Then I saw the light.
Beyond the water tower was a small shed. The door was open, illuminating a figure standing there. It beckoned to me, called my name. It was an operant, lending me mental assistance.
Creative energy warmed me, redaction infused my muscles with fresh strength. Nobody coerced me, but I got up and began to move. PK helped pick up my leaden feet and lay them down. I groped and flopped across the tracks, scrambled on hands and knees up the ice-coated incline to the shack. Snow stung the unfrozen parts of my face like a spray of needles.
Someone dragged me over the threshold, closed the door, began stripping away my ice-stiffened outer clothing. I was aware of a small fusion-powered Mr. Heater unit, radiating blessed warmth. I saw racks of tools, a workbench, coils of hose hung on the wall, a lantern, a piece of machinery in one corner that might have been a water pump.
I sat on an old plass crate, feeling its rough surface beneath my painfully thawing fingers. My rescuer stood behind me, hands pressed to my icy face, curing the chilblains, speeding my congealed blood, pouring healing redaction into my moribund nervous system. The spasms of shivering ceased and I ached all over. Briefly, my body endured the painful recovery from frostbite. Then a plass cup touched my lips and I drank some of my own coffee and brandy between fits of hysterical giggling. I had nearly frozen to death, while the drink had remained hot inside its state-of-the-art Zojirushi vacuum bottle, forgotten in my daypack.
He squatted in front of me, smiling, prodding me here and there with his PK to be sure I had revived. Then he put my warmed clothing back on me, draping the jacket over my shoulders.
I said, “Merci, Denis mon fils.”
He said, “De rien, One’ Rogi.”
Time elapsed while my brain finished booting up. Then I asked Denis what the hell he was doing up here.
“Waiting for you,” he said, pulling up another crate and sitting down. “You wasted too much time checking out the twin sluices on the Ammonoosuc, but there was no way I could coerce you to get a move on. If you’d reached the cog track just half an hour earlier you’d have missed the ice-fog.”
“Was that your car in the Base Station lot?”
“No,” Denis said, veiling his eyes. “I came another way.”
“From Pinkham Notch? Up Tuckerman Ravine? Where are you stay—” The banal words dwindled to a choked mumble. I finally realized who I was talking to. What I was talking to. My face went slack with fear.
Denis sighed. “Get hold of yourself. It’s me, all right. But I don’t know how long I can retain possession of my body. Fury could return any moment and seize control. That’s why I’ve come to you. I need your help desperately. Even though I couldn’t coerce you, I was able to insert a suggestion into your mind that you come hiking on the mountain. You were ripe for the hint and you came. I had to meet you someplace where there were no other people nearby. Nobody that Fury could use.”
I had no idea what he meant. “You know I’ll help you any way I can. What do you want me to do?”
“First of all, I want to inject a mass of data into your mind as rapidly and efficiently as possible: the history of Fury and the Hydras. You’ll have to lower your mindscreen for a moment.”
I stiffened. What if the person talking to me wasn’t Denis? I’d be handing him my immortal, freshly contrite soul on a platter! The magnetic blue gaze held me riveted. I might not have been coerced, but I was certainly spellbound by the intensity of his personality. And frightened to death by it, as I’d been so many times in the early years.
“I want you to know the truth about Fury and me, Rogi. If you do, it will make my next request that much easier to understand. But if you can’t bear to open up, that’s okay.”
He’d saved my life from the Great White Cold. And I did know him. He wasn’t Fury. He was the baby who’d bonded to me at his christening, the needy child who took me as his metapsychic teacher and moral mentor, the idealist who’d summoned the Intervention. He was Denis Rogatien Remillard, my son.
I squeezed my eyes shut, said, “Do it!” and dropped the screen. The information was suddenly there in my memories, as though I’d always known it. Some of it, I had.
Dear God in heaven, I had.
I stared at him, lost to speech, too devastated even to pity him. He said, “Put up your barrier again. Make it as powerful as you can. You know why.”
“You want me to kill you,” I whispered.
“You’re probably the only one who can,” he said mildly, “and it must be done. This physical body must die. The monster retains his ascendancy by feeding on lifeforce, as Victor and the Hydras did. Sometimes, when Fury weakens, I’m able to take control for a brief period of time. Fury knows about it, and he’s desperately afraid of me and what I might do. He once told the Hydra to kill him if I broke free and tried to interfere with his schemes. But Madeleine was incapable of harming her master—mind or body. When Fury made the Hydras he installed a permanent inhibition to prevent them from turning on him.”
“There must be some other way! A stronger redactive metaconcert might heal the personality breach—”
“I doubt it would work. Fury would d-jump. Teleport out of any trap that could be devised. That’s how I got here on the mountain. Yesterday I was on Okanagon, destroying the first generation of Mental Man. I had appealed to Marc—warned him that the infants had been transformed into Hydras. He refused to listen.”
I murmured, “Sacré nom de dieu.”
“Fury and I are yoked together for as long as this body lives,” he told me. “I’ve managed to undo some of the evil that the monster has perpetrated, but not the bulk of it. The Metapsychic Rebellion will probably escalate into a war. Mental Man can be resurrected if Fury shows Marc the way. And if the monster should ever begin to … feed on a regular basis, my persona could be permanently repressed. Locked away, utterly helpless. My only hope is to put an end to this ghastly double life. Through you, Uncle Rogi. Call up the outspiral of metacreative energy you used on the Parnell Hydra. Do it now.”
I could only shake my head in desperation. “It—it doesn’t work like that. When Parni came at me I was in a state of total panic. Out of my mind with fear. Thinking I was going to be killed myself.”
“Try!” Denis commanded. He hauled me to my feet and I cowered back against one wall of the windowless shed. My jacket fell from my shoulders. Outside, the wind had begun to wail. A flash of farsight showed me that heavy snow was falling.
The paramount mindspeech flooded my brain: You must try, mon père!
I pulled myself together. “All right. You—you better stand over there.”
Denis put his arms around me in a final embrace and I very nearly lost it. He whispered, “Bon courage,” then drew away and stood calmly on the opposite side of the shed, less than three meters away. He signed himself and closed his awful eyes, waiting.
I lifted my arms and spread my legs, assuming Leonardo’s X-man pose. Praying for strength myself, I slowly conjured up the glowing knot of vital energy, feeling it pool and grow in the region behind my heart. I put it into a flat spiral motion, forcing it to move downward through my spleen and my solar plexus, up into the suprarenals, the thymus. The metacreative glow intensified, breaking out of my body and filling the shed with dazzling golden light. It was still much smaller than the ball that had incinerated Parni.
Concentrating, I made the energy knot curve down through the root-chakra at my tailbone. It accelerated, turned upward again—
Denis opened his eyes and laughed.
I faltered. The spiraling energy slowed, seeming to halt inside my head. Its luminosity fluctuated, deepened from yellow to amber. To orange. I seemed to see Denis through a fiery haze.
Not Denis.
Fury.
“Did you think I’d let you destroy me?” the monster said. “Your own son! How could you even think of it? There’s unbearable pain when a child dies. I know. All of my own beloved children are dead now. Gordon, Quentin, Cel
ine, Parnell, Madeleine—even the dear New Ones. All my Hydras are dead. But there will be a great rebirth. As Mental Man is reborn, as I myself was reborn, so will my own children be.”
At the time, I didn’t understand what he was talking about, nor did I know the true physical condition of Mental Man. The monster took a step closer to me. He was still smiling and he looked exactly like Denis. He was Denis.
But why? I found myself saying. Why if we’re free to choose why did you let it be?
“Love failed,” Fury said.
Denis was a short man, but the creature confronting me seemed suddenly enormous. Powerful arms seized my torso in a bear hug, squeezing the breath out of me and lifting me off my feet. Still in the X-posture, I was rigid as a pair of crossed boards, a human Saint Andrew’s cross.
“It’s time I was rid of you and your useless love,” the thing said. “Perhaps I’m incapable of coercing you or killing you with mindpower, but there’s nothing to prevent me from throwing you out that door. The wind is blowing a hundred forty kloms an hour and the temperature is minus ten. You’ll be dead in minutes.”
His psychokinesis tore open the shed door and he carried me toward it like a shop mannequin. Whirling snow filled the interior of the little building and the wind yelled like a thousand demons.
Behind my eyes, the ball of vital energy still burned feebly. It was the color of congealing blood.
Then, apparently without any volition on my part, my right arm came down. My hand thrust into my pants pocket, felt metal, pulled out the three antique brass keys that still served to open the doors of my bookshop, my apartment, and my garage. The keys were on a ring, and attached to it was a fob that looked like a red-glass marble enclosed in a silvery cage.
I was on my feet again, Fury had put me down just inside the wide-open door and was staring at the thing in my hand with rapt fascination.
He said, “Is there really an end to the fury?”
The Great Carbuncle blazed.
The dying gout of energy centered on my brain’s thalamus rekindled, brightening to eye-searing gold. It began to move again, impelled by my desperation, arcing into the left elbow of my upraised arm, diving to my left knee, to the right. I thrust my right arm high, holding tight to the key ring, and accelerated the outspiral up to my right elbow—
Oh, Denis! Are you still in him somehow, still susceptible to love?
I don’t know.
I blotted all sensation, all thinking from my consciousness. Only the golden energy existed, a miniature sun, growing as I stoked it with my own life and widened the spiral.
To the crown of my head, to my left hand, my left foot, right foot—
The monster lowered his head and flung himself at me. His skull struck my breastbone like a cannonball, pushing me out into the storm at the same instant that the shining globe reached my right hand, which still held the Carbuncle. A thunderclap of sound deafened me and I was convulsed by a tremendous neural discharge. I cartwheeled in mid-air, lifted by the hurricane wind. I fell onto rock, thinly padded with rime and snow, and lay stunned.
The blackout was momentary. Gasping as the fierce cold sliced through my wool shirt and pants, I slipped and slid and crept and groped back to the shed and managed to collapse inside and kick the door shut behind me.
There was nobody there.
For a long time I lay on the concrete floor, oblivious to the puddle of meltwater under my face, while the valiant little heater raised the ambient temperature to a prophylactic level. I sat up woozily, head pounding. My bandanna handkerchief was spread squarely on top of one of the plass crates. Heaped in the middle of it was a cone of dry grayish-white powdery material. My key ring lay alongside, its red diamond fob faintly reflecting the lamplight.
I gaped, uncomprehending. “Denis?”
Rest for a little while. Then use the phone in that box on the wall over there to get help. One final thing. The Great Carbuncle—take it to Jack in Hawaii.
I was suddenly warm and dry and the vacuum bottle of spiked coffee was in my hand. I managed to lift it to my lips and take a comforting swig.
How do you feel?
“I’m … okay.”
Then it’s finished. We’re such imperfect maddening things such spoilers! How is it possible that the design remains integral? Perhaps I’ll find out. Adieu mon père bien-aimé.
“Go,” I whispered. “Va done, mon enfant. Goodbye.”
The blizzard wind pounded the little shed on the mountain. Alone, I let the tears flow.
27
SECTOR 12: STAR 12-340-001 [NESPELEM]
PLANET 2 [OKANAGON]
4 MAZAMA [29 OCTOBER] 2082
IN THE MORNING, AFTER MARC’S EGG TOOK OFF FOR THE CEREM complex, Cyndia waited another hour to be absolutely certain that he would not look back and farsee her. Then she went to his home office and turned on the subspace communicator.
A sparkling galactic logo appeared on the monitor and the computerized voice said: “Routing to what planet, please?”
“Earth,” Cyndia told it.
There. She had taken the first step. But it wasn’t irrevocable.
“Number, please, if you have it available.”
“Oh-oh-two-oh, plus-six, pound-oh-three, patch: six-oh-three, six-four-three, three-six-one-six.”
“Phone patch service to groundside comsys in North American Region Pound-Oh-Three will necessitate a delay of approximately seven minutes. Please stand by. And thank you for using GTE Subspace Communications.” The display switched to a bucolic New England farm scene with background music from Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata.
Not irrevocable. She was only validating the data, not committing herself.
While she waited for the everyday miracle that permitted instantaneous communication across 540 lightyears, Cyndia picked up the computer-assisted design pad that Marc used for his CE modifications, turned it on, and began sketching with a silver stylus. Her fingers seemed to have a life of their own, working without any conscious volition on her part while she wondered what she would do if Uncle Rogi did confirm that she had actually seen a dead man.
She told herself that it couldn’t be true. The person calling himself Denis had to be some powerful human operant loyal to the Milieu. First he’d slaughtered Mental Man, and then he’d tried to get at Marc through her. Telling monstrous lies.
A terrible Remillard family secret? Hydras? Metapsychic vampires? It was ridiculous.
But there had been odd rumors in Rebel circles for years. Her father had hinted at it—but he’d never mentioned any Hydramonsters. Rory had heard that the mysterious killer of Davy MacGregor’s wife was a being called Fury, supposed to be a Jekyll-Hyde multiple-personality aspect of one of the senior Remillards, undetectable even by the Cambridge machine. Fury’s luckless host was said not to even know it existed. The two prime candidates for the pathology, she recalled, were the First Magnate and his son Marc.
Ridiculous. It was pure fantasy.
As fantastic and unlikely as Mental Man Himself …
Those poor bodiless babes floating miserably in their uterine capsules, undergoing algetic conditioning. Algetic! Ah, he’d promised that the brains would feel no pain, and so they hadn’t. Not in the encephalizing procedure. The hurting had come afterward, when the children were encouraged to achieve fully independent life without artificial support.
That butcher Jeff Steinbrenner had called it “necessary discomfort.” Marc had been more straightforward: Extraordinary mental expansion inevitably involved mental suffering. He had been mistaken to think Mental Man would be spared Jack’s ordeal. Pain was an inescapable part of the maturation process, a necessary step toward the great goal.
And I did nothing to prevent it! Because he wanted it so …
The silver pen continued to draw the intricate mechanical design on the CAD plaque, refining the concept. It could be hidden inside her body and activated at the proper moment. He’d never know what was happening. Never know at all what h
ad been done to him until he tried to make more embryos with Rosamund Remillard’s ova.
But it wouldn’t come to that. The design was not the mechanism. The tool was not the accomplished work. Even if Rogi said—
The subspace communicator chimed softly. A new icon appeared on the screen and the artificial voice spoke simultaneously: “We’re sorry! The number you have called responds with a voice-mail answering machine. Do you wish to communicate with it?”
She sighed. “Yes, I suppose so.”
Rogi’s weather-beaten, oddly youthful face appeared. Messy silver locks straggled over his forehead. His dark eyes held a slightly cryptic glint. He said, “This is The Eloquent Page bookshop, Roger Remillard, Proprietor, speaking. I can’t come and talk to you now, but if you like, you can leave me a message and I’ll get back to you eventually. Look over the menu for options … If you’re really desperate to get ahold of me and it’s a serious matter, say FORWARD. But God help you if you’re wasting my time or trying to sell something. Because if you are, I’ll activate the frivolous-com option and sock you with the usual fine. No hard feelings! A bientôt.”
The face was replaced by a small-business mail menu. Cyndia said: “Forward.”
After an interval, a white-haired Polynesian woman of inscrutable mien appeared on the display. “Johnson residence.”
“My name is Cyndia Muldowney. I’m Marc Remillard’s wife, calling from the planet Okanagon. I wonder if I might speak to Uncle Rogi?”
The woman’s face broke into a friendly smile. “Cyndia! So happy to see, talk wit’ you at lass! I’m Malama—ole friend of da family! You hang in dere, I get Rogue. He’s out loafin’ on da lanai.”
She disappeared. In a moment the bookseller himself showed up, looking decidedly seedy.
“Cyndia?”
“Uncle Rogi, this is extremely important. Please be very careful what you say on this open beam. It’s not likely that anyone is eavesdropping, but we must assume they might be. Do you understand?”