Several of the humans at the table winced.
“They proctored our Poltroyan race,” Fred said. “Our legends say that we barely survived the terrible experience and achieved coadunation. We have empathized with your own racial distress because we feel closely related to you, having experienced an evolution that largely parallels yours, even to the aggressive impulses that once ruled us. This is why we have been eager to mitigate the severity of the Simbiari Proctorship whenever possible and to share with you our fetal educational techniques and other useful data. So you would not make the mistakes we made long ago when the Krondaku proctored us—”
“Or even fail,” Minnie put in, her pretty little face somber, “as did the seventy-two luckless emergent races entrusted to our Poltroyan Proctorship.”
“What happens to those who flunk out?” Tom Spotted Owl asked.
“They are isolated,” Fred said sadly, “denied the superluminal transport system that makes travel among the stars practical. The gray limbo of hyperspace is patrolled by the Lylmik to ensure that the quarantine is kept. Most civilizations do not endure long after failing coadunation.”
“This so-called coadunation.” Denis leaned forward, his blazing blue eyes fixed on the male Poltroyan. “It actually prevents aggressive behavior and guarantees altruism?”
“After a time, yes. Once a race reaches its coadunate number and is thoroughly matured, the racial Mind as a whole attains Unity and rejects malignant aggression just as any highly complex system rejects disorganization. In an imperfectly Unified race such as the Simbiari, a certain number of—uh—maverick individuals may still be capable of antisocial behavior, but not the vast majority. The four elder races of the Milieu, being perfectly coadunate, also partake wholemindedly of Unity—and this renders us incapable of any serious social sin. Of course, we still manage to commit personal transgressions. Pride, despair, frivolity, that sort of thing.”
“Fascinating,” said Margaret Strayhorn. “And how amazing that we humans were brought into your Milieu while we’re still so imperfect! Even with the new probationary period imposed upon our Concilium magnates, we’re being given far more than we deserve.”
“It was one of many decisions of the Lylmik in your favor,” Minnie said, “in which we Poltroyans have always concurred without reservation.”
Fred shrugged humorously. “And which the other coadunate races always opposed! But there you are.”
Everybody laughed.
Davy MacGregor lifted his glass of Rioja Reserva. “Here’s a toast to kind Poltroy! And to its reproductive physiology, so similar to ours, and its fetal education techniques, which we were able to borrow. But for them, we humans would have had to adapt the methods of the Simbiari.”
“And for the next eight months,” Margaret added, her face triumphant, “Davy and I would have had to pretend I was carrying a suboperant tadpole.”
Everybody called out congratulations amid laughter, and they all drank to the Amalgam of Poltroy and to the embryo.
“Immature humans and Poltroyans may matriculate at Dartmouth,” said Tom Spotted Owl solemnly, “but tadpoles, never.” More laughter broke out.
“If everyone has finished dessert, perhaps we can have our café de olla in the living room,” Socorro Ortega suggested. She explained to the Poltroyans, “The caffeine beverage is flavored with a spicy bark called cinnamon, and an aromatic semirefined sucrose called brown sugar is added to taste.”
“It sounds delicious,” Fred said. “The more sugar, the better!”
“He puts maple sugar in his soda pop,” Minnie confided to Socorro, shaking her head. “And jam on his scrambled eggs, and he dips fried onion rings in honey.”
But the president’s wife was unfazed. “The next time you come to dine, I’ll make a real treat for Fred: candied jalapeños.”
As they all rose from the table and began to move slowly out of the plant room, Paul fell in beside Davy MacGregor and his wife. “Will you and Margaret and Will be traveling to Concilium Orb on the CSS Kungsholm with us, by any chance?”
“Why, no,” Davy said. “That ship leaves on the seventeenth of November, doesn’t she? The three of us and Will’s wife are leaving day after tomorrow on the Aquitania. The ship’s a bunny-hopper, though, and we actually arrive at Orb four days after you do, on sixth December.”
Margaret Strayhorn gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I’m afraid I can’t take ships with a high superluminal displacement factor. Even slowtrack translations through the superficies into hyperspace make me feel dreadfully seedy, and now that I’m gravid I’ll probably be even worse. It’s a good thing that human magnates don’t have to meet in Orb more often than twice a year—an Earth year, that is. Otherwise Davy would have to go along without me.”
Davy MacGregor put a proprietary arm around his wife. “Not fewkin’ likely.”
Denis laughed. “Still on the honeymoon, I see.”
“Now and for aye,” growled Davy. “It wasn’t the bloody regen-tank that rejuvenated me, it was Maggie. And I’ll not be separated from her by the Concilium or Auld Clootie himself!”
Margaret shook her head in mock exasperation. She was tall and raven-haired, only thirty years old but already an Intendant Associate for Europe, like her husband. She had not been nominated to the Concilium, which seemed not to bother her in the least. “Davy, you are a darling idiot. What am I to do with him, Lucille?”
“Denis turned the magnateship down,” the older woman said quietly. “It’s hardly a disgrace.” She left unsaid the fact that Paul would now probably be unopposed for First Magnate if Davy had declined. Only the son of Jamie MacGregor was deemed to be as fit as Paul Remillard to be humanity’s first spokesman in the Galactic Concilium.
The dinner guests followed Socorro and Tom into the magnificent formal living room of the President’s House, where chairs had been grouped around the great fireplace. A middle-aged woman in a dark dress and white apron was bringing in a coffee urn, and the president’s daughter followed with a big tray of cups and saucers.
“This is Susan O’Brien, who made the mole de poblano we enjoyed tonight,” Socorro said, “and her helper is our daughter, Maria Owl, who has been keeping the trick-or-treaters from storming the fort.”
The guests all murmured appreciatively as they acknowledged the introductions. The president and first lady showed Davy and Margaret and the Poltroyans some of the antique treasures that graced the room, including the portrait of the second Mrs. Daniel Webster, an exquisite small sculpture by Jadwiga Majewska, and a number of pre-Columbian artworks from Dartmouth’s collection that were on loan to the house.
The doorbell rang.
“Drat,” said Maria Owl, who was serving the coffee. “Won’t those kids ever give me a break?”
“Why not let me take care of them this time?” Margaret volunteered. She started for the front hall before Socorro or Tom could protest. “We have nothing quite like this at home in Scotland. It would be a pleasure.”
“Oh, would you?” Maria said. “The candy bars are in a basket on the table by the door. One treat for each trickster, and if it’s students, don’t let them bully you into handing out more.”
Margaret laughed. “No fear.”
Although the outside porch lights were bright, the hall itself was rather dimly illuminated by a small crystal chandelier. Margaret Strayhorn picked up the basket and opened the heavy door.
Five children who looked to be ten or eleven years old stood there in an expectant line. There was a colonial miss in a domino mask, a Bugs Bunny, a heavily made-up witch, a pirate with an eye patch, and a clown-faced tramp. Margaret was charmed—and simultaneously surprised to note that all of the children were operant and their minds thickly screened.
“Trick or treat!” the youngsters said.
And Hydra struck.
Margaret Strayhorn was a strong-minded woman, especially in the metafaculties of coercion and creativity, and she had the advantage of a split second’s worth of guarded surprise ju
st as the Hydra focused its initial drain upon her crown chakra. This saved her life.
As her hair burst into flames Margaret gave a single piercing scream. At the same time she instinctively mustered her entire creative quotient into a self-preserving barricade. An instant later, she crumpled to the floor. The mental defense had drained all her strength.
By that time the others had come rushing into the entry hall. The front door was wide open on empty blackness. Margaret lay on her side with both arms crossed in front of her face, as if still warding off her attacker. The top of her scalp was scorched and smoking in a peculiar radially symmetrical pattern, as if some diabolical agent had momentarily impressed upon it an incendiary brand.
Stunned with horror, Davy MacGregor dropped to his knees beside his wife and lifted her burned head. “Maggie! My God, Maggie!”
Her eyes opened. The pupils were so widely dilated that they seemed black pits. “I saw it,” she whispered. “It would have killed me, but I got a wall up and deflected its first strike. And then … it went away.”
“What did?” Denis cried.
“I don’t know,” Margaret Strayhorn said helplessly. “I don’t know.”
ForgivemeforgivemeOdearFuryIdidmybest—
Yes. [Panic regret anger yearning BROKENHEARTED WEEPING.]
But Fury I FAILED. And … she did see me.
No … just us.
[Misery. Deprivation. Insecurity. Impending disassembly.]
She was so quick … I never thought she’d be able to scream or prevent the insertion of the crown chakra drain. I was going to paralyze her with the first stroke, then pull her into the bushes. Afterward I would have incinerated her body completely—just as you told me to do. No one would have suspected that I did it. But now—
But HOWFuryHOW? I’m not strong enough to take her!
[Sigh.] Will it hurt as much as the other lessons Fury?
NO! Goddamfuckshit NO! I’ll do anything! I want it! All of it!
I’ll do anything! Dearest Fury you made me and you made me so very happy. I’ll do anything you say. Just let me feed on lifeforce again. Let me grow. Please.
19
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
I AWOKE ON THE MORNING OF 21 NOVEMBER WITH A THROBBING skull from the hangover of the Western world, but no guilt at all. If ever a man had a good excuse for getting shitfaced, c’est moi.
Marc had told me that he would coerce Bill Parmentier to fly him back to Ape Lake between the first and fifteenth of November with more food. But though the weather remained unaccountably perfect, so that supplies could have been dropped to us even if the lake ice would not yet take the weight of the ski-shod Beaver, Marc had not come.
As the food ran low, we had tried to trap more hares; but Teresa’s earlier massacre had exterminated those in our immediate vicinity, as the absence of tracks proved. Ape Lake had very little other accessible winter wildlife aside from mice, our good friend Herman the Ermine, and a few spruce grouse. We had tried one of the latter, and it looked tempting coming out of the Coleman oven, roasted to a turn and accompanied by spicy apple rings. But the meat tasted horrible, permeated through and through by the skunky flavor of the spruce needles the bird had been eating.
I suppose we might have gagged it down if we were actually starving to death—but neither of us was that far gone yet, and so the bird was given to a grateful Herman, and we ate our last tin of sardines spread on biscuits, with peanut butter and biscuits for dessert. Later, upon consulting one of the reference flecks, Teresa learned that she should have prepared the bird by parboiling it and dumping out the malflavored water several times. The next time she cooked a grouse she followed the technique, and the result was edible—but just barely.
During the week that had just passed, I tried no less than twenty times to bespeak Marc telepathically—and damn the consequences if my feebly powered, imperfectly beamed thoughts slopped out from intimate mode and were overheard. But there had been no answer, which led me to two possible conclusions: either the boy was far out of range of my farspeech, no longer on the planet Earth … or he was dead.
My natural Franco pessimism opted for the latter. I feared that the Magistratum had discovered that our canoe accident was faked and that Marc had been an accomplice in Teresa’s disappearance. The Simbiari Proctors might never squeeze the whole truth out of that valiant young mind, but that wouldn’t stop them from pronouncing him guilty of compounding a felony and accessorizing after the fact. Their meting out of punishment was customarily swift. The family would have been helpless to save him.
Nevertheless, day after day, as my own hope dimmed, I kept on burbling to Teresa that her son was bound to show up tomorrow for sure. I tried to suppress my growing panic, commanding myself to keep up a cheerful front for Teresa’s sake, all the while thanking heaven that the one operant trick I was good at was keeping my thoughts well screened. But finally, on November 20, without my knowing it she inventoried our remaining supplies. At supper she quietly told me that we had less than three weeks’ worth of food reserves left if we ate very sparingly, and we would have to resign ourselves to the fact that Marc was not coming.
“I suspected as much,” said I. We had dined on pasta and Velveeta with leftover pease porridge on the side. Most of what remained in our larder of staples was simple starches. We did have fair amounts of spices and condiments left, and plenty of tea and freeze-dried coffee and dried fruit, but almost no protein.
As she uttered the fateful words, I stared down at my tongue-polished plate in despair. I momentarily considered emulating the noble Captain Oates on Scott’s fatal Antarctic expedition: I would take a hike out into the snow, telling Teresa that I might be gone some time, and simply never return. But even as the fantasy played itself out in my imagination, I realized that my death wouldn’t save her. She would still be out of food before Jack’s birth, and what would become of her and the child then? The strongly coercive members of the family
who might be able to penetrate the Megapod Reserve tracelessly and take her and the baby home and hide them would by that time be 4000 lightyears away on Concilium Orb, attending the inauguration. Even if they became aware of her need, it would take them two to three weeks to return, and long before then Teresa would have starved in the wilderness, or else she would be compelled to reveal herself to the Magistratum.
“It’s not hopeless, Rogi,” she said. “You have the rifle. You can go hunting.”
“There’s nothing left to hunt around the lake but small game, and the high-powered rifle bullets would blast them to shreds. I could certainly trap what’s left of the hares and grouse, but you expend a lot of energy moving around outside when it’s very cold. I don’t think I’d be able to bring in enough small critters to keep us both going.”
Teresa had leaned across the supper table and bestowed that dazzling smile of hers upon me. “Why then, you’ll simply have to go off away from the lake and find something large.”
It was at that point that I decided the only useful thing to do was get drunk …
Huddled deep within my sleeping bag on the morning after, with my head on the verge of meltdown, I could hear Teresa moving about the cabin, humming an intricate operatic aria as she whipped up something that was probably flapjack batter. The bacon and powdered eggs were long gone, and breakfast was now usually fried cakes, oatmeal, or cinnamon-rice with raisins and a bit of reconstituted milk.
The ambrosial smell of coffee seeped through the thick layer of down and bunny fur covering my face. I heard her footsteps approach, ventured to use my broken-down farsight, and saw her with my mind’s eye, holding a steaming cup.
“Rogi, dear, don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll find some kind of big game. And if we have lots of meat, we can eke out the other things.”
I sat up, taking the coffee and cradling it in my shaky hands. “All I have is two boxes of ammo. And I don’t know a thing about hunting. My sport is backpacking, and I’ve always believed in live and let live. In rugged mountain country like this … dieu de dieu, I don’t know! I’d have to hike down to a lower altitude—”