Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (58 page)

“No. I’ll pull my weight this time—and when the chips are down, too, God help me.” Severin spun about and marched toward the row of gaping black full-body rigs that stood on the other side of the bay.

Marc said, “Let’s invest.”

In the beginning was the double constellation.

The larger one was a beehive swarm of one thousand five hundred and fifty stars, most of them green, varying in hue and magnitude, softly humming a myriad of quasi-musical notes. The smaller grouping was a circle of nine white sparks that maintained a figurative silence. A single blue-haloed individual hovered at the circle’s center.

The target was still invisible in the symbolic realization. Until the metaconcert was established, Cible was irrelevant.

The Conductor began. His song was a nearly inaudible basso drone at the start, the tempo irregular. As the volume intensified, so did the azure radiance of his corona. Subtle filaments of gold, reaching forth in two dimensions, linked the other nine minds of
the focusing team into a starry wheel. It began to turn and a rhythmic triadic song commenced, a simple canon creating a biconvex lens that slowly acquired concentric internal rings, rippling and fluctuating. The executive song’s tempo was andante, deliberate. Only when the song was well established and the lenticular rings clear and rainbow-bright did the beehive of subsidiary grandmaster minds begin to assume a structure and musicality of its own.

The Conductor orchestrated the generator edifice patiently, as he had done during the tedious practice sessions back on Okanagon that had consumed the previous six weeks. Over half of these energy-source metaconcert members were highly experienced El8 geophysical specialists who had needed only to familiarize themselves with the new full-body equipment. To these Grand Masters, the 600X cerebroenergetic enhancer was an exhilarating step-up, a sophisticated mind-tool that freed them from the physical constraints they had labored under earlier. They now had a metaphorical starship to ride in, where before they had been confined to mundane mental vehicles restricted, as it were, to solid ground. Their song was a meld of soaring horn-calls, still pianissimo in volume. The framework of mental energies that these virtuosi built was topographically complex, residing in six dimensions. Its colors were those of high-level creativity: vivid emerald, aquamarine, and limpid tourmaline-blue.

The CE novices were incorporated last by the Conductor, shepherded into place, reassured, conjoined one by one. The role of these minds in the metaconcert generator would be largely passive. They would contribute vital energies to the fabric of the great structure, and sing with voices as filling and implicit as those of massed strings and sustained winds. Most of the subsidiary Grand Masters were creators, glowing a duller green than their more experienced colleagues; but there were knots of other colors as well—redactive scarlet, coercive sapphire, the sun-gold warmth of the psychokinetics, the violet stability of grandmasterly far-sensors. The whole constellation was harmonious and symphonic.

The Conductor surveyed the finality of the generator, making minute adjustments to timbre and pitch. Then he introduced the target.

It was a torus, a kind of transparent donut-shape enclosing a madly swirling number of small smoky spheres, each with a dot of dull garnet smoldering in its heart. The Cible icon was both chaotic and resistant, symbolizing the relatively tiny, dense metallic core of the moon that would have to undergo a critical
transformation in order to bring about the demolition of the stony outer envelope.

Diobsud occulted Cible and the window of opportunity opened.

The Conductor commanded the generator energies to cohere, to amplify, to emerge. The song of the metaconcert was a choral thrust. A shaft of white light spurted out of the large structure, passed through the lens, and impaled the torus along its horizontal axis.

Immediately the bounding spherules froze.

The Conductor modified the lens, narrowing and intensifying the beam. One by one, the spherules seemed to migrate to the poles of penetration, melting together, expanding to fill the opposing sections, their glowing hearts merging and brightening in stately ascending harmony. At the finale the confining torus dissolved and there were twinned red flares like beads on a brilliant needle. The metaconcert roared to a crescendo.

The red flares coalesced into a singularity. At its center a writhing spider of white flame bloomed and died in a thunderous detonation. The symbolic image disappeared. The metaconcert withdrew and there was silence. What would happen next was beyond its control. The disruption of the lunar core had begun.

Marc showed his colleagues the real Cible, a darkened sphere faintly salmon in color, illuminated by starlight. It was apparently unchanged. A tiny body, the mock planetesimal, streaked toward it on an oblique impact trajectory and vanished without a trace into the satellite’s atmosphere.

Cible emerged from Diobsud’s shadow into sunlight again.

Abruptly, the moon seemed to inflate, like a being catching a last painful breath. Auroral rays sprang briefly from its poles. Shock waves of gas ionization sped toward the equatorial region, the yellow of nitrogen and the pale red and steel-blue of argon, blotched with monstrous bolts of static electricity. The waves collided and expanding rings of plasma burst into being, giving Cible the aspect of a miniature Saturn. As the gases attenuated, the watchers saw the satellite’s thick rind of surface ice shatter crazily. But the enormous fractures were visible only for an instant before dazzling white steam boiled up, momentarily creating a new atmosphere. It thinned almost immediately, driven into space by the devastating heat generated by the modified core.

Now the metaconcert saw the rupturing lithosphere, cracks hundreds of kilometers in width that glowed with red and gold pulsations on Cible’s night quadrant, intricate movements traced by clashing seismic waves that caused the crust to ripple and
shimmer. Glowing flecks, thrown outward like spades from a bonfire, were in reality immense gouts of molten magma—some having enough momentum to achieve orbital velocity and batter the gaseous ring of the devastated little world.

Marc said:
EXPLICIT
.

It was finished. The mind-image of Cible disappeared.

The metaconcert disbanded. Its shaken orchestral participants emerged from their black shells and gathered in small silent groups in their respective CE bays, studying the aftermath now with their own farsenses. The 156 starships of the Rebel fleet were far enough from the event to be unscathed, but Class 2 meteoroid screens were erected as a precautionary measure until the time of departure.

Cible did not perish utterly. It was too massive to disintegrate. Most of its atmosphere was gone, however, along with nearly all of its water. Over the next five hours, long after most of the weary metaconcert members had sunk into stuporous slumber during the journey back to Okanagon, the wounded satellite continued to cool and subside. Smoking ridges like far-flung webs of thick scar tissue gradually covered the crustal fractures. In a few places, upwellings of thinner magma spread out to form maria, oceans of stone that were smooth at first, then increasingly pocked with small craters as suborbital debris fell back to the surface. The new volcanoes would continue to pulse fitfully for years, sending up umbrella-shaped clouds of ash that would gradually bury the lunar surface beneath a powdery regolith.

Cible had been lifeless before and it was lifeless still, a celestial body inconsequential except to a handful of local astronomers and the CE operators who had used it as a practice target.

She had sent Thierry and Mitsuko and the children to a hotel in Chelan Metro for the night, and when Marc returned from the Sector Base she met him at the front door of the deserted house, dressed in a gown and negligé of cherry silk.

“Was it successful, Marcas?” Cyndia asked, drawing his head down to lightly kiss his mouth. But she knew the answer already from his tight smile and the emanation of fatigued satisfaction that seeped from beneath his carelessly crafted mindscreen.

“We achieved the objective. The seven hundred novice Grand Masters formed an adequate subrogate structure in the creativity generator. Their energy output was inferior to what Mental Man’s would have been, but the cobble worked. We’ll be able to do the demonstration if it proves necessary. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s
guess.” He pulled away from her embrace, shaking his head. His burning gray eyes were deep-sunken and there was a hectic flush on his cheekbones. He had not bothered to shower off the dermal lavage from the CE rig. The lightweight athletic suit that he wore was stained with sweat and pungent chemicals.

“Come and have a hot soak,” she urged. “Are you hungry?”

“No. Only dying of thirst, filthy … and unaccountably horny.”

Her laugh was light and nervous. “I have some Veuve Clicquot waiting for us in the bedroom. Back on the Old World, it’s almost midnight on New Year’s Eve in the San Juan Islands. I thought we could have two celebrations at once.”

“Mmm. New Year, 2083. I’d completely forgotten.” His thoughts were still on the metaconcert exercise and he shook his head abstractedly, allowing her to lead him toward their rooms. The main corridor of the house with its tall ceiling and massive planter-urns was dimly lit, silent and full of shadows.

“I’m glad we’re alone here tonight,” he said.

“I thought it would be for the best … not knowing how the Cible exercise would work out.”

She opened the door to their bathroom. It simulated a natural grotto with three shallow terraces, carved from lustrous olivine shot through with rich veins of milky quartz and gold. At the top were dressing rooms and toilet cubicles, luxuriously appointed. Carved cabinets and shelves of precious woods held cosmetics, perfumes, thick towels on warming bars, machines for hair-styling, manicure, pedicure, and massage. A new Armani-Vestiarista Moduplex stood ready to dispense underwear and casual clothing on command. It would also polish footgear and freshen up more substantial garments in its dry-cleaning armoire.

On the level below was the sunken spa, carved from a single block of jadeite three meters in diameter. It was fed by a steaming cascade that splashed down a tumbled course of backlit amethyst boulders. Beside the tub, exotic foliage plants and vines with pendant golden flowers framed an open shower niche with multiple sprayheads where shampoos, body emollients, and shave-lotions could be programmed vocally.

At the lowest level was a great swimming pool banked with full-grown trees and ornamental shrubbery. Half of its 30-meter length was indoors and the rest, divided above and underwater by a tall slab of one-way, matter-impermeate glass, extended into the gardens outside.

Marc strode to the refreshment bar, called for a liter of orange juice, and tossed it down his throat. “God! That’s better.”

He stripped off his clothing, nudged the soiled garments into the floor hopper with his PK, stepped into the shower, and nearly disappeared in a froth of cleansing bubbles.

When he emerged he said to Cyndia, “Join me in the tub?”

But she shook her head. “I’ll sit here with you while you soak.” She pulled up a brass bench with a green repelvel cushion.

He submerged completely in the steaming water, then came up, activated the Jacuzzi jets, and relaxed with a sigh of contentment, closing his eyes.

“Was it very difficult?” she asked.

“The hardest thing I’ve ever attempted. I feel as though I’ve been stomped by a herd of buffalo—inside and outside.”

She got up, fetched a large glass of steaming amber liquid from the bar, and put it into his hand. “It’s a bullshot, spiked with vitamins. If you won’t eat, at least have that.”

He shrugged and sipped the alcoholic broth slowly, letting the swirling water and his own self-redaction soothe away the worst of the nervous tension.

She waited in silence as he seemed to doze. Then: “May I see what happened to the satellite?”

“If you like.” He sent a compact précis of the event into her waiting mind, not noticing when she uttered a low cry of dismay. “The exercise worked well enough, but Alex says that no amount of fine-tuning the revised program will give this configuration more efficiency than what we achieved today. I’ll have to do an entirely new design.”

“The energy output seemed … devastating enough to me.”

“With Mental Man, we would have had far more flexibility. Only five starships would have been needed in the operation instead of a hundred and fifty-six. And we could have split the metaconcert energies—even utilized more than one focus if we’d wanted to. Blown Cible to smithereens in a tenth of the time by negating its gravity rather than simply tinkering with its material core. Without paramount minds in the generator we’re effectively limited to the more elementary modes of creative metamorphosis. However, a new design will enable us to up the gross energy output another twenty or thirty percent by plugging in a few hundred more 600X operators who are still in training, plus an auxiliary superstructure of E18 helmet ops. But the gain will be partially offset by decreased legerity in the executive focus.”

“I’m sorry,” she confessed. “I don’t understand.”

He sighed, opened his eyes, and climbed out of the tub. “We’ll
be stronger, but slower and clumsier.” He showed her another image as he descended to the big swimming pool and dove in.

Stroking underwater, he said: Originally, I had hoped we’d be able to conduct decisive hit-and-run operations, popping in and out of hyperspace without the Milieu being able to nail us. But if the concert takes longer to set up and execute, we’ll have to pick our strategic objectives very carefully and also take steps to defend the fleet of starships carrying the CE operators during the action. To this end, I’ve ordered the Astrakhanian ships to take on full crews and proceed to a hyperspatial rendezvous consonant with Molakar support.”

“Molakar?” Her face fell in dismay. “I thought …”

He said: Cordelia and her staff of analysts are running a new set of simulations. They should be ready in time for the Concilium session so we’ll know exactly what our options are. But the likeliest now is the Molakar demonstration.