Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (17 page)

NoPapaNO I don’t need that I don’t want to defeat or humiliate you it would be all WRONG if what you gave me was only recompense for your guilt
.

The First Magnate stood up. After a moment he regained his poise, but his face was ashen. Jack was entirely dressed now except for his formal suit coat. Paul took up the garment and held it so that Jack could slip his arms into it.

Paul said, “Can you show me a mental précis of exactly what you’d require?”

“I could try. But the problem is, I really don’t know what data I’m lacking. All my theoretical knowledge of erotic response is virtually meaningless without the mnemonic and imaginative framework that would enable me to personalize it. A normal human formulates his individual style of sexuality all throughout life, beginning in early childhood. I wasn’t able to do that. I have the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but no hope of putting them together without help from a generous, thoroughly experienced man. One that I respect and trust. One that I love.”

“Your Uncle Rogi …” Paul began.

“He’d
tell
me anything I asked. What he won’t do is lower his mindscreen of his own free will so that I can absorb the body of specialized data that I must have. And of course it would be unthinkable for me to invade him and steal his memories, even though I could do it without leaving a trace.”

“Your brothers …”

“Marc was willing to open that part of his mind to me—but he told me quite frankly that his libido is anomalous, and I believe him. Luc said he’d gladly volunteer if I thought Diamond would be happy with a homosexual husband.”

Jack inserted a tiny spray of white miniature roses and baby’s breath into his lapel, then reached into the flower box and held out another boutonniere to Paul. “Please, Papa—help me know what it is to be a sexual being.”

The First Magnate stared at the flowers, then at his son.

“If you can’t,” said Jack the Bodiless, smiling, “I’ll understand.”

“Give me that.” Paul took the small bunch of roses and poked it into his buttonhole. Then he surveyed the young bridegroom with a critical scowl and made a minute adjustment to Jack’s tie. “There. You look pretty damned good, if I do say so myself.”

“Shall we go?” Jack was calm. He picked up his top hat and gloves and began to move toward the door. In the shadowed room his aura was visible to Paul’s mind’s eye—a halo of gold and blue with twelve flamelike interior petals of star-white. It was more intense than any other vital-energy field the First Magnate had ever seen.

“Wait,” Paul said. Unaccountably, his eyes were stinging.

Jack turned. His father took a tentative step toward him, then enfolded him in a sudden, crushing embrace.

“All right, son,” he whispered. “Go for it. Your wedding gift.”

I
HAD TWO GOOD REASONS TO BE CROCKED ON THE DAY OF THE
wedding: I was scared out of my wits and at the same time dizzy with newfound hope.

Frightened because Hydra had attempted to do me in and would undoubtedly try again; giddy because Denis had saved me from the monster and there really seemed to be a chance that he wasn’t Fury after all.

Anne might have been wrong … or she might have been lying. A niggling notion had already prompted me to briefly consider the latter contingency during the course of her revelations back in February. I began to think about it a lot more seriously as I recuperated from the attack of the homicidal brook trout.

By Anne’s own admission, the only two members of the family without alibis on the night of the Hitchcock Hospital fire that nearly killed Baby Jack were Denis and herself. And she had admitted being tempted by Fury. I’m no psychologist, but it doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure out that Anne’s Athenetemptation might not have had an
external
source at all. She said she had identified with the goddess. What if her own submerged Fury persona had tried to seduce her “good” core personality, hoping to integrate the dissociated duo into a single, more efficient mind?

But why would an Anne/Fury order Hydra to kill its host body?

Ah, but she hadn’t died in the starship crash! She’d just been put on hold for a year or so, and eventually she’d emerge from the regen-tank as good as new. The accident might have served Fury’s evil purposes in a number of ways.

This was my reasoning: If the Dynasty—sans Anne—performed their exorcism of Denis and discovered that he was innocent, they’d be thrown back to square one, clueless except for
my hysterical babbling. But if Anne were there on the scene and Denis was proved not to be Fury, her good core persona would surely tell the other Remillards that Fury therefore had to be part of
her
. And she’d demand that they nail it, whatever the cost to herself.

Anne’s crash could have been arranged in order to preserve Fury from this threat of detection. Fury might even have figured out some way to take over Anne completely before her healing was completed!

I could take scant comfort now in the fact that Anne was switch-off down in Concord, guarded day and night by the operant security personnel Paul had arranged for. If Fury did reside in her brain, it might
not
be sunk in the usual state of tank-induced oblivion. It might still be fully aware and able to use its farsenses or even other metafaculties, actively egging on its slave Hydra to perpetrate assorted nefarious schemes—including the engineering of my demise before I managed to blow the gaff.

As I lay in Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital, getting checked out after the drowning attempt, I knew that I would have to transmit to Jack and Dorothée not one improbable piece of unsavory intelligence but two—and to do it, I’d have to keep out of Hydra’s clutches at least until the day of the wedding ceremony, a week away. Marc certainly would have been able to protect me, but God only knew how he’d react to my assertion that either Anne or Denis was certainly Fury. Most likely, he’d just laugh. He was highly skeptical about my fish story (he also doubted that Anne’s crash on Okanagon had involved a Hydra), and too wrapped up in his own private affairs to humor a drunken old geezer afraid of bogeymen under the bed. That left me with only one other surefire refuge from Hydra.

When the doctors decided I would survive the dunking, I got Marc to put me on an express flight to Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. The egg-bus didn’t crash en route—although I expected it to, momentarily—and dear old Malama Johnson met me at Lehue Skyport as I’d requested. She asked me no questions but just took me home with her.

“Don’ worry, Rogue,” she said, hugging me. “I gonna spin a kahuna cocoon roun’ you, make you kapu to aihamu, akua mano, an’ da kine monsters so long as you heah. Nothin’ gonna off you kokole while I’m aroun’.”

Even top metapsychic researchers concede that certain kinds of ancient “magic” are mysteriously efficacious. Whatever—no Hydra came prowling while I stayed in Malama’s house. After an
interval of peaceful tropical days punctuated with mango coolers and mai tais, we both flew back to the White Mountain Hotel in New Hampshire in time for the rehearsal on the eve of Dorothée and Jack’s nuptials.

When I was a young man it would have been inconceivable for a wedding party to have a 133-year-old ring-bearer or a roly-poly Hawaiian flower “girl” who was definitely of a certain age. Nowadays the roles might still be filled by children, according to the old custom; but one is just as likely to see a superannuated relative like me, an amiable ex-spouse, a special friend—human or non—or even a beloved companion animal carrying rings and flowers.

Malama was serene and regal at the rehearsal in a green-and-white muumuu with antique shell leis. I had a bad case of the heebie-jeebies until she calmed me with her loving coercion, whereupon I acquited myself like a champ. When the practice session was over Malama said that she had scanned the hotel premises and detected no lurking fiends. She told me I was now on my own, kissed me aloha, and went off to party with Tom Spotted Owl, the President of Dartmouth College, and his wife Socorro Ortega.

I wanted to believe I was safe, but I couldn’t shake the realization that neither Marc nor Denis had managed to detect the presence of Hydra up at White Moose Lodge—which meant that the thing must be a crackerjack at mental disguise. It could be in the hotel, biding its time before taking another shot at me.

What to do? There was only one reasonable course of action. I went down to the hotel bar and got shitfaced. Then, enveloped in a comforting haze of Kentucky corn-squeezings, I shuffled off to my bed in the suite I shared with Marc and slept like the proverbial log.

Damn good thing, too, considering what was going to happen to me the next day.

When Marc and the others finished wreaking their wicked will on me in the bathroom of the groom’s suite, I was rendered sober enough to be freshly terrified; but on second thought, it seemed unlikely that Hydra would try to scrag me hereabouts, surrounded as I was by most of the mental stalwarts of the Remillard Dynasty, along with a mob of guests that included nearly a hundred Magnates of the Concilium and enough heavyweight grandmaster operants to stagger the Earth in its orbit. I still had my trusty flask tucked in my hip pocket, but I decided to hold off drinking until
after the ceremony. Once I had cornered Ti-Jean and Dorothée and unburdened myself, Hydra’s motive for killing me would be negated and I’d have real cause for celebration. If the rumors were correct, Paul had laid on beaucoup cases of Taittinger Blanc de Blancs ’71 to toast the happy couple. A magnum of that would go a long way toward restoring my usual sunny disposish.

Toting the little lace-trimmed cushion upon which the wedding rings would rest during the procession, I descended in the elevator with Jack, Paul, and the groomsmen and went to the Roosevelt Parlor on the garden level where Denis and Lucille were waiting with the priest and the rest of the bridal party. Only Dorothée herself was missing, and I was still skittish enough to be alarmed.

“Where’s the bride?” I whispered to Marie Remillard. “She’s all right, isn’t she?”

Mentally, Ti-Jean’s sister indicated an inner door of the parlor and said: Of course she’s all right. It’s an old tradition for the bride not to let the groom see her just before the ceremony. She’s waiting in the next room with Malama. Praying, actually!
I
certainly would under the circumstances …

We were a decorative bunch. Except for Ian and Kyle Macdonald—who wore full Scottish fig, including Balmoral bonnets with rakish feathers, kilts, fancy shirts with lacy jabots at the neck, and black velvet Prince Charlie coatees with square jeweled buttons—the gents were a muted symphony in dove gray. Ti-Jean’s suit was a bit darker than those of the others, and he was the only one wearing a silver brocade waistcoat. The priest, a genial Jesuit named George Duval, who had been Jack’s favorite teacher at Brebeuf Academy, had managed to find an antique black cassock, one of those funny little clerical hats with a pompon on top, and a white linen surplice edged with fine old lace. He had been talking with Denis when the groom’s party arrived, and now he took a minute or two to shrive us all so our souls would be squeaky clean for the upcoming ceremony. All I had on my conscience were a few venial sins of frivolous fornication, plus an uncharitable wish to do Marc and Luc grievous bodily harm because of the cruel way they’d sobered me up.

The ladies were a pastel chorus of Gibson Girls, swanning grandly about in the latest mode of 1905. I discovered (not by peeking: see below!) that none of them went so far as to wear authentic corsetry—which would have compressed their waists to near-lethal waspishness—but otherwise their outfits were typical of the romantic Edwardian Era, and amazingly attractive. Because the wearers were still self-conscious about the impression they’d
make, their minds involuntarily leaked subliminal details of couture that were fairly easy to pick up. I found it amusing to do so, rather than listen to Lucille’s hectoring as she organized the procession.

The three bridesmaids were Dorothée’s foster sister Ellen Gunn, an old school chum named Cicely Duncan, and Jack’s elder sister Marie. They wore high-collared princess gowns of fine batiste linen, formfitting to the hips, with swinging gored skirts and long, narrow sleeves. The lightweight fabric had multitudinous tucks, simulated hand-embroidery, and innumerable inserts of white Point de Paris and Cluny lace. Marie and Cicely were in pale apple-blossom pink, while young Ellen Gunn, the nonborn maid of honor, had a gown of dusty rose. Their hair was upswept, augmented with wiglets, and crowned with huge mushroom-shaped straw hats gussied up with ribbons and masses of pink and white flowers.

The bride and groom had chosen to have their grandparents, as well as their surviving parents, as part of the procession. Masha MacGregor-Gawrys, Dorothée’s formidable Rebel grandmother, wore a dress and semifitted coat of pale apricot linen, edged and inserted with natural Point de Venise lace. Her auburn hair was topped by a hat heaped with silken daisies, wallflowers, and poppies.

Lucille, the self-appointed mistress of ceremonies, was awesomely chic in a gown and fitted Directoire jacket of réséda green silk with tiny gold buttons. A dark, softly curled wig replaced her usual French bob and bangs, and she wore a towering chapeau wound about with folds of ecru and moss-green chiffon and decked with satin foliage, silk mignonettes, velvet pansies, and a single enormous lavender rose. She carried a folded green parasol, which she used like a marshal’s baton as she got us all properly lined up.

The bride’s stepmother, Ian’s second wife Janet Finlay, had chosen a rather simple honey-colored batiste princess dress in a style similar to that of the bridesmaids, with champagne lace inserts and trim. Her hat, in contrast, was a huge confection piled with creamy ostrich plumes and fake aigrettes. Over her shoulder she wore a taffeta sash of the Farquharson tartan (Finlay being a sept of that clan), fastened with a canary diamond brooch handmade by the bride.

Paul’s sister Catherine was standing in for Jack’s deceased mother, Teresa Kendall. Cat was also a close friend of Dorothée, who had been her student at the Metapsychic Institute. Her tailleur
(which went wonderfully well with her blonde hair) was periwinkle-blue silk with a lace-trimmed cutaway coat, embroidered in ivory and navy. The saucy brim of her hat was upturned on one side, confining a mass of light blue plumes and azure satin rosettes.