Magnificat

by Julian May

  Paul’s farspeech said: Shuttle in position.

  Jack said: Very well. We’re deploying the Kauai gem.

  The airlock of Scurra opened and a tractor-beam thrust forth a transparent red sphere slightly less than a meter in diameter. Although the thing had no obvious orbital-correction machinery, it took up and maintained a position 2.9979 kilometers off the bow of the little ship, on a beeline between Scurra and Paul’s shuttlecraft.

  Dorothea said: Gem deployed.

  The com display on the bridge lit up with the planetary Great Seal overlaid with a flashing WARNING notification. It said: “XSS Scurra-Two, this is Okanagon ISTC. Your vessel and its auxiliaries now occupy c-space interdicted by the Metapsychic Rebellion. Please state your intention immediately or risk a hostile engagement.”

  The young woman in the flying suit encrusted with diamonds sat in a command seat before the starship’s navigation console. Beside her was a pedestal topped by a crystal bowl holding a disembodied brain. Her pseudovoice said softly, “Okanagon Interstellar Traffic Control, Scurra-Two requests communication with Marc Remillard, Chairman of the Rebel Party.”

  “Scurra-Two, say who would communicate with the Chairman.”

  She said, “Jon Remillard of the Panpolity Directorate for Unity and Dorothea Macdonald, Dirigent of Caledonia—designated advocates of the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu. We are here for the final confrontation.”

  The traffic control computer said, “Please wait.” The icon disappeared. In a moment the com screen showed Jack and Dorothea their own starship, Paul’s shuttle, and a gleaming blood-red speck.

  “They’re not scoping us from groundside or from Chopaka Moonbase,” Jack said. “The scan originates from behind us.” His PK touched the pad activating their own external survey system. He commanded: “Survey, Tri-D mode, three-sixty-degree, star-ship analytical graphic.”

  The larger display above the console came to life, showing a swarm of 670 representational starship images almost entirely ensphering their own spacecraft at a distance of less than a hundred kilometers. Peripheral displays began a swift presentation of vessel classification and ID. There were 191 Vulpecula-class cruisers, 50 huge Bering-class dreadnaughts, and 429 miscellaneous ships attached to the Twelfth Sector Fleet.

  The Rebel armada had exited hyperspace.

  * * *

  In spite of Alex Manion’s deep misgivings, Marc had pushed himself to the limit in order to reconfigure the offensive metaconcert after the Molakar demonstration. He completely reorganized the executive focusing structure and also managed to modify the original monolithic generator into a more versatile tripartite design. By incorporating CE trainees, he had increased the number of 600X operators to 1900, divided into two groups that could be mobilized with great speed and agility. The third group of energizers was more cumbersome and would be held in reserve for critical situations. It comprised 5110 operators equipped with El8 helmets—virtually every Grand Master in the Rebel Party healthy enough to participate. Less than half of them were top-certified in creativity, but they did possess that metafaculty at least at the masterclass level. Marc’s new design had incorporated their minds in positions where they would significantly augment the output of the GM creators in their group for very brief periods without seriously impeding the flexibility of the metaconcert as a whole.

  In addition to the mental weaponry, the Rebel fleet was armed with a wide assortment of photonic projectors. Twelve of the midsized cruisers also carried a single robot shuttlecraft bearing an antimatter explosive device that Rory Muldowney’s underworld associates had stolen years ago from the Krondak Planetary Modification Group.

  On the bridge of his flagship, Marc and the members of his new prime focus team viewed the exterior scan display with unconcealed incredulity. They were all dressed in CE coveralls, ready to be conveyed to the bay where the 600X rigs waited. The operators on the other ships were already fully invested.

  Marc gave a bark of cynical laughter as he studied the screen. “This is the Milieu’s answer to our Molakar demonstration? My little brother’s toy starship?”

  “Evidently so,” said Owen Blanchard. “How very curious.”

  “I don’t believe this! Do you know what Scurra means in Latin? ‘Clown!’ And the situation is completely ridiculous.”

  “Perhaps,” Jordan Kramer said tentatively, “Jack and Dorothea have been sent to us with a declaration of surrender after all.”

  “Davy MacGregor’s communiqué was quite clear,” Cordelia Warshaw said, shaking her well-coiffed head. “The so-called Milieu advocates are to engage us in a confrontation. If we win, Rebel humanity may secede from the Milieu without sanction. If we lose—”

  “We’re fucked to a fare-thee-well,” said Hiroshi Kodama.

  “Maybe it’s some kind of diversionary tactic,” Pete Dalembert suggested. “While we roll about laughing at Scurra, the Lylmik could be sneaking up on us in hyperspace,”

  “That’s not their style,” Marc said tersely.

  “I don’t like it,” said Helayne Strangford. “Your brother has always been a wild card, Marc—no one really knows his mental potential. And that wife of his is just as peculiar, wasting her paramount metabilities dirigenting that backward little Scottish planet. Who knows what the two of them might have cooked up?”

  Alex Manion and Owen Blanchard were studying a smaller display with a proper depiction of Jack’s starship.

  “Scurra’s lifeboat is deployed,” Alex said. “And there’s something damned odd out there just beyond the nose of the ship itself.”

  “Hang on,” murmured the Fleet Commander. “I’m cranking up the scan resolution.” He hit a pad and a close-up of the glassy red ball flashed onto the main view-screen.

  “What the hell is it?” Patricia Castellane asked, dumfounded.

  Marc’s eyes narrowed. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s a much-enlarged version of my Uncle Rogi’s watch fob. When I was a child, I called it the Great Carbuncle.”

  Diarmid Keogh exclaimed, “Get on with ye!” And his voiceless twin sister Dierdre transmitted a derisive trill of telepathic scorn.

  Alex Manion wasn’t laughing. “The thing Rogi said the Lylmik gave to him ages ago? Before the Intervention?”

  “Yes,” Marc said. “A very mysterious object. Rogi’s Carbuncle was a red diamond polished in a spherical shape. He told me that it had saved his life several times by summoning Lylmik help. He even claimed it had something to do with the Intervention itself. Of course I didn’t believe him—and I didn’t bother to scan it intensively.”

  “Too bad,” said Jeff Steinbrenner. “It might have given us a clue.”

  Marc turned to Owen. “You’d better have one of the comet-burner gunners get a bead on the thing, just in case.”

  “Very well. And not that I want to rush you—but it’s about time that you answered Scurra’s hail. All of us would like to know what’s going to happen next.” The Fleet Commander gestured to the command seat. “Be my guest.”

  Marc sat down and the others withdrew out of com-scan range. He touched the MW pad. “Marc Remillard responding to Scurra-Two.”

  Images of the brain and its masked spouse appeared on the big bridge screen. A dual pseudovoice spoke.

  “We’re here for the confrontation.”

  “Just the two of you?” Marc said.

  “Paul is also here, in the shuttlecraft. His role is subsidiary. But we’re not really alone. Every human mind in the galaxy who believes in nonaggression and peaceful coexistence is with us spiritually. There are more of them than you might think, Marc. Molakar forced a lot of people to examine their commitment to you and your Rebellion more carefully.”

  “What a pity these spiritual allies of yours are so scattered and so far away. Or are you expecting reinforcements?”

  “No one besides the three of us will confront you physically.”

  Marc laughed. “Only mentally? In some grand metaconcert as diffuse and exiguous as the cos
mic background radiation?”

  “We may surprise you,” said Jack and Diamond. “Shall we begin?”

  The communication cut off.

  Marc spun about and gave a sharp command to Owen Blanchard. “Blast the damn Carbuncle! Now!”

  Shaken, Owen transmitted the order. The prime focus team watched in rapt fascination as the image of Scurra and its odd satellite reappeared on the big display. An instant later a golden beam of coherent light seemed to lance out of nowhere, striking the red sphere. There was a blinding flare. But when it dissipated, the Carbuncle still hung against its backdrop of sunlit, blue-and-white Okanagon—apparently unscathed.

  “Shielded against actinic,” said the Fleet Commander. “Try again with the X-lasers?”

  “Negative.” Marc was grim. “Never mind. We’ll get it with the concert.” His glance swept the assembled senior Rebels. “I don’t know what Jack and Diamond have up their sleeves. But whatever it is, it’s no match for us. Let’s go down to the bay and get this thing over with as fast as we can.”

  In tight metaconcert, the brain and the woman clad in diamonds sent out their farspoken summons. It was a call similar to the one Denis Remillard had made on the night of the Intervention, appealing to human beings of good will to join together, even if only for a brief time, in a grand conjunction of peaceful and loving calmness.

  The first to respond were the Uniate and coadunating children There were millions of them by then, on every human colonial planet—even Rebel Okanagon—a silvery chorus of innocence that echoed faintly among the stars. Then the adult operants who had always remained loyal to the Milieu joined in, followed by normal minds who had never given up on the power of love to transform.

  My mind’s eye watched and my mind’s ear heard what happened—even though I held back.

  On Saint Augustine’s Day, 2083, the final confrontation caught me as I was walking along the Connecticut River on a cool May evening, full of fear and torn by conflicting hopes. I sat down on a rock by the shore, blind to my surroundings, while my mind farsensed the drama taking place 540 lightyears from Earth. I desperately wanted humanity to be free of the Milieu, but at the same time I shrank from Marc’s appalling tactics, praying with all my soul that there would never be another Molakar.

  There would be, however—and every human being in the galaxy would be a witness to it.

  Jack and Dorothea gathered that initial diffuse flow of coadunation into a concerted Song of Unity. Lucille told me afterward that operant adults experienced the transition as instant Unanimization. The nonoperants, still incapable of bonding fully in cosmic consciousness, felt suddenly uplifted by a surge of wonder, joy, and mental fellowship.

  The loving metaconcert pervaded the mental lattices of the aether like the mist hovering over the surface of the Connecticut River on that calm New Hampshire night—tenuous, still relatively insubstantial, capable of being torn by the least breath of malignant wind. Of itself, this precursor to the Unified Mind of Humanity posed no threat whatsoever to the Rebellion.

  Even though its joyous song was heart-stirring and indescribably beautiful, I still refused to join in.

  Jack and Dorothée, strengthened themselves by the fullness of Unity, gathered the flood of loving energy and channeled it into the huge gem he had constructed in his laboratory on Kauai, the red diamond sphere with the mysterious Lylmik machines at its faintly glowing heart. Paul Remillard helped in the telergic transfer, his mind a living conduit that helped to concentrate the lesser emanations of the nonoperants.

  The Song changed.

  Marc, encased in his black CE armor and interrupted in the critical task of constructing his own metaconcert, watched in disbelief as his peripheral farsight showed a slowly expanding bubble of white light that emerged from the Carbuncle, engulfed Jack’s starship, and spread toward his own Rebel fleet. He had no idea what it was, and he did not intend to find out.

  Owen! Abandon armada formation of encirclement retreat onehundredkayklom higherorbit NOWNOWNOW!

  Very well. Armada executing maneuver.

  Patricia Castellane, Dirigent of Okanagon, spoke to Marc on his intimate mode: Hit them with the antimatter bombs! All of them!

  Marc said: We’re too close to the planet we can’t risk it.

  Patricia said: The concert isn’t half built. Would you rather have the fleet dive back into hyperspace like a flock of scared rabbits? Do it! It’s my world.

  Marc said: FIRE ALL ANTIMATTER DEVICES AT SCURRA.

  Twelve robot spaceboats emerged from the midst of the retreating armada and streaked toward the glowing bubble, which was expanding more rapidly. When they reached the superficies there was a tiny flurry of rainbow sparks.

  The shuttles seemed to vanish. An instant later, on the bubble’s opposite side, sparks flashed again and the bomb-laden craft reappeared, tracing an impact trajectory toward Okanagon.

  Marc roared: Owen! Abort action recall boats NOWNOWNOW!

  After a moment Fleet Commander Owen Blanchard’s emotionless mental voice replied: The boats are behind that big energy bubble and our guidance systems are unable to penetrate it.

  Ti-Jean and Dorothée made certain that every human mind saw what happened. Mercifully, they did not transmit the telepathic shout of the two billion people who died when the antimatter devices ruptured Okanagon’s unstable crust and transformed the once-lovely earthlike planet into a holocaust.

  Jack’s mind spoke to his brother on intimode: God have mercy on all of you.

  Marc said: Perhaps you’d better start praying for yourself.

  At that terrible moment, when not only humankind but all of the exotic races of the Milieu watched in stunned horror, the Galactic Milieu itself faltered. Its peoples had been shielded from aggression for so long that they had forgotten its most seductive quality: the inborn instinct to take violent revenge upon one’s enemies.

  Billions of imperfectly Unified Simbiari experienced despair and hopelessness for the first time in their lives, knowing that their first all-important Proctorship had failed.

  Even more Poltroy ans were affected, in spite of Unity. Their ancient heritage of violence, suppressed for so long, began to resurface in their racial Mind in response to the perceived threat of the human Rebels.

  The Gi cowered in helpless panic while the phlegmatic Krondaku tried to resist the temptation to withdraw into themselves. The Lylmik only watched, waiting to see if Marc Remillard and his Rebellion would prevail while the Galactic Milieu died.

  Jack and Dorothea said: Persevere.

  The monstrous cinder that was Okanagon glowed crimson and black inside a haze of orbiting debris.

  Persevere.

  Uncommitted human minds and even greater numbers of dedicated Rebels, at first stunned by the awful spectacle, began to rush into the sanctuary of the loving metaconcert. I held back myself; but a torrent of others rejected the terrible sword of the Angel of the Abyss and his remorseless demand for full mental autonomy. As humanity made its critical choice, Jack, Diamond, and Paul welcomed and incorporated the converts. The Song intensified and the great bubble of coadunate mental energy swelled and acquired a heliodoric corona. When it attained a diameter of 29,979.2458 kilometers it halted its distension, ready.

  Marc’s metaconcert was finally actualized. He ordered the ship carrying the secondary focus team—Adrien, Catherine, and Severin Remillard, Annushka Gawrys and her brother Valery, Masha MacGregor-Gawrys, Rory Muldowney, Robert Tremblay, and Ian Macdonald’s highly operant siblings Lachlan, Annie Laurie, and Diana—to execute a hyperspatial translation, penetrating the sphere of energy surrounding Scurra.

  When the maneuver worked, rather to Marc’s surprise, he orchestrated a titanic creative blast from the screaming generator of his own metaconcert, striking simultaneously at the great red diamond from outside and inside the glowing bubble.

  Two things happened. All of us who were watching saw the first event. The second became widely known only four days later.


  The enormous sphere of coadunate energy contracted like a collapsing star. I saw a woman dressed in a gem-encrusted silver flying suit and a naked brain enclosed in blazing plasma. In the aether, two voices said: Persevere.

  Marc heard Jack speak on his intimate mode: It’s finished Big Brother now you must magnify too like it or not adieu dear Marc. [Scent of white pine fading gemlight crash of silence.]

  A miniature nova blazed momentarily where Scurra had been. The invading Rebel ship with its secondary focus team was vaporized by an incandescent shock wave. The shuttlecraft carrying Paul Remillard endured for only a microsecond longer before it also vanished.

  I was told later that there is a striking chemical phenomenon that can be demonstrated with a supersaturated solution of anhydrous sodium acetate, cooled below its normal “freezing” point of around room temperature. A single tiny flake of the solid chemical is dropped into the supercooled solution … and within moments the entire volume of liquid undergoes a swift phase change, becoming a solid crystalline mass.

  This, I was informed, is analogous to what happened to the Mind of Humanity, still enmeshed in its lattice of metaconcerted love, as it saw the glowing dust that had been a tiny starship named Scurra fading and wafting away on the solar wind.

  The Carbuncle concentrating the Mind endured, and so did the Song, now augmented by almost every human individual. It rang from one end of the galaxy to the other, now joined by a thundering chorus of uncountable exotic voices in a hymn of Unity.

  The human participants knew the third level of consciousness only for a moment before sliding back reluctantly to lower plateaus of coadunation or simple fellowship. The Song descended into diminuendo and faded away. The great red diamond remained, wrapped in stillness.

  The confrontation was over.

  I came to my senses sitting on my rock beside the river. It was full night, with a sky full of sparkling, enigmatic stars.

  A massive wave of dysergistic flashover had struck Marc and the other nine members of his executive focus team at the instant of the phase change. They did not die, but their hyperenergized brains were severely injured, causing the entire Rebel metaconcert to collapse. The minds that had comprised the tripartite generator structure were not so lucky as the focusing agents. Every one of the El8 helmet operators was roasted alive by metacreative flashover, and many of the smaller ships that had carried them were destroyed. Those operators whose bodies were frozen solid in 600X CE rigs mostly survived, the weaker mentalities reduced to virtual imbeciles while the stronger suffered brainburns similar to those of the prime focusing team. Because of the cerametal refractive lining in the CE bays of the larger Rebel starships, their hulls did not breach. There was some internal damage to the vessels, but in most cases this was not so critical as to preclude superluminal travel.