“So I’ll need a week or two to work out the fewkin’ details!” Aiken shot back.
There would be other coal deposits much nearer,” Claude Majewski said. “Those modern maps of yours are deceptive, Aiken. They show the strata and deposits as they exist today, in the twenty-second century, not as they were six million years ago. There used to be little limnic coal basins all over the Massif Central and a really large deposit at Saint-Etienne, but they were all worked out late in the twentieth century. Go back to the Pliocene and you’ll probably find easy pickings just a few kloms south of here. Find some near a volcano, and you might luck out with natural coke!”
“Better hold off establishing Pliocene Mining, Unlimited, until you eyeball the territory,” Richard advised Aiken with a sour grimace. “The local honchos might have their own ideas about us helping ourselves to the natural resources.”
“Entirely possible,” Bryan agreed.
“We could convince them to let us have a piece of the action,” said Felice. She smiled. “In one way or another.”
The nun said, “We could also try to avoid conflict by going to an unsettled area.”
“I don’t think that’s Felice’s style,” Aiken said. “She’s looking forward to a little fun and games, aren’t you, babe?”
Landry’s pale frizzy hair was standing out from her head in a charged cloud. She was wearing the simple cheongsam again. “Whatever I’m looking forward to, I’ll find. Right now all I want is another drink. Anybody coming with me?” She strolled back into the auberge, followed by Stein and Richard.
“Somebody should tell those two they’re wasting their time,” the old man muttered.
“Poor Felice,” Amerie said. “What an ironic name for her, when she’s so dreadfully unhappy. That aggressive pose is just another form of armor, like the hockey uniform.”
“And underneath she’s just crying for love?” Elizabeth inquired, her eyes nearly shut and a faint smile on her lips. “Be careful, Sister. That one’s standing in the need of prayer, all right. But she’s more of a black hole than a black sheep.”
“Those eyes eat you alive,” Aiken said. “Something damned inhuman is moving around in there.”
“Not even normally homophilic,” Majewski said. “But I’ll certainly grant you the damned.”
“That’s a cruel and cynical thing to say, Claude!” exclaimed the nun. “You don’t know anything of the girl’s background, any of the things that have maimed her spirit. You talk as though she were some monster, when all she is, is a pathetic child who has never learned how to love.” She took a deep breath. “I’m a medic as well as a nun. One of my vows is to help the suffering. I don’t know if I can help Felice, but I’m certainly going to try.”
A gust of wind lifted Amerie’s veil and she clutched it impatiently with one strong hand. “Don’t stay up too late, guys. Tomorrow’s creeping up on us.” She hurried off the terrace and disappeared into the darkened garden.
“Could be it’s the nunnie who’ll need the prayers,” Aiken said, giggling.
“You shut up!” barked Claude. Then he said, “Sorry, son. But you want to watch that smartass mouth of yours. We’re going to have enough trouble without your adding to it.” He looked at the sky as a prolonged and powerful bolt of lightning descended over the eastern hills. Ground-strokes rose up to meet it and there was a grumble of thunder. “Here comes the storm. I’m going to bed, too. What I want to know is, who the hell ordered the omens for this outfit?”
The old man stomped away, leaving Elizabeth, Aiken, and Bryan staring after him. Three successive thunderbolts gave him a ridiculous theatrical exit; but none of the people still on the terrace was smiling any more.
“I never told you, Aiken,” Elizabeth ventured at last, “how much I like your costume. You were right. It’s the most spectacular one in the whole auberge.”
The little man began snapping his fingers and clacking his heels like a flamenco dancer, turning and posing. Lightning shone on his loose-fitting garment. What seemed to be cloth of gold was actually a costly fabric woven from the byssus threads of Franconian mollusks, famed throughout the galaxy for beauty and toughness. All up and down the arms and legs of the suit were small flapped and fastened pockets; pockets covered the breast area and the shoulders and hips and there was a very large pocket on the back with an opening on the bottom. Aiken’s golden boots had pockets. His belt had pockets. Even his golden hat, with the brim tipped up jauntily on the right side, had a band full of tiny pockets. And every pocket, large or small, bulged with some tool or instrument or compressed decamole appliance. Aiken Drum was a walking hardware shop incarnate as a golden idol.
“King Arthur would dub you Sir Boss at first sight,” Elizabeth said, explaining to Bryan: “He plans to set himself up as a Pliocene Connecticut Yankee.”
“You wouldn’t have to bother with Twain’s solar eclipse to gain attention,” the anthropologist conceded. “The suit alone is enough to overawe the peasantry. But isn’t it rather conspicuous if you want to spy out the land?”
“This big pocket on my back has a chameleon poncho.”
Bryan laughed. “Merlin won’t have a prayer.”
Aiken watched the Lyon city lights dim and disappear as the approaching storm curtained the valley with rain. “The Connecticut Yankee had to contend against Merlin in the story, didn’t he? Modern technology versus sorcery. Science against the superstition of the Dark Ages. I cant remember too much about the book. Read it when I was about thirteen there on Dalriada and I know I was disappointed with Twain for wasting so much space on half-baked philosophy instead of action. How did it end? You know, I’ve forgotten! Think I’ll go hit the computer for a plaque of the thing for bedtime reading.” He gave Bryan and Elizabeth a wink. “But I may decide to aim higher than Sir Boss!”
He slipped off into the auberge.
“And then there were two,” Bryan said.
Elizabeth was finishing her Remy Martin. She reminded him in many ways of Varya, calm, incisively intelligent, but with the shutters always closed. She projected cool comradeship and not the slightest jot of sex.
“You won’t be staying with Group Green for long, will you, Bry?” she remarked. “The rest of us have built a dependence in these five days. But not you.”
“You don’t miss much. Are you sure your metafunctions are really gone?”
“Not gone,” she said. “But they might as well be. I’ve dropped into what we call the latent state because of brain damage. My functions are still there, but inaccessible, walled up in the right half of my brain. Some persons are born latent, with the walls. Others are born operant, as we say, and their mind-powers are available to them, especially if they receive proper training from infancy. It’s closely analogous to the acquisition of language by babies. My work back on Denali involved a good deal of that kind of training. Very rarely, we were even able to coax latents into operancy. But my own case is different I have just a few teaspoonful of my original cerebrum left. The rest is regenerated. The leavening was enough for a resoul job, and a specialist restored my memories. But for some unknown reason, metapsychic operancy seldom survives a really spectacular brain trauma.”
“What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“My husband and I were caught in a tornado while we were egging on Denali. It’s a sweet little world, with some of the galaxy’s worst weather. Lawrence was killed outright. I was broken to bits but ultimately restored. Except for the MP functions.”
“And is losing them so unbearable…” he began, then cursed and apologized.
But she was calm, as always. “It’s nearly impossible for a non-meta to understand the loss. Think of going deaf, dumb, blind. Think of being paralyzed and numb all over. Think of losing your sex organs, of becoming hideously disfigured. Put all of the anguish together and it’s still not enough, once you’ve known the other thing and then lost it… But you’ve lost something, too, haven’t you, Bry? Maybe you can understand something of the way I feel.”