Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

…The little boy dashes on, too inexperienced to realize that he should move to the side, out of range of the machines, instead of continuing down the row immediately ahead of it. He runs faster and a stitch comes in his side. He begins to whimper and runs more slowly. He trips, falls, gets up and staggers on with tears blinding his bright-blue eyes. Up in the air an egg-flier hovers over him. He stops and waves his arms, screaming for his mother. The harvester moves along, cutting the stalks off at ground level, hauling them into its maw on a spiked conveyor, chopping, shredding, plucking the kernels from the cobs, reducing the rows of giant plants to neat packages of grain and finely ground cellulose pulp…

“No. Please, no more.”

“You must. We must. Once more and then gone forever. Trust me.”

…The egg lands and the child stands stock-still, waiting for his mother to save him, weeping and holding out his arms as she runs toward him, picks him up, with the noise louder and louder and the dust swirling about them in the hot sun. She holds him close to her as she pushes obliquely through the tough, impeding stalks while the great orange thing moves on, cutter beams and carrying spikes and whirling knives at work. But the fifteen meters she must traverse are too far. She gasps and lifts the boy high and throws him, so that the green com plants and the orange machine and the blue sky all spin very slowly around him. He falls to the earth and the harvester rumbles past with the busy clanking of its machinery drowning out another noise that did not last very long…

“Oh, Jesus, I can still hear please no the machine stops and he comes and screams at me you murdering little animal Gary Gary oh my God no Daddy Daddy Mommy fell help her oh my God Gary you did it to save him and he killed you and it’s his fault the murdering little animal no no what am I saying God my own little boy Steinie I’m sorry I didn’t mean it oh God Gary Steinie… Daddy please keep me.”

“He did. Stein.”

“I know now.”

“You heard it all? All that he said?”

“Yes. Poor Daddy. He couldn’t help saying it. I know now. Angry and frightened and helpless. I understand. He shot the dog, though… But I don’t have to be afraid. He couldn’t help it. Poor Daddy. I understand. Thank you. Thank you.”

Stein opened his eyes.

An unfamiliar woman’s face was very near to him, sun-reddened round cheeks, a turned-up nose, intent indigo eyes set a bit too closely together. She smiled.

He said, “And I don’t have to be angry at either one of us.”

“No,” Sukey said. “You’ll be able to remember and feel sad. But you’ll be able to accept it. No guilt or fear or anger about this part of your life ever again.”

Stein lay without speaking, and she let her mind merge with his in a touch that admitted a sharing of his ordeal, bespoke her care for him.

“You’ve been helping me,” he said. “Healing me. And I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m Sue-Gwen Davies. My friends call me Sukey. It’s a silly sort of name…”

“Oh, no.” He got up onto one elbow and studied her with an innocent curiosity. “You went through the auberge training program, too. I saw you, the first and second days I was there. And then you were gone. You must have passed through the gate ahead of our Group Green.”

“I was in Group Yellow. I remember you, too. That Viking costume isn’t easy to miss.”

He grinned and shook sweat-touseled eflocks out of his eyes. “It seemed like a good idea back then. Sort of reflection of my personality… What are you supposed to be?”

She gave a self-conscious little laugh and toyed with the embroidered belt of her long gown. “An ancient Welsh princess. My family came from there a long time ago and I thought it might be fun. A complete break with my old life.”

“What were you, a redactor?”

“Oh, no! I was a policewoman. A juvenile officer on ON-15, the last Earth colonial satellite.” She touched her silver torc. “I didn’t become an operant redactor until I got here. I’ll have to explain about that…”

But he broke in. “I tried metapsychic treatment before. It never helped. They said I was too strong, that it would take a special kind of practitioner, one with commitment, to ever get down inside of me and root my mess out. And you did it.”

She protested, “Elizabeth did all the preliminary lancing. I was trying to do it”, her eyes slipped away from his, “and I bungled the job badly. Elizabeth did a marvelous fix and drained out all the really dangerous stuff that I couldn’t touch. You owe her a lot, Stein. So do I.”

He looked dubious. “Back at the auberge, me and my pal Richard called her the Ice Queen. She was a very cryogenic and spooky lady. But wait! She told us that her metafunctions were lost!”

“They returned. The shock of passing through the time-portal did it. She’s a marvelous redactor, Stein. She used to be one of the top teachers and counselors in her Sector. She was master class. I’ll never be so good, except perhaps with you.”

Very carefully, he folded her in his huge arms. Her hair was long and black and very straight, with a simple grassy perfume from the Tanu soap. She lay against his bare chest, hearing his heart beating slowly, afraid to look into his mind in case the thing that she hoped for would not be found. They were alone now in the tower room. Even Elizabeth had disappeared when it became clear that the healing would be a success.

Sukey said, “There are things you have to know.” She touched the silver torc about her rather plump neck. “These silver collars, your friend Aiken got one, too, and so have some other people who’ve passed through the portal, they make latent metafunctions operant. That’s how I became a redactor… And there’s an exotic race living here in the Pliocene along with us. They’re called Tanu and they came here a long time ago from some galaxy light-billenia away. They’re latents, too, and they wear golden collars that make them almost as powerful as the metapsychics of our Milieu. They look quite human except for being very tall and having mostly blond hair and funny eyes. The Tanu rule this place almost like the barons of the Middle Ages ruled ancient Earth.”

“I’m beginning to remember,” Stein said slowly. “A fight in a kind of castle… Are we still locked up in that place?”

Sukey shook her head. “They took us, you and me and a few others, down the River Rhône. We’re on our way to the Tanu capital. This is a place called Darask, almost at the Mediterranean shore. We’ve been here for two days. Elizabeth helped the mistress of the place, who was having a hard time in childbirth, so we got to stay and fix you up and rest as a kind of reward. The river trip down here was pretty nerve-racking.”

“So Elizabeth is here, and Aiken. Who else?”

“Bryan, from your Group. And another man, named Raimo Hakkinen, who used to be a forester in British Columbia. I think he was in Group Orange. And there’s a Tanu man in charge of bringing us to their capital city. His name is Creyn and he seems to be some kind of exotic physician when he’s not acting as a prisoner-escort. He healed all of the wounds you got in the fight, by the way, and without using any regen-tank, either, just something like plass wrapping and mind-power. The rest of your friends and the other people who were being kept prisoner in the castle were sent to another place hundreds of kloms north of here.”

“What are they planning to do with us?”

“Well, Elizabeth is special, obviously, because it seems she’s the only human in all of Exile who is operant without a torc I suppose they plan to make her Queen of the World if she’ll stand for it.”