I said: Baby? Jack? Ti-Jean?…
The cabin and its furnishings seemed to fade away, and I was surrounded by a strange light of the deepest carmine red. I heard a symphony of sound: a double-time beat played on two giant tympani, an accompanying fluid rustle adorned with small peeps and squeaks, slow periodic gusts of wind. I tasted something that was sweet-salty-bitter, felt lapped in warmth, comforted, shielded. My own heart seemed to catch on fire as the other mind touched me, came joyfully into me. I saw him and he saw me. His eyes were enormous and wide open and aware. He was serenely afloat, tiny hands clasped, a perfectly formed unborn baby boy. Perfect. Perfect …
He said: Rogi!
And let me know him.
22
SWAFFHAM ABBAS, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, ENGLAND, EARTH, 7 DECEMBER 2051
ADRIEN REMILLARD HAD HAD NO IDEA WHY PROFESSOR ANNA Gawrys-Sakhvadze was so anxious to see him. She had farspoken him in mid-morning, New Hampshire time, and asked him to have dinner with her that evening if it was at all possible.
Adrien was rushing to complete his portion of an extensive revision of his father’s textbook Metaconcert Structure and Template Programming—its looming deadline being the reason he and Denis had stayed behind on Earth when the rest of the family left for Concilium Orb. He definitely did not have any time to spare for a chin-wag with an old family friend. Not even one so beloved as Dotty Annushka, so named by Adrien when he was a toddler unable to pronounce “doctor” and she was a visiting fellow at Dartmouth’s physics department. Anna adored the seven Remillard children with the fervor of a woman unable to have any of her own, and as a frequent guest she had introduced them to homemade Russian ice cream and other unforgettable ethnic treats.
Adrien pleaded the press of urgent work when she called. He had only three days left to finish his section of the book before he and Denis were scheduled to leave Earth themselves. Couldn’t he and Dotty Annushka get together when they were all in Orb, when there would be all the time in the world for lengthy discussion? Or perhaps whatever was on her mind could be talked about right now.
But Anna said: I must see you in person immediately Adrien. Please I beg of you I would not make such a request if the matter were not of the most paramount importance.
So he took off at once in his egg, and three hours later met her for a quick supper at The Windmill. The pub was not far from the Institute for Dynamic-Field Studies, where Anna worked, situated in a little village northeast of Cambridge. Although she greeted him with a hearty Russian hug and kiss, her rejuvenated face had a drawn look. She was clearly very much keyed up and apprehensive, betraying deep anxiety in spite of determined efforts to shield her emotional state. She would not talk about her “important business” in a public place—especially not one like The Windmill, filled with operant scientists champing sandwiches and cottage pie and swilling old ale. The discussion must wait until they went to her laboratory after the meal. There, she told him, they could converse behind the secure shelter of a mind-proof sigma-field and be sure that no one on Earth overheard them.
Adrien’s eyes widened at that. He said: For heaven’s sake Dotty!
But she would say no more until he finished eating. Then they went out of the cozy pub into the winter night. A bitter wind was blowing off the frozen fens, but it was only a short walk to the IDFS complex. Following Anna’s instruction, Adrien had left his rhocraft in the crowded car park of the pub.
When they were away from the center of the village, Anna said, “Do you know that Davy MacGregor’s wife has died?”
“Yes. Paul farspoke the news to Papa, and he told me. It’s a terrible thing. Margaret and Davy seemed so happy together. I understand that Davy is devastated by her suicide.”
Anna took Adrien’s arm as they crossed the road and entered a side lane. “Davy farspoke me early this morning with further details of the investigation. The Magistratum did find incinerated human elemental remains consonant with a woman of her mass, including gold and alloy metals equal to the weight of her wedding ring. And her aura is extinct, as far as the Krondak comparators can determine. She certainly isn’t within a thousand lightyears of Orb. The Magistratum is prepared to declare her legally dead, but the verdict will remain open.”
“But she left a suicide note—”
“The note was in her handwriting and had her fingerprints and DNA traces on it. But Davy is convinced that she never would have taken her own life. He thinks she was coerced to write the note, then was murdered in the same mysterious way that Brett McAllister was—by the person who attacked her at Dartmouth on Halloween. Davy told me he suspects that the killer is a member of the Remillard family. Perhaps even Paul himself.”
Adrien halted in his tracks, looking down at the Russian physicist. She wore a long faux-fur coat and hat, which combined with her stocky build to lend her a roly-poly teddy bear aspect that belied the brutal words she had just spoken. This dear old woman had known him and his family for over forty years; but she was more than a friend—she was also the Director of the Department of Sigma Studies of Cambridge University, and not one prone to vaporous fancies.
Adrien asked, “But what motive could any of us Remillards have?”
“Some Magnate-Designates of my acquaintance believe that the only conceivable motive for Brett’s murder was his opposition to his wife’s serving on the Concilium. Once he was dead, Catherine acquiesced. And now we have Davy as the only one opposing Paul for the position of First Magnate. Davy is too powerful an operant to attack with impunity. But this murderer—if Davy is right and Margaret was murdered—might well have thought that Davy would be so distraught with grief after Margaret’s death that he would give up the candidacy. You know, of course, that Davy’s own mother was murdered by an anti-operant fanatic years before the Intervention took place. And losing his first wife Sybil just after Will was born crippled him emotionally for thirty years.”
They began walking again, and soon they entered the IDFS complex, with its scattered large buildings. The east wind raked the expanse of frost-silvered grass and strummed the leafless black poplars lining the drive.
“This murderer can’t be one of my family,” Adrien said. “I’d stake my life on it.”
“Would you?” Her tone was as cold as the rising gale. “No doubt the Magistratum would agree with you. They subjected all of you to mental probing after Brett McAllister was killed, and they were forced to exonerate you.”
“Nevertheless, you say that Davy believes that a Remillard killed his wife and Brett. Has the Magistratum taken any cognizance of his notion?”
“Davy has accused no one … officially. He may be wild with grief, but he still has sense enough not to precipitate a scandal that might disrupt the Concilium Inauguration. Nevertheless, you must agree that if the two deaths are connected, the Human Polity is placed in a frightful position. The Remillards are called the First Family of Metapsychology for a very good reason: all of you have positions of influence and power. And if one is a calculating killer—”
“No one in my family could have done such a thing! I know them too well.”
“My dear Adryushka, you are hardly without prejudice.” Her tone softened. “And perhaps, as you say, Davy’s suspicions are unfounded. But if he is right, it is my considered opinion that there is only one Remillard whose innocence is utterly unassailable. One who could not possibly have killed Margaret—and by implication, did not kill Brett, either. You.”
!!
“No one could have coerced Margaret Strayhorn to write a suicide note over a distance of 4000 lightyears—much less coerce her to jump into a waste destructor. You were here on Earth when she died—ergo, you are not the killer.” She smiled at him. “Besides, I know you, my dear little Adryushka that I dandled on my knee! I know you are goodhearted and honest and unselfish … I know you do not blindly accept the dictates of the Galactic Milieu as Paul and Anne do, and you are not quite as bedazzled by your younger brother’s undoubted brilliance as your older s
iblings often are.”
Adrien only shook his head. They walked on for a while in silence. Then he asked, “Why did you want me to come here?”
“I must put a very important proposal to you. One that … I had intended to postpone speaking of until much later. But circumstances have changed, and it is appropriate to present it to you now.”
“What is this proposal?”
“First, let me tell you that there has been a great scientific breakthrough at Cambridge, which the exotics are as yet unaware of. The discoverers have kept it under wraps, feeling it would not be politic to reveal it until after humanity has been granted full Milieu citizenship and exotics no longer control the law enforcement bodies. I will tell you about it very shortly, so there is no need for you to coerce it out of me.”
Adrien was stung by her evident mistrust. “Dotty Annushka—do you really think I would do such a thing?”
“I wasn’t sure,” she replied calmly. “If you were more loyal to the Milieu than to your own human race, you might.”
They pressed on without speaking and without communicating mentally, Adrien at a loss to understand Anna’s imputations against his siblings. And what was this about a mysterious breakthrough? It was a serious breach of professional ethics not to publish news of important scientific discoveries immediately. If Anna, normally so conscientious, had colluded in a cover-up, she must have had an extraordinarily good reason for doing so. What in hell was going on?
At last, when Adrien was nearly half frozen in his light windbreaker jacket, they reached a wing of the extensive Sigma Studies Laboratory. Anna doffed a glove and put her thumb on the heated lock pad of a side door. It swung open. Inside, the mock-medieval structure was warm, silent, and brightly lit, its corridors deserted.
“No one is working here tonight,” Anna said. “I made certain of that. Being the director of an establishment has advantages as well as responsibilities.”
They came to a door marked EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS—ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE, which she also thumbed open. Beyond was a rather small, windowless room clogged with equipment and haywired power cables. The air carried a faint odor of ozone, and the floor looked as though it hadn’t been swept in weeks. In the center of the room, where there was a cleared space, two rickety old wooden folding chairs stood before a small, very businesslike control console. A piece of apparatus suspended from an electric hoist hung about two meters above the console.
Anna slipped out of her furry coat and tossed it aside. Beckoning Adrien to join her, she sat down on one of the chairs and began working at the controls.
“Is this the new ultrathoughtproof sigma generator?” he asked, indicating the gadgetry that dangled just above his head. He sat down beside her and let his deepsight tour the circuitry of the device at lightning speed. It was very compact and obviously more sophisticated by several orders of magnitude than the mechanical privacy screens that had already been in use for many decades in the Milieu. None of those was secure against the probing of a Grand Master operant human, a Krondaku, or the more powerful minds among the Simbiari. Before Adrien had finished analyzing the new generator, the lights in the room suddenly went dim and it seemed as if they sat inside a dome of darkly transparent glass.
“The field is quite gas-permeable, so we can’t possibly suffocate,” Anna said, taking her hands from the control pads and sitting back with a suddenly relaxed air. “And as you see, it’s not light-opaque like the earlier screens. No more claustrophobic feeling.” She reached out and tapped the superficies with one knuckle. “Impermeable to solids and liquids, though, and alleged to be proof against the thoughts of even a Grand Master like you. Care to give it a test? There’s a coffee machine on that bench in the corner. See if you can PK it into operation. Do your best, my dear. I could use a cuppa.”
Obediently, Adrien exerted his psychokinetic metafunction, a faculty much prized by operant children but unappreciated by Milieu intellectuals, both human and exotic. An adult—especially a powerful adult—who used his PK blatantly risked being labeled a case of arrested development. Still, the odd bit of mental prestidigitation sometimes had its uses.
But not, evidently, inside Anna’s newly designed sigma-field.
“That’s very good,” Adrien conceded. “Tried to hit the button on Mr. Coffee with every erg I could crank, and got nowhere. Is this screen your great scientific achievement?”
“Good heavens, no.” She was staring at him with a strange expression that combined hopefulness and fear. “The existence of this new sigma technology is well known in the field, if not to the general public. No, our truly important breakthrough is something quite different, not even officially connected with the IDFS. I will tell you about it—show it to you—after we have discussed the reason why I asked you to come to England.”
Heroically, Adrien restrained his impatience. “Very well.”
Anna’s hands, bare of rings and with the nails cut short, were laced tightly in her lap now. She stared at them as she began to speak. “I am, I suppose, a moderately important person. I have made a few good contributions to dynamic-field physics, and I have exerted a certain professional and public influence that must have impressed the exotic preceptors, since they have nominated me to be a Magnate of the Concilium. Still, if I should die tomorrow it would be no great loss. There are at least five others in this institute who are as deserving as I of the honor the Milieu has seen fit to bestow on me.”
She lifted her eyes to meet his and continued quietly. “And I would die, my dear Adrien—that is, I would take my life—rather than reveal the secret I intend to share with you tonight. I know in my heart that you would not do anything to harm or compromise me. But if you betray me, I will have no other recourse than death. I tell you this so that you will know the depth of my commitment. A commitment … that I think you will want to share.”
Alarm surged up in Adrien’s mind. What the hell was she leading up to? Her mental barriers had abruptly fallen, and something unusual and very dangerous waited just beyond her passive vestibulum, daring him to inspect it. But he could not. Whatever this great mystery was, the responsibility for revealing it would have to be hers.
“No, Annushka. You’ll have to speak. I won’t take this from you.”
She nodded. “Very well … A long time ago, you were at a large party. Everyone was drinking heavily, and thoughts that ordinarily are kept carefully sequestered were flying about like the proverbial bats out of hell. The burden of those thoughts was resentment against the Simbiari Proctorship, against the exotic domination of Earth—even though we humans had agreed, in principle, to endure whatever hardships were necessary to prepare ourselves for full citizenship in the Galactic Milieu. You were as drunk as the rest, and you spoke your mind with considerable vehemence, saying that we might be making a great mistake accepting the constraints of a civilization engendered by exotics. You said, among other things, that we were still ignorant of the very essence of the Milieu—that ineffable Unity so prized by the nonhumans, which seems so contrary to human nature and to our cherished sanctity of the individual.”
“I did say that,” Adrien admitted. “And I still have the same doubts. But lately I’ve been too busy with other matters to stew over them. And some of the studies by our xenologists and philosophers have led me to believe that Unity might perhaps not be the bugaboo it seemed to be. But—”
Anna held up a restraining hand. “What would you say if I told you that there exists a small group of highly placed operants, including myself, who are convinced that humanity’s future best interests lie outside the Galactic Milieu?”
Adrien said quietly, “I think I might agree with you. In the short term, we need the exotics very much. In the long term … why shouldn’t we be independent? Especially independent of this troubling Unity thing! I admit that I don’t understand it, but it scares the hell out of me. It seems to have a different effect on different races, and it’s certainly a more subtle thing than the hive-mentality
analogs the nonoperant alarmists are so afraid of … I’m an American, Annushka, and we value our liberty above almost everything else in the world. Anything that threatens that freedom goes against our national spirit, which is why our people gave the Simbiari Proctorship such a hard time. What those exotics did whipping us into shape was nothing more or less than despotism—exerted with the best possible motives. I’ve had to ask myself if the Unity might be tyranny of a worse kind—something that we wouldn’t even recognize as an abridgment of liberty. A kind of slavery that we’d welcome, that would make us very peaceful and contented, transforming our minds into something that isn’t human at all. And we’d never realize what had been done to us, because we’d already be happily caught in the trap. Forever.”
Anna took both his hands in hers. He was still her little Adryushka, keen as a razor, always questioning, never quite willing to take anything at face value. His hair, disheveled by the windy walk, was a dark tangle, and his rather plain face with its small mustache was pale and strained. He was only forty years old, a loving husband and father, with extraordinary talents and a long life of public service lying ahead of him. Did she have the right to ask him to be party to a conspiracy against an organization that had given humanity the stars?
But their little group needed him so badly—especially now, on the eve of humanity’s admittance into Milieu citizenship. He would certainly be part of the Human Polity’s inner circle of power, one of the operant elite. He, more readily than any of the rest of their little cabal, would be able to determine whether the Milieu and its Unity were as dangerous as her instincts prompted her to believe.
“Adrien, my dear, I have an invitation for you. I will only extend it once. This is why I called you here, so I could make this offer to you before you became a magnate—so, if you wished, you could take the oath to uphold the Milieu with a mental reservation and feel justified in conscience if later you decide to repudiate that oath. If you refuse my invitation, you will have a very perilous secret to keep, and my life will also be in your hands. I will not permit myself to be used to confirm the existence of anti-Milieu operants, much less betray them.”