Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (57 page)

I muttered something snide in Canuckois but Jack seemed perfectly amicable. “It’s all right. I’ll go to him. I know Rogi’s anxious to talk privately with you.”

She was palpably relieved. “Do you know where the CEREM facility is?”

“I’ll find it,” said Jack the Bodiless confidently. And he left the two of us alone.

I pulled up a stool. Cyndia’s gaze slid away from mine and she toyed with one of the virtual gloves on her workbench Silence grew.

Finally, I said, “What are you making?”

She started as if I’d administered an electric shock. “Nothing! I mean … nothing special. A sonic implant. To play music.”

“Don’t fancy those dinguses myself,” said I. “Gimme old-fashioned headphones—or better yet, full-spectrum wraparound stereo in my living room, with a faux fire burning in the old stove and a nice glass of sippin’ whiskey to hand. More human way to go.”

She stared at me in mute misery, shaking her head slowly. Tears welled in her lovely dark-lashed eyes.

“It’s over,” I told her gently. “The Fury monster’s dead, along with the poor soul who harbored it. And so are all its Hydra-children. Would you like me to tell you the whole story—so far as I know it?”

“Yes. Please.” She opened a workbench drawer, took out a tissue, and wiped her face.

I talked for over an hour. She didn’t interrupt, except one time when she fetched us some ice water from a dispenser on the wall. When I got to my final confrontation with Fury on the mountain, I told her what I had withheld from Jack.

“Fury told me that all of the Hydra-children were dead. Not just the five originals, but what he said were
New Ones
. It went right past me at the time, but I pulled it out of my memorecall later, all right. Along with what Fury said next. He told me: ‘There will be a great rebirth. As Mental Man is reborn, as I myself was reborn, so will my own children be.’ I don’t know what he was driving at. Do you, Cyndia?”

“Yes.” She had picked up the virtual visor and turned it over and over in her hands, staring blindly at it. “Marc didn’t surrender all of the Mental Man embryos to the Krondak agents of the Magistratum. He kept over a hundred that had assayed as operant paramount. I spirited them away myself, to a secret gestatorium Shig Morita and Peter Dalembert built beneath the Orcas Island house. I helped nurture those babies to term, Rogi. Mental Man became a reality.”

“Bon sang!” I murmured.

“Later we brought the children with us to Okanagon and hid them in the new CEREM facility. Marc planned to outfit them with 600X CE and use them in some overwhelming demonstration—some coup that would persuade the Milieu to let humanity go. I don’t know exactly what he planned to do. A large group of Rebel specialists came to Okanagon recently in connection with the project. New equipment and metaconcert programs were designed for this demonstration and Marc was very excited about
it. You see, the babies’ brains developed much faster than had been originally anticipated. And then … and then …”

“Denis showed up,” I prompted.

“Somehow, Denis was able to penetrate the cosmic-class security of CEREM. He killed every one of the babies. Electrocuted them. I was there just afterward and he talked to me, admitted it. He told me the children were Hydras, psychic vampires. The Madeleine Hydra had done it as part of some mad scheme to found a Second Milieu and dominate humanity. After telling me all this, Denis somehow disappeared without a trace. For—for reasons of my own, I never told Marc about any of this.”

“Denis was able to teleport,” I told her. “Generate an upsilon-field with his mind. He was an uncertified paramount metapsychic whose powers eventually emerged from semi-latency. But what did Denis mean about Hydra being reborn in Mental Man? If both Fury and the Madeleine Hydra are dead, that seems impossible.”

“All I know is that Marc intends to begin the project again. And this time, its purpose has nothing to do with the Rebellion. It’s too late to engender the babies for that. I—I think Marc wants Mental Man for His own sake
even though he knows the project is wrong wrong wrong immoral obscene!”

Her last words were an unexpected despairing scream that hit me like a physical blow. I leapt to my feet. She turned away, weeping helplessly, her small fists pounding the workbench again and again until I took hold of her arms to keep her from injuring herself. She writhed in my grasp, a thing in torment, her mindscreen concealing the precise meaning of what she had said. I never knew the full extent of the Mental Man horror until the adult Hagen and Cloud told me about it years later in Hawaii. Neither did most of the Galactic Milieu …

Almost as though some emotional switch had been thrown, Cyndia suddenly relaxed. Her sobbing ceased and she extricated herself from my embrace. We stood facing one another.

“I’m all right now,” she insisted. “I’m sorry I lost control.”

“Cyndia, for God’s sake! Tell me what Denis meant!”

She shook her head, blew her nose, and wiped her face with more Kleenex. “I’m the only one who can deal with it. It needn’t concern you, Rogi. I—I must ask you to promise not to tell anyone else about this. Especially Jack.”

“Are you out of your mind?” I yelled. “Marc intends to resurrect Mental Man, and Denis tells us they’ll be Hydras! We’ve got to tell Jack and Dorothée and Davy MacGregor and the Galactic Magistratum and the whole goddam Lylmik Quincunx! We’ve
got to warn your father and the Rebel Council that Marc’s gone off his rocker—”

“Listen to me!” she said, exerting all her coercion. “You misunderstood Denis when he spoke of Mental Man as a reborn Hydra. He was speaking metaphorically, not literally. Mental Man is a danger
in Himself
—not as a true Hydra. I came to that realization some time ago, after an agony of soul-searching. There are things about the Mental Man project that I haven’t told you. That I don’t intend to tell you! Just believe me when I say that I’ll put a stop to it. There will be no more Mental children. I can deal with this situation. I’m the only one who can.”

“Damn cocksure of yourself, aren’t you?” I shot back. “So all-fired certain you can make Marc change his mind! Well, I’ve known him a helluva lot longer than you have, and I think he’ll do exactly as he damn pleases. You want to know what else Denis told me? He said that he and Marc were the most dangerous men ever born! He warned me that Marc might do something awful to Hagen. To his own son.”

The blood drained from her face. “I knew it.”

“What did Denis mean?” I demanded.

“It doesn’t matter.” She turned her back on me. “I’ll see that nothing happens to Hagen or Cloud. And I’ll put an end to Mental Man. But you mustn’t interfere, Rogi. Or let Jack or the others know. They can’t stop Marc. Only I can.”

“If you’re wrong,” I said grimly, “God knows what’ll happen.”

She spun about. Her tear-grimed face was stubborn. “I know my husband. I understand his obsession and I know how to defuse it. I love Marc. I can do this, Rogi. You must believe me.”

I couldn’t take any more. Heading for the door, I said, “Have it your way, then, and the hell with you! I’m outa here. I’ll wait on the front stoop for Ti-Jean.”

“You won’t say anything to him?” she pleaded.

I made a dismissive gesture. “No. What can I tell him that’d make any sense? But I swear to God, if Marc’s determined to bring back Mental Man, you’ll never persuade him otherwise.”

“Persuasion,” said Cyndia Muldowney, “was not quite what I had in mind.”

I went stomping back through the house, fuming with rage, and on the way I met the nanny, Mitsuko Hayakawa, with the kids. Hagen was just shy of his second birthday, towing a little wagon with a Steiff dinosaur for a passenger, and Cloud was still a babe in arms, nearly six months old. I stopped for a minute and tried to be
sociable, but bad vibes blanketed me in an invisible miasma and the poor children didn’t want to have anything to do with me.

I wouldn’t see them again until nearly thirty-one years later, when they returned from the Pliocene Epoch through the time-gate, finally escaping the fate that their father had planned for them.

Jack came back nearly three hours later, after Thierry took pity on me and gave me something to eat. Ti-Jean was as serene as ever, but he did tell me that the meeting with Marc had gone badly. I didn’t have the heart to press him for details. Although Jack never said anything to me about it, I think Marc must have told him the truth about Mental Man—perhaps in some attempt to win approval for the scheme. All I know for certain is that from that day on, the brothers were adversaries, not friends, and their antagonism would not be resolved until the culmination of the Metapsychic Rebellion that was rapidly approaching.

H
E HAD BEEN NAPPING IN HIS CABIN ON THE
PSS V
ULPECULA
, conserving his strength, when Owen Blanchard’s powerful coercion woke him.

Marc. The fleet’s in co-orbital position.

Thanks Owen. Please alert the other ops and tell them to proceed to their CE bays and invest.

You’re not coming to the bridge to address them yourself?

I think not. This exercise will either work or it won’t work. There’s nothing to be gained by a pep talk. What’s the final estimate of our window of opportunity?

Four-pip-zero-two-one minutes. You’ve got exactly two hours until occultation per your sked.

Mock planetesimal in orbit?

Shining like the Moon over Miami and traveling like a bat out of hell. It’ll simulate a very plausible satellite-smasher to our tame stargazers back on Okanagon if they do a proper enhancer hack-job.

Excellent. Let’s hope they don’t have to simulate a near miss! Well I’m on my way …

Marc broke mental contact with Blanchard, donned the monitor-studded black coverall with its neck-ring seal, went to the personnel conveyor, and hit the
S-BAY
pad with his PK. He had been sleeping in the captain’s cabin of the Vulpecula on its brief billion-klom voyage from Okanagon, and so his ride was solitary.

When the door whisked open he stepped out into what had once been the starship’s shuttlecraft bay. The three spaceboats normally carried by a Twelfth Fleet cruiser of the Vulpecula class were absent and the entire compartment was now dedicated to ten 600X
CE enhancers, their auxiliary equipment, and their bulky power supply. The chamber was also newly lined with refractory cerametal and capable of being enveloped in an SR-80 sigma-field that would safely contain a small thermonuclear device. In the event that the CE exercise went awry and the operators destroyed themselves, the Vulpecula and its crew had a fair chance of survival.

Waiting for Marc were the nine people who shared prime focus for the psychocreative metaconcert: Alex Manion, Dierdre and Diarmid Keogh, Hiroshi Kodama, Patricia Castellane, Helayne Strangford, and Adrien, Catherine, and Severin Remillard. Marc wasted no time greeting them, but projected into their minds a farsensory image of what lay outside the starship:

The planet Diobsud, largest gas-giant in the Nespelem solar system, was seventh from the sun (Okanagon being second) and slightly smaller than the Old World system’s Jupiter. Marc’s mental image showed the world half-lit. Its cloud bands were white, pale yellow, and dusty chocolate-brown, a drab contrast to Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere, and its rings were tenuous and unspectacular. As if to make up for these esthetic deficiencies, Diobsud had an extensive collection of satellites. Five of them, including Satellite XV, which now loomed less than 300,000 kilometers away from the PSS Vulpecula and the 155 other commandeered Fleet vessels that comprised the little Rebel armada, were relatively huge—between 9,000 and 11,000 kilometers in diameter, very nearly the size of Okanagon.

Satellite XV, newly named Cible by Marc himself in ironic celebration of the occasion, had been chosen for the critical exercise because of its near-terrestrial density and its favorable position in orbit. To the mind’s eye, it was a relatively featureless peach-tinted sphere, presently half-lit like its primary, clothed with a smoggy atmosphere that hid the mostly ice-covered surface. In about two hours, the bulk of Diobsud would shield Cible from the view of anyone in the vicinity of Okanagon. The eclipse would last slightly longer than four minutes, during which time the metaconcert would do its work.

The moon’s new name was French for “target.”

“The subterfuge measures are in place,” Marc told his companions. “If all goes well, the mock planetesimal made of inflated Ronlar will seem to have impacted Cible during its eclipse by Diobsud. At least two local astronomers on Okanagon—good Rebels, needless to say!—are recording optical observations of the planet and its satellites, supposedly for orbital perturbation studies. A small sneetch of the computer-enhancement program
should insure that the disruption appears to be a regrettable but normal occurence.” He paused. “Are there any questions?”

The nine looked at him, saying nothing. Then Severin Remillard lifted a languid, black-gloved hand. “If this stunt comes off, will we be able to see poor old Cible blow? It’s not every day you get to wreck a world.”

“My farsight will remain in peripheral mode, non-enhanced,” Marc said rather coldly. “If you like, I’ll cancel the symbolic iconography of the metaconcert at the critical moment so that we all have a real visualization of the event.”

“I think I do prefer,” said Severin, “but just this once, mind you. Later on, when we get serious, I’d just as soon stick with the nice clean icons.” After a beat, he bespoke a deliberate addition: It might help minimize the guilt.

Adrien said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Sevvy!”

His elder brother only smiled.

Hiroshi Kodama said, “I recommend that from this point forward, we think only of our strategic objective—the freedom of the human race. Whatever personal misgivings we have must not be allowed to divert us from the goal we have all agreed to pursue.”

“Nice speech,” said Severin.

“You may withdraw from the metaconcert if you prefer,” Marc said, his mind-tone scrupulously neutral. “Olivia Wiley is standing ready as backup.”