The metaconcert slowly dissolved into eight sparks that formed themselves into a tight constellation and slipped away into ambiguity. I waited.
After a time, still uncomprehending, I left that place.
Someone lifted the heavy CE helmet from my head. I was sitting on the warm cellar floor. I looked up and saw Paul’s gray-bearded face, as pale and expressionless as a statue. A line of tiny wounds from the electrodes ran across his brow, one of them oozing a trickle of blood. His hair was damp and plastered to his head and his Nomex coverall was halfway unzipped, showing the ordinary apparel beneath. He helped me to my feet without a word.
Dorothée was sitting on the leather couch, her helmet beside her and her head in her hands. Severin held his sister Catherine in his arms. She was sobbing quietly. Adrien, Philip, and Maurice, their faces stained with blood, sweat, and tears, were helping one another out of the silver suits. There was no sign of Jack. I found out later that the disembodied brain was engaged in a frantic, intensive search—first of the farmhouse locale and then of the region within a five-klom radius of it. Jack’s hunt, like others conducted later by the Dynasty, was fruitless.
Denis—or whoever the integrated personality was—had vanished.
I heard footsteps coming down the cellar stairs and a moment later Lucille entered. She drew in her breath sharply. Her dark eyes darted about the improvised enclosure, taking in the bizarre CE helmets and the protective garb.
“What are you doing?” she exclaimed. “What’s this equipment for?”
Nobody replied.
She whirled about, confronting me. Her voice rose. “Where’s Denis?”
I could only shake my head numbly.
“What have you done?” she demanded in a terrible whisper. “What have you done to him?”
It was a question none of us could bring ourselves to answer.
Jack’s paramount creativity produced a simulacrum of a body, dead in bed of a massive cerebral hemorrhage and “discovered” too late by the grieving family on Christmas morning. There would be no miraculous regeneration of the revered Nobel Laureate, the Grand Old Man of Metapsychology. Severin signed the death certificate and the other formalities were smoothed by the First Magnate. After a simple requiem, the alleged ashes were interred in the old cemetery in Berlin, New Hampshire, where Denis Remillard’s mother and father and eight of his nine siblings lay.
A public memorial service was held at Dartmouth’s Rollins Chapel, rather sparsely attended because of the Christmas-New Year’s vacation. Later, tributes to the great man poured in from every corner of the Milieu and were featured in all of the galactic media, human and exotic. The Remillard Foundation presented an impressive endowment to Dartmouth College in Denis’s name, and a new data bank in the School of Metapsychology was named in his honor. His last book, An Ontological Interpretation of Unity, was published posthumously and proved to be a potent weapon for Milieu-loyalist academics in their continuing skirmishes with Rebel theoreticians.
The Dynasty never knew for certain what the new entity symbolized by the green star did during the three and one half years that it continued to live. I myself found out the truth (which I will recount in due time) in the autumn of 2082, on Mount Washington, when my foster son at last found the peace of death.
His genuine ashes are buried near the mountain’s summit, in a place that only Lucille and I know.
17
SECTOR 15: STAR 15-000-001 [TELONIS]
PLANET 1 [CONCILIUM ORB]
GALACTIC YEAR: LA-PRIME 1-391-230
[18 JUNE 2079]
AFTER THE MEETING HAD ADJOURNED, JACK REMILLARD DECIDED to make a brief detour on his way back to the apartment, accompanying Anne to Rive Gauche.
“Your enclave has a better selection of cut flowers than Rialto,” he explained to her as they boarded the glowing, inertialess capsule in the tube station serving the Directorate chambers. “And I’d like to pick up some real champagne at that little wineshop across the square from your place. Tonight’s a special occasion for Diamond and me. Our first wedding anniversary.”
Anne’s remote blue eyes lit up and a hint of her lost beauty returned to her gaunt features. She was wearing a carnelian-red pantsuit and a V-necked oyster blouse with a clerical rabat. “That’s right! Forgive me, dear, but I’d completely forgotten. Congratulations—and please convey my blessing to Dorothea. I don’t suppose I could tempt you two with an invitation to dinner at the Closerie tomorrow?”
The Jesuit priest’s fair hair was still unflatteringly short as a consequence of her long stay in the regeneration-tank, and she moved with care because her regrown legs had yet to regain their full function; but there was nothing whatsoever wrong with Anne Remillard’s intellect. As the last order of business at the meeting of the Panpolity Directorate for Unity they had just left, Jack had resigned as pro tem chairman and applauded as his aunt was unanimously reelected to the position.
“Thank you for the invitation,” he said, “but we’re heading back to Caledonia early tomorrow. Diamond has her dirigent duties to catch up on, and I’d like to finish our new house there before winter—get the landscaping done just right and install my lab. There’s also a problem with Ian Macdonald I have to look into.”
The door of the capsule whisked open and both of them alighted into a glassy, brilliantly lit tunnel. A discrepant fired-enamel sign framed in wrought iron identified the stop as RIVE GAUCHE ENCLAVE. They rode up a moving ramp into what might have been a quaint street in Paris’s 5e Arrondissement. The tall woman moved slowly. Her male companion, much younger and dressed in slacks and a hand-knit Caledonian sweater, took her arm unobtrusively from time to time when the pavement became irregular or the curbstones steep.
“Is your wife’s father still giving her a hard time with his Rebel politics?” Anne inquired.
“The situation’s a bit stickier than that. You may recall that Ian’s an Intendant Associate for a rather thinly populated subcontinent. About three weeks ago, special agents for the Office of the Dirigent of Caledonia found a well-hidden factory for making bootleg CE helmets tucked away in the mountains near Ian’s airfarm. The metacreative brainboards for the hats had been purchased quite openly from CEREM—allegedly for use in some autoerotic recreational design. But the helmets found in the police raid were weapons: mental lasers. There’s some suspicion that Ian may have colluded in building and supplying the factory.”
Anne said, “Damn.”
“My sentiments, too.”
“I’ve heard about the black market in creative CE. But why in the world would your father-in-law want to get mixed up in something like that?”
“Possibly for money, possibly for other reasons. His farm is going through a rocky patch. He overextended himself by buying out a couple of his neighbors and then had a disappointing harvest.”
“How solid is the evidence against him?”
“Not very. When the ODC agents and the local police busted the hat factory, the six operant technicians who were running it committed suicide before they could be interrogated. Shocked the hell out of the naive Callie cops. The techs were all recent immigrants from Earth and Okanagon and Elysium without previous criminal records. So far, Ian’s link to the operation is a flimsy one: propinquity, and the fact that he was twice seen talking to the man who seemed to head up the operation. They were in a pub in Grampian Town, the closest settlement to Ian’s farm and the factory, but he maintains he was just having friendly chats with a constituent. The Planetary Magistratum has to be very circumspect in its investigation of Ian because he’s an IA. Thus far, it hasn’t come up with enough evidence to warrant bringing him before the Justiciar of the Caledonian Intendant Assembly. Diamond is worried sick, but she can’t ream her dad on the sly because of the parent-child inhibition. So she’s asked me to give it a try.”
Anne gave a ladylike grunt. “Don’t you dare touch it, my boy! Not with the proverbial barge pole.”
“Figured that out all by myself,??
? he retorted gloomily. “But I’ll have to do some sniffing around all the same. I’m not looking forward to it.”
They walked on for some time without speaking.
It was “evening” in Orb’s fanciful replica of the Left Bank of the Seine and the streetlamps had just been lighted. The people who lived in Rive Gauche, together with fair numbers of human, Poltroyan, and Gi tourists from other enclaves in the great artificial planetoid, strolled in the sweet-scented spring dusk beneath the chestnut trees. Little shops and boutiques, open late for business in a manner that was decidedly unGallic, beckoned to the passersby with seductive displays. The aromas of pastry, roasting coffee, and spicy charcuterie vied with those of blossom-laden shrubs and window boxes. Restaurants were beginning to fill with early patrons, human and exotic, relaxing now that the stress of the Concilium session was finally over.
Anne said, “Paul mentioned that you’d done a third intensive scan of Earth just before coming to Orb.”
“Yes, similar to the two I performed immediately after Denis’s disappearance. This time, I keyed my seekersense to the metapsychic ident of the merged personae and to the individual auric IDs. The job took me three horrendous weeks and I got nib de nib. Bupkis! Sweet eff ay! If he’s alive, the Denis/Fury entity somehow left Earth—probably within hours of the integration attempt.”
“Are you still considering the d-jump hypothesis?”
“I have to. Denis just vanished, Anne. The couch restraints were still fastened but he was gone without a trace. He didn’t simply go invisible. I could have detected that easily. Just as soon as the metaconcert broke up I searched the farmhouse and its immediate vicinity and found no sign of him. I couldn’t do an overall scan of Earth until a few hours later because my brain was too fatigued, but when I did carry it out the results were negative. The subsequent Magistratum investigation of starship passengers and crews exiting Earth within the limited window of opportunity was exhaustive. None of those people could have been Denis or Fury. We’re left with three possibilities: He’s dead and mysteriously annihilated, he’s alive and still on Earth but he’s changed his MP ident, or he escaped Earth in some unknown way. If he is alive, his physical disappearance from the farmhouse points to a d-jump—and if he did it once, he’ll probably be able to do it again.”
“So if Denis/Fury did achieve a long-distance metapsychic dimensional translation, he could be anywhere in the galaxy.”
“Or out of it. If he botched the upsilon-field maneuver, he could be dead in interstellar space, or trapped in the gray limbo, or even smeared inaccessibly and eternally among six sets of lattices and twenty-one dimensions.”
“Oh, God, not that,” the priest murmured.
“Psychophysicists don’t even agree that mental manipulation of the upsilon-field is a genuine phenomenon. A child was supposed to have done it on Engong in 2067, over a distance of less than two kilometers. That’s hardly verification for a teleport hop of X lightyears. The odds are that Denis died when the metaconcert hit him with the lethal redactive impulse, and his body was absorbed into the lattices through a sexternion.”
“Each morning, in my daily mass, I pray that Denis is safely dead. But I think you and Dorothea and Lucille and the Dynasty would have known if the metaconcert had extinguished a mentality of that caliber.”
“Or Uncle Rogi would have known. His stubborn belief that Denis is still alive is what really worries Paul. The other members of the Dynasty and Diamond are fairly comfortable with the alternative.”
“And what do you think, Jack?”
“If the entity did survive, we can’t know for certain whether it’s Denis or Fury or someone else altogether. Until the persona manifests itself—if it ever does—I think we must let the matter be. We’ve done all we can for now.”
Anne steered them to a florist shop in the rue du Chat-qui-Pêche where a Gi, having completed its purchase of a bunch of violets, was nibbling on them delicately and thinking about a second course of hemerocallis. Jack bought a large bouquet of old-fashioned Zéphirine Drouhin roses, round as muffins, bright cerise in color, and exuding a heady perfume. Then they went to an establishment called La Grappe, where Anne inspected the champagne offerings and advised him to go with the Dom Pérignon tête de cuvée. She ordered a case of ’63 Haut Brion to be sent to the cellar of her own flat on the following day, reserving a single bottle to take home with her now.
When Jack commented on the purchase, she said, “I plan to stay in Orb at least through the next Concilium session. I’ve a lot of catching up to do after my long hiatus, and the Directorate is going to need a fresh approach to its Unity education campaign among the normals.”
“I’m afraid I let that aspect of the Directorate mission slide a bit during my late, unlamented tenure,” Jack said apologetically. They left the wineshop and lingered for a moment in a little alcove next door, where a huge wisteria vine that had nearly engulfed a plane tree was in extravagant bloom. “Most of the exotic Directors were more interested in responding to the Rebel attack on the Sorbonne findings—the evidence of spontaneous coadunation—than in the rest of the agenda.”
Anne made a moue of distaste. “That was nothing but a tempest in a theoretician’s teapot! We’ve got to pay attention to the non-operant populace’s growing fear of what they believe are dehumanizing aspects of Unity.”
“What Marc hinted at in his second address to the Concilium Committee on Interpolitical Affairs?”
“Exactly. He gave us a useful clue to upcoming Rebel strategy there. We tend to forget that normal humans outnumber metas by nearly fifteen to one. If the Rebel leaders really intend to bring about humanity’s secession from the Milieu, they’ll need wholehearted support from nonoperants. Which means that we’ve got our work cut out for us, convincing normals that Unity is nothing to be afraid of … while Rebellion is.”
They began strolling back toward the tube station.
“Do you actually intend to accuse the Rebels of plotting violence?” Anne’s question betrayed her skepticism.
“That bootleg CE factory found on Caledonia worries me more than I like to admit.” Jack said somberly. “Operant mobsters from the Russian and Japanese worlds and a few other planets with organized crime have used mind-boosters in starship piracy and other spectacular capers. But the Scottish planet has no mafia in its cultural tradition, and no big-time operant outlaws have ever flourished there. Diamond is afraid that the mental lasers might have been intended for a militant faction of the Rebel movement. But there’s never been any proof of such activity anywhere in the Polity … yet.”
“But you think a Rebel connection is plausible?”
“Ian’s politics are no secret. And there have been rumors of such things before, on Okanagon and Satsuma and even on the Old World. If it’s true it will be very hard to prove. The exotic races have such a guileless view of the Rebel movement! And of course they control the Galactic Magistratum. So far as I know, there has never been any investigation of potential Rebel militancy. Loyalist humans have hesitated to press the issue because it would increase the polarization of our Polity, and things are bad enough as it is. The early years of the Simbiari Proctorship when the rights of free speech and assembly were temporarily abrogated haven’t been forgotten. Humanity won’t sit still for a militant-Rebel witch hunt unless the evidence is overwhelming.”
Anne agreed.
They had come to the station entrance. Jack said, “I’m afraid things will just have to get worse before they can get better.”
Anne’s smile was melancholy. “It seems to me I’ve heard that tag line before, and fairly recently at that.” She kissed him lightly. “Blessings, Jack. Let me know what you find out about Ian.”
He said goodbye and went off into the underground. Anne stood for a moment watching, then sighed. Her still-healing body ached in spite of the continual low-level self-redaction generated automatically by her mind. If she had been on Earth, she would have suspected that a change in the weather
was forthcoming; but no rain was programmed for Rive Gauche until the day after tomorrow.
Curious, she said to herself.
She deliberately banished the pain, then went off to see what was on the menu at La Closerie des Lilas. She had decided that she did not care to dine alone in her apartment tonight after all.
Dorothea Macdonald and David Somerled MacGregor had departed from the final Conference of Dirigents separately, but by chance they arrived in Ponte di Rialto at the same time. It was only natural that she should invite him to share her gondola. A steam-powered vaporetto water-bus would have taken them more quickly to their apartments further up the Grand Canal, but it had been a long day, and both of them welcomed the chance to wind down in companionable silence riding in the slower boat. It was powered in the traditional way by a nonoperant human gondoliere who rowed it along with a single long oar.
The simulated night was full of fog and sea-smells. The lamps and lighted windows of the palaces and other monumental constructions along the Grand Canal—almost all containing residential flats in Orb’s Venetian re-creation—made blurred patterns of radiance on either bank. The canopy of their gondola was open on three sides, and after they had traveled only a short way the gold lamé of Dorothea’s hooded jumpsuit was dotted with microscopic beads of moisture and Davy’s tweed jacket smelled of soggy sheep. Their stolid boatman wore an enviroponcho and hummed along obliviously to pop music, inaudible to the passengers, playing on his auditory implant.
“I enjoy nights like this,” Dorothea said. “The fog reminds me of my childhood in Edinburgh, when the haar would steal in from the sea and the house seemed wrapped in cotton wool. Jack and I chose to live in Rialto because it was completely different from Caledonia or Hawaii or New Hampshire in America.”
“Aye, it’s beautiful,” the Dirigent of Earth agreed. “Not twee or Disneyesque like some of the other Orb enclaves. That was why my Maggie liked it—and why I’ve kept our flat here, even though she was able to live in it only a few brief hours before she was killed. She adored the real Venice, y’see, where we’d honeymooned. But I’ve found that I can’t go back there now. It’s turned into an immersive pageant for holidaymakers, all tarted up and sterile. This place makes no bones about being artificial, but to me it has more of the original Venetian ambiance than the real thing. Here I can remember Maggie and our happiness together, and when I sleep I can dream of her peacefully, without vengeful nightmares poisoning me the way they do back in Concord, among your toplofty in-laws.”