Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (43 page)

Jack himself took this line, but he was careful not to denigrate
his older brother’s professed desire to make operant embryos widely available. Paul, on the other hand, went savagely on the offensive. He called Steinbrenner’s credentials into question (and there were undoubted murky patches in his professional background), demanded an independent study of the embryonic MP assay technique (which Marc declined to cooperate with), and even hinted that Mental Man might be nothing but an elaborate hoax designed to win support for the Rebel Party.

Privately, Paul made the mischievous suggestion that Marc, by using his own sperm to engender Mental Man, was unconsciously attempting to outdo his own father in the procreative game. By that time, the First Magnate had sired not only six children by his late wife, Teresa Kendall, but also thirty-eight natural offspring whom he freely acknowledged.

The official reaction of the Galactic Milieu to Mental Man was initially a long, loud silence. At last, nearly a month after Marc’s press conference, Davy MacGregor and the other Planetary Dirigents of the Human Polity made a joint response:

The issue of Mental Man would be put up for consideration in the Galactic Concilium, as were all matters of high Milieu policy. Only human and exotic magnates would participate in the debate. The decision of the Concilium would be final. Until that decision was issued, CEREM and Marc Remillard were forthwith enjoined from publicizing Mental Man in any way, shape, or form, and were expressly forbidden to nurture any human embryos beyond the seventh week of life or to cause said embryos to be nurtured by other persons, through either uterine implantation or in-vitro culture. Officers of the Galactic Magistratum would inspect the CEREM premises periodically to insure that the injunction was not violated.

The majority of nonoperant human beings—and respectable numbers of operants—gave a predictable response to the dictum. Boiled down, it amounted to: Fuck that.

And thus began the final act of the Metapsychic Rebellion.

Cyndia’s reaction to the epiphany of Mental Man was private and deeply troubled. Although Marc denied it to the media, he actually
had
urged her to permit Jeff Steinbrenner to evaluate their unborn baby by means of amnioscopic CE. But she obdurately refused, perhaps out of a secret fear that Marc might want to abort the fetus if it fell short of paramount potential. Marc had seemed to bow willingly to his wife’s wishes, especially since she otherwise appeared to be enthusiastic about the project. Cyndia did agree to
having their unborn child educated in utero using experimental preceptorial methods intended for Mental Man, since the new teaching technique was largely a much-modified and expanded version of that already widely in use among operant parents.

Denis Hagen Muldowney Remillard (his mother insisted upon the unusual second name, but refused to explain its significance) was born on schedule on 21 November 2080, a healthy little blond bruiser weighing in at 3.9 kilos. Due to the press of Rebel affairs, his father was not in attendance at the birth, although he did manage to get home in time for the christening, which took place at historic Emmanuel Church in Eastsound village on Orcas Island. I was Hagen’s godfather, and Cyndia’s older sister Sara the godmother.

With his aura no longer enveloped in that of his mother, the little boy was subjected to conventional assay of his metafaculties and determined to be a potential grandmaster operant in farsensing, creativity, and psychokinesis. The assay also showed that the baby was a potential paramount in coercion and redaction—but these metafaculties were all deeply latent and unusable. There was always the chance that the boy’s proto-paramount powers could be raised to operancy later, however, and Marc seized on this hope to cheer his wife and assuage his own bitter disappointment.

The mental deficiencies of Hagen and the opposition of the Milieu to Mental Man were not the only problems Marc had to contend with at that time. Paul’s disparagement of Dr. Jeffrey Steinbrenner’s professional abilities proved to be quite unwarranted, and the embryonic assay technique perfected by the bionic specialist was a great success. Unfortunately, the thousands of embryos produced by the union of Marc’s sperm and Dierdre Keogh’s ova were not.

After working for over a year on the Mental Man project, Steinbrenner and his associates failed to find a single embryo with paramount potential.

A
RELATIVELY LENGTHY PERIOD OF REST AND RECUPERATION
was required after the strenuous d-jump from Astrakhan. Fuzzing his identity, Fury checked into a luxury suite at the Four Seasons in downtown Seattle and had room service bring up a rare steak, a small Caesar salad, a crème brûlée, and a bottle of Stolichnaya. After he had eaten and drunk he fell into a dreamless sleep.

The monster awoke the next morning with an inconveniently voracious appetite for lifeforce. Cursing, he self-redacted and managed to suppress the urge—but only at a serious cost to his vitality.

Later! He’d take care of his hunger later. It would be easy to find suitable prey in this city: a drunken Inuk down around Pioneer Square or a runaway adolescent over by the Pike Place Market. Unfortunately, the interval between necessary feedings was becoming shorter and shorter. The problem was an irksome one, but he had so far been unable to address it because too many other things were happening that demanded his personal attention.

The Astrakhanian Dirigent, Xenia Kudryasheva, was proving tougher to kill than he had anticipated, and her hostility to the local Rebel faction had reached a ticklish level. Construction of the modified starships was moving right along, but there had been a nasty scare when the facilities of a crucially important subcontractor on Yakutia were demolished in a power-plant mishap. The French world of Blois, in a fit of Gallic mulishness, had at first refused to take up the slack by revising production schedules in its own factories. Fury himself had been obliged to coerce the six members of the Blésois Commerce Ministry, the board of directors of Dassault-Aérospatiale, and the heads of three trade unions in order to get things rolling again. Besides all that, there was the upcoming Concilium session to worry about. Nine fence-sitting
human magnates, more or less ripe for conversion to the Rebel cause, were going to require the most delicate sort of mental noodging on his part to bring them over the fence.

I am spreading myself too thin, he thought.

Not for the first time, Fury cursed the fact that high-powered coercion and the reading of hostile minds were impossible to bring off at a distance. The personality-disjunction problem was only one symptom of impending difficulty. His farsenses were no longer what they should be, and neither was his self-redactive faculty. The d-jump to Earth had been a considerable strain, necessitated by another schedule conflict. If only he could have put Hydra on an Earthbound starship and let her do this particular job herself! (She was so much better at Marc’s subliminal coercion.) But it was still unwise to use Hydra in any situation where she might have unsupervised access to Cyndia Muldowney.

Fury’s seekersense located Marc and Cyndia at the Orcas Island house and he spied on them briefly through excorporeal excursion. Uncle Rogi was there on a house visit, having breakfast in the huge kitchen with the couple and their infant son. The old bookseller had brought Baby Hagen a present—a revised version of the papoose-swing he had built years ago for Jack the Bodiless. The infant dangled happily in the device, sucking his thumb and making cornflakes hop around the kitchen table with his PK. The conversation among the three adults was vapid, and so Fury wasted no more time on them. The contact with Marc would take place much later, when he was asleep …

A fast farsensory glance showed that on this Saturday morning only a skeleton force of technicians was on duty at CEREM’s Mental Man facility. As usual, the hardworking Jeffrey Steinbrenner was among them. Excellent!

It was snowing in the Cascade Mountain foothills, so Fury went down to the hotel’s Moduplex and ordered heavy winter clothing from REI. Later, as he flew his hired egg eastward, he called a North Bend outfitter on the RF com and reserved an enclosed Arctic Cat snowmobile. The machine was waiting for him when he landed. It took less than half an hour to drive it along the Snoqualmie River trail to the signposted chainlink fence that marked the boundary of the CEREM campus.

No other winter funseekers were in the area. He parked the Cat in a thicket of tall Himalayan blackberries and shut off the engine. After making sure that the small cryopak container was safely tucked in one of the big cargo pockets of his pants, he climbed out.

It was quiet except for the shrunken river’s ice-muffled purling
and the slow tick of the cooling snowmobile. White flakes drifted down in nearly windless air, striking the mirrored surface of the immense sigma hemisphere just inside the fence and sliding down to form a fluffy bezel on the adjacent ground. His farscan showed that no human guards were abroad behind the force-field. A notice hanging on the fence warned:

Fury smiled, then d-jumped inside the barrier, rematerializing in the midst of some ornamental rhododendrons next to the Mental Man facility. He rested for a few minutes, recovering his strength and scanning about the installation to insure that his presence had not been detected. No alarms sounded, no farsensory touch flicked over him, no personnel within any of the buildings showed surprise or otherwise deviated from what they had been doing.

Eleven biotechnicians were scattered about the upper floors of the Mental Man lab, fertilizing a batch of worthless ova from one of the new donors and performing various technical maintenance chores. Jeffrey Steinbrenner was alone in the gestatorium on the basement level, preparing for an assay session. Once again Fury’s mind generated an upsilon-field and he teleported through space. A split second after he appeared in an alcove of the gestatorium just out of Steinbrenner’s view he used his creativity to become invisible.

It was Fury’s first tangible visit to the facility, although he had excursed to it mentally from time to time when he visited the Old World in order to keep track of Mental Man’s progress. The enormous room was dimly illuminated by crimson indirect lighting, and the sound of a recorded human heartbeat was audible over the soft strains of a Mozart string quintet. Three walls of the gestatorium were lined from floor to ceiling with recessed racks holding ovoid uterine capsules. Each one was transparent, about 50 centimeters high, and had biomonitoring displays at the front. The life-supportive equipment was concealed in the walls behind the racks, as was the conveyor system that transported encapsulated embryos to various parts of the building for study or processing.

The cadaverous scientist had seated himself in the operator’s chair before the metapsychic assay unit in the center of the room.
The device was the size of a small desk. On top, a windowed boxlike extrusion with a headrest contained a single uterine capsule with tiny occupant awaiting analysis. A CE power-supply module stood on the left side of the chair. On the right an El8 helmet with its specially modified farsensory brainboard lay on a stand, ready to be donned.

Fury stood directly behind Steinbrenner while he dictated preliminary information into the unit’s computer command mike and transferred data from the capsule’s vital-signs monitor. Then the doctor relaxed for a moment, watching the embryo with his unaugmented deepsight.

And so did Fury.

The developing human being was about two centimeters long, floating inside a diaphanous fluid-filled amniotic sac the size of a plum. A curling umbilical cord attached the embryo to a much larger spongy placenta, thickly webbed with prominent blood vessels and bedded in a slab of protoplasm at the rear of the artificial womb. Except for its dark eye pigment, blood vessels, and the quick-beating red heart clearly visible within the thorax with its ghostly ribs, the baby seemed to be made of translucent plass. The fingers and toes on its miniature limbs were fairly well formed and male genitalia were visible. Its head was disproportionally large, bent forward as if in serene meditation, the brain a gleaming shadow with the cerebrum neatly halved. The embryo’s face, indistinct except for the eyes, was that of an indeterminate primate; but the baby’s aura was already unmistakably human.

Steinbrenner put on the heavy CE helmet and energized it. He gave no sign of having felt the internal photon beams that drilled his scalp and skull in preparation for the insertion of the electrodes. Fury waited. Finally, when the scientist bent forward and began his painstaking scrutiny of the embryo, Fury slipped through the brainboard interface and into Steinbrenner’s unsuspecting mind.

Yes …

[Image.] It’s not easy to separate and quantify them, even with the El8. An operator needs … a good deal of experience to use this equipment. At present I’m the only one able to do MP assays with any degree of accuracy.

In a moment … wait … did you see that fluctuation in auric intensity? They don’t like to be mind-touched. I suppose it’s actually a simple tropism, no more mysterious than a worm flinching from a needle. But I can’t help thinking that the babies are already in a state of primitive awareness, operating on both vital and mental levels.

No. Twofold masterclass potential, at most. In coercion and redaction. The other three faculties are latent GM. What a pity. We’d hoped that the three new egg-donors would provide us with a breakthrough, but thus far we’ve done no better than with Dierdre Keogh’s ova. Not a single paramount embryo—not even in the latent state.