Magnificat

by Julian May

  Across the table, Lyudmila Arsanova slowly lifted her beautiful face and looked directly at him: Of course we know each other. We have been destined to come together from all eternity—

  Abruptly, Marc pushed back his chair and stood up. “Rory, I want to express my appreciation to you for providing us with a place for this meeting. Thanks to you and your liaison with our friends from Astrakhan, we’ve been able to clarify some very important policy considerations today. The physical implementation of the Metapsychic Rebellion has taken a great step forward.”

  There was mental applause, and scattered affirmations of “Hear, hear!”

  Marc continued. “Knowing that these starships are available to us opens new strategy options to us that were formerly unavailable. The store of armament you’ve assembled here on Hibernia will surely remain an important part of that strategy. I have no doubt that both the warships and the stockpile of matériel will prove invaluable, one way or another, when the final countdown to human independence begins … And now I’d be honored—and so would everyone else sitting at this table—if you’d take us on a tour of your famous armlann. You’ve got us all dying of curiosity.”

  Rory agreed at once and asked his guests to follow him. Marc kept close on the heels of the Hibernian Dirigent as they trooped downstairs to the lodge’s handsomely fitted game room. The secret passageway leading to the arsenal’s passenger lift was revealed, rather ludicrously, when the billiard table was tilted on end.

  Rory seemed to have regained his usual mordant good humor. “The principal entry into the armlann is from a cave at sea level on the opposite side of the island. But it’s a dank place, more often than not stinking from the carcasses of unlucky water-beasts zapped by accident by the security devices. This here is the family entrance that my daughter uses when she comes to have tea with her old dad. Kindly step into the lift car.”

  It was a rather tight fit for nine people. Lyudmila Arsanova smiled up at Marc and apologized for treading on his foot.

  “Not at all,” he murmured, shifting away from the too-intimate contact. Back at the table, he’d thrust her ruthlessly from his mental vestibule with the same unceremonious finality dealt out to other would-be lovers who had refused to take a hint. But she still hadn’t given up, damn her! The mysterious inner compulsion lingered in his mind as well, along with an elusive fragment from—of all things—Jack and Diamond’s wedding mass:

  You have ravished my heart my sister my bride you have pierced my soul with a single glance …

  The elevator door slid open. They emerged into an area resembling the receiving dock of a warehouse, undistinguished except for the fact that its curving walls and ceiling were smoothly bored from limestone strata of a mottled pinkish-gray. Boxy ship-containers and plass pods stood about, some of them opened to disclose such mundane items as rolls of electrical flex, a brand-new ventilation turbine, D-water drums, and packages of buffing compound. The atmosphere was dry and warm. A nearly subsonic hum hinted at the operation of some machinery. From the distance came an irregular clinking sound, as though someone were pounding on metal.

  “We’ll find my daughter this way,” Rory said, heading into a side passage. “She’s the sole guardian of the armlann.”

  Professor Anna Gawrys said rather reproachfully, “Surely the poor young woman doesn’t spend all of her time here, down in the bowels of the earth?”

  Rory laughed. “Not a bit of it, Annushka. The regular maintenance schedule takes only ten weeks out of each year, although extra work is required when fresh batches of equipment arrive and have to be mothballed. And from time to time, when we outgrow our space and new storage cells are required, Cyndia supervises their construction. The rest of her days are spent lolling around Tara Nua, giving me a hand now and then at Dirigent House when she’s not throwing parties. The lass insists her madcap socializing is a necessary smoke screen to divert suspicion, but I think she protests too much.”

  “You would,” said Patricia Castellane.

  They came into an enormous vaulted chamber. The floor was a circular balcony of metal grating and beneath their feet the lighted multiple levels of the armlann fell away into blurred obscurity.

  “Holy shit,” murmured Fleet Commander Owen Blanchard.

  Rory grinned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Hiroshi Kodama was assessing the amount of weaponry stored. “Each level contains twenty-four cells, and the number of levels is—”

  “Ninety-two,” Rory said. “The newer, larger pieces are nearest the top. At the bottom, the cells are crammed full of portable arms—Bosch 414 blasters and the like.”

  “Perhaps not quite enough matériel to fight a war with,” Cordelia Warshaw observed judiciously, “but enough to bolster Rebel enthusiasm.”

  A hulking piece of equipment standing a dozen meters away was the source of the rhythmic sounds. Most of the visitors ignored it and hurried to peer over the balcony railing into the awesome shaft. Marc, Rory, and the two Astrakhanians were among those who went to the Tadano tractor.

  “Síondaire!” the Hibernian Dirigent called. “Our guests are here.”

  “I’ll be right out, Taoiseach,” said a muffled voice, “just as soon as I finish bashing this bent access-panel back into place.” The pounding resumed.

  “I am very impressed by the armlann,” said Ruslan Terekev. “It hardly seems possible that a single young lady could be responsible for its maintenance.”

  “My daughter’s no ordinary lass,” Rory said proudly.

  After a last vehement flourish of blows, the concealed engineer said, “There! Now it’s done.”

  Two feet, clad in heavy boots, emerged from under the tractor, followed by the rest of a slender body clad in a grubby blue hooded coverall. The engineer’s face was smudged with grease, and goggles covered her eyes. A tool tote rested on the rolling trolley beside her. Lying there, she smiled up at the visitors.

  “May I present,” Rory said, “my youngest daughter, Cyndia Muldowney.”

  Marc reached down a big hand and she took it, jumping easily to her feet. She was a tall woman, but the top of her head came only to his shoulder. They stood unmoving, facing each other. One of her gloved hands was still in Marc’s grip. She used the other to pull off the protective eyewear and hood.

  A luxuriant fall of curling, red-gold hair. Pale, translucent skin beneath the grime. A high forehead and a delicately curved, thin-bridged nose. Exceptionally large eyes the color of Loch Mór in summer, set deeply and framed by startling black lashes. Full lips parted, at first unable to speak.

  Because in that instant the cavern was filled with a burst of blinding white light.

  The people at the railing swung about with exclamations of astonishment. But by then the inadvertent flare of Marc’s metapsychic aura had faded, lingering only in his widening, amazed stare.

  “So you’re he,” she whispered, searching his face.

  “And I know who you are,” Marc replied. “I knew it the moment I saw you.”

  You have ravished my heart my sister my bride you have pierced my soul with a single glance how beautiful are your breasts honey and milk are under your tongue what magic lies in your love …

  Ignoring everyone except each other, Marc and Gyndia walked off toward the elevator, hand in hand.

  Staring after them in stunned disbelief, Rory whispered, “Dear Lord, no!”

  Ruslan Terekev’s face was a granite mask. “Yes. Oh, yes indeed! Dirigent Muldowney, I think you will now have to find a new custodian for your armlann.”

  After Fury and Hydra had fled from the island, he tried to calm her raging grief:

 

  Anguish. Let me alone. I want to DIE.

  < I/I will comfort you … there.>

  Ahhhh—STOP I don’t want it don’t want YOU—

 

  NEVERuntillkillbothofthemDAMNthemtoHELL!r />
 

  I know … It’s over for me.

 

  Despair.

 

  You still plan to use my ova.

 

  Hatred! Use hers the damned bitch hers hers—

 

  Really? Really?

 

  I … believe.

 

  Ahhh. Yes. OhFuryBelovedFury what would I do without you/you?

 

  I know. I vow to follow you/you. To obey. Just have patience with me for a little longer while I cope with this awful disappointment this disaster this horror I don’t understand how it could have happened how could he do it how after all my work all those coercive dreams HOW could it have happened? How could Marc fall in love with the wrong sister?

  20

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  I FLEW INTO HIBERNIA FOR THE WEDDING ON A CHARTERED STAR-SHIP with Lucille and the Dynasty, together with Marc’s close colleagues at CEREM and his friend Boom-Boom Laroche, who had recently become a Deputy Evaluator of the Galactic Magistratum and a Magnate of the Concilium.

  Less than four weeks had passed since the day that Marc and the lovely young engineer had met. Everyone knew that they had been inseparable during that time, already married in spirit if not in the eyes of the Catholic Church. On the Old World, no one would have thought a thing about the premature cohabitation; but the operant community of the Irish planet was more conservative where sex was concerned—and many of them also still harbored dark memories of the way Marc’s father had dishonored their Dirigent.

  There had been baleful telepathic clucks following the announcement of Cyndia’s espousal, and Cardinal McGrath of Tara Nua, an operant Rebel cleric who made no secret of his disapproval of the fiancé, very nearly declined to concelebrate the nuptial mass along with Anne Remillard, S.J. But in the end Marc’s personal magnetism won over even the most hard-shelled of the Hibernians. Being Irish and past masters in the art of coercive blandishment themselves, they finally accepted Marc as a worthy suitor for their beloved Dirigent’s daughter—even though any fool could see what a sly, silver-tongued Froggie he was. On the other hand, as Cardinal McGrath dryly noted, somewhere in the man’s ancestry there had to be honest Celtic blood, or he wouldn’t be such an expert in dishing out the malarkey.

  Of course none of the wedding participants (most especially the bride and groom) knew a thing about the mortal impediment to the marriage. If Rory Muldowney had ever had any doubts about Cyndia’s paternity he had long since banished them to the dead files of his subconscious, and none of his constituents would have dreamed of humiliating him or his dearly loved daughter by raising the issue—although there was secret whispering.

  Rory’s antipathy to Marc never entirely disappeared; but to his credit, he gave the couple his wholehearted blessing when it became clear that their union was written in the stars.

  The members of the Family Remillard (and I myself) had genuine reasons to be apprehensive over Marc’s upcoming marriage, knowing what we did about his anomalous personality. When the news first reached me I was knocked for a happy loop. Was it actually possible that this magnificent, appalling man whom I had sadly relegated to the status of emotional cripple had discovered human love? Even Jack was astounded. The only one who seemed unsurprised by the news was Paul.

  The ceremony was to be small and private, held in the little Lady Chapel of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in the Hibernian capital city. Unlike the wedding of Jack and Dorothée, Marc’s caused no media furor. In 2080 he was still a rather mysterious figure in the eyes of normal humanity. Except for his personal role in the salvation of Caledonia, Marc’s work with CE was largely unremarked by the general public. His leadership of the Rebel Party had made him notorious among the Magnates of the Concilium, but it was not until he deliberately brought a highly edited version of the Mental Man controversy out into the open that he became a galactic celebrity.

  The wedding took place in the evening, and while the number of participants was limited, it was a gorgeous affair with the groom in white tie and the bride wearing a gown of deep green satin trimmed at the décolletage with white lace flowers and pearls. Cyndia had no veil except her abundant hair, which fell nearly to the middle of her back, but she did wear a wreath of fragrant violets with pendant green ribbons, giving her the archaic air of an ancient Irish princess.

  The couple exchanged traditional Claddagh rings having carved clasped hands holding a crowned heart. There were no unseemly visual metacreative manifestations when they kissed to seal their vows, but in some uncanny fashion the transcendent love between them seemed to glorify the very aether pervading the chapel. I wept as the couple embraced, and so did Lucille, sitting next to me. And when Marc and Cyndia left the altar, triumphantly smiling, there was an explosion of applause and rapturous cheering. We couldn’t help it. The joy of the bride and groom had conquered all of us, obliterating every doubt and apprehension.

  For the first months of his marriage Marc was a man besotted by physical passion. Having denied and repressed this part of his nature for his entire adult life, his late discovery of true love and its sexual consummation reduced him to a state of calentural irrationality. The pair went to live on Earth, in the handsome house on Orcas Island, and Marc spent nearly every moment with his adored bride. He abandoned his work at CEREM and absented himself without leave from the Galactic Concilium—thus missing Alex Manion’s shocking paper purporting to prove that Unity was incompatible with mental-lattice field theory, which tipped the scandalized Concilium on its ear and lost Alex the Nobel Prize at the last minute.

  Cyndia, in turn, was so deeply in love with Marc and so bewitched by his coercive charm that she never tired of him. As metapsychic lovers (and even some nonoperant ones) sometimes do, they submerged themselves in each other to the exclusion of all others and the neglect of mundane affairs. Having traveled along that road myself once upon a time, I might have predicted what would inevitably happen.

  Spring comes early to the beautiful Pacific Northwest of America. In March and April, Marc and Cyndia were able to hike in the Olympic rainforests, kayak among the San Juan Islands, and go sailing in Marc’s big Nicholson yacht with the servo grinders and other magic doodads, exploring the sparkling waters of Puget Sound. In May, when the orchards of eastern Washington State were in full bloom and the rainbow trout were rising on the high-desert streams and lakes, he taught her catch-and-release flyfishing. In June they toured Ireland, land of Cyndia’s ancestors, and after that they came to New Hampshire, where they wandered the picturesque byways of Marc’s boyhood on bicycles, canoed on the Connecticut River, and backpacked along the Appalachian Trail in the White Mountains.

  And then, one fine day on top of Mount Washington, near the scene of the Great Intervention, Cyndia told Marc something that irreparably changed everything between them.

  She came to my bookstore in Hanover several days later, saying that Marc was off conferring with colleagues at Dartmouth College’s Department of Metapsychology, and asked if we could have a confidential chat. I was surprised all to hell since a
t that time we hardly knew one another, having met for the first time at the wedding on Hibernia; but I didn’t need to read Cyndia’s well-shuttered mind to know that she was seriously concerned about something.

  So I locked up the place, programmed the sign to read GONE FISHING, and took her to the Starbucks coffeeshop next door. I ordered us a couple of cool frappuccinos and we sat down together at one of the shaded sidewalk tables.

  “Lucille suggested that I speak to you,” she said, delicately sampling her drink. “I have a problem. With Marc.”

  “And Lucille told you to talk to me?”

  “She said you knew him better than anyone—with the possible exception of Jack.”

  Cyndia Muldowney was carelessly dressed in faded jeans, a white sleeveless shirt with big gold buttons, a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, and huaraches. Her shining hair was pulled back in a long ponytail. Those extraordinary dark-lashed eyes, which Rory Muldowney told me that the Irish describe as “put in with a smutty finger,” had sea-green depths backed with a stony indomitability I had not noticed before. Before long we would all discover that the spine of the beautiful Hibernian engineer was pure cerametal.

  “I’ll help you any way I can,” I said, and meant it.

  “I’m pregnant, Uncle Rogi. I told Marc last Wednesday, when we were hiking on Mount Washington. Our son should be born around the third week in November.”

  I opened my mouth to congratulate her, but she firmly coerced me to silence and continued in that sweetly accented voice of hers.

  “When I broke the news, Marc seemed to react normally, happily. But that night, back in the funny old White Mountain Hotel, he didn’t come to bed. He just sat by the open window staring at the stars, a million miles away. I thought he might be farspeaking an important message to someone, and so I just waited. Finally, I dozed off. When I woke up it was past four in the morning and he was still sitting there. He said he was thinking and told me to go back to sleep. I begged him to tell me if anything was wrong. You see, it was the first time that … he hadn’t wanted me. He just kissed me and said he’d explain in the morning. After that, he must have redacted me because I fell asleep. But before I drifted away, I felt his hand on my abdomen. And I thought I heard his mind say ‘Mental Man.’ ”