Part 35 (2/2)
AIKEN: Please. Please. Try anything. Oh Elizabeth they're so freakish so enormous and now It's bigger than all the rest of my body controlling me punis.h.i.+ng me making me Its slave making me hate It because I used It I didn't know it would happen didn't think why how I did itELIZABETH: Tell yourself it's only a delusion. A dream. Not real.
AIKEN: Not happening to my body?
ELIZABETH: No, dear. Be easy. Wait for me in the cave. It will be all right. (Please let it be.) AIKEN: Yes. I told myself that.
ELIZABETH: Goodbye, Aiken. (Goodbye poor demiG.o.dling, poor rampant Loki, poor priapic Fool, poor Mentu-Ra with the fiery mentule, poor Ithyphallikos. Now we both know what a terrible thing it is to live the myth of our own choosing.) The storm, racing along the front of the Pyrenees, came into view shortly after Minanonn carried Elizabeth, Dionket, and Creyn over the valley of the Proto-Aude to the Great South Road. Anvil-headed cloud cells formed a long rank from the Gulf of Lions into the angry sunset. They were filmy white at their stratospheric tops and purplish black below, tinged with lurid brushstrokes of copper on their western flanks, where the lowering sun still sulked. Lightning flickered in their hearts and beneath the grey-curtained bases. A low rumble of thunder became almost continuous as Minanonn bore his pa.s.sengers farther south.
”Don't worry,” the former Battlemaster rea.s.sured Elizabeth.
”We'll be at the cave ahead of the rain.”
”It will mean an end to this awful heat wave, at any rate,” she said.
”Has it seriously distressed you?” Dionket asked in surprise.
”I found it pleasant myself. Reminiscent of Duat. We could have used a bit more humidity, though, to make it genuinely homelike.”
”You First Comers!” Creyn said, amused. ”Nostalgic for the ancestral h.e.l.lhole.”
”Nonsense, lad,” said Minanonn. ”Duat was much more comfortable than this planet. A soft haze to temper the sun's glare, never these prolonged droughts for part of the year and half drowning the rest. On Duat, the rains came fairly uniformly all year round. And the temperature was rarely low enough to chill, even at aphelion.”
”He speaks of the Tanu motherlands, of course,” Dionket explained. ”We lived in the equatorial regions and the Firvulag at the poles, where the really high mountains were. Ghastly country, that of the Foe. Constant winter.”
”No changing seasons at all?” Elizabeth asked.
”None to speak of,” said the Lord Healer. ”Our planetary axis had a minimal tilt.”
”A stiff-necked world,” Creyn observed, ”like the peoples it bred. Fortunately, the sp.a.w.n of Duat's daughter-planets proved more flexible. It was they who engendered the peaceful galactic federation that rejected Duat's attempt-our attempt-to reintroduce the ancient battle-religion.”
”Brede told me something of your history,” Elizabeth said.
Her gaze was fixed on the looming line of thunderheads. ”At the time of your exile, were the Duat colonies the only planets in your galaxy that had an interstellar socioeconomy?”
”The only planets,” Dionket said, ”but not the only people.
There were the s.h.i.+ps.”
”The s.h.i.+ps.” Elizabeth's voice was tinged with wonder. ”They seem incredible, even though I have Brede's gla.s.s model. How could highly intelligent life-forms evolve in a void?”
”There is no void,” said the Lord Healer. ”The s.p.a.ce between the stars is pervaded by matter and energy. All of the organic molecules necessary for the generation of life are present in the clouds of dust that drift through the galaxies. This one, as well as the star-whirl of Duat that is its sister.”
Elizabeth was silent. The surrounding air had attained a preternatural clarity. Even without exerting her fa.r.s.ensing eye, she seemed able to detect each separate leaf on the jungle trees, each tuft of dry gra.s.s between the ruts of the dusty road, each pebble and gra.s.shopper and rock-rose of the arid verge. She finally said, ”We had seven hundred and eighty-four human planets in our Milieu, including Old Earth. How many worlds were daughter-colonies of Duat at the time of your exile?”
”More than eleven thousand four hundred,” Dionket replied.
”Even with the attrition from the Galactic Civil War, the total population approached one hundred fifteen billion.”
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