And found Brett lying there. And screamed.
He was facedown, and his dungarees and jersey had been burned from his body. Most of the skin was charred and cracked, revealing a terrible red moistness beneath. Along the spine and the back of his neck and head the burning had been deeper, blacker. But along his body’s dorsal midline there were seven curious white areas, patches of ash about the size of a palmprint, each one having the distinct outline of a different intricately drawn multipetaled flower.
Catherine Remillard’s mind was lost to rational thought, and she did not really notice the patterns. She only screamed again and again and again, and the three fishermen came running, and the watchman, and eventually the Rye Township Police.
The Hydra was back in bed long before then, sleeping and sated and out of Fury’s reach.
9
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
TERESA AND I STOOD ON THE TINY ROCKY BEACH OF APE Lake, surrounded by our collection of duffel bags and boxes, which now seemed very meager indeed. We watched the De Havilland Beaver disappear behind a wooded slope above Ape Creek, which drained the lake at its eastern end. When the buzz of the aeroplane engine finally cut off, I had to bolster my emotional screen to prevent Teresa from detecting the sudden panic that washed over me. I was no longer concerned about Paul or the Magistratum tracking us down; what frightened me was the isolation of this place, and the responsibility I had assumed by agreeing to hide here in the wilderness with an inexperienced, mentally unstable woman, who harbored in her womb a child marked for some awful Galactic destiny.
Forcing myself to concentrate on practicalities, I began to move our supplies off the exposed beach and into a patch of shrubbery, where they would be hidden from aerial observation.
The sky was indigo, except for a residual carmine radiance at the opposite end of the four-kilometer lake, where the sun had gone down behind the heavily glaciated crags of what would one day be called Mount Remillard. A single bright planet hung above the mountain’s shoulder. The lake waters were pale opal blue, ruffled by the floatplane’s dissipating wake. Across the water was a steep 1800-meter ridge that connected two anonymous peaks that I later christened Mount Mutt and Mount Jeff. This precipitous opposite shore was thickly forested with spruce and whitebark pine in its lower reaches and had sparse patches of dwarfed and battered krummholz trees and tundra vegetation at the higher elevations. Tree level at this latitude was about 1500 meters, but much of the lakeshore at the western end was barren moraine or ice-scoured rock. An arm of the huge Fyles Glacier formed a natural dam at that end of the basin, and small icebergs that had calved off its face were white specks on the distant waters.
Behind us little Megapod Creek chuckled as it flowed down from another ominous hanging glacier that nearly hid Mount Jacobsen; only the hulking summit of this peak, more than 3000 meters high, was visible. To the south, a delicate pink afterglow tinged snowfields covering Talchako Mountain, which was even higher than Jacobsen. We seemed completely hemmed by ramparts of rock and ice, alone in a secret oasis of alpine forest and high meadows, where the last flowers of summer still bloomed and milky water lapped the lichen-crusted boulders at our feet.
Teresa said, “How lovely.” Her mind was smiling.
“It is that.” I was casting about with my inefficient seekersense. “Uh—do you detect any critters?”
She sat down on one of the supply boxes, eyes shut, and concentrated. “Birds,” she whispered. “Something small up the slope, among the trees. It may be a hare or a marmot.”
“No Bigfeet? No bears?”
“No … Rogi, may I just sit here for a moment? I want to describe the place to Jack. He’s very interested.”
And something seemed to say: Yes.
I felt the hairs creep at the back of my neck and ventured a telepathic query: Baby? Jack? Is that you?
There was no response. Teresa had become pensive and inaccessible, and the baby’s thoughts—if I hadn’t imagined them—were doubtless linked to hers.
I picked up the duffel that held our sleeping bags, my little old dome tent, and the necessities I had set aside for our first night in the wilds. It was going to be dark soon, and the beach was too narrow and rocky to camp on. I decided to take a look at the cabin site, which was up the slope. From the air, the log structure had seemed much more dilapidated than I had remembered from my visit of eight years earlier. I thought I might as well find out the bad news right away.
I climbed up a dim trail that angled off to the right of the creek through a tangle of stunted mountain hemlock and Englemann spruce. The way was steep but short, and I came almost at once to a reasonably level little bowl-shaped clearing, where the log cabin stood.
The structure had originally been erected on a 4.5-meter-square foundation of cemented fieldstones, with a small set of concrete steps leading to the east-facing front door. The four walls remained more or less intact, although in places the cement chinking between the logs had fallen out. The north-side window from which I had watched the Sasquatch family still had glass. The pole roof had collapsed from the weight of too many winters’ snows, scattering nearly indestructible silvery cedar shakes all over the rotted wood-plank floor.
The cabin interior was a jumble of moss-clad poles and broken rusty stovepipe sections. The crumbling bunks and the other rustic furnishings I remembered had mostly biodegraded into nature’s green maw, but I did spot one corner of the iron stove peeping coyly from beneath a growth of scrubby willow that had made itself at home among the moldering floorboards.
I took a deep breath and told myself there was no reason to panic. I was simply going to have to repair the cabin before the snow flew, using our small stock of tools and whatever information on the subject might be found in our fleck library. I had never constructed anything more elaborate than a predrilled bookcase in my life, but in my veins flowed the blood of voyageurs, coureurs de bois, and ten generations of bushwhacking Franco-Canadians. There was also, in a pinch, the Family Ghost. I would manage.
I found a suitable spot for the tent and wasted no time setting it up and camouflaging it lightly with evergreen branches. Mosquitoes and other biting insects were beginning to home in on me in spite of my metacoercion, and pretty soon it would be impossible even for an operant to move around outdoors without a head net or plenty of insect repellent. There was just room inside the tent for two people to sit and heat tea water in my little portable microwave, and then doss down in sleeping bags atop inflated Mylar mats.
We would have to leave the rest of the equipment down on the beach for the night, since there was no time to build a cache. But none of the food was open and attractively odoriferous, and the local wildlife would probably take a day or two to move in and check us out. I figured the stuff would probably be safe. I would drape the more brightly colored bundles with my old camouflage tarps, on the off chance that personnel of the Megapod Reserve would fly over.
Only one other necessity required investigation. When I had arranged everything neatly inside the tent, I emerged and prowled slowly along the edge of the clearing farthest from Megapod Creek, looking for another trail that I remembered was somewhere in the vicinity. Sure enough, I found it partially obscured by a fallen snag, which I moved aside. The path wound through the thick growth of krummholz and shrubbery to another tiny clearing—and there fortune (or a certain Lylmik) smiled, and I discovered a roofless but otherwise intact little portable fiberglass latrine hut, of the type used in campgrounds all over North America during the late twentieth century. All I would have to do to put it into operation was dig a fresh pit nearer the cabin, drag it over, and stretch some plass on top to keep out the elements and the bugs.
I was whistling as I made my way back to the cabin site in the fast-fading twilight, heading for the shore trail to call Teresa. I could see her down below. And I thought: Tonnerre de dieu! The dear girl has actually thought to do something useful! She had gone a few meters to the outflow of Megapod Creek,
where there was a clear dark pool uncontaminated by the floury glacial silt, and was kneeling there filling one of our collapsible 19-liter water containers.
Teresa stood up and turned again toward Mount Remillard, now a black silhouette against the purplish western sky. A light breeze had begun to blow, and there was a scent of evergreen resin and distant snow. The evening-star planet shone with uncanny brilliance in the pure cold air.
And Teresa sang to it.
I stood rooted to the spot, unbelieving. The voice that had supposedly been lost forever soared once again with the old magical richness that had enchanted audiences across the inhabited Galaxy. She sang to the star and to her child, and a flash of premonition chilled me at the same time that the beauty of the music wrung my heart.
Oh, Teresa. Let me be able to save you. Save both of you …
The cold wind strengthened and the song soon came to an end. She began to look about anxiously, and so I hurried down to her, sending on my farspoken reassurance that everything was ready for the night.
10
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD, A DIGRESSION
THE CONSPIRACY THAT EVENTUALLY LED TO HUMANITY’S Metapsychic Rebellion was a long time germinating.
For more than thirty Earth years there were only two rebels: the Soviet-born Anna Gawrys-Sakhvadze, a professor of physics at the Institute for Dynamic-Field Studies at Cambridge, and her sometime lover and colleague, Owen Blanchard, an American who eventually emigrated to the planet Assawompsett and became the first President of its renowned Academy of Commercial Astrogation.
In the twenty years that Anna and Owen were together at Cambridge, the inevitable subject of their pillow talk concerned the cowardly way in which their fellow Earthlings had surrendered their birthright of freedom to the benevolent despotism of the Galactic Milieu. Throughout many a long English night, after they had satisfied the demands of their bodies, the couple debated, analyzed, and ultimately condemned the Great Intervention of the Galactic Milieu as an immoral piece of meddling in the evolution of a sovereign race. By invading our planet in 2013 and thrusting Earth compulsively into their advanced civilization, the Milieu had violated some of the most fundamental tenets of human freedom. The Simbiari Proctors, who acted as agents of the other four nonhuman races during the long “educational” years that preceded our attainment of full Milieu citizenship, had severely restricted humanity’s intellectual freedom, religious freedom, reproductive freedom, media freedom, educational freedom, and freedom of choice in matters of lifestyle and domicile. They had made a mockery of habeas corpus and the right to mental privacy. They had seduced human youth with visions of high technology and new worlds to win. They had virtually enslaved human metapsychic operants (Anna and Owen both had exceptionally high mindpowers) by limiting their career choices and by attempting to manipulate their motivation and loyalty. And always, lurking in the future when the number of living human minds attained a certain mystical “coadunate number,” was the inevitable time when all human operants would be inducted into a mysterious mental state called the Unity, which a good many psychologists and theologians feared would submerge human individuality in a Cosmic Overmind.
I myself still shrink away from Unity four decades after the fact; but I am the perennial outsider, the last of the Metapsychic Rebels, too feeble a mentality to threaten the Milieu. And so I have been left in peace, granted immunity by the capricious Lylmik I call le Fantôme Familier, as a reward for serving as a cat’s-paw …
From the earliest years of her academic career, Anna Gawrys-Sakhvadze had been happy enough studying the permutations of sigma-fields at Cambridge, which probably boasted more operants on its faculty than any other human university. But Owen Blanchard had been a promising concert violinist at the time of the Intervention, and the Simbiari testing program that had uncovered his coercive and creative metafunctions also decreed that he renounce music in favor of dynamic-field physics, a science vital to the entry of the Human Polity into full citizenship in the Milieu. In those early Proctorship days, Earth needed all the high-wattage brainpower that it could get. So Owen bowed to the inevitable and even came to enjoy designing hyperspatial drive mechanisms and then supervising the Department of Upsilon Studies. But when he played his violin for Anna, his resentment of the Milieu, and especially of the nonhuman Simbiari Proctors who had denied him the life he had chosen, gave his performance a fire that was almost diabolical.
At the time when circumstances eventually parted the couple, they knew that their treasonous opinions were held by few other metapsychic operants of importance. Open opposition to the Galactic Milieu was futile; operants did not even have the dubious option of escaping the twenty-first century through the time-gate invented by the eccentric Frenchman Théo Guderian, as “normal” humans did. If operants bowed to the Milieu’s yoke, they might prosper and ascend to positions of honor and responsibility, while resistance to the dictates of the Simbiari Proctors brought professional disgrace, the ignominy of “open incarceration,” or even the death penalty for sedition.
“We are two lonely rebels,” Anna whispered when she kissed Owen goodbye at the Unst Spaceport. “But let us not give up hope completely. As the end of the Proctorship nears, humans may once again remember the nobility of self-determination. I shall keep a cautious eye out for other operants who share our beliefs, and you must do the same. Humanity can be free again, and it may be that you and I are destined to play a role in bringing about that freedom.”
Deep in his heart, Owen Blanchard thought her dream of rebellion was hopeless. Once he reached the exuberant new planet he had been assigned to and became absorbed in the affairs of the fast-growing academy, he had no time for idealistic brooding. He worked hard building his institution into the best school for superluminal starship personnel in the Human Polity, he married and fathered two sons, and he nearly forgot Professor Anna Gawrys-Sakhvadze of Cambridge University.
Until he met Ragnar Gathen in 2050.
Gathen was a senior captain in the Civil Interstellar Force, the closest thing to a military space fleet that the Human Polity boasted during the years of the Proctorship. Sheer serendipity seated the two men side by side at a performance of William Tell, that operatic tribute to Swiss liberty. Between the acts, over drinks, Blanchard and Ragnar Gathen discovered they were both in their secret hearts rebels against the Galactic Milieu, both operants with growing political influence, and both likely to be nominated Magnates of the Concilium in two years, when the hated Simbiari Proctors finally stepped down and the Human Polity took control of its own destiny.
After assuring himself of Ragnar’s sincerity by means of a mind-probe, to which the other man willingly submitted, Owen introduced him to Anna, who also anticipated being nominated as a magnate. Anna saw interesting possibilities in the new recruit, and he visited her often when he was on Earth.
Ragnar introduced his sister Oljanna, a spaceliner captain who shared his rebellious sentiments, to Anna’s nephew Alan Sakhvadze, who was similarly inclined. The young people promptly fell in love and were eventually married.
Alan Sakhvadze, who also worked at the Institute for Dynamic-Field Studies, in a different department from Anna’s, was a close friend and colleague of his cousin Will MacGregor. Eventually he converted Will to the anti-Milieu point of view, bringing the number of rebels to six. Neither young man was magnate material. But Will’s father, Davy MacGregor, the son of the metapsychic pioneer Jamie MacGregor and an administrator of the European Intendancy, was. His metafaculties were so extraordinary that he was considered the only serious rival to Paul Remillard for the post of First Magnate.
Will was certain that his father entertained serious philosophical doubts about the mysterious concept of Unity, which the operants of the Human Polity would eventually be obliged to embrace. Whether Davy’s doubts might lead him to repudiate the Milieu was problematical. No member of the cabal possessed the mental firepower to undertake a coercive-redactive mental examination of
the great Davy MacGregor. If he was to be brought into the group, it would have to be accomplished by more subtle means.
Anna nevertheless found the conjecture about Davy very interesting, as did Owen and Ragnar. Three—possibly four—Magnate-Designates were strongly opposed to the exotic domination of humanity! Might there be other potential rebels among the nominees?
She herself knew of two possibilities. Jordan Kramer was a stalwart twenty-four-year-old psychophysicist and Magnate-Designate who worked both at Cambridge and at a research facility on Okanagon. Gerrit Van Wyk, a year older, was probably the most brilliant cerebroenergetic specialist in the Polity. Unfortunately, he was also a very low-powered operant and a notorious lush; in addition, he had a face like a frog and possessed a querulous and eccentric personality. The Milieu nominated him to the Concilium anyhow.
After the most delicate kind of backing and filling, the suspect pair were maneuvered into situations where Owen, the most powerful coercer in the group, could forcibly probe their minds. When the indignation of the probees subsided, they allowed themselves to be recruited, and subsequently indicated to the group that they were at work upon a revolutionary kind of psychoassay device that might ultimately be very valuable—or very dangerous—to the cause of human freedom.
The mind-reaming of the unlovable Van Wyk brought unexpected bonuses. He knew of two other highly placed operants with seditious propensities and suspected that a third might also be a closet rebel. The first was none other than the famous Hiroshi Kodama, Intendant Associate for Asia. The second was also an Associate, in the European Intendancy. Her name was Cordelia Warszawska, and she was a prominent xenologist at the University of Cracow as well as a skillful politician … and a platonic friend of Davy MacGregor’s.