Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (6 page)

A
NNE’S STUNNING ANNOUNCEMENT PUT MY BRAIN ON HOLD
.

I rejected what she had said and ceased processing input, passing into a state that the shrinks call profound denial. I saw, I heard, I smelled, I felt every aspect of the pleasant old bookshop all about me. I even grinned idiotically at the grieving priest who had placed both her hands on my shoulders to steady me. I was no more capable of rational thought or response than a chunk of firewood. I stood there, sickened to the depths of my soul, while Marcel anxiously stropped my legs and Anne tried in vain to redact my barricaded mind.

She finally took me by the hand and opened the door leading to the building’s small lobby. The little coffeeshop opposite my place was dark, shut up early because of the snowstorm. Anne and I and the cat climbed the creaky old inner staircase and I felt the carpeted treads under my feet and the age-smoothed wood of the banister beneath my fingers. The people in the insurance agency that occupied the second floor of the old Gates House building had all gone home and the wind whipped around the dormers of my third-floor apartment. Outside, the Great White Cold walked abroad, and my heart was lost somewhere in the blizzard along with it.

I didn’t speak until we were in my kitchen, me sitting at the oak table with an untasted Wild Turkey triple before me, she—having checked out the leftovers and rejected them—scratching up the makings of a decent meal for us while she sipped a Scotch rocks made with Bruichladdich.

“Denis can’t be Fury,” I said at last. “You’re full of shit, Annie.”

She found a packet of Nova Scotia lox that I had been saving for a special occasion, a heel of Vermont cheddar, butter, and six eggs
in the refrigerator. In the pantry was a flute of gamma French bread and some ready-to-zap Turkish apricot pastries. Tying an apron over her chic black wool pantsuit, she began to grate the cheese.

“I can’t prove my contention, Uncle Rogi—which puts me up the proverbial fecal watercourse without a paddle. But I am morally certain that my father is the malignant entity we call Fury. He doesn’t realize it, of course. That’s what’s so abominable about this situation.”

“I don’t believe it,” said I. “I know Denis better than any of you. He’s like a son to me. Pour I’ amour de dieu—he bonded to me when he was only a few days old!”

“I have only circumstantial evidence to support my belief. But it’s strong. Very strong.”

I took a tentative lap of the whiskey, found it good, and swallowed a sizable belt. “Tell me.”

“The first clue involves the single occasion when I’m positive that the Fury persona actually took over its host’s physical body. That was in 2054, when someone went to Baby Jack’s room in Hitchcock Hospital at Dartmouth and started the fire that was intended to kill him. A living entity was truly there in the flesh. It wasn’t merely a metacreative ‘sending.’ The hospital security monitors proved that, even though the intruder creatively fuzzed his image so it was unrecognizable, and the operant guard at the scene had his mind wiped.”

“But we thought one of the Hydras did it.”

“They couldn’t have. The timing is wrong—but I only proved it much later. Just before the fire, the four Hydra-children were at Paul’s house. They’d killed the housekeeper, poor Jacqui Menard, and were trying to do a snuff-job on you. You told me so yourself.”

“It was kinda confusing,” I mumbled, pouring myself another stiff snort. I was actually half-sozzled at the time. “I’m certain all four of the Hydras were there, ready to fry my brain. I’m still not too sure how I got away from the damn brats, but I did. Then they escaped in a red egg that looked like yours, and there was this sonic boom—”

“They stole my rhocraft earlier in the evening. The time of their takeoff at illegal velocity was precisely noted by a curious college student living in one of the houses nearby. Unfortunately, he never thought to notify the authorities. It took me a long time to track down that witness. The Hanover police and the Galactic Magistratum weren’t especially interested in
when
Hydra decamped.
They just wanted to know where the children had gone. No one bothered to compare the time of the sonic boom with the time-code on the monitor recording of the intruder in Jack’s room. When I finally found the witness, I discovered that it was impossible for the Hydra-children to have started the fire. Ergo, Fury did it personally.”

“And you’re certain … that it was Denis?”

“Every one of my siblings had a verifiable alibi for that time except me—and I know I’m innocent! There was no way you or Marc could have done it. Lucille had gone to comfort Catherine after visiting Marc in the other hospital south of town, but Denis went home alone after dropping off Lucille at Cat’s house. You remember how my sister collapsed after her son Gordo’s death. Mama was going to spend the night with Cat and the other children. Papa has no alibi from the time he left Mama until nearly an hour later, when he came to the hospital after the fire was put out.”

“Why didn’t anyone else think of Denis?”

“The Dynasty never seriously considered him to be a Fury suspect. I didn’t myself. We thought the monster was one of ourselves, or perhaps Marc. That our own father could be the controller of Hydra was inconceivable. You must remember that all of the Remillards—including Denis—passed the test on the Cambridge lie-detector machine after Jack’s rescue. The mind-probe reaffirmed that none of us was Fury. We knew about the possibility of Fury being an aspect of a multiple-personality disorder in one of us, which wouldn’t register on the machine, but there was also the faint hope that the monster might not be a family member after all.”

“My head ached for a week after the Cambridge ream-job.” I poured myself some more booze on general principles. “What are you going to do about this mess? Tell the Lylmik?”

“I went to the four Supervisors in Concilium Orb and asked for their help. They said they could do nothing and justified themselves with the usual mystical gobbledygook. They further declined to put the matter to Atoning Unifex, their chief. Apparently, since we Remillards produced this family demon, we’re the ones who will have to exorcise it.”

So the Family Ghost had washed its invisible hands of us! Even as I was cursing the thing inside my skull, a useful idea obtruded, no doubt spawned by the liquor’s lowering of my misery quotient. “We can count on help from Jack and from Dorothée, too. She’ll be part of the family soon.”

Anne considered this without much enthusiasm. “At least it’s
worthwhile taking both of them into our confidence. Fury can never probe their paramount minds and learn we’re on its tail. But I’m not at all sure about the other members of the Dynasty. Or Marc.”

“He told me he’s had dreams,” I admitted. “And not harmless ones like mine, unless I misunderstood him. Fury’s trying to tempt him into joining it—like it once tempted Dorothée.”

“And me,” Anne confessed.

“Toi aussi? Ah merde—ça, c’est le comble!” And the first hint that Anne might be lying came tiptoeing into my mind on icy little pygmy crampons.

“That was when I first started to suspect Denis. When Fury tried to convert me to its cause in a series of elaborate dreams.” She replenished her drink. “It happened late in 2054, right after humanity was finally enfranchised in the Galactic Milieu.”

“That’s eighteen years before Dorothée had her encounter,” I said.

“Perhaps she and I share some attribute that made us suitable candidates for Fury’s scheme. In my case, Fury took the form of the goddess Athene and tried to recruit me. I was going to be far superior to Hydra, it said—a kind of sacred vessel of election, but a mind-slave all the same! At the culmination of my dream-temptation I had this sudden devastating insight that my temptor was Fury, not Athene. I rejected the goddess and her plan for a Second Galactic Milieu, but I nearly lost my mind as a consequence. Later, when I had recovered, I recalled that the goddess was Zeus’s favorite, his daughter who had sprung full-grown and fully armed from his own brow, the wise, powerful virgin who sat at his right hand and even used his sacred shield and lightning bolts to administer justice.”