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by Julian May


  After working for over a year on the Mental Man project, Steinbrenner and his associates failed to find a single embryo with paramount potential.

  21

  SEATTLE METRO, EARTH 14 JANUARY 2081

  A RELATIVELY LENGTHY PERIOD OF REST AND RECUPERATION was required after the strenuous d-jump from Astrakhan. Fuzzing his identity, Fury checked into a luxury suite at the Four Seasons in downtown Seattle and had room service bring up a rare steak, a small Caesar salad, a crème brûlée, and a bottle of Stolichnaya. After he had eaten and drunk he fell into a dreamless sleep.

  The monster awoke the next morning with an inconveniently voracious appetite for lifeforce. Cursing, he self-redacted and managed to suppress the urge—but only at a serious cost to his vitality.

  Later! He’d take care of his hunger later. It would be easy to find suitable prey in this city: a drunken Inuk down around Pioneer Square or a runaway adolescent over by the Pike Place Market. Unfortunately, the interval between necessary feedings was becoming shorter and shorter. The problem was an irksome one, but he had so far been unable to address it because too many other things were happening that demanded his personal attention.

  The Astrakhanian Dirigent, Xenia Kudryasheva, was proving tougher to kill than he had anticipated, and her hostility to the local Rebel faction had reached a ticklish level. Construction of the modified starships was moving right along, but there had been a nasty scare when the facilities of a crucially important subcontractor on Yakutia were demolished in a power-plant mishap. The French world of Blois, in a fit of Gallic mulishness, had at first refused to take up the slack by revising production schedules in its own factories. Fury himself had been obliged to coerce the six members of the Blésois Commerce Ministry, the board of directors of Dassault-Aérospatiale, and the heads of three trade unions in order to get things rolling again. Besides all that, there was the upcoming Concilium session to worry about. Nine fence-sitting human magnates, more or less ripe for conversion to the Rebel cause, were going to require the most delicate sort of mental noodging on his part to bring them over the fence.

  I am spreading myself too thin, he thought.

  Not for the first time, Fury cursed the fact that high-powered coercion and the reading of hostile minds were impossible to bring off at a distance. The personality-disjunction problem was only one symptom of impending difficulty. His farsenses were no longer what they should be, and neither was his self-redactive faculty. The d-jump to Earth had been a considerable strain, necessitated by another schedule conflict. If only he could have put Hydra on an Earthbound starship and let her do this particular job herself! (She was so much better at Marc’s subliminal coercion.) But it was still unwise to use Hydra in any situation where she might have unsupervised access to Cyndia Muldowney.

  Fury’s seekersense located Marc and Cyndia at the Orcas Island house and he spied on them briefly through excorporeal excursion. Uncle Rogi was there on a house visit, having breakfast in the huge kitchen with the couple and their infant son. The old bookseller had brought Baby Hagen a present—a revised version of the papoose-swing he had built years ago for Jack the Bodiless. The infant dangled happily in the device, sucking his thumb and making cornflakes hop around the kitchen table with his PK. The conversation among the three adults was vapid, and so Fury wasted no more time on them. The contact with Marc would take place much later, when he was asleep …

  A fast farsensory glance showed that on this Saturday morning only a skeleton force of technicians was on duty at CEREM’s Mental Man facility. As usual, the hardworking Jeffrey Steinbrenner was among them. Excellent!

  It was snowing in the Cascade Mountain foothills, so Fury went down to the hotel’s Moduplex and ordered heavy winter clothing from REI. Later, as he flew his hired egg eastward, he called a North Bend outfitter on the RF com and reserved an enclosed Arctic Cat snowmobile. The machine was waiting for him when he landed. It took less than half an hour to drive it along the Snoqualmie River trail to the signposted chainlink fence that marked the boundary of the CEREM campus.

  No other winter funseekers were in the area. He parked the Cat in a thicket of tall Himalayan blackberries and shut off the engine. After making sure that the small cryopak container was safely tucked in one of the big cargo pockets of his pants, he climbed out.

  It was quiet except for the shrunken river’s ice-muffled purling and the slow tick of the cooling snowmobile. White flakes drifted down in nearly windless air, striking the mirrored surface of the immense sigma hemisphere just inside the fence and sliding down to form a fluffy bezel on the adjacent ground. His farscan showed that no human guards were abroad behind the force-field. A notice hanging on the fence warned:

  ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING!

  CEREM LTD

  IS LICENSED TO USE DEADLY FORCE

  TO REPEL UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS

  FROM THIS PROPERTY

  Fury smiled, then d-jumped inside the barrier, rematerializing in the midst of some ornamental rhododendrons next to the Mental Man facility. He rested for a few minutes, recovering his strength and scanning about the installation to insure that his presence had not been detected. No alarms sounded, no farsensory touch flicked over him, no personnel within any of the buildings showed surprise or otherwise deviated from what they had been doing.

  Eleven biotechnicians were scattered about the upper floors of the Mental Man lab, fertilizing a batch of worthless ova from one of the new donors and performing various technical maintenance chores. Jeffrey Steinbrenner was alone in the gestatorium on the basement level, preparing for an assay session. Once again Fury’s mind generated an upsilon-field and he teleported through space. A split second after he appeared in an alcove of the gestatorium just out of Steinbrenner’s view he used his creativity to become invisible.

  It was Fury’s first tangible visit to the facility, although he had excursed to it mentally from time to time when he visited the Old World in order to keep track of Mental Man’s progress. The enormous room was dimly illuminated by crimson indirect lighting, and the sound of a recorded human heartbeat was audible over the soft strains of a Mozart string quintet. Three walls of the gestatorium were lined from floor to ceiling with recessed racks holding ovoid uterine capsules. Each one was transparent, about 50 centimeters high, and had biomonitoring displays at the front. The life-supportive equipment was concealed in the walls behind the racks, as was the conveyor system that transported encapsulated embryos to various parts of the building for study or processing.

  The cadaverous scientist had seated himself in the operator’s chair before the metapsychic assay unit in the center of the room. The device was the size of a small desk. On top, a windowed boxlike extrusion with a headrest contained a single uterine capsule with tiny occupant awaiting analysis. A CE power-supply module stood on the left side of the chair. On the right an El8 helmet with its specially modified farsensory brainboard lay on a stand, ready to be donned.

  Fury stood directly behind Steinbrenner while he dictated preliminary information into the unit’s computer command mike and transferred data from the capsule’s vital-signs monitor. Then the doctor relaxed for a moment, watching the embryo with his unaugmented deepsight.

  And so did Fury.

  The developing human being was about two centimeters long, floating inside a diaphanous fluid-filled amniotic sac the size of a plum. A curling umbilical cord attached the embryo to a much larger spongy placenta, thickly webbed with prominent blood vessels and bedded in a slab of protoplasm at the rear of the artificial womb. Except for its dark eye pigment, blood vessels, and the quick-beating red heart clearly visible within the thorax with its ghostly ribs, the baby seemed to be made of translucent plass. The fingers and toes on its miniature limbs were fairly well formed and male genitalia were visible. Its head was disproportionally large, bent forward as if in serene meditation, the brain a gleaming shadow with the cerebrum neatly halved. The embryo’s face, indistinct except for the eyes, was that of an indeterminat
e primate; but the baby’s aura was already unmistakably human.

  Steinbrenner put on the heavy CE helmet and energized it. He gave no sign of having felt the internal photon beams that drilled his scalp and skull in preparation for the insertion of the electrodes. Fury waited. Finally, when the scientist bent forward and began his painstaking scrutiny of the embryo, Fury slipped through the brainboard interface and into Steinbrenner’s unsuspecting mind.

 

  Yes …

 

  [Image.] It’s not easy to separate and quantify them, even with the El8. An operator needs … a good deal of experience to use this equipment. At present I’m the only one able to do MP assays with any degree of accuracy.

 

  In a moment … wait … did you see that fluctuation in auric intensity? They don’t like to be mind-touched. I suppose it’s actually a simple tropism, no more mysterious than a worm flinching from a needle. But I can’t help thinking that the babies are already in a state of primitive awareness, operating on both vital and mental levels.

 

  No. Twofold masterclass potential, at most. In coercion and redaction. The other three faculties are latent GM. What a pity. We’d hoped that the three new egg-donors would provide us with a breakthrough, but thus far we’ve done no better than with Dierdre Keogh’s ova. Not a single paramount embryo—not even in the latent state.

 

  That’s the only valid rationale for Mental Man. The Rebellion would never be able to control the political indoctrination of thousands of grandmasterly nonborn children. We need the hundred paramounts Marc originally planned for. A manageable number for the preceptive program.

 

  I’m convinced that all we need are the right ova. It seems obvious that there was a component of genotypic variability in our previous female donor that fought the dominance of paramount traits present in Marc’s gametes. In short, all grandmasterly oocytes aren’t created equal where Marc’s sperm are concerned! [Complex diagram.] Although Dierdre Keogh has a splendid genetic heritage, it was apparently wrong for Mental Man.

 

  Exactly. The candidates were limited to women from the Remillard and the Macdonald families. Dorothea Macdonald would have been an ideal donor, but of course her participation was out of the question. Her two Macdonald aunts are good Rebels who would have given up an ovary willingly, but both of them are menopausal rejuvenates with eggs of dubious vitality. Neither one has daughters, so that essentially eliminated the Macdonalds. In the Remillard line, we don’t have a gamete viability problem because of the so-called Immortality Complex. Remillards not only self-rejuvenate, but they also seem to produce viable germ plasm for an indefinite period. However, only women with a firm commitment to Rebel politics were feasible Mental Man donors. In the first generation, Catherine declined to contribute for personal reasons. In the second generation, all three of Severin’s grandmasterly daughters contributed sample ova. These are the eggs being tested now.

 

  Yes, given Marc’s supradominant MP heritage, we should be able to engender fair numbers of paramounts. Adrien’s daughter Rosamund has said she would also contribute an ovary. We’ll hold it in reserve.

 

  I know about it. And I did approach Marie, because Marc was too scrupulous to do it himself. But she cut me dead. The woman’s not even that much of a Milieu loyalist—only puritanical about the incest factor, damn her! Marie is a latent subparamount in both coercion and redaction and an operant GM in the other faculties. Since we know that Marc’s MP traits are being inherited as supradominants, it’s virtually certain that we could have had a breed-true situation in at least two metafunctions using Marie’s ova.

 

  His son Hagen is a latent paramount in two metafunctions and Marc is operant in three. Given the heterozygous mating with Cyndia, I concluded that Marc’s MP traits must be transmitted as supravital with incomplete penetrance of the operancy factor.

  … What?

 

  Jesus Christ! But no one ever—

 

  Shit, yes! I see what you mean. If Marc’s sperm don’t carry supradominant MP genes, it could signal a disaster for Mental Man! Only his children with Cyndia or Marie would be reliably paramount, and even then their operancy couldn’t be guaranteed—

 

  The Hydra? That’s ridiculous! She’s been a fugitive from justice for twenty-six years. No one knows her whereabouts—much less whether she’d cooperate in the project.

 

  You … you’re really bespeaking me.

 

  This isn’t just a daydream.

 

  Who are you? What do you want? Are you Madeleine herself?

 

  My God.

 

  Jesus! Yes! Of course! And with the homozygosity—

 

  … Yes. It can be easily done, if you insist.

 

  Marc will have to make that decision, not me.

 

  Yes … yes.

  Jeffrey Steinbrenner stored the results of the assay in the computer. He de-energized the CE helmet and lifted it from his head. Sitting back in the chair waiting for his mind to recover, he absently wiped the tiny line of electrode wounds on his brow with an antiseptic towelette.

  The craziest dream! He remembered every bit of it—and it was sheer lunacy.

  Worse luck.

  He picked up the command mike and ordered the conveyor to take the embryo inside the assay unit to the deep freeze. Then he got up, stretched his cramped arms and shoulder muscles, and gave his balls a scratch. He’d better pack it in for the day. It was clear that overwork had finally caught up with him.

  He was heading for the door of the gestatorium when he saw the small insulated container lying on the floor, unobtrusive in the red light. Murmuring an astonished obscenity, he stooped to retrieve it. The label said:

  CAUTION—BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS

  UNDER CRYONIC SUSPENSION

  CONTENTS: 1 HUMAN OVARY

  DONOR: ROSAMUND DRAKE REMILLARD

  “Oh, shit!” said Dr. Jeffrey Steinbrenner.

  He went rushing upstairs in a rage, ready to mind-ream the technicians on duty. He’d find out soon enough which one had been guilty of this
piece of egregious carelessness. And when he did, the idiot could kiss his or her sorry ass goodbye!

  After it was good and dark and he was certain that the fucking social workers had finished their sweep, the Dene derelict named Sam Ontaratu came out of hiding.

  He had lurked all day long in Underground Seattle, the damp and stinking warren of ancient streets and decaying nineteenth-century structures that still underlay portions of the modern city. Now he was glad to be back outside in the clean open air, even if the weather was rainy and cold. With its noxious vapors and rats the size of terriers, the Underground was no place for a Dene man to stay any longer than he had to.

  Carrying his duffel, Sam left the abandoned building that gave secret basement access to the subterranean world and slouched along Yesler Way, the original Skid Road of North America. He scavenged a big sheet of bubble wrap from the recycling bin of an antique shop, crossed Pioneer Square, then turned into a dark alley and made his way to his favorite nighttime hangout, a loading dock behind a rug store on First Avenue. An iron ladder set in the wall brought him up to the raised, sheltered nook. He grinned happily when he saw that his usual corner was bone dry and unoccupied.

  He peed off the dock, then pulled a sleeping bag out of his duffel, along with an unopened liter of Potter’s Crown Canadian and a meatloaf sandwich left over from lunch at the Union Gospel Mission yesterday. When the bag was arranged on the bubble-wrap mattress, he slipped off his boots, tucked them into the duffel (which became a pillow), and got ready for bed.

  He was well on his way into drunken oblivion when the weird head showed up and rousted him.

  “Get out of the sleeping bag and stand up,” the guy commanded. He was on the other end of the dock, over near the ladder.

 

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