Magnificat by Julian May
Sam Ontaratu cursed and told him to go away, and that was when the dude socked it to him with his metacoercion. Sam let out a groan. “Aw, man. What d’ya wanna do that for?”
“Up!”
The coercion intensified, conquering Sam’s flaccid musculature, and he realized he was going to have to obey. Still muttering, he managed to cork the flat whiskey bottle and shove it into his shirtfront before he squirmed out of the warm nest and staggered upright, supporting himself against the wall of the old building.
The head was wearing pricey civvies—a rainproof down jacket, heavy pants, and snow boots—therefore he was neither a beat cop nor a member of the dreaded Seattle PD Skid Road Homeless Squad. But Sam should have known that already. None of the night-crawling fuzz were metas. Once in a great while a Holy Joe operant would come prowling around the waterfront, hassling bums for Jesus. But this dude didn’t fit the mold. No way did he have a do-gooder air about him.
No way at all.
A tingle of alarm penetrated Sam’s alcoholic haze. “I got no money, no scag,” he moaned. “Gimme a break, man.”
The weird head closed in, arms held out from his sides like a wrestler ready to pounce. His eyes were wide and blazing. He wore no gloves and his hands trembled violently.
“Down on your knees,” he said in a grating voice.
Oh, no! None of that shit! Sam was a Sahtu Dene Native American and a Sahtu was a man. No meta snakecharmer was going to force him to do that.
The coercion abruptly eased off. The dude got this funny look—a kind of double-take, like he just remembered something.
Sam ducked sideways, out of reach, and pulled out the whiskey flask. When the weird head made a clumsy turn Sam slammed the bottle smack into his face. The creep screamed and blood spurted from his nose. He tripped over his own feet and went sprawling.
“You get the fuck outa here!” Sam yelled, brandishing the booze.
The weird head looked up at him with the damnedest expression: not anger, not pain. Terrified surprise. Like he didn’t even know where he was.
Then, just like a candle flame blown out, he disappeared.
“Christ,” Sam whispered fearfully. The dude was totally gone! Sam shuffled to the edge of the loading dock and looked down into the alley, expecting to see a body.
Nobody. Nothing. Only the wet alley pavement and rows of Dumpsters and recycle bins shining in the rain. Over on the Ave, groundcars whizzed by. Sam Ontaratu squinched his bleary eyes and took a good look at the bottle that he still held. It had blood on it. It was also a little less than half full.
“Christ,” Sam said again, shaking his head. Then he crawled back into his sleeping bag, finished off the whiskey, and slept.
Out in the San Juan Islands off the Washington coast, the precipitation fell as icy rain that rustled against the drape-shrouded windows of the small sitting room.
Marc and Cyndia had gone off a couple of hours earlier to catch a performance of Die Walküre at the Seattle Opera. Thierry Lachine, the houseman, was in bed with the flu. The nanny, Mitsuko Hayakawa, was off in Twisp, visiting her elderly mother over the weekend. But Rogi didn’t mind babysitting. There was a nice blaze going in the fireplace, and the armchair was comfortable. He’d put a good old Carl Hiaasen comic thriller into his plaque-book and a modest quantity of Wild Turkey into himself, then settled down for a quiet winter evening.
Rogi nodded off after a while, waking eventually to find the fire dwindled away to embers and the clock pushing midnight. He got up, yawned, and went off to the nursery to check on the baby. Hagen was sleeping peacefully in his cherrywood crib. He was a good kid, never fretful, and his little brain was chock-full of the usual operant infantile dreams—blunt sensory perceptions and the braided loops of learning experiences, unscreened and innocent.
Rogi smiled down at the child, thinking how different he was from precocious, wary Baby Jack …
And different from young Denis too. Do you remember how you comforted Denis when he was frightened by the cold water poured on his head during his baptism? And how he bonded to you when his mother asked you to be his teacher?
The old man smiled, looking up into the empty air of the nursery. “I remember it like it was yesterday, mon fantôme! Amazing, the way little Denis was able to farspeak real words almost from Day One. This godson of mine’s not quite so talented as the other two, but he’s gonna do just fine.”
I hope to God you’re right Rogi. But I’m afraid that this child may be in great danger. From his own father.
“Ghost, are you crazy? Marc loves Hagen! He’d never hurt him.”
He might—thinking he was doing good … I can only warn you of the possibility. There’s no one else I can tell no one who would believe me no one who can help me to prevent it danger to the baby his mother to you to the entire galaxy it’s not only Marc it’s ME turn around Rogi TURNAROUND AND LOOK AT ME!
In a panic of confusion, Rogi obeyed. He did not expect to see anything. The Lylmik entity that he called the Family Ghost was always invisible during its infrequent visits.
But this time, there was a man standing near the dark nursery window. He was slightly built, and his hair was fair, and his youthful face had a smear of blood around the nose and mouth.
“No,” Rogi said. “Oh, no. This isn’t happening.”
Marc and I are the most dangerous men ever born—God help us!—but if he won’t then you’ll have to I can’t explain I can’t even stay here any longer ROGI HELP ME! Help Hagen and Cyndia and the whole human race and the Galactic Milieu …
“Denis?” the old man whispered. “Denis, mon fils, is it you?”
But the apparition had vanished. The dark nursery was empty, except for Rogi himself and the wailing baby.
… What?
The singing was splendid and Baldwin’s new staging of the Valkyries’ ride is terrific. But this time around I found the plot a little too evocative for comfort. I don’t like old Wotan the god-king. He talks too much and he’s a manipulator.
!!!That’s wonderful!!! And it’s about time. I was beginning to wonder if Mental Man was nothing more than a gross misconception on my part.
Will we be able to engender large numbers of operant paramount embryos now with the cousins’ ova?
I don’t understand.
I have a contingency plan ready in case the Concilium decision on Mental Man is negative. We’ll move to Okanagon—lock, stock, and barrel.
That’s impossible!
I don’t see how. There are intrinsic limits to infantile preception. I’ve consulted the top authorities on developmental metapsychology and they say—
That was only a fantasy. Besides, Catherine showed me that Jack’s genome and mine have significant differences. The mutation—
It … would be wrong.
ank you. Millions of them, free and triumphant, leading humanity into the Second Milieu.>
Millions …
It should have been me not him! Why wasn’t it me?
… Jack did survive the transition. He must have been paramount in creativity even at that early age to accomplish the reincarnation.
I can still see it: Firemen cutting off internal sigmas guarding burning hospital room door open smoke flame breaking window snow steam ash blackened twisted melted equipment A NAKED ADULT MAN METAMORPHOSING BACK TO HIS TRUE SHAPE TRANSFORMED JACKFORMED THE BRAIN changing again to a child safe alive triumphant …
But how?
Yes … God it will work He’ll be born Mental Man the pinnacle of human evolution our savior!
This is a dream. Only a dream …
22
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
I TOLD TI-JEAN AND DOROTHÉE ABOUT THE SPECTRE OF DENIS A month or so later, when they came to Hanover following the Concilium session. Right there in the back-room office of my bookshop, Dorothée did a minor ream-job with my full consent, recovering my memory of the experience and analyzing it with Jack’s help. What they discovered was inconclusive: I had seen something that both my ordinary senses and my ultrasenses perceived as real. It might have been Denis, or it might have been a delusion that I had invested with his metapsychic identity.
“Which do you think it was?” I asked Dorothée.
“I think that you saw him,” she said, her pseudovoice flat and emotionless. She wore her sparkling diamond mask, but her clothing was otherwise unremarkable—black wool pants and a jade cowl-neck sweater. She’d taken off her rain jacket.
I was collapsed in my old leather swivel-chair and she sat on a stool next to me, holding one of my hands. Her ream had been so skillful that there was no pain, but I still felt wrung-out. I turned to Ti-Jean. “And you?”
He was perched on the edge of my battered desk. Marcel the cat was peacefully asleep in the IN basket, and the gales of March were strumming the tightly clenched leafbuds of the maple tree outside the little office window. “I’ve suspected almost from the beginning that the integrated entity who escaped from us on Christmas has the ability to d-jump,” Jack said. “To teleport. This could be one explanation of what you saw. Or it could have been a metacreative ‘sending,’ an illusionary projection. Whatever … I think it was Denis, temporarily in control of his own body again.”
“So what are we going to do about it?” I asked them, my impatience increasing.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Jack said, “except wait and see whether Denis appears again. If he is alive, it’s possible that the fusion of his two disparate personae during the metaconcert was only temporary. The Denis part might now be subordinate, as the Fury part was before. In time, the good persona might give us some clue we can act on to wipe out the bad persona. It’s all we can hope for.”
I pulled free of Dorothée’s solicitous grasp and pleaded with Ti-Jean. “Denis was in agony! He knows now that he’s Fury. He begged me to help him. Can’t you at least do another scan of Earth? Have another shot at tracking him down?”
The bright blue inhuman eyes shifted. “Uncle Rogi, the odds are too long and there’s other work for me to do. Vitally important work.”
“Damage control,” I opined with some cynicism. “Countering Marc and Mental Man. That’s all you care about now.”
Jack admitted it.
Dorothée said, “Marc is the Pied Piper, Rogi. The metapsychic temptor—so magnificent and strong and reasonable! Do you know what I thought when I saw him give that interview on the Tri-D, taking the defense of human liberty upon himself as though no one else in the Galactic Milieu gave a damn about it? I thought: He looks like my guardian angel would look—those calm gray eyes, that beautiful, trustworthy masculine face. Why not let him fight and guard and rule and guide me? Why not let that paramount mind and those big wide shoulders deal with the mess in the Milieu? I wasn’t coerced by Marc, Rogi, I was bewitched … for a little while. Until I remembered who he was, and how he’d lived a life that even the most charitable person would call utterly self-centered. Marc may believe it when he says he’s totally committed to the sovereignty of human nature, but—”
“Of course he believes it!” I exclaimed, full of indignation. “He’s seen through the window dressing of mystical Unity bullshit that’s blinded Paul and the other loyalists—that’s blinded you. The exotics don’t want us the way we are. They want us crammed into their inhuman mold. No more messy individualism or oddball thinking or nonconformist behavior. Just tranquillity and good order for all. Docilated minions! A racial lobotomy! Us Rebels saw through the schmooze-job decades ago. We just had to bide our time until a real leader came along, one who could turn us away from the fake paradise promised by the Great Intervention. Now he’s here! Maybe Marc’s an angel with a fiery sword. But he won’t chase us out of the fucking Garden of Eden, he’ll lead us out—because that’s where we want to go.”
“If you only understood—” Jack began. But I cut him off with a Franco curse.
Dorothée said, “Marc is no guardian angel. No warrior Michael, either. If anything, he’s Abaddon—the Angel of the Abyss.”
“You’re afraid of him!” I cackled. “Both of you—scared stiff that more and more straight-thinking metas and ordinary folks will join the Rebellion and leave you and the other human loyalists sitting on a sawed-off branch!”
“We’re very much afraid of Marc,” Jack said. “And I think that deep in your heart, you’re afraid of him, too.” He gave Marcel a farewell pat and got down off the desk, then took Dorothée’s jacket from the office clothes-tree and held it while she put it on. “What Marc has done has nothing to do with any commitment to human liberty. He’s manipulated public opinion with coldblooded efficiency because he sees the Milieu as a threat to his own ambitions. Your angel with a fiery sword is laying the groundwork for war.”
“If war comes,” I blustered, “it’ll be the Milieu that starts it, not Marc.”
“Do you really believe that?” Dorothée spoke pityingly.
“Yes,” I declared. “And so do billions of other people who just want to be free. Free to be human. We’ll fight for that freedom if we have to.”
“But will you fight for the sake of Mental Man?” Jack asked, pausing as he slipped on his jacket.
I stared at him.
“Think about it,” he said. “And at the same time, think about what Denis—or your own unconscious mind—might have meant by calling Marc one of the most dangerous men ever born.”
Then Jack the Bodiless and Diamond Mask went out through the front of the bookshop into the equinoctial twilight. I sat there in my chair in the back room, and the wind whistled and the old clapboard building creaked and Marcel the Maine Coon cat watched me with mellow predatory eyes until it was time for us to go off to supper.
Although the Galactic Concilium is not a body open to public scru
tiny, news about its arcane telepathic deliberations was usually well leaked by human magnates in the years preceding the Rebellion—especially by those belonging to the Rebel Party. The great debate on Mental Man was a prolonged one that would not be resolved in a single session; but after Marc’s calculated toss of the gauntlet into the faces of the exotics, only the most cockeyed optimists held out much hope for the project’s ultimate approval. Even among the Rebels there was grousing and grumping about why the leader of the party had deliberately injected this side issue into the anti-Unity debate. On the other hand, if Mental Man actually had offensive-defensive potential, then why had Marc revealed His existence prematurely, rendering Him vulnerable to the Milieu spoilers?
Marc refused to explain.
Paul Remillard and the other pro-Milieu loyalists, who still formed a commanding majority among Human Polity magnates, remained confident that they could shoot the project down—or at least stall it until that magical moment when our race “coadunated,” and Unity more or less happened all by itself. To that end, they stepped up the propaganda barrage touting the benefits of Unification, enlisting not only human philosophers, religious leaders, and psychologists but Poltroyan advocates as well.
All Earthlings loved the little Purple People. Their good will toward men, their warm sense of humor, and their undeniable individuality made them formidable opponents to Rebel spokesmen who accused all of the exotic races of being submerged in a lockstep alien “hive-mentality.” To know a Poltroyan was to have a gut feeling that the slander just couldn’t be so. The winsome little bald-headed folks with the ruby eyes managed to be exemplars of Unity without even opening their mauve lips; and when they did speak out, they were awfully convincing.
Two of the most eloquent Poltroyan apologists for Unity were Fritiso-Prontinalin and Minatipa-Pinakrodin—old friends of the family who had once been visiting fellows at Dartmouth College. I was in attendance when Fred and Minnie came back to Hanover in October 2081 and chaired a hugely successful pro-Unity monster rally at Seuss Auditorium. They were so persuasive that I even found myself wavering … just a little.
“Up!”
The coercion intensified, conquering Sam’s flaccid musculature, and he realized he was going to have to obey. Still muttering, he managed to cork the flat whiskey bottle and shove it into his shirtfront before he squirmed out of the warm nest and staggered upright, supporting himself against the wall of the old building.
The head was wearing pricey civvies—a rainproof down jacket, heavy pants, and snow boots—therefore he was neither a beat cop nor a member of the dreaded Seattle PD Skid Road Homeless Squad. But Sam should have known that already. None of the night-crawling fuzz were metas. Once in a great while a Holy Joe operant would come prowling around the waterfront, hassling bums for Jesus. But this dude didn’t fit the mold. No way did he have a do-gooder air about him.
No way at all.
A tingle of alarm penetrated Sam’s alcoholic haze. “I got no money, no scag,” he moaned. “Gimme a break, man.”
The weird head closed in, arms held out from his sides like a wrestler ready to pounce. His eyes were wide and blazing. He wore no gloves and his hands trembled violently.
“Down on your knees,” he said in a grating voice.
Oh, no! None of that shit! Sam was a Sahtu Dene Native American and a Sahtu was a man. No meta snakecharmer was going to force him to do that.
The coercion abruptly eased off. The dude got this funny look—a kind of double-take, like he just remembered something.
Sam ducked sideways, out of reach, and pulled out the whiskey flask. When the weird head made a clumsy turn Sam slammed the bottle smack into his face. The creep screamed and blood spurted from his nose. He tripped over his own feet and went sprawling.
“You get the fuck outa here!” Sam yelled, brandishing the booze.
The weird head looked up at him with the damnedest expression: not anger, not pain. Terrified surprise. Like he didn’t even know where he was.
Then, just like a candle flame blown out, he disappeared.
“Christ,” Sam whispered fearfully. The dude was totally gone! Sam shuffled to the edge of the loading dock and looked down into the alley, expecting to see a body.
Nobody. Nothing. Only the wet alley pavement and rows of Dumpsters and recycle bins shining in the rain. Over on the Ave, groundcars whizzed by. Sam Ontaratu squinched his bleary eyes and took a good look at the bottle that he still held. It had blood on it. It was also a little less than half full.
“Christ,” Sam said again, shaking his head. Then he crawled back into his sleeping bag, finished off the whiskey, and slept.
Out in the San Juan Islands off the Washington coast, the precipitation fell as icy rain that rustled against the drape-shrouded windows of the small sitting room.
Marc and Cyndia had gone off a couple of hours earlier to catch a performance of Die Walküre at the Seattle Opera. Thierry Lachine, the houseman, was in bed with the flu. The nanny, Mitsuko Hayakawa, was off in Twisp, visiting her elderly mother over the weekend. But Rogi didn’t mind babysitting. There was a nice blaze going in the fireplace, and the armchair was comfortable. He’d put a good old Carl Hiaasen comic thriller into his plaque-book and a modest quantity of Wild Turkey into himself, then settled down for a quiet winter evening.
Rogi nodded off after a while, waking eventually to find the fire dwindled away to embers and the clock pushing midnight. He got up, yawned, and went off to the nursery to check on the baby. Hagen was sleeping peacefully in his cherrywood crib. He was a good kid, never fretful, and his little brain was chock-full of the usual operant infantile dreams—blunt sensory perceptions and the braided loops of learning experiences, unscreened and innocent.
Rogi smiled down at the child, thinking how different he was from precocious, wary Baby Jack …
And different from young Denis too. Do you remember how you comforted Denis when he was frightened by the cold water poured on his head during his baptism? And how he bonded to you when his mother asked you to be his teacher?
The old man smiled, looking up into the empty air of the nursery. “I remember it like it was yesterday, mon fantôme! Amazing, the way little Denis was able to farspeak real words almost from Day One. This godson of mine’s not quite so talented as the other two, but he’s gonna do just fine.”
I hope to God you’re right Rogi. But I’m afraid that this child may be in great danger. From his own father.
“Ghost, are you crazy? Marc loves Hagen! He’d never hurt him.”
He might—thinking he was doing good … I can only warn you of the possibility. There’s no one else I can tell no one who would believe me no one who can help me to prevent it danger to the baby his mother to you to the entire galaxy it’s not only Marc it’s ME turn around Rogi TURNAROUND AND LOOK AT ME!
In a panic of confusion, Rogi obeyed. He did not expect to see anything. The Lylmik entity that he called the Family Ghost was always invisible during its infrequent visits.
But this time, there was a man standing near the dark nursery window. He was slightly built, and his hair was fair, and his youthful face had a smear of blood around the nose and mouth.
“No,” Rogi said. “Oh, no. This isn’t happening.”
Marc and I are the most dangerous men ever born—God help us!—but if he won’t then you’ll have to I can’t explain I can’t even stay here any longer ROGI HELP ME! Help Hagen and Cyndia and the whole human race and the Galactic Milieu …
“Denis?” the old man whispered. “Denis, mon fils, is it you?”
But the apparition had vanished. The dark nursery was empty, except for Rogi himself and the wailing baby.
… What?
The singing was splendid and Baldwin’s new staging of the Valkyries’ ride is terrific. But this time around I found the plot a little too evocative for comfort. I don’t like old Wotan the god-king. He talks too much and he’s a manipulator.
!!!That’s wonderful!!! And it’s about time. I was beginning to wonder if Mental Man was nothing more than a gross misconception on my part.
Will we be able to engender large numbers of operant paramount embryos now with the cousins’ ova?
I don’t understand.
I have a contingency plan ready in case the Concilium decision on Mental Man is negative. We’ll move to Okanagon—lock, stock, and barrel.
That’s impossible!
I don’t see how. There are intrinsic limits to infantile preception. I’ve consulted the top authorities on developmental metapsychology and they say—
That was only a fantasy. Besides, Catherine showed me that Jack’s genome and mine have significant differences. The mutation—
It … would be wrong.
Millions …
It should have been me not him! Why wasn’t it me?
… Jack did survive the transition. He must have been paramount in creativity even at that early age to accomplish the reincarnation.
I can still see it: Firemen cutting off internal sigmas guarding burning hospital room door open smoke flame breaking window snow steam ash blackened twisted melted equipment A NAKED ADULT MAN METAMORPHOSING BACK TO HIS TRUE SHAPE TRANSFORMED JACKFORMED THE BRAIN changing again to a child safe alive triumphant …
But how?
Yes … God it will work He’ll be born Mental Man the pinnacle of human evolution our savior!
This is a dream. Only a dream …
22
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
I TOLD TI-JEAN AND DOROTHÉE ABOUT THE SPECTRE OF DENIS A month or so later, when they came to Hanover following the Concilium session. Right there in the back-room office of my bookshop, Dorothée did a minor ream-job with my full consent, recovering my memory of the experience and analyzing it with Jack’s help. What they discovered was inconclusive: I had seen something that both my ordinary senses and my ultrasenses perceived as real. It might have been Denis, or it might have been a delusion that I had invested with his metapsychic identity.
“Which do you think it was?” I asked Dorothée.
“I think that you saw him,” she said, her pseudovoice flat and emotionless. She wore her sparkling diamond mask, but her clothing was otherwise unremarkable—black wool pants and a jade cowl-neck sweater. She’d taken off her rain jacket.
I was collapsed in my old leather swivel-chair and she sat on a stool next to me, holding one of my hands. Her ream had been so skillful that there was no pain, but I still felt wrung-out. I turned to Ti-Jean. “And you?”
He was perched on the edge of my battered desk. Marcel the cat was peacefully asleep in the IN basket, and the gales of March were strumming the tightly clenched leafbuds of the maple tree outside the little office window. “I’ve suspected almost from the beginning that the integrated entity who escaped from us on Christmas has the ability to d-jump,” Jack said. “To teleport. This could be one explanation of what you saw. Or it could have been a metacreative ‘sending,’ an illusionary projection. Whatever … I think it was Denis, temporarily in control of his own body again.”
“So what are we going to do about it?” I asked them, my impatience increasing.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Jack said, “except wait and see whether Denis appears again. If he is alive, it’s possible that the fusion of his two disparate personae during the metaconcert was only temporary. The Denis part might now be subordinate, as the Fury part was before. In time, the good persona might give us some clue we can act on to wipe out the bad persona. It’s all we can hope for.”
I pulled free of Dorothée’s solicitous grasp and pleaded with Ti-Jean. “Denis was in agony! He knows now that he’s Fury. He begged me to help him. Can’t you at least do another scan of Earth? Have another shot at tracking him down?”
The bright blue inhuman eyes shifted. “Uncle Rogi, the odds are too long and there’s other work for me to do. Vitally important work.”
“Damage control,” I opined with some cynicism. “Countering Marc and Mental Man. That’s all you care about now.”
Jack admitted it.
Dorothée said, “Marc is the Pied Piper, Rogi. The metapsychic temptor—so magnificent and strong and reasonable! Do you know what I thought when I saw him give that interview on the Tri-D, taking the defense of human liberty upon himself as though no one else in the Galactic Milieu gave a damn about it? I thought: He looks like my guardian angel would look—those calm gray eyes, that beautiful, trustworthy masculine face. Why not let him fight and guard and rule and guide me? Why not let that paramount mind and those big wide shoulders deal with the mess in the Milieu? I wasn’t coerced by Marc, Rogi, I was bewitched … for a little while. Until I remembered who he was, and how he’d lived a life that even the most charitable person would call utterly self-centered. Marc may believe it when he says he’s totally committed to the sovereignty of human nature, but—”
“Of course he believes it!” I exclaimed, full of indignation. “He’s seen through the window dressing of mystical Unity bullshit that’s blinded Paul and the other loyalists—that’s blinded you. The exotics don’t want us the way we are. They want us crammed into their inhuman mold. No more messy individualism or oddball thinking or nonconformist behavior. Just tranquillity and good order for all. Docilated minions! A racial lobotomy! Us Rebels saw through the schmooze-job decades ago. We just had to bide our time until a real leader came along, one who could turn us away from the fake paradise promised by the Great Intervention. Now he’s here! Maybe Marc’s an angel with a fiery sword. But he won’t chase us out of the fucking Garden of Eden, he’ll lead us out—because that’s where we want to go.”
“If you only understood—” Jack began. But I cut him off with a Franco curse.
Dorothée said, “Marc is no guardian angel. No warrior Michael, either. If anything, he’s Abaddon—the Angel of the Abyss.”
“You’re afraid of him!” I cackled. “Both of you—scared stiff that more and more straight-thinking metas and ordinary folks will join the Rebellion and leave you and the other human loyalists sitting on a sawed-off branch!”
“We’re very much afraid of Marc,” Jack said. “And I think that deep in your heart, you’re afraid of him, too.” He gave Marcel a farewell pat and got down off the desk, then took Dorothée’s jacket from the office clothes-tree and held it while she put it on. “What Marc has done has nothing to do with any commitment to human liberty. He’s manipulated public opinion with coldblooded efficiency because he sees the Milieu as a threat to his own ambitions. Your angel with a fiery sword is laying the groundwork for war.”
“If war comes,” I blustered, “it’ll be the Milieu that starts it, not Marc.”
“Do you really believe that?” Dorothée spoke pityingly.
“Yes,” I declared. “And so do billions of other people who just want to be free. Free to be human. We’ll fight for that freedom if we have to.”
“But will you fight for the sake of Mental Man?” Jack asked, pausing as he slipped on his jacket.
I stared at him.
“Think about it,” he said. “And at the same time, think about what Denis—or your own unconscious mind—might have meant by calling Marc one of the most dangerous men ever born.”
Then Jack the Bodiless and Diamond Mask went out through the front of the bookshop into the equinoctial twilight. I sat there in my chair in the back room, and the wind whistled and the old clapboard building creaked and Marcel the Maine Coon cat watched me with mellow predatory eyes until it was time for us to go off to supper.
Although the Galactic Concilium is not a body open to public scru
Marc refused to explain.
Paul Remillard and the other pro-Milieu loyalists, who still formed a commanding majority among Human Polity magnates, remained confident that they could shoot the project down—or at least stall it until that magical moment when our race “coadunated,” and Unity more or less happened all by itself. To that end, they stepped up the propaganda barrage touting the benefits of Unification, enlisting not only human philosophers, religious leaders, and psychologists but Poltroyan advocates as well.
All Earthlings loved the little Purple People. Their good will toward men, their warm sense of humor, and their undeniable individuality made them formidable opponents to Rebel spokesmen who accused all of the exotic races of being submerged in a lockstep alien “hive-mentality.” To know a Poltroyan was to have a gut feeling that the slander just couldn’t be so. The winsome little bald-headed folks with the ruby eyes managed to be exemplars of Unity without even opening their mauve lips; and when they did speak out, they were awfully convincing.
Two of the most eloquent Poltroyan apologists for Unity were Fritiso-Prontinalin and Minatipa-Pinakrodin—old friends of the family who had once been visiting fellows at Dartmouth College. I was in attendance when Fred and Minnie came back to Hanover in October 2081 and chaired a hugely successful pro-Unity monster rally at Seuss Auditorium. They were so persuasive that I even found myself wavering … just a little.