Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (53 page)

Marc … Hagen … Marie … Madeleine … Cloud … 
I myself?
But that’s impossible! I can’t be—Oh, sweet Jesus. No. Ní hea in aon chor!

I’m sorry. Your true father is Paul Remillard.

I don’t believe you. Bréagach thú! Liar! All of this is a lie!

Cyndia, I have no time to argue. I can only tell you what must be done. If you insist on it, your actual paternity can be proved by a simple test. But the fact that both Hagen and Cloud are latent paramounts confirms the truth of what I say [genetic diagram].

I see … an Daidí bocht! Poor Rory.

The two most critical progenitors of Mental Man are Madeleine and Marc himself. It may be impossible for you to cope with Madeleine. I can’t neutralize her myself because … another criminal entity would prevent it. At the moment Madeleine is calling herself Lyudmila Arsanova. She’s Chief of Staff in the office of the Astrakhanian IG and she’s here on Okanagon. She could assume a new identity at any time. In the past, she’s been Saskia Apeldoorn—

Dia linn! The chief technician at our Orcas Island gestatorium?

That’s how she was able to subvert the fetuses. Madeleine’s not
a paramount, but she is formidably dangerous. Your best hope of putting a stop to Mental Man lies with Marc. The DNA in his sperm must be modified, either by hard radiation or by sonic disruption. The latter is preferable, since it would certainly sterilize him while producing relatively unobtrusive damage to his seminiferous tubules—

Are you mad? I can’t hurt my husband. I can’t!

It’s impossible for me to deal with Marc myself. I’m paramount in creativity, but so is he. His mental and physical shields are nearly impregnable. In any direct confrontation, we’d reach a stalemate. There’s only one person who can reach him when his safeguards are completely down. You. His wife.

Mo léan, is uafásach an scéal é … 
I can’t hurt him!

Then he’ll sire more Mental children. Madeleine will turn the babies into a fresh generation of Hydras and the obscenity will begin all over again.

Millions. He said there’d be millions …

Cyndia, I can’t stay here any longer.

Millions. But I can’t, Denis! I can’t talk to any of the Rebel Dynasty. They’d be sure to tell Marc! Ah, faoi Dhia cad é a dhéan-faimid! What on earth are we to do?

There’s only one other thing I can suggest that might convince you that I’m telling the truth. The day after tomorrow—not before—call Uncle Rogi on the subspace communicator. The new teleview patch option will connect you directly to his bookshop, but remember that you’re speaking on an open beam. Be circumspect. Ask him … if he’s seen a certain paradoxical relative recently. Tell him that you and this relative had a worrying conversation. Ask Rogi if the relative is trustworthy. Will you do that?

But I still can’t—

Someday when you meet with Rogi in person, he might be able to explain everything to you in detail. Goodbye, my dear. God give you strength.

“Denis?” she whispered, staring at the empty space where he had stood. Then she heard Marc’s voice in a distant part of the laboratory, roaring with grief and rage at the first sight of his dead children.

She hurried to be with him.

When he was certain, absolutely certain that life was extinct, he left the terrible place and flew to the new CEREM complex. His own personal 600X rig was ready in the observatory chamber, fully responsive to his commands in its operation and fitted out
with the farsensory brainboard he had been using for surveillance of the Rebellion’s enemies. He donned the pressure-envelope coverall in the dressing room and came out into the observatory.

It was waiting for him. Reasonably compact in its production design, the full-body CE device was 230 centimeters in height and roughly the size and shape of a black coffin. It weighed three tons. He stepped into the body-molding metal-and-ceramic casing, which was held fast in the trunnion cradle of a hydraulic ascensor. His voice, reduplicated by the CE rig’s computer, began the sequence:

CLOSE CASING.

The double lid came together, imprisoning him in armor.

ENHELM OPERATOR.

A hoist brought the opaque helmet over his head and lowered it, mating it to the body casing. His farsight watched the display on the computer as fourteen photonic beams pierced his skull. The cerebrum was insensitive to pain but not the scalp and delicate outer membranes of the brain, and he experienced a brief, blinding headache. Needle-electrodes of the crown-of-thorns apparatus, finer than hairs, penetrated his gray matter, reached the hollow ventricles at the center, and grew synorganic intraventricular enhancer units. Electrodes linked to the refrigeration and pressurization systems penetrated his cerebellum and brainstem.

INITIATE METABOLIC REPROGRAMMING.

Cryogenic fluid began to fill the casing. He winced as his carotid and femoral arteries were punctured and catheterized for the circulatory shunt.

ENGAGE AUXILIARY CE.

He became one with the machine. All pain ceased. His heart and lungs slowed and stopped. The freezing took only a moment and he was divested of his limiting body at last.

ENGAGE PRIMARY CE. OPEN OBSERVATORY DOME. ACTIVATE ASCENSOR. KILL SIGMA-SHIELD OB-3.

The world opened to his mental vision. As the hydraulic lift carried his armored form upward into the starry night, his enhanced ultrasenses surveyed the planet Okanagon as though it were a grain of sand magnified infinitely beneath an electron microscope. Each of its two billion individual living entities was perceptible as a tiny pulsating point of light. He sifted them, sorted, studied their metapsychic signatures.

Ruslan Terekev—the murderer—was nowhere to be found. Was he dead? It seemed impossible for him to have escaped in a starship so quickly.

The beacon of his seekersense whirled at lightspeed around the planet. He found two vessels with superluminal capability, still rhopowered, en route to the c-zone where they would go superluminal. Neither of them carried the killer of Mental Man. If Terekev had left on a starship he was already in the gray limbo, where not even 600X augmentation could search him out.

Very well. Tune to the childhood memory of
her
aura: his damned sister Madeleine, who had allegedly subverted Mental Man and turned Him into her creature …

With the infant brains dead, he would never know for certain unless he captured her and reamed the truth out of her. If she died in the process it was unimportant—

There!

He swooped in, using excorporeal-excursion mode, and found her. Unbelievably, she was only nine kilometers away, just leaving the 1-102 expressway in her open convertible Mustang groundcar. Driving very slowly under manual control, she turned onto the road leading directly to CEREM. Her eyes were red and swollen and her face was streaked with dried tears. She clutched the steering wheel in a nerveless grip. He could hear her muttering.

“He must be there he must be …”

Was it possible that she was actually coming to confront him? Her aura glowed undisguised. Everyone at the gestatorium knew where he had gone, and with the observatory sigma down, she could easily farsense that his CE rig was activated. He was incapable of coercing her mindscreen open or penetrating her mind redactively because only a single metafaculty at a time was enhanced by CE. If he bespoke her, would she panic? He decided to risk it. There was no way she could escape from him now.

He said:
Madeleine
.

She gave a violent start and the vehicle swerved. But she regained control an instant later. Her voice was a tremulous whisper, full of hysterical hope. “Marc?”

Yes. Pull over to the side of the road and stop the car
.

She did as she was told, halting beneath a great copperleaf tree that glistened in the brilliant starlight like a gargantuan piece of jewelry. She shut off the convertible’s engine, and the headlights died. From the jungle on either side of the road came the discordant musical clamor of exotic night-creatures. Purple and green will-o’-the-wisps bobbed amidst the undergrowth.

“They’re dead,” Madeleine said. “All of the Mental Man children
are dead. I heard their telepathic scream as he electrocuted them. Our babies. Oh, Marc.”

It was Ruslan Terekev?

“Yes.”

He’s left the planet. How did he escape? Where has he gone?

She laughed softly. “You don’t know, do you! I wonder if I should tell you? I wonder if I should tell you everything? Would you be my ally or my executioner? I was coming to you with a proposition. I—I can’t do it alone, you see.”

The mindvoice was gentle, seraphically strong, nonjudgmental.
Did you turn Mental Man into a Hydra monster, Maddy? Is that why Terekev killed Him?

She cringed, covering her face with both hands, and began to sob. The sound was raw and harsh, like the ululation of a tortured animal, and her eyes seemed to have no tears left. “Our children … our poor paramount children. They weren’t monsters. They never would have harmed us. They would have shared it with us—the Second Milieu.”

What the bloody hell are you talking about?

She uncovered her ravaged face and her eyes blazed. “Mental Man was ours! Yours and mine, Marc. The ova didn’t come from our cousin Rosamund, they came from me. A homozygotic mating was the only way to engender operant Mental Man in the first generation. I told you that! In your dreams. You knew. You’ve always known.”

 … In my dreams. It was you all along. Poisoning me. Damning Him!

“Don’t be an imbecile!” she cried. “Your unconscious mind accepted me! Agreed! You were ready—oh, yes, you were ready! Until the bitch interfered. How could I have guessed that the template would also fit her?”

Cyndia! Paul and … Laura Tremblay. Oh, dear God
.

Madeleine laughed wildly. “Don’t talk like a stupid hypocrite. You know that the only God is in ourselves and in our omnipotent children.”

It’s over
.

“No, it’s not. We’ll simply start again.” She was eager now, sitting straight and looking up at the night sky through the coppery leaves, seeming to see his face among the stars. “You’ll find a way to postpone the Rebellion until Mental Man is reborn. The dream is alive, Marc. In both of us! Let’s talk about it. Shall I drive on? Shall I meet you at CEREM and tell you everything about the Second Milieu?”

An immense silence seemed to tauten the aether. She waited, not daring to breathe.

Come
, he said.

All of the gates and doors of the place opened before her. She came into the observatory chamber, eagerly smiling, and found the black cerametal coffin of the CE rig still in the mechanical embrace of the ascensor.

The farsensory brainboard lay in the ejection tray of the MP interface module.

“Marc?” she said tentatively.

I’m in the machine
, he said.

“I’ll permit you to scan my memories redactively. If you’re very careful, you should be able to circumvent Fury’s suicide compulsion. You’ll see that I’m telling the truth.”

It’s not necessary. I believe what you said. In any case, I don’t have a redactive brainboard available for this CE rig. I’m in creativity mode now
.

“Then let me tell you—”

No. I don’t want to hear it
.

The mental laser that destroyed her cerebral cortex was surgically precise, avoiding any damage to the cerebellum or brainstem. Later, when he had divested, he summoned Dierdre and Diarmid Keogh and told them to place the vegetative body in cryogenic storage.

He’d decide what to do about it later.

O
N
28 O
CTOBER
I
FLEW MY EGG FROM
H
ANOVER TO
M
OUNT
Washington for my last climb of the season.

This sudden impulse to get away had come over me the night before. I phoned the Appalachian Mountain Club in Pinkham Notch and their recorded weather forecast told me that the sky was going to be clear in the Presidential Range tomorrow and the temperature was expected to peak around 7 Celsius. Some precip was scheduled to arrive late in the evening, but the day was going to be damn near perfect for a fall hike.

Around 0730, I landed in the parking lot at Marshfield Base Station on the west side of the mountains. The cog railway and the restaurant and souvenir shop were closed for the season. It being mid-week and most folks other than me being gainfully employed, I had the place almost completely to myself. There was only a single car in the lot and no other rhocraft.

I could see my breath as I put on my little daypack and got out my steel-tipped walking stick. The yellow leaves of the paper birches shimmered against a bright blue sky and my farsight discerned a light frosting of rime-ice on the upper slopes. I took out my map and gave it a quick once-over. My plan was to climb to the summit of Mount Washington by way of the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail, a picturesque but steep route lying south of the cog tracks. Then I’d return via the Jewell Trail north of the cog, which would loop me back to my starting point at the station. With stops for lunch and rubbernecking, I’d cover about 14 kilometers in nine hours if I moved along briskly.

I was badly in need of a day’s distraction and some strenuous physical exercise. Rebellion wasn’t looking nearly as attractive to me as it once had. The media furor over Fred’s murder and the near-fatal attack on the First Magnate by what were presumed to
be Rebel extremists had mostly subsided, but a lot of influential operants were still in a stew over it. Even though Marc and the other Rebel leaders had issued statements deploring the crimes and repudiating whoever had committed them, the party’s image was still besmirched.

Paul’s recovery was taking a lot longer than anticipated. The Dynasty rumor mill had it that Davy MacGregor—now lobbying actively in favor of Unity during whirlwind visits to Human Polity planets and doing a damned effective job of it—was going to be appointed Acting First Magnate at the February Concilium session. He would then have the authority to purge the Human Directorates of members with Rebel inclinations, which would result in our party losing most of its political clout.