The Many-Coloured Land sope-1 Read online

  He had, though. He couldn’t help it. Realizing the illogic of the thing, observing himself from afar with a chagrined detachment but still unable to control the situation, he knew he loved her from the first moment they met. Carefully, he had tried to explain without appearing a complete ass. She had only laughed and pulled him down onto the petal-strewn lawn. Their passion had delighted them both but brought him no true release. He was caught by her. He would have to share her life forever or go in misery apart.

  Only one day with her! One day before he had to travel to the important meeting on the Poltroyan planet. She had wanted him to stay, suggesting the sailing holiday, but he, duty-bound, had put her off. Imbecile. She might have needed him. How could he have left her alone?

  Only one day…

  Bryan’s old friend Gaston Deschamps, encountered fortuitously in a Paris restaurant, had invited him to kill some empty hours observing the Fête d’Auvergne from behind the scenes. Gaston, the pageant director, had called it a droll exercise in applied ethnology. And so it had been, until the introduction.

  “Now we will return to those thrilling days d’antan,” Gaston had proclaimed after giving him the fifty-pence tour of the village and the chateau. The director had led the way to a high tower, thrown open the door to the elaborate pageant control room, and she had been sitting there.

  “You must meet my fellow wonder-worker, the associate director of the Fête, and the most medieval lady now alive in the Galactic Milieu… Mademoiselle Mercedes Lamballe!”

  She had looked up from her console and smiled, piercing him to the heart…

  “This is your Captain speaking. We are now reentering normal space above the planet Earth. The procedure will take only two seconds, so please bear with us during the brief period of mild discomfort.”

  Zang.

  Toothextractionhammeredthumbwhangedfunnybone.

  Zung.

  “Thank you for your patience, ladies and gentlemen and distinguished passengers of other sexes. We will be landing at Unst Starport in the beautiful Shetland Islands of Earth at exactly 1500 hours Planet Mean Time.”

  Grenfell mopped his high brow and ordered another drink. This time, he sipped. Unbidden, an ancient song began unreeling in his mind, and he smiled because the song was so like Mercy.

  There is a lady sweet and kind

  Was never face so pleased my mind.

  I did but see her passing by,

  And yet I love her till I die.

  He would take the tube to Nice and egg on to Cannes. She would be waiting for him at the quay of that peaceful old town, perhaps wearing a green playsuit. Her eyes would have that expression of gentle melancholy and be green or gray, changeable as the sea and as deep. He would stagger up with his duffle-bag and a fitted picnic hamper full of food and drink (champagne, Stilton, gooseliver sausage, sweet butter, long loaves, oranges, black cherries), and he would trip over his feet and she would smile at last.

  He would take out the boat and make the small boys at the slip stand back. (There were always small boys now that families had rediscovered the quiet Côte d’Azur.) He would attach the thin tube of the tiny inflator and throw the wadded packet of silver-and-black decamole film into the water. Slowly, slowly as the boys gaped, the eight-meter sloop would grow: bulb keels, hull, decks, furniture fixed below, cabin, cockpit, railings, mast. Then he would produce the separate pieces, rudder and tiller, stabilizer, boom with sails still furled, lines, deck seats, lockers, buckets, bedding and all, born miraculously of taut decamole and compressed air. Dockside dispensers would fill the keels and stabilizer with mercury and ballast the rest of the boat and its fittings with distilled water, adding mass to the rigid microstructure of the decamole. He would rent the auxiliary, the lamps, pump, navigear, the gooseneck, CQR anchor, and other hardware, pay off the harbormaster and bribe the small boys not to spit over the quayside into the cockpit.

  She would board. He would cast off. With a fresh breeze, it would be up sail for Ajaccio! And somehow, in the next days, he would get her to agree to many him.

  I did but see her passing by…

  When the starship landed in the beautiful Shetlands it was six degrees Celsius and blowing a deary northeast gale. Mercedes Lamballe’s teleview number responded with a SUBSCRIBER CANCELED SERVICE notice.

  In a panic, Grenfell finally got hold of Gaston Deschamps.

  The pageant director was evasive, then angry, then apologetic. The fact is, Bry, the damn woman’s chucked it. Must have been the day after you went offworld two months ago. Left us flat, and the busiest time of the season, too.”

  “But where, Gaston? Where’s she gone?”

  On the view screen, Deschamps let his gaze slide away. “Through that damn time-portal into Exile. I’m sick about it, Bry. She had everything to live for. A bit off her bonk, of course, but none of us suspected she was that far gone. It’s a damn shame. She had the best feel for the medieval of anyone I’ve ever known.”

  “I see. Thanks for telling me. I’m very sorry.”

  He broke the connection and sat in the teleview kiosk, a middle-aged anthropologist of some reputation, mild-faced, conservatively dressed, holding a portfolio full of Proceedings of the Fifteenth Galactic Conference on Culture Theory. Two Simbiari who had come in on the same ship with him waited patiently outside for some minutes before tapping on the kiosk door, leaving little green smears on the window.

  And yet I love her…

  Bryan Grenfell held up one apologetic finger to the Simbiari and turned back to the teleview. He touched the stall.

  “Information for what city, please?”

  “Lyon,” he said.

  …Till I die.

  Bryan posted the data to the CAS and picked up his own egg in London. Even though he could have done the research just as easily at home, he took off for France that same afternoon. Installing himself in the Galaxie-Lyon, he ordered a supper of grilled langouste, orange soufflee, and Chablis, and immediately began to search the literature.

  The library unit in his room displayed a depressingly long list of books, theses, and articles on the Guderian time-portal. He thought about skipping over those catalogued under Physics and Paleobiology and concentrating on the Psychoanalogy and Psychosociology entries; but this seemed unworthy of her, so he poked his card into the slot and resignedly ordered the entire collection. The machine spat out enough thin plaque-books to pave the large hotel room six times over. He sorted them methodically and began to assimilate, projecting some, reading others, sleep-soaking the most tedious. Three days later he fed the books back into the unit. He checked out of the hotel and requested his egg, then went up to the roof to wait for it. The corpus he had just absorbed sloshed about in his mind without form or structure. He knew he was subconsciously rejecting it and its implications, but the realization was no great help.

  Broken hearts healed and memories of vanished love faded away, even of this strange love whose like he had never known before. He realized that this had to be true. Measured judgement, consideration of the scary data he had stuffed himself with, common sense uncharged with emotion told him what he must do. Sensibly do.

  Oh, Mercy. Oh, my dear. The uttermost part of the galaxy is nearer than you are, my lady passing by. And yet. And yet.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Only Georgina had been sorry to hear that Stein was going. They had got gloriously drunk together on his last day in Lisboa and she’d said, “How’d you like to do it in a volcano?” And he had muttered fondly that she was a crazy fat broad, but she assured him that she knew a guy who would, for suitable consideration, look the other way while they took a research deep-driller out of Messina, where there was this adit that led right into the main chamber of Stromboli.

  So what the hell, they egged on over and the guy did let them get away with it. So what if it cost six kilobux? It was seismic down there in the surging lava with colored gas bubbles oozing slowly up the observation window like a bunch of jellyfish in a bowl of inca
ndescent tomato soup.

  “Oh, Georgina,” he had moaned in the postcoital triste. “Come with me.”

  She rolled over on the padded floor of the driller cockpit, white flesh turned to scarlet and black by the glare outside, and gave the weeping giant mother-comfort from her melon-sized breasts.

  “Steinie. Lovie. I’ve got three beautiful children and with my genetic quotient I can have three more if I want them. I’m happy as a clam at high tide playing with my kids and torching busted bores and loving up any man who isn’t afraid I’ll eat him alive. Steinie, what do I need with Exile? This is my kind of world. Exploding in three million directions all at once! Earthlings increasing and multiplying in every nook of the galaxy and the race evolving into something fantastic practically before your eyes. You know that one of my kids is coming out meta? It’s happening all over the place now. Human biology is evolving right along with human culture for the first time since the Old Stone Age. I couldn’t miss it, lovie. Not friggerty likely.”

  He broke away and knuckled out tears, disgusted with himself. “You better hope I didn’t plant anything in your potato patch then, kid. I don’t think my genes’d meet your standards.”

  She took his face in both hands and kissed him. “I know why you have to go, Blue Eyes. But I’ve also seen your PS profile. The squiggles in it have nothing to do with heredity, whatever you may think. Given another nurturing situation, you would have turned out fine, laddie.”

  “Animal. He called me a murdering little animal,” Stein whispered.

  She rocked him again. “He was hurt terribly when she died, and be couldn’t know you understood what he was saying. Try to forgive him, Steinie. Try to forgive yourself.”

  The deep-driller began to lurch violently as massive eruptions of gas rose from Stromboli’s guts. They decided to get the hell out of there before the sigma-field heat shields gave way, and burrowed out of the lava chamber via an extinct underwater vent. When they finally emerged on the floor of the Mediterranean west of the island, the driller’s hull clanged and pinged with the sounds of rocks falling through the water.

  They rose to the surface and came into a night of mad melodrama. Stromboli was in eruption, farting red and yellow fire clouds and glowing chunks of lava that arched like skyrockets before quenching themselves in the sea.

  “Holy petard,” said Georgina. “Did we do that?”

  Stein grinned at her owlishly as the driller rocked on steaming waves. “You wanna try for continental drift?” he asked, reaching for her.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Richard Voorhees took the Express Tube from Unst to Paris to Lyon, then rented a Hertz egg for the last part of his journey. His earlier notion of eating and drinking and screwing his way across Europe and then jumping off an Alp had been modified when a fellow passenger on the liner from Assawompset happened to mention the odd Earth phenomenon of Exile.

  That, Richard knew instantly, was just the kind of reprieve he needed. A new start on a primitive world full of human beings with no rules. Nothing to bug you but the occasional prehistoric monster. No green Leakie-Freakies, no dwarf Polli-wogs, no obscene Gi, no glaring Krondaku making you feel like your nightmares just came true, and especially no Lylmik.

  He started pulling the strings as soon as he got out of decon and was able to get to a teleview. Most Exile candidates applied months in advance through their local PS counselors and took all the tests before they ever left home. But Voorhees, the old operator, knew that there had to be a way of expediting matters. The magic passkey had come via a big Earthside corporation for which he had done a delicate job less than a year ago. It was to the advantage of both the corporation and the ex-spacer that he exit the here and now as soon as possible; and so with scarcely any arm-twisting at all, the outfit’s XT-Operations agreed to use his good offices to convince the people at the auberge to let Richard take abbreviated tests right there at the starport, then proceed directly to Go.

  This evening, however, as he glided out of the Rhône Valley toward the Monts du Lyonnais, he still admitted to a few qualms. He landed at Saint-Antoine-des-Vignes just a few kilometers from the inn and decided to have one last meal on free turf. The August sun had dropped behind the Col de la Lucre and the resolutely quaint village drowsed in leftover heat. The café was small but it was also dim and cool and not, thank God, too cutesy atmospheric for comfort. As he ambled in, he noted approvingly that the Tri-D was off, the musicbox played only a subdued, jangling tune, and the smells of food were incredibly appealing.

  A young couple and two older men, locals by the look of their agrigarb, sat at window tables wolfing large plates of sausage and bowls of salad. On a stool at the bar sat a huge blond man in a glossy suit of midnight nebulin. He was eating a whole chicken prepared with some pinkish sauce and washing it down with beer from a two-liter pewter tankard. After hesitating for a moment, Richard went and took another stool.

  The big fellow nodded, grunted, and kept feeding his face. From the kitchen came the proprietor, a jolly pot-bellied man with a heroic aquiline nose. He beamed a welcome to Voorhees, spotting him as an offworlder immediately.

  “I have heard,” Richard said carefully, “that the food in this part of Earth is never prepared with synthetics.”

  The host said, “We’d sooner gastrectomize than insult our bellies with algiprote or biocake or any of the rest of that crap-diddle. Ask any gorf in the place.”

  “Say again, Louie!” cackled one of the oldsters at the window, hoisting a dripping hunk of sausage on his fork.

  The proprietor leaned on the counter with hands palm down. “This France of ours has seen a lot of change. Our people are scattered over the galaxy. Our French language is dead. Our country is an industrial beehive underground and a history buff’s Disneyland on top. But three things remain unchanged and immortal, our cheeses, our wines, and our cuisine! Now, I can see that you’ve come a long way.” The man’s eyelid drooped in a ponderous wink. “Like this other guest here, maybe you still have a ways to go. So If you’re looking for a really cosmic meal, well, we’re a modest house, but our cooking and our cellar are four-star if you can pay for it.”

  Richard sighed. “I trust you. Do it to me.”

  “An aperitif, then, which we have chilled and ready! Dom Pérignon 2100. Savor it while I bring you a selection of whimsies to whet your appetite.”

  “Is that champagne?” the chicken muncher asked. “In that little bitty bottle?”

  Richard nodded. “Where I come from, a split of this will set you back three centibux.”

  “No shit? How far out you be, guy?”

  “Assawompset. The old Assawomp-hole of the universe, we call it. But don’t you try.”

  Stein chortled around his chicken. “I never fight with a guy till I meet him formal.”

  The host brought a napkin with two small pastries and a little silver dish full of white steaming lumps. “Brioche de foie gras, croustade de ris de veau a la financière, and quenelles de brochet au beurre d’ecrevisses. Eat! Enjoy!” He swept out.

  “Financier, huh?” muttered Richard. “There’s a good epitaph.” He ate the pastries. One was like a cream puff stuffed with delicious spiced liver. The other seemed to be a fluted tart shell filled with bits of meat, mushrooms, and unidentifiable tidbits in Madeira sauce. The dish with white sauce consisted of delicate fish dumplings.

  “This is delicious, but what am I eating?” he asked the host, who had emerged to take the credit cards of the local diners.

  “The brioche is filled with goose liver pâté. The tart has a slice of truffle, braised veal sweetbread, and a garnish of tiny chicken dumplings, cock’s combs, and kidneys in wine sauce. The pike dumplings are served in creamy crayfish butter.”

  “Good God,” said Richard.

  “I have an outstanding vintage coming up with the main course. But first, grilled baby lamb filet with little vegetables, and to set it off, a splendid young Fumé from the Chateau du Nozet.”

  Rich
ard ate and sipped, sipped and ate. Finally the host returned with a small chicken like that which Stein had lately devoured. “The speciality of the house, Poularde Diva! The most adolescent of young pullets, stuffed with rice, truffles, and foie gras, poached and coated with paprika supreme sauce. To accompany it, a magnificent Chateau Grillet.”

  “You’re kidding!” Richard exclaimed.

  “It never leaves the planet Earth,” the host assured him solemnly. “It rarely leaves France. Get this behind your uvula guy, and your stomach’ll think you died and went to heaven.” Once again he whirled out.

  Stein gaped. “My chicken tasted good,” he ventured. “But I ate it with Tuborg.”

  “To each his own,” Richard said. After a long pause for attending to business, he wiped pink sauce off his mustache and said, “You figure somebody on the other side of the gate will know how to brew up some good booze?”

  Stein’s eyes narrowed. “How you know I’m goin’ over?”

  “Because you couldn’t look less like some colonial gorf visiting the Old Country. You ever thought about where your next bucket of suds is coming from in the Pliocene?”

  “Christ!” exclaimed Stein.

  “Now me, I’m a wine freak. As much as I could be, dragging my ass all over the Milky Way. I was a spacer. I got busted. I don’t wanta talk about it. You can call me Richard. Not Rick. Not Dick. Richard.”

  “I’m Steinie.” The big driller thought for a minute. “The stuff they sent me about this Exile told how they let you sleep-learn any simple technology you think would be useful in the other world. I don’t remember if it was on the list, but I bet I could cram brewing easy. And the hard sauce, you can make that outa just about anything. Only tricky bit would be the condensation column, and you could whip that up outa copper-film decamole and hide it in your hollow tooth if they didn’t wanta let you in with it on the up. You with your wine, though, you might have a problem. Don’t they use special grapes and stuff?”