Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (39 page)

“The others have already arrived, except for Marc Remillard and Alexis Manion, who are expected shortly. I’ll show you to your rooms so you can freshen up. We’ll be having lunch in about an hour, and after that my daughter Cyndia will take us all on an inspection tour of the armlann. She’s an engineer and supervises the place.”

Ruslan said, “This—this armlann is your private arsenal? The one you propose using to arm the starships?”

“It’s Hibernia’s free contribution to the Rebellion.” Rory made the correction with polite firmness. “A prime strategic asset of the cause.”

“Of course,” the Intendant General murmured. “And we of Astrakhan will be honored to assist in the ultimate deployment of these weapons against the exotic despots. Provided, of course, that the Rebel leadership accepts our proposal. I trust that Fleet officers are also in attendance, as we requested? Their expertise will be needed in the evaluation.”

“Owen Blanchard himself is here, along with two other top Rebel honchos of the Twelfth—the Chief of Operations, Ragnar Gathen, and the Deputy Ops, Walter Saastamoinen. You’ll also be conferring with Cordelia Warshaw, our top strategic adviser, and Professor Anna Gawrys, Hiroshi Kodama, and Patricia Castellane—all members of the Executive Council involved in what you might call military matters. But of course the ultimate decision on your warship scheme rests with Marc Remillard himself.”

Ruslan Terekev was surprised. “He is not bound by the vote of his Council?”

“Oh, no,” said Rory blandly. “He’s the generalissimo. It was the only way he’d agree to take on the leadership. Marc consults with the rest of us, but in the end he calls the shots.”

“I see.”

“Most of us Rebels would have it no other way,” Rory Muldowney said with a twinkle in his eye. “But there are a few sore losers.”

*  *  *

Marc made a perfunctory apology as he picked up his old friend Alexis Manion at Loch Salainn Starport and immediately bundled him into an Avis rent-a-rho. “I’m sorry to have dragged you away from Earth at such short notice. Was the express trip hard on you?”

Alex pulled a comical grimace. “You know I hate high-df starflight. But I’ll survive.”

Marc laughed dismissively. Nobody’s priorities mattered but his own. The egg lofted into the stratosphere and picked up the Connemara Vee-way.

“I wouldn’t have called this emergency meeting of the Council if the matter under consideration wasn’t crucially important. If it’s any consolation, I had to travel all the way from Orb on a tight catenary myself. I’ve been stroking the Krondak honchos of the Panpolity Operant Affairs Directorate. They demanded a progress report on full-body CE, and it’s taken me three weeks at coercive max to satisfy them with an exhaustive demonstration of the rig.”

Alex was nonplussed. “Satisfy—!”

“Yes. You’ll be interested to know that 600X CE is now conditionally approved for use in the geophysical modification of planets. There will be no more obstructive maneuvers from the Science Directorate or the Unity advocates or anyone else in the Concilium unless the equipment evinces some serious flaw … or is used in an ‘inappropriate’ manner.”

“Well, congratulations! Until inappropriate circumstances prevail, that is.”

“Thanks. This meeting today will help define the parameters of those very circumstances.”

Alex said, “I think you’d better tell me more about this strange-bedfellows entente cordiale between the Russians and Rory Muldowney. What the hell are they up to?”

“The Rebellion is about to be presented with an offer that’s too good to refuse. The Astrakhanians are proposing to do secret modifications on all of the big colonization transports scheduled to be built in their yards, effectively fitting them out as disguised Rebel battle wagons. The big guns and other weaponry will come from Dirigent Rory Muldowney’s notorious illicit armory.”

“Why—that’s marvelous!”

“No, it’s a disaster in the making.” Marc was quite calm. “And it could jeopardize the future of the Rebellion unless it’s handled very carefully.”

“I don’t understand. Aren’t Muldowney’s weapons any good?”

“On the contrary. They’re mostly ingenious modifications of legitimate equipment.”

“Then what’s the problem? We certainly need warships in order to wage a war—even if it ultimately amounts to a saber-rattling bluff, as most of us hope. What was it Voltaire said? ‘Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons!’ ”

“Not if those big battalions tempt the hotheads in the Rebel Party into a premature declaration of independence against the Milieu. Some of our more impetuous co-conspirators—the Irish Dirigent prominent among them—believe that we can compel the Galactic Milieu to capitulate and grant humanity its freedom simply by threatening it with an old-fashioned Star Wars-type of deep-space shoot-’em-up. But that strategy can’t possibly work. In a Metapsychic Rebellion, God is on the side of the big minds, not the big guns.”

“I tend to agree with you, but—”

“I’m not just expressing a personal opinion, Alex. After I accepted the Rebel leadership I spent over five weeks working on war-game simulations at Oxford with Cordelia Warshaw and Helayne Strangford and Alonzo Jarrow. We studied dozens of different offensive scenarios that stopped short of doomsday—most especially including confrontations that featured laser and antimatter matériel and the kind of CE blaster-hats that certain of our Rebel associates now look upon as the ultimate secret weapon. The outcome was always the same: If a Rebel force were ever faced with a psychocreative metaconcert that included all of the Milieu’s coadunate minds, we’d be stone goners—no matter how many photon cannons or El8 operators our warships carried. Superior exotic mindpower forced us into the Milieu. Only superior
human
mindpower can insure that we escape from it without risking the complete destruction of galactic civilization.”

“I presume you’re talking about your new 600X CE enhancer. But even if we do use those hellish things, have we enough grandmasterclass operators to tip the balance of power?”

“For a decisive victory, the Rebel metaconcert would need at least nine thousand metacreative GMs equipped with full-body rigs.”

“We don’t have half that number of longheads on our side—and so far, only a handful of 600X enhancers.”

“True,” Marc agreed. “But I ran another simulation with Helayne just before I left Orb. We could be certain of victory if we built enough rigs to equip all of our GMs … and added just a hundred 600X-empowered paramounts to our side of the equation.”

“Jesus, Marc! Just say we’re fucked and be done with it. You know you’re the only paramount mind the Rebellion’s got!”

“At present.”

Alex posed a wordless telepathic query.

Turning away, Marc let his gaze wander over the panorama visible through the polarized dome of the rhocraft. They were flying over a great body of gray-green water bordered by verdant mountains. Alex Manion waited.

Marc finally said, “Our Rebellion
can
succeed if it includes the participation of Mental Man.”

Manion exploded. “Oh, for God’s sake! Can we talk reality here? Even if you could implement that wacko scheme of yours, it would take decades to get the project off the ground.”

“Wrong. The genetic feasibility studies were extremely favorable, and Jeff Steinbrenner is establishing the initial embryonic assay parameters right now at the CEREM facility in Seattle Metro. I’ve built a new lab for him and given him carte blanche and unlimited funding.”

Alex goggled at his friend, struck speechless.

“The normal human brain is neurologically mature at nine years of age,” Marc said. “There’s a fair probability that Mental Man might mature much earlier. We’ve got to stall the Milieu’s Protocol of Unity until Mental Man is ready for combat.”

“It’d be immoral to use little children—”

“To guarantee the mental freedom of the human race? I think not. The Mental Man cadre would be educated from the beginning with an understanding of their duty. Their destiny. The young metapsychic operants of today are inculcated with similar principles by their parents and preceptors—often even before their birth. Is that immoral?”

“No, but—”

“When Jack was nine, he was intellectually adult. So was I. Only our emotions and bodies were immature, and our metafaculties had yet to reach their full potential. With our special training regimen, Mental Man will have his full faculties after five years. Perhaps much earlier.”

“But the project you described to me would change the children in a fundamental way—before they freely consented.”

“We would change them infinitely for the better. Insure that their minds are superior. If it were a matter of choice, I think you’d be surprised at the number of parents who’d opt for a Mental child over a product of genetic roulette, even if it didn’t have daddy’s brown eyes or mommy’s nose. I certainly would. Eugenics of the
mind has been debated by scientists and ethicists for over a hundred and fifty years, but no one has ever had the courage to take it from theory to practice—probably because the results couldn’t be guaranteed by the available technology.”

“Well, one man tried …” Alex’s mind projected an image.

“Don’t be an ass!” Marc snapped. “Hitler was a madman, not a trained operant scientist with state-of-the-art resources at his command.”

His friend was shaking his head. “Marc, I don’t know what to say. I had no idea that Mental Man was anything more than … a bizarre fantasy of yours.”

“It’s far from bizarre. The life-supportive equipment required by the project already exists. Shig Morita refined and upgraded the nonborn in-vitro reproduction technology that’s been in successful operation for over sixty years. What’s new is our ability to preselect the embryos with paramount potential, using farsensory CE. Jeff Steinbrenner developed the basic sorting technique several years ago when he was a staffer at IVFF in Chicago. His goal then was a fairly simple one: to enhance the engendering of operant nonborns. But implementation of his research was considered too controversial by the shortsighted bureaucrats who enforce the Human Polity Reproductive Statutes. CEREM won’t be troubled by any such restrictions.”

“Would you care to show me a detailed précis of the entire Mental Man project?” Alex asked very quietly.

Marc smiled, still staring out the window. “Not yet. We’re still working a few bugs out of it.”

“I’ll bet you are! For starters, I presume that only one of the gametes in this fabulous scheme can be guaranteed to carry the genes for paramount metafunction: your own.”

“Correct. Studies of my family heritage show there is an excellent chance of supravital alleles in mental traits as well as in the self-rejuvenating complex. Unfortunately, there are sublethal alleles as well, but we should be able to screen them out rather easily.”

“May I ask who will contribute the eggs for these wunderkinder?”

“Dierdre Keogh, the most brilliant female Grand Master working at CEREM. She was delighted to donate one of her ovaries to the project. Every one of her six natural children is a GM—although the spectrum of operant metafaculties varies.”

Alex gave a skeptical grunt. “Her natural brood is also atypically
homozygotic—brilliant like their parents, and maybe even a bit more emotionally unzipped.”

“Jeff thinks that the odds are high that we’ll engender useful numbers of operant paramounts using Dierdre’s ova. The preceptive training of the fetuses will begin in the fifth month of life, just as my brother Jack’s did. He was the first Homo summus—the first Mental Man.” Marc turned to catch Alex’s eye. “Fortunately for our Rebellion, I can guarantee that the new generation will have a different political orientation.”

“Holy God! You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

Marc didn’t bother to answer the question. “I’m not yet prepared to announce the initiation of the Mental Man project to the other members of the Council, and I certainly don’t want the Astrakhanians to know about it. So please keep this conversation of ours confidential. What I need from you at this meeting is your support when I insist that we hold off arming the new fleet of Russian-built starships. I don’t want those guns or bombs installed until a hostile confrontation between our forces and those of the Milieu appears imminent and we have no other choice.”

“You can’t tell the Russians to stuff it—”

“Certainly not. We’ll need the starships eventually, along with whatever vessels of the Twelfth Fleet that our Rebel officers can commandeer. But for the present, discreet modifications in framedesign are all that I’ll agree to in the Astrakhanian scheme. We can’t take a chance on having Milieu loyalists catch us with our pants down—let alone risk a literal loose-cannon situation involving firebrands like Muldowney … or even Ruslan Terekev himself. This Rebellion will start when
I
say so. And we won’t bluff. We’ll fight to win.”

“Poor old Rory,” Alex drawled. “All those lovely weapons—scorned in favor of a gaggle of deus-ex-machina paramount brats.”

“Muldowney’s a good man,” Marc said, “absolutely loyal to the Rebel cause. It’s just too bad he’s had such a difficult time accepting my leadership.”

“Perhaps he finds it hard to separate you from your father in his mind. An understandable psychological blivet, under the circumstances.”

Marc let that one go by. Every Magnate of the Concilium knew that the Hibernian Dirigent’s wife, Laura Tremblay, had committed suicide twenty years earlier when Paul Remillard told her that their love affair had ended. In spite of Laura’s unfaithfulness,
Rory’s love for her had never faltered. Neither had his hatred for the First Magnate of the Human Polity.

Marc admired the big Irishman on both counts …

“ETA Inisfáil NAVCON five minutes,” the egg’s navigation unit announced with a lovely lilt. “If you’re expected, please enter the access code—and ten thousand welcomes to you! If you’re not expected, I’m sorry to tell you that a landing option on the island is not available. Please go away, because today this airspace is protected with truly fearsome security measures you’ll not be happy to encounter!”

Alex laughed. “I’m encouraged. At least the traffic-control computers on this planet have a more civilized attitude than the ones on Earth. Maybe it’s a favorable omen of things to come.”