Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

Claude declared he could manage on his own. Felice gave one hand to Richard and the other to the nun and hauled them up after her by main strength. It was slow going, but they were finally able to reach the top shortly after the sun descended behind the hills on the other side of the lake.

When they had regained their wind, Claude said, “Why don’t we hole up on the eastern side of these big boulders? There’s a nice dry shelter in there and I don’t think anyone below could spot a fire if we lit one after nightfall. I could gather some wood.”

“Good idea,” said Felice. “I’ll scout around a bit.” She went off among the crags and gnarled savin junipers while the others tended their wounds, inflated decamole cots and weighted the legs with earth, because there was no water to waste, and regretfully laid out a meal of biscuits, nutrient wafers, and cheesy-tasting algiprote. By the time Claude had assembled a pile of dry branches, Felice was back, her bow resting jauntily over her shoulder, swinging three fat marmot-like animals by their hind legs.

“Hail, Diana!” chortled the old man. “I’ll even skin and clean ’em!”

They lit the fire after it was completely dark and roasted the meat, devouring every gamey morsel. Then Richard and Claude collapsed onto their cots and were asleep in minutes. Amerie, her brain buzzing with fatigue, still felt obliged to shake the grease and scraps off the dinnerware, sterilize them with the power source, then shrink and stow them away. There’s my big, helpful girl!

“I can see the fort,” came Felice’s voice from the nearby darkness.

Amerie picked her way over the rocks to where the athlete was standing. The ridge fell steeply to the southwest. The young moon hung over the lake and an incredible profusion of Pliocene stars reflected upon the water, differentiating it from the black land. Far to the south on their side of the lake was a cluster of orange specks.

“How far away is it?” the nun asked.

“At least fifteen kloms. Maybe more. As the vulture flies.” Felice laughed, and Amerie was suddenly wide-awake, experiencing the same feeling of fear and fascination she had known before. The woman beside her was an indistinct silhouette in the starlight, but Amerie knew that Felice was looking at her.

“They didn’t thank me,” the athlete said in a low voice. “I set them free but they didn’t thank me. They were afraid of me still. And that fool of a Dougal!…None of them, not even you, sympathized or understood why I wanted to…”

“But you couldn’t kill Dougal. For the love of God, Felice! I had to put you out.”

“Killing him would have been a comfort,” said the young girl, coming closer. “I was working on my plans. Plans I never told to the rest of you. The golden torc was the key. Not only to free us, but to rescue the others, Bryan, Elizabeth, Aiken, Stein. To free you of the human slaves! Don’t you see? I really could have done it! With the golden torc I could have tamed this thing inside me and used it.”

Amerie heard herself babbling. “We’re all grateful to you. Felice. Believe me. We were simply too stunned by it all to say anything after the fight. And Dougal, he was just too fast for Basil and Yosh to stop, and too crazy to realize what he was doing when he threw the torc away. He probably believed he wouldn’t be safe from Epone’s power until the torc was separated from her body.”

Felice said nothing. After a while the nun said, “Perhaps you could get another.”

There was a sigh. “They know about me now, so it will be very dangerous. But I’ll have to try. Maybe waylay another caravan, or even go to Finiah. It’ll be hard and I’ll need help.”

“We’ll help.”

Felice laughed softly.

“I’ll help. I won’t be retiring to any hermitage for quite some time yet.”

“Ah. That’s… good. I need your help, Amerie. I need you.”

“Felice. Don’t misunderstand.”

“Oh, I know all about your little vow of renunciation. But that was made six million years ago in a different world. Now I think you need me as much as I need you.”

“I need your protection. We all do.”

“You need more than that.”

Amerie backed away, tripped over a rock and fell, tearing open the scabbed cuts on her hands.

“Let me help you up,” said Felice.

But the nun scrambled to her feet unaided and turned back toward the glowing remnants of the campfire where the others were sleeping. She stumbled and clenched her fingers into the lacerated palms so that her nails opened the cut even more, while behind her Felice laughed in the darkness.

“He’s ready, Sukey. You must take the final discharge.”

“But, can I? I could botch it again, Elizabeth.”

“You won’t. You’ll be able to handle this aspect of his healing. He wouldn’t let me, but you can do it. Don’t be afraid.”

“All right. Just let him come out of the torc’s neural bath slowly. I’m ready.”

…Illinois cornfields, flat as a table and stretching from horizon to horizon, with the toy farmhouse and outbuildings lonely amid the immensity. Sitting in one of the cornrows, a three-year-old boy and an Alsatian bitch. The boy, clever with his hands and mischievous, circumvents a childproof fastener and removes a beeper-trace from his jeans. He offers it to the bitch. She is pregnant and of capricious appetite, and so she swallows it. The boy rises from the ground and toddles off down the row toward an interesting noise in the far distance. The bitch, unsatisfied by her electronic snack, runs toward the farmhouse where lunch is being prepared…

“No! I can’t go there again!”

“Hush. Easy. You’re close, so close.”

…A robot harvester, nearly as large as the farmhouse and bright orange, moves along, swallowing the corn plants in a thirty-row swath, grinding the stalks and leaves to useful pulp, shelling the ears, long as a man’s forearm, and packing the rich golden kernels into containers for shipment to other farms all over the Galactic Milieu. This new maize hybrid will yield twenty cubic meters of grain to the hectare…

“I don’t want to look. Don’t make me look.”

“Be calm. Be easy. Come with me. Only once more.”

…The little boy wanders down the straight row where the black soil has baked to crumbly gray dust. Gigantic plants loom over him, tassels brown against the sky, swollen cobs jutting from the stalks ripe and ready for harvest. The boy walks on toward the noise but it is far away from him and so he must sit down and rest for a while. He leans against a cornstalk thick as the trunk of a young tree, and the broad green leaves shade him from the sun’s heat. He closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the noise is very much louder and the air is full of dust…

“Please. Please.”

“You must go there one last time. But I’m with you. It’s the only way out for you.”

…Wonderment becomes unease becomes fear as the little boy sees an orange monster chewing toward him, its robot brain conscientiously scanning the rows ahead for signals from a beeper-trace that would trigger instant emergency shut-off. But there is no signal. The machine moves on. The boy runs ahead of it, easily outdistancing the harvester’s steady one-klom-per-hour pace…

“She knew! She looked for me on the scanner at lunchtime and only found the dog, sending two signals instead of one there in the yard. She knew I had to be out in the fields. She called Daddy to have him stop the harvester and look for me, but there was no answer. He was outside the farm contower trying to fix a stuck rotor on one of the antennas.”

“Yes. Go on. You can see her looking for you in the egg.”