Magnificat

by Julian May

  Concordance damped the inharmonious vibrations. The dogs fell silent.

  Perspiration had broken out on Impulse’s pale forehead. “It’s unseemly,” he muttered. “Grossly indecorous! This time, Unifex has gone too far. Surely you can see that, colleagues! Surely …”

  Asymptotic Essence smiled at him enigmatically. The other two Lylmik studied the grassy ground.

  After a time Homologous Trend looked up at Noetic Concordance. “Unifex did say that everything works.”

  “Yes,” she said. Her startling eyes shone in her ebony face like inset jewels.

  “One could take the word of Unifex,” Trend went on, “since It has never evinced demonstrably false data. On the other hand, it would be prudent to check matters out personally.”

  “I agree,” said Concordance. The two of them arose, nodded to their colleagues, and strolled off with their dogs.

  “This is madness.” Eupathic Impulse’s voice was a husky whisper. His breathing had accelerated and the human heart within his rib cage thudded at an elevated tempo. Asymptotic Essence put her puppy down onto the ground and stared at her colleague wordlessly.

  She was really very beautiful—according to limited human criteria, of course. The curve of her cheek was harmonious and her lips were moist and soft. Her breasts swelled the blue silk dress in piquant contrast to her narrow waist. The slit skirt hinted at delicious hidden attributes that Impulse recalled from the first occasion when they had donned their bodies, before Unifex had given them clothes …

  “Madness,” he said, less confidently. His human body, which had embarrassed him once before, showed fresh signs of willfulness.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Asymptotic Essence. She pulled him to his feet and threw her arms around him. “One has observed certain precoital maneuvers among humans that might prove pleasurable. Shall we experiment?”

  “I—I shall submit,” Impulse said faintly. “Submit to the Percruciate Progressive Principle. Under protest.”

  Essence’s laughter bubbled up as she molded herself against him and drew his face down to hers. “Whatever it takes,” she said, and kissed him, probing with her tongue.

  Again, all the dogs began to bark.

  12

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  I DIDN’T QUITE GET OFF SCOT-FREE IN MY ERADICATION OF THE HYDRA.

  Around noon on the day after the wedding, Marc shook me awake in our suite at the White Mountain Resort Hotel and ordered me to get dressed. I had a hangover clanging like the bells of hell, but I was damned if I’d ask Marc to cure it and he didn’t volunteer. Creeping out into the sitting room in search of caffeine and stronger analgesics, I discovered that we had company: The fuzz had arrived in the person of Guy “Boom-Boom” Laroche, who was at that time a Chief Inspector for the Galactic Magistratum, based in Concord. Official business had kept Laroche from attending the wedding ceremony. I was too wretched and woolly-headed to wonder why he had shown up now.

  The two bruisers sat at the table eating lunch, neither one offering a femtoerg of sympathy for a poor suffering old man. Funny thing, though, the looks they gave me were neither condescending nor pitying. In fact, both their minds leaked intimations of puzzlement, touched with something very close to awe.

  In my misery, I didn’t give a hoot, nor did I bother to speak. The coffee on the sideboard was hot and strong. I chugalugged a liter of it black, which soothed my pounding head not a whit. Then I called up a double Bloody Maria with extra Tabasco sauce from the suite’s bar and sat myself down at the table with extreme care, so that my throbbing skull would not accidentally part company with the first cervical vertebra. While the healing potion was scorching its way toward my stomach, I caught sight of Exhibit A.

  A mutilated oak tavern stool.

  Oops!

  Instant recall.

  “Yes,” said Marc with ominous gravity. “And Boom-Boom recovered white ash from the crevices in the hotel barroom floor. An off-the-record forensic analysis confirms that the stuff is human-body residue, consonant with incineration at a couple of thousand degrees Celsius.”

  “But how did you manage it, Uncle Rogi?” Laroche asked softly. He had on civilian clothes, and his sincere, ugly-cute kisser with the soulful eyes made you want to trust him with your life. He was a top-notch interrogator and the scourge of upper-echelon operant crooks. “You zapped your victim in a rather special way. No scorch marks anywhere in the room, no gaseous or particulate traces in the furnishings. Just the ashes and the barstool neatly cut in half. That means you must have dispersed the energy of combustion and the residual chemical odds and ends into the dynamic-field lattices via a sexternial aperture. We never suspected you of such metacreative finesse.”

  “I didn’t do a friggin’ thing.” I feebly clawed apart a sourdough roll and slapped butter on it. It was the only food on the table I could contemplate without ralphing.

  “Don’t lie,” Marc said evenly. “You were so pleased with yourself last night and so smashed on champagne that you would have babbled about killing the Hydra to the entire wedding reception if I hadn’t re-installed the mind-block. You told me, and you told Jack and Dorothea, and they told Paul, and Paul asked Boom-Boom to get the truth of the matter. Now tell us exactly what happened.”

  “Why don’t you just use your paramount redaction and screw it out of me?” I sniveled.

  “I would if I could,” Marc assured me. “But there’s some kind of new barrier in place that I’m unable to penetrate. You’re just chock-full of surprises this morning, Uncle Rogi.”

  Well, well! Had the Hydra pulled a fast one? Or was there some other reason Marc was suddenly unable to pry open my conk?… Ooo! Thinking was too painful.

  Boom-Boom said, “Will you give me permission to examine your mind?”

  Just in time, I stopped myself from laughing in his face. In my present condition, it might have been fatal. I told him, “Go ahead and arrest me, tu gros connard, toi! Then you’ll have a legal right to ream my mind as much as you please.”

  The two of them just stared at me.

  “Huh. I thought so! You’ve got no probable cause except my drunken boasting. No body, no weapon, no nothing.”

  Boom-Boom showed me one of his dazzling, understanding smiles. His teeth were enormous, and white as sugar cubes. “Now, Uncle Rogi, be sensible. You’ve already confessed the killing to Marc, Jack, and Dorothea.”

  “You know I was sozzled last night. The confession’s useless. Now that I’m sober, I recant.” I drank some more of the Bloody Maria. “You can’t prove the ashes are from Parnell Remillard, either, can you!”

  “True,” the galactic cop admitted. “And the zapped chair—c’est une situation bizarre à I’extrême, but it’s hardly evidence of homicide.” He heaved a great sigh, then suddenly speared me with his dark and compelling eye. “But let me tell you what we do know for certain. One of the hotel’s resident waitrons reported for work this morning thinking that today is yesterday. He apparently has perfect twenty-four-hour amnesia. Somebody else substituted for him during the wedding reception. Of course, the interloper might have been just another determined tabloid reporter. But if we knew for certain that the fake waitron was a Hydra—and that you killed it—it would help the First Magnate’s continuing inquiry into the Fury affair. Why do you think Parni was trying to murder you?”

  Slick! But I didn’t fall for it. My lip remained zipped, as did my mindscreen. On the intimate mode, I told Boom-Boom: Fous-moi la paix flicaillon!

  But he continued his cajolery. “You have nothing to lose by talking to me, Rogi. The Lylmik have sealed the Fury files and made them accessible only to the highest level of the Magistratum. Absolutely nothing will happen to you if you confess to killing Parnell Remillard. Hell, if we could, we’d give you a medal! But if you have evidence of recent activity by a Hydra, we have to know about it.”

  Shaking my head, I snarled another denial and started up from my seat to get more coffee.
<
br />   Marc’s PK took hold of me and slammed me back down with a force that rocked the table and exploded stars of agony behind my swollen eyeballs.

  “Stop acting like an old fool! No one’s interested in charging you with murder. Talk, damn you!”

  “All we want to do is confirm that it was really a Hydra that you zapped,” Boom-Boom said, his coercion as sweet as maple syrup. It was the old game of good cop/bad cop. They’d play it until my head cracked like a peanut shell.

  Oh, what the hell…

  “All right, all right!” I cried. “I killed Parnell Remillard. It was self-defense.”

  “Atta boy.” Laroche bestowed an encouraging smile. “Tell us more.”

  I eyed Marc apprehensively, but he was making no effort to breach my mindscreen and confirm the truth of what I was saying. “When Parni came after me in the bar it was his second attempt to put out my lights. I have no idea why. He’d already tried a week earlier up at White Moose Lodge and nearly drowned me. Marc was a witness, but he didn’t want to believe me. Then Parni showed up here at the hotel, wearing the waiter outfit. I told Marc about it and he still didn’t believe me.”

  “Marc scanned the man you were suspicious of,” Boom-Boom said. “He detected no anomalous mental pattern.”

  “Hydras are talented. You should have caught Parni’s lunker brook trout gig.” I closed my eyes, chewed the bread very slowly, and tried not to groan. Even my teeth hurt. This was definitely one lulu of a crown fire. “Either of you boys got any aldetox?”

  Marc went into the bathroom and called some up from the hotel shop, then clapped the minidoser against my temple with unnecessary firmness. The ghastly headache began to abate almost immediately.

  “Why didn’t you use your mental laser on the fake fish?” Boom-Boom persisted.

  “I was too kerflummoxed to get my brain in gear. The zap isn’t something I can conjure up instantly. Most of the time, I can’t do it at all. I have to be scared shitless.”

  “And you’re certain that the—the person who attacked you in the lake and the man who threatened you in the hotel bar were the same? Your identification of Parnell is positive?”

  “I knew him as a kid. It was Parni. He wanted me to recognize him, the vicious bastard.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone this way before?”

  “No. But I nearly wasted Vic Remillard the night of the Great Intervention, when he tried to blow up the chalet on Mount Washington with the delegates of the last Metapsychic Congress inside. Worse luck, my mind-zap only put the fucker into a coma for twenty-six years.”

  Laroche gaped at me. “You were responsible for that?”

  I shrugged, precipitating another small explosion of pain behind my eyes. The aldetox shot was fighting the good fight but the hangover still wasn’t out for the count.

  Boom-Boom continued the interrogation for another half hour, going over and over the details. I was frank about everything except the Hydra’s motive for wanting me dead. Then Marc far-spoke the First Magnate, who was at his home down in Concord, and passed along the news. He also asked if Boom-Boom should bring me in for a mechanical mind-ream. Fortunately, Paul decided that nothing was to be gained by subjecting me to the Cambridge machine ordeal. Surprise surprise. He believed my story.

  Paul said he would break the news to his brother Adrien about the death of his prodigal son. Boom-Boom promised to have the forensics lab send what was left of the ash sample to the First Magnate, who could pass it on to the bereaved parents.

  The secret dossier on Fury and Hydra was eventually amended by Chief Inspector Guy Laroche to read that Parnell Remillard was “probably deceased.” This left the Fury monster with a single remaining confederate—Paul’s younger daughter, Madeleine.

  Marc’s sister.

  In late July, just after their honeymoon and shortly before they were scheduled to travel to Orb for the Concilium session, Dorothée and Jack came secretly to Hanover, metacreatively disguised, and stayed in my apartment above the bookshop. An attempt by me to demonstrate the outspiral mind-laser to them failed utterly, but they were fascinated by my unorthodox chakra-revving technique and decided to experiment with it themselves later.

  Then, with Jack’s assistance, Dorothée sifted my mind for mnemonic data that might be useful in designing die metaconcert program for Denis’s exorcism. The redactive process was horrendous, just as the young folks warned me it would be. I was in bed for a week afterward, more or less numb from the neck up, and they cared for me like I was an infant. Marcel wouldn’t come near me; my discombobulated mental vibes must have convinced the cat I was one of the Living Dead.

  When I was finally on the mend, the newlyweds prepared to leave Earth. They told me that my ream-job had provided valuable data on Fury’s mental signature, among other things. While she was inside my head, Dorothée had also done a careful assay of my creative metafaculty and found it almost “normally” puny. If I did possess a talent for mind-zapping, it was so deeply latent that it was damned near extradimensional.

  I was instructed to take it easy for the next couple of months until my violated memory bank’s NMDA receptors got back up to snuff. They ordered me to lay off alcohol entirely, because booze would further “insult” the little wounded brain-cell thingies. A mild postcoercive suggestion, planted in me by Ti-Jean, would subtly prompt me to shut up in case I was inclined to say anything imprudent about the upcoming exorcism. Jack and Dorothée were particularly emphatic about me not spilling the beans to Marc.

  That reminded me of the puzzling thing that had happened during my grilling by Marc and Boom-Boom. I asked Jack if either he or Dorothée had meddled with my mindscreen, making it impossible for Marc to ream me. They said they hadn’t.

  “Then why,” I asked, “couldn’t he break into my head? He’s done it before.”

  Jack thought for a moment. “Marc was very close to you during his early childhood, wasn’t he, Uncle Rogi?”

  “Well, I suppose so. He was always hanging around the bookshop when he was real small. Not saying much—except now and then coming up with a zinger of a question that’d rock me back on my heels. He was proud as the devil even then, pretending that he didn’t really care when Teresa didn’t have time for him. He and Paul never did get along, so I guess he kinda latched on to me by default. It was easy, with the family house on South Street just around the corner from my shop.”

  “That might explain Marc’s inability to probe you,” Dorothée said. “He could have an inhibition based upon his view of you as a quasi-parental figure. Similar to the one Denis must have.”

  “But Marc’s drilled my brain in the past,” I reiterated.

  “The inhibition could come and go, influenced by any number of psychological factors,” Jack said, “such as the continuing integration of Marc’s deep unconscious with his conscious mind, the current state of his metapsychic complexus, and particularly his changing emotional orientation in relation to you.”

  “Emotional orientation?”

  “How he feels about you,” Dorothée said gently. “The intensity and tenor of one’s feelings toward an authority figure can and often do change as a person gets older. Marc may not consciously realize that he loves you more in his maturity than he did as a young man distracted by the struggle to master his paramount mindpowers. When you nearly drowned, his repressed feeling for you might have been shocked into full realization.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Marc, the quintessential cold fish, capable of love? Pas de danger!

  “Emotional factors like these will also complicate the Dynasty’s attempt to heal Denis,” said Jack. “It won’t be easy for them to get into their father’s head. The data that we gleaned from you provided useful details of Fury’s mindset—but we hope the information will also help us to analyze the parent-child coercive relationship as it appertains to Denis and the Dynasty.”

  “Anne talked about that, too.” I hesitated, then asked, “When are you going to do it? The exo
rcism?”

  “We should have the metaconcert design finished some time in September,” Jack said. “We’ll work on it during our spare time at the Concilium session. I’ll also be able to complete most of the brainboard design for the new CE helmets while we’re in Orb. Once I get back to Earth and build the hats, we come to the really dicey part: practicing the energized metaconcert with the Dynasty.”

  “Do they know yet?” I asked.

  “We informed the First Magnate,” Dorothée told me. “It’s up to him to break the news to his brothers and sister.”

  “We’ll require at least a solid month of metaconcert practice, for safety’s sake,” Jack said. “In order to keep the operation secure, we’ll do the prep work at my place on Kauai. The Dynasty should have no trouble coming there incognito. I’ve asked Papa to arrange it.”

  “Will you … do it to Denis on the island?” I asked.

  “No. He almost never leaves home these days, and we can’t afford to arouse his suspicions by insisting that he come to Kauai. Diamond and I have already decided on an ideal place for the procedure: my sister Marie’s farm just outside Hanover. She’ll be taken into our confidence when everything is ready. We can set up the equipment out there without attracting any attention.”

  “Marie’s farm?” I repeated numbly. “Where Denis and Lucille used to live?”

  “The place is perfect for another reason,” Jack said. “This year, Marie will be hosting the réveillon after midnight mass for the first time. We’ll do the coercive-redactive procedure then, when Denis—and his Fury alter ego—will be least likely to suspect that anything unusual is in the air.”

  They were going to do it on Christmas.

  13