Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (28 page)

I had no illusions that I would be able to stave off the terrible redactive procedure by attacking Anne’s theory and substituting new ideas of my own. Jack and Dorothée had accepted Anne’s deduction. It was all too plausible. The metapsychic exorcism of Denis would proceed as planned.

What’s more, I was going to have to take an active part in it.

Jack had agreed with Anne’s original notion that I was the only one whose mind Denis would never be able to read. So I was the designated Judas-goat, the one who would somehow have to lead Denis to his fate. While the metaconcert worked him over I’d have to wait, like any anguished parent pacing the floor outside the sickroom of a gravely ill child, together with Lucille and the other unsuspecting Remillard family members who would have come to the Christmas réveillon, our traditional Franco-American supper and gift-giving session.

God rest ye merry, gentiefolk. Let nothing you dismay!

Denis’s gift from us would be life or death.

By November my continual brooding (made worse by the enforced period of teetotality) had made me such a mental basket case that even my old buddy, the seditious fantasy writer Kyle Macdonald, began to wonder what was wrong. I told him it was a busted love affair, even though I’d been celibate for nearly eight months.

“Laddie, what you need is a distraction,” Kyle decided. “Let me see what I can do.”

Two days later, on a rainy Thursday afternoon, his egg landed
on the pad behind my place and he came stomping in the shop’s back door with a big shit-eating grin on his face.

“Pack your bags and fix up the moggy with food and water for the weekend,” he commanded. “There’s a three-day interdisciplinary symposium on the perils of Unity being held in Lyon over the Armistice Day holiday weekend. I’m tired of staying home alone while Her Nibs goes off gallivanting, so I’m going to France with her and Sally Lapidus … and so are you!”

“France?
Now wait just a damned minute—”

But he paid no attention to my protests and went around putting out lights and locking the shop and programming the
CLOSED
sign. “Get your auld bones hopping and don’t keep Masha waiting outside in the egg, or we’ll both find our balls in the wringer. Shlep-ping you along on this wee trip was just as much her idea as it was mine.”

His wife, Mary MacGregor-Gawrys, was a noted metapsychologist, a Rebel stalwart, and Davy MacGregor’s favorite niece—by no means a female to cross lightly. She and Kyle periodically fought like fiends and vowed to go their separate ways, but their indomitable Celtic sex drives invariably brought them back together again.

“What the hell makes you think I’d have a good time at some meeting of Rebel eggheads?” I whined querulously, trying to resist Macdonald as he herded me upstairs to my apartment while Marcel the cat trailed in our wake, meowing anxiously. The kiltie bastard wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but he was a hell of a lot stronger.

“The symposium is only an excuse to get out of town, dummy! While the two lassies do their panel discussions and other tosh and taradiddle, you and I will sightsee and drink and then show up for the nightly parties. There are always parties.”

“But it’s so far away—”

“Not in my new Formula egg. A few hours flying and we’ll be there in time for a late nosh. You’ll love the restaurants in Lyon: La Pyramide! Georges Blanc! Paul Bocuse! La Mère Guy! We can swill great burgundy and eat real coq au vin and truffle soup and breaded tripe. And I’ll pick up your entire tab.”

I unlocked the apartment door. “Tripe? Quelle puke!”

“Fake frog. So eat the pig’s feet rémoulade.” He hustled me into my bedroom and hauled a garment bag out of the closet. “You’ll need a decent suit. And some sexy underwear. Dear little Sally broke up with that economics bloke from the Amos Tuck School she was going with, and you might get lucky.”

Sally Lapidus?… I’d seen her around Catherine Remillard’s Metapsychic Preceptorial Institute, a clinical psychologist who had been one of Dorothée’s early operant mentors. Sally wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous like Masha—few women were—but she was a well-rejuvenated brunette with a vivacious manner, fine dark eyes, and an exquisite set of knockers. I, on the other hand, was feeling about as dashing as a pile of dog-barf, and I feared that Kyle was overly optimistic about my chances with the lady.

As I stood in front of the open armoire in my bedroom, still vacillating, Kyle put his hand on my shoulder and said quietly, “Come along, man. What have ye got to lose?”

The freeloading part didn’t bother me. I’d cooked Kyle enough scratch suppers when he and Masha were on the outs, and he was currently flying high on the profits from his latest satire,
Revenge of the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles
.

I said, “Oh, hell, why not?”

Anything was better than moping around the bookshop watching the cat snooze in the front window while the last dead leaves dropped off the trees along Main Street. I gathered up my things, belted on the nifty leather stormcoat Denis and Lucille had given me for my 133rd birthday, and followed Kyle down the stairs and out into the murky back yard.

His new rhocraft was a screaming-orange Lamborghini.

As we climbed in, Masha snapped, “About time. I’d bloody well given up on you two bozos.”

But Sally Lapidus gave me a sweet, welcoming smile and made room for me on the rear banquette. I began to feel better already.

We took off, and three hours later we landed in La Belle France. I’d had a nice nap, Kyle and the two ladies had jollied me out of my blue funk, and they’d filled me in on the latest poop in the Rebel community—including the mind-blowing information that Marc was preparing to announce his affiliation with the Rebel cause at the next Plenary Session of the Concilium.

As we were checking into our hotel off the Place Bellecour, we met a group of six fellow conferees from Edinburgh, former colleagues of Masha’s, who insisted that we accompany them to supper at the legendary Bistrot de Lyon. The venerable eatery was crowded and noisy, full of happy people speaking heavily accented Standard English and even genuine French. The oysters, tartare de boeuf, and bouillon de poule aux ravioles were delicious (I passed on the gras-double), and the “pots” of young wine light and therapeutic—just what the doctor ordered for a recuperating
old head-case. I ate and drank judiciously and listened to the shoptalk of the Rebel theoreticians with mild interest.

Up until a year or so ago, I hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to the deeper anti-Unity aspects of the Rebel cause. But then some Milieu-loyalist metapsychologists in Paris caused a furor in the media by claiming to have detected outbreaks of something called spontaneous coadunation—a sort of prelude to Unity that exotic scientists had predicted would occur when the human population in the galaxy reached a certain critical number, provoking what physicists call a phase change. Rebel theorists pooh-poohed the great news and immediately set out to prove that spontaneous coadunation didn’t exist … and even if it did, it didn’t necessarily mean that Earthlings were on a sure downhill slide to Unity.

Denis (who looked forward to human Unification as though it were the Second Coming of Christ) had tried to explain the coadunation thing to me as a superior kind of mental harmony brought about by intensive interactive communication among multiple minds. He compared it to the evolution of single-cell organisms into complex, multicelled creatures, and the evolution of human society from little family-based clans into global or even galactic civilizations. He told me that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the canonized French Jesuit paleontologist, had discussed the possibility of this kind of global consciousness as far back as the 1930s. Mental coadunation, whatever it was, supposedly jibed nicely with what Denis called systems theory. When he had tried to explain
that
to me, my eyes glazed over.

Neither coadunation nor Unity appealed to me on a philosophical level, despite Denis’s best efforts to explain them. Frankly, they scared me. I couldn’t help being dubious about a phenomenon that might threaten the sanctity of my own thoughts …

Well, all right. Maybe my thoughts weren’t all that sacred. But they were mine and I wasn’t keen on promiscuous sharing, not even to advance the evolution of the transcendental Mind of Humanity. I also had a suspicion that coadunation was nothing but a rehash of the romantic old notion of the perfectibility of human nature. You know: If we all just think together and strive together and achieve true mental siblinghood together—voilà!—human selfishness, contrariety, and original sin will disappear, and peace and love will rule the stars.

Sure.

Maybe the racial minds of the Gi and the Krondaku and the Simbiari and the Poltroyans and the Lylmik had evolved along those lines. But humanity was something else altogether. We were
still blatant ethical primitives and a whole lot of folks like me still clung to our individuality with bloodyminded fervor. It seemed to me that we weren’t ready for Unity—and maybe Unity wasn’t ready for us, either.

Sitting there in the French restaurant, listening to the Rebel academics affirm in their elegant jargon the same basic conclusions my crude old mind had reached all on its own, I felt vindicated. I also felt depressed all over again, because it was plain that these people—and a whole lot of others just like them—intended to do more than debate the issue politely in sessions of the Galactic Concilium. They were going to fight for what they believed in.

And they had chosen Marc Remillard for their new leader, which meant that no matter how scintillating their theorizing was, where practical matters were concerned they were nothing but half-assed innocents.

It was two in the morning when we got back to the hotel. Dark-eyed Sally did not invite me to her room. It was just as well.

“There’s this village a little west of the city,” Kyle told me the next day. We had just finished a. chilly and strenuous exploration of the ancient subterranean tunnels in Lyon’s Croix-Rousse district and I was ready for something different. “It’s called Saint-Antoine-des-Vignes. Supposed to have a great spot for lunch, and then I’d like to check out an unusual kind of country inn near it that Johnny Ludlum told me about. I’m thinking of using it in my next novel.”

I was game, so we drove westward out of Lyon Metro toward a small range of mountains. The cheap groundcar that my novelist friend had rented lacked satellite navigation aids, and before long we were lost. It began to rain. Rags of mist draped themselves over the hills and obscured the inadequate directional signs. Almost by accident we finally found ourselves in Saint-Antoine, an obvious tourist trap with most of the boutiques and trumpery shops closed for the season. But the cafe-cum-pub, Chez Lalage, was open and its car park was jammed. Inside was a wonderful surprise, for the menu included both ordinary fare and a single plat du jour of the highest gourmet quality, with wines to match. The proprietor, a handsome young fellow named Louie, proudly told us that his wife, the chef, had headed a four-star establishment in Paris before succumbing to his charms and burying herself in les boondocks du Lyonnais.

Kyle and I lunched on the awesome blue-plate special, pigeonneaux à la Aristide Briand—fat squabs stuffed with foie gras and truffles. Then we had langoustine salad, and finished up with tiny
dessert soufflés flavored with parfait d’amour. The bill was staggering—and so was I, since we had downed a couple of bottles of splendid ’75 Leflaive Pucelles Puligny-Montrachet along with the meal, and my alcohol capacity still wasn’t quite back up to snuff.

I was ready to curl up and go to sleep after that memorable lunch, but Kyle had other ideas. Following an earnest conversation with Louie, he drove us out of the village and turned onto a twisting, forest-bordered track that led into the cloud-shrouded mountains. Just when I became convinced that we were lost again, we pulled up at an open iron gate. On one of the gateposts was a polished brass sign:

L’AUBERGE DU PORTAIL

“This is it,” Kyle said, and turned in. “The Inn of the Portal.”

Tall shrub-roses with scarlet hips, nearly leafless now with the approach of winter, lined the graveled driveway. At the end of it, looming out of the mist, were three substantial buildings with balconies and mansard roofs, connected by covered arcades. They were poised above a series of landscaped terraces, and on a clear day the front rooms of the auberge would have commanded a fine view of the Rhône Valley. We drove into a parking area paved with flagstones. The main entrance to the inn had tall oaken doors shielded by a porte cochère. In the courtyard of the right wing was a rose garden, forlorn in the rain. Beyond that, tucked among pines and leafless mulberry trees, stood a quaint cottage with dark shutters and half-timbering. In spite of the lousy weather, a group of tourist types stood reverently in front of the little building listening to the spiel of a guide.

“That’s where the time-gate is,” Kyle said. He grabbed his camcorder, got out of the car, and began to make a video. “The equipment is set up in the basement of that cottage. The inventor was a chap named Théophile Guderian. He lived there until he died in 2041. His widow Angélique is supposed to have made a fortune shipping off well-heeled dafties and adventurers to Exile in the Pliocene Epoch, six million years in the past. Too bad we can’t get inside the cottage to look over the machinery. It’s off-limits except to the actual Time-Travelers and the operating techs. We’ll be able to pick up some literature in the office, though.”

“Time-gate?” I stood beside him on the puddled flagstones, my jaw hanging open. “Say! I think I remember hearing about this place years ago. I’d forgotten all about it.”

“L’Auberge du Portail is the site of the only known temporal
singularity in the galaxy. Guderian’s gadgetry won’t work anyplace else.” Kyle did a slow 360-degree pan of the scene, finishing the shot by zooming in on the cottage. “Milieu authorities try to keep it hushed up, and there’s a stiff fine if you publicize it in the vulgar media. If I do decide to use the place in my fantasy novel, I’ll have to disguise the locale. The European Intendancy is mad as hell that they haven’t been able to shut the auberge down, but they’ve tried for years without getting anywhere. The Pliocene Exile serves a useful purpose, y’see, siphoning off malcontents. I’ve heard that Davy MacGregor himself has given Madame Guderian permission to stay in business … Come on, let’s tag along on the tour.”