Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (2 page)

Go home
, Marcel said.

“Le fantôme familier won’t talk to me,” the old man remarked sadly. He tugged at the cat’s soft ears and scratched his chin. Marcel began to purr. Rogi’s brief spate of wakefulness was fading and he felt an overwhelming fatigue. “The Great Carbuncle always rousted the bastard out before. What the hell’s the matter with him? He hasn’t been around prompting me in weeks.”

He’s busy, said a voice in his mind. An’ not feelin’ so good. He come back laytah an’ kokua when you really need ’im.

“Who’s that?” Rogi croaked, starting up from the chair.

It’s me, brah. Malama. I got da word from yo’ Lylmik spook eh? Somet’ing you gotta do fo’ you go mainland.

“Oh, shit. Haven’t I had enough grief—”

Hanakokolele Rogue! Try trust yo’ akamai tutu. Dis gonna be plenny good fo’ da kine memoirs. Firs’ t’ing yo’ catch some moemoe den egg on ovah my place. Da Mo’i Lylmik wen send special visitors. It say dey gone clarify few t’ings li’ dat fo’ yo’ write summore.

“Who the hell are these visitors?”

Come down in aftanoon fine out. Now sleep. Aloha oe mo’opuna.

“Malama?… Malama?” Rogi spoke a last feeble epithet. Why was his Hawaiian friend being so damned mysterious? What was the Family Ghost up to now, using the kahuna woman as a go-between?

Sleep
, urged Marcel. He jumped down from the desk and headed out of the room, pausing to look back over his shoulder.

“Ah, bon, bon,” the old man growled in surrender.

Outside, the sky had turned to gold and wild roosters were crowing in the ravines. Rogi turned off the desk lamp and the transcriber and shuffled after the cat. The key ring with the Great Carbuncle, forgotten, lay on the desk looking very ordinary except for a wan spark of light at the heart of the red fob, reminiscent of a similar, more sinister object buried in Spain.

Rogi slept poorly, plagued by dreams of the Fury monster and its homicidal minion, Hydra. Roused by the pillow alarm at 1400 hours, he slapped shave on his face, showered, put on fresh slacks and a more subdued shirt, and went out to the egg parked on the landing pad at the edge of the garden.

Tony Opelu was trimming a hibiscus hedge with a brushzapper. He waved. “Howzit, Rogi! Goin’ to town? Try bring back couple E-cells fo’ da Jeep, eh? She wen die on me this mornin’.”

“No trouble at all.”

“T’anks, eh? Howza book goin’?”

“Just finished the chunk I was working on. I’ll be taking off for the mainland tomorrow, leave you and Haunani in peace. It’s been a real pleasure being here, but I’ve got a hankering for home.”

“It happens,” Tony conceded.

“I’ll leave a note for Elaine. Give her my best when you see her again.” Rogi climbed into the ovoid rhocraft, lit up, and lofted slowly into the air under inertialess power.

Rainclouds shrouded the uplands, but the lower slopes of Kauai
were in full sunlight. He flew across Waimea Canyon, a spectacular gash in the land that Mark Twain had compared to a miniaturized version of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Beyond were dark lava cliffs, gullies carved in scarlet laterite soil, and lush green ridges with glittering streams and the occasional waterfall. He flew on manual, heading southeast, descending over lowland jungles that had once been flourishing cane fields. Some sugar was still grown on the island, but most of the local people now earned a living catering to tourists. There were also colonies of artists and writers on Kauai, enclaves of retired folks who scorned rejuvenation and intended to die in a paradisiacal setting, two cooperatives dedicated to the preservation of island culture that staged immersive pageants, and a few metapsychic practitioners who specialized in the huna “magic” of ancient Polynesia.

Malama Johnson was one of those.

Her picturesque house, deceptively modest on the outside, was in Kukuiula Bay, a few kilometers west of the resort town of Poipu, not far from the place where Jon Remillard and Dorothea Macdonald had resided when they were on Earth. There were no other eggs on the pad behind Malama’s place, but a sporty green Lotus groundcar with a discreet National logo on the windscreen was parked in the shade of a silk oak tree next to her elderly Toyota pickup.

Rogi disembarked from his rhocraft and tried farsensing the interior of the house. But Malama had put up an opaque barrier to such spying, and his mind’s ear heard her scolding him in the Pidgin dialect that Hawaiians loved to use among their intimates:

Wassamatta you peephead? Fo’ get all yo’ mannahs o’ wot? E komo mai wikiwiki!

With a shamefaced grin, he knocked on the rear screen door and came into the empty kitchen. “Aloha, tutu!”

Malama Johnson called out in perfectly modulated Standard English. “We’re in the lanai, Rogi. Come join us.”

He passed through the cool, beautifully appointed rooms to the shaded porch at the other end of the house. It was dim and fragrant, with a fine view of the sea. The stout kahuna woman bounced up and embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks. She wore a royal blue muumuu and several leis of rare tiny golden shells from Niihau. “Cloud and Hagen flew in last night from San Francisco,” she said, indicating the two guests.

Rogi swallowed his astonishment. “Hey. Nice to see you again.”

The fair-haired young man and woman nodded at him but
remained seated in their rattan chairs, sipping from tall tumblers of iced fruit juice. They were immaculately attired, she in a snowy cotton safari suit and high white buckskin moccasins, he in a white Lacoste shirt, white slacks, and white Top-Siders. Rogi knew the visitors, all right, but no better than any other members of the Remillard family did. They were still very reclusive and reticent about their early lives. Their presence here on Kauai under these peculiar circumstances came as a considerable shock to the old man.

He took a seat at Malama’s urging. On the low koawood table was a tray holding an untouched dish of pupus—Hawaiian snacks—and two beverage pitchers, one half-empty and one that was full. Pouring from the latter, the kahuna offered a glass to Rogi. The drink had a sizable percentage of rum and he gulped it thankfully as he eyed the young people. They were in their early thirties. A remote smile touched the lips of Cloud Remillard as she looked out at the sea. Her brother Hagen was blank-faced, making no pretense of cordiality.

Rogi ventured an awkward attempt at heartiness. “So the Family Ghost put the arm on you two kids to collaborate in the memoirs, eh?”

Hagen Remillard’s reply was chill and formal, and every aspect of his mind was inviolably shielded. “We were bespoken by a Lylmik wearing the usual disembodied head manifestation. He ordered us to come here and talk to you about certain events that took place during our exile in the Pliocene Epoch.”

“That … should be mighty interesting.” Rogi’s grin was wary.

“You know that our entire group was debriefed by the Human Polity Science Directorate when we first came through the time-gate.” Hagen did not meet the old bookseller’s eyes. “At that time we were instructed not to publicize details of our Pliocene experiences, and we complied scrupulously. Even now, very few people know that the two of us were among the returnees.”

“It was a relief, having an official excuse to keep quiet about our identities,” Cloud said. “We knew that if the public were spared the more gaudy details of our prehistoric adventures, there would be less likelihood of our lives becoming a media circus. In most of the Milieu, our group was just a nine days’ wonder. You know:
Time-Travelers Return!
Whoop-dee-doo … then on to the next bit of fast-breaking news. My husband, Kuhal, had a harder time of it, but at least he’s humanoid and so he adapted. We’ve been kept busy doing certain work connected with our conditional
Unification and we’ve managed to live more or less in peace—until now.”

Hagen said, “The entity who countermanded the Directorate’s gag order told us that he was Atoning Unifex, the head of the Milieu’s Supervisory Body. Cloud and I were properly overawed at first. But as the Lylmik spoke to us we both experienced a shocking sense of déjà vu. After Unifex vanished we were confused—no, we were terrified!—and we wondered if we had experienced some shared delusion, a waking nightmare. Not long afterward, the Lylmik’s orders to us were reconfirmed by the First Magnate of the Human Polity and also by the Intendant General of Earth. Both women took some pains to tell us what an extraordinary communication we’d been honored with.” The young man’s face was sardonic. “That was a considerable understatement.”

“We agreed to come here and talk to you only after it became evident that we would be coerced if we refused,” Cloud added. Her voice was low-pitched, but warm and without rancor. “We’ve had quite enough of that already in our lives.”

“Did you recognize Unifex, then?” Rogi asked softly. “Do you know who he really is?”

“I knew almost immediately,” said Cloud. “I was always closer to him than my brother. The realization was … shattering. Hagen didn’t want to believe it.”

“Unifex is Marc Remillard,” Rogi said. “Your father.”

“Damn him!” Hagen exploded to his feet and began striding about the lanai like a caged catamount. “We were so relieved when the time-gate closed after us and the Milieu authorities obliterated the site! Cloud and I and all the rest of us thought we were finally free. Papa was trapped six million years in the past along with that madman Aiken Drum, and he could never hurt us again.”

“He never meant to be cruel,” Cloud murmured.

Hagen rounded on her. “He never thought of us as thinking, feeling human beings at all. We were nothing but subjects in his grand experiment.” He turned to Rogi and Malama. “Do you know what his gang of decrepit Rebel survivors called him behind his back? Abaddon—the Angel of the Abyss! At the end almost all of them repudiated him and his lunatic plan for Mental Man.”

“Papa gave it up, too,” Cloud insisted. “Or he would never have sent us back through the time-gate.”

Hagen’s rage seemed suddenly extinguished, leaving hopelessness. He slumped back into his chair. “Now we discover that our father won out after all. Not only did he miraculously survive for six million years, but somehow he also managed to transmute
himself into the Overlord of the Galactic Milieu! God help us and our children.” He lifted hate-filled eyes to Rogi and Malama. “God help all of you.”

“Unifex atoned,” the Hawaiian woman said serenely. “During all those endless years he tried to make restitution for his crimes. He performed his penance not only in this galaxy but in the other one—where the Tanu and Firvulag people came from. I know almost nothing about his Pliocene activities and his later accomplishments in Duat, but everything that he’s done for the races of the Milky Way has been for the good. He founded the Milieu and guided it every step of the way. Thanks to him there are six coadunate racial Minds secure in Unity—and thousands more nearly ready to join the galactic confederation.”

“Too bad he didn’t do a better job shepherding his old home planet,” Hagen said bitterly, “preventing natural disasters, plagues, famines, wars—to say nothing of the Metapsychic Rebellion. His Lylmik self just stood idly by while his earlier self nearly destroyed galactic civilization.”

Malama only smiled. “The greatest spatiotemporal nodalities are immutable and the past, present, and future form a seamless whole. It is impossible to change history. Unifex acted as he must act—and yet his actions were and are freely done. Our own actions are free as well, contributing to and formulating the mystery of the Great Reality.”

Hagen gave a scornful laugh. “And ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world’?”

“Perhaps,” Malama said.

They sat in silence for several minutes. Then Hagen spoke again. “Something’s just occurred to me. The Lylmik race is the closest thing to Mental Man that our galaxy has produced, but it’s decadent and headed for extinction. What do you want to bet that Papa tried to modify
Lylmik
evolution just as he wanted to modify ours—and failed!”

Rogi shrugged. “Nobody knows a damn thing about Lylmik history.”

“Maybe,” the young man continued slowly, “Papa plans to return to his original scheme now that he’s six million years wiser after the fact … and he has his original experimental subjects back in hand.”

“Don’t talk like a fool,” Cloud cried out to her brother. “The Galactic Concilium would never permit the Mental Man project to be revived—not even by the arch-Lylmik himself.”

“Would you bet your life on it?” Hagen shot back at her. “Again?”

“I can think of one sure way you two can help prevent it,” Rogi said suddenly, “in the unlikely event that Hagen’s right.”

“How?” the brother and sister demanded.

“Tell me all you know about Marc’s scheme, and I’ll publish it in the fourth volume of my memoirs. The full story of Mental Man has never come out. Most of the details of the plan were suppressed by the Galactic Concilium—supposedly to preserve the tranquillity and good order of the Milieu.”

“You were on the brink of the Metapsychic Rebellion then, weren’t you?” Cloud asked.

“Right. Officially, the Rebellion was fought to liberate humanity from the Milieu and its Unity. But the main reason Marc decided to declare war was because he was so pissed off at having his great dream condemned. He caused a monumental uproar when the Mental Man project was cancelled, charging that the exotic magnates and their loyalist human confederates were conspiring to deprive our race of a great genetic breakthrough. He said that the Milieu was afraid humanity would become mentally superior to all the rest of creation, and the only solution was breaking away, as the Rebel faction had advocated for so long. A lot of normals believed that the Mental Man project would insure that all their children would grow up to be metapsychic operants. But Marc and his people never did explain to the general public exactly how this miracle was going to be accomplished.”

“He didn’t dare,” Hagen muttered. “They would have lynched him.”

Cloud said, “It was years before Hagen and I finally discovered what Papa had planned. When our mother found out the truth … well, you know what happened.”