Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (46 page)

As Dorothée had said, it’s impossible to exert coercion over the Tri-D. So I can only agree with her that Marc’s awesome success in those broadcasts involved a more old-fashioned brand of sorcery. The citizens of the Human Polity were not an unsophisticated lot; for the most part they were well educated, well informed, and immune to the sort of romantic balderdash that once fired people to march out on crusades to liberate Jerusalem or conquer the world for Communism. But Earth hadn’t had a real hero in ages, and maybe that helps to explain Marc’s near-instantaneous leap into the realm of superstars. He was handsome, brilliant, rich, and politically powerful—but he also seemed genuinely concerned about things that mattered deeply to humanity. He addressed our perennial fear of exotic domination, the still-festering resentment of the Intervention and the proctorship years, the operant-normal dichotomy, even our primitive belief in human racial superiority—and we ate it up because he seemed strong enough to be our champio.

Our real heroes were more modest and more alien. No wonder we didn’t appreciate them until they were dead.

*  *  *

Throughout the rest of the year 2081 and the early days of 2082, while the secret Concilium discussions continued and the public wrangles and media tempests raged, Rory Muldowney and the other Rebel militants expanded their stockpiles of illicit weaponry—both conventional and CE. Meanwhile, the shipyards on Astrakhan turned out one modified colonization transport after another. But the new vessels were not put immediately into service. Instead they were podded and kept in dry dock on the Russian planet because the Lylmik Supervisors had put a temporary halt to the establishment of new human colonies until the Unity question was resolved.

Using Marc’s sperm and the presumed ova of Rosamund Drake Remillard (an unmarried astrophysicist who eschewed any personal involvement in the Mental Man project), Dr. Jeffrey Steinbrenner and his associates engendered and cryonically stored some three thousand human embryos having paramount metacreative potential during the period between February 2081 and January 2082. Over 96 percent of the embryos were adjudged to be latent.

On 6 January 2082, at the close of the Plenary Concilium Session and acting upon its express order, Krondak agents of the Galactic Magistratum officially terminated the Mental Man project at CEREM. All of the frozen embryos were confiscated and removed from the premises. Their ultimate disposition was not announced.

Rebel humanity—and billions of heretofore uncommitted normals and operants—grieved for stillborn Mental Man. Marc, in a dignified announcement, called the forced termination of the project an atrocity, perpetrated by exotics envious and fearful of human potential. He stopped short of predicting any specific dire consequences, but warned that “human patience” with Milieu despotism was wearing thin.

In fact, Marc had anticipated the Concilium decision to quash Mental Man, and 114 precious embryos that had been assayed as
operant
paramount creators were no longer at CEREM when the Krondaku arrived. Thanks to advance warning of the raid from Boom-Boom Laroche, Cyndia Muldowney had smuggled them out of the facility two weeks earlier and reinstalled them in a clandestine gestatorium built by Shigeru Morita beneath the house on Orcas Island. There, dedicated Rebel biotechnicians, personally supervised by Cyndia, tended the paramount babies for over seven months.

Coincidentally, the second natural child of Marc and Cyndia, Cloud Laura Muldowney Remillard, was born on 19 May 2082, two weeks before the Mental Man fetuses were fully mature and ready to be freed from their uterine capsules.

A
FTER SHE HAD NURSED FOUR-DAY-OLD
C
LOUD AND TUCKED
the sated, sleeping infant into her cradle, Cyndia called up a status report from the gestatorium. Fetus Forty-Two, whose informal name was Conlan, was acting up again. She and Saskia would have to decide what to do about him later, when the reprogramming sked was due to flip. Such a hyperactive little fellow! What Conlan really needed was birth. But he’d have to stay in his artificial uterus for two more weeks, until the ship from Okanagon arrived to take him and the other children to their new families, and to the secret preceptive school that would turn them into Mental Man …

Cyndia went out onto the bedroom balcony where Marc was standing at the railing in the moonlight, gazing out over the ocean. The night was very warm and he was naked except for a pair of gold silk shorts, impossibly splendid, and her heart caught in her throat at the sight of him. He turned his head and smiled at her and she felt her healing body catch fire and wrench her with pain. It was too soon, but she wanted him all the same. More than anything, more than life itself, she loved and wanted him.

“How are the children?” he asked.

She knew which children he was talking about. He never came to see Hagen put to bed, never sat with her while she nursed Cloud. But it wasn’t important.

“They’re fine, ardaingeal ionúin,” she said lightly. “All of them. I just checked.”

“Come here and look,” Marc invited. “There are whales out in the channel tonight.”

“Whales?” She came to his side and looked out to sea. “Can you tell who they are? My farsight doesn’t seem to be working too well lately.”

He studied the cavorting black-and-white creatures. “I see Tunji, Filthy McNasty, Airegin, Ecaroh, Cannonball, and Mahjong with her new calf.”

“Maybe it’s time for us to give that baby a name. A second christening on this most auspicious day! You choose.”

He thought for a moment. “How about Nuage in honor of our daughter? It’s French for ‘cloud,’ and I’m fairly sure the calf is a female.”

“Perfect.”

“I’ve made us some sangria.” He turned to a table where a pitcher and two glasses stood and poured for both of them. “Sit down, love. It’s been a long day for you.”

The big double chaise was positioned to catch the evening breeze. He took her hand and helped her to recline, then stretched out beside her.

She adjusted the filmy blue nightgown and robe that she wore to conceal the effects of childbirth on her body. The wine punch was good and she drank it quickly, hoping it would assuage the lingering ache in her loins and belly. When she finished she set the glass aside and lay with her head in the crook of Marc’s powerful arm. His skin was dry and cool with a faint musky scent. Turning slightly, she searched his shadowed face, recognizing the familiar signs of deep preoccupation.

He said, “I’m glad we decided not to delay Cloud’s baptism until Jack and Dorothea come to Earth next week. Thierry and Mitsuko were ideal proxies.”

She gave a soft laugh. “And of course we wouldn’t have dared to invite the designated godparents to the island. Their paramount ultrasenses might have detected the secret gestatorium.”

“There’s that,” he agreed. “But I didn’t much feel like having a big family affair this time around, the way we did for Hagen. There are too many important things on my mind right now.”

Cyndia was careful not to let her reaction show. “It
was
rather nice to have an intimate little ceremony—just the surrogates and the babies and Sister Virginia and us.”

“And now only us. And a pod of dancing killer whales.”

“Don’t call them that,” she chided him. “Call them orcas.”

“If it makes you happy. But they’re still hunters. Beautiful, intelligent meat-eaters.”

“Mmm.” She let one hand trail over his thigh. “Like you, my love. And me.” She gave a comical little growl.

He smiled. His rejection of her sexual invitation was kind but firm.

She adroitly covered the awkwardness of the moment. “I’ve been wondering—is this island named for the whales? Or are the whales named for the island?”

“Neither. ‘Orca’ is Latin for some sort of whale, and the island was named by the Spanish explorer Francisco Eliza in honor of the Viceroy of Mexico—one Don Juan Vicente de Güemes Pacheco y Padilla Orcasites y Aguayo Conde de Revilla Gigedo.”

She burst out laughing in spite of herself. “Good heavens, what a name! But I can’t believe the similarity is only a coincidence.”

“Coincidences happen. Synchronicity is everywhere, weaving happenstance into inevitability. We should know, chérie.”

“Yes.” She was suddenly sober. The dull pain in her lower abdomen sharpened for an instant and made her catch her breath.

“Innards acting up again?” He was genuinely concerned.

“Just a little. The … baby’s nursing makes the womb contract.” As do other things! “It’s nature’s way of bringing mothers back to normal after childbirth.”

“To hell with nature. Let me deal with it.”

He pulled her to him, his great hands cherishing her swollen breasts, and she closed her eyes and abandoned herself to the slow, soothing waves generated by his redaction. Gentler than orgasm, the internal caresses quieted the dismal aching and flooded her brain with endorphins and serotonin.

She sighed. “Ah, Marcas, Marcas. That’s so good.” And I love you so very much …

“I love you, too. I can’t bear to have you in pain.” He kissed her lips and she shivered with a soft coming.

“There’s no pain anymore.”

It wasn’t precisely true. The physical discomfort was gone, but a nagging disappointment remained, no matter how she tried to convince herself that it was inconsequential. Once again Marc had chosen to be absent at the birth of their child, the daughter she had insisted on bearing. This time, he had been on the other side of North America in Concord, the capital of the Human Polity, attending what he said was an important Rebel strategy meeting.

She’d tried to make allowances. On Hibernia, midwives presided at normal deliveries, which customarily took place at home; and many a young father, too queasy or too frightened to be present at the birth, was shooed offstage during the great occasion and only allowed to creep back when the baby was safely born, washed clean, and nestling in its radiant mother’s arms. Hagen’s birth had happened at home that way, just as she’d planned, and it
had been a rewarding experience, even though Marc was away on Okanagon conniving with the Twelfth Fleet officers on the way they’d staff the new warships.

But when Hagen was born there had been no gestatorium concealed under the house.

Cyndia had supervised the lab’s operation willingly, even eagerly, knowing how vitally important the operant paramount fetuses were to the success of the Rebellion. But as her own tiny daughter grew within her, she began to imagine that the Mental babies were calling out telepathically to unborn Cloud, inviting her to join them in the gadget-laden, crimson-lit, artificial uteri …

Seafóid—it was only the Irish in her! Or one of those foolish caprices of pregnant females that a sensible engineer like herself should have laughed to scorn.

But instead, whenever the horrors came on her, she’d make excuses to Saskia and the other biotechnicians and flee the gestatorium—even the house itself, caving in like a hysterical coward to an irrational sense of dread. Mo náire thú, Síondaire! she’d say to herself. Shame on you, Cyndia! But it didn’t help.

An even greater uneasiness had seized her when she thought of giving birth to Cloud in the same house that sheltered Mental Man. So when her time came, she left Hagen in the charge of Thierry and Mitsuko, flew her own egg to the village of Eastsound in the northern part of the island, and checked into the little clinic. The delivery had been prolonged and painful but otherwise normal. She managed it naturally, as she had Hagen’s birth, with the assistance of the local nurse-practitioner.

Afterward, since her farsenses were temporarily inadequate due to stress, she called her husband on the teleview, reaching him at Severin Remillard’s Concord apartment. Marc seemed surprised when Sevvy and the other Rebels told him to go home to his wife and baby daughter; but he had returned to Orcas Island on the following day, properly solicitous and considerate, bearing a big bouquet of pink roses and a silver dumbbell rattle from Tiffany’s branch store in the Human Polity capital.

When Cyndia asked if she should set up a metapsychic assay of the newborn’s mind, Marc quietly told her that there was no hurry. She realized then what he must have done sometime earlier in her pregnancy, probably while she was safely asleep.

When formal testing was eventually carried out Cloud was shown to possess both redaction and farsensory metafaculties at the Grand Master level, and masterclass coercion. Her other mindpowers were paramount but deeply latent, as Hagen’s were …

Cyndia said, “You were working hard this evening. I couldn’t help perceiving the subspace communicator calls.”

The SS com was useless for confidential exchanges, but it served to notify distant recipients of impending narrow-beam telepathic messages that were unexpected. Even a paramount far-sensor like Marc found it fatiguing to focus on the intimate mode over interstellar distances when the person called was not “listening.”

Marc shifted position. His embrace fell away. “There’s bad news, I’m afraid.”

“Tell me, Marcas a mhuirnin.”

“Two weeks ago, one of Boom-Boom’s Krondak colleagues in the Magistratum office in Orb let slip that large numbers of high-df starships are quietly assembling at the big Eleventh Sector Base on Molakar. The Rebel execs and I have been trying to make sense of it. That’s what the conference in Concord was about, and that’s why I’ve been burning up the aether ever since I got home.”

“Molakar? That’s the Krondak Tau-Ceti world.”

“Yes.”

She stiffened, sitting up straight on the chaise. “But why would the Krondaku do a thing like that?”

“There could be any number of reasons. The Human Polity has been made privy to none of them, so we can only speculate. But the Krondaku are the most mentally formidable race in the Milieu—always excepting the obfuscous Lylmik—and Molakar is less than twelve lightyears from Earth. It was the staging point for the Great Intervention.”

Her eyes were wide. “Mother of God. You don’t think that the Milieu is planning a preemptive strike at Earth? An interdiction, cutting us off from our colonies?”