Brother Anatoly said, "Come on, son. You"ll be safe. Who"d connive at brainburning on a night like this, with popcorn and mulled wine? Have some. I was just leaving." Touching Elizabeth"s hand in pa.s.sing, he started for the door.
Marc commanded, "Stay here."
The friar stopped dead, then went to a chair far back in the shadows and sat down.
On the table by the fire, the crock of spiced wine steamed.
The corn puffs were also hot, and glistening with b.u.t.ter. Aiken, all aglow in gilded leather, helped himself and said, "I don"t mind sharing a little snack with you, Remillard. I brought my long spoon." He plumped down on the couch farthest from the hearth. After hesitating, Hagen sat beside him. Cloud took the seat near her father. Elizabeth sat alone on the lefthand couch.
"I said I would tell you children about your heredity," Marc said without preamble. "You know my own body is self-rejuvenating. Except for my recalcitrant hair, my appearance hasn"t changed very much in thirty years. I"m a mutant, like all the children of Paul Remillard and Teresa Kendall. The rejuvenating character is genetically dominant, as are most mutations.
Both you, Cloud, and you, Hagen, are also virtually immortal."
"I knew it!" Hagen leapt to his feet. "But you wouldn"t tell us the truth before, would you, Papa? No-that would have weakened your hold over us and diminished your stature in the eyes of the others. You had to be unique! So you fobbed us off, warned us not to have any kids of our own, hinted there was a chance we carried horrible genes like Uncle Jack"s-"
"What you were told," Marc interrupted, "and what you were not told were for your own safety and peace of mind. You have supravital alleles for self-rejuvenation and high metafunction ... and you have others. The infamous patchwork heritage of the Remillards. You would have found out about the immortality eventually, of course."
"But what about the rest?" Cloud asked, bewildered. "Were you afraid we wouldn"t be able to bear knowing the truth?"
"You might have borne it," Marc told her. He was still facing the fire. No one spoke for several minutes. Hagen subsided back onto the couch.
Finally Elizabeth said, "Marc, you must tell them why they were brought to the Pliocene."
"Because you are the parents of Mental Man," Marc said.
Hagen and Cloud sat as though turned to stone. Then Hagen said, "You censored the library flecks back on Ocala, wiped out all details of the real motive behind your Rebellion. All we had were hints, and the fact that Mama tried to kill you herself to prevent the plan"s success. For G.o.d"s sake, Papa-what was the Mental Man project?
What is it still?"
His mind showed them.
Overwhelmed by disbelief, they sat with mental barriers fallen.
Elizabeth said to Aiken: Keep your guard up now if ever.
Aiken said: Lord Woman he"s not coercing can"t you see?
Marc still did not face them. He had his palms flat against the mantelstone and his head bowed. Flames outlined him with a burning corona. He said, "Until I conceived this project, long before I met your mother, I looked upon my immortality as nothing but the bitter jest of a whimsical evolution. Have you ever thought what physical immortality really might mean? An operant mind shackled to a weak, emotion-tossed human body!
It was more a curse than a blessing in a world populated by fearful, short-lived fellow humans and self-righteous exotics already suspicious of human genetic potential. Our whole family had the trait-more or less. Much good it did us ... And then Jack was born. The rest of us watched his very special combination of sublethals run its course. It was terrible and it was grand and it was the answer.
He personified the ultimate trend of human evolution: the disembodied brain capable of wearing any material form it chose. Or none. But we discovered that le bon dieu had played another cosmic joke. Poor Jack was not immortal. The marvellous brain was doomed to break down slowly. It would die in less than eighty years ... Then I had the revelation, the idea for Mental Man"s artificial engendering.
Some members of my family and some magnates of the Concilium who could appreciate the dream helped with the early experimentation. We used my seed, since I represented the culmination of the immortal strain, and female gametes from the most genetically favoured women involved in the project. It was all done artificially and in secret because of the controversy the idea had provoked. We seemed to be succeeding. And then difficulties began; there was sabotage, disloyalty. The debate concerning the morality of the whole Mental Man concept became an ideological battleground between the fearful and the far-sighted. Was it beneficial to the Galactic Mind to permit the acceleration of evolution by such radical means? Human thinkers were divided. Exotics universally condemned us."
"And Mama," Cloud said.
"And Cyndia," Marc agreed. "Marriage and natural children had never been part of my life-schema. All I wanted was to father Mental Man in vitro and in cerebro. But there was Cyndia. For a time, she even seemed to favour the project. You see, she thought the developing nonborns would be allowed to keep their bodies ... She insisted that we have children of our own, even though I told her of the family problems. Finally, I couldn"t deny her. You two were born, ostensibly perfect. But I knew you would never be able to attain your full potential, any more than I had, unless-"
"Unless you included us in the Mental Man project as well,"
Cloud said.
"And that"s when she tried to kill you!" Hagen shouted, surging up. Aiken"s fingers closed about his wrist like steel bands and he sank back with a groan. "And when Mama bungled it, you killed her."
Marc turned toward them at last, calm and implacable.
"Cyndia"s first intent was not to take my life. After the disaster struck our secret laboratories in the early days of the Rebellion, she thought that sterilizing me would be sufficient to put an end to Mental Man, and to the war. She had a small sonic disruptor, a very sophisticated device. She did what she set out to do and narrowly missed killing me. My mind struck her down in selfdefence."
"Jesus," said Aiken. "Then all you had left were the kids."
"Oh, Papa," Cloud said in a dead voice. "That"s why you said it was necessary to bring us to the Pliocene when your Rebellion failed. Why you want to keep us with you now."
Marc said, "The Milieu will not permit you to reproduce our strain. You have the dangerous strengths and weaknesses of both your parents. In my day, the Human Polity eugenicists were more free and easy in such matters. It was fairly easy for the powerful to circ.u.mvent the restrictions. But even Jack was born illicitly, as you know. He should have been aborted, with his overwhelming quotient of so-called lethal genes."
"And if he had been," Elizabeth said, "you would have won."
Marc only smiled his famous smile.
Hagen"s thoughts were chaotic, imperfectly screened. "But you could have been restored in the regen tank, back in the Milieu or even here. G.o.d-you were restored here, after Felice fire-flayed you! And your self-regenerating faculty-don"t tell me it balks at rehabilitating zapped gonads!"
"The body doesn"t balk," Marc said. "Only the mind."
Taken aback, Hagen could only repeat, "The mind?"
Marc"s steady gaze turned to Elizabeth. "Ask the Grand Master why she receded into metapsychic latency after her accident, even though her brain was perfectly restored."
"We restore ourselves," she said to Hagen. "In any healing process-whether ordinary or extraordinary, tank or Tanu Skin or specialized autoregeneration-the restored body cells must be reintegrated into the whole. Accepted and directed to function through the subtle redactive processes of the mind."
"And ... you can"t?" Cloud asked her father.
"No," said Marc.
"But, why?"
"Perhaps Brother Anatoly knows," said Marc lightly. "We"ve been considering at some length the heart"s sly subornation of the intellect. What I should do, I do not! Je suis le veuf, without a star left on my lute. For me, there is only the abyss ... You children must take up the engendering of Mental Man in a place safe from the interference of jealous exotics and puny-minded humans. But there"s no need for a star-search any longer. We don"t have to wait to be rescued. Before too long I"ll have the ability to d-jump all of us anywhere in the galaxy. There are at least three worlds I know of with high-technology civilizations that could foster our project. None has true operant metafunction or even superluminal transport as yet, but we could deal with that easily enough once we took control of a planet." Marc displayed a mental image.
"We." Hagen eyed his father with misgiving. "Then the other children are still to be included somehow in the project, just as you told us back on Ocala?"
"All who still accept the Mental Man ideology may join us.
An adequate pool of genes from operant human stock is essential to offset the sublethal alleles of the Remillards. My old colleagues have known this all along. What they did not know was that you two were the only sources left of the immortality strain. They a.s.sumed-as I did-that I would be able to restore my fertility eventually. Most of them still think I have done so.
It was the better part of prudence not to disillusion them during the early years of our exile. The times were unsettled. I was well able to take care of myself, but you children were vulnerable."
"I"m surprised," said Hagen caustically, "that you didn"t bank specimens of our germ plasm."
"I did. The Keoghs, who were our chief physicians and knew the truth, took one ovary and one testis from you while you were still very young children. The only other person who knew, my closest friend and confidant, destroyed them at about the same time that he began poisoning your minds against me."