Pliocene Exile - The Adversary Part 9

CHAPTER TWO.

The convoy of fourplex modular ATVs, its number reduced to fifteen after the disaster with the freight hauler back in the Rif Mountains, crept along in the bra.s.sy African sunset enveloped in dust, ion-defiant midges, and antic.i.p.atory elation.

The Mediterranean rim was less than 90 kilometres away.

And the Great Waterfall.

For more than two months, ever since they had dared to leave the camp on the Moroccan sh.o.r.e to which they had been diverted by their elders, the runaway adult children of Ocala Island had fled northeast by north toward that landmark that had somehow become symbolic of their guilt and daring. They had crossed more than 1500 kilometres of Pliocene wilderness-swamps and jungles, waterless desert, and most recently the Rif Range-and now rolled through the sere hills and scrub thickets covering the upper extremity of the broken Gibraltar Isthmus. Logic had told the expedition's leader, Hagen Remillard, to bear farther east on a more direct course to the flooded Mediterranean Basin, which they would have to cross in order to rendezvous with Cloud in Afaliah. But logic faltered before the irresistible glamour of the Waterfall. How could they pa.s.s it by? They had shared in its creation when they joined minds with their parents and helped mad Felice admit the western ocean waters into the Empty Sea. To view it was a psychological imperative.

The five youngsters of Ocala's meagre third generation, called the Cubs, were even more eager than their parents. When a towering column of vapour signalling the cascade finally appeared on the horizon, the little ones dissolved into a frenzy of fidgeting. It became evident that none of them would be able to sleep that night without first beholding the marvel; so Hagen decided to forgo the usual sunset bivouac and press on. There, would be plenty of moonlight to illumine the scene.

Hagen regretted his impulse when Phil Overton caved in to the winsome coercion of his four-year-old, Calinda, who had been begging to sit with her father in the leading ATV. Brokenhearted protests from the other Cubs, both vocal and excruciatingly telepathic, were inevitable. In spite of Hagen's objections, nothing would do but that all of the little ones transfer to the command module. Diane Manion traded places with Nial Keogh and swore to Hagen that she would use every erg of her redactive metafunction to keep the Cubs under control, and the complaisant Overton was demoted from navigator to a.s.sistant babysitter. But the closer they came to the Waterfall, the more disorderly the children became.

"Daddy, turn on the peep-sweep again!" Calinda pleaded.

"This time, I know we'll be able to scan the falls!"

"The peep-sweep! The peep-sweep!" chanted Joel Strangford and Riki Teichmann, who were four-and-a-half and five. They tussled with each other, trying to get closer to the c.o.c.kpit's terrain holo display, and shoved little Hope Dalembert to the deck in the process. She began to wail.

"Meatheads!" The indictment of six-year-old Davey Warshaw was pitying. "A TSL can't see a hole in the ground when there are hills in the way."

"It can too! It can too!"

"Only if the refractive angle's right," Davey sneered. "And it's not. You think the Gibraltar Gate's some little bitty thing like a dry wadi or a sandpit that the peep can a.n.a.log? Hah!"

"Then fa.r.s.ense it for us, Mr. Smarty!" Calinda demanded.

Although incapable of such a feat, Davey used his imagination to conjure a vision that stunned the other Cubs to silence: a planetary orb cleft like a gigantic melon, with a fountain of water gus.h.i.+ng into outer s.p.a.ce.

Gently, Diana Manion emended the picture. "It's more likely to look like this, dear."

All the Cubs squealed in disappointment.

"But that's just a little waterfall," Riki protested. "Like in my Nana's book about the Old World. Niagara.

Our waterfall's bigger than any in the whole world that ever was!"

Calinda's lip thrust out. "Don't want to see a little waterfall.

Hagen-you said it would be humongous."

"Humongous," repeated little Hope Dalembert, through tears.

"Phil, Phil, turn on the peep-sweep!" Joel cried, and the others chimed in, swarming over the hapless Overton and crowding Hagen at the command console until he fended them off with his PK and uttered a simultaneous mental expostulation: All of you be quiet!

Miraculously, they were.

Aloud, Hagen said, "Now listen, you Cubs. We're almost there. I think I sense something! You might, too, if you just pipe down for a d.a.m.n minute ... "

The whine of the turbine as the ATV laboured toward the top of a ridge. The crunch and snap of flattened brush. The hum of the faltering environmental conditioner. Outside, an off-key serenade of dwarf hyenas hidden in the dusk-purpled chaparral.

And then, a sound, that was no sound. An atmospheric stirring so profound that it could not be detected by auditory nerves.

'Daddy, there's something in my throat," Calinda whispered.

"I taste a noise."

Phil swept her onto his lap before her apprehension could grow, and Diane was swift to mind-comfort the three smaller children. But Davey Warshaw, mature in wisdom, was jubilant.

"That's it! That's the Great Waterfall! Faster, Hagen-drive faster!"

The son of Abaddon gave a short laugh and advanced the throttle. An obstructing scrub oak threatened, and instead of turning aside, he zapped it. The Cubs shrieked as they charged ahead through swirling resinous steam and flying woodchips.

The solar-powered turbine of the ATV howled at the steepening grade and climbed higher and higher toward the evening sky.

The peculiar subsonic vibration intensified to a singing in the bone. Even the adults felt the large cartilages of their throats thrill to its enormous note. Hope Dalembert whimpered and hid her face in Diane's breast; but the four other Cubs, wideeyed, strained with ineffective juvenile farsight to discover what lay ahead. The vehicle finally crested the ridge, b.u.mped over summit outcroppings, and slowed to a halt on a narrow windswept plateau.

The ATV and the height on which it stood s.h.i.+vered in neverending thunder. The sound was not painful to the ear; the frequency was too low, too nearly palpable. The adults and children sat motionless for a long minute. Then Davey had the hatch open and was clambering out, and Phil Overton took Calinda and Joel while Diane kept tight hold on the hands of Riki and Hope.

Hagen, left alone in the c.o.c.kpit, took brief note of the stupendous landform being plotted on the graphic display of the terrain scanner. He remarked to the empty aether: "We're finally here, Papa. It's your scene as much as Felice's and ours. Would you like to commander my eyes?"

Nothing.

Hagen laughed. "Did she kill you, then? Did a raw-talent crazy finish off the Milieu's challenger? What a tacky ending that would be. Not at all what my Oedipal fantasy antic.i.p.ated."

Nothing.

"You won't stop us from reopening the time-gate," he whispered. "You let us get away from Ocala. you could have blasted us, and you didn't. I know you, Papa! You don't dare stop us.

And it's not only the guilt-but the tempting elegance of the wheel come full-circle that you won't be able to resist ... "

Nothing.

Hagen stifled soliloquy and let thunder fill his skull. His hands worked automatically to kill the vehicle systems and then he went outside to join the others.

They were on a land's end beneath an indigo sky. The full moon of late August was well risen above the eastern horizon.

On their left a wide sluiceway stretched toward the Atlantic, and on the right was a monstrous chasm, the new Gulf of Alboran, with its distant floor of starless black water. Joining these two like a silver curtain stretching into infinite night, its hem frothing in the sump of the world, was the grandest waterfall Earth had ever known.

Hagen's instruments had mapped its dimensions: 9.7 kilometres wide and 822 metres high, with a flow ever-increasing as erosion widened and deepened the Gibraltar cut. The Great Waterfall would live for less than a hundred years, for in that time it would fill the entire Pliocene Mediterranean Basin.

One by one the other vehicles of the convoy reached the plateau and came to a standstill. Their occupants alighted and gathered near the cliff edge-twenty-eight men and women and five little children. Normal speech was impossible and mental converse seemed superfluous. It was enough to look, and to memorize.

They might have stayed there for hours but at last the moonlight dimmed and the breeze grew dank. A wall of heavy fog pushed out from Europe and obliterated the spectacle.

Calinda Overton's small mind-voice said: I think it's over.