Magnificat

by Julian May

  “Pretty soon, Greedyguts,” the bookseller said, flicking off the lights in the front of the shop. “I still have a little work to do sorting out the last of the stuff that came in while I was off gallivanting on Caledonia.”

  He went to the back room and worked for more than an hour, unpacking the newly arrived copies of rare old science-fiction and fantasy books that were the stock in trade of The Eloquent Page bookshop. Some choice items had shown up in response to his circulated want-list: Several R. A. Lafferty paperbacks in good condition, a first of Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C41+, a fine set of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels in the original British edition, and an excellent Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. He smiled and laid them out carefully on the worktable. Best of all, a New York dealer had managed to find mint copies of the 1943 Knopf edition of Donovan’s Brain by Curt Siodmak and the 1946 Viking edition of Franz Werfel’s Star of the Unborn. Along with a pair of bookends of polished New Hampshire granite, those two evocative volumes would be his wedding presents to Ti-Jean and Dorothée.

  Marcel uttered a chirping cry and projected urgent vibes—and at the same moment someone began to rap loudly on the front door. Rogi looked up in annoyance and decided to ignore the interruption; but the caller, a powerful metapsychic operant, was not to be denied:

  UncleRogi Iknowyou’rethere LETMEIN I must talk to you.

  He reached out with his seekersense, recognized the person standing outside in the blizzard, and said: I’ll be damned!

  With the cat galloping ahead, he hurried to the front of the shop and unlocked the door. A tall figure swathed from head to heels in a hooded gray woolen cape came in, stamping slush from her boots. The storm was overwhelming the capacity of the sidewalk melting grids.

  “Annie! What in God’s name are you doing out on a night like this? I thought you were still in Concilium Orb.”

  “So do the other members of the family.” The Reverend Anne Remillard, S.J., took off her cape and shook it over the entry mat. “I just egged in from Kourou Starport and I’m here on Earth for only one reason: to talk to you. But first, I’m starving and desperately in need of a drink.”

  “Why, sure—but howzabout I tell Denis and Lucille that you’ve arrived? With a little luck, we can nip around the corner and have a really decent dinner at their place. All I got is leftovers I was planning to nuke.”

  “I—I don’t want to see Papa tonight.” Anne’s voice broke and Rogi saw to his amazement that there were tears in her eyes. Her mind was unassailable. “He’s the one I must talk to you about. And you’d better brace yourself for bad news.”

  “Let’s go upstairs to my apartment, then,” Rogi said gravely. “Is Denis ill?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” The tears vanished and Anne’s fine-boned face, almost gaunt in the shadows of the darkened shop, became a grim mask. “I’m still not absolutely certain about this, but I think Papa is suffering from a dissociative mental disorder.”

  “What in Christ’s name is that?”

  “In laymen’s terms, a split personality. I may be mistaken.” I hope to God I am you’re the only one I dare talk to about this—

  “Annie, will you stop beating around the bush and tell me?”

  “Denis is Fury,” she said.

  3

  SEATTLE METRO, ORCAS ISLAND, EARTH

  2 FEBRUARY 2078

  WHEN HE KNEW IT WAS HOPELESS, WHEN HIS SLEEP-DEPRIVED body was beyond metaredaction and his paramount mind stumbled and flagged despite the utmost self-coercive press, he reluctantly set the analysis aside and took off for home.

  The weather was terrible. A winter storm with near-hurricane-force winds pounded Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, raising mountainous waves, closing the submarine tubeways, suspending skim-ferry service, and clearing Seattle Metro’s lower airways of all but the most powerful private rhocraft. His big black Lear-Hawkins laughed at atmospheric turbulence and ordinarily he would have enjoyed free-flying through the raging night. Instead he programmed the egg to fly to Orcas Island on full auto. He had labored for over eighty hours without a break in the crucial systems compatibility analysis and he was exhausted to the point of collapse.

  Weakling mortal immortal!

  Too tired to do the remaining four or five hours of work that would have completed the job. Too tired to pilot his rhocraft on manual a mere 170 kilometers from CEREM to his home in the San Juan Islands. Too tired to keep vagrant thoughts and memories from plaguing and distracting him.

  Jack, the lucky bastard, wouldn’t have succumbed to simple fatigue so readily. He could stay wide awake for weeks on end if necessary, living on photons of light and the occasional PK condensate of atmospheric molecules and fucking dust-bunnies.

  And to think that I once felt sorry for him poor little brother poor grotesque mutant genius …

  If Jack had been here to help, the knotty brainstem adaptation problem that had frustrated and infuriated him would already have been either validated or deep-sixed, the Keogh proposal judged GO or NO-GO. But ever since the Science Directorate inquiry into the Caledonian incident, Jack had disclaimed interest in cerebroenergetic enhancement technology. All he seemed to care about was meddling in galactic politics, promoting Unity, and mooning over his bizarre love affair with Dorothea Macdonald. Jack squandered his unique life on irrelevancies, while the important work he had once shared with his elder brother went begging.

  Jack is a fool. He doesn’t appreciate how special he is how lucky how superior to ordinary humans he has no drive no fire no élan his vision is mediocre puerile fribbling. It should have been me God WHY couldn’t it have been me?

  The full-body CE rig would be a step in the right direction—if he could only build it. If he could verify that the E18 SIECOMEX system was compatible with the arcane cerebellar/stem unit of the Keogh design. Four more hours of work with the simulator and he’d know whether or not he would finally be able to lay his betraying flesh aside, setting his metacreativity free to achieve its ultimate magnification.

  Finally free! Free as Jack the Bodiless free as a Lylmik free as an angel … if the reactionaries don’t hamstring me.

  The ethics of artificially enhanced mindpowers still deeply perturbed the other five races of the Galactic Milieu. From the very beginning of CE research the exotic members had expressed strong reservations about any form of brain-boosting—an unprecedented human scientific innovation. His own work, involving the creative metafaculty, was even more suspect in exotic eyes than amplification of the other higher mindpowers “because of the potential for abuse.”

  THEY said. Liars! But the inquiry had caught them out forced them to confess the real reason for their opposition.

  The spectacular triumph of the CE-equipped geophysical team on the Scottish planet last November had finally drawn the debate from the cloistered Concilium into the public arena of humanity. Numbers of other Earth colonies besides Caledonia were at risk from seismic disaster, and those worlds, some settled for over fifty years, could not readily be abandoned without wreaking enormous hardship. Now, with a CE remedy to crustal instability at hand, any attempt to outlaw the new technology would cause an uproar among humanity.

  The cat is out of the bag and we’re not putting it back just to soothe the vague qualms of jealous exotics.

  All the same, it was galling that he might have to keep the new full-body rig secret in order to forestall any renewed onslaught from the hand-wringers. Who lately included both Jack and the First Magnate of the Human Polity.

  I might have known Papa would oppose me. He has a vested interest in appeasing the exotics. But Jack—!

  Immediately after the successful CE modification of the Caledonian diatreme, the Human Polity Science Directorate convened an inquiry intended to quell exotic misgivings. CEREM’s Chief Operating Officer, Shigeru Morita, testified that the most powerful brain-boosting device, the El8 helmet, could be utilized only by highly trained grandmasterclass metapsychic operants. It went w
ithout saying that the Milieu’s careful training and monitoring of all such gifted individuals should preclude any possibility of reckless or even criminal activity among them. The knottier question of whether high-end CE presented an unacceptable hazard to the operators remained open. There were certainly grave personal risks; but they seemed to be at an acceptable level compared to the benefits derived. Even the Dirigent of Caledonia, who had nearly lost her life in the diatreme operation, concurred on that point.

  A majority of the Science Directors had been prepared to give metacreative CE their unqualified stamp of approval—until fresh opposition surfaced from an unexpected direction. The First Magnate of the Human Polity entered the dispute (as was his right, ex officio) and testified to the real reason behind exotic apprehensions about CE:

  The nonhuman races of the Galactic Milieu feared that any kind of cerebroenergetic enhancement would skew the evolution of the human racial Mind, making it incompatible with Unity, the coadunate mental state that formed the very foundation of the benevolent galactic confederation.

  Unity! That damned bête noire …

  The exotics’ thesis was totally unprovable. But it had impressed many of the Science Directors—including Jack, who was also a member of the Panpolity Directorate for Unity. By a scant three-vote margin, the Directorate decided that the El8 CE helmets and other, less powerful mind-enhancers might continue in use without restriction. But the Directors also overwhelmingly endorsed a motion calling for a floor debate at the next Concilium session, proposing a moratorium on further metacreative CE research. Paul Remillard, the First Magnate of the Human Polity, and his son Jon went on record favoring the moratorium.

  Imbeciles! Creative CE had proven its vital importance. Could the same be said for Unity?

  Thus far, the Milieu had failed even to define the Unity concept satisfactorily, and it remained a troubling abstraction to the majority of the human race. The nonhuman races had not yet made an outright declaration that an ununified humanity would be expelled from the galactic confederation; but Milieu-loyalist humans feared that such an announcement would inevitably come as the human population attained its critical “coadunate number” of ten billion, sometime in the mid-Eighties.

  They can’t expel us and put us in some galactic quarantine it’s too late we’re too strong for them why can’t the damned exotics accept that?

  But they wouldn’t. So while Milieu scholars redoubled their efforts to demonstrate Unity’s potential benefits to humanity, the Rebel faction of the Human Polity viewed with alarm the potential loss of human mental autonomy Unity might entail, and spoke more and more openly of a draconian solution to the controversy. And pro-Unity human Magnates of the Concilium waffled and weaseled.

  A parliament of assholes!

  At this critical time, the human Milieu loyalists would do anything to forestall a premature Concilium debate on Unity. His own CE research would merely be an incidental casualty in the Unification battle.

  Damn them damn them DAMN THEM I’ve got to find a way to shoot down the research moratorium they can’t be allowed to stop me now not now when—

  Exotic opposition to CE had been somewhat ameliorated by the general belief that the El8 helmet represented the upper limit of creative brain-boosting technology. Enhancement of the creative metafaculty much beyond the 300X factor yielded by the El8s was supposedly impossible because of natural constraints imposed by the human condition. Above 300X, the energized brain in creative mode was quite capable of incinerating the operator’s body.

  But the Milieu was wrong about 300X CE being the ultimate creative boost for metapsychic humanity. It was merely the upper limit for helmet-based CE design. The way to circumvent the barrier was obvious: dissociate the energized brain during mental enhancement by freezing every body part except the self-fortified cerebral cortex to near absolute zero. A full-body CE rig would simultaneously protect the operator’s extraneous flesh and bone and turn them into useful superconductors of mental energies.

  Jackforming.

  It went without saying that this radical new concept, already in the planning stage at CEREM when the Caledonian inquiry was convened, would be anathema in excelsis to the exotic magnates. They would pressure their human colleagues to vote the moratorium.

  Let them try.

  The notion that he should back off from this crucially important work in order to reassure exotic misgivings about human mental evolution was not only ridiculous, it was also contrary to the very philosophy of science. The human race had a right to achieve its maximum mental potential.

  And so do I!

  The artificial enhancement of creative brainpower was no more immoral than the augmentation of human muscles by levers and other machines. When they were backed into a corner, the exotics would have to give in—or finally admit that their Unified minds were afraid of human mental superiority.

  I’ll continue research on the full-body rig and in time I’ll demonstrate its practicality in some overwhelming fashion and they won’t dare to suppress it.

  The radical new technology had had a difficult birth.

  His CEREM organization included no workers who were expert in the advanced cryonics needed for the revolutionary design. And so Jeffrey Steinbrenner, his Director of Bionics, had suggested that they secretly approach Dierdre and Diarmid Keogh, the shining lights of Du Pont’s Cryotechnology Division. Overcoming his personal distaste for the eccentric lifestyle of the talented pair, he had requested a private feasibility consultation at an astronomical fee. In a surprisingly short time the brother and sister presented CEREM with a credible “barber-chair” full-body CE rig proposal that was everything he had ever dreamt of.

  Provided that it could be made compatible with the operating system of the El8.

  He thought it could. So did Jordan Kramer and Gerrit Van Wyk, the hotshot psychophysicists he had lured away from Cambridge University, who had helped him to modify the SIECOMEX system for the ultra brain-booster. Steinbrenner, a brilliant neurologist as well as a specialist in bionics, had been less certain of success.

  But I’m certain now.

  Because of the need for perfect security he was doing the systems compatibility analysis himself. Shortly before fatigue cut short the marathon simulation session, his efforts finally seemed to be pointing to a positive resolution.

  The full-body CE rig would be built and he would use it.

  And nobody is going to stop me—not Jack, not the First Magnate, not the Science Directorate, not the whole Galactic Milieu …

  He was home. The doors of the subterranean egg-bay opened, a welcoming haven of light on Orcas Island’s western flank. The rhocraft docked and he hauled his aching frame out and trudged to the lift.

  Perhaps if my body wasn’t so damned big it would require less sleep.

  But he was 196 cents tall and weighed more than a hundred kilos, having inherited the massive frame of some ancestral French-Canadian voyageur. In the North Woods of the eighteenth or nineteenth century his powerful muscles, big hands, and bull neck would have given him a decided survival advantage; in the Galactic Milieu, A.D. 2078, a heroic body was very nearly an embarrassing anachronism.

  The elevator door opened on the second floor and he stepped out. His imposing multileveled house, built of cedar and native stone, was maintained by a single nonoperant houseman named Thierry Lachine, assisted by an extensive array of domestic robotics. Thierry had long since retired and the premises were silent except for the muted tumult of the storm outside. There was a spectacular view of the San Juans and Vancouver Island from the glass-walled corridor leading to his bedroom, but he lacked the energy to exert his farsight and banish the darkness.

  Sleep. All I want to do is sleep.

  He was so fatigued that the thought of food was repellent, but he knew he required nourishment. Yielding to a nostalgic impulse, he called up from the bedroom snack unit a fortified version of Grandmère Lucille’s favorite Franco-American comfort food, remembered from
his early childhood: Habitant pea soup, thick and golden and aromatic. He downed it unceremoniously, drinking from the bowl, then stripped off his clothes and fell into bed naked. Exhausted as he was, his mental and physical safeguards remained adamantly in place. No one could harm him while he slept.

  He had made certain of that.

  * * *

 

  So it’s you again.

 

  I don’t … when I’m awake. I thought you were long gone. Go away!

 

  No. You’re full of the most incredible shit you’re a REMsleep dream I don’t want to listen to you I don’t have to—

 

  I doubt it damned sex-obsessed dickhead.

 

  I’ve abolished my sexual urges. They’re an irrational distraction. Useless.

 

  I … I can’t help that. No one can control dreams. Especially wet ones.

 

  Bullshit. Human beings have practiced celibacy sublimated sex in favor of a greater good for ages.

 

  Like Paul does? Plant my superior germ plasm in every other presentable grandmasterclass female in the sector? [Revulsion.]