by Julian May
The others froze in wild surmise.
Fred said eagerly, “It might work! Unlike the rest of us, Davy is not identified in the public eye as an adamant opponent of the Rebel view. Even his participation in tonight’s panel surprised many.”
“Losh, I just did it for Scotland,” Davy rumbled, looking at his plate. The others laughed.
“The next meeting of the Concilium is in February, Earth reckoning,” Paul said briskly to Davy. “Between now and then you’d have to lobby the top Rebel magnates—and probably also appeal to those who are still straddling the fence. It would take you away from your Dirigent duties—”
“I’ve a fine deputy in Esi Damatura, now that she’s seen through Marc’s self-serving persiflage. I’ll do it, provided there’s no interference from you, First Magnate.” Davy’s gaze flicked to Jack the Bodiless. “Or other members of your illustrious family.”
“Go forth,” said Paul with heavy irony. “Wheedle those Rebel idiots back into the Milieu with your honeyed Scots tongue. But keep in mind that there’s one Remillard I can’t control for the life of me—so watch your back.”
When the supper was over, the First Magnate and his Poltroyan friend decided to walk to the shuttle terminal. They said goodbye to Jack and Dorothea and to Davy, who was going back to his hotel, and walked through Hellfire Lane, a narrow and twisting pedestrian way lined with darkened small shops.
“I hope that Davy MacGregor will be successful in his new undertaking,” Fred remarked, “but he may already be too late. If only he had assumed leadership of the Unity Directorate when you asked him to, four orbits ago! I do not wish to denigrate the heroic efforts of Anne Remillard as leader of that body—but she has perhaps been overly concerned with discrediting the enemies of Unity rather than wooing them.”
“That’s my sister Annie,” the First Magnate conceded with a gloomy chuckle. “Smite the foe hip and thigh, and damn the appeasers … Davy told me a few months ago that Cordelia Warshaw urged him to head the Unity Directorate, too. She thought he had Rebellious inclinations and hoped he’d be a mole for their side. Of course Davy sent her off with a flea in her ear. He’s no Rebel—just a man who had honest doubts about the potential effect of Unity on the Human Mind. Fortunately, he resolved his doubts rather quickly when Marc took over the Rebel Party helm. My oldest son has that effect on people: You either fall for him hook, line, and sinker or decide he’s very bad news indeed. I meant it when I told Davy to keep his guard up around him.”
The ruby eyes looked up anxiously. “Surely you don’t think Marc would actually threaten Davy’s life!”
“Perhaps I’m exaggerating. A physical attack would certainly backfire. The Earth Dirigent’s prestige is too high—even among my son’s most fanatical followers. God knows, Davy’s more popular than I am! The fact that he had serious doubts about Unity and resolved them counts heavily in his favor. It insures that people will at least give him a sympathetic hearing when he presents the Milieu’s case. But I don’t think he can stem the tide of Rebellion—much less talk the militant Rebel faction into surrendering its illicit armament. Davy will also have a devil of a time justifying the Milieu’s termination of Mental Man. When the Galactic Magistratum shut down the project, it was the last straw for a lot of previously uncommitted people. Marc made you exotics seem like jealous xenophobes, determined to keep humanity mentally subordinate.”
“But that was not our intention,” Fred protested. “There are deep ethical objections to the Mental Man concept that few members of your race seem to have considered.”
“Tell that to the low-level operant parents who were hoping to adopt a paramount baby! It’s a good thing nobody knows where the Krondaku stashed those confiscated embryos. They’d probably be highjacked and implanted into surrogate mothers before the Magistratum knew what hit it. And under the revised Repro Statutes, the Milieu would have no choice but to let the babies grow to term. Damn Marc! How did he dream up such a lunatic scheme in the first place?”
The First Magnate had been striding along heedlessly, walking faster and faster through the dark lane, and the little Poltroyan was hard pressed to keep up with him. Finally, Fred fell back, panting. “My friend, you will have to go on without me or give me a chance to catch my breath.”
Paul apologized for his thoughtlessness and suggested that they rest for a moment. They paused in the entry of a shop that sold electronic bagpipes.
Fred said, “I am not looking forward to our return to Orb. The Human Affairs Directorate will be very disappointed when I report our failure to impress the Caledonian populace.”
The First Magnate grunted. “I’ll have to decide whether or not to propose a defensive strategy to the Lylmik Supervisors that utilizes weaponry.”
“Love’s Oath!” Fred exclaimed. “Surely you don’t mean that the Milieu should take up arms itself?”
“The loyalist humans might have to. How else can we get the guns away from the Rebels if MacGregor’s initiative fails? At the very least we’ll have to design counterassaultive metaconcerts. The thing I fear the most is creative CE converted to mental lasers. Do you have any notion of what a few hundred Grand Masters wrapped up in 600X CE rigs could do—say, to the Fourteenth Fleet installation at Assawompsett? To say nothing of exotic targets …”
“If we had warning of an impending attack, the nonhuman polities could unite in a defensive metaconcert. The most logical defenders would be the Krondaku, the most powerful nonhuman metacreators. Given sufficient warning, numbers of them would be able to erect a mental shield able to turn away any Earth weapon. But you must understand that tactics for a battle are quite different from the effort needed to sequester humanity from the Milieu. Uniates cannot act aggressively! Our ethic prohibits the deliberate harming of another sapient entity. It is true that an occasional individual, especially amongst the Simbiari, may be momentarily overcome by atavistic antisocial instincts during an emotionally charged situation. But in any Unified activity, such as metaconcert, we are incapable of taking the offensive.”
“Clobbering the Rebels would be up to us loyalist humans. I intend to point out to the Lylmik Supervisors that some kind of defenses will have to be put into place at critical installations at once. We don’t dare wait any longer. I admit I can’t understand why the Lylmik haven’t done more to defend the Milieu. They must know the danger.”
Fred sighed. “It does no good to question them. It is up to you to convince the Quincunx to act.” He rose to his feet. “I’m feeling better. We must move on, Paul. The shuttle to Wester Killiecrankie Starport leaves in less than an hour.”
They set off again, the tall, elegant human and the violet-skinned exotic, too abstracted to farsee the person waiting for them in the shadows a few dozen meters ahead. The man emerged abruptly into plain sight.
The First Magnate uttered a surprised exclamation. “Terekev! What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you, my son,” said Fury. Come to me.
“You … aren’t Ruslan Terekev.” Paul felt his willpower dissolve before the paramount compulsion. He was forced to obey, moving out in front of the astounded Poltroyan to approach the waiting coercer. “Who are you?”
“I’m the one you would have killed. You and the other children, during the Christmas metaconcert.”
The assailant stretched out one hand and touched the top of Paul’s head. The First Magnate’s body convulsed. He gave an inarticulate moan. There was a sudden nauseating smell of burnt hair and skin. A dull-glowing green corona shone momentarily around Paul’s form, then faded as Fury withdrew his hand. It was not yet time to feed.
The First Magnate was paralyzed, his brain spun with vertigo, deprived of its metapsychic powers. He stared at the wavering apparition that confronted him. The stocky, homely aspect of Ruslan Terekev was melting away and the man standing there was Denis Remillard—eternally youthful, slightly built, and blond.
But he was not Denis.
Paul’s power of speech rem
ained. “Papa? It can’t be you! You died—”
Fury said, “You’re the one who must die, my son. I can’t allow you to upset my plans—and the plans of my creatures.”
“Marc!” Paul’s voice was a despairing rasp. “He’s your new Hydra!”
“Unfortunately not. He is still his own man—for the moment. But I need him, as he needs me. His Rebellion will pave the way for my own Second Milieu. And the death of this one.”
Paul writhed, trying vainly to resurrect his own metafaculties, to coerce the thing that had been his father, to smash it with PK or a creative bolt, to destroy its mind with the fearsome converse of the healing metafunction—
“You can’t harm me,” Fury said. “No operant child can exert mental duress upon a parent. You should have known that. All of you, in the Christmas metaconcert. You would have destroyed me. You merely made me whole. And now you will be consumed.”
Fury gripped his son by the upper arms. The first neural drain commenced. Paul’s anguished scream rang in the aether.
Then Fury howled. Aloud.
A small shape had darted from the darkness behind the First Magnate. On its hands, diminutive as those of a six-year-old human child, were the talons that had once made the Poltroyan race formidable predators on their icy ancestral world of Elirion. Fred had stood petrified and incredulous when Fury struck. Now, shrieking an archaic battle cry, the Uniate Magnate of the Concilium, Fritiso-Prontinalin, paragon of civilized gentility, sprang at Fury and raked his claws across the monster’s face. He missed the blazing eyes but dug hideous gashes in Fury’s forehead and cheeks.
Fury bellowed in agony. Supremely confident of being able to deflect any mental assault, he had never considered the possibility of physical violence. He seized the small exotic’s neck and a globe of dazzling emerald light engulfed the Poltroyan’s head. There was an explosion of lifeforce, an instantaneous emptying.
A decapitated husk lay steaming on the cobblestone pavement at the monster’s feet.
“You—you little bastard—” Fury was shuddering, shielding his wounds with his hands, torn between the necessity of retaining his mental hold on Paul and the irresistible urge toward self-redaction. He took a step backwards, nearly lost his footing, and uttered a sharp cry as he caught himself. He stood before the paralyzed form of the First Magnate, electric blue eyes wide and baffled, mouth sagging open in uncomprehending horror.
Denis said, “Paul? Son?”
The First Magnate abruptly crumpled to the ground. He was only dimly aware of his father kneeling over him and felt himself hurtling toward the edge of some vast internal precipice. The pain was unbearable. Rational thought was grinding to a halt despite the fact that he had been inexplicably set free from Fury’s indomitable coercion. Paul knew that in a moment he would pitch over the brink into black chaos. But not yet.
“Papa,” he forced himself to say. “Is it really you this time?”
“Yes. Oh, Jesus, yes.” Tears flowed down Denis’s lacerated face. “He’ll come back, though. He always does. Tell me how to put an end to it! Tell me, for the love of God.”
But Paul was falling, falling. “Rogi,” he said in a choked voice. “Go to Rogi.” His eyes closed and his breathing became stertorous and shallow.
Rogi?…
Fury rose shakily to his feet. With a great effort of will he exerted his metafaculties. The gashes on his cheeks and brow disappeared. So did the stains on his clothing. He looked down at the two bodies. The Poltroyan was dead, but he’d have to finish off Paul.
But could he?
Would Denis let him?
What if the attempt triggered the return of the opposing persona?
Sirens sounded in the distance. Paul had given a mental shout as the aborted feeding began, and Jack and his wife must have heard it. Police and paramedics were on the way—perhaps the paramount couple themselves. There was no time for experimentation. If the Denis persona returned and took control, he might let the body be captured. That must not be allowed to happen.
Fury knew that his Terekev disguise was compromised. Paul had recognized him. But the First Magnate’s mind had been severely traumatized by the incomplete chakra drain. Treatment could take months. The Intendant General of Astrakhan was still safe—for a time.
Swiftly, Fury modified the symmetrical ashy stigma on Paul’s scalp into a more conventional-appearing wound. His waning mindpowers abolished all traces of his own blood and tissue from the dead Poltroyan’s talons and from the vicinity of the assault. His farsight found an unoccupied toilet stall in a men’s room in a quiet corner of Wester Killiecrankie Starport.
Using the last of his creativity, he d-jumped into it.
The necessary feeding and revitalization took place not long afterward, and he was careful to dispose of the evidence.
Rainclouds came racing in, as they often did around dawn on Caledonia, and the brief spell of fine weather gave way to a steady downpour on the new day. Dirigent House was wrapped in mist. Looking out from her office, she could not see the ground. It was easy to imagine that she was the only one awake in New Glasgow, the only one on watch.
The only one who understood the terrible danger.
Oh, Callie! she thought. What if the Milieu does decide to restrict humanity to the home solar system? What if we have to leave you forever and resettle on some drab terraformed Mars or wretched artificial satellite of Earth? How could we bear it?
Perhaps it was partly her own fault that the Rebels had become so strong here, that her own father hated the Galactic Milieu and had conspired to build a secret weapons lab on Beinn Bhiorach. Perhaps she should have pressed the investigation into Ian’s collusion in that sorry affair. Perhaps she should have tried harder to counter Calum Sorley’s venomous attacks on the confederation, his rabble-rousing in the Intendant Assembly.
Perhaps her own misgivings about Unity had made her too permissive and complacent, and now the whole Scottish world would reap havoc because of it.
The great debate that she had organized—had it been a monstrous tactical blunder, inflaming anti-Unity sentiment rather than enlightening the populace? Dear little Fred, that gentle, brilliant soul, was dead and the First Magnate gravely injured because she had invited them here to defend the loyalist point of view. And within a few hours the entire Galactic Milieu would know that Caledonian Rebels were probably responsible …
There was a soft knock on her office door. She turned away from the window to greet her husband. A normal human being would be haggard and worn after coping with the awful events of the previous eight hours, but Jack the Bodiless was physically unaffected.
“How is your father?” she asked, after he had kissed her forehead.
“The doctors decided against regeneration. Regular hospital care and redaction of the brain injuries will probably restore him to full mental function—in time.”
“Thank God. Will he go back to the Old World for treatment?” She led Jack to the easy chairs over by the window-wall and they both sat down.
“I’ll take him to Concord myself in Scurra II when the medics say he’s fit to travel. I wish I could personally supervise his redaction. Unfortunately, that won’t be possible—but Polity Research Hospital is ready to bring in Yevgeniy Solovyev and Jaana Sav-isaar, the best human practitioners in the galaxy. If Papa can be healed, those two will do it.”
“If—?” Her hazel eyes widened above the diamond mask.
“Papa wasn’t just hit over the head by some Rebel-sympathizing thug. There’s significant damage to the neurons of his cerebral cortex. An ENEA scan confirmed it. Ordinarily injuries like those are associated with incompetently conducted coercive-redactive reams. But on rare occasions, criminal operants have inflicted them by deliberate perversion of the redactive function: brainburning.”
“Fury,” she said.
“I’m afraid so. The lone Hydra would never have been able to overcome an operant as strong as Paul. It had to be Fury, the one person who could attack
his son with impunity.”
“Have you searched the planet?”
“Yes. It only took a couple of hours, Callie being so thinly populated. Davy MacGregor and I did it in metaconcert. We couldn’t detect Fury’s presence and he’s probably managed to escape offworld. But this time, we may have a fair chance of tracking him down. Only twelve starships took off from Wester Killiecrankie between the estimated time of the attack and four o’clock this morning, when Paul’s neural damage was confirmed. The Galactic Magistratum in Orb will trace the passengers on those ships. They’ll be put under surveillance.”
“It will be a big job—”
He held up one hand to silence her. “I already have three prime suspects ready to put under the microscope: Hiroshi Kodama, Masha MacGregor-Gawrys, and Ruslan Terekev. They all left Caledonia during the critical time period.”
“I see what you’re driving at! All of them were in the green room after the telecast and heard Paul say that he intended to force the loyalty-oath issue. We already know that Fury must have a vested interest in supporting the Rebellion. He would have been desperate to stop Paul. Poor Fred was probably killed to eliminate an incriminating witness. It makes sense, sweetheart.”
Jack had sprawled back in his chair and was frowning at the ceiling. “What doesn’t make sense is Paul’s survival. Why didn’t Fury finish the job?”
“The most logical answer to that,” Dorothea said, “is Denis.”
“Damn! Of course!” He flung himself upright in excitement. “I should have thought of that. The stress of the encounter somehow caused another disjunction of the Denis/Fury personae—like the one Rogi saw. The two personalities are psychologically at war. Fury’s in charge most of the time now, but Denis breaks free at odd intervals, induced by God knows what, and frustrates Fury’s intentions.”
“Fury might be in a critical state, on the verge of dissolution, liable to make other mistakes.”
“Perhaps.” Jack slumped back again. “We’ll still have a hell of a time trying to catch the monster off-guard. He’ll be mindscreened up the cosmic wazoo whenever he’s in dangerous company. I certainly caught no hint of a Fury identity when we were whacking away at our Rebel friends during the debate last night.”