Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (56 page)

The face was replaced by a small-business mail menu. Cyndia said: “Forward.”

After an interval, a white-haired Polynesian woman of inscrutable mien appeared on the display. “Johnson residence.”

“My name is Cyndia Muldowney. I’m Marc Remillard’s wife, calling from the planet Okanagon. I wonder if I might speak to Uncle Rogi?”

The woman’s face broke into a friendly smile. “Cyndia! So happy to see, talk wit’ you at lass! I’m Malama—ole friend of da family! You hang in dere, I get Rogue. He’s out loafin’ on da lanai.”

She disappeared. In a moment the bookseller himself showed up, looking decidedly seedy.

“Cyndia?”

“Uncle Rogi, this is extremely important. Please be very careful what you say on this open beam. It’s not likely that anyone is eavesdropping, but we must assume they might be. Do you understand?”

The old man pinched his slightly crooked nose and squeezed his eyes shut momentarily. “Uhh. Go ahead. I’ll do the best I can. Does this have something to do with … politics?”

“Not really. And please let’s not play Twenty Questions. This may be a matter of life or death. Now listen: Two days ago I received a visit from an extraordinary person. One I never thought I’d ever meet. A certain relative of yours. I thought he was dead. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

“Batège!” Rogi exclaimed. “He said he’d come straight from Okanagon, but—”

“Stop! Don’t say any more. This person … naturally I thought he was an impostor.”

“He was who he said he was,” Rogi stated flatly. “And now
he’s really dead. I was there when he passed away. Yesterday.” The old man’s lips tightened and he lowered his gaze.

For a moment Cyndia could not speak. “Then what he told me was the truth? He said some truly incredible things. That your family had … skeletons in its closet.”

Rogi’s head snapped up. “Oh, he said that, did he? Well, you better believe he was telling you the truth. Fortunately for us, the bones have stopped rattling. The skeletons are all dead, too.”

“Are you certain? All of them? Even the sister?”

“That’s what this relative told me. I don’t think he would have lied.”

“Thank God,” she whispered. “Then there’s really only Marc.”

“What’s that?” The old man looked startled. “What else did Den—the relative say to you? About Marc.”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell you now. Perhaps later. When we meet in person.”

“Cyndia, I’ll try to come to Okanagon. We’ve gotta talk all this over. You have a right to know. And there’s something else, about Marc and your children …”

“I was afraid there might be,” she said simply. “Come if you can. Goodbye, Uncle Rogi.”

She switched off the SS com unit before the old man could say anything more, and sat staring at its blank screen for several minutes. Then she turned to the ordinary teleview that sat on Marc’s desk and phoned a big scientific supply house in Chelan Metro to put in a lengthy order. Only one item was unavailable and would have to be obtained from Earth. She requested FedEx SpeedStar service, but the catalog told her apologetically that the device was on back order from the manufacturer and would probably take over eight weeks to arrive.

“Do you still wish to place the order, Citizen?”

“Yes,” she said.

When she had finished, she studied the mechanical drawing on the CAD plaque for some time, committing the design to memory before erasing it.

Then she left Marc’s office and went out into the garden, where the nanny Mitsuko and little Cloud and Hagen were enjoying the sunshine.

A
FTER
I
WAS DONE TALKING TO
C
YNDIA
I
SHUFFLED BACK INTO
the kitchen, where Malama was cooking up some Spam in pineapple sauce and pea pod rice, a simple supper for the two of us. The sun had just gone down and the sky along the Pacific horizon was smeared with thin scarlet clouds. When the entrée was done Malama just dumped it onto a serving platter and set it on the kitchen table, where a salad and lilikoi punch were already waiting. She told me to sit down and urged me to help myself. I took a heaping plateful and dug in like a starving man.

The kahuna watched with approval as I gobbled the food and took seconds. “I’m glad your appetite has returned.”

Talking with my mouth full, I said, “I don’t even care that you’re feeding me Spam.”

“You know it’s a traditional Hawaiian delicacy. Are you feeling better, dear?”

I allowed as how I was, and thanked her for putting my head back together with her redaction. A day after Denis’s death, I was able to mourn him without falling to pieces, even though I still hadn’t completely come to terms with the reality of what I had done.

I had egged to Kauai on auto-Vee almost as soon as I was rescued from the top of Mount Washington by the AMC, only stopping in Hanover long enough to give Denis’s ashes to Lucille and ask her to take care of Marcel for a while. She told me she had known instantly when her husband died. Philip, Maurice, Anne, and the convalescent Paul, the only members of the Dynasty on Earth at the time, had also mentally experienced their father’s demise. They were with Lucille now, comforting her and one another. None of them had asked for specifics of Denis’s death
and I volunteered nothing. It was enough for them to know that he was finally at peace.

I had decided to tell only one other person about Denis/Fury’s end on Mount Washington. Jack had to know the truth.

Or most of it.

After supper I borrowed Malama’s old Isuzu 4×4 and drove to Lawai Kai, which was only a few kilometers away. Jack had been in residence there for a couple of months. According to Malama, he was working on some important scientific project.

He had cancelled the mechanical security measures around his estate in anticipation of my arrival, and I drove around to the back of the plantation house and parked among the palm trees. He came out to meet me. After I climbed out of the truck we held one another in a wordless embrace. He’d felt Denis’s release, too—although, like the others, he had no idea where or how his grandfather had died.

He said, “Let’s take a walk down to the shore, and you can tell me about it.”

We followed the winding path along the lagoons and finally came out in the picturesque cove where Queen Emma’s house had once stood. We sat down side by side on the sand. There was no moon and the surf was gentle. Noctilucent plankton in the water edged each breaking wave with faintly green-glowing foam.

I told him almost everything. Some instinct told me to leave out Fury’s mysterious remarks about the eventual renascence of Hydra in Mental Man.

When I finished the story, Jack said, “And Denis told you to give me the Great Carbuncle?”

I pulled the key ring out of my pants pocket and held it out to him. There was a microscopic crimson spark in the nucleus of the spherical fob. “That’s what he said. No reason given.”

Jack detached the caged red gem and gave the keys back to me. He studied the fob intently for a considerable length of time, I presume scanning it with his deepsight. I’d looked into it that way myself from time to time. There was certainly something inside that supposedly flawless diamond, but I’m jiggered if I could ever figure out what it was.

Jack said, “What can you tell me about this thing?”

“It’s got something to do with the Lylmik. I think it calls them, summons their help. At least, that’s what the Carbuncle seems to’ve done for me. You can believe it or not. I don’t give a good goddam.”

“I believe it.” He climbed to his feet and slapped the sand off his
blue jeans. “I’ll take good care of this and give it back to you just as soon as I can. Now I think we’d better get back to the house. I’m going to have to put in a subspace call to Orb alerting Davy MacGregor to a farshout He’s got to know about Fury and Hydra’s death. Don’t worry. I’ll pledge him to secrecy. As far as the Milieu at large is concerned, Fury was an unknown who assumed various identities.”

“You gonna call Marc, too?”

“No,” Jack said. “I’m going to Okanagon and talk to him in person. I haven’t decided whether to tell Marc that Denis was Fury. It might give him a significant propaganda weapon to use against the Dynasty.”

“I’ll keep mum if you want me to,” I said, “and to hell with being loyal to the Rebellion. Family comes first. The fewer people who know about Denis, the better. Just tell Marc that Fury came rarin’ after me, and I zorched the bastard. He’ll believe I’ve got the watts, after the way I blew Parni away. Better yet, let me come with you and I’ll spin him a plausible yarn myself. I’ve got another reason for tagging along besides. There’s something really important I have to say to Cyndia.”

Jack considered my suggestion. “I’ll be going at maximum displacement factor, but I suppose I could put you into oblivion stasis.”

I gave a little fakey chuckle. “Oblivion sounds like the perfect place for me right about now. Let’s get going.”

The cosmopolitan planets tend to be less tourist-oriented than the ethnic worlds, and a lot less picturesque. Most of them have large, bustling populations that seem excessively eager to terraform the exotic landscape and ecology into a faithful approximation of Home Sweet Home. In cosmop cities especially, a visitor is likely to get the impression that he’s in bland old Cleveland or Manchester or Osaka or Volgograd, rather than on an exotic world umpteen lightyears from Earth.

When I first visited Okanagon a number of years ago, I got a pleasant surprise. It was gorgeous.

Except for the great plateau where the Twelfth Fleet had its starbase, the enormous, mostly equatorial continent of the planet was ribbed with spectacular snow-crested mountains. The inhabited regions were along the deeply indented coast and in broad river valleys that can best be described as temperate jungles, verdant and lush with flowers. The cultivated land had soil so fertile that wooden fenceposts proverbially sprouted when they were
stuck into it, blessing Okanagon with an unending series of bumper crops. The rampant vegetation also made the massive earthquake scars unobtrusive except in the higher elevations, where quiescent lava flows, landslides, and raw precipices betrayed severe seismic activity. I would never have noticed the peculiar courses of the rivers, which had right-angle displacements to their courses along the more active fault lines, if Jack had not pointed them out to me as we flew over them in his private starship, XSS Scurra II.

Because Scurra was so small and Jack a notably privileged VIP, we didn’t have to land at a starport, but proceeded directly to Marc and Cyndia’s home, which was situated on the Osoyoos River about 400 kloms from Chelan, the planetary capital.

We arrived late in the afternoon, just after a shower had freshened the air. The house was a large contemporary structure with open verandas and extensive gardens. I found out later that the CEREM complex was within easy groundcar driving distance in the mountains nearby, with the more critical installations buried in a stable rock formation.

We came in under rhopower. No overt security measures or domestic NAVCON challenged Scurra as we overflew the estate and landed on a pad beside the tennis court. Our welcome could not have been more conventional. Marc’s longtime nonoperant houseman, Thierry Lachine, opened the front door to us with a hearty “Bonjour.” Both Jack and I had met him many times before when visiting Marc’s former home in the San Juan Islands, and we made small talk as we followed him through cool corridors with ochre-tiled floors and dark green wood paneling, sparsely hung with abstract paintings. The starkness of the decor was slightly relieved by an occasional large ceramic planter, full of tall foliage plants having greenish-copper leaves. Somebody, undoubtedly young Hagen, had been digging in one of the pots with a small shovel of yellow plass that lay in a scattering of dirt on the polished floor. Thierry laughed and ignored the mess. One of the tidybots would come along and deal with it eventually, he said.

“Do you like living on Okanagon?” I asked him.

“I miss the nightlife in Seattle,” he admitted. “Chelan Metro isn’t exactly a toddlin’ town and they’ve never heard of ice hockey hereabouts. But I can’t complain too much. Triple salary helps.”

“Have you been bothered by earthquakes?” Jack asked.

“We do have the occasional tremblement de terre, for sure. And some of them are whoppers. But the house is stabilized by inertialess force-fields, just like CEREM and the important government
buildings, so I guess we’re safe enough. Me, I don’t pay much attention to ’em … This way, please. Madame’s in her atelier.”

We went outside, across a beautiful patio with a great view of the river and into a small building connected to the garages by a breezeway. I expected we’d find Cyndia puttering in a glorified garden shed, but “Madame’s atelier” turned out to be an elaborately equipped workshop that any professional nanoengineer would have been proud to call his or her own. When we came inside she had on virtual gloves and a visor and was tinkering with something microscopic through the proxy of a pair of slave manipulators.

“Knock, knock, Cyndia!” said Thierry brightly. “Visitors.” And he left us.

Cyndia said “Explicit” into the command-mike, stripped off headpiece and gloves, and literally flung herself into my arms. “I’m so glad you came! So very, very glad.” Then she kissed me. Her greeting to Jack was more subdued but still sincere.

We’d given Cyndia and Marc no advance warning that we were on our way to Okanagon. Jack was afraid that his brother might try to avoid the meeting by skipping offworld. When our starship came through the superficies into normal space in the Nespelem solar system, Jack tried to farspeak Marc with no success. He did reach Cyndia, however. She told us that Marc was working at CEREM (fortified by the usual gonzo sigma-fields) and she would tell him we were on our way to the house. She had been sure he would be happy to see both of us.

Wrongo.

“I’m sorry,” she confessed, her lovely face flushed with mortification. “Marc refuses to come to the house and meet you. He said he’d see you at CEREM, Jack, if you felt you had to speak with him. He’s been … moody for the past week or so.”