Read Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) Online
Authors: Julian May
She tapped the console. The Tri-D display split in half. Her side remained three-dimensional; the other was flat, depicting Fleet Commander Owen Blanchard on the bridge of the Vulpecula. He identified himself and then said, “Our communications officer is hailing Molakar Starbase, requesting to speak with its Starbase Governor.”
A bit of backing and filling took place. Then a hideous exotic visage, all warts, fangs, and multiple eyeballs, appeared on the Vulpecula’s big bridge display screen and a rumbling voice said, “Portitor Zela’edoo Kark responds to Commander Owen Blanchard. How may I assist you?”
“I make this formal inquiry on behalf of the Rebel Party of the Human Polity,” Blanchard replied. “Please explain why large numbers of Krondak starships have assembled on Molakar.”
The Portitor blinked several accessory optics. “Please wait.” About ten seconds went by. Then the exotic said, “I regret to inform you that the information you request is privileged.”
Blanchard’s face looked infinitely weary. I recalled that he and Annushka were the very first Rebels, long decades ago when it was unthinkable for an operant human to speak out in public against the Galactic Milieu.
Blanchard posed a final question. “Does the Krondak fleet intend an interdiction and blockade of the planet Earth?”
I whispered, “Oh, shit.”
Kyle, looking like a grizzly bear conked with a sledgehammer, didn’t say a word.
Zela’edoo Kark said, “I cannot respond to that query. This communication is terminated.” The Krondak face vanished.
Owen Blanchard said, “Initiate the demonstration.”
We watched Molakar die.
It was impossible, of course, to show the activity of the metaconcert. We in the viewing audience did not even see the 156 vessels of the Rebel force gathered in attack formation. We saw what the officers on the Vulpecula’s bridge saw.
For five excruciating minutes there was nothing. Then the reddish-brown clouds of the planet seemed to catch fire, beginning at the polar regions. What began as scattered pulsations of red and green light congealed into blazing waves of ionized oxygen in the upper reaches of the planetary atmosphere, surging in some arcane gravomagnetic consonance with the roiling magmatic plumes beneath the crust.
The thinner suboceanic lithosphere was the first to crack. Lava burst up through the seafloor in a hundred thousand white-hot fountains, vaporizing the sluggish seas, causing titanic bubbles to billow to the surface. The heat initiated noxious chemical changes in the complex hydrocarbons mixed with the water, breeding towering clouds of poisonous steam that clashed tornadically with the cooler air surrounding them. Deadly gases spread across the land, driven by hurricane winds. The sessile lifeforms that Molakarians call plants were incinerated in raging firestorms. Earthquakes rocked the continents.
Most of Molakar’s population died then. And since the Tau-Ceti star is less than twelve lightyears away from Earth, numbers of particularly sensitive operants on our planet not only saw the Krondak world’s destruction in living color on their home Tri-D
sets but also farsensed the death-cry of its two billion highly intelligent inhabitants. Kyle and I, incompetent heads and bumbling revolutionaries, felt only vicarious pain.
Because of its more massive nickel-iron core, Molakar was a tougher nut to crack than Cible had been. The landmasses were not completely shattered by seismic activity, nor was the atmosphere driven entirely into space. There were no volcanic lava-bombs hurled into orbit, only rivers and lakes of seething gold, thinly edged with carmine, webbing the desiccated seabed off the continental shelves.
This took place within thirty minutes.
I have always feared the repugnant Krondaku, but that night I wept for them. They were not monsters, they were people having many of the same emotions as human beings, the first race to be inducted by the Lylmik into the infant Galactic Milieu. They were unfailingly just, but also capable of kindness. They mated for life and adored their grotesque offspring and cherished the elderly members of their race.
All the same, I decided that what Marc had done to Molakar was justified. Probably …
Apocalypse gave way to banality. PSS Vulpecula and her cohort fled into hyperspace and the view on my Tri-D screen returned to the studio on Okanagon, where the female astrophysicist—her face gray with shock—gave a terse technical description of how the CE metaconcert had meddled with Molakar’s mantle, and exactly what had happened after that.
Annushka made a final statement on behalf of the Rebel Council. “It was with the most profound regret that our forces accomplished this demonstration. We now call upon the Galactic Milieu to insure that no additional punitive action on our part will be necessary.
Rescind the Unity Protocol
. We will give you fifty Galactic Standard days to respond. Any attack on Okanagon or Earth, or any attempt to sequester those planets by sigma-fields or any other means, will result in immediate retaliation.”
Then the professor and her two companions rose to their feet and stood shoulder to shoulder, as if drawing strength from one another. The studio cameras zoomed in on their faces. Anna Gawrys said, “Citizens of the Human Polity, the Metapsychic Rebellion has shown you one way to achieve freedom. Whether it succeeds depends upon you.”
The Tri-D images winked out. After a moment of silent nullity,
the station logo came on. There was no commentary, only the solemn cadences of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, mourning the death of a world.
A
MISTY DRIZZLE FELL IN NORTHERN BEINN BHIORACH ON CALEDONIA’S
first evening of summer, tapping on the tender new foliage of the coleus trees in the garden and dimpling the placid black waters of Loch Tuath that fronted their cottage. But the droplets seemed miraculously to evaporate without getting a person wet.
“It’s dry rain,” she noted as they came out of the house. “Part of our Caledonian folklore. You’ve never been in it before, have you, love?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Let’s walk to the farm rather than take the groundcar,” she suggested. “I’d so love to have a last feel of the dear old place before we leave.”
“We’ll be back after it’s over,” he insisted. “For a good long rest.”
“And then a second vacation on Kauai,” she added. “We’ll have earned it, well and truly.”
They set off down the narrow two-rut track, which was barely damp. The native trees in the glen and on the mountainsides were aglow with colors that were nearly fluorescent in the prolonged soft twilight. When the coleus leaves were full-grown they would be the size of handkerchiefs or even larger. Now they were like crimped, velvety cat’s-ears, cerise-pink and primrose-yellow and rho-violet and magenta. Their undersides, lifting in the light wind wafting down from the extinct Forge volcano, were silvery.
They passed the docks at the end of the loch and came up the riverside road through the pastures and fields. Terrestrial grass, mingled with vivid-orange neòinean plants, grew lush in the repellor-fenced paddocks where sheep, ruddy West Highland cattle, and miniature horses grazed with their young. Long-tailed
Mesozoic rinkies flew overhead. Their wild cries mingled with the bleats and whickers of greeting that the farm animals offered to the human couple passing by.
Hand in hand, Jack the Bodiless and Diamond Mask walked along the gravel road to her beloved childhood home. He wore jeans, a navy polo shirt, and a brown windbreaker. She had on her shining azure lamé hooded jumpsuit and the matching half-mask adorned with blue diamonds. When they finished their visit, they intended to embark immediately for Earth.
The airfarm seemed deserted tonight. There were no eggs or aerostatic harvesters on the landing pad and no sign of workers or ground vehicles in the vicinity of the skyweed processing plant or the other outbuildings. Over by the river, the young oak tree that had sprouted from an acorn she picked up in an Edinburgh churchyard thrust out sturdy branches adorned with monochromatic, alien green. The main house, quaintly gabled and painted Wedgwood-blue with white trim, stood on a landscaped knoll high above the other buildings like a small castle on its motte. Some of the windows were already lighted. Only the satellite dishes, the NAVCON antenna, and the fairy-critter gun on the roof detracted from the structure’s archaic charm.
Dorothea paused at the bottom of the knoll’s stone stairway. “I don’t really know what I’m going to say to him, Jack. I couldn’t refuse when he asked us to come see him, but—he’s a Rebel, even if he is my father. After what’s happened, I’m not willing to let him spoil our last night on Callie.”
“Let’s just see what he wants,” Jack said. “If it’s a row, we can leave.”
They ascended through rock gardens bright with golden tuft and many-colored azaleas. At the slightly higher elevation the “dry rain” unfortunately regained its normal wet properties. Jack erected a metacreative umbrella until they reached the shelter of the house’s enclosed porch.
Janet Finlay, Ian Macdonald’s Arizona-born second wife, opened the door to them. She had declined rejuvenation, as her husband had, and her once hard-favored features had softened with the plumpness of middle age. She wore a ranch shirt in sage-green with pearl snaps, a black denim skirt, and Western boots made of Caledonian teuthis leather.
“Evenin’, kids.” She smiled warmly as they came into the entry hall and exchanged brief hugs. “He’s holed up in his den like a sulkin’ coyote, so you might’s well go on along. You all come
back into the library for coffee after you’ve had a chance to chew the fat in private. I’ll wait on you.”
“Thank you.” Dorothea led Jack to the office wing of the big house. The workroom where Janet and Dorothea’s foster sister Ellen Gunn supervised the operation of the airfarm was deserted at this time of the evening, its cluttered desks abandoned, the computer displays and sophisticated business machines devoiced but still blinking as they ruminated electronically over cuds of data.
When Jack and Dorothea reached the door of her father’s inner sanctum she knocked gently. A low voice said, “Aye, come in.”
Ian Macdonald slowly turned away from the window where he had been standing. Even in the rainy dusk the view to the north was magnificent, encompassing the entire farmstead and the reach of cliff-girt Loch Tuath beyond. A Celestron light-multiplying telescope was still focused on the river valley. Dorothea realized that her nonoperant father had probably been watching her and Jack from the moment they left the cottage.
“Hello, Dad,” she said, when he remained silent.
He said, “Hello, Dorrie. Jack. Why don’t we sit down?”
Far from being a conventional snuggery, the room was almost like the bridge of a ship with tall windows on three sides. Two huge Tri-D projection maps—one of the farmlands and the other of Beinn Bhiorach Subcontinent, which Ian Macdonald served as elected Intendant Associate—flanked the doorway. The principal pieces of furniture, occupying the room’s center, were a padded swivel-chair and a massive antique Scottish table-desk crowded with reader-plaques and durafilm printouts. Near the southern bank of windows overlooking the rugged inland mountain range was a shiatsu recliner of wine-colored leather, two cabriole armchairs done in worn forest-green plush, and a pedestal cocktail table made from a sawn and polished slab of malachite.
Ian perched his rangy frame rather awkwardly on the edge of the recliner while his daughter and son-in-law took the other two seats.
“I’ve been delegated,” the farmer said without preamble, “by a certain group within the Rebel Party to ask you with the utmost confidentiality if there’s any way we can stave off this war.”
“A breakaway faction?” Dorothea’s brow creased.
“Don’t get the idea that our Rebellion is fragmenting,” Ian growled. “We’re all as steadfast as ever in our resolve to secede from the Milieu. But certain members of the Rebel Council wonder whether Marc might not have … formulated our ultimatum too rigidly. If so, I’m to let you know informally that we’re
still open to negotiation. We don’t want flat-out war any more than the Milieu does.”
“You made my brother your leader,” Jack said levelly. “Why aren’t you posing this question to him?”
Ian did not reply directly. “I’m going to be frank with you. The Rebel Council expected Milieu capitulation to follow the Molakar demonstration. When our fifty-day deadline came and went last week without any response at all from your side, a conference of Rebel bigwigs met to discuss new options. I wasn’t there, you understand. I’m small potatoes in the Rebel hierarchy, just a body who happens to have a very important daughter. So I was appointed an informal delegation of one.”
He stared at her in hopeful appeal, but the hazel eyes were coolly noncommittal above the mask of blue diamonds. Ian’s sponsorship of the clandestine laser-helmet factory had never been proven, but she was morally certain of his complicity and had been deeply scandalized by it.
Jack said, “Suppose you tell us what the new Rebel options are.”
“Aye, well, the majority of the magnates—including Marc—are prepared to conduct another cataclysmic demonstration unless serious negotiations for the implementation of human independence begin immediately.”
“And the Rebel minority?” Dorothea asked. “Is it having second thoughts after the Molakar atrocity?”
Ian spoke with anguished sincerity. “We ordinary folk never dreamt that Marc had contemplated such a gruesome thing! We were as appalled as you. On the other hand, if it was true that the Krondaku were getting set to blockade Earth or embargo our colonies, then they deserved what they got. But … there’s no other truly appropriate target left now, is there?” Again, he seemed to be appealing to Jack and Dorothea. “I mean, no other exotic world that just begs for smashin’. There’s only innocent planets and the Concilium Orb itself. If Marc’s CE metaconcert destroys one of them, it’ll be naught but terrorism.”
“Yes,” the Dirigent of Caledonia said to her father. “That’s what your Rebellion has committed itself to.”