by Julian May
PAUL: Annie, I think it would be for the best.
LUCILLE: Undoubtedly. Please, dear.
ANNE: Trapped like a rat.
ADRIEN: Well, thank God that’s settled. [Image of agenda.] On to the next item of business.
CATHERINE: [Screenslam.]
PAUL: Cat, don’t. You knew when you agreed to come here that we would have to work this out.
PHILIP: [gently] The project you and Brett worked on is sidelined for complete restructuring. It may take months to replace Brett—if he can be replaced. You must face it, my dear: you’re no longer indispensable to that particular operation. You belong where the exotic nominators said you belonged—on the Galactic Concilium.
MAURICE + SEVERIN + ANNE + ADRIEN + PAUL + DENIS: Yes.
LUCILLE: You know in your heart that we’re right, darling.
CATHERINE: You were all right … from the beginning. If I hadn’t balked, Brett might still be alive.
VARIOUS: [Indignant horror.]
PAUL: Cat, for God’s sake …!
CATHERINE: All right! All right! You win! The damned Dynasty always wins! I’ll stop my puerile mourning for Brett, and admit that my project no longer needs me, and accept my responsibility to the Human Polity! Are you all satisfied?
PAUL: Thank you, Cat.
CATHERINE: And now for the love of Christ get on with the next order of business—the one all of you have been afraid to face from the start!
MAURICE: [uneasily] Um … can I get us all drinks first?
LUCILLE: Come and help me bring in tea and coffee, Maury. We need something to warm us on a night like this.
SEVERIN: Cognac in my tea, garçon, s’il vous plaît. The good stuff.
MAURICE: [following Lucille] Canuck Philistine!…
DENIS: [to Catherine] I understand why you did it, but I’m sorry about your hair.
CATHERINE: [smiling absently] No big thing. Brett liked it long, but it was always a bit of a nuisance to care for.
DENIS: I’m a little disappointed that you haven’t noticed the blue orchid. I brought it in just for you.
CATHERINE: Papa, it’s exquisite … And three blooms at once this time.
DENIS: You’ll take one home with you.
CSATHERINE: I couldn’t—
DENIS: Certainly you will. I insist. [Cuts a flower with his penknife and places it in her hands.] There. I’ll have Maury bring you a plass bubble to carry it in.
CATHERINE: I—all right, Papa. [Kisses him.] Thank you for—for trying to cheer me up.
ANNE: All of us loved Brett. But we can’t afford the luxury of mourning. The only meaningful way to honor his memory is to bring his killer to justice.
SEVERIN: The damned Magistratum has been doing nothing but spinning its wheels since it put the family through their brain-grinder and came up empty.
ADRIEN: DO you know what the latest scuttlebutt theory is? That the murderer is a nonhuman! One of my colleagues in Exotic Affairs told me that the Proctors now suspect a metaconcert of disaffected Simbiari, since their own race is the only other besides humanity that’s so poorly attuned to Unity as to be capable of murder. They postulate a metaconcert because no individual Simb has the mental wattage to have extracted the summa totalis of Brett’s psychocreative energy in that crazy complex fashion.
PHILIP + ANNE + SEVERIN + CATHERINE: [Incredulity.]
PAUL: The theory is perfectly plausible.
SEVERIN: Bullshit. The murder was the work of a psychopathic human operant with a tantric lotus-ladder fixation.
ANNE: Thank you, Dr. Jung.
SEVERIN: [doggedly] The seven ashen chakras found on the body can have no other meaning. The police ought to be looking for some Oriental colleague of Brett’s with a professional grudge.
PAUL: They did. No such person exists. Neither Brett nor Cat has any associates who could be classified as genuine enemies. And among those who are less than warm chums, none possesses high metafunction.
SEVERIN: Then the perpetrator was a random killer. The idea of a Simbiari metaconcert is absurd. What rational motive could our worthy Green Brethren—or anyone else, for that matter—have for killing Brett?
ANNE: The Magistratum was willing to believe that all of us had a rational motive … until they probed us.
CATHERINE: Only exotic imbeciles would think that my own brothers and sister would conspire to kill my husband just because I had refused the magnateship!
PHILIP: [quietly] But now you have agreed.
CATHERINE: Yes …
PAUL: The Magistratum still questions whether the forensic redactive probing of the seven of us—and Marc—gave any valid data at all! They suspect that we may be powerful enough to thwart the mind-ream technique.
ADRIEN: That’s ridiculous. No human Grand Master is that good—
PAUL: Frankly, I wonder whether this Simbiari villain metaconcert theory might be only a smoke screen.
SEVERIN: While they continue to suspect us?
PAUL: Or Marc.
CATHERINE: My God.
PAUL: If any human being is capable of resisting Krondak-Simbiari mind-probing, it’s Marc. God knows none of us can get through his deep screens. Not that I actually suspect him of having anything to do with killing Brett—
ANNE: We must mount our own investigation of Brett’s death. Use every resource. It’s the only way to clear the family name. Accepting pardons for helping Teresa have her baby is one thing—but an allegation of murder is something else.
ADRIEN: You know, Annie’s hit the nail on the head. As usual! It’s no secret that the new probation period for humanity was a direct consequent of the murder investigation. Krondak and Simbiari members of the Magistratum even tried to rescind our family’s nominations because of Brett’s death and Teresa’s disappearance. All that saved us was the Lylmik veto.
PHILIP: Now, there was a curious thing … It might lend credence to the notion of a nonhuman faction attempting to discredit us. The Lylmik would put a stop to that, but they might be willing to let the Magistratum plod on and ferret out the Simbiari cabal on its own.
MAURICE: [reentering with Lucille] The Lylmik want the Proctorship ended. They want the Human Polity to take its place in the Concilium, and they want the most powerful operants of our race—that’s us!—working for the Milieu rather than against it. This is why they’ve decided to ignore the scandals and push on with our inauguration.
ADRIEN: [ruminatively] Paul, you reported Teresa’s illicit pregnancy to the Magistratum before Brett’s death, didn’t you?
PAUL: I notified Malatarsiss right after Mama called me. At 1346 hours on Thursday the twenty-fourth. Brett was killed at least fourteen hours later, in the wee hours of the twenty-fifth.
ANNE: SO the exotic metaconcert theory is remotely plausible. Given a conspiracy in the Magistratum itself. We should also keep in mind that Cat’s decision to decline the magnateship was the talk of Concord that afternoon.
CATHERINE: But … that the exotics should kill, just to impeach us and keep us from taking our Concilium seats. Why?
MAURICE: They might be looking ahead. Afraid that what the Lylmik say about humanity’s mental superiority is true. Resenting it.
CATHERINE: The Galactic Milieu is supposed to be above dirty politics! That’s what the concept of Unity is all about.
PAUL: The Simbiari are an imperfectly Unified race. Just as we will be someday. The fact that this theory is being taken seriously should indicate to us that a Simbiari conspiracy is within the realm of possibility.
ADRIEN: There’s no way this family can initiate any private investigation of exotics. Not before the end of the probation.
PAUL: True … Shall we be content to leave matters in the hands of the Magistratum until then?
PHILIP + MAURICE + SEVERIN + ANNE + ADRIEN: Aye.
CATHERINE: What if the killer is someone else entirely?
MAURICE: You mean, some psychopathic Kundalini Yoga adept who murdered Brett with or without a motive?
PHILIP: All the more reason for us to postpone action. The Magistratum is aware of that possibility. Its enforcers can do a better job searching for such a person than we ever could.
PAUL: So we’re agreed: we wait.
PHILIP + MAURICE + SEVERIN + ANNE + CATHERINE + ADRIEN: Yes.
CATHERINE: Then that winds everything up … Mama, Papa, I know you’ll understand if I leave now. Adrien, can we go?
ADRIEN: Sure, Sis. My egg is your egg.
ANNE: Let me remind you all of one thing! Tomorrow you will be part of an honor guard escorting me and young Marc to the Kourou Starport in Guiana.
VARIOUS: [Moans and catcalls.]
ANNE: Cheer up. You can all have Cayenne chicken and mango daiquiris at the Devil’s Island Rendezvous after the dear lad and I pop into hyperspace. [To Paul] You’ll have him ready? I checked the Orb flight on my wrist-com. We’ll all have to take the shuttle from Burlington at 0635. Keep Marc in the dark until we’re safe at the Kourou boarding gate, won’t you, Paul? Just to be on the safe side. Tell him you’re just seeing me off, and pack a bag for him on the sly. We wouldn’t want him to disappear, or get sick at the last minute, or think up some extremely logical reason why he has to stay here on Earth.
PAUL: Will do. [Denis helps Catherine wrap her orchid. She goes out with Adrien. Anne leaves. Lucille begins to collect cups and saucers. Paul helps her carry things to kitchen.]
DENIS: [on intimate mode] Philip. Maury. Sevvy. Please stay on after Paul goes.
PHILIP + MAURICE + SEVERIN: ??? Certainly.
PAUL: [reentering living room] Well, I’ll get along, too. Good night, Mama, Papa. Thanks for hosting the confab. [To his brothers] See you at Burlington, mes frangins. [Exit.]
DENIS: [after an interval] I have something to tell you three. It concerns Brett’s murder. Perhaps we’d all better sit down again. LUCILLE: [looking in] Et moi aussi!
DENIS: You may as well.
LUCILLE: [sitting] I knew you were up to something when you coerced Paul into leaving.
SEVERIN: [astounded] Papa! You mean, you can still—
PHILIP: Be quiet, Sevvy. What is it, Papa?
DENIS: I have one solid piece of information to put before you. The rest is only intuition … You all know what this is. [Image.] It’s a depiction of the peculiar patterns of ash that were left along Brett’s spine and on his head when his killer extracted his psychocreative lifeforce. Please compare that set of lotus patterns with this one … [Image.]
PHILIP: They are virtually identical.
DENIS: The second set was found on the body of Shannon O’Connor Tremblay. She was murdered in 2013—on the very day of the Great Intervention—by my younger brother Victor. Similar marks were found on the body of her father, Kieran O’Connor, who was also presumed to have been killed by Victor. I regret to say that an emotional block in my mind prevented me from making the correlation before this. [General consternation.]
PHILIP: But Victor acted alone! He shared his powers with no one, not even Shannon’s devil of a father. There’s no person he could have transmitted his—his technique to. And Victor’s been dead for eleven years. We were all there at his bedside and saw him—felt him!—die.
DENIS: He died. After nearly twenty-seven years in a coma, encapsulated inside his own brain, unable to communicate mentally or physically with another living thing. He died. Yes … That’s what we thought.
PHILIP: God almighty, Papa, are you suggesting—
MAURICE:—that Victor’s mind somehow regained its potency—
SEVERIN:—that the contagion was passed on, that his diabolical ambition lives—
PHILIP + MAURICE + SEVERIN: —in the mind of one of us?
DENIS: I’ve asked myself if it was possible, if God could have permitted Victor’s imprisoned psyche to reach out at the very end, after we’d prayed for him for so long … reach out either in love or in a last temptation—
MAURICE: Papa, I don’t mean to be blasphemous, but God doesn’t have a damned thing to do with this! The question is: Did Victor have the strength, right then at the vital-field dissolution, to break through his latency and take over another human mind?
PHILIP: Mama wasn’t there at the deathbed. But all the rest of us and our spouses were. I think we can eliminate Maeve and Cecilia from suspicion. Since the divorce, Maeve has avoided the family. At the time of the Rye Beach barbecue, she was in Ireland, asleep in bed with her latest boyfriend. And Cecilia was off-world at a medical convention. That leaves me and Maury and Sevvy, my wife Aurelie, Adrien and Cheri, Anne, Paul, and Cat herself. Nine family members as potential tools of Victor—if he was capable of mind-transfer.
LUCILLE: No! No! You’re talking witchcraft, not valid metapsychology! Such things can’t happen! One mind can’t be enslaved by another. The human personality—
SEVERIN: —can fragment. Multiply. You’re a trained psychologist, Mama. You know that scores of separate personas can reside within a single diseased mind. An ordinary mind! Who knows what monstrous deviations might afflict operants? We can utilize the mental lattices to influence the very fabric of time and space, matter and energy! Who’s to say what else we’re capable of? The abnormal psychology of Homo superior is still being written. I’m writing a bit of it myself! If such a transfer were possible, the victim might not even be aware of it consciously—just as a patient with multiple-personality disorder is unaware of the existence of the other identities.
LUCILLE: Denis … do you think it could happen?
DENIS: I don’t know. But you see why I’m afraid, don’t you?
PHILIP: Good God, yes! Maury and I are probably the only ones besides you and Mama and Uncle Rogi who can remember what Victor was really like in his prime. The man wasn’t a human being at all. He was … an evolutionary aberration.
SEVERIN: [quietly] I remember Victor quite well. The last time we saw him—before the Intervention, that is—was at the family Christmas party at Tante Margie’s in Berlin in 2012. You were fifteen, Phil, and Maury was thirteen, and I was nine years old. Anne and Cat and Adrien were just little kids, and of course Paul hadn’t even been born … Uncle Victor came in with his twin deadhead stooges, Uncle Lou and Uncle Leon, all loaded down with expensive presents just like always. And just like always, the operant relatives were polite and had their toughest mental defenses in place, and the normal ones were either fawning over the family black sheep with the Midas touch or else scared white. Only the littlest kids were glad to see Uncle Vic—the ones who were too young to realize that there was more to him than a big good-looking guy handing out incredible loot … That year, when I was nine, was the first time I knew. Vic didn’t try to make mental contact, didn’t really do a thing. But all the same, I knew. It was the mystery of evil coming home to me for the first time, and I was damn near petrified. Vic just laughed and gave me this fantastic rhythm programmer with one of the first of the brainboard interfaces. Right after Christmas I traded it …
MAURICE: Good thing. Those early brainboards had nasty possibilities. [A meditative interval.]
DENIS: [slowly] Boys, do you agree when I state that no known operant entity could have killed Brett in that manner from long distance?
PHILIP: I think it’s a safe assumption. Even a grandmaster-class exotic operant—always excluding the Lylmik, whom we know so little about—would have had to be in Brett’s immediate vicinity to initiate a psychocreative drain of such extraordinary complexity.
DENIS: The Magistratum probed all your minds and presumed you and your spouses innocent of Brett’s murder. Aurelie and Cheri were exonerated because their metapsychic powers are too meager to have accomplished the killing, and they are completely incapable of resisting exotic mind-probe techniques. We can safely eliminate them from suspicion. But we know, and so does the Magistratum, that probing does not necessarily exonerate us … There are only four members of the family who I can be certain were nowhere near Rye Harbor when Bret
t died on that boat. You three and your mother. Severin was here in Hanover all the previous Thursday and throughout the night and early morning on Friday, the day of the murder. Lucille had called him up from Concord when she thought she’d convinced Teresa to have the abortion. Early Thursday evening, when your mother discovered that Teresa had disappeared, she called you two others up from the capital to help in the rough farscan search. The three of you stayed with her until the next morning.
SEVERIN: But Paul never went to the beach. He remained in Concord and came to Hanover late Friday morning—