The Many-Coloured Land sope-1 Page 6

  “You must not! You must not!” cried Richter, taking hold of the top of the gate.

  Madame took a step backward and stared at him in astonishment. He was moon-faced, with pale protuberant eyes and thick reddish brows, now hoisted in dismay. Expensively dressed as for a strenuous walking tour, he wore a large rucksack. To it were lashed a violin case, a lethal-looking dural catapult, and a golfer’s umbrella. The stolid dachshund guarded a large parcel of paged books, carefully wrapped in plass and equipped with straps and a carrying handle.

  Gaining control of his emotions, Richter said, “Forgive me, Madame. But you must not destroy this so-wonderful achievement of your late husband! It would be a sacrilege.”

  “Nevertheless, there are the death duties,” said Madame. “You spoke of business, Monsieur. But you should know that many journalists have already written about my husband’s work…”

  “I,” said Richter with a faint moue of distaste, “am not a journalist. I am a poet! And I hope you will consider my proposal most seriously.” He unzipped a side compartment of the pack and removed a leather card-case, from which he extracted a small blue rectangle. He held this out to Madame. “Evidence of my bona fides.”

  The blue card was a sight draft on the Bank of Lyon entitling the bearer to collect an extraordinary amount of money.

  Madame Guderian unlatched the gate. “Please enter, M. Richter. One trusts the little dog is well mannered.”

  Richter picked up his package of books and smiled thinly. “Schatzi is more civilized than most humans.”

  They sat on a stone bench below a bee-loud arch of Soleil d’Or and Richter explained to the widow why he had come. He had learned of Guderian’s time-gate at a publisher’s cocktail party in Frankfurt and decided that very evening to sell everything that he owned and hasten to Lyon.

  “It is very simple, Madame. I wish to pass through this time-portal and live permanently amid the prehistoric simplicity of the Pliocene Epoch. The peaceable kingdom! Locus amoenusf. The Forest of Ardent. The sanctuary of innocence! The halcyon land unwatered by human tears!” He paused and tapped the blue card still in her hand. “And I am willing to pay handsomely for my passage.”

  A madman! Madame fingered the secateurs deep in her pocket. “The time-gate,” she said carefully, “opens in but a single direction. There is no return. And we have no detailed knowledge of what lies on the other side in the Pliocene land. It was never possible to circumtranslate Tri-D cameras or other types of recording equipment.”

  “The fauna of the epoch is well known, Madame, as is the climate. A prudent person need have nothing to fear. And you, gnadige Frau, must suffer no qualms of conscience in permitting me to use the portal. I am self-sufficient and well able to look after myself in a wilderness. I have selected my equipment with care, and for companionship there is my faithful Schatzi. Don’t hesitate, I beg of you! Let me pass through tonight. Now!”

  A madman indeed, but perhaps one that Providence had sent!

  She remonstrated with him for some time while the sky darkened to indigo and the nightingales began to sing. Richter parried all of her objections. He had no family to miss him. He had told no one of his intentions, so there would be no inquiries made of her. No one had observed him walking on the lonely road from the village. She would be rendering him a blessing, fulfilling for him what had once been an impossible dream of Arcady. He was not committing suicide, he was merely entering a new, more tranquil life. But if she refused him, his Seelenqual would leave him only the grimmest alternative. And there was the money…

  “C’est entendu,” Madame said at last “Please accompany me.”

  She led him down into the cellar and threw on the lights. There stood the gazebo with its cables, just as poor Theo had left it. The poet gave a joyous cry and rushed to the apparatus, tears running down his round cheeks.

  “At last!”

  The dachshund trotted sedately after her master. Madame picked up the parcel of books and placed it inside the lattice.

  “Quickly, Madame! Quickly!” Richter clasped his hands in a paroxysm of exaltation.

  “Listen to me,” she said sharply. “When you have been translated, you must immediately remove yourself from the point of your arrival. Walk three or four meters away and take the dog with you. Is this clear? Otherwise you will be snatched back into the present day as a dead man and crumble to dust.”

  “I understand! Vite, Madame, vite! Quickly!”

  Trembling, she moved to the simple control panel and activated the time-portal. The mirrored force fields sprang up, and the poet’s voice was silenced as if by a broken teleview connection. The old woman sank down on her knees and recited the Angelic Salutation three times, then got up and switched off the power.

  The mirrors vanished. The gazebo was empty.

  Madame Guderian let a great sigh escape her lips. Then she thriftily turned out the cellar lights and mounted the stairs, fingering the small slip of blue plass tucked securely in her pocket.

  After Karl Josef Richter, there were others.

  The very first gratuity allowed Madame to pay the inheritance tax and discharge all of her other debts. Some months later, after her mind had been fully opened to the time-gate’s profit making potential by the coming of other visitors, she let it be known that she was establishing a quiet auberge for walking tourists. She purchased land adjoining her cottage and had a handsome guesthouse built. The rose gardens were expanded and several of her relatives drafted to assist with domestic duties. To the astonishment of skeptical neighbors, the inn prospered.

  Not all of the guests who entered chez Guderian were seen to leave. But the point was moot, since Madame invariably required payment in advance.

  Some years passed. Madame underwent rejuvenation and displayed an austere chic in her second lifetime. In the valley below the inn, the most ancient urban center in France also underwent graceful transition, as did all of the metropolitan centers of Old Earth in those middle years of the twenty-first century. Every trace of the ugly, ecologically destructive technology was gradually obliterated from the great city at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône. Necessary manufacturing establishments, service and transit systems were relocated in underground infrastructures. As the surplus population of Lyon was siphoned off to the new planets, empty slums, dreary suburbs faded into meadows and forest reserves, dotted here and there with garden villages or efficient habitat complexes. Lyon’s historic structures, representing every century for the more than 2000 years of its lifetime, were refurbished and displayed like jewels in appropriate natural settings. Laboratories, offices, hotels, and commercial enterprises were tucked into recycled buildings or disguised to harmonize with the ambiance of nearby monuments. Plaisances and boulevards replaced the hideous concrete autoroutes. Amusement sites, picturesque alleys of small shops, and cultural foundations multiplied as colonials began returning to the Old World from the far-flung stars, seeking their ethnic heritage.

  Other types of seekers also came to Lyon. These found their way to the inn in the western foothills, now called L’Auberge du Portail, where Madame Guderian personally made them welcome.

  In those early years, when she still regarded the time-portal as a business venture, Madame set up simple criteria for her clientele. Would-be timefarers had to spend at least two days with her at the auberge while she and her computer checked civil status and psychosocial profile. She would send no one through the gate who was a fugitive from justice, who was seriously deranged, or who had not attained twenty-eight years of age (for the great step demanded full maturity). She would permit no one to carry modern weaponry or coercive devices back to the Pliocene. Only the simplest solar-powered or sealed-pack machines might be taken. Persons obviously unprepared for survival in a primeval wilderness were dismissed and told to return upon acquiring suitable skills.

  After thinking deeply on the matter, Madame made a further condition for women candidates. They must renounce their fertility.

&n
bsp; “Attendez!” she would snap at the stunned female applicant in her unreconstructed Gallic way. “Consider the inescapable lot of womankind in a primitive world. Her destiny is to bear child after child until her body is worn out, submitting all the time to the whims of her male overlord. It is true that we modern women have complete control of our bodies as well as the ability to defend ourselves from outrage. But what of the daughters who might be born to you in the ancient epoch? You will not possess the technology to transfer your reproductive freedom to them. And with the return of the old biological pattern comes also the return of the old subservient mind-set. When your daughters matured, they would surely be enslaved. Would you consign a loved child to such a fate?”

  There was also the matter of paradox.

  The notion that time-travelers might disrupt the present world by meddling with the past had seriously troubled Madame Guderian for many weeks after the departure of Karl Josef Richter. She had concluded at last that such paradox must be impossible, since the past is already manifest in the present, with the continuum sustained in the loving hands of le bon Dieu.

  On the other hand, one ought not to take chances.

  Human beings, even the rejuvenated and highly educated people of the Coadunate Galactic Age, could have little impact on the Pliocene or any subsequent time period if they were restrained from reproducing. Given the social advantage to female travelers, the decision to demand the renouncing of motherhood as a condition of transport was confirmed in Madame’s mind.

  She would say to the protesters: “One realizes that it is unfair, that it sacrifices a portion of your feminine nature. Do I not understand?. I, whose two dear children died before reaching adulthood? But you must accept that this world you seek to enter is not one of life. It is a refuge of misfits, a death surrogate, a rejection of normal human destiny. Ainsi, if you pass into this Exile, the consequences must rest upon you alone. If life’s force is still urgent within you, then you should remain here. Only those who are bereaved of all joy in this present world may take refuge in the shadows of the past.”

  After hearing this somber speech, the women applicants would ponder and at last agree, or else depart from the auberge, never to return. Male time-travelers came to outnumber the female by nearly four to one. Madame was not greatly surprised.

  The existence of the time-gate came to the attention of local authorities some three years after the Auberge du Portail commenced operation, when there was an unfortunate incident involving a refused applicant. But Madame’s high-powered Lyon solicitors were able to prove that the enterprise violated no local or galactic statute: It was licensed as a public accommodation, a common carrier, a psychosocial counseling service, and a travel agency. From time to time thereafter, certain local government bodies made stabs at suppression or regulation. They always failed because there were no precedents… and besides, the time-gate was useful.

  “I do a work of mercy,” Madame Guderian told one investigatory panel. “It is a work that would have been incomprehensible scarcely one hundred years ago, but now, in this Galactic Age, it is a blessing. One need only study the dossiers of the pathetic ones themselves to see that they are out of place in the swift-paced modern world. There have always been such persons, psychosocial anachronisms, unsuited to the age in which they were born. Until the time-portal, these had no hope of altering their fate.”

  “Are you so confident, Madame,” a commissioner asked, “that this time-portal leads to a better world?”

  “It leads to a different and simpler world, at any rate, Citizen Commissioner,” she retorted, “That seems sufficient to my clients.”

  The auberge kept careful records of those who passed through the Pliocene gate and these would later be fascinating fodder for statisticians. For example, the travelers tended to be highly literate, intelligent, socially unconventional, and aesthetically sophisticated. Above all they were romantic. They were mostly citizens of the Old World rather than of the colonial planets. Many of the timefarers had earned their living in the professions, in science, technology, or other high disciplines. An ethnic assay of the travelers showed significant numbers of Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Germans, Slavs, Latins, Native Americans, Arabs, Turks and other Central Asiatics, and Japanese. There were few African blacks but numbers of Afro-Americans. Inuit and Polynesian peoples were attracted by the Pliocene world; Chinese and Indo-Dravidians were not. Fewer agnostics than believers chose to abandon the present; but the devout time-travelers were often fanatics or conservatives disillusioned about modern religious trends, particularly the Milieu dicta that proscribed revolutionary socialism, jihads, or any style of theocracy. Many nonreligious, but few orthodox, Jews were tempted to escape to the past; a disproportionate number of Muslims and Catholics wanted to make the trip.

  The psychoprofiles of the travelers showed that a significant percentage of the applicants was highly aggressive. Small-time ex-convicts were common clients, but the more formidable reformed evildoers apparently preferred the contemporary scene. There was a small but persistent trickle of broken-hearted lovers, both homophile and heterosexual. As was to be expected, many of the applicants were narcissistic and addicted to fantasy. These people were apt to appear at the auberge in the guise of Tarzan or Crusoe or Pocahontas or Rima, or else costumed as throwbacks to every conceivable Old World era and culture.

  Some, like Richter, outfitted themselves for the journey with Spartan pragmatism. Others wanted to bring along “desert island” treasures such as whole libraries of old-fashioned paged books, musical instruments and recordings, elaborate armories, or wardrobes. The more practical gathered together’ livestock, seeds, and tools for homesteading in the style of the Swiss Family Robinson. Collectors and naturalists brought their paraphernalia. Writers came equipped with goose quills and flagons of sepia ink, or the latest in voice writers with reams of durofilm sheets and book-plaque transcribers. The frivolous cherished delicacies of food and drink and psycho-active chemicals.

  Madame did her utmost to accommodate the impedimenta, given the physical restriction of the gazebo’s volume, which was roughly six cubic meters. She urged the travelers to consider pooling their resources, and sometimes this was done. (The Gypsies, the Amish, the Russian Old Believers, and the Inuit were particularly shrewd in such matters.) But given the idiosyncratic nature of the timefarers, many preferred to be completely independent of fellow humans, while others ignored practicalities in favour of romantic ideals or precious fetishes.

  Madame saw to it that each person had the minimal survival necessities, and extra shipments of medical supplies were regularly sent through the gate. Beyond that, one could only trust in Providence.

  For nearly sixty-five years and throughout two rejuvenations, Angélique Guderian personally supervised the psychosocial evaluation of her clients and their eventual dispatch to the Pliocene. As the uneasy cupidity of her early years was finally submerged in compassion for those she served, the fees for passage became highly negotiable and were often waived. The number of prospective travelers increased steadily, and there came to be a long waiting list. By the turn of the twenty-second century, more than ninety thousand fugitives had passed through the time-portal to an unknown fate.

  In 2106, Madame Guderian herself entered the Pliocene world called Exile, alone, dressed in her gardening clothes, carrying a simple rucksack and a bundle of cuttings from her favorite roses. Since she had always despised the Standard English of the Milieu as an insult to her French heritage, the note she left said:

  “Plus qu’il n’en faut.”

  The Human Polity of the Galactic Concilium was not willing to accept this “more than enough” judgement however; the time-portal obviously filled a need as a glory hole for inconvenient aberrants. Organized in a humane and somewhat more efficient manner, it was allowed to continue in operation. There was no advertisement of the service, and referrals were kept discreetly professional.

  The ethical dilemma of permitting persons to exile themse
lves to the Pliocene was tabled. Study confirmed that no time-paradox was possible. As for the fate of the travelers, they were all doomed in one way or another anyhow.

  CHAPTER NINE

  All the way back to Earth from Brevon-su-Mirikon, Bryan Grenfell planned the way he would do it. He would call Mercy from Unst Starport just as soon as he got through the decon and remind her that she had agreed to go sailing with him. They could meet at Cannes on Friday evening, which would allow him time to drop off the conference data at the CAS in London and pick up some clothes and the boat from his flat. Fair weather was scheduled for the next three days, so they could cruise to Corse or even Sardegna.

  In some secluded cove, with moonlight on the Mediterranean and soft music playing, he would nail her.

  “This is your Captain speaking. We are five minutes from reentry into normal space above the planet Earth. There will be a momentary discomfort as we pass through the superficies, which may inconvenience sensitive persons. Please do not hesitate to call your flight attendant if you require an anodyne, and remember that your satisfaction is our prime directive. Thank you for traveling United.”

  Grenfell leaned toward the com. “Glendessarry and Evian.” When the drink appeared he tossed it off, closed his eyes and thought of Mercy. Those sad sea-colored eyes, ringed by the dark lashes. The hair of cedarwood red framing her pale high-boned cheeks. Her body, almost as thin as a child’s but tall and elegant in a long gown of leaf green with trailing darker ribbons. He could hear her voice, lilting and resonant, as they walked in the apple orchard that evening after the medieval pageant.

  “There is no such thing as love at first sight, Bryan. There’s only sex at first sight. And if my scrawny charms inflame you, then let’s lie together, because you’re a sweet man and I’m in need of comfort. But don’t talk about love.”