Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

The day’s journey had been something like descending a series of vast canyoned steps. They would sail peacefully for thirty or forty kilometers, then encounter savage rapids that would chute them to the next lower level at jetboat velocity. Despite Skipper Highjohn’s reassurances, Bryan felt that he had survived the ordeal of a lifetime. The last stretch of rapids, occurring, as he had suspected, in the gorge area about fifty kloms above the future Pont d’Avignon, had been formidable beyond belief. The prolongation of terror had blunted his senses to the point of stupor. Aiken Drum had begged Creyn not to put him to sleep for that last rough ride, being eager for some taste of the thrills that Bryan had described. When the boat had tumbled end over end down the face of the final great cataract and fetched up in the placid Lac Provencal, Aiken’s face had turned to gray-green and his bright eyes were sunken in shock.

“A fewkin’ flea ride,” he had moaned, “In a fewkin’ food blender!”

By the time they reached Darask on the Lower Rhône, they had journeyed nearly 270 kilometers in less than ten hours. The shallowing river twined and split and braided itself into scores of channels divided by rippling grasslands and mudflats inhabited by flocks of long-legged birds and cream-and-black checkered crocodiles. Here and here islands rose from the marshy plain. Darask crowned one of them looking for all the world like a tropical Mont-Saint-Michel towering above a sea of grass. Their boat had used its auxiliary engine to move out of the mainstream of the Rhône into a secondary channel leading to the fortified town. Darask had a small quay secured behind a limestone wall more than twelve meters high that butted against unscalable cliffs.

And now, in the town beneath the high-rising palace, ramas were lighting the small night-lamps, clambering up spindly ladders to tend those on brackets along the house roofs, working pulleys to raise long strings of lanterns up the face of the inner fortifications. Human soldiers touched off larger torches on the bastions of the town’s perimeter. As Bryan and the others surveyed the scene, the peculiar Tanu-style illumination sprang into operation, outlining the spired palace in dots of red and amber that symbolized the heraldic colors of its psychokinetic lord, Cranovel.

Aiken inspected the Tanu lamps along their own balcony. They were of sturdy faceted glass resting in small niches in the stone, without wires or any other metallic attachments. They were cold.

“Bioluminescence,” the little man in gold decided, shaking one. “You want to bet there are microorganisms in here? What did Creyn say, that the lights were energized by surplus meta emanations? That figures. You get some of the lower echelon torc wearers to generate a suitable waveform while they’re playing checkers or drinking beer or reading in the bathtub or performing some other semi-automatic…”

Bryan was paying scant attention to Aiken’s speculations. Out in the surrounding marshland, the ignes fatui were lighting their own lamps, wispy blobs of methane blue, firefly glimmerings that winked on and off in scattered synchrony, wandering pale flames gliding around the island’s misty backwaters like lost elfin boats.

“I suppose those are glowing insects or marsh-gas flames out there,” Sukey said, coming up behind Bryan to stare into the darkening landscape.

Raimo said, “ Now I hear something. But not with any meta-faculty. You guys catching it?”

They listened. Sukey pursed her lips in exasperation. “Frogs!”

An almost inaudible trill was building up on the breeze, swelling and finally fracturing into a complex treble chord of tinkles and peeps. An invisible batrachian maestro lowered his baton and more voices chimed in, gulps and grunts, rattling snares, pops and clicks, tunking notes as of hollow canes. Additional frog voices contributed their simulations of slowly dripping water, plucked strings, human glottal trill, buzzing drill bits, amplified guitar notes; and underriding it all was the homely jug-o’-rum of the common bullfrog, that durable Earth creature that would, in only six million years, accompany mankind on its colonization of the far-flung stars.

The four people on the balcony looked at one another and burst into laughter.

“We’ve got a front-row seat,” Aiken said, “in case there’s any Firvulag invasion. And this blue pitcher is full of something that’s cool and definitely alcoholic. Shall we pull up chairs and fortify ourselves just in case the monsters arrive on schedule?”

“All in favor?” Bryan demanded.

“Aye!”

They held out their mugs and the little man in gold filled them, one by one.

Elizabeth pressed the back of her hand to her clammy forehead. Her eyes opened and she exhaled a long, slow breath. Creyn and a haggard Tanu man in a rumpled yellow robe bent anxiously over her chair. Creyn’s mind touched hers, supporting, querying.

Yes. I have separated them. Finally. Sorry so weak my skill rusty disuse. They will be born now.

The mind of Lord Cranovel of Darask wept gratitude. And she? Safe oh safe my darling?

Human women tougher than Tanu. She recovers easily now.

He cried aloud, “Estella-Sirone!” and ran to the inner chamber.

In a few moments the querulous wail of a newborn infant came to the two who still waited. Elizabeth smiled at Creyn. The first grayness of dawn lightened the mist outside the palace windows.

Elizabeth said, “I’ve never handled anything quite like that before. The two unborn minds so intertwined, so mutually antagonistic. Fraternal twins, of course. But it seems incredible that genuine enmity should have been able to…”

A Tanu woman dressed all in red put her head through the curtained doorway and exclaimed, “A lovely girl! The next one is a breech, but we’ll get it safely, never fear.” She disappeared again.

Elizabeth got up from the chair and walked wearily to the window, letting her mind reach out beyond the birthing rooms for the first time since she had entered so many hours ago. The anomalies were outside, crowding closer and stumbling over one another in horrid eagerness, those twittering little unhuman minds, seemingly operant, changing their soul form even as she tried to grasp them for examination. They eluded her, wove disguises, faded and flared, shrunk to atoms or expanded into looming monsters that postured in the mental-physical fog swirling about the towers of the island palace.

Another baby cried.

Pierced by a terrible realization, Elizabeth’s mind met that of Creyn. A slow-distilling drop of regret formed from a complex of the man’s emotions. Then he slammed down an impervious screen between them.

Elizabeth ran to the door of the inner chamber and pushed the draperies aside. Several women, both human and Tanu, were attendant upon the new mother, a human wearing a golden torc. Estella-Sirone was smiling; the beautiful baby girl held to her right breast. Cranovel knelt beside her, wiping her brow.

The Tanu nurse in red brought the other baby to show to Elizabeth. It was a very small boy, weighing about two kilos, wizened as an old man and with an oversized head thickly covered with wet dark hair. Its eyes were wide open and it screeched thinly from a mouth that had a full set of tiny sharp teeth. Even as Elizabeth watched, the manikin shimmered and became furry all over its body, then shimmered again and turned to a virtual double of its plump blonde sister.

“It is a Firvulag, a shape-changer,” the nurse said. “They are the shadow-brethren of the Tanu from the foundation of worlds. Ever with us, ever against us. The twin situation is fortunately rare. Most such die unborn, and the mother with them.”

“What will you do with him?” Elizabeth asked. Fascinated, horrified, she sounded the small alien mentality and recognized the anomalous mode, now that it was fully separated from the more complex psychic structure of the Tanu sister.