Anne had been the first Remillard to be appointed by the exotic Proctors to the North American Intendancy and to the Assembly of Intendant Associates, the Human Polity’s quasi-independent legislature. She had also been the principal political mentor of her younger brother Paul from the very beginning, guiding and advising him in his swift ascent to Intendant Associate, encouraging him to aspire to the First Magnate chair when the Human Polity was accepted into full voting membership in the Galactic Concilium. After Anne herself achieved the rank of Intendant Associate, she dared to speak of her own secret ambition to the rest of the family: she wanted to be no less than Planetary Diligent—the chief operant executive—of Earth, after the Simbiari Proctorship ended.
His aunt’s dream had further overawed Marc, and he had continued to admire her uncritically … until this enforced trip from Earth to Orb. Furious at being shanghaied and fearful about what would happen to his mother and Rogi, the boy had shut himself up inside his inviolable mental fortress, hardly speaking to Anne during the voyage and even distancing himself from her physically, insofar as that was possible on a rather small starship. There was plenty of time to think during his self-imposed isolation, and one of the things he brooded over was the murder of his Uncle Brett McAllister. Using much the same logic as Denis had, Marc deduced that Anne—together with her sister Cat and her brother Adrien—was a principal suspect.
And so was his father.
In his solitude, thinking about unnatural death and trying to suppress the very genuine fear that had taken root within him, Marc also puzzled over something that had mystified and disturbed him for nearly eleven years: the passing of Victor Remillard. His recollection of the events on that Good Friday in 2040 had the vivid accuracy of perfect memorecall. As a precocious toddler, he had been curious about the family ritual he had been excluded from, and so he had extended his ultrasenses into the adjacent bedroom and experienced the deathbed scene almost as fully as the adult witnesses had. What young Marc had seen and felt had been quite incomprehensible to a baby’s understanding. Even now it defied complete analysis. But things were becoming clearer to him as he grew more closely acquainted with the shadowy aspects of his own mind and the minds of other superior metas.
However, there was still no answer to the principal question: Could a dying mentality, energized by evil ambition, find sanctuary in the mind and body of another? Everything Marc knew of psychology and theology denied that such a thing was possible. But something had happened at Victor’s deathbed; and whatever the dying man had done was done with the conscious or unconscious assent of the mind—or minds—invaded. The notion that Victor, or some agent of his, must be involved in Brett’s strange death had come upon Marc in a synchronicitous flash, having nothing to do with logic, and all the more distressing because of that …
Aunt Anne was looking at him now with those pale, cold eyes of hers that also held a surprising intimation of foreboding.
“Will you work with me, Marc?”
His gaze slid away. As subtly as he could, he projected grudging resignation, a slight cracking of the mental shell that she had perceived as completely indomitable. He projected adolescent uncertainty, and a desperate need to trust in some reliable adult. He projected the merest hint of his old admiration for her.
“I’ll—I’ll do my best, Aunt Anne.”
She reached out one hand and touched his own, smiling a little. “Good. And I’ll try to help you, too, Marc.”
Then the food arrived, and the French waitron was very maternal and jolly when Marc apologized for insulting the restaurant’s cuisine. He confided wryly to her that he was only a Franco-American and a poor excuse for a gourmet, but he hoped to visit all of the ethnic enclaves of humanity while he was in Orb and educate his taste buds.
She laughed pleasantly. “And you must try exotic food, too! Except for the Krondak kind, of course, which contains too many petrochemicals and unhealthy alkaloids. The cuisine of the Gi is really delightful—like feasting upon the most subtly perfumed desserts and salads—while Poltroyans do wonders with seafood and strange meat dishes, and the Simbiari devise the most delicious candies imaginable. The Green Ones are only partially photosynthetic, you know, and do amazing things with sugars. Then there are the Lylmik. Just think! You may actually meet one of the rare beings here. Those who have done so say the experience is unforgettable. One realizes that they do not eat. Some say they subsist upon the music of the spheres, but I suspect that is nonsense.”
Marc said, “I’m looking forward to my stay here very much. I’ve heard that visiting the exotic enclaves of Concilium Orb is like taking a quick tour of the inhabited Galaxy. I’ll be the envy of my college classmates when I get back to Earth. Everybody’s heard the fabulous stories about Orb and wants to come here, but of course it’s off-limits to tourists—even operant ones.”
“How long do service personnel contract for?” Anne asked the woman curiously.
The server sighed. “Only three hundred days for most jobs. I hope they change that eventually. I would love to re-up when this tour is finished, even though my husband can hardly wait to get back to Paris. But life is so much more exciting here, especially now that humanity will be taking its place in the Concilium.” She lowered her voice. “And salaries in Orb are triple those of the Human Polity worlds, and of course we normals have the same shopping privileges that operant bureaucrats do. We can also use the same artistic and cultural and recreational facilities as the magnates and their operant assistants—if we want to.”
“Do you want to?” Marc asked.
The woman eyed him shrewdly. “Not always, no. And we are very glad to be able to live in our own nonoperant neighborhoods within the ethnic enclaves. One is always most comfortable amongst one’s own kind, n’est-ce pas?”
Marc said, “Mais naturellement, madame. Vous m’en direz tant.”
She uttered a happy cry. “You do know French after all, young Franco-American! Épatant!”
“Only a little. My great-granduncle taught me.”
“And is he here with you?” the smiling woman inquired.
“No.” Marc looked away, his face now expressionless.
The waitron tucked her big tray under her arm and began to move away from their table. “Eh bien. Bon appétit, and have a nice day.”
For many minutes, Marc and Anne ate in silence. When she had finished the second of her croissants, she said, “If there was a very good reason for it, you could call your grandfather on the subspace communicator and arrange for a head-sked on intimate mode. His farspeech would have no difficulty reaching the four thousand lightyears from here to Earth.”
“Why would I want to talk to Grandpère?” Marc finished the last of the hot chocolate and licked the foam from his lips. It had been served in an incongruous large cup of thin china, but it was whisked perfectly, with honey and vanilla and a hint of cinnamon.
“I know you’re not that close to Denis. But if there was any … serious family business you had to discuss with someone on Earth, any matters you had to arrange, he would be the one to call on.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Marc pushed the empty cup away and laid his knife and fork parallel across his plate. “Will we have to begin work right away?”
Anne smiled. “Not really, although I do want to drop in at our offices today. What did you have in mind? Sightseeing?”
“I’d like to check the place out. Just prowl around. Twenty-three days in the gray limbo didn’t do my nerves any good.”
“I can certainly vouch for that!” Anne consulted her wrist-com. “We’ve been invited to dinner tonight at 1930 hours by Kyle Macdonald and his wife Mary Gawrys, over in Lomond Enclave. You remember them, don’t you?”
Marc nodded. “He’s the science fiction writer, she’s the European IA. Uncle Rogi told me that he introduced them. I tried some of Macdonald’s plaques, but the stuff was pretty wild and implausible.”
“I hope you’ll keep your literary criticism to y
ourself at dinner. Now: If I let you run loose today, will you promise to work on the Paliuli housing tomorrow? It’s going to be very difficult to get anything decent on the beach. I’ve heard the Russians have tried to hog all the best places.”
Marc’s gray eyes were alight. “Just let me have some time to myself today, and tomorrow you can ask me anything!”
Anne laughed. “Off with you, then. Just don’t get into anything you can’t get out of.”
He flung his napkin onto the table and almost upset the wrought-iron chair as he sprang to his feet and hurried off across the terrace. There was a tube entrance a hundred meters away from the restaurant, next to the boulangerie, and he forced himself to slow down and walk to it, turning once to wave over his shoulder to Anne, who was drinking another cup of coffee and watching him with an expression that betrayed considerable anxiety. Then he plunged down the steps into a glowing glassy gut that was a shocking departure from the folksy charm of the French enclave. He caught an inertialess capsule almost immediately and headed for the outermost level of the colossal cerametal planetoid—and the Orb Spaceport.
For over four hours, Marc sat quietly on a bench in the Human Terminal, letting his farsight and other ultrasenses roam, absorbing all of the formalities of departure to be certain that he would make no mistakes. He studied the ticketing procedure, the quarantine setup, the rather casual way the smaller private superluminal craft were boarded, even the way the exotic ground crews serviced the ships of the Human Polity in the docking bays.
This time he was ready to break whatever laws it took to get him back to Earth. But how to do it?
He could easily coerce his way on board a big passenger ship and brainwipe the coercees—provided none of them was masterclass. But when he disappeared, Anne would be bound to send out a subspace squawk on him, so that was out. He could use his creativity to disguise himself or go invisible, then stow away; but she’d still have the Magistratum waiting Earthside to check out arriving ships from Orb, and a Grand Master exotic cop would see through any attempted mental camouflage of his like a plate-glass window.
Okay, what was left?
Use his coercion to hijack a very small ship. One of those executive hoppers with a crew of three. There was a Caledonian jobbie over in Bay 638 that checked out as a likely prospect. Disable its communications and beacons. Mindfuck the crew just short of imbecility once they put the ship on course, popping in and out of hyperspace. Sleep only while the ship was traveling its catenary in the gray limbo. And none of your bunny-hopping 180 df this trip; push the displacement factor to 250 or even higher. He’d have no trouble taking the pain of tight-leash translations through the upsilon-field. If the crew wonked out from overload, they’d be that much easier to handle. With luck, he could get home in two weeks, long before they’d expect him. He’d load up with food and get gone to B.C., and hide out with Mama and Uncle Rogi until it was safe to resurface.
If he pulled the trick off artfully, the family would probably even continue to cover up for him. Buying off the owner of the hijacked exec hopper and the crew would cost a bundle, but that was no big deal for the family corporation. Provided he didn’t kill anybody.
He got up from the bench and bought himself a large Pepsi-Cola at a refreshment bar. Then, sipping it through a straw, he strolled casually to the feeder tunnel that would take him to Bay 638. The small-craft facilities were much less crowded than the main terminal area and the noncrew people hurrying along the tunnel tended to be earnest-looking business types in sober suits, carrying briefcases, or rumpled scientists meandering along, thinking great thoughts on declamatory mode. There were no young people about, and several passersby eyed him curiously as he stopped at the observation window overlooking Bay 638 and stood there drinking his Pepsi.
The display beside the access door told him that the ship was CSS Roderick Dhu, a twelve-passenger De Havilland S-211 out of Grampian Town, Caledonia, owned by Guinness PLC. Its EDT was about one hour from now.
Perfect! And the spacecraft was even a lineal descendant of the antique Beaver floatplane that had carried him, his mother, and Uncle Rogi into the Megapod Reserve!
“Seems almost like fate, doesn’t it?” an adult voice remarked.
Marc whirled about, his heart pounding. He had been aware of no one approaching him, sensed no aura. But he had company. Standing close behind him was a very tall elderly man with a neatly trimmed white beard and a patriarchal halo of snowy hair. He wore floor-length blue garments in a style that Marc could not immediately identify as typical of any ethnic group. His eyes had a preternatural brightness, set deep within dark sockets.
Marc suspected immediately that he was not human. The mental signature was totally absent, even to a third-level probe delivered at point-blank range. But what kind of exotic was he? The Krondaku were known to assume illusory bodies sometimes, especially when they undertook sociological research or other work among humanity that depended upon an unobtrusive or nonthreatening presence. A Krondak Grand Master would be able to suppress his aura beyond the reach of any human-generated redactive probe … and the Magistratum had a disproportionate number of the frightful, supremely intelligent beings on its roster.
The cup of Pepsi trembled in Marc’s hand as he turned, his mental screen strengthened to the maximum. “Excuse me. What did you say?”
“I said nothing special. I implied a great deal.”
Marc grinned and shrugged. “Sorry. I don’t understand. I was just looking this ship over.”
“Wondering whether the crew would use this access door or the one down in the bay to board her. The answer to that is: neither. They’ve just been notified that they can’t return to Caledonia today after all. A small problem with the environmental system. But you needn’t start looking for another ship.”
“Oh,” said Marc. Oh, Jesus—the exotics were on to him. He had been so sure that his secret thoughts were beyond their reach, so sure that he’d pulled the wool over their eyes during the interrogation. But they’d only bided their time! Some giant brain had been reading his mind, probably from the moment he arrived in Orb, and knew all about—
“Your scheme to pinch the ship. Oh, yes. It would probably have worked, too, if you were able to control the coercive-redactive ream precisely enough to avoid permanent mental damage to the crew. I’m not sure you’re up to that yet. But the point is moot. There’s no need for you to go back to Earth. The two of them will survive without your help.”
“Who will?” he whispered. But he knew.
“Off we go,” said the disguised exotic briskly. “Don’t waste time.”
A heroic form of metacoercivity took hold of Marc. He had never experienced anything like it. He wasn’t a child hurried along by a stronger adult; he was a mosquito borne along by a gale. As he walked helplessly alongside his captor, heading back toward the main terminal, Marc managed to look more carefully at the face of the person beside him. “Do—do I know you?”
The tall man laughed but did not answer the question.
“What do you want?” Marc asked.
“I want you to take a hike, kiddo. Get the hell out of this terminal and don’t come back until you’re ready to go home.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“No. Providing you haul your young ass out of here and don’t try pulling a stunt like this again. You do, and I’ll see that you come down with the galloping shits and spend the time from now until Inauguration Day in the hospital. The pediatric hospital. You’ll like it. The bed gowns have Walt Disney characters printed on them.”
Marc was dumfounded. This was a Krondaku? He sure as hell didn’t talk like one! But whoever this guy was, he was no Enforcer of the Magistratum. He was somebody else—playing games! Somebody who obviously knew all about Mama and Uncle Rogi …
Marc felt the anger that had blazed within him drain away. A sudden, awful suspicion gripped his heart. “Are you him? Vic …?”
“I have nothing to do with Victor Remillard or
his creatures,” the being said. “But you’re quite right to keep the possibility in mind. They pose a rather serious threat to the good order of the Galactic Milieu. They’re damn near as dangerous as you.”
The two of them had entered the busy terminal. Marc’s mind spun as he was compelled to walk directly to the tube entrance. His mind began to shout: Who are you who are you who are you? He was aware that the telepathic scream went no further than the boundary of his own skull.
Side by side, the disoriented boy and the tall man stood waiting for a transport capsule. In one last futile attempt to break the coercion, Marc had managed to drop his nearly empty cup of cola, scattering bits of crushed ice all over the capsule platform.
“You’ll find out who I am eventually,” his captor said. “Just remember what I told you. I wasn’t joking about incapacitating you if you make trouble … Here’s your capsule. It’s been very interesting talking to you face-to-face, but now—get lost.”
A big hand took hold of Marc’s shoulder with a painfully strong grip and thrust him unceremoniously into the open hatch. “I’m sending you to Carioca Enclave. Colorful as all get-out, but don’t lose track of time and turn up late for dinner, or your Aunt Anne will be more than a little pissed. Au revoir, kiddo.”
The hatch slammed, and the capsule shot into the glowing purple rho-field of the tubeway, whisking Marc away at 6000 kph. Unifex’s smile faded, and he shook his head. Then with a gesture he cleaned up the ice and the rest of the mess and went back into the terminal. He had decided to have a Pepsi himself before he dematerialized.