The Golden Torc by Julian May
"Sorry to be so crude on the teleport, Merce lovie, but I'm feeling a little wonky myself yet. Lie still and I'll see if I can conjure you dry."
"You," she said. "You live."
"The baddest penny of them all. When I saw that we didn't stand a chance with our King Canute act, I figured every man for himself and spun myself a little air capsule. Popped up and only had enough strength left to float. This tub was a mighty welcome sight, I can tell you. I'd just about had it when it came sailing by, chirky as you please."
Slowly he dried her, cleansed her of salt and filth, clumsily restored her torn clothing. By the time he finished she was nearly asleep.
"The gown," she murmured, "is supposed to be rose-colored—not gold and black."
"I like gold and black better."
She tried to rouse herself. Her whisper retained a trace of the old coquetry. "Now then ... what's in that naughty mind of yours, Lord Lugonn Aiken Drum?"
"Go to sleep, little Lady of Goriah, little creative Mercy-Rosmar. There's plenty of time to talk about that tomorrow."
***
Winter rains swept over the Bordeaux marshes. The great river was silty, and the fish were shy, but there were still plenty of wildfowl and the small antlerless deer with the tusks, and in higher parts of the large island where the oaks and chestnuts grew, succulent mushrooms. Sukey craved them now and had nagged Stein until he agreed to go for a basketful. And then she was sorry when it began to rain so hard, and saw to it that there was a fine hot stew waiting for him and a good fire in the cabin hearth.
He returned when it was nearly dark. Besides the mushrooms, there was a haunch from a half-grown wild porker. He said, "The rest is cached up a tree. I can fetch it tomorrow. Cook this pig meat well, remember."
"I will, Stein. I wouldn't take a chance. You know that." She caught up one of the wet, callused hands and kissed it. "Thank you for the mushrooms."
"I'm all soaked," he admonished her. "Wait." He stripped off the squelchy buckskin jacket and pants and the rawhide moccasins and warmed himself at the fire while she leaned against him, watching the flames and smiling secretly. In the summer it would be born, and there would be plenty of time to search for other humans then, in the days of lasting calm weather when the great balloon would sail very slowly and land with scarcely a jolt. Next August or September, they would leave. And in the meantime, this wasn't so bad. They were all alone, completely safe, with plenty of food and a snug cabin and each other.
"Eat now," she told him. "I'll take care of your things and see to this meat."
Just before they were ready to go to bed the rain stopped. Stein lifted the door flap and stepped outside, and when she heard him returning she came to stand beside him in the peaceful, dripping dark. The stars were out.
"I love it here," she said. "1 love you. Oh, Stein."
He encircled her with one great arm, saying nothing, only looking up into the sky. Why should they leave this place? They had often talked of it, but why was it necessary to seek out other humans? Who knew what they would be like? Besides, there were wild Firvulag in the mainland wilderness. He knew, for he had seen their will-o'-the-wisp dancing lights once when he had gone exploring in the dinghy.
The two of them had been very lucky in avoiding contact with exotics on their way to this haven. It would be madness to run the risk all over again, doubly mad to take a newborn infant on a journey in the balloon. A balloon was too unpredictable. It flew its own way, not yours. If an unexpected strong wind took them, they might be carried hundreds of kilometers before being able to descend safely. They could be carried southeast, all across France, over the Mediterranean...
Never. He would never return there to look on what he had done. He would never do it.
"Oh, look!" Sukey cried. "A shooting star! Or—is it? It's moving too slowly. Too late, it's gone behind a cloud! And I forgot to make a wish."
He took her hand and led her back inside their little home. "Don't worry. I made the wish for you," he said.
***
The lights on the orbiting flyer's display were all dead now, and the exotic alarms no longer sounded a warning. Without power, without oxygen, the craft faithfully maintained its parking orbit, going around and around the world at an altitude of something less than 50, 000 kilometers.
During most of its orbit, the dull-black surface of the flyer made it virtually invisible against the backdrop of space. But now and then sunlight would strike the flight deck's front port, brightening Richard's face and causing a brief beam to reflect back to Earth.
Around and around the little broken bird went, endlessly circling.
***
In the Hall of the Mountain King at High Vrazel, the decimated council of the Firvulag met to discuss new business: the election of a new Sovereign Lord of the Heights and Depths, Monarch of the Infernal Infinite, Father of All Firvulag, and Undoubted Ruler of All the Known World.
"We're going to be in trouble this time," Sharn-Mes warned them.
"How so?" queried Ayfa.
He told her and the others the bad news. "The Howlers are demanding the franchise."
***
The great black raven spiraled downward to the place where its fellows were feeding. All along the North African shore, the scavenger birds were prospering as never before. The bounty had persisted for nearly four months now and still showed no sign of scarcity.
Pruuk! grated the newcomer. It ruffled its feathers malignantly when another bird was slow to move aside on the carcass of a porpoise. Pruuuuuuuk! it repeated, lifting its shoulders and opening its wings. It was a huge bird, half again as large as the others, and its eye sparkled with a mad gleam.
Uneasily, the rest of the flock moved back from the meal, leaving the great stranger to dine in solitude.
***
"They're coming! They're coming!" Calistro the goat-boy shouted as he dashed up the length of Hidden Springs Canyon, his charges forgotten. "Sister Amerie and the Chief and a lot of others!"
People swarmed from the cottages and huts, calling out to one another in excitement. A long train of riders was wending its way into the village outskirts.
Old Man Kawai heard the commotion and stuck his head from the door of Madame Guderian's rose-covered house beneath the pines. He sucked air through his teeth.
"She comes!"
A small cat came running from the box under the table, nearly tripping him when he spun about to snatch up a paring knife. "I must cut flowers and hurry to greet her!" He pointed a stern finger at the cat. "And you—see that your kittens are groomed so that you do not disgrace both of us!"
The gauze-screened door slammed. Muttering to himself, the old man chopped off an armful of the heavy June rose clusters, then rushed down the path scattering pink and scarlet petals behind him.
***
THE END OF PART THREE
Epilogue
REMEMBERING THE INCIDENT of his childhood, the young male ramapithecine came again to the Lake of Giant Birds.
There was a trail that some larger creatures had made more than a year ago, now kept open by other animals, for it had been a dry summer and the crater lake a boon to the thirsty. The ramapithecus was not in search of water, however.
Slowly he crept out into the open area along the crater rim. There was the bird! When he crouched under it, he wondered why it seemed smaller. And the hole in its belly was gone, along with the climbing-up thing. But this was his bird. He knew. The memory burned within him. His mother screaming her anger ... snatching, flinging away a precious joy that gleamed the color of the sun.
He searched. Into a bush. That bush, that gorse bush. He extended a brown-haired arm into the spiny thicket. Careful. Scratch at the dusty soil. Dig, probe.
His hand touched something smooth and hard. He drew it out with great care. It was as he remembered. The knobs snapped open, the halves turned, and this time it fitted around his neck snugly enough so that it could not be slipped off over his head. It would not be t
He got up and started down the path to the forest where his mate, more timid, was waiting for him. The sunshine was brighter, the smell of the maquis more pungent, the trilling of birds and insects more distinct. All of the things around him were transformed. It excited and pleasured and scared him a little, all at the same time. I'm coming! Yes, I am!
He leaped in his joy and the lesser creatures on the trail hastened to get out of his way.
***
THE END OF THE GOLDEN TORC
Volume III of the Saga of Pliocene Exile,
titled THE NONBORN KING, tells of a
realignment of power structures during a
turbulent period in the Many-Colored Land,
wherein human and exotic antagonists receive
their first intimations of a new-old menace
from the western morning.
Appendixes
Apologia Pro Geologia Sua
Map of Northwestern Europe
During the Pliocene Epoch
Map of Western Mediterranean Region
During the Pliocene Epoch
Map of Eastern Aven (Balearic Peninsula)
During the Pliocene Epoch
Apologia Pro Geologia Sua
THE ANCIENT LANDSCAPE depicted in this saga represents Europe during the so-called Mio-Pliocene Regression, when the Mediterranean was at its lowest ebb prior to the opening of the Straits of Gibraltar. The timing of the latter event has not been firmly established, but it may have taken place about 5.5 million years before the present, and I have rounded off this figure to 6 million years. During the Miocene Epoch, the Mediterranean Basin received Atlantic waters via two channels that opened and closed a number of times—the Betic Channel in southern Spain and the Rif Channel, which extended across northern Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The rupture at Gibraltar took place after the Rif and Betic channels had closed. With the opening of the Gibraltar Gate, the filling of the Mediterranean might have been a fairly rapid thing; perhaps only a hundred years after the cataclysm, influx from the Atlantic would have filled the basin of the Empty Sea completely, drowning the ancient Valley of the Rhône almost as far north as Lyon, and undoubtedly initiating tectonic adjustments that not only altered the Mediterranean floor into its present topography of abysses and shallows but also caused profound modification of the geology of the Italian peninsula, Sicily, and other unstable regions.*
The map of the Empty Sea that I have drawn is entirely speculative, especially in its treatment of the Southern Lagoon Estuary, the Great Brackish Marsh, and regions now known as the Alboran Sea and the Algerian Basin. There are, however, volcanic remnants that make my rubble dam at least remotely plausible; viz. at Cabo de Gata; at Cap de Trois Fourches, Morocco; and of course at Isla de Alboran itself.
I have postulated that Pontian flora and fauna were contemporaneous with the Mediterranean flood. The climate, geography, vegetation, and animal life of Pontian times are essentially as set forth in the novel—but geologists and paleobiologists will be quick to detect a few fudgings that I hope can be forgiven in the spirit of good fun. Ramapithecus, that enigmatic and fascinating hominid of many aliases, is placed as late as the Pontian by virtue of a jaw described in 1972 by G. H. R. von Koenigswald, to which he gave the name Graecopithecus freybergi.
The structure called the Ries (or Rieskessel) is the subject of some controversy—one school of thought accepting it as an astrobleme, while another holds it to be the result of a cryptovolcanic explosion that brought to the surface "meteoritelike" materials. Arguments for the latter viewpoint are summarized in G. H. J. McCall, Meteorites and Their Origins (New York: Wiley, 1973). The more dramatic impact hypothesis is elegantly supported in E. Preuss, "Das Ries und die Meteoriten-Theorie" (Stuttgart: Fortsehritte der Mineralogie, 1964, 41:271-312). McCall seems not to have considered the Preuss material in his later survey. In my novel, trajectory, velocity, and mass data are from Preuss. Both K/Ar and fission-track testing of the Moldavite tektites (usually considered of identical age with the Ries) yield—alas!—an approximate age of 14.7 — 0.7 million years.
Footnotes
The only other events remotely comparable to the flooding of the Mediterranean were the "Great Missoula Floods," which took place during the Pleistocene Ice Age in western North America. Melt waters from the Cordilleran Glacier of the Rocky Mountains flowed toward the west until they met a lobe of the Okanogan Glacier, which blocked Clark Fork Valley near the present Lake Pend Oreille in northern Idaho. This formed Glacial Lake Missoula, one of the largest freshwater bodies ever to collect in the western part of the continent. More than a thousand feet deep in some places, it inundated the valleys of western Montana until the natural dam of ice and rubble broke. Some 500 cubic miles of water drained from the lake through the Grand Coulee within a period of about two weeks, scouring the Washington landscape known as the Channeled Scablands and draining into the Pacific through the Columbia Gorge. Hydraulic damming in the gorge piled the flood waters some 400 feet above sea level in the region adjacent to Portland, Oregon. The flooding was apparently repeated a number of times. In comparing the Missoula Floods to the filling of the Mediterranean, one should recall that the Mediterranean Basin now holds about one million cubic miles of water; but in early Pliocene times, the basin is presumed to have been much shallower.
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Julian May, The Golden Torc