"Are you still there, damn you?"
From inside the hallway, the Ghost said: Yes. You will not refuse me, Rogi.
The bookseller cursed under his breath, stepped inside, and slammed the door. Stamping his feet, he shook himself like an old hound and untwined the red muffler. "Go ahead — coerce me! But sooner or later I'll break away, and then I'll sic the Magistratum on your self-righteous, scheming ass! I'm a Milieu citizen and I've got my rights. Not even the Lylmik can violate the Statutes of Freedom and get away with it. "
The Ghost said: You're half drunk and wholly ridiculous. You've worked yourself into a frenzy without even knowing what my request is.
Rogi rushed up the stairs, past the doors of darkened offices on the second floor, until he came to his own aerie. He fumbled in his pocket for the famous key ring with its gleaming red fob.
"You've set your sights on Hagen and Cloud— or on their kids!" he said wildly. He flung the door open and nearly tripped over Marcel, his great shaggy Maine Coon cat.
The Ghost said: My request does concern them, but only indirectly.
Outside, the snow hissed against the double-glazed windows. The old wooden building responded to the storm's pressure with dozens of secret little noises. Rogi slouched into his sitting room. He dropped his coat and scarf over a battered trestle bench, sat down in the cretonne-covered armchair in front of the standing stove, and began to take off his boots. Marcel circled the bench purposefully, bushy tail waving. He broadcast remarks at his master in the feline telepathic mode.
"In the right coat pocket, probably frozen stiff, " Rogi told the cat. Marcel rose on his great hind legs, rummaged with a forepaw that would have done credit to a Canada lynx, and hooked a doggie-bag of French fries left over from Rogi's supper. Uttering a faint miaow, incongruous for such a large animal, he transferred the booty to his jaws and streaked out of the room.
The Ghost said: Can it be the same Marcel, food-thief extraordinaire?
"The ninth of his line, " Rogi replied. What do you want?
Once again the strangely evocative laughter invaded Rogi's mind, along with reassurance:
You have nothing to be afraid of this time. Believe me. What we want you to do is something you yourself have contemplated doing from time to time over the past twenty years. But since you're such a hopeless old flemmard, you've put it off. I've come to make sure you do your duty. You will write your memoirs.
The bookseller gaped. "My... my memoirs?"
Exactly. The full history of your remarkable family. The chronicle of the Remillards as you have known them.
Rogi began to giggle helplessly.
The Ghost went on: You'll hold nothing back, gloss over no faults, tell the entire truth, show your own hidden role in the drama clearly. Now is the appropriate time for you to do this. You may no longer procrastinate. The entire Milieu will be indebted to you for your intimate view of the rise of galactic humanity — to say nothing of Hagen and Cloud and their children. There are important reasons why you must undertake the task immediately.
Rogi was shaking his head slowly, staring at dancing pseudoflames behind the glass door of the stove. Marcel strolled back into the room, licking his chops, and rubbed against his master's stockinged ankles.
"My memoirs. You mean, that's all?"
It will be quite enough. They should be detailed.
Again the old man shook his head. He was silent for several minutes, stroking the cat. He did not bother to attempt a thought-screen. If the
Ghost was real, it could penetrate his barrier with ease; if it was not real, what difference did it make? "You're no fool, Ghost. You know why I never got around to doing the job before. "
The Ghost's mental tone was compassionate: I know.
"Then let Lucille do it. Or Philip, or Marie. Or write the damned thing yourself. You were there spying on us from the beginning. "
You are the only suitable author. And this is the suitable time for the story to be told.
Rogi let out a groan and dropped his head into his hands. "God— to rake up all that ancient history! You'd think the painful parts would have faded by now, wouldn't you? But those are the most vivid. It's the better times that I seem to have the most trouble recalling. And the overall picture — I still can't make complete sense of it. I never was much good at psychosynthesis. Maybe that's why I get so little consolation from the Unity. Just a natural operant, an old-style bootstrap head, not one of your preceptor-trained adepts with perfect memorecall. "
Who knows you better than I? That's why I'm here myself to make this request. To give help when it's needed —
"No!" Rogi cried out. The big gray cay leapt back and crouched with flattened ears. Rogi stared pointedly at the spot where the Ghost seemed to be. "You mean that? You intend to stay around here prompting me and filling in the gaps?"
I'll try to be unobtrusive. With my help, you'll find your own view of the family history clarifying. At the end, you should understand.
"I'll do it, " Rogi said abruptly, "if you show yourself to me. Face to face. "
Your request is impossible.
"Of course it is... because you don't exist! You're nothing but a fuckin' figment, a high-order hallucination. Denis thought so, and he was right about the other loonies in the family, about Don and Victor and Maddy. You tell me to write my memoirs because some part of my mind wants to justify the things I did. Ease my conscience. "
Would that be so terrible?
Rogi gave a bitter laugh. The cat Marcel crept back on enormous furry feet and bumped his forehead affectionately against his master's leg. One of Rogi's hands automatically dropped to scratch the animal's neck beneath its ruff. "If you're a delusion, Ghost, then it means that the triumph of Unified Humanity was nothing but the result of an old fool's schizophrenia. A cosmic joke. "
I am what I say I am — a Lylmik.
"Then show yourself! You owe it to me, damn you. "
Rogi... nobody sees the Lylmik as they really are, unless that person is also a Lylmik. We are fully perceptible only to minds functioning on the third level of consciousness — the next great step in mental evolution, which you younger races of the Milieu have yet to attain. I tell you this — which is known to no other human — to prove my commitment to you. My love. I could show you any one of a number of simulacrum bodies, but the demonstration would be meaningless. You must believe me when I say that if you saw me truly, with either the mind's eye or that of the body, your sanity would be forfeit.
"Horse-puckey. You don't show yourself, I don't write the memoirs. " A tight little smile of satisfaction thinned Rogi's lips. He patted his lap and Marcel leapt up, purring. The old man watched the dancing artificial flames. He whispered, "I've had my suspicions about you for years, Ghost. You just knew too much. No probability analysis, no proleptic metafunction can account for what you knew. "
The Seth Thomas tambour clock that had belonged to Rogi's mother struck twelve with familiar soft chimes. Outside, the storm winds assaulted the north wall of the building with mounting vigor, making the aged timbers groan and the clapboards snap. Marcel snuggled against Rogi's stomach, closed his wildcat eyes, and slept.
"I'm bound and determined to know the truth about you, Ghost. Read my mind! I'm wide open. You can see I mean what I say. I'll work with you and write the memoirs only if you come out in the open at last — whatever the consequences. "
Rogi, you're incorrigible.
"Take it or leave it. " The old man relaxed in the armchair, fingering a silken cat's ear and toasting his feet at the stove.
Let me propose a sublethal compromise. I'll let you see me the way I was.
"You got a deal!"
Rogi realized that the thing was invading his mind, flooding him with the artificial calm of redactive impulses, taking advantage of the liquor's depressant effect, triggering endorphins and God knew what-all to bolster him in anticipation.
And then Rogi saw. He said, "Ha. " Then he laughed a
little and added, "Goddam. "
Are you satisfied?
Rogi held out a trembling hand. "Are you going to tell me the way you worked it?"
Not until you complete your own story.
"But —"
We have a deal. And now, good night. We'll begin the family history tomorrow, after lunch.
PART I
The Surveillance
1
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
I WENT DOWN to walk along the icebound Connecticut River very early today before beginning this chronicle. My wits were more than usually muddled from overindulgence, and I had received an emotional shock as well — call it a waking dream! — that now seemed quite impossible out here in the fresh air and the revitalizing aetheric resonances of the rising sun. As I went west along Maple Street the pavements were still patchy wet and steaming; the melting network had been turned back on precisely at 0200 hours. In the business district and throughout most of the college precincts the -25° chill would be gentled by area heaters, but in this residential part of Hanover it was still fast winter. The night's brief storm had given us an additional ten or fifteen cents of snow, piling small drifts in the lee of fences and shrubs. Out here only a few wealthy eccentrics had force-field bubbles over their houses to screen out the elements. It was early enough so that the gravo-magnetic ground-cars and flying eggs were still locked away in their garages.
Down in the sheltered strip of woodland alongside frozen Mink Brook the scene was even more reminiscent of the New England I knew when I was a kid in the 1940s. The snow under the tall hemlocks and birches was almost knee-deep and level as a marble floor. I'd brought decamole showshoes in my coat pocket and it took only a moment to inflate them, slip them on, and go slogging down to the shore path that paralleled the silent Connecticut.
The great deep river was locked under a thick ice mantle, reminding me that winters are colder now than in my youth — if not always so picturesque. Thanks to the storm, the snow-cover of the Connecticut was again without blemish, swept clean of the tracks of skis and power toboggans and the footprints of foolish rabbits seeking a better climate on the other bank, over in Vermont. I 'shoed north for nearly two and a half kloms, passing under the Wheelock Street Bridge and skirting the Ledyard Canoe Club. Finally I reached that awesome patch of forest preserve where white pines tower eighty meters high and little siskins and nuthatches whisper mysteriously in the brush thickets. The scent of conifer resin was intense. As so often happens, the odor triggered memory more strongly than any effort of will ever could.
This snow-girt woods I had not visited for three decades was the place where the boys used to come.
The Gilman Biomedical Center of the college was only a few blocks away — and the Metapsychic Institute, and the hospital. Young Marc, an undergraduate already showing the promise that would someday make him a Paramount Grand Master, used to coerce the nursing staff in the intensive care unit and take Jack away. The beloved baby brother, slowly dying of intractable cancers that would devour his body and leave only his great brain untouched, rode in an ingeniously modified backpack. Marc and Jack would spend a morning or an afternoon talking, laughing, arguing. Stolen, pitiable hours of pine and pain and the contention of those brother-minds! It was then the rivalry was born that would bring thousands of inhabited planets to the brink of ruin, and threaten not only the evolution of the Human Mind but also that of the five exotic races who had welcomed us into their peaceful Galactic Milieu...
Close to the shore where the snow lies drifted, it is not easy to tell where granite ends and the frozen river begins. The juncture is veiled. Molecules of water have slowed to the solidity of stone, apparently immutable. My deep-sight easily sees through the snow to tell the difference, just as it pierces the icy lid of the Connecticut to perceive black water flowing beneath. But I am not strong-minded enough to see the subtler flux of the ice molecules themselves, or the vibration of the crystals within the granite boulders, or the subatomic dance of the bits of matter and energy among the nodes of the dynamic-field lattices that weave the reality of ice and gray rock in the cosmic All. My vision of the winter river in its bed remains limited, in spite of the abstract knowledge science lends me.
And how much more difficult it is to apprehend the greater pattern! We know we are free, even though constraints hedge us. We cannot see the unus mundus, the entirety that we know must exist, but are forced to live each event rushing through space and time. Our efforts seem to us as random as the Brownian movement of molecules in a single drop of ultramagnified water.
Nevertheless the water droplets come together to make a stream, and then a river that flows to the sea where the individual drops — to say nothing of the molecules! —are apparently lost in a vast and random pooling. The sea not only has a life and identity of its own, but it engenders other, higher lives, a role denied to water molecules alone. Later, after the sun draws them up, the molecules condense into new water drops or snowflakes and fall, and sustain life on the land before draining away to the sea again in the cycle that has prevailed since the biogenesis. No molecule evades its destiny, its role in the great pattern. Neither do we, although we may deny that a pattern exists, since it is so difficult to envision. But sometimes, usually at a far remove of time, we may be granted the insight that our actions, our lives, were not pointless after all. Those (and I am one) who have never experienced cosmic consciousness may find consolation in simple instinct. I know in my heart — as Einstein did, and he was justified in the long view if not in the short — that the universe is not a game of chance but a design, and beautiful.
The great white cold takes hold of the amorphous water droplet and turns it into an ice crystal of elegant form. Can I organize my memories into an orderly ensemble and give coherence to the tangled story of the Family Remillard? I have been assured that I can... but you, the entity reading this, may decide otherwise.
C'est bien ça.
The chronicle will begin in New Hampshire and conclude in interstellar space. Its time-span, willy-nilly, will be that of my own life; but I will tell the story from a number of different viewpoints — not all of them human. My personal role in the drama has not always been prominent, and certain Milieu historians have forgotten that I existed, except for grudging footnotes! But I was Don's fraternal twin and close to his wife and children, I was with Denis and Lucille at the Intervention, and I know what drove Victor and the Sons of Earth to their infamy. I was privy to the secrets of the "Remillard Dynasty" and to those of the Founding Human Magnates. I watched Paul "sell" New Hampshire as the human capital of the Milieu. I stood by Teresa throughout her tragedy. I know what kind of demons possessed Madeleine. I can tell the story of Diamond Mask, since her life was inextricably entwined with that of my family. Marc's tormented presence and his Metapsychic Rebellion will pervade these memoirs and climax them.
Above all, however, this will have to be the story of Jon Remillard, whom I called Ti-Jean and the Milieu named Jack the Bodiless. Even though he was born after the Intervention, his life is prefigured in the struggles and triumphs of the people I will write about in this book: the first human beings to have full use of their higher mind-powers. But Jack would be their culmination. He would show us the awful and wonderful course our human evolution must take. He was the first Mental Man. Terrified, we saw in him what we will eventually become.
Saint Jean le Désincarné, priez pour nous! But please — let us not have to follow your example for at least another million years.
2
OBSERVATION VESSEL CHASSTI [Simb 16-10110]
9 AUGUST 1945
"LOOK THERE, " CRIED Adalasstam Sich. "They've done it again!"
The urban survey monitoring system had zeroed in on the terrible event at the moment of the bomb's detonation, and at once Adalasstam stabbed the key that would transfer the enhanced image from his console to the large wall-screen. The other two Simbiari on duty saw the fungoid growth of the
death-cloud. A blast wave spread away from it, obliterating the beautiful harbor.
"O calamity! O day of despond! O hope-wreck!" intoned Elder Laricham Ashassi. Thin green mucus poured from the scrobiculi of his fissured countenance and outstretched palms. Being the senior member of his race present, it was his duty to express the sorrow and vexation of all Simbiari at the catastrophic sight — and its implications. The telepathic overtones of his keening brought the observers of the other Milieu races on watch hurrying into the oversight chamber.
The two little humanoid Poltroyan mates, Rimi and Pilti, who had been at work in EM Modulation Records next door, were followed closely by the monstrous bulk of Doka'eloo, the Krondak Scrutator of Psychosocial Trends and a magnate of the Concilium. The horror unfolding on the wall-screen was so riveting that none of the entities thought to prevent the entry of the ship Gi, NupNup Nunl, until it was too late. The creature's great yellow eyes rolled back into its skull as the mass death-shout from the holocaust filled the chamber. NupNup Nunl uttered a wail in a piercing progression of minor sixths, lost consciousness from shock, and proceeded to collapse. Doka'eloo caught it with his psychokinesis and lowered it gently to the deck, where it lay in a disheveled heap of silky filoplumage, gangling limbs, and pallid genitalia. Aware that their supersensitive colleague's mind had withdrawn safely into the consolation of the Unity, the others paid no more attention to it.