and bristling gills of lurid scarlet, the tarpon resembled cruising dragons rather than ordinary fish. Numbers of them exceeded three meters in length and they were capable of attaining an even greater size as the fisherman knew only too well. When hooked, a bulldog tarpon would fight with maniacal ferocity, sometimes for twenty hours.
He watched them parade by while the sun soared higher, bringing a sheen of sweat to his deeply tanned skin He wore only a pair of stagged dungarees, bleached by age and sail water His self-rejuvenating body was as powerful and firmly muscled as ever; but his face showed, as on a chart of flesh and bone, the pain-etched odyssey of the failed idealist. Only when one particularly large specimen of tarpon glided past, its jaw-plates scarred from an enconnter several seasons past. did the fisherman's mouth curve in a reminiscent, one-sided smile of peculiar sweetness.
Not you, he told the huge fish. You've had your turn on the hook. Another A greater.
Engrossed as he was in the study of the tarpon, he was instantly aware of the featherlight scrutiny" the farsense of the children, spying on him again, even though all of the inhabitants of Ocala knew that it was strictly forbidden to disturb him when the tarpon were running. None of the surviving senior rebeis would dream of it, remembering only too well the capabilities of the one who had led them in their challenge of the galaxy. But the second generation, now grown to restless young adulthood, was less inclined to reverence. Even his own children, Hagen and Cloud (never having been told of his aborted plans for them had the Rebellion succeeded), believed that his mental powers were diminished by time, and by his thus-far futile scrutiny of some 36,000 Pliocene solar systems in an attempt to locate other coadunate minds The disdain of the youngsters had been shaken only once:
last fall, when Felice Landry in her extremity besought help from what she believed were dark forces- So powerful had been the girl's projection of need that the operant metapsychics of Ocala, there on the other side of the world, had clearly farsensed what she was trying to accomplish at Gibraltar He had smiled at her temerarious rage in that whimsical manner of his. and said: "Why shouldn't the Angel of the Abyss take care of his own?" And forthwith he had combined and focused the psychoenergies of the forty-three surviving conspirators of the Metapsychic Rebellion, plus the uncoadunate but immense creativity of their thirty-two mature children, and vouchsafed the totality to the madwoman. And the Empty Sea filled.
This had been a mere hint, a shadow of his potential. But it was enough to make the more imaginative of the youngsters reassess their derogation of the lonely star-searcher.
Sitting there in the skiff, he felt them sweep him again, ever so discreetly He knew what they were up to They were bored with their exile on Ocala, bored with the murderous intrigues and harsh restrictions of their elders, and above all bored by their own lack of coadunale menial Unity (for none of the fleeing rebels had possessed the specialized training required of metapsychic preceptors). Now that Europe, the mysterious and alluring Many-Colored Land, was known to be in a slate of chaos, the more ambitious members of the second generation were hatching callow schemes of conquest. Not for them the patient search of planet after planet for kindred minds, the dream of a rescue from exile The children had hopes of achieving power and Unity right here on Pliocene Earth. And the bolder ones entertained an even greater ambition. An unthinkable one.
Out in the channel, the enormous fish cavorted in the sun.
He lifted his rod from its case, opened the tackle box, inspected the reel mechanism with his deep-vision, mounted it, and began to thread the line. The fly rod was laminated bamboo. Grafted by himself more than twenty years ago. He had made the reel as well. But that fishing line was the
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