“I first saw Teresa on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2036. I was twenty-two, a wet-behind-the-ears politician with an excessive metaquotient and a fine reputation for running rings around the Simbiari Proctors. She was only nineteen, and that night she made her debut singing the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor. At the end of the opera the audience got to its feet and screamed and stomped and applauded for nearly fifteen minutes. A new superstar was born—but she was more than that to me. When I first heard that extraordinary voice of hers I was … overcome.”
“Do you mean libidinously stimulated?”
Paul winced. “Let’s just say that it took all my self-redaction to keep my poor body under control. It was my first experience with an aphrodisiac, and the magic was all in Teresa’s voice. Denis claimed it had something to do with her incredible creativity. I don’t know about that. I did know that I’d die if I couldn’t have her.”
“And so you were married.”
“Five months later, right there on the stage at the Met. The next four years were the happiest of my life. We had Marc, Marie, and Madeleine, three magnificent operant children. Then Luc was born with terrible physical deformities, and there were other babies with lethal genetic traits that were stillborn or aborted. It was a terrible time for Teresa. She lost her voice and her entire personality changed. Tests showed that your mother’s germ plasm had mutated—probably sometime just before the birth of our third normal child in 2040.”
“But Madeleine wasn’t normal.”
“There was nothing wrong with her genes,” Paul said tersely.
Jack now stared at his pair of antique lace-up shoes and spats in momentary bafflement.
“Better put the pants on first,” Paul suggested. “The spats go over the shoes and button up the sides, with the strap underneath.”
Neither of them spoke for some time. Then:
“Papa … why did you and Mama stop loving each other? Was it because she tricked you into conceiving me, and made you a party to a crime against the Proctorship Repro Statutes?”
“Not really. I forgave her that. We had drifted apart long before because … she no longer aroused me. Our falling in love was irrational and so was the falling out. Perhaps what we had together wasn’t real love at all—at least, not for me. Perhaps what I felt for her was only sexual magnetism. A kind of enchantment. I never tried to analyze it deliberately at the time. One doesn’t do that …”
“But you’ve thought about it since.”
“Oh, yes. At this late date I’ve come to believe that true love has to be more clear-sighted and unselfish than I ever was with your mother. If I’d really loved her I would have been more accepting when she changed. I would have tried to evolve myself. Instead, when Teresa’s erotic appeal faded there seemed to be nothing I could do to save the marriage. I found myself attracted to other women. Never to a singer, though! There were all kinds of new aphrodisiacs: a lovely face, perfect breasts, an alluring body, eyes with a provocative light in them, tantalizing movements, the promise of sexual excitement that certain women can’t help projecting … My God, Jack! There must be a thousand reasons why a man is attracted to one woman and not another. Each of my women has been appealing in a different way.”
“Your women … but you didn’t love any of them.”
“I enjoyed having sex with them.”
“And your enjoyment wasn’t diminished by the knowledge that you were betraying your wife and the religious values you’d been brought up in?”
Paul exploded. “Goddammit, Jack! Don’t you judge me!”
“Papa, I’m not. I’m only trying to understand. But it seems so illogical.”
The First Magnate’s anger drained away, leaving only distaste and a terrible pity for this innocent, cerebral being, this prochronistic Adam just a few steps below the sexless Lylmik on evolution’s ladder, still determined to sample the forbidden fruit.
And who, Paul asked himself, am I supposed to represent in this weird little biblical scenario?
He stared at the floor. “Sex is often illogical, just as your brother Marc maintains. It’s part of our animal nature, but it’s also evolved into more than that. We don’t just do it in order to reproduce. We do it for solace and the relief of nervous tension and fun and even for the hell of it. Sometimes sex is only mindless fucking. But it can also be sacramental.” He paused. “At least that’s what they say.”
“I’d like sex to be that way for Diamond and me. Perhaps not every time, because that would make it too solemn. But numinosity should definitely be a part of it. How does the old marriage prayer put it? ‘With my body I thee worship …’ ”
The First Magnate laughed without humor. He still had not met his son’s eyes. “The wedding vows also say that the bride and groom are supposed to forsake all others until death parts them. But that’s an ideal some people can never five up to. I couldn’t, after I stopped loving your mother. The basis for erotic attraction is obscure and capricious and it can vary over the years. I know I’ve hurt a lot of my sexual partners by rejecting them—particularly Teresa. But I didn’t act callously, in cold blood. I’m truly sorry that your mother’s heart was broken. But I couldn’t stay with her when our love ended, and I don’t consider myself culpable in the matter of her death.”
“I don’t either, Papa.”
“You know my reputation as a galaxy-class womanizer. I’m not proud of it. Objectively I realize that promiscuity and an unwillingness to commit to a stable sexual union are psychological flaws. But it’s the way I am. I need sex and I’ll have it and I’ll do my best not to be deliberately cruel to my partners. And that’s that.”
Jack finished fastening his spats. “I think I know why most metapsychic operants are monogamous,” he said. “Opening one’s mind to a lover at the start of a relationship either strengthens the mutual attraction or destroys it rather quickly when incompatibilities become obvious.”
“In theory,” Paul said, “that’s true. But a marriage or a love affair can never be a linear system. They’re chaotic harmonies, like all of biological nature. Both lovers have to adapt continually to each other’s changing needs to keep the truth and beauty alive. But that’s not easy. Especially when there’s important work to do … and you must agree that my work is important.”
Jack said nothing. He had moved in front of the mirror to attack the tricky knotting of his silk cravat. Psychokinetic manipulation would have done the job in a trice, but like all well-bred operants, Jack felt that the casual use of that faculty while he was embodied would be déclassé.
Paul lifted his head and spoke calmly. “Can you understand me when I say that the sexual part of my life is completely irrelevant to what’s most meaningful to me—to my real passion?”
Jack nodded slowly. “Your true love is the Galactic Milieu, isn’t it. Not any human being. Not even yourself.”
“I’ve dedicated my life to the Milieu, and the consensus seems to be that I’ve been a good First Magnate. I’m damned proud of what I’ve accomplished. But …”
Jack waited.
Finally, his father said in a low voice, “But sometimes I wonder if I’m not the biggest fool in the galaxy. You see, Jack, I’ve never known the kind of sexual transcendence Uncle Rogi talked to you about. I’m the last person you should take as your role model and adviser. Find someone who knows what real love is.”
“I have.” Jack’s voice was gentle. “But I want to have a genuine sexual relationship in my love life, too. You could make it possible.”
“How?” Paul asked warily.
“I need your memories of sexual arousal. With them I’d have a truly human male paradigm. A foundation to build my own sex life on.”
The First Magnate was stunned to speechlessness. Share the most intimate aspects of his sexual fantasies with this grotesque mutant?
But he’s human, Paul told himself. Perhaps more human than I, because he has the capacity to love a woman without reservation.
/>
This creature.
This son of his.
Jack eyed Paul obliquely as he put on his waistcoat of silver brocade. “I know it’s asking a great deal. The sexual part of a parent’s life is an intensely private thing. Leviticus even says, ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father or mother.’ ”
Paul’s mind cried out: It’s not Old Testament morality or inhibition or squeamishness that makes me deny you God help me I begat you by accident without love I would have prevented your birth I was revolted to the depths of my being at what you became I failed you even when you conquered the mutation rejecting you avoiding you letting Denis and Lucille and Rogi and Marc raise you I know I owe you reparation but—
NoPapaNO I don’t need that I don’t want to defeat or humiliate you it would be all WRONG if what you gave me was only recompense for your guilt.
The First Magnate stood up. After a moment he regained his poise, but his face was ashen. Jack was entirely dressed now except for his formal suit coat. Paul took up the garment and held it so that Jack could slip his arms into it.
Paul said, “Can you show me a mental précis of exactly what you’d require?”
“I could try. But the problem is, I really don’t know what data I’m lacking. All my theoretical knowledge of erotic response is virtually meaningless without the mnemonic and imaginative framework that would enable me to personalize it. A normal human formulates his individual style of sexuality all throughout life, beginning in early childhood. I wasn’t able to do that. I have the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but no hope of putting them together without help from a generous, thoroughly experienced man. One that I respect and trust. One that I love.”
“Your Uncle Rogi …” Paul began.
“He’d tell me anything I asked. What he won’t do is lower his mindscreen of his own free will so that I can absorb the body of specialized data that I must have. And of course it would be unthinkable for me to invade him and steal his memories, even though I could do it without leaving a trace.”
“Your brothers …”
“Marc was willing to open that part of his mind to me—but he told me quite frankly that his libido is anomalous, and I believe him. Luc said he’d gladly volunteer if I thought Diamond would be happy with a homosexual husband.”
Jack inserted a tiny spray of white miniature roses and baby’s breath into his lapel, then reached into the flower box and held out another boutonniere to Paul. “Please, Papa—help me know what it is to be a sexual being.”
The First Magnate stared at the flowers, then at his son.
“If you can’t,” said Jack the Bodiless, smiling, “I’ll understand.”
“Give me that.” Paul took the small bunch of roses and poked it into his buttonhole. Then he surveyed the young bridegroom with a critical scowl and made a minute adjustment to Jack’s tie. “There. You look pretty damned good, if I do say so myself.”
“Shall we go?” Jack was calm. He picked up his top hat and gloves and began to move toward the door. In the shadowed room his aura was visible to Paul’s mind’s eye—a halo of gold and blue with twelve flamelike interior petals of star-white. It was more intense than any other vital-energy field the First Magnate had ever seen.
“Wait,” Paul said. Unaccountably, his eyes were stinging.
Jack turned. His father took a tentative step toward him, then enfolded him in a sudden, crushing embrace.
“All right, son,” he whispered. “Go for it. Your wedding gift.”
9
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
I HAD TWO GOOD REASONS TO BE CROCKED ON THE DAY OF THE wedding: I was scared out of my wits and at the same time dizzy with newfound hope.
Frightened because Hydra had attempted to do me in and would undoubtedly try again; giddy because Denis had saved me from the monster and there really seemed to be a chance that he wasn’t Fury after all.
Anne might have been wrong … or she might have been lying. A niggling notion had already prompted me to briefly consider the latter contingency during the course of her revelations back in February. I began to think about it a lot more seriously as I recuperated from the attack of the homicidal brook trout.
By Anne’s own admission, the only two members of the family without alibis on the night of the Hitchcock Hospital fire that nearly killed Baby Jack were Denis and herself. And she had admitted being tempted by Fury. I’m no psychologist, but it doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure out that Anne’s Athenetemptation might not have had an external source at all. She said she had identified with the goddess. What if her own submerged Fury persona had tried to seduce her “good” core personality, hoping to integrate the dissociated duo into a single, more efficient mind?
But why would an Anne/Fury order Hydra to kill its host body?
Ah, but she hadn’t died in the starship crash! She’d just been put on hold for a year or so, and eventually she’d emerge from the regen-tank as good as new. The accident might have served Fury’s evil purposes in a number of ways.
This was my reasoning: If the Dynasty—sans Anne—performed their exorcism of Denis and discovered that he was innocent, they’d be thrown back to square one, clueless except for my hysterical babbling. But if Anne were there on the scene and Denis was proved not to be Fury, her good core persona would surely tell the other Remillards that Fury therefore had to be part of her. And she’d demand that they nail it, whatever the cost to herself.
Anne’s crash could have been arranged in order to preserve Fury from this threat of detection. Fury might even have figured out some way to take over Anne completely before her healing was completed!
I could take scant comfort now in the fact that Anne was switch-off down in Concord, guarded day and night by the operant security personnel Paul had arranged for. If Fury did reside in her brain, it might not be sunk in the usual state of tank-induced oblivion. It might still be fully aware and able to use its farsenses or even other metafaculties, actively egging on its slave Hydra to perpetrate assorted nefarious schemes—including the engineering of my demise before I managed to blow the gaff.
As I lay in Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital, getting checked out after the drowning attempt, I knew that I would have to transmit to Jack and Dorothée not one improbable piece of unsavory intelligence but two—and to do it, I’d have to keep out of Hydra’s clutches at least until the day of the wedding ceremony, a week away. Marc certainly would have been able to protect me, but God only knew how he’d react to my assertion that either Anne or Denis was certainly Fury. Most likely, he’d just laugh. He was highly skeptical about my fish story (he also doubted that Anne’s crash on Okanagon had involved a Hydra), and too wrapped up in his own private affairs to humor a drunken old geezer afraid of bogeymen under the bed. That left me with only one other surefire refuge from Hydra.
When the doctors decided I would survive the dunking, I got Marc to put me on an express flight to Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. The egg-bus didn’t crash en route—although I expected it to, momentarily—and dear old Malama Johnson met me at Lehue Skyport as I’d requested. She asked me no questions but just took me home with her.
“Don’ worry, Rogue,” she said, hugging me. “I gonna spin a kahuna cocoon roun’ you, make you kapu to aihamu, akua mano, an’ da kine monsters so long as you heah. Nothin’ gonna off you kokole while I’m aroun’.”
Even top metapsychic researchers concede that certain kinds of ancient “magic” are mysteriously efficacious. Whatever—no Hydra came prowling while I stayed in Malama’s house. After an interval of peaceful tropical days punctuated with mango coolers and mai tais, we both flew back to the White Mountain Hotel in New Hampshire in time for the rehearsal on the eve of Dorothée and Jack’s nuptials.
When I was a young man it would have been inconceivable for a wedding party to have a 133-year-old ring-bearer or a roly-poly Hawaiian flower “girl” who was definitely of a certain age. Nowadays the roles might still be filled by childre
n, according to the old custom; but one is just as likely to see a superannuated relative like me, an amiable ex-spouse, a special friend—human or non—or even a beloved companion animal carrying rings and flowers.
Malama was serene and regal at the rehearsal in a green-and-white muumuu with antique shell leis. I had a bad case of the heebie-jeebies until she calmed me with her loving coercion, whereupon I acquited myself like a champ. When the practice session was over Malama said that she had scanned the hotel premises and detected no lurking fiends. She told me I was now on my own, kissed me aloha, and went off to party with Tom Spotted Owl, the President of Dartmouth College, and his wife Socorro Ortega.
I wanted to believe I was safe, but I couldn’t shake the realization that neither Marc nor Denis had managed to detect the presence of Hydra up at White Moose Lodge—which meant that the thing must be a crackerjack at mental disguise. It could be in the hotel, biding its time before taking another shot at me.
What to do? There was only one reasonable course of action. I went down to the hotel bar and got shitfaced. Then, enveloped in a comforting haze of Kentucky corn-squeezings, I shuffled off to my bed in the suite I shared with Marc and slept like the proverbial log.
Damn good thing, too, considering what was going to happen to me the next day.
When Marc and the others finished wreaking their wicked will on me in the bathroom of the groom’s suite, I was rendered sober enough to be freshly terrified; but on second thought, it seemed unlikely that Hydra would try to scrag me hereabouts, surrounded as I was by most of the mental stalwarts of the Remillard Dynasty, along with a mob of guests that included nearly a hundred Magnates of the Concilium and enough heavyweight grandmaster operants to stagger the Earth in its orbit. I still had my trusty flask tucked in my hip pocket, but I decided to hold off drinking until after the ceremony. Once I had cornered Ti-Jean and Dorothée and unburdened myself, Hydra’s motive for killing me would be negated and I’d have real cause for celebration. If the rumors were correct, Paul had laid on beaucoup cases of Taittinger Blanc de Blancs ’71 to toast the happy couple. A magnum of that would go a long way toward restoring my usual sunny disposish.