Tale of the Thunderbolt (Vampire Earth #3) - Page 7

La Citadelle, Haiti: A black revolutionary known as "the Tiger"-who earned his reputation by sawing people in half-dreamed of Haiti's Citadelle as one of a ring of forts to guard Hispaniola against a return of the white slaveholders. The work of two hundred thousand laborers, of whom twenty thousand perished and, according to island legend, had their blood used as mortar to cement the stones, reshaped the top of the mountain with battlements faintly resembling a giant ship. This grim monument looks out on eroded mountains, now being reclaimed by the lush forests of the days when Christopher Columbus viewed them.

Set in walls a hundred feet high and fully thirty feet thick at their base, gunports like shaded black eyes look out on the north coast of Haiti and the steep track leading to La Citadelle. It is exactly the kind of cyclopean monument the Kurians make their refuge as they order the affairs of men. Behind walls of cannonballs piled like banks of skulls, there are storerooms and cisterns enough to feed an army for a year, space for troops, and catacombs beneath ready for untold horrors. The Kurian Lord has perches aplenty to stand, brooding at an altitude of three thousand feet while the stars whirl overhead. He could contemplate his domain in security, knowing that even a United States infantry division of the twentieth century would have a tough time blasting his men from the mountaintop, but their like no longer exist on Vampire Earth.

Were the Citadelle's lord looking out from his sun-bleached battlements one bright April morning, he would have seen a strange column ascending the switchback trail to his door. A black man hikes in the lead, being helped up the hillside by his sniffing dogs. Behind him a muscular mass of apelike Grogs, using their arms as much as their legs to negotiate the slope, followed by a taller, fawn-colored relative carrying a gun with a six-foot barrel. Behind him a handsome, dark-haired man with a slight limp uses a staff to get help up the worst parts of the trail. Ragged black soldiers, all wary eyes and ready weapons, follow in single file. The Kurian might think it a strange, pathetic assortment to challenge the stronghold atop the Pic La Fer-riere, let alone the entire Kurian Order.

David Valentine's second thoughts collided with third- and fourth-thoughts on the long climb. He had thrown the dice with his life lying on the table on more than one occasion, but never on such a strange gamble as this. Were it not for Ahn-Kha's steady presence beside him, locking his long toes around tree roots and rocks as he helped him over washouts on the trail up the mountain, he would have returned to the Thunderbolt days ago and quitted his task. Despair had never struck him when the bullets were cracking all around, but waited to infiltrate once he had a full belly and a decent night's sleep.

He had rejoined the Thunderbolt after a morning with Victo spent following the Limbe River to the coast, and from there a short canoe trip to her anchorage off Labadee. Following a freshwater shower and a change of clothes, he held an open-air meeting on the stern, telling his story to the Jamaican pirates and New Orleans mutineers, and explaining what would happen over the next few days.

As sunset fell, the officers and men decided that Carrasca and Post would stay with the ship, and a few members of the crew would join Grogs and the Haitian guerrillas on the next step: making contact with the "Kurian ally" in his moun-taintop fortress. This stirred the interest of the crew; they

had more questions than he had answers. The Thunderbolt would be safe enough. Her main armament had been repaired, and she was as ready to face a seaborn challenge as the day she sailed into Cape Haitian.

With that finished, the Grogs and men took their arms from the locker, and such provision as the NCOs could force them to carry. A beach party of sorts welcomed them to the mountains of Haiti, with comic sign language and a babble of English, French, and Spanish along with island patois the method of intercourse. Two mornings later, Valentine found himself sweating up La Ferriere's escarpment with his odd conglomeration, guided by Victo.

Two silent sentries in tiger-striped uniforms stood in the lot before the main gate to the fortress. A rusting wall of aged jeeps and trucks was the first, and least impressive defense of La Citadelle, blocking the last few feet of what was left of the road up the slope.

A circle of Haitians Valentine took to be porters lounged in the shade of the high point looking out over the path like the prow of a massive ship. Some slept, some talked, one or two eyed the visitors with interest when a pair of sailors lit cigarettes. Valentine thought of the thousands of their forefathers it must have taken to build this castle among the clouds.

The guards and Victo exchanged more singsong words in their Creole. Valentine caught "Papa Legba," and "oui" but little else. A man in a clean white uniform appeared at the main gate and led them to an inner courtyard. There did not seem to be many inhabitants in evidence, just a handful of sentries keeping watch on the approaches to the fortress. The faint cry of a baby came from a high, narrow window. Below it the sound of the visitors echoed between the courtyard's stone walls.

"Papa Legba awaits," Victo translated. He looked eager, like a child about to be taken to Santa Claus himself on Christmas Eve.

The majordomo in the white uniform had the rest wait, then led Valentine and Victo deeper into the fortress. The air inside the thick walls was cool and still. They went up stone staircases, past small galleys which once held cannon, and into some kind of common room. Shafts of light came in from openings in the roof to splash yellow on the high walls. A sizable fireplace dominated one wall, fronted by chairs and tables of mahogany, roughly finished as if the resident eschewed form for function. An old man sat before the fireplace. Nothing but dead ashes filled the hearth. He stood, his back still to them, and took a crutch from the wall.

"So they sent a Valentine to see me. My cousins to the north do have a sense of irony."

Victo fell to his knees, hands clasped under chin, and began to weave back and forth.

"I really am old. It's safe to say I'm the oldest sentient you shall ever converse with, unless you touch one of the minds encased in what you call a touchstone. But I hardly think they'd count,"

Father Max used to talk about the touchstones, cryptically carven rocks containing a world's worth of information. Touching one caused what the old priest called a "revelation of sorts"-if it didn't drive you mad. Valentine had never heard of minds being encased in them.

Papa Legba turned around. He was a hunched-over, wizened figure, resembling a Haitian great-grandfather, right down to toothless gums. Weariness colored his every movement and expression.

"What's your game, Kurian?" Valentine asked.

"Show some respect," Victo interjected, his prayers over. "Papa's been protecting you since you came to this island. If you don't see that, you're a fool."

"You have no reason to love us, Valentine the younger. And I have even less reason to love you: I was once a Great One in the north. My mind-mates-what you would call a 'family'-are dead at your father's hand. From the perspective of my years, it hardly happened yesterday."

Valentine kept his face a mask, confusion and suspicion and interest all warring within.

"But that is war, and I hardly blame your race. I returned here to forget. Out of my sorrow came thinking, and from thinking came wisdom. After all, you've been supplanted out of your birthright, and you're being consumed even now. It is no wonder you struck back, though many said you'd be happy with Kur setting the parameters of your existence."

"Came to play god? I'm supposed to kneel before you and thank you for your divine intervention?"

The Kurian sighed. "One definition of man: a biped who is ungrateful."

He looked Valentine in the eyes. The Cat felt the same vertigo that he'd felt in Jamaica when he met the Specter's gaze across the sights of Ahn-Kha's rifle. He shifted his eyes away, feeling a little like a cowed dog.

The Kurian's toothless mouth turned up. "Let us turn from dark thoughts. Have a seat. Would you care for refreshment? No? Very well. To your duty, then."

"My duty is to bring back this weapon you claim to have. What is it?"

"A powerful one, a tool that can stop my brethren's avatars."

"What's it do? Shut down the connection between you and your Reapers, maybe? That would be handy."

"All in good time. You're an impatient race. Excuse me, I must sit. I tire easily," the Kurian said. "Valentine, surely you know that the first Door opened in the Western Hemisphere was right here on Haiti. There was a rich, rich harvesting of auras during the revolts against the colonial powers. I, and one or two others, encouraged some of the excesses. Papa Legba is the keeper of doors and gates, according to local legend. In this case, they were right. The door to the 'other world' was in my care. It is in my care now. The 'other world' just happened to be Kur."

Valentine bit his tongue. He envisioned what was beneath the mask the Kurian wore; a shriveled, blue-skinned bat-winged octopus lurked behind the grandfatherly fakery. But to see one of the legendary doors-

"You'd like to see the gate, wouldn't you? I will show you. It's safe enough. This island isn't important anymore- my cousins do not use it. They have others, bigger and better located. Those hungry for their own principalities go through the newer ones on the larger continents. Asia is popular at the moment: they're much less troublesome than you North Americans. I'm 'just minding the store' as your kind used to say up North."

Valentine pushed at the old ashes in the fireplace with the toe of his boot. "You want to aid us against your 'cousins'?"

The Kurian shimmered for a moment in thought or emotion. "This is a beautiful world, with a gifted though primitive people living on it. I don't care to see it become a corpse, like Kur. Sad. Kur is a husk. The surface has been cleaned of all life save lichen. The same could happen here. That's why I stopped feeding on your kind."

"You aren't afraid of discovery?"

"I keep up appearances with the help of my scoundrel friend on the Cape, and a few others. Though it might be hard to say with whom the good Boul really sides, just as he does not know all my devices."

"I don't believe you," Valentine said in English, to prevent another outraged ejaculation from Victo. "How do you stay alive? I thought you needed to feed to live."

"I do feed, off vital aura, as you call it. Though you might say I just wet my lips, rather than drinking great drafts as my cousins do."

"You kill only once a month, I imagine. I'll write the Vatican and nominate you for sainthood."

"Your letter would be laughed at. There is still a powerful figure at Saint Peter's, true, but he comes from Kur, and his cardinals are to be feared. I will show you how I feed. No one dies. No one is hurt. I shall give you a tour, starting with the Door to Kur. Then you'll see me feed."

Valentine took his hands from his weapons. "You have me curious. 'Curiosity killed the cat' is another saying we have up North, though I hope it won't prove out today."

A pair of Haitian servants-"Voudou priests," Victo whispered in his ear-emerged at a wave of Papa Legba's hand. One had a small chair, like something a child might be carried in, on his back. The Kurian slid into it and crossed a seat belt across his chest.

"I have a litter for going outside, but this works better on some of the stairs, as you will see."

The priests led the way, through narrow corridors and down shoulder-width stairs. Valentine's sensitive nose noticed a change in the quality of the air, and he knew himself to be underground. The priests lit and took up oil lamps. They came to a wider corridor. A heavy door stood at the end, and Valentine startled when he saw two pinched-looking Reapers slumbering in alcoves to either side. The skin was stretched tight over their bony faces, and lips were rolled back from black pointed teeth.

"They sleep," the old Kurian said. "Have no fear."

Valentine found his heart beating in the vicinity of his Adam's apple as he passed the motionless robed figures. If they came around, they would make a quick end of him and Victo.

"I wake them once or twice a month, when sacrifices of goats and cattle are brought to Baron Samedi," Legba said in English, winking at Valentine. "I'm not the only one using that convenient charade. I would suspect there are a dozen or so Baron Samedis on the other side of the island, though the ceremonies may be a little more gruesome. Religion is useful. Don't think it applies just to ignorant Haitians. When we took your country in the days of your father and grandfathers, many of my cousins appeared as Jesus, and his supplicants were taken to Rapture in the embrace of the avatars. Dressed in white they look like tall, thin angels, and their serene eyes held many a Christian spellbound."

Beyond the doors was a well-room, less finished than the rest of the fortress, built around a pit, perhaps two and a half meters across. The stones lining the walls were not cut and shaped, but irregular, larger at the bottom and growing smaller as they neared the curved ceiling. The priests lit two more torches standing in brackets, and the room quickly filled with an oily reek. The Kurian slid off his chair-backpack. Thanks to the torchlight, Valentine could see that the wall stones formed a vaguely unsettling mosaic of light and dark rock, rather like tentacles reaching from the dark well.

"That leads to what is purportedly a cistern, Valentine. Care to climb down?"

Valentine looked down the granite-walled well. A series of metal rungs descended into the bottom. Only a single row of bricks acted as a warning of the depths beneath. Valentine's sharp eyes picked out a bottom lit by a dim red glow. He looked at Victo. The spy shrugged, wide-eyed-and kept clear of the pit.

Valentine felt a curious pull from the depths. "Why not? I've always wanted to see one of these Doors."

"If you hear anything on the way down, or while you are there, climb up quickly," Legba advised

"You can count on it."

Suppressing a shudder, Valentine clambered down the ancient metal rungs, testing each with a foot before resting his full weight on it. As he neared the bottom of the cistern, he felt if grow a good deal warmer. Appropriate enough for a descent into hell. The rungs gave way to handholds carved into the stone, placed closer together than the rungs on a regular ladder. Feeling for the holes with his feet, he descended until he stood inside the cistern.

Clammy sweat coursed down his back, but its source was not the heat. He loosened the machete in the sheath strapped to his thigh and touched the automatic at his hip. Three rings of characters resembling Chinese ideograms surrounded him, melted into the rock and lit from within. Curious, he probed one with his foot. His eyes adjusted, and he peered

at the walls. Several tunnels, also circled with the ideograms, emptied into the room, the letters glowed red, like the heating coils on an electric burner. He walked over to one and looked more closely. It gave off no heat, and reminded him of an old present from the Lifeweaver who Oversaw his training as a Cat. He walked back to the ladder and looked up.

"There are different doors down here. Do they all go to Kur?" he whispered up the shaft.

"In a way, Valentine. You're looking at me from Kur itself. The gate is in the middle of the well."

With two hands and two feet again on the ladder, Valentine looked around. "You must be joking. How can that be? I didn't feel anything when I descended. It just got warmer."

"The Doors work just like that. They are literally doors, joining one world to another. When you pass from a dining room to a kitchen, you do not feel anything save the heat of the stove. You haven't crossed thousands of light-years, you've just gone a few feet. I'm not a scientist who can explain it, but two pieces of space have been joined like a button joins two pieces of material in a garment."

Valentine sniffed the air, tasted it. It seemed drier than the air of Haiti, and it had a metallic tang like a blacksmith's shop when the forge is working. A whisper sounded from deep within one of the tunnels, and he heard a dry scrape like a snake shedding its skin on a rock. Valentine heard the shuffling gait grow nearer. He did not bother with a last look around, and shot up the ladder. A sudden, not-so-irrational fear of things reaching for him, grabbing him to pull him away from Earth forever spurred him in his climb. He sprang from the mouth of the well.

He was trembling.

"I thought I might skip the grand tour for now. Just out of curiosity, what does come up that ladder?"

"No one for thirty or more of your years, Valentine. And before that for a long march of years, much more disappeared

down it than came back up. Remember, there were hungry minds on Kur for centuries before we seized your planet."

Valentine's imagination, always too eager to supply visions at the wrong moment, visited him with images of bound Haitians being thrown down the well to blood-smeared shapes below. The torchlight's dancing shadows turned to a magic-lantern show of human souls in torment.

Valentine's eyes met the Kurian's, and he felt that sinking sensation again, not unpleasant this time, for it calmed his pounding heart.

"You're a sensitive man, young Valentine," the Kurian observed. "What leaps your mind makes."

"I've seen enough," he said, sniffing at the substance clinging to his clothing. It smelled like flour. The procession capped the torches and took up lanterns and the aged Kurian and left the well-room. From his seat on the bearer's back, the Kurian smiled at Valentine's relief.

"We leave the Citadelle tomorrow morning, and I shall take you to my true home, the palace ruins. I invite you to share my hospitality under these austere roofs, but somehow I think you will prefer to sleep outside the walls tonight."

"You read my mind," Valentine said.

"What I could. Your father was-what is the expression-an 'open book.' You keep more of yourself under lock and key. Afraid of what's in there?"

Valentine backed out of the room before the Kurian could say more.

They strung mosquito netting between wrecked trucks. Valentine and Ahn-Kha bedded down inside a defunct tap-tap, still brightly painted where the encroaching rust had not yet touched. Faces, slogans, depictions of food, and animals adorned the old shell.

Ahn-Kha gnawed on the leg of something Valentine guessed to be a dog.

"My David, you saw a Door?"

"Yes."

"My father told me they were simple-looking things. Just an arch of stone, no different from the gate we used to go into the courtyard."

"This one was in a well. It couldn't have been one of the original Doors of the Interworld Tree-those were supposed to be huge. They were built by the race that came before the Lifeweavers."

"I did not know this. I thought the Kurians built the network between worlds."

"Yes, but it's built on an older one, or they learned how to do it from an older race. Some kind of creatures made out of pure energy. The man who told me about it called them the Pre-Entities. They go back hundreds of millions of years. They were the original beings that existed on vital aura. They left behind their science when they finally died out, and the Lifeweavers found it. There was some kind of schism, and a bunch of Lifeweavers on a planet called Kur learned how to live off vital auras, becoming vampires, in effect."

"This word, Lifeweavers. In my tongue, they were called the 'prime movers,' I think it would be in English. Some of them use you, yes?"

"Help us."

"And the Gray Ones and other creatures who fight you, are they being 'helped' by the Kur?"

"Okay, use us. Change us even. You've heard people say they bred the Grogs. Maybe they did the same with us. Once a Lifeweaver told me that my species 'exceeded their expectations.' It makes me wonder. Lately I've felt like a pawn in a game of chess, but I can't see the rest of the board."

"Paw in chest?"

"A pawn. Chess-an old strategy game. Remember the Big Man's office in Omaha? You've seen the board. Eight squares by eight squares. The pieces are figures meant to represent different medieval icons. They move into an opposing piece's square, and it is removed from the game. The

pieces are supposed to be kings and queens and knights and things. The pawns, well, they're the-"

"Cannon fodder," Ahn-Kha said, ears dancing, as they tended to do when he was pleased with himself.

"Yes. They tend to get taken off the board by the more powerful pieces."

Ahn-Kha crunched the bone between his teeth, like a ruminant with its cud. "Tell me, my David. In chess, can a pawn kill an enemy king?"

"Yes."

"Then be that pawn."

The next day, Valentine's party grew. A throng of voudou priests, porters, guerrillas, Grogs, and Valentine all shared a breakfast of rice porridge, ladled into wooden bowls from a larger pot. The unknown chef added texture by throwing in chunks of sweet potato, making three straight days he'd eaten it in one form or another. He had already grown tired of the endless parade of sweet potatoes and rice.

Papa Legba bobbed out the gate in a litter carried by four strong porter-priests. It reminded Valentine of pictures he had seen of Oriental monarchs being toted around in curtain-draped chairs. They left the walls of the massive Citadelle atop its mountain and made the descent northward on the landslide-broken road.

Valentine watched the sweating, straining back muscles of the porter-priests as they negotiated the trail. "You'd think a voodoo spirit could find a better way to get around," he muttered to Ahn-Kha.

On the way down, he had time to admire the view. Scattered clouds fled the coming sun. To the west, the Chaine de Belance and the Massif du Nord joined at the heart of the guerrilla country. To the north, partly hidden in morning mists, the old plantation plains stretched to Cape Haitian and the Caribbean, with further lower mountains to the east. New forests fought to make a comeback against soil weakened by erosion. He looked up at the fortress behind and

above and tried to guess where the door to Kur was buried. Odd to think that another world can be so close, he thought. As if you could climb the mountains to the moon by joining it at the horizon.

Ahn-Kha glared at the sun, his ears drooping. "Too hot here, my David. It drains. The sun fixes itself to you like a leech."

"We won't be in it all day. They said it is only a few miles."

Valentine halted and let the men and Grogs walk by. The mixed forces had a sprightly step, though the Grogs panted in the heat. The new acquaintances, the feeling of being among friends-or in the Haitians' case, having allies off the island-formed a bond between the diverse groups.

The column plunged into new forest, vigorous young trees shooting upward, racing each other for the sun. As the land flattened out, they emerged into a field of palmetto, which in turn gave way to better-tended lands. Food crops and orchards surrounded them. In the distance, Valentine picked out the ruins of a mansionlike palace. A newer roof had been grafted onto old walls, though smaller wings of the old building still languished in disrepair.

Glorious gardens surrounded the hilltop half-ruin. Valentine had seen small decorative gardens before, but never anything on such a scale. Flowers representing each color of the spectrum stood in well-tended rows, clipped paths running around and between them, for a mile all around. A lake, shade trees, even a small fountain stood about the earthquake-ravaged walls.

Haitians in their eternal straw hats worked the fields and gardens. They had a sleek vitality to them: the healthy look that an ample diet and activity brings. Valentine had seen many farms and camps under Kurian rule, but never one where the occupants looked so hale.

Papa Legba, as Valentine was now willing to call him with grudging interest, descended from his litter. Valentine

watched rib bones like oversize fingers spread and then close as the Kurian drank in the air.

"Come, come, Valentine, Victo. Walk with me in my gardens. Bring your giant guardian, if you wish. Francier, look to our guests, would you? Take them to a well, and let them pick their desire from the orchards."

TaleOfTheThunderbolt

Some of the sailors elbowed each other as they admired the lithe Haitian girls.

Valentine jerked his chin, and the gesture brought Torres forward. "Keep the men out of trouble," he said, before joining the Kurian. Ahn-Kha sang out a few orders to the Grogs and followed.

Legba made his way, slowly and painfully, to a bleached stone bench in the garden. Victo and Valentine each took an arm and helped him sit. Haitian girls, all muscle and gleaming smile, ran to his aid from the well, bringing water.

"Thank you, my children," the old Kurian said.

"You know what you are called up North?" Valentine asked.

"No. I'm sure my former cousins settled on something outrageous."

"The 'Once-ler.' It's from an old children's book by a man named Seuss."

Papa Legba shook his head. "I haven't heard of it. I don't read much human work. Some Dostoyevsky. A few lines of poetry, perhaps. I know a little Baudelaire."

Valentine watched it drink.

"So Kurians do live off of something other than fear and death," Valentine said.

"Yes, we eat. Though not as much as a human."

"The people here are so strong-looking. I was expecting a bunch of half-dead skeletons. I thought you were just taking their vital aura in doses rather than all at once."

"It is a hard thing to explain, Valentine. You know all life creates aura, even single-celled organisms. To a certain extent, this aura is also projected, just as your body gives off extra heat. The healthier a body is, the more it throws off.

I'm able to live off this part of the aura, though only just. It is a bit like osmosis. I have to be careful when I sleep, however. I was napping in a grove some years back, and when I woke, the grass was dead all around, and I had killed the tree shading me.

"It has not been easy, no. And again no. Perhaps it can be compared to giving up a drug addiction. Except the body does not recover after healing itself of the need for the drug. I live with it, fight with it, every day. A real physical need, like starvation, not the psychological one so familiar to those who give up a habit. I can control myself while awake, but in my dreams, Valentine, in my dreams. When I sleep, it is six thousand years ago, or thirty, and I swill myself into a coma on the sweet screaming auras of your kind."

Legba's appearance flickered for a moment, and Valentine got a glimpse of multipupiled eyes, but the black face returned, licking its lips. "Why does evil have such strength? The thoughts, they grow on you in a way that virtuous deeds do not." Papa shut his eyes for a long moment, and his face became as false as a death mask. He opened his eyes again.

"My children, I've seen evil not just at its birth, but at conception. I was on the councils when we first began to learn from the Anciens about the secrets of aura. I spoke for scientific inquiry, for reason, for knowledge. What harm lay in facts?

"Harm, indeed. It had been so long since our race knew evil, it was as though we had regained the innocence of your Eden. Though the weight of the Opinion went against us, we did not fail in our resolve, so we met in secret. We pieced together what we could, supplemented the rest with our own formidable science that had researched aural energies. We called the others Dau'weem, which has no precise translation in French or English. The closest I can come is 'back-thinkers.' We were the Dau'wa, the 'forward-thinkers,' and held ourselves superior.

"It would be easier to lay the finger on one evil being.

Say that this Dau 'wa pushed us into what we became. But it was not so simple on Kur. We were scientists interested only in truth, and we were ready to subvert the Opinion even at the cost of our lives. The arrest of a Dau 'wa galvanized us, and we began to plan against the day when there might be a more widespread persecution. We planned escape routes to other worlds, began to talk of weapons and plots. Sure enough, some of us, purely in the interest of science, tried out our theories on plants, animals, and finally a sentient. I remember the first time I fed on a sentient, some trembling wide-eyed creature from a long-nighted world of rock and ice. I consumed one and then another, and found that each aura was richer, as the terror in their pounding hearts mounted, knowing what was coming. I developed a taste for it.

"Some of them fought. We learned-what you would call the hard way-that it could be dangerous to drain the food ourselves, we turned to intermediaries, using our own DNA as well as others, to design the creatures you call Reapers. It took us ages to get the connections right, to get our animating guidance flowing out and the auric channels to us. In the midst of all this, we were unmasked. It was heresy on such a grand scale, I think the councils were unsure of how to handle it. They dithered, and we acted. Some fled to other worlds, including yours, and tried to carve out niches where we could live in hiding. A few recanted, but the rest of us used our avatars as weapons. We told ourselves lies, that it was us or them, justifying any tactics. They had forgotten war, but we took to it with a will, and our skill waxed.

"Kur was ours. During the battle, we made the most terrible discovery yet. A Dau'weem has the richest aura of all, like nothing we had experienced before. We began to openly boast of being connoisseurs of death, and we hunted our brothers up and down the tunnels of Kur.

"That proved to be a mistake. Had we pushed our advantage at that time, we could have owned every portal in the

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