Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (3 page)

“No, I don’t,” Rogi said. “Not really. Tell me! Help me tell the story to the whole Galactic Milieu. That’s got to be the reason why you two were sent here to talk to me. I don’t understand why Unifex doesn’t give me the information himself, but he must have his reasons.”

“It was his worst sin,” Malama Johnson stated in her calm voice. “Worse than leading the Rebellion into violent conflict and causing the deaths of all those people. Deep in his heart, Marc thought the war against the Galactic Milieu and its Unity was justified, as his followers did. But the Mental Man project was quite different. He knew it was wrong, and yet he couldn’t resist the awful elegance of the concept—the opportunity to personally
engineer a great leap forward in human mental and physical evolution.”

The three others stared at her wordlessly.

“Don’t you see, dear grandchildren?” Malama spread her hands, embracing all their minds in huna healing. “Unifex is too ashamed to talk about it. Even now.”

I
FLEW HOME TO
N
EW
E
NGLAND ON AUTO
-V
EE THE NEXT DAY
, sleeping most of the way with my cat curled up beside me on the rear banquette. Oddly enough, I didn’t have bad dreams after the interview with Marc’s son and daughter, for which I suppose I can thank Malama Johnson. God knows, I would never be able to think of Marc—or the Family Ghost—in the same way again after the horrors that poor Cloud and Hagen disclosed to me back on Kauai.

I woke up, feeling fairly decent, as the egg announced that we were nearly home and demanded further navigational instructions. We traced a leisurely holding pattern 1200 meters above Hanover, New Hampshire. It was a lovely morning and the old college town by the Connecticut River was at its most charming, spread out below like a patchwork quilt of bright colors thanks to the autumn foliage.

I discovered that I was ravenously hungry. Half a dozen congenial campus eateries lay within strolling distance of my apartment, and I had opened my mouth to give the command to descend—when suddenly a completely different notion on where to break my fast occurred to me.

Sheer serendipity.

Right.

I programmed the aircraft for Vee-flight to Bretton Woods, and a few minutes later we’d whizzed 90 kilometers northeast and descended into the egg-park area of the old White Mountain Resort Hotel. It crouched at the foot of Mount Washington, a gargantuan white wooden confection with bright red roofs on its gabled wings and quaint towers. As the rhocraft landed, I announced myself over the RF com and confirmed that the establishment
would be delighted to accommodate Citizen Remillard for breakfast.

I opaqued the egg’s dome for decency’s sake, used the facilities, freshened up with a Beard-Wipe, combed my hair, and donned my old corduroy jacket. Then I opened a pouch of cat food for Marcel and thrust him into his carrier-cage. He bespoke telepathic indignation as he realized I was about to go off and leave him behind.

“Sorry, old boy. No companion animals allowed in the hotel dining room. Old Yankee custom.”

Marcel gave a bitter hiss of betrayal as I exited the rhocraft. Silly brute. When were the goddam cats going to admit that the raison d’être of the human race was not humble service to felinity?

I came through the gardens, where chrysanthemums and dahlias and winter pansies still bloomed, and ambled into the hotel’s main entrance, giving my nostalgia free rein as I sopped up the familiar Edwardian ambiance. I hadn’t been here in thirty years, but the old place, beautifully restored, subtly tricked out now with high-tech innovations to allow year-round operation and adapted to accommodate other races besides humankind, looked almost exactly as I remembered it. The lobby was crowded with tourists, both human and exotic, many of them preparing to ascend Mount Washington via the antique cog railway.

I went out on the veranda, where there was a gorgeous view of the Presidential Range, not yet touched by snow. The lower slopes were a blazing mosaic of dark evergreens and gold-and-scarlet sugar maples.

Memories overwhelmed me like a psychic avalanche. The wedding of Jack and Dorothée had been held here in 2078, and I’d been the ring-bearer and killed a man for the second time in my life. And in 2082, the last time I had stood on the mountain, my nephew Denis had been with me.

Denis. And the other.

But I dared not think of that yet. So I went in and had a fine breakfast, then returned to my egg, where Marcel had retaliated against my perfidy in the time-honored catty fashion. I didn’t even bother to chide him, only turned on the aircraft’s environmental deodorizer full-blast and flew home. It was time to begin writing again, with or without the Family Ghost’s help.

It was more than happenstance that brought me back to the White Mountain Hotel.

In my younger days, before opening the bookshop, I worked at
the place as a convention manager. My nephew Denis, who adopted me as his father figure when my twin brother Don let him down, first visited the hotel in 1974 when he was seven years old. We rode the smoke-belching cog train to the summit of Mount Washington together, and it was there that the boy and I first met Elaine Donovan and made the joyous discovery that there were other people on Earth with operant higher mindpowers besides ourselves.

Fifteen years later, as I attended mass in the Catholic chapel in nearby Bretton Woods, I heard my wretched brother’s telepathic death-scream. Even worse, I experienced Don’s last burst of furious hatred for me—and also, mysteriously, for himself. At his funeral I received disquieting news from Denis, who was then a professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover and one of the most famous metapsychic researchers in the country. My nephew blamed himself for not preventing his father’s death. Denis also told me that Don had been murdered, and that I myself was in deadly danger. He urged me to come live near him—so that he could protect me and also help me to attain my full metapotential.

I didn’t want to leave the White Mountain Hotel. I had a job that I was good at and thoroughly enjoyed, and nobody in the place knew I was a metapsychic operant—which suited me just dandy. In the end, however, Denis did convince me to join him. I moved to Hanover and became an antiquarian bookseller, sole proprietor of the shop called The Eloquent Page; but from then on the relationship between Denis and me was more ambiguous and troubling.

I loved my foster son dearly. But deep in my heart I was afraid of him and his tremendous mindpowers—as I was also afraid of my own metafunctions. The fear was entirely irrational, rooted deep in my unconscious, and I never have managed to shake free of it.

Like many geniuses, Denis Remillard was a man of unexceptional appearance. He was fair and slightly built, with a manner that seemed gentle and self-effacing—unless you happened to look directly into his electric blue eyes and feel the strength of the coercive power lurking there. Whereupon you might be excused for thinking that your skeleton had suddenly liquefied and seeped out through your paralyzed toes.

Denis’s intellectual achievements were even more prodigious than his metapsychic talents. His research earned him a Nobel Prize in psychiatric medicine, and his books and monographs are
classics, still highly respected thirty years after his death. As is Denis himself.

The 2013 Congress on Metapsychology was held at the White Mountain Hotel at his instigation, and its fateful climax was largely his doing. Prominent metas came to New Hampshire from all over the world for what was supposed to be their last annual convocation. They were a beleaguered minority in those early days of the twenty-first century, weary of being assailed and misunderstood by hostile normals, discouraged by the apparent inability of our race to live together in peace and fellowship, but still hopeful that they might somehow be able to use their higher mindpowers for the good of all humanity.

On the last night of the Congress, the operants were scheduled to dine at the spectacular Summit Chalet atop Mount Washington … and there they were also supposed to die. Other historians in addition to myself have told how the operant madman Kieran O’Connor conspired with Denis’s younger brother Victor to murder the Congress delegates. The failure of the plot has been ascribed by some people to fortuitous coincidence—by others to the aggressive use of metaconcerted mindpower by numbers of the delegates under attack.

In these memoirs, I have told what actually happened. Some of the besieged operants did use their mindpowers as weapons. But then, rallied by Denis, they resisted the temptation to strike back mentally at their enemies. It was Denis who integrated their minds—and the minds of countless other human beings of good will, both operant and nonoperant—into a benevolent mental alliance that extended worldwide. That unique, loving metaconcert, foreshadowing the greater one forged by Jack and Dorothée in 2083, lasted only for a few moments. But it was sufficient.

The planet Earth had shown the watching Milieu that its immature, quarrelsome Mind was worth saving. The sky above Mount Washington—and above every major population center in the world—filled with exotic starships, and the human race was inducted willy-nilly into a galactic confederation.

I also had a hand in it, and so did a certain Lylmik. But the Great Intervention would never have happened without my nephew Denis.

Et maintenant la leçon touche à sa fin.

T
HE RUDALM-COMPOSER
M
ULMUL
Z
IML LANDED ITS RHOCRAFT
across the street from The Eloquent Page bookshop, climbed out, and stood in the snow for some time absorbing the local telluric aura and giggling in unashamed rapture at the heady stimulation of it all. Earth in winter! The veritable heart-nest of the Remillard clan! It was inimitable. Sublime. Very nearly inenarrable!

The hermaphroditic exotic had feared that Rogatien Remillard’s place of work and residence would have been tarted up and modernized by now, sixty-five years after the Great Intervention. But no—there the exquisite old three-storey building stood, Federal-style clapboards gleaming in the thickening snowfall, windows cheerily alight (the upper ones had green shutters), and sloping metal roof softly blanketed. So evocative. So
human
! One might readily compose a worthy rudalm on this enchanting scene alone. (But, alas, if one expected to sell the work to the lucrative Human Polity market as well as to one’s own, more aesthetically sensitive Gi race, the leitmotif required more interspecies appeal and pizzazz.)

The planet’s sun had long since set. Increasing numbers of crystalline flakes danced in the frigid atmosphere, glistening as they drifted through the beams of streetlights and the headlamps of passing groundcars. Melting grids were working full tilt to keep the sidewalks and streets clear for pedestrians and vehicles, but fresh snow was already thick on the bare branches of the trees and other unheated surfaces. It lay nine cents deep on the little patch of frozen lawn in front of the bookshop and whitened the concrete footing and the evergreen shrubs around the building’s central vestibule steps.

The Gi musician’s tall quasi-avian body was clad in a rented environmental suit, and its enormous yellow eyes peered out
through a transparent protective visor. The creature found the nocturnal townscape to be almost unbearably ravishing, especially when savored through the pla’akst sensory circuit, but it now began to shiver and feel incipient chilblains in its feet and hypersensitive external genitalia. Turning up the suit’s thermostat didn’t seem to help. Reluctantly, the Gi decided it had accumulated enough outdoor imagery. It was time to get on with the interview and the full-sensory extraction.

MulMul Ziml tripped off heedlessly across Main Street, only barely managing to dodge a scannerless, aged groundcar full of Dartmouth students that skidded on the wet pavement trying to avoid it. The reversed turbine whined and a horn blared furiously. The near-disaster had been entirely the Gi’s own fault and it prayed forgiveness from the Cosmic All as it scrambled clumsily onto the opposite sidewalk. Fortunately, the human occupants of the vehicle weren’t metapsychic operants, so MulMul’s excruciating telepathic cry of terror had not distressed them unnecessarily.

The door of the bookshop opened and an operant human male peered out, broadcasting emanations of anxiety. “God! Are you all right?”

“Quite safe, quite safe,” the Gi fluted. “How kind of you to inquire! It was
so
silly of me not to calculate the velocity of the approaching vehicle before attempting to cross the street, but I’d forgotten how fast you Earthlings drive.”

“Well, come inside before we both freeze our bizounes off,” the man said rather tetchily. “I suppose you’re the one Dorothée said was coming.”

“Yes, the Dirigent most kindly—” The Gi broke off, did a double take, and shrieked in delight. “It’s
you
! Uncle Rogi!”

The bookseller sighed and shut the door behind the exotic visitor. “That’s what everybody in town calls me. You might as well, too. Take off your things and come sit by the stove with me and my buddy. Tell us about this opera or whatever it is you’re writing.”

An antique cast-iron heating device and several chairs occupied one corner of the bookshop. There were also reading lamps and a small table with a coffee-making machine. Another male human, weakly metapsychic like Rogi, was sitting there quaffing from a mug. His mind-tone was amiable and a species of small domestic animal rested on his lap.

MulMul hesitated. “You’re sure you won’t mind if I divest?
Some Earthlings feel uncomfortable in the presence of unclothed members of my race.”

The bookseller laughed. “Hell, no. Go right ahead. Me and Kyle need more than a buck-nekkid Gi to shock us. Just hang your suit on the clothes-tree there and kick off your boots. I know you folks can’t abide coffee, so I’m going to make you a hot toddy. You look like you need one.”

Rogi went off to the back of the shop and MulMul shyly undressed, shaking out its compressed filoplumage and untangling its testicular peduncles and accessory mammillae. “The rental agent at Anticosti Starport assured me that this garment would keep me comfortable in the coldest weather,” the Gi remarked, “but I fear it may be defective. My toes have turned quite blue with cold and just
look
at my poor phallus.”