Pliocene Exile - The Adversary Part 43

"I'm afraid you're right," the geneticist sighed. "But if it did turn out to be true ... " He grinned at Katlinel and her superlatively hideous spouse. "How I'd love to take the two of you on a grand tour of the Galactic Milieu. You'd love it. Really, you would."

Kuhal Earthshaker sat on a gla.s.s bench in a secluded part of the castle garden, waiting until she should come. The evening was alive with sound: chirping green bush crickets, a nightingale warbling his heart out in antic.i.p.ation of the fall mating season, the chiming of small crystal bells festooning the trees, and as a background to it all there were crowd sounds from the city's Gyre of Commerce, which lay only a few hundred metres down the hill, beyond the garden wall and a narrow greenbelt. During the regime of Kuhal's elder brother, Nodonn Battlemaster, evening markets had been forbidden; but the usurper changed all that in his haste to curry favour with his compatriots, who preferred to shop and carouse after the fierce Pliocene sun had set. Now greys and barenecks wandered abroad freely at all hours, disturbing the peace and making extra work for the rama cleanup crews.

A st.u.r.dy crescent moon was rising. Fireflies winked in the shrubbery surrounding the lily pool. Up in the Castle of Gla.s.s, the jewel-coloured windows were ablaze and a full show of faerie lights outlined the freshly repaired towers and battlements. The King, having returned triumphant from Calamosk that afternoon, was having a party to introduce the North Americans to the High Table and to the flower and chivalry of Goriah. Kuhal had put in a brief, obligatory appearance and managed to arrange this rendezvous.

And now she was coming.

He rose from the bench as he felt her coolly questing thought.

She came out from among the willows, a strangely alien figure in a futuristic diamante sheath of grey satin, her mind carefully guarded.

Cloud, he said, opening to her.

Then they were standing together, not touching physically.

Her redactive probe, soft as a moth wing, worked swiftly behind his eyes. She said aloud, "Well you're truly recovered at last.

Both hemispheres in fine fettle, all your metabilities restored, your bereavement receded to memory, where it belongs. Fighting a losing battle and working off your penance cleaning Aiken's Augean stables seem to have agreed with you. I'd say you were a normal man again."

"Only when you're with me," he said. "And it seems we've been separated for ever."

"Less than three weeks!" she said, laughing and drawing back from him. His face was shadowed and his fair hair tousled. For the first time since the Grand Loving, he wore the rose-gold robes of the Second Lord Psychokinetic.

"It hardly seems possible," he said. "So many terrible things have happened."

"Well, your ordeal is over now, and you're reinstated at the High Table-for services rendered." Her voice had gone flat and the mental carapace hardened. "What do you intend to do now?"

"Serve him," Kuhal replied, "as I vowed. He is sending me to collect armaments for Roniah, and to secure Castle Gateway in preparation for the new construction. It's a task fraught with great responsibility."

"No doubt," she said shortly, turning away from him to look out over the pond. "Good luck."

He was bewildered. "Cloud-what's wrong? I thought you would rejoice at this meeting, as I have. Has my submission to the King displeased you? Changed this between us?"

She was wearing a shawl of cobweb wool, which she now pulled more closely about her shoulders, although the evening was warm. "There's nothing between us, Kuhal-except perhaps a little transference, which is rather common in redactor-patient relations.h.i.+ps ... So you're off to Roniah, are you? How soon?"

"The day after tomorrow. But the task need not take long, and we can find ways to be together-"

"No," she said offhandedly, seeming to be absorbed in the sight of a great white heron that had appeared among the waterlilies, stalking froggy victims. "I don't think we'll see each other again, now that you're well. I'll be staying here in Goriah, helping to keep the recruited scientists in line. A number of them are less than enthusiastic about the Guderian Project. But we must complete the device as soon as possible and I'll have no time for distractions. You really don't need me any more, Kuhal-and I certainly don't need you."

He laughed, a low and quiet sound, and with the utmost gentleness exerted his psychokinesis. She felt herself lifted a few centimetres above the gra.s.s and rotated in midair to face him.

He had lowered himself to one knee so that their eyes could meet, but there was no trace of subservience in him as he said, "You lie to me, Cloud Remillard. You with your mind in hiding!

I know you do care for me, else you would not have had tears in your eyes upon your presentation to the High Table this evening-nor would you have agreed to meet me here."

"Put me down!" she exclaimed angrily. "You great barbarian lout!" Her mind pummelled him, but she was unable to free herself from the humiliating sustention, or to undermine his coercion with her own. After a long moment he lowered her, still smiling into her outraged face.

"You lie," he repeated. "Admit it."

The mind-screen trembled. Anger gave way to a more complex emotion. "Perhaps I do care ... a little. But since I've been back with my own people, I've had time to think. To a.n.a.lyse our situation in the light of what ... will happen."

"You mean, in light of your determination to pa.s.s into the future world of the Galactic Milieu?"

She cried, "We're going to do it or die in the attempt! There's no way you can understand what we've been through, how desperate we are to escape!"

"I know you didn't hesitate to destroy most of my own race when we seemed to stand in your way."

"Yes," she admitted, and the screen thinned to translucency, showing the flush of guilt overlying resolution. "And you'll never forget that. But that's only one part of it."

"I love you in spite of everything. We'll go together to the Milieu."

She let slip a little choking cry. An image peered from her brain, childishly comical, which she tried vainly to suppress.

"What," he enquired with bemused dignity, "is a basketball player?"

She burst out laughing, and then wept and threw her arms around him as he knelt. "It's a joke," she said miserably. "A vicious, cruel joke. That d.a.m.ned Hagen ... speculating on what our life together might be-especially if we both went to the Milieu."

"I don't understand," he said, holding her. But his mind sang.

She had lied!

"We're too different," she said, pulling away, and he saw a persistent dark core of denial in the heart of the brightness.

"And for all his brutal attempts at humour, Hagen was basically correct. Sooner or later we'd end up despising each other ... or worse."

"In Afaliah," he reminded her, "the physical differences were nothing compared to the affinity of our minds."

She drew away, began to walk back the way she had come.

"When we were in Skin, we were two wounded creatures in need. Licking each other's hurts. Both lonely. Both ... bereaved. It was natural that there be an attraction. Inevitable.

But now the need has pa.s.sed. We're finished, Kuhal! I'm going now."

He followed. She went more quickly, almost running, but his exotic legs kept pace with her easily. They came into the shadows of the trees where moonlight was as spa.r.s.e as a flung handful of coins. He seized her with both hands, looming like some fearsome woodland spirit, and she shrank away from his desperation. "Nothing you've said touches on the real reason for your rejection of me! Why, Cloud?

Why?"

She said, "Fian."

There was wonder in his voice as he asked, "You would deny me because of my dead twin?"

"He was more than your brother!"

"He was the mind of my mind ... and he is dead."

"I won't take his place," she said. "Never!" Her redactive thrust caught him off guard, and when he recovered he was standing alone with only the shawl in his hands.

The King wearied of his party, which if truth be told was not much of a success. The young North Americans cared little for dancing and drinking and the preliminaries to sweet houghmagandy, preferring to talk shop with the scientists and technicians who had been a.s.sembled for the Guderian Project. Along about midnight, when things should have just started getting a glow on, the ballroom was half empty and the orchestra playing for itself. Those guests who did remain were mostly human, engaged in depressingly earnest conversation.