Rogi ventured an awkward attempt at heartiness. “So the Family Ghost put the arm on you two kids to collaborate in the memoirs, eh?”
Hagen Remillard’s reply was chill and formal, and every aspect of his mind was inviolably shielded. “We were bespoken by a Lylmik wearing the usual disembodied head manifestation. He ordered us to come here and talk to you about certain events that took place during our exile in the Pliocene Epoch.”
“That … should be mighty interesting.” Rogi’s grin was wary.
“You know that our entire group was debriefed by the Human Polity Science Directorate when we first came through the time-gate.” Hagen did not meet the old bookseller’s eyes. “At that time we were instructed not to publicize details of our Pliocene experiences, and we complied scrupulously. Even now, very few people know that the two of us were among the returnees.”
“It was a relief, having an official excuse to keep quiet about our identities,” Cloud said. “We knew that if the public were spared the more gaudy details of our prehistoric adventures, there would be less likelihood of our lives becoming a media circus. In most of the Milieu, our group was just a nine days’ wonder. You know: Time-Travelers Return! Whoop-dee-doo … then on to the next bit of fast-breaking news. My husband, Kuhal, had a harder time of it, but at least he’s humanoid and so he adapted. We’ve been kept busy doing certain work connected with our conditional Unification and we’ve managed to live more or less in peace—until now.”
Hagen said, “The entity who countermanded the Directorate’s gag order told us that he was Atoning Unifex, the head of the Milieu’s Supervisory Body. Cloud and I were properly overawed at first. But as the Lylmik spoke to us we both experienced a shocking sense of déjà vu. After Unifex vanished we were confused—no, we were terrified!—and we wondered if we had experienced some shared delusion, a waking nightmare. Not long afterward, the Lylmik’s orders to us were reconfirmed by the First Magnate of the Human Polity and also by the Intendant General of Earth. Both women took some pains to tell us what an extraordinary communication we’d been honored with.” The young man’s face was sardonic. “That was a considerable understatement.”
“We agreed to come here and talk to you only after it became evident that we would be coerced if we refused,” Cloud added. Her voice was low-pitched, but warm and without rancor. “We’ve had quite enough of that already in our lives.”
“Did you recognize Unifex, then?” Rogi asked softly. “Do you know who he really is?”
“I knew almost immediately,” said Cloud. “I was always closer to him than my brother. The realization was … shattering. Hagen didn’t want to believe it.”
“Unifex is Marc Remillard,” Rogi said. “Your father.”
“Damn him!” Hagen exploded to his feet and began striding about the lanai like a caged catamount. “We were so relieved when the time-gate closed after us and the Milieu authorities obliterated the site! Cloud and I and all the rest of us thought we were finally free. Papa was trapped six million years in the past along with that madman Aiken Drum, and he could never hurt us again.”
“He never meant to be cruel,” Cloud murmured.
Hagen rounded on her. “He never thought of us as thinking, feeling human beings at all. We were nothing but subjects in his grand experiment.” He turned to Rogi and Malama. “Do you know what his gang of decrepit Rebel survivors called him behind his back? Abaddon—the Angel of the Abyss! At the end almost all of them repudiated him and his lunatic plan for Mental Man.”
“Papa gave it up, too,” Cloud insisted. “Or he would never have sent us back through the time-gate.”
Hagen’s rage seemed suddenly extinguished, leaving hopelessness. He slumped back into his chair. “Now we discover that our father won out after all. Not only did he miraculously survive for six million years, but somehow he also managed to transmute himself into the Overlord of the Galactic Milieu! God help us and our children.” He lifted hate-filled eyes to Rogi and Malama. “God help all of you.”
“Unifex atoned,” the Hawaiian woman said serenely. “During all those endless years he tried to make restitution for his crimes. He performed his penance not only in this galaxy but in the other one—where the Tanu and Firvulag people came from. I know almost nothing about his Pliocene activities and his later accomplishments in Duat, but everything that he’s done for the races of the Milky Way has been for the good. He founded the Milieu and guided it every step of the way. Thanks to him there are six coadunate racial Minds secure in Unity—and thousands more nearly ready to join the galactic confederation.”
“Too bad he didn’t do a better job shepherding his old home planet,” Hagen said bitterly, “preventing natural disasters, plagues, famines, wars—to say nothing of the Metapsychic Rebellion. His Lylmik self just stood idly by while his earlier self nearly destroyed galactic civilization.”
Malama only smiled. “The greatest spatiotemporal nodalities are immutable and the past, present, and future form a seamless whole. It is impossible to change history. Unifex acted as he must act—and yet his actions were and are freely done. Our own actions are free as well, contributing to and formulating the mystery of the Great Reality.”
Hagen gave a scornful laugh. “And ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world’?”
“Perhaps,” Malama said.
They sat in silence for several minutes. Then Hagen spoke again. “Something’s just occurred to me. The Lylmik race is the closest thing to Mental Man that our galaxy has produced, but it’s decadent and headed for extinction. What do you want to bet that Papa tried to modify Lylmik evolution just as he wanted to modify ours—and failed!”
Rogi shrugged. “Nobody knows a damn thing about Lylmik history.”
“Maybe,” the young man continued slowly, “Papa plans to return to his original scheme now that he’s six million years wiser after the fact … and he has his original experimental subjects back in hand.”
“Don’t talk like a fool,” Cloud cried out to her brother. “The Galactic Concilium would never permit the Mental Man project to be revived—not even by the arch-Lylmik himself.”
“Would you bet your life on it?” Hagen shot back at her. “Again?”
“I can think of one sure way you two can help prevent it,” Rogi said suddenly, “in the unlikely event that Hagen’s right.”
“How?” the brother and sister demanded.
“Tell me all you know about Marc’s scheme, and I’ll publish it in the fourth volume of my memoirs. The full story of Mental Man has never come out. Most of the details of the plan were suppressed by the Galactic Concilium—supposedly to preserve the tranquillity and good order of the Milieu.”
“You were on the brink of the Metapsychic Rebellion then, weren’t you?” Cloud asked.
“Right. Officially, the Rebellion was fought to liberate humanity from the Milieu and its Unity. But the main reason Marc decided to declare war was because he was so pissed off at having his great dream condemned. He caused a monumental uproar when the Mental Man project was cancelled, charging that the exotic magnates and their loyalist human confederates were conspiring to deprive our race of a great genetic breakthrough. He said that the Milieu was afraid humanity would become mentally superior to all the rest of creation, and the only solution was breaking away, as the Rebel faction had advocated for so long. A lot of normals believed that the Mental Man project would insure that all their children would grow up to be metapsychic operants. But Marc and his people never did explain to the general public exactly how this miracle was going to be accomplished.”
“He didn’t dare,” Hagen muttered. “They would have lynched him.”
Cloud said, “It was years before Hagen and I finally discovered what Papa had planned. When our mother found out the truth … well, you know what happened.”
“No, I don’t,” Rogi said. “Not really. Tell me! Help me tell the story to the whole Galactic Milieu. That’s got to be the reason why you two were
sent here to talk to me. I don’t understand why Unifex doesn’t give me the information himself, but he must have his reasons.”
“It was his worst sin,” Malama Johnson stated in her calm voice. “Worse than leading the Rebellion into violent conflict and causing the deaths of all those people. Deep in his heart, Marc thought the war against the Galactic Milieu and its Unity was justified, as his followers did. But the Mental Man project was quite different. He knew it was wrong, and yet he couldn’t resist the awful elegance of the concept—the opportunity to personally engineer a great leap forward in human mental and physical evolution.”
The three others stared at her wordlessly.
“Don’t you see, dear grandchildren?” Malama spread her hands, embracing all their minds in huna healing. “Unifex is too ashamed to talk about it. Even now.”
1
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
I FLEW HOME TO NEW ENGLAND ON AUTO-VEE THE NEXT DAY, sleeping most of the way with my cat curled up beside me on the rear banquette. Oddly enough, I didn’t have bad dreams after the interview with Marc’s son and daughter, for which I suppose I can thank Malama Johnson. God knows, I would never be able to think of Marc—or the Family Ghost—in the same way again after the horrors that poor Cloud and Hagen disclosed to me back on Kauai.
I woke up, feeling fairly decent, as the egg announced that we were nearly home and demanded further navigational instructions. We traced a leisurely holding pattern 1200 meters above Hanover, New Hampshire. It was a lovely morning and the old college town by the Connecticut River was at its most charming, spread out below like a patchwork quilt of bright colors thanks to the autumn foliage.
I discovered that I was ravenously hungry. Half a dozen congenial campus eateries lay within strolling distance of my apartment, and I had opened my mouth to give the command to descend—when suddenly a completely different notion on where to break my fast occurred to me.
Sheer serendipity.
Right.
I programmed the aircraft for Vee-flight to Bretton Woods, and a few minutes later we’d whizzed 90 kilometers northeast and descended into the egg-park area of the old White Mountain Resort Hotel. It crouched at the foot of Mount Washington, a gargantuan white wooden confection with bright red roofs on its gabled wings and quaint towers. As the rhocraft landed, I announced myself over the RF com and confirmed that the establishment would be delighted to accommodate Citizen Remillard for breakfast.
I opaqued the egg’s dome for decency’s sake, used the facilities, freshened up with a Beard-Wipe, combed my hair, and donned my old corduroy jacket. Then I opened a pouch of cat food for Marcel and thrust him into his carrier-cage. He bespoke telepathic indignation as he realized I was about to go off and leave him behind.
“Sorry, old boy. No companion animals allowed in the hotel dining room. Old Yankee custom.”
Marcel gave a bitter hiss of betrayal as I exited the rhocraft. Silly brute. When were the goddam cats going to admit that the raison d’être of the human race was not humble service to felinity?
I came through the gardens, where chrysanthemums and dahlias and winter pansies still bloomed, and ambled into the hotel’s main entrance, giving my nostalgia free rein as I sopped up the familiar Edwardian ambiance. I hadn’t been here in thirty years, but the old place, beautifully restored, subtly tricked out now with high-tech innovations to allow year-round operation and adapted to accommodate other races besides humankind, looked almost exactly as I remembered it. The lobby was crowded with tourists, both human and exotic, many of them preparing to ascend Mount Washington via the antique cog railway.
I went out on the veranda, where there was a gorgeous view of the Presidential Range, not yet touched by snow. The lower slopes were a blazing mosaic of dark evergreens and gold-and-scarlet sugar maples.
Memories overwhelmed me like a psychic avalanche. The wedding of Jack and Dorothée had been held here in 2078, and I’d been the ring-bearer and killed a man for the second time in my life. And in 2082, the last time I had stood on the mountain, my nephew Denis had been with me.
Denis. And the other.
But I dared not think of that yet. So I went in and had a fine breakfast, then returned to my egg, where Marcel had retaliated against my perfidy in the time-honored catty fashion. I didn’t even bother to chide him, only turned on the aircraft’s environmental deodorizer full-blast and flew home. It was time to begin writing again, with or without the Family Ghost’s help.
It was more than happenstance that brought me back to the White Mountain Hotel.
In my younger days, before opening the bookshop, I worked at the place as a convention manager. My nephew Denis, who adopted me as his father figure when my twin brother Don let him down, first visited the hotel in 1974 when he was seven years old. We rode the smoke-belching cog train to the summit of Mount Washington together, and it was there that the boy and I first met Elaine Donovan and made the joyous discovery that there were other people on Earth with operant higher mindpowers besides ourselves.
Fifteen years later, as I attended mass in the Catholic chapel in nearby Bretton Woods, I heard my wretched brother’s telepathic death-scream. Even worse, I experienced Don’s last burst of furious hatred for me—and also, mysteriously, for himself. At his funeral I received disquieting news from Denis, who was then a professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover and one of the most famous metapsychic researchers in the country. My nephew blamed himself for not preventing his father’s death. Denis also told me that Don had been murdered, and that I myself was in deadly danger. He urged me to come live near him—so that he could protect me and also help me to attain my full metapotential.
I didn’t want to leave the White Mountain Hotel. I had a job that I was good at and thoroughly enjoyed, and nobody in the place knew I was a metapsychic operant—which suited me just dandy. In the end, however, Denis did convince me to join him. I moved to Hanover and became an antiquarian bookseller, sole proprietor of the shop called The Eloquent Page; but from then on the relationship between Denis and me was more ambiguous and troubling.
I loved my foster son dearly. But deep in my heart I was afraid of him and his tremendous mindpowers—as I was also afraid of my own metafunctions. The fear was entirely irrational, rooted deep in my unconscious, and I never have managed to shake free of it.
Like many geniuses, Denis Remillard was a man of unexceptional appearance. He was fair and slightly built, with a manner that seemed gentle and self-effacing—unless you happened to look directly into his electric blue eyes and feel the strength of the coercive power lurking there. Whereupon you might be excused for thinking that your skeleton had suddenly liquefied and seeped out through your paralyzed toes.
Denis’s intellectual achievements were even more prodigious than his metapsychic talents. His research earned him a Nobel Prize in psychiatric medicine, and his books and monographs are classics, still highly respected thirty years after his death. As is Denis himself.
The 2013 Congress on Metapsychology was held at the White Mountain Hotel at his instigation, and its fateful climax was largely his doing. Prominent metas came to New Hampshire from all over the world for what was supposed to be their last annual convocation. They were a beleaguered minority in those early days of the twenty-first century, weary of being assailed and misunderstood by hostile normals, discouraged by the apparent inability of our race to live together in peace and fellowship, but still hopeful that they might somehow be able to use their higher mindpowers for the good of all humanity.
On the last night of the Congress, the operants were scheduled to dine at the spectacular Summit Chalet atop Mount Washington … and there they were also supposed to die. Other historians in addition to myself have told how the operant madman Kieran O’Connor conspired with Denis’s younger brother Victor to murder the Congress delegates. The failure of the plot has been ascribed by some people to fortuitous coincidence—by others to the aggressive use of metaconcerted mindpower by n
umbers of the delegates under attack.
In these memoirs, I have told what actually happened. Some of the besieged operants did use their mindpowers as weapons. But then, rallied by Denis, they resisted the temptation to strike back mentally at their enemies. It was Denis who integrated their minds—and the minds of countless other human beings of good will, both operant and nonoperant—into a benevolent mental alliance that extended worldwide. That unique, loving metaconcert, foreshadowing the greater one forged by Jack and Dorothée in 2083, lasted only for a few moments. But it was sufficient.
The planet Earth had shown the watching Milieu that its immature, quarrelsome Mind was worth saving. The sky above Mount Washington—and above every major population center in the world—filled with exotic starships, and the human race was inducted willy-nilly into a galactic confederation.
I also had a hand in it, and so did a certain Lylmik. But the Great Intervention would never have happened without my nephew Denis.
Et maintenant la leçon touche à sa fin.
2
HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH
2 FEBRUARY 2078
THE RUDALM-COMPOSER MULMUL ZIML LANDED ITS RHOCRAFT across the street from The Eloquent Page bookshop, climbed out, and stood in the snow for some time absorbing the local telluric aura and giggling in unashamed rapture at the heady stimulation of it all. Earth in winter! The veritable heart-nest of the Remillard clan! It was inimitable. Sublime. Very nearly inenarrable!
The hermaphroditic exotic had feared that Rogatien Remillard’s place of work and residence would have been tarted up and modernized by now, sixty-five years after the Great Intervention. But no—there the exquisite old three-storey building stood, Federal-style clapboards gleaming in the thickening snowfall, windows cheerily alight (the upper ones had green shutters), and sloping metal roof softly blanketed. So evocative. So human! One might readily compose a worthy rudalm on this enchanting scene alone. (But, alas, if one expected to sell the work to the lucrative Human Polity market as well as to one’s own, more aesthetically sensitive Gi race, the leitmotif required more interspecies appeal and pizzazz.)