by Julian May
Sadly enough, certain of the Remillards did meet their end during those days. Their tragedy went virtually unnoticed because of the gaudier events that Milieu historians have concentrated on; but I will tell it here as part of the family chronicle.
In the months following the Alma-Ata affair, Denis brooded over the misuse of operant metafaculties. He discussed this subject at length with both Tamara Sakhvadze and Urgyen Bhotia, and was convinced that resolute pacifism was the only ethical course open to persons with higher mind-powers. There remained, however, the odious problem of Victor. Denis had told Lucille what he knew and what he suspected about his younger brother, and she was simultaneously outraged and wary. Lucille was particularly concerned for Sunny and the nonoperant siblings left under Victor's influence, and pressed Denis to do something to help them, even if it meant a direct confrontation that might end in violence. But Denis refused, countering her reproaches with both logic and his espousal of the superChristian ethic. No course short of engineering Victor's demise was likely to resolve the terrible stalemate — and Denis would not kill his brother in cold blood even to save the lives of his mother and the others.
Denis stood by, apparently impotent, while his younger twin brothers Louis and Leon, who turned twenty-one in 1999, were brainwashed by Victor and joined him in Remco Industries as nonoperant factotums. Both young men were ruthless and intelligent, and they were also completely trustworthy, unlike many of Victor's operant associates. That left only George, who was nineteen, and Pauline, two years younger, still living with Sunny. George was an unprepossessing young man, very unassertive, who was studying computer technology under Victor's orders. I had always thought him a poor stick. Paulie, the youngest of Don and Sunny's big brood, was an exquisite creature. Except for her dark eyes, she was the image of her mother as a young woman — and when I saw her that year at the family Easter get-together, suddenly matured into radiant femininity, my heart stood still.
Their older sister Yvonne had been married in 1996 to the middle-aged operant crook Robert Fortier, whose sinister mother still acted as Sunny's nominal housekeeper, all the while contriving to dominate her utterly. Over the years, by use of ingenious metapsychic variants on old-fashioned racketeering, Victor and Fortier had converted Remco into an international operation that now owned not only pulpwood harvesting companies but a large paper mill in New Brunswick, a chemical plant in Maine, and other forest-product industries in cities scattered across upper New England and southeastern Canada. Having succeeded so well in his first dynastic ploy, Victor now decided to attempt a much more audacious variation on the theme.
One of my nephew's underhanded acquisitions was a small genetic-engineering firm in Burlington, Vermont. This outfit had perfected and patented a bacterial organism called a lignin degrader, that broke down (i. e., "ate") a common waste product of the pulpwood industry, converting it into a host of valuable chemicals that had heretofore been obtained from increasingly scarce petroleum. The process utilizing the superior bug was very nearly ready to be put into production, and it was going to be a gold mine; but Victor's Remco Industries faced a dilemma well known to medium-sized corporations — it did not have enough capital to develop a lignin-chemistry company of its own, which would reap huge profits. Rather, it would have to license the process to giant petrochemical conglomerates and settle for a much smaller piece of the pie.
Naturally, Victor balked at this. The golden bug and its principal nurturer had been stolen from a famous Michigan university at considerable risk to Victor's own hide, and he had invested a good deal of money in the perfecting of the process. Having won game and set, as it were, he wasn't going to let outsiders rob him of the match.
There was only one font of finance he felt he could safely approach for additional capitalization, a money source that had earlier approached him, only to be repulsed. Now, Victor decided, the time was ripe for reconsideration. And so he made a telephone call to Kieran O'Connor's Chicago office, waited patiently while his name was passed from buffer zone to buffer zone in the corporate hierarchy until it reached the Boss of Bosses, and then made his proposition.
A merger, to their mutual profit. To seal the deal, Victor would marry Shannon O'Connor and Kieran would take Pauline Remillard.
O'Connor laughed his head off at the raw Franco chutzpah of it all. It was primitive. It was damn near Sicilian! Still, Kieran had kept his eye on Victor over the years and had been impressed. At the callow age of twenty-nine, Victor was worth upward of sixty-two million dollars — peanuts when compared to Kieran's own empire, but not too shabby when you remembered that the kid had started out with nothing but his drunken daddy, a '74 Chevy pickup truck, and two Jonsered chain saws boosted from a local logging-equipment supplier. And this lignin-gobbling bacterium had possibilities. Kieran's facile mind hatched a scenario in which the process could be used as a fulcrum in a scheme to corner the world's energy supply. As for Victor himself, he would either have to be made an ally or eliminated. The dynastic link-up opened the way for either option.
After their telephone conversation had gone on for some ten minutes, Kieran told Victor that he was inclined to accept the proposition. There were, however, two small matters that would have to be clarified. First, did Victor have his sister Pauline under complete control, as Kieran did Shannon?... and was she really beautiful and unsophisticated?
Of course!
Kieran hoped that was true, because they couldn't coerce the girl permanently. The second matter was more delicate. Kieran did not want Pauline as his wife or mistress. He would possess her only once (for reasons not explained to Victor), and after that she would be married to Kieran's close associate Warren Griffith, who had recently lost his third wife under tragic circumstances. There was, however, this thing about Griff. He was brilliant, both in coercive talent and business acumen, but he had special personal needs. Pauline, as his wife, would live in a ménage à trois, and the third party was a young man of rather stern disposition. Did Victor understand?
Different strokes for different folks, Victor said. But Kieran would have to make damn certain that Paulie didn't end up like the third wife.
Kieran would see to it personally.
Then there was no problem.
And so this decidedly curious arrangement was agreed upon. But Victor made the mistake of explaining the situation very carefully to Pauline while she was under his coercive hold. He talked to her for three hours one late October afternoon when the sky was clear and the trees were in full color on the hillsides surrounding Berlin, and then he left her in the back yard of Sunny's big house on Sweden Street, sitting on a rustic bench under an incandescent maple tree. When her brother George came home that day from computer college, she asked him to take her for a ride in his car along the Androscoggin River, and while they drove she told him without any emotion at all (for that was the way Vic's brainwashing affected the forcibly latentized) what was in store for her.
George thought about it in his nerdish way. And he thought about his own future as a superhacker under Vic's mental thumb, and his older brother Denis's apparent inability to help any of them. Then he told Paulie not to worry. They drove up to Dave's Gun Shop in Milan, where George bought a handsome Marlin 120 shotgun with a twenty-six-inch barrel and a genuine American walnut stock and forend, all hand-checkered, because George didn't want to wind things up in a sleazy way. After that they found a nice spot where Paulie could watch the river and the trees reflected in it and not notice a thing. There was string in the glove compartment that George tied cleverly around the trigger and guard of the gun to take care of himself.
Vic knew at once when they died and so did I; but for some reason he did not receive the farspoken truth of the affair that was transmitted to me in the split second of George's final agony. Instead, Victor went to the car and found the note, which he destroyed before calling the State Police to report the double tragedy. He was mad as hell. Kieran O'Connor took the news more calmly and
said that he would think things over, and doubtless something could be worked out between them after all. He promised to get back to Victor early next year, after the Millennial hysteria cooled and the financial world returned to normal.
Sunny's link to a reality that had become insupportable was shattered by this final trauma. She smiled a great deal at the double funeral and said that Don and the five dead children spoke to her from heaven, saying she would soon be joining them. Victor now had no objection to her going to Hanover to live, so Sunny spent her last months in the pleasant house on East South Street with Denis and Lucille, rocking newborn Maurice and reading storybooks to little Philip.
I saw her nearly every day. She remembered who I was when I would address her as Marie-Madeleine, as I had done when we first met in the Berlin Public Library thirty-eight years earlier. We often spoke about those days. At other times, her drifting mind perceived young Maurice as baby Denis, and she and I would re-enact some of the simple metapsychic teaching games I had devised so long ago. Such charades soothed her even as they tortured me, but at any rate they did not last long. She died the next spring, in March, impatient for the flowers to bloom.
13
MOUNT WASHINGTON, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH
31 DECEMBER 1999
THERE WAS THE question of where to spend the Turn of the Millennium... Her father was going to an opulent masked ball in Vienna where the international set was prepared to outdo the twilight of Byzantium, and he invited her to accompany him. She declined. It wasn't her style to waltz away the fateful hours in the company of tipsy financiers and diamond-crusted media stars, and then at midnight link arms to sing "Brüderlein und Schwesterlein" and "Auld Lang Syne, " awash in sentimental tears and vintage champagne.
No. She wanted something different... just in case the world did end, as the crazies kept predicting. Something incomparably dramatic.
Kieran laughed indulgently, but then went all serious and reminded her that she would have to be with him in Zurich without fail on Monday January 3 for the signing session establishing their new European satellite consortium, in which she was a nominal officer. Perhaps, he suggested offhandedly, she could spend the holiday weekend skiing. She would be welcome to use Darmstadter's chalet at Gstaad, since he and his family would be going to the ball.
She thought about that. She was a superb skier, and her operancy gave her unusual talents that added zest to the sport. But she would not go to Gstaad. For one thing, her father had suggested it. For another, it was crowded and artificial and she might meet people she knew. Her fancy painted a very different picture of the Millennial Eve: a precipitate slope of powder snow, virgin in the moonlight, and herself flying downhill, a streaming torch in her hand, into the blackness below. Yes!
And then she had another great idea. The perfect place — and an appropriate companion.
She telephoned him and invited him to be her guest in the Bugaboos. He did ski, didn't he?
"Yes, " he said.
"Then let me send the family Learjet for you and we can meet in Banff. Our chopper and a private guide will be waiting. We'll have to see one another eventually. Why not do it this way, without him even knowing?"
"He doesn't know?"
"He's in Europe. That's why I'm... free. "
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then he said, "If you'd like something really climactic, an even bigger thrill —"
"Bigger than skiing the Bugaboos?"
He told her what he had in mind and this time it was her turn to hesitate. "Is it possible?"
"If you're black diamond... and if you have some PK, it's quite possible. I've done it twice. "
"I suppose it's illegal or something. "
"Oh, yes, definitely. " He laughed.
"Tell me where to meet you!" she demanded.
And so he had; and early the next morning she had driven out to DuPage County Airport and taken the Lear herself. It took her a little over two hours to get to North Conway, New Hampshire, from northern Illinois, since she had to detour around some bad weather over Buffalo. But when she touched down at White Mountain Airport she found bright sunshine, fresh powder, and a throng of like-minded ski nuts overflowing the resort town, all determined to await Gabriel's trump schussing their brains out. There were no rental cars to be had, but she coerced the young man at the Hertz office into giving her the keys of his own nifty little BMW sports coupe. Then she drove north to Wildcat Mountain, where she spent what was left of the day and the early evening warming up her muscles on the rather modest slopes of Upper Lynx and Lower Catapult, all the while eyeing the real challenge that loomed to the west, dazzling in its deepest snow-cover in decades.
Could they get up there without a chopper? He'd said they could, in spite of the fact that it was deadly dangerous as well as prohibited. That, of course, made it perfect.
Along about seven she was ravenous so she drove down to Jackson, to a well-known country inn on the Thorn Hill Road. There she dined alone on lobster bisque, a salad of spinach, endive, and red onions with mustard-vinaigrette dressing, veal scallops with black mushrooms and cognac sauce, potatoes rösti, and steamed baby green beans. She drank a single glass of a fine Souveraine California Cabernet and left the rest (to the scandal of the host), and finished with a pumpkin-pecan tartlet and a pony of calvados.
Then it was time to meet Victor Remillard.
Following his instructions, she drove to the deserted parking lot of the Mount Washington Carriage Road. Its gate was open and she turned off her headlights and went in, following a plowed track through very deep snow that was sometimes drifted higher than the roof of her car. The sky to the south had a warm glow from the lighted slopes at Wildcat, three kilometers away, but aside from that the only illumination was from starlight. The moon, four days past its full, had not yet risen above the eastern heights. Near a deserted ticket-taker's shack was a cleared space where a peculiar vehicle was parked. It looked like a boxy van precariously perched above four very wide tractor treads. She parked beside it and studied it with fascination.
Only a few minutes passed before he came, driving a big four-wheeler that he slewed around smartly, throwing up a plume of snow that glittered under the stars. He parked a few meters away, then got out and came crunching toward her. Pulling up her hood and slipping on her gloves, she stepped out of the BMW and went to meet him.
Shannon O'Connor I presume.
Victor Remillard... I know.
Hey good screen!
And yours.
Lots to hide?
Haven't you?
Touché.
Pas du tout.
Ready fun?
Believe it.
Good sky.
No wind.
Headwall powder!
Super!
PK OK?
?? Yes. ??
Sure you can drive this thing? Homing.
Marchons! No hands babe! Not in SnoGo?
Ready when you are. I'm valuable. UP only DOWN XC.
Epatant! To Papa! Oo!
Mg fusees!! Not you? Treeslalom.
Torches X 2? We'll see. Ace hi!
Wired for stereo. LET'S GO! Mogulbomber?
Hardhat? Yo!
And deepvision Aerials too?
Nightvision? Only 720&Möebius!
!Hotdog hotdamn hotdog hotdamn hotdog!
!Hotdog!
So they were off in a roar of monster twin diesels, charging up the famous road leading to the summit of Mount Washington. But they weren't going to the top; they were going, by ingenious and unlawful routes, to the lip of the Headwall of Tuckerman Ravine, a steep glacial cirque that had been scooped into the southeastern flank of the peak during the past ice age. The ravine was a natural trap for snow blasted off the Presidential Range by the hurricane winds of the region. In this final winter of the Second Millennium, one of the coldest and stormiest in decades, the vast bowl of Tuckerman Ravine was filled with snow more than twenty-five meters deep. Peopl
e normally skied Tuckerman in the spring, when most of the snow in the country surrounding it had melted and it was possible to hike up through the woods from Pinkham Notch to the Hermit Lake camping shelters on the ravine floor. The only way to get to the Headwall from Hermit was to slog with your skis on your back — up and up and up. At the rim of the declivity — if you got that far on the fifty-five-degree slope — you skied down. The great challenge was to schuss, to ski straight to the bottom. The feat had last been accomplished by Toni Matt in 1939. Once down the Headwall, it was possible to take the precipitous Sherburne Ski Trail back to the Notch and the highway. In the dead of winter, however, nobody skied Tuckerman Ravine. The powder was bottomless and the scene magnificent, but the upper reaches of the mountain were off-limits to the public. It was deadly up there, with some of the fiercest winter weather on Earth.
But not on that New Millennium's Eve.
"Did you lay on the Sno-Crawler just for me?" Shannon asked.
"Not on your life. It belongs to the contractor who services the weather observatory and the TV and microwave transmitters on the summit. During the winter the Carriage Road is closed halfway up and unplowed. Once a week this crawler goes up with supplies and the relief crew. "
"And you can just hop into the thing and make free with it whenever you fancy a little jaunt?"
He laughed. "Not by a damn sight. But I have my methods. "
They sat side by side in bucket seats, strapped in with sturdy web harnesses. Shannon had erected her heaviest mental screen, the dual-layer one with the false substrate that she used to defeat her father's probing. Victor had made a perfunctory stab at it during their initial encounter, then backed off; but she could still feel the searing power of him, like a searchlight held at steady focus against a window blind; and when they had faced each other in the dark parking lot she had seen his ghostly aura — vermilion laced with steely flashes of blue, the colors of potency and danger.