As long as we have you, everliving!
"Faithful Pat." He was standing close to her, looking down from his great height, and he had let the dressing gown fall. His contours were still magnificent, but an intricate network of keloid scars, the consequent of a too-brief sojourn in the regeneration tank covered his entire body below the neck. Only his hands and genitals had been perfectly restored.
She came into his arms and their lips met, tasting salt and honey, setting her whirling into the bright burning maelstrom that had him as its inevitable beginning and end. In the wondrous way of master metapsychics there was no constraint of gravity between them, no barrier posed by garments, no awkwardness in the embrace. The ineffable pleasure spun her to the brink of senselessness, lifted her as on a giant wave to the ultimate conjunction. There the binary star would shine for a small eternity, she in the shouting blaze of fulfilment, he, as always, withdrawn into his abyss.
From the beginning, Marc had warned her that there would be no love. She had willingly agreed, leaving him solitary at the climax. But tonight his curtain had been only imperfectly woven.
She had caught a glimpse of what lay beneath the brilliant corona of o.r.g.a.s.mic release.
She lay alone on the bed, having surfaced into consciousness.
Recollection clamped her heart in ice. Had he been distracted because of the terrible events that had taken place? Or had his subconscious been compelled to give up the secret?
"Marc," she whispered. "Is it true?"
He was fully dressed, staring out the forward window of the sterncastle. The sea had moderated and was star-stippled. The sails had been hoisted by the winching mechanism and the great schooner forged ahead.
He said, "You will tell no one. It could be disastrous to morale. The children don"t know, of course. No one did, except the Keoghs-and Manion. Alex has his own reasons to keep silent."
"How ... how long?"
Since before the Rebellion since her death je suis le veuf a la tour abolie.
"My G.o.d! But we thought that the Keoghs had-"
"After Cyndia"s death, they restored me completely, just as the tank restored me here." He was calm. "There is no organic dysfunction, only nonviability. My late brother blamed it on a sense of sin. I suspect rather a defect of the will, or the inevitable trauma when falling from a great height." He regarded her steadily from beneath winged brows. "The cure, if any, will be spontaneous-induced by success. We still can succeed. Mental Man will live if we prevent the children from pa.s.sing through that time-gate. Ideally, we need all of them. At the minimum, my son."
"If you had only told Hagen! Or taken precautions-"
"Precautions were taken-and circ.u.mvented. I was too trusting during our early years on Ocala. Later, trying to compensate for my neglect, I was too stern with the children. Hagen is weakwilled. Flawed. He knows it. My attempts to intimidate him merely made him hate me. To reveal the truth ... would give him a weapon. It"s a h.e.l.lish mess, complicated even more by the children"s alliance with Aiken Drum. But we can still succeed. If the time-gate doesn"t open ... if I can prove to Hagen and Cloud that I love them, that their destiny is with me ... "
Patricia rose slowly, pushing the light brown hair back from her face, working to suppress the misgivings. "There are so few of us left to help you. O"Malley may not survive, and Fitzpatrick and Sherwoode aren"t strong. If we discount those three, that leaves only twenty-two for your offensive metaconcert. Six of us magnates."
"We"ll manage. We have plenty of conventional weapons to counter Aiken Drum. And the d-jump capability."
"You can"t take any weapon with you inside the armour."
He did not respond to that. She went to the cooking unit and took out his meal, then poured cups of tea for both of them.
"Come and eat your supper while it"s hot," she said, sitting down at the table in front of the windows. "There"s ham in orange sauce, and even some of your favourite gamma pea soup."
"I ordered it up thinking that I"d be celebrating a successful long jump." He took a spoon and studied the steaming bowl.
"Just three pouches left after twenty-seven years. Habitant pea soup in the Pliocene. A touch of New Hampshire aboard a windjamming bateau ivre!" He shook his head slightly and began to eat.
Patricia drank her tea without attempting to touch his thoughts. After a time she began speaking in a low, urgent voice. "I understand now why you opposed those of us who wanted to counter the time-gate threat with force against the children. You were never really afraid of retaliation from the Milieu at all, were you?"
He made a dismissive gesture. "It was a smokescreen. A necessary deception, I thought. Aimed primarily at the children, and at the more dubiously loyal of our own generation."
"I thought so. So you could listen to all our bloodthirsty talk about killing the children if necessary-even pretend to consider the option-but all the while you knew you"d have to find another way."
"I have," he said. "Destruction of the deep rock formations around the site. It"s simple and humane-"
"And Alex Manion says it can"t possibly work."
"What?"
Marc lay the spoon down. She felt the power of his coercion engulf her. Willingly she threw open her memory to show the complex mathematical equations exactly as the dynamic-field specialist had shown them to her.
"Alex calls this the theory of the persistence of temporal event nodes. In essence, you can"t destroy the time-gate site here in the Pliocene because we know it still exists six million years from now, in the Milieu we all came from. Ergo, your hope of demolishing the formations, upsetting the geomagnetic factors in the tau-lattice, is futile. No paradoxes allowed. Reality is. Past, present, future-"
"-and all held secure in the hand of G.o.d," he finished for her, mouth lifted in the famous smile. "Once I believed it."
"I never did! And I don"t want to believe it now." But Alexis Manion does, and he was the best dynamic-field theorist in the Milieu."
"d.a.m.n him to h.e.l.l ... Pat, do you know whether he"s spoken to any others about this-this theory?"
She lifted helpless hands. "I"m afraid there"s no doubt of it.
He probably made use of every moment that he wasn"t docilated." She spoke with desperation. "Could Alex be mistaken?"
"No. But he could certainly lie," Marc"s face was bleak. "I"ll find out tomorrow. But even if he"s telling the truth as he sees it, I"ll keep that gate from opening!"
"But how?" she cried. "Marc, talk to us about this! Confide in us, as you used to. We all feel lost! You"ve been so absorbed-first in the star-search, now in this d-jump business.
We"re loyal and we want to follow you but we don"t see how we can deal with this situation. We"ve waited so long and now there are so few of us left ... " Help us! We have put all our trust in you. Calm our fears.
Say you won"t d-jump to another world and abandon us.
He reached across the table and took her hand. His skin was warm, the fingers youthfully perfect, and the mental contact invincibly rea.s.suring.
"Abandon you? Never. I have something quite different in mind. Right now, there are still urgent matters that I must attend to. However, I promise to make myself available again-not just to you magnates, but to everyone. We"ll have regular conferences, starting tomorrow. And I have good news. I"m gaining the confidence of the mastercla.s.s woman, Elizabeth Orme. And I"ve made a start on Aiken Drum, too. Now that the d-jump is nearly perfected, I can begin pressuring him in earnest. Before he knows it, we"ll have Kyllikki moored in shallow water off Breton Island opposite his castle. With our sigmas in place, the ship will be an impregnable threat."
"The children have the big force-shield-the SR-35."
"And we have my battery of X-lasers that will cut through any portable screen ever built! Aiken Drum will capitulate, I tell you. And with him on our side, the children will be checkmated. There are other ways to insure that the time-gate never opens. We can destroy the laboratories, after giving warning so that the children can evacuate them. If I wipe out the schematics and certain irreplaceable pieces of manufacturing apparatus-fleck-etchers, photonic alloying machines, mindcontrolled micromanipulators-no one will ever build the Guderian device here in the Pliocene. Eventually the children will come to their senses."
"Marc, they won"t want to return to Ocala."
He laughed. "Let them spend a few years as subjects of Aiken"s barbarian kingdom, then! We can make d-jump visits on holidays, provided we"re in the neighbourhood of Earth, and renew our invitation at intervals."
He showed her what was in his mind and she gasped.
"Is it feasible?" she cried. "You could carry us?"
"If I can generate an upsilon-field large enough to take myself and three tons of armour plating through hypers.p.a.ce, it should only be a matter of practice before I"m able to encompa.s.s a larger volume and greater ma.s.s. For short hops on Earth, I doubt that the pa.s.sengers would even require life support. Felice didn"t."
"But ... you said we"d go extraplanetary."