Magnificat

  “And do let me compliment you on your handsome costume,” said the male, Fritiso-Prontinalin. “It’s a bit different from the human nuptial garb we’re familiar with.”

  Paul gave a humorous shrug. “Clothes like this were the height of fashion in this part of Earth about a hundred and eighty orbits ago, when this hotel was new. But my outfit won’t be complete until I find a certain little bunch of flowers I’m supposed to wear right here.” He thumbed his lapel. “I hope your rooms are comfortable.”

  “Our accommodation has a lovely view of the mountains,” Minnie said. She added playfully, “The furnishings are just the least bit lackluster, but perfectly adequate to our needs.”

  Paul affected to be shocked. The sumptuous lifestyle of the Poltroyan race was legendary in the Galactic Milieu. “No emerald-studded bathtub? No solid-gold clothes hangers or platinum doorknobs? I’ll complain to the management.”

  Minnie giggled.

  Fred said, “It was very extravagant of you to have rented this entire huge establishment, but I suppose it was the only way to insure against an invasion by unwelcome newsgatherers.”

  The First Magnate let his exasperation show. “We’ve blocked the entry roads and set up sky barriers, and the hotel perimeter is cordoned with stun-fencing. In spite of all that, reporters in disguise have already been detected and ejected from the kitchen staff, the corps of waitrons, and the groundskeeping crew. One brazen gentlewoman of the tabloid Tri-D even tried to substitute herself for a viola player in the orchestra. Her AV recorder was hidden in the fiddle.”

  Both Poltroyans laughed. Then Fred’s kindly face turned sober. “How is your sister Anne? We understand you personally saw to her safe transport to Earth.”

  “I got in from Okanagon late last night and took her directly to the Polity Genetic Research Institute in Concord. They say she’s doing well, and her complete recovery is only a matter of time. But having Anne out of the picture for nearly a year will play merry hell with the Unity Directorate, and it’s going to have to contend with a tricky matter of moment during the next Concilium session. You probably haven’t heard the news yet, but metapsychologists from the Sorbonne in Paris are going to announce officially that they’ve detected the initial stages of emergent coadunation of the human racial Mind. I’m not familiar enough with autocatalytic set theory to understand the details, but it seems that a distinct phase transition is taking place.”

  “But that’s wonderful!” Minnie exclaimed. “What is the difficulty? I should think you Earthlings would be overjoyed.”

  “There are certain human magnates who’ll use the announcement as an excuse to inflame anti-Unity sentiment among our people. Anne was a past master at dealing with these loose cannons, but unfortunately the other Directors aren’t nearly as handy in a brawl. Theoreticians, most of them.”

  “There’s your son Jack,” Fred suggested. “Wouldn’t he be the logical chairman pro tem? His paramount mind—”

  “Is only twenty-five years old,” Paul said dismissively. “It’s true that the majority of the Unity Directors are prepared to approve his interim appointment, but I’m afraid that he lacks the experience—and the authority—to deal with this impending crisis. The top guns among the Rebel magnates, people like Annushka Gawrys and Hiroshi Kodama and Cordelia Warshaw, would eat the boy for breakfast during a no-holds-barred debate over the protocols of Unification. It’s not that Jack isn’t brilliant. I’m just afraid he’s not tough enough to be our principal spokesman on this issue.”

  “He might surprise you,” Minnie said.

  Fred asked, “If not Jack, then who?”

  “I was thinking,” Paul said, “of appointing Davy MacGregor.”

  The two Poltroyans were shocked into silence.

  “I believe that the Lylmik Supervisors would agree if Davy would.” Paul flashed an ironic smile. “You have to admit that MacGregor is tough enough to take on the entire Rebel contingent with both hands tied behind his back.”

  “Indubitably,” Minnie agreed. “But it surprises us that you would consider a person who is so … conspicuously uncongenial in his relationship to yourself and the other members of your family.”

  The First Magnate lifted his beautifully tailored shoulders. “Davy is the perfect one for the job—not only because of his temperament and superior mindpower but also because of his great prestige as Earth’s Planetary Dirigent. He’s here at the ceremony, you know. A distant relation of the bride. I plan to sound him out later today. He may tell me to take a flying leap, but I hope not.”

  “If this plan of yours is for the best,” Fred murmured, “then may the All in all speed its happening.” He added telepathically: Paul mydearoldfriend can you afford to risk it? Deliberately bringing MacGregor into close association with Remillards enhances possibility of his discovering that Fury+Hydracreature are still alive&active.

  Minnie’s mind said: Davy has it in him to destroy you+your-family in order to avenge his wife …

  Paul said, “He’s a just man. If he takes the job he’ll give it everything he’s got. And to hell with the risk to my family! The Human Polity needs Davy MacGregor for the Unity debate. This issue is going to be crucial to the future of our race. If the Rebel faction ever gains the upper hand in the Human Polity, you know as well as I do that the exotic members of the Concilium will write us off as a bad job and rescind the Great Intervention.”

  The two little purple people nodded their gold-painted heads solemnly. “The Amalgam of Poltroy would cast its vote against you with the greatest reluctance,” Fred said, “but we would have no other option. An ununified humanity intent on cutting itself off from our confederation would present an unacceptable risk to the survival of the Milieu.”

  “Oh, please!” Minnie pleaded. “Let’s not talk of such things on this day of joy for Dorothea and Jack.”

  Paul agreed and they said goodbye. The Poltroyan couple took the elevator down to the garden level while the First Magnate continued along the corridor and knocked on a door.

  Come in Papa, said Marc.

  Paul entered the suite occupied by the groom and the best man and found four Gilded Age dandies lounging about drinking champagne amidst the scattered remains of a lavish lunch. Uncle Rogi was still sitting at the table, clearly feeling no pain. Paul’s sons Marc and Luc and Luc’s spouse Kenneth Macdonald stood near the window, checking out the scene below. All of them were dressed in the same elegant gray formal wear as the First Magnate.

  “I’ve come for my boutonniere,” Paul said. “Where’s the bashful bridegroom?”

  Rogi hauled himself up. Swaying a little, he declaimed: “Waiting for his dear papa to arrive and impart a few last words of paternal wisdom before he marches down the aisle … Ti-Jean! Tire ton cul de là!”

  The inner bedroom door opened. The four gallants tried to keep straight faces as a disembodied brain sailed slowly out, suspended in mid-air. It was wearing a pearl-gray top hat.

  “Good God!” said Paul.

  Marc kept his composure but the others fell about laughing. Uncle Rogi thrust a glass of champagne into the First Magnate’s hand and helped himself to more.

  “I couldn’t resist it,” said Jack the Bodiless, wreathed in mental smiles. “Can you believe that Uncle Rogi tried to talk me into going down to the ceremony like this?”

  “Wrong!” Rogi declared in ringing tones. “I said Ti-Jean should go on his honeymoon like that.” He went into a fresh fit of laughter, delivering salacious toasts to the floating brain in broken Canuckois.

  “Uncle Rogi,” Luc Remillard observed redundantly, “is as sozzled as a boiled owl.”

  “You lie, mon cher fagot,” the old bookseller said sweetly. “I am as drunk as a skunk in a trunk!”

  Paul grimaced in distaste. “Couldn’t you boys have kept an eye on him?”

  Luc shrugged. “It’s a wedding, Papa. Rogi has a right to celebrate.”

  “I guess somebody’d better redact him sober,” Ken Macdonald said. ??
?Can’t allow a swacked ring-bearer, can we? My sister the exalted Planetary Dirigent would have our balls for bidet-swabbers.” He turned to Luc. “What say we two give it a try, luv?”

  “Nobody touches my mind!” Rogi yelled. He dodged nimbly away from both men, simultaneously tossing down the last of his bubbly, and headed for the outer door.

  Marc Remillard casually reached out and touched his fleeing great-granduncle’s shoulder. Rogi froze in mid-skitter, paralyzed by coercion. Without effort, Marc frog-marched the skinny old man toward the bathroom. “We won’t have to redact him. Black coffee and a modicum of simple emetic therapy will do the trick.”

  “Don’t mess up his clothes,” Jack said.

  Luc and Ken cackled heartlessly and followed along to watch the fun.

  The levitating brain doffed its topper and said: “Will you help me get ready, Papa?”

  Paul slammed his strongest mental shield into place. “If you like.” Uneasily, he followed the thing that was his youngest son into the bedroom and shut the door behind them, muffling the pitiful offstage noises.

  “I have a confession to make,” Jack said.

  “Oh?” Paul pretended to inspect the groom’s clothing, which was laid out neatly on the antique colonial bed.

  “I’m responsible for Uncle Rogi’s overimbibing. I coerced the poor old guy into guzzling too much champagne in order to distract him. You see, he’d got it into his head that it was his solemn duty to give me my prenuptial sex instruction. He’s been trying to get me alone ever since he arrived.”

  Paul barely suppressed a snort.

  “You know how close we’ve always been, Papa. I didn’t want to deliberately hurt Rogi’s feelings, and I confess that I do need certain information. But not the kind of thing he had in mind. I hoped … to get the data from you.”

  “I see.” The First Magnate smiled tightly at the hovering mass of cerebral tissue. “Well, I’ll certainly do the best I can—under the circumstances.”

  Jack’s psychokinesis opened the cherry wood wardrobe door and a considerable quantity of thick, grayish-pink liquid matter flowed out like a colossal glistening amoeba. Paul stood motionless and his eyes widened as the amorphous blob moved across the fine oriental rug without leaving a trace and gathered into a large spheroid directly beneath the suspended brain.

  “Didn’t you know, Papa?” Jack’s pseudovoice was good-humored in the face of his father’s evident repugnance. “I usually keep the artificial plasm now when I disincarnate. It saves a lot of time if I don’t have to regenerate a new body from scratch—to say nothing of averting wear and tear on my surroundings from molecular scavenging.”

  Paul hadn’t known. If truth be told, he had not lived with his mutant son or otherwise shared the ordinary day-to-day domestic intimacies with him for over twenty years. When Jon Remillard was five years old, the widowed First Magnate had given him and his older siblings into the care of their grandparents, Denis and Lucille. Paul’s work, which took him to every human-colonized planet in the Galactic Milieu, to Concilium Orb, and to hundreds of exotic worlds as well, had made any kind of normal family life impossible for him. In later years, when the First Magnate’s heavy responsibilities finally eased, he discovered that his meager parental instincts were almost completely atrophied. His children matured into adulthood without him.

  Paul had convinced himself that he loved his offspring dearly (except, of course, for the prodigal Madeleine, who was hiding God knew where, plotting God knew what). His relations with his four other children were amiable but rather formal; but that could hardly be helped, since they saw one another so seldom.

  The oldest, Marc, was the most estranged of the lot, a quirky, self-centered genius who neglected his duties as a Magnate of the Concilium in favor of dubious researches into the cerebroenergetic enhancement of the human brain. Marie, the second-born, a quiet and circumspect woman who often seemed embarrassed by the antics of her more colorful brothers, was a Professor of History at Dartmouth College who wrote popular gothic novels under a pseudonym. She had recently moved into the old farm out on Trescott Road where Denis and Lucille had lived before returning to their original home on South Street. Luc Remillard had completely overcome the physical disabilities of his youth and now enjoyed robust good health. He and his lifepartner Ken Macdonald were consulting metapsychologists at the research institute headed by Paul’s older sister Catherine.

  And then there was Jack the Bodiless …

  The soupy ball of organic matter slowly elongated and rose, becoming a misty, turbulent column. The upper part engulfed the floating brain and the vapor swirled eerily, generating a faint, not unpleasant odor that Paul’s perfect memorecall recognized as the scent of a very young baby. Within moments the reincarnation intensified to the point that the ectoplasm assumed substantial human form. Beginning at the feet and continuing up the legs to the trunk and arms, it solidified into an accurate representation of living human flesh. All that was lacking were the scars, blemishes, and other irregularities of natural bodies. The head and face appeared last of all, and Jon Remillard finally stood before his father like a normal man. He was of medium height, having dark wavy hair, blue eyes with a disturbing luminosity, and the high-bridged nose and square jaw characteristic of most of his family. He struck a statuesque pose and smiled shyly.

  “This body design is something completely different from the usual run. Usually I only do a detailed job on my head and arms because clothing hides the rest. How do I look?”

  Paul kept his voice level. “Fine, son.”

  “Are the sex organs proportional? I modeled them on Marc’s, but he’s twenty-three cents taller than I am and outweighs me by more than twenty kilos.”

  “They’re appropriate for your build,” Paul said heartily. “They’re perfect. You’re perfect. You look like the goddam Apollo Belvedere without the fig leaf.”

  Jack began to dress. “Funny thing about me and Marc. I suppose he’s my closest male friend, besides being my older brother. Intellectually, we’re ideal colleagues. When we work together our minds sometimes slip into metaconcert with no effort at all, like a pair of musicians playing an intricate duet in precise tempo. But … he tried to talk me out of becoming a sexual entity. He thinks it’s a waste of time and vital energies. He called me a fool for wanting to experience that part of human nature.”

  “Sometimes,” Paul said briskly, “Marc is a paramount grandmasterly ass. Just you wait: One of these days he’ll fall head over heels and make a fucking idiot of himself.”

  Jack laughed as he slipped into his shirt and installed the cuff links and studs. “I sincerely hope so. But his celibate mindset left me with a nice personal problem. Up until now, the bodies I’ve fashioned for myself have been little more than hollow shells activated by my creativity and PK. Their rudimentary internal organs merely imitated natural function to enhance the overall realistic aspect. I never bothered with things such as extracephalic endocrine glands at all.”

  “I didn’t know.” Paul sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Jack began to put on his stockings and garters. “This particular body took me quite a while to design. It’s still far from being a faithful replica of the real thing, but it does have a fairly complete set of sensory equipment, nerves, and blood vessels. The male organs are as perfectly constructed as I could manage to make them and the gonads produce the appropriate hormones. I got most of the function data I needed from reference materials—including Denis’s book on operant sexuality. But I still have to fine-tune the imaginative programs for male erotic stimuli response. And for that I need help.”

  “Uh—would you say that your brain structures and sensory network are typically human?”

  “Reasonably so.”

  “I asked because normal human sex is largely mental. The data you seem to require are concerned with integrating the ancient limbic system of your brain—the part responsible for the sex drive and emotion—with the more highly evolved neocortex that
thinks and exercises imagination. My redactive metability’s not in the same class as Marc’s or your Uncle Severin’s, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t made my needs clear, Papa. Actually, the integration process you mentioned is already well established in me. So are the hormonal patterns, the mechanisms for erection and ejaculation, and the pleasure pathways. But I’m … still lacking in libidinous spontaneity. What I need help with are the more subtle aspects of eroticism in both the male and female. My new body reacts to physical stimulation, but not to imaginative images or fantasies. I’m still incompletely human.”

  Paul frowned to cover his apprehension. Surely this creature didn’t expect him to—

  “I’d like my first act of intercourse with my wife to be as transcendent as possible for both of us. As Uncle Rogi’s was, with Elaine Donovan. When he told me about their experience, I knew I’d somehow have to find a way to emulate it with my own lover.”

  Paul’s silvery brows shot up. “Rogi? Transcendent? Well, I’ll be damned! The old roué never compared notes with me.”

  “Rogi also told me that he fell in love at first sight,” Jack added quietly. “And he’s never stopped loving Elaine, even though he’s tried to put her out of his mind. My own experience with Diamond was nearly instantaneous, too—except that the initial attraction was cerebral in nature, an immediate apprehension of spiritual affinity. Rogi says that his falling in love with Elaine Donovan was irrational. That seems to be a common phenomenon. But I understand that other natural human beings such as Grandpère Denis have experienced intellectual love first, then achieved mutual sexual passion later.”

  “It can work that way. I wouldn’t know from personal experience.”

  “Would it be tasteless or impertinent of me to ask how you and Mama fell in love?”

  Paul stared straight ahead. “As a young man I was rather inhibited sexually. Much like Marc—although I had an occasional unsatisfying adolescent affair, while he seems to have kept himself pure for science.”

  Jack grinned.