INTERVENTION

by May, Julian; Dikty, Ted

  ELLSWORTH: [breaks off in coughing fit and sets pipe aside] Well! In general, one might compare your case to that of certain royal alliances in the old days. When marriages were made for beneficial political considerations. Peacemaking and the like. I recall that Queen Jadwiga of Poland was deeply in love with a certain prince but married Jagiello, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, in order to unite the two countries, bring the pagan Lithuanians to Christianity, and save her kingdom from the threat of the Teutonic Knights. Her act was self-sacrificing—the more perfect choice. She had no moral obligation to do it, though.

  REMILLARD: And what about me? I'm a free man, not a goddam optimal phenotype!

  ELLSWORTH: You have a right to your individuality. If marriage is repugnant, you may certainly remain single. On the other hand—

  REMILLARD: Well?

  ELLSWORTH: Your preference for the solitary life may be selfish. Even unhealthy. You were always too cerebral as a boy and now—forgive me—you've grown up to be a rather atypical man.

  REMILLARD : Tamara and Glenn Dalembert say I'm a cold fish. Urgyen says I have an unfortunate proclivity for the inward-trending spirituality of the East, which is contrary to the loving globalism that must characterize those in the forefront of mental evolution.

  ELLSWORTH: Good heavens ... I wonder if your lama has read Teilhard?

  REMILLARD: It wouldn't surprise me a damn bit.

  ELLSWORTH: I won't belabor an obvious point. But much is expected of those to whom much is given. In the matter of the more perfect choice. And there is the love. Your Tibetan friend was right about that. I'm sure you feel that you love humanity in the abstract, Denis. Your sense of duty testifies to it. But a person like you... you need to know love in the concrete sense as well. Marriage and family life are the most usual pathway to love's fulfillment. But if you are certain it would be impossible for you—

  REMILLARD: I'm—I'm not certain.

  ELLSWORTH: Perhaps you're only afraid.

  REMILLARD: My uncle, the matchmaker, has even suggested a woman he felt would be the perfect mate. She's a colleague of mine at Dartmouth. I laughed at him, of course. But then I checked out her assay, and it was amazing how her metafunctions were strong in areas where my own are weakest. Psychocreativity, for example. She's a brilliant woman. She's my temperamental opposite, however, and—and sexually experienced, whereas I am not.

  ELLSWORTH: Oh. Does the poor girl have any notion that you're considering her as the royal consort in this grand eugenic scheme?

  REMILLARD: Certainly not. I did the analysis with complete objectivity and discussed it with my closest colleagues, who concurred as to the young woman's suitability. My—my larger obligations to evolving humanity were also a subject of discussion. My genes. There is an undeniable tendency of evolution to proceed in jumps, rather than small, gradual increments. And I'm one of the jumps.

  ELLSWORTH: Are you, by George! Denis, there's something terribly surreal about this conversation. You aren't a set of privileged gonads and this young woman you evaluated is not a mere source of superior ova. You can't ask her to marry you if you don't love her.

  REMILLARD: Why not? Arranged marriages have been the rule among most human societies from time immemorial. She would have to agree, of course. But I presume that she would see the genetic advantages of our union as readily as my other colleagues did.

  ELLSWORTH: Denis! Listen to me. You're not prize cattle. You'll have to live and work together and raise children.

  REMILLARD: I don't know why one couldn't research marriage just like any other subject. There have been intensive studies of the psychodynamics of stable, mutually satisfying conjugal relationships. The most questionable factor would be Lucille's sexual sophistication. We'd have to deal frankly with its potentially inhibitory influence upon my libido.

  ELLSWORTH: Lucille! So she does have a name. And do you think she's attractive?

  REMILLARD: [surprised] Well, yes. I guess she is, in a rather austere way. Funny—her character isn't austere at all. I think one might call her passionate. She has a temper, too. I'd have to—to modify some of my mannerisms. I'm kind of a snot, you know.

  ELLSWORTH: [laughs] By all means, modify. Does Lucille like you at all?

  REMILLARD: She used to actively despise me ... I was a trifle tactless in urging her to join our group in the early days. We hit it off better now. She's accepted her own operancy, which was quite a problem for her when she was younger. She may still be somewhat afraid of me. I'd have to work on that.

  ELLSWORTH: Denis—you've made your decision. Just let love be part of it.

  REMILLARD: I'm sure we'll work very hard learning to love one another. The children will help. It'll be fascinating to analyze the penetrance of the various metapsychic traits in the offspring. And she and I would begin operant conditioning of the fetuses in utero, of course, and evaluate preceptorial techniques as we train the infants. It'll be the metapsychic equivalent of Piaget's research. Lucille should be fascinated.

  ELLSWORTH: I'm going to pray my head off for your poor little kids. And for you and Lucille, too.

  REMILLARD : Do better than that, Jared. Marry us. I'll let you know the date just as soon as Lucille and I work everything out. It shouldn't take long.

  8

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  ON THE FACE OF IT, their marriage should have been a disaster.

  Decreed by inhuman entities from another star, sordidly abetted by me, arranged in a coolly rational agreement between two mature young persons who were not even faintly fond of one another, and undertaken for the sake of an abstraction, the union of Denis Remillard and Lucille Cartier, when judged by the sentimental criteria of the late twentieth century in the United States of America, was peculiar to the nth degree.

  The media came breathlessly scurrying to chronicle what they hoped was the first great metapsychic affaire d'amour... only to have the principals dismiss all inquiry into the romantic aspects of their betrothal and dwell instead upon the heritability of mental traits. The eyes of the interviewers glazed over as the putative lovebirds discussed assortative mating, the differentiation between penetrance and expressivity on the one hand and dominance and epistasis on the other, and the uncertainty of positive eugenics. Confronted with such esoterica, gossip columnists and "human interest" video scavengers beat a hasty retreat. A sedate article dealing with the genetic rationale of the Remillard-Cartier nuptials eventually appeared in Natme.

  On 22 July 1995, Lucille and Denis were wed in Hanover's quaint fieldstone-Gothic Catholic church. The ceremony was attended in person by the families and colleagues of the couple, and viewed through excorporeal excursion by an undisclosed number of operants scattered throughout the globe. The bride wore a tailleur suit of pale blue linen and the groom a two-button lounge suit of navy summer worsted. They were attended by Dr. Glenn Dalembert and Dr. Ume Kimura. A wedding supper took place at the Hanover Inn, after which the bridal couple departed for a symposium on operant educational techniques being held in Brussels. The bride's diminutive bouquet of forget-me-nots and white mignonette was caught by Dr. Gerard Tremblay, the Metapsychology Department's ingenious public-relations maven, and he married an operant colleague named Emilie Bouchard later that year.

  When Denis and Lucille returned from their brief academic honeymoon, they lived for some months in the Dartmouth faculty apartments. Early in 1996, at my suggestion, they bought the big old house at 15 East South Street, near my bookshop. After furnishing it to their taste and organizing what they called a Preliminary Metapsychic Prenatal Curriculum, they began to make babies with the same competence that they brought to their experimental work. Philip was born in 1997 and Maurice in 1999. A stillbirth in 2001 was the occasion of great sorrow; but the couple assuaged their disappointment by doing a revision and update of the Prenatal Curriculum and the first outline for their joint opus, Developmental Metapsychology. The next child, Severin, was born in 2003; two years later came Anne, then another
miscarriage, then Catherine in 2009 and Adrien in 2011—at which point Denis and Lucille prematurely judged their reproductive duty to be completed. The six offspring were all metapsychic prodigies as well as healthy and scrappy Franco-American kids nurtured by parents who loved them dearly.

  And loved each other.

  Oh, yes. Denis had maintained all along that love could be learned if both parties were determined, and he was right. I never pried into their sex life—which one presumes they managed as efficiently as they did everything else—but I did spend many hours each month in their company and in that of their growing brood. They came to love each other devotedly as husband and wife, and each was the other's best friend—which is much rarer.

  If I were asked to point out the principal factor leading to the success of their unorthodox union, I would say the politeness. From the beginning, they adhered to a self-imposed rule that they would always behave toward each other with care and consideration, as though one spouse were the honored guest of the other. All disagreements would be debated logically, with as much heat as necessary, but without personal reproaches or fits of sulking. There would be no casual rudeness, no flippancy, no baiting or other psychological game-playing at the other's expense, and absolutely no taking the other person for granted. In the early part of their marriage, when they were still adapting, their relationship seemed to me to have a "more charitable than thou" artificiality—even a comical Alphonse-and-Gaston aspect. After all, at this point in history one expected a certain breezy camaraderie between husband and wife. Yet here were these two highly idiosyncratic scientists—the one capable of freezing the ballocks of a brass baboon with his coercion, the other possessed of a temper that could literally set a house afire—conducting their domestic affairs in an atmosphere of courtly gentility that Queen Victoria might have thought a trifle extreme.

  I called it weird; but then I had been brought up in the rough-and-tumble menage of One' Louie and Tante Lorraine. I was further amazed when Denis and Lucille carried their exquisite civility over into their relationship with their children. Later, I understood what a brilliant behavioral ploy the courtesy was. (And of course a highly structured family and social system has characterized the majority of human operants ever since the Intervention.) In a home where emotional nuances are almost continually broadcast by the minds of operant family members (shielding requiring effort and being an art only gradually learned by the young), there is a "crowded" ambiance that demands individual restraint and a reserved manner of action. Ume Kimura explained to me that in Japan, which in those days had an enormous population crammed into a very small area, similar extremes of politeness prevailed. Etiquette, some wag has said, is just an effective way to keep people from killing each other. Strong operants such as Denis and Lucille knew instinctively that they would have to live by more formal rules than normals, and so would their children.

  The politesse, far from putting walls between my nephew and his wife, smoothed what might otherwise have been a stormy or even calamitous first year of marriage. In the beginning they had only professional respect for one another, a goal mutually agreed upon, and a listing of theoretically compatible character traits that Denis wryly dubbed "Sonnet from the Portuguese, Computer-Enhanced." They were telepaths, bound to attain the deepest knowledge of each other's virtues and flaws, and so for them there was no glamour-tinged first phase of wedded life, no seeing the Beloved Other as a marvel of perfection; conversely, there was no posthoneymoon letdown. Since they were both mature and motivated, they worked hard to modify grating mannerisms and habits, made allowances for irreconcilable frailties, and strove continually to bolster the ego of the partner. From this initial effort soon came an easing of friction, and also, I have no doubt, the intense pleasure of sexual mutuality—the same as Ume and I enjoyed during our time together.

  Later, when Lucille and Denis began to really know one another, there was fondness—and still later, love. They never experienced the consuming thunderbolt that struck me when I first saw Elaine; nor could their love compare in intensity to Marc's helpless physical passion for Cyndia Muldowney, or Jon's consummate metapsychic union with Dorothea Macdonald, the woman known to Milieu historians as Illusio Diamond Mask. Instead, Denis and Lucille seemed to grow slowly together. Their minds plaited, remaining individual but each supporting and enhancing the other with shared strength—almost like the mythical red brier and white brier that entwined and grew in a straight dual trunk toward the sun, blooming in arboreal splendor rather than in a tangled thorny sprawl upon the earth, as lesser roses did.

  Lucille was always the braver; Denis was wiser. He was glacially efficient and just; she was fervently high-minded, with a greater creative insight. In later life he was retiring and scholarly; she became the grande dame of metapsychic society, as brilliant (and controversial) as their last child Paul, who was conceived after the Intervention and nurtured in utero on the exotic mental precepts of the Galactic Milieu.

  Together, Denis and Lucille wrote six landmark studies of human metapsychology. They were personally instrumental in bringing about the Intervention itself. Denis died as a martyr to Unity without really having known Unity. Lucille lives on in this Centennial Intervention Year, an honored pioneer and formidable clan matriarch. Their legacy is enormous, but its undoubted culmination is in their descendants—justifying the great gamble they embarked upon back in 1995. Their children became the Seven Founding Magnates of the Human Polity. Among their grandchildren were Jon, who was called a saint by both exotic and human minds, and Marc, who was called the Angel of the Abyss.

  And now there are two more generations—Marc's children, Hagen and Cloud, and their newborn offspring—all carrying the precious genes for superlative metafunction as well as self-rejuvenation—which Denis never dreamt of in his wildest fancies as he and Lucille exchanged their vows.

  I dedicate this memoir to all Remillards, living and dead, and most especially to the one who is both.

  9

  NEW YORK CITY, EARTH

  6 NOVEMBER 1996

  KIERAN O'CONNOR WAS old enough to remember when presidential candidates made their victory or concession speeches on the day following the election. But here it was, only 11:45 p.m. at the General's campaign headquarters in San Francisco, and the race was decided already. The Republican candidate—Kieran O'Connor's candidate—had been defeated. But Kieran was well content.

  The four quadrants of the Sony split screen on the wall of Warren Griffith's Manhattan townhouse switched from varied depictions of network pundits commenting on the 292 electoral votes safely in Democrat hands to a single image of a handsome, silver-haired man. CBS, NBC, ABC, and SNN were opting to telecast Lloyd Baumgartner's concession speech live.

  Kieran reached for the remote control. It lay between his stockinged feet on the littered cabriole cocktail table. When Kieran canceled the mute, the measured accents of General Baumgartner filled the room. He delivered his brief announcement in perfect extempore style, his eyes unwavering as he looked directly into the cameras, his manner tranquil in defeat. He thanked the voters who had given him a majority of the popular vote and nearly carried him to an upset victory. He thanked the party that had chosen him as its standard-bearer, thanked his devoted campaign staff, and thanked his gentle-faced wife Nell, who stood at his right shoulder, smiling with tears in her eyes. Baumgartner did not say that he would be back in the running again for the fateful presidential race in the year 2000, but his partisans and political opponents alike took that fact for granted. His rival, Stephen Piccolomini, had won the presidency riding on the coattails of the retiring incumbent, but he had not rolled up the expected landslide; his margin was a precarious twelve electoral votes, and his party retained only a two-seat majority in the Senate.

  "Next time," muttered Warren Griffith. "Next time you're in, General. And so are we."

  The speech ended to applause and the split screen showed pan shots as the network cameras swept over Baumgartner's campaign wo
rkers, who packed the ballroom of the famous old St. Francis Hotel. Some of the people were weeping, but others stomped and cheered as if for a victory, and dozens of hand-lettered signs waved on high, proclaiming:

  THE BEST IS YET TO COME!

  When the vice-presidential candidate approached the lectern for his turn at the microphone, Kieran flicked the remote's instant-replay pad, programmed it for five minutes, and watched Baumgartner once again declare himself defeated. Then Kieran turned off the Sony and the wall-screen went back to being an excellent counterfeit of Fuseli's The Nightmare, 1781 version. Griffith, who was the chairman of Roggenfeld Acquisitions and one of Kieran's principal strategists, liked that LCD projection so much that he'd had it on for ne1arly six months. There had been jokes about it when Kieran and Viola Northcutt arrived early in the evening for the election-night vigil.

  Now Griffith got up from his chair and said, "We still deserve to celebrate!" He padded off into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of Pol Roger and three glasses. The two guests pretended to be surprised, just as socially proper telepaths all over the world did under similar circumstances. Griffith said, "Our candidate did not lose. He merely didn't win emphatically enough." Untwisting the wire, he eased out the cork and restrained the overflow with psychokinetic expertise. Then he made a respectful mental gesture to Kieran, calling for a toast.

  Kieran O'Connor nodded and his severe features softened as he watched the bubbles rise. Catching an unvoiced hint, Warren Griffith flopped back into the wingback chair he had occupied throughout most of the evening. Viola Northcutt was curled up in the corner of the leather sofa opposite Kieran, unshod feet neatly tucked under her camel's-hair skirt. Somewhere in the townhouse an antique clock chimed three in quavery deadened tones.