Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy)

by Julian May

  Then it’s just you and me and the fishies tonight. Alex and Arky said they probably wouldn’t be able to make it until tomorrow, and Boom is trapped in Concord indefinitely. Talk to you later.

  I said: Tight lines mon fils.

  Then I forgot Marc and concentrated on my aquatic prey.

  You have to understand that flyfishing is a deliberately inefficient sport. Any blockhead can catch a fish with a pole, a hank of string, and a hook with a worm or marshmallow or some other organic bait. But to deceive the wily trout into striking at a pinch of fiber, feathers, or tinsel tied to a barbless hook requires a carefully conceived strategy and artful tactics. If you’re a metapsychic operant, you have to handicap yourself even further to make it a fair fight. You dassn’t use your ultrasenses to find the fish underwater. You can’t metacoerce the critter into sampling the fly. And of course you must never use your creative faculty to conceal your presence or enhance the fly’s illusion of edibility.

  Sometimes I cheat.

  But I didn’t this night, except in harmless ways like PKing the nearly invisible tippet into clinch knots tying on the fly, and using the same homely metafaculty to resolve tangles. In the space of two hours, I caught and released a couple dozen valiant tiddlers too small to snap the half-kilo test leader.

  I fairly hooked—and broke off, because I made various mistakes in playing them—five fish of respectable size. The brook trout took my flies away with them, but eventually the special-alloy barbless hooks would fall off or dissolve, leaving the critters unharmed. The moon vanished, the loon serenade continued, and I was a happy man. When the hatch came to an end, the duns that had survived greedy fish flew away to rest in the bushes. Fully mature ephemerides that had hatched a few days earlier now spun giddily in their mating dance overhead. Fertilized females bounced along the water’s surface laying their eggs while the males dropped from the sky, dead of a surfeit of ecstasy.

  Eventually Marc got hungry and decided to pack it in. I told him I’d stay just a tad longer, fishing the spinners.

  And of course it had to happen; no sooner had Marc disappeared inside the lodge than I finally hooked the big one.

  I had taken note of this fish over an hour ago, cruising well out of range in shallowish water on the right side of the springhole. It was taking spent mayflies with majestic precision: gulp, gulp, gulp (pause for a number of minutes to ruminate), gulp, gulp, gulp (time out for really serious contemplation). My mind’s eye could study the stately fish without compromising angler’s honor since I wasn’t casting to it. It looked like the grandaddy of all brookies, a real mossback, dark greenish-blue above and silvery-white below, with pale wiggly markings up around the dorsal fin and blue-ringed yellow and pink spots on the flanks.

  I didn’t paddle the belly-boat over and try for him earlier because I was afraid he’d spook. Besides, with every feeding pass he got a little closer. I was willing to wait, playing my game with smaller fry.

  Finally, he condescended to head my way, drawn by a shower of dying insects. I hastily tied on a rusty spinner. Gulp, gulp—

  I cast, and my fly settled like a whisper a meter in front of the trout’s abovewater snout. I gave the spinner a tiny, seductive twitch.

  Gulp.

  Gotcha!

  I set the tiny hook in the monster brookie’s tough jaw and mentally howled out a prayer: S’il vous plaît, mon doux Jésus! No mistakes this time!

  The fish streaked off, making my little reel squeal like a tortured mouse. He dove to the bottom of the springhole. The line went dead slack.

  God! Had I lost him already? (No fair peeking.) I lifted the rod high, reeled in with delicate caution, and met resistance. There was a vibration as the trout shook his head and darted off a short distance, but the rod—not the fragile leader—took the strain. Then the line went limp again. Had the fish broken off, or was he coming toward me? It took all my willpower not to look. I cranked in line like a madman, but the dinky reel was too slow on the uptake. Somewhere underwater the brookie was wagging his great head again. If I didn’t tighten the line soon I’d surely lose him. I took hold of the line and began stripping in slack cautiously with my free left hand, catching each fresh loop with my right index finger while simultaneously gripping the rod. It’s not classy flyfishing but it works … provided the damned fish doesn’t zoom away all of a sudden and half take your finger off, catching it in a bird’s nest of snarled line.

  Taut at last! I held my lunker ever so gently while I got the coils of loose line back on the reel. He exploded in fury—zeeee! went the reel—and away he ran again. He pulled me and the float-tube out into deep water. Then he jumped, a tactic that had already lost me three or four decent fish that evening. But this time I was ready, bowing the rod to the fish in the approved fashion. He splashed back and sounded again, but he was definitely weakening.

  I began the end game, reeling in as much line as I could when he was quiet, but allowing him to run short distances when he wanted to. Gradually he came closer and closer to the float-tube. It was full dark with only stars to illuminate the water, but my night sight saw him darting and pausing near the surface. He had to be 125 cents long and weigh over 4 kilos, a very respectable size indeed for a brook trout.

  Coaxing him in, I held my breath and prayed that he wouldn’t take me by surprise at the last minute and snap the cobweb tippet. I even spoke to him telepathically (a totally useless ploy, since a trout has a cerebrum smaller than its eyeball), reassuring him that I would set him free as soon as I got him into the net and removed the hook with forceps.

  I had the net in the water now, moving it slowly so the fish wouldn’t panic when I eased the meshes around him. My entire attention was fixed on my prize as I brought him close to the left side of the float-tube. The net moved up to take him from behind.

  He turned, saw the net … and laughed.

  I swear that my mind’s ear heard him, and the laughter was completely human. Incredulous, I tracked him with my farsight as he dove straight down, hauling line from my screaming reel, then reversed and rocketed toward the surface again, directly underneath my float-tube. Snout-first, he struck the mesh sling I sat in and delivered a fearful blow to my testicles.

  I yelled. Great balls of fire popped in front of my eyes and I dropped the rod. The sudden, excruciating pain was so distracting that I failed to notice that the quick-release buckle of the float’s ’tween-legs strap had popped open. I began to slide deeper into the water, too agonized to think straight. Coldness flooded around my armpits, down my body, and into my aching groin. I gripped my crotch and cursed, trying to redact away the pain.

  The laughter in my mind intensified. I seemed to see the great trout, now scarcely a meter away from me on the left. His head was out of the water, his eyes glowed a spectral green, and my fly was still affixed in the corner of his grinning mouth. The fish dove and struck me a second terrible blow in the privates. When I screamed again my mouth filled with water.

  It was then I realized that my waders were rapidly filling and dragging me down.

  I thrashed like a gaffed shark, trying to grab the belly-boat seat and haul myself up before my head went under again, but I was being pulled down too fast. Ordinarily I’m a pretty decent swimmer and I hadn’t really started to panic yet. Underwater, I pulled my fishing vest loose from the dangling float-tube strap that had snagged it, opened it, unfastened the buckles of my waders, then tried to push them down and free my legs of both waders and swim fins.

  I couldn’t.

  Something bound my ankles tightly together and I knew what it was: not the easily broken nylon leader but WF1F flyline, as strong as steel wire. More of the stuff floated around me, writhing in the water as though it were alive. The goddam fish was circling me with unbelievable speed and I was being trussed like a rolled rib roast! I felt my knees suddenly constrained as more line wound around them. My left wrist became entangled and that arm was yanked tightly against my body. My bursting lungs now hurt more than
my wounded nuts.

  Again I had a vision of the homicidal trout and heard it laugh. But the voice was that of a man. An imbecilic notion came into my oxygen-starved brain: Didn’t I know this fish?

  Wasn’t it Parnell Remillard, Adrien and Cheri’s wayward son, one of the two surviving Hydra-units?…

  It was at that point that I panicked.

  The bizarre attack had left me so muddleheaded that it had not occurred to me until then to send out a telepathic shout for help. I tried to farspeak Marc, but the effort was pathetically weak. Precious air escaped from my nostrils. I sank deeper and deeper and my ultrasenses faded to extinction. I was enveloped in pain, darkness, and a growing lethal chill. Dreamlike visions dredged from my memories began to explode before my blind eyes. I was dying and the sadistic Parnell was greatly amused.

  I refused to surrender to the Hydra. With the last of my strength I drew up my knees, then abruptly straightened my bound legs, flapping the swim fins. Again and again I performed this maneuver, trying to propel myself toward the water’s surface. But something was holding me down. The flyline had snagged on the bottom. My free right hand fumbled at a pocket of my fishing vest. I had a small Swiss jackknife. If I could just get hold of it—

  I was rocked by a third savage blow, this time to the abdomen. My lungs expelled their remaining hoard of air. I stopped struggling and drifted, knowing Parnell had finished me. Fury’s secret was safe.

  Oddly, I could see again—but the vision was detached, evidence that the terminal excorporeal excursion had begun. My body was suspended near the bottom of the springhole in about five meters of inky water, tethered to the broken branch of a sunken log by a few turns of line. The flyrod lay in the mud amidst waving weeds. There was no sign of the trout. I felt warm again. The pain had vanished and I was moving slowly away from my mortal hulk, up to the surface into marvelous, shining air.

  Without emotion, I watched a swimming human figure descend and approach my dead body. This was an uninteresting development, and so I turned away and smiled into the fascinating light. I began to speed toward it—

  The light went out.

  After a blank interval I realized I was breathing. My lungs were on fire and my brain was a throbbing clot of agonized jelly. Two men were talking.

  “He’s coming around. His heart’s steady, and from what I can tell, his brain function is back in the normal range.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Rogi’s a damned tough old Canuck. Hard to kill.”

  “I don’t think I could have saved him without your redactive course. Even in extremis, his mind was shut up tight against me.”

  “I’ll bring him to the lodge in a few minutes. You’d better go on ahead. Get the egg ready and tell the hospital in Colebrook that we’ll be flying him in.”

  I heard departing footsteps skwodging in the mud. My eyes still refused to open. Unearthly laughter rang out, and for an instant I convulsed in terror, stiffening in the arms that held me. But it was only the damned loons cackling. I groaned in relief, then mumbled, “Gonna be sick.”

  Strong hands turned my body and held my head while I vomited lake water. Then a dazzling dart seemed to impale my brain and I instantly felt better, zapped by redaction. My eyes opened and focused—more or less—and I processed optical input: a starry sky framed by conifer trees, branches of underbrush up close, and a face looking down at me. Deep-socketed eyes with winged brows, the aquiline Remillard nose, a cleft chin, a thin-lipped mouth smiling a lopsided smile.

  “Feeling better?” Marc asked. He wiped my mouth with a bandanna handkerchief and lifted me into a sitting position.

  “It was Parnell—Adrien’s kid—that tried to kill me,” I wheezed feebly. “Hydra disguised as a killer trout! You gotta believe me, Marco.”

  “We’ll talk about it later.” He scooped me into his arms like a child and carried me toward the lodge. I could hear excited voices.

  A maudlin tear trickled down my cheek. “Thanks for saving my life. Stupid old fart … I didn’t think to call till it was almost too late. But you heard me after all.”

  “I didn’t hear your mind calling,” Marc said. “And I didn’t really save you. I came running after you were out of the water and helped with the mental first aid.”

  We had reached the parking area of the lodge. The caretaker couple were there with blankets and pillows, leaking anxious vibes. Marc’s big black egg was open and he put me onto the rear banquette and covered me up. Somebody was already in the pilot seat. Marc climbed in beside me, the other guy slammed the hatch and started the rho generator. The egg shot up inertialess into the night sky.

  Marc said, “Here’s the one who heard your farsqueak, dived into the lake, cut you loose from the mess on the bottom, and pulled you ashore.”

  The man in the pilot seat turned around and smiled. I goggled at him, so blitzed that I couldn’t utter a word. Like Marc and I, he was sopping wet. His damp blond hair straggled over a youthful brow and his eyes were the same vivid coercer-blue as Ti-Jean’s.

  But it wasn’t Jack the Bodiless who had saved me. It was Denis.

  8

  BRETTON WOODS, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH

  18 JUNE 2078

  THE FIRST MAGNATE OF THE HUMAN POLITY OF THE GALACTIC Milieu smoothed his striped silk tie, checked his spats, put on his pearl-gray stroller, tugged down his waistcoat, shot his cuffs just a trifle, and surveyed himself in the hotel suite’s full-length mirror. He liked what he saw. Paul Remillard was a slender, striking man with a palpable air of command. The self-rejuvenating gene complex of his famous family made him appear half his actual age of sixty-four, and the archaic formal wear looked notably spiffy with his silver-streaked hair and well-trimmed beard.

  All he lacked was the finishing touch of a boutonniere. Who had charge of the damned things, anyway?

  He decided to farspeak Lucille. It had been her idea that the attire of the wedding party should reflect the romantic Edwardian Era when the White Mountain Resort Hotel was new. Jack and Dorothea, amused by the incongruity of the matriarch’s conceit, had acceded willingly. Period clothing was optional for the guests but strongly encouraged. Even the attending Krondaku had insisted upon assuming human form and coming in fancy dress so that their normally monstrous appearance would not clash with the mise en scène.

  Paul sent out a farspoken hail on Lucille Cartier’s intimate telepathic mode:

  Mama! Wheredolpickupflowerformybuttonhole?

  Goodafternoon dear my goodness aren’t you the dapper boulevardier!

  The posies. Where?

  Flowersforgentlemen in Marc&Jack’s suite just trot over pick yours up I’m inconference with cateringstaff yourPapa soothing IanMacdonald’s wounded Scottish pride I suppose it really wasn’t toowiseofme to suggest he forgo kilt for Englishstyle 1905soup&fish we’llmeetyou RooseveltParlor lhour relax dear I have EVERYTHING IN HAND.

  Super! [Passionate gratitude.]

  Lucille laughed indulgently and withdrew her mind.

  Paul thanked God that his mother had volunteered to oversee the nuptial arrangements. Who would have thought that the logistics would be so complicated—or that the popular media would take such an inordinate interest? Other children of the prolific Remillard Dynasty—including Paul’s second son, Luc—had tied the knot without attracting any special attention. “Why,” the First Magnate had grumped earlier to Lucille, “are the sensation-mongers getting into such a pucker over these two?”

  His mother’s response had been dry, but she charitably refrained from chiding him for his insensitivity. “Dorothea and Jack are Milieu heroes, Paul dear. Don’t tell me you’ve been too preoccupied with your official duties to notice. And they’re also quelque peu bizarres! There’s the inevitable vulgar speculation about how in the world they’ll ever manage to … do it.”

  Paul had frowned quizzically as comprehension dawned. “That’s a good question! But dammit, it’s nobody’s business but the newly weds’. I don’t often take advantage
of my perks of office, but I’m going to do my utmost this time to make certain that our family privacy is respected.”

  “Good luck,” Lucille had wished him tartly. “I’m sure you’re a wiz at keeping great matters of state secret. But the marriage of Jack the Bodiless and Diamond Mask is something else altogether.”

  Carrying his top hat and gloves, the First Magnate went out into the sunny corridor. Windows at either end of the long hallway were wide open and their lace curtains flapped in the lilac-scented afternoon breeze. He looked down into the back garden from the elevator alcove and saw neat rows of folding chairs, a red carpet leading to a flower-banked altar area with florists still fussing over it, and a giant marquee with tables all formally set for the wedding dinner. A small ensemble of musicians was playing Mozart’s String Quintet in E-flat for a group of appreciative listeners. Most of the four hundred guests had been ensconced in rooms in the hotel overnight, and numbers of them were already strolling about the lawn or seated in the chairs, humans in old-fashioned finery and exotics in their own version of traditional formal attire. Paul could not help chuckling. The place was starting to look like a fantasy adaptation of the Ascot Opening Day scene in My Fair Lady.

  The door to one of the other hotel suites opened and two gorgeous beings emerged. They were members of the diminutive Poltroyan race, less than a meter in height and humanoid in appearance except for their violet-tinted skin and ruby eyes. Their bald heads were gold-painted in elaborate designs and they wore robes heavily embroidered with precious metal thread and edged with rich green fish-fur. Following Poltroyan custom, both were decked in the extravagant pearl jewelry they had worn during their own espousal celebration years ago. The First Magnate was so taken aback by their splendor that he hardly recognized his two old friends.

  “Paul!” they exclaimed in happy unison, and came bounding over to seize both his hands.

  Paul embraced them in turn. “Minnie … Fred. High thoughts!”

  “What a beautiful day for your youngling’s mate-affirmation,” said the female Poltroyan, Minatipa-Pinakrodin.