Magnificat

by Julian May

  MAURICE: Et in terra pax the human race was promised pax but we never seem to enjoy it for very long do we Phil maybe this Rebellion is Fury’s fault but I think not we’ve never really needed a devil to blame for our failures we humans do very well wrecking the world all by ourselves.

  PHILIP: Remette-toi! Garde ton calme ti-frère et ton espérance surtout.

  [LECTOR: All please rise now and greet our

  celebrant Brother Bartholomew Jackson by

  joining with the choir in singing Adeste Fideles.]

  PHILIP+MAURICE: Adeste fideles laeti triumphantes …

  The First Magnate’s rhocraft, a Saab without official markings that he had borrowed from the staff transport pool, hurtled through the starry sky high above the storm clouds. Paul Remillard was dressed in casual slacks of charcoal nebulin and a bulky red-and-white cardigan that Santa Claus might have envied. He sent his powerful farsight arrowing ahead of the egg, scanning the farm outside of Hanover.

  “Most of the others are finished eating and are getting ready to pass out their presents. We’ve timed it perfectly.”

  “Everything you do is perfect,” said Severin Remillard without a trace of bitterness. “As for myself, I’m highly imperfect and the first to admit it.”

  He was seventy-five years old, Paul’s senior by eleven years, but the family’s arbitrary self-rejuvenating gene complex had given Severin an earlier climacteric than his brother. He was a tall, blond man who might have been in his late thirties, more muscular than Paul, with strong features that would have been attractive had he not been so haggard. A deep vertical crease was drawn between eyes that had turned bloodshot with fatigue, and his mouth was a taut line. He had on a down vest, a blue plaid flannel shirt over a bronze polo-neck, and heavy whipcord pants stuffed into Timberline boots.

  Paul said, “You have nothing to worry about, Sevvy. You were more than competent in the CE practice sessions. This flop sweat you’re experiencing is distressing but it can be overcome if you’ll just let me do a—”

  “No,” Severin said. “I’m telling you for the last time that I can’t participate in the metaconcert operation. I’ve tried to psych mystery out of this—this stupid negatory mind swamp I’ve fallen into, but it’s no good. I’m no good.”

  “Stop talking like an idiot. Let me into your brain and I’ll banish whatever horrors are eating you with a quick Band-Aid fix. Later, after we’ve taken care of Papa, Cat and I will do a permanent redact job on you.”

  “Tranquilizing me isn’t the point, Paul. I’m not just yellow-bellied—I’m a weak link in the structure, a danger to all the others in the metaconcert. You don’t understand …”

  Back in Concord, faced with Severin’s sudden panicky recalcitrance, the First Magnate had been obliged to coerce his brother into accompanying him to Hanover. But there was no way that he could force Severin to assist in their father’s healing.

  “You can’t let us down now, at the last minute,” Paul remonstrated. “You’ve got a strong grandmasterly redactive faculty that’s a vital component of the program.”

  “You don’t need me,” Severin insisted. “The concert design is more coercive than redactive anyway, and with the CE hats it generates gigawatts of mindpower. My God, at full zorch you could probably coerce the whole damn population of New Hampshire to dance a jig in the snow in their birthday suits and still have enough mental energy left to shrink Papa twice over.”

  “Not if he’s a suboperant paramount in redaction. And Jack thinks he almost certainly is.” LOOK [image] how your absence would fuck up our attempt to integrate dual personae we must have your input!

  “Postpone the operation and find somebody to take my place. Both Luc and Ken Macdonald are trustworthy and strong in redaction. Train them up and plug them in.”

  The First Magnate exploded. “Dammit, Sevvy, we’re ready now! We’ve spent four tough weeks perfecting the metaconcert using the eight of us. It’s been a bitch setting this thing up without arousing anyone’s suspicions and we can’t start all over now because of your cold feet. We can’t risk Papa finding out. We’ve got to go ahead.”

  The pinched face of the retired neurologist had begun to shine with greasy perspiration. Severin pulled out a handkerchief and swabbed his brow. He shrugged off his down vest and fiddled with the air vents on his side of the rhocraft cabin. “I tried to tell you it might be psychologically impossible for me to function in this metaconcert, but you kept shouldering my objections aside. You convinced everyone that I was just afraid of risking my own skin. But that’s not the problem at all.”

  “Then what the fuck is it?”

  Severin’s head was bowed. “I’m vulnerable to Fury in a way you never even suspected. I’ve never told anyone. Ah, shit … I can’t even articulate the engram now. Just take a look at this.” [Image.]

  The memory was more than thirty years old. In a shadowy sickroom, Denis and his seven adult children and their brave spouses and reluctant old Uncle Rogi gathered around a bed where a comatose figure lay. The patient was a ruggedly handsome man with dark curling hair. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Paul’s son Marc. But he was not Marc.

  The First Magnate was incredulous as the meaning of the vision became clear. “Victor? You think that Papa’s dissociative persona is actually his dead brother Victor? That’s preposterous! You can’t tell me you’re afraid of a ghost.”

  “I know … my fear seems … irrational to you.” Severin spoke slowly, in an oddly pitched, strained tone, as though he were pulling each word past some dense mental obstruction. “But you never knew Vic when he was in full control of his faculties. I … did. And every time we gathered for that annual Good Friday prayer session I was … frightened nearly out of my mind by … that devil who had tried to seize control of me when I was a child … and afterward.”

  “Seize control?” Paul was stunned. “What do you mean?”

  Severin plodded on, speaking more easily now, forcing himself to tell the story as he stared unseeing at the flickering positionreport images on the navigation screen. “The only way I could get through those Good Fridays was by redacting myself affectless, suppressing every human emotion, turning myself into a fucking block of wood. Papa never seemed to notice what kind of shape I was in when we linked minds for the prayer—or whatever it was that he did with us. All through the years that Victor lived on in a coma, I’d go home from the Good Friday sessions and vomit my guts out from sheer relief. I was safe from Vic for another year. The bastard hadn’t managed to get me.”

  “Get you,” Paul repeated, stricken.

  “He’d tried, you see. When I was just a little kid.”

  “Jesus, Sevvy. You should have told us. We could have helped you—”

  “No. It was my battle and I had to win it. I don’t expect you to understand, Paul. You were the youngest of the Dynasty, the prodigy, everyone’s pet, trained from the time you were in the uterus with exotic preceptive techniques. But the three of us who were born before the Intervention had to pull ourselves up by our mental bootstraps. It was hard. Phil and Maurie were always pretty tough nuts, but I was the weak little brother. Victor must have known it and he never bothered either of them, only me. He said I was special, damn him! He pretended to know how I felt, how I chafed under the ethical restrictions our parents made us live by. Oh, he was clever—he knew what buttons to push and I almost gave in to the temptation more than once. His mind-fucks were quick and short and they only happened at the big family get-togethers like Easter and Christmas. I always managed to fend him off.”

  Paul shook his head but said nothing.

  “I was there at the Great Intervention along with Phil and Maurie and Papa and Mama. I was ten years old. Uncle Rogi zapped Victor on the mountain and turned him into a vegetable, and the whole world was saved, and I thought my fight with the demon was over. But it hadn’t even really begun yet. When Papa began that annual prayer vigil, I became obsessed with the fear that Victor would recover and begin th
e harassment all over again. Then, in 2040, Vic’s body finally died … but his spirit was reborn as Fury. In some obscene coercive way he seduced my poor unborn son Quint—along with Celine and Gordo and Parni and your Madeleine. He made them Hydras. He would have made me a Hydra, too, if I hadn’t resisted him with all my strength. Earlier on, I guess Vic was too inexperienced in evil to spring the trap on me properly. So he tried again when I was a full-grown man.”

  “Sevvy, I think I know what—”

  “Victor came to me again, about five years after he died. As Fury. Trying to steal my soul. I fought him again for the last time and won.”

  Like Anne, Paul said to himself. Like Dorothea. And how many others?

  Severin closed his haunted eyes. There were tears on his cheeks. “Victor’s still alive, Paul. In our poor father’s brain. And I don’t dare face him again. That—that last fight took the heart out of me. This time, Victor would win.”

  Paul let his coercive strength embrace his brother. “Listen to me, Sevvy. You’re not the only one this has happened to. Fury tempted Anne, too. And Dorothea Macdonald. In both cases, it pretended to be someone else to enhance its attempt at coercion. The monster is real, but it is not Victor. That kind of occult transference between the living and the dead doesn’t happen. Victor is gone and can never threaten you or harm you again.”

  Severin smiled sadly. For the first time his wavering gaze met Paul’s steady one. “But if I believe he lives, it doesn’t matter whether or not my belief is true. I’m vulnerable to Fury—whoever it is—because of this unresolved mental trauma from my childhood. I can’t be part of your metaconcert. All throughout the practice sessions I tried to redact myself, to overcome the old fears. But I couldn’t … You can’t prove to me that Fury isn’t Victor. No one will know the truth until the metaconcert enters Papa’s mind and finds out for itself. But by then it would be too late for me—and perhaps for the rest of you as well if my mind gives way and leaves the metaconcert open to invasion by the monster.”

  “That’s nonsense! I’ve told you how Dorothea strengthened the program design to prevent any countercoercive movement by the Fury persona—”

  “If Fury is Victor, I’d be the chink in the dike. I’d crack and he’d subsume all of us. You know as well as I do that there are aspects of metapsychology that are still a complete mystery to us. Just ask that Hawaiian kahuna woman, Malama Johnson, about the unquiet dead! Ask her about your own wife, Teresa …”

  Paul took hold of his brother’s shoulders. His voice was charged with angry intensity. “Pull yourself together, man! You’re a scientist and a Magnate of the Concilium—not a damned superstitious Pacific islander. It doesn’t matter whether the Fury demon is a ghost or an aspect of a deranged personality. If it lives inside Denis’s mind, we can integrate it and render it harmless with this metaconcert Will you be able to live with yourself if you refuse to give our father the help he needs?”

  “I’d help Papa if I could.” Severin’s voice was flat with despair. He disengaged Paul’s hands. “I’m sorry. So sorry.”

  The First Magnate drew in his breath, biting off an exclamation of angry frustration. Severin, the onetime brain surgeon, had correctly assessed his own disability. In his present disturbed state he was incapable of participating effectively in any metaconcert operation. No quick and dirty makeshift redaction could possibly restore him.

  “I’ll farspeak Jack,” the First Magnate said dully, “and tell him we’ll have to abort.”

  PAUL: I never heard of such a thing.

  JACK: It’S been done before Papa. On the Siberian planet when the wife of one of the metaconcert participants died on the eve of a critical operation and there was no substitute available for the bereaved man. He was in no emotional state to fill an active role in the metaconcert so he was given a deep course of calmative redaction that almost completely cut off his volition. His mind remained aware and observant but incapable of exerting willpower. They plugged him into the conceit and it functioned.

  PAUL: A dummy unit in our CE metaconcert? Is that what you’re proposing?

  JACK: A nonparticipant mind of precalibrated metafunction that would nevertheless round out the symmetry of the original eightfold configuration and permit the release of coherently programmed energy.

  PAUL: And you really think this sneetch would work?

  JACK: The Yakutian concert achieved a respectable percentage of its rated output—to the amazement of one&all. Severin is right about there being a huge coercive surplus in our setup and I think the synergized redactive quotient of the seven of us should suffice to integrate Grandpère.

  PAUL: And if it doesn’t?

  JACK: The monster could take permanent possession of his mind forcing us to utilize the lethal option. There has always been that risk. Reorganizing the metaconcert with other participants would be risky as well. It would mean a considerable delay.

  PAUL: Severin suggested that Luc and Ken might sub for him.

  JACK: I’m not at all certain that they would be suitable. Luc suffered from epilepsy as a child and his brain might not stand up to the strain of CE. Ken’s redactive faculty is only marginally at the grandmaster level. No … if we decide to abort now our best course would be to wait until Anne is fit to join the metaconcert.

  PAUL: But that could be months from the time she exits the tank. And we’d have to check her out ahead of time to make certain that she wasn’t Fury herself.

  JACK: Yes. The decision is yours Papa. And Uncle Sevvy’s.

  PAUL: … It’s my considered judgment that we should go ahead now utilizing the dummy configuration. Severin says he’s willing.

  JACK: Very well. Diamond will take care of Uncle Sevvy’s calmative redaction. Just let him be the first to break away from the réveillon and come downstairs. Can he maintain a firm mindscreen until then?

  PAUL: No problem there.

  JACK: Then let’s get on with it. Please cue the other concert participants on intimode when you think it’s safe for them to leave the réveillon. The operation site is secured with a mechanical fuzzer and thus far no one’s paid any attention to it at all. Be sure Uncle Rogi knows exactly when to bring Denis downstairs. I’ve made arrangements for Rogi to witness the procedure but it’s best if we don’t tell him in advance.

  PAUL: I’ll take care of everything.

  JACK: Diamond and I will be waiting. A bientôt Papa.

  16

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  MY TWO FAVORITES AMONG THE REMILLARD DYNASTY WERE Severin, the iconoclast who had first won my heart when he was a nonconformist schoolboy, and Adrien, whose sense of humor and unpretentious manner were a refreshing contrast to the relentless gravitas of Phil, Maurie, Anne, Catherine, and Paul.

  Adrien had inherited the slender frame and plain features of his mother, Lucille. His hair and eyes were dark, and he wore a small mustache. In 2078 he was a Magnate of the Concilium and a consulting metapsychologist in the Panpolity Directorate for Justice. He was also one of the top strategists in the Rebel Party and had been instrumental in bringing me into the ranks. Under normal circumstances I greatly enjoyed Adrien’s company.

  But my heart sank as I entered the crowded vestibule of Hanover’s Catholic church on Christmas Eve and immediately bumped into him, his wife Cheri Losier-Drake, their youngest son Cory, and Cory’s wife Norah Jacoby.

  I had not seen them since Jack and Dorothée’s wedding and they greeted me warmly, insisting that I sit with them during the mass and also accept a ride out to the farm afterward. It was impossible to refuse. I was forced to be jolly old Uncle Rogi to Cheri and the young folks en clair, while more or less simultaneously listening to Adrien’s technical discussion of the upcoming exorcism on my intimate telepathic mode. My discomfort was compounded by having to express belated condolences on the death of Parnell. Cheri and Adrien had no idea that I was the one responsible for snuffing their son, the Hydra.

  The majestic ceremony of the solemn hig
h mass was no help to my dread-filled soul. I was unable to pray. I was barely able to go through the motions of singing and speaking the ceremonial responses. When it was time for communion, I shuffled up and took the bread and wine like an automaton.

  Adrien was so preoccupied that he never noticed my malaise. But Denis did. I felt his benign coercion prodding at my mind-screen, gently at first and then with increasing strength, attempting to discover what was wrong. But of course he could not. Coming back to my seat I met his concerned gaze and intimode query with a glassy smile and shook my head slightly.

  No big thing mon fils, I told him. Just a touch of the holiday blues a good hot cup of cafébrûlot or some rumpunch will fix me up fine&dandy.

  Denis nodded. A minute later he and Lucille exchanged knowing glances and I knew they would cook up some kindly plot intended to restore my spirits. It would never do to have Uncle Rogi play the party pooper at the Christmas réveillon.

  There was a monumental traffic jam in the egg-park after mass let out. The robot-navigators in the rhocraft of the parishioners, unable to respond safely to the conflicting commands of several hundred pilots all in a rush to enter the same airspace, kicked everybody’s system into emergency override and forced the eggs to take off one at a time. The result was that we got to Marie’s place sometime after the other family churchgoers, who had traveled in groundcars.

  The farmhouse was postcard-pretty in the continuing snowfall, framed by dramatic pine trees and leafless mutant elms. Two small evergreens flanking the front door were decked with tiny lights, and the house windows and sodium yard-lamps cast a mellow glow on the white blanket covering the lawn and the winter-fast meadows.

  Adrien parked his egg out next to the barn and we tramped through the shallow drifts, bearing our small sacks of presents. Marie and the others greeted us at the door with shouts of “Joyeux Noël!” Only Paul and Severin had not yet arrived. The other members of the Dynasty were there with their spouses, and a few adult grandchildren were also in attendance: Phil and Aurelie’s youngest daughter Marianne and her husband Hans Dorfmann; Cat’s twins, Ron and René McAllister-Remillard; Maurice and Cecilia’s son Roland with his wife Maio-Ling Wu; and Paul’s son Luc with his spouse Ken Macdonald.