Felice Landry watched Counselor Mishima manipulate the elaborate lock mechanism of the cellar door. It swung ponderously open and they entered the old wine-keep, dank and musty and with a faint over-scent of ozone. She stared at the gazebo, that unlikely gate to freedom, and clutched her new arbalest to her black-armored bosom. She was trembling, nauseated, exerting all her willpower to keep from disgracing herself in this ultimate moment. For the first time since early childhood, her eyes, within the T-shaped Grecian helmet opening, were sticky-lashed with tears…
“We will translate you in groups of four, as I have already explained,” said Counselor Mishima. “Your extra baggage will follow after an interval of five minutes, so be prepared to retrieve it from the tau-field area. And now, if the first people will position themselves…”
Elizabeth Orme watched without emotion as Bryan, Stein, Richard, and Felice crowded closely into the latticed booth and stood motionless. All of them, she thought, have made their plans except me. They have their goals, touching or comical or mad. But I’ll be content to drift through the Exile world in my scarlet balloon, looking down on all the people and the animals, listening to wind and the cry of birds, smelling pollen, resin from the forest, smoke from wildfire on the grassland. I’ll come to earth only when I feel that the Earth is real again and I am. If we ever can be…
Mirrored walls sprang up as Mishima threw the switch. The four people in the gazebo were on their way. Aiken Drum, his golden suit glittering with a hundred reflections from the cellar lights, stepped forward impulsively.
“Damn! So that’s all there is to it? Not even enough power drain to dim the lamps!” He studied the vinelike cables that seemed to grow out of the packed soil of the floor and disappear somewhere short of the vaulted ceiling. Mishima warned him to touch nothing, and Aiken gave him a reassuring gesture. But he had to get a close look. The glassy framework was shot through with faintly moving patterns hovering at the edge of visibility. The black bodies of the lattice-nodes each enclosed a tiny point of unwinking light that seemed to be shining at a great distance.
“How long does it take for people to get from here to there?” Aiken asked. “Or should I say from now till then?”
“The translation is in theory instantaneous,” replied Mishima. “We maintain the field for some minutes in order to enable a safe exit. And I may say that never once, in the four years that the Human Polity has carried on the work of Madame Guderian, has there been an accident to time-travelers.”
Aiken said, “Counselor, I’d like to take one more thing with me into Exile. Can you give me a description and diagram of this device?”
Without a word, Mishima opened the oaken cabinet and took out a small plaque-book It was obvious that other travelers had made the same request. Aiken kissed the plaque triumphantly and stowed it in a large pocket below the right knee of his shining suit.
Mishima stepped to the control console and switched off the field. The mirror-walls winked out. The gazebo was empty.
“They have passed safely through the portal. Now the rest of you may enter.”
Claude Majewski hefted his twenty-kilo pack and was the first inside. Old Man, you’re crazy, he said to himself, then smiled because he could hear Gen saying it. On a sudden impulse, he opened the pack compartment that held the carved and inlaid box from the Polish mountains and took it out. Is there really a Pliocene world beyond the gate, Black Girl? Or is it a hoax after all, and do we step out of the glass cage into death? Oh, Gen, go with me. Wherever…
Sister Annamaria Roccaro was the last to get into position, smiling in apology as she crowded next to Aiken Drum and felt the hard tools in his pockets pressing through the sleeves and skirts of her habit. Aiken was nearly a head shorter than the sturdy nun, almost as small as Felice but in no way as vulnerable. He’d survive, would Aiken Drum. May the rest of us as well! And now, Mother of God, hear my archaic prayer: Salve Regina, mater misericordiae; vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus, exsules, filii Hevae. Ad te sus-piramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle. Eia ergo, advocato nostra, ilka tuos misericordes oculos ad nos convene. Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exih’um ostende…
Mishima threw the switch.
There was pain of translation and a momentous snap hurtling them into the gray limbo. They hung without breath or heartbeat, each one screaming alone into silence. And then they felt sudden warmth and opened their eyes to a blinding dazzle of green and blue. Hands were pulling them, voices urging them to step forward out of the shimmering area that had been the gazebo, to step down a little, to come out quickly before the field reversed itself, to enter into Exile.
PART II — The Initiation
CHAPTER ONE
“Come along, sport, come along now. Step down a little. We’re the guardians of the time-portal. We’re here to help you. Come on. You’re feeling zonked-out right now, but that’ll pass away right quick. Just relax and come along. You made it safe to Exile. You’re safe, you hear me, cob? Come on now. We’re all going along to Castle Gateway. You can relax there. We’ll have a nice jabber and answer all your questions. Come on.”
As the pain receded and his wits phased in again, Bryan was at first aware only of the nagging voice and brilliant light. He was conscious of somebody holding him by the right wrist and upper arm, a blurred figure he couldn’t quite focus on. Another someone seemed to be vacuuming dust off his clothes with a hand-held machine. Then he was being forced to walk and he looked at his feet and saw them quite clearly, shod in a pair of pigskin boots with crinkled soles, moving first over damp granite, then on thick sod with grass that had been mowed or cropped short. He was stepping on small daisylike flowers. A butterfly with zebra stripes and long swallowtails hung motionless on a dew-spangled weed.
“Wait,” he mumbled: “Stop.” The insistent tugging left off and he was able to stand still and look about him. The newly risen sun shone over a wide expanse of green tableland going golden in its higher, drier reaches, Tanzania? Nebraska? Dorubezh?
France.
Nearer, there were rounded boulders of crystalline rock. They had been used to mark the sides of a path that led back to a peculiar, indistinct block hanging in the air like a heat mirage. Men dressed alike in white tunics and pants with blue cords about the waist were gathered around Richard and Stein and Felice, Several more guardians stood waiting for the other members of Group Green to arrive. The wavering force field winked out. Bryan insisted upon standing still until it reappeared with four more human figures, which the guardians hastened to lead into open ground.
“All safe, sport. You can come along with me now. The rest’ll all be tagging along.”