Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (32 page)

Norah Jacoby unrolled a scrollo keyboard and played “Silent Night” in tinkling celesta tones. Some people sang along while others settled back to talk quietly. I noticed Severin slip away, and the words of the carol froze in my throat.

After a few more minutes passed, Catherine excused herself in the most natural manner possible. Norah switched her keyboard to the spinet mode and played “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” Paul was deep in conversation with Denis and Lucille, discussing some new charitable project being undertaken by the Remillard Foundation. Philip and Maurice wandered off together, arguing some abstruse political point. Norah and the other grandchildren delivered a fortissimo rendering of the Dartmouth “Winter Song.” Then Adrien left the parlor, allegedly in search of cognac. Paul said he’d like some, too, and got up to follow Adrien. Norah played “Cantique de Noël” and Denis and Lucille joined in as we all sang the old carol in French. Outside the parlor window, the snow fell thick and clean. It was almost three o’clock in the morning.

Paul’s mind said to me on my intimate mode:
It’s time to bring him downstairs
.

In my unobtrusive corner, I got to my feet, clearing my throat.

“And now we’ve come to a very special part of the réveillon,” I
announced. “Denis, your children have prepared a surprise for you. Would you please come along with me? And the rest of you … kindly wait here with Marie, who will have something to say in just a few minutes.”

There were delighted exclamations. Lucille beamed at her husband as I took his arm and led him out of the parlor into the hall.

“No fair peeking with your farsight,” I warned him in a playful tone.

We went to the door leading down to the cellar. As I opened it he gave a murmur of surprise. The cloudy superficies of the specialized sigma-field concealed the stairway below the first step.

Once again I felt him probe tentatively at my mind. He was vaguely concerned because of my jittery behavior. I tried to project an air of excitement and uttered a poor excuse for a conspiratorial chuckle. “Those crazy kids of yours really know how to hide a secret. Ready to go down?”

Denis laughed. “All right. I promise to be completely surprised.”

I moved ahead of him, taking hold of the railing, and held out my hand. Denis took it. “Allons!” I cried gaily.

We stepped through the matter-permeable barrier and I led him down the steps. The cellar was full of shadows, lit by a single old-fashioned filament bulb that hung from the beamed ceiling. The walls were grimy whitewashed rough stone, obviously of a great age, but the floor had been sealed with a modern hypocaustic composite and was slightly springy underfoot, exuding warmth. In the area immediately to the left of the stairs were storage shelves, the house’s fusion heating plant, the refuse recycling unit, and the kinds of miscellaneous junk that you’d expect to find in a basement. To the right of the stairs was a partition of new, unpainted particleboard with a door in it, very slightly ajar. The area inside was dark.

“Is it in there?” Denis asked amiably.

I gestured. “After you.”

Smiling, Denis pushed open the door.

And froze.

There was an instantaneous explosion of light. Seven figures haloed in blue-white radiance stood motionless inside the cleared enclosure, stationed in a semicircle around a padded leather chaise longue of the type used by clinical metapsychologists. They were clad in dazzling silver Nomex and their heads were entirely hidden beneath silvery CE helmets of an unfamiliar and grotesque design. Before Denis or I could take a breath or articulate a
thought, an eighth disembodied CE helmet with a blood-red aura seemed to appear out of nowhere. It hovered just in front of Denis at eye level.

Jack said:
Grandfather please lie down on the couch
.

The others reiterated coercively:
LIE DOWN. PLEASE
.

Denis seemed to be struggling against some invisible assailant. He staggered, then his body convulsed as though shocked by a bolt of electricity. He clapped his hands over his ears and I heard him scream at the top of his lungs.

The blood turned to ice in my veins. All my instincts urged me to go to Denis’s aid, but a voice in my mind said sharply:
No! Don’t touch him!

Another spasm racked Denis, and then a third. He fell to his knees with his arms attempting to shield his head. His agonized cries, raw and hoarse, now came with every breath. I was stiff with horror. I had never expected anything like this.

LIE DOWN ON THE COUCH
. This time it was the metaconcert speaking. The eight minds had merged into one.

Denis said: Don’t do this to me Children don’t.

OBEY
.

My son whispered, “No.” Another great paroxysm shook him. He slumped to the warm, yielding floor, groaned, and lay still.

“Look what you’ve done!” I shouted, boiling over with indignation. I started for Denis, only to crash into an unseen metacreative wall with a force that nearly knocked me senseless.

When I pulled myself together I saw Denis lying on the couch, his limbs fastened with restraints. Six of the demonic, glowing figures had gathered closely around him, and the bodiless casque floated above like a burning satellite. The seventh person was coming toward me. Below the silver CE helmet, her face-mask was encrusted in diamonds. Dorothée held something in her gloved hands. It was an El8 model hat, familiar to me from my adventure on the Scottish planet.

The young woman’s mental voice said: We need you to be a witness Uncle Rogi. Put the helmet on. It will allow you to monitor the procedure. Don’t be afraid. It only has a farsensory brainboard. There is no direct linkage to the metaconcert.

Before I could react she clapped the damned thing on me and I went blind. I felt an excruciating burst of pain as the minute photon beams of the crown-of-thorns zapped my scalp and drilled my skull. Electrodes shot into my brain, the pain stopped, and the world disappeared.

*  *  *

I was drifting in a fantastic realm that was strangely familiar, a place of cathedral-like silence that nevertheless seemed to vibrate with a million echoes. My ultrasenses, strongly augmented by cerebroenergetic enhancement, were bewildered at first by the new richness of detail that I had not been aware of during my earlier apperception, but I knew I’d been in this place twice before.

When Fury was born.

When Jack was born.

Around me lay a dark and subtle immensity, roiling and formless at the same time that it possessed a paradoxical structure. I was part of a patterned, multilayered black fabric in which ominous protean masses were embedded. They seemed to grow and diminish and grow again in restless spurts, illuminated by faint, pyrotechnic bursts of cold-blue radiance coming from some unknown source. I was aware of vanishing abysses below me and soaring eminences above. Pulsating waveforms rushed through me, engulfing me in chaos and then retreated like ebbing surf, leaving behind new patterns in the all-encompassing fabric, wondrous and fearful and indescribable.

The place was alive with creativity.

I was within the aether, the domain of the mental lattices. And I was not alone.

I had completely forgotten why I was here and it took me some time to focus on the more tangible entities in the place. I did not immediately identify the obliquely tilted, elongate patch of brightness off in the distance, but I knew that it was important.

As I came nearer to this thing (or it approached me) I discovered that it was actually a close grouping of incandescent objects like tiny stars or sparks. One of them moved only in two dimensions, drawing and redrawing a straight white line. The other seven whirled in intricate orbital patterns about the long axis drawn by the first, spinning threads of blue and scarlet into a kind of spindle shape, a rodlike hollow structure that tapered at both ends, fashioned entirely of colored light.

The spindle grew in size and complexity as I watched, enthralled. And there was music. The echoing silence had imperceptibly given way to a slow, swelling theme—notes that were vastly deep, almost growling, full of intriguing potential. A second melody joined the first, weaving a harmonious variation at a slightly elevated pitch. Then other voices came in, one by one, until there were eight parts flowing freely in eerie contrapuntal song.

I finally realized that it was the metaconcert.

The individual spooling mentalities of the fusiform structure soon became indistinguishable from the dense, swift windings of light. I saw the upper end of the spindle intensify in brightness, the red and blue threads coalescing into a peculiar, searing violet. My mind’s ear heard a new chord of celestial music, high-pitched and piercing, superimposed upon the lower notes of the fugue. The spindle was changing its orientation, tilting, rotating, searching …

Suddenly I caught sight of another luminous object, whisking in and out among the lattices. It was double, something like a close-coupled binary star or a dumbbell nebula. One saw it for only a split second, moving in the distance, before it vanished again among the murky mental tapestries.

Evidently the metaconcert had been on the lookout for the binary, because the spindle swiveled about with incredible speed, pointing in the direction of its quarry. A thin, laserlike beam sprang from the violet end and lanced into shadowed complexity. There was a brilliant rainbow flash. Prismatic concentric shock waves exploded outward and dissipated. The fabric of the aether flickered wildly, as though bolts of heat lightning were racing behind thick clouds.

The binary object was reeled slowly into view. When its capture was complete the spindle stood upright, holding above it blurry twinned luminosities, one pale gold, the other livid bluish-green. A kind of atmosphere enveloped them both and formed a ligature between them, and they seemed to orbit slowly about a common center of gravity. It was this invisible point that was somehow gripped firmly by a short white beam coming from the tip of the metaconcert. The captive binary pulsated as it turned, dancing to an irregular rhythm of its own.

Whatever the spindle had caught was passive, waiting. The metaconcert spoke.

Ah, doux Jésus! There it was at last! My confusion vanished. I finally realized what was happening, what I was being forced to watch.

The questioning went on but I no longer heard the details of the telepathic speech. My heart had burst like a ruptured dam, overwhelming me with the truth I had tried so long to deny.

Denis was Fury. Fury was Denis.

I wanted to curse and weep, to flee this awful province where I confronted the death of hope. But I could not flee. I heard the metaconcert extract every obscene detail of Denis’s trauma from the strangely docile binary. I was held fast and compelled to witness while the details of my miserable brother’s sins assaulted me.

Donny, mon frère, how could you have done it? How could you have ruined Denis and Victor, helpless children who only wanted you to love them?… And you, Denis, my dearest son! Why was your fission so inevitable? Do you mean that you had no choice? Or
did
you choose?

New threads of light whipped out from the glowing violet tip of the spindle. There were hundreds of them, sharp-edged as razor wire, spinning a glittering spherical cage that completely enclosed the binary mind.

The cage began to contract.

A ghastly scene unfolded then before my enhanced farsenses, searing sights and sounds that I cannot adequately put into words. They were not real. I realize now that my sojourn within the mental lattices consisted entirely of a chain of symbolic icons, creations of my own imagination, my mind’s attempt to translate and reify an indescribable conflict into something I could understand. The struggle between the two dissociated personalities and the
metaconcert seemed interminable, but later I realized that it could not have occupied more than an hour in ordinary time.

The metaconcert song fell into a monotonous eight-note loop without the earlier variations and polyphony that had given it beauty. Like the contracting cage of light, it had become an instrument of torture, thudding like the relentless blows of a hammer, louder and louder. I seemed to hear the two captive personae screaming, each one fighting for its life, each one suffering unspeakable pain and terror. I saw the merciless cage squeeze the binary star, forcing the madly throbbing components toward conjunction, toward integration. The concussive song of the metaconcert reached a roaring crescendo—

And the two units of the doublet merged.

In a sudden ringing silence the star collapsed to a wan ember, then expanded again into a globe of effulgent emerald. The cage shattered, allowing the new green star to drift free into an aether suddenly awash with countless points of scintillating light. The mental integration had taken place.

But which personality had survived?

The metaconcert spindle spoke in a rather shaken tone: