppose I had better."

Aiken rode close to scowling Sukey and patted her shoulder in a brotherly fashion. "There now, sweets. The past mistress of mind-bendery will give you a flash course, and then you can work on me! I guarantee not to gobble you alive. We'll have lots of fun while you straighten out the kinks in my poor little evil soul!"

Elizabeth's mind reached out and gave Aiken a tweak that made him squawk out loud. "Enough of you, my lad. Go practice working your will on bats or hedgehogs or something."

"I'll give you bats," Aiken promised darkly. He urged him mount forward along the wide track, and the cavalcade began to move once more.

Elizabeth opened to Sukey, gentling the woman's fear and discomfiture. I would like to help you. Little mindsister. Be at ease. Yes? (Bloody-minded stubborn chagrin breaking down slowly.) Oh why not. I did make a terrible hash of it.

All over now. Relax Let me know you...

Sue-Gwen Davies, aged twenty-seven, born and raised on the last of the Old World orbital colonies. A former juvenile officer full of sturdy empathy and maternal concern for her wretched young clients. The adolescents of the satellite had mounted an insurrection, rebelling against the unnatural life chosen for them by technocratic idealist grandparents, and the Milieu had belatedly ruled that the colony must be disbanded. Sukey Davies had rejoiced even as her job became redundant. She had no loyalty to the satellite, no philosophical commitment to the experiment that had become obsolete at the very moment that the Great Intervention commenced. All of Sukey's working hours had been spent trying to cope with children who stubbornly resisted the conditioning necessary for life in an orbiting beehive.

When the satellite colony was terminated, Sukey came down to Earth, that world seen below for so many aching years. Paradise and peace existed down there. She was sure of it! Earth was Eden. But the real promised land was not to be found on Earth's manicured, busy continents.

It was inside the planet.

Elizabeth came up short. Sukey's mind was moderately intelligent, strong-willed, kindly, latent in high redactability and moderate farsense. But Sukey Davies was also firmly convinced that the planet Earth was hollow! Old-fashioned microfiche books smuggled onto the satellite by bored eccentrics and cultists had introduced her to the ideas of Bender and Giannini and Palmer and Bernard and Souza. Sukey had been enthralled by the notion of a hollow Earth lit by a small central sun, a land of tranquillity and invincible goodness, peopled by dwarfish gentlefolk possessing all wisdom and delight Had not the ancients told tales of subterranean Asar, Avalon, the Elysian Fields, Ratmansu, and Ultima Thule? Even Buddhist Agharta was supposed to be connected by tunnels to the lamaseries of Tibet. These dreams seemed not at all outr£ to Sukey, the in habitant of the inside surface of a twenty-kilometer-long spinning cylinder in space. It was logical that Earth be hollow, too. So Sukey came down to the Old World, where people smiled as she explained what she was looking for. Quite a few helped relieve her of her severance pay as she pursued her quest. There were not, she discovered from expensive personal inspection, mirage-shielded polar apertures leading to the planetary interior, as claimed by some of the old writers; nor was she able to gain entrance to the underworld via the purported caves in Xizang. Finally she had gone to Brazil, where one author said there was a tunnel to Agharta located in the remote Serra do Roncador. An old Murcego Indian, sensing an additional gratuity, told her that the tunnel had indeed once existed; but unfortunately it had been closed by an earthquake "many thousands" of years in the past.

Sukey pondered this pronouncement for three tearful weeks before concluding that she would surely be able to find the way into the hollow Earth by traveling back into time. She had dressed herself in robes reflecting her Welsh heritage and come eagerly to the Pliocene, where...

Creyn says his people founded the paradise!

Oh Sukey.

Yes, yes! And I powerful healer can belong! Creyn's promise!

Calm. You can become metapractitioner of stature. But not instantly. Much, much to learn dear. Trust listen follow then act.

Want/need to. Poor Stein! Other poor ones I can help. Feeling them all around us do you feel too? ...

Elizabeth withdrew from the fidgeting immaturity of Sukey's mind and cast about. There was something. Something completely alien to her experience that had only glimmered on the fringes of her perception earlier in the evening. What was it? The enigma would not resolve itself into a mental image she could identify. Not yet. And so Elizabeth put the problem aside and returned to the task of instructing Sukey. The job was a difficult one that would keep her busy for quite some time, for which thanks be to God.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bound for the River Rhone, the party rode for three more hours into the deepening night and coolness, coming down from the plateau via a steep trail with precarious switchbacks into a forest so thick that the bright light of the stars was blocked out. The two soldiers ignited tall flambeaux; one man rode in the van and the other at the rear. They continued their eastward progress while eerie shadows seemed to follow them among the massive gnarled trees.

"Spooky, isn't it?" Aiken inquired of Raimo, who was now riding beside him. "Can't you just imagine these big old cork oaks and chestnuts reaching out to grab you?"

"You talk like an idiot," the other man growled. "I worked in deep forests for twenty years in the B. C Megapod Reserve. Ain't nothing spooky about trees."

Aiken was unabashed. "So that's why the lumberjack outfit. But if you know trees, you must know that botanists credit them with a primitive self-awareness. Don't you think that the older the plant, the more attuned to the Milieu it must be? Just look at these trees along here. Don't tell me they had hardwoods eight-ten meters across on the Earth we knew! Why, these babies must be thousands of years older than any tree on Old Earth. Just reach out to 'em! Use that silver torc of yours for something besides an Adam's apple warmer. Ancient trees ... evil trees! Can't you feel the bad vibes in this forest? They could resent our coming here. They might sense that in a few million years, humans like us'll destroy 'em! Maybe the trees hate us!"

"I think," said Raimo with slow malevolence, "that you're trying to make a fool outa me like you did with Sukey. Don't!"

Aiken felt himself hoisted up from his saddle. His chained ankles caught him like a victim on a rack. Higher and higher he rose, unI'll he was suspended dangerously close to the branches overhanging the trail.

"Hey! It was only a joke and that hurts!"

Raimo began to chuckle and increased the tension still more. Squeeze. Pummel the glacial mind-grip of the Finno-Canadian and make him let go, let go, let go!

With a crash that made the startled chaliko squeal, Aiken plummeted back into his saddle. Creyn turned around and said, "You have a penchant for cruelty that will have to be curbed, Raimo Hakkinen."

"I wonder if all your kind would think so?" inquired the former woodsman in an insolent tone. "Anyhow, you can make this little shit stop bugging me. Tree-spooks!"

Aiken protested, "A lot of old-time cultures believed that trees had special powers. Didn't they, Bryan?"

The anthropologist was amused. "Oh, yes. Tree cults were almost universal in the ancient world of the future. The Druids had an entire alphabet for divination based on trees and shrubs. It was apparently a relic of a more widespread tree-centered religion that derived from utmost antiquity. Scandinavians revered a mighty ash-tree named Yggdrasil. Greeks dedicated the ash to the sea-god Poseidon. Birches were sacred among the Romans. The rowan was a Celtic and Greek symbol of power over death. The hawthorn was associated with sex orgies and the month of May, and so was the apple. Oak trees were cult objects all over preliterate Europe. For some reason, oaks are especially vulnerable to lightning, so the ancients connected the tree with the thunder-god. Greeks, Romans, Gaulish Celts, the British, Teutons, Lithuanians, Slavs, they all held the oak to be sacred. The folklore of almost all European countries featured supernatural beings that dwelt in special trees or haunted the deep woods. The Macedonians had dryads and the Stvrians had vilyas and the Germans had seligen Fraulein and the French had their dames vertes. All woodland sprites. Scandinavian people believed in them, too, but I've forgotten the name they gave them..."

"Skogsnufvar," said Raimo unexpectedly. "My grandfather told me. He was from the Aland Islands, where the people spoke Swedish. Full of dumb fairytales."

"Nothing like ethnic pride!" chortled Aiken. And that brought on another row, as the forester lashed out again with his enhanced PK function and Aiken fought back with his coercive power, trying to make Raimo ram his own forefinger down his throat. At last Creyn cried, "Omnipotent Tana, enough!" Both men groaned, clutched at their silver torcs, and subsided like a pair of whipped schoolboys, silent but unrepentant.

Raimo pulled a large silver flask from his pack and began nursing from it. Aiken curled his lip. The forester said, "Hudson's Bay Company Demerara, one-fifty-one proof. Grownups only. Eat your heart out."

Elizabeth's cool voice requested, "Tell us about the Skogsnufvar, Bryan. Such an awful name. Were they beautiful?"

"Oh, yes. Long flowing hair, seductive bodies, and tails! They were your standard archetypal anima-female menace, luring men into the deep woods in order to sleep with them. And ever after, the poor chaps were completely in the power of the elf-women. A man who tried to leave would sicken and die, or else go mad. Victims of the Skogsnufvar were written about well into the twentieth century in Sweden."

Sukey said, "Welsh folklore had such creatures, too. But they lived in lakes, not forests. They were called the Gwragedd Annwn and they came up to dance on the water in the misty moonlight and lured travelers into their underwater palaces."

"It's a common folkloric theme," Bryan said. "The symbolism is easily grasped. Still, one has to feel a bit sorry for the poor male elves. They seem to have missed out on a lot of good dirty fun."

Most of the humans laughed, including the guards.

"Are there any parallel legends among your people, Creyn? " the anthropologist asked. "Or didn't your culture produce tales of enchantment?"

"There was no need," the Tanu replied in a repressive tone.

An odd notion occurred to Elizabeth. She attempted to slide a microprobe through Creyn's screen without triggering his awareness.

Ah Elizabeth don't. These petty aggressions games idle scrabblings for superiority.

(Innocent incredulity scorn-colored taunt.)

Nonsense. I am old tired civilized of goodwill to you and yours even ultimately crushable. But others my kind not. Beware Elizabeth. Reject not Tanu lightly. Remember puffin.

Puffin?

Child poem your folk from human educator among us long deceased. Lonery bird only one of kind ate fishes bewailed solitude. Friendship proffered by fishes if bird refrained devouring. Deal accepted meal habits changed. Fishes only game in town for purlin.

As you Tanu are for me?