“We’re not going in … that?”
“Of course we are,” said I, heartily.
“But does it really fly?” Teresa asked.
Parmentier was just a tad miffed. “Madame, she’s flown for sixty years and may well go another sixty. The De Havilland Beaver is the workhorse of the North! She’s reliable and cheap and goddam indestructible, and I wouldn’t have one of them finicky rhocraft eggs in trade if you paid me.”
The twentieth-century aeroplane rode on the glassy water atop two floats. It was vaguely dented and patched, and the windscreen plass was age-yellowed and etched with a patina of fine scratches. But the Beaver’s saucy orange-and-white paint job was fresh, and the single propeller was a truly beautiful artifact of varnished laminated wood, without a nick or chip. The aircraft looked elderly but businesslike, and so did its pilot.
Our bags and boxes of supplies and equipment filled the entire open tail compartment and most of the area behind the pilot and copilot seats, leaving a minimal amount of space on the bare metal floor.
“Rogi, you and your boy just crawl in there and squat,” Bill directed. “Your lady can ride first-class up beside me.”
“No seat belts for us?” Marc was aghast. “But this aircraft has an inertial propulsion system!”
Parmentier guffawed merrily. “Don’t hardly need seat belts when you got no seats! Just hang on to that side strap if you feel scared, sonny.”
We all climbed aboard, our pilot began throwing switches, and a minute or so later the big radial engine burst noisily into life. Bill warmed her up. Then he advanced the throttle, and the Beaver roared across the lake toward the setting sun, climbing rapidly and making a deafening noise. Teresa was terrified and gripped the edge of her tattered seat. I was aware of Marc flooding her mind with calming redactive impulses, and I could have used a few myself. The aeroplane circled steeply to give us a nice view of the idyllic resort scene below, tumbling Marc on top of me, then came around to a southwesterly heading.
“Next stop, Kidney Lake!” Parmentier shouted.
But it wouldn’t be. At an appropriate moment, Marc would seize the pilot’s mind with his coercion and compel a course change to another destination, 30 kilometers deeper into the precipitous, glacier-draped mountains. After Teresa and I were dropped off, Marc and Parmentier would fly back to Nimpo Lake. A posthypnotic suggestion would convince Bill that the Remillard family had decided not to fish at Kidney Lake after all. Marc would fly away in the red egg, privacy screens up, and return to New Hampshire by another circuitous route. He would return the Hertz egg to Burlington International Airport in Vermont and take a bus home, fuzzing his identity psychocreatively.
And then the charade would begin.
Marc said to me on the intimate mode: You’re certain that this aircraft can fly through the rho-trap barrier?
Sure as hell did before. That’s an internal combustion engine. Runs on j-fuel. No dynamic-field technology at all. As I understand it all of the Reserve personnel use antiques like these or old-time helicopters when they fly in to their work sites. But they only go to work during June July and August. Rest of the year the place is officially closed. Deep snow.
And the alarm systems?
Parmentier’s got a black box stashed in the Beaver’s instrumentation that cancels the alarms. A lot of the locals do. Some of them work in the Reserve part time or ferry in supplies. They also fly into the Reserve during the off-season when they get a hankering for some really spectacular fishing. The wardens wink at it so long as it doesn’t happen very often. You saw that rainbow trout lunker mounted above the fireplace back at the lodge? Bill caught that years ago in one of the Reserve lakes.
Gosh! LUST.
But fishermen never go to Ape Lake. It’s all milky with glacial silt. No fish. Bill told me there are critters though. Grizzlies and wolves and cats and lots of mountain sheep and goats. A few moose down in the lower end of Ape Creek Valley. And of course the Bigfeet themselves. It’s really a gorgeous spot. Very dramatic that remote basin with Mount Jacobsen hanging right over the cabin site and the glaciers calving into the far end of the little lake … Of course I wasn’t there in winter.
Marc said: You’ll manage Uncle Rogi.
I mind-nattered on: Teresa and I will have to lie low for another week until September and then we won’t have to worry about having our chimney smoke spotted by anything human. Say! Remind me to steal Bill’s map of the area so I have a better idea of the lay of the land. I didn’t bother to get a compass because Jacobsen is such a blatant landmark. Only an imbecile could get lost … Christ de Tabernacle! I forgot snowshoes! Well I suppose I can make some. I wonder what else I forgot … Why don’t we set up a head-sked and if I think up anything important you can bring it.
Marc said: I won’t try to farspeak you from home. It would be too dangerous even on intimate mode when the investigation is on and I’m under suspicion. I’m bound to be under surveillance for a while. But I’ll be back sometime between the first and the fifteenth of November with plenty of food and I’ll try to think of other stuff you might also need to last you until the baby is born.
I said: We’ll be watching for you. Very eagerly.
He said: Thank you … for everything Uncle Rogi.
Then his coercion reached out and took control of Bill Parmentier’s mind, and the last leg of our strange journey really began.
8
RYE, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH 24–25 AUGUST 2051
THE HYDRA HUNG HIGH IN THE SKY AND LOOKED INTO flames.
They flashed yellow from the sea salt on the burning driftwood and blue around the crackling chewed-over sparerib bones that Adrienne had made them toss in. Silly Adrienne, prancing busily around among the kids and adults, checking to make sure everybody threw napkins and paper plates and potato skins and other barbecue leftovers into the fire. Bossy Adrienne. She was even worse than her mother, Cheri! Always hassling the family with Mickey-Mousery when all a person wanted to do was relax on the beach and go switch-off.
The Hydra considered the tyrannical eldest daughter of Cheri Losier-Drake and Adrien Remillard through the flames’ leaping and decided that one day it would certainly take care of her.
… God! It’s Fury! Christalmighty Fury I’m SOglad it’s been SOlongSOlong I began tothink you WitchoftheWestmelted! Lately allthis MilieumindLOVEshit crowding out goodstuff.
[Chuckle.] And here you are at last. Does it mean—
[Yearningeagernessexcitement … fear.]
Better than the nervebomb?
Cunning old Fury … WHO?
!!!…?
Goddamfuckshit NO! Just show me how! (He really does deserve it you know. What a prick! So does she the silly superior bitch but I understand why he’s the one and it’s going to be allright it really is I’LL DO IT.)
Right. [Thrill!]
Nervebomb! NERVEBOMB! Please GodGodGod nervebomb nervebomb give it to me give it—aaaaaah! … Oh Fury how I love you.
The little white trawler rocked, making concentric vermilion rings on the black bonfire-painted Atlantic. Then after a time the boat floated level and quiet again, and the water smoothed. They lay flat on their backs on the deck, hands joined, coming back,
watching motionless stars and speeding satellites and listening to the faint laughing and shrieking from the rest of the family on the beach. His wrist-com, which was all he wore, tapped twice on his carpal tendons.
“Midnight, my lovely Cat. Happy birthday.”
She uttered a mock moan. “Brett, you beast. Did you really have to remind me? Forty-two!”
“Immortal hypocrite. You know very well that you look like a twenty-year-old.” You’re glorious and irresistible and I’m mad for you and tonight I need you once again my comfort my love my joy my wife we need each other come banish the last doubts this time rise to me reassure us both …
He levitated slightly, turned over, and drifted open-armed above her. She raised her own arms to him and whispered, “I wouldn’t abandon you and our work for the world, Brett. Not for the whole Milieu. No one can make me. No one.”
Her long blonde hair lay in shining coils on the deck matting and all over her nude body, veiling it from throat to knees. She framed his face with her hands while he kissed her mouth and eyelids and pressed his lips to her warm palms before guiding them to his already awakened sex.
His mind said: They’re going to insist. Tempt you with the power. Appeal to your family pride. [Jocosity.] Urge you not to break up the Set!
[Laughter.] You and the children are my family. My pride is in our work, and it will continue as our love continues.
Cat mydearestdarlingsteadfast Cat.
He parted the thick tresses above her breasts and tongued the nipples, increasing the feedback of psychocreative energy that had begun once again to flow between them. She caressed him, deepening the erotic current, intensifying its neural rhythm through the magic that only operant minds possessed. Their bodies closed slowly. Tendrils of her hair rippled and wafted into the air, undulating and questing, stroking his shoulders and flanks, twining with soft strength about his arms and between his legs, drawing her up to him, enfolding both of them in a silken fluid medium that shimmered in the starlight.
They floated, coupled but now motionless, and let the metapsychic tension build, then held themselves on the brink until neither could resist letting their minds ignite the discharge. The wave crested, broke, subsided slowly into a tide of warmth and peace. Its ebb carried away the last vestiges of irrational anger and guilt from his heart and the lingering temptation from hers.
“Together,” he whispered. “We’ll live and work together. Always.”
… Even though the Galactic Milieu had demanded otherwise.
The exotic legislators in the Orb World, acting within the mystery they called Coadunate Unity, had weighed the merits of every adult human operant. By means of unfathomable criteria, they had selected only one hundred—out of hundreds of thousands—to be inaugurated as the first human Magnates of the Concilium. No one was surprised that all seven members of the so-called Remillard Dynasty were included on the roster. But Catherine Remillard, alone of the family, had not sought the honor, had made her disinterest emphatic. As a member of the Milieu’s governing body, she would be required to give up the Child Latency Project, the work in the Polity Education Ministry that she and her husband, Brett Doyle McAllister, had devoted the past seventeen years of their lives to. The program had borne prodigious fruit—more than fifty thousand latent children between the ages of five and nine raised to operancy by means of the subtle creative-redactive regimen that Cat and Brett had developed together, working in painstaking metaconcert. But their work was not finished. The program was still too primary-oriented to help the majority of latent youngsters, those over the age of nine; but lately there had been hints of a potential breakthrough.
The exotics in Concilium Orb were apparently willing to sacrifice the McAllister-Remillard research partnership for some nebulous greater good, but Cat was not. Late yesterday afternoon, she had notified both the Intendant Assembly in Concord and the Concilium that she was turning down the magnateship. Her decision had caused a sensation.
There was going to be a high old family row, of course. To postpone it and to shore up resolution (and ostensibly to celebrate her birthday), Cat and Brett had fled their research establishment in the capital of Earth and egged to the beachfront mansion in Rye that was the summer home of Cat’s younger brother Adrien and his wife, the sculptor Cheri Losier-Drake.
This grandiose old place, which was only half a klom down the beach from the more modest summer home of Denis Remillard and Lucille Cartier, had been in the Drake family for generations, its twenty rooms rendering it a conspicuous white elephant. But all that had changed when Cheri married one of the distinguished offspring of Denis and Lucille. She and Adrien had six children, and Cheri would eventually acquire a horde of operant nieces and nephews that numbered more than thirty. Fortunately, she was a warmhearted child-nurturer and an enthusiastic hostess who championed tribal conviviality, with the result that from late May until September, the enormous carpenter-Gothic house on the beach was almost always full of youthful guests, and Cheri got very little sculpting done. Professional parents would show up when their work permitted, and other relatives were encouraged to join the mob scene for parties, particularly the annual Fourth of July beach picnic and the Labor Day crab-and-lobster feast that traditionally closed the summer season.
Cat and Brett, whose four children were close in age to those of Adrien and Cheri, kept a modified Dutch trawler named Doolittle at the Rye Harbor Yacht Club, less than a kilometer south of the big beach house. Other family boaters—especially Paul, with his splendid Nicholson ketch, and Anne, who had spent the day racing in her Swan—sneered at the modest McAllister stinkpot. But Brett and Cat had no love for the hard physical labor of sailboating. Putting about in Doolittle was soothing. The fact that the trawler had lately become too small to accommodate their four growing children also suited Brett and Cat just fine …
When they were gravity-bound on the deck again, he gently untangled himself from her hair. “There’s sure to be a certain amount of family hell to pay over your decision, Cat. But eventually they’ll come around. Even Paul. Every operant educator in the Polity appreciates the importance of our work. And no one but you is even remotely competent to evaluate the configurations of our pilot secondary-level project.”
She nuzzled his ear. “There’s no one else who can make sense of your redactive programming gestalts, you mean. My genius lies in converting yours to practical application.”
“We’re still more than a year away from getting the ultimate refinements really nailed down. But when it’s finally ready, millions of kids with latent metapsychic talents will be unblocked and freed to use their higher mindpowers. Kids who would otherwise have been condemned to a lifetime of normalcy—”
Abruptly, she sat up. “Brett, you know we mustn’t speak of it like that.” Mustn’t even think about it that way even though we Truepeople know we are the chosen the elite the future the heirs and successors to poor normal humanity God maybe that’s why I feel our project is so urgent even more urgent than finally admitting humanity to the Galactic Concilium the division the gulf between Operant and Non must be bridged and as soon as possible for our sakes as well as theirs—
“It will be,” he soothed her, speaking aloud.
I didn’t tell you because there were so many other things on my mind but that wretched Gordo still has the metabigot complex encysted I didn’t excise it after all the miserable boy simply pulled the wool over the mind of his own shrink-mother!
Brett laughed. He got up and began pulling on his dungarees. A chill breeze had sprung up, and he handed Cat a velour robe. “Gordo’s eleven. Perhaps it’s time for old Dad to take over his civilizing. With sterner therapy measures.”
“Well, we might do well to consider it. Lately, I just can’t seem to get through to the child.”
Brett said: Don’t fret. Not about the world’s kids. Not about ours. For now just think of the loving.
She began braiding the extraordinary hair into a single thick plait. Her voice was
low, her thought flavor bittersweet. “I do think of it. Of you and me together. Always.” And I want it to go on forever and to hell with our responsibilities to operant humanity to hell with the aspiring normals and the arrogant exotics and everything and everyone except you and me and the sea. And stars that are nothing but little lights in the sky—
“Shush. You know you don’t mean that.”
He swept her into his arms and kissed her one last time, and then they went into the pilothouse and started the engine of the white trawler and headed back to the harbor.
The Hydra skulked among the mooring slips of the yacht club, hiding behind a big garbage dumpster until Doolittle was finally docked among the gaggle of Remillard sailboats, a sturdy snow goose awkward in the company of sleek terns and frigate birds.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Then it was time! Nobody awake on any of the other boats, and the watchman safe in his cubicle watching a porno video and beating off.
Yes Fury. [Stumble.] Shit! [Terrorexasperation—]
Nopleaseno look nobody noticed it’s allright—
Catherine Remillard awoke at dawn, cold and aching and faintly nauseated, hearing the gentle slap of wavelets against the trawler’s hull and the voices of three fishermen up on the dock quarreling about the quality of the day’s bait. She was lying uncovered on one of the bunks. Her skull was splitting. How very odd!
In the way of metapsychic spouses, she cast about for her husband’s aura, but he was apparently nowhere nearby. She swore mildly, got up, and secured warmer clothing from a locker. After she had dressed, she went forward to the pilothouse.