by Julian May
"No choice?" Anatoly flared. "Ne kruti mne yaitsa, khui morzho-viy! A choice is exactly what they do have!"
Marc fed the fire, smiling. "God, you have an ugly mouth, priest."
"I know. It got me in trouble a lot back in Yakutsk. Lack of charity, the besetting sin of my life ... It could be yours, too, you Paramount Grand Master tinkling cymbal, if you persist in treating your children like specimens in some breeding experiment!"
"You have no notion of the importance of the Mental Man concept."
"Maybe not. But I do understand human dignity—and your children's right to a free choice."
"The birth of transcendent humanity is more important than the rights of two individuals, no matter who they are! Hagen and Cloud can't be permitted to withdraw. Not now, when I finally have the means to bring the project to fruition."
"Then make them believe in you," Anatoly said. "Convince them. Convince yourself! Prove that the Milieu's verdict on you was a mistake."
The flames were building as the resinous wood caught. Marc said, "The human race must fulfill its great potential. This can't be evil!"
"So," said the friar in a voice ominously quiet. "Instead of my re-forming your erroneous conscience, you want to reform mine! One poor old zalupa konskaya tells you it wasn't a sin after all, that makes it all right? It's not me you have to justify yourself to, Marc—it's Hagen and Cloud."
Firelight shadowed Abaddon's eyes. "You'd better pray that I can, Anatoly. Because all I really require is their germ plasm."
There was a knock on the door.
Elizabeth's mind said: We've come.
Marc sprang to his feet and stood with his back to the fire, a silhouette in a black polo-necked sweater and black cord trousers. The salon's double doors opened. Four people were there, all wearing Tanu storm-suits with the hoods thrown back. Elizabeth stepped aside. Cloud and Hagen, both in white, stood there together. Behind them was the King.
Cloud said, "Papa!" Marc opened his arms and she ran to him. Their minds embraced and she kissed him, and he held her bright-haired head against his chest until she stopped weeping. Then she looked up at him with a plea naked in her eyes, moved away, and waited for Hagen.
The young man stood a full four meters off, at the side of Aiken Drum. His hands were still gloved, stiff at his sides. He ignored his sister's invitation and Marc's, keeping his mind tightly barricaded. He said, "I'll hear what you have to say, Papa. That's all." The heavy raindrops clattered against the windowpanes.
"Will you sit down?" Marc's voice was mild. "It won't take long." He deliberately turned his back on them to poke up the guttering fire.
There were three large settees grouped around a low table. Brother Anatoly said, "Come on, son. You'll be safe. Who'd connive at brain-burning on a night like this, with popcorn and mulled wine? Have some. I was just leaving." Touching Elizabeth's hand in passing, he started for the door.
Marc commanded, "Stay here."
The friar stopped dead, then went to a chair far back in the shadows and sat down.
On the table by the fire, the crock of spiced wine steamed. The corn puffs were also hot, and glistening with butter. Aiken, all aglow in gilded leather, helped himself and said, "I don't mind sharing a little snack with you, Remillard. I brought my long spoon." He plumped down on the couch farthest from the hearth. After hesitating, Hagen sat beside him. Cloud took the seat near her father. Elizabeth sat alone on the lefthand couch.
"I said I would tell you children about your heredity," Marc said without preamble. "You know my own body is self-rejuvenating. Except for my recalcitrant hair, my appearance hasn't changed very much in thirty years. I'm a mutant, like all the children of Paul Remillard and Teresa Kendall. The rejuvenating character is genetically dominant, as are most mutations. Both you, Cloud, and you, Hagen, are also virtually immortal."
"I knew it!" Hagen leapt to his feet. "But you wouldn't tell us the truth before, would you, Papa? No—that would have weakened your hold over us and diminished your stature in the eyes of the others. You had to be unique! So you fobbed us off, warned us not to have any kids of our own, hinted there was a chance we carried horrible genes like Uncle Jack's—"
"What you were told," Marc interrupted, "and what you were not told were for your own safety and peace of mind. You have supravital alleles for self-rejuvenation and high metafunction ... and you have others. The infamous patchwork heritage of the Remillards. You would have found out about the immortality eventually, of course."
"But what about the rest?" Cloud asked, bewildered. "Were you afraid we wouldn't be able to bear knowing the truth?"
"You might have borne it," Marc told her. He was still facing the fire. No one spoke for several minutes. Hagen subsided back onto the couch.
Finally Elizabeth said, "Marc, you must tell them why they were brought to the Pliocene."
"Because you are the parents of Mental Man," Marc said.
Hagen and Cloud sat as though turned to stone. Then Hagen said, "You censored the library flecks back on Ocala, wiped out all details of the real motive behind your Rebellion. All we had were hints, and the fact that Mama tried to kill you herself to prevent the plan's success. For God's sake, Papa—what was the Mental Man project? What is it still?"
His mind showed them.
Overwhelmed by disbelief, they sat with mental barriers fallen.
Elizabeth said to Aiken: Keep your guard up now if ever.
Aiken said: Lord Woman he's not coercing can't you see?
Marc still did not face them. He had his palms flat against the mantelstone and his head bowed. Flames outlined him with a burning corona. He said, "Until I conceived this project, long before I met your mother, I looked upon my immortality as nothing but the bitter jest of a whimsical evolution. Have you ever thought what physical immortality really might mean? An operant mind shackled to a weak, emotion-tossed human body! It was more a curse than a blessing in a world populated by fearful, short-lived fellow humans and self-righteous exotics already suspicious of human genetic potential. Our whole family had the trait—more or less. Much good it did us ... And then Jack was born. The rest of us watched his very special combination of sublethals run its course. It was terrible and it was grand and it was the answer. He personified the ultimate trend of human evolution: the disembodied brain capable of wearing any material form it chose. Or none. But we discovered that le bon dieu had played an other cosmic joke. Poor Jack was not immortal. The marvelous brain was doomed to break down slowly. It would die in less than eighty years ... Then I had the revelation, the idea for Mental Man's artificial engendering. Some members of my family and some magnates of the Concilium who could appreciate the dream helped with the early experimentation. We used my seed, since I represented the culmination of the immortal strain, and female gametes from the most genetically favored women involved in the project. It was all done artificially and in secret because of the controversy the idea had provoked. We seemed to be succeeding. And then the difficulties began; there was sabotage, disloyalty. The debate concerning the morality of the whole Mental Man concept became an ideological battleground between the fearful and the far-sighted. Was it beneficial to the Galactic Mind to permit the acceleration of evolution by such radical means? Human thinkers were divided. Exotics universally condemned us."
"And Mama," Cloud said.
"And Cyndia," Marc agreed. "Marriage and natural children had never been part of my life-schema. All I wanted was to father Mental Man in vitro and in cerebro. But there was Cyndia. For a time, she even seemed to favor the project. You see, she thought the developing nonborns would be allowed to keep their bodies ... She insisted that we have childrenof our own, even though I told her of the family problems. Finally, I couldn't deny her. You two were born, ostensibly perfect. But I knew you would never be able to attain your full potential, any more than I had, unless—"
"Unless you included us in the Mental Man project as well," Cloud said.
"And that's when s
he tried to kill you!" Hagen shouted, surging up. Aiken's fingers closed about his wrist like steel bands and he sank back with a groan. "And when Mama bungled it, you killed her."
Marc turned toward them at last, calm and implacable. "Cyndia's first intent was not to take my life. After the disaster struck our secret laboratories in the early days of the Rebellion, she thought that sterilizing me would be sufficient to put an end to Mental Man, and to the war. She had a small sonic disruptor, a very sophisticated device. She did what she set out to do and narrowly missed killing me. My mind struck her down in self-defense."
"Jesus," said Aiken. "Then all you had left were the kids."
"Oh, Papa," Cloud said in a dead voice. "That's why you said it was necessary to bring us to the Pliocene when your Rebellion failed. Why you want to keep us with you now."
Marc said, "The Milieu will not permit you to reproduce our strain. You have the dangerous strengths and weaknesses of both your parents. In my day, the Human Polity eugenicists were more free and easy in such matters. It was fairly easy for the powerful to circumvent the restrictions. But even Jack was born illicitly, as you know. He should have been aborted, with his overwhelming quotient of so-called lethal genes."
"And if he had been," Elizabeth said, "you would have won."
Marc only smiled his famous smile.
Hagen's thoughts were chaotic, imperfectly screened. "But you could have been restored in the regen tank, back in the Milieu or even here. God—you were restored here, after Felice fire-flayed you! And your self-regenerating faculty—don't tell me it balks at rehabilitating zapped gonads!"
"The body doesn't balk," Marc said. "Only the mind."
Taken aback, Hagen could only repeat, "The mind?"
Marc's steady gaze turned to Elizabeth. "Ask the Grand Master why she receded into metapsychic latency after her accident, even though her brain was perfectly restored."
"We restore ourselves," she said to Hagen. "In any healing process—whether ordinary or extraordinary, tank or Tanu Skin or specialized autoregeneration—the restored body cells must be reintegrated into the whole. Accepted and directed to function through the subtle redactive processes of the mind."
"And ... you can't?" Cloud asked her father.
"No," said Marc.
"But, why?"
"Perhaps Brother Anatoly knows," said Marc lightly. "We've been considering at some length the heart's sly subornation of the intellect. What I should do, I do not! Je suis leveuf, without a star left on my lute. For me, there is only the abyss ... You children must take up the engendering of Mental Man in a place safe from the interference of jealous exotics and puny-minded humans. But there's no need for a star-search any longer. We don't have to wait to be rescued. Before too long I'll have the ability to d-jump all of us anywhere in the galaxy. There are at least three worlds I know of with high-technology civilizations that could foster our project. None has true operant metafunction or even superluminal transport as yet, but we could deal with that easily enough once we took control of a planet." Marc displayed a mental image.
"We." Hagen eyed his father with misgiving. "Then the other children are still to be included somehow in the project, just as you told us back on Ocala?"
"All who still accept the Mental Man ideology may join us. An adequate pool of genes from operant human stock is essential to offset the sublethal alleles of the Remillards. My old colleagues have known this all along. What they did not know was that you two were the only sources left of the immortality strain. They assumed—as I did—that I would be able to restore my fertility eventually. Most of them still think I have done so. It was the better part of prudence not to disillusion them during the early years of our exile. The times were unsettled. I was well able to take care of myself, but you children were vulnerable."
"I'm surprised," said Hagen caustically, "that you didn't bank specimens of our germ plasm."
"I did. The Keoghs, who were our chief physicians and knew the truth, took one ovary and one testis from you while you were still very young children. The only other person who knew, my closest friend and confidant, destroyed them at about the same time that he began poisoning your minds against me."
"Manion!" cried Hagen, and he began to laugh uproariously.
"Why does Alex want us to go back to the Milieu, Papa?" Cloud asked. Her brother's laughter choked off.
"He wants Mental Man—and you—subordinated to the Unity. He's a deluded fool."
Hagen brushed this aside. "So you really do need us after all. We're the priceless raw material for your Mental Man stud farm—is that it?"
Marc cut him off. "You and Cloud will be the principal administrators of the project. It will be yours. I'll subdue the host planet for you, give you every assistance. But theresponsibility would be yours. Think very carefully before you refuse it. Nothing comparable awaits you in the Galactic Milieu. On the contrary." And his mind displayed a panorama of alarming scenarios that caused the two young people to gasp, then turn incredulouslyto Elizabeth.
She shook her head. "I don't know. Certainly not the more drastic hypotheses. The Milieu would never be so unjust. Ultimately, your fate would probably depend upon you. Your mind-set and response to the Unity—"
"You mean, we'd have to take our medicine," Hagen said, "and swear to be good little neurons in the Galactic Brain."
"It's not like that!" Elizabeth protested. "The Unity is love and fulfillment and an end to loneliness. Manion was right when he told you you'd find peace with your own kind."
But Marc said, "There's no room in the Milieu for persons whose dreams diverge from the norm—much less persons whose mental potential exceeds the narrow course predetermined for humanity by the exotic races. You are Remillards. You'd be a threat. And unless you submitted to the domination of the Unity you'd be dealt with ... as I was."
"And don't forget Me," said Aiken.
"I'd never do that," Marc replied smoothly. "Elizabeth told me your history. In spite of your vast latent metabilities, the Magistratum was prepared to dispose of you. I invited you to be here at this meeting precisely because I saw you as my ally, one who would plead my cause to Hagen and Cloud once you understood the truth. I'm not afraid of having Milieu agents come after me through the time-gate. Why should they bother? The past is. They know I can never return. I stand condemned. But you, High King ... What kind of reception would you have if you should go back to the Milieu? Are you ready to subordinate your mind to the will of your inferiors in the Unity? And if you stay here, and a two-way warp is established, are you ready to welcome busybody reformers from the future, backed by the enforcers of the Magistratum? Your rule is hardly a model of enlightened democracy! And the third contingency: closure of the gate after the disaffected have fled the Pliocene. At the very least, you stand to lose many of your most talented subjects. There are even uglier possibilities."
Aiken grinned. "Including the one that all this havering may be moot, if the Firvulag are right and Gotterdammerung is about to fall."
Suddenly the little man in gold was on his feet, holding Hagen's wrist with his left hand and Cloud's with his right. All three of them were inside a shining envelope of psychocreative force.
Marc tensed. He stepped forward, his eyes alight with fury. He said: It is not your decision to make'.
"I've made it mine." Aiken was no longer smiling. "Do you care to dispute the point?"
The aspect of Abaddon faded as quickly as it had appeared. Marc shook his head with apparent unconcern.
Aiken drew Cloud and Hagen toward the tall French windows that still streamed with rain. He said to Marc, "We'll think very carefully about what you've said, and then we'll give you our decision. But not now. We need time."
"You may have two days," Marc said coldly. "No longer."
The windows were flung open, admitting a howling blast of wind-driven water. Aiken and the young Remillards were abruptly hooded, unrecognizable, ready to fly. The King asked, "Will you wait here at Black Cra
g for the answer?"
Marc said, "If I'm not here, Elizabeth will know how to find me." His mind reached toward his masked son and daughter. I know that what I've told you has been shocking. Frightening, even. But all that will be taken care of in time. You'll understand everything ... in time. Don't let Aiken stampede or coerce you. You carry a priceless potential, an enormous responsibility. Let me help you fulfill it. Don't turn away from me. Forgive me for the mistakes, for hurting you. I only meant it for the best. I do love both of you. Believe me...
The golden figure and the two white ones vanished into the storm. The window-doors slammed shut.
Marc and Elizabeth had completely forgotten Brother Anatoly. He hauled himself up from his isolated seat with a wheezy sigh and came sloshing through the puddles on the floor. At the fireside table he busied himself ladling out three cups of the still-steaming mulled wine. He gave one to Marc and one to Elizabeth, then stood muttering under his breath for a moment. He said, "You're going to need all the help you can get. Take it and drink it. You know what it is. For your good and everybody's."
Elizabeth's eyes went wide with shock. "I can't! What do you think you're doing?"
"Of course you can," said Anatoly comfortably. "Look at him. Are you that much worse?"
Very carefully, Elizabeth set the cup of wine down on the table. "Amerie must have been out of her mind to send you," she said, and then she rushed out of the room.
Marc raised a bemused brow over the rim of his cup.
Anatoly drank his, then took Elizabeth's. "I do believe she's scandalized. She has terrible scruples, you know. And despair. It's difficult to deal with. In her way, she's even prouder than you. And unfortunately, damnation will always be a matter of choice."
"I still don't concede guilt."
"You're an arrogant, invincibly ignorant bastard, and your subconscious does concede, and ego te absolvo." He finished Elizabeth's wine and set down the empty cup. "This new thing, on the other hand, is a different kettle of borscht. It's wrong and you know it. No psychological bullshit about it, Remillard. You force those kids or mutilate them again and you make your own hell. For keeps, this time."