Pliocene Exile - The Adversary Part 82

Hagen pushed off his hood and looked at his wrist chronometer. It was only a little after one in the morning. "My G.o.d, it took that Tanu, Minanonn, nearly four hours to carry us to Black Crag. The King's flown us back in less than ninety minutes!"

"With a detour to Roniah," said a deep exotic voice from the shadows.

Cloud was on her feet, straining her fa.r.s.ense. "Kuhal," she whispered.

The Second Lord Psychokinetic stepped out onto the silver lawn. There was a human woman with him.

Bewildered, Hagen managed to say, "Is that you, Diane?"

"The King sent us both," said the daughter of Alexis Manion.

"He said-and I quote-'It's been a long time since any of you had a fun-break. Go downtown and play. Tomorrow you can come back to the castle and we'll discuss the future.' "

"Did-he tell you where we'd been?" Hagen asked.

Kuhal said, "He told us everything. He said he had his reasons."

Cloud nodded and spoke as if to herself. "We're not to be allowed to keep it a secret."

A breeze blew up from the Gyre of Commerce, carrying the eerie skirling of an electronic bagpipe. Kuhal drew Cloud aside.

"The King may not have realized, when he arranged this meeting, but you and I had agreed to set a wall between us. He knew we still farspoke one another over the leagues and shared our heart's troubles. He saw that we were friends-"

"And mistook it for love," she said.

"It had always remained so, on my part."

Cloud moved away from his touch. "And so you have been brought here to influence my decision. And Diane to sway Hagen."

"I think you misjudge Aiken deeply. His motive was kindness, not machination."

"Perhaps you're right."

They walked along the shrub-bordered path, leaving the other couple behind at the lily pond. Mushroom-shaped gla.s.s lamps lit the way to an obscure gate in the garden wall that opened into the town greenbelt. Cloud kept her mind veiled. She still had the storm-suit hood covering her hair and the taut skin made her slender figure almost s.e.xless, a glimmer of white moving along beside a demiG.o.d in barbaric High Table vesture.

"Through all the turmoil of the last month," he said, "you farspoke me from this very garden."

"Papa watched us," she said. "He says he didn't listen."

"What matter if he did? The guilt owing to the Flood is his as well as yours. He might have gained insight, as you did."

Cloud laughed, a sad, quiet sound. "Papa has enough guilt of his own to make the Flood deaths seem irrelevant. I doubt that he thinks of the event from a moral standpoint at all. We children asked his help in an expediency, and he condescended.

But the crime was ours."

"You are sorry," Kuhal said.

"Most of us are," she admitted, "now. Now that we perceive you as real people instead of inconvenient abstractions standing in the way of our great undertaking. Yes, we're sorry ... but remorse isn't really enough, is it? Sterile brooding over the wrongs we've committed doesn't help.

Not when the wrongdoing was so appalling."

His mind reached out in empathy, only to impinge on the mental s.h.i.+eld.

She said, "As we flew down to Black Crag, I mind-spoke at some length with Minanonn the Heretic, asking him how he had found peace after realizing the futility of the battle-religion. He told me that a change of heart isn't really sufficient recompense for a great sin. It has to be affirmed by some kind of repentant action or the mind can't purge guilt, and if we try to deny this, then the soul finds its own penance, as Papa's has tried to do.

But in his case, where he consciously rejects atonement, there will never be any true peace ... Hagen and I and the others don't reject the idea of recompense, as Papa has. But we don't know how to atone for what we did to your people."

"Your father has offered you one possible course of action,"

Kuhal said. "Mental Man could be a force for wisdom and goodness in this galaxy."

Her mind-veil parted briefly, letting irony escape. "It could-if Papa and Hagen weren't part of the scheme. But I know my father better than anyone. He says that Hagen and I would be the administrators-but he'd never let us be. Not while he lived. And if my brother killed him-as he would, inevitably-Mental Man would carry the mark of Cain, just like all the rest of the human race."

"And mine," Kuhal said.

Her mind flashed a smile. "You do understand."

"We understand each other, Cloud. And I think you speak of this now only to bolster your courage, for you know very well what you must do, what decision you must make-and convince your brother to share."

"Hagen's going to be terribly afraid, Kuhal. Back on Ocala, when Alexis Manion first began to talk to us about the Unity as an alternative to Papa's plan, Hagen was almost paralysed at the very notion of defiance. As much as he feared Papa and wanted to escape, the thought of confronting a Galactic Mind in the Milieu-becoming a part of it-frightened him still more.

We're a self-centred lot, we Remillards. Jealous of our individuality."

"Don't I know that!" The yearning insufficiency reached out to her. The need. "And love does mean a surrender of some part of the heart's sovereignty. But not subordination, Cloud.

Not in real love. And not in this Unity we must all join, either, if it is as Elizabeth's mind shows it. Your father's rejection of the Unity was part of his greater rejection of love in favour of power."

"You're wrong! Papa does love us. And he loved Mama to the point of unreason. He's pa.s.sionately concerned with the welfare of the human race-"

"In the abstract, perhaps. But not the untidy, b.l.o.o.d.y-minded verity of real people."

She refused to respond to this.

Kuhal said, "I understand very well why your father was called the Angel of the Abyss. The G.o.ddess leads and teaches her children, trying to bring them to maturity, and weeps over their obtuseness. But Abaddon would force his offspring into perfection."

Cloud's mind smiled. "You don't know how lucky you Tanu are to have perceived deity as a G.o.ddess. Mothers are much more inclined to let their children grow up at their own pace."

They came to the garden gate. The lights of the city twinkled through the open woodland and they heard crowd noises. The sound of music was much louder, the pipes wailing some restless chase tune.

"Do you think you'll have much trouble convincing Hagen?"

Kuhal asked.

"I'll have most of the others on my side, with the princ.i.p.al exception of Nial Keogh, who's a vicious little power seeker.

Some of them, like Diane Manion, are simply timid about going to the Milieu and more inclined to accept the devil we know rather than the one we don't. But I think I'll be able to handle things. You'll help, won't you? Thanks to your advice, I was able to do a pretty good job smoothing over the mess after that stupid attack on the King's life at the iron foundry. No doubt you'll be able to suggest some ploys for dealing with this situation as well."

"Politicking," he said whimsically. "Why shouldn't I know the game? I've been at it for more than four hundred years."