Part 1 (2/2)
The time-travellers also proved to be a valuable technological resource, enhancing the rather decadent science establishment of the Tanu by injecting the expertise of the greatly advanced Galactic Milieu. It had been strictly forbidden for time-travellers to carry sophisticated weaponry back to the Pliocene (a restriction that was often honoured in the breach), and the Tanu were conservative in the type of military hardware that they permitted their human serfs to build. Nevertheless, it was human ingenuity that eventually gave the Tanu almost complete ascendency over the Firvulag-who never mated with humans and generally despised them.
Most of the enslaved time-travellers actually lived quite well under the benevolent overlords.h.i.+p of the Tanu. Rough work was done by small ramapithecine apes who were, ironically, part of the direct hominid line that would climax in h.o.m.o sapiens six million years in the future. The ramas wore tiny grey torcs that compelled obedience; they had been used in largely abortive breeding experiments by the Tanu prior to the arrival of timetravelling humans.
Certain human slaves were also fitted with the collarlike torcs.
Those who occupied positions of trust or were engaged in vital pursuits wore grey torcs similar to those fitted to the ramas.
These did not amplify the mind, but did allow telepathic communication with the Tanu, who were also able to administer punishment or reward through the device. Luckier humans, who showed evidence of metapsychic latencies when tested, were given silver torcs. These were similar to the golden collars worn by the Tanu, making latent metafaculties operant. The silver torcs contained control circuits, however, and disobedience brought swift and excruciating punishment. Silver-torc humans were accepted as conditional citizens of the Tanu kingdom, and under certain circ.u.mstances the silvers might be granted golden torcs and full freedom. For humans as well as for Tanu the torcs were potentially hazardous. Occasionally an incompatible human torc wearer would be driven insane or killed outright by the device. Pathological reactions were especially likely among humans without significant metapsychic latencies.
The eight members of Group Green were to be mind-tested by Tanu overlords immediately upon their arrival in the Pliocene, as were all time-travellers. Five of them were ”normal,” that is, possessing latencies far below the threshold of potential operancy. These were Claude Majewski, an elderly paleontologist; Sister Amerie Roccaro, a physician and burnt-out priest; Stein Oleson, a herculean planet-crust driller; Richard Voorhees, a disgraced stars.h.i.+p captain; and Bryan Grenfell, an anthropologist who had followed his lover, Mercy Lamballe, into the Pliocene.
The other three members of Group Green were anything but ”normal.” Aiken Drum, a charming young criminal, showed very strong latencies and was fitted with a silver torc. Felice Landry, a disturbed young athlete, knew that she also possessed extremely powerful latent metafaculties; but for reasons of her own, she refused to cooperate with the Tanu overlords and was able to postpone being tested.
The eighth and most unusual member of Group Green was Elizabeth Orme. In the Milieu, she had been a fully operant Grand Master metapsychics, an honoured teacher. Through a brain trauma she had apparently lost her awesome powers of fa.r.s.ensing and redaction and reverted to the ”normal” state. In despair at having been shut out of the metapsychic Unity she had rejoiced in, Elizabeth elected to pa.s.s into the Pliocene.
There she would be among others like herself, since no operants were allowed to undertake time-travel.
To her horror, Elizabeth discovered that the shock of temporal translation had begun the restoration of her lost powers. Convalescent, at first terrified and then consumed with rage at the irony of her situation, Elizabeth heard the Tanu overlord Creyn tell her that a ”wonderful life” awaited her in the Many-Coloured Land. As the only torcless operant, she would be considered a unique treasure: The Tanu King himself would be her consort ...
That evening, two caravans set out from the Tanu Castle Gateway. Group Green had been split in half. Bound north for the city of Finiah on the Proto-Rhine was a sizeable mob of normal humans destined to become ordinary slaves and brood stock. These included Claude, Sister Amerie, Richard, and Felice-who had confided to her friends that she planned not only to escape, but also to ”take” the entire Tanu race!
The southbound caravan was much smaller. En route to the Tanu capital of Muriah in the Mediterranean Basin were the Tanu overlord Creyn, Elizabeth, Aiken Drum, two other silvertorced humans named Sukey Davies and Raimo Hakkinen, the gigantic driller Stein, who had been fitted with a grey torc in preparation for life as a gladiator, and the untorced anthropologist Bryan Grenfell, whose expertise was strangely valued by the Tanu and who looked forward to finding his lost lover somewhere in Muriah.
The caravan bound for Finiah was soon involved in a prisoner revolt, engineered by the erstwhile professional athlete, Felice.
Abnormally strong, with powerful coercive latencies that let her mind-control animals, Felice had smuggled a small steel dagger past the searchers at Castle Gateway. Working with Richard, the stars.h.i.+p captain, and two men named Yos.h.i.+mitsu and Tatsuji who were costumed as samurai, Felice engineered the killing of the female overlord Epone as well as the entire prisoner escort of grey-torc human troops.
One group of freed prisoners elected to follow Basil Wimborne, a mountain climber and former Oxford don, who felt the best plan of escape lay beyond Lac de Bresse in the Jura highlands. Claude, the old paleontologist, convinced his three Group Green friends that they would be safer fleeing into the heavily forested Vosges Mountains rather than risking a long lake voyage to the Jura. A lone course was taken by the surviving j.a.panese, Yos.h.i.+mitsu, who headed north hoping to reach the sea.
Claude, Richard, Amerie, and Felice fled deep into the Vosges. Eventually they were contacted by a ragtag group of free outlaw humans, fugitives from Tanu settlements, who called themselves Lowlives. The Lowlife leader was none other than Madame Angelique Guderian, former keeper of the time-gate and the ultimate author of Pliocene humanity's degradation.
She wore a golden torc, the gift of the Firvulag, who had formed a shaky alliance with the Lowlives against their mortal foe, the Tanu.
A great manhunt had been mounted by the Tanu after the prisoner revolt. Basil Wimborne and most of his contingent were recaptured and sent to Finiah. Its city-lord, Velteyn, led a Flying Hunt himself over the Vosges in search of the other escapees; but they were safe with Madame and her Lowlives, listening incredulously to the old woman's scheme for freeing humanity from the Tanu yoke, which would utilize the rather reluctant cooperation of the exotic Firvulag.
Hundreds of kilometres east of the Rhine River lay the socalled s.h.i.+p's Grave. There the t.i.tanic s.p.a.ce-going organism who had carried both Tanu and Firvulag from the Duat Galaxy to our own had plunged to Earth, creating a huge crater. Tanu and Firvulag pa.s.sengers in the s.h.i.+p, led by its spouse, a woman named Brede, had escaped from the dying organism in small flying machines before it impacted. Later the two groups of exotics had left the flyers parked around the rim of the crater after their two greatest heroes, s.h.i.+ning Lugonn of the Tanu and Sharn the Atrocious of the Firvulag, fought a ritual battle in honour of the defunct s.h.i.+p. Ceremoniously entombed within one of the flyers-which were presumed to be still at the crater after a thousand years-was the body of Lugonn, together with his laserlike weapon, the Spear.
Madame proposed to lead an expedition of Lowlives to the s.h.i.+p's Grave crater and retrieve this Spear for use against the very Tanu who held it sacred. And if the flyers were still operational, as seemed likely, the expedition would attempt to bring one back to partic.i.p.ate in a joint Lowlife-Firvulag attack on Finiah, a Tanu stronghold.
After many vicissitudes, this first phase of Madame Guderian's great plan for the liberation of Pliocene humanity was successful. The Tanu were forced to abandon Finiah, thus losing their only barium mine, which had produced an element vital in the making of all torcs. Felice, who showed increasing symptoms of a severe psychosis, obtained a golden torc for herself from the ruins of Finiah. The mental amplifier unlocked the stupendous powers of coercion, psychokinesis, and creativity that had been latent in her brain, and fuelled the girl's fierce desire for revenge upon the Tanu.
The next phase of Madame's plan involved an infiltration of the torc factory in the Tanu capital, Muriah, and a parallel operation that had as its objective the permanent closing of the time-gate.
Madame and ten other conspirators, including Felice, Claude, Sister Amerie, and Basil Wimborne-who had been rescued during the fall of Finiah-now set out on a long trip south. They took with them the laserlike Spear of Lugonn. Its energies had been totally discharged during the Finiah operation, but they hoped that their clever Group Green companion, Aiken Drum, would be able to recharge it when they appealed to him for a.s.sistance down in the Tanu capital.
Aiken-together with Elizabeth, Bryan, Stein, and the other privileged captives-had encountered an utterly different face of the Many-Coloured Land upon their arrival in Muriah some weeks past. They were presented to the Tanu aristocracy at a lavish feast, where they were treated at first like honoured guests instead of slaves.
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