Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (45 page)

I
TOLD
T
I-JEAN AND
D
OROTHÉE ABOUT THE SPECTRE OF
D
ENIS A
month or so later, when they came to Hanover following the Concilium session. Right there in the back-room office of my bookshop, Dorothée did a minor ream-job with my full consent, recovering my memory of the experience and analyzing it with Jack’s help. What they discovered was inconclusive: I had seen something that both my ordinary senses and my ultrasenses perceived as real. It might have been Denis, or it might have been a delusion that I had invested with his metapsychic identity.

“Which do you think it was?” I asked Dorothée.

“I think that you saw him,” she said, her pseudovoice flat and emotionless. She wore her sparkling diamond mask, but her clothing was otherwise unremarkable—black wool pants and a jade cowl-neck sweater. She’d taken off her rain jacket.

I was collapsed in my old leather swivel-chair and she sat on a stool next to me, holding one of my hands. Her ream had been so skillful that there was no pain, but I still felt wrung-out. I turned to Ti-Jean. “And you?”

He was perched on the edge of my battered desk. Marcel the cat was peacefully asleep in the
IN
basket, and the gales of March were strumming the tightly clenched leafbuds of the maple tree outside the little office window. “I’ve suspected almost from the beginning that the integrated entity who escaped from us on Christmas has the ability to d-jump,” Jack said. “To teleport. This could be one explanation of what you saw. Or it could have been a metacreative ‘sending,’ an illusionary projection. Whatever … I think it was Denis, temporarily in control of his own body again.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” I asked them, my impatience increasing.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Jack said, “except wait and see
whether Denis appears again. If he is alive, it’s possible that the fusion of his two disparate personae during the metaconcert was only temporary. The Denis part might now be subordinate, as the Fury part was before. In time, the good persona might give us some clue we can act on to wipe out the bad persona. It’s all we can hope for.”

I pulled free of Dorothée’s solicitous grasp and pleaded with Ti-Jean. “Denis was in agony! He knows now that he’s Fury. He begged me to help him. Can’t you at least do another scan of Earth? Have another shot at tracking him down?”

The bright blue inhuman eyes shifted. “Uncle Rogi, the odds are too long and there’s other work for me to do. Vitally important work.”

“Damage control,” I opined with some cynicism. “Countering Marc and Mental Man. That’s all you care about now.”

Jack admitted it.

Dorothée said, “Marc is the Pied Piper, Rogi. The metapsychic temptor—so magnificent and strong and reasonable! Do you know what I thought when I saw him give that interview on the Tri-D, taking the defense of human liberty upon himself as though no one else in the Galactic Milieu gave a damn about it? I thought: He looks like my guardian angel would look—those calm gray eyes, that beautiful, trustworthy masculine face. Why not let him fight and guard and rule and guide me? Why not let that paramount mind and those big wide shoulders deal with the mess in the Milieu? I wasn’t coerced by Marc, Rogi, I was bewitched … for a little while. Until I remembered who he was, and how he’d lived a life that even the most charitable person would call utterly self-centered. Marc may believe it when he says he’s totally committed to the sovereignty of human nature, but—”

“Of course he believes it!” I exclaimed, full of indignation. “He’s seen through the window dressing of mystical Unity bullshit that’s blinded Paul and the other loyalists—that’s blinded
you
. The exotics don’t want us the way we are. They want us crammed into their inhuman mold. No more messy individualism or oddball thinking or nonconformist behavior. Just tranquillity and good order for all. Docilated minions! A racial lobotomy! Us Rebels saw through the schmooze-job decades ago. We just had to bide our time until a real leader came along, one who could turn us away from the fake paradise promised by the Great Intervention. Now he’s here! Maybe Marc’s an angel with a fiery sword. But he won’t chase us out of the fucking Garden of Eden, he’ll
lead
us out—because that’s where we want to go.”

“If you only understood—” Jack began. But I cut him off with a Franco curse.

Dorothée said, “Marc is no guardian angel. No warrior Michael, either. If anything, he’s Abaddon—the Angel of the Abyss.”

“You’re afraid of him!” I cackled. “Both of you—scared stiff that more and more straight-thinking metas and ordinary folks will join the Rebellion and leave you and the other human loyalists sitting on a sawed-off branch!”

“We’re very much afraid of Marc,” Jack said. “And I think that deep in your heart, you’re afraid of him, too.” He gave Marcel a farewell pat and got down off the desk, then took Dorothée’s jacket from the office clothes-tree and held it while she put it on. “What Marc has done has nothing to do with any commitment to human liberty. He’s manipulated public opinion with coldblooded efficiency because he sees the Milieu as a threat to his own ambitions. Your angel with a fiery sword is laying the groundwork for war.”

“If war comes,” I blustered, “it’ll be the Milieu that starts it, not Marc.”

“Do you really believe that?” Dorothée spoke pityingly.

“Yes,” I declared. “And so do billions of other people who just want to be free. Free to be human. We’ll fight for that freedom if we have to.”

“But will you fight for the sake of Mental Man?” Jack asked, pausing as he slipped on his jacket.

I stared at him.

“Think about it,” he said. “And at the same time, think about what Denis—or your own unconscious mind—might have meant by calling Marc one of the most dangerous men ever born.”

Then Jack the Bodiless and Diamond Mask went out through the front of the bookshop into the equinoctial twilight. I sat there in my chair in the back room, and the wind whistled and the old clapboard building creaked and Marcel the Maine Coon cat watched me with mellow predatory eyes until it was time for us to go off to supper.

Although the Galactic Concilium is not a body open to public scrutiny, news about its arcane telepathic deliberations was usually well leaked by human magnates in the years preceding the Rebellion—especially by those belonging to the Rebel Party. The great debate on Mental Man was a prolonged one that would not be resolved in a single session; but after Marc’s calculated toss of
the gauntlet into the faces of the exotics, only the most cockeyed optimists held out much hope for the project’s ultimate approval. Even among the Rebels there was grousing and grumping about why the leader of the party had deliberately injected this side issue into the anti-Unity debate. On the other hand, if Mental Man actually had offensive-defensive potential, then why had Marc revealed His existence prematurely, rendering Him vulnerable to the Milieu spoilers?

Marc refused to explain.

Paul Remillard and the other pro-Milieu loyalists, who still formed a commanding majority among Human Polity magnates, remained confident that they could shoot the project down—or at least stall it until that magical moment when our race “coadunated,” and Unity more or less happened all by itself. To that end, they stepped up the propaganda barrage touting the benefits of Unification, enlisting not only human philosophers, religious leaders, and psychologists but Poltroyan advocates as well.

All Earthlings loved the little Purple People. Their good will toward men, their warm sense of humor, and their undeniable individuality made them formidable opponents to Rebel spokesmen who accused all of the exotic races of being submerged in a lockstep alien “hive-mentality.” To know a Poltroyan was to have a gut feeling that the slander just couldn’t be so. The winsome little bald-headed folks with the ruby eyes managed to be exemplars of Unity without even opening their mauve lips; and when they did speak out, they were awfully convincing.

Two of the most eloquent Poltroyan apologists for Unity were Fritiso-Prontinalin and Minatipa-Pinakrodin—old friends of the family who had once been visiting fellows at Dartmouth College. I was in attendance when Fred and Minnie came back to Hanover in October 2081 and chaired a hugely successful pro-Unity monster rally at Seuss Auditorium. They were so persuasive that I even found myself wavering … just a little.

As I have wavered on many an occasion since then, now that I’m the last of the Rebels. Mais cela n’a aucune importance.

Marc was too shrewd to take on the Poltroyans, the Teilhardians, the proponents of cosmic consciousness, the pro-Unity academics, or the loyalist Magnates of the Concilium in direct confrontation. (And of course he refused to engage in public debate with Paul, even though his father tried incessantly to maneuver him into one.) Marc left the down-and-dirty fighting to his Rebel colleagues—especially Alex Manion and the formidable Professor
Masha MacGregor-Gawrys—and stayed above the fray with seraphic equanimity.

Dorothée had struck some kind of universal chord when she hung the angelic label on him. It was picked up by other loyalists and was widely used by Marc’s detractors even before the militant phase of the Rebellion began. But in 2081, when there was still hope for a peaceful secession of humanity from the Milieu, Marc was careful to maintain a sympathetic image. During his interviews on the Tri-D broadcasts of “Meet the Press,” “On the Record,” “Newsmakers,” and other discussion programs, he neatly evaded adversarial questions about Mental Man and made the project seem as innocuous as in-vitro fertilization or the nonborn colonial fosterage scheme. Speaking simply but with commanding fervor, he played the philosopher-scientist, reaffirming his personal belief in human individualism and his commitment to mental independence at the same time that he justified Mental Man.

Unity, Marc declared again and again, must never be imposed upon humanity by fiat. We must be left free to choose it or reject it. He also emphatically denied the exotic assertion that anti-Unity humans threatened the very existence of the peaceful Milieu. The real threat to galactic civilization, he maintained, was the refusal of the exotic races to compromise.