by Julian May
The audience was still. Momentarily, the lights flickered. A few people cried out, then fell silent again as the illumination steadied.
"Make no mistake, " Denis said quietly, "we could very easily die in support of our principles. But I believe there are two honorable courses open to us. The first is simply to wait for rescue, utilizing what passive defenses we can muster. The second is to unite in a very different form of grand metaconcert — not only embracing those of us here, but also every other operant that we can summon telepathically from all corners of the world, and even the normals. Yes! I believe that we must try to gather them under our aegis as well. The focus of our grand metaconcert must be our enemies, the enemies of peace and tolerance everywhere. But we won't try to destroy them or even to coerce them. We'll try to reach their hearts. "
Out of the stunned hush, Jamie MacGregor's voice was imploring. "But could it work, lad? It's a brave notion — but could it possibly move them?"
Denis had lowered his head. "I don't know. I don't even know if we can put together this type of metaconcert. In aggression, mind-melding is easy. Mob rule! But this other kind... demands that one surrender part of one's individual sovereignty to the whole, and to do so leaves the mind vulnerable. I myself find the idea of metaconcert frightening. Invasive. I've only conjoined with my wife, whom I love more than life, and with my uncle, who has acted as a father to me. I don't know whether I would be able to do it with all of you or not. There's a potential for damage — very serious damage — to the coordinator. But I've decided that I'm willing to try, if this group asks me to do so. If it choses to uphold the Ethic. "
Denis lifted his eyes slowly and swept the room. "Of course, you're quite free to choose the other way. I know you'll want to think it over. But please don't take too long. "
Victor had managed to rally most of his scattered force in the lee of the Gulf Tank, a landmark next to the upper section of the railway where the cog locomotives once took on water. Sleet coated the old wooden structure with glistening rime and whitened the rocks; but little of it stuck to the huddling men, who were dressed in electrically heated suits and helmets.
The most telepathically talented of the attackers had eavesdropped upon Denis's speech, and when it was over the aether clanged with their contemptuous laughter.
Victor shouted into the roaring wind, not caring who heard: A prayer! That's what they want to zap us with boys! Not mental lasers or great balls of fire but a goddam prayer!
When all except a few stragglers had assembled, Victor got down to business. He projected a mental map pinpointing their location — some six hundred meters from the chalet as the crow flew, if one would have dared on such a vile night. The disabled transport aircraft that had carried the delegates up the mountain and the twenty or so vehicles belonging to the restaurant staff were in a sheltered bowl on the other side of the summit. One small squad of men would go around the north slope, secure the vehicles for the group's escape, and dispose of any persons in the vicinity. The five-man demolition crew, which Victor planned to lead himself, would advance on the western side of the chalet under cover-fire from the rest of the force.
"You guys get up two, three hundred meters from the building, and make like the Battle of Gettysburg. Never mind trying to hit anything. Just fire high and fire a lot so those heads don't have time to think about anything but their precious skins. " Victor projected a farsight view of the western half of the building, which jutted shelflike above a small precipice and was supported by stout piers anchored in bedrock. If these were undermined, the entire structure would topple downhill into the vast gulf of Ammonoosuc Ravine.
"Once I'm certain the charges are placed right I'll activate the timers, " Victor said. "And then I'm going to yell go-go-go over the helmet intercom, and telepathically too. You hear that, you haul ass for those cars. You'll have ten minutes from the shout. Whatever you do, don't mind-yak to each other — especially about the explosives! Remember these are heavy heads inside the building and they can use your thoughts to target you if they change their minds about doing a pray-in. Everybody understand?"
They muttered into their helmets. A few of the men, wearing older models with low wattage, were already having to scrape ice from the visors.
One querulous voice asked, "Vic — you sure we can get down the mountain with that other bunch coming up? Seems to me —"
Victor cut him off. "We got us a shit-trip. Nobody knows it better than me. But if push comes to shove we can walk off this rock-pile six different ways. Anybody starts wetting his pants better think hard about the one million cash he won't be getting if he screws up. I'm gonna come through this thing and so will you if you do what I told you. Now get going!"
32
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
AS I ROBBED the body, I cursed my late adversary for being built like an ape instead of a proper beanpole.
This meant that his electric suit would have to be slit around the upper inseams and crotch in order to fit me — a mutilation that fortunately did not damage the thermal wiring — and the embarrassing fore and aft gaps filled in with a ludicrous loincloth rigged from my cut-up jacket. His high moon-boots closed the ankle gap nicely, however, and once I had turned up the suit's heat full blast, pulled on the warm gauntlets, and settled the helmet into place, I was no longer at imminent risk of death through exposure, an expedient that had seemed all too likely before I had encountered this straggling mercenary and chopped him across the back of the neck with a sharp wedge of granite.
I had managed to bash my head and bruise my left leg severely in my escape from the train. The injuries, together with the arduous scramble that had preceded my ambush of the mercenary, had reduced my mental faculties almost to zero. Not only was I dead beat and only slowly recovering from hypothermia, but I was emotionally torpid — certain that nothing I could do would be able to help the twenty-eight hundred operants trapped in the chalet above.
I had no farsight and I had no farspeech. The helmet was equipped with the usual intercom radio, but to use it would only alert Victor and his minions. I could expect my neurons to revive as I thawed out — but the storm was intensifying, and with the increased wind velocity and precipitation the atmosphere was becoming loaded with wrongo ions. Trained operants could project their thoughts through such muck, but hardly the likes of me.
I knelt to study my victim's weapon. It was thickly glazed with ice and unfamiliar in aspect, resembling a cross between a large electric drill and sections of the chromed exhaust system of a small motorcycle. I hadn't the faintest notion where the trigger might be, and the thing's weight was formidable — no doubt the reason why the desperado had fallen behind his companions, only to be dispatched by me in very cold blood. I decided to give further armed combat a miss and concentrate on saving my life.
I began to work my way across the slope in a southerly direction, having a vague notion of outflanking Victor's force and approaching the chalet obliquely by way of the main portion of the Appalachian Trail. On my left, the chalet blazed with lights, and I thought: Boobies! Don't you realize you're sitting ducks? Blackout! Blackout!
But then I realized the foolishness of my futile shout. Victor and his operant henchmen were not handicapped as I was; with their farsenses, they could perceive the chalet as readily with illumination as without it. I was the booby, as usual.
I crept into the teeth of the wind, more often than not going on my hands and knees over the icy, boulder-strewn mountainside. My mind drifted back to the time so long ago when I had been marooned in the Mahoosucs in another storm, only to be rescued — if I really had been — by the Family Ghost. O ingenious figment of my imagination! Where are you now — off on some interstellar jaunt? Or given me up as a bad job?... How could I blame you, Ghost? I disobeyed your orders. There I was, at least three times feeling the irresistible compulsion to tell Denis the tale of the Great Carbuncle, and on each occasion cringing at the banality of it...
> O Ghost, you picked a loser. You told me I would know the appropriate moment to urge Denis to unite his colleagues and the Mind of Earth in prayerful metaconcert. And if this isn't the moment, I don't know what it is! But here I am and there Denis is, and Lucille, and their three boys, and all the rest of the good-guy operants, and I've blown it, and so have you.
Ghost, mon ami, let me try to make small amends. I will pause in the shelter of this blasted crag (since I'm in need of a breather anyway) and at least attempt to fulfill your esteemed orders. I will squeak into the hurricane and perchance le bon dieu in his mercy (if not you in yours) will bring a happy ending to this comedy:
Denis! This is your Uncle Rogi. Listen my son. I have been told to give you an important message. Unite the minds of your colleagues in a metaconcert of goodwill. Renounce violence. If you do this beings from the stars will no longer shun our poor planet but will come and be our friends... This sounds incredible? Bien entendu! Nevertheless I have been told many times that it is true. Denis! Do you hear me? Answer if you do.
I waited.
The first thing that happened was that every light in the chalet went out.
The next thing was that all hell broke loose.
Victor's men began to fire at the building with their automatic weapons from a long line of attack strung across the slope just above me. Tracer bullets stitched the curtains of sleet with scarlet smudges. I heard the sound of smashing glass, then exploding grenades. The howl of the wind was almost drowned out by the racket of the weaponry and I crouched in numb horror for several minutes — and then unaccountably felt infused with fresh energy and impelled to get moving.
I came upon some kind of trail. My impaired night-sight showed me the cairns quite distinctly, together with the slightly less rough rock surface that passed for a designated pathway on the Spartan slopes of Mount Washington. The shooting was really nowhere near me, but to my left. I began to move rapidly uphill, and the trail slanted away at an angle that put the wind at my back. I judged that I was probably approaching the chalet by one of the steep short cuts that gave access to the summit from the southwest. The thump of grenades had stopped, although fusillades of bullets continued unabated. I was moving up a gully and could no longer see the tracers. I had no idea whether Vic's troops were advancing or standing pat.
Then the gunfire became muted by the lay of the land, and once again I was acutely aware of the hundred-voiced wailing of the mountain wind and the hiss of freezing rain. My personal aether was a tangle of ionic chittering and sibilance, as meaningless as static on an untenanted radio frequency. I heard nothing from Denis, no Ghostly reassurances, only my ragged breathing and the pounding of my pulse. Slipping and sliding on the ice, I climbed upward. My semiexposed rump, with its inadequate covering long since soaked through, had lost all sensation. My legs worked automatically. I had some vague idea, I think, of coming up beneath the overhang of the building and working my way around to the service entrance.
The ground began to level out. I was in an area of enormous jagged rocks, heaped around the massive concrete pillars that supported the western side of the chalet. My farsight provided a faint grayish view for a radius of a few meters. Beyond that was blackness.
Until I saw the blood-red glow.
A frisson of dread passed through me. Had Victor set the chalet afire? But the patch of radiance was too small for that... and it moved. Heaven help me, I thought of the real Great Carbuncle, that will-o'-the-wisp of Mount Washington folklore that lured stormbound hikers to their doom. But what would it be doing flitting about the foundation of the chalet? The bulk of the building now loomed above me, every windward surface plastered with a heavy crust of rime. I could dimly farsense that most of the western windows were broken. There were no telepathic thoughts to be discerned.
The magnetic carmine gleam drew me toward it. The worst of the sleet was behind me now that I was beneath the overhang, but there was a kind of frozen fog swirling through the cavernous dark that disguised the source of the red glow until I was nearly on top of it.
Suddenly, my ultrasense went off like an alarm clock, telling me that the thing I had perceived wasn't a light at all. It was an operant's aura, and the mind generating it was powerful, pitiless, and all too familiar.
I saw Victor.
He was recognizable in spite of the cold-weather gear he wore, unscreened and heedless, ablaze with anticipated triumph as he strapped the last of three packages of explosive to one of the piers of the chalet. Before I fully realized what he was up to he had finished the job. From a nearly empty backpack laying on the ground he took a device like a pocket radio, flicked switches, and tapped out some code. Then his voice was loud in my helmet phones:
"Go-go-go!"
The gunfire stopped, and at the same moment there was an abrupt lull in the wind.
Victor turned and saw me standing there, not ten meters away. My mind was paralyzed by his coercion even before I realized that he had spotted me.
"It took you long enough to get here, " he said. Carefully, he tucked the little electronic gadget into the pack. Then he came for me. He didn't say another word, didn't transmit a farspoken message; but I knew what he was going to do. During that trip up the mountain in the cog, Kieran O'Connor had passed on to Victor the terrible secret of mind-bonding. Kieran had used his body as a tool. Victor wouldn't have to. The ultimate result on me would be the same... and if I refused him I'd finish up as Shannon had, incinerated as my psychic energies revitalized this creature that had once been a human being.
Victor had taken his helmet off and cast it aside. His eyes were like bore-holes into lava. And I thought, Jesus, I can't let him take me and I won't be a martyr. I'm going to try one last out-spiral —
Victor stopped.
Deep within the mountain was a sound, a slow and swelling vibration. The rocks around us began to shine with a barely perceptible greenish fluorescence and there were clashing tinkling chiming noises everywhere as their ice coating fractured like glass. The terror and hopelessness I had felt was wiped from my mind and in its place came an uncanny sense of warm benevolence: a beckoning bright calmness. Victor seemed to be feeling it, too. His raging aura dimmed and he flinched as if he had been struck, then looked frantically about. The expression on his face was one of a furious, perplexed child. Poor Victor! Something seemed to urge me to reach out to him, to show him where help lay. But I was too old and too wary and I resisted —
The phenomenon cut off as abruptly as it had begun. The banshee wind, carrying thick snowflakes this time instead of freezing rain, smote us with renewed vigor. It had gone pitch black except for Victor's red halo. I cringed before him and before the storm and heard him laugh.
"So that's the best they can do, is it?"
Then he was coming at me again. One blow of his fist knocked my own helmet off, and then he clamped my skull between hands like the jaws of a vise. The deadly eyes! My vision was a flaming blur and my heart leapt behind my breastbone and I shouted NO and summoned my body's core-energy and made it spiral around and around and around and out...
Victor was lying there at my feet. He had no aura but he breathed. His face was dark, bruised profoundly. His gloved fingers made small scrabbling noises in the icy detritus.
A voice said, "Quelle bonne rencontre. "
I gave a violent start and looked behind me. Someone was coming through the blizzard, carrying a powerful halide lantern that threw vivid orange reflections on the wild scene. I recognized Victor's villainous old sidekick, Pete Laplace, and would have ducked away — but my psychocreative zap had so drained me that I was incapable of moving a muscle. Pete limped up, shone his lamp briefly on Victor, then unwound his Ragg wool muffler and stuffed it under my nephew's head.
The vibration in the mountain started up again.
Old Pete looked about, smiling thinly. As the rocks went phosphorescent he shambled over to Victor's backpack and began stomping all over it. I heard breaking n
oises along with a fresh chorus of glacial tinkling.
"That's enough of that, " old Pete declared. "Now let's see if those folks upstairs and their brain-pals around the world and a few other souls on this perverse little planet have got what it takes. "
I felt once again the pervading flood of calmness; but its joy and serenity no longer invited me — they passed me by. I experienced it but I was not really a part of it. I seemed to see faces — the delegates, Lucille and the children, Jamie, Pyotr, members of the Coterie; and I saw others whom I knew were elsewhere — Oriental and Slavic faces, blacks and Latins, natives of America and Australia, the hawk faces of desert tribes, urbane Europeans. There were Caucasian elders and suboperant schoolchildren from the Indian plains, academics, operant peace officers, scientists, government officials. I saw Ayeesha, the kind Syrian nanny of the Remillard household. I saw Jamie MacGregor's grandmother. I saw Tamara Sakhvadze, weeping, with her grown children Valery and Anna. I saw Gerry Tremblay. I saw Elaine...
So many of them in free coadunation, operants and normals, and Denis extended to his uttermost mental limits holding and guiding the prayer. I could not hear what they said. It had nothing to do with the stars and everything to do with Earth. It was not my prayer, nor was it affirmed by every mind on our proud and stubborn and foolish world. But it sufficed.